Summary of Generation 3

From Leo's diary

Dear diary, 

During my life I moved to many places for very different reasons, and I surely passed through some really hard moments. Yet, I'd never imagined such a resolution, and I still struggle to understand how we actually ended in such a situation. It was a long journey, and the more time passes the more I end thinking about the old days...

I, my twin Orion and our little brother Aster are all born in Oasis Spring a few years after the aliens belonging to our parents' generation decided to stop using a disguise to merge among the humans, making the alien presence on the planet official. We are part of the second generation of alien born and grown up on the Earth, and the first one to not be born following an abduction (well, apart from Aster and a few others). 

At a first moment humans seemed unsure about what to do with us, most of us were just living our lives after all. However, their attitude towards us became clear very soon.

Since when we were children, people were staring at us as if they had never seen an alien before, or straight change their way just to avoid crossing us along the street. Other school kids weren't much better, they were told by their parents not to play with us and so we ended up spending most of our time with the other few alien children around the place. 

The attitude that humans showed towards us became so deeply rooted that, soon after, protests against us started, and it was when politics got involved.

Mr S. was the first of a long series of politicians who wanted to strictly regulate aliens in the Sim Nation. We were a threat to public security, he claimed, because we could use a disguise or telepathy at any moment to commit crimes and get away with it. Soon after, using alien abilities could even be considered a penal crime by law.

After hearing him repeating these ideas on TV day after day people openly started to show their hostility against us, while others seemed plainly afraid of us.

The situation at school wasn't easy at all at the time, we had never been bullied so much before, and even our parents were struggling in their workplaces. And this is when they came up with a very controversial idea.

We started to wear a human disguise, choose a fake name, and moved to Windenburg pretending to be just a normal and boring human family just like the others. 

I've always been very unsure about that choice, it meant openly breaking the law after all. On the other hand, it was so much easier to live our lives when everyone else treated us just like anyone else. Those few years could have been among the happiest in my life, even if I had some reservations about whether what we were doing was right or not, I didn't want it to end either.

In particular, I was very fond of the time I spent with the scouts. This may not seem like very relevant information, my dear diary, but this was when I met Claire.

I have to admit that I wasn't very impressed by her at first. The other members of the group presented her as the "youngest daughter of Mr S.",  and she mostly seemed to be a rebellious kid bossing around that aliens-friendly scout group to annoy her father.

However, everything changed when I found out she was hiding behind a disguise too, and thus about her true life. 

So we found out to have much in common, such as the weight of having to hide our true identity and keep a disguise on all the time, a messy childhood, and the general certainty that the alien conditions in the Sim Nation were completely unfair towards us. Our families didn't know at the time, they wouldn't have approved, but we had been each other support, as well as partners, since then. 

Our life went on in tranquillity for a couple of other years, when I had just graduated from high school and enrolled in the local police.

I had this vague idea in mind. I wanted to be useful to others, in particular to those who needed it the most. And I wanted to help the other aliens as much as I could, to avoid them facing discrimination also from the police. 

But this was also when we got reported for unauthorized use of an alien disguise.

We never knew who reported us, and probably this is not so important either. My parents always talked about it as if we had just been unlucky, but, at this point, I realize it was probably inevitable. Disguises are not perfect, and we couldn't pretend all the time to be someone else, we couldn't avoid suspicion forever. 

We were under home arrest until the end of the process, and our morale was at its lowest. I missed Claire as never before in those days, and she later admitted it was the same for her. And also that our misfortune was probably the trigger that convinced her to stop her father once and for all.

By removing her disguise in the midst of an online video stream, she demonstrated that her father, Mr S., was one of the very few ones to use alien abilities to his advantage. In his case, he obliged his own daughter to constantly use a disguise to preserve the facade of a perfect and happy human family. 

Needless to say, a huge scandal followed, the political career of Mr S. ended, and the support for his party dropped. 

Claire had to face the months of the trial in reclusion in her bedroom. Then, her father paid a huge sum in tribunal expenses, and then kicked her out. 

She moved to our place, we needed some time for deciding what to do at that point with our lives. Being the aliens caught using a disguise meant a lot of suspicious looks and harsh comments from our neighbours, but neither of us wanted to move somewhere else with other new identities again. No, this time we would have faced the hardships, and made our best so that the situation could improve in the future. 

Time went by, and day by day we were getting used to the new state of things. Those years were also when our two children, Luke and Lyra, were born.

We love them more than anyone else, and they motivated us to give even more to ensure the best life for aliens like us.

My brothers had to make important choices around that time as well. I had always thought to understand well Orion, we always spent a lot of time together, yet not even I could imagine he could have decided to move on Sixam together with the (self-appointed ) "rebels".

They broke a huge number of laws to live on Sixam in an underground bunker studying the old alien technology. He never openly admitted it, but I'm quite sure he just felt unhappy on Earth and looked for a more challenging and rewarding life there.

Our brother Aster instead has never been the type of person looking for anything sensational and out of the scheme, and always gave priority to his girlfriend (then wife) Roberta and to their children Samuel, Peter, Camille and Ariana. 

They were some of the busiest people I've ever met, yet they also seemed so happy about their lives.

Meanwhile, both Claire took quite a lot of time to choose the right career for us, and to get invested in them.

Claire has always been involved in groups asking for more rights for aliens, but she originally never considered turning that into a real job. Yet more and more people started saying that they had to make an official party if they wanted to obtain any concrete result, and also that she would have been a good leader for it. She was a bit sceptical at first, she didn't want to enter a jungle of opponents so similar to her father, but eventually decided to make the jump and try. 

