Xpedition

(This is the ninth and final installment in the X series, and is intended to be read after "Xhalation", "Xcogitate", "Xemplify", "Xpectation", "Xotica", "Xogenous", "Xpand" and "Xosphere".)

Excerpt From 'On Establishing a Communications Protocol With Extra-Terrestrial Life', by Joanna Harrington (classified):

'One of the thorniest problems that exists within the realm of interspecies communication is the establishment of context. Virtually all of humanity's languages share an overlapping set of shared contexts derived from a common environment, if not a common culture; we may not always have the gift of a Rosetta Stone to directly interpret the words of a long-dead language or a foreign tongue, but we share enough of the same lived experience to be able to form a common (if rudimentary) vocabulary. Water is water, bread is bread, and we can begin the process of communicating with another human being by working our way out from these basic and universal concepts to discover at least the fundamentals of translation.

'But "universal" takes on an entirely different meaning when dealing with sentiences that have evolved under a different gravity to breathe a different air. To truly communicate with a lifeform that shares none of our cultural experiences, not even the most basic and fundamental, we must unpack the entire concept of context from language. This proves to be a thornier task than initially expected, as it's only when we attempt to divorce communication from our cultural experiences that we discover just how inextricably it's intertwined with the language that shapes our very thoughts.'

* * * * *

They fell through the sky at ninety miles per hour, a suicidal speed by any reasonable measurement. Even though Doctor Lorenza Campos understood on an intellectual level that they were plummeting not at the solid earth of downtown New Orleans but at an existence beyond human comprehension, emotionally she still stared at the instruments that showed their rapid descent like she was looking down the barrel of a gun. It didn't help that whatever was on the other side stood a far greater chance of rendering them unrecognizable as human beings than a collision directly into solid concrete.

She didn't want to be here. Even if she had joined a select team of the furthest explorers in all of human history, even if her name would go down in whatever legends remained as one of only five people to step outside the universe as it was currently understood and make contact with a sentience that defied everything ever recorded about the laws of physics and nature, Lorenza wished she was back in her cramped, uncomfortable bed having furtive, lousy sex with her girlfriend. It wouldn't really save her, not with the dimensional gulf widening hourly now. But at least she'd get laid before she died.

The armored personnel carrier wasn't likely to offer her any opportunities for sex. It had been modified extensively, packed with extra armor and sensory instruments until it barely squeezed in Lorenza and her four fellow passengers. And the emergency payload, but Lorenza didn't want to think about that. If they ever got to the point where they needed to use that damn thing, then she might as well pack it in and get her last orgasm right there in front of everybody while the getting was good.

She was trying not to think about sex, really she was. But Lorenza's body was keyed up with adrenaline, and she desperately craved some kind of release. And unlike her military compatriots, she couldn't get catharsis out of violence. She weighed 110 pounds soaking wet and she could barely fluff a pillow. Why she was on this stupid fucking mission, ordered by the stupid fucking bitch of a President who fucking snuck it up on her after a goddamn pity fuck that wasn't even any goddamn good--

Lorenza forced herself to unclench her fists. Of course Lalli--President Cotton--needed her chief scientific researcher there at the point of first contact. It was shitty, it was terrifying, it was almost certainly a suicide mission despite the President's desperate hopes, but that was the kind of tough decision you had to make when you were the person in charge of what was left of the world. You couldn't let sentimentality get in the way. You couldn't decide to send the second most qualified person just because the most qualified person was your clandestine lover. And if she didn't want to go, you absolutely made it an order.

And if you were falling right out of the goddamn universe straight into an environment so toxic that anyone exposed to the air would turn into a living nightmare within seconds, you distracted yourself by getting pissed at your girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend, if Lorenza ever made it back. If that particular miracle ever happened. If Joanna Harrington came through from beyond the grave... or beyond wherever she was right now in that fucked-up translucent mound of Jell-O she called a body. Lorenza wondered if Joanna was communing with the hive mind. She wondered if she would recognize the payload if she saw it. She wondered if they'd all know what it did even before it went off.

