Moo

By J.C. Miller

“The president and secretary of state are on a conference call with our allies, so you’ll get the briefing from me,” the White House chief of staff explained, briefing four leaders of the majority and minority parties from both houses of Congress. “I don’t know when the president will be able to join us, he’s already spoken to the Russians and the Chinese, and I assume he’ll be talking to them again before he’s able to speak to you.”

Confused faces stared back at him. Was there some war? It couldn’t be since they’d be at a more secure location. Perhaps a disaster. “What is that?” The speaker pointed at a monitor displaying a series of numbers.

“Several hours ago we received a message with an extraterrestrial origin.” The blank faces began to form questions. “An object entered our solar system at an unknown time. We began receiving unknown signals, which drew the interest of the team at SETI. We continued receiving signals, and were able to track the location and speed of the source. It is moving extremely fast but is also decelerating towards Earth. It is now inside the orbit of Uranus.”

“When will it be here?”

“We can’t say, if they continue decelerating at this pace, it should be a matter of days, but we don’t know their capabilities. As I was trying to say earlier, the signals went from indecipherable to a Fibonacci sequence--”

“Are they hostile?”

“We have no way of knowing that. We assume a hostile force would not announce itself like this, but the president has quietly moved us to DEFCON 3. Given that the alien vessel--whether or not there are any aliens on it--is obviously much more technologically advanced than us, we also assume that they have superior telescopes and tools. These will be paired with superior computers or superior minds to interpret the data, or both. No doubt they are already studying us. As they move closer to earth, TV signals and other broadcasts might even be decipherable to them. There’s still a couple of hours of light delay between us. But we should be prepared for a lop-sided information position, whatever their intentions are--”

“Excuse me sir,” a young man in a short sleeve dress shirt who had clearly missed a shave barged in holding a flash drive. “We’ve received an audio broadcast from the aliens.”

“Does the president have this?”

“Yes, my boss brought it to him, I gave a copy to the joint chiefs,” he gestured back over his shoulder, “and this is for you.” Without asking permission he inserted it into the chief of staff’s open laptop and played the file. The seconds felt like minutes while they waited.

Moh-ooo. Moh. Broo. Mohhhh.

“Is that mooing?”

“It sounds like a cow.” The mooing continued.

“Why the hell would aliens be mooing at us?”

“Maybe they’re not mooing at us.”

“You think they’re trying to talk to the cows? That makes no sense. It’s either an error in the file or we’re just interpreting it as mooing because that’s what it sounds like to us, and we have no frame of reference.”

“Why couldn’t the message be for the cows?”

“Because they’re not intelligent, they don’t communicate. They’ve never had language. It’s not like a probe trying to communicate with whalesong or something.”

“Yeah, but imagine if you’re looking from space. The whole planet has been configured for the advancement of cows. There’s more than a billion of them on the planet. Half the crops in this country are fed to livestock. If you’re looking at the planet from a telescope, you see forests have been cut down to raise cows or crops for cows. The human roads and cities are much smaller by comparison, and we use those roads to transport fertilizers to the farms to grow crops for the cows.”

“And to take the cows to the slaughterhouse--are you seriously entertaining the idea that an alien probe could assume Earth’s dominant species are cows?”

“Why not? Just because we bury or burn our dead, doesn’t mean their species couldn’t ‘recycle’ dead bodies or feed them to the lower species or use them as fertilizer. I mean, in most of our science fiction, humans recycle dead bodies or their nutrients or stuff. But imagine you’re looking from space, what are humans doing when they cut down the rainforest? Raising cows or raising food for cows. You could detect the methane from the cow farts as changing our atmosphere. We could look like the lowly servants of cows”

“Okay, so let’s say detecting cow farts convinces the aliens or their computer or whatever that cows are in charge. As they get closer, they’ll pick up TV and radio broadcasts. It’s the Beatles, not the bovines, on the radio. Won’t it be obvious when they see TV that it’s a human--”

“We have an image from the aliens,” the tired underling interrupted, fiddling with his phone now that he had figured out how to cast onto the monitors. “Received just minutes ago, high resolution, the heading on the email SETI sent indicates it contains an image of the aliens.” The monitors changed resolution as the phone display took over.

On the screen, an alien with six appendages and large eyes peeking out from what appeared to be a gray covering that ran head to toe, obscuring a mouth and nose, if it possessed a mouth or nose at all. In two of the appendages, it held a white sign with a written message, clearly trying to communicate with Earth. The first true, intelligible message ever received by Earthlings from another world. The message was in English, and they could all understand it.

“Eat Mor Chikin.”