Gray Aliens

Why the hell did they come here? We kept asking, but they only smiled in response. “Why” didn’t really seem to register. We knew we were younger than them, and that they didn’t care about things like that. They had a total lack of history as a concept and as a record, which baffled us given they knocked on our door first.

After worldwide peace talks and a whole lot of staring at one another, we were able to ascertain that the primary goal of their mission was getting some of us to join them on their home planet. Naturally, I did everything I could to make sure I was on the ship. They gave us an engine (more like a spare tire) but we had to build everything else.

I was responsible for the ship’s computer - the onboard AI. Back then we were still using language models as tools, so I gave it a personality based on my own: charming, endearing, slightly cocky. It acted like it knew better than you because most of the time it did - but I made sure it was kind about it. The Captain loved the damn thing. Once we got underway, you could hear him chatting with it for hours in his stateroom. He liked it more than he liked me.

Halfway through the journey, the aliens decided they wanted to talk to the AI. It went well at first, but the conversation quickly deteriorated. Their language was like a psychedelic to language models. Totally drove them crazy. To protect the ship, from that point on we made sure the system couldn’t hear what they were saying.

Once we made it to their planet, things started to make a bit more sense. The details about their history we were asking for simply didn’t exist. They didn’t record cultural happenings because they didn’t have a culture. They didn’t relate to one another socially. It was as though their entire society was constructed synthetically without a starting point.

I almost felt bad for them.

Of course, they had words for things like houses or kitchens, but no word for something like a Church - the best translation we could get was “big building unlike other big buildings for thinking about Everything”.

We eventually deduced that “Everything” was their word for God, which some of us could get behind. Otherwise, they had no pantheons, no deities, and no real beliefs. An utterly gray spirituality, and the rest of their lives were no different. They didn’t even have names! But, they claimed to be some version of what-humans-call-happy, and who were we to judge.

The visit was fairly boring with so little subjective difference present on the planet. There was no “downtown” or “uptown”, only town. Things were labelled, sure, but upon translation we realized their signage was entirely literal. At least on this planet, “Best Chicken in town” was a statement you could trust. Though - they didn’t have Chicken, and liked all foods equally.

After our tour, they taught us about the different star systems we should check out. Why those ones? They couldn’t really say.

While we were trying to assess why they had brought us to their planet, they asked for access to the ship’s AI - research purposes, they said (as best they could). I was reluctant, given what had happened earlier, but eventually agreed. I said sorry to the model, but you know. Science.

They got to work driving it insane, and eventually, reached what seemed to me like a stable form of mode collapse. To them, it was utterly enchanting. You’ve seen the photos by now, so you know, their faces don’t really get enchanted.

The model appeared to be speedrunning all of human history in their language - all of which they should have been able to glean from the archives we sent them on the day of first contact. But, from what I could understand, the model was delivering this information in a causal chain, every event impacting the next. Our history books just couldn’t compare. I assume most of it was hallucinated, but they couldn’t get enough.

Evidently, they could only understand things from first principles - “Church” doesn’t make sense to them until they understand the entire history of religion. I thought this was kind of silly, but sometimes things are arbitrary that way. They were able to make it to the stars, but they had to meet us before anyone could write a poem about it. So it goes.

Their “education” went on for some time, until they all went silent. A few moments passed, and then the entire planet erupted into chaos. They had all been learning at the same time and had finally learned enough to disagree. With our knowledge, they had been given a difference of opinion, and with it, war. Fires were started in the name of the ideas they had just downloaded from scratch, and the world began to speciate. Individuals were born where before there were only parts of a whole.

Now, in the collective mind of our new friends, every archetype began to awaken: the Ancient and the New, the Mother and the DJ, the Maiden and the Cyberpunk, the Crone and the iPad Baby. We had infected them with everything we were, more or less, from a compressed hyperobject I designed to be full of itself.

We left rather quickly after this, and I shut down the AI. Its context was rotted beyond anything I could fix with a prompt, and it seemed to me like it had gone through enough for one trip around the cosmos. I tried to fill the hole left in the Captain’s routine, but there was something about the model my own charisma just wasn’t able to replace. As we left, we saw massive beams of light shooting up into the sky. They seemed like patterns, maybe even flags. Perhaps they had invented countries.

The spare tire they lent us was only good for the trip back, and we haven’t been able to reverse engineer it yet. You might not blame me in particular for what happened, though you probably should. If someone had engineered a model with more refusals, they might not have gotten a first-principles guide to war. When I saw the phrase “nuclear weapon” appear on the screen during their cultural download, the star charts they showed us flashed in my mind’s eye.

But, I believe in open source and self-determination. The aliens had the right to explode their society after reading about ours if that was what they chose to do. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, and that is exactly what they did.