The whole, um, baby, is constructed together by both parents. They don't have separate gametes they could select on."
"But," said the Lady Sensory, "couldn't we maybe convince them, to work out some equivalent of gamete selection and try that instead -"
"My lady," said the Xenopsychologist. Her voice, now, was somewhat exasperated. "They aren't really doing this for the sake of evolution. They were eating babies millions of years before they knew what evolution was. "
"Huh, this is interesting," said the Lord Programmer. "There's another section here where they construct their arguments using appeals to historical human authorities."
Akon raised his eyebrows. "And who, exactly, do they quote in support?"
"Hold on," said the Lord Programmer. "This has been run through the translator twice, English to Babyeater to English, so I need to write a program to retrieve the original text..." He was silent a few moments. "I see. The argument starts by pointing out how eating your children is proof of sacrifice and loyalty to the tribe, then they quote human authorities on the virtue of sacrifice and loyalty. And ancient environmentalist arguments about population control, plus... oh, dear. I don't think they've realized that Adolf Hitler is a bad guy."
"They wouldn't," said the Xenopsychologist. "Humans put Hitler in charge of a country, so we must have considered him a preeminent legalist of his age. And it wouldn't occur to the Babyeaters that Adolf Hitler might be regarded by humans as a bad guy just because he turned segments of his society into lampshades - they have a custom against that nowadays, but they don't really see it as evil. If Hitler thought that gays had defected against the norm, and tried to exterminate them, that looks to a Babyeater like an honest mistake -" The Xenopsychologist looked around the table. "All right, I'll stop there. But the Babyeaters don't look back on their history and see obvious villains in positions of power - certainly not after the dawn of science. Any politician who got to the point of being labeled
"bad" would be killed and eaten. The Babyeaters don't seem to have had humanity's coordination problems. Or they're just more rational voters. Take your pick."
Akon was resting his head in his hands. "You know," Akon said, "I thought about composing a message like this to the Babyeaters. It was a stupid thought, but I kept turning it over in my mind.
Trying to think about how I might persuade them that eating babies was... not a good thing."
The Xenopsychologist grimaced. "The aliens seem to be even more given to rationalization than we are - which is maybe why their society isn't so rigid as to actually fall apart - but I don't think you could twist them far enough around to believe that eating babies was not a babyeating thing."
"And by the same token," Akon said, "I don't think they're particularly likely to persuade us that eating babies is good." He sighed. "Should we just mark the message as spam?"
" One of us should read it, at least," said the Ship's Confessor. "They composed their argument honestly and in all good will. Humanity also has epistemic standards of honor to uphold."
"Yes," said the Master. "I don't quite understand the Babyeater standards of literature, my lord, but I can tell that this text conforms to their style of... not exactly poetry, but... they tried to make it aesthetic as well as persuasive." The Master's eyes flickered, back and forth. "I think they even made some parts constant in the total number of light pulses per argumentative unit, like human prosody, hoping that our translator would turn it into a human poem. And... as near as I can judge such things, this took a lot of effort. I wouldn't be surprised to find that everyone on that ship was staying up all night working on it."
"Babyeaters don't sleep," said the Engineer sotto vocce.
"Anyway," said the Master. "If we don't fire on the alien ship - I mean, if this work is ever carried back to the Babyeater civilization - I suspect the aliens will consider this one of their great historical works of literature, like Hamlet or Fate/stay night -"
The Lady Sensory cleared her throat. She was pale, and trembling.
With a sudden black premonition of doom like a training session in Unrestrained Pessimism, Akon
guessed what she would say.
The Lady Sensory said, in an unsteady voice, "My lords, a third ship has jumped into this system. Not Babyeater, not human."
(3/8) The Super Happy People
The holo showed a triangle marked with three glowing dots, the human ship and the Babyeater ship and the newcomers. Then the holo zoomed in, to show -
- the most grotesque spaceship that Akon had ever seen, like a blob festooned with tentacles festooned with acne festooned with small hairs. Slowly, the tentacles of the ship waved, as if in a gentle breeze; and the acne on the tentacles pulsated, as if preparing to burst. It was a fractal of ugliness, disgusting at every level of self-similarity.
