write a new story | short stories

hesitant alien

inspiration for this comes from a short story by wreckthisphan. thank you for allowing me to use your story as a prompt for mine!

Never, not once, had I expected to see the creatures.

But yet, here we were, my fellows and I, gazing down at them from afar. Thrill, exhilaration, and nerves overwhelmed my body all at once. For this had always been a wish, but I had never truly strived for its fulfillment. For this had always been something I wanted, but never knew how much I needed.

It feels as if I know everything now, like I am aware of everything worth knowing. So strange. So perfectly and completely beautiful.

It was my very first ship, my very first experience outside the practiced regularity of all that I had ever known. From the moment I first boarded, from the second I got my first glimpse, I was committed. Completely and utterly sold. I wanted to learn about them. Needed to.

And I did. I can only speak for myself, but to me, the decades that passed in that same ship felt as if they were just seconds, passing by in a blur almost too fast for my eyes to see. As my fellows analyzed the planet itself, I became increasingly focused on the creatures. Their inherent complexity both puzzled and fascinated me. As they grew, matured, created, improved, evolved, I watched. I wondered how their minds worked. I wondered how such small, insignificant things could feel like the world to them. I wondered how they could not see the true beauty of their own lives, how they themselves functioned, and the lives of all the others around them to whom they barely gave a second glance. I wondered how, when they ruled their planet, with its dazzling views and alluring adventures, with its issues worth fixing and perfections worth protecting, they still battled, fought, debated, screamed.

I wondered how, in a world so wonderful as theirs, some of the creatures would tell themselves they wanted nothing more but to die.

At the beginning, I was convinced by these claims. It saddened us all that for some, I had good reason to be. There were too many creatures with tear-stained desires and tragic endings, and my mind could not understand these. I could not understand how they could possibly wish for the end, not realizing the ripple of the effects it created. I watched these ripples as much as I could, but they did not compute, would not translate in a logical way to the database. We had never experienced something so raw and undefined, unable to be analyzed. We were astounded. We were astonished. We were baffled.

We were awed.

We watched as the creatures discovered more and more about the world around them and the complicated parts within themselves. We watched as their minds battled over questions they could not find the answer for. We watched as they puzzled over the constant impossible decisions that would seal their fate. Every day, they faced a new struggle. And every single day, the creatures fought against their obstacles with everything they had in them, every scrap of resolve remaining, and they won. They survived. Eventually, they would die, and that day, they would not triumph over their struggle. But for years up until then, they would fight. And they would win.

I admired them more than I cared to let on to the others.

It was a slow process, but it went on. The creatures evolved, invented new technologies, advanced in their individual fields. From afar, we analyzed their dynamics and their planet, and we watched. Throughout it all, we watched, and I continued to wonder, continued to face my own unanswerable questions and impossible decisions. Beyond the information we gathered, I was limited only to wondering, but it was enough.

And then, after the passing of decades (perhaps shorter, perhaps longer; time had become irrelevant), the creatures tried to get to us.

Hesitation in my tone, I asked our commander how to proceed, what our next course of action would be. I knew it was likely that in order to flee unnoticed, as we were so accustomed to doing, we would have to eliminate the creatures now approaching. I had never wanted something I knew must happen less. Trying to understand them and their many odd ways had brought me to one concrete conclusion; they did not deserve such a fate. They deserved to live and grow in their own respective ways, to come to their own ends. We were all aware of the unlikeliness that they would receive this.

And so, the question is raised. Did we eliminate them?

Something that I could not find the word for at the time, something that I can only describe now as fondness, emanated from the commander then. Her answer shocked us all.

"No."

She taught my fellows what I, lost in my own observations of the other species, had already discovered. That they grew and matured as they did, just like us. That they all looked and acted differently, but were all the same in so many more ways than they knew. That they loved, cared, improved, invented, became, and, eventually, died.

This time, I told the others of my admiration for them. For there is something the commander told us that I had not yet realized.

The creatures are just like us.

I pinpoint that exact day as the moment I learned the most important thing that can ever be taught and known. To me, it was the secret of the universe. It was everything all at once. 

We are not so different, after all. Somewhere, deep down within, in a small place most refuse to acknowledge, every single last one of us is the same. 

All we want to do is live.