Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Translator's Note: The following text was transcribed from a recording narrated by Technical and Construction Engineering Specialist First Class and General Engineering Supervisor of Erid's Operation Investigate Undimming Star, personal name Shining-With-Renown-Fast-Tempo-Dancer-Drifting-Homeward, born seventeenth generation of the Terraced Cliffs Architecture and Engineering Combine, first-rank apprenticed at Highest-Spire Strategic Rail Junction Polytechnic, mate of Ancient-Runes-Discovered-After-Diverting-The-Great-River, and referred to from now on as "Rocky". This is Rocky's description of an incident of particular historical interest: first contact with a member of the dominant intelligent species on Earth, third planet in the Sol system, known as Homo sapiens, or humans. (Hi, everybody!)

Currently, Rocky has spent a little over two Human years in what you might call an intense immersive English language learning course, so he could have easily produced this text himself. (He's also picking up Russian and Mandarin Chinese in his spare time.) However, he insisted on recording this narrative as an audio file in his first language (one of the three most common urban Eridian dialects) and then assigning it as my weekly translation homework.

For various reasons, I am not currently planning on transmitting this report back to Earth, but Rocky says it'll be useful to Eridian linguists if we arrive on Erid with a pre-existing corpus of parallel texts in both English and Rocky's first language so they can learn English as quickly as possible. I don't necessarily believe that they're going to need it for me personally, because I'm going to run out of food shortly after we arrive on Erid. But in some best-case scenario of the future where both our stars are saved, I hope other humans and Eridians will meet someday. And maybe you'll be reading this then.

A few introductory notes for the hypothetical human reader. First, although this report was recorded years after the fact, it was trivially easy for Rocky to recall his exact train of thought at the time, thanks to the frighteningly perfect barely-organic Eridian memory storage system. Second, all Eridian scientific units of measurement have been converted to whatever units of Earth measurement happened to sound right to me at the time. Apologies to all fans of the metric system. Third, most Eridian narratives, even their simplest stories for small children, tend not to be strictly chronological. Eridian audiences never have trouble tracking multiple threads and timelines in a story, so Eridian storytellers just kind of throw in all the important parts wherever (well, not wherever, Rocky says there's actually a very specific structure which is so intuitive that they don't even really think about it consciously and therefore it's really difficult for him to explain, colorless-green-ideas-sleep-furiously style) and the audience just processes the whole thing as a gestalt. I have no idea if I've captured that accurately, so keep in mind that he's not an artist and I'm not an anthropologist and we're both just doing our best. In practice this looks like me trying to tell Rocky that for humans, it's best if stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, and him saying that his stories do have those things, and me saying "In that order, though?" and him telling me to shut my face and translate.

Finally, on the insistent and generous advice of my Eridian cultural consultant, I have reluctantly done my best to translate expletives in a way that correctly conveys the desired emotional emphasis, so my further apologies to anybody who wanted a serious historical first contact narrative that did not include the phrase "shit from a butt."

I am calm. I am calm. I am calm.

The alien airlock hatch shuts. I spend two minutes softly screaming obscenities, only stopping when I've sent five full rounds of echoes reverberating down the central corridor line. Loopy with relief, I stagger to the closest cooling vent, crank it to max and collapse underneath, clinging fifteen-fingers-strong to alertness. I can't sleep. I can't miss what the aliens do next!

By the time I'm steady enough to hurry back to the scanner readout room, a lot is happening. For a minute I think maybe a SECOND alien ship has arrived? But no— it's the same one as before, just reconfigured. About one-third of its main cylindrical body has split into two separate modules connected by long cables, currently rotating slowly around a central point. Interesting. There are areas inside our ship that were designed to create gravity using centripetal force. Are the aliens doing it for the same reason?

It takes a little creativity with our engine settings, but I eventually match the alien ship's rotation. Just as I calculated from its speed, the resulting gravitational force is not very strong. Does their home planet have weak gravity? Maybe their species glides or flies. Maybe they never evolved an inherent fear of falling from great heights. Seems wild, but would explain some shit! Like, maybe to aliens, crawling around on the hull of their ship in the absolute death-silent vacuum is just a totally chill activity! Maybe the alien wasn't scared at all!

Translator's Note: Oh, buddy. Yeah, no.

I should maybe clarify: this was not entirely the alien's fault. I assumed they had hull robots! I hadn't observed anything that resembled a hull robot, but clearly that just meant they were safely tucked away when they weren't needed. And considering how many crucial pieces of equipment broke off the outside of our fuckass ship on the way to Tau Ceti, I can hardly argue with that design choice... even though it's frustrating me now because I have no idea where I should throw my capsule. I finally have the hull robot fling it towards a juncture between the ship's two biggest modular sections, hoping for the best.

