mmomeh

[mmomeh]

Of all the questions to ask first...

I. Murder and Mayhem

When it finally happened things did not promptly go to hell, which was amazing in retrospect. The UFOs were common knowledge after the spooky elongated extrasolar asteroid and that weirdness with the Navy in the East Pacific, and we should have known they would send actual people - or is it beings? - sooner rather than later. It turned out to be later anyway, because it never occurred to the Cetians that the species spewing all of those radio signals were hominids instead of cetaceans. Sure, Terra's an almost-spherical rock covered by a giant puddle of saltwater 11 kilometers to the bottom at its deepest point, but confirmation bias is a real bitch, amirite?

The Cetians got hold of the Eridanim, who sent undercover researchers in series: the first one used a stolen identity and Nork play money to hire a hacker who created a few fictitious people in Pennsylvania's state records. After that, one thing followed another until the research team included someone attached to the permanent White House staff - a worker in the Mess, as it turned out. You overhear the most interesting tidbits being shared over snacks.

All was progressing comfortably, until a bad guy found his way in with rapidly deflagrating clothing innocuous-looking and custom-engineered to get past the sensors, setting it aflame to assassinate the President's Chief of Staff during lunch. The assassin murdered half the dining room's other occupants in addition, but not the intrepid researcher. He was merely singed and showing bits of tough, grey-green dermal tissue through his human suit, while all those standing around him at the moment of horror were thence looking like spitted hogs, and to the last quite dead... along with the assassin, of course.

[Note: "He" is used here for convenience, since it was learned that the researcher's role in sexual reproduction was penetrative. It turns out that Eridanim gender dimorphism expresses similarly enough to Homo sapiens, that the Earthside researchers expected to circulate among the general public were all of the same apparent gender as the singed researcher. Patriarchy is still a thing, and why make things hard when you can make them easy? Their boss was a "she", though. No matter the planet, androgens make you a special kind of stupid, who knew?]

It was a good thing for all concerned that "false identity made by grave injury" was one of the contingencies that the Eridanim gamed, rehearsed, and prepared for. It was especially fortuitous that the Deputy Chief of Staff had been using the toilet when s*** got real, and happened to be a huge First Encounter nerd ever since watching E.T. in grade school. He related to Elliott and Gertie somethin' hard.

We can skip over the boring discussions of Secret Service procedure and operational security, which were in any case completely unsuited to handling the situation at hand. Most importantly there were other onworld Eridanim who nursed the injured researcher back to full health, and promptly thereafter he was introduced as a no-kidding E.T. in the White House Press Room with cameras rolling. They put in a tiny speedbump by limiting the live broadcast to C-SPAN, but every little bit helps.

It turns out that Eridanim stem cells are some serious superhero stuff, so the Earthside Eridanim medics injected the former White House employee with their anti-rejection drugs, and a bunch of stem cells, and warmly invited the Secret Service to chop off one of his arms during the broadcast. Please use a sharp blade, be quick about it, and load him full of epinephrine after messing him up, the medics requested, and whaddaya know? One of the Secret service ran home to get his favorite katana and quickly returned to commit mayhem-by-request, grinning until he drew his sword. Ain't this some shizzle? his face told the cameras. Fantastically teal blood spurted out and left a gooey mess on the carpet, drawing a gasp from all assembled.

It wasn't mayhem for long. A new arm, and hand, and fingers grew out from the shoulder of the bereaved Eridanim before the Press Secretary was halfway through taking questions from the assembled representatives of the media.

That satisfied all but the absolute worst megachurch pod people and fire-and-brimstone mobs, who were informed at the end of the press conference that Stateside any terrorism would be considered f***ing around, and those responsible would soon find out.

And so it went, in a few cases.

The xenophobes content themselves with a new political party now - it functions on the whole "Earth for Earthlings" bit that our own science fiction has already done to death by way of putting Plain Old Racism up on the pillory. Better that than crypto-Nazis, I guess.

The most amusing part of the wingnut proceedings came when some over-the-top bleeding hearts complained that the U.S. government's kid-glove treatment of the Eridanim showed up its selective enforcement of immigration law. Maher, Oliver, and Colbert each tore that argument to pieces in a hail of logic and ableism-tinged insults.

Most everybody else is just glad that the waiting is over. They're out there, the thinking goes, and they don't want to subject us to genocide. Hooray?

II. Waiting Games

With five television networks and a horde of online influencers they were comfortable talking to, the Eridanim... clammed up.

As it turned out they were scientists-not-diplomats-or-PAOs, so they asked for a year. That's how long, they explained, it'll take qualified people to make their way to Earth. We'll be zoo animals for you if you insist, but we'd much prefer to let the newcomers take the deluge of questions. Trust us when we say that you'd prefer it, too.

