My friends and I are in an on-again/off-again writing club where the rules are simple. Every two weeks you have to submit three short stories that it took you 20 minutes or less to write. These are the results.

No Comprendo

The President was making himself a sandwich – something he did whenever he had a spare moment as a way of relaxing from his hectic schedule – when his break was interrupted by a chief of staff.

“Sir, I need you to come with me right away.” Was all that was needed to be said for the sandwich to be left behind.

They raced through the white house and into a video conferencing room that was already ablaze with activity. Members of NASA, the military, heads of the scientific community, and a few that even the President didn’t recognize were awaiting his arrival.

“Well I can see this is something we need to dive right into,” said the President. “What’s going on?”

“To summarize, Mr. President,” began the head of NASA. “A week ago we began receiving a consistent signal from a star 83 light years away. Investigation revealed that it was an attempt at communication, so we brought in all our top linguists, mathematicians, and decrypters to figure out what is trying to be said to us.”

“And I’m just hearing about this now?” The President asked, incredulous.

“We didn’t feel it was an issue worth communicating to you until we knew what was being said.”

“So what is being said?” Asked the President.

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence before the head of NASA spoke up. “Well, that’s the problem. We don’t know.”

“How long will it take before we do know?”

“We’ve come to the conclusion…um, well I’ll just say it. We’ll never know. We don’t know what kind of advances we need to make to understand it, and we have no idea how to decode it. All we know is that in humanity’s current state, we cannot figure out how to translate this message.”

The President left to finish the sandwich he had left. It was all he could think to do.