A photon of just the right frequency, impacting a pumped molecule, could cause the molecule to tip out of its unstable state. The molecule shed energy and emitted another photon of the same frequency. So the result was two photons, where one had been before... And the two photons stimulated two more atoms, resulting in four photons... A chain reaction followed, growing geometrically, with a flood of photons from the stimulated silicon monoxide molecules—all at the same microwave frequency, and all coherent—with the same phase.
Lieserl knew that to get significant maser effects, pumped molecules had to be arranged in a line of sight, to get a long path of coherence. The convection cells, with their huge, multimillion-mile journeys to the surface and back, provided just such pathways. Maser radiation cascaded up and down the long flanks of the cells, spearing into and out of the helium core.
The maser radiation could even escape from the Sun altogether, she saw. The convection founts grazed the surface, at their most extreme points; maser energy was blasted out, tangential to the surface of the swollen Sun, forming tiny, precise beacons of coherent light.
And the maser beacons were, she realized with a growing excitement, very, very distinctive.
Excited, she swept back and forth through the huge convection cells. It wasn’t difficult, she found, to disrupt the form of the coherent silicon monoxide maser beams; she imposed structure on the beams’ polarization, phasing and coherent lengths.
She started with simple signals: sequences of prime numbers, straightforward binary arrays of symbols. She could keep that up almost indefinitely; thanks to the time it took for the coherent radiation to reach their firing points at the surface, it was sufficient for her to return to the convection cells every few days to re-initiate her sequence of signals. She could trace echoes of her signals, in fact, persisting even in the downfalling sides of the cells.
Then, as her confidence grew, she began to impose meaningful information content on her simple signal structure. With binary representations of images in two and three dimensions, and with data provided in every human language she knew, she began to relate the story of what had happened to her, here in the heart of the Sun—and of what the photino birds were doing to mankind’s star.
-Ring, Ch. 13