"Do the aliens have deflectors up?" said Akon.
"My lord," said Lady Sensory, "they don't have any shields raised. The nova ashes' radiation doesn't seem to bother them. Whatever material their ship is made from, it's just taking the beating."
A silence fell around the table.
"All right," said the Lord Programmer, " that's impressive."
The Lady Sensory jerked, like someone had just slapped her. "We - we just got a signal from them in human-standard format, content encoding marked as Modern English text, followed by a holo -"
" What? " said Akon. "We haven't transmitted anything to them, how could they possibly -"
"Um," said the Ship's Engineer. "What if these aliens really do have, um, 'big angelic powers'?"
"No," said the Ship's Confessor. His hood tilted slightly, as if in wry humor. "It is only history repeating itself."
"History repeating itself?" said the Master of Fandom. "You mean that the ship is from an alternate Everett branch of Earth, or that they somehow independently developed ship-to-ship communication protocols exactly similar to our -"
"No, you dolt," said the Lord Programmer, "he means that the Babyeaters sent the new aliens a massive data dump, just like they sent us. Only this time, the Babyeater data dump included all the data that we sent the Babyeaters. Then the new aliens ran an automatic translation program, like the one we used."
"You gave it away," said the Confessor. There was a slight laugh in his voice. "You should have let them figure it out on their own. One so rarely encounters the apparently supernatural, these days."
Akon shook his head, "Confessor, we don't have time for - never mind. Sensory, show the text message."
The Lady Sensory twitched a finger and -
HOORAY!
WE ARE SO GLAD TO MEET YOU!
THIS IS THE SHIP "PLAY GAMES FOR LOTS OF FUN"
(OPERATED BY CHARGED PARTICLE FINANCIAL FIRMS)
WE LOVE YOU AND WE WANT YOU TO BE SUPER HAPPY.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO HAVE SEX?
Slowly, elaborately, Akon's head dropped to the table with a dull thud. "Why couldn't we have been alone in the universe?"
"No, wait," said the Xenopsychologist, " this makes sense."
The Master of Fandom nodded. "Seems quite straightforward."
"Do enlighten," came a muffled tone from where Akon's head rested on the table.
The Xenopsychologist shrugged. "Evolutionarily speaking, reproduction is probably the single best guess for an activity that an evolved intelligence would find pleasurable. When you look at it from that perspective, my lords, my lady, their message makes perfect sense - it's a universal friendly greeting, like the Pioneer engraving."
Akon didn't raise his head. "I wonder what these aliens do," he said through his shielding arms,
"molest kittens?"
"My lord..." said the Ship's Confessor. Gentle the tone, but the meaning was very clear.
Akon sighed and straightened up. "You said their message included a holo, right? Let's see it."
The main screen turned on.
There was a moment of silence, and then a strange liquid sound as, in unison, everyone around the
table gasped in shock, even the Ship's Confessor.
For a time after that, no one spoke. They were just... watching.
"Wow," said the Lady Sensory finally. "That's actually... kind of... hot."
Akon tore his eyes away from the writhing human female form, the writhing human male form, and the writhing alien tentacles. "But..." Akon said. "But why is she pregnant?"
"A better question," said the Lord Programmer, "would be, why are the two of them reciting multiplication tables?" He glanced around. "What, none of you can read lips?"
"Um..." said the Xenopsychologist. "Okay, I've got to admit, I can't even begin to imagine why -"
Then there was a uniform "Ewww..." from around the room.
"Oh, dear," said the Xenopsychologist. "Oh, dear, I don't think they understood that part at all."
Akon made a cutting gesture, and the holo switched off.
"Someone should view the rest of it," said the Ship's Confessor. "It might contain important information."
