The film cut to a rapid slideshow of still photos taken by the orbiter. The swastika had indeed disappeared, leaving no sign it had ever been there in the first place. Then the image magnified to show a detailed view of the probe’s landing site. The four impressions left by the lander’s feet were still visible, as was the circular hole the cryobot had burned into the ice—ice that had miraculously reverted to its natural color.
“Forty-two hours after NASA lost contact with the lander, its radio transmitter came back online, broadcasting on the same top-secret NASA frequency. When its signal reached Earth, we discovered that it contained a brief voice message, apparently sent by the inhabitants of Europa. To our surprise, it was worded in plain English, and spoken in the voice of a human child.”
A recording of a young girl’s voice began to play on the soundtrack.
“You have desecrated our most sacred temple,” the child’s voice intoned in a flat, inflectionless tone. “For this there can be no forgiveness. We are coming to kill you all.”
Even as I shuddered in my seat, something about the message struck me as oddly familiar. It was like something out of a bad science fiction movie.
Then Carl Sagan’s calming voice-over continued.
“It was quickly determined that the female voice heard in the alien transmission had been synthesized from one of the brief audio recordings included on the gold record we had attached to the lander.”
“To our dismay, this twenty-one word message began to repeat on a continuous loop, hour after hour, day after day. The Europans, as we began to refer to them, ignored all of our attempts to respond or explain our actions. For reasons we still don’t understand, it appears they viewed our first attempt to make contact with them as an unforgiveable act of war. By sending a melt probe to explore beneath their moon’s surface, we may have unknowingly violated some territorial or religious boundary their species holds sacred. Or the Europans may simply view our species as a threat to their own. We still aren’t sure of their motivations, because all of our subsequent efforts to communicate with them have met with failure.”
Another wave of nervous chattering swept through the auditorium. I scanned the audience, half expecting someone to flip out, but everyone remained calm and in their seats—including me. The revelation that evil aliens were coming to try to wipe us out didn’t send anyone into hysterics or create a panic—and I thought I understood why. For decades, we had all been inundated with a steady barrage of science fiction novels, movies, cartoons, and television shows about aliens of one kind or another. Extraterrestrial visitors had permeated pop culture for so long that they were now embedded in humanity’s collective unconscious, preparing us to deal with the real thing, now that it was actually happening.
“We began to send more probes to Europa, numbering in the hundreds, but nearly all of them were lost or destroyed shortly after they reached the moon’s orbit. However, through trial and error, we were eventually able to place a handful of remote surveillance platforms on several of Jupiter’s neighboring moons, allowing us to closely monitor Europa without being detected. Their cameras sent back the following orbital surveillance images.”
Thousands of satellite images of Europa began to appear on the screen, displayed rapidly in chronological order, so that they created a rough stop-motion video, showing what appeared to be a thin ring of metallic debris forming around the moon near its equator. When these photos were magnified and enhanced, millions of construction robots became visible, crawling along orbital scaffolds and the skeletal hulls of the spacecraft they were building.
It looked just like the Sobrukai homeworld during our mission last night, except that Europa’s surface was mostly white, instead of red. And instead of the purplish gas giant named Tau Ceti V looming behind it, it was the familiar cyclopean eye of Jupiter.
The Europans were building an armada, just like the Sobrukai. But much closer to Earth. They had Foundry Ships orbiting their moon, cranking out fighters and drones—just like those I’d spotted above Sobrukai last night. The Europans had also towed several large asteroids and meteorites into safe orbits around their moon, and now hordes of those spider-like construction robots could be seen swarming over and burrowing into their surfaces, to mine them for metals and other raw materials. When an asteroid was all mined out, another would be towed into orbit.
As the time-lapsed footage continued to play, flying through weeks, months, and years of incessant construction by these self-replicating machines, a small fleet of glittering spaceships began to form around Europa. It continued to grow until the alien war vessels grew so numerous they formed a Saturn-like ring that encircled the equator.