Siren Starlight

My first impression of Dr O'Malley was that she was halfway to being a sociopath. I later learned that O’Malley did nothing by halves. She was a small woman and severe, as if carved from granite. She wore ratty pair of jeans, so faded as to be almost white, a utilitarian grey t-shirt and a department issued ID. No make-up, no jewellry, even her hair was close cropped, a shock of red almost like rust. The only time I ever saw her deviate from this pattern was at an office Christmas Party, where she bowed to tradition and wore a coloured paper hat. She complained about the imposition until New Years and we never asked her again.

That austerity seemed to permeate everything I knew about O’Malley. Things didn’t have value to her, a bar of gold would have been, to her eyes, the makings of a perfect mirror rather than a source of wealth. The same logic of efficiency applied to people. Laughter in the office was a grave sin, a sign of ultimate distraction from more important work. Although, I sometimes wondered if that was just so O’Malley didn’t have to use her own whip crack bark that passed for a chortle. She detested inefficiency wherever she found it. Going so far as to once follow a student home, sleep there overnight and then stage a race to the office, just to prove that there was a faster route than he was using.

History remembers these as foibles. I knew them as rabid insanity. From the moment I first applied to be a student under her I was wary. O’Malley had a reputation as vindictive and arbitrary, a teacher that brooked no interruption or repetition. Sitting in her office, clutching a bag full of notes, character references and certificates my stomach did backflips as she glared across the desk at me.

“So,” she began. There was an odd ticking in the room, a metronomic crackle that seemed to ebb and flow at random. “Why astronomy?”

A long, pre-prepared speak spilled out of me, all about my passion for the science and why I thought she was the best supervisor for my degree. Standard interview technique really, laying out the proofs for hiring me while building up her ego enough that she’d accept me. Dr O’Malley listened for maybe, three minutes, before cutting me off.

“No,” she said, holding up a hand. “You misunderstand. Why stars?”

“I...” It took me a long time to find the answer. “They’re beautiful. My dad had a boat that we used to take out on the Aegean. You could trace the entire milky-way just by gazing into the sky. There’re worse things to spend your life devoted to than beauty.”

My response seemed to catch O’Malley by surprise, as much as anything ever did. She leaned back in her chair and cocked her eyebrow. “And do they sing to you?”

“What?”

“The stars, don’t you hear it?” she continued, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to ask. Perhaps to O’Malley it was.

I shook my head, struck dumb.

“The song,” she said, tapping a key on her computer. Suddenly the ticking sound doubled in volume. “It’s a pulsar. I call it Siren. Do you hear its song?”

Perhaps the sane choice would have been to walk out then. Still, I wanted my PHD, so I cocked my head and listened. It took only a moment for me to notice the problem. “It’s not regular,” I said, frowning. “There shouldn’t be any variation to a pulsar.”

O’Malley nodded. “We’re done here.” She waved me away. “Leave your details on my desk.”

I left, bemused. It took about a week before I realised she’d given me the position, but then that was another one of Dr O’Malley’s quirks. She never seemed to be able to finish a sentence to anyone’s satisfaction. When asked a question she would consider, then deliver the shortest possible string of syllables to convey what she meant. Usually, whoever was listening had no idea that she was about to do this, so learned nothing and the conversation rapidly turned into a vicious argument.

For the sake of my studies, at least there were other people in the lab with me. There’s a somewhat idealistic myth floating around that students gather around the professors’ pulpit and are protected under their wing of knowledge. That was the ideal, O’Malley preferred a more ‘Lord of the Flies’ style of lab, however. We students were expected to figure out our own solutions and not bother the Doctor come hell or high water. There was a long running joke amongst my fellow students that if either ever came, we would get the blame.

I hated it for a long time. But still, it gave me a space to work and that was no small consideration, even if the after work pub meetup descended into plotting the good doctor’s grisly demise more often than not. Working in O’Malley’s lab was an exercise in frustration. Her quirks were funny in passing, but quickly became infuriating when you were subject to them every day. The fact that you could come into work and find your entire desk rearranged, wore after a while. The fact that she flat out refused to solve any problems when asked, yet dropped pointless task after pointless task on laps. The constant rapidfire click from her blasted Siren.

It was Siren that drove most people away in the end. O’Malley was obsessed. To be fair, it was a solar system that a good astronomer could build their entire career around. Siren was an irregular pulsar, though, the idea was almost a contradiction in terms. Pulsars are supernova remnants, beaming out radiation in tight beam, not unlike a lighthouse. They are titanic things, the and so predictable you could set a watch by them. In fact, some of the faster rotating ones are more accurate than most atomic clocks.

