Gone With The Meme

Bell Labs, March 1940

“Lab Director, would you mind taking a listen to this call we found?”

The earnest appearing tech at my office door seemed shy, but excited.

I didn’t prefer to be interrupted in that moment, but it was rare for a tech to come directly to me in the middle of the afternoon like this for just a phone call, “What sort of call?”

“Some of the offices forwarded over some sort of strange phone call we picked up being sent to the weird Area Code 347.”

“What is unusual about that area code?” Sure I work for AT&T, but I’m a lab director in the research labs, I don’t know everything about phone dialing.

“That area code doesn’t exist, it’s just not on the map. That’s why it bounced between a few offices before it was sent to us.”

“So it’s a garbage call? Noise in the system?” I might as well start with the obvious questions.

“That’s why we’d like your ears on this, Director, before we go chasing ghosts in the system.”

I shrugged and followed the tech to a workstation where I was handed a headset and the recording was played for me. An oscilloscope was plugged in showing the waveforms of the recording as it progressed. It began with standard dial tones and then proceeded quickly in a mash of what sounded like line noise but had very visible uniformity on the oscilloscope. There were some very striking square waves that looked far too regular to be just line noise. Then it returned to dial tones, followed by more square waves. If it was garbage, someone had spent a lot of time crafting it.

Having heard it I took in the name of the workspace and addressed the tech, “That sure is interesting for garbage, Martin.”

“There’s one more twist; there were three more calls after this one to the same number.”

I sighed, of course there was more to this weird rabbit hole. “What are your working theories, Martin?”

Martin scratched his chin, “One: Some sort of military encrypted signal bleeding into the wrong line using a fake area code. Two: Some sort of buggy IBM mainframe teletype piggy backing on one of our lines. Three: Some buggy military IBM mainframe combination of the first two. Should we ask through our defense contracts if this might be one of their projects? The way it uses our dial tones seems like our proprietary tech, but doesn’t exactly match anything I know of. That would lead me to suspect Theory One or Three the most, unless IBM is trying to hack something they shouldn’t.”

I grimaced, “Let’s try not to get the military involved just yet. Can we slow this down, get printouts of it, somehow?” I had a technical background myself in a different specialized mathematics research field and I was feeling a bit rusty in some of the specifics of the practical phone systems, but I was certainly intrigued at the wild shapes on that oscilloscope. Even the sounds, as much as it sounded like line noise had a regularity to it, a pattern.

“It’s too fast.”

“It is too fast?”

Martin looked almost upset, “Faster than any system we have running today. We could use some mainframe time on this. We need a project code to charge this to.”

That was the gut punch to the lab’s purse strings that I should have expected, but Martin had done a good job getting me curious enough to maybe want to spend a bit of money on it, “Well, I guess we’re exploring your second theory. Maybe IBM will tell us it is just another of their experiments and we won’t waste too much more time on it. Or maybe they’ll be just as weirdly intrigued by it to do some leg work on it for free. I’ve got some contacts, let me discreetly reach out.”

Back at my desk I dialed my “friend” Bob at IBM. I hated calling Bob for a number of reasons, including that he was a giant prick, but for as high up in IBM’s red tape he had risen he still had modest engineering chops and might possibly still chase the possibility of an engineering puzzle with the eagerness of the nerd he used to be before IBM tried to remold him into a black suit designed only for budgetary paperwork. He picked up immediately and like the prick he was started straight into dominating the conversation, “Hey Maggie. We missed you at the golf course last week. I hit quite the eagle in the back nine, you should have seen it. Miss too many more holes and you might fall way behind me.”

I hated playing golf with that crew but keeping a somewhat regular weekend play schedule with them I felt reminded them that I was worth any two of them. I tried to steer the conversation back to why I was calling, “Bob, my lab has picked up an engineering puzzle and we wanted to make sure it wasn’t some sort of IBM skunkwork project accidentally abusing our lines. Something we think might be coming from one of your mainframes.”

I filled Bob in on it being from calls to an area code that doesn’t exist, we scheduled a pickup for copies of our tapes of the strange calls.

Bob showed up to a conference room a couple weeks later with printouts and a somewhat angry expression, “Maggie why are you wasting our time investigating some sort of telegraph? This has to be from your side of the fence with all the dial tones and ASCII.”

“ASCII?” With a brute force like Bob I might as well wait for him to explain and I glanced at Martin to make sure it was Bob doing the explaining. It would help Bob blow off some of that steam. He loved explaining things.

