Gray Alien's Burden

Chapter 3: A Gray On A Mission

Over the next several days Jake and I met with local officials, charities, relief organizations, and administrators, all of whom provided me with a list of requirements. I then leveraged my colleagues to prioritize the distribution to Maple Leaf despite the fact that Canada was still weeks away from the plebiscite. Jake made a point for us to also spend time with the patients he befriended. There I met several children who were eager for me to tell them stories of my home planet. I found myself spending hours with Jake and the children telling them about the Gray homeworld of Ombarra with its lavender oceans and the ancient space elevators that still operated despite the invention of gravimetrics.

"Ooh!" they all gasped with wonder.

"Do you have transporters?" a child named Sandeep asked. Like the other children, Sandeep's cranium was as bare as my own due to the chemotherapy.

"Of course," I expressed. "We originally arrived on a T-3 interstellar transport ship that entangles..."

"No," he replied. "I mean, like the transporters on 'Star Trek'!"

Confused, I craned my neck. "Star Trek?"

Jake chuckled. "It's a science fiction TV show. Sandeep is referring to the ability to turn matter into energy, send it to another location and re-materialize it."

My orbs widened as I turned to Sandeep. "I have never heard of such a thing. It sounds fascinating!"

Later in the conversation, the children expressed a desire to be "beamed" off their planet to someplace where they could be free of sickness

The mission was becoming something far more personal than a senior service officer would have allowed and it took all my discipline to keep my orbs from swirling green with sorrow seeing the suffering around me. The fleet in orbit carried hundreds of millions of tons of food, water desalinators and purifiers, rudimentary medical equipment, and nannite replicators. It was the largest relief effort in United Gray Consortium history, but this was a desperate planet with over 4 billion human beings. Even before the Cruel Summer, over a quarter of its population had been living in extreme poverty. It was twice that now. Humanity's needs simply dwarfed what we had available. My superiors reminded me daily how only those who incorporated got priority for assistance. Maple Leaf was losing more people than we could save under the current level of support. Every evening, Jake dropped me off at the Holiday Inn and I returned to my room, ate my protein paste and allowed myself to break down.

Regional Manager Bob communicated with me frequently to see how I was doing. After one particularly difficult day where seven patients died, including Sandeep's mother, I abandoned all efforts to conceal my personal feelings and expressed flatly, "I find that I am most frustrated by the lack of sufficient support."

The Regional Manager's obs glistened sympathetically. "It is understandable, colleague. You are witnessing a kind of suffering that is completely alien to us."

My orbs threatened to swirl green again, so I decided to change the subject. "But while I go on lamenting, here you are having to navigate ever so cautiously trying to reason with those ludicrous isolationists over at the UN."

The Regional Manager tilted right. "Indeed. It appears that this Anthro Primus is gaining momentum within the various tribes."

I had been following the news about the nascent Anthro Primus movement and its admirers with some of the tribal leaders. Just today President Reagan publicly criticized Canadian Prime Minister Mulroney for holding a plebiscite, stating that incorporating into the United Gray Consortium was akin to surrendering one's deity-provided free will, which was a trope among Anthro Primus groups. Anthro Primus at first seemed like an isolated pocket of religious and ethno-nationalist extremists; after all, we arrived to save humanity from themselves when they were hours away from nuclear war. Leaders who echoed Primer propaganda were the same ones responsible for so much human suffering and its near destruction. Who would believe they were now promoting a belief of "humanity first"? Sadly, as more tribes voted to incorporate into the Consortium such as Guyana and Malta last week, the more Anthro Primus grew.