They fanned out. Being each in good shape and of adequate size and mass, they took up sports in public. Quite a few of them became baseball and cricket players. One of them in particular, an intelligence analyst named Mlan Norvoss, hit a century for Australia in a Test match. The scene at the MCG was next to pandemonium. The residents of the Po River Valley watched with interest.

Generally the Eridanim made a good impression. Norvoss doesn't care much for the British, though.

To tide us over, the Eridanim gave us the translation matrices for cetacean calls that had been compiled by the Cetians before they tumbled to the true identity of the Big Bad. Biologists and anthropologists were thrilled. Dolphins don't care much for the humans, though.

Exactly one year after that first press conference, a mostly-hollow carbon fiber sphere 400 meters in diameter sauntered through the inner region of Terra's gravity well and onto terrestrial orbit. A funny-looking lifting body popped out and meandered its way gently down to the surface, landing in Central Park East. Calls had been made, so there were armored limos on hand to take the new arrivals to the UN, and cameras to gaze upon the whole spectacle like it was something out of a B-movie from the Eighties.

[Note: It's true that the Eridanim diplomats could've made it to Terra more quickly, but it was an open secret that they wanted a brief spell to prepare. That was a hard case to dispute.]

The first stop - by prior agreement - was the General Assembly, where the Eridanim minister threatened nothing, promised nothing, requested nothing, and tried very hard to insist that all of Terra's neighbors were mostly harmless.

"Steve" - as he was dubbed by a few commentators because he was first out of the alien shuttlecraft, like Steve Austin - was telling the unvarnished truth, but it would take humanity a while to learn why and how. We're still getting all of the details, and I'm one of the people collecting them.

My ID card declares me Samuel Clemens Douglas. Most people call me Sam within five minutes of meeting me.

III. So Many Questions

Steve and the other New Guys were guests on our planet, so we got to ask the questions. Some were asked by journalists, some by officials and scientists within and without the national security establishments of various nations, yet others by the Internet commentariat. The Reddit AMA was a revelation. Here are some snippets of the Q&A from that excursion:

"You guys are pretty clever, so why didn't you just take us over?"

That would be vastly more trouble than it's worth, at least for us. Also, as you know, imperialist ventures rarely satisfy anyone apart from a lucky - wealthy! - few.

"Your people clearly have FTL translation, but it still took you a year to get here. What's up with that?"

Most spacefaring civilzations in the Galactic neighborhood use what you call an Alcubierre drive. It's not the sort of thing you can power-up near to any celestial mass without causing a mess, and it took centuries to build one that wouldn't destroy the vessel mounting it, or rip the fabric of spacetime. We actually spend more time on sublight ion drive getting to a safe distance, than we do travelling in FTL.

"How do we know that there's no invasion fleet following you by a few days or weeks or whatever?"

Like I wrote before, imperialism's a waste of time and resources as far as we're concerned. That's especially true at interstellar scale.

"Then why are you guys so chill?"

The short answer is that we learned the hard way to get along. The last time we failed at that, it cost us 90% of our population and four generations of social progress.

"Are there any species or civilizations around that we ought to worry about?"

I would think not, but we're still learning about your people, who have already learned that travelling and living in space is hard. Fighting wars in space is even harder.

"What do you like, or dislike, about Earth and humans?"

We like the flora and fauna, especially in the rainforests, and if our technology's up to the task we'd like to help you preserve them. The continents of our homeworld are desert littered with oases and a tiny fraction of seasonal lakes that we enjoy, but the diversity we see on Earth is literally awesome.

We also like the arts of all kinds that we find here. We're looking forward to taking copies of those works home. I think humans know the full extent of their imagination, and from what I know so far of your planet's history, that's one of the more significant things that have kept you from blowing yourselves to bits.

That takes us directly to what I don't like, which is this: you people argue about everything, every day. It's not the arguing that bothers me so much... it's repetitive and tiresome, but sometimes you see people trying to understand and that's nice. Rather, I get annoyed when I think of what you could accomplish if you'd shut up and agree on things from time to time. That prospect is amazing and terrifying.

Some of my dismay also comes from your civilization's idea of macroeconomics. That's something that leaves me with nothing nice to say, and naturally it's one of your favorite topics of argument.

On and on it went - not just in the AMA, but everywhere. The Eridanim set up a YouTube channel and a UN-administered web site to record all the questions and answers, so that they could cut down on the time they spent repeating themselves.

Eventually they lost interest in answering questions, and that's when things got interesting for me and some other folks.

Chapters IV-VI to follow when I'm up to it. I hope your interest is piqued. BMH