Akon flipped a hand. "I don't think we'll run short of volunteers to watch disgusting alien
pornography. Just post it to the ship's 4chan, and check after a few hours to see if anything was modded up to +5 Insightful."
"These aliens," said the Master of Fandom slowly, "composed that pornography within... seconds, it must have been. We couldn't have done that automatically, could we?"
The Lord Programmer frowned. "No. I don't, um, think so. From a corpus of alien pornography, automatically generate a holo they would find interesting? Um. It's not a problem that I think anyone's tried to solve yet, and they sure didn't get it perfect the first time, but... no."
"How large an angelic power does that imply?"
The Lord Programmer traded glances with the Master. "Big," the Lord Programmer said finally.
"Maybe even epic."
"Or they think on a much faster timescale," said the Confessor softly. "There is no law of the universe that their neurons must run at 100Hz."
"My lords," said the Lady Sensory, "we're getting another message; holo with sound, this time. It's marked as a real-time communication, my lords."
Akon swallowed, and his fingers automatically straightened the hood of his formal sweater. Would the aliens be able to tell if his clothes were sloppy? He was suddenly very aware that he hadn't checked his lipstick in three hours. But it wouldn't do to keep the visitors waiting... "All right. Open a channel to them, transmitting only myself."
The holo that appeared did nothing to assuage his insecurities. The man that appeared was perfectly dressed, utterly perfectly dressed, in business casual more intimidating than any formality: crushing superiority without the appearance of effort. The face was the same way, overwhelmingly handsome
without the excuse of makeup; the fashionable slit vest exposed pectoral muscles that seemed optimally sculpted without the bulk that comes of exercise -
" Superstimulus! " exclaimed the Ship's Confessor, a sharp warning.
Akon blinked, shrugging off the fog. Of course the aliens couldn't possibly really look like that. A holo, only an overoptimized holo. That was a lesson everyone (every human?) learned before puberty, not to let reality seem diminished by fiction. As the proverb went, It's bad enough comparing yourself to Isaac Newton without comparing yourself to Kimball Kinnison.
"Greetings in the name of humanity," said Akon. "I am Lord Anamaferus Akon, Conference Chair of the Giant Science Vessel Impossible Possible World. We -" come in peace didn't seem appropriate with a Babyeater war under discussion, and many other polite pleasantries, like pleased to meet you, suddenly seemed too much like promises and lies, "- didn't quite understand your last message."
"Our apologies," said the perfect figure on screen. "You may call me Big Fucking Edward; as for our species..." The figure tilted a head in thought. "This translation program is not fully stable; even if I said our proper species-name, who knows how it would come out. I would not wish my kind to forever bear an unaesthetic nickname on account of a translation error."
Akon nodded. "I understand, Big Fucking Edward."
"Your true language is a format inconceivable to us," said the perfect holo. "But we do apologize for any untranslatable 1 you may have experienced on account of our welcome transmission; it was automatically generated, before any of us had a chance to apprehend your sexuality. We do apologize, I say; but who would ever have thought that a species would evolve to find reproduction a painful experience? For us, childbirth is the greatest pleasure we know; to be prolonged, not hurried."
"Oh," said the Lady Sensory in a tone of sudden enlightenment, " that's why the tentacles were pushing the baby back into -"
Out of sight of the visual frame, Akon gestured with his hand for Sensory to shut up. Akon leaned forward. "The visual you're currently sending us is, of course, not real. What do you actually look like? - if the request does not offend."
The perfect false man furrowed a brow, puzzled. "I don't understand. You would not be able to apprehend any communicative cues."
"I would still like to see," Akon said. "I am not sure how to explain it, except that - truth matters to us."
The too-beautiful man vanished, and in his place -
Mad brilliant colors, insane hues that for a moment defeated his vision. Then his mind saw shapes, but not meaning. In utter silence, huge blobs writhed around supporting bars. Extrusions protruded fluidly and interpenetrated -
Writhing, twisting, shuddering, pulsating -
And then the false man reappeared.
