Untitled SETI story - Part I

Daisy rubbed her eyes and flicked at the red straw loitering against the rim of her tumbler of coke-and-meltwater. It made a full round of the glass, perturbing the last rounded remnants of the ice. The meager sighs of the beverage's expended effervescence underlined the monotony of her life recently.

Six weeks in Puerto Rico. 'Woohoo', right?

She was not the easily-jaded type, but after a month's worth of 8-hour shifts of doing basically-nothing, she was sick of the heat, sick of the view, sick of Carlton's painful attempts at conversation, and sick of closing her eyes to see a burned-in grid of negative-colour zeroes - the aggregate effect of zoning out while staring at a raw output terminal at 3am in the morning on an intern posting with SETI.

A beep from her terminal followed by a deep bass judder through the floor of her little perch overlooking the dish signified a scheduled target change, and the engagement of huge winches to tug the enormous feedhorn assembly to a new position. The cables twanged and popped and resonated with the strain. That, at least, was something that still amused her.

She glanced at the clock. 6:57am. One more hour before day shift and bed. She zoned out as the familiar otherworldy hum-and-zott of motor-and-cable continued. Some zeroes near the edge of the grid bubbled into higher numbers. It barely registered with her. The ball of undulating numbers cleared the edge of the grid and crossed the centre, some of the centre-most digits transitioning to letters after hitting 9. Daisy scratched her nose absent-mindedly.
The vertical centre line of digits on the grid briefly read
6
E
Q
U
J
5
The happenstance sparked recognition in her, and she glanced momentarily at the framed image on the wall - those same digits on a printout, circled in red pen, with "WOW!" written in excited penmanship in the margin.

Still, she was unmoved, beyond appreciating the coincidence - after all, it simply represented a spike in signal strength on the feedhorn - measured 1-9, then A-Z for easy reading. ASCII output. Old-school.

This was Arecibo, SETI, no fancy 3D signal attenuation graphs here, baby. The mid-nineties was as advanced as the in-situ equipment got, at least in SETI's on-site shack. Newer and better ears the world-over were listening to the cosmos on behalf of the usual retinue of Ivy-Leagues and Institutes of Technology, and thanks to an investment fad among the Silicon Valley Billionaire pack, SETI was now well-funded enough to outbid the small-fries and nearly monopolise Arecibo full-time.

The recurrence of the famous "WOW!" pattern was of course a red herring, a not-entirely-unlikely confluence in the data, and gone amid the constantly-shifting values in the blink of an eye.
It had spiked her attention, though. There was a signal, for sure - but that was hardly unusual.
Probably a satellite, she mused, watching the blob continue to pulse as it slowly slid across the detector grid. They caught comsats several times a night, the odd civvie aircraft would blink through, and occasionally a terrestrial signal reflected off a passing LEO object.
...but...
Comsats stick pretty close to the equator, planes and LEO sats are faster, and reflections are never this strong
She glanced at the feedhorn pointing read-out. Nowhere near the equator. She whipped out her phone, unlocked it, and tapped into the Sat-Pass app to see what was passing over her at that moment... a couple of spent rocket stages and a Russia Geo-science bird... but nothing in the track the telescope was slewing through...

The blob slid off the screen. The groan-and-womp of the slewing mechanisms ceased, and the subtle hum of the star-tracking motors kicked in as the great dish found its scheduled target and settled in for a quarter hour of uneventful observation.

She sighed and sat back in the creaky chair.

Daisy. You're not going to find a signal from the great beyond at 7am while strung-out on caffeine and high-fructose corn syrup.

She rubbed her itchy eyelashes again - the ever-present grid behind her eyelids flaring red with the pressure. Her mind overlaid an impression of the signal, unbidden. There had been a rythm to the pulsations.

Atmospheric scintillation? ...maybe... just a bit too rythmic, though...
A Pulsar? No... none in that part of the sky.
She had the locations of every notable pulsar in Arecibo's swathe of the heavens memorised by this point. She knew there weren't any new ones because stars exploding violently in the night sky are kind of hard-to-miss. For a SETI observer, seeing a pulsar transit the screen pipping off millisecond-perfect radio spikes could be momentarily thrilling, but mislea - hang on...
 
this signal had transited the field just like a pulsar, or a geostationary comsat.

It's stationary in the sky, relative to the stars... it's coming from Out There...

Part II