“At IBM we encode text in a well designed encoding we call EBCDIC. You all at AT&T are the ones that like to insist on the hideous ASCII because it is backwards compatible with old telegraphs, despite its obvious deficiencies. You can clearly see some English text in ASCII in key places of each call.”

Bob pointed to highlighted sections in the ASCII decoded document including “u up?”, “babe?”, “talk to me”, “plz”.

Bob turned to leave, but then turned back, “The engineers claim they needed a good break from all the projects for Germany and enjoyed this test, so I’ll invoice you the friends and family rate for the mainframe time, yeah? Still, though, it’s wild, where did AT&T dig up a 25 kilobits per second telegraph?”

Martin almost choked on whatever warm beverage was in his mug, “25 kilobits per second? I knew it was fast, but that’s impossibly fast.”

“Roughly,” Bob shrugged. Then Bob’s expression changed again to something like fascinated curiosity, “Wait? This isn’t a prank? This really is some sort of alien telegraph?”

I glanced to Martin and back to Bob, “You really know about as much as we do. Thanks for the printouts, Bob. We’ll let you know if we get more of these alien telegraph messages.”

Martin returned to my office in a few days with a bunch of analysis and a few other techs, “We’ve got a lot of notes and some wild theories,” he began and I felt like I was all ears.

He starting pointing to repeating patterns near the visible English words, “A lot of theories keep coming back to these undecodable patterns, which recur in the plain text sections with such regularity we believe that this encoding isn’t actually ASCII but something derived from it, using the highest bit in ways we don’t expect. We suspect they are still plain text and not encrypted, though. We don’t know what language they encode, but it seems regular enough to be some form of language. Given the English words in between and the way the patterns seem to reflect sentiment, we have suspicions it might be some sort of future punctuation.”

“Future punctuation? From the future? I think you need to walk me through these wild theories a bit more,” I had no idea what to think.

“Right, so that was a crazy theory I threw out for a laugh earlier, but working from there started to unlock some of our other findings, Director,” Martin looked almost scared to admit the theory had started from him, “for instance, these other neighboring bytes seem to increment at the right rate to be timestamps of some sort. We cross-correlated our phone log data and IBM’s notes on these relative timings inside the calls and they appear to align with an error of only a few wall clock microseconds.”

“Okay, timestamps, so these are definitely from the future?”

Martin nervously started rambling, as I find so many good techs are easy to fall into, “They appear to be seconds counted after some sort of epoch, so we don’t know exactly what the epoch is, so we mostly only know that these events are roughly 54 years after that chosen epoch. That’s too low to be something like the AD epoch, we wouldn’t expect an American telegraph in 54 AD, for instance. If we assume the epoch is this century and say 1900, telegraphs from 1954 would be wild, but this also doesn’t seem to be tech from only 14 years ahead. We have reason to suspect the epoch itself may be in our future. So much of the headers and flow around these text blocks is a control and signalling system like we would design, but it’s message switched. We have enough growing confidence in the message structure to further affirm that weird future punctuation is text data and not message metadata. But speaking of message metadata, that’s where we keep finding more weirdness. The timestamps we found, as mentioned—”

“Right, we’ve covered the timestamps. They are at least 54 years after some point we don’t know,” I tried not to betray any impatience in my voice, I just was hoping to short-circuit an accidental loop. “What’s ‘message switching’ and why does its metadata matter?”

Martin took a deep breath, “Message switching is barely a theory right now: instead of connecting a circuit and allocating all the bandwidth we need for it up front in theory we could break things like phone calls up into lots of smaller pieces and float them down large chunks a piece at a time. A bit like sending lots of little postcards through the mail instead of a single large book. No one is crazy enough to suggest this sort of message switching, but if you have roughly 25kbps speed to communicate with maybe it makes a lot more sense. I can barely imagine what a full trunk of these sorts of messages would be like. That’s a massive amount of bandwidth, and probably just one trunk among many by that point! We’re lucky that whatever switching system is in charge of these is only delivering us one specific phone number to phone number interaction and not a whole regional office worth’s. That sort of bandwidth could have flooded our systems. It is incredible to think about.”

“So we expect that sort of message switching to be more than 14 years out?”

