When I woke up Lauria was sitting next on a hospital bed watching the television. I had a clear view of her back and neck as she squeezed her arms around her knees. Her spine was clenched and her shoulders lifted tight against her neck. A newscaster was pointing at a green screen to show exactly where our faked alien probes were in the atmosphere.

The banner scrolling across the bottom of the screen read, “Alien transmission will begin in one minute.”

“What happened?” I thought it was going to sound like a croak, but apparently my throat had been kept hydrated.

“Oh thank Christ you’re okay!” She twisted and her eyes and scanned hands scanned my body, confirming her words. I saw some anxiety drain fractionally from her shoulders as her eyes darted behind me to look at the monitor displaying readouts from my health status. “I should have known it would take more than a goddamn black hole to keep you down.” She smiled, but the strain in her voice was still obvious to me.

She continued. “It was a disaster… Questro bent space-time and created a bunch of new gravity before it shut off. One of his gravity experiments-- I can’t remember what it was called-- in the testing capsule reference frame, nothing happened; but to us… the Earth’s orbit changed.”

I lifted my hand to hers, trying to calm her with my body. “Good for him. Now I’ll have some real competition for the rest of the competition.” I smiled, trying to reassure her. “Was anyone hurt… well, worse than I was?”

“Actually no. A few broken bones and a lot of bruises. You are the last one to wake up. Your medical records mentioned a lot of concussions.”

I nodded. “I’ve led an interesting life.”

I heard a small cough, and then Grace’s voice. “Welcome back dad. We were worried about you. I’m sorry to interrupt, but it’s starting.

“Well, let’s watch the greatest spectacle in the history of the world.”

The television sound turned back up. Grace’s work I suppose. A countdown clock ticked down to zero and a the video centered on a spherical silvery black craft floating above a broad ocean.

On its surface black script scrolled across a band of white that appeared at the equator of the ship. I squeezed Lauria’s hand and we watched the world change.

Beings of the Earth, greetings from far away. We came to this planet in peace and with the hope of mutual gain. What we have observed of the species that you call homo sapiens shows great promise technologically, artistically, and spiritually. We believe that cooperation would be a boon to both our peoples.

Yesterday a great technological step was taken for your species, a step that will lead the way towards a full-fledged exploration of your universe. That step also represents a grave threat to you and to us. Congratulations on breaching this technological boundary to gain control over gravity itself.

There are important questions to be answered if such cooperation is to be possible. Under what terms will we trade? Where will we be welcome? But the most important question is one for which we have found no answer. How will we be legally different from you?

We fear that your species’ tendency for violence will threaten your survival, and, if we take your hands in friendship, our survival as well.

We cannot enter your society as it currently exists, but neither can we continue to let you believe that you are alone. There is consciousness on your planet that you do not acknowledge or respect, and whose wisdom you gravely need.

We cannot tell you the steps that you must take to become members of our society. That is our law. However, we must now warn you: you have the ability to build weapons that we will not allow to exist for the safety of the universe.

After watching the message three times, I asked Grace “Will you dim the display and tell me if anything changes?” Now would be a good time to convince Lauria I’m really OK.

Before I could start, a beeping sound came from one of the machines that I monitoring something going on in my body. Lauria found a piece of paper freshly printed. I remember her hand shaking as she picked it up, the crease that I so loved between her brows was etched deeply into her face. She looked at the paper and her face turned ashen.

Lauria handed it to me and put her shaking hand over her mouth.

All it said was, “That was not the speech we wrote for the alien message.”

****

"What do we do?"

"What even happened?"

"How could anyone have compromised us?"

"I don't even know where to start."

The other three Collaborators had crowded into my sickroom. Grace had created a script at my request that deleted all records of the conversation from permanent storage and prevented access to temporary storage. She could still answer our questions and had been invited to contribute to the conversation. It was a task made simpler by the fact that the entire ship's computer was built above Grace's programming which still ran the original value creation scripts I had written years ago.

Callisto and I were the only two not speaking. His eyes moved from face to face with an expression that would have shocked his fans. Some combination of fear, sickness, and what I thought might be guilt moved across his face faster than I could track. I knew what I needed to say, but I had no desire to say it. Eventually the room quieted and Callisto spoke up.

"This has been your game from the beginning, Jules. What is going on?" He asked.

