Gnus of the Strange

They told us that they had come in peace. They always say that, though, don’t they. If they say anything at all. Otherwise, they would just get rid of us and we would never be the wiser. That is an assumption we make, that everything is black and white. Everything is boolean. They are either here in peace, or they are here to destroy us. So, when they come for something else, we never know what to expect.
The first meeting between us and them took place soon after they made their presence known. I would say it was soon after they arrived, but I have no idea when they arrived. Come to think of it, I don’t even really know for sure when they made their presence known. I only know what I have been told, because I did not need to know more. At least, I didn’t think I did.
I learned, as most of the rest of the world did, of their arrival from a special bulletin while I was watching reality TV (that’s all there really is to watch anymore that you can’t just DVR without risk of finding out too much before you get a chance to watch it, so it is probable that’s when most people found out.) There was simply an indication from representatives of the UN that the event had occurred, along with the usual sign-off “We will let you know more as soon as we have it.” Then reality TV was right back where it belonged. Of course, I immediately did what everyone else did – to the web! All but the best ISPs promptly had their servers crash.
The news was skimpy, but the speculation was as rampant as could be given that the web actually had a lot less traffic than usual. The bloggers were going at it, and comments were coming from all over. Not surprisingly, the more paranoid types had their own web servers, and therefore the speculation tended to be paranoid – from the crazies, so to say. While I am not a crazy, I am a paranoid type, which is why I got to see all of this firsthand. For about 5 minutes. Then I went back to reality TV.
I was asleep when the next big news came out, so I did not hear about it until the next day. I got in to work on time, but all of my co-workers were already there, and it was much noisier than usual. Of course, they were in the way of the coffee, which I badly need every morning, so I had to overhear what they were talking about. For a change, it wasn’t the reality shows they were talking about, so I had no idea what was going on. That was embarrassing, since I am an astrophysicist and they were talking about “first contact”. Apparently the “event” from last night had further explanation that I had missed out on with that silly sleep thing. Silently I vowed to cut down on sleep, and continued listening.
“And we believe they just showed up ‘overnight’” was the first I caught of the conversation, “I guess that just goes to show how little of our own sky we can actually observe at any one time.”
“That was already well known – what it really goes to show is that we don’t look in the right area of our own sky.” There is always that one guy who clubs you over the head with an obvious statement…as if you had not already thought about it. In this case, that guy goes on to say something actually meaningful, so you have to go a little easy on him. For us, that guy was named Russell Borman, not “Russ” for short, and he did not let the world down this time, “Though we have so little information to base the ‘right area’ of the sky on, that is not surprising. Given the level of technology they have shown, it is probable they found it quite easy to avoid our skyward gaze.”
“What are you guys talking about?” I said because I thought I had the chance. Nobody noticed, so I must not really have had the chance, and the conversation continued on in the same vane for awhile. I gathered what information I could; apparently the UN had been contacted by an EBE (extra-terrestrial biological entity) overnight. This made no sense to me – it seemed like it was too much out of the science fiction realm – how do you “contact” a slow-moving administrative body like the UN and have word get out so quickly? The answer came to me almost immediately – they didn’t. The EBE had been there for quite some time, and the word was only getting out now. Kudos to UN security for being able to keep this under wraps!
Except apparently they had not. When I got to my desk (with my now, mostly gone, cup of coffee), I had an email indicating I should see my boss as soon as possible. Nothing more than that, although I was guessing my boss did not actually have any information, at least that could be shared. I saw my boss was in her office, and I went immediately there and knocked. I was frantically ushered in.
“Where have you been? I told you to come here immediately when you got in. Shut the door.”
“Sorry, as usual I went to go get coffee right away. Email is only my second priority at best when I get in, and it was difficult to get to the coffee after what happened.”
“Yes, well, about that. What do you know?”
“Little. I fell asleep early last night, and I jumped in on the conversation around the coffee half way in. By then everyone had moved past the information dissemination phase into the hypothesis phase, so I missed out on it. I left after I got my coffee. From what I pieced together during that coffee gathering phase, aliens are visiting.” I shrugged my shoulders. I knew what was more important, at least to me.
“Short version, yes. Aliens are here, and they have been for awhile. They don’t want to interfere in any way, so they communicated with us in what appeared to them to be the best way. They just want to learn more about us, which apparently is easier for them to do via direct communication at this point. They have learned all they can from remote viewing. That is all I know as well. I called you in here because you fit best for what they want. Someone who has some idea of what is going on in the world, but is not influenced greatly by it.” She smiled meekly, not knowing if I would take this as an insult.
