Journal of an Alien Diplomat

Posted originally by a Writefag credited as "Someone else." in an archived Humanity Fuck Yeah! thread from 2011. The story details the diplomatic first contact between humanity and an unnamed alien species through the lens of a journal composed by an unnamed alien diplomat.

Journal of an Alien Diplomat

Entry One

The delegation will meet for the first time today. I’m keeping this record as ordered, though I don’t see the point. The humans aren’t exactly reclusive, but the hoops they made themselves jump through before they even returned our first contact message were absurd. I heard second-hand that they nearly went into a civil war over the possibility of our message being bait for some sort of trap. Are they just naturally paranoid, or have they run into some other species of non-humans that gave them trouble? I rather suspect the former, their military, for just having one star system, is pretty numerous.

Entry Two

The humans sent up some civilian diplomat instead of a military leader. I was surprised; they seem to value martial prowess fairly highly, so why do they have a civilian leader? Apparently, this guy was selected after a brief voting period, which wasn’t made open to the general population, but was only open to national leaders. That’s troubling: national leaders in a spacefaring species? That can only mean delays in the future.

Entry Three

A few more diplomats came up today, with huge stacks of portable computers. Our translators already added the one language they have used so far to the universal system, so we didn’t have any trouble deciphering the data from the computers. Apparently they want to know as much as possible about us, and in exchange, they provided a bunch of information about themselves, their history, some more language dialects we didn’t have covered yet, and some of their own starmaps. I was stunned. Why are they being so trusting? They were on the verge of a civil war when we contacted them. No, it was because we contacted them.

Entry Four

I know it’s been several weeks since I last updated this thing, but the human’s data is taking up all of my time. Apparently they have been in a state of what we would consider constant civil war since their people evolved far enough to grasp fire. Over the dumbest things, too, from religion to territory. Nearly a fifth of all of their most important technology, including their relativistic drive technology, was derived from something designed to kill other humans. No wonder they’re being so open, our people wouldn’t engage in an internal war on the scale these humans have, ever. They’ve killed more of themselves in the last thousand years than my people have ever died. Total.

Entry Five

The ninth week of the contact meeting is ending now. The reactions from the humans on their worlds have been more interesting than all the data they gave us, by now: they’re starting to get back to routine. They have their own planet, another planet, and about five moons in their system colonized to some degree, and each has a distinct culture and way of life. The reaction on each when we made contact was the same: they flipped out, and their peoples were seized by everything ranging from panic to joy. But now? Their reactions have stabilized to the extent that I don’t think we’re going to get a reaction out of them unless we create some further provocation. The most-read news articles on their electronic communication networks are more about domestic problems and entertainment and their economies than they are about us. Are humans just more comfortable in routines, or are they frustrated with our lack of diplomatic progress? I’m confused. The humans I’ve met seem unconcerned, but I know the Ambassador from our people is getting worried.

Entry Six

I’m relieved. The human ambassador met me personally, today, informally, here on the ship. He said that he could tell that I was getting worried about the negotiations, and he wanted to address me personally. I asked how he could tell I was worried when he had only met our species for the first time less than one hundred Solar cycles ago, and he replied that it was all part of being a diplomat. I stated outright that I was confused by the seeming lack of disruption on the part of the people below. He said that there were plenty of people who were disrupted, but that most of the humans in the system had already decided to wait and see what the outcome of the negotiations were before doing anything. “After all,” he said, “even if my species becomes an active member of the galactic community, most humans will stay right here, living their lives. We’ll be affected by galactic politics, new technology, and colonization, even assuming that we could find new Earth-type worlds out there, but most will want to stay right where they are.” I asked him how he could say that when so many of his people had colonized the rest of the system, and he laughed. I think. “It’s completely different when you can see Earth out your window.”

