They contacted us.

Earth, 2119. It’s the 100th anniversary of the first oficially-registered contact made by intelligent extraterrestial beings with Earth. Or how most people like to call it: “the day aliens finally contacted us”.

It took place decades before I was even born –a few years before even my parents were born–, but still, it’s regarded as the most important contemporary historic event, by far, so I’m pretty familiar with it.

First, when the sighting of a meteorite falling and landing near the border between southern Mexico and Guatemala was covered by the media, it went fairly unnoticed. The damages were minimal, and it was nothing too interesting. That is, until someone that had collected the meteorite made an interesting finding: the meteorite wasn’t exactly a rock, but rather, a metal capsule.

This created a massive media uproar. The coverage was huge, conspiracy theorists were thriving, and the tourism in that area increased drastically. Everyone was dying to see what the capsule held.

It was extremely hard to open. It took days and days, and many failed attempts. It seemed to be made of an extremely resistant metal, that not even the most refined of machines could cut it open or pierce it. It was nothing chemists and other metal experts had ever seen before.

But, at last, the day people in a very high-tech lab were able to break it open came. Inside was a small piece of a strange paper-like material with some pictures on it. But then, they realized it was not actually pictures. They were glyphs.

Soon enough, it was found out the glyphs in question were ancient Mayan glyphs. The people in charge of identifying the object got some archeologists who specialized on Ancient Mayan civilization, and they discovered that the message could be roughly translated to “the day is near”.

This troubled a lot of people. Was this a mistranslation? Was this a prank that went out of control? Was this a strategy for the media to sell a ridiculous yet interesting story?

However, this seemed to perfectly match a conspiracy theory that had been popular for a few years before. Years before, there had been speculation that the end of the world would arrive in December 21st, 2012, because of some misconception regarding the Mayan calendar. As we can tell, it didn’t end. But, there was speculation about the date not being exactly accurate with our own calendar, with there being a margin error of about 15 years.

And indeed, the date had been off for about 7 years.

The thing is, the date wasn’t really about the end of the world, as so many people had wanted to think. Instead, it was about a new beginning. A new change in the world. And indeed, a big change it was. When the highly speculated day arrived, people in Earth were contacted by “extraterrestial” beings, from a planet from a somewhat distant galaxy. There was an interesting thing about these aliens though. They were, in fact, humans. Or at least, they descended from them.

The most popular theory in this modern age is that they’re the descendants of the Ancient Mayan civilization, which was thought (apparenlty accurately) to have misteriously disappeared centuries ago. These Ancient Mayas, according to this theory, had such an advanced and refined technology that they were able to transport most of their people to a faraway planet, in pursuit of divine realization. They couldn’t find their gods over there, but what they did find was a hospitable, gorgeous planet, which they made their home. Given the fuel they used took quite a few centuries to be made –or rather, to fully understand how to make it– they couldn’t go back and retrieve their companions left behind, so they decided that they would contact them once possible, which, interestingly, matched the date they had calculated as being the day of the world’s renewal. Little did they know, Earth would have already changed beyond recognition by then.

Communication with them was extremely difficult. Their original language had evolved with the passage of centuries in relative isolation –since they were still quite populous–, which resulted in dozens of languages almost completely unrelated to any language known to Earth inhabitants, except for Ancient Mayans, of course. But as decades passed, both Eartheners and these foreign beings –we don’t call them humans, since they aren’t exactly that, anymore, given that their bodies somehow evolved to a more suited physique for their new planet– found a way to understand each other, and this led to a revolution in society, politics, economy, and life itself, as the world knew it, as the cultures from people from Earth and these “aliens” started interacting with each other.

A hundred years later, we still haven’t figured out the perfect system to interact with each other. However, the trade between both planets has been rapidly improving, and it is estimated that, in a few years, we’ll receive our first visitors from their planet, since now they have crafted enough fuel to power airships suited for people transportation.