Enspinors

An unidentified object has entered your area. You have a compass, a shortwave receiver, and ten minutes. ENSPINORS is a hunt built out of real instruments. The compass reads your phone's magnetometer and the bearing it gives you is a true one. The shortwave band behaves the way a shortwave band behaves. The time signal you find is modelled on WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado — a real station, broadcasting the exact time, right now, as you read this. And someone has been tampering with it. WHAT YOU DO Sweep the horizon with your phone held up like an aerial until a signal answers. Reject the reflections. Tune down the shortwave band and find the carrier. Take the waveform apart into its harmonics. Listen to the clock — and notice that some of its ticks arrive early, and some arrive late, by microseconds. That is a message. Copy it, character by character, in real Morse. Then fly a drone…