Entry Sixteen I suppose the entry before this must seem quite hysterical. It was not the numbers alone which disturbed me, and the others of the delegation. The human ambassador told me once that “necessity is the mother of invention.” These people need a means of controlling their population so badly that the first thing some of us did when we returned to privacy was propose that they be given a working FTL drive and the coordinates of a world they could inhabit and we could not.
Of course the Ambassador rejected that foolishness. I approve. What unnerved me so deeply was that the humans seem to be capable of surviving so much that we could not. I do not, of course, speak of solar radiation. A little extra stellar radiation could be compensated. These, however, are a warlike people. That was my impression when first we met, and my opinion has not wavered.
Yet, they coexist in tight groups in most of their population centers, their colonies were made of a mix of people that their nature states they could not tolerate, and their culture overcomes fractious divides so fast…we nearly kill them off, and then, not sixty days after the event, those who continue to demand that we suffer retribution are labeled – OPENLY! – by their leaders as deluded. If these people had developed FTL drives on their own, we would have met them on the edges of our own territory, I am sure. We would have met as friends. But we would have met as equals, when we are currently not. I should not be so disturbed by that thought. Yet I am.
Entry Seventeen
Two hundred seventy days gone by. The human ambassador has become more and more reluctant to divulge information about his own people to us, even as he shows us around his homeworld and pours more and more data about his species into our computers, for our analysts to devour.
He answers every question we ask him, yet he divulges less and less in the way of specifics. Oddly enough, he actually seems far more relaxed in our presence than he was when we met. He showed up in a completely different set of clothing than the type he usually wears today, lacking the odd cloth around his neck. I wonder why?
Entry Eighteen
We returned to Earth today, and I am far more impressed this time than I let myself be last time. The human ambassador this time took us to what seems to be a site of great importance to his people: a building in one of their largest cities called the UN Headquarters.
The building, I mean, not the city. We spoke to a panel of two hundred human ambassadors, each representing a human nation or extra-planetary colony. We answered questions, and had our images captured by their media, through a very thick-looking defensive device. When I asked why we were being defended, the human ambassador’s aide told me that it was for our own protection from those humans who did not appreciate our presence here as much as they should.
I was touched by this, though apparently this is not at all unusual. We spoke to many of these diplomats, and I came away with the feeling that many had wanted to ask far more questions than they had been able to, out of a sense of propriety. Our own Ambassador told me that he thought it was to prevent any sort of insult, but I was not sure. Some of the human ambassadors seemed outright angry at our presence, and several were apparently restrained from outburst only by their peers’ angry gestures.
I think it has something to do with the nearly groveling request the human chief ambassador gave to us on the very first day: not to even decrypt, let alone translate, a single one of the millions of messages sent to our ship, directly or otherwise, that did not bear his signature.
Entry Nineteen
Three hundred solar days have passed since the humans replied to our communications. We hold meetings on their planet as often as we do in space now. I am pleased by this, in all honestly. There is a strange appeal to these people that was simply not there when we first met. One particularly unguarded conversation with a human diplomatic aide produced an interesting result.
The young woman said that she and many others were raised on fiction involving humanity playing the defender against unexplained or meaningless alien invasion, or playing the victim of some horrible, incomprehensible force of destruction, and the thought that life beyond their own system would be friendly and share the virtue of self-sacrifice was a vast relief. I had never considered this.
Most species in this galaxy, we find, are very open with us immediately, or at least after a very brief period of distrust. These people did not trust us beyond discussion until we had offered our lives to save their planet, yet it seemed that we had achieved more in that act of proposed sacrifice than we had realized. These humans do, however, place too much emphasis on propriety for the sake of propriety.
I do hope this woman does not come to reprimand because of our entirely unofficial exchange. The ambassador of the humans has certainly been making more and more of an effort to control what we see and hear of these people the more time we spend with them.
Entry Twenty
I understand fully now why the human ambassador was trying to restrict our communications. The ship’s crew, not a part of our diplomatic efforts, have been covertly compiling and translating vast amounts of the messages directed to our ship, without our approval.
We have been exposed to their indirect communications, of course – we discovered them through the presence of their first radio transmissions, after all – and we have tapped their system-wide information networks, but the unauthorized communications directed to us, specifically, have been politely ignored and untranslated, thanks almost entirely to the human ambassador’s fervent pleas.
The crew of the ship, however, have found that some of these signals contain messages of such hate and vitriol, such murderous rage and terrorized accusations, that had I not spent over three hundred local days immersing myself in their culture, I could have mistaken it for a declaration of war. The human ambassador has much to answer for.
To be continued...
Thanks to u/Prohibitorum for original transcription. Original Image