Akon fought to keep his face from showing distress, but a prickling of sweat appeared on his forehead.
There'd been something jarring about the blobs, even the stable background behind them. Like looking at an optical illusion designed by sadists.
And - those were the aliens, or so they claimed -
"I have a question," said the false man. "I apologize if it causes any distress, but I must know if what our scientists say is correct. Has your kind really evolved separate information-processing mechanisms for deoxyribose nucleic acid versus electrochemical transmission of synaptic spikes?"
Akon blinked. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw figures trading cautious glances around the table.
Akon wasn't sure where this question was leading, but, given that the aliens had already understood enough to ask, it probably wasn't safe to lie...
"I don't really understand the question's purpose," Akon said. "Our genes are made of deoxyribose nucleic acid. Our brains are made of neurons that transmit impulses through electrical and chemical -"
The fake man's head collapsed to his hands, and he began to bawl like a baby.
Akon's hand signed Help! out of the frame. But the Xenopsychologist shrugged cluelessly.
This was not going well.
The fake man suddenly unfolded his head from his hands. His cheeks were depicted as streaked with tears, but the face itself had stopped crying. "To wait so long," the voice said in a tone of absolute tragedy. "To wait so long, and come so far, only to discover that nowhere among the stars is any trace of love."
"Love?" Akon repeated. "Caring for someone else? Wanting to protect them, to be with them? If that translated correctly, then 'love' is a very important thing to us."
"But!" cried the figure in agony, at a volume that made Akon jump. "But when you have sex, you do not untranslatable 2! A fake, a fake, these are only imitation words -"
"What is 'untranslatable 2'?" Akon said; and then, as the figure once again collapsed in inconsolable weeping, wished he hadn't.
"They asked if our neurons and DNA were separate," said the Ship's Engineer. "So maybe they have only one system. Um... in retrospect, that actually seems like the obvious way for evolution to do it. If you're going to have one kind of information storage for genes, why have an entirely different system for brains? So -"
"They share each other's thoughts when they have sex," the Master of Fandom completed. "Now there's an old dream. And
they would develop emotions around that, whole patterns of feeling we don't have ourselves... Huh. I guess we do lack their analogue of love."
"Probably," said the Xenopsychologist quietly, "sex was their only way of speaking to each other from the beginning. From before the dawn of their intelligence. It really does make a lot of sense, evolutionarily. If you're injecting packets of information anyway -"
"Wait a minute," said the Lady Sensory, "then how are they talking to us? "
"Of course," said the Lord Programmer in a tone of sudden enlightenment. "Humanity has always used new communications technologies for pornography. 'The Internet is for porn' - but with them, it must have been the other way around."
Akon blinked. His mind suddenly pictured the blobs, and the tentacles connecting them to each other -
Somewhere on that ship is a blob making love to an avatar that's supposed to represent me. Maybe a whole Command Orgy.
I've just been cyber-raped. No, I'm being cyber-raped right now.
And the aliens had crossed who knew how much space, searching for who knew how long, yearning to
speak / make love to other minds - only to find -
The fake man suddenly jerked upright and screamed at a volume that whited-out the speakers in the
Command Conference. Everyone jumped; the Master of Fandom let out a small shriek.
What did I do what did I do what did I do -
And then the holo vanished.
Akon gasped for breath and slumped over in his chair. Adrenaline was still running riot through his system, but he felt utterly exhausted. He wanted to release his shape and melt into a puddle, a blob like the wrong shapes he'd seen on screen - no, not like that.
"My lord," the Ship's Confessor said softly. He was now standing alongside, a gentle hand on Akon's shoulder. "My lord, are you all right?"
"Not really," Akon said. His voice, he was proud to note, was only slighly wobbly. "It's too hard, speaking to aliens. They don't think like you do, and you don't know what you're doing wrong."
"I wonder," the Master of Fandom said with artificial lightness, "if they'll call it 'xenofatigue' and forbid anyone to talk to an alien for longer than five minutes."
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