Anomaly by Peter Cawdron

Anderson and Dr Bates came over and sat down as well. It was just after one in the morning and the thought of a nice cup of hot chocolate before heading off to bed was just too alluring.
    “It's been a long day,” said Cathy, with the emphasis on drawing out the word long. “Have we learned anything else about our new, intergalactic friend?”
    Teller thought about it for a second.
    “Kind of,” he replied.
    Out of the corner of his eye, Teller could see Finch making sure he caught the conversation. Teller wondered who would be watching the telecast this late into the evening. He figured, for the most part, the live feed must have been boring, like watching grass grow. It's daylight somewhere, he thought, so someone would be watching all this live.
    Cathy just listened, letting Teller talk, as did Bates and Anderson.
    Mason was nowhere to be seen. He must have turned in for the night, thought Teller.
    “It's quite clever, really,” Teller began, describing something he'd been thinking since the UN meeting. “The whole idea of how ET has chosen to interact with us is ingenious.”
    He sipped his hot chocolate.
    “I mean, we have no way of detecting the anomaly directly. All we can see is how it manifests itself. We have no idea what it is actually made from. I read one comment on the Internet that suggested it's made of non-baryonic matter.”
    Cathy turned her head to one side, not following him.
    “Dark matter,” he said, clarifying his comment. “But we really don't know if there is any dark matter. That's just the best theory we have at the moment to explain vast discrepancies in our gravitational model.”
    Teller was aware his comments were being broadcast so he tried to stay as objective as possible.
    “The anomaly might be made of dark matter. But it could just as easily be some kind of technology that can exist at a subatomic level, below what we can register, or in some other dimension. Certainly, that glowing ball of lithium is an example of manipulating matter at a subatomic level. It should burn out within seconds, but it is constantly being replenished.”
    “How?” asked Cathy.
    “Oh, I have no idea,” replied Teller. He looked over at Bates who shrugged his shoulders.
    Bates added his thoughts, saying, “Remember E=mc 2 ? The amount of energy required to continually create matter in this fashion is phenomenal, and yet we see no evidence of the energy itself, no radiation at all, but there it is.”
    “They're showing off,” said Anderson lightheartedly.
    Teller smiled, saying, “Oh, they're certainly doing that. The whole flip-the-world-upside-down does that quite effectively. But I've been thinking. We can't see the anomaly directly. We can only see what it does, like moving the intersection or the flags and the vaporous ball of lithium, but we can't actually see the anomaly itself. And I think that tells us something important about it.”
    “What?” asked Bates, intrigued by the point.
    Teller sipped his hot chocolate before continuing.
    “Well, Mason was right in his address to the UN. This is all about trust. Whoever made this probe could have set it up to actively investigate any foreign intelligence it came across, and it could have done that without us ever knowing anything about it, but they didn't. They wanted this to be a discussion, a two-way conversation. They wanted this to be respectful, not forceful. And I think that's quite profound.
    “Look at the patience involved. I released that helium balloon almost thirty-two hours ago, and the anomaly responded with lithium in a fraction of a second. Now it's just sitting there waiting, knowing full well the flurry of interest it has just generated among us ignorant savages.”
    Anderson added his thoughts. “I remember reading about how Jane Goodall first enticed wild chimpanzees into the open. She sat on the edge of the forest every day for a year, patiently waiting, watching as her presence challenged their social order. And