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literature
Character - Alien Explanation
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Literature Text
A question that plays out frequently on your media is, "Where do we come from?" Or alternatively, "Why are we here?" In the interests of fostering goodwill, we will now answer that question. It should be said that the same question plagues us as well, and perhaps someday a species greater than ours will reveal itself and answer the question for us as well.
To understand the answer, first you must understand a little about us. We are [translation error]. No single form holds us, we can become anything our minds imagine. Our bodies, to use a term you would understand, are completely amorphous. In truth we have no set body or form, only substance. What makes this possible is our basic genetic makeup. The term we have coined, using your language, is MutaGene. We are composed of this MutaGene, and it is us. Not an entirely informative explanation, I know, but one we hope comprehensible by your kind.
The foremost property of MutaGene is giving life to the lifeless. If I should wish to become larger, I only need to find some non-sentient matter and incorporate it into my own. Your species can do something similar, but at a far less efficient pace. You take in matter, make a small fraction of it your own, and expel the rest as waste. We are only different in that we do not create waste, and have much simpler methods of ingestion.
Our scientists find MutaGene quite interesting to study. But they must be careful with the raw material, as our laws pertaining to new life are very strict. Use in a lab setting is regulated but allowed, with the understanding that any life created will be allowed to live out its days freely and die a peaceful death. Creating life in quantities allowing for propagation and long-term survival as a new species is avoided, as any such incident comes with heavy consequences for the creator. The scientist in question would then be responsible for that new species, surely the end of his free time.
Your creation was not so simple. It began with a simple delivery. A colony of scientists stationed out beyond your Milky Way cluster were requesting regular shipments of MutaGene, and when the usual procedures had been satisfactorily completed the order was sent. A shipping company was contacted, and a driver was assigned the shipment. The journey was long, even for our kind, and the driver met his end while sleeping at the helm, due to a comet statistically off course. The shipment was scattered across the sector.
Some thousand years later, when the children of that driver were only just reaching maturity, life was detected in the Milky Way cluster. The driver could not be held responsible for it, his children neither so, in fact no one could be found as culpable. And so your kind was left to see to itself, with little expectation for your survival. You must remember, every other new life-form created with MutaGene had been overseen by members of our race, raised from its earliest beginnings with the help of a species already far advanced. It was thought impossible for a species to come into its own without our guidance.
But you did.
And now, the peculiarities of your society are at the forefront of fashion in ours. A being with a small number of limbs is said to be a human mimic. We watch all of your television, read all of your books, study what makes you happy and sad and [translation error]. And most importantly, we now protect your kind. The drama of your culture has become vitally interesting to our own, and so the ending of your culture is something we work tirelessly to prevent. Some of course disagree with these ideals, but such disagreement brings forth powerful and important debates.
A recent significant discovery is the realization that you might not be alone in your galactic sector. In hindsight we never actually found each planet where some of the MutaGene might have landed, and so there might be a close relative to your species somewhere close by.
To understand the answer, first you must understand a little about us. We are [translation error]. No single form holds us, we can become anything our minds imagine. Our bodies, to use a term you would understand, are completely amorphous. In truth we have no set body or form, only substance. What makes this possible is our basic genetic makeup. The term we have coined, using your language, is MutaGene. We are composed of this MutaGene, and it is us. Not an entirely informative explanation, I know, but one we hope comprehensible by your kind.
The foremost property of MutaGene is giving life to the lifeless. If I should wish to become larger, I only need to find some non-sentient matter and incorporate it into my own. Your species can do something similar, but at a far less efficient pace. You take in matter, make a small fraction of it your own, and expel the rest as waste. We are only different in that we do not create waste, and have much simpler methods of ingestion.
Our scientists find MutaGene quite interesting to study. But they must be careful with the raw material, as our laws pertaining to new life are very strict. Use in a lab setting is regulated but allowed, with the understanding that any life created will be allowed to live out its days freely and die a peaceful death. Creating life in quantities allowing for propagation and long-term survival as a new species is avoided, as any such incident comes with heavy consequences for the creator. The scientist in question would then be responsible for that new species, surely the end of his free time.
Your creation was not so simple. It began with a simple delivery. A colony of scientists stationed out beyond your Milky Way cluster were requesting regular shipments of MutaGene, and when the usual procedures had been satisfactorily completed the order was sent. A shipping company was contacted, and a driver was assigned the shipment. The journey was long, even for our kind, and the driver met his end while sleeping at the helm, due to a comet statistically off course. The shipment was scattered across the sector.
