Happy Sunday. This week I'm back with another short story, the second one of the year. I do this ever so often, and you can find the last short story here, and lots more in the back catalogue of this blog (I recommend Maisy and Not Long For This World if you'd like pointers on where to start). For this week's story, called The Observed, I decided to try my hands on otherworldly science fiction. Please enjoy, and as always, do let me know what you think.
— The Observed —
A long time ago, somewhere in a galaxy far away, the Nexuria realised they weren't alone in the universe. They'd been searching for other beings – life forms of any sort – for aeons, and finally their efforts had borne fruit. Thousands of light-years away, across the Milky Way, in a hitherto unknown solar system, was a small, young planet full of water, carbon and oxygen. The planet was home to all sorts of primitive life forms, with one species standing out from the rest as showing some sort of elementary intelligence. This species called themselves Humans.
The Nexuria didn't want to bother with the Humans at first. After all, why should they make contact with a species so primitive that they hadn’t even figured out time travel, let alone interplanetary exploration? The Humans’ greatest achievement, as evidenced by the Nexuria’s astro-archaeological findings, was a brief sojourn to their planet's only satellite, which they called the “Moon”. Even then, for decades afterwards, they couldn't figure out how to make a secondary home of it or harness its resources.
Logic and reason gave way to sentiment in the end, though, because even though the Humans were beneath them, the Nexuria considered it their duty to nurture this young species they'd discovered. But first, they had to make contact. The Nexuria were a cautious species. They didn’t dare to make themselves known to others until absolutely necessary. No, they decided to observe the Humans, first from afar, and then up close. They sent representatives disguised as Humans to infiltrate their communities, live amongst them, learn their ways, collect data, and report.
As planned, they initially observed from afar, taking in anything and everything, all the data they could collect all over the planet the Humans called “Earth”. They learnt that the Humans weren’t the only species on Earth. There were other species which came in all shapes and sizes. Some of these species were more advanced than others, but not by much. The Humans considered themselves superior, over and above all the others. They weren’t, of course, but that didn’t stop them from believing they were.
Some of the Humans even considered themselves superior to other Humans, on account of the hue of the gelatinous outer coverings of their corporeal form, caused by variations in the amounts of a specialised polymer made from amino acid housed beneath said gelatinous outer coverings. In one of their most widely spoken languages – English – they called this gelatinous outer covering “skin”, and the polymers “melanin”. Some Humans considered the amount of melanin in skin to be inversely proportional to intelligence. This reasoning ran deep, such that for a time, the pale ones – those with little or no melanin – enslaved those with lots of it. Needless to say, the Humans did other unspeakable things to those they considered lesser Humans, and even more unspeakable things to other species.
But to their credit, the Humans were nothing if not resourceful. They’d harnessed the limited resources their near-barren planet had to offer, and put themselves in charge. They ran Earth, in short, so it was only logical for the Nexuria to study the Humans to determine whether they were worthy of contact. And study them, they did. What they learnt was fascinating.
The Humans were strange in their ways. They’d evolved specific rhythms to organise their lives. They divided time based on the rotation of the Earth about its axis, the revolution of the Moon around the Earth, and the Earth’s orbit around its star, which they called the “Sun”. These events gave them time constructs which they called days, months, and years.
The Humans performed most of their activities when their part of the Earth faced the Sun during its daily rotation. They called this period daytime, which sometimes amounted to roughly half of the time it took the Earth to complete a full rotation about its axis. The other period, which they called nighttime, was reserved for rest and sleep. Rest. Sleep. What a waste! In fairness to them, they had little say in the matter. They were made of meat, after all. Their systems tended to deteriorate and cease proper function without adequate rest. Their meat brains ran slower, their meat muscles ached, and even the part of them which wasn’t made of meat – their superior, calcium-rich endo skeletons – also stiffened, bristled and otherwise malfunctioned without rest.
