It all began on Tuesday 29 February 2028 when the Palomar Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Programme detected an unusual 31.9-second signal coming from Sirius C and sent it out for analysis. A few days later, the University of California, Berkeley SETI Coordination Program, distributed fragments of the signal to three participating members of SETI-at-home via the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).
One computer belonged to nineteen-year-old Leila Keeler who was recovering in hospital from leukaemia. Another computer belonged to Clausius Shannon, Lecturer in Information Technology at UC Berkeley. And the third computer belonged Luper Beauchamps, a thirty-five-year-old scientist working as Assistant Director of the Palomar Observatory.