Her first occupation was at one office of the Ministry for Technological Innovation, and during those days she took every chance to recall the utility of the ultra-modern Sixam technology. As a nice side note, she also convinced the Government to finance the research my brother Orion and the other rebels were conducting on Sixam for retrieving the old (yet ultra-technological) alien devices, allowing them to work in a decent-sized lab here on Earth.

As for me, instead, I was unexpectedly reintegrated as a police agent.

I didn't know how to interpret it at the time, after all my colleagues didn't show any remorse when arresting us for illegal disguising. Yet, my first Captain seemed to believe in me enough to give me a second chance. 

I felt so lost at the time, the line between right and wrong seemed so subtle, and I wasn't sure about returning to the police. It was my Captain's trust in me to make me decide to remain, and with hindsight I can now say I'm happy I made that choice. Who knows what would have happened to me, otherwise.

A few months later the Captain retired, and got replaced by a colleague with a quite different mindset.

He didn't just trust an alien like me, but he also believed that it was possible to use my alien abilities to the advantage of an ongoing investigation against an alien drug dealers' gang. This offer confused me even more than what the previous Captain told me, using telepathy and a disguise to catch other aliens was the right thing to do? After a lot of thinking and confronting with Claire, I decided to focus on the fact that the gang was in fact composed by criminals, and that in this way I could demonstrate that alien abilities are not only useful to criminals, but also to enforce law and order. Thus, eventually, I accepted this new task.

It took many years to track them down, they knew what they were doing. Not even using telepathy I was able to understand their plans for so long, that investigation instead of being an interesting challenge was turning into a great source of frustration.

The investigation reached really absurd levels during that week in Strangerville, where we got involved in an accident in the lab where Orion and his friends were working. Let me write this down, my dear diary, that week spent with Orion and Silas trying to track down what had happened in that place was just surreal...

Yet, not even solving the Strangerville mystery helped us to track the boss of that gang. To be honest, their drug was spreading more and more and its effects were becoming more severe.

Media started to report the news more and more, and it became just another reason to blame aliens. "The drug is made from an alien plant, their stuff is dangerous!", I can't count how many times I heard it...

It took us years before finally being able to arrest a suspect close enough to her boss to provide us useful information.

And suddenly my neverending investigation was over. We took a dangerous group of criminals away from the streets, and all my colleagues agreed when saying that we wouldn't have solved it if it wasn't for me and my telepathy. 

I hoped that this would have helped in improving the aliens' reputation, but now I realise I was probably too naive. They were just looking for a justification for fearing us, one day it was the drug made with that weird fruit, the other day it was a group of aliens on the other side of the Country vocally protesting for the right to be treated like anyone else.

Meanwhile, Claire's political career was advancing, and she managed to put together enough support to run as a presidential candidate in the oncoming elections. Her stronger opponent, Mr M., sounded like the carbon copy of her father, and based his whole campaign on the fear of aliens and proposing further restrictions on us.  He could be one of the very few people I genuinely think to hate. 

The pre-electoral period was really stressful for Claire, and at all we all shared a bit of her burden. She didn't expect to win, but not even to lose as badly as she eventually did. 

When Mr M. won, one of his first actions made it clear how his hate towards us was not just a facade held to get votes, but that he really hated us back.

On the assumption that having aliens living next to them was too dangerous to the humans, Mr M. proposed and pushed the approval of a new law dictating the transfer of all aliens to a single province, the one surrounding Strangerville.

It was an inhuman and unethical disposition, humiliating and discriminatory, but we weren't able to find any turnaround before we received our notification letter and we were obliged to leave.

And this is when I moved to yet another town, this time on the Strangerville plateau just next to Orion and Silas's place.

We were resigning to this new life as a closed province of the Sim Nation, when the rebels finally disclosed the plan they had in mind all along. 

Within their labs, they had been working hard for decades, hiding many data from the Government. Actually, they had hidden so much that no one else had any clue about their plan to turn the Strangerville province into a fully autonomous Country, where aliens could live autonomously on their own. They planned to call it New Sixam. 

The independence of New Sixam was officialised by a local referendum, which also appointed Claire as its first President. The relationships with humans were so deteriorated by then that no one was surprised by the result, while the Sim Nation government was too scared of our ultra-technological weaponry to attempt any contestation. This way, Claire was eventually able to give her first speech as the President of that new Country.

Despite all her attempts to keep the communication channels with the other Countries open, many Countries and (above all) the Sim Nation surrounding our borders denied any kind of diplomatic relationship.

There are still many infrastructures missing, but I'm sure that in a few years everything will be in place and operational. No, that's not what I'm worried about.

Finally, us aliens (or, actually, sixamians, as Luke always reminds me to call us) have a place where to live in which everyone is treated the same way. However, we can't avoid noticing how New Sixam risks turning into a fabulous golden cage, from which no one would be allowed to leave. I don't think we'll live a bad life in here, but both me and my family feel quite salty about the current difficult diplomatic relationhips. 

So here I am, patrolling the street of this new and young new Country. My younger colleagues seem so enthusiastic about it, while I feel just... tired. Maybe the best I can do is to teach them how to do this job before retiring, I had enough adventures up to now for my tastes. 

I don't think I will keep writing about politics on this diary either, I just want to focus on my family and enjoy as much as the circumstances allow me in my last years. 

However, I noticed that Luke is often busy writing, I'm quite sure he's keeping a diary too. He's very good at analysing any situation, I'm sure that anything he writes would be much more interesting than the boring notes I take these days. So, if any curious-private-diaries-reader ever read this diary, I would suggest you to look for his diary to see what happens next...