PJ’s Blog

From the first contact the the Aliens, back in 2654, humans have realized that they were very little like the aliens they had imagined. They seemed highly intelligent, since they obviously had very advanced technology and were able to travel at great speeds between stars, but they didn’t exhibit any exterior sign of communication, either between them or towards the humans.

The complete radio silence of their ship on approach and their lack of response to all attempts to communicate with them seemed to indicate the same lack on communication capability the hypoteses of the scientists were varied, but the one that got the most attention was that the aliens were some kind of advanced animal, shaped purely by evolution, which evolved their advanced technologies over long periods of time (they could, given the age of the universe had a headstart of many billions of years over Earth life). However, the construction of an exact working replica of the nearest moon base inside their ship hinted at something else. They were clearly adaptable, capable of creation, but the apparent lack of communication didn’t match the concepts that mankind considered essential for the development of an advanced civilization.

Over time, humans studied the aliens they were in contact with very closely: they were very docile, and lent themselves to all examinations very candidly. What was discovered was a little disconcerting. The aliens did not indeed communicate through ideas and concepts, which means that they were incapable of holding a conversation, for instance, the were all connected together through a network of electrical impulses. Their prodigious intelligence came from the fact that each individual was part of a distributed computing network, in a way. Computer metaphors for living brains are far from ideal, but where the human brain was designed as a central processing unit dealing with only the inputs and outputs of it’s local system, the Aliens were designed as the myriad of processing units inside a super computer.

So, taking that metaphor, humans tried to find the terminal and the language they could use to tap into the Alien living network, and try to communicate to the higher, hive mind. But the computer metaphor didn’t hold, unfortunately. The Aliens were connected in the same way the neurons in the human brain are connected. It’s the whole system that gives the whole it’s emergent properties of intelligence and consciousness.

But humans persevered in trying to communicate with the aliens, which were evidently very interested in the welfare of the human colonists, since they constructed the replica moon bases and supplied it with ample energy. In the base’s forth copy, the aliens built an odd structure, a pedestal with a bundle of hundreds of bio-metal wires coming out of it. Engineers, computer experts, biophysicians, psychologists have all tried to work out a way to understand the connection and to build a human interface for the Alien system.

To this day, that system hasn’t yet been developed, and at each new copy of the moon base the aliens construct the same connector.

The humans are free to exit the moon bases, and the aliens sometimes come into the human colony, but interactions are never more than brief spurts of attention from the aliens. There has been a long debate on the aim of the Aliens when they brought the human colony to Lalande, was the colony some sort of experiment? Were they being kept for amusement, as animals in a zoo? Did the alien hive mind have some sort of greater plan for them? This idea of the greater plan of the hive mind rang true to many, and cults pop up from time to time who preach the benevolence and mysteries of the hive mind.

Many questions remain, but the most pressing is this: is there a hive mind? Is there a higher consciousness in the Aliens, trying to communicate with the humans?