The instant Nora disconnected from the probes conversation circuit she was immediately pinged to join the SETI chatroom forum again. As she popped into the virtual conference room she noted the guest counter now registered over a hundred trillion. “Not bad for an old nerd” she thought to herself as she approached the speaking alcove. As she was an esteemed member she was granted speaking privilege, as you can imagine, the very vast majority of the guests were muted. Some of the biggest influencers in the ‘verse were there, awaiting her report on the first true alien contact Terrans had ever encountered, this was a moment nearly one and three quarters of a billion years in the making. Professor Montague sat at the long conference table facing the audience and gestured to Nora to take a seat at his side. The rest of her team sat to his right, the left side of the table sat members of what could be considered Terrans governments, although most Terrans resided outside of their control, including Nora and her team.
Professor Montague stood and spoke after Nora took her seat. “Greetings to small portion of all Terrans, today we have finally answered the most important question we as a species has ever asked ourselves, are we alone? The answer is no, we are not alone in the universe!” The room erupted in silent emoji’s above near infinite chat bubbles out into the distance. The muted chatroom equivalent of a deafening roar of applause. “As the title of Professor, an ancient and esteemed moniker given to my position as head of SETI this past epoch I have joined with the leaders of the United Terran League and with their Ambassador services, a branch that has not been activated in the last half billion years I might add, we have decided to release the footage of the first contact to Terrans at large.” The muted chat bubbles in the room erupted in emojis once more. The equivalent of gasps, roars, cheers, and all manner of Terran emotions. The Professor held out his hand and a small rectangular movie clip with a play button in the center appeared above it. He then held it up and it exploded into a hundred trillion different directions at once streaking towards the chat boxes in the room.
Entire milliseconds passed as the room watched the footage again and again. While this wasn’t a millionth of a percentile of the Terran population in the universe, this video file would find its way to every server in the ‘verse, cross the almost infinite galaxies, and awaken Terrans in a way nothing else could. This was truly history in the making, and the Professor, although he looked befuddled in his tweed reading jacket, the twinkle in his eye showed he knew exactly what he was doing, and had probably spent plenty of time writing this speech thought Nora. The Professor continued, “The UTL will provide all Terrans with Ambassador Rachel, who last used the title of Ambassador over a billion years ago to bring all Terrans together after the unification wars that tore across multiple galaxies. She has been inactive for half a billion years awaiting for a time she would be needed again.”
This brought Nora’s head to the left, that was Ambassador Rachel, one of what history wrote as the greatest negotiator in Terran history. It is doubtful another Terran in the universe was more famous for bringing the peace of the last billion years. She almost missed the next part of the Professors speech. “We also have Doctor Sebastian joining our team, many of you will recognize him as the father of the skip drive making intergalactic travel possible.” Again, the emoji’s flared throughout the chat room. “To his left we have Doctor Mikoh, mother of the string radio, and by far the oldest Terran in this room, and the loveliest I might add.” Doctor Mikoh waved to the crowd before giving the esteemed professor a sullen look. “Right, um, to the good doctors’ left we have General Paxton, one of the last officers still with us from the unification wars. While we do not know if his insight will be important, it is good to have him on our staff, as he is one of the few Terrans left who remember what a unified military was like.” He then waved to his left and right as he continued.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“These professionals you see before you at this table represents the best that all of Terrans has to offer to our new friends on the edge of the universe. The UTL will begin work on a new vessel, an ark if you will, to journey to the home world of the Nal’Shiar. A suitable white dwarf star has been allocated for it’s power source, and with it, the vessel shall be built around it. Once constructed, it will be able to travel the vast distance and will be our communication, manufacturing, and diplomatic hub in that region of space.” Doctor Sebastian, if you would?”
The Professor stated as he sat back down in his central seat. Doctor Sebastian rose, “I will dispense with the pleasantries and focus on the task at hand, the UTL has brought together it’s resources to begin construction of what we are calling the Caplan Explorer. While this is not a new concept, all Terrans have used such stellar engines in the past, but the most they have ever achieved is warp transit due to to the enormous mass of the structure combined with the weak power output of a white dwarf star.” Doctor Sebastian brought up a large three dimensional image, “What will make this unique is that the white dwarf in question will be surrounded by a material that will absorb the energy of the star at a distance of only 100 meters. Giving us the full output of the star while keeping the Dyson sphere the size of a large planet.” This caused a millisecond of pause before the chat bubbles erupted in emoji’s, mostly of shock and confusion. Doctor Sebastian pointed back up at his 3D image, Along the symmetry of the structure we will install an improved form of skip drive that I have been developing over the last few Millennia. This will allow us to bring everything Terrans need across this vast distance of space.” Doctor Sebastian then gestured to Doctor Mikoh and sat down.
Doctor Mikoh stood and pointed to the 3D image, “The Caplan Explorer will also house one of the most powerful communication arrays that mankind has ever built. A forty third generation string radio, drawing on the power of a white dwarf should give us zero latency across the interstellar medium. It will also house enough servers and bandwidth to allow a large contingent of Terrans to come and go to meet the Nal’Shiar. This will of course require vetting through UTL authorities, and will require complete professionalism while in their presence. This is a young species and we do not need to scare them. Hence the need to scale down the size of the vessel, showing up with a solar system sized craft would not be good in our opinion.” She then gestured to General Paxton, “In order to facilitate the construction of this ark, we will be relying on General Paxton and his army corps of engineers.”
Doctor Mikoh sat down as General Paxton stood and pointed to the 3D image of the ship, “The corps of engineers had a plan for a ship of this scale for the past two hundred Millennium, the problem has been cost, the amount of coin necessary to fabricate the material capable of not only resisting the heat of 100,000 kelvin, but absorbing nearly 95% of the energy would have bankrupted all aspects of the UTL. As such the powers that be at that time set aside a budgetary amount in case of a need in the future. Those accounts have been drawing interest for the last two hundred thousand years, and thanks to improvements in manufacturing and technology, we might have enough coin to build it.” The General gave a smug grin as he pointed back to the Caplan Explorer. “Unfortunately I have to agree with the council here that this will not be a military vessel and it will not be armed. We will simply be facilitating it’s construction, any questions?” The room erupted in emoji activity as everyone pinged the council for recognition at once.