Kit Bashir“Why the long face?”
“Lost my job. The whole SETI institute got shut down.”
“Oh, I heard something about that, the new administration decided to stop wasting money trying to find aliens, yeah?”
“Oh no, we found them alright, a long detailed message in the fourteen-twenty megahertz band. Looks like it was beamed right at us from the edge of a small open cluster about eight hundred light years away. We call it the HOLY FUCK signal.“
“What?! Why haven’t I heard about this? What did the aliens say to us?”
“Well, that’s the problem. The message was sent AT us, but it wasn’t FOR us. It was for the previous tenants”
“Previous whatnow?”
“Look, the Earth is forty five hundred million years old. There’s plenty of time for alien visitors to have colonised the planet, flourished for a million years or more, then gone extinct and had every trace of their civilization erased by geological activity”
“And this message is for those dead dudes?”
“Exactly. It appears they mortgaged this planet. The HOLY FUCK signal is a foreclosure notice.”
Dr Gerald Kutney