“We have no reason to do it now. We don’t even have most of the theory of how it would operate at all yet. The people thinking about that sort of network design probably aren’t even working in this building yet if this does come out of our labs. Of course, the big smoking gun seems to be that we found the version number. These seem to be messages from a Signalling System 7.”

“We’re on–?”

“3 mostly, maybe 3.5 if we are feeling generous with ourselves. Signalling Systems are decades of work both to build and then to roll out. That’s possibly a lot of years. We think that version number is likely accurate. If we assume the epoch start date is closer to some future Signalling System release date we’re starting to feel like we’re getting glimpses of what feels like the deep future. Right now a favorite choice is if we built our next Signalling System mid-century, 1950-ish and it was so state of the art we thought it worth numbering time after that point, and if that’s it, are we getting messages from at least 2004?”

“But in the future they’ve reverted to some sort of telegraph?” I was starting to wonder if Bob was maybe right that this was some sort of prank, but not on him.

“Partly. With weird future punctuation. That gets back to our suspicions from other parts of the message metadata. We think this can carry audio, text, video, and other things.” Martin was excited like a puppy, “There are fewer limits than any system we currently have. 25 kbps is probably too low for real-time video, but if you send enough messages you could watch a movie or something. Imagine the possibilities! Imagine the insane bandwidth needs and how many phone lines they would need for things like that! No wonder it is trying to message an area code we don’t know about yet.”

The enthusiasm was fascinating and almost infectious, but I was supposed to be wearing a business-minded hat on this side project, “So we’ve got telegraphs from the future? What’s the use of this? How much of this tech can we reverse engineer and start building? How long until we can send video over phone lines?”

Martin glanced around at his fellow techs who hadn’t spoken at all yet, but apparently now was when they were needed for moral support, “So we were thinking that we should respond to these telegraphs.”

“You want to try to send telegraphs to the future?” That certainly wasn’t where I was expecting this to go.

“Think of what more we could learn!”

“Wouldn’t that be dangerous to the timeline if we learn something out of order?”

“Weren’t you just asking if we could reverse engineer tech out of this?”

I took a few seconds to gather my fury about that response, “Fine, but do we even have the ability to send messages back?”

Martin indicated the pair that had accompanied him, “We think we can do it. The dial tones are easy enough and the bootup sequences just after them seem regular enough we could copy and paste them we think. Or at least, a single channel of them, we think it’s a paired call and response and we only need to send one channel of the exchange and hope the other side responds with the same responses. We think we understand enough of the message format to make a reasonable attempt at faking a message, and we just have to hope the system on the other end isn’t strict about it. The only real problem is—” Martin stopped and again looked for some sort of moral support from his peers.

I waited patiently.

Martin finally took a deep breath, “It’s still too fast for us. We’d need some help.”

I sighed, “You want me to waste more money on IBM computing time?”

Martin nodded and I worked on a plan to butter up Bob to help us send an “alien telegraph” message. I realized it probably meant planning on a few rounds of golf with that lout and his usual crew.

I was surprised that Bob seemed almost eager to help on this next step, despite having been angry it wasn’t a good, “proper” IBM protocol. I got the feeling some of his engineers were wasting nearly as much time on analysis of it as my techs have been. I was less surprised that Bob was adamant this be a shared effort and the exact message contents must be work-shopped between all of us. IBM didn’t want to just be a dumb conduit, even after acting like they had nothing to do with this effort.

After more meetings than it should have taken, thanks to some of the weight of IBM’s bureaucracy trying to crush our spirits, the combined committee settled on trying to send a simple “Who is this?”

All of us were deeply surprised that responses occurred almost immediately in short succession. IBM was faster this time at getting printouts back to us, and it was basically the same committee, now with something of a dedicated conference space in one of my labs. A few of the IBM engineers had almost taken to working some days entirely from my lab. (I have few illusions that at least some of it had to do with our slightly more relaxed dress code. They probably relished any excuse to dress down.)

Response message 1 was “y shout?” and message 2 was “u srsly gonna new phone who dis me?” Both had plenty of “future punctuation” following each. Response message 2 felt like a small win for my techs over the IBM members of our committee trying to muscle into our turf. It was pleasing to us to know that whatever this “future telegraph” was they still called it a phone. We would take the small win there. Response message 1 got the most attention though because it caused some confusion and a lot of small arguments.

