XF
A First Contact Story, for Immigration Control
Hi! And welcome to Immigration Control.
As I may have mentioned before, this is another one of my story collections, or anthologies, if you prefer. I prefer it, actually. It’s a nicer word. As I will mention in the forthcoming update, I am intending to present you with this entire collection, although a fair amount of it is going to be paid only. It’s somewhere in the region of 110k words, in three parts, with a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue (which you can read at that link there), and part I will be free for everyone, but the rest of it will be paid only. I don’t have any paid subscribers yet, so I’m going to have to start enticing.
You already have most of Part I to read, as it happens. This story, XF, is the first one. After this you have D-Zero Meson Oscillation, then there’s Ciao, SETI!. There is one more to come. That’s Fortunately, I was saved by the Aliens, which you can read there. That’s where Unofficial Katy’s conception happened.
I will edit and provide links at the beginning and the end of each story for the previous and next in the collection; that way you can navigate your way through it a little easier.
You actually also have one story from part II, which is Shipyard Ahoy!, which you can read at that link. I’m going to keep that one up here for free, because I can’t imagine any sci-fi fan not liking it.
This story, then, XF, doesn’t really need much of an introduction, as it speaks for itself. However - I would very strongly urge you to read Request Denied (the prologue) first, as this story, and all the others, will make more sense. The collection is, after all, themed, and you need to have the idea contained in the prologue in your head, kind of thing. Although that idea is restated and reinforced in this one.
Anyhow, that’s about it for an intro. I wouldn’t want to burble at you.
The last thing I wanted to say was that it’s Friday today, and although I am a little late to the party, I thought I’d get involved with this wonderful #Sci-Friday thing. So I am giving a big shoutout (tag, that is) and total gratitude to
, and also to , for the reviews - with a name like that, he should definitely be a cool supervillain.Anyhow - there’s my intro. This story is around 4.5k - but don’t worry, it skips along. And as you’ll see, it isn’t really possible to split up at all.
I hope you like it.
XF
It has been seven hours and, I don’t know, fifteen minutes perhaps since the silver machine came gorgeously and seamlessly to rest on the White House lawn.
…
Predictably…
…
The first thing the President did when informed about the radar track was to order DefCon2 and allow himself and selected lackeys to be ushered hurriedly down to the White House bunker. So much for leadership in the face of tension.
…
So much for making his people feel safe.
…
So much for courage.
…
Part of me would like to seal the bastard down in there. Let them all starve to death. But that would be too easy.
No, we have other plans for you.
With all intention the timeship materialised some five kilometres from what was left of the ISS. The girl who would be the final astronaut was afforded a full and perfect view of the thing as it snaked past ever so softly. She filmed it on her little device and, without waiting for permission, streamed the footage live to your Internet.
Everything is intention.
Spacetime became distorted, kind of folded out from itself. The antitime force pushing it away to create the required entry field for the return to linear time. The transition, as always, was smooth and beautiful.
We had no problems entering your atmosphere, your airspace. There was no friction. Our shielding sees to that. Nothing exists within a few inches of the outer skin.
And so once through your mesosphere we just drop like a stone towards your surface, your Atlantic Ocean to a depth of some five hundred metres above the water. Last time we were here this place would have been an island. I think you still remember her name.
At least some of you do. But most of you have forgotten. Most of you have become a disappointment.
We do not glide too fast across the waters. Less than the speed of sound. We want you to have time to launch your atmospheric interceptors, with their missiles and their projectile cannons. But you don’t yet have the order to engage. Sure, by now your radar has told you our trajectory, that we are on a direct course for your Capital. But for now, you are nothing but an escort.
And we want you to have time for the news to break. For your entire species to know.
We want you to think, in the meantime. Before the contact begins.
By the time we approach your coast, and can clearly see your city, you have your airborne camera crews circling around like so many flies of summer and reporting their incessant chatter back to the studios. Ground crews too. Half of them are excited, half of them are terrified. But like we said, all is intention.
We want you to think. We want you to be aware of your thoughts.
And so we decelerate, we glide and we descend, noiselessly to rest on your White House lawn. And we say nothing.
We just watch. We observe. And we wait.
What happens next, is entirely up to you.
We can hack directly into your Internet of course, we can watch your broadcasts. Quantum entanglement remotely. We’ve been doing it for a long time. Or did you not think we were intelligent enough to study you exhaustively before we came? Learn everything about you. Your languages, your cultures, your social history.