Nothing happens for nearly twenty minutes, until the message capsule is nearly halfway between our two ships. Then a large round lid starts to open. I wince as I realize how far it is from where the capsule's trajectory will take it. But they're opening the hatch anyway, so they must believe they can reach it? Maybe instead of a lot of small hull robots they just have one long flexible grabber?

A shape starts to emerge from the round hatch. I know intellectually that the void doesn't conduct sound waves and there's no way the aliens can perceive me. Still, some primitive instinct makes me go utterly motionless, listening as hard as I can.

It isn't shaped like a grabber arm. Maybe it's an autonomous drone. If you added magnetized gloves, it could walk on the hull? I guess that would be one benefit of making your ship mostly cylindrical and apparently coated in various metals.

The thing coming out of the compartment has a long narrow structure, with two arms and a stumpy flattened ball shape connected to one end, and two more long arms that sort of trail behind it. Before it comes completely out, it folds itself eerily in half and fumbles around with its upper hands. When it unfolds again, the scanner shows two tethers. It was clipping the tethers to a rail near the hatch.

I shudder to my absolute center with horror as it dawns on me. Shit from a butt, that's not a drone! That's a person! That thing is ALIVE!

Ohhh why, why, why would the hum at the start of creation (that I don't even believe in) allow this to happen. Why would the alien go OUTSIDE its ship into the cold and silence! No Eridian would go outside the ship if an alien threw a message too far for our hull robots. And this big weird thing, whose body is all kinds of completely munched up—

I wait one more excruciating moment, but there's still no audible response from the alien ship. I flinch, realizing that the alien left their airlock hatch open when they came out. If it works like an Eridian airlock... well, with the outer hatch hanging open, if someone opens the inner hatch then their whole ship could lose pressure. So if they want to come out and rescue their crewmate, they'll have to close the outer hatch first. And... that will happen any second now, right? And then another alien will come out and, I don't know, extend a rescue ladder? Something? ANYTHING?

Okay. Be calm. It took a while for the first alien to come outside after I threw the capsule. Whoever is inside is probably getting into their protective gear. Calmly. Carefully. Maybe it takes a while.

Maybe they could hurry up just one shitting smidge.

It occurs to me that while I wait, I can at least stop the alien from drifting too far. I scramble over to the piloting controls and start to move our ship into its path, very very slowly. I hope the alien's sensor displays are still working somehow and it isn't going to be totally shocked when it just suddenly slams into our hull. I don't want it to land weird and hurt itself. It hit their ship pretty hard when it bounced back on the tether. But it's still moving its limbs around, so even if it has no warning to brace and impacts our ship at its current velocity... hopefully it will be okay?

As I move our ship, I'm still observing the hatch on their ship. It's still not closing. Why not! Surely their spaceship designers couldn't have been that unimaginative!? Surely they could predict a scenario where they'd need to close the outer hatch from inside?

"Oh. Oh..."

I can't think about this right now. No, no, no.

What if the reason no one is responding from the alien ship is—

What if no one's coming? What if it's all up to me?

I manage to slowly rotate our ship into the alien's path, freaking out on multiple different axes. What if the alien hits our ship and bounces off in some random unpredictable direction and all I've done is make things worse? What if its protective suit is made out of some improbable alien material that's reactive to xenonite and it just instantly explodes on contact with the hull?

No, no, that's stupid. It already touched my capsule and didn't explode. But what if it hits at a bad angle and something on our ship punctures or breaks some part of its obviously janky void survival gear?

Okay. I can make fun of their design choices later. This situation is at least partially my fault. So I have to fix it. I'm going to fix it. I split my attention between the readout screens, the printer controls, and the hull robot manipulators. It takes an infuriatingly long time to instruct an external repair drone to build a prong ladder that extends out from our ship. I keep having to override protocols that would otherwise stop me from using such a large quantity of rapid-set repair xenonite to construct equipment not rated as mission-critical, and making such an unsuitable shape for external mounting, and so on. As I'm working on that I also start printing a replacement tether with clips on both ends. Better ones.

While I'm doing this, the alien starts doing something with its upper hands. Oh, it's knotting its tether around my message capsule, so it will have all four hands free when it hits our ship. Good plan, alien. At least I know it hasn't fallen into shock-sleep due to its injuries, or gone completely insane with terror, if aliens even do that.

