Existence

seeking correlations… but un-correlations are another matter/liquid/solid/plasma/vrasma/ectoplasm!/!

ais don’t not-look very well – but autie-murph does it great /!/ not-patterns suit a savant like him + + + who deals with cobblies every day + + +

and so we ask-now that we found them-can/should we help mother-n-child??? this part is hard - › how to go beyond noting/noticing/not-icking/not-acting and create instead an arrow of effective action??? not our-forte… nor even aspies or high-funcs

doing stuff + + + that is what normalpeople are for -/- poormoms

bad enough is our handicap / our clumsiness / with realworld/cause/effect… only now there is this new thing… this alien/other/outerspace THING in the news… a world-intruder that has the cobblies all not-leaping about and not-yapping frantically

we need a friend ./.

we’ve used friends before – yes.?. dangerous. -/- sometimes they betray our trust -//- this friend had better be a good one…

29.

INCOMPREHENSION

Once you finally got the aliens talking, it proved hard to shut them up.

“Congratulations! As a space-faring type, you have surpassed very long odds. Few get as far as you have. You are now welcome to join us.”

That much came through pretty clear. It was the proclamation that made headlines around the world.

Less noticed-though still cause for rampant speculation-was how hard Gerald and the rest of the contact team had to work, in order to get that much clarity out of the Artifact. The ratio of useful information coming out of the ovoid crystal-versus confusing chaos-was still frustratingly low.

Like sipping from a fire hose, Gerald thought. Except this hose sprayed in all directions.

Bathed in exactly the right wavelengths to maximize energy use, the object he had snagged out of orbit with his garbage-collecting tether now shone with a vibrancy that enthralled onlookers. Scenes portrayed through its gleaming, curved surface appeared to swoop and shift at a dizzying pace, from cloud-flecked planetary horizons to mysterious cityscapes, revealed through unraveling mists. From desert ruins, drowned by drifting sands, to slick ocean vistas that rolled with oily viscosity and shimmered all the colors of a rainbow. From salty expanses that featured endless rows of windowless, cubiform huts, all the way to vast ice fields, where mysterious cracks opened to emit brief swarms of black, arachnoid shapes, spreading out to harvest strange, gray-green globs…

A series of alien figures also floated up, jostling each other as before. They seemed to push forward to press hands or paws or tentacles against the egglike inner surface of the message bottle, bringing close their eyes, orb- lenses, and other sensory organs to gape outward at the Contact Team.

Behind Gerald, just on the other side of a barrier of quarantine glass, stood members of the international commission, representing all the nations, estates, and important interests on Earth. And of course, there was everyone else, a large fraction of the world’s population, who played hooky from school and work, or else MT- tracked every moment while pretending to do their jobs. Economic productivity was taking a hit and no one seemed to care.

A gaggle on one side, staring out, and a super-gaggle on the other side, staring in, he thought. With plenty of ambiguity over which mob is the most eager or confused. Indeed, Gerald still occasionally experienced that same frightening illusion that he and his comrades were somehow the ones encased within a cramped, simulated world, and the Artifact denizens were the ones peering into a zoo-terrarium through their narrow, magic lens.

“We’re getting more complaints about visual signal degradation in the broadcast feed,” reported General Akana Hideoshi. “People don’t like the high-contrast, bleached, and reprocessed version being offered to the public. It inevitably provokes conspiracy theories-that we’re not sharing everything we see or learn.” Akana shook her head unhappily.

“Well, I don’t know what to do about that,” replied Dr. Emily Tang, the team’s interface expert. “Our policy masters have demanded protocols to keep the dataflow clean. After all, what if this device turns out to be a Trojan horse? A way for outsiders to inveigle some alien software virus into our networks? Or to reprogram people who watch closely. Such parasitic code might be tucked inside the bit stream, woven through it via steganography, turning any seemingly benign picture into a possible source of infection. The computers in this building are quarantined and scrutinaized. So are we humans who have direct eye contact. But we cannot allow the public to get direct access to unwashed data!”

Emily was paid to be suspicious, even though such precautions made her the subject of paranoid rumors, especially on the part of openness fetishists out there. Nor can I blame them, Gerald thought.

Along with about a billion others, he had been disappointed with the Big Deal, when it failed to meet the top goal of the Fourth and Fifth and Sixth Estates-total transparency. A bigger deal to end secrecy. A world where the politicians, zaibatsus, guilds, gangs, and superrich power brokers would have to operate in the light. While retaining their wealth, legal powers, and advantages, the world’s top movers would at least forfeit their privilege of cheating in the dark. Above all, everyone should state openly what they owned. A powerful idea, briefly igniting mass imagination…

… till it had to be bargained away, when all the top castes joined forces against it. Now? Everyone knew the Big Deal was a stopgap measure, buying time, or a little peace, till promised techno-miracles might revive the roaring optimism of the tween years. And some came! Only each breakthrough brought its own freight of future shock, and rising calls for mass-refusal. Every social model-even cheap, two-year-old versions that a citizen could download for free-portrayed the Big Deal teetering toward collapse in half a decade or so. Nor would mere truth and openness suffice, this time.

The Artifact might have chosen a better occasion to suddenly appear. Almost any other occasion.

Why couldn’t it have been snagged by some earlier astronaut? Gerald thought. Back in the giddy Apollo days, for example. Or during the rich, early part of this century, when everyone was calm, and there were still plenty of resources to keep folks from each other’s throats?

Even those who expect only good things when we join some interstellar community-nothing but wisdom and beneficial technologies-even those optimists know there will be disruption and of pain. And meanwhile, people who already have power will come up with every possible rationalization. Reasons to preach that change is dangerous.

“Anyway, there are other security-related concerns,” Emily added. “Tiger and I have come up with a range of possible theories for the chaotic, disorganized way the Artifact beings have related to us- the so-called Rabble Effect.”

Genady Gorosumov, the team’s xenobiologist, looked up from the holistank where he had been tending his models-growing simulations of all the different kinds of Artifact aliens that had been exhibited, so far-trying to understand them by vivisecting replica archetypes, based upon visual appearance alone. He brushed a pile of dismembered skeletal pieces toward a tray. Made entirely of light patterns, they swiftly reassembled into an articulated model of the centauroid alien.

“Now that is interesting. How do you explain the way these entities push and shove at one another? They seem to have no sense of order or cooperation-certainly no concept of turn-taking, or courtesy! Even when groups of them work together, briefly, in order to speak to us coherently, it is always