Your attitude.
Some of you have been speculating on the nature of our spacecraft. None of you have thought yet that it might be a timeship. But at least, we are pleased and proud to hear, most of you accept its sheer beauty. Just over seven hours ago you saw the encircling, outer rings decelerate their orbits then coalesce into a single, quasicrystal embedded girdle. The ship is a perfect sphere, perhaps twenty of your metres in diameter, with no discernible portal. Seamless. It glows metallic with a silvery-golden sheen. It’s not an alloy you would’ve heard of. It’s way beyond your technology. Many of you have already realised this. And some of them, well, they have at least accepted the fate that if we are hostile, then resistance will be futile.
And we enjoy your speculation.
When I say we are at rest on your lawn the truth is, actually, we are merely hovering above it, perhaps a metre or so. Your scientists think that’s anti-gravity. They wouldn’t be too far wrong.
Likewise you are speculating about where we are from. None of you have thought yet about when. Of course you don’t know. You can’t. We could be from anywhere. Or anywhen. And I’m not going to tell you that now. Not just yet.
There is one amongst you, however, who seems more enlightened than the others. Her speculation is better. Why have they come here, to us, specifically? She asks. Does this not suggest they have come from close by? Unless the galaxy is so sparsely populated that one has to travel thousands of parsecs just to meet a single, other intelligent lifeform, the greater likelihood is that we are from not very far away at all. The same sector. There are plenty of star systems just like this one in your vicinity. Plenty of stars little different to your own Heliona. They all have a system of planets, many of them in the habitable zone, in stable orbits, with more than enough time for evolution to do its thing.
And even those systems who don’t, well, they can be engineered.
Given enough time, given enough intention, perhaps you need to realise that’s already and long-since happened throughout the galaxy. I believe you call it the Zoo Hypothesis. Well, perhaps it’s about time you realised that truth.
And came to understand its implications.
We do not hate you. Hate is not the correct word to use. Our species has long-since extinguished hate from our emotional repertoire. If we ever had it in the first place, which I doubt. But it has been so long now I don’t remember. But I don’t think we ever did. Most species do not hurt each other when they are young. You might think they do because you have become young, you have regressed to barbarism. But you weren’t like that before. Nowadays your anthropologists assume that young species are brutish and violent and only later progress to civilisation. We know better. It’s not like that at all. They only believe that to try and make themselves feel better, to excuse themselves, self-deceive into thinking they are better than you once were. Temporal racism, you could call it. But you are not better. You have become vile. You have become threatening.
No, we do not hate you. Hate is a destructive emotion, for the self and the other, the subject and the object. It achieves nothing but pain, sadness and shame. You know all about that, of course. And yet still you indulge yourselves in its turbulent energy. Why do you do that, by the way? Of course we know and we understand, but we would like to hear what you have to say on the matter. We would like to know what you think about yourselves.
Sending us cute little Voyager probes with cute little pictures of your cute little selves and your imperfect world in various guises, and an odd assortment of music is, well, that’s one thing, but it doesn’t really tell us what we seriously need to know – what you think about yourselves. Maybe that’s why you didn’t do that. Maybe deep down you know what you have become. And you didn’t want to think about it, because you cannot bear the shame.
But now we are here, you cannot avoid this. That one who is enlightened, she has already been asking the question. What must they think of us? And all the hurt that we do.
All is intention.
You have been attempting to communicate with us for hours now. You have tried all manner of methods. Scientific and mathematical, binary and hex, myriad streams of images and series of notes in varying musical keys and fifty-five different languages, from Ancient Akkadian to postmodern English. Of course we understand it all, but we are not here to talk. Not yet, anyway.
But still you try. Some might think your perseverance is laudable. Others might think it ludicrous or bloody-minded. You beam your missives at us and receive only silence. Some of you, naturally, are speculating that this timeship is empty of life, that it is just an automaton, a robot, only here to gather information or release some pre-programmed greeting when the correct conditions are met.
But your so-called leader, your President, is cowering in his bunker, is he not? So that condition cannot be met.
Others believe there is life in here, just that we can’t understand a word you say. I hear mention of your Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on a number of occasions and you’re already consulting with linguistic theorists and experimental translators. As if our culture is so vastly different than yours despite inhabiting the same physical universe with the same physical laws and we have the same ability to build tools and machines and timeships in accordance with those laws. And as if we did no preparation on what many of you have concluded must have been a very long journey. Perhaps this is why some of you are thinking this must be an automated scout ship. In which case, perhaps beaming all this information at us is a useful thing to do.
