My dear diary, the more time passes, the more I find myself looking back at my past, at my victories and my mistakes, and wondering about whether my choices were right or not. So, maybe, summarising all I did could help me rationalize and come to a definitive answer, don't you agree?
My name is Luna Miller, and I'm one of the aliens born from alien abductions when the inhabitants of Sixam were still planning to conquer the Earth to turn it into their new home.
I lived in Oasis Spring together with my father Stuart, his wife Sylvia and my brother (well, technically, half-brother) Milo for years only knowing a very small part of the truth, pretending to be just like any other girl by disguising myself to hide my green skin and pointy ears, and pretending to not be able to use telepathy.
It was just when I was about 15 years old that I learnt the truth. In part it was my dad teaching me what he had learnt from his job, but, for the most part, I had to learn it the hard way.
One day, in fact, the Sixam aliens decided it was time to pass to the next phase in their plan, and I and all the other young aliens born by the abduction of the earthlings were dragged on their planet to take part in it.
And this is when I learned the truth about the aliens' intentions, and why I was born in the first place. The native species of Sixam was extremely intelligent and managed to invent teleport machines and others for the recombination of matter, thanks to which they were able to build a very advanced and hyper-technological society on their planet and prosper for centuries.
However, they had a problem, a very serious one: the star around which Sixam is orbiting was slowly fading, producing less and less of the light and heat required to sustain life on the planet. Not even their technology was able to solve such a huge problem, so the Elders' Council ruling the planet decided to colonize a new one. The Earth was the most suitable planet for their purposes, and the youngest generations of aliens were genetically engineered to integrate a large amount of human genetic code to allow us a comfortable life on the new planet.
It was a very hard time for me. I was born and I grew up in a very human family who always treated me as one of them, how could I forget it and just adhere to the Sixam plan?
But we Millers were never people who resign to what we think is wrong, so we ended up in dad's secret lab in the basement trying to come up with a plan.
It didn't take long before we realized that the Sixam aliens came up with such an absurd plan just because their morals, ethics and values were completely different from ours. They were used to thinking in a purely rational way, and to take their choices only on the basis of data, analysis and simulations, while the earthlings are well known for the importance they give to compassion, feelings and emotions. Those aliens weren't used to reason in these terms but, in principle, there wasn't anything making them unable to understand our viewpoint. We just needed to convince them to listen to us, and we decided to do it by forcing our message into their minds with telepathy.
Probably this wasn't the most polite approach possible, but for sure it was very effective. With this new information in their heads, the Elders' Council revised their original plan, and decided that all aliens had to move on the Earth. They also calculated that the best outcome for us would have been obtained by keeping disguising ourselves as humans and hiding among the locals, and so we did.
I felt so much relief at the time, finally I could live happily with my family and friends without fearing any imminent war for the annihilation and replacement of humans. Everyone seemed to be doing well, I was for sure convinced this was the case anyway, and the only thing we aliens had to do was to keep the secret and hide our true identity. Maybe we weren't humans, but we felt like earthlings too, we just wanted to live like anyone else.
I had just graduated from high school back then, and soon after I started my job at the hospital. I've always liked medicine and I like helping others, so taking care of other aliens and avoiding their true identities to be discovered during medical checkups seemed like the natural choice to me.
I still had a lot of free time back then, which I mostly spent with other two aliens I met on Sixam, Hermes and Ivy. They had passed through the same things as I did, and it was so refreshing to have friends of my age I could talk about whatever passed in my mind. I considered them to be my closest friends.
I thought we would have been together forever, at the time. With Hermes this was definitively the case, considering that we married a few years later and shared our lives from then on. Ivy, on the other hand, soon drifted apart from us, to the point we completely lost any contact with her in about a year since then.
We found out much later what had happened to her. The discontent among the aliens was rising already, many were struggling to fit into the human society, and a group of the most unhappy ones (labelling themselves as "the pirates") were hiding on Sixam with unclear purposes. The Elders' Council was officially taking care of them, so we weren't particularly worried about the situation, until Ivy showed up again, abducting me with an old spaceship to explain their reasons.
During that time, Ivy had had a child with a human. A hybrid kid to be precise, looking like a normal human if not for the purple skin. He and the few other hybrids born during those years were totally unable to disguise themselves, and thus feared by the Elders' Council as a threat to their plan.
We felt so betrayed at that moment, we had been told that whole time that hybrid children couldn't be born. Instead, those children were not just existing, but also kept hidden who knows where by the Elders' Council. That's why Ivy and many others were hiding on Sixam, and why they were asking so vocally about a big change: not just the Elders' Council had to be dismantled, but the aliens should have ceased to hide from humans and accept the consequences.
I think that at the time I was much more idealistic than I am now, the idea of overthrowing that obsolete Elder's Council which elaborated the Earth conquer plan and which was hiding the hybrid children, and also the one of stopping the use of a disguise and show ourselves for who we really are, seemed so appealing at the time.
Both I and Hermes agreed, and we were among the very first aliens to show our true faces when, eventually, the existence of the submerged and secret alien society became public domain.
Everything seemed right, we were in peace with our moral values, but now I can say we had no real clue about the consequences of that change. We were so naive and optimistic...
Our first miscalculation was about the end of the Elders' Council. We soon realised that, in fact, the Council was not just imposing their weird plans on us aliens, but also controlling the usage of the alien technology and of the Sixam's security forces. Consequently, since the very first months after the council overthrow, the most questionable individuals started taking over the old spaceships and using them to wreak havoc and commit crimes, no one seemed to be able to stop them anymore.
