ONLY CONTACT

Considering that I am an actual, literal one in a hundred and seventy billion type of a person,(the
only human being ever known to have been eye to extrahuman eye with the Optera,) I give off an
extremely generic impression. I look just like one of those particular bodhi pilgrims that stalk the
pedtubes of any ashram or university, who's shaven pate rather than suggest devotement or piety,
accentuates a ruffian aspect that more than hints of a pre-enlightened past, spent in some thuggish
milieu. You know my type, wearing the grass sandals and full peace-toga of a confirmed light
licker, but still possessing the iron demeanour of someone with whom you might not wish to fuck.
For me the look is half disingenuous. I was brought up on Sac-Te in the twenties, far from any
civilised mesh and was definitely a bit of a, lets say, hooligan. I am not however any kind of
searcher or acolyte. I've lived with my wife, (your new tutor,) Por Shamti, here on this
planet/seminary Cass-En for eighty five years and I wear the trappings of inflorescence because I've
learnt that it is the only garb remotely comfortable (or lets face it available) on this rock of lava, not
because I'm in anyway drawn towards the lantern.(My wife often jokes that it is rather the lantern
that is drawn to me.) I'm not a believer, but I ended up here, a big part of your world, wearing the
garb, because of the events I'm about to relate.
So, this is the seventeenth time that I have written down this story. It is your teacher who
persuaded me to first write it and then rewrite it every five years, part of her reasoning being that as
I get older, articulating it using this ancient method might reveal fresh insight into my unique
experience.
This will add to the myriad versions of this tale extant. I have collaborated on the creation of
many sims, films, animations, also I have been recorded narrating this very same story whilst being
interrogated, hypnotised, analysed, whilst undergoing twenty eight different types of brain scan,
under the influence of various powerful and mild drugs. On stages in auditoriums, concert halls,
lecture theatres, whilst narrating live over the mesh of countless solar systems, whilst sat around
tables to audiences of four, three, two, so many one on ones I can't remember, once through some
special method whilst I was asleep and twice whilst being tortured.
Still, Por is correct, each time I pick up a pen and write it down it's like I discover some new
angle, some hitherto undiscovered dimension seems to leak from the ink. Under Por's instruction
I've assumed different readerships for each retelling, likely and fantastical. People in way distant
futures and pasts, children, AI. I've told it to the fifteen year old me that existed four years before it
happened. Once I wrote it for the benefit of the Optera, Por suggested that I made it into a sort of
thank you note but it turned out to be more of a complaint because, after all I didn't actually need
rescuing. Now I'm writing it for you, my wife's new students who I'm sure already know all there is
to tell. Still your going to be scrutinising this yarn for at least ten years so you might as well have
your own version. Writing for various audiences is, Por says, a great way to further ventilate my
account.
Each time I have to decide at which point to start. Ten years ago I went far, far back and began
with the tale of how my parents met. That version, the longest to date, is now what is called my
autobiography, a sort of written version of a liferide sim. Some of you have no doubt read it. The
last time I wrote, five years ago, I started with me floating alone in space, totally pasted on hefty
drugs, with nothing between my body and the endless void but a vintage spacesuit. That version I
think is one of my best, it's like the outline to a cheap thrill-sim, the type that Por disapproves of.
This time I'm going to take a totally different approach, I'll explain more about how I got there, into
the situation that led to the Optera taking me on board their ship and since I'm telling it for students,
I feel able to incorporate stuff that I can't have known at the time. I will also mix in some of the
different theories and you can unpack it all later.
For instance the popular supposal these days is that I just happened to be hanging somewhere
within signal distance of the path of the Optera nest, this I'm sure you know is an idea that has taken
years and much perusal of the mysterious movements of our squid like friends to gain traction.
You'll doubtless learn that this current theory could easily fall out of favour, due to the input of new

data or more likely, the rise of some fresh idea.( It's hard to understand now why it used to be
posited that the Optera detected me from another dimension before coming to get me.)
