S.E.T.I., No!

by Corwyn Green

(1997)

(Dedicated to Kilgore Trout, the character in Kurt Vonnegut's novels)

If you could see the culture of the world as it would soon become, you would not recognize it.

First of all, the concept of "genre" would utterly disappear. Everything, westerns, romances, science fiction, all of it will become mainstream, and "mainstream" will be the weirdest, most mind-bending combination of things. Mainstream, as the people of the future define it, is be an existential romance taking place on the non-existent third moon of the Earth, it’s a King Arthur legend where Morgan le Fay becomes the immortal queen of the world, it’s something that’s the literary equivalent of modern art, it’s a boy-meets-girl story with no twists whatsoever, it’s a semi-documentary novel where all the characters are witches, et cetera and ad nauseam.

You think that’s bad? You should just hear the music. Moug synthesizers with bagpipes and violins. 1960's guitars doing renaissance music. A-capella recreations of Metallica and Megadeth, with humans making the guitar sounds. And then there’s the stuff they made up that you have no words for yet.

The college students of the time listen to all this stuff at parties, claiming that "it all rocks".

And you know what? It rocks as much as music from any other time period.

But you, as a science-fiction reader, are probably wondering "what about the sci-fi? Is it gone completely?"

Yes. Sci-fi as you know it is gone. It is believed to be one of the purposes of all art to push at the boundaries of imagination, so you could say that it's all sci-fi. If you think straight-fiction Ray Bradbury stories are sci-fi, then yes, it's all sci-fi. If you think sci-fi must be scientifically accurate, then nothing—save the real world itself—is sci-fi.

But some things you associate with sci-fi are very different in the future. For one thing, there is no such thing as a non-Trek girlfriend, any more than there is a non-Shakespeare girlfriend. No such thing a sci-fi convention either, but then, there were no genre conventions of any kind. There were no poetry reading since people shamelessly mixed poetry and prose. Literature wasn’t really literature either, but included sound and pictures. Art classes claim that Kurt Vonnegut started this trend by including pictures in his books. But there are many who think it was the Internet and the ability to mix almost anything electronically. Most probably, both sides are wrong and the trend, if due to anything more than the passage of time, is due to something else.

Aliens were everywhere. Not real aliens, but painted ones, written ones, holographic ones. Everywhere. Everyone knew that Earth was not the center of the universe, so if there was intelligent life on Earth there had to be similar life elsewhere. Humans thought Earth was one planet in a crowd of inhabited planets, much like humans were in a crowd of other humans, like the Sun was in a crowd of other stars, and the galaxy in a crowd of other galaxies, none more important than any other.

As Earthlings had not yet met the Aliens they knew were out there, they speculated about them. They wondered what their "cousins" in the cosmos would be like. Will they be nice? Will they be obnoxious assholes? Will they need help once in a while? Would they like to come over and socialize over a cup of tea or would playing pool in a dimly lit bar be more their style?

You should see all the "alien" brews and concoctions out there. Each is certified by scientists with many abbreviated letters after their names to be "the most likely drink the aliens would drink" or "the most likely mush the aliens wouldn’t get poisoned by if they came to Earth and sampled it" or anything. It makes you wonder about all the impressive abbreviations after their names. If they are so highly qualified for scientific work as they seem, why are they making food for creatures that aren’t there to eat it?

Then there are the xenobiologists. But every school wants a good xenobiology department, just as every school wants good chemistry, math, and art departments. So every school employs xenobiologists to teach. Kids fall in love with that science, major in it in college, then teach it. Et cetera and ad nauseam.

But it could be worse—they could all be literature teachers. I know it was worse back then, I was there. In the past—your present—all literature majors became literature teachers too, but literature teachers convinced little kids that a poem about cutting grass is a poem about class struggle, and a poem about native African life is a poem about race wars in inner city ghettos. I heard of one teacher who taught that a Robert Frost poem about a boy riding on a tree branch was really about masturbation. There are probably kids out there who believed that teacher and believed, for the rest of their lives, that Robert Frost was a sick old guy instead of a gentle admirer of Mother Nature. Because kids can't see how the words on the page could mean such strange things, they invariably leave those classes thinking "I don't get poetry". Then they never read it.

Things are definitely better now that xenobiology replaced literature teachers. Suddenly, entire novels written in poetry, like Chaucer's and Shakespeare's but not as good, began to appear.

Maybe it was the absence of the romance/tragedy mentality literature teachers had taught that led to the mixing of all genres. Just a thought.

In the future, the xenobiologists wouldn’t be the only ones doing work to no end. But with machines doing all the real work, people had to do something or get really bored. So they did things they could respect each other for. They talked in snotty conceited voices and worshiped each other. But is that so bad? They'd say "Wow, you're an xenobiologist? You must be very intelligent!" or "wow, you made that multi-universal drink that the aliens would actually enjoy consuming?". That’s not bad. In the middle ages, people went around flogging themselves, wearing shirts of horse-hair just to make themselves uncomfortable, and trying very hard not to do anything that might lead to the birth of more people. Now THAT was bad. I know, I visited them. They thought I was a witch because I didn’t share their fears and guilts and I almost didn’t escape with my life.

