A New Home

1. Kalki

People come across many places they start calling home throughout their lives. Yet, one always tugs a bit stronger. For Kalki, it was her grandparents’ house where she spent her summer holidays.

On the road from Patiala to Chandigarh, a small lane started from an unnaturally large gate. The local government chose to spend all their money on this beautifully sculpted golden gate instead of fixing the road that lay ahead of it. The pothole-studded road passed through fields of sugarcane and mustard, and occasionally would have small paths connecting to a distant well-constructed yet lonesome house in the field. 

Kalki’s grandparents’ house was two stories high. It was surrounded by a well-maintained garden in the front, perfect for playing tag, and a cattle-shed in the back, perfect for playing hide-and-seek. 

A white granite temple stood just beside the shed. A half-elephant half-human stone Ganesha rested towards the far side of the temple. It was Kalki’s favorite hiding spot. 

Kalki would always spark a conversation with the Ganesha idol when she hid in the temple. She talked about her brother and how annoying her cousin sisters were getting each year. She would tell every weird fact she learned from her cousin Parth. He was the oldest among the cousins. He acted as the window to the mysteries of the adult-life.

One time he introduced the kids to the concept of the aliens. Every star in the sky is just like our sun and each of those stars have planets around it. There are a hundred billion stars in just our galaxy and there might be trillions of galaxies.

That night every child insisted on sleeping outside. The night sky was filled with possibilities beyond their wildest imaginations. She chose her favorite star and tried to reach it with her palm. Kalki wanted to ask Ganesha if he had temples in that world too. If not, she’d build one someday.

Kalki’s curiosity never died. She was still trying to reach for that star.

She moved to America to study astronomy at age 17.

She lived in an apartment in California on the 22nd floor with two other Asian students. Outside, crowded and sturdy streets were surrounded by apartments just like hers that clouded the sun. 

She had trouble making connections. Maybe people expected her to behave differently, or maybe people here didn’t meet her own expectations. It might just be the cultural gap. She couldn’t imagine ever calling this place home. 

She would often find herself staring at her phone for hours, contemplating calling home. She couldn’t worry her parents. Her grandfather had taken a massive loan against his house to pay for her tuition. 

The dreams of that star were her only oasis. In her dreams she’d imagine an alien, not too unlike a human, reaching out to her. His smile would remind her of her grandfather.

Years passed by and the memories of mustard fields faded, but her determined eyes still contained the dreams of that smile. California became her home. She lived with her son and worked for SETI. She led a fulfilling life. Work and motherly duties kept her busy.

Her passion for aliens translated into exceptional work. She became chief of engineering at SETI in no time, always looking out for new strategies and technology to reach out for a sign of extraterrestrial life. She launched a myriad of satellites to various critical locations in the solar systems, and one of them was able to pick up a signal.

A message from the beyond.

The existence of the aliens both excited and terrified people. The terrified won.

Soon, the FBI raided SETI and gave an order to abandon the research. Abandon the pursuit of the mysteries of a new world. SETI was disbanded and a ban was put on anyone researching communication with aliens.

That smile never appeared in her dreams again.

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2. Ylf

The sun greeted them from behind the clouds as Ylf made it to the rooftop. The breeze smelt of sweet petrichor, vibrating ever so gently to Ascal's flute. His tunes swirled with the wind, brightened with the sun, and resumed a somber celebration of the gray sky. Ylf was no poet, but at times like these they felt their heart beat to poetry. Their bionic memory tissue retrieved an Ancient song to describe exactly this feeling, harmonizing it effortlessly to the flute in their mind.

Ascal was the best musician they had ever heard, if not the best in the world. Ylf had begged him to play at festivals, but he refused. "Is this how you let me know I am getting fired?" he'd joke, and Ylf had learnt to not bring it up again. Men with far less talent would drown in their own braggadocio, competing for crowds, yachts, asteroids, and coteries of lustful women.

Not Ascal. No one could square up against him, on a stage or off it. Yet, here he was, in a colony of hermit scientists, in the middle of the sea, playing to the wind, the sun, and his boss, who also doubled as his neighbor.

