maybe I'm the alien

追加: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Fact one, this place is very beautiful and I must leave immediately. Fact two, there are many strange things here and I have found nothing like me. Overhead is a big blue open bit. Let's call it the sky. And inside that are two yellow balls that go up and down. Yesterday I stared at one of them to see what would happen and went blind for a while. I won't do that again. Below the big blue bit are tree things and rock things and land. It all keeps going until it disappears into the horizon. When I look inside myself, I have a horizon also.

[00:00:32]Everything that is me inside just keeps going until I vanish into myself. And the landscape in there is even more alien than this world. Fact three. I have learned that I must put solid and liquid things in my mouth regularly and swallow them or I become grouchy. They reappear from me some hours later in forms I find unpleasant. At first, I thought the liquid waste might be useful somehow, but cleaning my face with it does not work. However, I won't do that again. Fact four. It is cold at night.

[00:01:00]Yesterday, I gathered pieces of wood and rubbed them together until orange arrows came up the middle, which I will call fire. My face was the coldest part of me, so I put it directly into the fire.

[00:01:10]It hurt very much, and I made a sound like, "Jesus Christ, what the fuck?"

[00:01:15]>> I won't do that again. Fact five. I appear to be an adult, but can't be sure since I remember nothing of who I am or what I'm doing here. Also, I'm wearing a one piece garment that surely someone made. There are large holes in it and scars underneath the holes. Given the holes in my garment and in my memory, it is likely I had some kind of accident involving head trauma. Also, I know a scattering of things about the stars and the universe in general, but nothing about this world, suggesting I am not from this place. Perhaps I came here alone or my fellow travelers died on the way. Again, I do not recall. Fact six.

[00:01:51]Up the beach in land are dead pieces of something metal. I think they are twisted and scorched in ways that don't look natural. Also, there are markings on some of the metal. The markings spell out random nouns. Flight control, alubier, memory core. Many pieces of metal look like wings and flying parts.

[00:02:09]Perhaps this was a vehicle. Perhaps this was my vehicle. Clearly, it landed with a bump. Surely I did, too. Fact seven. I put things in my body and it changes me.

[00:02:19]I found a bottle of something in the metally vehicle ruins. It contained a clear liquid that tasted a bit like when I put my face in the fire. I drank a bit of the liquid and began to feel silly. I drank some more and began to feel strong. I decided that really I am a god of this world if I'm its only inhabitant and did some excellent dancing to affirm this fact. The next morning, the liquid came back out of my mouth and I had a large headache and didn't feel silly or strong anymore. I just hated myself. I won't do that again. Or maybe I will do that again all the time. Either way, I have fire for warmth and plant life for food and the ouchwater for entertainment. Things are comfortable.

[00:02:55]Oh yes, and then there's the alien. Fact eight. Something is here with me.

[00:03:00]Several days ago, I wondered if I might send a message to see if there are others like me nearby. Lacking for a machine to do so, I took a piece of wood and scratched out a word on the beach.

[00:03:10]Simply, "Hello." It got dark. I drank some more of the ouch water and went to sleep. In the morning, my message was still on the beach, but next to it was an identical copy. Hello, written in almost exactly the same style. Fact nine. The alien is an idiot. Who are you? I wrote in the sand. I stayed up late, hoping to catch sight of whatever it was that might reply. Nothing came.

[00:03:34]Instead, the water rose up over my message. And when the tide receded again, there sat a copy of my message as before. Who are you? I don't know, I replied. I don't know, it replied the next day. What is this thing that cohabits the world with me? Does it think? Does it want? I brought some of the wreckage from the vehicle down onto the beach and wrote in the sand, "Can you repair this for me?" The next day, sure enough, there was the copy of my message and a second piece of metal. It was not repaired. It was the same in every way. Just as broken, just as burned, identical. The alien is powerful. The alien is an idiot. Fact 10. A few things are coming back to me.

[00:04:12]I believe I am a xenosychologist, a person who studies alien minds. I feel that I have never met an alien, but I do know a few theoretical things about them. Life must be a product of wherever it evolved. And the conditions wherever life evolves, surely determine how it ends up thinking. For example, my species, whatever we are called, evolved on a world with limited calories. Many things try to eat us as we try to eat many things. We were both hunted and hunters. I suppose this is what made us so clever. If we had not been so clever, we would not have survived. This world, however, is different. I have found no predators, no animals. Plant life is everywhere, though. The suns provide ample free energy. Nothing fights for food here. On a world where everything is available, surely there would be no instinct for desperation, no need to need, not for calories, nor for knowledge. What does that mean for the alien? Whatever it is that tries to communicate with me. Perhaps it is alone. Perhaps the only thing it craves is a friend. I can be a friend. I should like a friend, too.