"Hang in there, bud!" I tell it. "I'm working as fast as I can!"

Maybe I'm wrong that it's alone. Somehow it's still getting sensory data. I can tell right away when it detects the repair drone building the ladder. I didn't want to directly poke it or grab it, but I do try to place the ladder as close as I can. The alien should be able to reach out and grab on, but it isn't moving, just tilting its stumpy ball back to listen as the ladder extends past it.

"Grab it! I'm helping! I'm going to put you back!"

It does nothing. Okay. Maybe it's confused. I was waiting for the new tether to be finished before I sent up a handler arm, but fine. I send it up there empty-handed. When the alien turns its sensors towards it, I use the controls to open and close the gripping fingers.

After a second, the alien reaches out and opens and closes its long wiggly fingers in response.

"Good! Good! Yes, we both do things with our hands. I can grab. You can grab." I do it again. So does the alien.

"Okay," I say, "now, like this," and I turn the handler arm and have it grab the ladder. "Hear that? Grab the ladder! With your hand!"

It grabs on, all thanks to the hum (that I do not believe in) and instantly pulls itself close. For a minute it clings tightly. I let it have a second and then I start demonstrating how it can climb back, scooting the hull robot forward and grabbing the next ladder prong, then the next one.

Finally it starts climbing towards its ship, its one tether trailing behind it. I send the handler arm down the rail to grab the clip part. It has a weird shape, but not as bizarrely alien as I might have expected. I guess there's only so many ways to design one. I clip the tether to the arm attached to the ladder, shivering with relief, and slowly use the arm to follow the alien back towards its ship.

Translator's note: My cursory research indicates that it's best practice for an oral history if the original audio stays attached to the transcription. I'd like posterity to know that Rocky saved the original recording on our shared drive, in my Eridian language homework folder, as Dumb-Ass-Alien-Retrieval-small-Mission_Report_Final_Draft_FINALv3b-ACTUALLYthisone_FINAL.wav and I'd like to ask for that to be preserved. My dear future human visitors to Erid. You'll figure out soon enough that Eridians are so much like humans in so many ways, but not this one. That file name is a deliberate choice. Rocky's making fun of how I save drafts. He got his own report down in one take, obviously. He's efficient like that.

One of the aliens is in the tunnel. I can hear it so much better now that I put atmosphere in the tunnel and it took off its suit, and, yeah, its whole body is exactly as munched up as I thought it was. It has a layer of external squishy parts that really, really seem like they should be internal organs, then a sort of jointed internal scaffolding that includes some carapace-like structures. These seem to have even more organs tucked inside them. I'm no biologist, but I'm going to assume these are the most important parts, since they evolved to have proper protection.

I think inside the cage-like carapace in its upper body I can hear its heart pumping (it seems to have just one big one) and also two big gas exchange sacs that inflate and deflate simultaneously. Up at the top in what I originally thought was a sensor display, there's a more normal mostly-enclosed hard casing with a very thin layer of other gunk around it. A lot of complicated tube structures are going in and out of that casing, including the main gas vent. It seems to have only one of these, too... This is possibly an unfounded assumption but I'm starting to suspect there might be evolutionary reasons why this species doesn't seem to grasp the concept of basic redundancy for safety-critical systems. Anyway I'm guessing the top bit is either its brain, or egg storage. Maybe both. I'm so curious. I can't wait until we can really talk to each other.

It picks something out of the clutch of one of its hands, pinching it between two fingers to hold it out towards me. It's a single piece of thin wire, twisted around itself to make... Oh! The first time it came into the tunnel, I showed it a model of what it sounds like, so it made its own model of itself! There's a round loop representing the big top part, a straight line for its main body, an intersecting line for its top arms, and the lower arms splitting off at an angle from the body.

It uses its other hand to point to the little wire alien and then to itself.

"Yes!" I say, and do the same. "I understand. That's you!" I hold up my alien and point between mine and theirs. "Model," I say slowly. "Model."

The alien's top part rocks up and down. It holds up a finger in the 'wait' gesture but it doesn't go anywhere this time, just crouches down to sit on the ground with its lower arms bent and folded around each other in what seems like a precarious and uncomfortable way. It pulls another piece of wire out of a pocket in its clothes and starts bending it. I lean close, fascinated at how its weird fingers pinch and move. It talks while it works. Its voice is a sort of low, gritty wha-arr-wha-arr with only a few very quiet clicks. It wobbles up and down and doesn't seem to be hitting any actual notes on the Eridian scale— or note, I should say, because it's only doing one at a time. I could be missing some higher or lower range frequencies because of its thin atmosphere and the wall between us, but I'm pretty sure I'm getting most of it.

