Not So Different, yet as Different as Can Possibly Be

9-First Contact.

// Wrote this last minute (can you tell?), but hopefully it keeps up to standard. I just moved into a new apartment this week, but I didn't want to miss my deadline. I may be many things, but I keep my word. 🙇‍♀️//

   Twelve light-years. Twelve bloody light-years! That's how close they were to earth.

   In 2039 a signal was picked up by scientists around the globe, but most dismissed it as natural phenomena. For as long as anyone could remember, that's what any signal coming from space had alwaysbbeen. Not signs of alien life, signs that they were not alone, but just some misinterpreted bit of nature, a quasar, magnetar, or some other brand new celestial body.

   Hope of finding another sentient life had died in most, but not in all. One group found where the radio waves were coming from, and, with crossed fingers, sent a signal of their own. It was a series of long and short beeps, but in a pattern that gave the first thousand digits of pi in binary.

   After another twelve years, a second signal was recieved, one that gave the first thousand digits of the square root of two in binary. Humans were not alone.

   It took a couple hundred years for it to happen, given cosmic lag time, but eventually humanity discovered that this other species had only recently been discovered, because they had only recently invented radios.

   Eventually, by comparing each other's sciences, humans and these new people found out that they had both been incredibly wrong on how the universe worked. After finding out how it really did, they discovered how to travel faster than light, faster than time, and how to also send nessages at these miraculous speeds. And so they both frantically built ships to come and visit one another. To say hello. To assure one another that they were not alone.

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2313

   K'kacho stared sat nervously in the airlock. Linda Parker was on the other side of the door, and he wanted to see her in person. He had met her years ago at the interspecies linguistics meet up. A video conference/convention of sorts for linguists of both species. Faster than light travel was still being invented, but faster than light communication had been mastered nearly a decade ago.

   It would have been difficult for the average !ka to visit, as the human's far more flexible mouths meant they could produce sounds that no !ka had any hope of reproducing. Like wise, the humans could not full replicate all of the various clicks that came so naturally to the !ka with their hardened beaks.

   And so, everyone spoke their own languages while fully understanding everyone else's. He had spoken to a random human while he waited for the host to start the main speech. Him using K!ak, her using English, and both knowing each other's language well enough to understand each other. They talked about their families, and hobbies, and favorite pastimes. She introduced herself as Linda, and he introduced himself as K'kacho. And so, a friendship was born.

   And then there came what he would call "the incedent." They had been friends for two years, and the friendship had evolved into something more, though both were hesitant to admit it. She had asked for a video call, and he had agreed.

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   "So he goes back to school, and he sees Jake McNamara." Lind told him, stifling her laughter as best she could. "And he asks John if he was there at his party."