At first, she figured it was just another irritating message with no caller ID.
Although, the fact that it was only comprised of five letters, with two of them the same and sitting together, did make her wonder. They weren’t exactly letters, more like symbols or characters from some foreign language, maybe. She didn’t know very much about this kind of thing. As it was, she was struggling with English at school. The more she looked at the word, if it was a word, the more curious she became. She went on searching for the strange symbols on the World Wide Web in the evenings for a number of weeks, with no joy. It seemed that they were completely unknown. She knew the man next door spoke several languages and worked at the observatory at the edge of town; she wondered if he could help.
When he saw them he was instantly intrigued. He admitted that he’d never seen anything like them before. She forwarded the message to him so he could show one of his colleagues, who happened to be a keen code-breaker. Opening the message’s properties, he commented that the URL didn’t make any sense. He said that it looked more like coordinates than an address. He said he would check that out for her, using the observatory’s super browser for finding planetary locations and in due course, he would let her know.
It was quite a while before she heard back from him. What he had to say didn’t help much. He said that the address was certainly a space coordinate, but not one he could identify. The equipment he used told him it was a location beyond anything the observatory was able to track. In his opinion it was spam. He suggested it was some kind of elaborate prank sent by someone with a degree of knowledge regarding astronomical distances. As for the message itself, his friend was still working on it.
Looking back, the whole thing had taken place during her school years, but it had never been entirely forgotten. She was now in her late twenties and married, when she was contacted by the man who had been relentlessly working on the symbols. He explained that he had finally managed to crack the code. He said the word that had been sent was hello. He provided her with what he called an extrapolated alphabet that she could use, if she wanted to reply. She thanked him very much for all his trouble.
It was after discussing this unexpected and most exciting new turn of events with her husband, despite him telling her that in his opinion it was all a load of poppycock, that she decided to reply to the message…
Shortly after, on the far side of a distant galaxy, the pair chatted.
Roughly translated into English, one said, “It looks like I managed to break into planet Earth’s text message system.”
“Oh! Really? That’s pretty exciting isn’t it?”
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I said ‘Hello’”
“OK. What did they say?”
“They said, ‘Hew is this?’”
“That’s good isn’t it?”
“Not really. It took them fourteen years to reply and they spelt the word who wrong!”
