Contact across the Solar System

Message Drops

A day after the arrival of the SPO, three parachuting objects were sighted at New York City at roughly the same time. One of them was at the Bronx, to the north of Manhattan, one at Queens, to the east, and one across the Hudson River in Hoboken, NJ, a separate city west of Manhattan. These were not skydivers, but scorched-looking cones. When they landed, local police agencies dispatched bomb squads to pick them up.

A New York City one got to work on the Queens capsule. It had no measurable radioactivity, so it was likely not a nuclear bomb or a dirty bomb. After opening it as stated in its instructions, they checked again. It had no measurable radioactivity. It also didn't explode when it was opened, so it wasn't booby trapped.

The canister had a roll of metal foil inside, and on it was some writing, clearly some kind of message. That message was actually a set of messages in different languages, with the English one first.

The bomb squads who worked on the Bronx and Hoboken capsules found that they were identical to the Queens one. Even their messages were identical.

Then someone noticed that the capsules came down at about the time that the SPO passed over New York City. Was it a coincidence? Or were the capsules ejected by the SPO?

A few hours later, as the SPO went over Los Angeles, another capsule came down there. Over the next day, as the Earth rotated underneath the SPO's orbit, capsules came down over cities in Oceania, Asia, Africa, Europe, Canada, and Latin America. The day after that, a few more capsules came down over all those places. People in Wellington and Canberra and Jakarta and Hanoi and Bangkok and Tokyo and Seoul and Beijing and New Delhi and Astana and Tehran and Nairobi and Johannesburg and Lagos and Cairo and Algiers and Moscow and Kiev and Athens and Stockholm and Warsaw and Prague and Berlin and Rome and Madrid and Paris and London and Toronto and Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia and Lima and Mexico City and other cities, people in those cities all saw a capsule come down.

The SPO stayed in orbit for another day and then departed, also with no visible means of propulsion. It headed off to where it came from, outside of the Earth's orbit, and astronomers lost track of it when it approached an asteroid. Was that asteroid its base? In any case, it went as mysteriously as it came.

As the capsules started coming down, it became very evident that the capsules were associated with the SPO, and people soon started looking for them. With all these capsules' presence correlating so well with the SPO's positions, it was evident that they were all ejected by the SPO.

The capsules turned out to be much like some Earth-spacecraft capsules, but its parts' dimensions were different from typical Earth-spacecraft ones, suggesting that their builders had different size conventions. Some of the parts had writing on them, writing that did not match any known Earth writing system. Someone painstakingly disassembled something that looked like a computer chip, and indeed it was -- one that matched none that was made by any Earth computer-chip company. Someone got the idea of finding the capsules' isotope compositions, and the capsules and their parachutes had about 3 or 4 times as much deuterium in their hydrogen as on the Earth. Yet more evidence of their extraterrestrial origin.

But the form of contact was mysterious. Why drop a lot of capsules and then run away? Why not stick around to try to communicate with us?

Even weirder was the curious slighting of Israel and the nations of the Arabian Peninsula, or so it seemed. Some Israelis and Israel supporters considered it proof that anti-Semitism extends across the Solar System. Meanwhile, some Arabs considered it some obscure plot against the Arab world. Cooler heads suggested that it was a reluctance to drop capsules on war zones.

Meanwhile, on the Aurora, Orthon chuckled as he watched the Earthers figure out that that's where the capsules came from.