Entry Seven

Things have picked up so much. We got our translators working to the effect that nuance of speech, not just content, can be translated appropriately. The human ambassador’s speech and conversation were suddenly so much clearer. To his credit, he told us that he had been refraining from common speech, slang, and aphorism as much as possible. “I wouldn’t want to use a saying or phrase that had a clear meaning to another human, but made no sense – or worse, insulted – one of your people. Now, I can speak freely.” I have to wonder if this faster-paced dialogue will negatively affect the negotiations. The Ambassador broached the toughest topic today: Faster Than Light travel.

Entry Eight

Generally, species are content to create FTL on their own, before they even contact us, or vice-versa. Humans are the exception. They colonized their entire star system, with seven inhabited bodies and over a thousand mined, explored, probed, or mapped bodies with no habitation in their system. So much of their population lives in their orbital platforms that their own homeworld barely even supports two thirds of their species. They did this without FTL. Clearly, the fact that they have reacted peacefully to our presence rather than precipitously fighting or ignoring us indicates that they are mature enough to handle Faster Than Light travel…but I am privately concerned. One of the human diplomats has already begun copying our speech and movement patterns. I found myself opening up to him without even realizing it until afterwards. He must be doing it on purpose, to set us at ease. After one hundred twenty of their days, they’re copying the behavior of their first alien contact. This is one of their finest diplomatic minds, of course, but still. If they can do it with behavior, can they do it with technology? I suspect they will ask for a working FTL drive to study in their next meeting.

Entry Nine

I am vindicated, it seems. I spoke my concerns to the Ambassador today, and he agreed that there would be no gifting of FTL technology to the humans, that they would have to earn it on their own. The humans would react poorly, I guessed, but tactfully, as at least a few of them seem to genuinely care what we think. I was right, naturally. The human ambassador asked that their people be given a working FTL drive to reverse-engineer, in exchange for an unspecified piece of technology of theirs. Their technology, the Ambassador quickly replied, was inferior to ours in every way save communications, and we had no need for their communications technology. Communicating faster than light is something we can do already; communicating instantaneously anywhere in their system, as they do, is a wondrous piece of technology, but not necessary for our people. The human ambassador reacted with shock and surprise immediately, and then quickly became suspicious. I think he may have gleaned that we have discussed this amongst ourselves. How? I can not guess. We spoke of other things, and the ambassador of the humans seemed mollified by the discussions that followed. Will he broach it again? Probably.

Entry Ten

The humans surprise us. It is exactly half of one year after first contact, and life, as I before noted, continues. They are fully one third finished with another of their orbital habitation platforms, and we were given a tour of the construction site. Huge robotic construction devices smelt down chunks of ore from the many, many asteroid and lunar mining platforms the humans have throughout their system, ferried to them by relativistic drive-powered ore haulers. The slag is then fed into their forges and reduced to elemental purity, and the refined ore is then crafted, still in space, into modules, which are then attached to the frame of the space installation. The elemental slag is mostly hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and silicon, in this system. They use these things to make air and computers, apparently, which are then used in the construction of their platforms. I am astounded. They have created the most efficient industrial complex we have ever seen…by necessity. They lack FTL, so in the absence of easily-reachable resource deposits that they can mine on their colonies, they simply process asteroids into something useful. Another reason to deprive them of FTL? If they can prosper in such paucity, how will they react to plenty?

Entry Eleven

Disaster! One of the probes that the humans use to drag the ores they extract from their asteroid belts slammed into our ship today! Our forcefields held, but the drone was wrecked beyond repair, and the asteroid deflected towards Earth! It now moves only a few times faster than the speed of sound, leisurely by space travel standards, but it is colossal. It will depopulate the part of the planet it hits, surely. I am told that the probes and ore-haulers use a computer guidance system to slip into Earth orbital slots with their payloads, where the ores are removed by the pace and need that the human construction schedule dictates. If we had not been in the path of these probes, this would have never happened! The humans provided us with a copy of the ore haulers’ schedules to avoid just such a calamity! How did this happen?! What will happen to Earth?!

