Timing

I was sixteen when they came.

They touched down in large ships all over earth, silently with no visible means of propulsion. Jagged, asymmetrical leviathans ridged with glowing seams and thousands of softly humming translucent spikes as tall as skyscrapers. Their spindled undercarriages contacted the ground and there they impossibly balanced, footprints with no more square footage than a volkwagen bug. Islands on tiptoe with their furthest spires still in space.

A triangle of light spasmed open in their base and they came out.

They floated silently and ghostly like their ships did. They were made of a dark metal that could be made intangible at will. Red sensors ringed their masses. No two of them were the same size. Their appendages dangled, chunky black tentacles of many different widths, some cables nearly dragging on the ground as the beings floated out of their vessels. The smallest one I saw was as long as a cat and the largest was the length of a bus balanced on its bumper.

The missiles we’d fired at their ships at first contact still hung there in the upper atmosphere, barely moving in some sort of time-retardant field. The bullets and shells that had been fired at them from the ground troops did the same. So we stopped. We didn’t know if our stilled ordnance would go off when the visitors left. Our noisy impotence in the face of their silent superiority became embarrassing.

They scanned everything. They took no interest in us except to regard those that came close to them with a whirring chirp of blindingly quick quadrary math. Scientists and mathematicians figured out their language but the numbers still didn’t make sense.

Small ones for flowers but long ones for gardens, small ones for trees and massive ones for forests. Medium ones for buildings but huge ones for cities. London’s number was bigger than Vancouver. Damascus had a larger number that Paris. Water seemed to make the math go recursive and eat itself.

A temporal theoretician named Davis figured it out after some terminally ill humans approached the aliens in search of a divine cure. They were measured and forgotten by the aliens and left disappointed to succumb to their diseases. Those measurement numbers took on meaning after their deaths.

We don’t know how long they’ll be here but the aliens appear to know how long each of us will live.

People seek them out now. It’s a dare to get yourself measured. New parents bring their children, newlyweds find out how long they’ll have together, and one presidential candidate famously got measured at a press conference but the result was scandalously disappointing.

The aliens seemed to have a sense of time like we have a sense of smell. Common opinion is that the passage of time whorls around them and that they are more sensitive to it. That they smell time in chains and whips, in spills and gusts, in pours and dams. When we speak to them, they seem to only measure our word lengths and move on. Perhaps they’re entropy police cataloguing the known universe. We don’t know if they’re sentient or automated.

We are not intelligent life to them. They speak in measurements and nothing else. How they invented space travel is a mystery to us.

All I know is that I was measured yesterday and I have another forty-three years to live. I plan to make them count.





tags

Coldships

It was a shock to learn how short their life spans were but not surprising considering how much naked energy they threw off. We do not know how long we live because none of us have ever died, only changed form.

They called themselves Humans. They are beings of fire. They burn so hot. They seemed to be made of pure radiant heat. They seemed impossible. They had special suits to survive in our environment. Those suits protected us, encasing their boiling energy. They called our environment a ‘vacuum’ and spoke of an ‘atmosphere’ where they lived.

An atmosphere that dimmed the stars on their planet (during a period called ‘night’) and made their transport vessels work tremendously hard when taking off and burn with friction when landing. They also had more gravity on their world. Such fragile, determined creatures. It was inspiring.

We have no ‘atmosphere’. Our planet has low gravity. We achieved space travel by jumping hard into the air and returned by waiting. After a time, we came back down.

The humans had names for our parts. They said we were crystalline. Our blood, when we decided to make it liquid, is thick and able to stay flowing in what the humans see as extreme cold. They called it ferrofluid. Our intelligence is encapsulated in each of our particles. They called that nanotechnology. Each tiny particle of us is a switch, able to align or crook tangent to the other, forming solids and liquids. They say that makes our entire race one living ‘computer’.

They said we were -420 degrees Celsius but that’s only because that was the lower limit of their temperature gauges. Down at our temperature, gases become stable liquids and deep inside us, even colder, some solids do, too. Like iron. “Sloshed around like silver paint in a test tube, like molten lead, all granular like a black and white picture of Jupiter with some sparkles thrown in.” one of the humans said.

We took their form at first so as not to alarm them. We were much taller than them and blue but it helped. Though we can take any shape, we haven’t tried many.

The humans have imagination. They showed us their engineering and architecture data. The math of load-bearing weights and geometry was something we knew instinctually, much like a human catching a ball wouldn’t consciously figure out the parabola and the necessary arc needed to intersect and catch it. We are angles, from our tiniest particle to our largest forms. They showed us flimsy carbon strings they called 'diamond'.

We extrapolated. We improved.

We can make fusion reactors the size of what they call a fingernail. And then we make more. And then we attach many of them together. We do not have to use ‘tools’. We are the tools. We are the systems.

They have told us how to get farther. They didn’t know how to build those machines. They only had theories. They showed us.

We extrapolated. We improved.

We have the ability to create stable holes in space now that help us slide further when we ‘jump’. They have star maps that tell us where to go.

We let them travel inside us in special chambers to go far, to go where they wanted to go, to explore and record together, each experience filling up the cels of our cathedral spaceship bodies.

It’s only fair.




tags