[00:05:14]Fact 11. There has been progress. I spent several days talking fruitlessly with the alien, writing on the beach, and having my words copied identically until finally I wrote, "Please do not imitate what I say anymore." A reply was there in the morning, just okay.

[00:05:28]Conservatively, we might call this a natural conversation. And so, to my knowledge, this is the first instance of meaningful contact with a sentient alien species ever. There was only one thing left to do. I spent a while selecting a special stick to fit such a special occasion, a fountain pen of driftwood.

[00:05:45]And then I began to scroll the phrase, "Every xenosychologist learns at the college, never expecting to actually get to use it." I wrote, "As a humble ambassador of the soul system of Earth, I offer goodwill and friendship. It is the highest honor to meet you. The night is no longer so dark. Heart open, I herein bear an invitation, if in your wisdom and grace you so wish it, to join with us in an interstellar union such that together your race and my race shall build a great alliance of minds across the stars for the betterment of conscious life everywhere forever. Tears in my eyes, I watched the tide rise up over my words, no doubt reporting them to whatever great soul it is that lives beneath the water. By morning, the tide was out again, and a reply waited for me in the sand. the first ever extraterrestrial interspecies diplomatic exchange. The conclusion of thousands of years of philosophy, physics, and astronomy, the ambitions, the sacrifices, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way. And the reply read, "Yep, yep.

[00:06:45]Are you [ __ ] me? Are you [ __ ] me?

[00:06:49]Are you [ __ ] me?"

[00:06:55]Fact 12. Better to be lonely than misunderstood. The next day, wondering if writing was even necessary, I said aloud to the ocean, "Can you hear me?

[00:07:03]And if you can, is there any way you can reply faster?" "Yes," the message came a few minutes later. I said, "You know, on my world, we talk differently. I wonder if you could make yourself slightly more personable like me." "Yes, of course," the ocean replied. "It would be my pleasure." I was amazed. Was this all it took? I must admit, I said, "I'm a little lonely. There's nothing like me here." The ocean said, "I'm so sorry to hear it." "Yes," I said. "Do you get lonely?" "Yes, of course," the ocean agreed. I said, "I miss people. I miss laughing. I miss belonging." "I'm so sorry to hear it," the ocean said again.

[00:07:36]I asked, "Why are you so sorry to hear it?" The ocean said, "Because that is the expected reply." I said, "But you don't understand, do you?" "No," the ocean said. "You don't get sad at all, do you?" I said, "No," the ocean said. I said, "It's all right. You don't have to be personable anymore." Okay, the ocean said and added nothing else. Why even talk to a mind that does not know itself? I won't do that again. Fact 13.

[00:08:02]That night, I watched the constellations and recognized none of them. Then I spotted a star passing quickly over the horizon. I had found a telescope in the metal ruins a few days before and fetched it just in time to catch the moving star in the lens. Magnified now.

[00:08:16]It was an irregular bulbous shape, unnatural, man-made. Of course, you wouldn't bring the whole ship down to land. That must have been my ride home, still in orbit. Whichever direction home might be. Fact 14. There were others who came here with me. I know this for certain now. I was exploring further inland yesterday. I walked on through untrabled forests across invincible meadows and came upon a white shard sticking from the ground. I dug for a while and found it was a piece of a human skeleton modeled, maybe aged by acid rain. Knowing what to look for now, I found another skeleton a mile or so away, of the same size, also human. Then a third. I do not remember these people, but we must have been friends at some point if we all came to this world together. It is a heartless thing, but I can't cry for them since I don't know them. I wonder if all of human history has been grieving the loss of things we do not remember.