Entry Twelve

We have come to a conclusion. The crew and diplomatic staff have decided that we will divert the asteroid into the Earth’s sun, using our own ship to provide the stopping mechanism. Our fields are not recharged; the impact will kill us. We are not committing lightly, fully half the crew said that we should abandon the humans to their fate and continue on negotiating, some of the rest said that we should do all that we can without destroying ourselves, but I and the Ambassador disagree. We did this. Our misgivings about their technological level aside, the humans should not be driven to near-extinction by their own first contact.

Entry Twelve: Addendum

Bizarrely enough, all is well. The asteroid nearly hit the planet when the humans took matters into their own hands. We had maneuvered our ship into the path of the asteroid, ready to deflect the massive thing with our own ship, if need be. We did this. This was our fault. Except, the human diplomats were frantic, demanding that we move the ship at once. We were baffled. We were offering to solve the problem we had caused, so why were the humans demanding that we did not? They beseeched us to move, to let the asteroid move along its own path, directly towards the planet, saying that we did not deserve to suffer, to bear the brunt of this calamity. Finally, we gave in, and moved out of the course of the asteroid. We were watching what we thought would be the end of the Earth below…but we were wrong. A blast appeared near the asteroid, and we realized what was happening: the humans had detonated a nuclear device in the asteroid’s path to divert it. Not destroy it, no, but divert it. A few dozen of their own drone craft slammed into the side of the asteroid which had just been hit by the bomb, propelling it into near-Earth orbit. The human ambassador actually took me aside and explained that they had a contingency set aside for just such a catastrophe, dating back to when they had first created the mining drone and ore hauler network. He told me that the technology they had first employed to create the interplanetary ore haulers had originally been far more primitive, and unable to precisely calculate the appropriate course and speed to get the asteroids safely back to Earth. The Asteroid Diversion weapons and drones had been created to reduce any risk. In total shock, I asked why they had done this, and almost as importantly, why they had been willing to risk such a mining venture if they knew such a potential problem existed. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” he replied.

Entry Thirteen

Fifty days have passed since the asteroid incident, and the human’s reaction has been alarming. Civilian populations – and not a few military – across the system are clamoring for attention, some demanding that the human diplomats apologize for what “they” have done – as if the humans caused this! – others demanding that we suffer for this transgression, others yet launching into wild speculation. Above it all, the human ambassador has changed the tack of these negotiations completely. Now, all he seems to ask about is the justice systems of the galaxy, where before he has inquired about everything from laws restricting invasive plant species in agriculture to FTL drives to the origins of our linguistic colloquialisms. When asked what his official stance about the asteroid incident will be, by other members of his own species who are not part of his delegation, he replies cryptically. “Patience is a virtue.” “Never close doors you can not open.” “Invite no conflict where none exists.” “Yellow is most flavorful.” I have no idea what the last one means. Perhaps our translators are not as capable of translating euphemisms as we thought. Regarding the possession of the nuclear devices they employed to divert the asteroid, he has hastened – quite uninvited – to assure us that it has been over a century and half since any nuclear device was used in war. This assuages my fears somewhat, especially since we discreetly scanned the complex on the planet’s surface that launched the “nuke” and found that even the most powerful of these devices is little more than six times the effective power of the ones they employed: strong enough to damage our fields, surely, but nowhere near enough to destroy us outright. But I should not be thinking of these potential new friends as potential new enemies, as he himself says.

Entry Fourteen

Again, I am amazed by the humans’ ability to ignore trouble. It is now two hundred fifty days after first contact, and the human media has actually greatly reduced their mention of us, and the asteroid incident. They are now beginning to return to what I am told (with vast disgust, interestingly) by the human ambassador is the norm for their media: music, banal daily news, and what I think may be some form of medical treatment, aimed at those who suffer reproductive isolation. The fact that, in less than a year, the human species has been exposed to alien life and nearly been wiped out by the carelessness of said life seems to have been absorbed by the population with a genuinely amazing degree of blasé acceptance. I understand we will be going on a tour of Earth itself, tomorrow, though in full body-suits, naturally. We will have to be. Their atmosphere is breathable, of course, but their sun is so much more radioactive than ours in the spectra of ultraviolet and radio that to not wear suits would be downright stupid.