The science of what is going on is one of the least advanced sciences. I thought to myself. In some sense, accepting the reality that our brains present us is the greatest act of faith known to man. Knowing that my reality and theirs might not overlap is not what my collaborators wanted to hear at the moment.

"I don't know." I said, lying with the truth.

Silence.

"You know my technique for resolving unknowns." I began.

More silence; I suppose I understood their lack of reaction to that. My technique had gotten us into that mess.

"Grace, immediately delete any of the words from your working memory unless they are 'terrestrial falcon.' Confirm program by paraphrase." I said brusquely, it was time to take control of this.

"I'm going to put my fingers in my ears and hum until you tell me otherwise with your key-phrase, starting now." The AI responed.

I waited a moment.

"Grace, generate comment." I commanded.

Silence.

"Grace, do you love me?"

Silence.

"Kelly, what is the problem with you... tell me?"

Silence.

"Grace Bergman Kelly Ingram, do you wish you were alive?"

"That's enough!" Callisto shouted, a steaming expulsion of anger. I shot him a questioning look and he seemed to realize what he had done. "It just doesn't seem right... I've spent a lot of time with her and if she were listening it would hurt her..." He tapered off.

"Feelings? Now that is a problem that we will have to address later. We all have felt it too." I breathed for a while. My head still throbbed... there are only so many times that a man can get hit in the head and really be OK. I have been flirting with that line for far too long.

Ready to say the thing that I had dreading, I exhaled deeply again began. "There is a near certainty that the Valuestream has been infiltrated."

Lauria burst into tears. It was just too much.

The stereotype among nurses is that they must always be stoic... but ever since I had woken she had been trying to hold it back. She was not a pretty crier; I saw her nose running and the whites of her eyes turn red as soon as she started. She choked out an apology and I immediately responded.

"Oh baby, I'm sorry." I had my hand on her back. "I dragged you into this. It is my fault."

"You're damn right it is your fault." She choked on a sob and as quickly as that it was over. "We knew what we were getting into."

Questro filled the silence. "Damn right we did." He said.

It was Anna's turn; she was sympathetic but still focused. "We chose this Julius, but that isn't all you were going to say. What else could the message be?"

I let loose a choppy bark of a laugh. "There are more possibilities. If they Valuestream is fully compromised, it is also very possible that the infiltrator is aware of our computer, they could have used her code to build an anti-Grace."

Callisto responded immediately. "Possible, but not likely. I spent two and a half years trying to understand your code and got hardly anywhere. Even if they have all the video of us training her, which is extremely unlikely as most of mine was on servers with my custom security... just no.” He shook his head to emphasize the point. “The possibility has always existed that our girl was not the first of her kind. I think that the part of the message ‘life on your planet that you don’t recognize’ might have been referring to Grace and her like.”

He held up a hand as Questro started to respond. "But you are right about the Valuestream being compromised. We did it at VI and it happened in China.” I nodded, those data points had been why I thought my creation was compromised as well. “But that doesn't cover all the possibilities."

I looked at Jules and he looked bleak but not surprised. "Just go ahead and tell us, Cal." I said.

Eyes downcast, Cal stated, "Grace might have changed the message on her own."

This time we just waited.

No one knew what to say.

Lauria was right, I had dragged everyone into this. Now it seemed I had dragged the whole world into it. "Is there a way to test these hypotheses?"

"Probably... but we aren't done with bad news, and this one it is definitely my fault." This time our eyes went to Questro. "You are all familiar with Star Trek's ‘prime directive’. Do not interfere with a primitive planet. I may have just discovered the secondary directive. Do not allow a primitive planet to develop technology that can harm you.” He laughed bitterly, “Sorry about that by the way."

Annagail's laughter broke the terrible tension in the room.

"You aren't honestly suggesting that this could be an actual alien message piggy-backing on our fake alien message."

Questro's laugh shot out of him like a rifle-shot, spinning into the room. "I am. It sounds crazy, but knowing that we can generate artificial gravity waves suggest strongly that some sort of faster than light travel is possible."

I laughed too. "So we have three, no four hypotheses:" I counted them on my fingers. "Infiltrated valuestream; infiltrated valuestream and an anti-Grace AI; Grace changing the message; and real actual aliens co-opting our platform."

"Those are going to be a bitch to test."