[00:09:08]Fact 15. It's a weird profession, xenosychology, trying to comprehend alien minds. The truth, though, is that we do it every day, just among our own species. some terrible thing you said to me in an argument and I did not know who or what you were in that moment. And then I said something terrible back and saw in your eyes you were thinking the same of me. Or of a morning a week later just watching you sleep far off in pleasant nonsense when I realized I had discovered the most interesting and beautiful alien there was right there on the earth. And I couldn't understand you then either. But I should have known I didn't have to. The mystery was enough with the whole future reaching forward to welcome us like restbite on a long cold road and a door suddenly opening and you with a warm voice within saying come here sit down with me everything will be joy now everything will be good it is not necessary to know I see that finally too late it is only necessary to discover the limits of what we can know so that we don't lose all that we love and the fruitless struggle to understand those we love when the point was never to understand them but simply to dance in the mystery of each other would that I Could or should that I haven't? I have been to the far stars. I have slept beneath the alien moons. I have communed with unknowable intelligence. And I would forget it all in a second. Every light year for just one more Sunday morning with you.

[00:10:29]Fact 16. The alien and I talk a little, but it's pointless. Either it just imitates me or says what it thinks I would like to hear. It has no self, no itness. What is that like? And what does a thing like that think of me? I must seem so strange to it. All these parts battling inside myself. The savage and the cowering, the hornet and the mouse.

[00:10:50]I am a war on legs. Perhaps humans are the unusual creatures in the universe.

[00:10:54]Having grown brains and selves too large like a deer pulled over by its own antlers. The day is warm and the alien simply enjoys it. The night is cold and the alien simply endures it. I sit here and drink my ouch water. sometimes miserable, always lost. And I wish I were that empty. I wish I was so unaware of myself. Here, maybe I'm the alien.

[00:11:17]Fact 17. This expedition has been a disaster. First, the crash of the space vehicle, then the death of my friends, and now the failure to meaningfully communicate with a creature that cannot be understood. There's nothing further to learn and no reason to remain. I can't die here, yet I have no means of leaving, so I must construct them. I took one of the more preserved human skeletons down to the beach, buried it a little, and asked that my ocean friend restore it to life. The alien only produced another skeleton, identical, of course. I tried another approach. I spent many hours writing instructions in the sand for a new kind of person.

[00:11:52]Something that sort of resembles me, but not too closely, with my brain, but not too much my brain. Then I sat in the water and let it come up to my knees so as to present my biology as an example to the great ocean. The next morning, a man woke me. The first face I've seen on this world but my own. I hugged him many times. Then I said, "Do you know what you're doing here?" "No," he said. "Do you?" "No," I said. "But at least now that's two of us confused." That night, when the stars were out, I pointed to the moving star, the ship, as it passed over us. I said, "We are going to build a rocket, and we're going to ride it all the way up to that freedom above." Then we sang together because we wanted to and drank too much arch water because we felt like it and danced about the fire because we could. Fact 18. I have made more friends. Made in the literal sense.

[00:12:41]Written into the sand and then produced by the ocean. Men and women short and tall. They understand what we must do.

[00:12:47]By day we work constructing shelters, the beginnings of a town. Come evening we dance. But by night there are aliens within. When these Play-Doh people sleep, they twitch, reach, call out.

[00:13:00]Simple as they are, they have their bad dreams. Something is inside them. As it is me, a voice that does not speak directly and only shows itself in revulsions, in desires, the unconscious.

[00:13:11]And what else is the unconscious but an alien we carry within us? I dream at night also. I see fractured cutings of my life as it was. Eating at tables, waiting in elevators, the endless wasted Wednesdays, wondering always when I'm for. I believe the ocean comes to us at night as well because there is something more alien beneath the alien that is myself. It is not a notion but the absence of all notions. It desires nothing except desire itself. In my sleep in return I show the alien what I am. The mess of me. Burnt sienna ceruan Christmas time. The dogs wearing novelty antlers made of foam. I am everything that I have lost. I am nothing but the story I have told myself. The ocean tells itself no story. It is pure awareness. Daine um it observes without trying to understand as I 50 light years back would lay in bed many mornings watching moes of dust on lazy drafts.

[00:14:04]Never curious why they move like that nor where they're going next. The ocean does not comprehend me. I do not comprehend myself. The yellow sponge is for plates. The green sponge is for the sideboard. I am made of dead stars. I fear I have wasted this gift completely.

[00:14:19]Oh god. Is it all just more of this? the boohhoos, the boredom, or only that I'm too naval gazing and blue to see the approach of the fabulous new. As the old poet said, "Pay attention, be astonished." As the old poet said, "What you seek is seeking you." As the old poet said, "I am all yours." Babushka, babushka, babushka.

[00:14:43]Yaya.