Entry Fifteen

What in the world are these humans doing without their own FTL drives?! I returned from a ten-day tour of their homeworld today, and I can say with certainty that I have never been more unnerved. These humans possess, I knew, massive space stations, tightly packed with their own, and their non-Earth colonies were barely at the level where abundant food could be harvested. I had made, naturally, the same assumption that the Ambassador did when we saw these places: that these were criminals being made to suffer, or volunteers who chose to live in these awful conditions because they had literally no choice, or the infirm and weak, who could be sheltered in a completely artificial environment because their homeworld was too harsh for them in some way. What I discovered is that Earth is, if anything, nearly as badly overpopulated in its capitals and trade hubs as it is in their colonies and space stations! I saw towers of apartments, some with over two thousand people living in them, stacked so close together they looked like rows of molecules in a crystal, and the people there seemed as if this was the norm! The leaders and visionaries and great speakers of humanity spoke and feted and recited prepared lines, but I heard none of it. These people are not a people in true squalor, not really, certainly not by their own standards, but I hear tell of truly shocking slums in the cities of the poorer continents. It seems a disparity of wealth and power exists here, and I am unnerved deeply. A population this large achieving the great works of their peoples, like the ore haulers and orbital platforms, is not impossible…but only a tiny fraction of their people are wealthy enough to have done it. A small percentage…without FTL.

Entry Sixteen

I suppose the entry before this must seem quite hysterical. It was not the numbers alone which disturbed me, and the others of the delegation. The human ambassador told me once that “necessity is the mother of invention.” These people need a means of controlling their population so badly that the first thing some of us did when we returned to privacy was propose that they be given a working FTL drive and the coordinates of a world they could inhabit and we could not. Of course the Ambassador rejected that foolishness. I approve. What unnerved me so deeply was that the humans seem to be capable of surviving so much that we could not. I do not, of course, speak of solar radiation. A little extra stellar radiation could be compensated. These, however, are a warlike people. That was my impression when first we met, and my opinion has not wavered. Yet, they coexist in tight groups in most of their population centers, their colonies were made of a mix of people that their nature states they could not tolerate, and their culture overcomes fractious divides so fast…we nearly kill them off, and then, not sixty days after the event, those who continue to demand that we suffer retribution are labeled – OPENLY! – by their leaders as deluded. If these people had developed FTL drives on their own, we would have met them on the edges of our own territory, I am sure. We would have met as friends. But we would have met as equals, when we are currently not. I should not be so disturbed by that thought. Yet I am.

Entry Seventeen

Two hundred seventy days gone by. The human ambassador has become more and more reluctant to divulge information about his own people to us, even as he shows us around his homeworld and pours more and more data about his species into our computers, for our analysts to devour. He answers every question we ask him, yet he divulges less and less in the way of specifics. Oddly enough, he actually seems far more relaxed in our presence than he was when we met. He showed up in a completely different set of clothing than the type he usually wears today, lacking the odd cloth around his neck. I wonder why?

Entry Eighteen

We returned to Earth today, and I am far more impressed this time than I let myself be last time. The human ambassador this time took us to what seems to be a site of great importance to his people: a building in one of their largest cities called the UN Headquarters. The building, I mean, not the city. We spoke to a panel of two hundred human ambassadors, each representing a human nation or extra-planetary colony. We answered questions, and had our images captured by their media, through a very thick-looking defensive device. When I asked why we were being defended, the human ambassador’s aide told me that it was for our own protection from those humans who did not appreciate our presence here as much as they should. I was touched by this, though apparently this is not at all unusual. We spoke to many of these diplomats, and I came away with the feeling that many had wanted to ask far more questions than they had been able to, out of a sense of propriety. Our own Ambassador told me that he thought it was to prevent any sort of insult, but I was not sure. Some of the human ambassadors seemed outright angry at our presence, and several were apparently restrained from outburst only by their peers’ angry gestures. I think it has something to do with the nearly groveling request the human chief ambassador gave to us on the very first day: not to even decrypt, let alone translate, a single one of the millions of messages sent to our ship, directly or otherwise, that did not bear his signature.