Anyway how did I get there? I was undertaking a stupidly dangerous stunt called Becalming,
a diversion invented by delinquents on Sac-Te, made possible by two separate advances. The first
being a development in mind curdling drugs, the formulation of Rossencra 58. Wax we called it,
also known as Clodhoppers Compress. The second an innovation in small crew space vehicles,
the Spectrum CFR Jumpship. In the twenties the CFR was the only affordable indium can capable
of jumping without piggyback right off an elevator-less mud ball like Sac-Te, then cruising
interstellar. Both these elements had to be there for Becalming to exist. Also there had to be some
desperate youth fucked up enough to invent a recreation so completely demented.
As I say, I was brought up in the twenties which on a spent resource class Z-distant planet
whose only inhabitants were marooned level zero miners, was twice as rough as what you've
imagined. I once saw someone get their nose bitten off for the crime of walking into a bar whistling,
and everyone in the dive agreed with the biter. You see it was considered cuntish to express such joy
de vivre in a shit hole like Sad Sac.
In our teens, me and my friends were super alienated. We were Beurans just like most of you,
yes the majority tribe in the big wide galaxy, but a minority on Sac-Te where 98 per cent of the
population were Tunagi.
Have you ever heard Benzglow? That's Tunagi music. I don't mean the the modern toned down
Beuranized version some of you posers listen to whilst smoking Kraff in your dorm. I mean the full
on raw uncompromising noise that sounds like a thousand retards hitting a rock with a tin pipe
whilst someone slowly strangles a fox to death. The Tunagi listen to that shit constantly whilst
drinking gallons of Zepp. Zepp is a sort of emulsion of alcoholic rat piss and sour dog's milk that
makes anyone who drinks it a bit............ fighty. Their only other pastime is Bangka. A sport that
involves catching an iron ball on the back of your neck that they prefer to play in traffic whilst
wearing those half mast pantaloons they love so much.
Por always says that my description of life on Sac-Te sounds tribalist and I sincerely apologise if
there are any Tunagi reading this who are offended. I have a much better understanding and more
tolerance of Tunagi culture now. Of course I do, one of my best friends is a respected Tunagi poet,
but I want to convey what it was like to be a teenager on Sac-Te, what it was that drove us to create
a culture that involved reckless shit like becalming.
They say that the sign of a real crappy planet is that everyone emigrates, I think that if it's a
proper shit hole like Sac-Te then no one leaves, because everyone is too depressed to imagine
escape and if they do ever experience the outside galaxy, they can't relate, because the way people
are is just so different.
Anyway, we were bored! We all resented our redundant parents for getting us stuck on such a
Tunagi backwater. We didn't fit in, we had nothing to do, nowhere to go, so we smoked Kraff,
huffed Zon and then when Wax came along, we dripped it.
What can I say about Wax. Would anyone ever take it if they had access to proper Compress?
No, except of course as Por once pointed out to me, there are probably now more academics who've
dripped trying to understand my mind-state during contact, than there ever were hillbilly drippers.
Anyway there was no Compress on Sac-Te, so we dripped Wax.
Wax does connect you to the infinite, sort of, just not quite the same way that Comp does. I've
taken C a few times in my life, fuck sometimes I've been fed it before I've told this story and I'd say
that the difference is, that on C when you become aware of the wholeness of everything it sort of
makes you feel small, small but secure as if your nestled in the bosom of the absolute. Wax makes
you feel as though your somehow being squashed right up against the edge of everything, it makes
you feel big, really fucking big, but not safe or cosy. No you feel as though that limitless whole
might suddenly crush you. Yes you feel lit by the lantern, but also, that it's flame might burn you.
I've tried to explain the effects so many times to so many academics and priests and the best way
that I know to describe it is to compare it to those boxes that you get from Xion. You know they
were everywhere ten years ago. You start out with a tiny box and inside that there's another box but

when you take it out it's somehow a bit bigger than the first box and there's a box inside that one
and that's a bit bigger and so on till you end up with a box that's bigger than you! Por tried to
explain how they work but I don't get it. Anyway on Wax you are that box and it's like you keep
taking yourself out and getting bigger, you're constantly having revelations like There I am that's
the real me! but then your like No look there's a deeper, even more real me! and each time you
get bigger, until your filling up the universe and the mental feeling is mirrored by a physical one.
