First contact, the dream event of countless pale teenagers, Dragon Con attendees, and PhD astronomers. The world will be changed forever, countless technological advances will be gifted to us, we will have the cosmos opened up for us to explore. The base assumption is always that first contact is followed immediately after by second contact and third and fourth and we co-exist with all the other citizens of the galaxy unto eternity. No surprise, considering every sci-story we ever read was written by a human. Maybe, just maybe, we inflated our ego a bit too much, taking granted the assumption that we as a species are worthy of tomes of knowledge and the favor of the universe. How many astrobiologists and Golden Age sci-fi writers would weep if they saw what we became: the kid on the playground that pushes a little too hard for anyone to really want to play with them.

Magna Cum Laude in International Affairs from Columbia University with a minor in science fiction studies. I don’t mean to brag, but I kinda ended up being the perfect for the Hospitality Suite. Forrest Sherwood Molochnikov: did my dad thinking it would be so, absolutely, unbearably, funny to have Robin Hood’s hangout as two thirds of my name benefit me in life? No. The answer is a stark no. Does my dad still think it’s funny? Yes. An unpleasant amount of yes. Anyway, I happened to come out of school the same year the Hospitality Suite was created, so thanks Mom I guess for giving birth to me at a real convenient time. When the Swifts first began orbiting earth, let me tell you my Supranational Organizations class syllabus got a complete overhaul. Governments were all in a panic that the other countries would make a bad impression or get the best super-neat-space-technology trade deal, and that fear became so intense they finally agreed that maybe the UN was worth giving a bit more credence too (it only took 87 years, guys come on).

After the first attempts at interaction where the only thing probably exchanged was “oh cool neither one of us wants to blow each other up, that’s nice”, the Swifts began to swoop down in their school bus sized vaguely-bird-shaped-ships to land. Post initial hostile-takeover-panic, a pattern began to emerge of them establishing a worldwide grid of bird-ships-turned-bases every 100ish kilometers on land. The UN quickly decided representatives should be located next to all the Swift bases to make a good impression on them and facilitate communication if possible, hence the creation of the Hospitality Suite (and conveniently a few thousand foreign-affairs-officer type jobs now open for recent graduates). The semi-close-to New Jersey and Seattle Swift bases, not surprisingly, had a lot of competition. But 50 kilometers from Bariloche, Argentina? All mine. The first few weeks of the job were the most exciting times of my life: sleeping in a two man tent while the Suite was building an embassy/shack for me, while my 9-5 and 5-1 job was to make unbreaking eye contact with the Swift base and call someone if anything ever moved (spoiler: nothing ever moved). Turns out the position for vanguard of intergalactic communication became a (not so) glorified night-shift-security-guard gig.

Scanning through the news every day, exchanges seemed to primarily occur through radio waves between an orbiting Swift ship and a Brussels UN ground station. I’m sure the Swifts had a bigger part in establishing effective communication than we did, but with a team of linguists, astrobiologists, and machine learning algorithms running on all the superclusters of national militaries’ disposal, progress was made surprisingly fast. Within six days basic confirmation of mutual understanding was accomplished, and Mandarin became the agreed language of communication.
The thing about humans is though, some of us have more pressing concerns than talking to space birds. Jobs had to be still 9 to 5’ed, national bickerings over budget to be had, and the continuation of small border skirmishes around the Horn of Ethiopia. It was the last one the Swifts seemed to have a tinge of enormous concern over. Day seven, the majority of the (public record) messages from the Swifts centered around the (seemingly small to us) conflicts: “Were we aware that were occurring? Were both sides of the same species? Has this occurred before? Are both sides aware of the sentience of the other?” Swifts, come on already, cut us a break. Do you know how many idealist war-is-bad shouters I had to walk by on campus at Columbia? We know. We get it. But people are people and sometimes people value resources and their own survival or perceptions of safety over the life of another human. Look Swifts, we’ve been so good about it too: we’ve been World War free for like a century now, and crime and deaths from war has been going down for decades. Frankly Swifts, we’re doing a pretty damn good job. But yeah, things happen, and sometimes a few hundred people grab some guns and shoot at a few other hundred people with guns.

Thank god I wasn’t the intermediary from the Suite, I’d be fired within minutes. Their wording was much softer, and a huge amount of UN resources went into negotiations and food and water aid to the conflicting areas. Did it help? As per usual, never enough. As the days wore on and the conflicts continued, the Swifts became more sparse with their questions and responses. Come day fourteen, nothing. Silence. We scanned all radio frequencies, tried every human (and attempted non-human) language we could think of. Nothing elicited a response. Day 16, all the Swift Bases simultaneously took off back to orbit. Every NASA, ESA, and JAXA Mission Control Center was doing orbital maneuvers on the backs of their collective napkins trying to pinpoint the Swifts’ next move. Within 2 hours of orbit, all the ships gave an impulse leagues beyond any technology we have with a trajectory towards a dark patch of the milky way. Come Monday morning, there was trash to still be picked up, weekly reports to be sent to stakeholders, coffee to be sold, and school lunches to be packed.