Entry Nineteen

Three hundred solar days have passed since the humans replied to our communications. We hold meetings on their planet as often as we do in space now. I am pleased by this, in all honestly. There is a strange appeal to these people that was simply not there when we first met. One particularly unguarded conversation with a human diplomatic aide produced an interesting result. The young woman said that she and many others were raised on fiction involving humanity playing the defender against unexplained or meaningless alien invasion, or playing the victim of some horrible, incomprehensible force of destruction, and the thought that life beyond their own system would be friendly and share the virtue of self-sacrifice was a vast relief. I had never considered this. Most species in this galaxy, we find, are very open with us immediately, or at least after a very brief period of distrust. These people did not trust us beyond discussion until we had offered our lives to save their planet, yet it seemed that we had achieved more in that act of proposed sacrifice than we had realized. These humans do, however, place too much emphasis on propriety for the sake of propriety. I do hope this woman does not come to reprimand because of our entirely unofficial exchange. The ambassador of the humans has certainly been making more and more of an effort to control what we see and hear of these people the more time we spend with them.

Entry Twenty

I understand fully now why the human ambassador was trying to restrict our communications. The ship’s crew, not a part of our diplomatic efforts, have been covertly compiling and translating vast amounts of the messages directed to our ship, without our approval. We have been exposed to their indirect communications, of course – we discovered them through the presence of their first radio transmissions, after all – and we have tapped their system-wide information networks, but the unauthorized communications directed to us, specifically, have been politely ignored and untranslated, thanks almost entirely to the human ambassador’s fervent pleas. The crew of the ship, however, have found that some of these signals contain messages of such hate and vitriol, such murderous rage and terrorized accusations, that had I not spent over three hundred local days immersing myself in their culture, I could have mistaken it for a declaration of war.

The human ambassador has much to answer for.

Entry Twenty one

The human ambassador was confronted over the messages we have received today. I asked him to meet us aboard the ship, not our own Ambassador, such as to put him at ease. He met us without his various aides and diplomats, with nobody but him, his second, the Ambassador, the ship’s captain, and me present. We tried a tactic that I suggested myself, placing transcripts of the communications before him with no comment. He picked them up, curious, and riffed through them, displaying a chemical reaction that drained much of the blood from his face. His second could stand to look at the communiqués no more than he. He looked through a few pages before seemingly getting the gist, dropping them on the table and looking at us blankly. Our Ambassador asked him what he had to say on behalf of the people who sent the messages, and he replied only after a few seconds of staring at the table. “I wish they did not exist.” Imagine the room: the three of us, sitting across from two human diplomats who looked so nervous they could have been taken for gravely ill. Not one of us even saying a word. I do not know how long we sat like that. Finally, the Ambassador asked the obvious, just to ensure no meaning was lost. “The people, or the messages?” “The people,” the ambassador replied sadly. “People so afraid of what they’re unfamiliar with that they hate it. It’s an instinct we should have shed by now.”

Entry Twenty two

The human ambassador seemed disarmed. Even resigned. Why should he not be? He had been caught in a lie of omission. The ship’s Captain spoke next. “Some of these people are threatening violence against the diplomats under my protection. Why should I permit that?” The human ambassador’s second looked rather sullen at the word ‘permit,’ but did nothing. The human ambassador acted as if he had not heard. “Humans are a tribal people by nature, and we did not evolve as the pinnacle predator. So, we treat cultures we have not experienced, and potential threats we have not faced before, with great skepticism. Why do you think we suddenly allowed you to visit Earth after the incident with the asteroid? You showed a virtue we share: willingness to sacrifice. It’s easier to relate to someone who acts like you.” “Then why did the hateful messages not cease entirely?” I asked. The human ambassador shook his head. “Because, sir, the human race is a fractious one. We do not think with one mind, or share one opinion. Why do you think we still have the United Nations around? The more humans there are in a room, the more inevitable the disagreements are.” He actually smiled. “It’s about the only thing that makes normal human diplomacy bearable: the educated mind likes nothing more than a disagreement.” “But these messages are not invitations to a debate,” I pressed. “Some are open messages of hate.” “And many humans are stupid,” the human ambassador replied with disgust. “Products of intolerant upbringing, or ideology.” “Suppress them then,” the Captain said with equal disgust. “Never,” the human ambassador said with sudden vigor. “All humans of any importance agree on this: everybody has a right to be wrong. Anyway,” he said with somewhat less passion, “nothing is more attractive to the dispossessed than an officially sanctioned bad idea.”

