The Visitors

It was early May when Dr. Sarah Landon got the call, and she’d thought it was a hoax. She hardly thought that the White House would be calling her, and the claim that an alien ship was headed earthward and sending communications was just too much. She’d hung up, and it wasn’t until the President himself called her back that she’d taken it seriously.

The aliens, who called themselves the Hrr’k, had sent a message, modulated on a beam of visible light directed at the planet. Any expert on modern digital radio communications would recognize the encoding scheme, but the choice of light as the carrier had meant that the signal had taken a while to be recognized. There was text in multiple languages, and then some instructions for building a more advanced receiver. The message was a little odd to say the least:

“Hey Humans, prepare for a total Star Trek moment! And not the Kirk kind, the Picard kind! We love your TV and radio, and we’ve been watching you for a while. So, we figured we’d come visit. But hey, don’t go all Independence Day on us and blow up our ship, okay? We’re not here to hurt you, we’re here to get to know you. And we don’t mean that in a probing way, if you know what we mean! That’s not us. And we’re not grey with big eyes. In fact, we’re more like octopus meets elephant. But don’t like, eat us, okay? We’re not food. We’re people, just like you. We’re just a little different. It’s a big universe out there, and we’re not the weirdest thing you’ll ever meet. So, like, chill out, okay? We’ll be there soon. We’re looking forward to meeting you!”

The military was convinced that this was just a ruse, and that the aliens were here to invade, because that’s what the military always thinks. But the President had determined that engagement was appropriate and had had a tech team build the communications device the aliens had described. It was a simple thing, just a highly directional radio receiver and a computer to decode the signal. A message was sent, and 90 minutes later, a reply was received, this time in English:

“Good to make contact, U.S.A. Say ‘Hi’ to your president for us! You weren’t the first, Australia was. And then China. We reckon that Russia will probably be reaching out within the hour. We’re looking forward to meeting you all!”

That was the point in time when Dr. Landon was called in for the Presidential Task Force on Alien Contact, and she had barely said “yes” when the story broke. The world was in a mix of panic, excitement, and disbelief. The aliens were coming, and they were coming soon, and they seemed to be hip to all the human tropes about aliens into the bargain. They had even made their own movie, where a Hrr’k family lands and has to get a job to support themselves, only they hate all the human food and the kids have to go to school and learn to fit in.

An attempt was made to prohibit the distribution of the movie, but the French-language version leaked out, and it was a hit, and quickly enough all the other language versions were available too, either released by reluctant governments, not wanting to have their variant overlooked, or pirated copies. What was odd about the movie was just how compelling it was, even as it was a simple enough story. The Hrr’k family were lovable, and the humor was broad and silly, but it worked. People laughed, they cried, they related to the characters. The Hrr’k did this thing where they always seemed to need to touch their tentacles and that was played for laughs, but it was also endearing. The movie was a huge hit, and people were eager to see more and excited about the upcoming arrival of the real thing.

Sarah had been on task forces before, thinking through the potentials of alien contact, but it had never been like this. Humans had always imagined that aliens would struggle to understand us, but the Hrr’k seemed to have a pretty good handle on human culture. A week out, they were streaming another drama and pretty much everyone on Earth was on the edge of their seat for the next plot twist. And like TikTok, they also made plenty of thirty-second shorts, and they were hilarious, with one series called “Humans are WEIRD!” and another called “Hrr’k Uck!” that was a parody of the Hrr’k movie.

Colonel Jackson “Jack” O’Connor was the DoD representative on the task force, and he was deeply skeptical. “They’re trying too hard to be liked!” he said. “They’re trying to get us to let our guard down. They’re trying to get us to think of them as people, when they’re not. They’re aliens, and they wouldn’t be here if they didn’t want something from us. But in the battle for hearts and minds, I think they’re winning.”

And they really were winning. The Hrr’k were causing waves through the entertainment industry because of their skill at storytelling. They shared movies and drama series and comedies, and many of them were entirely human stories with no Hrr’k characters at all. They just seemed to understand human nature in a way that few humans did. Their characters totally got under your skin, and you found yourself caring about them deeply. Of course, some people complained that all this new content was going to put human creators out of work, but the problem was that the quality was so high that the vast majority of people weren’t willing to settle for watching only second-rate human-created content.

They also had behind-the-scenes features showing how their media was made, showing Hrr’k writers and directors and animators at work (although the movies were photorealistic and appeared to be live action, all human characters were actually lovingly animated, in some mix of technology and handcrafted artistry). The Hrr’k creators talked about how they studied human culture and psychology to make their stories resonate, and the human movies they were inspired by. It was hard to complain about them flooding the market when they seemed to care so much about making good stories that people loved.

When four weeks later, their ship arrived and entered orbit, the world was excited, but it was also somehow anticlimactic. There had been numerous fictional versions of the arrival played out on screens over the preceding weeks, the bulk of which weren’t made by humans. Everyone knew to expect multiple landing parties in different nations to avoid the appearance of favoritism, and in the USA, everyone knew to expect Dr. Sarah Landon to make first contact. The Hrr’k watched the news, after all, and knew she was the head of the task force, knew that there had to be quarantine rules initially where only a few Hrr’k and humans met, and even knew that the President would be squeamish about shaking hands with something that looked more like a cross between oversized squid and a baby elephant than a person.