That is, you really feel as though you're growing and though everything around you seems to grow
as well so it should all be relative, you still feel like a giant, like your hands are a kilometre wide.
The Xion box thing by the way is a great illustration of why it's good for me to keep retelling
this story. I've used that metaphor in the last two versions but before that I'd never seen a Xion box,
so Por's whole theory about me finding fresh ways to explain is sound.
Wax was big on Sac-Te. It was the one thing that we shared with the Tunagi, although when we
took it we didn't then settle down in a cellar for twelve hours of deafening Benzglow. No, we liked
to get out into the open. Drive a land cruiser out into the desert then lay back, maybe play some
gentle Tarani music and look at the stars.
Then the Spectrum CFR arrived, actually a whole freightship full of them. We fell immediately
in love with them. My friend Stone had a job down at the docks smashing crabs and he got one on
the never never the week they arrived. The controls on that thing were so intuitive a below average
intelligence monkey could fly one. I should point out that there wasn't actually anywhere in range
that we could get to, for us it was all about getting off planet. What I was always most surprised at
people being surprised at when I first used to tell this story, is the fact that I'd never been into space
until I was eighteen. That's just what it's like on a planet with no elevator and even if there had
been one, there was nowhere to go! It was a ten month journey to the nearest habituated planet, BleTarn which I've heard is more of a dump than Sac. So for us the CFR was all about the joyride into
the ether, you could comfortably fit six lads in it, take it up, zip into deep space then get totally
candled.
Who was it who first looked around and noticed that our home planet was full of old GUI spacesuits? Left there from the days when Sac-Te was a thriving base planet for asteroid mining. Then
who first realised that the disposal chute on a CFR was just big enough for a person to crawl into
and use as an air lock. Well, nobody knows who, but somebody did and then it wasn't long before
Becalming was invented.
Up you blasted, into the middle of the wide black yonder, then one of you would get into the
suit, drip Wax, crawl through the chute and out into space. Your mates would programme the ship to
pick you up twelve hours later, then fuck off, far away, leaving you alone in the void.
Technically one pilot could have dropped off five becalmees but it was usually the other way
round, one floater per trip. When I first saw someone do it it was sort of a dare, then it became some
kind of initiation rite. Soon everyone wanted a go so just about every time we went up somebody
took a turn.
It still is to this day one of the most amazing experiences I've had and I'm talking about the
times I didn't get picked up by space beings. It was as though Wax was always meant to be taken for
Becalming and had just been waiting for it to be invented so it's true potential could be realised.
You hung there, totally alone in the unfathomable emptiness of space, then you started to grow
and grow till you were the size of a galaxy and it was like everything that you thought you were
disappeared, but was replaced by this feeling of...... oh fuck how can I write it. Look when you
lantern chasers talk about the present moment being all that exists, well when you're becalmed you
become that moment. I can never explain it adequately. Por has spent the last 80 years getting me
to listen to mathpoetry, to visit art galleries, hoping that an education might help me better describe
these events but when it comes to being becalmed I still can't put it better than how I would have
when I was eighteen and that is that it fucks you up big style, it smears your brain all over the
fucking universe! You don't get close to the lantern ,you are the lantern and you can feel your own
heat, but it's a cold heat, so cold that it burns.
Of course it was very very fucking dangerous, mostly because everybody involved was curdled.

There were three deaths that I'd heard about, people some how fucking up the programming of the
ship and just not getting back in time, or suits malfunctioning, or people just too out of it to crawl
back into the chute, but no one I directly knew ever corked and we weren't put off. The important
thing was to check the suit was OK and make sure that you programmed the coordinates into the
ship before everyone was too mashed.
It was during my fourth becalming that non human galaxy voyagers picked me up, changing me
from just another no mark uneducated fuck-head, into the very special individual of so much
interest to the world of Optera Understanding Studies that I am now.
As I said, current popular theory is that the Optera were just on their usual incomprehensible
wanderings and I just happened to be, by a one in how ever many billion chance (Por will tell you
the correct number) floating there right in their path. And for reasons that remain obscure (as I say
I'll discuss the theories,) they picked me up . One individual Optera came out of the nest, probably
(though nobody knows for sure) attached by some sort of line, grabbed me with its six slippery
tentacles and took me back into the nest/ship.