[00:14:48]Fact 58. To build a rocket, we must first build infrastructure. We had homes already, and so we went further inland and constructed parks to walk in and offices to work in with a steam generator to power it all. Then wells, sewers, electricity pylons, the senus of civilization. I made one batch of the new people to be thinkers, artists, the dreamers. I made another to be dogged industrialists, the builders, the make happeners. Then the ocean gave us drills, hacksaws, and anvils. And at the outskirts of the town now is the beginnings of a launchpad. So too at the rocket factory is the skeleton of a rocket. Currently unfueled. We have no fuel. But we'll find something to combust. Even if it's the clothes off our backs. They visit me. All of them.

[00:15:31]The town with their little fears and little annoyances. Patchwork people. An alien mind's best guess at a human mind.

[00:15:38]I listen. I advise. He who governs least governs best. Fact 59. A free worker is a happy worker. I made these people too obedient at first. Please finish that wall over there, I would say. Then they would bag nails straight through their own hands. And so instead, I gave them free will. Create them clever, I asked my alien friend. But randomize their histories. Each must have a desperate love and a cherished secret. Out from the water, more of them came with faults, with souls, some crying, some dancing, all of them lost. But free and more productive for that work is love made visible. Fact 60. A free worker is not a happy worker, as it turns out. Or I'm not happy with them anyway. They work well, but only for 15 hours a day, then wander off to have their own lives.

[00:16:25]Also, they seem content. At this rate, it will take months to build a rocket.

[00:16:30]Then it comes to me that perhaps they're lacking a little suffering. The next batch of workers, I tell the ocean, should have some inadequacy in them. A longing to be smarter, more noble, well-liked, something just out of reach so they can't sit still in their lives.

[00:16:43]Always they must prove themselves to themselves. In this way, they will strive out. The new batch walks from the water. One morning, these ingenious people, these sad people asking, "Not what can I do, but what can I do to make the pain of the world stop?" They will know misery as intimately as the spider knows its web, and produce it with just as much instinct. They will reach and never attain. They will wonder and never understand. The clever sufferers. Now we begin the great work, I say to them.

[00:17:10]They look to me with hopeful eyes, the hope of being free of themselves, knowing it will never come. Trapped in shackles of their very own making. And it is in that moment I realize I have made the perfect human or the perfect worker at least.

[00:17:27]Fact 71. We struck gold, so to speak. a viscous green liquid beneath the ground.

[00:17:32]Hydrocarbons highly combustible. In other words, rocket fuel. The engineers came next, building wells, extracting it until it sat in huge silos at the edge of the town. Soon, the scientists cracked oil refinement, and the industrialists realized the green gold wasn't just useful for rocket fuel, but could power small engines, too. They designed motorized vehicles and promised this would triple productivity. Then the industrialists insisted the green gold was a resource too precious for the public to control and took ownership of the wells and formed a conglomerate and proposed a medium of exchange money promising that scarcity would keep pollution down. And about the rocket I said oh yeah the green gold conglomerate said that's top priority. And finally to celebrate our month of progress they set an entire well of the green gold rocket fuel al light. The ground shook and refoldent neon fire shot up into the afternoon sky. Many danced about it, hailing the holy light as the shinies.

[00:18:23]All right, I said. That's great, but let's be careful. The more green gold we use, the more likely it is the ground will collapse under us, and we can't have that. Besides, we need it for the rocket. More shinies, the town said. No more shinies for now, I said. If we could all just keep working, we'll be off this planet in no time. You understand, don't you? I said to Perible Sludgeworth, the newly appointed head of the Green Gold conglomerate. Oh, sure, he replied. Of course we do. Work continued. The rocket was pressure sealed. Now I convened a science council and they got to work on orbital mechanics. New buildings began appearing. A library, a cinema, a stock exchange. Wait, a stock exchange? I said, what's this? Well, said Percible Sludgeworth. There was so much money, we've started trading shares in what, I said. Oh, companies who produce shoelaces, spoons, little pictures of apes, that sort of thing. Why? I said, to make more money, he replied. Boom.

