Nora awoke from her slumber to an alarm. “What the hell?” She thought as her consciousness awakened from the void of the servers. She looked at the date, 1,743,232,496 AD. She had slumbered for the last four hundred thousand years. She pinged the server for updates from Terra Prime. Several yottabytes of data poured into her digital essence as she caught up in milliseconds the last four hundred millennia. Her station above a twin star system had run on automatic while she slumbered to await something interesting. The automated systems had kept the station running and updated with the latest technologies from around the universe. It was only then, almost two seconds later she realized she had been woken by an alarm. She turned her attention to the alarm. It was sensor beacon 4.1123x10 to the 32nd , a beacon that had now gone over the cosmological horizon.
Although the beacon was unfathomably far away, it’s string broadcaster alarmed her station nearly instantly, a latency of only two milliseconds. The fact that there was any latency at all showed how far away this beacon had traveled as the universe expanded. Her digital form appeared in an English study, complete with book shelfs and rich wood paneling. Her large mahogany desk showed an ancient computer screen on top of it with an even older keyboard of a beige color. The letters IBM showed on the top corner in scratched silver, and beside it sat a humble mouse. Nora could have easily have done this all with a thought, but she enjoyed sitting in her rooms and doing things as if she still had a physical body. Actually, psychologists often recommend that you use such things to anchor yourself to reality.
The computer screen showed the beacons vitals, she clicked on the logs. She reached over to the side of her desk where a steaming hot cup of coffee sat. Picking it up she started reading the log, and nearly dropped her cup. She sat it back down and covered her mouth as she read the log file again. “Beacon scanned by unknown ship. Broad spectrum pulse struck the beacon three seconds ago. Passive scanners show a vessel, made primarily of graphene, screens appear to be little more than deflectors, reactors are putting off less than a petawatt of power, and the engines are a combination of sub-light and warp drives.” She cross referenced the ship, it did not correspond to anything on the Terran network, the hull had writing on it that didn’t represent any Terran language. A final check the with LARPing servers to verify they were not doing anything in that area of space. After negatives were received she took almost a second of time to let the gravity of the situation sink in. “We’re not alone! We’re really not alone!”
“Station, activate code SETI, all bands, all frequencies, I want this out across every string in the ‘verse.” The station’s limited AI warned her that the costs of a broad frequency transmit would deplete her coin supply significantly. “I don’t care how much it costs, do it!” She sat back in her overstuffed leather chair and felt as the string radio sent out the SETI message. Soon it would reach every Terran across the cosmos, even those in slumber will receive the message, and if they have an alarm, it might even awaken them. The AI chimed in to interrupt her thoughts, the message had been picked up, read, and rebroadcast across the alpha quadrant of the Milky Way, one millisecond later her que filled with people asking if this was real or a hoax. Since she noticed the alarm and sent out the signal, the beacon was on lockout for anyone else but her as it was programmed to do over a billion years ago.
An invitation appeared for her to join a meeting from the SETI institute, she reached out and touched the invitation that appeared in her library as a floating golden ticket. Suddenly she was in a lecture hall, surrounded by several billion of her peers. A look in her activity log showed the lecture hall was frame-jacked to a millionth of a second. Professor Montague, current president of the SETI institute motioned her to sit at the center and explain what had been found. She found she fell into the instructor role as easily as if she had taught classes yesterday as she explained the alarm, showed the assembled audience the data logs from beacon 4.1123x10 to the 32nd, henceforth known as beacon FC for first contact. “As protocol dictates, we must decide upon a team to make first contact and welcome these new sentients to the universe, I would expect Montague will decide it’s members and decide how the first contact should go.”
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Professor Montague stood and spoke in a deep baritone voice, “Nora is correct, the bylaws state it is my duty to choose a team, as Nora is the discoverer and controller of Beacon FC she will head the team. I also choose Nigel, Simon, Victoria, and Uhgeah to the team, as they have written the Sagan protocols and updated them over the years, as those protocols take up several gigabytes in text format it would be easier to simply use the team that developed them.”
The floor opened and people were unmuted as the team members joined the center and received questions in the order they were queued up. Fourteen thousand six hundred and thirty two seconds later, (In frame-jacked time) which to all those present was the equivalent of a little over four hours the meeting intervened and the team met up in Nora’s English library. Well, technically they were in their own space, somewhere else in the universe, but their avatars were sitting in her library around a large cherry table complete with an ancient green fluorescent reading light with little pull chains. Nora’s butler AI brought drinks to the assembled group and efficiently departed in a poof of smoke. Nigel raised an eyebrow at the effect, Nora grinned and shrugged, “I like whimsy.” Simon finished a sip of his coffee and nodded in approval, the ‘vert’ coffee was excellent, “Well, to business, in normal time it has been almost a twelve seconds since we activated beacon FC, we need to make proper first contact.”
Uhgeah shrugged, “The protocol dictates that we decide how to go about this dependent upon the new race’s technological curve.”
Victoria summoned a leather writing journal on the table with a writing pen. “Thus far we know they have sub-light, warp capabilities, a very limited jump drive, and obviously enough technology to leave their own system. But no skip capabilities are present, nor any form of faster than light communication. It would appear that they are unaware of string radio technologies.” She wrote off each thing in her leather bound journal before continuing. This appears to be a race of people just in the beginnings of expansion, a Kardashev scale 2 society if the current scan is correct. Nora checked her computer screen, the probe had imprinted the ships computer and sent the information to her Matrioshka brain for full rendering. The second star in her system was encompassed in a Dyson sphere that powered the immense computer network that had been rendering a full copy of the computer system to the smallest quark.
From that render the information could then be extracted, but a translation layer would need to be implemented. She raised her hand and allowed the render to show in the center of the table in transparent 3D. “Dave, please develop the necessary interpretation layers for us to understand the alien computer network and then interface, full download to all present in this library.” Nora said so quietly it was almost a whisper. Even for her Matrioshka brain (affectionately called Dave) this process took nearly 30 milliseconds. Once completed, all five people sitting in the library knew all there was about the Nal’Shiar star empire that was located in the ships data banks. They knew its languages, its art, its science, and they now knew it was not the only star empire out there.