"You may have mentioned it once or five thousand times," I said, "but I always make a point not to listen when you talk shop."

Pierre grunted before he unclenched his teeth long enough to force down another sip. (American beer. You have to start somewhere.)

"In fact, I'm only here because Laura thinks you're having an affair."

"That is preposterous!"

"I know, but I must look after my little sister, even when she's being neurotic."

He took another sip and nearly fainted. We had been sitting there for twenty minutes and he had almost lowered the foam line in his (small) glass of beer by a full centimeter. Dangerous. Denzel the bartender (not his real name; I don't think that anyone on campus knows his real name) walked up to our table, carrying my Friday night special: a quart of tequila, no worm. I hate the worm.

"Not tonight, buddy," I said, shaking my head, "I have to get this guy home before he drinks himself into a coma."

Denzel blinked, lower lip quivering. Mattie and Ambroise and that guy who always wears a bow-tie all stared at me with the horrified look of betrayal I remembered seeing on my nine-year old cousin the night Hulk Hogan turned heel. Somewhat disturbed, I returned my attention to Pierre.

"So, what is it that you were saying about interns and extras?"

"Introns and exons," he corrected. "The exons are the DNA fragments which encode protein structure; the real genes, so to speak." He belched. "Introns are just long repeating patterns with no discernible purpose. Junk DNA."

"And that's what's been keeping you out until 3 AM every night for the past month? Junk DNA?"

"My thesis advisor does not like me much." He gingerly lifted the glass to his mouth, thought better of it and put it back down. "Good heavens, this stuff is strong."

"And what's so terrible about junk DNA that you can't tell your wife about?"

He sighed. "You know that DNA is a form of language, right?"

I nodded. I may be a sixth-year senior (major undeclared), but even I know about ATGC and all that crap.

"Well, for many years, we have known that introns are built along linguistic patterns. For the longest time, it was nothing more than an odd bit of trivia, and only the most frivolous of people paid it any attention."

"Which brings us to your advisor."

"Right. About seven years ago, she conned a well-meaning but sadly decrepit alumnus into funding a project to match intron patterns against all known human and cetacean languages. Her theory was that, if she could find a grammar that parsed a statistically significant number of introns, she might be able to prove that language was a genetic necessity, or some such balderdash."

I was dubious. "Doesn't make much sense."

"She is a tenured professor. She does not need to."

"Did she find anything?"

"Nothing whatsoever. Correlation between introns and natural grammars never even reached what was expected from pure random chance. My predecessors slavered for years deriving probable grammars for languages dead since the Mesolithic; one of them even spent four months among the ancient Anasazi, to no avail."

"She got time travel funding for this nonsense?"

"Her benefactor was very rich."

Denzel caught my eye; he still had my booze on the bar. I hesitated, but mouthed "no".

"And then," Pierre continued, "the Xyr showed up."

(In case you've been cryogenically frozen and your brain hasn't thawed out yet, the 342^nd Xyr are a mostly friendly band of nomadic aliens made up of dozens (maybe hundreds) of sentient species, who showed up four years ago, settled in lunar orbit and have been happily hacking away at our most cherished beliefs and social conventions ever since.)

"My advisor's benefactor died of a stroke when he learned of the aliens' arrival, and by one of those suspicious coincidences which always seem to favor those who deserve it the least, he left her a sizable chunk of his fortune, including a few cubic miles of Manhattan real estate. She promptly sold the lot, bought the Xyr's extensive linguistic database and proceeded to inflict her pet project on a new generation of grad students, myself included.

"For the first year, it was the typical do-whatever-you-have-to-do-to-get-your-Ph.D.-and-then-run-away-screaming graduate student fare. I would test twenty extra-terrestrial grammars every day, each of might parse 0.2% of a test set of intron sequences at the best of times; results so pitiful that we came within a drosophila's eyelash of cancellation. But then we found something."

"You did?" I liked this story less and less with every passing second. Denzel, reading my mind, hurried with my tequila.

Pierre nodded and looked up to the bartender. "Please bring me some aspirin, won't you? Now, where was I… Oh yes! Early last month, I was running a routine parse against Vercliac, a language which apparently belonged to an extinct species which was part of the Xyr a few hundred million years ago. My second test set returned an astonishing 88% score, and my fourth, a 79.2%.

"Everyone was immediately taken off their projects to work on dialects related to Vercliac. We found a 91% match on Friday around 2:30 AM; after that, it was only a matter of parsing all of the introns and looking at the output."

I poured myself a shot of tequila as slowly as I could, to postpone the inevitable. The news had to be spectacularly bad to drive my brother-in-law into a bar. I waited. And waited some more. Finally, I couldn't stand it.

"Come on, spill it out! Is there an actual message in our DNA?"

He grabbed my bottle and drained it in one gulp.

"Better than that. Much better. There are thousands of messages, the exact meaning of which will require decades of analysis. However, there was a short one which we understood immediately. It is located in an intron we share with just about every pluri-cellular Earth-based life form."

He turned around, looking for Denzel. Then, almost offhandedly, he concluded:

"We found a copyright notice."

Better order a big bottle this time. With a knife and fork for the worm.