A dragonfly drone, clearly impatient, buzzed loudly till Ylf picked up their package. Gesturing an apology at Ascal, they walked downstairs cursing their awkward self. He smiled goodbye, his tune taking a melancholic turn.

In their four decades of life, not many men or women had been as kind to Ylf as Ascal was. Maybe that's why they read too much into it. Or, maybe not.

Since suns rose over a distant ocean, life began in threes -- man, woman, and mamman. Men fought over women, women chose their mates, and the mammen raised kids and gestated. When a woman first engineered the genes to breathe air, the world celebrated the ascendancy to land. A few sued her, and lost, for the mammen she murdered in the process. History called this the "First Wave" of Mammen's Rights.

The "Second Wave" began with a picture of three mammen in spacesuits, the first of their species to walk on another planet. Mammen survived the dry air in suits better than men or women, so they were, unfortunately, an obvious choice. Eventually the world came to terms with "at least some" mammen being the intellectual equals of men and women. Rights progressed, doors opened, but most minds remained closed. A million years of slavery had left its mark on society, and the very bodies of mammenkind.

Ylf wondered how deeply slavery had scarred mammen genes. Modern mammen remained aromantic and asexual, an exception in a world where most species included all three sexes in their mating rituals. The flute haunted Ylf. Could mammen love?

Ylf invoked their concentration hormone. The question of romance could wait.

By nightfall, most of their calibrations were complete. Equipment had been hard to come by. Some were scavenged from the trash in their lab, smaller purchases were easy to play off as part of their Ancient tech collection. As for more complex circuitry… Well, they weren't the lead scientist for nothing.

Ylf mounted the transmitter onto the floater, before triple-checking everything. It was all purely electronic, of course. Even a hint of bionics would expose Ylf's genetic identity. In two weeks, they would lower the floater into a current. It would swim the chaotic ocean currents, the origin untraceable, and a year later send out a signal to one of the spaceships overhead.

A mamman convicted of treason would never return to sea. Forced into hormonal therapy, their mind would be numbed into nothingness. Until consent and personhood meant nothing, and they were but a surrogacy machine. Except for a rare flicker of consciousness, in a lull between doses. The very thought made Ylf nauseous. Their concentration hormone spiked.

If all went smoothly, the government spaceship would send out a signal as instructed, one among the billions of the regular communication signals they sent to the homeworld. This signal would be different, however, it would be transmitted to an ocean world, 40 light years away. A world every government knew about, as did every scientist with top security clearances. Ascal had called it the "Gong", after an Ancient musical instrument.

Ylf had written a proposal to launch drone ships that could signal this world without revealing the location of their homeworld, or their newer colonies. The government declined, leaving Ylf with little choice.

On a starlit night, before moonrise, the transmitter sent out its signal. On another corner of the world, Ylf watched the stars, as Ascal performed for his audience of one. They reached out for the stars, their fingers stretched and sucker splayed. And for once, they had hope that someone would reach back.

Ascal had never seen Ylf look more beautiful as they did that day.

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3. Kalki

When the future was muddled, Kalki turned to the past.

She returned to India. Her son had settled down, and was too busy for her. Sons never abandon their parents in India. Her brother’s family was more than happy to welcome her. All the kids' faces seemed a bit annoyed, nothing a few American gifts can’t fix.

Her brother lived in their grandfather’s house now. The house was renovated and had one extra storey. It was surrounded by two more similar buildings. Her brother’s three sons occupied each of them. She missed living with a large Indian family.

She failed to form any meaningful connection, even here. She was too old to play tag with the kids. There was a huge cultural gap between them now with the adults in the family. She continued to stay there because she was terrified of being alone.

Some months later, she was diagnosed with cancer. She decided to die in that house, the closest thing she had to a home. As death approached, the mystery of the alien message started occupying her mind again.

There were many theories about the message. Some thought a natural abnormal signal was mistaken for a message by incompetent scientists. Others wondered if the government fabricated the message to keep their minds occupied. Some were sure that the message was a declaration of war and started preparing for it. There were a few who even thought the message came with a messenger. But, most sane minds concluded that the message was most likely just a “Hi”. The aliens wanted us to acknowledge their existence.