Entry Twenty three

Eleven Lunar cycles, just over three hundred local days, have passed since I arrived. The humans have given up pressing for FTL drive technology completely now, seeing that it will get them nowhere. We have addressed the humans directly, without a buffer of diplomats at the UN Headquarters, or through proxies like the ambassador. We spoke on their interplanetary data network, using their admittedly superior instantaneous broadcaster. The human ambassador has recovered quickly from the shock we gave him, much to his credit. It was, in fact, he who suggested that we address the people directly. He told us people would react best if we broke down our speech to the simplest possible elements, explaining why we made each decision. I thought that that would be interpreted as an insult, but he assured me that if there was one thing that humans resented in unison, it was having people talk as if everybody in the audience understood exactly what was going on. So we told them what the ambassador had told them already: that we were representatives of a large confederacy of species who agreed to mutual defense in the case of extra-galactic invasion (constantly invoked), refusal of FTL drive technology to those who did not already have it (blessedly a rare concern), and integrating new species into the galactic community (humanity was one of less than a dozen). The people of Earth were then permitted to ask questions of us directly, screened by a human diplomatic team on Earth and sent up to us. They ranged from the banal (what’s your homeworld called in English?) to the probing (from what stems your desire to keep us from FTL?) to the disturbing (do your people ever invade others?). I wonder what use it could do, but the human ambassador seemed to think it was a success.

Entry Twenty four

Only a few days left in our Earth diplomatic exchange. The ambassador of the humans seems to have taken ill, somehow, he has been more and more uncomfortable in his dealings with us, in the physical sense. At the advice of his cohort, we have taken to keeping all of our meetings on Earth, so that he does not have to abide by the discomforts of the quick, but rough transit from the surface to the ship. Here he seems more familiar, if not more comfortable. He has explained to me the reason for his sudden change of topic all those days ago, after the asteroid incident. He said that he had wanted to know how our people treated its criminals, not in punishment for their crimes, but in our leniency to the excused. If someone commits a crime, for instance, but saves another’s life, do we let him go, or punish him fully, or punish him less? We told him then, that generally it depended on the severity of the crime, for some crimes can not be uncommitted. He explained that he had relaxed upon hearing that, because it was a value we shared, though not all of the nearly two hundred nations on Earth, let alone the six colonies, had justice in common.

Entry Twenty five

The ambassador worsens now, his health deteriorating. Our meetings last only a few hours, with the rest of our time spent pouring over the larger and larger amounts of information his staff have been releasing to us. Information about their militaries, mostly, knowledge regarding their capability to adapt to warfare in space. Our talk of extra-galactic threats, it seems, has startled several of the species’ military leaders, and they wanted to know how much they would have to change if they agreed to be part of our confederation. We took one look at their military history and realized that they would have to retool their entire military from the ground up. Over nine tenths of the armed forces they had available to them were tied to the ground, with most if the remainder comprising obsolete oceanic navies and aerospace forces that couldn’t seriously threaten our escape pods, much less our juggernaut-tier defender ships. One thing that was actually somewhat surprising to me was the data regarding their nuclear weapons. One file stated that at one point, one of the now-dissolved nations of their people had possessed a nuclear weapon, called Bomb of Kings, that could have produced a yield over two hundred times that of the bomb that diverted that asteroid. A blast like that could have reduced our diplomatic cruiser to a fine, radioactive powder. Yet, it seemed that all such weapons were decommissioned and turned into power plant fuel decades before our first contact. What was surprising to me was that these very warlike people could have displayed the restraint needed to make weapons such as that and not use them. There were well in excess of twenty four thousand nuclear weapons in humanity’s history, detailed in two global arms races in two centuries. Yet only two had been used?