It is thus not surprising that the humans, already confused by the discovery of a few millions aliens hiding among them, started to be wary, if not afraid, of us. And we weren't spared from this wave of chaos either, as also Hermes was abducted and impregnated early during this stage.
I was pregnant too at the time, of twins to be precise. And this is how we ended with three little boys that livened up our days.
Their names are Leo, Orion and Aster, and they were probably the happiest page in our lives for both me and Hermes.
Our second miscalculation instead showed up a few years later, when we were the busiest with the children. During those years the humans had managed to slowly regain control over the chaotic situation we had caused, and new and scary political currents were emerging.
The most vocal exponent of those movements was, since the very beginning, the infamous Mr S. He kept claiming that we aliens were a public threat and that our technology and abilities, such as disguises and telephaty, had to be restricted due to public safety concerns. Many aliens like us tried to point out that the aliens acting as criminals were a very small percentage and that it felt discriminatory to restrict us all in order to punish them, but many humans seemed simply blinded by their fear for us and dismissed any attempt of communication.
Meanwhile, the children were growing quickly, and they soon started to face our same issues.
Orion has been the most impatient since the very beginning, and got in trouble more than once for reacting to the other children bullying him and his brothers just because they were aliens.
I and Hermes felt so helpless, we had done what we felt like it was the right thing to do, yet we were receiving that treatment in turn.
Did we really do anything to deserve it? We definitively felt like we didn't, and day by day the desire to react grew stronger. We didn't feel like the government, nor the society, were treating us fairly, we didn't feel represented by them anymore. And this is when our stubbornness in following the rules started to crumble.
We felt like we had a better time when we still disguised ourselves, when people just treated us like any normal people. Also, and more importantly, we couldn't accept the fact that our children risked missing any opportunity just because of the way humans were treating and avoiding the aliens. So, when Leo, Orion and Aster were old enough to understand and participate in our choice, we decided together to start new lives elsewhere, with new identities and new disguises.
And this is how we decided to move to Windenburg. At the time the only thing I regretted was moving so far away from my brother Milo but, once again, it is now that I can look back at what we did that I start to see how many problems we didn't consider at the time.
First of all, we didn't consider that we could have met other aliens in disguise, yet here she was, Claire. And she wasn't just a common alien either, but the youngest daughter of the infamous Mr S. She was born from an alien abduction too, and at the time I thought that spending time with her was probably the biggest risk we could take.
Yet, the boys at this point were old enough to make their own life choices.
The first one was Leo who, keeping the secret from us, fell in love with Claire and started a relationship with her. I later realised he really needed someone out of our family to share all his thoughts and sentiments with, without any restriction dictated by his disguise. Later on, after getting his high school diploma, he decided to enter the police, hoping to be able to provide fairer treatment to the other aliens. Another risky choice, in fact, but just in line with what I and Hermes did all over our lives.
Then there is Orion, where should I start from... He is really stubborn sometimes, but, as Hermes often reminded me, I shouldn't get mad at him considering that he inherited this side of him from me. Among our children, Orion had always been the least inclined to follow the rules, and he would always throw an irreverent grin at anyone who would try to bother him. Yet, the more time passed the more I realised he was the one who struggled the most at resigning to the unfair situation we were living in. That is probably why he, eventually, took such extreme life choice.
In fact, now he is living on Sixam together with a group of other aliens called "the rebels". They are working hard on saving the old Sixam technology which was left rotting on the planet after the dismantling of the Elders' Council and, albeit they would be considered criminals on the Earth, they claim to be doing quite well. I would just like him to call us a bit more often, but I’m also sure he’s capable of managing any kind of weird situation.
Finally, Aster had definitively been the one who gave us the least worries. He never liked to get into troubles, and spent a lot of time with his brothers and his girlfriend Roberta.
They moved out together recently, and he also managed to find a job as an illustrator for children's books. I'm sure they are going to do great.
Then the unexpected happened, the event that made me question again every choice I took along my life. We never knew who reported us, but someone had found out about our alien disguise and denounced us to the police.
Was the desire for a fairer and better life really a mistake? I'm not sure about the answer yet, but for sure it backfired, badly. I and Hermes were denounced for the long years of disguising and for forging fake IDs and medical records, and we were punished with several years of house arrest. The boys instead received a less severe sentence, as the events happened when they were still minors and all the responsibility was put on their parents, and only had to pay a hefty fine.
But we weren't the only ones who ended up regretting our past choices. Ironically, also Mr S. had to answer difficult questions about his past soon after.
Claire, understandably mad at her father, eventually decided to publically show her true alien identity and denounced Mr S. for having obliged her to disguise all along. A huge mediatic scandal followed, resulting in the end of the political career of Mr S. and in a momentary truce for us aliens. But for how long could this last, I wonder?
I'm very old by now, Hermes passed away a few months ago and I will probably reach him quite soon. Can I conclude I don't have any regret? Well, I regret all the continuous hostilities between aliens and humans, and that it wasn't possible to establish better communication among us. Also, I'm sorry to leave my children living in such a difficult world, where they will have to fight for any little fundamental right. Yet, I don't regret what I did. I always choose what I felt was the right thing with the information I had at the time, even if many things backfired on us I don't think we could have done better than this.
Also, I'm sure that Leo, Orion and Aster will be strong enough to face any challenge, and maybe even enough enterprising to change the current course of the events.
This will probably be one of my last notes on this diary, I'm getting tired of writing over and over about my life. So goodbye, my dear diary, it has been an adventurous run.
P.S.
My father once told me he was convinced that someone was reading his diaries. Well, my dear curious private diaries reader (if you really exist), you have to know that Leo is often writing on a diary too. Thus, if you are curious to know how the story continues, you should probably try to find where he's hiding it...
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