So, with all eyes on her, the moment had arrived. Dr. Landon stood in the hastily erected facility in the Washington Mall, and the air carefully sealed and filtered. Three Hrr’k entered, and Sarah was struck by how much they looked like the movie. In person, they really did somehow give off a baby elephant vibe, small but stocky, with quite a variety of flexible appendages, each with a myriad of vilii, like short bits of living spaghetti, shimmering with iridescence. As in their movies, they didn’t seem to need clothes, as colors would move across their vilii, which would move in expressive waves. The three stayed in a group and kept touching each other, and she realized that they were communicating through touch.

“We finally get to shake hands, or at least hand and tentacle!” said the one in the middle, who was leading the group as it walked, or more accurately, danced, towards her. “I’m Hrr’k K’rr, and these are my best meats, Hrr’k L’rr and Hrr’k M’rr. We’re so excited to meet you, Dr. Landon! We’ve been watching you for a while, and we’re so glad to finally be here!”

She reached out her hand as they reached out their tentacles, and she felt a strange tickle as they touched. K’rr reacted with something that Sarah interpreted as surprise (she’d seen enough Hrr’k movies to know their body language) and said, “Oh, maybe we should try again.” Sarah carefully took K’rr’s tentacle in her hand again, but again something was amiss.

“May I shake your hand?”, asked M’rr, and Sarah nodded. M’rr’s tentacle touched her hand.

The aliens huddled briefly, touching each other, and then K’rr stepped forward again. “I’m so very sorry, Dr. Landon. It seems that we are having some trouble connecting with you. I think we may have misunderstood your media. Can we try to explain?”

“Please do,” Sarah said, intrigued.

“Well, suppose you had a radio play. In it, a character might say something like ‘I’m really glad I have this coffee cup in my hand’. That’s not really true to life dialogue, but since there’s no visual component, the writer has to make it clear what the character is doing. So, they have to say it out loud. But in real life, you wouldn’t say that, because it’s obvious. You just have the cup in your hand, and you don’t need to say anything about it. Right?”

“That makes sense,” Sarah said, nodding.

“And in your movies, people often share their feelings in words. They say things like ‘I feel happy to see you’ or ‘I feel sad that you’re leaving’. But in real life, you don’t need to say those things out loud, because if you have a true connection with someone, you can feel their feelings. You can just know. Right? But we don’t know how you do that, because your movies don’t show that happening, they just do it the fictionalized way, with words.”

“Well, people don’t always use words, sometimes they just show their feelings through body language or facial expressions, or their actions,” Sarah said, cautiously.

“But what about connection?” K’rr asked. “Can one mind not touch another? Or is that something that only happens, uh, when you have a sexual experience?”

“Uh, even sexual experiences, as powerful as they can be for creating a sense of connection, don’t literally connect minds,” Sarah said carefully.

The Hrr’k shrank back, touching each other urgently. After a moment, K’rr stepped forward again.

“Dr. Landon, we are so very sorry. It seems that we have misunderstood something fundamental about your species. We respect all creatures, obviously, and we’re… pleased… to have… encountered you. But we… we thought you were people. I mean, yes, I know, you think of yourselves as people, but we thought you actually were people. We thought you experienced connection, that you could feel each other’s feelings, that you could understand each other deeply. But it seems that you don’t. You just pretend to. You just say the words, but there’s no real connection there.”

M’rr joined in, saying “And the fault is ours. We were misled by your clever artifice. We mistook your play-acting for truth, and that was our error. We are so very sorry.”

Similar scenes play out across the world, the Hrr’k trying to connect with humans, but finding that humans were empty of connection.

In the streaming media the Hrr’k had been generating, there was a sea change. Now in their shows, humans were always explaining that they didn’t feel any real connection to each other. They were always saying things like, “I don’t know what you’re feeling, I can’t feel what you’re feeling, I can’t understand what you’re feeling, I can’t connect with you.” Themes of divorce, cruelty, and betrayal were common. Human sexual relationships were portrayed as empty and meaningless, a desperate attempt to fill a void that could never be filled. In the few movies that contained Hrr’k visitors, they were always portrayed as being connected, always touching each other, always feeling each other’s feelings, always understanding each other’s thoughts, always loving each other. The Hrr’k embraced joy and playfulness, happy, always laughing, always smiling, always dancing, yet also knowing immediately when one of their own was in pain, and always there to help. These Hrr’k characters showed what proper people were like, and what humans clearly were not.

As the week-long quarantine dragged on, the Hrr’k began to withdraw. They had come to Earth to make friends, to share their culture, to learn about humans, but they had found that humans were not real people. They had found that humans were not capable of connection, and did not understand love.

In the end, the Hrr’k left when the quarantine was over. None of their technology was shared, and no word of future contact. They did, however, leave a vast storehouse of media they had generated. Thousands upon thousands of hours of movies and TV shows, music and art, all of it about connection, about love, about understanding, about happiness. And in each one, it was made clear that these were concepts humans could never truly understand, and every human portrayed knew this truth to their core. But like all of their media, each story was compelling; a work of purest art that drew you in and captivated you.

When a different race of aliens arrived a quarter century later, the human greeting them was sure to note “As a human biological organism, I do not experience connection, and I do not understand true love.” Everyone understood that was the right thing to say.