That means of course that I should now be, the only human able to describe in detail all the
things that a OUS student really wants to know. What do they look like when alive? What is it like
in a nest? And I should really be able to shed some light on the one really big question that all your
studies are about. The one part of your catechism that really matters, what are the Optera?
But as I'm sure you already know, I can't tell you any of that, for the simple reason that all
through the event, I was out of my fucking head.
This is why your whole religion, your whole branch of philosophy and your whole science has
such a fucked up love hate relationship with me. Yes I met them, I was on one of their ships for
approximately 14 hours and twenty minutes. No I can't tell you much about it. Or even worse
nobody can untangle what part of my experience was down to the Wax and what was the genuine
impression of being in a Optera nest. When I say it was like being underwater, which it was, is that
because I was inebriated or is that exactly what it feels like to be on a Optera ship? I know that
every single member of the OUS community, every monk and pupil, wishes that the one human
being to ever have contact with the only known lifeform in the universe not from Earth that's more
complex than bacteria, wasn't totally stewed when it happened.
I remember a few years afterwards, I'd had such a hard time trying to fit back in on Sac-Te, and
then there was that first attempt on my life by those fucking Germer maniacs. When I realised that
there was no way I was ever going to return to anything close to normal and when it was first made
clear to me that there would always be a place for me inside the OUS and I realised that I was going
to accept that offer and I would probably always be close to fucking lantern chasers and that you
would always look at me with that confusing mixture of revered fascination and deep contempt,
well I'm not ashamed to say that I cried. I cried because I felt so alone. I'd seen the way that light
lickers who wanted to make me into a study course looked at me and it wasn't a look of
understanding. Your not used to people like me, we're from the same tribe but we're light years
apart. I know that if it wasn't for me, most of you would go through your whole lives without ever
meeting a single infidel.
It was only when I met Por and she pointed it out to me, that I saw the paradox. No matter how
much I'm looked down on for being a shonky Wax head, if I wasn't, contact would have never
happened. She told me how much of a tragedy that would be for all of you. How my story is to you,
proof that the Optera are the agents of the lantern that you think they are. My wife clarified to me
how much it all means to you and that no matter how much you revile me, every night you all get
on your knees and thank the lantern that I exist.
Actually I'm aware that there will always be a tiny fraction who hold the view that I have put the
Optera off making any further contact. That because of the state I was in I actually fucked it up for
everyone by being such a terrible ambassador for the human race. I just try to avoid that sort.
As I say I can't tell you anything useful about contact, but me writing it down is what this is all
about so, I will try! I was a good two hours into my outing when I became aware of a grey blob in
my field of vision that grew and grew until it was like a great big, grey, pink and white spinning top

covering the whole of space. Then it felt like I was grabbed by a big glutinous hand. I remember the
face, it seemed to be formed from yellow syrup. I thought it looked sad, like it knew some terrible
secret about me. I became transfixed by one eye, a pulsating blue mirror bigger than me. I thought it
was a magic portal and I wanting to float through it. Then I was placed into a grey, glowing,
translucent, hexagonal box under a thick sea from where I could see big squid like creatures
swimming around me, as though I was in an aquarium. There was a humming noise deeper than
anything I've heard that could have been music, and there were intermittent blue flashing lights. I
felt like I was there for hours. Not long before the end, some kind of invisible force wrapped a ball
of greasy fat around my suit. I was sucked out of the box into a tube and then could only see lines of
white light flying past me outside of the ball. Everything went red, then blue, then white, I felt like
I was being born. There was a gentle thuddum sound, then the ball of fat fell to pieces around me
and I was sat in my suit on the planet Lebarr,, which was amazing because Lebarr is at least two
years away from Sac-Te.
There was more, but I'm not going to write a detailed description of my hallucinations again. I
was oblivious to what was actually happening. I had no idea that I was aboard an Optera ship or
even that I was in a large structure. I was only aware of the hexagonal box. I never felt like I was
being probed or even observed in anyway, I'm pretty sure my suit remained locked the whole time
and OUS has always agreed with that.(Nobody thinks there's oxygen on a Optera nest.) You can
ride a sim if you want to experience the whole thing, there's at least twenty on the mesh the one
called Encounter, is I think the most accurate.
