The Alien

He entered the secured area wearing a thick white protective suit and proceeded into a room separated into two halves that looked something like a holding cell for serial killers in American movies. In the other half of the room, safety behind a transparent partition, was an alien. The strangest part? That was just another day on the job for him. This wasn’t the first alien he had seen, but certainly the first of this type.

Everything was on a need-to-know basis. All that he needed to know, was that it was his job to communicate with this alien, and that they had no previous experience to work with. It had been ten days of interacting with the alien, and he did not know how long the alien had been in government custody for. He sensed that the top brass was getting impatient. Excitingly, they had a breakthrough yesterday: a system of reciprocal communication was established whereby if they performed an action, the alien would mimic it and try to repeat the alien word for it.

The alien certainly looked strange: many elongated fingers, small beady eyes, and an awkward bipedal gait that resembled nothing that they had seen before. But there were a lot of similarities between us, thought Alex: it did have hands, arms and legs, mouth, eyes, and ears, even though they were very different looking. It also seemed to survive in a similar atmosphere as ours: the atmospheric composition of the alien’s room was designed to replicate that of inside his spacecraft, but that they could replicate it, just as they could speak about the alien’s appearance using familiar terms, showed more similarities than differences.

Language was a whole separate story. There were markings all over the ship, so they provided various writing implements, but even though some of the markings were similar to the ones on the ship, they were in different order and didn’t map over. They tried showing giving the alien some pictures, and the alien responded well to this: it wrote what they could only assume were the corresponding words down beside the pictures and repeated the words in its voice that was simultaneously guttural and shrill.

Very quickly, they were able to use a computer-assisted language program to translate basic terms and phrases. The translator was very rudimentary, particularly for alien languages with a completely different structure to theirs. It was like watching a nature documentary where the Indigenous person speaks for a long time, and the translation is “he likes to hunt”.
The issue was that the people in charge insisted that the communication process focused on military and technology related issues. He understood the rationale, and it seemed quite reasonable. But unless there was an imminent alien invasion, it would be more efficient to learn the intricacies of each other’s cultures first, instead of starting with pictures of the weaponry found on the alien ship. Alas, here he was just an asset.

Today, he sent a scale model of a weapon found in the spacecraft, as well as an engine of the spacecraft into the alien’s room. He watched as it ran its fingers over each, understanding what they were.

“How?” he asked using the alien language. The translator did its best to approximate the question in the alien language.

If the alien could look confused, it did.

“How does it work?” he tried.

The alien picked up the gun, aiming, and shooting by pulling a trigger.

Guns are the same everywhere, he guessed. The mechanical garble of the translator spat out a similar output.

“How is it made?” he tried again.

“I don’t know,” effectuated the translator.

Then it signaled for food. He sighed and pressed a button. One of the rations from the alien’s spacecraft was dispensed into its room, a silver packet with an unappetizing-looking brown substance within it. Tough. As it had been for the past week. The alien didn’t seem to want to explain how its technology worked, or there simply weren’t enough shared words for the translator to pick up yet.

But the translator indicated a high degree of confidence in its translation. He decided to try a different tack.

“Did you make these devices?”

“No, AAA did,” replied the alien. There was an untranslatable part in the middle.

“Can you tell me more about AAA?”

“AAA are those who think and create.”

“Can anyone be an AAA?”

“No, you have to be BBB.”

“In your home, some people are AAA and some are not? Because they are either BBB or not?”

“Yes,” said the alien.

It demanded more food through gestures used a few days ago, even though the translator already understood the words for food.

“No food until this round of questions is over. Are there a lot of AAAs?”

“No, most just use what the AAAs make and the rest of them just do what BBBs tell them to do.”

“Would an AAA be able to tell me more about how this technology works?”

“Yes.”

“But someone who isn’t an AAA or is BBB be able to?”

“Nope. We’re just brute force.”

At the point, the loudspeaker came on: “Break. Please report to the meeting room.”

“I’ll be back,” he said, “thanks for answering my questions.”

That was weird, he thought, thanking an alien. The General had never done that before. At any rate, he knew what the page was about. He had strayed too far off the script and his military overlords were not happy with his performance. But he was.

“Sit,” instructed the General as he entered. He did as he was told.

“You went rogue. I don’t know where you come from, but here, insubordinate behaviour will not be tolerated.”

“I just thought it’d be more efficient to understand the culture and thought process of this alien before asking about how their technology worked.”

“You don’t think, solider. You do.”

“I’m not a solider within your chain of command,” he said, with more bravery than he felt, “I’m an external consultant. In any case, I learned something important about the alien.”

The General stood there silently, glaring at him. He took this as approval to carry on.

“This alien has evolved to have a hive mind, like a group of ants. Or at the very least, only few creatures of his species have been specialized to think intelligently, and the rest simply serve as brute force.”

“How can you be sure of this?”

“Clearly this drone doesn’t know up how any of the tech works, short of the right way to point a weapon. I don’t think it even qualifies as intelligent life.”

“Interesting observation about these humans,” said the General, his antennae bobbing in excitement, “I will report back to HQ.”

“What did you say?”

“Humans,” said the General, “that’s what they call themselves phonetically.”

Humans, he repeated to himself, working his mandibles around the word. It even sounded pink and fleshy.