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Here's story 294, of 300 so far.

Please note: permission is expressly denied to input any part of the story below into a machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) or Large Language Model (LLM) system in any form.

Report Card

Their first attempt to contact us went unnoticed.

Apparently we had evolved in an unusual way, at least from a technological perspective. There were many commonalities with the other intelligent civilisations they’d encountered, but there were also gaps; areas that we’d somehow skipped over.

We’d missed, for example, the quirk of magnetism that allowed for unlimited power generation given the correct high-atomic-number elements. We’d also missed the shortcut to synthesising arbitrary elements from the most abundant substance on our planet: salt water.

But there were other areas in which we were ahead of schedule. Electronics, for example, and telecommunications. Philosophy and image-capture. Computer graphics and encryption. Oh, and music.

We were very behind on fuels, propulsion, economics, and education. We were exactly on the curve for data storage, and marginally ahead in diplomacy. We were relative dullards in geometry, though, and our concepts of xenology and xenoanthropology were childlike to the point of embarrassment.

Their first message used true randomness as a signal; artificially enhanced entropy, in this case of neutrinos arriving at the troposphere. We didn’t notice at all. Our species-wide cultural focus on regularity and artificiality as a means of detecting meaningful and intelligence-originated communications meant that we dismissed the signal immediately; indeed, we didn’t even delineate it from background activity. Their next attempt, accordingly, was more suited to the slow learners of our small corner of the galaxy.

We did, of course, notice the radio frequency approach. A high-amplitude, multi-frequency repeating sequence of the first sixty-four prime numbers, followed by a seven-digit sequence indicating a specific frequency to listen on. Duly attuned, their original intended message was repeated, albeit in a much lower-bandwidth form. It took more than a month to receive it, and somehow it arrived at all points on the Earth simultaneously, regardless of the planet’s rotation and its own relative movement against the celestial backdrop. Did they have transmitters in thousands upon thousands of star systems? Were they somehow able to induce RF signals at remote points in space, in a spherical field? It was a subject of considerable debate.

By the time they told us that they were using our planet’s own gravity as both transmitter and carrier, we were too preoccupied with the message’s content to do much more than note the fact for future study.

Every nation on Earth — in the form of their governments, security agencies, universities, companies, and private citizens — worked for a further year before the message was deciphered. It wasn’t what we were expecting at all.

It came to be known as the Report, but newspaper cartoonists, and talk show hosts, and comedians, and the wits of the internet, all unanimously agreed instead to call it the Report Card — and with good reason.

It was information from an alien civilisation, clearly vastly in advance of our own and almost unbelievably older, and the human beings who found it most familiar and intuitive were the actuaries employed by insurance companies. The Report identified a little over nine thousand categories by which a given planetary civilisation could be assessed, including aggregated scores in usually logical (but sometimes inscrutable) groupings. Of the nine thousand or so, fully 1,200 were unknown to us, but we interpreted them as best we could. Accompanying each grading — which was in a binary number system, but there were certain indications that the senders may have preferred counting in base 24 for some reason — was a percentile against a sort of galactic average.

We didn’t fare especially well.

Governments initially tried to keep the deciphered message secret, which lasted all of fifteen hours before it was independently decoded by thousands of others around the world, with the information and method of encoding shared universally on the internet. After the first summaries hit the international media, it was less than one further hour before stock markets were closed to protect currencies and national economies. Earth, or rather humanity, didn’t exactly get top grades.

Most significantly, the Report included projections, again evidently on a statistical basis, regarding our future. They covered everything from planetary matters (like seismic activity, species extinctions, atmospheric pollution, climate change, and so on), to predicted wars, epidemics, famine and drought, political upheaval, and of course a rolling mortality rate per age group, averaged for five-year intervals, per continent. The data was sobering in the extreme. I don’t think there was a single person amongst those who read it, understood it, and believed it, who didn’t also feel a profound sense of shame.

There were attempts to soften the blow, of course. Our actuaries told us that statistical data is an expression of reality that’s useful for planning purposes, rather than showing reality itself. Our investment firms reminded us that forward-looking statements were inherently unreliable, and that present conditions aren’t necessarily an indicator of future performance. People from every walk of society questioned the data, naturally enough, and also the conclusions drawn from it — both human and alien.

Philosophers and physicists, in particular, agreed on one thing: the Report was a truly elegant gift.

It wasn’t possible, they said, to give this sort of information to a less-evolved species without potentially (and nigh-instantly) invalidating the predictions contained within it. It was like a temporal paradox, but without the physical — and philosophical — mess of time travel. A sufficiently advanced civilisation, with sufficiently advanced analysis techniques coupled with a galaxy worth of data, could produce predictions that were akin to a genuine glimpse of the future. In any case, we couldn’t afford to bet against the Report’s accuracy. The picture it painted was simply too bleak.

When we met them, some eight hundred light years distant and more than a century of Earth time later, it wasn’t very long before our diplomatic envoys posed the question: was this the idea all along? The same thing we do with our own children, during even their most elementary education? A carefully crafted warning, to nudge the nascent being — or race — onto a more fruitful path, but without direct intervention?

They chose not to answer, and so far they haven’t budged on that point during the three ensuing centuries of our acquaintance and friendship. Nor have they stopped assessing us, albeit now on a semicentennial basis.

These days, we do much better.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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