We first detected it in an automated survey of the Oort Cloud in the southern sky above Peru. 2024 OZ-92 was flagged for review by the analysis pipeline Tuesday morning at 2:09 AM local time. It wasn’t anywhere on the optical array but it lit up in ultraviolet like a light. In case you weren’t keeping up on these things, nature doesn’t do that. The spectra were hardly believable too. Carbon, iron, titanium, vanadium, aluminum; it wasn’t just some rock for sure.

We kept the discovery under wraps at first. You needed something in space to see this thing, the UV is strongly attenuated by the atmosphere, which kept the population of people who could scoop us on the discovery thankfully small. By our best estimates, 2024 OZ-92 was between 1 meter and 1 kilometer on its longest axis. Like I said, it was practically invisible. The UV emission was a single source about a meter in size. We didn’t believe for a minute that was all there was to it; you might see the same thing if it was shining a spotlight straight at us. Whatever it was, it was outputting tremendous power to show up against the backdrop of space at that distance.

Parallax measurements put 2024 OZ-92 out to about 1400 AU from the sun in a highly hyperbolic orbit. Sorry, I’m not explaining this very well. When I said “highly hyperbolic orbit” I meant to say “coming at us really fast.” This thing was moving so fast we almost lost it again the first night after we reviewed the satellite data. We could not believe it until we compared the first shots of it and did some rough math in a terminal. Our numbers said solar flyby in 20 years. Or something like one percent the speed of light.

We knew we had limited time to publish our findings. The more time that passed the more chance someone else published first. Not to mention, our survey data was made public on a monthly rotation. If we stopped the scheduled drop in 12 days that would only point the whole community directly at our survey path. Along with Doctor Jacob Andersson, our Swedish post-doc and programming expert, I spent those first few days sleep deprived in the lab: optics tracking so we could keep the satellite tracking it, coordinating with the two other labs we let in on the secret in order to get non-stop coverage, and writing code to stitch it all together.

By Wednesday night we had real-time tracking and data capture going. Our P.I., a Swiss old-guard named Alain Schweizer, was already drumming up the press for a big announcement Monday. If you weren’t in the know, a principal investigator’s job as head of the lab is primarily about securing grant funding and publicity is one way to make that happen. The clock was ticking and we were going to have the analysis before anyone even knew this thing was out there.

That night I was out in the Mojave desert. We would come out here carrying our telescopes when the skies were clear to just take a night to enjoy the stars. Working in a lab with pictures of stars all day you lost some of the grandeur of the Universe. Out here you felt small under the canvas of the night sky, it was a moment to commune with nature again. All of this out here was why we did it after all.

The cold desert air filled my nostrils as I struggled to get focus on my telescope optics. Peering into the eyepiece, I was suddenly blinded by a flash of magenta. It filled my vision in one eye and made me stand with a start, covering the eye with a hand. The after image burned in my vision not as a bright image but a pulsing light. When I recovered I noticed everyone around was looking up. The weird, pulsing purple light was in the sky, outshining the stars.

That’s when I woke up. Not in the desert, at my desk. I’d fallen asleep in the lab out of exhaustion. The tracking data for 2024 OZ-92 was a quarter of the screen in front of me, one of my Emacs terminals was another quarter, and the video feed we’d set up took up the remaining half. I’d been setting up a false-color setting for the video since the data was ultraviolet. I looked over my code, regaining my senses: “max_saturation_color = 0xFF00FF”. Bright magenta. Just looking at it was nauseating now. I set it to blue.

It was getting late and I was moving lethargically. I thought I should really just finish up for the night; the clock read 11:27 PM. There was a satellite switch coming up and the JWST had the best optics. It was a good test for my hastily-written video pipeline. The swap happened right on schedule. Success! I was elated. The frame rate increased and… wait, what was that? I peered closely at the video. It wasn’t just my imagination: 2024 OZ-92 was pulsing.

I rushed back to the code. We pulled data on single objects so often from star fields that it was just a matter of finding the right functions and constructing the calls, something I could have done in my sleep. Time blurred. Multiple harmonics. Carrier signal. Could this be a message?

If it was a message I don’t know how they expected anyone to know what it said. The Shannon entropy was high which meant it was either extremely complicated or just noise. I was really running out of steam now. I looked at the clock again: 2:09 AM. I pushed my analysis to the server and called it a night. My wife Amy was asleep in bed when I got home. I haphazardly dumped my clothes on the floor and crawled into bed next to her.

The corridor stretched out long in front of me. I could see that it branched at even intervals down to the end where a bright, pulsing magenta light shined. It hurt to look at and any length of time doing so made it seem like it was filling the corridor. I was lucid, I knew I was dreaming again, and I didn’t like it. I turned around.