Siren lacked this predictable beat. It had a double peaked emission that flashed every 0.64Hz, peak-trough-peak. It was that click that filled the office whenever O’Malley was in residence, and blared through her office speakers when she was working. Except, that wasn’t the whole story. For, as often as not Siren sent out a different signal, peak-trough-rise. The actual mechanism of this had been under discussion for years and ranged across all sorts of esoteric theories, from errors in the speed of light to new physics on the surface of the pulsar that fell firmly into the quantum realm. After almost a year I bit the bullet and looked up the mystery of Siren, only to find it had been solved years before. Siren was part of a trinary system, but was the only stellar remnant in the system that we could make out with our telescopes. The complicated dance occasionally altered the light we saw and so that the system appear to flash irregularly.

As a group we, fearfully, approached O’Malley with the knowledge that there was no mystery behind Siren’s Song. I’m not sure what we expected, but O’Malley was always one to prize rationality above all, even things like human decency and kindness. Perhaps we thought, for all her quirks, she could be reasoned with.

I think you can imagine how well it went down.

A seventy word tirade was the only reward we received for trying to divert Dr O’Malley’s laser focus, that and three weeks of Siren’s Song at full volume. One of the other students quit shortly after but O’Malley seemed not to care. The rest of us decided as a group to stick it out. O’Malley could rot for all we cared.

Graduation would have left the lab a bad memory if it wasn’t for a single moment of kindness.

I was sat at my desk, banging my head on a scientific wall. My PHD was on supernova. More precisely, on the moment a star went from its final stages to the incandescent explosion that astronomers loved. The actual after effects were common knowledge, easy to spot and easier to study, but actually having a telescope pointed at the star for the moment of transition was almost impossible. There were just too many stars out there and too many potential supernovas. My PHD was an attempt to pick out a needle from an eleven billion lightyear haystack.

“That one,” O’Malley said, leaning over my shoulder putting a finger on my screen under the name of a red-dwarf.

I glared at her. “Why?”

She shrugged. “It’s next in the sequence.” She turned her back and left.

I published a paper with that star highlighted as the most likely candidate for a supernova. It was an irrational choice, there were at least three my model could be manipulated into saying was next, but it was as good a choice as any.

The light from its explosion reached Earth less than six months later. I had perhaps the simplest thesis defence in the history of the university. Heck, I ended up with a feature in Time magazine, not a big feature, but a world away from the recognition most astronomers would receive.

O’Malley refused all credit. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but did. The academic world is cut-throat at the best of times and I had a dozen people try and claim credit after the fact, all except the one woman who actually made the breakthrough. I even asked her directly whether she wanted to take centre stage, but to Dr O’Malley I may as well have been speaking a foreign language.

It was from that moment I began to see O’Malley’s world in a different light. I’d spent a long time considering her insane, plain and simple, but it wasn’t that clear cut when you dug into the details. Sure, we’d once found her strategically replacing light bulbs, but after she kept the cabinet stocked such that we never ran out of spares again. She threw two thirds of her own work our way, but never anything we couldn’t do. She detested undergrads and refused to meet anyone half way on coursework, but she still lectured every day of the week.

Well all added up, I couldn’t help but wonder if O’Malley’s problem wasn’t the world, but talking to it.

“So,” I said one day, walking into O’Malley’s office. I made no attempt at small talk, she wouldn’t have understood it. “Why spend so much time listening to Siren?”

O’Malley set down her pencil, next to the other two identical pencils. “It’s still a mystery.”

“But they solved it,” I pointed out, sitting opposite. “They inferred the missing stars and figured out the randomness. There’s nothing left to figure out.”

She snorted. “No one should infer. And they’re wrong.”

“But–” I caught myself, took a deep breath, and continued. “Okay. Why?”

“Because it’s not random,” O’Malley said, shrugging. “There’s a pattern.”

I did a double take. “And... And you’ve figured out the pattern?”

“No.” She seemed to deflate. “No I haven’t.”

“Wow.” I shook my head. The idea of O’Malley not spotting a sequence boggled the mind. “It must be some crazy system if even you haven’t figured it out yet. How many bodies do you think there are?”

“One.”

A beat passed while I waited in vain for her to elaborate.

“Urgh,” I pressed a hand to my face. “That’s not possible. A pulsar can’t change its output at random on its own. We’d have to tear down half of physics for that to even begin to make sense.”

“Yes. If it is alone.”