But, we as a species were too afraid. 

As the cancer got worse, she started getting dreams of that alien, demanding a reply. The alien’s form twisted and he got more and more aggressive each night. During the day, she just roamed around the house, looking for nothing. The house felt like a prison, a labyrinth with no escape.

She eventually found her way to the temple. She had avoided visiting it. The thought of facing Ganesha scared her. As soon as she entered the place, a flood of nostalgia calmed her nerves. She remembered her cousins getting mad at her for hiding here during games of tag. She felt like she was still hiding. Life’s more like a game of tag than hide-and-seek.

She paid her respects to Ganesha, sat in silence for an hour and prayed. Then she responded to the alien message. She had built a backdoor technology in secret a long time ago. Some part of her always believed she would find the courage someday.

It would not take much time for the US government to track her. The world would soon know her name and would hate her. She no longer cared. She aimed her palm to the sky and reached out to a star. She hoped it was the same star she chose all those years back.

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4. Ylf

Lush green and yellow-gold swathed the wild lands of the plains below. Ylf's skin itched under the burning sun, stinging in the dry wind of summer heat. They squinted to track the last speck of light from a rocket evacuating thousands of souls. Until it was gone.

Silence gripped the world. Their bionic retrieved a tune Ascal played when he missed them. Ascal, their husband. Memories flashed unbidden in their mind. His proposal. Seventy years of blissful marriage. The pain in his eyes when the police dragged Ylf away.

They rushed to the shed to cuddle into a ball of grief. They'd begged for divorce. He must have learnt how their 'unusual' marriage saved Ylf from hormonal imprisonment, and refused. As Ylf's "owner", only Ascal had any say over using them for gestation. Weeds stuck to their slimy body as they rolled over the grass in pain. Maybe he still loved them. Ylf pleaded, in letter after letter, for him to leave. Leave them alone on a planet they had condemned. He deserved to live free.

Their lamentation ceased by sundown, eyes fixed on the statue before them. Ascal would have made the smart choice. He would evacuate. Ylf was flushed with concentration, trying to dent the pain. The statue's upper body was eerily similar to their own. The large ears of this animal served to cool them, but looked uncannily similar to Ylf's ear-fins. The statue had a single trunk, not two. Its legs began beneath their torso, not at the shoulder. A strange fusion of their two species. Of course, there was no way the Ancient ones would have known.

Day after day, a drone dropped food and Ylf chose to live, not entirely sure why. Maybe they had started enjoying their chats with the statue. Their bionics now blared warnings of hallucination. The more time they spent here, the more they thought about the woman who once lived here. "What did she see in you?" they asked the statue. An alien god, who would judge her evil race? Or, like young Ylf, did she see good in all? Oh, how wrong she was. How wrong they both were.

Ylf was led to believe that the Ancient ones killed each other in a nuclear war among nations. That was what drove them to study electronics, and Ascal to Ancient music. They hoped to revive the Ancient ways of an extinct race, and keep their memory alive. But no. They were just sucking dry the bones of a civilization they had devoured. Playing with food.

Traitor House was a museum long before it was their prison. An old scientist had betrayed her kind by catapulting them into a war of destruction. Of course, she'd done no such thing. It was Ylf's government who betrayed the trust that this woman, this Kalki, had placed upon them. A biologically engineered drone swarm was sent to annihilate humans, person by person, child by child. All "cleaned out" before the colonial ships made land.

The colonizers wouldn't make the same mistake as their prey.

The genocide was declassified a decade after Ylf's signal. Once the uproar from the people died out, evacuation ships began to be built in earnest. Half the population were well on their way to the homeworld when Ylf was arrested. Fifteen years in prison, Ylf had finally stopped trying to figure out how they were found out. All that mattered was that they were caught, and punished in the cruelest form the law would allow. Life imprisonment on dry land, on a lifeless planet.

So it was that Ylf, and their solitude, were the sole witness to the shooting stars that apparated into the night sky. A fleet of ships, in eighty five years. Relativistic travel. They reached out to touch the falling stars, wishing for an end to this game of celestial tag, for good or for worse.

Ascal would have loved to watch this. He loved a spectacle.