by Richard Lau
“Slow mail day?” asked Thierry, sliding into his chair, ready to start another nine-hour shift at the SEPTIC Institute.
His attempt at irony was lost on his desk mate, who had started an hour earlier to make up time for leaving work early the previous day.
“If only,” retorted Kellie. Then, in a dramatic whisper, more to herself than to her co-worker, she uttered, “You’ll see.”
Thierry logged into his computer, not understanding how Kellie could be in a bad mood. Unlike the others in the office, who were simply earning a paycheck to pay the bills, Kellie actually liked to read. She read books during her time off. She surfed the web and checked her social media during her breaks at work. As a budding fiction writer, she should appreciate the creativity, imagination, and even the psychological manipulation that went into the messages they received.
Then Thierry saw the counter on his screen. “One thousand, nine hundred new messages?” He tried to ignore the “Zero read” statistic.
“Better get started, buddy,” Kellie commented unsympathetically, her eyes locked onto her own screen.
Thierry scanned the subject lines of the email list. “A lot of these are ‘I Love You’ messages from Venus!”
Using her “what-did-you-expect” tone, Kellie replied, “It’s been that way ever since the Venusians discovered that their homeworld is considered the goddess of love by many Earthers. I’ve gotten about two hundred of them, too.”
“But the messages just contain faked or stolen photos and a link to a malicious site or lead to a relationship scam! Why don’t we just block them?”
Kellie turned to look at him. Her glare more blinding than the glowing font on Thierry’s screen. “You know that doesn’t work. The Venusian spammers would just register new and different addresses. Anyway, we don’t want to stop the input, as Earth’s translation A.I. uses the communication as part of its training. Its learning model is improved with quantity.”
Thierry reluctantly started opening the messages, quickly perusing them, and hitting delete. “Well, why can’t the A.I. simply filter out the messages?”
With his boyish looks, thin frame, and shaggy mop of hair, Thierry reminded Kellie of her eight-year-old brother, and it was hard for her not to treat him as such, even though they were both in their early twenties. “What a NUBEE question!”
Thierry cringed at being called the acronym for a New Unsolicited Bulk Email Examiner. Sure, Kellie had been at SEPTIC longer than he had, but he was simply expressing his frustration. He knew that the A.I. screening wasn’t foolproof, and the Earth governments didn’t want to overlook an important missive that had been mistakenly flagged and deleted as SPAM. The result could be interstellar war or a missed trade opportunity. And so, the solution was the formation of Stopping Extraterrestrial Phishing and Tricky Incoming Correspondence (SEPTIC) and its human email readers, like Kellie and himself.
“I see the Neptunian prince is still around,” lamented Thierry, skipping around in his list for some variety.
“Yup,” said Kellie. “Still needing our help to smuggle his fortune to Earth. I’m tempted to forward his 48 messages to the Neptune Tax Authority, but then I’d be accused of spamming them!”
“At least here’s a new one.” Thierry read from the email. “Has the warranty for your sun expired? Renew now to make sure your planet is covered. Don’t wait for your star to burn out!”
“Had eleven of those, already,” replied Kellie, unimpressed.
“Maybe it’s time to go nuclear again,” Thierry said, recalling the time Earth had faked a nuclear disaster by sending out spam messages of its own claiming a mass extinction event, and therefore, had no one left to spam. However, the plan failed when extraterrestrials detected still emanating broadcasts of I Love Lucy. And the amount of spam actually increased with new messages offering Environmental Radiation Clean-up and little green pills increasing breeding potency for irradiated species.
For several hours, Thierry and Kellie read with quiet focus, along with the other human email screeners inhabiting the rows of desks filling the auditorium-sized room. The silence was only broken by the almost-rhythmic mouse clicks on the SPAM button and the occasional grunt or sigh of a particularly disgusted or bored spam reader.
“Why do the Ursans keep sending ‘Grow a larger tentacle’ spam?” grumbled Kellie. She pushed out her lower lip and blew her chestnut curls off her brow in an exasperated sigh. “They know humans don’t have tentacles!”
“Speak for yourself, baby,” bragged Brad, overhearing from his adjacent desk. He made what he thought was a clever gesture under his desk
Kelli had long since stopped reporting him to Human Resources. They never read their e-mails. Too much spam. Brad was also related to one of the company’s executives, so his low productivity, poor performance, improper behavior, and many mistakes were regularly ignored.
However, Brad thought he was God’s gift to women, and Cheryl in accounting apparently agreed, saying, “Yeah, God’s White Elephant gift.” Brad, admittingly handsome but not the brightest, took it as a compliment on trunk size.
So, Kellie did what she always did and sent Brad’s personal email address (which he gave out freely to any female) to a spammer who specialized in financial scams.
Two hours passed, and Brad suddenly cried out “Oh no!”
“What’s wrong?” asked Thierry, hoping for some new or novel spam to break the monotony of the endless stream of unsolicited messages.
Brad held up his mobile phone. “I got caught exceeding the speed limit again!” He read from the screen. “I wish I knew where that damn radar camera was. I was clocked going over 299,792,458 meters per second. How am I supposed to obey traffic laws using the metric system when the speed limit signs are in miles and hours? This is so unfair!”
Thierry gave Kellie a knowing nod. She stifled a grin and said, “Brad, you know you’re not supposed to be reading personal email during your shift.”
“But now I have to pick up a bunch of gift cards on the way home to pay for the fine…”
Kellie and Thierry could barely hold back bursting with laughter. Brad still hadn’t caught on that government agencies didn’t ask for gift cards for payment, only scammers who didn’t want the funds traced. His misery, however, was soon forgotten in a fresh onslaught of incoming bulk messages.
Finally, Kellie couldn’t take anymore asteroid-mining job offers, black hole deliveries, Alpha Centauri lottery winning announcements, Martian real estate offers, and arrest threats from those a-holes on Uranus.
“Did you know SEPTIC used to have another name?” she asked Thierry.
“No,” he said, leaning back, rubbing his eyes and thankful for the break. “That was before my time.”
“It used to be called SETI. S-E-T-I. The acronym stood for ‘Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.’ This was back when Earth was desperate to contact any alien intelligence.”
Thierry sighed. “Those were the good ol’ days.”
~
Bio:
Richard Lau is an award-winning writer who is published in magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, as well as in the high-tech industry and online.
Philosophy Note:
So far, the human race has not had any luck making contact with an intelligent alien lifeform. But once contact has been established, would there ever be such a thing as too much communication?
