The signal comes, as they can tell after a bit of triangulation, from space. Approximately 0.3 light-seconds out, just within the orbit of the moon.
The following few minutes are a scramble to contact Emergency Services, publish their livecaptures of the signal, and get the radio telescope operators at the Distant Island observatory onboard before the transmitter goes under the horizon.
When a call comes in on the priority line from their Smaller Continent counterparts, they react immediately.
There are a few things that they do in reaction. The very first actions are to try and confirm things with their own radios, of course. After that, they publish a preliminary incident advisory. Not many people follow the preliminary advisories feed — Emergency Services usually does a good job of making them non-preliminary as soon as there's anything useful to know.
Once they confirm the signal, more things start to happen, quite quickly. The Diplomatic Issues supervisor begins the process of notifying the city authorities of all the cities that subscribe to Emergency Services. That gets a bit more notice, as city officials are pulled online.
The Network Threads supervisor publishes a notice that theoretically-breakable cryptography may not be advisable over open RF links. That gets a good deal more attention, as the Network automatically switches to one-time pads where feasible. People start to notice the Network slowdowns and rapidly depleting shared key material, and the news networks start picking it up.
Finally, the Personnel manager drops a message to the linguists and mathematicians who have registered as nonhazardous-emergency volunteers — just the ones in Largest City, to start with.
Attention: Possible First Contact
This is not a drill. Please report to the indicated rally point at best safe speed.
She rolls over in bed and presses a pillow to her face.
When she doesn't acknowledge the message, her computer turns the room's lights on and repeats the message. It only does that for very important things, so this time her sleep-addled mind pays enough attention, and she sits bolt upright.
"Shit!"
Five minutes later, she runs into her building's conference room and claims one of the bean-bag chairs around the central monitor. She sips some of her yerba mate, to see if it's cool enough to drink yet, and winces a little as it scalds her lips.
One of her colleagues has already arrived, and is fiddling with the room's computer.
"Tomom, do you know what's going on?" she asks him.
Internally, she tries to calm her beating heart. This is quite possibly the most exciting thing that has ever happened — not just to her, but period. Every few years, she participates in the First Contact Rehearsal Festival because it's fun, and now it's happening for real.
"I know as much as you," her fellow linguist — a thin bald man with an uncanny talent for mimicry — replies. "But I messaged Emergency Services, and they sent us this archive link — ah! There."
The monitor comes to life, showing a five-part media file. One track looks like a timing signal, with crisp spikes two times a second. The second track is a slow digital signal. The third is a much faster digital signal. The fourth looks like analog audio, based on the spectrogram. The fifth is a different fast digital signal, this one with much more regular data.
"... huh. Now that we[in] are set up, I think we probably want to call dispatch and get more details," she opines. "But first, would you play that audio track?"
She nervously runs her hands along her robe (green, for science) and waits to hear the first words from the potential aliens.
"[Unintelligible alien language]!" the recording says. It's clearly being produced by a human, or an alien with a closely-matching mouth and nose. "[Unintelligible alien language]."
"... huh. Does that sound at all familiar to you?" he questions, settling into his own beanbag chair and turning the sounds over in his head.
"It could be one of the Many Birds languages, maybe? Or, at least, I'm not hearing any phonemes that would rule it out. But I'm also not catching any familiar words, so I doubt it. Also, like, on priors. How long is this recording?" she asks.
Tomom checks the stream metadata.
"... looks like this is live," he responds. "So you're right, we[in] should check in with dispatch. And then go through and make a transcript?"
"Sounds good."
She fumbles her phone for a moment, but then taps the callback link on the emergency message that wok her.
"This is Emergency Services," the voice of the incident manager replies. "Linguistics incident manager for possible contact situation speaking."
"Hi — this is Miþetel from the Largest City Research University Linguistics Department. With me is my colleague Tomom. We[ex] are all set up to try and translate the stream you sent us[ex], but we[ex] wanted some additional context. Where is this coming from, and what else do you know about the situation?"