I'd rather write about one of the more hotly contested details that you will be studying. Was the
distress beacon on my suit on or off. I can tell you that it was definitely completely disabled before
we even took it onto the CFR three months earlier, and my five friends who have told their side of
the story many times, plus the two other people who'd been up in that ship with that suit all agree
unequivocally that that suit did not have a working beacon. The last thing we wanted was some
fucking HTS ship spotting a distress signal and picking us up, so we made extra sure that the
beacon was non functional. There once was you'll learn a small (very small) school within the OUS
that believed what I said, and therefore theorized that the Optera spotted me without receiving any
kind of electronic pulse.
That was however always a minority view. The orthodoxy is that it is just so much more
probable that a bunch of idiot Waxheads got it wrong. They point out that the emergency beacon on
any GSU suit activates automatically when it gets more than ten K away from a ship. They also
point out that neither me nor any of my mates had any training in the use of a GSU suit and that we
all admit to being wasted when I crawled out of that chute. They talk about the probability of an
Optera nest flying close to me, then they point out how mind boggling lower the chances become if
you have to believe that they literally flew so close to me that they could detect me just using their
natural senses.
I'd really love to say to those people, FUCK YOU! I know what I know and that beacon was
100% definitely disabled! But over the years I've had it broken down to me so many times, what it
would take, what it would mean and just how hugely incredibly unlikely it is that the Optera
coincidently flew so close that they could just look out from their nest and see me with their
admittedly massive eyes, and how so, so, so, so, so,so, much more feasible it is that me and my
mates made a mistake......... and the Optera heard a S.O.S. that is after all audible from
7,000,000,000 kilometres away, and decided to help.
And I know that not only is that a much more conceivable scenario, but also if I am wrong, then
there is clear proof that the Optera fulfil some ancient definition of what constitutes intelligent life,
that they are in fact Aliens with Radios and I know how much is invested in the working beacon
theory, how it just has to have happened that way .
I could point out, that of all the thousands of people who have stranded themselves in the
pathway of Optera ships, with distress beacons screaming for help ,(some of them on Wax in case
that is a defining factor,) desperately trying to be the second human to make contact, not one of
them has ever been picked up. I could say that maybe, just maybe it's because none of them have

ever managed to place themselves within seeing distance of a nest, though of course we've really no
idea how far the Optera can see. It's up to you to decide what you can swallow, it will affect the way
you study this and I know that no matter what I say it's highly unlikely that any of you will chose to
believe that that beacon was switched off. My wife will blatantly instruct you to believe that the
beacon was on. I'll just say one more time. No it fucking wasn't! Me, Stone and Mad Han disabled it
by closing down all it's possible functions one by one. We did it round at Stone's house the day we
found it. Stone's Dad showed us exactly how to do it, he was an old asteroid miner and he knew
what he was talking about. We checked it five times then, and made sure that it hadn't magically
turned itself back on every time we used it because if we had caused a HTS ship to turn of it's
course, not only would that of severely harshed our buzz, it would have landed us into a world of
shit!
By the way, the actual suit I was wearing has just been returned to the university here on Cass
where it's usually kept, after being on loan to the institute of Yaranti for fifteen years. How and why
all it's data got erased is a whole branch of OUS in itself. As I understand it, despite their new
methods Yaranti didn't make any break through, so the theory remains that the Optera wiped it on
purpose. Though I talked to professor Binay once and he admitted to me that it is possible that it
could have been blanked as a result of being covered in Optera gunk and being thrown at a planet. It
was an old suit.