It was a final distraction that saw her through the last few seconds before they plummeted through the portal and came out onto the other side still doing ninety.

* * * * *

'Obviously words are going to be useless here. Words are useless at times when dealing with our fellow human beings; just think of all the terms and phrases we've been forced to simply incorporate wholesale into the English language because there isn't a feasible translation for 'deja vu' or 'je ne sais quoi' or pizza or tacos or umami or kamikaze. One of the five fundamental tastes that every single human being has perceived since evolution equipped us with tongues, and we had to borrow a word to describe it. If that's what it takes to communicate with another human being through language, then just imagine what we'll have to do when we deal with an alien whose entire modality of sensory perception differs from our own.

'And it's not simply the untranslatable that makes things difficult, it's the implied and inherent cultural and historical context that binds us irrevocably to humanity when attempting to use language to describe the world around us. Oh, you might call me a Cretin for indulging in such Spartan feats of logic, but be a good Samaritan for a moment and imagine trying to disconnect our words from the history that made human beings the real McCoy when it comes to communicating with one another. We'd have to jury-rig some other kind of metaphor, swing for the fences just to get in like Flynn. Jesus Christ, what a disaster.'

* * * * *

They slowed down almost immediately, the thick and florid atmosphere of the X dimension increasing the drag on the APC even as gravity pulled them with a mere fraction of the strength that it had on the other side of the portal. Even so, they slammed into the top of the crystalline spire with enough strength to shatter it on impact. "We're through!" the driver, PFC Karen Burkle, called out with unnecessary vigor. Lorenza didn't put much trust in any of the crew, to be honest. The United States military was running a bit low on personnel at this point; she'd be lucky if any of these people had actually finished basic training, let alone logged any real combat hours.

But they could at least drive the carrier--or they would be able to, once it finally touched down on something that approximated solid ground. Lorenza's body shuddered through impact after impact as the APC crashed through one level of the spire after another--she didn't know if it was some kind of artificial structure, like the other-dimensional equivalent of an apartment building, or if they'd simply slammed into a natural formation and the sheer density of the vehicle was too much for the delicate crystal to bear. They couldn't exactly take samples, not with their slim chances of survival resting on an unbroken barrier between them and the outside world.

They finally hit the ground after almost a solid minute of crashing descent, and the driver turned and looked to Lorenza. "Hull integrity at 96% and dropping," she said, her face grim. "Which way do you want us to go?"

As if Lorenza had a fucking map. She pulled up the external feed, grateful for the filters that broke up the hypnotic signal floating through the air, and studied the green-on-green-on-green environment around them. "North northwest," she said after a moment's hesitation. "It's difficult to be sure, but I think I'm seeing some kind of a... an agglomeration of them there. A herd, or a flock, or whatever the term for these things is." She squinted, trying to tell whether the moving outlines she saw were a collection of spindly, inhuman creatures with insectoid legs or the vast squirming bulk of a single massive creature. Maybe there was no difference here. The decoded instructions embedded in the X translated out to 'JOIN. MERGE. BECOME ONE.' Maybe that was literal and not just figurative?

Lorenza sighed. She would have given anything for Joanna Harrington to be here. The woman had prepared for stuff like this, understood the cultural implications--hell, her whole career was building to this moment, back before she got a little too close to her research and wound up understanding more about the alien than anyone thought possible. If she was here....

Well. If she was here, Lorenza would be back in the sphere where it was safe, but that wasn't the point. Lorenza wasn't really an expert, she was just the last person left to do the job. Just like PFC Burkle. Just like all of them, really, although Lorenza wasn't about to learn everybody's names when she understood full well that they had a meaningful lifespan measured in hours at best. They weren't the heroes the world deserved, but they were the heroes the world was stuck with. And maybe, just maybe, they were the heroes that could... nah. Even Lorenza didn't believe she was up to this. She glanced down at the emergency payload, a sphere the size of a soccer ball encased in thick tungsten. It didn't look like it could save the world.