Entry Twenty six

Three hundred sixty days have passed. The human ambassador is dying. Neither their own medical technology, nor ours, even if offered, could save him. He is suffering from a massive, systematic organ failure that his staff has privately informed me to be symptomatic of heavy metal poisoning. I am in shock. How? Why? We have done no such thing to him. The hate-filled messages aimed at us from the surface have not changed in volume or content, either. So who has done this?

Entry Twenty seven

The human ambassador has contacted me privately from his deathbed. Not the Ambassador, not the Captain, me. He has told me privately that he knew he had been poisoned when he had taken us on one of our tours of the United Nations, when someone had slipped a poison in his drink. He hadn’t figured it out until his doctors had told him roughly what day it had occurred, and had no idea who, specifically, was responsible. He told me to contact the Ambassador and Captain on his behalf and tell them, and instruct them to tell nobody else. I asked him why I was to keep it secret, and he told me that he wanted us to make a decision. He then broke the connection before I could ask him what he meant. Needless to say, I am apprehensive. The man knows he’s been poisoned in the final days of the negotiations, so keeping it quiet when the culprit is unknown I can understand, but why would he distrust the rest of our crew and diplomats? Had he suspected us, he would never have told us.

Entry Twenty eight

The human ambassador is perhaps the boldest being I have ever encountered in all my centuries of life. Surely he can not have planned for every single outcome of this venture, surely he can not have predicted what we would do. Not now, after less than a year of knowing of our existence, after forty days of crippling illness. Surely he could not. And yet, here we are.

Now, on the final day of the conference, he announced – live to the whole species! – that he had less than a day to live, and that he knew that one of the diplomats on his trusted staff had poisoned him in the UN. He then cut the three of us into the transmission, streaming from the bridge of our ship. I can only thank goodness that we have been in front of live humans beyond the diplomatic corps so infrequently, else they would have seen our shock and horror at the sudden recording. The human ambassador then went on to state that he had told the aliens, had told us, that he knew that we were innocent, and that it was time for us to make a decision.

Entry Twenty nine

He said that if humanity was to become a trusted and valuable member of the galactic community, capable of upholding the responsibility of the confederacy’s laws and mutual defenses, that we had to do the same. We had, he said, the means of depopulating Earth right before us…the asteroid we had accidentally diverted towards Earth. He smirked through the drugs and pain, and said that trust was a “two-way street.” We needed to be able to trust humanity…but humanity needed to trust us. “And so, I leave it to you, my far-away friends,” he managed, “to render unto us the just desserts of this betrayal. I am dead, by the hand of one I trusted. You can inflict the punishment of the arbitrary, dropping an asteroid on our entire population, almost certainly killing the one responsible, and demonstrating what humanity has in excess…or you could not, and demonstrate what I think I see in you.”

He cut his channel.

Entry Thirty

There we sat, three aliens, before the entire human species. I couldn’t see them, but I could see their world. An entire planet, ten billion people…with three aliens controlling them all. Every single one of our communications channels, from radio to data stream to the instant-cast relay we were using to broadcast, was active, with unheard hails from across the Solar system.

Three aliens and a year of diplomacy to decide the fate of a species.

The Ambassador broke our frozen state of shock. Choosing his words carefully, he spoke to the instant—cast. “We have just seen the closest thing to a human leader killed by one of his own aides. This reflects rather poorly on your species ability to think ahead. You have had two periods in your history when you collected nuclear weapons…in case you MIGHT have had to use them. Half of your people live in untenable squalor, the other half travel the planets.”