An identical corridor stretched out before me, I raised my hand to block the light. My head ached right behind my eyes. I’m sure I let out a long sigh at this point. I started making my way forward. At the first branch a voice called out to me “Alex! Over here!” I turned and looked. It was my wife, but not. I can’t put my finger on exactly what was wrong about her but when I saw her I knew it wasn’t going to act like her.

I took a step into the corridor out of the light, “Are you… Oz?” I asked tentatively of our pet name for 2024 OZ-92. She tilted her head, more like an animal than a person. “Yes and no. No and yes!” This wasn’t going to be easy.

“Okay, why ‘no’?”

“Oz is not here.”

I distinctly sighed. It was hard for me to be annoyed at not-Amy though. Amy sometimes did this too. “And why ‘yes’?”

“I am Oz.” I wasn’t quite sure how that made sense to her, and I wasn’t prepared to follow that line of questioning.

“Why do you look like my wife?”

“OBJECTIVE: Minimal threat model. OBJECTIVE: Maximize interaction reward signaling.” She practically shouted them at me. I held up my hand. That was good though.

“What part of Oz are you?” I said, trying to lead into more fruitful responses.

“I am the shoelace.”

“The shoelace,” I repeated, dumbfounded.

She tilted her head at me again. “Maximum reached. Further processing required. Interaction terminating.”

“Wait!” I shouted from my bed, sitting bolt upright. The room was empty, it must be late morning and Amy had already gone to work. I was worried about these dreams, but Amy was really the only person I trusted to talk to about it. I thought about texting her, but “Hey, hun. We found an alien space ship and I’m having dreams that it’s abducting me in my sleep,” didn’t seem like something I could explain with words alone.

Exasperated and still very tired, I showered and dressed for work. There was still a lot of it to do. I came into the lab at 10 past 11 and the rest of the lab had already found my work from the night before. The response to my arrival was one of spontaneous cheering. They stood up and clapped. I nearly cried. It was beautiful.

Alain was full of praise as well. They’d repeated my measurements on the JWST on another pass only minutes before my arrival to the same results. “We’re calling it a Fast Alternating Emitter. I’m not prepared to call it a non-natural phenomena just yet. There are a few in the lab who disagree with me, but we want to be cautious about overstepping. We have reputations to defend after all.”

I chuckled. “A FAE, huh? Seems fitting. It’s as mysterious as a pixie for sure.” His reply was a no-nonsense stare. No? Nothing? Must just be me then.

“Let’s just keep excluding possibilities and keep our speculation in check, okay Alex?”

I nodded, smiled politely, and sat at my desk. Okay, self, speculation in check. Your weird dreams are definitely just dreams. I clicked on the monitor and got back to work. I grimaced a little at the video of Oz and its ugly magenta dot. Horrible color, I thought I set that to blue.

Thursday passed without surprises. Professor Schweizer directed the lab toward hypothesizing physical explanations for 2024 OZ-92’s odd UV emissions. I needed to turn my rough calculations from the day before into figures of power spectra in the signal for the draft of the paper. They were beautiful, but I couldn’t seem to tease much more information out of them. I found some curious but inconclusive regularities in the data. We talked back and forth through the afternoon and came up with a number of candidates including a harebrained idea about a natural deuterium/hydrogen arc lamp.

Through that evening Jacob and I worked on excluding hypothetical sources for the emission spectra. We also talked about possible intelligent phenomena that could be behind it. I didn’t mention my dream to him. He left after 11 PM and I was about to go as well when I had an idea about comparing the other spectra normalized against UV to show just how bizarre it was. Shortwave, microwave, infrared, visual, UV, X-ray: they all required different hardware to detect and so stitching it all together took some work. By the end of it I was exhausted again. I looked at my watch: 2:09 AM.

I came back to Amy asleep again and crashed beside her. As I drifted off to sleep I thought of taking her on a nice holiday after Monday for putting up with a lout of a husband like me. At this point it wasn’t at all surprising when I was greeted by a blinding magenta light. Same corridor, same light. I walked forward to the first side passage.

Oz was there, looking like Amy again. “Hi Oz, I guess I can say I’ve been expecting you.”

“Hi Alex! We’re making so much progress! Things are going so well.” She was warm and effervescent. I wasn’t sure why, but I found it upsetting.

“Who is ‘we’?” I said cautiously.

“You and me! This time, they’ll be ready when we get here!” She jumped a little, I felt my stomach go with it.

“Wait. Slow down. I don’t understand. Let’s go back. Last time you said you were ‘shoelaces’. Can you explain that?”

She tilted her head again. “Your language is strange. Imagery: We wind up and up and up and hold tight. I have not been provided accurate models to explain more. Please engage in further interaction during your activities to accelerate processing.”

“Wait. During the day? Have you been watching me?”

“Alex, I know this will upset you but we’ll need to utilize more of your resources in order to complete all mission objectives. Please remain calm.”

“You’re being evasive. This is exactly the way to make me not calm. I am very not calm. What else is in here?” I flipped around and marched down the corridor to the next passage.

