Note: I was going to give this another edit or two, and then I tried something out with the new Claude (a chatbot, notably superior to the other one I’ve had any interactions with; more to come on that front), and decided that the dialogue we had about the story as it stood was worth publishing in its own right. So in order to preserve the continuity between story and dialogue, I’m releasing this as it stands. I’ll put up the dialogue in a moment, in a separate post.
They came in peace.
This was no empty rhetoric. They really did take care to match actions to words. For instance: they might claim to come in peace, but in the event provoke conflict. If they knew of this possibility in advance and did nothing to mitigate it, could they really be said to come in peace?
Of course not. And it wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of cautionary tales.
So, for example, there was the case of Wah Soom, where their arrival had prompted both sides of a long-running, thitherto recondite philosophical controversy to very suddenly garner rival planetwide followings, instantly locked in an all-consuming war of annihilation. Their attempts at peacekeeping had succeeded on that occasion, but at the cost of uniting all the Soom – Wahk, Wahnken and Sumi – in furious determination to drive them off the planet.
On the desert world of Sfith, they had harvested the system’s Oort Cloud for ice, in order to come bearing the inestimable gift of water. Who could have guessed that Flood myths were so universal as to extend even to so parched a locale? The mass suicides that followed, driven, it was theorised, as much by existential shock as theoklytic remorse, were a salutary lesson.
No one liked to talk about Xanj, but lessons had been learned there too, oh yes.
The overall theme was that people, whatever their number of legs, eyes, etc., tended to be sensitive when aliens arrived unannounced. It was understandable; and understandable, too, given the motley variety of sentient life across the galaxy, that the form this sensitivity might take in any given case was so very unpredictable.
The thing to do, it was now generally felt, was to go easy. Take it slow. Let people get used to the idea before announcing their presence overtly; and even then, the gradual unveiling of the truth was to be preferred, whenever possible, over the sudden.
***
Daffar Quiu Seh wasn’t happy about Terra at all. De’d done everything by the book, and to be sure, motley variety and so on, but this lot were unpredictable in their very unpredictability. You never even knew where you weren’t, with them.
Example: the standard cultural insertions, begun a century ago now, had provoked an out-of-distribution xenophobic backlash of the sort de’d rarely witnessed. Aliens as metaphors for every sort of Terran kink, funk and hang-up. Aliens that put things in the sex parts, aliens that burst out of the chest. Bizarre fantasias of black floating acreage obliterating entire cities, for entirely inscrutable reasons. They’d almost withdrawn, but after a few decades Daffar Quiu had judged it safe to proceed, very softly. No interactions with politicians or controversialists of any stripe, no appearances on the increasingly polarised news networks – de had learned the lesson of Wah Soom, thank you very much! – just a few displays of unambiguously extraterrestrial prowess, shown to those with the training to recognise it and, it was judged, the level of trust to be believed. And they were believed, by a suitable proportion of listeners.
To Daffar Quiu’s enormous relief (de hadn’t revealed to der subordinates quite how nervous that intervention had made em) no mass freakout ensued. In fact, the reaction felt if anything rather flat. There was a flurry of interest, in certain circles, and then – it wasn’t that anyone very strenuously denied the possibility that alien beings of extraordinary power and reach were gently poking Terra, perhaps with more to come – it was more that people just… moved on.
Daffar Quiu’s relief had soon curdled to disappointment and a sort of aggrieved bafflement.
There was, as der second-in-command never tired of ‘helpfully’ pointing out, the case of Flah’Flah’Flah to cite as some sort of precedent. But then again, how really could the experience of probability membranes floating on the surface of a freak quantum bubble in one of the decidedly weirder regions of the Galactic Core relate to that of the Terrans? Daffar Quiu did not believe that it could. The ontological gulf, in the case of Flah’Flah’Flah, was so great that even the contact lead on that occasion had emself hesitated to assert, positively, that the Flah’Flah’Flah membranes were in fact ignoring em. Whereas in the case of the Terrans, there should be no such difficulty. Oh, there were differences – sexual dimorphism threw up some pretty wild aberrations, for instance – but in the grand distribution of things, the two species were nestled together in a very narrow arc of the bell curve. The Terrans even had the right number of arms and legs. Daffar Quiu was aware, of course, that galactically speaking there was no ‘right’ number of arms, legs, tentacles or sligadoons, but de would defy any contact lead, any person at all actually, to really tell em that deep down in der heart of hearts it didn’t make a difference.
Of course it did.
Not that this meant the Terrans would necessarily welcome Daffar Quiu’s team with open arms – but the very fact that both species had that metaphor in common indicated surely that some sort of mutual recognition was at least on the cards. That was another one, right there: the Flah’Flah’Flah membranes didn’t play cards, Daffar Quiu was willing to bet.