* * * * *

'Even the ostensibly wordless image, as striking and meaningful as it is to us, may be of little use when it comes to communicating with a sentience unlike our own. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but is that exchange rate really useful when a thousand words can produce no meaning in an alien mind? We watch Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, the most universally beloved of the silent stars due to their ability to convey emotion without speech, but how much can it mean to watch Keaton hanging from the clock tower without knowing what a clock or a tower even are? There's so much context embedded into 'A Nude Descending a Staircase' that even many humans can't unpack all of its meaning, much less something that understands neither clothing nor stairs.

'Even the entertainment designed for the pre-verbal contains context, albeit context that most children only understand on revisiting. 'One Froggy Evening' is a masterpiece of communication without words, containing only three signs and the random warblings of a singing frog, and yet it relies on knowledge of time capsules, amphibian behavior, and audience reaction to free beer. If you don't know what a road runner or a coyote is, and you don't know what they typically do in the desert, how do you possibly figure out that you're watching a timeless comedy and not a grim documentary about the hunter and the hunted? It's impossible. For us to extricate meaning from context, we have to find a way of conveying the simplest message possible. The first building block to establishing an accommodation between two entirely alien worldviews.'

* * * * *

They drove through the alien landscape, with the driver calling out their hull integrity status every five minutes, and Lorenza didn't even know what she was looking at for most of it. She saw more of those crystalline spires, growing and branching in a complex and fractal pattern that inevitably ended in shattering collapse. She watched the spindly aliens approach what appeared at first to be those wobbly tube men that beckoned people to used car dealerships, using their multiple limbs to resculpt them into forms not unlike their own. She wondered at first if it was some form of reproduction, if these were beings with multiple stages in their life cycle and this was a final metamorphosis... and then the truth hit her, and she almost gagged.

The tube men were what happened to gelatinous humanoids in the alien dimension's gravity. Those were people who'd been transformed by X, spaghettified and helpless in bodies imperfectly adapted to the other universe, and the spindly creatures were helping them to find a form that could walk on this side of the portal. Lorenza rubbed the payload for good luck, hoping at least that if it didn't work then she would lose her identity quickly and with an absolute maximal amount of sexual pleasure. At least the one thing she had to look forward to was a good hard orgasm before she stopped being herself.

They drove over fields of what looked like broken glass, the tires too thick and strong to be pierced by anything in this universe. They cruised through slow, drifting orbs of fluid that were the closest this reality had to rain. They drove for what felt like hours, even though the internal chronometer showed that less than thirty minutes had passed--but for all Lorenza knew, even time itself worked differently over here. Maybe they would escape, if they did escape, to find themselves coming out the moment they left just like Narnia. Hell, maybe they'd get lucky and a goddamned talking lion would show up to sort this bullshit out. If things were getting fucking weird on this scale, at least she could hope that they'd get weird in humanity's favor.

They got weirder. But it wasn't exactly in a good way. When they finally approached the titanic lifeform, Lorenza realized it was both a flock and a single individual--the spindly creatures tessellated together, joining up to form a massive entity that could only move thanks to its manipulation of local space-time to create a gravity fluctuation that was unusual even on the scale of the world around it. And when they... it... they... needed to perform multiple tasks at once, or tasks on a finer scale, its body would burst out into a group of individuals who would operate in perfect, unified harmony before rejoining the colony. Lorenza wanted to sit down and write a paper on it all, but hull integrity was down to thirty-six percent and she didn't have time.

She turned on the external microphone. "Hello," she said, to absolutely no response. "We are approaching you as representatives of the human race, requesting an end to what we see as... as hostile actions, and asking you to cease operations in our sphere of existence. We don't know whether you intend to harm us or not, but your manner of living is inherently inimical to us. We cannot survive. Do you understand us? We cannot survive contact with you. Please. Please stop and go back."