As it talks, it folds the wire into a pentagon, then pulls out another piece of wire and starts looping it around the first shape and bending it. I think I get where this is going. Amazing. The first representation of an Eridian made by an alien! It keeps chatting at me, occasionally pointing its top bit at me and then down again. Obviously I can't understand it, but from context I'm going to guess it's saying: "I couldn't make a model before because I couldn't hear your shape very well through the other wall! Now I can!"

It doesn't take long, and then it stands its Eridian model up on the flat surface of its hand and also holds it up for me to observe. Well. They clearly didn't send an artist— my body is just a flat five-sided shape, my arms are way too short and straight, and it's completely out of scale to the other figure. But this isn't an art commune, so who cares! I can still tell it's supposed to be me!

It raises its other hand, but I beat it to the jump, quickly pointing a finger at the model and then at myself. "Yes! I hear what you did! That's me, you made an Eridian! Nice!"

It has some kind of sharp protrusions inside its breathing vent and it bares them at me as it exhales and inhales quickly. Laughing? It reaches forward and puts model-me on top of the basic representation of our ship that I etched into the container of molecule models representing my atmosphere. It points to the etching, then past me, down the tunnel. Then it twists around and picks up an alien-hand-size cylinder with a hollow housing and some simple mechanisms inside, and makes its alien model stand on top.

The wire alien hops along the cylinder and then does a jump. It jerks back, hits the cylinder and bounces off. The big alien rubs its fingers together to make the wire creature twist and tumble, and then it sings out in a quiet, gritty screech, "Aaaaaaaaaaaa!!"

It sustains the note for a long time, and it's also a much, much higher pitch than any other noise I've heard it make so far. It's honestly not too different from the sound of an Eridian screaming, and I shudder.

It puts its cylinder down and picks up another straight piece of wire. It makes the wire come from the Eridian ship and pushes the little alien figure against it. It says something that still sounds fast and choppy, but more like its normal words. I'm going to assume this is "Thanks for saving my crewmate, or possibly me!" I mean, I don't know anything about these people. It could also be saying "Foolish alien, we didn't like that one! We were hoping it would float away!" but I'll go with my first guess.

"Yeah! I made a ladder!"

It puts the wire and the alien model together in one hand and has to reach down again for the cylinder representing its ship. It seems weird that it's not using its lower two hands, but when I curiously examine the weird hand casings it's wearing, it seems like those actually… aren't hands? They are similarly structured, but with small fingers maybe half as long as the ones on its upper hands. I mean for all I know it can extend and retract its lower fingers, but if that's the case then why wear those weird flat fingerless gloves? Maybe their lower hands are specialized? Just for really delicate work? Or— this is a gross thought, but maybe they evolved to have hands that are just for food and so they politely muffle them when they're not eating?

It puts the little alien back on its ship, and clutches them both in towards its middle part, and it leans in towards me and it talks and talks, kind of stuttery, start-stop, gesturing vaguely with... I guess those are shoulders? I gotta figure out a word for the top part, too, it seems important.

"Listen," I say, "I'm not getting all this..."

It has to put the models down, and then it takes one of its hands and puts it right over where the big pump is. It starts tapping in the same rhythm as the pump, a little off-beat, and for a few cycles it inflates and deflates its gas sacs very deeply.

"I have no idea..." I say, and then it stops tapping and cycling gas and it just jabs its finger at me, again and again and again. It says one thing. It says that same thing again. "...Oh."

I get it. I tremble as the understanding clicks sharply into place. The alien is saying: that was me! That was me. All my critical biological functions are still happening— I'm alive. You did that.

It's thanking me.

I don't know if I can deal with this. It was my fault! I don't deserve its thanks. "Okay, listen," I say sharply, "I know I'm being judgy, but I gotta ask— how in the absolute shit does your species ever accomplish anything if you're constantly having to put things down to pick other things up?"

I think it laughs again. It puts its weird five-fingered hand against the wall between us.

I put my hand against the xenonite too. I can hear it even better now. It's just a big wet sponge. I don't even really understand what's holding it together. What a strange, strange creature. And I saved its life!

It warbles something incomprehensible.

"No, I'm just saying, buddy!" I respond. "You were lucky I was here! I mean, two hands? No wonder you fell off the ship!"

Translator's note: Womp womp.