by Ufuk Özden
“There’s a part of me that wishes,” I say, “that they would deem us humans worthy of a deal.”
“Don’t feel blue, if I may use the expression,” replies Baco while his eyes are dancing over the page he’s reading. “It’s not just the humans. Your planet offers nothing of interest on a universal scale. Not from their perspective, anyway. You do not seem to have the capacity for performing mental tasks to meet their standards. It’s not just the humans; there isn’t a single species on your planet worth keeping. None of them is smart or strong enough. Your planet is doomed with global warming and your evolutionary patterns that are helpless. Homo -sapiens have no potential from a cosmic perspective, compared to the existing alternatives. They could genetically modify your great apes to create a workers’ class, but they already have contracted species that are able to carry twenty-eight earth ton probes with sheer brute force, in outer space with minimal extra telestial life-support.”
“I know humans take pride in their intelligence,” Baco continues, “but the universe is filled with tinkerer species that make no mistakes and require little to no breaks. In their societies, every single individual is a natural-born engineer or a technician who can build or repair the most complicated kind of machinery after a four Earth-day integration course. They can design and build a fully automated underwater propelling system before you can make a presentation about your design idea.
“Then you have an unstable frame of mind and instability issues. You are dissonant,” he goes on. “A mere change in your thyroid levels changes your entire personality. The human brain is fragile, your hormones are unpredictable, and your self-awareness seems to confuse you. And you seem to be fond of writing books about your fundamental problems.”
I tell him that it’s what makes us special, at least in my opinion. A confused hormone bag with self-awareness is something to be.
Baco tells me that humans entertain the idea of being unique but said uniqueness is merely a manifestation of our weakness. He tells me of a species who have mastered their literature by similar looking and yet meticulously crafted symbols that invoke the purest feelings when read by anyone who can speak their language. If you speak it well enough, reading one symbol could leave you shaking in intellectual ecstasy for earthly hours. “I’ve seen at least six civilisations who can do the same with their music. It’s possible to be stable, talented, advanced and still enjoy intellectual pleasures,” he says.
“The life on Earth has diversity with no species that has achieved anything significant by universal standards,” says Baco, who has turned a dozen pages in his book since the beginning of his monologue.
He tells me that our octopuses are intelligent but they’re aquatic with a short lifespan. Our tortoises have a relatively long-life span, but they lack the intelligence and the capacity to build tools. Tardigrades are near indestructible but good luck hiring them to build space bases in extreme conditions. “There are no species on Earth,” Baco says, “that would justify any investment.”
“You’re neither smart nor powerful. And you lack endurance,” he says. “When they announced the scheduled harvesting of your planet, I had to check a few databases to learn more about Earth.”
Baco tells me that there was no backlash when they announced the end of life on Earth. People looked us up in their universal encyclopaedias and found out that we were nothing but billions of underdeveloped lifeforms swimming, walking and occasionally flying.
Baco once scanned a telepathic column praising the harvest program’s organisers for having chosen a planet such as Earth, as it did not host any species with the potential to develop enough to contribute to our universal heritage.
“Despite the seemingly curious variety of organisms,” he says, reciting a column, “their DNA sequences are composed of equally inefficient combinations that eventually kill them in the best-case scenario. Their only hope to sustain their species is to reproduce in messy ways, which is simply outdated by our modern standards. They have no effective means of transferring data either. The pupil is required to follow the same slow and long training procedure only to learn as much as what is already known. Had I not known better, I would have said that life on Earth was designed by a young and distracted student who was fancying different cosmetic ideas and tinkering with weak organisms without any long-term goals in one of those planet jams.”
I tell Baco that the writer was a racist on a universal scale.
“Having lived here for a considerable amount of time, I haven’t reached a conclusion that would make me disagree with him,” Baco says. “And yet, wherever I go, I see the building blocks of our existence. I see the patterns and how they form. Organisms, instincts, economics, conflict, desire, you name it. Everything is a more or less complicated combination of these blocks. I feel that the same sense of boredom would swiftly strike me again, even after meeting the rumoured beings of energy who have been hiring advanced civilisations to harvest carbon atoms from the organisms across the universe. There is a need and there is a transaction.”
I take another sip from the wine and sit down.
“Do you think there is a God, as we call it?” I ask him. I quickly finish off what’s left in my wine bottle before Baco can give me another alien lecture on how foolish we humans are. Instead, he seems thoughtful.
He tells me about civilisations who terraform and manage planets in their free time, unlike the chaotic planet jams where aliens would get wasted and create planets with walking genitals only to be exterminated after forty-eight Earth hours. Most wealthy families would have their own planet as a family heirloom, which was meticulously crafted like the front yard of their mansions. Except for a few families with psychopathic tendencies, most families take pride in creating civilisations with individuals that are incapable of feeling any sort of pain or boredom. They live for millions of years with a fixed smile on their faces and high as fuck. And they never find out that they’re a hobby project with many local awards.