Martin boiled down the working theories on “the shout problem” from Response message 1 for me a few hours after a debate between him and one of the IBMers got a bit heated, “Several of them from IBM have a working theory that we should have included ‘alien punctuation’ along with our message and that we should spend a lot more time researching the ‘alien punctuation’. I contend that IBM got sloppy with the teletext transcription of our message and at the moment they won’t admit to any such thing. It’s possible punctuation changed a lot in the future, but given the overall sloppiness with punctuation in the messages we are seeing, we don’t think a lack of punctuation would appear to be shouting, we think we have a simpler theory.”

“What’s the theory?”

“Most of our teletypes are upper case. Old telegraphs were upper case. Most of IBM’s teletypes are upper case. We think IBM just encoded the message entirely in upper case.”

“Why would case matter?”

“You’ve noticed all the messages we’ve gotten so far are entirely in lower case, right? Some of us have been debating about that since the beginning why all the text would be in lowercase, even though we are all today so used to messages entirely in upper case, and our belief is that we’ve come across evidence to fit our theory: if all uppercase is ‘shouting’, then all lowercase is a, possibly intimate, ‘whisper’ to someone ‘natively’ using text communications. Given the speed of responses, we think this is something of a text native medium. We just need to get IBM to admit they encoded nothing but upper case to evidence our theory. They want to waste more time theorizing about what we call the ‘future punctuation’ despite us having no real basis to explore its patterns, no Rosetta stone of any sort, plus no real belief from us on the Bell Labs side that a lack of punctuation would mean ‘shouting’. Think about period versus exclamation mark: it’s the one that’s not the default that is seen as shouting. That’s been somewhat steady in English text for a long time now. Future changes to punctuation or not.”

It wasn’t hard to prod Bob to admit they had indeed teletyped the message entirely in upper case. I wasn’t going to win a war with Bob’s team on entirely ignoring what they called the “alien punctuation”, but I did get Bob to admit enough defeat that it would be easy next time to tweak their encoder program to encode only lower case no matter what teletypewriter they chose to use, so long as we all worked together to keep trying to find patterns in the “alien punctuation”.

Even with “the shout problem” somewhat resolved amicably, any next follow up message got swallowed in committee meetings. We agreed that Response message 1 was probably a rhetorical question given the timing proximity to Response message 2. No one could agree on an appropriate response to Response message 2. Some wanted to try to mention that we were in 1940 and had no idea what area code the other side was trying to correspond with. Others were worried about the timeline repercussions of admitting to anything of that sort. Some wanted to just repeat the first message. Some wanted to ask what year the other person believed it was. With clear timestamps in the message, even though we didn’t know the epoch date, some of us thought we’d get even more confusion back if we tried to ask at all about time. Many of the IBMers still thought it might be aliens so they wanted to ask about distance. They didn’t appreciate my techs pointing out that the number we were sending these reply messages to was a supposedly ordinary New York City number (and we felt any questions about distance would probably just get “New York City” whether or not there were “aliens” at the other end). (We would not want to confuse our IBM friends by telling them that the NYC return address was via a trunk line that doesn’t exist and our regional office in NYC still doesn’t understand how we are getting dials to nor from it, despite our pressure to keep digging.)

Our weeks of deliberations were interrupted by Response message 3 arriving. It was simply “c any gud films l8ly?” with no future punctuation at all. Martin, at my behest, worked very hard not to rub it into the IBM faces that the “alien punctuation” was neither necessary nor did a lack of them imply “shouting”.

Thankfully deliberation on a return response to Response message 3 was quicker and easier than our gridlock in responding to Response message 2. Terrible grammar aside, “good films” was a pleasing enough conversation topic. It seemed easy enough to talk about January’s big release that had been dominating our collective watercoolers and so it was decided to send back “gone with the wind”, emphasizing the lower case text as we’d all agreed on after “the shout problem”.

Response messages 4 and 5 were also received in short succession. Response message 5 was a baffling “tbh bae idgaf” that stumped all of us in the joint committee on alien/future communications. For as baffling as Response message 5 was, though, Response message 4 also dubbed Binary Object Alpha, was a huge confusing dump of binary computer noise with a few strange bits of ASCII embedded that seemed incidental to the overall binary object.

Where Response message 2 had felt like a small win for us on the “phone teams”, Binary Object Alpha had lit a strange fire in our IBM counterparts. Though where we’d not been able to stop talking about Response message 2, IBM got peculiarly silent and shy any time we tried to have a frank discussion on Binary Object Alpha, just a weirdly subtle seeming shift in that they thought they had won some sort of round. It took a few days for me to corner Bob on a golf course to the get the “straight talk” out of him on the subject. With a couple of cocktails and a good few holes below par he was surprisingly forthcoming to me, “We’ve been calling Binary Object Alpha the ‘future photo’.”

