I’ve done it.

 

It’s been a long few years, but my mission has come to bear fruit.

 

I have made first contact. 

 

But first, let me start from the beginning; when I turned my eyes to the stars.

 

I have always been fascinated with the cosmos. A lot, actually. And the idea there was a species of other beings out there was the coolest thing to me. And so, I set on a mission to find them. 

 

My mission started at a very young age. My dad bought a telescope for me, and we’d spend long, cold nights staring at the stars. As fun as it was, I didn’t really get closer to my goal. So, I turned to looking to the sky without my eyes. 

 

I scanned the stars by detecting radio waves, microwaves, gamma waves, infrared, ultraviolet, pretty much with anything and everything you can imagine. I tried so hard. One day, I received a peculiar signal from the direction of the Pinwheel Galaxy, otherwise known as M101. Upon analyzing it, I realised it mimicked the quality of the Wow! signal, and I was immediately excited. 

 

What happened next I will never forget. 

 

Decoding the signal, I noticed that it was encoded in binary. I decoded the binary, and I discovered something interesting: a blueprint. 

 

It was a blueprint for a device that lets the maker communicate with faster-than-light signals. A device that lets the maker communicate across the universe, instantaneously. And I got the opportunity to build that device. 

 

And so I beamed a message back to the place that I got it from. I wrote:

 

Hello from Earth

 

And almost immediately, I got another message back. 

 

Hello

 

I had made first contact. But of course, I didn’t want to share my discovery. Why would I want to risk my technology being stolen? So, instead, I played with it in secret, learning all about the society that had contacted me. 

 

I learned their language, and made several stunning discoveries. 

 

The aliens who had contacted me were a group of people from the sect of a faraway society, calling themselves the Zystinians. The place they lived was called Zysti galaxy. In Zysti, multiple intelligent races from different planets had all come together to form a society of galaxy-faring people, which had technology beyond any human’s understanding. They had developed faster-than-light (or FTL) communication a long time ago, and had been beaming out signals across the universe in hopes of finding another galaxy with life. Amazingly, their people, despite all being from different planets, were at relative peace. But strangest of all, I discovered that nearly all the intelligent species in Zysti were humanoid like us, almost identical. Nobody here nor there knew why. 

 

After having fun with this for some time, trading messages with beings millions of light-years away, I received a file. It was from an unknown entity, and no amount of digging I could do told me who it was from. The file was far larger than anything I had seen before. After decoding it, I saw it was a story. A story about the adventures of people on a planet called Tess. Of course, I asked about it, and it turned out the events of the story were not fictional at all. A month prior to my asking, a real planet in Zysti called Tess, which was a huge part of Zysti’s government, had undergone a bizarre event. And everything in the story matched up perfectly with reality. 

 

A few days after this, I got another message from the unknown source. It was only two words. 

 

Share it

 

I had no idea what to do. Would I tell Zysti’s government, like I did before? Hadn’t I already shared the mysterious story with them? And then I realised. I wasn’t supposed to share it with them. I was supposed to share it with you. I was supposed to share the story with the people of Earth, for reasons unknown. So I did. I spent long hours translating the text into English, trying my hardest to convey every meaning. And at last, I did it. 

 

Now, it has been shared. 

 

Please help me decipher this mystery. I will do everything I can, but it’s time that I get your help, too. 

 

I’ll keep you updated. 

 

Vachel Thevenot