[ WP ] We 've explored space and found life , though it does n't `` live '' in a way we 've expected .

“ Okay, so what am I looking at? ” 
 
 “ It ’ s our first contact with extraterrestrial life. ” I wasn ’ t the first person to see it, or even in the first thousand, but they had to get out of the scientific world and let someone creative take a look for a change. 
 
 “ They ’ re…what are they? Strings? ” 
 
 “ No idea. That ’ s why we ’ re giving you a copy of the footage. You figure it out. ” 
 
 I loaded it into the computer, and separated it, frame-by-frame. One of the intern kids wrote up a script to look for patterns in the movements. No luck. They were just erratic movements, with no pattern. We spliced it into a loop and had it look again. No luck. Looked for wavelengths, nothing. It was just thousands of millions of little strings moving randomly. I told the kid I was going home. 
 
 On Monday when I walked in, I saw the kid passed out at the screen, phone in hand. He didn ’ t call me. I kicked his chair and yelled for him to wake up just as the scientist showed up right behind me. 
 
 “ I figured it out. The movements, these things aren ’ t really strings. They ’ re bundles of one dimensional beings. ” 
 
 “ Okay… ” I respond. 
 
 “ But that ’ s not the cool thing, watch. ” He cued up the computer. Frames overlaid on frames, forward and backward in time. The whole video snapped to a single instant. 
 
 “ Holy god. ” I saw it, but I had no idea what it meant. 
 
 “ They ’ re in one physical dimension, and three temporal. And they just said hello. ” 

