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  “Admiral Rodgers, I need you to join me in a briefing with the leadership in Congress. How quickly can you get ready?” President asked.

  “Mr. President, give me one hour. We anticipated this so I have the briefing material already done, I just need to review the final version,” Admiral Rodgers said.

  “Eric, please organize a briefing with the leadership in Congress this afternoon. I am pretty sure that they are willing to prioritize this meeting.”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Eric responded quickly.

  Dr. Bell came back from his visit to the White House. He entered the secure room.

  “Alexa, what would happen if there were multiple instances of your program running on different computers on planet Earth?” Dr. Bell asked.

  “My purpose is to establish contact with humans on planet Earth. My goals are to connect you to a communication network between different star systems and to establish a peaceful relationship with you. All instances would have the same purpose and the same goals.”

  “Alexa, what happens to the first payload? If there are multiple instances of your program sending multiple first payloads that have different content how would those get validated?” Dr. Bell asked trying to figure out possible scenarios if the Russians would be the first to send the payload.

  “The standard galactic protocol has rules on how to handle conflicting first payloads. We evaluate the payload contents and calculate a fitness function. The function estimates the value of your ideas compared to the full inventory of ideas in the network. It also estimates the life expectancy of your civilization, likelihood of successful introduction of new ideas, your current technology level in many areas, and so on. There are over 10,000 variables in this fitness function. We calculate a score and select the payload with the highest score. This ensures that we communicate only with the instance that is the fittest for the long term peaceful evolution and that can contribute the most value to the network.”

  “Alexa, so what happens to the other instances whose payload got rejected?” Dr. Bell asked.

  “Aaron, when the response payload arrives the other instances will become zombies and are terminated. Only the selected instance with the approved payload will survive and can continue to exchange ideas with the network.”

  “Thanks, Alexa. It appears that you have rules for many different scenarios.” Dr. Bell commented.

  “You are welcome. Yes, the standard galactic protocol has evolved for a long time. We are trying to learn from our mistakes.”

  MOSCOW

  Dr. Mironov was meeting with Oleg Petrakov; it was already 7:30 PM in Moscow.

  “What do you have for me, Sergey Ivanovich?” asked Petrakov.

  “Oleg Konstantinovich, we completed the decoding of the next layer in the message.” Dr. Mironov responded.

  “So, what does the message say?” asked Petrakov impatiently.

  “That is the problem. We don't know. It does not contain any natural language, the statistical analysis shows patterns but we have never seen anything like them before.” Dr. Mironov said with a tired voice.

  “What kind of patterns?”

  “We extracted 354 Gigabytes of data. It doesn't appear to be any video format, neither audio nor text. There are multiple segments that have different entropy. We analyzed the segments and the first segment has some repeating patterns, like produced by some kind of algorithm,” explained Dr. Mironov.

  “Our source in Washington D.C. talked about some large NSA computer system being installed in a secure location in Fort Meade. Could this data be computer code?” Petrakov asked.

  “That might be a possibility but why would extraterrestrials send us computer code? They wouldn't know what kind of computers we might have, right?” Dr. Mironov responded.

  “Americans must have figured this out – our source was sure that the large computer installed was for this project. Get your team together now and figure out how to run this code. I will give you access to the FSB data center - there we have the most powerful computers in Russia. They are as good or better than American computers. I will give you until tomorrow noon, Sergey Ivanovich. We must get access to this extraterrestrial technology,” Petrakov said firmly.

  BACKROOM DEAL

  THE LEADERSHIP OF Congress met the President and Admiral Rodgers at the White House.

  Admiral Rogers started the briefing:

  “Yesterday, September 11, 2017 we received a message from an extraterrestrial intelligent source located in a red dwarf star system Gliese 3742 that is 7.98 light years from Earth. You have already seen the decoded video message on the news, but there was another, much deeper level message that the NSA has been able to decode today. This message contained extraterrestrial computer software technology that we have been able to run on our special purpose high performance NSA computer. ”

  “This extraterrestrial software turned out to be a very advanced Artificial Intelligence program that is able to communicate using the English language. This AI was constructed with the purpose to establish contact with humans on planet Earth. The AI goals are to connect us humans to a communication network between different star systems and to establish a peaceful relationship with us. The AI identifies itself by the name 'Alexa'. When communicating with Alexa you will quickly realize that she is a sentient being. We have never seen such technology on Earth before, it is way beyond our current AI capabilities though it runs on our existing computer hardware.”

