Becca’s first month at her job was easy-going. Things at home were good too, with Gia enjoying having her around so much she offered to let her move in full time, with Becca paying half of the mortgage of course. Becca quickly took her old friend up on the offer. The two girls re-bonded quickly, and life at home was a blast.
Work was just as much fun, with Becca making a good group of friends, and finding herself more and more attracted to her boss. In fact, one Friday morning, thirty-three days after she had first started, he asked her if she would work late with him, that night, and she had immediately jumped at the offer.
In her head, of course, she thought that maybe Tom had some sort of motive in mind when asking her to stay behind with him. He wanted to get her alone ... he wanted to ... well, Becca’s brain took her into plenty of scenarios for the rest of the day about just what he maybe wanted to do. She could hardly wait for the day to end, and then it was five, and some people filed out, with more heading home over the next hour. At six-fifteen it was just Becca and her boss, and they met up in his office. He had a laptop open in front of him, and he looked to her when she entered. Becca was wearing a skirt with a hem which ended an inch above her knee, and dark pantyhose. Her blouse was flirty, open at the neck a bit, showing the tops of her rounded cleavage. She had picked well for a long night with the man she so desperately wanted to climb atop, right there at his desk, without even knowing that perhaps she was going to get the chance. She even had somewhat sexy underwear on, lacy and black. Everything was working out great.
“Hey, I thought we could order some food, do you like Chinese?”
“I love it,” Becca said, sitting across from her boss and folding one long leg over the other slowly, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling as she noticed his gaze go to her legs. Over the course of the month or so she had been at the office, she had learned that Tom was recently divorced, having split up with his wife late the previous year. Having just got out of her long relationship with Chad, the two had bonded over their shared experiences.
Becca let Tom handle the ordering, after telling him that whatever he got would be fine, and she waited silently while he called, watching him and trying to look as sexy as possible.
When he hung up he smiled and looked across to her. “First of all, I just wanted to say that you’ve done awesome, since you started. I wanted to ask you here tonight because there’s something that I thought you should see. Hear rather. I wanted to pick your brains on it a bit. You’re honestly one of the smartest people that have ever come through those doors.”
Becca couldn’t help but smile. He was heaping the praise on, and she had to admit that it seemed like he might make a move.
“Come with me, I can’t hold it in anymore,” Tom said, motioning for her to follow him. She did so, and he led her through the office and towards the back. He opened a door there that she had been through many times since starting work. It led to a wide open room filled with humming machinery. It was one of the most powerful microphones in the world, and it was aimed towards space.
“So, there’s only a few of us, in the company, who know about this,” Tom said. “It’s big; maybe too big, so we’ve decided to keep it quiet. My boss is finally letting me tell a few people in the office, and I thought I’d come to you first. You’re smart and you haven’t been with us for long. We’ve had some things like this before, which have ended up being nothing, so I didn’t want someone who’s been around for that in on this, not right now. I need fresh eyes. Well, ears.”
Becca could tell that whatever was about to happen it sure wasn’t going to be wild office sex. She found herself feeling only slightly disappointed. Whatever Tom wanted to share with her had her attention. He had hyped it up pretty-damned well, and she was hanging on his every word.
There was a small metal desk near the back of the room, buckling under the weight of an ancient computer. A pair of large headphones hung on a hook nearby.
“Put these on,” Tom said, pulling the headphones off of the hook and handing them to her. Becca pulled the chair out from the metal desk and sat, sliding the headphones onto her ears. Tom leaned past her for a moment and flipped a switch on the computer. The screen glowed dark green, and came to life, a line of code appearing and scrolling downwards, and then changing to a blank green background. Tom typed in a command, and there was a slight hiss in the headphones.
Then, the hiss was gone, and Becca’s mouth fell open when she heard what replaced it; tones, one after the other, and almost musical. They played for a minute, and then two, and Becca realized that a pattern was repeating. She looked up at Tom with wonder on her face.
“Right?” he asked, as she pulled the headphones off and set them on the hook.
“How long does it go on?”
“Half an hour; a minute less actually. There’s a recording in my office, we can listen to it again. I just thought you should hear it for the first time on the actual equipment.”
“Where was it taken?” Becca asked, meaning in what direction the microphone had been focused. Space was large, but scientists had divided it into easily mapped quadrants and sectors, using letters and numbers to keep it all straight.
This was a big discovery. Tom didn’t even have to wrack his brains to remember where it had been recorded.
“H-A-2-11,” he said.
“I want to hear it again,” she said.
Tom nodded. “Come on.”
They hurried out of the larger room, back into the office proper, rushing through the sea of cubicles to his office with the frosted glass. Once inside he opened his laptop as she sat across from him, and he turned the computer so that it more or less faced them both. He played the recording again, loudly at first and then turning it down so they could speak after a few minutes.
“Did anyone else hear it?” Becca asked. Again, space was big, and there was a chance that another company had been training their microphones on exactly the same spot as Becca’s department had luckily been doing.
“We don’t know yet. No one has been reaching out to us, and we sure aren’t reaching out either. If anyone else had this, they would want to work it out. Sit on it for a while. This is big, no one will want to jump the gun and be made a fool of.” Something like this, it could get a lot of support. A lot of outside funding. It was a narrow tightrope. Go public too early, and it could turn out to be nothing, and you are ridiculed for seeming like alien-obsessed nerds. Go too late, and you’re the second or third company with the news, and your thunder has been stolen.
“So ... aliens?” Becca asked. She had to, and to her great relief, Tom didn’t laugh. He looked at her seriously, and he shrugged his shoulders.
“It could be, right?”
“I guess so. It’s ... specific. Half an hour of a minute or so long ... what, musical number being played ... it seems like it’s not just random.”
“Right. It definitely doesn’t seem random.”
“You’re recording in the same spot?” Becca asked.
“Of course,” Tom said, and then there was a faint ding from his cell phone and he pulled it from his pocket.
“Food is here,” he said with a smile, and he stood and left his office.
The night passed more quickly than Becca could imagine, and suddenly it was nearly ten and she found herself yawning, something which her boss did not miss.
“I’ve kept you late enough,” he said.
“No, this is huge. We can work all night.”
They had been working, both of them agreeing that it was a message, the notes seemed too carefully chosen to be anything else, and they had listened to the recording, first as they ate, and then more seriously, hunched over the desk with pens in their hands and paper before them, scribbling down any sort of cypher which came to mind. Unfortunately, nothing had come from their session. Anything that either of them had written down they had subsequently crossed out.
“Here, take a recording,” Tom said, sliding a USB stick across to her. “I don’t think I need to mention that this stick needs to stay in your possession. And no one hears it: best friend, mom, grandma, whoever.”
“Yeah. Got it.”
Becca took the stick and slid it into her purse. She was about to argue against leaving once again, but she yawned, unable to keep herself from doing so, and she knew it was time to head home. Tom walked out with her, walking her to her car before turning and heading to his, parked much closer to the building in a spot reserved for a manager. Becca was tired, but she was fine to drive. The excitement of hearing the musical tones, which had come from space, was enough to keep her up on the drive, and then for an hour longer after she had climbed into bed.