Work Text:
Don't look them in the eyes. Humans.
Talk to them but don't look in the eyes.
Look anywhere but the eyes.
Because once you look them in the eyes, the eyes will swallow you. The eyes will drown you. The eyes are powerful like a vortex. The eyes are mysterious, terrifying, and unknown. The eyes are poisonous.
The humans are like Medusas, like Gorgons.
You will know, once you look them in the eyes, that those eyes are also looking at you. Observing you. There is a creature behind these eyes, thinking about you, the conversation, everything surrounding you. The creature behind the eyes keeps doing observations, running analyses, drawing conclusions using the brain, and the creature has a tongue to speak the results of the analysis, the thinking process, and the conclusions.
But you can't see the creature, not really. You can only see the eyes. They sneak behind the eyes, peeking out from the sockets like wolves hiding behind the windows. You are only looking at the windows.
You can't see the brain. Only the face it controls, the hands it controls, the legs it controls. And the term for this big, six-foot-tall robotic structure is -- a human.
What is a human? The whole thing, the body, or the brain that controls it?
Should you knock on the skull, looking into the eyes, and ask the thing hidden inside: Hello there, how's it feel in there? Cozy? Dark and small?
Sometimes you look at the eyes and you forget they can see you too. Then you stare for too long, because you are observing every detail of the eyes like observing a hand, or anywhere else -- all the other parts that cannot see you. Those eyes might be dark or shallow, blue or brown, all the different colors, the lights reflected in them, the sparks, the glares, the curves and patterns, cat-like or snake-like, the rainbow colors, the asymmetry between the two. Everything is in the eyes, in the pupils. In the colored parts and in the dark center. You keep looking at those small details because they are fascinating like stars in the sky.
You look at them like appreciating a painting on the wall. And then the painting moves. It blinks, it shifts away, it looks aside, it averts the look, it narrows or widens, it frowns, it laughs or saddens, it rages, it relaxes. It shows emotions and doubts and uneasiness and worry. The wall moves too -- leaning in or moving away, fidgeting or standing still, swinging or resting comfortably. So much to tell, so difficult to decipher. The complicated movement of the eyes and the body. The whole thing.
Imagine a huge sixty-foot robotic giant rumbling around, moving its hands and legs, taking steps, picking things up and putting them down. It is no different.
That is startling.
You suddenly get reminded again, that the eyes are alive. But the eyes are not really the thing that is alive. The body is the human, but the body is also not the human.
Then you start asking: What is a human? What is a life? What are you? What am I?
Just because you looked at that human in the eyes, and now you don't know what you are anymore.
All the while, the usual pretending-to-be-human act is still ongoing. You talk about whatever chatty topic you are going on with that human, you smile, you move the way they move, you use the brain to manipulate the body like the perfect robot would, subtle down to every muscle. You shift your eyes away after a certain time and look back after a certain time, controlling the movement and intervals like a precise robotic program, because a miscalculation might start irritating -- because the action you are doing, is something humans only appreciate for a very specific amount of time, not less and not more, not avoiding eye contact and not staring. If you get it wrong, it turns into something humans dislike, socially unacceptable, or something that just subconsciously, subtly, makes them decide they just don't like you. But what is that specific time range -- that is so delicate and such a complicated human thing to understand, that you find far too difficult.
So, for any alien pretending to be human, living out there among human society, trying hard not to raise alarm and be discovered, here is a piece of free advice for how to behave when interacting with humans:
Don't look them in the eyes.
Look at the point between the two eyes.
Look at the middle of the nose bridge or the center of the brows.
Look anywhere but the eyes.
Make it look like you are meeting the eyes but you are not actually.
That is safer.
And easier to live with.
Good luck.