It did look at them. Lorenza got a clear, unmistakable sense of vast and unknowable attention being focused on the APC for the first time, and the big creatures shed off a dozen or so of the spindly aliens to examine them closer. But it didn't respond, at least not in anything approaching human language. That wasn't entirely unexpected--Lorenza had hypothesized that they might have absorbed some understanding of English from the people it transformed and incorporated, but it was always a gamble. Plan A, to the payload's Plan B.

The creatures clustered around the carrier, reaching out to it with their insectoid limbs. "Hull integrity just dropped to 24%," Burkle declared, her voice thick with panic. "They're doing something to us, they're breaking in." She reversed course rapidly, but the tires had already decomposed too much to bear the strain and they burst. Within moments, they'd spun out, the wheels digging too deeply into the sludgy earth to move.

Time for Plan B, then. With a gulp, Lorenza unbuckled herself, scooped up the payload, and dropped it into the launch tube to eject out into the middle of the crowd of aliens. She sat down and did her best to furtively masturbate while she still could.

* * * * *

'In the end, we need something that conveys meaning without context. Not just data, but meaning. We could show them the periodic table, or transmit Fibonacci's Sequence until we're blue in the face and the numbers are getting too high to count, but all that shows is that we use math and chemistry the same way they do. It doesn't connect us to them as a species, it doesn't bridge the vast and unthinkable gulf between two ways of viewing the universe. Even if they understood why we called it Berkelium and Californium, which they absolutely won't, they won't understand us.

'We need a simpler scale of meaning, if you'll pardon the pun. I hate to invoke Hollywood here, because we all know that the aliens of popular culture are there not to represent what's truly on other worlds but to stand in as a symbol for aspects of ourselves, but there's one movie that went over these same questions that we're asking one another now and came up with the same answer. If we are going to have a close encounter with life that has stood under other skies and stared up at other suns, we need to reduce our first contact to the purest and simplest form. Emotion. And there's only one way to convey emotion without context.'

* * * * *

The payload landed with a dull thud in the squidgy earth, sinking up to its equator due to the weight of its casing. Lorenza could actually see the air around it fizzing as it fought a doomed battle to assert its reality against the overwhelming pressure of the other universe. She held her breath, hoping against hope that Joanna Harrington wasn't just cashing her public service checks to write any old bullshit that went through her head during late-night drinking sessions with her fellow scientists.

And then 'Rhapsody in Blue' began to play.

The creatures looked at it. They gathered around it, staring with what passed for eyes and listening with what passed for ears as the notes swooped and dived up and down the musical scales. They caressed the tungsten casing, then pulled their spindly limbs away in shock at the dense and entirely humaniversal material touched lifeforms who had a periodic table all their own. Angrily, one of them struck the payload, only to be calmed by the touch of another. Lorenza watched it all, her thighs squeezing together in the hopes of getting at least one orgasm out of their stay of execution.

Even without the creatures' reality-warping touch, the sphere was degrading. Tungsten was transforming into glassy green crystal, the shift in physics overwhelming the strong and weak forces to metamorphosize the metal into something not found on any periodic table in the universe Lorenza knew. All the while, though, Gershwin's familiar strains rang out, sweet and invigorating and mournful all at the same time, promising the beauty and excitement of the big city and the heartbreak and tragedy of urban life. Lorenza had never really listened to it before, and she was surprised to find tears running down her face. She slowed her rhythmic squeezing, lost in the beauty of the music in a way she'd never been back home.

With the outer shell transformed, the aliens were free to caress it, and they did--more than caress, they nuzzled the sphere, feeling the vibrations of the bass resonate through their otherworldly bodies as Gershwin's composition became sweet and soft and melancholy. Lorenza knew that their presence was corrupting the payload further, rotting it down to its very heart where the speakers were located, but that was all part of the plan. Hell, that was the only part of the plan, and even if it was a stupid and unworkable plan it was the only plan Lorenza had. Her whole mind, her very existence as a person was staked on it, along with that of every other human being on the planet Earth. She needed it to work. Or she needed one final climax to see her out. Either one would do.