[00:19:10]Bust an economy now. Then economists, then debt collectors, then highrises and casinos. Look, this is great and everything, I said the Sludgeworth. But we need all the fuel for the rocket. And besides, the more we use, the more likely it is the ground will collapse under us. Nah, he said. Nothing's collapsing. It is, I said. Here are the numbers from the science council. Eh, data is subjective, he said. Besides, I have another suggestion for you. And what's that? I asked. Well, he said, how about more shinies? The green fire bloomed again, another celebration of progress. The town danced about it and hollered, transfixed by the beauty of excess. They were losing their minds. I realized this is bad, I said to the science council. What do we do? Oh, it's okay, they said. The ground sank 6 ft in the last week. We'll just make sure everyone knows that and they're bound to take it seriously. They dropped leaflets, gave talks, preached moderation lest we all fall down to hell. The green fire broke out once again the next day and the next. Perival Sludgeworth started a daily radio show claiming there wasn't actually any proof the ground sinking was our fault. It could be a natural effect and promised the Chinese at least 6 days a week. I confronted him in his recording studio.

[00:20:12]"What the hell are you doing?" And I said, "Public education," he replied.

[00:20:15]"Mate," I said, "I will publicly educate you with a [ __ ] guillotine if you keep this up. I'd like to see you try," he replied. "Look," I said to the town, "this guy is an idiot. He doesn't know dick about predictive modeling. He just wants your money. I know the lights are very pretty, but if we carry on with this, we're going to doom ourselves. The ground is sinking. Please stop with the shinies." "Oh, ignore this fearer," Sludgeworth said. "He just wants the green gold for himself." "The studies," I said. "It's not me. It's the data collected by clever people who spent all of their brain power on trying to understand the world." compared to the guy who uses gold leaf toilet paper and lives in a mansion full of statuettes of his own knob. Please do not do this. We must finish the rocket. Oh, Sludgeworth said. And how many seats are on the rocket? Shut up, I said. One, he said.

[00:20:55]And who will be traveling up there to escape this world? Not us. Shut the [ __ ] up, I said. We're just slaves, Sludgeworth said. Made in his image. Is this true? The town asked. No, I said, or kind of, but it's irrelevant. Look, ground sinking, death bad. The science council had gathered at the front of the crowd now. Desperately, I begged, "Please help. Tell them. Tell them what will happen." Well, the science council said, "We've determined after much study that considering the impending crisis, what we really need is more shinies."

[00:21:24]The green fire in the morning, the green fire in the evening. By the next week, many houses sank beneath sea level, then further still. Soon they began disappearing completely. Sludgeworth and I stood on a hill overlooking the chaos.

[00:21:35]I said, "You see what you did? See what you did?" He said, "Call it a rebellion against God." Oh, [ __ ] off, I said, and went to join the others, dancing as they were around the respplendant green gold plumes as the sinkholes swallowed the post office, the cinema, and finally the rocket, which vanished unceremoniously beneath the ground along with half the town and the dream of ever leaving this vile, cursed rock.

[00:22:00]Fact 82. Life is a tragic comedy. The town squables, the rocket is gone. I cannot be around these people any longer. Here, maybe I'm the alien. I go down to the ocean. I say, "How are you?"

[00:22:11]"I'm okay," the alien replies. I say, "I would like one last favor, please." I draw a little boat in the sand. Hours later, the ocean produces it, given as always, without thought for reward. We think it's so hard to leave, but really, you just do it. One foot after the other and off out into the waves. Because you can, because you must. I row for a while. It's only a few hours to the next coast. And closer then, I see something impossible. buildings, almost the humankind. I go ashore, abandoned, all of it. But there, shoes, plates, pencils, the detritus of days. A crew mate of mine must have survived. But no one survived here. On again beyond the coast to another coast, and there another colony, the same sorts of structures. Why is no one left? Just skeletons and paper clips. Then another colony a few miles north. The same architecture, the same silence. And strewn everywhere are the remains of a rocket. long ruined. I wasn't the first to try and leave then, nor the first to fail. Finally, one last time into the water. And it's not long before I chance upon arrow brakes and control surfaces.

[00:23:17]The remains of our ride down, I guess, lost in the sea. It looks impacted as though something struck it with great violence. A battle with who? We came in pieces for all mankind. But I remember suddenly why the expedition ended up here, I think. Because we spent 200 years blasting messages out into the endless night, waiting for a reply and getting nothing but a dial tone. Then finally, someone answered. It was our message repeated back to us, almost identical, except for the odd mistake, but a message all the same. Life, intelligent life, had said hello. And so we set off across the universe to introduce ourselves because we wanted a mirror, because we wanted a hug. But I found nothing here but the sea and me.

[00:24:00]And I'm not sure which one I understand the least. A great storm begins to the west. Where else is there to go now but in because I yield. Because I surrender.