“They already have the knowledge and tools to perform any task attributed to any deity in any religious faith system. If there’s a higher being, the logic would require it to be different than a mere being that creates beings that create beings. Otherwise, we would go back to patterns and combinations. What God is thought to be capable of has already been achieved many times, even by dedicated amateurs. Immortality is more of an issue about management of resources rather than the genetical or digital engineering that it requires. Feelings can be adjusted. And the working principles of the universe are well known. If the cosmic definition of God can be reduced down to a being who creates gods, then what else could God possibly put on the table that would make us question the possibility of an even more supreme being? And if it’s a concept behind the borders of universal understanding, we cannot comprehend any of it as we are limited by the thought patterns and ideas of this space.”
Baco reminds me that all such questions have become obsolete and there is only a pattern reforming itself. “It’s just a will to be as long as it is possible,” he says.
Thus, he was so bored that he came here to get disintegrated with us. Not the visitor that we need but the visitor that we deserve.
The Final Play
I ’ve spent a week working on Baco’s goat farm during the days and spending the nights feeding on goat meat and drinking Baco’s mildly sour wine which gets me shitfaced after a couple of glasses. Baco has abandoned all gardening done by the past visitors except for the thyme plants and a small vineyard.
He doesn’t seem to be interested in the world’s political affairs and argues that human interactions are highly primitive. He says that humans’ instinct to dominate their own species is a curious case, as the dominator is not usually superior to other individuals who accept being dominated “Any dominator who manipulates masses to make them forget that they are masses, easily takes over control with no true power. When the dominator succeeds, the masses turn into a group of weak individuals who feel isolated
from each other. And once that happens, the individuals worry about nothing but securing their own well-being. The dominated are as selfish as the dominator so it turns into a system that needs to be supported by all individuals regardless of how little they benefit from it. Most Earthlings with higher intelligence compared to others cannot seem to resolve this. Humans, for instance, are too selfish to work as a colony and too scared to act as individuals.”
I walk to the small pier where I first set foot on the island and sit on the dilapidated wooden pier after carefully searching for any metal pins sticking out. If I stepped on one, I could perhaps ask Baco to take me to the mainland on his boat for a tetanus shot but gods know if he would agree to it. He’s been kind to me by not being rude, but I’m not willing to push the limits of his hospitality. Shortly after I hear his footsteps and see Baco Bobonts walking towards the pier. What surprises me, though, is that he’s wearing swimming shorts.
“I need to go shopping and see if things are any more interesting because of The Trip,” he says. He jumps on his small boat and unmoors before asking me if I would like to join him or if I need anything. I look around one more time checking for rusty nails. And I take my time doing it, trying not to realise that I’m stranded on an island with goats at the mercy of a suicide tourist from outer space.
From a cosmic perspective, my cousin’s death did not make much of a difference. But then again, most people’s wouldn’t. We show up and hang around for a while until we’re no more. The rest is shovel work. The shovels did their work swiftly when my cousin died. However, he had to wait for four months until he got his granite headstone because of a rainy autumn season. Although he’s been buried and largely forgotten, his passing has helped me become the fool I am. A halfwit dragging himself around without an agenda. On the bright side, it’s led me here to meet Baco and find out that The Trip is a field day at slaughterhouse Earth.
I walk around the island through goats, haystacks, and trash that the visitors left behind. My mind’s blank as if some meddlesome bastard wiped off the board that I had all of my notes on. Watching my feet move in harmony, I only feel the heat. I occasionally hold my phone up to receive a signal to no avail. I take a nap, wake up with a dry mouth, and get back to my fool’s patrol. I walked the path around the island a few dozen times when I hear the loud sound of Baco’s boats engine. When I arrive at the pier, I find Baco sitting in his boat. He tries to wink at me. There’s something disturbing about watching him aping facial expressions. It feels off and perturbing, like reading a poem written by an AI out of the blue at 2:00 AM. in a computer lab without anyone asking for it. It comes to life.
“I see you didn’t do much shopping today,” I say.
“No, I did not,” Baco promptly responds. “But I’ve purchased various spices and sauces for cooking.” Then the silence fills the void for a while. And since I know that he won’t say another word until I do, I take the initiative. So, I ask him what items he’s got on his agenda.
Before he answers, Baco jumps on the pier holding a plastic bag filled up with items that he bought. A jar of mustard falls off the bag into the sea between the pier and the boat and sinks down immediately, as expected. We both watch the jar silently as it hits the bottom in crystal clear water, as if we’re two seamen paying their respects to a sunken vessel. Baco kneels down and shakes his head. “I do not feel like diving,” he says bluntly. “As for your question, I am leaving the island tomorrow. I’ve seen something on your internet that has come to my attention.”
