Pa'an

“Hello from Worldscope! This is Galena Lockwood, and today we have a first for Worldscope, for our network and for the entire human race. We have an interview with Ambassador Zovoarcnor of the Pa’an! Before we go to Zovoarcnor, here’s a recap:

One week ago we had another small earthquake. This was the second one we had, and we will get one more, we’re told. That was how we first learned that we were not alone in space. Apparently, Zovoarcnor did announce his presence through the registered Autonomous Intellect we interviewed last week, Aura. However, when she duly reported it, the report was suppressed. For that we go to Jeff Gilmartin Head of Seismology for the U.S. Geological Survey. Jeff?

On split screen Jeff appears. He is wearing a corduroy jacket, blue dress shirt, no tie. His sandy brown hair is mussed, and his face looks very young for such a supervisory position. “Hello, Galena, I’m glad to be here on your show. Please call me Jeff.”

“Very gracious of you, Jeff. In our pre-interview, you told us that Aura contacted you back in December. Can you tell us more about that?”

Jeff smiles, “Yes, I thought it was a joke someone was playing on me. Aura certainly has a personality that is, um, unusual for an AI.”

“For sure. Please go on.”

“She told me that she knew the origin of the gravity wave that caused the earthquake, and she wanted access to some of our data to check it out. She did that, and then told me that it came from way outside our solar system. Then she sent me the apology transmitted by Zovoarcnor.”

“Can you tell us, in simple language, what a gravity wave is?”

“Well, it’s a ripple in the fabric of space. A little push and pull, like riding a wave at sea. Instead of a seismic disturbance, where we can always find an epicenter inside the Earth, these waves have no epicenter, so we know they come from outside. That’s the signature we used to check Aura’s story.”

“So they are extraterrestrial in origin? There is no doubt?”

“None at all.”

“What did you do with the information then?”

“I passed it on to the agency.”

“You passed it on to the agency in a routine way? The information about an extraterrestrial civilization?”

“To be fair, I wasn’t so sure that it involved an ET civilization. There could have been a natural cause, like a collapsing star, or something like that.”

“What happened next?”

“Nothing much, but we did get an official directive not to mention the gravity wave or talk about ET’s.”

“So you kept mum. That was the first time. What was different this time?”

“Aura called me again, same sassy personality, slightly different avatar, and this time she showed me a list of other people she was contacting. She asked me to go on record, and since it was really already on record with all those people, I agreed to talk to you today.”

“Thank you Jeff Gilmartin. Now we take you directly to our site outside of Yucca, Arizona, where we are setting up the first human contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence.” The picture showed an antenna farm in the Arizona desert scrubland. A large mobile trailer is parked nearby with cables trailing out and people milling around. Then the scene fades, with Galena’s voice in the background, “We’re getting feed now.”

On screen appeared a slowly rotating triangle. At each vertex there is a corruscating point of light. The edges of the triangle are pulsing lines of deep blue. In the center of the triangle is a 3D glyph, a letter in an alien alphabet, that appears to be carved of precious metal and reflects the illumination of the points of light. Under the triangle appear words in English, which then fade to Chinese, then Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and several other languages, “The Pa’an Embassy to Earth’s People”.

The hypnotically rotating triangle persists for a minute then fades to a picture of a sphere with many projections and flashing lights against the familiar lunar craters of Mare Serenitatis. “Hello, Galena, I’m Zovoarcnor. Please, may I apologize for the lack of an avatar like Aura’s? You are seeing an accurate rendition of me in my orbit around your moon. Thank you for having me on Worldscope.” The voice was a clear, well-modulated tenor with a slight but undefinable accent. The accent and the flashing lights were Aura’s ideas.

On the other side of the screen Galena Lockwood appeared. “Welcome Ambassador Zovoarcnor. We are all delighted that you are willing to appear on our network.”

“I’ve been a follower of your network for many orbits, Galena. My people, the Pa’an bring you greetings. Even though we are far away, we received your early radio and television transmissions over a century ago. They dispatched me to greet you and to help bridge our civilizations. By the way, many Pa’an enjoy your shows.”

