You Live Where?

"I am so embarrassed, here we are having a lovely First Contact conversation with some of the most fascinating visitors we've ever had, now all of a sudden a single sentence is nonsensical. I sincerely apologize, I suspect our translator is severely malfunctioning. Give me just a moment, I’ll consult with my communication aide.” The ambassador scuttled away to the edge of the consultation chamber, directly in front of the panoramic view of low-TRAPPIST-1j orbit.

Fatima turned away from the ambassador to her second in command, lowering her voice refusing once more to believe the direct coms can only be heard in the helmets. “Did you send them the complete or abridged rosetta installer?”

Mazi closed his eyes to concentrate. “I’m pretty much certain it was the full package. Do you think their translation glitch is on our end?”

His superior let out an extended thinking hum and stretched, still fatigued from deceleration. The consultation chamber’s artificial gravity matched the surface of TRAPPIST-1j, about twenty percent greater than Earth’s. Fatima was familiar with this heavier feeling and shuddered slightly as she had a flashback to the world’s last fat camp she was sent to as a teenager. Mazi noticed none of this since he was trying to discreetly finish reading the species culture notes in his helmet display.

“Eh, I don’t know. Just seemed worth it to ask,” she said lazily through a yawn.

As the ambassador came back, the loud clacking of their hundreds of thin clawed legs on the amethyst-colored rough stone surface echoed throughout the room. Left behind was the communication aide, occupied pulling levers and weaving wires at a blurring speed on a recessed control panel in the floor.

“While my aide calibrates the necessary programs, I must say based on the documents we received you’re not exactly what we expected.”

Fatima rolled her eyes and groaned quietly to Mazi, "lord have mercy, we have to deal with this here too?"

"If we wanted to be talked down to by the powerful we could've stayed home." agreed the second in command.

“And I'm absolutely delighted! You look very little like the images in your planetary primer. Your bodies remind me of dark polished stones, however in the images your species looks,” the ambassador paused to think of diplomatic language, “...less appealing to our beauty sensibilities”

Fatima and Mazi turned to each other, astonished their appearance was rightfully praised for once.

The communication aide approached, their charcoal exoskeleton panels expanding and contracting rapidly leaving a trail of fine black dust. Mazi shared with his commander what was on his helmet display, [nonverbal communication: rage or anxiety].

“Well which one?” wondered Fatima.

“I think it’s the same reaction for both.”

“Lovely.”

In an instant the ambassador was extremely close to Fatima, lifted half their serpentine body to reach the human’s height and drummed a few dozen legs on her shoulders.

Her eyes widened and she gasped then froze up and couldn’t utter a word.

The ambassador reassured Fatima, “Please know we are trying our best to correct this, we are always very interested in learning about aliens.”

“Excuse you, no! No, no, please don’t do that!” Mazi was nearly shrieking.

“Do what?” The hosts both asked.

“That, your legs! On her body, don’t do that. It's extremely frightening.”

The climate control in Fatima’s suit couldn’t keep pace and she was sweating in sheets.

“Oh. I’m terribly sorry, that’s how we embrace when we are being sincere and polite. I hadn’t even considered you didn’t know that.” The ambassador turned to Fatima, “and here I was offended you weren’t returning the gesture! Extraterrestrial relations are never without surprises.”

When the hosts were standing that close, Mazi and Fatima felt an incredibly unpleasant jittery sensation in their abdomens. Whereas farther away their speech sounded like distant slow taiko drumming. But up close the vocals weren’t just incredibly loud, it was blue whale bassy.

"My stomach feels like a subwoofer." was the first thing Fatima could get out after the ambassador freed her shoulders.

The communication aide tried to fill the uncomfortable conversational lull they’d all fallen into. “I’d like to tell you both that the tops of your bodies look absolutely delicious.”

Mazi and Fatima gripped one another's arms in fear, not bothering to run knowing there was nowhere to go in this sealed stone chamber with no direct access to their ship. Terms they regretted not negotiating an hour prior.

The ambassador extended all their legs in sequence, flowing like rolling ocean waves from their tail to what is approximately a head, which the humans’ helmet display translated to [overwhelming irritation]. “What my communication aide has done an abhorrent job of communicating to you is that the part of you on the very top, it looks just like our most coveted rare medicine, fine brown kinky woven roots of the herb that heals cracks in our bodies. It not only repairs us but it is known to be the finest tasting thing in the world.

“Did you think I wanted to eat you?” The communication aide was shocked by the accusation.

“Yes!” shouted the Earth explorers in unison.

“I could never eat a thing which thinks!”

Knowing better than to tell them humans once regularly consumed things which think, Mazi tried his hand at easing this second wave of tension in the consultation chamber. “These views are extraordinary, I’d have a hard time focusing if I worked up here every day.” He smiled, hoping they had gotten to the human facial expressions chapter. He felt a genuine appreciation of the stunning faint yellow reflection of their star off the planet’s jagged ice formations.

“Views?” asked the communication aide.

“Yes. From the giant windows behind you?”

The ambassador made a slow slurping sound the helmet display captioned as [laughter, approximately].

“I always forget they’re there. We have extremely short distance light perception, so little of it makes its way below ground it’s not really a useful sense to us except when directly near one another.” The ambassador touted, “We installed the window to be progressive, you know in case we meet any of those adventurers who find that kind of exposure thrilling.”

