The only way

Ralph entered hall no. 1 at 8:30 am, as he had done every day for several years. His gaze immediately turned to the center of the hall, where on the pedestal, surrounded by a multitude of instruments and a web of cables, was the meaning of his work. In fact, not only him - millions of people around the world. The first alien ship. A decade and a half ago, he made an emergency landing and was partially damaged, leaving, however, a lot of material for study. The real miracle was that the politicians and scientists after this event did not quarrel, but were able to organize an effective study of the gift that had fallen from heaven. The best minds of the planet were thrown on the reverse engineering of the ship. Ralph, who heads the group of studying communication devices, stood in the hangar and once again admired the swift, ship-like look and feel of an arrow in flight. He remembered everything that happened in recent years.

Almost immediately it became clear that the technical thought of the creators of the apparatus had gone far ahead. It was found, all the same, in alien technology and something familiar. Year after year, scientists studied the ship, tried to restore its individual nodes - and over time something began to turn out. First managed to get inside. Unfortunately, the ship turned out to be unmanned, so it was not possible to meet the living aliens, even the dead aliens. Then gradually began to uncover other secrets: the composition of the material of the body, the principle of operation of the engines, the purpose of some auxiliary mechanisms. Great luck turned out to be the intact state of the onboard computer - it was possible to turn it on and even with time to remove all the information stored inside. Of course, it was in completely unfamiliar alien and machine languages, but the general coding principles were soon deciphered. For a decade and a half in an alien ship, we managed to understand almost everything. The mechanism of the engines was very difficult, and the engines themselves - damaged, but work has already begun on building their own, similar. But even according to the most optimistic forecasts, there were still a few dozen years before the end of this work. Another success was the discovery of the principles of super-long-distance communication. The elegant theory of T-waves allowed to send messages instantly to arbitrary distances, leaving relativism far away in wake, with its ridiculous belief in the maximum speed of light. Secrets retreated one by one - star maps, ship black box recordings, on-board system operation algorithms, sensor device. All this gave modern physics not just a push - a whole series of super-powerful kicks and at the moment laboratories and factories around the world were actively studying, mastered and put into practice alien technologies.

A few weeks ago, the first own T-wave communication station was completed. Finally, the opportunity to send a message to the creators of the ship. To this, however, because of the imperfection of the new technology, it was necessary to throw all the energy of the planet - and even this was barely enough to transfer several kilobytes of data, and half an hour waiting for a response. But it was worth a try.

Or not worth it? The world is divided into two camps. The first believed that it was definitely necessary to make an attempt to communicate, greet the alien mind, report the found ship, tell about themselves and wait for an answer. The latter were more careful. Their main argument was a few unsolved mysteries in an alien ship. For example, the purpose of his flight has not yet been understood. According to the decrypted algorithms of the onboard systems, the ship was given the task of “flying forward, dodging obstacles”. To infinity. Some kind of nonsense! He should not have returned, should not have achieved a specific goal, did not carry passengers or cargo. Moreover, it fell solely because of an error in the flight control program (it turned out that a certain combination of the type of a star, the planet, the mass of its satellite, and several other parameters threw the program into a branch with an uninitialized parameter — and this led to an emergency landing) . Or maybe this was the goal — when such a combination of parameters appeared, to sit down, giving the local residents the opportunity to explore advanced technologies and get in touch? Or did the ship fly somewhere, but did this accident destroy the important plans of the aliens? In this case, they can be unhappy, they can fly in and pick up their property, they can complain about the seizure and damage of their equipment, and in general - how things will turn out ... It was scary.
')
After a long debate, it was decided to get in touch all the same. In the message, tell about the ship crash and attach a detailed description of the causes of the accident found, emphasizing that no external impact on the ship was undertaken and the only reason for the emergency landing was an error in the subroutine (calculations and logs were attached). It was scheduled to send a message and at this key moment in the story the whole world stopped, knowing that there was enough energy available for only half an hour waiting for an answer, and hoping that it would come in that time.

...

The project manager for the creation of long-range drones "Strela" entered the premises of the onboard systems programming department and immediately called the lead developer:

“Anton, the message came again.” 7 minutes ago.
—Where is this time?
- Alpha Swan. More precisely you need?
-Not. We sent only one prototype in that direction ... Just a second ... Yes, CL-15300. What is in the message?
—Bagreport. Uninitialized variable. Very well written, I will tell you. I have already viewed the source code - they are right. Our bug.
- Well, let's fix it.
- Fix it, of course. But what to answer with this, from Alpha? They stressed that they have little energy to wait for an answer.
—Standard form.
—Standard form? "Hello! Your appeal is very important for us, it was registered in our bug tracker under the number ... ", etc.? Oh well. But are you sure that we do everything right? What do you want?
—Andrew, we have already discussed this a thousand times.
“Yes, but ...”
“No, but you know that as well as I do.” Already many years have passed since the cost of manufacturing equipment similar to our UAVs, and even much more complex, has become disproportionately low compared to the salary of testers. Yes, we could hire for finding this bug with a forgotten variable of a living person and he would spend on it - how much? Well, let 2 days of work. At current rates it is 500 ergs! And the creation of the drone cost us 15 ergs. Even though 9 out of 10 Strel prototypes are irretrievably lost, the profit from the bug report of the tenth covers everything. You yourself know - it turned out that this is the only way.