"We[ex] were alerted to this broadcast by the Smaller Continent Radio Operators' Network 25 minutes ago. It is coming from an orbit just inside the moon, where we[in] have no records of spacecraft. So far, that's all we[ex] really know. The mathematicians think that tracks two and three are digitally encoded mathematics texts. Track five is probably video data — we[ex] will push a codec for it as soon as we have one written."
The incident manager pauses for a moment.
"You're one of two groups of linguists analyzing this independently. Please don't try to contact the Twin River City group to avoid cross-contamination. As far as we[ex] are aware, this isn't urgent per se, but we would still appreciate regular updates as you're able. If it would help, I can stay on the line with you indefinitely. My records show that you should be expecting two more people who acknowledged their emergency messages."
"I see. Thank you."
She raises an eyebrow at Tomom, but he just shrugs.
"I'll call back when we have some information," she says, and cuts the call.
They scroll back to the beginning of the audio message, and begin the tedious process of transcribing it into full IPA. Since they can't assume anything about the phonology of the language, they can't afford to leave any aspect of the sound un-transcribed.
Lhamesi comes in while they're a few minutes into this process, hanging her outer-robe by the door.
"Sorry I'm late; I had to take the cross-town train," she explains. "What's going on?"
Tomom catches her up while Miþetel pauses the recording and looks at what they have so far. She makes a clean copy of her notes, and then starts circling what she thinks are repeated words.
þereminians get serious about media archival. And that means that sometimes, you'll want to store and play a media file in an uncommon (or bespoke) format. So Network video streams support embedding sandboxed bytecode (a bit like WebAssembly) as a software decoder.
It also comes in handy in this situation — the computer scientists who gathered at their rally point push an update to the metadata of the stream.
Just as she is about to speak, to call out the words she's identified, the stream on the monitor gets a little 'loading' circle, and the fifth track changes to show a grayscale video.
Unlike early grayscale films, this one isn't grainy at all. It looks like a good camera that just declines to include color information. Pictured is a tall human woman wearing a light dress. She is smiling without showing her teeth, but with a genuine crinkle at the corners of her eyes.
"[Unintelligible alien language]!" she says, waving at the camera. "[Unintelligible alien language]."
She walks to the side, the camera following her, and gestures to a whiteboard full of symbols. "[Unintelligible alien language]," she continues.
"... we're sure this is aliens, right?"
"We[ex] are sure it's aliens. For one thing, there's absolutely no records of any spacecraft in that orbit," Pakesalh says, nodding for emphasis. She's more of the analyze-data kind of astronomer than the operate-telescopes kind of astronomer — but that's a good thing, when the operate-telescopes astronomers are busy trying to get a closer look at the alien.
In any case, she's patched into a conference call with a bunch of high-ranking Emergency Services people, which is only mildly nerve-wracking.
"But even if someone did manage to sneak something up there, it certainly wouldn't look like this," she continues, bringing an image up on the screen. It's a blurry photo of a pale golden spot, one or two pixels across.
"For those of us with less telescopy experience, Pakesalh, why could this not be of terrestrial origin?" the director questions, leaning forwards across the table. Insofar as þereminia's various overlapping institutions constitute a government, she's unquestionably high up in it — and a few minutes conversation with her shows why.
Director Ŋaceta has a way of putting people at ease, and rapidly narrowing in on what's important, that has served her well in managing such a large and sprawling organization.
Pakesalh blinks. "See that scale marker there? Whatever it is, it is only about the size of my fist. There's no way that we[ex] could have even targeted it, except that it's putting out a very strong radio signal — stronger than our technology would be able to fit in that volume, never mind the power source."
"Well, there's even less chance that any aliens actually look like that," Pakesalh's colleague from the math department points out. His fingers flick back and forth over a clicky thing as he talks. "Even a panspermia scenario had to have happened far enough back that there should be some visible differences. Or a lot of our archeology is just wrong."
