On July 2nd, 1996, the researchers at SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, contacted extraterrestrial intelligences.
Unfortunately for them, they had no idea, for, of course, this was exactly what they had been searching for.
The reason they didn't know they were in touch with extraterrestrial information was simple: They didn't know where to look. Huge radio telescopes pointed into the sky, searching for oscillations along the electromagnetic spectrum which seemed to ordered, or not quite random enough, to be originating from a civilization which might also be pouring television commercials and bad pop music into their surrounding electromagnetic environment. This would be taken as a sure sign of intelligent organization and technology.
So it never occurred to them that the mysterious moment of dizziness they all felt might be a message from another star. And because they hadn't tuned their nervous systems to measure sense-information from the mental direction, instead focusing on extending their eyes and ears and skin, looking into frequencies which were not given to their endogenous sensory apparatus humans are born with rather than that "sixth sense," mentation, considered in Buddhism to be a sense just like the other five, transmitting ideas in the same way eyes transmit sights, they missed it entirely.
Most of them felt the wave as dizziness. A brief vertigo, as if looking from a great height. Or a cloudy swilliness, as after a few tokes of good marijuana, or a glass of fine brandy. Some of the ones who had come in from backgrounds less oriented by Western science felt as though they had been performing yogic breathing exercises, or meditating. Subsequently, all of these people felt a little calmer for the rest of the day.
Ted Java had a brief moment of introspection. He closed his eyes, settled back in his seat, and felt as though he were drawing inward at an incredible rate, seeing the clouds of his soul unlifted--he wasn't ready for this, though. He clung to the slipping pieces of his I, clung to the wispy strands of fog, and found himself staring into the black sludge we all face when we look at what we fear, or hate, in ourselves and others. This was a bit too much for him, and after July 2nd had to enter therapy for three months, which steadily made his life more hopeless at its inadequacy to handle the emergent unconscious material which had been attached to this black sludge. Ultimately, he attempted suicide and although the hospital staff should have been able to save him in time, he ended up dying anyway--but instead with a great smile crossing his lips, the first genuine smile he'd displayed since this day. (And, actually, his death is in a coincidental or synchronstic manneer connected with the events which transpire in this story. But they might not be evident on first reading.)
Three technicians, Bob, Cindy, and Linda, found themselves with expanded perceptions for the next three days or so.
Bob was hip, he'd done acid many times before, so when the corners of the room suddenly no longer bent at right angles, and when the overall magnitude of multi-colored spirals in the air increased by bounds, he figured it was just one of those "flashbacks" that the police told you you'd get even if you'd only ever done acid once. When he didn't come down from the flashback the next day, he got worried and called his doctor, who advised him to enter a hospital for addicts. Monday, he quit work and enrolled in a rehab program. The rehab program ultimately broke him and depleted all of his money, but fortunately he managed to get a job with DARE touring schools and telling him of how his life had gone to shit after eating acid and managed to live comfortably. He was still alive at the end of the time-scale this story encompasses.
The yoga sessions are finally paying off, is the thought that occurred to Cindy. She'd read Patanjali again and again, she new everything about these expanded awareness states that were supposed to occur to devout practicioners of Yoga. In fact, it was the yoga of love and compassion for other lifeforms that led her to this project of trying to contact extraterrestrials--to see if they could help save the Earth, and to see if she could help them. She was quite pleased with this development, and her Yoga instructor, having experienced a similar flash, a lot briefer and more intense than the one Cindy received, at precisely the same time as Cindy, concurred that Cindy was progressing. She lives too, but is a lot happier than Bob, and is waiting for something Bob could never imagine.
Linda didn't understand what was happening to her at all. She'd been to Church, as a kid, and had heard about how sometimes God will do things to your head to make you born-again, but never thought it would be like this. She ended up going to an evangelical church on Sunday, and came to realize that God had granted her vision of the Truth, and that this searching for life other than Earth was futile and blasphemous, for God had only made the Earth in seven days and had made no other worlds. After she repented her sins on Sunday evening, crying and confessing in front of a frantic congregation all of her transgressions against God Almighty, the state of altered awareness ended for her, and God granted her normal thought again, guided her to a good, true, holy life. She never went back to SETI. Curiously, she dies as well at the end of this story. Even more curiously, she will die at the same moment Ted does. (Not that it matters, anyway--these SETI technicians actually won't enter our tale again.)
Thus, the SETI telescopes remained pointed at the heavens, looking for radio blips which, decoded and translated, would probably resemble Nike ads and Beavis and Butthead. This is not their story.
.oOo.
However, a few weeks later, when scientists in other organizations determined that a large object was moving towards the Earth, apparently originating from outside the solar system somewhere between here and Sirius, and SETI confirmed this, other, more authoritative, SETI officials are brought in.
And it was then that something was finally appearing in the direction their senses were actually tuned too. Something which had appeared at the same instant as the other transmission.