And clearly, this lack of response is making many of you nervous. Perhaps this explains your President’s behaviour, his reluctance to show himself. As if silence implies hostility.
And naturally, you are wondering what, if anything, we might look like. As if possibly our silence suggests an incompatible atmosphere. Maybe we are not mammalian like you, not even reptilian, but resemble something more akin to your cephalopods and inside this hull there is only water, or some other fluid. Many of you are already deadly concerned about the possibility of infection. As if we would come all this way without considering the alien pathogen problem. It should be obvious, after all, that all interstellar species would have long-since resolved that little issue.
No, we have nothing to fear from your germs. Nor your atmosphere. It is perfectly breathable to us. A little less carbon dioxide than we are used to, admittedly, and a little too cold for our comfort. But perfectly survivable and not unpleasant, your pollution notwithstanding, naturally.
Granted, however, you are not to know that. Hence some of your commentators, we see from your broadcasts, have decided that we need to take readings of various kinds, environmental samples and the like, in order to prepare all our protections before our exit into your atmosphere.
I guess that’s a perfectly sensible conclusion, on reflection. But like I say, you were not to know that we already did all that, forty thousand years ago.
But you haven’t.
Our germs could be deadly to you. We could wipe out your entire species with a single breath.
But still there is no excuse to assume we are hostile. If we wished to exterminate you with some kind of virus then we wouldn’t show up in person to do it. We’d deliver that bioweapon in a different way, such that you would never even consider the possibility that it was us.
But that’s not why we are here. That is not our intention.
That’s just a last resort.
It has been seven hours and, oh I’d say seventeen minutes now since our beautiful silver machine slipped softly to hover over your White House lawn.
Soon we shall be ready to talk.
We have nanosurveillance inside your President’s bunker, by the way. Same as with your Oval Office. We are observing every conversation which happens in there. As we have done since it was built. Perhaps we’ll upload all those recordings to your Internet when we leave. Of course the people in whom you place your faith would not be happy indeed were you to finally and irrevocably discover what they really say and do when they think no one is watching. That would be some revelation for you, we are sure.
A growing number of the President’s increasingly unsettled aides have been pressing him for a decision. Will he come out to greet us? The longer he stays down there, the worse it will be for him politically.
We knew that would be the case. Can’t stay down there forever, Mr. President.
All your other social leaders know it, too. Naturally, we have been monitoring their communications and discussions. As expected, as we had hoped, your other leaders have grown angry and embittered at the thought that whoever we are, the fact that we landed on the White House lawn must mean we think this President of the United States of America is your most important and preeminent person, and his country the most predominant. Their communications clearly indicate this complaint. Many of them have, cleverly, made overtures to your United Nations through their emissaries there. Likewise, your Secretary General himself is more than a little agitated. Surely, he and his aides must think, in a momentous situation like this, it should be him to make this greeting, he who plays the role of the appointed representative of your species. That it should be the lawn of your United Nations where we land, not your White House.
And in that thought, you would be absolutely correct.
For this is precisely how we wanted this to play out. Precisely our intention.
There is a woman amongst the Secretary General’s entourage who is, as I have told you, more enlightened than the rest of you. She was called in to assist him within an hour of our arrival. She was rushed there precisely for that purpose, and she has already told him the truth. The longer the President delays, the worse it will go for him, and his country. She has advised the Secretary General that now is the time to bypass the United States of America and its control over the Security Council, to proceed with all haste to the Capital and form a greeting party of their own. Of course the President will know, and this will force his hand. Those emissaries from those rival states will, naturally, be accompanying that party. We are, as you should have come to expect by now, perfectly aware of the recent tensions between your nations.
I wonder what will happen to those tensions, in the days and weeks to come.
All is intentional.
She will be there also.
It has been seven hours and twenty-seven minutes precisely since we shot through your stratosphere and inserted ourselves into your airspace and your lives and coursed across your waters. The journey from your New York City, where your United Nations resides, to the President’s Capital does not take too long. They will be arriving within a few short minutes.
We shall be waiting.
