United Times/Tribune NewsOrg Archive
First Scheduled: June 12, 2438 By. Shelley Field We always wondered. Since striking out into the universe, we felt awfully alone. Through discoveries of jump-points, alien systems, it felt awfully lonely in the Black. Now everything changes. Because now we know.
At approximately 3:13 SET, Vernon Tar, a thirty-six year old Explorer, was scanning for undiscovered jump-points in the Davien System. Drifting through the Black with only the hum of his deep-range scanners to keep him company, Tar suddenly got a hit.
“When you’re in the quiet for that long, any kind of ping scares the hell out of you for a second,” Tar relayed via DataCom, “so I checked my display and, well, it wasn’t a jump-point.”
It was a ship. Initially thinking it was simply another Explorer or a lost vessel, Tar barely acknowledged it.
“I almost didn’t want to look at it. I was sure it was some other Jumper out here, looking for the same thing as me.” Only when the ship drew closer, did he realize what he was looking at; the first member of an alien race. “After I got over my shock, I knew it was a delicate situation. We just stared at each other for a while.”
Tar contacted UNE SOC and relayed his coordinates. A delegation party was quickly assembled and rushed out to the scene. Military forces were on hand in case they turned out to be hostile. The meeting lasted about forty minutes. UNE forces were left to wait for a response from the Alien Race.
Scientists are currently scrambling to devise programs to facilitate translation and communication but after millennia of civilization, we can all say that we handled First Contact with the grace and dignity of a truly advanced race. From here, now we know for sure that there’s another race out there, another civilization to share and grow with.
Incident Report
Submitted to H-SOC Central
Author: GEN Neal Socolovich
Authorized Users Only
Re: Alien Contact At approximately 3:00 this afternoon, first contact was established with an alien civilization in the Davien system. Here is an outline of what happened: Vernon Tar was searching the system for jump-points when his systems picked up a Contact. Assuming it was just another explorer, he opened fire before realizing that it was, in fact, an alien vessel. He got scared and called it in. We isolated the Comm to keep a lid on the situation and rushed to the scene as quick as we could and immediately enacted standard containment protocol and media-blacks.
As best as we could tell, the alien [hereafter JERRY] seemed shaken up and annoyed at being fired upon by Tar. We didn’t want to press the issue so we tried to calm Jerry down using pantomime techniques. Immediately notified the TECH-Div to start working on some kind of translation device. Jerry let them record some of his language. We also ran cursory scans of his ships. Nothing overt as did not want to arouse suspicion but Data is attached.
We’ve released some info to the press and used one of our personnel to pose as Tar for the interview to make sure he toed the line. We don’t think Tar will be a problem. We bluntly explained to him that if he keeps quiet, he gets to be the hero who made first contact rather than the idiot who nearly sparked the first interstellar war. Tar understood.
In the meantime, we deployed Scan-Arrays to Davien to keep an eye out but will anticipate more contact in the coming days or weeks. I’m sure they’re probably just as curious as us. They were curious. Two weeks later, an alien delegation appeared in the Davien System and established contact with Socolovich. Over the next few months, the two races worked to break through the communication barrier. When we could finally interact, we learned that they were the Banu. A collective race of planet-states who had also just started to explore the universe.
In October of 2438, Socolovich and the other delegates signed the first Interstellar Peace and Trade Accord with the Banu.