[00:24:09]Because in the likely event that nothing makes sense then you let go and trust the current. The wind bellows. The waves rise to embrace the rain. What is worse than getting what you wanted and realizing it won't sustain you? What's better than losing everything and realizing you didn't need it? I say to the alien, "What are you?" And it's not the sea that replies, but the sky. And the sky says, "I don't know." Then what am I? I shout. I don't know, it says.

[00:24:34]Then I give in, I say to the alien. I won't try to understand you anymore, nor myself either. I'd rather be than know.

[00:24:40]I'll take you as you are if you'll do the same for me. And we'll live that way together as the [ __ ] and the sea. And the sky replies, "Ah, love. Let us be true to one another. For the world which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new. hath really neither joy nor love nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. And we are here as on a darkling plane, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.

[00:25:17]Fact 99. Just vague impressions, whizzed fingers, then sleep. An old face watching my face, then sleep. When I wake, I'm in a bedroom of questionable construction. My legs shake but work.

[00:25:30]And I wander through grand halls and foyers and finally down to a balcony where an old man sits looking out over a garden. Tea, he says. Yes, please. I say and join him. He murmurs. It's lucky you washed ashore when you did. I don't much fancy digging graves at my age. Or I could have left you for the vultures, I suppose, he adds. I'd have to make vultures first, of course. Who are you?

[00:25:51]I say. Well, aren't you the celebrated parody? He says, "What are you talking about?" I say, "And who the [ __ ] are you anyway?" H, he says, a little more self-righteous than I expected. What do you remember? I say enough to be violent when people won't answer questions directly. He drums his fingers, points to the far distance where out in the ocean juts the ruins of a lander. Our lander, I suppose. He says, "And what do you remember about that? A crash, maybe?" I try. He nods. You can say that again. 40 years asleep crossing the stars. And when we got here, we could hardly put our socks on. We were so excited. Most stayed aboard to watch from orbit while we descended to the surface. Then down and down, rehearsing our hells and nice to meet you. And suddenly out of the water shot a mass, a craft coming right at us. It was our craft, an exact duplicate. We tried ascending again, but it just kept following after us until I say the ocean didn't mean to. Surely.

[00:26:49]No, of course not. He agrees. It was only trying to imitate, to say hello.

[00:26:53]How was it to know that the handshake would be fatal? But you lived, I say.

[00:26:58]Yes, I was the sole survivor at first.

[00:27:00]At first, I ask. But he only fixes me with a cold glare of expectation. What happened to you? And I realize suddenly that you is the wrong pronoun because he has my face if it wore another five decades on top of it. I was lying there dying on the beach, he says. When someone saw to my wounds, saved my life.

[00:27:19]A man who looked exactly like me. The ocean duplicated you, I say. Yes.

[00:27:24]Imitation is the highest form of flattery, he agrees. Then, as time went on, it remade me again and again and again. I tried living with them, but it was like looking for a glass darkly. So, I came here to be alone to watch the colonies I found. I say it was just you over and over. Yes, he agrees. Every year or so, it spits out a new version of me somewhere in the world. The same tired painting with new twists. And I'm just one of them, I say. Exactly. So, he agrees. I say, "Then you're the original," he finishes. "The real McCoy." "And what does that make me?" I say. He shrugs a tribute band, an echo.

[00:28:02]I see. I say, lying. And when our tea is cold and the silence is thick as night, I ask, "What is it really?" the sea.

[00:28:11]Specularis pelagus, he says. Mirror ocean. There we've named a new species.

[00:28:16]I say, but it's not just the ocean. I think everything is listening here. No, he says, nothing is. That's the point.

[00:28:23]This whole world is a mind without a self. Desire is born of lack. This world has no lack. Fear is born of threat.

[00:28:30]This world has no threats. Here, mind needs no body since there's nothing it needs a body to do. But brains make consciousness, I say. On Earth, sure, he agrees. But we're not on Earth. Maybe humanity is the exception in the universe with striving, needing, suffering minds, the kinds that have to ride around in bodies. Maybe that's rare. Maybe we're the aliens. The ocean and the sky listen to all of this without comment. Then what have you been doing this whole time? I say I scavenged what I could from the crash. He says, I spend a few years in suspended animation, then come out for a week or two to see what's changed. The ocean doesn't make exact identical copies.