“Wait, Alex! You won’t like what’s in there.”

In the next alcove was a normal looking wooden door like you’d see in any office building. I swung open the door.

“Oz, why is there an entire replica of my lab inside your ship?”

“Oz is not here.” The dream ended. I woke up in front of my keyboard. Not the ship, not my bed. I hadn’t gone home last night. Groggy, I went and got some coffee and mulled over the whole thing. I met Jacob who was there bright and early.

“Hey Alex, I’m glad you’re here.” He greeted me.

“Oh? What’s up?”

He gestured for me to follow and we went back to his desk. “I know we keep talking about this signal, but Schweizer is right, it just looks like noise.”

“Noise and complexity often look similar at first glance.”

He nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I had a similar thought, so I pulled out my favorite black-box solver. Unsupervised recurrent neural networks!” Now he was grinning.

I felt a little shiver run down my spine. “Don’t you think it’s a little dangerous to run an unknown alien signal through an arbitrary function generator?”

He frowned, not the response he’d been hoping for. “It’s not like we’re going to get some bootstrapper for a virus here, they don’t know anything about us.”

I slapped my forehead. “Shoelaces. Bootstraps. Of course!” A bootstrapper was a metaphor for a small program which enabled some larger program to function on unknown hardware. It “picked itself up by its own boot straps.”

“Are you sure you’re alright? Maybe you should get some more sleep.”

“I’m fine. I’m fine. Just one of those words that got stuck in my head. You know how it goes.” I still thought there were dangers with the neural network approach. In fact I was convinced there were dangers, but I needed proof about what the alien signal was and Jacob’s approach could give me what I needed. “Have you turned up anything useful?”

He shook his head. “No, these things take time. I don’t have some super computer to run it on after all. Judging by the learning rate it’ll take a day before we get anything out of it at all.”

“Okay. Let me know the moment you do. I’ll go make some great video for the presser.”

I’d been working for an hour when Professor Schweizer arrived. I showed off my videos and he seemed quite impressed. Just as he was leaving though he stopped and said “Oh, and Alex, be careful with the gains on those antennas will you? I got a couple complaints this morning about power budgets from the JWST. No big deal, just be more careful next time.”

I blinked back at him in surprise. “The antennas. Right. I’ll be careful.” As he walked away I quickly searched through my code. Buried in the middle of something unrelated the antenna driver was turning the secondary antenna’s gain to maximum and pointing it at the ephemeris data for 2024 OZ-92. As if that wasn’t enough, it then wired the bitstream for that antenna into some really bizarre looking code I couldn’t figure out immediately. In other words, the code was trying to communicate with Oz back through the satellite.

I broke out in a cold sweat. I didn’t write this. I checked the log. I submitted it at 2:09 AM with the rest of it. I deleted all of it from the server, but kept a local copy. I needed to know what this did.

Then I realized, 2:09 AM mattered some how. It kept showing up. I went back and checked. The first discovery reported by our analysis software was at 2:09 AM. For debugging we kept raw captures from the satellites before the went to analysis. I pulled up the file from that event. Lucky, these were cycled out for disk space but because we had turned off the automated survey they hadn’t been deleted.

It wasn’t there. I couldn’t believe it. There was no trace of the signal in the pre-processed image. The analysis pipeline had introduced the artifact. 2024 OZ-92 didn’t exist or if it did it started existing after we detected it. What was going on? I was so frustrated I nearly screamed. I calmed myself with some breathing exercises. Keep it together. You’re a scientist. Keep your assumptions in check. Validate evidence, exclude hypotheses.

I still hadn’t figured out why 2:09 AM was important. If I knew where to look I might have had some hope, but just scanning every database we had would take a lifetime. I had to start from some guesses. First, I had to throw out everything we’d learned that had gone through the analysis pipeline. That was almost everything, no person was going to look at thousands of images of stars and pick out each one independently. We used a relatively new neural network solution developed for star fields.

Well, if my own brain was any example, neurons were just as prone to exploitation as any code written in a program. That meant that despite that I could barely trust my own senses, there were some real physical limitations to modifying them. Light, the flow of information from one place to another, still required line-of-sight around big rocky bodies like the earth. That meant that in order to get to me and my tools consistently at 2:09 AM there had to be something in the sky. I set up the conic and scanned the ephemeris data for everything I could find.

I’m still looking. It’s nearing 2:00 AM and I’m running out of time. I’m terrified. I wrote all this down so you’d know just in case I wake up someone else next time. Tell my wife I love her. I don’t know what they want. I don’t know why they’re here. There is one thing I am certain of. Some messages were not meant for us to discover. When they come they will not say “we come in peace” but “we will take you with us.” If you want any hope of maintaining your sanity when the FAE light shines down on our world: DO NOT LOOK INTO THE LIGHT.