Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

In November 2000, I was Guest of Honor at Contact 4 Japan, a conference devoted to potential first contact with extraterrestrial life. For that conference, I was asked to devise a role-playing scenario involving the receipt of a series of alien radio messages; teams would try to decode the messages and provide appropriate responses. The conference was one of the most enjoyable events I’ve ever attended, and it also afforded me an opportunity to meet the staff of Hayakawa, my Japanese publisher.

After the conference, I decided to expand my first-contact scenario into a full-fledged SF story, and sent it off to Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog. Now, by this point, I’d had 300,000 words of fiction in Analog but it had all been in the form of novel serializations: The Terminal Experiment (which Analog ran under my original title, Hobson’s Choice), Starplex, and Hominids. When Stan bought this story—at 8,800 words, technically a novelette—it became my first short-fiction sale to Analog. “Ineluctable” went on to win the Aurora Award for best English story of the year.

* * *

What to do? What to do?

Darren Hamasaki blew out air, trying to calm down, but his heart kept pounding, a metronome on amphetamines.

This was big. This was huge.

There had to be procedures in place. Surely someone had thought this through, had come up with a—a protocol, that was the word.

Darren left the observatory shed in his backyard and trudged through the snow. He stepped up onto the wooden deck and entered his house through the sliding-glass rear doors. He hit the light switch, the halogen glow from the torchiere by the desk stinging his dark-adapted eyes.

Darren took off his boots, gloves, tuque, and parka, then crossed the room, sitting down at his computer. He clicked on the Firefox icon. Of course he had Internet Explorer, too, but Darren always favored the underdog. His search engine of choice was also the current underdog: Yahoo. He logged on to it and stared at the dialog box, trying to think of what keywords to type.

Protocol was indeed appropriate, but as for the rest—

He shrugged a little, conceding the magnitude of what he was about to enter. And then he pecked out three more words: contact, extraterrestrial, and intelligence.

He’d expected to have to go spelunking, and, indeed, there were over thirteen hundred hits, but the very first one turned out to be what he was looking for: “Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” a document on the SETI League web site. Darren scanned it, his eyes skittering across the screen like a puck across ice. As he did so, he rolled his index finger back and forth on his mouse’s knurled wheel.

“We, the institutions and individuals participating in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence …”

Darren frowned. No one had sought his opinion, but, then again, he hadn’t actually been looking for aliens.

“… inspired by the profound significance for mankind of detecting evidence …”

Seemed to Darren that “mankind” was probably a sexist term; just how old was this document?

“The discoverer should seek to verify that the most plausible explanation is the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence rather than some other natural or anthropogenic phenomenon …”