[Archive] Suitors of the Giant

Another short story from around 2015, this one was mainly a device to explore the difficulties of first-contact with aliens.

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They didn't come here for us. The Suitors' home world had developed as a satellite of a gas giant not unlike our Jupiter, and they arrived in our solar system looking for a world similar to their own- for the purposes of colonization as far as we know. They must have been surprised to see the night-side of our little gem sparkling down here a few light-minutes away. Its interesting, you know? They say the conditions on earth, our peaceful little plot of space, are only the way they are because of Jupiter, the giant protecting us from many of the asteroids or comets that might otherwise barrage our little planet. That, apparently, is what makes a giant's moon as common of a place as it is for life to form, or so they told us. They'd never seen another planet quite like ours before. The Suitors could never meet us face to face- at least not in the flesh anyway. They required a very different atmosphere than us. They needed oxygen, of course, but far less, and much more moisture in the air.

I remember the day of first contact in a dreamlike way. Their approach was not boastful or offensive, but cautious. They watched us for several months, hiding around dead Jupiter in their reflection-less ship. We would later learn that the Suitors had only ever made contact with one other race, and that it had resulted in a grave loss on their part, though they would never discuss with us the event in any detail, only that it had happened quite some time ago. I'm happy, to think about it, that we did not scare them off. To watch most of our fictional depictions of first-contact, you'd think we were convinced that aliens had the single minded goal of conquering our measly little planet, and I suppose you could speculate that we were projecting, right? I mean, to look at human history, we have a long history of subjugating one another, it's only fair to assume we'd extrapolate that out into space, right? But we had matured, I think, by that point. I like to think we had. At any rate, it seems they were understanding, if only because we shared so much in common with them.

They had a name for themselves, though the exact wording escapes me. Something a bit silly and self-referential like our own 'Man-the-Wise' you know. I guess that must be standarad. At any rate, language doesn't work the same for them. To hear them 'talk' to each other... theres alot of touching, and then it sounds like a dolphin and a crab trying to have a conversation. As I said, dispite apperances, we really do have alot in common with them.

They evolved, like us, from a per-sentient brachiating creature that moved down to the ground and developed tools, had manipulating appendages and big brains. They spread out, conquered their planet, fought among themselves for space, resources, religion, and developed complex societies, and finally graduated out to the stars- a step we had only barely flirted with at that point.

It was funny actually- funny to me, I mean, I'm not sure if they have comedy- anyway, it was funny, they seemed surprised, actually, that we had space ships at all. To them, I like to imagine, it must have been as if they sailed into shore in a nuclear submarine, and found that the native children had some-how cobbled together a functioning sail boat. We couldn't cross oceans, but we were, in fact, mariners.

Anyway, I'm getting side tracked, I was talking about first contact. I've mentioned where we were similar, but the differences are what matter at first. Unfortunately, there really isn't any way to say 'we come in peace' to a civilization utterly foreign to your own, evolutionary parallels not-withstanding.

The Suitors were pretty clever though. They had intercepted just a little bit of our media, apparently, and had some how figured out just enough of our body language from it to send their message. The clip they played was from an old western- it was just people waving to one another. That's it. A few looped clips of people waving to one another. Like, holy shit, right? If they had that, they must have seen other stuff, like war films, or pornography, right? Maybe they were just... hedging their bets?

Anyway, in case you're wondering, no one thought it was a joke- we would have, sure, but they sent it while orbiting right up above us in the atmosphere- that said, I'm sure Russia was still convinced America was fucking with them or something, but yeah.

I know as much as I do only because I was part of the little team slapped together to figure out what to do. I know what you're thinking, and it was just like in a movie. You don't seriously think the American government has some sort of 'alien-contact-team' on hand do you? And no, the world didn't just turn to the United States to figure it out on their own- as nice as it might have been to present a unified front to the Suitors, there was no way anybody was going to get along with each other with so little time to prepare. To the Suitor's credit, they ultimately ended up making contact with every nation that wanted to speak with them- but as it turned out we were the first to legitimately try and communicate. I hear China tried to send them some sort of message, but it just isn't that simple. They needed some kind of baseline for human communication before anybody could talk to anybody, in the traditional sense.

So they had us. They didn't scramble us from across the nation, the Government just grabbed what they had laying around in arms reach. We were all from D.C. There were a handful of biologists and astronomers, a few generals and senators, the vice president (the president herself was squirreled away somewhere in case they nuked us I guess) and me, a linguist. An interpreter, specificaly- not my ideal career parth, but thats life for you.