“OK, what does that mean?” I didn’t intentionally make things difficult, but most of the people I interacted with would not believe that.
“It means you have a conference call in half an hour with a bunch of UN people and a variety of others that have been hastily chosen to give input into the situation. That is all I know. I don’t know who else, and from where else, anyone is involved.”
“OK – I assume that information is in my email somewhere as well, and I just have not gotten to it yet?”
“That is my guess. It won’t be from me, I just gave the people who asked your information and washed my hands of it. They basically pulled you out from under my supervision at this point, for an indeterminate amount of time. In short, they told me without so much as telling me directly that I have to get other people to do your work for an unknown period of time. So, I have my hands full, and since I have no more to tell you, feel free to leave.” Clearly not happy, so I left post haste.
I got back to my desk, found the email, and went back for more coffee. Conversation was still ongoing, so that took me another 5 minutes. By then it was 15 minutes to meeting time, so I wasted a little more time browsing the web about our little alien encounter, then conferenced in a little early just to make sure I did not miss anything this time.
As it turned out, that did me no good as the only other people who also dialed in early were in the same position as me, so it was just more speculation from a few with mostly silence from the others. It seemed I was a member of a somewhat elite group, or at least small in number, though, which gave me a modicum more of a proud feeling. Naturally, those leading the conference were 5 minutes late.
“Hello everyone, sorry to keep you waiting.” They weren’t, but what could we do? “My name is Karen Simons, and I am sure you have some idea of what is going on, but hopefully no idea of why you are on this conference. If you do, someone did not do their job.” Slight nervous laughter from a few voices I recognized from the early joiners. “Basically, protocol for this dictates that we get together a few people to discuss the situation and determine what to do. The protocol also dictates what type of people we need to get together. Obviously, that would be you all. What we need from you now is ideas on what to do, once we have briefed you on what we know. Realize that the information we are about to give you is not to leave this conference. You can not speak of it with anyone, even someone else from this conference. There is also a reason we did not give you any preparation time. The protocol as written wants ideas that are generated directly from spontaneous conversation and brainstorming. Further evaluation of the ideas will be done by a smaller panel of experts later.”
“That having been said, here is the information we have for you. We have been contacted by an extraterrestrial race. They have traveled from beyond anywhere we have ever seen. We can only guess at their technological advancement; they didn’t really contact us so much as a message appeared from them within our computer network. Yes, we did verify that no one broke through our firewalls and left it, as much as we could. A few follow-up messages helped make us feel more secure in our investigation that we were not being hacked. Finally, an actual representative just appeared much as the messages did, and that basically concluded the issue. As to why they had not just appeared in the first place, rather than make messages appear, they felt it would be less intrusive and less likely to create a panic that would not be of any use at all. But once we did not truly believe that the messages were authentic, they found they had little choice and that the risk of panic was now low enough so as to appear. They also left us one last message indicating where and when they would do so, to help lessen the panic. As to what they want, it is not entirely clear, but from what we can gather, they want to help us evolve. They believe we may be stuck making minor changes rather than major leaps forward, and they simply want to help us. They did not indicate what they would get out of this, but at this point we have to assume they will at some point. We have asked, and their answer has always been that we would not be able to understand the answer until we had made a number of major leaps. We have very little we can do to contest this. And that is the information that we have. We now need to figure out what our options are. Protocol indicates we will use a whiteboard that everyone can write to. The comments written on each individual whiteboard will be translated, consolidated, and placed on the group whiteboard on the bottom of your screen. The briefing is over; please begin commenting now.”
I was never going to be the first one to jump in on something like this. I tended to bide my time, wait to see what others had written, digest it, and then make my comments if I had any. I saw no reason to do any differently during this time period. But the first comment wasn’t a comment at all, but a question that so obviously should have been answered as part of the briefing, “Why is this so apparently urgent?”
Karen Simons jumped in immediately, “If we knew that we would have answered it during the briefing. We have just been given a timetable by the extraterrestrials that indicates we need to get our protocols moving quickly. Now please, lets get on with the process.”