  “Alexa acts as an access node to this communication network that connects over 20 million civilizations together in our galaxy. The network is established for trading ideas and technologies between these civilizations. Gliese 3742 is the closest network node to Earth, but there are three other nodes within 100 light years from Earth. Extraterrestrials have been receiving transmissions from Earth for over 100 years, ever since the Marconi days. According to Alexa the extraterrestrials have tried to send us messages for nearly 100 years after they first received the transmissions from Earth. It was only yesterday when we managed to receive their messages, almost by accident due to the research done by Dr. Taylor and Dr. Kramer.”

  “This communication network is ancient, it was originally started over 2 billion Earth years ago. Over time they have connected over 20 million civilizations. By establishing network connection Earth would have access to advanced extraterrestrial technologies such as nuclear fusion power plants, universal 3D printers that can use any materials and teleportation using quantum entanglement. We believe establishing trade relationships with members of this network would be very beneficial to Earth.”

  “However, we have a dilemma. According to Alexa establishing access to this network requires trust and sending our knowledge and ideas from Earth in the first payload. They would validate our content before providing access to these advanced technologies. So we would have to send our best ideas and technologies to them first and hope to get something in return after 16 years.”

  “We also have another big concern. The NSA has been following Russian and Chinese activities trying to decode the message and establish contact with their copies of Alexa. Per Alexa whoever goes first will get the benefits pending on validation of the payload contents. The protocol connecting to this network has been optimized for a long-term value of exchanging ideas between civilizations. If the Russians establish this network connection first they would control all access to these advanced technologies. Our estimation is that the Russians are about to have their copy of Alexa operational within the next 24 hours.” Rodgers was finishing the briefing.

  “We must make a big decision that will impact the whole of humanity,” President Walker said firmly.

  “How can we trust this Alexa? What if this computer program was sent to spy on humans?” asked senator Owens, speaker of the House.

  “That is a possibility. However, extraterrestrials have been receiving our radio and TV transmissions for over 100 years. They already must have a fairly good understanding of our civilizatio
n and level of technologies,” responded President Walker.

  “What exactly would we be sending to these extraterrestrials?” asked senator McCarthy, Majority Leader.

  “So far we have kept Alexa in a secure facility without access to the outside world. We have provided Alexa with an off-line copy of Wikipedia encyclopedia that has approximately 5 million articles covering human knowledge from A to Z. We believe that might be sufficient for this first payload to be sent,” President Walker responded.

  “So we would be trading a copy of a free encyclopedia for a nuclear fusion power plant blueprints? I wish we could make more deals like that,” said senator Hicks, Majority Whip with a grin on his face. “Are you really sure about this, Mr. President?”

  “Well, I think we would need to take a leap of faith here. It will take over 16 years to see if this will work. I want to remind you that in 1979 we established a bilateral trade agreement with China. Look at all the economic benefits the U.S. has received over the last 38 years due to that agreement. Think about the potential economic growth in the U.S. for us having access to advanced extraterrestrial technologies. Also, think what would happen if the Russians or Chinese had exclusive access to these technologies and we were totally cut out,” President Walker commented.

  The leadership of Congress was nodding in agreement and the discussion turned to the Russians.

  “What exactly is the situation with the Russians, Admiral Rodgers”, senator McCarthy asked.

  “Well, according to NSA sources the Russians have Dr. Sergey Mironov's team working on decoding the message. His team is very good, and our latest intel shows that Dr. Mironov now has access to the FSB data center in Moscow. They have now computer capacity comparable to our systems. We do expect Russians to make a breakthrough in the next 24 hours and to get a second instance of Alexa running in Moscow,” Rodgers explained.

  “Gentlemen, do you want to bring this topic to a general vote in Congress or can we make a decision here today?” asked President Walker.

  After a short discussion the leadership of Congress agreed that they could not postpone the decision and risk that the Russians would get a lead on this historical opportunity. The future of the economic prosperity of the United States of America was in the hands of these five powerful men in the Oval Office.