It wasn't long after I was found lying in a broken open ball of that gunk, that the Germers came
into being with their paranoid theories about what my story really means. Apparently there are some
suspicious humans who have seen the Optera as a rather sinister presence since they were first
spotted and they've often used the language of disease to spread their fear. You don't need me to
point out the flaws in their thinking, you're educated people. If the Optera could infect me with a
virus that is going to wipe out all humanity, why couldn't they just put it on a lump of goo and fling
it at a planet. The most illogical part of their thinking is, if they really think that the disease might
be activated when I die, why are they so keen to kill me? Mind you if I hadn't seen Por so calmly
terminate one of them that time they came crashing through the windows of that lecture hall, with
their blade guns spitting blue death, I might never have fallen for her. Believe me there is something
about seeing a woman break the neck of your would be assassin that can make her seem extremely
attractive and if I hadn't met your tutor I would be a very lonely man now. A seminary planet is the
only place in the galaxy that is remotely safe for me, (the Germers aren't the only crazies that want
me dead,) but it's never going to be somewhere I fit in .
In a way I'm sort of like a living saint to the OUS, even though there are many amongst you who
can't understand why I have never converted. It's because I have no faith and because your religion
makes no sense. Fuck I've met plenty of monks who never even knew that there was such a thing as
a secular Beuran. Let me make it clear to you all right now, there are whole planets full of us in the
outside galaxy. Some people can't understand why my experience didn't make me see the light, or
how after so many years of living amongst you, even marrying one of your most eminent and pious
professors, I can still be an unbeliever. I've learnt after a long time, to appreciate the home that I
have here amongst you, but as I say, if not for my wife, I would be a very lonely man.
So what do I think? Are the Optera animals, or intelligent beings. Well they're animals in the way
that humans are animals, I mean nobody thinks that they're not, although I'm sure you'll come
across at least one old dean who will argue even with that, but are they intelligent beings who have
developed technology? Or animals that naturally fly around the galaxy. Are their nests like
aeroplanes that were invented and built, or did they evolve like the wings on a bird. Here I must
confess that I have had the difference between the biotech and evolution camps explained to me by
the top experts in the fields, I've heard the whole evolution can be biotech argument and I don't
think I'll ever really get it.
On the animal question, you know I once spent a year on Inverracc being left under the sea in a
space suit, whilst a variety of trained sea creatures, robots and people in rubber Optera suits picked
me up and took me to a nest. Then after each time I would be asked to rate on a scale of one to a
thousand how much it felt like being picked up by the Optera. Sometimes I was given Wax first. I

think even the egg-heads who came up with that one had to admit it was a complete waste of time.
That's the thing about me, even though here I am part of the course, the only living breathing link
to the Optera you have, I've really added very little to what is known about them. More was learnt
from the greasy goo that they wrapped me in before they tossed me at Lebarr. The fact that the
Optera obviously didn't mind us having that goo to study, has given the OUS more insight into their
thought processes than I ever will. (I should point out that without that ball of alien gak my story
might have never been believed.)
Of course most of what we know about the Optera comes from the study of the dead nest and the
bodies of the Optera that were found, floating near a shipping lane, one hundred and twenty years
before my excursion. Me and Por went to Stermlat where it's housed just a few months ago. Of
course even we didn't get to see the original but they say the copy is exact and it is an amazing,
wondrous, mysterious sight to behold. It's hard to believe that something so big flies through space
so fast. Why did the fifteen million Optera on that nest die, was it some sort of tragic accident, the
result of an act of war perhaps or part of the natural cycle of life and death? Some of the more
brilliant amongst you will one day get to study the original, close up whilst trying to answer those
very questions. Before then, right here on our campus inside the Debald dome, they still have that
mock up of a single hexagon. The best guess anyone could make of what one would look like alive.
I've been in it, on Wax, and can confirm that it definitely reminds me of a real one, really you
should check it out.
I've talked to professor Banour as well, and he explained to me the most amazing thing that
they've learnt from that dead nest, is that the matter (like the the matter of that fat that I was
delivered in) is like no other known matter in the universe. That the strings, inside the particles that
make it up, are they think, somehow programmable. He thinks that the Optera can control the
vibration of those strings, which apparently gives a lot of weight to the pan-dimensional theory. I
once asked him if the Optera find had ever helped us develop new technologies. He laughed and
said that in that way, it was as useful to us as a broken mesh-receiver would be to a fish.
There is so much that is not known about them. Do they have a home planet? Have they ever
been on a planet? Are they pan-dimensional, is that how they travel so fast? Why do they race off
whenever one of our ships approaches them? Are they scared of us? I'm afraid as far as all these
questions go, your guess is as good as, and probably more educated than mine.
