The Only Thing That Could Ever Unite Us

Four: vespers

So. He was actually going to meet what might or might not be aliens. Scientists were still undecided as to whether the entities were actually entities or not, indeed whether or not they were even alive or what they might be if they weren't, along with other matters like what they were made of, how anything could live in a vacuum, why water wasn't as important as they'd thought it probably was, etcetera ad infinitum.

They certainly seemed very lively for anything other than a life form, and, if the dreams were an attempt at communication, this was the first contact that had been speculated about in countless works of fiction from the dawn of modernity until the 3T made fiction obsolete, along with all other conceptual art.

It was a bit of a shame fiction had ended now he came to think about it. He'd quite liked the occasional story. But it was inevitable. After all, why would you spend hours, maybe even days trying to explain an idea when you could just upload it in full? And, more to the point, why would anyone pay you for doing it when they could download other thoughts and ideas for free? The Interplanetary Convention Against Empathy, which forbade the direct sharing of emotions almost the same day it became possible to do so, meant that emotional arts lasted a little longer, but they eventually fizzled out as people lost interest, the victim of immortality. For the first half century of your life you cared deeply about the emotions of others, for most it began to wane as they approached 100 (even if they didn't want to admit it, feeling guilty for their disinterest). By 150 there was a distinct hint of ennui maturing later into full tedium. By 200 years old, when you entered the state of wisdom in which you realised that human emotions were as banal, predictable and repetitive as the outputs of any other neural engine, you would happily give someone's nanobots a run for their money keeping them alive if they actually answered the question "how are you?" with anything other than a vague affirmation of their wellness. With nanobot control over neurotransmitters and, if necessary, cognitive structures most people treated even their own emotions as curable illnesses to be avoided if possible and corrected if not. Hopefully the custom of asking after one another's well-being would stop altogether eventually, the Secretary General thought. After all, of course you're well. We're not savages.

Arts now were strictly abstract, almost only ever constructed by synthetic sentiences because humans couldn't be bothered and attracted the vitriol of their peers if they tried, and studiously avoided both thoughts and feelings and focused instead on what the market might find pleasurable. As the market grew more jaded, he supposed it would either grind to a halt altogether or need to develop in more... extreme... directions. Hopefully they'd just give up on it, otherwise he'd have to legislate when it inevitably went too far, and legislation which obstructed or limited pleasure was always unpopular.

Any remaining, post-fiction, thoughts about first contact scenarios died when the final variables for the Drake Equation were worked out giving an answer of exactly 42.

42 civilisations in the entire Galaxy. They ran the figures again and again and it stayed the same. It was, as much as it could be and so far as the combined mental prowess of humanity and its army of synthetics could determine, definitive. So, the Fermi Paradox was no paradox after all - the distances between civilised species were so vast that contact was all but impossible. They were definitely out there, and we'd definitely never meet any of them.

Until we did.

He shrugged. Stranger things had happened. Okay, actually he couldn't think of a single example of anything stranger and the 3T literally only talked about the last few weeks when he tried to find out what the strangest thing that ever happened was, but there was at least a chance that something stranger had happened to somebody at some point in human history. And even if it hadn't that still did nothing to get him off the hook.

He was going to meet aliens. And he was taking the ambassadors of the nations of Earth with him.

The Secretary General of the United Nations of Earth indulged himself in a mild sedative before going to sleep that night. And, when that didn't work, he took a strong one.