THE SIXTH THEORY * THE SPHERE

The rock was 2.6 billion years old. Something inside it was still awake. Professor Anette Corrigan opens the semester with the question science prefers to ask sideways: where did life come from? Over fourteen weeks she means to lay out six theories — primordial soup, the RNA world, hydrothermal vents, panspermia, clay, and the sixth that no serious researcher will touch. The one about silicon. That same afternoon an unstamped grey envelope is waiting on her lectern, addressed in handwriting she has not seen in eleven years. Eighty kilometres from Kiruna, in the oldest and deadest continental crust in Europe, a deep scientific borehole drops into empty space at 2,347 metres. The diamond core bit comes back ground down to bare steel. The recovered material is silicon and carbon in a one-to-one ratio, arranged in a pattern that repeats with a precision geology does not produce. Before the summer ends the project will vanish from the paperwork, the site will belong to a company with no past, and Anette will receive an invitation she cannot refuse. The sphere is a hundred and eighty metres across. It transmits sixty-seven pulses. And it is waiting for someone willing to count before they start guessing. Hard science fiction about first contact, the origin of life, and what it costs to say "I don't know" and mean it. Book one.