But not all future people will partake of the fashionable, futile, and self-aggrandizing endeavors of the xenobiologists. Some, like the people in Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, actually did things that led somewhere.

The huge dishes that looked like craters in the Earth were gone. SETI, like everything else, had followed the trend of miniaturization. Now SETI had something that looked like a orange stick ending with a black knob, encircled by three yellow rings. But as bad as it looked, it was efficient. It could scan stars for planets and even capture a hazy image of a planet. If there had been any signs of life on any world, SETI would have seen it.

SETI had found nothing. But, like so many children’s stories said, "if you don’t see them, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist". The eggheads kept at it.

But they didn’t just plunge onward, headless of their lack of results. They felt that if they got no results, they needed better methods and machinery. So some of them used the old machinery, and some of them worked at improving it.

One of the latter wise-guys found a way to use the images gathered from any three planets to extrapolate all the possible worlds in the universe, from which it could be seen just where alien life could possibly exist. This method was completely accurate within the galaxy, somewhat accurate in the neighboring galaxies, and unbelievably inaccurate as it approached infinity. But then, an alien race so far away that it’s registered as "at infinity" by Earth’s instruments didn’t really count, the humans reasoned.

This extrapolative method attracted much publicity, so all the world was watching when SETI proved, conclusively and irrevocably, that there were no such things as aliens, never have been, never could be, and never will be, except perhaps at the edges of infinity. They repeated the experiment three times, getting the same answer every time.

SETI also proved that, if there are any earth-like planets out there, they are also "at infinity". This meant that humans can build space stations and colonize planets, but they could never walk around without space suits under another planet’s sky. SETI’s extensive study of other possible worlds proved that Earth was indeed the best of all possible worlds, at least as far as human life was concerned. The rest of the universe was Hell.

But generation upon generation of humans had lived on Earth, and each generation had left its garbage for Nature--or future generations--to clean up. Many people didn't care about "future generations" on the grounds that "what have future generations ever done for me?". Many others didn’t phrase it quite that simply, but they still felt the same way.

Now these future generations have finally been born to Earth, and they discovered that they had to actually live in the shit you were too lazy to clean up. But future generations are just as lazy as all other generations, so instead of cleaning up the shit, they paid scientists big money to research time travel. They wanted to travel back in time and strike back at their ancestors. Meanwhile, they went on shitting onto their planet.

It is my personal opinion that this planet is the best of all possible worlds inhabited by the worst of all possible peoples. If humans had been any more selfish, sadistic, or stupid, they would have annihilated themselves long ago. They only survived by being only as bad as possible, but no worse, hence, the worst of all possible peoples. But that’s just my opinion.

Fortunately for you, and for them, time travel at their level of technological development was like a stone-age man trying to fly to the moon using something sewn from bat’s wings.

They hadn’t realized that if their attempt to time travel would be successful at any time in their future, then they would have ensured that they had never been born, and they would not have been there to try to time travel in the first place, therefore, their attempts must have been futile. Since they didn't realize that, it kept the scientists busy. All the people who used to work as xenobiologists and SETI personnel were now working on time travel. At least they were employed.

But what to do with all the aliens? Things have gone way too far to simply place aliens in the same category as fairies and gods. People looked at the pictures of aliens, and decided that they were mirrors of themselves. People started writing picture-and-sculputre-and-other-filled essays, debating each other about what aliens meant, about what Man actually saw in himself. Like an insane lonely person talking to his reflection, Man looked at the aliens and tried to figure out what they said about himself.

People studied the aliens every aspect, even their origin. They looked into the past to find when aliens have first appeared, and naturally came to the 20th century--the Genre era as it was called--and found the genre of science fiction.

They found no answers. So, like an insane lonely person smashing the reflection he could no longer bear to look at, Man started obliterating the aliens. At first it was slow, a bit of angry graffiti scrawled in pencil next to a picture. Then they defiled and tore down entire alien images. Before you knew it, people were piling up and burning aliens in the street, pictures, mechanical constructions, even 20th century science fiction books. They chanted "aliens suck" and "science-fiction sucks" much like the people who burnt disco records in 1979 chanting "disco sucks".

I had been to 1979--twice, although I didn’t meet myself--just to be one of the disco-burners: twice. Now I knew how the disco fans must have felt.

Star Wars (re-mastered and re-recorded into the holographic cubes that both computers and T.V. used for screens, with new scenes added each time) and Kurt Vonnegut’s books (re-issued, unchanged, over and over again) were spared (and even re-released again), since no one considered them alien-fiction or science fiction. Go figure.