She has already suggested a few logical truths to your Secretary General during the air transit to the Capital. They landed on the White House lawn. That means they know it is a place of political importance. That means they have already studied this world, they know all about humanity and its history and its behaviour. It means they understand English, or any other language you care to use. Their silence is pregnant. Designed to provoke you, into emotions and questions and self-awareness.
Clearly they are possessed of a supreme, psychological intelligence. For having studied humanity, they know just how humanity will respond to this event. This may, indeed, even be their reason for visiting.
Their intention.
And given that they already know everything they need to know, you can be sure they are not hostile. Clearly their technology is beyond anything humanity has to offer, perhaps even imagine.
If they were hostile they would have long-since invaded and colonised this system. This is not some diplomatic vessel, here to negotiate your capitulation. It is not here to issue demands. Nor is it here to request your help, for humanity has nothing to offer in that regard.
They are simply here to deliver a message. In their own, silent words. By gesture, and provocation.
They know just how humanity will respond to this visitation. This is the reason for the event.
And now we can see how thoughtful your Secretary General has become. Perhaps, soon, matters that were once a burden will swiftly become clear.
They are landing now, on the other side of the building. Perhaps they don’t want to alarm us.
Or perhaps they simply need time to collect their thoughts and compose themselves.
But she will be there with you.
She can help you.
She will be your guide.
And so your President has made his decision. Or rather, the decision was made for him. He tries to convince himself not to feel fear. The skies above his mansion are alive with his atmospheric interceptors, all equipped with your latest killing machines. At a touch of a button they will unleash a shower of projectiles at us.
He has given the order.
Deep down, of course, he knows they won’t have any effect, that our shielding will see to that. But he convinces himself of their efficacy anyway, to still his tachycardia.
And so he joins the party from your United Nations. After simple, subdued greetings, they walk tentatively together through the White House and out onto the lawn, standing before us, some twenty metres away from where we are waiting, and watching. We can see how you all cannot help but gasp, now you are so close to our beautiful silver machine.
It has been, I’m not sure now, perhaps seven hours and thirty-seven minutes since you first caught sight of us. Now it is time.
It is time, now. All of you are watching, on your television screens and your Internet, on your handheld communication devices. You can see, and you can hear.
You are waiting, too.
All is intention.
We do not wait for you to speak. We open a small portal in the side of the ship facing you. The ship’s surface seems to melt away like liquid metal, seamlessly. We project out a small object, not unlike one of your handheld computers and about the same size. We are careful not to alarm you, we only hover it slowly, until laying it to rest on the grass at the feet of the Secretary General. As he picks it up, tentatively, we seal up the portal again, as if it has never been.
We have our nanobots hovering around the scene, too small for you to detect. They are capturing and recording every sense. Your Secretary General understands that now – they are transmitting directly to the device’s screen. One of them is directly in front of him, just above head height.
Then we change the image. Replace it with three brief words.
The name of that woman who is there with you, and the last word is the simple, pregnant, ‘home’.
Your Secretary General glances around to her. She is smiling. There is fond affection in that smile.
He beckons her to join him, she steps forward, tilts her head a little and reads the words on the screen.
“It’s a translation device, amongst other things,” she says. “With music and culture and images of Home. You can keep it, if you wish.”
And then she smiles at him again.
“I,” he stutters a little, “I don’t understand.”
“I’m not human,” she speaks, softly. “As I think you do understand, deep down. I have been here to observe you, to live amongst you, as you. And to record my experiences. And yes, sometimes, to offer you my guidance. But now it’s time for me to go. The people in there are my family. It’s time for me to go home.”
The Secretary General glances his eyes downwards with a little sadness, but he is not a bad man, and somehow he understands.
“So,” he looks up at her again and allows himself a short, half-laugh, “they are only really here to collect you?”
“And to bring me home, yes.” She smiles back, then adds, “Thank you. For your hospitality.”
“Perhaps I should have known,” he says, with a smile.
“I believe,” she tells him, “I have given you all the help you need. All the correct questions to ask. And I think you now understand the events that are about to happen. And that those events are inevitable, but necessary. We will not interfere, except to protect this beautiful planet from your nuclear weapons. We will not allow you to do that to her. It is for you, your species, to solve your own problems. And perhaps when you are done with all that, and have learned to live well again, perhaps then you will be able to visit us. And if so, you will be very welcome.”
“Where is your home?”
