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curious. Peo raised an eyebrow.
    “What do the Chinese think?” Peo said.
    Gale shrugged and shook his head. “They’re in the dark.”
    Conn had a thought, culled from one of her teenage obsessions. “Do you think it has something to do with the moon shower?”
    Peo looked at Conn. On screen, Gale frowned thoughtfully. Conn felt her ears flush again. “I mean”—she stammered—“if a lot of governments got this message, and the moon is involved, maybe it’s from whoever surveyed the moon.”
    Peo said, “We don’t know anybody surveyed the moon.”
    Gale whistled. “Man, that would be something else, though. Wouldn’t it?”
    Conn had a bee in her bonnet now. This could be it, the follow-up contact she had been waiting for since the moon shower. “Peo, can you play it again?”
    Peo did. Something seemed different about it. After three rewinds and replays, Conn couldn’t put her finger on it. “Gale, let us work on this some more, and we’ll get back to you if we come up with something,” Peo said. Gale agreed and signed off.

# # #
    Conn took a copy of the animation home that evening, first promising Peo that she would remember her NDA. She deliberately did not watch it as soon as she got back to her apartment. She made dinner. She watched a show. She was trying to sneak up on the problem. Finally, she played it again.
    It jumped right out at her. The bird’s-eye orbit of the “Earth” around the “sun,” the partial one. It was shorter than the first time she had seen it. But it looked the same in each iteration Conn put it through that night.
    She synced her Wear with the monitor she was watching the animation on, and called up an app she used for math homework involving geometry. First, she verified that the third orbit was following a circle exactly. She then measured the orbit: 57.404 millimeters. She realized if she was measuring on a different device next time, the circle would be a different size, and she wouldn’t get a useful result to compare. So she measured the orbit as a percentage of the circumference of the circle: 53.662. A little more than halfway. That tracked with her memory of how it looked the first time, watching with Peo, but she was certain this orbit was shorter now.
    It was Monday night. She decided to force herself to set it aside, and to pick it back up again on Wednesday.
    That day, she played the animation again. It didn’t look discernibly shorter. But then she synced with her Wear and measured the orbit again: 53.114.
    So she wasn’t losing her mind. The engineer in her cautioned that she should measure it again in a couple days before she went around thinking she’d proved the orbit was shrinking.
    Two days later, with another measurement under her belt, she told Peo about the shrinking orbit.
    “I measured it again this morning—52.567 percent. It’s definitely getting shorter.”
    “How strange,” Peo said. “Maybe it’s a countdown. To a particular day of the year.”
    “I thought of that,” Conn said. “But there are so many better ways to communicate that. Like, I don’t know, numbers that get smaller.”
    “Arabic numbers? Hindi numbers? Chinese numbers? All of the above?” Peo said. “This may be a way to communicate a countdown in any language. There’s one way to find out—or at least be fairly certain. Does each measurement times three hundred sixty-five equal a whole number?”
    When Conn was done beating herself up for not thinking of that, she multiplied three hundred sixty-five by each of her percentages of the orbits. She got 195.866, 193.866, and 191.870.
    “Not whole numbers,” Conn said. “But look at the numbers to the right of the decimal points. They’re all three almost the same distance from the next integer up.”
    “Try three sixty-five and a quarter.” Which was actually how many days there were in a year, accounting for the leap year every four years.
    Conn got 196.000, 193.999, 192.001.
    “That’s it! The orbit