From Stuart diary
I, Sylvia and Milo were staring at Luna and her new friends (whom we'd never heard of before, by the way), waiting anxiously for their explanation. Was it really possible that they had managed to find a way to avoid being totally annihilated by the aliens?
Luna: We were doing an exercise with telepathy, that's how we got the idea!
Milo: (impatient) But what's your idea?
Luna: The older people of our species, and in particular the ones in the Elders' Council, have a very different way of reasoning from ours. They are extremely rational in what they do, but they do not conceive concepts such as friendship, family or love.
Stuart: ... I'm not following you, how could this information help us?
Luna: The point is that, for this reason, I, Hermes, Ivy, and all the other aliens born on the Earth are very different from them. We know what it's like to grow up in a family, have friends and feel loved. Some have been luckier than others, but deep down we are all fond of this planet, we feel like earthlings too! And, even if all this is inconceivable for the Elders' Council, we don't want to further help them destroy our home and our families!
Hermes: In brief, what we need to do is to make the older aliens understand how deep our bond with humans is, and at that point propose them a different type of agreement.
Ivy: Yes, that's it!
Stuart: But they have never understood it in decades, how do you plan to do?
Hermes: We will all use telepathy, to share with them the memories and emotions from our life here on Earth, and about our bonds with humans. To reach them all at once, we will need...
Stuart: ... the satellite dish.
Luna, Hermes and Ivy: yes!
It was brilliant, how could we not think about it earlier? If the aliens kept overlooking the emotional consequences of their plan, all we had to do was to force that information in their minds, all at once.
The plan was secretly shared with all my colleagues, so that as many young aliens as possible could participate in the telepathic message. We know the frequencies they use for their communications and how to hack what they are broadcasting, so all we have to do is to collect all the memories from our kids and convey them to the satellite dish in our garden. Since telepathy is so important to them, their TV devices also allow the transmission and reproduction of brain waves, and so our signal should be as efficient as it would be in person.
All aliens have to follow their 8 PM news program, it's the one they use to communicate all the official statements for the day, so by acting at that time we are confident to be able to reach most of them at once.
Stuart: Ready, Luna?
Luna: Yes, I am!
Stuart: The signals from others are coming too, let's get started!
We managed to transmit 32.3 seconds of our signals before the aliens managed to regain control over their transmission. At the very moment it was over, I and Luna just watched each other and run upstairs, to join Sylvia and Milo and see the older aliens' reaction live on TV.
And we were not disappointed: all those aliens were literally flooded by the telepathic message of our kids. At that moment, they all had just been invested with the feelings and emotions that Luna and the others had experienced growing up on Earth, and they appeared visibly confused. Luna explained to me that the emotions and memories shared through telepathy are extremely vivid, to the point of being almost as strong as those experienced firsthand. And that telepathic message brought together the experiences of millions of young aliens like Luna, Hermes, Ivy and all their companions, as could the aliens who wanted to annihilate us being indifferent to something like that?
The TV news frontmen also seemed quite upset, and they seemed even more so when they received the transcription of our second message for that evening: a proposal for a new deal.
Frontman: (confused) ... Humans propose us to go to live on Earth together with them. They say there will be plenty of space and resources for everyone.
Instinctively, my colleagues and the other few humans aware of the matter would have wanted to expel every single alien out of the planet. But this would have meant to also exhile Luna and the others. How could we let such a thing happen, they are our children after all! And if we allowed them to stay, why not allow the other aliens too?
Admittedly, the fact that any aggressive action on our side would have meant the instantaneous annihilation by their space fleets was also carefully considered when deciding the content of our new deal proposal.
Nowadays, there are just a few million aliens still living on Sixam, even the ones born on Earth have outnumbered them years ago. They can easily disguise themselves to appear similar to us, they would be able to integrate into our society in no time, just like Luna and the others did growing up here. With some planning, they could smoothly move here without anyone noticing.
The Elders' Council took four and a half days to give us an answer, they wanted to run new simulations and carefully check them before accepting any change to their original plan. They had left us on our toes until the last moment before communicating that our proposal was better than the alternative by a 0.23% margin. Soon, they too would start moving on Earth and interrupt the total colonization plan.
A few days later, at the lab, my colleagues and I were warned by a flashing light coming from the black hole generator and, before we could figure out what it was, we were dragged to the other side and greeted by this scene:
The aliens were celebrating the approaching of their new and more comfortable life on Earth, and had organized a terrestrial-themed party in which they wanted us scientists who "collaborated" with them up to that point to participate.
All the memories that our kids had shared with them had made them want to live like the earthlings as soon as possible, they seemed excited to try their hand at activities normal for us like dancing, music and drinking cocktails at a bar.
I certainly did not expect this conclusion for this adventure. In the end, what saved us was not the frenzied lab experiments or the high technology, but simply being good parents to Luna, Hermes, Ivy and all the other alien kids like them. Who could have imagined it?
§HermioneSims§ corner:
A lot of things happened in the last few chapters! As I probably wrote somewhere, what I'm doing here it's mostly playing my game, and writing down what happens trying to write down a plot that makes sense. The aliens' party is part of the latest stages of the scientist's career, and it took me some time to find a way to fit it into the story...
I like the plan that Luna has set up, very clever- and I love the resolution to this. It wasn't waging war or threatening violence that solved the problem, but the love of human parents for their alien children, and the younger generation's experiences amongst emotional and loving people that helped them realise the errors of their elders' ways.
ReplyDeleteThanks again! I really had to reason a lot on this part, this is the kind of weird plot twist I usually set up when watching out of a bus window when going to work. :P
DeleteHowever, not everything is solved yet, I couldn't solve every single problem at the end of generation 1 already, when still 9 are missing :P
That was a really clever idea! And something that could only be achieved by everyone working together. I like how the ideal solution is so close to the alien solution but without, y'know, the whole wiping-out-all-humans idea. As long as everything is distributed equally, there really is enough for everyone. I wish people in the real world would realise that, too.
ReplyDeleteI love the solution here. Ironically, Sylvia and Stuart helped save humans by raising an alien daughter, because they raised her with love. I hope that the aliens won't feel pressured to constantly wear disguises though.
ReplyDelete