Starshift

So we've finally made it. With the secrets of cold fusion revealed, humanity can finally reach the stars; not even the sky's the limit anymore. We've begun to chart the surfaces of Mars and Mercury without help from little robots or sky-eyes... we've even made first contact with extra-terrestrial life. Aliens.

I'd like to say that we did it ourselves, but that's not really true. It was those aliens - they call themselves the Arrai so I guess we will too - that did most of the work. They picked up on one of our random 'hey, this is Earth, we come in peace' long range radio transmissions, and after going over the info crammed into the feed, figured 'what the hell, let's drop in and check 'em out.' Next we hear is a return transmission that doesn't make a smack of sense. They don't speak Sol Common, of course.

They must've been pretty smart cookies to have figured out our message, and they probably assumed the same of us; that we could puzzle out their language. As it turns out, humans are morons... before we've gotten down more than a couple sentences, the Arrai send us a second message in passable Common, then a couple more in the most used local dialects: English and Spanish. Smart cookies, yeah.

It goes on like this for about a year, radioing back and forth. It would've been faster, but there's some heavy lag between messages from the distance. Somewhere in the mix we get cold fusion and start testing it out. About the time we've got flesh and blood teams charting the not-blue planets, the Arrai tell us they're sending something that'll make communication easier. Sure enough, the lag starts going down. A couple months after that, we've got a real live UFO in orbit, some sort of relay station. Once that shock's worn off, we get a message from it in Common that's by now damn near perfect:

'Arrai ambassadors and technologists await reception. Please send orbit to surface transport as soon as possible. Information regarding Arrai life support follows.'