The Condition

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A machine built to forecast the price of copper found the first message from another civilisation. It filed it as item three hundred and eleven in a queue of four hundred and six. In March 2030, at an observatory in Ladakh owned by a Luxembourg investment house, Dr Asha Varghese is clearing a queue of low-priority anomalies with a mug of tea going cold. One of them does not repeat at any interval that means anything. Five months later a proxy of the Lasan Alliance speaks in a boardroom in Kirchberg. It is not a person, it has no name, and it has watched humanity for eleven weeks. It says our species identifies problems reliably, agrees they exist, solves them excellently and executes at scale - and fails at one thing only, which is acting when the acting is expensive to whoever decides. Then it gives the condition, in ninety-one words, and tells the company to publish it within thirty days. The company does not publish it. Nobody decides not to. It goes onto an agenda as item seven with fifteen minutes allocated. This is the story of how the largest fact in human history was mislaid by careful people following excellent procedures - and of the four scientists on a plain at four and a half thousand metres who found it, one of whom is dead by the twelfth of July over the custody of a hard drive. Told forty years later by the woman who read it. There is no villain anywhere in it, and that is the point. The aliens arrive, deliver their terms, and go away for seven years. This is a novel about institutions, written as a memoir - about what eight billion people did with a message once they finally had it, and why nobody could be blamed for the six months in which they did not. Book One of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.