I couldn’t help but grin, “So you agree with us now that this is probably future communications rather than alien communications?”

Bob was surprisingly dark and sober seeming, despite my having loosened him up a bit, “Yeah, there doesn’t seem to be any remaining question on that on our side.”

I raised my eyebrow at that, because that was quite the statement. I didn’t say anything knowing that Bob was more likely to give me more if I let him ramble.

Finally he bit into the silence, “It’s the wildest thing. More bits of ASCII, we think we’ve found a few more timestamps in your weird seconds past the epoch thing, but other parts of this format feel familiar to us like they have an unmistakable IBM thumbprint. If AT&T has won some sort of war that the future of computing looks like ‘phones’ that message each other over phone lines like weird telegraphs, we are heartened to see that IBM still has its fingers on the scales and now ever more confused how we lost this war. This future photo is a mathematical marvel. It implies math that IBM hasn’t invented yet, but seems likely to us that it is IBM that will be the company to do so. How do we build such marvels and still lose in the marketplace of machines? How did we lose the war? Why are they using telegraph letters and weird timestamps in this otherwise IBM looking format? Whatever it is, it’s not fair, and management wants us to shutdown future projects with you losers at AT&T to avoid losing and to try harder to win the future, but so far we’ve mostly only agreed to keep a lid on what our R&D employees can tell you and an agreement to not discuss any technical details of the future photo beyond that we definitely think it is a photo of some sort.”

I thanked Bob for both the information and the warning that things were about to get more complicated.

Eventually I circled back around to the work conversation, “So we can’t collaborate on Binary Object Alpha. What about Response message 5? Any fresh insights on the IBM side? Thoughts on how we proceed? Any surprises to bring to the next committee meeting?”

Bob hesitated in a manner that I didn’t like, “So we may have inadvertently gotten the military involved.”

“What?”

“An executive may have said the words ‘future photo’ too loud and to discourage looking too deeply into Binary Object Alpha may have passed along the ‘encrypted message’ challenge of Response message 5.”

“Without other context?”

“Uh, probably.”

“Bob! Get me the name of your military contact you dumped that problem on.”

I had Martin help lead an effort to draft a clean executive summary of the messages so far, our findings and speculation. The next “committee for future communications” was in the office of a Lieutenant Colonel Collins. Bob and a couple IBMers were there, despite the tension of being the reason this escalated to a military question and the tension of whatever was going on with Binary Object Alpha. Collins took his time reading the executive summary and finished his reading with laughter, which was not an emotion I expected.

Collins glanced at the assembled rag tag group, “None of you have clearly spent that much time reading uncensored military communications such as the military’s love of abbreviations including rude ones, I imagine. You mentioned Gone With The Wind. What’s the most memorable quote from that movie?”

Martin tried his best Clark Gable impression, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” That obscenity has been the talk of the town.

Collins pointed to Response message 5, “To be honest, babe, I don’t give a fuck.” Someone gasped at the elevated obscenity. A couple of the committee groaned at not getting it before when it seemed so obvious now. “If I had to guess Binary Object Alpha is probably a picture of Clark Gable, maybe even a movie still from him delivering that line.” The IBM folks glanced at each other with a weird mix of unpleasant and pleasant surprise. I supposed they might excited to have a better target to try to hit in reversing that future math.

It took a few more days of committee debate to find a response that we all hated the least (“funny”), but just before we could send it we got Response messages 6 and 7 in short succession “DON’T GHOST ME” and then “fine, blocked u jerk”. Response message 6 seemed to verify the shouting theory, but 6 and 7 together seemed to paint a story for which we were missing pieces. The committee’s attempt (a couple more days later) to send a reply failed with a number disconnected signal for that trunk line we had been using to connect to the ‘future’. Multiple more attempts were made after that one, in faster succession. I’ve attached this narrative summary to the final report of the committee. AT&T’s final hypothesis was that given the speed with which we received many of these responses from the ‘future’ it seems to have been a medium for rapid communications and the many days the committee needed to form messages to send was a delay that probably violated social norms for whoever sent us these messages.

We wondered if we’d see more of such messages some day, but still had no idea how they had arrived in the first place.