He leaned forward, obviously dreading his next words. “I have read your history, steeped in blood. Your own ambassador admitted in shame that tens of thousands of communications, with which we have been bombarded since we arrived, represent a substantial portion of your population and their mindset: ignorant, fearful, theocratic. You actually have the nerve to make war on yourselves even as you petition for the ability to spread to other star systems, and join our defense against the enemy from beyond the galaxy.”

He sat back, looking drained. “Now, your ambassador, without even so much as warning us, forces to decide whether or not your people get to exist, or join the confederacy even if you do. It is not, to borrow a phrase, what I signed up for.”

Entry Thirty one

Then, he turned to me…and his thoughts must have echoed my own, and the Captains’. He looked back at the camera…and grinned. “Yet…the very person who just entrusted you to us clearly thought that you were worthy of us. He has spoken at length about the virtues we share…compassion for the family, sacrifice when needed, curiosity. He said that nothing we had done or said or shared could have achieved as much as our willingness to divert that asteroid did. He showed us the monuments to progress your people have made. Your people achieved powered flight less than three hundred years ago, yet you have colonized six bodies in your system, two terraformed from little more than rock and methane ice. You show a drive and an adaptability we have never seen before.

“After less than a year of meetings, when one year ago he did not know we existed, your ambassador decided that not only were you deserving of our trust…but we were deserving of yours. About your culture and mindset, I know only what I can learn in one year, and already, your ambassador chose to think that I knew enough to judge you favorably.” The Ambassador stood, the camera tracking him. The Captain and I joined him. The Ambassador faced the instant-cast and spoke.

“He was right. Our greeting lasted a year, humanity. So, now, let me welcome you to the galaxy.”

Entry Thirty two

Life has become rather hectic of late. A new human ambassador has been chosen, and the UN is busily streamlining their voting bodies to make it easier to make decisions on behalf of the species, rather than opposing political ideologies. I understand that the process was eased by the discovery of the one responsible for the poisoning of our friend, the former ambassador. He died mere minutes after hearing our decision. I didn’t think I would be capable of getting so personally involved in an alien diplomatic affair, but I felt emotionally drained when the diplomat responsible for slipping the poison to the ambassador was caught.

Representatives from the other twenty eight members of the confederacy that have attained spaceflight have arrived to officially welcome humanity into the greater galaxy, but the UN Security Council was most direct in their demands that our Ambassador take point.

The negative backlash against the decision to leave the entire species’ fate up to the Ambassador was disheartening to behold; I understand that entire regions of the planet nearly rose in arms over the human ambassador’s choice. I am led to understand that his appointment had not been uncontested, as he was apparently very rich in his own right, and some did not think that he would represent humanity faithfully. I am glad he proved them wrong.

Our own Ambassador has been the subject of rather angry commentary from the human press of late, apparently those few moments wherein he looked like he might really drop the asteroid on the planet, and alongside the litany of complaints against humans including “theocratic,” were enough to convince some elements of humanity that the choice had been a loaded one. More than a few people in our own staff grumbled that we had been saddled with an unfair burden, now having the responsibility of leading a foreign race by example, and they are not wrong.

Entry Thirty three

Still, I can think of worse men to lead by example than one who has had centuries of experience in diplomatic patience, and made the correct choice given the opportunity to blunt such an apparently threatening species as humanity. As for myself, I have tabled the recommendation that we use one of our freighters to drag the largest asteroid we can to the orbit of Earth and have it be used to create another of their space platforms, and use that, a truly neutral ground, as the base of operations for future participation in the Confederacy. Certainly the easily preventable death of their previous ambassador helped to convince the new one of the idea’s merit.

The galaxy is a convoluted place, and the diplomatic tactics embraced by the humans since we met them – poisoning, ultimatums, et cetera, whether these are the norm or not – will not be greeted with anything even remotely approaching enthusiasm by the rest of the galaxy…but I am confident that, in time, the rest of the confederacy shall see as we do: that humanity has a place among equals in the defense and enrichment of the spacefaring people.

End Journal.