The Crash

The crash site was enormous. Nearly a mile in diameter of what was a lush, dense forest was now a burning circle of death. In its center was a small, unremarkable grey disk, about fifty meters wide and only a few meters high, fractured along its center beyond repair. Inside, a single being lay dead.

It looked nearly human at a glance. It took a closer look to notice its unusual off-colored grey skin, its oddly folded ears, and what looked like a tail coming from behind with what seemed almost like another, smaller hand at its end. Small spiked protrusions came out of the lower part of its left arm, something that was not mirrored on its right.

On the ground near its body was an electronic device that looked very similar to a portable tablet device, such as an iPad or Kindle Fire here on Earth. It was jet black with a matte black screen, with the only protrusion being a single button at its top left.

Curiosity being an innate trait of human beings, the government agents pressed the button, and the screen lit up with a variety of glyphs and icons unknown to human beings. However, the screen looked very much like an iPad login screen, and the researcher was quickly able to gain access by simply pressing the first four glyphs presented, the alien equivalent of having a PIN of "1234".

This brought up a screen with a variety of icons of unknown purpose. What got the attention of the researchers was a bright pink icon in the center with small alien language glyphs below that looked like a complicated mess of lines, reminiscent of Chinese letters but were not in any way identical. However, this gave linguists an idea: since Chinese characters were made up of symbols that represented a thing or idea, and the more complex characters were combinations of these symbols, perhaps they could decipher the language.

They decided that the unknown icons should not be touched and instead went for a couple of icons that looked very close to a piece of paper with words on it, hoping those would be some sort of text -- and indeed, they were rewarded with two very long documents they scanned in and began work to decipher. A small bar along the left side that was slowly decreasing in size was apparently the battery indicator, so they knew they had to work fast.

As the biologists worked on the remains of the alien being and other scientists looked at the ship itself, marveling at its amazingly advanced technology that would allow humanity to roam the stars, the linguists were able to decode with a fair amount of confidence the meaning of most of the symbols. The two text icons were apparently fiction novels, one about a female alien committing a horrendous murder that was so perfect even the top minds of their species couldn't figure it out, and the other a trashy novel that the linguists could only describe as "intensely pornographic". The remainder of the icons were simple: one was "Slick-Creature" and brought up a game very similar to Snake; another was "Collective-Information", and launched what could only be a web browser; one was "Pleasure-Ears", bringing up a music player that played the most dissonant, jarring music anyone on Earth had ever heard, and given that there were hundreds of similar tracks, they could only conclude that all their music sounded this way; "Talk-Transfer", a chat program with the only remnants of any chat was one with "Tail-Nothing-Large-Swimmer-Smaller", which was assumed to be some sort of name where the actual meaning of the glyphs meant nothing and only the name had meaning, speaking about a "mission" and an "extreme danger", ending with "speak-love-towards-paired-female" -- "tell my wife I love her?"

But the bright pink icon in the center gave them pause. Its glyphs meant "Mission-Plan-Very-Large-Fire". Had the alien meant to destroy something other than the forest it was found in? Was it going to destroy a major city? And had it meant to kill itself, given the message at the end of the chat?

They tapped the icon, expecting it to open some sort of interface they could investigate further. Instead, a glyph appeared, filling the screen:

Death.

The energy from that small tablet, the size of an average iPad, was enough to obliterate the entire solar system. The alien's mission had initially failed but was carried out by the curiosity of supposedly intelligent beings.