Having gathered data at a glance, the Nexuria needed to go deeper, to get closer to the Humans, and to observe microcosms in turn. But where to begin? Any place was as good as any other, so the Nexuria chose at random. The first place they settled on was called Manchester, a small region on a tiny, autonomous island in the Northern hemisphere of the planet. This revealed itself to be an interestingly fortuitous selection, because the region, Manchester, advertised itself as different. They had a slogan plastered all around their streets which read:
This is Manchester, we do things differently here.
But having visited place after place on Earth, traversing both real boundary lines created by the mountains, deserts and water bodies, and imaginary boundaries fashioned based on seemingly arbitrary logic or none at all, the Nexuria came to understand that the Humans of Manchester were not all that different from the Humans everywhere else. Ironically, the Humans of Manchester, in considering themselves different from other Humans, turned out to be more like other Humans, because, as the Nexuria learned, thinking of oneself as unique and different from others was one of the most widespread qualities among the Humans.
There were other things the Humans had in common. For instance, they all seemed obsessed with atmospheric precipitation and meteorological conditions. They had names for the various types too. There was rain, snow, sleet, and hail, and this was just in the English language. In Hawaiian, another Human language with significantly fewer native speakers than English, they had hundreds of terms for precipitation. They talked about it a lot, so much that it seemed an acceptable topic of conversation amongst strangers and loose acquaintances. They planned their lives around it and made it the focal point for some of their activities. Sometimes they loved to play in it, and sometimes, they wished it away.
On close observation, the Nexuria observed that the Humans were driven by impulses they called emotions. There was a suite of these emotions and emotional states – love, hope, fear, anger, to name a few. The Humans experienced these emotions to varying degrees and intensity, regardless of what part of the planet they resided, what languages they spoke, or how much melanin they had in their skin. This was another thing they all had in common – they were by and large an emotional species.
But there was a select group of these Humans – not defined by location, language, skin colour, or other biological traits – who especially fascinated the Nexuria. This group was defined by status, and they operated on a different set of rules. They were called the “leaders”. Some of them were chosen by the Humans they were meant to represent, others took the reins themselves while everyone else watched on and did nothing. The leaders were meant to take charge and look after the interests of the Humans as a collective. But they hardly ever did that. Instead, they looked after their own interests, and compelled the others to live and act in ways that were inimical to the interests of the collective. For example, while the humans had an immense, almost infinite capacity for love, it didn't take much to nudge them towards misguided hate and prejudice, and the leaders seemed all too willing and eager to do this. In other words, the leaders ruined the Human experience for everyone else.
What was perhaps most interesting to the Nexuria was the paranoia of these leaders towards other leaders, other Humans, and even other intelligent species. They spent a great deal of time – more so than other Humans – speculating as to whether they were alone in the universe. They devoted an inordinate amount of resources to preparing for inter-species warfare and defending themselves against an invasion. This was all borne out of hostility towards the “other”, which was telling of these Humans’ mindset. The Humans, it seemed, believed that if another intelligent species arrived on Earth, such a species would be inclined to enslave, subjugate, or slaughter them, in the same way they had enslaved, subjugated, or slaughtered other species, and other Humans. There was therefore little doubt among the Nexuria that the Humans would project their beliefs and actions onto them – or any other intelligent species out there – and consequently react with hostility if they revealed themselves.
The more the Nexuria observed, the less they liked what they saw. They saw an irrational species, full of themselves, and incapable of acting as judicious custodians of their planet. Why, then, should the Nexuria reveal themselves to the Humans? Why should the Nexuria bestow the secrets of the universe on the Humans? How could the Humans be entrusted with that much knowledge and power, given how they’d abused the little they had on Earth? No, it was too big a risk, the Nexuria concluded. They decided to leave the Humans be, to keep observing from afar without making themselves known. They would revisit the matter after the Earth had made an additional ten thousand revolutions around the Sun. That is if the Humans hadn’t destroyed themselves and the Earth by then.
The Humans, of course, knew of none of this. They carried on as they were, believing they were alone in the universe, a superior, predatory species to subjugate all the other species on their planet. Little did they know, that they were the primitives, the prey, the observed.
P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.