Comments on the convenience of reading on here, your feelings about length of stories etc are welcome (see end of post).
It all
started with the bird feeders. Somebody just couldn’t go to the stars without
some birdies to fly around the yard in their new home. Must’ve been someone
important, otherwise I can’t imagine how they got it approved: besides the
extra weight (not the birds, so much, but enough feed till we could grow more),
they’d had to make sure they weren’t carrying any diseases that could
contaminate the native biome. A joke: of course like humans, birds are a bundle
of bacteria, and how could we know which and if and how they’d affect an alien
ecosystem? If we were genuinely concerned, we wouldn’t go, and we sure wouldn’t
take pets.
Then, they had to be certain the birds wouldn’t
fly off and colonise the whole planet. They were modified to breed only when fed
a special supplement, and given an implant connected to the perimeter system
that would shock them if they got close to the electronic barrier and knock
them out if they passed it (an alarm would send someone out to collect them) .
So there we are, settling on our new planet,
planting our intensive garden plots and doing ground level surveys. As soon as
the habs are up, they thaw the birds and we have our own little flock to
entertain us. Okay, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to have something so
familiar when you’re setting up house on a largely barren planet halfway across
the galaxy! Plenty of feeders were put up in the common spaces, so everyone
could watch the birds.
Now, here’s where it gets weird: a couple
dozen birds, half as many feeders, and suddenly all the feeders are empty every
day. Clearly those little birds couldn’t eat that much!
But who or what else could be eating or
stealing it? A prank was the first thought, but everyone swore innocence. The pre-colonial
survey showed no animal life forms on this landmass, apart from some worm/crustacean
like things in the mud near the river. (One of the imperatives of the colonisation
program: we couldn’t choose a planet that already had advanced life -I know, care
to define that?). Those worms didn’t seem like seed eaters, and didn’t show any
signs they could move that far overnight and not still be around in the
daytime. On top of that, nothing had tripped the perimeter alert around the
colony, meaning nothing came in at ground level, and we’d seen no evidence of flying
life forms that could come over the electronic fence.
The seed kept disappearing, and the subject
quickly changed from a funny ‘must be an obvious explanation’ situation, to an
almost freaked out ‘something is breaching the perimeter in our tiny colony
years away from home/help!’ situation.
The perimeter was deepened, the monitors
doubled, the seed still disappeared.
A human
patrol was set up: while they were present, the seed was untouched; when no one
was looking, it disappeared again.
Finally, thermal imaging cameras were set up
by each feeder. The next morning, everyone gathered to watch the footage. No
one knew what to expect, but nobody expected what we found.
Frankly, we’re still struggling with a
description: they are like no life form on earth, so the typical references to
insects or birds or reptiles or pigs, are useless. Someone pointed out they
looked like ghosts in old cartoons, which fit with our feelings, the way they
just appear, at night, and seem so insubstantial (invisible to the naked eye).The
name ‘Caspers’ was floated, and it stuck. If we ever find a way to speak with
them, we’ll have some explaining to do about that name.
Once we saw the video, and the moment of stunned
silence passed, everyone spoke at once. Aliens! First contact! Is birdseed
contact? Are they intelligent? Why are they invisible? Are they sentient? We
have to talk to them! Do they talk? We have to call Earth! We have to leave!
This is amazing! This is a disaster!
First off, it did seem that we were dealing
with intelligent life, or at least higher life: no flying amoebas here. There
seemed to be complex communication among them, consisting of very high
frequency sounds that the recording devices detected, and also seemingly
patterned changes in the shape of their bodies ( bodies? gas clouds?
ectoplasm?). Also, it sure looked like they were playing, as they jostled
around the feeders. But was this intelligence like crows, or like humans?
Dolphins? Elephants? Bees? In any case, it meant we shouldn’t be here, but
leaving wasn’t really an option given the technological level of our space
travel.
Our colony had a few people who were more or
less up on the thinking in this field, but no experts. After all, the planet
had seemed to be devoid of higher life during the exploration stage, so the
xenobiologists sent were mostly of the cataloguing variety. And let’s be serious,
experts? In xenobiology? It’s all theory, no one has encountered any higher
life forms from other planets, and the study of lower life forms, such as those
found on this planet, has just begun. We aren’t even in agreement about what
terms like intelligent life mean on Earth, how can we know on another planet?
The debate may never be over, certainly not soon,
but we did come to a few interim decisions:
put the birds
back on ice; keep putting out seed, rationed so we don’t run out; start growing
more as fast as we can (who knows how they’ll react when they see a whole patch
of the stuff? will they raid our other gardens?); hope the alien (earth) food doesn’t
make them sick; keep recording them to see if we can learn any more, and
finally,
wait for the
‘experts/big shots’ from earth to send recommendations (and a team, but that’s
long-term).
Unless the Caspers begin communicating first,
that is,.. they’ve started what seems to be mugging for the cameras….
End
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