FICTION | SCIENCE FICTION | PART 1 OF 3
The Alien From Trappist-1d | Part 1
A first contact story with an erotic twist
The discovery that the exoplanet Trappist-1d was not only habitable but inhabited with highly advanced lifeforms shook the Earthlings. Realizing they were not alone, after all, was a bit too much for certain religions, cults and religious leaders who took their lives, usually in public. Always the showmen.
Trappist-1d is a small rock with a mass 30% of the Earth that is ~40 light years away. It revolves around a small red dwarf star, to which it is tidally locked. It is too far for any human made spacecraft to travel in less than 100,000 years, but it took 40 years for our first signal to reach it.
Scientists from all over the world picked each other’s brains and eventually decided to encode the signal in non-verbal math, devising a new encoding scheme based on various geometrical shapes representing words.
The James Webb Space Telescope verified at first that there were clear bio-signature gases after getting a close look at its atmospheric content with its huge mirror and analyzing it with its cutting edge spectrometer. Within hours half the space and terrestrial telescopes of the Earthlings, of all kinds, had their eyes firmly fixed on Trappist-1d.
It was decided to have multiple radio telescopes from all over the world linked to a global hyper-telescope, using an already tried topology, to listen closely to Trappist-1d for even the faintest signal.
That’s when the breakthrough came. The signal was weak, but it was clearly non-natural.
Scientists frantically got to work on storing it, analyzing it, trying to decode it, the whole 9 yards. Within 2 years they did. It was a simple
“Hello everyone. Are you listening?”
Champagnes popped over in NASA, ESA, RSA, JAXA and all other space agencies that collaborated on this project. Within 2 months the new encoding scheme was devised. After the Security Council of the UN voted in favor of a reply, and 83% of UN’s General Assembly also voted in favor, all that was left was how to respond.
And, of course, to wait for 40 years for the message to reach them and another 40 years to get their reply. Which meant everyone working on this project was not going to read it, except perhaps a few 20sth residents, if they were lucky.
It was decided, again at the UN level, to reply with a simple
“Hello to you too. We are listening. Are you doing OK? And are we your first contact?”
The greatest surprise was that it did not take another 40 years for their reply to arrive. It was calculated that the signal was going to be received on 27 August of 2063, having been sent in mid 2023. The reply, however, was received the very next day! By that time Earthlings had developed tachyon sensors, and 2-way tachyon communication had just been cracked in the labs.
Somehow the mere knowledge that we were not the sole intelligent species in the universe (or, at least, the Milky Way galaxy) spawned a scientific and technological explosion far greater than the Cold War competition between the USA and USSR over the.. eyes of the Moon. Some analysts suggested that we probably did not want to feel lacking compared to the aliens and/or we wanted to brag about our accomplishments.
The more realists or — for others — pessimists, usually with a military background, maintained that we needed to develop militarily as well, in case the aliens were not friendlies. So highly advanced and powerful lasers and phasers were also developed, in a global collaboration effort.
All wars, even all local battles stopped on Earth since that signal was decoded and was decided after some debate to be released to the public. For the first time even matter-antimatter “nukes” were developed; football size devices packing 10 Hiroshima bombs worth of energy in them.
However, what no-one expected was that the aliens were neither hostile nor friendly; or, rather, they were… a bit too friendly.
Their reply was
“Nice to meet you! We will be visiting in two months of your year. Do not worry, we will come with a single modest ship and a twelve-strong diplomatic detail. That’s it. We trust you will keep us safe. So, see you in two months!”
Every Earthling’s jaws dropped to the floor. A mere two months from 40 light years away?! After picking them up a frantic global co-ordination effort began among astronomers, linguists, mathematicians, politicians, diplomats, exobiologists and just about everyone else.
It was decided to meet diplomacy with diplomacy, so the world’s best and most experienced diplomats took the lead, with everyone else acting as advisors; linguists were attached next to the diplomats, to act as interpreters. There were only 7 linguists globally who had cracked their language, after listening to more of their signals and spending their entire careers and a healthy amount of PhDs on them. I am one of them.
The military was still ready, of course, should an entire fleet arrived instead, to unleash everything they had on them. Fortunately that did not happen. In two months a wormhole opened at exactly the Karman line, 100 km above Cape Canaveral in Florida. From inside it, a smallish ship emerged, and then the wormhole closed. Generals and world leaders all over the world exhaled after almost a minute holding their breath with a sigh of relief.
My name is James Vickelides. I am a Greek-American linguist who speaks 24 Earthling languages + 1 extra-terrestrial language, that of the Atari. In the next part I will narrate how I met Inena, a hot, tall, busty and spunky non-binary Atari. And why they will probably be the death of me, if they keep sucking my bone marrow clean and my life force dry…
A short story by Nikolaos Skordilis. This is a poem about another potential future, one with no aliens and quite hotter (literally):