She nods. "True. Which is why I think they must be adopting our appearance deliberately. Possibly because they anticipate a negative reaction otherwise. But to have good enough models of our appearances to do this, yet not to have figured out one of our languages, must give some pretty tight bounds on how they could have gotten here and how much processing power they must have aboard."
"And what would those bounds be?" the director asks.
She shakes her head. "I'm not a computational linguist. I know enough to know there should obviously be limits there, but not enough to know what they are."
"I see. Alright — notify us[ex] immediately if you figure out anything else, Cera, Pakesalh. I'll see if we[ex] can get someone competent to make that estimate to put some numbers on it. Keep up the good work," the director says.
She turns to one of the other members of the conference call.
"Put the last part of that discussion through to the linguistics teams, see what they can tell us."
She quickly checks her call waiting list.
"I need to get on the phone with Smaller Continent to coordinate a response, but do interupt me if something urgent comes in."
There's a general nodding as she leaves the call.
The deep space network exists to ensure reliable communication between spacecraft deployed around the solar system, and their support teams back on þereminia. With the alien craft over the horizon from both Smaller Continent Mission Control and the two Larger Continent Space Operations Centers, it is the best available path for a return message.
Large radio transmitters in the desert north of Tallest Mountains spin up, sending instructions to the Lunar Mapping Orbiter, which is in a good position to act as an intermediary. Since mapping the far side of the moon, the Lunar Mapping Orbiter has pulled double-duty as a central component of the deep space network, due to its relative proximity to the planet and convenient orbit.
And in orbit around the moon, a radiation-hardened computer notices the incoming signal and parses it. Narrating computers is always a risk of excessive humanization, but one way to describe the computations it performs would be this:
New verbatim relay request: acknowledged.
New antenna heading: acknowledged.
Checksums and command authorization match.Reconfiguring radio for wide-band retransmission ...
I'm on it, mission control!
They send back their own message in the same format: a timing signal, on top of a copy of the alien's first digital signal. Then their own faster digital signal containing the specifications for the radio bands and encoding which Emergency Services use. And then finally some analog audio and an accompanying black-and-white video.
This is not a choice made extemporaneously — Emergency Services usually has far more likely scenarios to plan for, but there is no force that would have stopped them from having procedures ready for a scenario like this. Matching the format of the signal is one planned method to communicate that they have received and understood the message.
The message they send shows three humans, wearing matching diplomatic uniforms. The deep purple doesn't come through on the video, but their enthusiasm does. The figure on the left is crying. They can't help it.
The middle human reads off a prepared message — once in Larger Continent Trade Language, and once in Smaller Continent Official Language. She knows that it will not be understood — but the aliens will surely save the message, and it will be these words that go down in history as þereminia's first message to their neighbors from the stars:
"Welcome. To one who has come an incredible distance: we[ex] convey earnest greetings in the name of þereminia and the people who call it home. We[ex] look forward to establishing peaceful contact and mutually beneficial trades between our[in] respective civilizations."
On her live feed, the alien pauses part way through relating some words in her language to her digital first contact message. Beside her, a copy of their video appears, and she listens to the message.
She turns to the camera and claps her hands together, posture oozing excitement. "[Untranslatable alien language]!" she responds.
She holds a hand flat against her chest, and says two words. Then she points a flat hand at the image of the diplomats and cocks her head.
... in what is in retrospect an obvious oversight, the Deep Space Network is primarily set up for packetized communications. In the media room in the desert, everyone scrambles to record and transmit a response message.
When they don't respond after a moment, the alien waves a hand, making the whiteboard and the copy of their video disappear. In their place, she puts a little orbital diagram, showing her position relative to that of the moon and the planet. Then, she shows a series of arcs of a circle emerging from a point on the planet, reaching a spot near the moon, and then changing course and continuing to her position. Then her position emits a series of arcs that hit the planet.
Then she shows the same animation, but this time she sends out the arcs as soon as the attenuated ends of the first set of arcs from the planet hit her.
"... I think she's saying that we[in] don't need to relay via the Lunar Mapper," one of the radio operators surmises.