Not that I'm complaining. It's good that there were at least two survivors.

But then, Earth’s children, using the super-high-tech telescopes they had gotten for birthdays and good grades, noticed something strange about Mars and called their parents over. The top half of the planet was rotating faster than it should, and the bottom half slower. It's as if the two halves were screwed on and were coming apart, which was exactly what was happening. The human colonies on the surface of Mars experienced severe earthquakes. Their life-support systems malfunctioned and many died before Earth rescued the rest.

Mars split in half, like a plastic egg from one of the toy vending machines you have in your corner of space-time. But there was no cheep, plastic, innocent toy within the planet Mars. That would be another story, much more suited to the likes of Douglas Adams. What Mars really contained was a hive of Martians, all living in the mechanical center of the planet. Like the Star Wars’ Death-Star which was mistaken for a moon, Mars was a space ship orbiting your sun--you had only mistaken for a planet.

It had come, from the edge of infinity, in search of other life. It had orbited Sol, waiting until humans have sufficiently evolved on Earth to be able to accept Martians. The Martians had waited for you because that was faster than traveling to the edge of infinity (again) to find another life-bearing planet.

Humans have proved a mite too clannish, too prejudiced to accept any but their own forms. So we assumed your form and came down among you. One of us was Prometheus, the "god" that gave you fire. But we didn’t really interfere as much as you think we did. You built the pyramids, on the backs of slaves, just to preserve the dead body of your celebrity politicians in. You invented calculus and nukes and NASA.

All we ever did was write science-fiction. That is our confession to you now: we sci-fi writers ARE the aliens. Jules Verne was an alien. He described the submarine so that you may create it and travel better--one step closer to NASA--but he didn’t tell you how to make it. He set the problem, you solved it. H.G. Wells was an alien. He introduced the concept of life on Mars, but he was forced to make it hostile so his books could sell well. All those 50's monster movies had aliens somewhere behind them--the movies were made so you will realize just how stupid the monster-attack idea is. Then we made the movies E.T. and Starman, to show you how your hostility could kill us. But in E.T. and Starman, we had to make the aliens humanoid, so you'd care about them as much as you care about humans. We don’t expect you to love a giant spider at your stage of development.

We aren’t spiders. We don’t actually have a shape. We are temporal space anomalies that create the illusion of bodies using electromagnetic radiation and force fields. Although we could look like anything, we would much prefer looking like nothing, and we wanted you to accept us in our formlessness.

Cordwainer Smith and H..M. Hoover are aliens, but they didn't get to do what they were supposed to because people didn’t read them enough. And they were the good ones, not like the 50's movies that were there just to be bad.

I don't know about Kurt Vonnegut and Alfred Bester though--I don't think they are aliens, I think they came to writing sci-fi by themselves. Charming, how fast some humans caught on.

But I'm a time-traveling alien, the others weren’t.

Our conversion campaign didn't work--and we didn't have the patience to start all over again. We had cabin-fever, having been cooped up in out space-ship for an immeasurable time, and we really wanted to walk around on a planet. We took the destruction of the alien images personally, partly because we are aliens, partly because those images were our project on your planet, they had been our art for centuries.

So we just came in and invaded, which was one thing we would not have thought of doing, but for our own science fiction writers. We kept humans as pets. I came back in time to tell you about the future, tell you the truth, give you the dignity of knowing what brought about your demise before you fall.

But then, none of this would actually happen, since I'm just a sci-fi writer. I'm only writing this because I've over-dosed on coffee and the sun has yet to come up, so I can't really "get up in the morning" just yet, so this is how I'm passing the time.

But then again, as an alien time traveler, I couldn't tell you the truth and make it sound like the truth because that would change the future and I would never have been born. I have to make it sound like a lie.

But then yet again, I could by saying the truth about the future, except for the part about us not looking like spiders in our natural form.

I’m not afraid to change things a little, because I’m only really concerned with Mars, and that things go on there as they will, which they will, because a little story on Earth won’t affect Mars at all. But proof that there are aliens would have changed everything--the images, the xenobiologists, maybe even the "mainstream" fiction.

You see what I’m saying? I’m just a sci-fi writer making up lies to amuse you. Nothing more.

The earth’s sun is an ugly red color by then, and showing signs of collapse. We will take our human pets and fly onward. On our ship, the societal and cultural differences between us and you will become irrelevant, and eventually, humans will end up having the upper hand. I know that, because then humans will take the entire ship back in time--something we have never been able to do but you will figure out--and pretend to be the planet Venus. The original Venus you would (or already have) destroyed and put it’s remains in orbit, mixed up with the asteroid belt. The fake Venus told us what it really was shortly before I went off time-traveling on your planet.

You, in our ship, will fly all over space-time, living longer than we will, while the rest of the universe spins onward and onward, going Bang and Crunch, Bang and Crunch, et cetera and ad nauseam, until even you get sick of it.

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