Mini-story: Report Card

Their first attempt to contact us went unnoticed. Apparently we had evolved in an unusual way, at least from a technological perspective. There were many commonalities with the other intelligent civilisations they’d encountered, but there were also gaps; areas that we’d somehow skipped over. We’d missed, for example, the quirk of magnetism that allowed for unlimited power generation given the correct high-atomic-number elements. We’d also missed the shortcut to synthesising arbitrary elements from the most abundant substance on our planet: salt water. But there were other areas in which we were ahead of schedule. Electronics, for example, and telecommunications. Philosophy and image-capture. Computer graphics and encryption. Oh, and music. We were very behind on fuels, propulsion, economics, and education. We were exactly on the curve for data storage, and marginally ahead in diplomacy. We were relative dullards in geometry, though, and our concepts of xenology and xenoanthropology…