Baco searches his bag and pulls out a crumpled piece of paper. He takes his time uncrumpling it with one hand while taking his shorts off with the other one. “May I see it?” He sees no reason why I can’t. It’s a post that he saw on a social media platform and immediately had printed out. The original poster appears to depict a middle-aged man who invites people to help him stage the last greatest play on Earth before The Trip. Obviously, the man is not quite familiar with the dynamics of the internet as he posted it on a group where people would ask for help in random matters, such as painting a table or breeding hamsters. He posted five months ago and as one would expect, no one has replied. I ask Baco how he stumbled upon this post. He says that most of our internet space is filled with poorly informative data and anything that one would do on Earth’s internet would be a waste of time. Therefore, he goes online when he has the will to waste some time and clicks on everywhere until he discovers something that catches his attention. I ask him if he’s contacted the man.
“I did. He told me that he was looking forward to seeing me,” Baco says. By internet standards, nothing could have sounded more legitimate and logical.
Trying to sound casual as if I could have spent the rest of my life herding goats on the island or swum to the mainland when I was bored, I ask Baco if I can join him. He says that I can. He’s so bored that there are no variables left to make it any worse of better. Yay! But what about the goats?
“They’re no longer my problem,” he says. “I assume that most members of the herd can survive for a long while with the resources left on the island. I do not expect humans to come here to help given that they’re mainly focused on The Trip.” I look at a group of bouncing kids in the distance and somehow I feel good for them, as getting harvested for your carbon atoms while attempting to headbutt your sibling sounds like a peaceful way to go.
The Sun is yet to sink behind the horizon line and I’m already wasted. Baco’s wine tastes so sour that you can only begin to enjoy it when you’re too drunk to care. Baco lights a fire in front of the gazebo and places a metal grill on it and asks me if I would like to pick a specific goat for our feast tonight. I swiftly decline. Baco tells me that not willing to know your prey is not exclusive to humans.
“That might be the reason for having so many subcontractors to harvest the carbon atoms,” he says. “Empathy isn’t beneficial to an efficient operation.” Then he picks up a cleaver by the fireplace and disappears into the night.
When he returns with a skinned goat on his shoulders, a sense of guilty pleasure strikes me. The balance of nature is such a wonderful remedy for wilful ignorance.
“Your plants suffer the same, if you’re curious,” says Baco while he’s marinating the bits that he chopped up. “Plants also suffer in a way that your science cannot yet comprehend. They cannot anticipate pain and yet they suffer the purest form of it. Nothing grows to be harvested and consumed. On Earth, you cannot live without making something else suffer.”
“I would still like to dream of a scenario,” says the wine in me, “where we could somehow reach out to the folks and prove to them how amazing and unique we are. We would unite after some of us had the dream and send a team to represent us. A team of scientists, philosophers, artists, and drunkards. Then they would be impressed and let us be. We’re good at putting on a show, we could be the agency announcing The Trip and organising events to motivate people on distant planets.”
“I see you’ve already embraced the idea of disintegrating every single carbon-based organism on a planet,” Baco replies. “And your instinct is to side with the dominators to destroy everything else. That’s a very humane reaction.”
Baco goes on and asks me how we intend to contact a civilisation that is only a light year away in our own galaxy and do what I promised. “While their work ethics are open for discussion, most agencies are capable of covering a ten-million-light-year radius. From a business point of view, it would cost them time and resources when there are so many civilisations that are already capable of performing the task.”
I open another bottle of wine while Baco is flipping the meat on the grill. This is one those moments when I see neither good nor bad but only the absurd that has been weaved into the fabric of existence. The universe seems like a sandbox and we are the excited kids trying to pick the best toy tools to shape it. Everything we do is limited to the capabilities of the tools that we have, and we cannot make new tools. Those who can make their own tools would
not even speak to us.
I’ve always hoped that somewhere beyond our reach, there was a reasonable explanation for why we, gas giants, neutron stars, nebulas, and super massive black holes are willing to exist. Now I don’t think that there’s an answer to anything that could make us all happy. Like Baco has said, it’s the struggle to be, even though the beings hardly get anything out of their own existence or don’t even know that they exist in the first place. And yet, I ask him if there is anything that we could have done to evade the doomsday.
“I’ve heard about some lesser civilisations asking to be adopted by a higher civilisation to save them from The Trip, although the outcome wasn’t always favourable.” He tells me about a species that survived thanks to a similar deal and these days they’re sincerely wishing that they didn’t. Their adoptive civilisation immediately privatised their planet and turned it into a business model where anyone with the sufficient funds could decide whatever would happen to their planet for an earthly week. They forcefully altered their genes and anatomy to make them near immortal so that they couldn’t kill themselves.
It had quickly turned into a sadistic playground for alien kids with rich parents. One of those kids had picked two million of them and replaced their skin with a near indestructible shell made of an element unknown to us humans. And it was a painful process, mind you. Then he summoned a storm bigger than the one on our Jupiter and threw all the poor souls right into it and watched them spin around in the winds exceeding the speed of sound by five times for a week. Usual spoilt kids’ game, you know.
Baco tells me that my fantasy could have made an interesting piece of literature if written well. “But you’d better write really fast,” he says. “And remember that no one will be left to read it.”