[ WP ] `` Hello , and welcome to our planet ! To what do we owe the honour of being invaded ? ''

`` Are you sure?'' 
 
 The message blinked on the Earth-link communication screen. Ania blinked back at it. 
 The 36-year-old made headlines two years ago when she became the youngest SpaceX employee to be promoted to Colonial Commissioner. Now she is in charge of operations at The Jovian System, and currently finds herself in low-orbit around Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter. She gave an irate sigh at this exacerbated question. Having just informed Director Musk, the most powerful man in the solar system, of intelligent radio communication on what was supposed to be an uninhabited system, she expected more than this reply. 
 
 `` A 38 minute delay in communication and this is all he has to say... Fuck's sake, he probably thinks the team is picking up its own ground scanning signals. How incompetent does he believe us to be?'' 
 
 Mark, one of the pilots of the mission and the only other person on-board the orbiter, kept his intense focus on his work. `` Probably just as shocked as we are,'' he said as he ruled out the use of modulation techniques on the signal. He was confident he could decipher the radio clicks quicker than the team of experts back on Earth. Besides, he had a head start, and they still had to relay their findings across vast amounts of space. `` The Galileo project showed habitable conditions, and JUICE proved definitively that no life was on the surface. We're all just trying to figure out what the hell is going on.'' 
 
 A screen in front of Mark showed the constant and unmistakably intelligent signal, as received by the team on the surface and relayed back to them where they were hovering in geostationary orbit. The signal varied in amplitude, frequency, and phase, but there was clear no methodology behind this. The only controlled variable seemed to be the length of the pulses and the length of the gaps between pulses. Almost like an advanced Morse code, Mark thought to himself, just utilising a larger variable set. 
 
 `` Ania,'' he kept scribbling on his note pad, `` the manner in which this code varies... It's not modulation. There's no structure, no pattern.'' He looked up at her, `` I think it's organic.'' 
 
 `` You mean someone, *something*, is speaking to us in electromagnetic waves?'' She glanced at the Earth-link again, hoping for something more, something she can act on. 
 
 `` Well it's certainly not like anyth...'' Mark broke off. He dashed down a rough table on a clean slate of paper, feverishly inserting values. `` Oh, God. They're using our UPC encoding.'' 
 
 There was no excitement at having solved the riddle. His face ashened as he lifted the paper for Ania to read: 
 
 `` Hello, vermin, and welcome to our planet! We have been awaiting your invasion.''
