“This way, Ms. Thompson, if you would be so kind.”

The agents, predictably, were overly polite. Usually this was the case, since they didn’t know who she was, but she was visiting important people. This made her important as well in their minds.

She knew from experience that it was the best to just ignore it. She nodded, and followed them, one in the front, one behind, while keeping a curious eye on the environment. As someone working with the Government for a few years now, she was no stranger to military and agency sites, but she never visited this specific one, or even heard about ETACA, who owned it. From the looks of the decoration, the site was new. Probably the agency as well.

After a bit of walking and a few turns, they finally arrived. Their goal was an office door, one of many, smelling of fresh paint, with no name tag on it. The agent in front knocked, waited for the answer, then opened the door. They let her go in but both of them stayed outside.

It was a fairly small office, with a single desk, three chairs and a file cabinet inside. Freshly painted, obviously, and without any visible decoration that would tell anything about the people occupying two of the chairs. One of them - crew cut, graying, uniform, muscles - was looking at her, returning the scrutinizing look she gave him. The other one - civil clothes, graying, glasses, sickly - was organizing some papers on the desk.

“Good morning, Ms. Thompson!” - the uniformed one raised from the chair to greet her - “Thank you for joining us.”

“My pleasure... “ - she checked the insignia on the uniform - “... Colonel. How can I help you today?”

There were no names or introductions, which was pretty common in this environment. She was fine with it, no one wants to learn new names every week.

“Before I explain what this is about, can I ask you to take a look at these articles?”

On cue, the other person in civilian clothes placed the papers in four groups, title on the top. One of them was from a magazine, others from different blogs and forums. Quickly browsing through the titles, Lina decided to speed up the discussion.

“Yeah, I read those three, and wrote the fourth one myself. What is your question?”

The two men looked at each other, then the colonel cleared his throat, apparently being ill at ease.

“We didn’t actually know that you wrote that one, Ms. Thompson. I’m sure we will look into that, right, Mr. Vance?”

“Uh, yes, Colonel, I will make an inquiry about that.”

“Anyway… Ms. Thompson, could you please briefly describe the topics of these articles for me?”

Thinking for a second, Lina went through the contents of the four articles in her head, looking for a common theme. It was fairly obvious, actually, and it made her very curious about what this assignment will entail.

“All four of them are looking at different aspects of first contact with Extra Terrestrial civilisations. One is looking at the probable technological differences, and how this could affect the economy. It has some interesting ideas. The next one looks into the possibility of getting infected by alien viruses. While the foundations are good, the variations are so numerous that even the author admits that it is impossible to prepare for everything. The third one is garbage; it’s supposed to be a generic article about everything related to the first contact, and therefore it doesn’t have anything substantial. Mine discusses a sensible approach to make first contact, considering the inevitable psychological and cultural differences of two races, and tries to define a way how these could be bridged, eliminating the chances of accidental war.”

“Garbage, eh?” - the colonel laughed elbowing the suddenly sour-faced civilian - “I couldn’t agree more! Can you tell me a bit more about the first one, please?”

“Sure.”

The discussion took a few minutes, mostly focusing on the theory that the alien technology can be unidentifiable for simply a different design approach, but it might also be a fully unexplored technological field where Earth scientist would lack the fundamental theoretical knowledge to even understand the function of said device. This time the civilian also joined the discussion, and Lina was pleasantly surprised by his grasp of the concepts, and the ideas he brought to the table.

“So, in short, it’s fair to say that it would probably take some time to understand even a simple piece of alien technology, if we could understand it at all, correct?” - summarized the colonel.

Lina nodded.

“Ok. Coming from this point, let’s talk about your artifact.”

“Well… my assumption is that it would be a very simple but obviously artificial shape, like a sphere or cube, as these are basically universal forms. It would have the ability to observe the target civilization, and make autonomous decisions, therefore it would have a partial or full AI, and a lot of passive/active sensors. It should be fairly indestructible, or largely redundant, even on a level of a network of physically distributed nodes. It would arrive on a small autonomous spacecraft that would destroy itself on arrival, mainly to prevent technological leakage. After a long period of observation, once it has established a good understanding of the language and the culture, the artifact would make contact and gradually teach the target society about the language and culture of the source civilization. Or, it would destroy itself if it would deem the contact impossible or meaningless. In case of the initiated contact, it would also send communications back to the source culture.”

“Yes, however in the first part you assume similar design principles to ours.” - added the civilian.

“That is correct. There is no guarantee to have a simple shape, even though from our perspective that seems to be a logical thing to do.”

“This is an excellent article, Ms. Thompson. A lot of us at the agency read it, and most of us agree with your conclusions. It’s really a tremendous amount of luck that we found you accidentally. We will need your brain to puzzle something out.”

“Puzzle something out? What exactly do you mean by that?”

“Would you like to see the artifact you just described in real life?”