Procrastination Is Indicated

 "So how long did it take to decode it?" The brows under the peaked cap knitted. Hands, surprisingly delicate fingers flipped pages back and forth, looking for explanations in the dense, nearly indecipherable text.

"Pretty long, actually. We might not be right about exactly what it says but we're pretty sure we've got the basic meaning: returning to origin, goals achieved, anticipation is high.'"

"Okay, that certainly does paraphrase the romanticized version well enough."

"Yes, ma'am. But wringing that out of the pure math of the original signal, well. The computers were smoking before they were finished. I mean, shoot - we've developed some entirely new math just making sense of that little message. It'll inject some new life into AI development. The algorithms..."

A hand waved, not quite dismissively. "I don't want to know. I didn't like Al Gore and I don't like algorithms. One sounds too much like the other and neither of them ever made much sense to me."

"Uh...okay?" Belatedly she realized the young Lieutenant didn't know who Al Gore was. God, she was getting old.

"But what's this note at the bottom? 'Ping time 4.14 e16 ±1.13e15 seconds?' The hell is that?"

"That's, uh, that's the estimated time the signal has been traveling."

"What, you mean like pinging the router on my computer?"

"Yes, exactly."

"Doesn't pinging usually mean you send a signal out and wait for it to get back?  Never mind.  Four point one-four...ten to the sixteenth. Wait, there's. Damn. Eighty-seven hundred and some hours in a year, times thirty-six hundred seconds in an hour is...well, shoot, that's about thirty million seconds in a year. How many ten to the whatsis is that..."

"That's three times ten to the seventh, ma'am."

"Okay, so a year is Oh my HOLY are you telling me this is...sonuva...hold up. That's a lot of zeros."

"It's a little over a billion years, ma'am. About one-point-two billion."

"Give or take."

"Yes, ma'am, give or take. About thirty-five million years, one way or the other."

"Couldn't narrow it down any closer than that?"

"Colonel?"

"Never mind. Can you leave this here?"

"That's your copy, ma'am."

"Okay. Dismissed."

"Thank you, ma'am." The lieutenant saluted crisply, pivoted out the door and closed it behind him.

A billion years. A Billion years! One billion years. She could feel herself shaping the word differently inside her head, but it didn't impart any new meaning. Just imagining the span of her own life started to lose context if she tried to consider it all in one big lump, this...this was too much.

Give or take, of course.

She clicked open a new window and started searching the internet.

***

"General, I can't begin to tell you what is coming, but I can say this much: whatever it is, it isn't human."

"You're sure about that?"

"One hundred percent certain. Beings we would recognize as anatomically modern humans only go back about a quarter-million years or so. Pre-human hominids go pretty far back, a few million years. But even that's just a drop in the bucket, this signal predates dinosaurs. This signal, sir...it predates damn near everything."

"What, even trilobites?"

"Even them. It predates plants. About the only thing it doesn't predate is simple, monocellular lifeforms like cyanobacteria, bacteria, that kind of thing."

"What were conditions like on this planet back then?"

"There wasn't hardly any oxygen in the air. If we were to land in those conditions, we'd fold up and die. It wouldn't take long."

"And this message has been in transit since conditions on this planet were like that?"

"That's what the analysis says. I think it's looking at perturbations in the signal, Doppler shifting, maybe even some polarization."

"How can they guess at that stuff if they didn't know the exact signal construction in the first place?"

"That will take a way more technical answer than I can give you. You're going to have to go a bunch of pay grades below me before you find someone smart enough to answer that. If you need me to, I know a guy."

The General chuckled. "Heh. Okay." He tapped the cover sheet of the report. "Let's think about this reasonably." He pulled a drawer open and propped his feet on the stack of books within it, carefully arranged there specifically for the purpose. He'd had this desk for a long time. "This signal has been traveling for over a billion years, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Planetary conditions are not what they left, if we assume they were from here originally. Right?"

"Assuming they came from Earth, right. Whatever they breathed, it wasn't oxygen. Not back then. Or else they didn't need much oxygen." She paused.

"And that's just how long that signal has been in transit. Nobody knows how long they were on the outward part of their journey, exactly how long they've been gone in total.
What kind of signal was this? Radio, X-ray, gamma rays?"

"Radio. UHF, a little higher."

"That implies that whatever speed they're traveling, they can't be closing in too closely on the speed of light, right? If they were moving at relativistic velocities, a radio signal would get compressed into something higher frequency, like a gamma burst."

"Unless they're transmitting at ultra-low, and we're getting UHF. They might be cooking right along, sir. Ultra-low isn't a bad choice either, its attenuation isn't bad."

"Takes an antenna miles long to generate it, though. Sure, okay. But even then. If they're moving at ninety-nine percent the speed of light, and they transmitted this message the moment they started back toward home, what's one percent of a billion years?"

"Wait, I know this one." The Colonel sat back in her chair. "That's ten million years."

"So if these people, whoever, whatever they are, did whatever they were doing, turned around and burned rubber to come back here, even at point nine-nine C, they're still ten million years away. Does that sound like a fair estimate?"

"Yes, sir."

"And of course, we could simply be the hapless lad at the airport not realizing that the pretty girl smiling and waving at him is actually smiling and waving at the guy behind him."

"Sir?"

"This message could be intended for someone else.  We just happened to pick it up on its way to whoever it was intended for."

The Colonel frowned.  That was a possibility she hadn't considered but of course it made sense.  In the countless eons since the message had been transmitted, the entire Milky Way been gracefully turning and swirling.  The beam spread of even a tightly collimated beam must, at this kind of transmission distance, be utterly vast on a human scale.  As big across as...she couldn't even guess.  It was pointless to guess.  The entire Solar System might simply be standing in the way, ignorantly blundering into the path of an email sent between gods.

The message might not even be for them.

The General carefully removed the staple from the corner of the report, then dropped the report into the shredder at the corner of his desk. The Colonel watched the sheaf of paper writhe and crinkle into the gnawing rollers without comment. When the machine shut itself off as the last bit of paper was macerated to bits, the General lifted his feet off the drawer and shut it.

"How do you like Air Force's chances?"

"We're going to get creamed. The Middies' quarterback is actually good and their defense is sheer genius. If we score at all it'll be a miracle."

"Damn. I had some hopes. Well, maybe next year. Lunch?"

"Okay." She got to her feet, glancing briefly at the shredder.

"Not our problem. Just let it go."