Chapter 1: The Tweet
My name is Albert. One day, I had a thought. This thought led me to wish that I could talk to someone not from Earth. When I meant 'not from Earth', I really meant that I wanted to speak to an extraterrestrial being. While I was thinking about how I would do this, I began to ask my self questions that would help me achieve my desire. So I thought to myself; If I were a being that belongs to a highly advance civilization, what would I need to do to speak with someone who belongs to a civilization that inferior to mine? Of course I was thinking that there must be some kind of organization that would prevent these highly advanced civilization from directly contacting a civilization that are still too young to comprehend or handle the myriads of obstacles that the universe would bring.
I, on the other hand had a sliver of idea of the problems that the universe would bring. But, I really didn't care for that. All I wanted to do was to chat with a being that's not from Earth. I didn't want to gain superpowers, I didn't want wealth and I didn't want knowledge of about their higly advanced technology. But since humanity is still at its adolescent stage where were still fighting with one another and are still focused on resources, instead of uniting the entire specie as one, there was no way I would be able to speak with one in my life time.
While I was still trying to figure out how I would attain my goal, I spoke to a friend who happens to be a lawyer. I didn't ask him for help but instead, I just casually chatted with him. While chatting with him I brought up the topic in a indirect way. I told my friend that I was writing a fictional story of a guy who wanted to speak to highly advanced alien civilization but can't since there are some sort of set rules that prevents him for doing so because he belongs to a much inferior civilization. Then he asked why would that be a problem? Then I told him about maybe that there was some sort of 'Prime Directive' like in Star Trek where highly advanced civilization are forbidden from mingling with younger civilization to prevent them from messing up their development towards becoming a highly advanced civilization. My friend looked at me and laughed when I explained the reasons of why a highly advanced civilization is forbidden from communicating with young civilizations such as us humans. After discussing more about the story that I am supposively writing, my friend the lawyer, began telling me that every law has a loop hole and lawyers has to use their knowledge of the law to find that loop hole in order to win their cases.
What my friend told me gave me an idea. If every law has a loop hole, the laws from preventing highly advanced beings from communicating with inferior civilizations like ours should have one too. Then I immediately thought of one possible way. What if I gave the highly advanced beings consent to communicate with me? Giving consent to advanced beings to talk to me will likely not derail humanity's development to becoming highly advanced beings. I mean, all I really wanted was to just simply chat with one.
But the problem was; how would I be able to send my consent to the aliens? Since there was no way I could just email some random alien and say "Hey! Chat with me I'm giving you consent!" After realizing that, I was back at step one, Feeling annoyed at the road block that I came upon, I decided to temporarily stop thinking about my desire to speak with an alien. Instead of continuing my pursuit in trying to chat with an alien, instead I to got online to read the news on what's going on around the world. During that time, there was a huge controversy about how the government were spying on everyone.
Then I had an epiphany. If collecting information is one of the government's habits, who's to say that highly advanced beings aren't watching us now? Who's to say that they haven't been monitoring us? Then I had an idea that would probably help me attain what I've been after. In this era, the internet is filled with humanity's information. If I were a highly advanced civilization and I wanted to annoymously gain essential data on pre-space faring civilization, I would tap into their main source of information and gather what I need. In this era, the Internet is humanity's main source of information. With that thought, I realized that I could literally just post my consent on the internet and just wait if it worked or not.
So one day, on December 25th 2017. Chrismas when I was under the influence of alcohol. I decided to post a Tweet.
After posting the tweet I wasn't sure what would happen. Then weeks passed and I forgot about the tweet and my desire to speak to an extra terrestrial. But all that changed when I spoke to an alien who I began calling Bob because his name is too difficult to verbally say and spell.