"Yeah, I agree. And that will let us just hook the media room in continuously. Do it," his supervisor agrees.
Lunar Mapping Orbiter, stand by.
New standby request: acknowledged.
Checksums and command authorization match.Returning to power-saving mode ...
See you soon, mission control.
The lead diplomat holds a hand to her chest. "Tatenika", she responds. Her fellow diplomats follow suit.
The alien repeats their names, nodding. "[Untranslatable alien language]," she remarks. She shows the orbital diagram again, this time letting it play out over time. Her dot falls out of orbit towards the planet, impacting in southern Largest Ocean in 130 hours.
"[Untranslatable alien language]," she explains.
"... yup, she's responding with a delay consistent with getting the signal directly from the DSN," he remarks, leaning back in his chair. "How the hell? The whole reason we need relays is because the attenuation is awful without line of sight. She must have some downright amazing antennas on that thing."
"Well, it makes sense. Communicating must be the whole point of a craft like that," she speculates.
"You say that as though we have any idea what design constraints they were working under."
She shrugs. "Well, she might be explaining some of it, now that she's talking about orbital mechanics."
Pakesalh is generally of the opinion that the alien's current extended monologue about orbits is probably at least six times better for building mutual comprehension of her language than whatever she was trying to convey with the digital signal.
Now it's his turn to shrug. "I guess we'll see. What's next? Confirming her approach?"
The linguists at Largest City Research University are among the best. They know their stuff, and they're working closely with the mathematicians and the physicists, in order to interpret some of the alien's utterances.
But more than that, they've done this before — on their competency exams, or during First Contact Rehersals, or just for fun. There's a certain kind of mind that will invent a constructed language, and then co-author a book about someone learning that language from scratch.
So learning unknown languages is not new.
But it is difficult.
The thing is, decoding a language takes time. It also takes lots of examples of speech acts in context. It's was big step when they figured out enough to realize the faster digital signal is a text corpus, and matched it up to the symbols the alien had shown in the video, and the sounds that she made.
But it would be insane to expect complete, usable translation in three days.
When the alien has orbited far enough to be directly behind the planet, the transmitter for the Deep Space Network spools up again. The alien has impossibly good antennas, so the extended language-learning session is ongoing using some less powerful transmitters that have line-of-sight.
Luckily, the Lunar Mapping Orbiter is still visible, just above the horizon from the Deep Space Network transmitters.
"Lunar Mapping Orbiter, this is a broadcast command for every member of the network. Store and forward it autonomously until every craft has confirmed receipt."
New store-and-forward relay request: acknowledged.
Destination addresses: acknowledged.
Checksums and command authorization match.Clearing storage for message ...
Ready when you are, mission control.
"All spacecraft: clear nonessential memory, record the following message, and repeat it omnidirectionally at best possible power for as long as you can. This is your last mission; accept no further orders."
"To our friends among the stars: We[ex] don't know for sure if you're out there, but we[ex] send this message in hope. We[ex] have recently been approached by an alien calling herself 'Weeping Cherry'. It is our[ex] sincerest hope that we[ex] will have productive, peaceful relations with her and the species she represents. But it does not do to live on hope alone. If this is our[ex] last message — then perhaps it can also be your first warning. Everything we[ex] have deduced about 'Weeping Cherry' and her capabilities is attached, including a copy of her own messages to us[ex] so far. With the hope of a bright future for all of us[in], sincerely, the people of þereminia."
End-of-message recognized. Applying command lockout ...
It's been a pleasure, mission control.
Relaying message ...
The alien pauses in the middle of acting out some example scenarios for the linguists, to turn and look in the direction of the DSN transmitter. She idly fiddles with the end of her braid, and then cocks her head and turns in the direction of the Lunar Mapping Orbiter.
"[Exclamation of surprise]. You [unknown verb] [unknown word] [interrogative particle]?" she asks, turning back to the camera. "[Possible copula] increase [unknown word]."
She smiles.