Overture (Earth Song) by Mark Wandrey

association with the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. And it had been completely her fault. But there in the SETI site she found herself still listed prominently among contributing astronomers. All her links were in place.  Her photo was still there, as well as the video of her keynote speech to the World Astronomers’ Association convention five years ago. Here it was like nothing had happened, even though SETI’s fall had been more directly her fault than anyone else’s.
    Some old longing made her click the link for her speech. In a moment she was watching herself, a younger more confident version, standing behind a podium covered with microphones. The speech was momentous for her career. Only seven years in the association, she was both the youngest member to ever give this speech and the newest member as well. The press had been made aware and what was usually a collection of old men listening to boring details became a media event. She was also the first woman to give the address. Halfway through the speech she sprung the trap.
    “ Ladies and gentlemen of the press, at this point I would like to deviate from the script.  Two months ago, while working at the Arecibo radio observatory, we received the first signal from another star system. It was, without a doubt, from an intelligent species.” The room exploded into roars of amazement and outrage, and her career exploded soon after.
    “ That was a stupid move,” she chastised herself for the thousandth time as she stopped the playback. It had been a move of desperation. The signal they received was only nineteen seconds in length and cut out before any other radio observatories could lock in on it. To make matters worse, one of the two main data recording drives had failed to record and the one copy was not perfect. One recording of the signal and no corroboration was a worst case scenario. The governing scientific bodies refused to authenticate the incident and there was no wide baseline interferometry, so the specific star system that originated the signal couldn’t be pinpointed.
    Mindy spent the next month watching the suspect channel and coordinates in space every moment they were in view, but the signal had not been repeated. Other friends at SETI had analyzed the signal itself and found tantalizing structure in it. Because of the quality they couldn’t yet decode whatever the signal contained.
    SETI had been accused of trying to create public hysteria over the supposed alien signal. Congressional hearings had resulted and SETI was publicly torn to pieces. Mindy had hoped that the public limelight would create pressure for JPL (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and NASA to use its formidable power to decipher the garbled signal and help them look for the source. Instead, they were made to look like fools. It was the first real mistake she had ever made, a critical overestimating of the public opinion. Her career and SETI’s funding had paid the price. Mindy sighed and clicked on her IM, paging an old friend.
    “ Hi stranger,” came the typed reply just a few seconds later.
    “ Been a long time,” she typed back.
    “ Still moving freight?”
    “ Yep. Still making pizza?”
    “ SEG,” was the reply. It stood for Shit Eating Grin, a bit of computer shorthand. “Pays the bills, if you know what I mean.”
    “ Yeah, same here. How’s the crunching going?”
    “ Slow, real slow. You been walking down memory lane again?”
    “ Of course. I got a line on a dedicated server on eBay yesterday; I’m going to try to get it to you.”
    “ I saw it too, but the pizza business isn’t going so good.”
    Mindy sighed and typed on. “I’m not rolling in it either, but I just got a bonus check.”
    “ I thought you were going to be going on a honeymoon with that?”
    “ Yeah, well, sometimes things don’t work out the way you hoped they would.”
    There was a long pause, long enough to make Mindy wonder if her friend had signed off before he