Pax Incorpora

First Contact

The day that the Warwolfs first contacted humanity was quite a surprising one. When radars picked the alien signal up Luisana Jimena had hardly believed she'd even heard it. A simple, but long, radio broadcast that peaked the dish arrays sensors. She almost wrote it off at the time as meaningless waves of unknown origin. A repeat of the WOW signal of so long ago. A novelty without import. As her assistant postulated possible solar origins Luisana tried to figure it out if she could even triangulate the signal origin with her sensors alone. However, it was as she was calling her friends in New Mexico to confirm that it wasn't some fluke of her aging base that the second radio signal hit. The same noises. The same frequency. The same length. Luisana barely even registered her colleagues of the VLA confirming that they, too, had received the signal. She almost dropped her phone when the researcher told her it was a perfect match with the first. It was the 11th of November, 181 years since the end of the Habsburg dynasty, and the dawn of a new era for humanity. On instinct, subconsciously, one word slipped from Luisana's mouth: "Wow."

The only thing more shocking than the confirmation of extraterrestrial life was the rather mundane response that followed. There were of course several fringe movements that declared themselves justified after years of scrutiny. Ufologists and pseudoarchaelogists who had long claimed of extraterrestrial encounters and that prehistoric wonders of the world could not have been created by humans claimed it was proof, vindicating their culturally disparaging theories. For most people, though, it was not especially surprising. A great many people even claimed that they'd "always known" that aliens were out there somewhere. By mathematical probability, per the Drake Equation, it was far more likely that humanity wasn't alone than that it was. Apparently everyone had believed aliens were real before it was confirmed to be true. By their own accounts, that is.

Even those in more spiritual spheres were insistent upon this fact. Churches of the US and the Vatican claimed it had long been possible that humans alone weren't obligated to be the sole sapient species of their faith. Religious texts were poured over, excerpts were extracted and distributed, and the predominant thought prevailed based on these most current interpretations. The creationists were none too satisfied with such developments, though, and alongside them came a growing wave of scrutiny and skepticism. Had Jimena's broadcast actually been received and wasn't some government conspiracy? How did no one know if it was simply a new disturbance from one of the Sagittarius A radio sources, a nearby anomaly to the perceived origin? Or perhaps a signal broadcast from or reflected off of a satellite unintentionally? An infinite number of questions spanned from occupational skepticism to fringe conspiracism with a single, elusive, answer: what had been discovered. It was this answer which Luisana was determined to find.

Luisana had the repeating signal, with a two minute and forty-eight second broadcast and a seven minutes and twelve second delay between them. She had the frequency, the pattern, and while she couldn't make heads or tails out of its weird arhythmic peaks she was confident that a signal such as it could only have been manufactured. More than this, the Beck administration of the US had given her access to federal satellites to figure out what she had heard. It took her only a day to triangulate and confirm the signals origin from the direction of Sagittarius, and a week to figure out the precise point of 20h, 11m, 12s at -36, 05, 50. The distance was harder, and it took her a month even to approximate it to one lightweeks distance. By this point she found her actual work hampered by public sensationalism. There were fifty junk messages for every significant correspondence, ranging from misguided attempts to help to malicious accusations. Nonetheless, she persisted. Luisana worked long nights to be able to gauge that the signal had come well outside of the Kuiper Belt. Then, armed with general origin, distance, and frequency, Luisana sent a reply.

— • • • —

Tame Clayglen really had no reason to be surprised when the humans began broadcasting their own signal to him. It'd been known for generations that the planet he was headed towards was inhabited even without radar, the manufactured lights on its surface scintillating like a thousand tiny stars and visible from even lightyears out. They'd been picking up its radio broadcasts ever since they had established receivers near the third species planet. Indecipherable transmissions of thousands of distinct pitches and volumes, ranging from electrical tones to (what were theorized to be) organic recordings of this prospective fourth species. Long had it been known that something lived on the far away blue dot orbiting the lonely yellow star, but it was only after finishing their newest third species colony that the Incorporation had decided it was time to reach back to them. Overseeing such communication, and tasked with the challenge of trying to decipher the aforementioned tones and recordings into a decipherable discourse, was Tame Clayglen of the first species.