Some thousand years later, when the children of that driver were only just reaching maturity, life was detected in the Milky Way cluster. The driver could not be held responsible for it, his children neither so, in fact no one could be found as culpable. And so your kind was left to see to itself, with little expectation for your survival. You must remember, every other new life-form created with MutaGene had been overseen by members of our race, raised from its earliest beginnings with the help of a species already far advanced. It was thought impossible for a species to come into its own without our guidance.
But you did.
And now, the peculiarities of your society are at the forefront of fashion in ours. A being with a small number of limbs is said to be a human mimic. We watch all of your television, read all of your books, study what makes you happy and sad and [translation error]. And most importantly, we now protect your kind. The drama of your culture has become vitally interesting to our own, and so the ending of your culture is something we work tirelessly to prevent. Some of course disagree with these ideals, but such disagreement brings forth powerful and important debates.
A recent significant discovery is the realization that you might not be alone in your galactic sector. In hindsight we never actually found each planet where some of the MutaGene might have landed, and so there might be a close relative to your species somewhere close by.
Suggested Collections
This setting is one I find interesting for two reasons. 1) It provides a loose parental framework for the universe, and 2) it provides for other alien species in our galaxy that would be in many ways similiar to us. For example, I assume that "Journal of an Alien" takes place in this setting. fav.me/d30u4a1
As you will see, "The Write-In" also has a connection to this setting. fav.me/d3641zp
To be perfectly honest, I wanted to show and not tell the content of this piece. I had this really strong mental picture of a big trucker type guy, with the face of a lion – in fact, quite a bit like that one lion Digimon now that I think about it – whose "truck" would be a space hauler. I imagined showing him stopping at the space-trucker equivalent to an interstellar diner to chat with the "locals" and explain his boring routine job. I imagined showing him nodding off at the helm, and then showing the tiny speck of interstellar dust that caused his rig to explode and scatter his cargo across the cosmos. And then maybe I even would have done a bit with one piece of that precious cargo landing on a volcanic planet Earth and setting life in motion. But the thing is, there's a lot of problems with that setup. First, why would he have the face of a lion before lions existed? Second, I also really liked the theme of, "You want to know why you are here? Okay, here is the exact explanation." and the trucker-adventure piece would not have gotten that across as well. Third, I started writing the alien speech that would work as the framing narrative for the story of the lion-trucker and basically couldn't stop. That third problem is the hardest for me; when I start writing, what I end up with is not always what I intended and yet I feel it is always the better piece. You can't force a piece to be written, you have to let it write itself. That's what I learned from writing this piece and many others. As for whether I like it … maybe yes, maybe no. I still have this aspiration to re-write the piece sometime as originally intended, which makes me think I don't like how this piece came out, but I also like the titular Alien Explanation of MutaGene and the kind of stories that could be told using it. As usual for these older Character pieces, I like what I got from it more than I like the piece itself.
As you will see, "The Write-In" also has a connection to this setting. fav.me/d3641zp
To be perfectly honest, I wanted to show and not tell the content of this piece. I had this really strong mental picture of a big trucker type guy, with the face of a lion – in fact, quite a bit like that one lion Digimon now that I think about it – whose "truck" would be a space hauler. I imagined showing him stopping at the space-trucker equivalent to an interstellar diner to chat with the "locals" and explain his boring routine job. I imagined showing him nodding off at the helm, and then showing the tiny speck of interstellar dust that caused his rig to explode and scatter his cargo across the cosmos. And then maybe I even would have done a bit with one piece of that precious cargo landing on a volcanic planet Earth and setting life in motion. But the thing is, there's a lot of problems with that setup. First, why would he have the face of a lion before lions existed? Second, I also really liked the theme of, "You want to know why you are here? Okay, here is the exact explanation." and the trucker-adventure piece would not have gotten that across as well. Third, I started writing the alien speech that would work as the framing narrative for the story of the lion-trucker and basically couldn't stop. That third problem is the hardest for me; when I start writing, what I end up with is not always what I intended and yet I feel it is always the better piece. You can't force a piece to be written, you have to let it write itself. That's what I learned from writing this piece and many others. As for whether I like it … maybe yes, maybe no. I still have this aspiration to re-write the piece sometime as originally intended, which makes me think I don't like how this piece came out, but I also like the titular Alien Explanation of MutaGene and the kind of stories that could be told using it. As usual for these older Character pieces, I like what I got from it more than I like the piece itself.
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