The SETI (Search for Extra Terrestial Inteligence) Institude was founded in the 70's on the hope of making contact, as its name implied, with inteligent life forms beyond the stars.

2019 was in full swing by now and no contact had been made since the very well known 'Wow! signal', a simple yet unique single line of code caught at random and maaybe by chance several years ago that never had repeat itself.

This, for Earth disgrace was about to change

'God I'm bored!' Joseph though for eleventg time this week.

He had worked for ten years now in the Institude and, what started as the dream of his life slowly turned to be something he had to drag his sorry-middle aged ass every day with the hope he could do the same the next day without finding out the goverment had finally shot down the place for lacking results.

This ,however, was not a sensless though.

In the last years or so, the suppoused civilian institude had experienced an increased in military personel in the needs of "protecting national affairs" (at least that was how the big fishes called it) but it was obious to everyone what was happening.

The army was taking over the place to make a better use of the advance detection technology laying to waste in a worthless effort without visible results.

'Better bored than jobless' Joseph thought as he watched a Lt. pass by his office like he owned the place.

God!" Joseph realized with poor consealed disgust "I even can tell their ranks at sight!"

The truth was Joseph wasn't

fond of the military long before all this started to happend.

He then shook his head as to prevent some memories to come to the front of his mind and decided that he better get back to work at least to distract himself from... well, himself.

Focusing again in his job, nothing exiting to be honest, he would watch information already recieved the day before in case one of the operators had missed it.

Maybe within the hour he would cover one of his subordinates allowing the poor bastard to take a coffe and some biscuits from the rest room.

'What an exciting day!' he thought full of sarcasm.

As in some sort of karmic twist he started to heard a conmotion down the hall where the main monitoring center was.

He exited his office just to ran with Steven, his fellow supervisor.

"What's happening?!" Steven said stoping in his tracks bearly avoiding Joseph

Before Joseph could akwarly said he didn't knew a randy came from the opposite direction breathing heavily and sweting "Oh! thank God you're here!"

""What's happening?!"" both seniors asked as the noise increased rapidly down the hall.

"We..." the randy said holding his breath "... are recieving something!"

For a moment, the world really seemed to stop. Probably only few seconds had passed but might be ten years for what it mattered.

"Are you sure?!" Joseph asked, fearing that would shatter the dream into obliviob

"Yes sir!" said the young man, a wannabe-scientist kid, at least in Joseph's mind, was trembling with excitment.

Without even minding the people in the hall Joseph rand down to the monitoring center moving faster every second.