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represents a year, and it’s shrinking by a day every day. How is it reading the current day? From the device running it?”
    “What’s a hundred ninety-two days from now?”
    Conn called up a calendar and figured. “September second.”
    “Great,” Peo said, warming to the challenge. “What happens on September second?” Conn Googled, both the full date and just “September 2.” She spent twenty minutes sifting through the results, but there was nothing of significance. Googling “FALCON” in conjunction with the date put her even farther into the weeds. She promised Peo she would look into it more over the weekend.

# # #
    The weekend came and went, Conn brooding over the animation, Grant asking her what was wrong, Conn not telling him, and feeling a little smug at knowing something he didn’t know. School and work conspired to keep Conn’s mind off the animation the first couple of days of the week. Her classes, including Heat and Mass Transfer with Professor Peo Haskell, were rushing through material to make up for class time lost to the weather. When Peo asked her while they ate lunch (alone) in her office if she had made any headway, she confessed she hadn’t, but brainstormed:
    “If the Chinese got this, and took it seriously, whatever is happening must have meaning to them,” she said. “It might be that we won’t be able to figure it out, a couple Westerners like us.”
    “If Gale says the US and India got this, too, then they did,” Peo said. “Unless each animation is different, and Gale didn’t know that.”
    “If each country, or language or whatever, was to get custom animations, then the countdown could have easily been expressed as numbers, getting smaller,” Conn said, because that was still bothering her. “Or just ‘September second.’ Why didn’t they just do that? Nobody at the US government can read Chinese? Or also, you could just take a picture of it, and Google would tell you what it said. Same in China if it’s English with Arabic numerals.”
    “So is it a puzzle? I mean, intentionally?” Peo asked.
    “Could be. But whatever is supposed to happen September second, I think it’s represented by the rest—the zoom-in on the ‘moon.’ If we can figure out what in the world ‘FALCON’ means, we probably solve the puzzle.”
    “Something is going to happen to the moon September second?” Peo asked. “Another moon shower, maybe?”
    “See, but here’s the thing,” Conn said, swiping away at her Wear. “The phase of the moon on September second is going to be a tiny crescent. It’s right before a new moon.”
    “Not waning gibbous, like in the animation,” Peo said.
    “Maybe zooming in and showing it football-shaped is just supposed to say, ‘this represents the moon. And: FALCON!’” Conn giggled.
    “Could be, I guess,” Peo said. “If I were trying to say ‘this is the moon—’”
    “FALCON!”
    “‘FALCON,’ I would show it as a crescent. Isn’t that a more universal representation of the moon?”
    “And that would match the phase of the moon September second.”
    “Could it be a different September second? Not the one coming up this year?” Peo motioned to Conn’s Wear. “Look up the phases of the moon on the next few September seconds. See if any of them are waning gibbous.”
    “Next year’s is...first quarter. Exactly half is illuminated.”
    “Thank you for playing, 2033.”
    “September second, 2034...Ooh. Waning gibbous!”
    Peo cried out, so urgently that Conn thought she was having a heart attack. “Conn!” she said. “There are two full orbits in the animation before the partial one.”
    “It’s supposed to be two years and one hundred blahbedy blah days!”
    “That’s it!” Peo cried, and gave Conn a high-five.

SIX
The Invitation
    February, 2032
     
    The sense of triumph was short lived. They had a date, but they didn’t know what was going to happen on it.
    If the message was that on September 2, 2034, something