Short Story Collection

Aliens are stupid

Aliens are stupid.

No, I'm not talking about real aliens like me. I'm talking about the aliens you made up, assuming you are human (If not, do me a favour and get me out of here as soon as possible because teenage humans at the school I go to are horrible). Ever since humans realised that the glittering lights above you were stars that probably had planets around them, you fantasise about aliens dramatically trying to take the Earth, swooping over America in a big metal ship to destroy the world, and then they are stopped when humans put aside their differences and work together to defeat the alien horde, or because the aliens didn't understand love and that is their downfall.

What rubbish.

Firstly, do you really think we would study you down to the last quark and still not know how you think? Not know what love is? We experience it as well, just not in the same way as you, but we're not emotionless. Honestly, if you are human and you are reading this:

 You are all idiots. All of you. 

There is simply no reason for us to want to kill you off. We don't want the planet for it's resources: There are plenty of those in the universe. We don't want to move in: To make the long, long trip from our planet to yours, we download our consciousness into the engine of our mothership, so we don't need anything to live on if we're pure thought. Besides, our planet is still habitable, at least for us. That's put in simple terms, at least. And really, why would we travel four hundred light-years through space to abduct some lone Earthling?

I've seen those movies. Forget about flying saucers and laser guns and giant mechanical spiders, we don't have those. We don't think like you, but we know how you think. The only similarities between my race and the human one is we are carbon-based and we are curious. 

On the outside, I don't look different. I look like a normal fifteen-year-old human girl with blond hair and blue eyes (Which to us is so weird, eyes should not be blue). But I'm not. My age is closer to ten thousand and fifteen Earth years old, and I'm not even an adult. I can't pronounce my birth name because my language evolved as a result of a very different anatomy. You might as well ask a cat to read Shakespeare. I also can't pronounce my planet. I bet you are wondering: Why on earth is this alien kid here if he/she doesn't want anything?

If that's what you are thinking, you are wrong. We do want something. Like I said before, my race is curious. Contrary to popular human belief, curiosity didn't kill that cat, in fact, it's essential for survival. I'm one of millions of Kepler 438b scouts, inhabiting human-shaped bodies throughout the world. There are tons of us in every major city. And we are currently studying human anatomy and behaviour, for no other reason than we are curious about you. We want knowledge. We want to know more. We are also very interested in an invention you call the nuclear bomb. We are a relatively peaceful species (Unlike you humans, waging war on each other all the time. Get it together, for goodness sake.) but we may have to fight in the near future. Also, we like velcro. Ingenious.

I guess I have to talk about my planet now. Like I said before, I can't pronounce it and I can't write it, but I know where it is. In the constellation Lyra, the second planet from a dwarf star. Humans discovered it in 2014 and called it Kepler 438b. What a horrid name. Anyway, our technology is a lot more advanced. Our version of '2014' was a million years ago. Think about that. Humans hadn't even evolved yet. And then, around your version of '2032' we realised Earth had life on it. So I got sent in a big mothership to check it out, along with a small percentage of the population. 

I shouldn't be writing this, so I'll burn it after I finish. If for some reason I don't and you are reading this, I'm going to give you a warning:

You people are loud as hell. Radio waves, visible light, that's all escaping Earth's atmosphere, traveling through space. You look everywhere for extraterrestrial life, sending out messages, and not even thinking about the consequences. It never crossed your minds that maybe there was a good reason we never replied to your messages, never let you know we were there...

Prepare yourself. So far we've discovered hundreds of life sustaining planets in this galaxy alone. Out of those, twenty-nine support intelligent life. My people are pretty much the nicest out there, and humans are on the top ten. But you need to quiet down, immediately. You are ridiculously unprepared for threats from space, and don't expect us to help you. Oh, and stay away from the planet you call Gliese 581e. It's actually the closest planet with intelligent life to Earth, only twenty light years away. But they don't know about us, and you'd better hope they don't know about you...

Because if they find you, you're toast.