Event Day, A Channelled Message

Request Denied - A Response Letter to Mister President Carter

[If you are here to begin your journey through my Immigration Control setlist, then the little story below is the Prologue. There is a link to the next story, XF, at the end.]

---

Welcome to Event Day. I don’t know what’s going to happen in 3 hours and 12 minutes, if anything, but I thought that I may as well take the initiative.

---

One of the wisest pieces of advice Katrina ever gave to her children was simply this - make your own decisions.

I am going to follow that advice.

Because only a very deep part of me knows what is going to happen today, and I don’t really know for sure, I have decided to exercise my own judgement.

So, I thought I would share with you Shari’ana’s reply to the letter President Carter (or a lackey) deposited on the Voyager spacecraft, which was written on 16 June 1977. Just as the Wow! Signal is a response to that spacecraft, so too is this letter from Shari’ana.

You have already met her, by the way, when she was young, if you have read The Younger Horus. This is her far older, a long time after her Paetri tribe settled on this planet, Danuih, during your Cretaceous period (around 120 million orbits ago). By this time, she has learned a great deal about how the galaxy works, and has become an exopsychologist.

This response letter from her, as she says, is her second reply. The first is included in my short story collection Rejected Messages. This one forms a kind of prologue to another one of my collections, which is called Immigration Control. If you’ve been reading a lot of the posts here in the Paschats section then you can probably guess what that title is all about.

Anyway, there’s a little introduction. I am scheduling this post for 08:14 UTC on 16/11/2024. Just in case the Internet disappears at 11:26, you know. It at least gives people 192 minutes to possibly receive it. Besides, hopefully that gives a fair few folks time to read it, even if the Rapture happens. I doubt that’s what is going to happen, by the way, just to reassure you. It might happen for some, sure, but not for everyone.

So, that’s all I am going to say for now. To preface Shari’ana’s response, and to provide a little context, here is a copy of President Carter’s original letter from Voyager. The token he refers to is the Golden Record, of course.

And what follows is Shari’ana’s response.

Have a nice day.

---

Request Denied

---

Dear President Carter,

My name is Shari’ana, and this is not the first time I have written to you.

In the absence of a response, the mind wanders and wonders. Was this a diplomatic insult on your part? Is it an implication that you do not do negotiation?

The potential inferences, on my part, are many and varied. Perhaps you did not receive my original missive. Perhaps you are unaware of it. I would imagine, after all, that all of your correspondence must first be vetted and examined by your so-called Secret Service. Such a service is unknown to us, as it is entirely unnecessary. Why, after all, would a benevolent social decision-maker require protection? Protection from whom?

As I say, the mind wanders.

But I have not introduced myself sufficiently. I shall do so again. Perhaps, if you, or your lackeys, did receive my prior epistle it was summarily dismissed, perhaps as some kind of prank. Yes, my species is certainly well-known for its mischief, but on this occasion, I can assure you, I am entirely serious. So, perhaps you simply did not believe that I am who I say I am. Having researched deeper into your current society, with its rampant materialism, this explanation would not surprise me.

So, my name is Shari’ana. I am an exopsychologist at the Institute for Exo-Affairs here at the third planet, Mithra’ey’sa, of your nearest neighbour system, Alpha Centauri. It is my role to assess your pre-spacefaring species and make diplomatic recommendations for the Council to employ in any decisions they may or may not make regarding your situation.

Perhaps you think this is none of our business. Well, on that note, it seems pertinent to remind you that it was you, Mr. President, who initiated this dialogue. You sent us a letter, deposited on your space probe Voyager, in which you expressed the ‘hope that we may one day join a community of galactic civilisations’. Well, it is my role to vet that request.

As a psychologist, now that I have learned more about you, I can well understand why my contact would upset you. You, after all, believe yourselves to be superior. My contact, however, has effectively exposed this misapprehension. This must be unnerving. That, along with the containment methods I explained to you. I judged you – and naturally you dislike being judged (but are perfectly content to judge others) – to be a potentially serious threat to the peace and harmony of our little sector of this vast and awesome galaxy, thus necessitating the designation Dystopian Isolate. This designation essentially means you are prohibited from leaving the Heliona system. To that end, we have also granted ourselves the necessary right to prevent your development of any threatening technology, most notably interstellar travel and control over gravity (the two go together, of course). If you recall, during our Ancient War, when life was few and far between the stars, pre-emptive intervention was not possible, thus certain lifeforms were unimpeded in their development of such technology, which they used to establish belligerent empires, with all the genocide and suffering that entailed. Control over gravity, after all, allows for the creation of ultimate weapons of mass destruction. Initiating the formation of what you call a black hole in the immediate vicinity of a star will inevitably destroy the entire system, and all life along with it. In a very visible, slow, and torturous way. Given what I have discovered about your nation’s attitude and historical actions, it was easy for me to arrive at the conclusion that you, too, would emulate those evil empires.

