After the press conference, it was the top headline of every news source on the planet, in various forms.

SETI SUCCEEDS : LACAILLE 8760 HOME TO E .T.

I was pretty excited, too, ‘cuz I got brought onto the team asked to decipher the message.

It was long, loud (well, in radio terms), and by the way satellites picked it up, very well aimed at the Earth and moon. They were clearly talking to us.

The body of the message turned out to be the binary representation of hundreds of math problems, without the solutions, arranged roughly by level of difficulty from the trivial (1 + 1) to the limits of modern mathematics somewhere in the middle, to questions we couldn’t even fathom.

Our best guess was that it was a sort of intelligence test to decide if we were worth talking to, so we sent a reply in the same format, with our answers filled in.

About thirty years later, the reply was a clump of nanites accelerated to almost the speed of light.

I guess we failed the test, because they’re busy disassembling the moon.