“You as well,” she said. She glanced at Kaveh in his sand-colored, “yes, I got this personally tailored” suit. He’d bought her pencil skirt and blouse from Banana Republic, but she felt so out of place in them she might as well have been wearing a clown costume. “Thank you for . . . everything.”

“Of course,” said Cohen. “I find the argument absurd that if a hostile ETI wanted to play games with a system like the stock market, a law might stop them, but it sets a dangerous precedent not just for our relationship to any potential alien civilizations but to each other as well. To say nothing of our position as world leaders—the rest of the world is looking to see what we do before making their own decisions.”

Kaveh shot her a look, and she caught it. He wasn’t thrilled, but the truth of the matter was that Cohen was right; most world powers, even China, had held off on passing their own laws. That didn’t mean that the rest of the world intended to follow suit with whatever the United States did, but they were certainly waiting to see what the United States did. Some smaller countries like Costa Rica, Luxembourg, and Cuba (who was proud to claim the title of the first to do so) had already passed laws extending personhood to amygdaline ETIs, but mostly as a symbolic gesture. Japan was the only G7 country to have passed a law extending human rights to amygdalines (and only amygdalines—other alien species TBD).

“What are your other expert witnesses going to say?” asked Cora.

“Our main point of attack is to focus on the Third Option as being completely toothless for its stated goals. Your job, of course, will be to enforce the philosophical answer—that ignoring any questions of what the law might accomplish, we know the answer to the personhood question—they are people, by any meaningful definition of the word, and to assert otherwise is rooted in discrimination.”

“Human supremacy, if you will,” said Sol.

Cohen, ever the savvy politician, gave Sol a look of sort of mutual understanding. “I’ll see you inside,” he said, and left.

“We get to live in the timeline where the phrase human supremacy is a thing,” said Cora, watching the man go, flanked by his staffers.

“Yeah,” said Kaveh. “Somehow I bet the type of person who uses that phrase isn’t going to be referring to all humans.”

* * *

“Chairman Leahy, Ranking Member Specter, members of the committee, my name is Brigadier General Wesley Porter. I am the head of the Space Intelligence National Security Task Force, whose mission is to gather intelligence about extraterrestrial activity outside of the purview of those presently in custody of the Department of Health and Human Services.”