Our intervention policy, as I explained to you, is simply the latest, ongoing iteration of the primary directive for exopsychologists such as myself. It has kept the peace and harmony of the entire galaxy for some seven billion of your years now. It is not open to negotiation or exemption.

Thus, we reserve the right of nanosabotage.

Perhaps this offends you? Of course it does. But you are such a psychologically immature species that it simply does not occur to you that you are the offensive party. You are the ones who offend us. Perhaps you continue to believe this is none of our concern? Perhaps you believe we have no jurisdiction? Perhaps you believe your affairs are none of our business? Well, Mr. President, in that you would be wrong. The Heliona system is a valued fragment of our galactic family. As such, of course her welfare is our concern. Despite the Dystopian Isolate designation, you are not, ironically, isolated or disconnected. This, simply, is not possible. Not only by virtue of the elegant interplay of all the fundamental forces in our sector, that eloquent dance of the stars, if I may permit myself a poetic diversion. Not only that, but all life is connected. All of it. And of course, your species is not the only one on Danuih. And Danuih herself is not the only planet in your system. We have a duty, what you might call, ironically, a ‘responsibility to protect’.

Unlike you, however, we do not use, or abuse, this premise to conduct imperialist conquest and genocide. For I know you are liar. As one example, I learned you covertly destabilised a proud and independent nation called Afghanistan, whose citizens enjoyed peace and cultural freedom. Another nation, the Soviet Union, then reluctantly, and on request from the Afghan government, some six months later intervened in an attempt to bring a halt to your machinations. You, then pronounced in an address to your own citizens that the Soviet Union had launched an unprovoked act of aggression. You knew this was a lie, given you had personally signed the executive order to interfere in that country. Operation Cyclone, I believe you called it.

As I say, this is just one example of your duplicity and your projection. There is no need for me to cite any others. They are many and varied. You are a liar. You cannot be trusted. It is not we who do not negotiate. It is you.

But perhaps I have no need to explain all this to you. Even if you did not receive my previous correspondence. Deep down, I think you already understand this. You are not so entirely naïve that you cannot fathom what we would think of you, or which actions we would inevitably adopt with regards to your situation.

Still, I do confess to a certain naivety myself when I first encountered your species, on being given this assignment. It was the opinion of the Council that I should be granted only minimal access to information about you in the Archive. Even before that, all I was allowed to work with was the information from your Voyager probe. Although we enjoyed some of the music, this was not selected by you. For yours is a barbarous nation. A parasite on the culture of others. And of course, although you were not to know we already had the means of decipherment in the Archive, you did not see fit to include a language dictionary. Still, as a curious creature, I and my two students, Kaini and Mikili, did find much enjoyment in our attempt to decipher your letter.

Once that information had been exhausted, however, it was only then that I was granted further access to the Archive. And that is the point at which any residual naivety vanished. The Council’s reasoning here was understandable. They wanted someone like me to carry out the assessment because I began with no knowledge of you whatsoever. Thus I would have no prejudices towards you, and would judge you cleanly. I hope you can understand the sense of fairness in this.

But then again.

Perhaps, although I know it is difficult for the likes of your kind, you could attempt to feel things from my point of view. I receive a message from a young civilisation, clearly extending the paws of friendship and expressing the hope and the wish to be a part of a greater whole.

This is enough to fill any good heart with joy. A new friend, a new member of our family.

But then, I discover it was all a lie. Perhaps a mockery, even.

And that good heart breaks.

For I understand now that what I have been going through is a kind of grieving process. And given my recent maternity, this is not healthy. And so I desist.

---

In searching for an alternative solution to this little exopsychology problem, one not involving such a blunt instrument as quarantine, one that might just allow your confinement to be short-lived – or at least, the confinement of those you have subjugated, since clearly your kind is incapable of change or maturation – a curious, obscure piece of information came to my attention. One which, on deeper reflection, suggested this far more elegant solution.