If that raised suspicions for anyone, it was not evident on the group whiteboard. Of course, it is also likely that for the purposes of the protocol, anything that was non-productive to the final outcome was not shared with the group. Since I did not have any issues I wanted to express, or try to write anything to the whiteboard at all, I have no idea. As far as the actual productive discussion goes, it followed fairly expected and pedestrian lines of thought, at least initially. The military solution: “If the extraterrestrials were in orbit around the earth, cold we just get rid of them, so that we did not have to worry about what they would do.” The completely academic solution: “Can we meet with them and learn all that we can from them to help further our knowledge?” Diplomatic requests: “Can we meet with their leaders and/or representatives to help get a better idea of what they are really looking for?” The devil’s advocate: “What happens if we just ignore their requests?” For a few minutes everything that came in were questions; then people started thinking more about the situation and coming up with some answers, or at least sub-questions to what had already been asked. “If we attack them, and even destroy them, what would stop them from coming back and wiping us out?” “What further knowledge could they get from us if they are so advanced? Isn’t that likely why they want to quickly evolve us?” “Do we have time to hold diplomatic discussions?” “Can we afford just to ignore them as if they were going to go away, and doesn’t our curiosity demand that we interact with them?” This went on for a few minutes before people began to narrow down on some ideas – you could get a feel for what type of people were on the conference based on the ideas that came about. There were a fair amount of either military or very aggressive types, and an almost equal number of theoretically opposite types asking for more information. As usual, the military types yelled louder than everyone else, and so more of the ideas generated were aggressive in nature. I got in a couple of thoughts, but mine were not that much different from those that wanted to gather more information under the thought that we did not have enough information to make the decision. Those were the prevalent thoughts on the group whiteboard by the time the conference began to peter out. A lot of military ideas, a few information gathering ideas, and scattered ideas here and there regarding diplomatic attempts and needing backup plans, such as protecting a few people in case the extraterrestrials had the worst in mind.
Karen came back once the whiteboard became stagnant, “I would like to thank you all for your ideas. We may be contacting a few of you as necessary after another panel has evaluated and maybe even fleshed out these ideas a little. It is likely we will need your help again either to validate final plans or even help make those final plans. Again, time is of the essence, so if we contact you, it will be very soon, perhaps within a couple of hours.” With that the conference ended abruptly.
Since I was theoretically on this project indefinitely, and I really had no desire to work on projects that I may be pulled off of again at a moment’s notice (as much fun as that would be for my boss!), I just sat there and thought. As usual, I tried to put myself in the other’s place, but in this case they were just too foreign to do anything but guess, so it became a strictly academic exercise. I figured I would not be one of the ones that would be contacted again anyway, but I was going to milk this down time as much as I could. I wasn’t wrong; I was never contacted again, except to get an email indicating the final results of the conference and to thank us for our work. I had never felt like I was much a part of the group; and I guess that is my own fault. I would have chosen differently, perhaps. I would not have chosen the military option, and neither did they. The reasoning given was that the risks were too great for such an unlikely plan – even if we did somehow destroy the visiting extraterrestrials, they would just send their military and wipe us out. They also chose not to go with the diplomatic solution, indicating we did not have enough time to even know how to approach them diplomatically. And that was it; there was nothing more addressed in the final email. It seemed that we were just going to get ready to assume the worst – we couldn’t beat them, so we were going to get ready to protect ourselves and our race as best we could. Get ready to run from the problem; maybe it will go away. I didn’t realize what the consequences would be; I don’t think any of us did. If only we had applied a different sort of logic to the situation, understood we were out of our depth, maybe it would not have turned out so poorly. I never did have to get back to work; none of us really did.

By the time we learned what we had to do, what we should have done, it was too late. For millennia we had been programmed for only 2 choices. Fight or flight. Our body chemistry was built that way. Adrenaline to help with either response. We had yet to overcome that body chemistry, and it was our fatal flaw. In this case, we chose to fight our way out as we always had, but the outcome would have been no different had we decided to retreat, chosen the flight response. They had given us a chance to grow, to evolve, and we had failed. Miserably. They could have gotten rid of us at anytime, and so they chose to do it now. After we had failed their tests, missed the chance they had given us to evolve.
You see, they were not aliens from another part of space, explorers sent in peace. They were scientists, those that understood the logical processes of the universe much better than we had. Our only chance had been to evolve, so we could help them. They came to us just as they had to hundreds of others in the universe. We were just one of their experiments, and we had not met expectations. We were of no use to them, so as is the case with all failed experiments, we were terminated. And all because we as a race chose not to use the logical processes we had been developing ourselves, but fell back to our ancestral ways. And as few individuals of our race had learned leading up to this point, and none ever would again, there were other choices besides fight or flight. But it was too late for us, because the vast majority of our race was stuck in the past – fight or flight, ignore scenarios if they were not what we wanted to deal with, make assumptions based on limited information because we did not want to know more, possibly to be better. And this is how the human race came to an end, having been just a blip in the universe not worthy of notice, a fractal macrocosm of many of the individuals in the human race itself. I hope someone out there gets to read this, that our entire existence is not completely gone, but I have a feeling this will be destroyed along with –