Lumina

When the invasion arrived, nobody noticed. 

A vast armada, hundreds of vessels, thousands of beings.

Advanced interplanetary craft descending through our atmosphere, into Washington DC, Tokyo, Mumbai. And every tiny hamlet in-between. 

FIRST CONTACT! The pundits should have screamed. 

WE’RE NOT ALONE! 

BUT DO THEY COME IN PEACE? 

Never underestimate the selective focus of homo sapiens, especially when there are elections, when the markets are going haywire, and did you see about what our daughter’s friend posted on TikTok? 

But the newspapers printed nothing of such a momentous interstellar event. It passed unnoticed on Main Street, on Wall Street, on K Street, and on Sesame Street. 

The invasion went unnoticed because it was unreported; it was unreported because it was unremarkable; it was unremarkable because, for all intents and purposes, nothing at all changed. 

Then there’s the matter of the physical size of the invaders. 

How many would fit on the head of a pin? 

I don’t know, because interplanetary beings can’t be bothered to humor us with such an assembly. But you can be sure it’s a lot. 

I can, however, tell you how many can fit on the nape of a human neck, just below the hairline, close enough to painlessly and seamlessly plug into the nervous system. 

Just one. 

Stand up straight. 

Slow movements. Don’t wobble. 

Do the arms swing in time with the legs? Or the opposite? 

The body is awkward. Only four limbs seems shockingly inefficient. And working out this walking locomotion must take years off a young human’s life. So wasteful. 

The communicator inside my carapace twitches. Vibrations, pulses. To humans it would have felt like a phone buzzing with a call. To our sensitive ears, it IS the call. 

“Easy. Slow. We detect an increased cluster of attention around you.”

I’m vaguely aware of natural humans giving me strange looks and I feel what is apparently called “awkward.” A fascinating sensation, almost extra-sensory. I remind myself that despite the untold number of us who have arrived on this world today, most of the people around me are simply going about their wobbling, bipedal lives. 

I breathe just as I was taught. The behemoth lungs inhale and exhale an appalling volume of air, and I feel the massive heart slowing down. The air here is thin, so I suppose it makes sense to inhale lots of it. I would suffocate without my breathing apparatus. Conversely, this human would also suffocate on my planet, though in his case, he’d feel more like he had inhaled air as thick as water. 

But the advantage of this thin air is that we can witness what we all came here to see. A celestial event unlike any on my world.

Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot. 

I’m moving forward. 

The staccato gait almost certainly makes humans vomit every day of their lives. 

Slowly, clumsily, I make my way to the bridge on the edge of town. Fewer people now. Good. 

I allow myself to slouch. This feels more natural. I want to lay on the ground, to feel the comfort of it under me, to feel the familiar tremor of footsteps, of others of my kind burying and speaking through vibrations across miles of densely packed terra. Piloting this biped is like traversing an empty void. Horrifying, really; this emptiness, this high off the ground. 

But I must face this discomfort head-on. Only a few more hours until the event, and I need to get there on foot. 

I allow myself one small concession.

I dared not do this in town, but now–I close my eyes, I close his eyes, and settle into the calming dark. 

I relax. 

I feel the human relax with me. 

You should understand. This vision. This, we spend months preparing for, training for. And even after that time, you can’t really prepare. 

It’s quite extraordinary. 

The color! The clarity! Luminous! Overwhelming! 

What an instrument this world has birthed. Our eyes are pale and drab in comparison. A shame most humans use theirs primarily for looking at one or another shimmering display all day. 

I peer into the water running below the bridge. Amazing how many hues these eyes discern. Even now I can see the quality of the daylight is different. It is warmer. Closer in wavelength to infrared radiation. Darker, too. 

Magic hour. Twilight. 

The words bubbled up in my human’s mind. They had a lovely ring to them, but I couldn’t afford to daydream. I have to keep my head about me. Darkness is descending. 

I make my way to the coordinates I was provided. In the middle of a wheat field. Wheat being a type of grass, apparently domesticated by humans long ago, as we domesticated subterranean mycelium back in the early days of our history. 

Several dozen humans are there already. Their heads turn to look at me as I approach, unsurprised, saying nothing. I know that if I looked at their necks, even with these sharp eyes, I wouldn’t be able to see the pilots, so small we are. 

I don’t have the codes for their communicators but I reach out my hand–the human’s hand–and make contact with the hand of the female closest to me–I ignore the twitch my human’s heart gives at the touch–and we speak through vibrations, as we do back at home. 

She turns and our visions meet. For no reason I can discern, for it has no bearing on the quality of our physical contact, our communication becomes clearer. 

I feel the human’s awkwardness again, confusing me no less than it did before. I sense he wants to break the eye contact. I see no reason for that. 

So we discuss what ships we arrived on, how was the flight? How are you dealing with the dizziness? Can you believe these eyes? Marvelous! 

Soon it is dark. This planet’s satellite is just a sliver this night, which is fortuitous. It is a different kind of light we are looking for tonight.

And it begins, tentatively at first. Just a sprinkle of energized particles, emitted by this system’s stear, dancing with this world’s peculiar magnetic field, all across the canvas of the thin atmosphere. 

Greens and blues splash across the sky, swim and shimmer and vanish into nothing. It is dark for a moment, troubling me. Is it over?  

But then it begins again, washing across the stardome, etching paths as if following a trail our kind makes through the soil, winding and coiling with colors flooding across the human faces, down their optical nerve, lighting up their brain, following an uplink, showing me everything. My heart, conveniently split into thirds along the length of my body, pumps in time with the orchestra of light above me. It is transcendent. 

Suddenly, a flash of dark. Then another. I check my instruments. The batteries are running low. The human is blinking. 

I realize it’s time to go. I power up my flight module and collect myself for the journey up. A shuttle will pick me up a short way above my current elevation, and then the voyage home will begin. I will never have a chance to return here. 

One more thing to do before I disconnect. He won’t understand, but I give my host a word of gratitude for this experience. I touch a good-bye to the human next to me, and she looks into my eyes again. I hold that as I disconnect, rising. 

“You’re welcome, I guess…” Clark mumbled.

She blinked, as if waking. 

They were looking at each other. Had they been talking? 

Do I know this woman? 

Clark looked down, saw they were holding hands. He disconnected abruptly. 

He took some steps back. He was in the middle of a field. At night. He swayed on his feet, dropped on his ass, harder than he expected. 

The ground, under the trampled wheat, felt calming, inviting. He stretched his legs out. The circling in his head evaporated. Absently, he scratched the back of his neck. It itched, as if from a mosquito bite. 

Had he blacked out? He can’t remember drinking or smoking. 

He should really try to keep his head about him. Daydreaming is just not a good way to go through life. 

He pulled his jacket tighter about him and shivered. He extricated his phone from his pocket. He fumbled with the switch on the side. It was no use, the phone was dead. 

But the screen wasn’t black. 

It pulsed with a glow. A green reflection, but not the green of grass, or aloe, or oak leaves. It was an ethereal green, something… above. 

Clark looked up to see wisps of the cosmic paintbrush unfurling ribbons and spreading wings and uncoiling tentacles across the star speckled dome, and vanishing with equal enthusiasm. 

And suddenly Clark felt very small indeed.