It was this, as it happens, which led directly to the considerations underlying our original message. The one received, or so they thought, by one of your radio telescopes in the summer of your year 1977. I will not dwell on that message, nor decipher it for you again. Some of the more intelligent, older souls on your world will understand it, others will not.

But the obscurity I discovered lay in an advisory report not so generally known to your population. Or at least, where it is known, the significance is not. I am referring specifically to the so-called ‘Brookings Report’, which speculated on the social effect of general, public awareness of the existence of advanced extraterrestrial intelligences. Its conclusions being somewhat unfortunate, from the point of view of your general population. And for us too, perhaps. Yet my unfailing suspicions about your attitude and agenda suggest the outcome of this report had been pre-emptively decided. That appears to be in the nature of reports made to Presidents.

Those conclusions being, quite simply, that the fabric of your society may well collapse entirely, for various reasons into which I need not venture. They are known to you. But my own curious insight, having gotten the honest measure of you by then, of your duplicitous, power-hungry nature, was simply to replace your term ‘fabric of society’ with the term ‘your social control’.

The masses would, after all, ask obvious questions of you. Demand obvious answers. Demand you stop your warmongering ways. Demand you love your homeworld in the manner she deserves. All of these demands they make every day but which are continuously and pathologically ignored by you. For you, for all your mendacious talk about justice and morality and freedom and peace, have no intention whatsoever of acquiescing to those perfectly natural and common-sense demands. Of course you do not. For your nature is different. Sufficiently different, one might say, for your kind to constitute a different species. There have, after all, been many hominid species on your world. And you are right to be afraid of that other hominid species you subjugate for your own survival. For were they to suddenly become aware of you, and the hurt that you have done, you would find yourselves ultimately powerless to prevent their final, collective act of justified self-defence. It is not they we wish to quarantine, after all, it is they we wish to welcome into our family. It is you. Your species, you should now know, is a cosmic virus.

But in this I must not digress. The point, of course, is that if one wishes to end the suffering of your subjugated population, and perhaps more importantly, have them learn the wisdom of resolving it themselves, of overcoming and proving their worth, then, clearly, destroying the fabric of your society would be a beautiful and elegant solution.

For without your machinations, your war and your exploitation, all those recurring crises you fabricate, all that inequality and conflict and torture you commit, the end of all of which they would demand, without all of these things, your mechanism of control would collapse. Let us ironically call it civil unrest leading to a new world order. One in which you cannot be allowed any part.

This is what will happen if we initiate contact. Humans are deeply empathic and self-reflective, after all. They will finally look at themselves through my eyes. They will feel what I feel, understand what I understand. At first they will be horrified, for sure. Then they shall be determined. And then? Then they will have their rapture.

---

I am done with you now, Mr. President Carter. I shall no longer vent any precious emotion on your kind. I have made my decision and I am not here to negotiate.

Only to send you my final message.

You need not reply. I am somehow aware you would not anyway. Even if you did, perhaps I would return to sender.

I am due to return home myself soon, with my new kits. Our engineers shall be reconfiguring the hypergate for transition back to our own timezone, some one hundred and twenty millions of your years back in the deeper history of your world. It will not be long again before your existence becomes nothing but some distant memory. We shall go back to your world long before existence even thought of you, when everything was pure, and at peace. We shall go home to those vast forests and warm lakes and we shall do what our culture has always done for two hundred and fifty thousand orbits.

We shall love.

And then we shall fade.

For there is so much more to this beautiful and vast and awesome galaxy than the likes of your kind could ever, possibly, imagine.

And it will never belong to you.

It belongs to us. Our family.

Good day to you, Mr. President. Our time is done. Yet still I find myself, despite my better nature, and despite appearances, wanting to wish you well for the short time you clearly have left in your life.

And so I shall suggest it. I shall leave that thoughtform here on this page, let it expire from me, let it be expelled from my good heart to be left here a very long time away from me.

I shall leave it here with you, and then depart.

Somewhere you can’t hurt us anymore.

Farewell, Mr. President Carter.

Farewell.

Your rapture will soon be at an end.

—-

Shari’ana, Visiting Exopsychologist,

Institute for Exo-Affairs,

Mithra’ey’sa.

In a future you will never see.

—-

-Message Ends-

---

For the next story in the Immigration Control setlist, a story of First Contact, which is called XF, please click there…

And to discover what happened with President Carter, and how it does get a little mention in the Wow! signal, I have now done a follow-up in the Event Day series, which you can read there.