As he said this Hansen realized he did have an accent, but it was subtle and impossible to place.

“But evolution has honed your mind to be a remarkable tool to understand posture, body language, and other subtle cues to your fellow human,” continued Fermi. “So the longer one spends with me the more wrong I seem. This can’t be helped. I can pass a cursory examination, and if I don’t move much and keep silent, I can go out in public, be a passenger in a car, or even an airplane. But extensive interaction, other than over an audio-only phone, doesn’t really work.”

The man claiming to be an alien was wearing a light blue button-down shirt. He unbuttoned it to just above his chest, exposing a mass of flesh about the size of a flattened-out baseball. It was repulsive.

“My genetic material isn’t exactly the same as yours, but its principles are analogous. My colleagues and I each were subjects of extensive reconstructive surgery and genetically engineered alterations during a period of over seven of your years. My species has had many thousands of years to perfect the engineering of our genetic material and can do tricks you have yet to even guess at. We were each genetically engineered to produce this growth that you see here.”

“What is it?” said Hansen, his voice betraying just the slightest hint of disgust.

“Think of it as a gill. There are trace elements of your atmosphere that are poisonous to us. And we like less nitrogen in our air. So the air we breathe is shunted through this bio-filter, ensuring we get the mixture we require.”

Hansen raised his eyebrows but said nothing. Just because the man said it didn’t necessarily make it true.

“We have vestigial appendages that are somewhat analogous to your hands,” said Fermi. “Which we’ve engineered back to functionality and converted into replicas of your hands. Even so,” he added, unbuttoning his shirt farther, “our own version of hands are indispensible to us, since they give us far better fine-motor control than the ones engineered to mimic yours.”

As he undid the fourth button down, twelve thin tendrils crept out in perfect coordination from two slits near where a belly button should have been. Hansen’s mouth fell open. While Fermi’s human hands had seemed clumsy while unbuttoning his shirt, the movements of the tendrils were fluid and elegant. He picked a pen up off the table with the tendrils, each moving independently, and spun it effortlessly in an intricate pattern that was mesmerizing.

“For us, a precision task like threading a needle could not be simpler. Your hands have greater strength, because your distant ancestors needed to swing from trees.” A small smile played over his face. “There are no trees on our planet.”

Hansen’s eyes narrowed as he considered the smile he had just seen. In addition, he remembered Fermi had nodded appropriately to something he had said. How could this be? While an alien could learn English, no alien could possibly learn involuntary facial expressions. If Hansen were impersonating an alien who laughed by emitting a high-pitched growl, he couldn’t train himself to do this if he genuinely was caught unprepared by something truly funny—he would revert to human laughter instead.

So was this just an elaborate hoax?

Despite the impossibility of mimicking spontaneous human expressions, Hansen was largely convinced it was not. There was still something off about Fermi’s mimicry he couldn’t put his finger on. And no special effect or artifice could possibly have created the tendrils he was seeing.

“You smile and you frown and you nod,” said Hansen. “If you really are an alien, how is that possible?”

“Great observation,” said Fermi, with another nod and another smile. “And great question. Through genetic engineering, our normal body language pathways have been subverted. Before I was modified, when I was amused or happy, my second and seventh tendril would wave to the left. But now, the involuntary impulses in my brain, triggered by amusement, are directed down a different pathway, causing my face to form a human smile instead. It’s all quite complicated, but it is a subroutine that is run automatically.” He sighed. “But as impressive as our capabilities are in this regard, my body language is not perfect, as you can tell. Close, but still a hair off. You can mold the bodies and brains of my species only so far into a human. To go any further, you actually have to be one. A perfect forgery is impossible.”

Hansen nodded thoughtfully and realized the very last of his skepticism had now vanished. “What do you call yourselves?” he asked.

“What we call ourselves is unpronounceable to you. We come from a planet, however, whose closest pronunciation in English would be Suran.”

“We’ve taken to calling them Wraps,” said Fuller. “And this is now what they call themselves as well. I’m not sure who first started this, but it kind of stuck. Or you might say, clung.”

Hansen couldn’t help but smile. He had had no idea what to expect after being abducted, but hearing a joke about Saran Wrap hadn’t been one of his guesses. He turned back to Fermi. “And there are four of you here? Four … Wraps?”

“Right,” replied Fermi.

The alien went on to explain how they had been transported here, basically instantaneously, and the civilization-wide effort this had taken.

“With respect to your theories, Mr. Hansen, your insight into the nature of quantum mechanics is raw and embryonic, but it’s on the right track. Your people don’t know enough about dark matter and dark energy to be able to see the proper solutions, but your theory is correct: you can get useful information from quantum entanglement, after all.”

Despite the situation he was in, Hansen couldn’t hide his elation upon hearing this from a scientifically advanced alien. He felt as though he were floating on a cloud. He had been maligned for his ideas for years. And here Fermi had matter-of-factly confirmed that the theory he so stubbornly defended against a never-ending onslaught of criticism was right—or at least on the right track. It was a vindication of his most deeply held beliefs.

Quantum physics held that particles could be in many places at the same time and could pop into and out of existence spontaneously. But one of the most counterintuitive aspects of the theory, now proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, was quantum entanglement. When a pair of particles were entangled, they would take on opposite aspects when the act of observation forced them into a determinative state.

As a gross oversimplification, all particles in the universe were like spinning coins, in an indeterminate state between heads and tails. But the moment one was observed, it would randomly collapse into either a head or a tail. Quantum entanglement said that these coins were emitted and spun in pairs. And if one ended up landing on heads, the other would always end up landing on tails. Always. And instantly. Even if the entangled coins were now on opposite sides of the universe, if one collapsed to a head, the other would instantaneously collapse to a tail, somehow communicating this instruction between them far faster than the speed of light.

This caused Einstein and others no end of headaches, and entire schools of brilliant physicists refused to accept that this was really what was happening. Einstein didn’t believe this was real, calling it “spooky action at a distance.”

Even so, even after quantum entanglement was conclusively demonstrated, the physics community insisted it still didn’t violate the speed-of-light barrier. Nothing could travel faster than light: not particles, energy, or information. But since information wasn’t being conveyed in this case, the speed-of-light barrier held. Yes, if a coin landed on heads at one end of the universe, its entangled partner would instantly land on tails at the other end. But since the heads or tails nature of the first coin was random, what good did this do anyone? No real information could be transmitted by this process.