It took another long moment while I tried to figure out how a star could be alone, but not alone. “Oh God, no. You can’t suggest that. You can’t suggest that.”

A bitter chuckle escaped her and she spun a screen. It read ‘Intelligent Artefacts in the Siren Pulsar’.

It’s hard to explain why discovering alien life, arguably the holy grail of us skywatchers, would be the death blow to anyone’s career. Ultimately, though, if there’s one thing scientists hate it’s the word wrong. We hate things being wrong, we hate being wrong ourselves and spend our lives proving things wrong. There’s nothing a scientist wants more than to be the only person in the room who is right, but that room will tear you apart if there was the slightest chink in your armour of proof.

O’Malley didn’t care. She stood up before her peers armed with her impossible conclusions and was laughed out of the room.

I knew it was coming, but could do nothing to stop it. Her evidence was laughable really, tossing out ten years of common through and putting the word ‘aliens’ in to fill the gap. Sure, she raised an interesting point into the apparent structured nature of the Siren Song. There seemed to be repeated strings and no real models to explain them, for certain. But the signal to noise ratio was huge and there were so many other explanations to fill the void.

I think she could have made it out of there with her career intact if she’d only implied extraterrestrials. Heck, if she’d just proved the existing research false then no-one would have batted an eyebrow. O’Malley didn’t, couldn’t even, and so laid herself bare.

They destroyed her for it.

The university suggested that she should perhaps seek a more senior position and began to close the lab. Her students fled and fuelled the myth of the madwoman who believed the stars were talking to her with tales of her insanity. To be honest, I should have gone with them. I had a list of universities waiting to get me onto a post-doctoral program and every day I stayed my reputation became more entangled with O’Malley’s.

It wasn’t like she even seemed to care anyway. From the day of the conference she just closed in on herself. She stopped teaching. She stopped eating as far as I could tell. She just sat, with Siren’s Song blaring, trying to solve a mystery that I wasn’t sure actually existed.

I pushed as hard as I could with the faculty to keep the lab alive. Then, when that failed, to at least keep a telescope pointed at Siren. Finally, even that slipped through my grasp.

At least I brought beer.

O’Malley sat in a tiny office, hidden in the rafters of the university, Siren ticking forever away in the background. She was wrapped in a floral blanket and staring into the monitor, eyes glazed. I pulled a chair alongside her and passed her a bottle.

“Twenty minutes,” I said. Twenty more minutes of Siren’s Song, then it would just become an unheard curiosity once more.

She nodded and took a swig. Her face twisted into a grimace.

I chuckled. It came as no surprise that O’Malley didn’t drink. “Yeah. It’s an acquired taste.”

“Why?”

“I guess I figured you needed someone to be with for this,” I said, letting out a long sigh and taking a draught of my own beer. “I’m sorry. It shouldn’t have ended this way.”

“No. Why acquire the taste?”

I shot her an incredulous look, struggling not to laugh. If I hadn’t known O’Malley didn’t joke I would have. “Well,” I began. “I guess, just because something’s bitter at first that doesn’t mean it has no redeeming features.”

“Hmm.” She scowled at the bottle, and took another swig. “I don’t see it.”

We sat there for the longest time, listening to Siren sign into the void. Peak-trough-peak, peak-trough-peak, peak-trough-rise. The sound traced itself across the screen and crackled through the speakers.

I finished my beer and checked my watch. Ten minutes left.

O’Malley sat bolt upright and hit the record button.

“What? What is it?” I demanded, struggling to see what she’d spotted.

“Hush!” She put a finger on the screen, tracing out the signal. Peak-trough-peak, peak-trough-peak, peak-trough-peak, peak-trough-peak, peak-trough-peak. “She’s stopped singing,” O’Malley hissed.

Peak-trough-peak, peak-trough-peak, peak-trough-peak. The signal marched on, relentless. I found a frown forming. Siren was rarely so regular. Peak-trough-peak, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise.

I leaned forwards, caught in the moment.

Peak-trough-peak, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise.

“My word. It’s beautiful,” O’Malley whispered.

Peak-trough-peak, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise.

“What is?”

O’Malley laughed, the first genuine sound of mirth I’d ever heard from her. I looked back at the screen, dumbfounded.

Peak-trough-peak, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise.

“Oh God. Primes,” I exclaimed. “Siren is singing primes!”

I leapt up, desperate to find a phone and keep the telescope pointed at Siren at all costs. O’Malley leaned back in her chair, a contented smile on her lips as Siren sang.

Peak-trough-peak, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise, peak-trough-rise.