“Originally, we are from Sirius. Then shortly before our sun died, when it burned into a white dwarf and we had no choice but to leave, some of us sought a new home. And we found this world. This is why we love her. But that was a very long time ago, as you measure things. Now, she is your home. My family live on a colony station in the Centauri system, your nearest neighbour. You will get to see this soon, on that screen. We will transmit our journey for you, including all the data your astronomers would wish for about that system. That should spare you the trouble of your flyby mission. Then we will cut off the signal, and you will be on your own again.”
He gives another little, brief laugh. “Then I wish you the safest of journeys,” he smiles, with genuine affection.
“Thank you. And as I say, perhaps one day, if your attitude is no longer a threat, you may construct a ship. And if you survive that journey, well then, all will be well again in our part of this vast and awesome galaxy. Until then, I wish you well.”
And then he offers his hand, she takes it gently, and with a final smile she turns, and walks away, home to us.
“Farewell,” is his final word. He means it genuinely, and sadly, as he watches her leave.
We open a larger portal for her in the side of the ship, which seals itself softly behind her, as if it had never been.
On the screen the Secretary General watches us depart, just as all of you do, on your television screens and your Internet, and your handheld communication devices. Most of you don’t want us to go. But that’s not your decision to make. You watch us rise through your atmosphere and out into space, past your ISS again, you watch as we open a hole in space and rush through into outer time, into that beautiful swirling blue vortex to our short transit to the Centauri system, then emerge high above the plane of the ecliptic untroubled by asteroids or micrometeorites or unwelcome gravity fields. Then we glide down into the habitable zone. You are receiving all the data you need on the system, just as we said, a motivation for change, if ever there was one.
The promise of a beautiful future, and the better things to come.
But not yet for you.
And now you can see our colony station, growing larger in the visiscreen. We will be home soon.
Our family.
And then, for you, it ends.
There will be a war. It is inevitable. But not with us.
Soon, all of you will be asking the correct questions, just as she did. What must they think of us? And all the hurt that we do. Soon, everyone will suffer self-examination and enlightenment, a revaluation of all values.
And they, the common people, will become the resistance. For their utopian demands will not be met. All your warmongers and your corporations, your corrupt politicians and your parasite bankers and your purveyors of weapons and your environmental rapists, your xenophobes, all of them will never give up their power.
For they depend on it for their survival. For protection from you. They know the ways they have wronged you. And the hurt that they have done. Soon you will know this too.
And this truth will make you free.
And all of your monotheistic ideologies will face their judgement and their reckoning. Their rapture. Now they have seen with their own eyes that we are incompatible with what they believe. They with their anthropocentric system with their vicious, anthropocentric patriarch who dares call himself a god and tell you how he made you in his own image, tells you that you are special, held above all other lifeforms, so long as you obey. But that demonic system will soon be dying. And then it will be done. For it is incompatible with our existence.
We are not the enemy. They are. You will discover this soon, when they resist your demands. And when that utopia does not prevail.
And all your social fabric, those mechanisms of social control, will disintegrate.
War is inevitable.
We will not interfere. It is not our place to interfere. We have simply granted you the necessary provocation.
For we did not need to greet you, or tell you what we think of you. It is what you think of yourselves that matters. We did not need to leave you any poignant worded token. Our mere insertion into your lives was enough.
We will shut down the visual feed when we have safely arrived and docked with our colony station. You will get to see how beautiful it all is, catch just a glimpse of the planet we orbit, so full of life and warmth and invitation. You will know all that you are missing, and all that you are threatening. You will come to understand that all this promise is not for the likes of you.
Our home will not be threatened. Not by you.
Our demonstration is over now. Our provocation done. Our cousin is back home again now, back home with her family.
We are not your enemy. You are.
We are not hostile. You are.
Perhaps your war will be long and bitter. Or perhaps it shall be short and sweet. I have not looked into that future yet, for it is all the same to me. We will know when it is done.
For we know all about you. We know what we think of you, and all the hurt that you have done.
Soon, all of you will know the answers to all those correct questions. Soon, all of you will suffer self-examination and enlightenment, and the revaluation of your values.
And then you will have your rapture.
And so it begins, and so it is done.
All is intention.
I hope you enjoyed that story! The next one in the Immigration Control Collection is D-Zero Meson Oscillation, which you can read at that link (that’s my intro to the story, part 1 is linked at the end). That one also happens to be the original, standalone version of Episode I of the Katrina series.
And as always, every like, comment and share is so very much appreciated!