I've tried very hard over the years to understand the way you God botherers see it. To me it
seems like this, in one way, you think that every particle in the universe is intelligent, lit by the
lantern, but you think everything but man has what you call blind intelligence. You think that
mankind is somehow separate, that only we can see the lantern because only we have true conscious
thought.( I don't understand why an animal doesn't have conscious thought. I think part of the
reason I've never converted, is quite honestly because I've never fully understood even the basic
concepts. How you can be confirmed when your twelve I've no idea.) Ah but then the Optera come
along and if I'm wrong and that beacon was on and they are aliens with radios which is what you
believed way before my adventure, then that means that there is some other form of life that can see
the lantern, and since you believe that everything outside of man represents the lantern, an
intelligence that isn't man must be some sort of agent for the lantern, or as I've heard it put angels
and even though generally your a bit cheesed off because they avoid human beings like we were a
disease, there was that one time that they saw one of us in what they thought was trouble and they
reached out, carefully picked me up then gently put me down somewhere safe and that is a very big
deal for your faith. Now, I have a lot of trouble understanding why you think that a squid having a
radio makes it into an angel, and I once heard that in the distant past it was thought that religion
would suffer if aliens were discovered, but they reckoned without your insane theological dexterity.
On the nights when my wife isn't with one of her three other husbands, I look into her eyes
amazed that I could fall in love with someone who believes such convoluted bullshit, but also I'm
forever grateful that she can love me, a dirty heathen, because as I've said, without her my life
wouldn't be worth living. Our love exists on a different level to belief or intellect. I can't explain it
any better than I can the inside of an Optera nest. I think (and you know it was my experiences

being Becalmed that first lead me this way) that ultimately we are all alone, inside our own Xion
box of existence, the really big stuff all packed inside, but loving someone and having someone
love you can really fucking mitigate.
Yes, the one human being to have ever met an alien thinks that we're alone. It's said that before
they were spotted, that was the big question for man, Are we alone in the universe? I bet most of
you don't even know this but I've heard that back then it was possible to be a scientist or a
philosopher, or any sort of academic without making an oath to follow the lantern. Anyway since
we realised the Optera were racing all over the galaxy the big question seems to be, why are our
bunk mates so stand-offish. Maybe the OUS, the whole science and philosophy that's grown around
the Optera is really all about us wanting to be loved.
Even though I wear the getup, I'm pretty sure I'll never go light licker. You must have heard the
argument, what if the Optera look at us the same way that we look at ants? I've had one of them
hold me and look right into my eyes and I ask this. What if the way the Optera look at us is not the
way that we look at anything, but the way that super intelligent ants would look at us?
I know that most of the OUS think that the bottom line is, even if I'm right and that beacon
wasn't on, the very fact that they picked me up and delivered me to a human friendly atmosphere is
enough in itself to indicate the sort of intelligence you desperately want them to have. But what if it
doesn't? What if it wasn't like me or you picking up a bug we found in a room and gently putting it
back outside? What if it was like a spider finding a bug in a room and gently putting it back
outside? What are your angels then?
Por says that theology and philosophy are not my strong points and maybe she's right. I should
finish this version, I'm not sure what it's adding to the cannon, maybe next time I'll try writing the
story from a different point of view, as the Optera maybe, or perhaps the space suit.
By the way, if you see me around campus feel free to come over and say hello. I'm sure Por will
introduce me to you all at some point. Before I finish I'd like to share a short poem. It's not
mathpoetry, it's a Tunagi, poem by Malokih Heer, a friend of mine. She says that her poetry doesn't
translate well into Beuran and if I am really totally honest I don't think I completely understand it's
full meaning, still I like it. Maybe one day I will learn Tunagi so I can read the original.
The Man And The Ant
Once a man picked up an ant
Dance for me ant,
No I can't
Dance for a man
You don't know
What it means
When I shake my head,
And move my legs
Then I will dance
No you will tread
On me
No matter
After all
You're just an ant
Then I will dance
And in my dance
I'll be a man
Then I will be the ant
Then you can dance
But you won't matter
And I won't understand