How to Decipher an Extra-Terrestrial Computer Screen — Marilyn K. Martin

So you are a genius-level computer programmer in your 20s, working long days with plenty of overtime and bonuses. But little time to spend it, so you just keep reinvesting it in your company stock. As you run on that energy-drink fueled treadmill between home and work. Most weekday evenings you arrive home at 10PM, fast food for dinner as you collapse utterly exhausted on the couch, and fall asleep in your clothes. And that's where they find you. An urgent knock on the door in the middle of the night. The Suits. Badges. The Feds. You blink blearily as you hear "National Security emergency ... Need your help ... No, you have no choice but to come with us ... No time for questions - get packed." A car with government plates rockets you to the nearest airport. And in a daze, you see sunrise from a helicopter in flight, your kidneys rocking in motion to the grating gyrations. Next thing you know, you are sitting at a circle table before a never-online computer. In another state, on a military base, with about thirty others like you. The Suits are now Uniforms, and most of them are armed. Lives interrupted, careers interrupted. You're referred to as 'genius level computer programmers', culled from the best and brightest private high tech firms. There's this ET-craft wedged high in a granite outcrop in Yosemite Park in California, you see. And when no one in the government could unravel its tricky, in-motion computer screen, you were rounded up to decipher that ET computer screen. Before that ET-craft explodes. And unleashes the San Andreas fault - or sends out an EMP blast to level Silicon Valley. Are you "in"?