“From the spacecraft to Earth,” Yulia added.
“Yes,” the doctor confirmed Yulia’s remark, “but we caught this message. The source is near Kanchenjunga. Maybe there was a mistake in the coordinates?”
Yulia rolled her eyes.
“There could be a mistake in the coordinates, or in the decoding, or even in the signals I’m receiving now. It could be a repeater error, or just a set of radio data, electromagnetic activity, etc. But that’s too much error for a system that just needs to be hung on the ceiling. And that!” she pointed to the old speakers, which were playing another batch of international hits.
Dr Capri stood up and stretched his shoulders. He looked at Yulia’s computer monitor, then out the window, then at the wires going into the control box. He yawned with fatigue and covered his mouth with his hand.
“If we’re at a blind alley, I have to tell Dr Lamichen,” Tulu-Manchi said.
“Maybe I should call my boss first?” doubtfully, Yulia said.
“Yes, you can call him. On that computer,” Dr Capri pointed to the old white computer in the corner, “there is the Internet. Meanwhile, I’ll go downstairs.”
Yulia was left alone and felt despair creep in. “What the hell is going on here?” she thought. She copied the data onto a flash drive. Mozart’s “Magic Flute. Aria of the Queen of the Night” played on the speakers. Yulia didn’t like the pressure of this music. She turned down the volume and went to the computer on the opposite wall. There Yulia launched Skype and typed in her boss’s username.
“Hello,” said Yulia’s boss, “how’s work going?”
“Mikhail Nikolaevich, we installed the system, but we are getting strange data. Can I send you the information, so you can check?”
“Tell me in words what happened,” Mikhail asked doubtfully.
“Well, to make a long story short, after the installation the system went crazy. It found an anomaly, not a space anomaly, but here, on the ground. The source is somewhere in the mountains. The system shows a large emission of energy and electromagnetic radiation.”
“So…”
“I decoded the signal. It was an audio signal on a long-range frequency. The signal…” Yulia turned to her laptop and heard faint sounds of music, “the signal is a ‘golden record’ from Voyager. Remember, music, greetings, sounds of Earth?” she became confused.