A ‘what if’ piece of speculative fiction.
A cyborg with an upper organic body walks to the podium, a United Federation of Planets logo etched in brass on its front. The roomful of recruits come to attention, some snapping their biocanvas uniforms with their well-drilled motions, others barely able to bring a hand to their forehead. Barely constrained questions flashed across the faces of some in the audience.
“At ease. You are all here after going through damn short basic training because the UFP needs. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t well skilled in your field: Soldiers. Hackers. Bioengineers. Astrophysicists. Mechanics. Doctors. Software, Wetware, and Hardware engineers. Game designers. All the skills necessary to establish connections with alien life.
“Before humanity expanded to the stars in 2328, the question that kept being asked was, ‘Why are we alone?’ We hadn’t detected radio emissions from extraterrestrials. The crash sites and proof of the 21st and 22nd centuries turned out to be deep state fake to detect security leaks. Humanity’s ever increasing telescopes and probes uncovered tremendous numbers of potential life-bearing planets in the galaxy. Fermi's paradox persisted - why hadn’t we heard from anyone? The Drake equation seemed to be stacking the odds against us.
“That all changed with the first space folding jump to Alpha Centauri. The exoplanet previously named Proxima Centauri C turned out to be a constructed worldship, over 12 thousand years old.
Initial attempts to contact the worldship through radio signals were met with aggressive and hostile transmissions. Electronic warfare attacks pummeled the exploratory ship, which beat a hasty retreat. The next 5 years of attempts to make contact were similarly rebuffed. The breakthrough occurred when a platoon of UFP marines with embedded electronic intrusion elements landed on the surface of the worldship via a stealthed dropship, and were able to identify and physically connect to a network terminal buried on the surface. They passively captured Exobytes of network traffic, loaded onto physical storage matrixes, then launched it into orbit for pick up by a second stealthed dropship.
“Six months of network traffic decryption and analysis revealed something completely unexpected. Beyond checks on power levels, network bandwidth, and storage availability, much of the remaining network traffic was related to game logic. Leader boards, quest completions, virtual land purchases, even microtransactions, and advertising systems were detected.
“Turns out that the Drake equation was missing one more factor: what percentage of intelligent life, when sufficiently advanced, retreasted in massive simulations and video games. We aren’t alone, we just don’t have good enough hardware to run our own post-scarcity version of the Matrix, Palia, Sword Art Online, or Animal Crossing.
“That intrusion team finally made contact with intelligence on the worldship. It was a guardian AI investigating increased ping times on one of the quantum network links we had tapped. We’ve spent the last 3 decades building a relationship with the worldship AIs, convincing them we aren’t a threat to their wards or them. Turns out these AIs have gotten a bit bored. They used their directive to find space for additional game saves as an excuse to look for other alien life… and they found it.
<A ripple of shock washes through the room>
“That’s right. We now know of an additional 15 sites of alien intelligences. Our new AI friends want to go exploring, but they need someone to make the physical network connection. You are going to be making first-contact. Take a look at your info packet; Time to get to work.