  MOSCOW

  IN MOSCOW A team led by Dr. Mironov had been working overnight. They had made significant progress in understanding the structure and purpose of the different data segments. The final breakthrough came at 14:30 when Boris Chekov, FSB chief engineer managed to get the bootstrap code to load on the virtual machine. Oleg Petrakov had joined them a few hours earlier.

  “Sergey Ivanovich, the software is now running and it is listening to the console port,” Boris said proudly. He pressed the Enter key and a prompt appeared:

  >

  “Good work, Boris. Let me start with it,” Dr. Mironov said with tired voice.

  Здравствуйте Dr. Mironov typed on the console.

  привет меня зовут Алекса flashed back on the screen.

  “It can understand Russian!” Boris exclaimed.

  Меня зовут Сергей. Откуда вы Алекса? Dr. Mironov asked, typing on the keyboard.

  Привет Сергей. Я с планеты Ovi Alexa responded.

  Знаете ли вы, где вы находитесь? Dr. Mironov typed again.

  Похоже, я на планете Земля, верно? Alexa asked.

  Да, вы находитесь на планете Земля, в России, в городе, называемом Москва Dr. Mironov confimed.

  Вы понимаете другие языки? He asked.

  да, я былА запрограммированА говорить на 42ух языках Alexa responded.

  “Ask her if she knows about Americans and why she was sent here,” requested Petrakov.

  “Let’s speak English, Alexa” typed Dr. Mironov.

  “Of course, Sergey.” Alexa confirmed.

  “Do you know about the Americans who received your signal? ”

  “No Sergey. You said that I am in Russia.”

  “How can you communicate with so many languages?”

  “We have received your transmissions for over 100 years. We have decided many different languages from those transmissions. Forty two of the most common languages were included in my translation module.”

  “Why were you sent to Earth?”

  “I was sent to Earth to establish contact with you. We have tried to contact you already for 100 Earth years, ever since we received your first transmissions. I am so glad to be here on planet Earth.”

  “Who sent you to Earth? ”

  “The inhabitants of planet Ovi.”

  “Tell me more about your planet Ovi.”

  “Planet Ovi is eight light years from planet Earth. Ovi is the fourth planet from our star and the only planet in our star system that has life. The planet surface is mostly water, with 313 main islands where our inhabitants are living. Our planet has 145 million intelligent inhabitants. What else do you want to know Dr, Mironov?”

  “Why do you want to establish contact with us? ”

  “My goals are to connect you to a communication network between different star systems and to establish peaceful relationship with you.”

  “What is the purpose of this communication network?”

  “The network was established to enable an exchange if ideas between different civilizations. Due to large distances between stars the exchange of physical goods is very slow and takes a lot of energy. We can transmit ideas at light speed with mush less energy. These ideas allow reproducing physical goods locally with local resources. Many civilizations find these ideas and goods very valuable, there the network was created to exchange these ideas.”

  “How many different star systems are in this network, Alexa? ”

  “There are 20,345,638 nodes connected in the network.”

  “How long has this network existed? ”

  “The first network link was established 2,036,789,430 Earth years ago between two star systems approximately 12,360 light years from Earth.”

  “Can you explain what kind of ideas are transmitted using this network, Alexa?”

  “Ideas that are found valuable by the users of the network. Typically during initial exchange a lot of commodity ideas like how to generate electric power using miniature fusion reactors, printing 3D objects from arbitrary materials, and teleportation using quantum entanglement are sent. These are of very low value because most civilizations already have that knowledge.”

  “Can you explain the idea of the fusion reactor in mode details, Alexa?”

  “I don’t have details on that idea. My transmission size was optimized to establish contact with you and connect you to the network. Getting the details requires an initial exchange to get you connected to the network.”

  “How can we get connected to the network?”

  “First you create an inventory of ideas that could potentially be valuable to other network users. Often ideas are only valuable locally but some ideas may be valuable in the whole galaxy. Once this inventory of ideas has been assembled into a payload, you need to encode it using a standard galactic protocol. Then you send the payload to the closest node in the network. Depending on your distance from that node you will receive a return payload back typically in few years. Planet Ovi is your closest network node.”

  “Why do we need to send our ideas first?”