I felt a bit like an afterthought, the lot of them were all pretty strong personalities, so I stayed quiet for awhile. A good bit of time was devoted to just trying to interpret the message they'd sent us. We had it all there in front of us, the video message playing on repeat, and a smattering of photographs of their ship spread out on the table. I remember thinking 'holy crap, this is actually happening' and it was pretty surreal. Anyway, one of the generals was convinced it was a trick. Like, they were trying to lull us into a false sense of security or something by sending us footage of cowboys waving at each other. From a human perspective, it makes sense- it was pretty easy to imagine the message like, as being ironic, or something, but as far as I could figure they knew exactly what they were doing.

They didn't send us pictures of themselves- they look a bit like octopuses, by the way- and they didn't try to talk to us in their language, which would be barely audible to us, much less intelligible. It was their attempt at a baseline greeting, no implications. Just 'Hello'. The senators were mostly concerned with what they wanted. After all, they had to want something otherwise they would have either never shown up, or would have obliterated us on sight, due to us being a huge threat, I guess? They were freaked out- I can't blame them for being a bit scared, but seriously, right? The vice president didn't talk a whole lot. He'd actually been an astronaut when he was younger, and I could tell all of this was really blowing his mind. Well, it was blowing all of our minds, but yeah. He just sat there, feet up, examining those photographs of the ship.

The ship was really a beautiful thing. It wasn't a saucer, lets get that horse shit out of the way. It was dark, very non-reflective, and faceted like a stealth bomber. It had some sort of symmetry to it, but there was no way of telling which end was the front. it was just like a big black cut gemstone. Not a lot to discern about them from that, other than how totaly alien they were to us.

So I started forming a plan. We were the home team, so the onus was on us to try to talk to them. Learning their language would come later. But first things first, we needed to say 'hi' back, right? After everybody had talked, discussed, worried, yelled, blustered, etc. etc. I took the floor, and did my damnedest to pretend to know what I was talking about. No one really had a better idea than mine- but the scientists at least seemed to be on board with me, and we formulated our response. It was pretty simple, just a video of us waving at the screen. We wanted to let them know they'd gotten something right.

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The politicians ended up taking a back seat. They figured there wasn't a lot they could do until we could actually communicate with the suitors. The biologists were waiting- or perhaps salivating for a picture of them, and the generals and the astronomers were busy discussing the ship. That really left me to figure out the whole language barrier thing. I guess that's why I was there, right?

First of all, the only way we had of communicating with them at the time was with video clips. It was weird, but I made due. I had to go in with a few assumptions. One, that they understood the concept of written language. Two, that they would understand the gesture of my hand pointing at something. I didn't have a lot to go on, but I figured that if they could pilot a space ship across the galaxy and send us a video of some fuckoffs waving at each other, they could probably figure out my primitive monkey gesturing and scribbles. So I got some note-cards and a pen, and started taking pictures. I started with the basics.

Pointing at my self, labeled 'HUMAN'
picture of the earth, labeled 'EARTH'
picture of the sun,
picture of....

I kinda drew a blank after that. There was a lot of earth stuff they'd need a bit more context for first. So I looked at what they'd already seen.

Picture of dudes waving: 'GREETING'
picture of their own space ship: 'SPACESHIP'

and then I did some numbers too. And I compiled all that into a video and then sent it off to them.

And then we waited. We only waited for a few hours, before they responded. And what a beautiful response it was, let me tell you.

"GREETING HUMAN GREETING SPACESHIP GREETING EARTH GREETING [photo of what we're pretty sure is their home planet] GREETING [picture of a group of Suitors] GREETING"

There you have it in all its glory.
They'd re-cobbled my slideshow into that order and added a few images of their own. The committee about had a fit. The astronomers started to drool over the picture of their planet, and the biologists flipped out over the picture of honest-to-god aliens. Let me tell you by the way, they look weird. Like, I was expecting little green dudes or something, to be perfectly honest. It was hard to determine scale at the time, but they were a bit larger than ourselves. Very centralized body plan. Several long appendages in a ring- uh... kinda shaped like a witches hat, right? They had this long bit that went back into a kangaroo-tail like shape, and then the 'brim' was folded up with the legs coming off of it. On their tops they had two big empty looking eyes, and on the underside they had a couple orifices and another pair of little focused eyes, along with another slender pair of appendages. They wore coverings on all of their arms and legs, and some had markings around their uh... faces. The stuff on the underside. Anyway, yeah, weird looking. The inside of their ship- we determined that's where the photo was taken- looked remarkably similar to the inside of one of our space stations. Wires and gadgets all over the place.

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That's as far as I got. The plan was for the main character to give a bit more backstory about herself, and I had a part planned later where the Suitors showed humanity the secrets of space travel or something. 

Basically, this project got totally shelved after the movie 'Arrival' came out, because they essentially took a similar concept to this story and made it ten times better, haha. Its a great movie, you should absolutely watch it.