We discovered we weren't alone and it wasn't a good news. Cynicism, doubt and disbelief. Eventually the weight of evidence was too overwhelming to ignore. The strange signals were received three months after it was generally agreed that there were creatures out there that were more intelligent than us and coming our way.
The nature of the signals was suspiciously similar to ours. That raised a few eyebrows. The encoding format for data was digital in nature, and the transmitters appeared to be using binary encoding. The data was neatly divided into 'packets', separated by long but predictable stretch of continuous 1's followed by a run of 0's of the same length.
The messages had a transmission cycle of roughly 27 days.
The first two days were repetitions of some basic mathematical patterns. Count up to a thousand, multiples of two three seven and thirteen. The first thousand numbers of the fibonacci series. A few other basic 'lists' that would be obvious to a high-school student. There were a few advanced series that would be of interest only to research mathematicians but nothing extraordinary. There were a few series that got cadres of grad students across the globe deciphering the meaning.
The following 'frames' as they came to be called, were more interesting.
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