Twin Earth

“Oh my God I think I’m going to be sick,” Rachel cried as the helicopter we were now flying in took a steep nose dive towards the jungle floor. “Should we even be flying in this weather?”

“I agree, couldn’t we have stayed in San Juan, visit a few casinos and have a few beers instead?” James shouted as he too clung on as if his life depended on it.

“We are not far now. This is the only time we can get to Hayden and his team before it becomes too dangerous to fly,” my father shouted back.

“It’s already too dangerous,” Rachel cried, closing her eyes and holding her chest tightly.

“A category five hurricane is heading towards us and there are two more building up further out at sea. It is unprecedented weather even for the Caribbean.”

Feeling nauseous myself, I stared out the window to the never-ending mountainous forest below and struggled to see any sign of civilisation through the torrential rain and mist. Except for the occasional water fall trying to go down instead of up, there was nothing else but trees blowing erratically in every direction. Even if San Juan had been a better option, everyone had been boarding up their windows or trying to leave town. I was suddenly missing the cold of a wintery Britain.

As my stomach churned as we once again took a nose dive deeper towards the forest floor, I was relieved to finally see a structure appear amongst the trees. It looked like a giant disc surrounded by three tall structures that connected in the middle and if you weren’t a scientist like myself you could easily assume it was a giant sling shot of some kind, but thankfully I knew it was one of the biggest radio telescopes in the world.

The helicopter finally came to a very bumpy landing a few metres from the huge dome and we all happily jumped out and ran towards a single-story building where a short middle-aged Puerto Rican man with crazy black hair waited patiently trying to keep his balance in the wind.

“Welcome to the Karst Hills,” the man shouted to us all as he beckoned us all through a door, hurriedly closing it behind us. “I was worried you wouldn’t make it. I’m Hayden.”

“Pleased to meet you Professor,” I smiled, shaking his hand and brushing down my own dishevelled mop of hair. “My name is Tom Takahashi. I assume you know my father and Doctor Yamamoto?”

“Yes, yes. Welcome. It’s good to see you all.”

“This is Miss Jenkins from University College London and my colleague Doctor Morgan,” I added.

“You can call me James,” James smiled also shaking Hayden’s hand.

“Rachel,” Rachel smiled shyly stepping forward and doing the same.

“It’s great to have you all hear. Thank you so much for coming.”

“Do you have any new updates for us old friend?” my father asked, clearly keen to get past the formalities.

“Yes, lots. Follow me.”

We followed Hayden down a short corridor and into a small office where a team of people were working. Yuki and James immediately hurried off together to investigate whatever was being worked on, however we were all interrupted by the lights flicking on and off for a few seconds and the computer screens glitching before everything returned to normal.

“Not again,” Hayden whispered tapping at a screen that had remained black. “The weather is affecting us greatly and the generators can only do so much. We’ve already had a tropical cyclone and a category three hurricane hit us in the past week and now this.”

“I see you’ve boarded up the windows? Do you expect it to get worse?” Rachel asked nervously.

“We just don’t know. We believe these unusual weather patterns are linked to the anomaly, but my main concern is the telescope. There has been some damage to the dome and our team is desperately trying to fix it, but what I can show you is the data signal we picked up in the last hour.”

“Is this the same signal you received last night?” my father asked.

“We think it is. It seems to be coming from the same area.”

“Sir,” a man whispered passing Hayden some papers.

“Thank you John. Okay, this graph shows you the frequency of the signal we have been detecting. It appears to be fluctuating, in a similar sequence to the gravitational fluctuations.”

“Are you still detecting those?” my father asked. “We have sadly had our operations shut down back in England.”

“Robert?”

“Indeed.”

“Did you manage to bring the samples with you?”

“No, they were taken by Robert’s mob,” I mumbled in annoyance.

“It doesn’t matter anyway. Trevor is over by the dome with Doctor Felix from the national science federation. He has some large samples he managed to obtain and has been studying them in detail.”

“Typical NASA,” Rachel grumbled.

Frowning at her ignorant comment I retorted, “maybe so, but if he was allowed special access after we left Morocco then that’s good news for us now. It means we have a better chance of understanding what is happening up there.”

Blushing, Rachel nodded and remained silent.

“Hayden, have your team or Trevor’s team managed to replicate the gravitational fluctuations we detected back in Morocco?”

“He has, and I believe your samples grew in size as well? Ours did too, but considerably so. One of the larger specimens grew by about a foot at one end, but we knew something was there already. We could feel it with our bare hands.”

“Wow, really?” I asked in surprise.

“Parts of the meteorite were hidden from our sight. We could feel it there, but we couldn’t detect it until after the fluctuations ceased.”

“So, some of it was invisible?” Rachel asked stunned.

Hayden nodded, with just as a surprised look on his face as ours probably had.

“So you believe the gravitational fluctuations have the ability to make solid matter invisible?” I asked.

“We believe so yes.”

“This is incredible,” I whispered.

“These data signals,” Rachel whispered as she studied the papers Hayden was now passing around. “What frequency are they emitting at?”

“Extremely low frequency. We wouldn’t normally even be looking for such infrasound signals and initially we disregarded this data as back-ground noise. It wasn’t until we realised that the signal had a repetitive wave to it that we started to record it. It seems to be fluctuating at around 50 octaves below middle C.”

“I’m sorry, my level of musical knowledge is pretty limited,” I replied. “What is that?”

“That’s low Tom. That would put it on par with a supermassive black hole hum. Have you played it Hayden?” Rachel asked.

“I never thought to do that. Let’s try.”

“Is it possible the sound waves are causing the ripple?” I asked.

“Possibly, but the anomaly doesn’t seem to be magnetized in any way. There are no huge blooms of gas jetting towards us like you would see around a black hole. It is extremely stable in comparison and on a much smaller scale.”

“That’s true. I couldn’t detect any electromagnetic fields around the meteorite samples either.”

We waited as Hayden punched in some data onto a computer and shortly afterwards, we all looked at each other as we listened to what sounded like a fairly melodic tune emanating from the two speakers on the side of the screen.

“I’ve balanced up the scale, so we can hear it.”

“It almost sounds legible,” I stated in surprise.

“Like real music,” Rachel added.

“And you say this is around 50 octaves lower than what we normally hear?” I asked.

“Yes. These are some of the lowest sound frequencies we can detect in space.”

“It sounds like some parts are missing?” Rachel asked. “Like a beat is missing or is that just me?”

“The gas around the anomaly is fluctuating so the signal often cuts out.”

“If we could detect this up close it would be quite something to listen to complete.”

“Well, that’s the next thing I want to talk to you about.”