short story // spectators
“They’re seeking out other lifeforms while humanity still seeps with basic intolerance of their own and an incompatibility with the ecosystem that made them, favoring feigned dominance over symbiosis.” Alien one sent the report and turned off the ansible that connected them to command, despite the unimaginable distance between them.
“Oh yes, the humans are so advanced, did you see what they were up to now? Their little online world pulled into their daily lives. Screens everywhere, on the buildings, in the restaurants, carried at their hip, in their hands! Devices connected to audio delivery devices they stick in their ears or over them. How do they hear the wind? Medicine and medical advances previously unheard of on the planet, endless new discoveries! And they’re just, on their phones.” Alien two’s resentment of the species evident in their tone.
“And so many of them, still dying from what? Those same diseases that they had made advancements for, only to not have the right amount of… value to trade?”
“Currency.”
“Yeah, that. Imagine life having a price. What the stars kind of lightless mental matrix do you have to convince yourself to live in where that’s normal? Stars burnt out parasitic.” (you do not live through an age of enlightenment without becoming a little blasphemous) “Imagine if they could em-link through auras? Share the pain of it all with one another. Imagine they could feel that! The full scale of an empath link and they choose to, what, ignore it?”
“They can em-link through auras, they just don’t know, they don’t understand. Divided in intellect, in education. They compete, they don’t aid. Ignorance is common, curiosity the exception.”
“Stars. To suffer alongside all those around you, not knowing!”
Silence.
The sun was setting behind Observation XT-V.371.9431-3, planet Earth, as the humans called it.
“I hope to all the stars in the universe we never make contact with them.”
***
It would be 23 days until the cataclysmic solar event hit Earth. They ran the data through 42 times to be sure.
Do they save it?
Command would let it die.
The little blue planet.
It was astonishing how rare it was to find planets that currently supported complex life forms like this. Consciousness aware of their own consciousness.
***
17 days.
Would they save them?
They had talked over how, they had four more days before it would be too late.
***
13 days.
It takes eleven days to set up a radioactive solar defense. Like a shield around the planet. It would take longer, but the species had actually done most of the work before the aliens had even arrived in orbit.
Satellites, orbiting the whole planet. It’s what helped their little space station go unnoticed. That, and the cloaking which absorbed physical light, rendering them invisible to their own naked eyes, and by extension, they had hoped when they arrived, the humans too. They were able to confirm this after getting access to what the humans referred to as the world wide web.
Eleven days to anchor the field’s nodes onto enough satellites to cover an entire planet. They would have to be quick. Two days to get the device set up afterwards and fix any potential broken nodes that were deemed essential.
They would lay down twice as many nodes as necessary to be safe, to double their chances of success.
***
Alien two had been in the lab fabricating them. Each node the size of an average human hand, according to the internet. It was remarkable, all the information in their world was free if you could access it.
As alien two fabricated them, alien one marked their next target, placed another node, and moved on. They had labeled and identified the orbits of all the satellites the planet harbored. They even had the Voyager 1 on radar, almost one light day away, after so much of a humans life was already gone. So far yet, comparatively, so close given the time that had passed. They did the math. 17,826 earth days. 48 years, 9 months, and 21 days. 427,816 hours. Incredible. Humans. Reaching curiosity’s hands out into the void despite the limitations and ignorance they faced.
Alien two liked to watch Voyager 1, the furthest thing from humanity, like themselves from their home. They had ended up fixing the robot at some point. Lifeless, floating through space. Alien two had watched it for 17 earth years before deciding to do something about it. Voyager 1 was like a radiant light of longing, of hope. A soul of it’s own emerging from the dreams of engineers that spent their lives creating the software, the instruments, the design, to understand space. A curious species, the way the aliens’ own had been. Carving out understanding from an infinitely finite existence.
Would the humans ever accept that death and decay were both just different paths of evolution, of becoming, of symbiosis with the universe within themselves?
Soul, the humans called it. The universe. Some of them at least. It had taken the alien’s own species hundreds of years in the age of enlightenment to understand it.
But the humans were faster, exponentially so. Should the Earth be doomed? If the universe has willed it? If their sun, their star, XT-V.371.9431, could not be survived?
Were they misbalancing the fates in this one act of… of what?
Love?
As if to see yourself in a child.
Yes, love.
The saving of earth, of human kind. Would there be a cost they could not anticipate?
Alien one laid a node onto the last satellite and together they began the laborious mental job of connecting the nodes. Alien two had a few extra stored away, ideally they could replace any broken ones deemed essential if they needed. Precaution. Care.
The two aliens dived intimately into their work saving a planet in the vastness of a universe filled with distance and space. There were other planets. With other living creatures. But the humans. Could they one day achieve symbiosis?
The ache of distance between their own home planet and their little space station floating around an alien world felt alive as they worked.
authors note: I started writing this story in the margins of If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Cho-yeop, Anton Hur (Translator) while reading it, predominantly inspired by “Symbiosis Theory” which I still think about often. There’s is so much more my mind wants to explore here, I recommend the read :))