“Do all inhabitants of TRAPPIST-1j have similar vision?”

“Inhabitants of what?” asked the aide.

“TRAPPIST-1j, your planet. That’s what we call it, named for a telescope built hundreds of years ago to find new exoplanets and that found your’s.”

“Interesting. We just call it Primary Satellite Ten. Our four moons are called Secondary Satellite Ten-One to Ten-Four”

“I respect the efficiency of that,” admired Mazi.

The ambassador curled toward the aide to say, “remind me to research what being compared to a tool means and if that’s a slur for foreign life.”

The communication aide returned to business. “So to address the translation issue, I think there is some vocabulary you have that doesn’t quite line up with ours’, it happens all the time. I just need to manually correct it. So this word “surface”...”

The four had a very long conversation about surface as a verb, a noun, its connotations, etymology, and so on until the ambassador was so flabbergasted they had to ask bluntly in hopes of finally finding clarity. “You’re saying you live on top of the ground? You mean under a constructed global shield?”

“No shield, nothing between our feet on the ground and the edge of the sky.” Fatima shared in a poetic tone.

“Every day you are exposed to stellar radiation?” the aide wondered.

“Yes, it’s actually quite beautiful at night near the poles of the world.” Offered Mazi proudly, momentarily zoning out to remember one scandanavian winter break of building sand castles in the day and watching the auroras in the evening.

“Beautiful? The process of protective atmospheric erosion is a matter of aesthetics for you? Does your star somehow not have severe solar flares?”

Fatima could see where this was going and was becoming a bit embarrassed. “No, it does.”

“And the atmosphere, it is so thick meteors burn entirely before they wreak catastrophic havoc on all of you?”

Mazi however did not see the trajectory of this conversation.“Not always, in fact a famously large one wiped out nearly all large life-forms millions of years ago.”

“And you still live helplessly on the naked surface of your planet? Why would you not reconstruct under the steady protection of deep stone? Oh, oh my I am so sorry.” The ambassador’s exoskeleton was rapidly contracting and they took a couple hundred tiny steps back. “I hadn’t even considered you might be from an underdeveloped marsh world. I am so sorry for being presumptive.”

“Actually we have plentiful hard rock deposits, which is where much of our fuel used to come from.” Mazi reflexively explained.

“Fuel from rocks? Nevermind, one mystery at a time. I just can’t accept that we’re talking about the same thing here there must be some kind of translation error.”

“I think you’ve got it.” Fatima was trying to maintain cordial patience. “We and most other species live on the top of the land under the atmosphere. There’s also abundant life in the liquid water oceans.”

The ambassador and aide created a cacophonous sound as they traveled back to the end of the chamber once more. Their volumes varied wildly, once so loud the humans clutched their stomachs from the disturbing sound wave. As their hosts exchanged animated gestures between their hundreds of sharp legs neither Fatima nor Mazi needed the helmet to confirm the translation [unintelligible anger].

The aide returned with the ambassador keeping a considerable distance behind. “I don’t know what the polite way to ask this is.”

“I think you need to just say it bluntly,” instructed the ambassador, “they are mature voyagers too.”

“The Humans, were you all—and you have my greatest sympathies if this is the case, it’s an unthinkably cruel punishment—exiled to the surface as a punishment by the water-life who conduct their own missions? It’s nothing to be ashamed of, we can’t all be winners.”

Fatima was indignant at the accusation. “Absolutely not, we are no victims. No other animal can even create complex tools let alone banish humans or travel to interstellar space.”

The ambassador rushed up to them at extraordinary speed. “But why would you not build a safer subterranean civilization since you know how perilous the surface of a planet obviously is?”

“Because building on land is much easier, it takes a lot of planning and tools and energy to dig underground.” Mazi defended.

“LAZINESS?” Boomed the ambassador. “Your whole civilization lives in perpetual threat of complete destruction from forces you are wholly aware of because you can’t be bothered to work any harder?”

Fatima hesitated so as to not truly speak her mind. “I wouldn’t characterize it in such a damning way, we have made incredible advancements living on the surface, especially with respect to—”

“You... I want to express this delicately and respectfully but I’ve never had to do this before. You cannot land on our planet. You have to leave. Immediately. I’m sorry you are works of art and until this seemed like delightful and very clever little critters but now that we understand how you all live I feel it is irresponsible to allow your primordial-level chaotic reckless instincts interact with our world. I wish you all the best in your travels, and I hope you find a civilization that welcomes you. Assuming you don’t annihilate each other first.

With that the stone floorplate Fatima and Mazi were standing on detached and glided through what had appeared to be sealed walls and carried them out to their shuttle.

“Well, shit. How many more times is this going to happen?” Mazi’s posture slumped and his face held a dejected expression.

“I’d be foolish to make a prediction but every other team in the entirety of the Central African Space Agency has a perfect record of denial so far and each time it’s a different reason. The hunt continues to find a civilization more batshit than us.”

After the humans exited the consultation chamber, the aide asked the ambassador, “I wonder if they think most cosmic life lives as carelessly as them right on the surface?”

“Surely not, if they thought that they’d probably think for most of their species’ existence that they’re the only life in the entire universe.” The aide and ambassador turned to one another and slurped raucously.