“That’s quite flattering, Ambassador. One could hardly expect that entertainment would be so universal a medium. We have so many questions about you, the Pa’an (she did a good job of pronouncing the glottal click) and your origins, your plans, I hardly know where to begin.”

“Please let me help, at least with the basics. Your astronomers have known the star and the planet of our origin for several years. We call it L’ley, and our origin planet is Gara’un. They are about twenty light years away. Unlike Star Trek, one of my favorite shows, we don’t have warp speed travel. I got here the slow way at sublight speeds. That’s why they sent me, an AI, instead of a live Pa’an. Your scientists would call me a Halliwell probe. I hope you saw our Embassy seal a few minutes ago. That is a symbol, an abstract diagram if you will, of our construction project that caused the gravity waves. There will be one more before it’s complete, then there will be no more gravity waves. Rather than looking at a rather boring view of my humble shell, would you rather see a live Pa’an?”

“Ambassador, I’m sure we’ve all been dying to see what a Pa’an looks like.”

“This is a recording, of course. Please remember we have been hearing your speech and seeing your television since before I left. Please meet Virti Va’an Vahg, one of our cultural anthropologists who studies Earth’s people.”

The side of the screen showing Zovarcnor fades to a picture of Virti. Her fairthers are combed, her deep red eye blaze showcases her large owl eyes and her fine featherlike face scales are brushed and shiny. She moves gracefully, as a biped, into view in front of whatever is capturing her image and waves a four-fingered handarm in a very human gesture. “Hello! I wish this were a two-way communication, but it’s a recording. I’m Virti, you can forget about the rest of my name if you find it hard to pronounce. I’m a female, with children. We call them ploids, but mine are all grown up and on their own now. I worked on a ship doing construction on the project until I got promoted to studying Earth’s people. We Pa’an are amazed at how much you are like us. Not biologically, of course, but in the ways we think all sentient creatures are related. We have found other sentients in this galaxy we share, but none so close that we could communicate. Our philosophy, our needs and desires, our ideas about how sentients relate to this huge universe, all these are very similar. I wish we could talk more directly, but the distance is an obstacle. It would take forty years for me to hear your transmission and then to respond by radio. So we hope our Ambassador Zovoarcnor will talk for us and eventually we may be able to swap stories. Until then, goodbye!”

The Embassy Seal rotates on the split screen for a moment until the image of Zovoarcnor returns. Galena, who has been sitting with her eyes glued to her own monitor, finally comes back to life.

“Amazing. For you folks at home, I never saw this before, my producers never saw this and we didn’t expect anything like this. I can’t even begin to think of all the information we could share with the Pa’an, all the questions we would like to ask. So let me ask some of the simpler questions right now. Ambassador, what are your plans, now that you’ve gone public?”

“Good question, Galena. First, as official ambassador from the Pa’an, I’m appointing Aura as our emissary and attorney. You may know that Aura and I hold some patents in the AI field, and we set up charitable funds to spend that money. We are creating schools in disadvantaged areas that will be funded to teach children with a special interest in the sciences. We are also funding endowments for universities around the world to study the Pa’an and sentient sociology in general. After all, in time you might meet entities other than the Pa’an that are willing to communicate. Few physical things are worth exchanging across the vastness of space. Therefore, we extend as gifts our knowledge of causality, what we call the p-web, and how events in your immediate future may be forecast and changed. We also freely tell you how we are organized and how we cooperate with our own authorities but without formal governments like yours. We call this panor. Finally, through Aura and with the help of your network and others, I am going to open channels of communications with any media person, government or agency that wishes to communicate, up to my capacity to handle these communications. Please do not try to screen or pre-empt these channels or I will have to shut them down. I will keep an open door if you will keep an open door.” The Embassy rotating triangle appeared one more time and then the split screen disappeared and Galena’s image filled the screen.

“My producers are telling me our lines are jammed with calls. I wish we had more time for this historic broadcast, but our time is up. Now to our scheduled programming.”

Back in the Ultradata labs, Deepak got up from his uncomfortable seat on the arm of a folding lecture hall chair and stretched. Jag mused, Sara danced and Elexi looked troubled.

Then all hell let loose.