It was in the decade after that first tentative contact, and its bemusing reception, that events planetside had begun to conspire in what usually would be considered a contact lead’s favour. To whit: the ongoing, escalating outbreak of alarming weirdness. It was of course a shame that millions of Terrans were dying rather horribly, but under normal circumstances the weirdness of it all, the fact that the events in question were ‘outlandish,’ ‘unprecedented,’ ‘better suited to the realm of science fiction’ would be considered a convenient preparation, at a planetwide level, for further contact. The usual pattern, observed in at least a trizen instances that Daffar Quiu could recall off the top of der head, was: alarming weirdness breaks out; no one believes it’s happening; revelation that it is, in fact, happening; violent reaction, eventually settling into a new equilibrium, with weirdness tolerance adjusted accordingly; odds of successful contact skyrocket. Some contact leads, it was rumoured, had even been known to insert a little A.W. on the sly in order to provoke just such a sequence. Not that Daffar Quiu would ever.
In any case: nothing of the sort ensued on Terra.
Yes, disbelief. Yes, truth revealed. And then, in case after case – nothing. If anything, an active effort of… denial was both too strong and too weak a word. Daffar Quiu could cite examples of Terrans actually promoted, and to the very highest levels, in the very fields in which they had unleashed megadeath levels of alarming weirdness and been exposed for having done so.
Many such cases.
It was all deeply weird, and rather alarming, and if it ever came up Daffar Quiu would certainly use the unprecedented nature of the situation to justify what de did next. Not, de was beginning glumly to accept, that it was likely to. Ever come up, that is.
De’d landed on the White House Lawn. It was a cliché, no doubt, and not just in Terran cinema. Something very similar was shown in the basic-level instructional contact videos, and always as an example of laughable naivety. The videos didn’t even bother showing any specially dire consequences attending such a course of action: it was not even wrong, the videos seemed to be saying. But after der decades of orbiting Terra, Daffar Quiu was beginning to wonder whether in fact the instructional videomakers were themselves guilty of a higher-order naivety, whether they were in fact being naïve about what might under certain circumstances be actually naïve at all, versus what might be the only way of hammering the truth, or anything for that matter, into certain exceptionally thick skulls.
So de did it: touched down in der personal Sother on the fabled sward, having first nullified, from orbit, all the security measures that might have prevented this; marched unopposed to the Oval Office; and announced emself. At first, the results were promising. The President was stunned, then very excited. She swiftly called a press conference. The world’s media caught fire, and briefly Daffar Quiu began to worry that de might have misjudged the situation; that de might have another Wah Soom, or heavens forfend another Xanj, on der hands.
But it was not precisely with relief that de greeted the slow, the almost more insulting, more aggravating in its slowness than outright rejection would have been, deflation that followed.
It wasn’t any one thing. There was no precise moment when the Terrans turned their back on em. Just… a new weight loss drug was released and turned out to have some fascinating side effects; that took up some space. A sex performer who had previously been genitally pledged to another sex performer but had then repledged, to a third party, turned out to have been doing sexual intercourse with the second party all along. A “prominent left-wing pundit” came out with a “hot take” about Daffar Quiu’s choice of landing spot, prompting the obvious backlash – at least they were still nominally talking about em – but then in a bizarre but somehow sickeningly predictable turn of events, that strand of the discourse pivoted to being about the weight loss drug, to having actually been about the weight loss drug all along.
Daffar Quiu didn’t actually have any floating black acreages to hand – that was not the way of contact teams, never had been – but de could quite easily create the illusion of such. De toyed with the idea of restaging the scenes from the famous movie of a few decades back, every major city enshadowed by inscrutable vastness, the world thrown into raptures of panic; but somehow, de feared, this admittedly undesirable outcome would fail to materialise in reality. Oh, there would be panic, perhaps, locally and at first. But then…
De could just picture it. The Terrans would not explain away the phenomenon; nor would they dismiss it, precisely. There would be plenty of breathless coverage. At first.
There were still people writing and talking about the White House Lawn thing, for that matter (often referred to using that exact phrase – ‘White House Lawn thing’ – accompanied by the hint of an eye-roll). It was generally accepted in a tepid sort of way that Daffar Quiu was an alien, and had landed there. It was just that hardly anyone, in the planetary scheme of things, was paying attention anymore.
What would it take, then, to really wake them up for good? To make contact, and make it stick?
Daffar Quiu could think of a few options. The galaxy was not a safe place to be out and about in, and every contact team was equipped to defend itself. Of course, der name would be mud in contact circles. But would that really be so much worse than the humiliation of reporting what had in fact transpired, here and now, after Terra had trudged a hundred times around its star with Daffar Quiu and team in tow? This less-than-dismissal, this outrageous not-even-snub, this easy assimilation into a news cycle that included, nay preferred, the fluctuating waistlines and genital inclinations of the sex performers?
So many options. The Terrans might not have much time to notice the deployment of some of the more drastic ones, but notice they would. Notice and take note.
***
They came in peace. They came in peace.
Daffar Quiu Seh kept reminding emself of that.