The hemispherical planetarium was empty except for one man in his late 20s who wore a thick pair of glasses that continuously beeped. Sri lay down in a reclining chair and pressed a button on his glasses. He had been running some experiments in the planetarium, developing a new form of display called Quark Gas Array (QGA). As soon as the display started, the planetarium lit up and a holographic movie played, making him feel as if he was floating in space.

He made himself comfortable and took a sip of his cold latte while the computer on his electronic glasses did quadrillions of calculations a second analysing the response of the display. He put the cup on the armrest and shifted his gaze to one of the information boxes being projected on his retina. He nearly choked on the gulp.

He stood up and hurried to his lab. On his desktop, he brought up a recent news article which was titled “Mysterious patterns observed in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)”

The article had a projection of the CMB with anomalous patterns highlighted. Sri brought up his own image of the snapshot of QGA. He applied some frequency filters to the image.

Adrenaline rushed through him and he banged his desk in an epiphany, the patterns from QGA had matched.

---

Years later in another galaxy, some trillions of light years away from the earth, a woman, who didn’t look anything like a human, was listening to the inter-stellar radio. The inter-stellar radio permeated some hundreds of galaxies in this buzzing part of the universe. If you were a living creature in the universe, this was the cluster you’d want to be in.

There was an interruption as her nearly-sentient radio, which was instructed to play “something interesting”, automatically tuned to another frequency which had a lot of static with hints of recognisable sounds.

The woman, who was one of the sharpest minds of her race, suddenly got up as if she heard a ghost. Her heart started beating faster.

“Songbirds,” she muttered to herself. There were plenty of those on her planet, so it wasn’t listening to the Songbirds that made her terrified. The sound then changed.

“The roar of lions.” She hadn’t seen lions in a long time but there were some zoos in nearby galaxies which she was sure had some.

There were more animal sounds that followed.

The diversity and pointlessness of the voices were indicative of only one thing.

First contact, She thought to herself, Aliens.

Although, aliens didn’t frighten her either. It was the thought of who those aliens could be that was making her guts wrench.

The sound was getting clearer each second.

Suddenly her suspicions were confirmed. What she heard made her jump from her seat –

“I love you”

It wasn’t that she didn’t know English. In fact, it was the language of multiple galaxies, a gift from the colonizers who were long gone for millennia by then. The voice wasn’t too different from her own voice either.

It was the words that had dug through her heart. “Love” was the word that preceded destruction and demise. It was the signature word used by the parasites, which called themselves the Humans. They were eradicated long back. If they returned, it’d be war.

She quickly sent this information to the federation. She immediately got a call back from the Chancellor.

“It’s impossible. We had erased their memory and destroyed their ships”

“I know Sir, but you can hear it for yourself.” She turned up the volume.

“Good god. Where’s it coming from?”

“I don’t know, but they are getting closer. The signal is getting stronger.”

“Did they break it? The barrier?”

“It looks like they have. They’ve broken the CMB.” the woman said, feeling a sense of personal defeat. The CMB was created by one of her ancestors.

“I’ll get the space force ready.”

---

“President Ma’am, why are you risking your life,” the pilot of the ship said while attending to his computer in front. The ship was thousands of times farther away from the earth than the, previously thought, radius of the observable universe.

“I’m a leader, officer. I should be the one to lead humanity to a new era. If we come across other civilisations, it’s very necessary that they talk to somebody who represents the voice of people.”

“I know, but it’s the first expedition.”

“My husband died while searching for the AI particle. We shouldn’t be afraid of risking our lives for doing what we must.”

“He was a great man. How many people can boast of discovering something as significant as the CMB barrier.”

The president felt a sense of pride as she replayed the events in her mind. They had discovered that CMB was just a façade, thanks to her husband - Sri. It also allowed humans to observe the universe which occupied the space beyond the CMB.

The new observations led to the unification of all the fundamental laws into one. More importantly, the new law predicted the presence of a new fundamental particle, the AI particle.

Soon the government funded a solar-scale particle accelerator. It was during its first operation that there was a catastrophic mishap which took Sri’s life. However, his death was not in vain, as the experiments confirmed the existence of the particle.

In the coming years, humanity engineered the AI particle to create a ship able to transport them billions of light-years in a very short time.

---

The ship was consistently beaming out a message which contained the knowledge of the Earth and its children, as an introductory message to aliens. Multiple giant antennas protruded from the moon-sized ship that the president was captaining.

One moment the president was reminiscing her past. The next moment there was a loud bang, followed by multiple bursts of light all around her. There were figures all around the president surrounding her, and pointing at her, what seemed like weapons.

The president was restrained to her chair with an invisible force. She could only see guns around her. Behind the guns were alien faces glaring at her, ready to shoot her at any moment.

Between those faces, a relatively calm but strange face appeared. He seemed almost like an earth man but not quite.

“Scoundrels. How dare you come back here. Filthy parasites leeching off precious nature.” the man had agony in his voice. He pointed a gun at her heart.

“You’ve misunderstood.”

“Have I? Is it not true, you’ve come from, what you call, Earth?”

“Yes”

“Do you not kill other beings? Do you not enslave, even your own kind, for your pleasure? Have you not polluted your air and land killing millions?” said the man almost stabbing her with his gun.

“All of that is in our past. We realised our mistakes. We come in peace.”

The man drew back a little but didn’t say anything.

She continued, feeling hopeful.

“I thought we’d have a better introduction. Should we?”

The man pulled the gun back. His expression didn't change. It was again she who spoke

“My name’s Jade Thunberg. I’m from Earth. We love all living beings.”

Love.

A gust of anger surged up from deep within his gut, as agony and fear shook him to his core. He clutched the gun tighter and his fingers reached the trigger.