Do Not Pass GO

By the time Leslie was about halfway through his coffee, it was pretty clear that Mr. Drake wanted to talk exclusively about the ghost ship. Leslie had been looking forward to a bit of small talk, some inane banter to fill the air while the new plow printed, but that didn’t seem to be in the cards.

“The whole west coast has gone dark,” Mr. Drake continued unprompted, “no information is going in or out”

“They’ve had rolling blackouts in the past,” Leslie offered, coming to terms with the nature of the conversation. He would be playing devil’s advocate on this one. Mr. Drake would be taking the role of unhinged conspiracy lunatic. This was not a role that the old man usually took, as he was rather practical, but in the post truth age it only took a momentary lapse in concentration for specious data to sneak its way into your synapses.

“I think this is different Les,” Mr. Drake said sadly, “let me show you something.”
He hoisted himself up from the kitchen table and led Leslie into the main living space of the structure. Upon a side table that was performing a number of duties including lamp stand, there was a Go board.

“When I bought this place, it came with a bunch of outdated technology,” he began, “Back before this neck of the woods was all wired up with fiber optic cables, people used satellite dishes to get TV shows and really shitty internet. These dishes are pretty hefty, so getting rid of them is kind of a pain in the ass. I have three of them that I swore for years I would get around to hauling to the dump. That never really happened. About ten years back, I ended up hooking one of them to a computer I wasn’t really using just to see what sort of signals it would pick up.”
Mr. Drake conjured a couple of chairs and bade Leslie to have a seat there with him instead.

“Mostly, I just got a bunch of radio noise, pretty standard stuff. The Sun, Jupiter, the Galactic Center, all the radio loud stuff. It was pretty interesting, but not entirely up my alley. I started analyzing some of this static to see what sorts of information I could get out of it, because not all static is static. Some of it is information. Every once in a while, I would get some actual binary data.”
Leslie was preparing himself for Mr. Drake to go fully off the deep end here, if he was citing noise from space this man was truly lost. Leslie scanned briefly around the house for bottles of piss and tinfoil hats. None were in evidence.

“The data that I eventually found was pretty weird,” Mr. Drake went on, “it was pulses of binary information in a pretty unorthodox format. Basically I was getting a string of three hundred and sixty one bits, all of which were zero. Except for one of them. This errant one was placed about halfway through the message. Three hundred and sixty one bits is a very strange message length for computer stuff, computers usually work in powers of two. So 256 or 512 would make a lot more sense. There are a bunch of protocols that handle messages of that length all the time, but 361 was wicked odd. It took me a couple of years to figure out what I was dealing with, but I eventually landed on Go. 361 is the product of 19x19, that’s how many squares are on a standard Go board. This single 1 hanging out in the middle of the message was an invitation to play Go. It was the first stone. Eventually I figured out that it wasn’t a binary system, but a ternary thing. +5 db would be a white stone, -5 db a black and +2 db acted as zero or a blank spot where no stones were. It was a strange mashup of analogue and digital stuff, but it kind of made a strange sense.” Mr. Drake eyed the board and then went on.

“So I started sending moves, and this space person started sending moves back, and I’ve been playing space Go for the last five years or so with this person, and I have no Idea who it is. They’re incredibly good at Go though, I’ve won maybe a handful of games over the years, but it’s so freaking cool that I can’t stop playing. I wasn’t the only person to figure this out, there are a bunch of us that play. We had to change to protocol a little bit to add address headers so we could tell which game is which, but the people that are involved in this are pretty brainy, so that was a pretty simple matter. I’m probably the least intellegent one in the group, but I figured it out first so they keep me around. I’m basically the dumbest guy on the moon here.”

“Anyway, the other day a message came through without a message header, one of the old style messages. It looks like it should be a game in progress, but it doesn’t look like any Go game that I’ve ever seen.”

Mr. Drake looked down at the Go board and kind of shrugged. What he observed looked like this:

○○●·●○●·●·○●○○···○○
●·○○○·○○○···●●●·○●○
●·●·○●·●○·●○●·●●·○○
○···○○○·○●···●○○·●·
●●●·○···○●○●·○○○·●○
·●●●·○···○●○●·○○○·●
○●●·●○●●·●○·●○○●·●●
●·●···●●·○○·●●·○●·●
·○●·○···●○○●·●○●·●·
●○○●·●○·●○●·●···●●○
○○·○○·○○·●●·○···○○○
·○○○·●○·○○·●·○●·●·○
○·●○·●○○·●·○●○·○○·●
○·●···○·●●·○●·●·●·○
○·●·○○·●·●○·○○·●·○○
···················
···················
···················
···················

“See how all the pieces are all crammed to one side?” Mr. Drake asked.

“Yeah,” Leslie said, while his eyes narrowed. He wasn’t exactly buying into this whole thing, he worked extremely hard to keep viral memes out of his consciousness, but this one had some actual verifiable data. Those were the most dangerous kind.

Leslie, as mentioned before, spent a lot of time in libraries seeking out this verifiable information. He considered himself an aficionado of the lost arts. Just like driving standard, he tended to do things the hard way. In his late teens, he had gotten interested in morse code. For most people this was a completely useless skill. The only real message that any normal person would send or receive in morse would be an S.O.S., and that would be probably as a joke, the staccato of the message being burned into the collective unconscious.

He had burned this method of sending and receiving information into his neurons under the assumption that it would come in handy one day. Also, because it was cool and kind of made him look like a badass. This was a common motivation among teens, without which we would have little to no acoustic guitar music. Leslie, having subtler tastes, settled on morse code. What he saw before him encoded on the Go board was definitely morse, he could recognise that, but his morse skills were a little dusty with age, so he merely made the suggestion to Mr. Drake out loud.

“Looks like morse to me,” Leslie stated, in a manner completely unbefitting to the mystery he had just cracked.

“Son of a thousand bitches,” Mr. Drake said under his breath, “I bet you’re fuckin’ right. What does it say?” Mr. Drake knew a lot of obscure esoteric stuff, but sadly morse wasn’t one of those things.

“Not sure, I haven’t used it in a while, do you have a book with the morse chart in it? We could look it up.” This was a typical Leslie strategy, he could take a picture of the board with the phone that was in his pocket and have any number of AIs translate what it saw, but that would be the easy way, and he preferred to have no middle man between him and his data. This was also a morse code message from space, so it deserved at least a little bit of reverence.

“You know what? I think I do. I have a boyscout manual tucked in the bookshelf somewhere, you mind grabbing it?” Mr. Drake said excitedly, redoubling his focus on the board.

Leslie grabbed the boyscout manual after a brief search through Mr. Drake’s stacks, which covered various unconnected topics like poetry, midcentury furniture design, bartending, a healthy representation of modern science fiction, and of course boyscout stuff.

He took the manual back to the table and took a minute to decode the message. It read as follows:

GREY GOO SCENARIO ON WEST COAST COLLAPSE IMMINENT PREPARE FOR THE WORST

He read this aloud to Mr. Drake.
“Huh,” he said, as he leaned back in his chair. He removed his glasses and began to clean them, “the fuck is that supposed to mean?”