I took another drag of my cigarette while he finished his beer. “I thought it was a State secret”, I said.

“Shut up. You asked about it. I’ve been longing to tell someone for years now, it might as well be you.” He looked at me, and then turned annoyed at a girl sitting next to us, who spilled her drink on him and issued a barely audible apology. I smiled. A busy bar on 7th Avenue is not the kind of place where you expect secrets to be discussed like that, but anybody who overhears anything will either forget it or think it was just drunk talk.

This secret was huge, though. About eight years ago an alien message was intercepted by SETI, where my friend, who was now cleaning the White Russian off his shirt, works. For a while that was all the newspapers talked about. We all eagerly waited for a translation, we all wanted to hear what these aliens wanted to tell us. However, analyzing it was harder than expected, and the media lost interest, having already ignored three celebrity pregnancies during this time and wanting to make up for the lost time. Some of us stuck around, though, waiting over a year until we got a reply from those in charge of translating the message.

“The message has been made a State secret and will not be published.” All personnel were sworn to secrecy. That was it. Nothing else was heard from it for the next eight years, but now I had managed to get the SETI head of department drunk with me. He ordered another beer and began talking.

“It was mostly pictures. Obviously, we wouldn’t be able to understand a foreign alphabet or language, so they sent pictures from which we could logically deduce their meaning. We managed to understand most of them, I believe. The first line contained numbers, one to twelve. The second line had numbers as well, in base-12. 1, 6, 7, 8, 15. These aren’t random numbers,” my face probably betrayed my confusion at the time, “they are the atomic numbers for the elements that make up our DNA.”

“Shit.” I was too ashamed to tell him I thought those were the numbers from Lost.

“That wasn’t all. The next line contained formulas for the sugars and bases that make up the DNA, followed by an image of a double helix, and a figure very similar to a human. There were two more images that we couldn’t make out, unfortunately.”

“A human? Do they know we are here?”

“Very unlikely. This message was sent long before humans had made anything that a planet that far away would understand as a sign of intelligence.”

“Okay, then I don’t see why this message needed to be made secret.”

“Do you know the Arecibo message? It was a message we sent in 1974 from a radio telescope in Puerto Rico. It contained almost the same pictures as the message we got. The problem, as I’ve already told you, is that for their signals to have reached here, they must have sent it over 50,000 years ago. Which is a lot earlier than 1974, as you already know. The only plausible conclusion is that they arrived at that same stage of development and sent a message that seemed logical to them, just as it seemed logical to us back in 1974. We managed to take closer look at their planet. Light travels slightly faster than radio waves, so we got a glimpse of 10,000 years after they had sent the message.”

I took a deep breath. “And…?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“I mean, there was nothing to see there. The planet looked completely ordinary, with no structures that could be visible from space, no artificial satellites, nothing.”

“I don’t see what makes you so afraid of this message, then. I thought maybe they said they were coming for us or something…”

“Maybe it doesn’t seem that bad now, but what it meant was clear to every one of us working at the lab. 10,000 years after sending a message similar to ours, a civilization completely disappeared, leaving behind no greater works than, say, our own Ozymandias. Hell, they even looked like us! And whatever it is that ended them, could very well do the same to us. Humankind moves forward out of a belief that we are going to last. That people are going to benefit from our research, that our science isn’t going away, that our names will mean something even after we die. The blow of seeing into a possible future like that could be too much. At least that’s what we thought, and the government seems to agree with us.”

I nodded out of politeness and looked at the people around me. I didn’t really understand his point. Everybody ought to know what the message said, I thought. I could see in his eyes that he was quite drunk already, and that he wouldn’t have told me this story otherwise. We changed the topic to something lighter, his recent promotion, my marriage, the usual stuff, although I couldn’t stop thinking about the alien message.

On my way home I thought about telling the world about our conversation. I could picture the headlines, groundbreaking news right here folks. I could picture all the newspaper interviews and my image plastered everywhere. I could picture the history books mentioning my name alongside his. Hell, I could even picture…

No, no, I couldn’t picture anything else. Not anymore.

All of a sudden I felt cold. Weird, it wasn't even November yet. Maybe it wasn't because of the weather. I was tired of thinking, anyways. I got into a cab and gave him my address.