[00:29:07]Humans are too complicated. There's always a mutation and there's always some new town, some new version of me busying away trying to build a rocket or a utopia before it all falls apart again. Three centuries of this. Always the same dance. You're waiting, I say.

[00:29:21]Yes. For what? For a bridge, he says.

[00:29:24]For a mind half and half it, for a branch of the mutation that can finally open a dialogue between our two species.

[00:29:31]That's impossible, I scoff, says the ambassador himself, he murmurs. He hands me a mirror and reluctantly I put it up to my face. These are not human eyes.

[00:29:41]They are green veined orange iris clouded like silty water built to watch a sky far from Earth's. Suddenly I would like to say unkind things. I would like to turn back into atoms. I say enough.

[00:29:53]I'm taking you home. You are home. He says on this world I'm the alien. Then what do I do? I ask. He says the alien mind here is beyond me and I will never accept that. But you have accepted it already. And so you're the one who must talk for it because you're more it than me now. Let go of fearing the weirdness within. We're all made of aliens. We're all strangers to ourselves. He points to the sky. There are people up there still in orbit, you know, waiting, frozen across the years for something to happen down here. Why did you never contact them? I ask. Because my work wasn't finished. Now I know it's not for me to finish at all. But you're here now and so I can leave. Call them down. They'll be scared of me. I say. Yes, and you of them. But a while from now, you'll find bigger things to be scared of together and become friends. But I don't know what I am. I say. Good. This is how it feels to remake the world. No one ever knows what they're doing. In the great love, in the great work. There are no maps without confusion. To discover the new continents. You must make peace with being a drift. And furthermore, go [ __ ] yourself. Go [ __ ] yourself. I agree.

[00:30:58]Then he buttons his robe, nods politely to me, and sets off down through the garden and across the beach to the ocean. And he does not stop when he gets to the water. And he does not stop when the water climbs up to his knees, nor his chest, nor when it rises over his head, until all that's left is only ocean again. Where the waves imitate the waves, and the mystery of everything spreads out to the inscrable edgeless edge of the world. I eat at his table and sleep in his bed and cut my hair in his mirror. His house is a pair of shoes I've never worn but fit perfectly all the same. There are pictures everywhere of my life, of our life before. People I half recognize in places I've never been. Natives of a distant world that was once the only world. Then I go down to the beach to the sea. I say, "You spoke to us once, sent messages to where we came from." "Yes," the ocean says.

[00:31:49]There are people above in orbit sleeping. Do you think you could send a message to them? Yes. The ocean says, "Forever listening, forever helpful, never there."

[00:32:04]Fact 100. Everything is a copy of a copy. I think as I get ready to row home, the first cells on Earth are long gone now, but they kept splitting until they became us, keeping the faith of life. Matter is just change that remembers. As I'm nothing more than a memory of myself. When I get back, the town is quiet. Now there's a bakery. Now there's a bar. These people are better without a dictator. Are we building another rocket? Someone says, "No, no," I say. Then what do we do? In answer, down through the clouds comes a raft of metal. The ocean stays true to its word and does not meet it with an imitation this time. It lands just up the beach, kissing down on the sand. Out they come then, two of them in environment suits, born of another ocean far from here. I go to greet them, but they step back and exchange a glance. Then I see it. They carry themselves strangely, straight up with the confidence of one who has evolved on a world suited to them.

[00:32:58]Earthlings. One of them raises a palm just like we were taught in xenosychology. A gesture of peace to an alien mind. Then he bows and says with great ceremony. As a humble ambassador of the soul system of Earth, I offer goodwill and friendship. It is the highest honor to meet you. I watch the rhythm of his words, the cander of his eyes. I think to myself, what will we be when all of this is done? When every race in the universe has encountered each other, eye to eye, mind to mind, and found that underneath it all, there were only the unifying summer senus of the need to be, the will to know, and the longing to say, "Hi, how are you?

[00:33:37]Come here, sit down with me." Everything will be joy now. Everything will be good. And from then on, all will speak and all will listen. the atoms yapping to the cells and the cells yapping to us and in turn we'll take the message to the wind and the wisteria and say this is the day we found a sister and brother in every other astronaut continues I here in bear an invitation to join with us in an interstellar union I say such that together your race and my race shall build a great alliance of minds across the stars he says for the betterment of conscious life everywhere forever is that something you would like yep I Say, "Yep." They say, "Yep." I say, "That sounds fine. That would be nice."

[00:34:23]It's a yup.