Karla Brown looked at the crew of the starship Enlightenment again and for the hundredth time struggled to come to terms with what had happened today. She, personally, just a nobody lab assistant, had made first contact with an alien race. It was staggering; beyond staggering! Until today she had never even believed that there really were alien races!
And yet here they were.
But that wasn’t all. There was their appearance. If, in an idle moment Karla ever thought about the possibility of alien life, she had always just assumed that they would look rather like they did on TV. That is to say, short big headed bug eyed ashen faced foetus gnomes with weird fingers. As she didn’t place much faith in the idea, she really hadn’t given it much in the way of independent thought. These aliens did,’t look like that at all.
Looking through the magnifying glass, their faces were startlingly human-like, although the colour wasn’t quite right and the feeler like antennia were definitely inhuman. Everything else was utterly bizarre. They had eight limbs! Six legs and two arms with all kinds of odd jointing arrangements. (‘It must take alien kids years to learn how to even walk with all that lot’, she thought.) The hands were long and slender but otherwise humanoid and able to manipulate objects like we do. The overall result was that they were constructed a little like a centaur, with a long horizontal leg section with a humanoid torso protruding from the front end.
There was a disparity between them, as some had filmy fairylike wings, whilst others did not. She would later learn that the wings were vestigal and in the modern species never functioned. The species had abandoned flight in favour of tools, it seemed. Some races had wings. Others did not. Throughout the history of their world this difference had sometimes been the cause of conflict and war.
Of course this all paled into insignificance, compared to the most striking difference of all. Not natural, she would learn, but rather part of a terrible accident. Karla peered again through the magnifying lens.
They were small. Very small indeed. There were about two dozen extraterrestrials on Karla’s desk, each one about the size of an ant! If it hadn’t been for the faint glow around each one as they arrived and the communication device they used Karla was sure she wouldn’t have even noticed them!
The communicator produced a truly bizarre effect. It both amplified the voice of the lien spokesperson and translated into English whatever language they were speaking. The overall effect was quite disorientating. The voice was still small, but far too large for the creature making it.
Even with the communicator, contact had not gone smoothly. After she first looked closely at the tiny beings Karla had recoiled in shock and was reliably informed that she’d ‘squealed like child’. After curiosity had gotten the better of her things had proceeded in a more orderly manner, although it was a far cry from Close Encounters.
‘My name is Karla,’ she stated and then asked the spokesperson’s name.
‘My name is Conrad,’ he replied.
Karla almost collapsed into peals of laughter. ‘Conrad!’ she repeated, ‘Sorry. I don’t mean to offend you, but that doesn’t sound very alien to me…’
‘It shouldn’t’ he explained, ‘Our translation devices replace our true names with an equivalent in your language. There would be little point in giving you a name which you couldn’t pronounce.’
It made sense, although it would take some getting used to.
Karla spoke to the aliens for some time learning more of their story. She discovered that although smaller than humans, Conrads race were not usually this small.
It was all because of events after the earlier communication. As the starship Enlightenment had begun to break up, an evacuation had been oredered via the ship's teleportation system.
‘Does that work through the Ether?’ Karla asked.
‘No,’ Conrad explained,’ Totally different. The teleporter essentially transforms you into energy and beams you to a specified destination where it rebuilds you from complete readings taken at the moment of departure.
‘As you can see, it went wrong. The ship was damaged. There are safeguards in place to protect the structural integrity of those being sent. However the ship was damaged and the device was never intended to send so many people at once. I’m hypothesising here, but it must have not had enough power to reconstruct us all. It has to protect each individual person, so it just reconstituted us to the same plan only scaled down…’
Karla let this sink in. It was too much to handle.
‘So you’re telling me that the transporter couldn’t handle…’ She did a quick count, ‘…twenty three people?’
Conrad paused. ‘You misunderstand, Karla, This was a rush transport. We arrived dead on target but others have been scattered apparently.’
‘How many?’ she asked.
‘This was a colony ship.
‘More than two million people.’
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