Moon moon
They told us it was an asteroid, a piece of rock from another solar system flung through ours. We only noticed when it was on the way out, tearing away from us. They told us it wasn’t an alien ship or even a probe. Just a piece of rock, shaped like a long, jagged spear point, streaking across the elliptic plane. They’re not even sure about that. What it looks like. It’s dark out there and Oumuamua is moving fast. Away.
They just had no idea how to speak alien or even what an alien looks like, sounds like. They still don’t.
When the next rock showed up, again jagged and rough-hewn, but not lumpen like an asteroid, not a space potato, but a kind of rough tool.
The problem was we didn’t speak alien.
The problem was, we were letting them (white men, mainly) look and listen and speak for us.
There are some women who can see millions of colors invisible to the rest of us, to men.
No one noticed when it entered the solar system on the same trajectory until it stopped just beyond the moon. Watching. Hanging there like a new moon, a moon moon. Dark, but maybe only in the spectrum we can see with our eyes. Some of us.
Mantis shrimp, who aren’t really shrimp, can see into wavelengths our eyes and even instruments can’t see. They say. These same shrimp can make a sort of shell-penetrating, rock shattering, laser cannon using only their bodies and the water that is their medium. Is that a technology? Maybe they can see the aliens we can’t see.
They say octopus have alien DNA or at least their DNA is so strange and labile it behaves in ways alien to us. To them. Octopus may even use their DNA to store memories. Like organic quantum computers. We still eat octopus. One alien eating another. You already know about whales, their songs, their languages we still can’t translate.
First they watched and listened to the rock out there. We wouldn’t even know except for amatuer astronomers and hackers, but amateur astronomy and hacking require money. You see the problem. Money is a language only some of us speak even though it is the dominant human language. Do aliens speak money? The alien rock ended up in the line of sight of something else. Or maybe too close to the scientific probe waiting out there for gravitational signals. Or background radiation. They are listening for a lot of things.
The problem is they own all of the instruments and decide how to speak, what to listen to. The problem is we don’t know who they are.
The rock out there, like oumuamua absorbs most of the light thrown at it in every wavelength and is red, the color of blood. It is bloody listening, absorbing. Our bloody new moon. Our periods align with this new moon moon, but what does that mean?
I use my phone and its GPS to locate it and stand in the darkest place I can find to face it. I have to drive out into the country, far beyond the lights of the city to get to this dark place. The phone has trouble locating us and the new blood moon. They named it, but I can’t remember what their name is. I don’t want to remember. I want to know what the aliens named it, named themselves.
I wonder if the octopus are rearranging their DNA to record this visitor or maybe they have a way to speak to it. Can the mantis shrimp see it or punch all the way?
I wonder if my own DNA is rearranging itself like it does every day to remake me, the universe, the world remaking itself to include this new world.
They estimate that there may be up to 10,000 of these interlopers passing through our solar system at any one time. But we only noticed Oumuamua and this new moon. Is it because we noticed? There are those who say we’re in danger, that any aliens would consider us food or parasites or some kind of threat (any aliens, in other words, think like humans, like them). There are those who believe any species so advanced must be advanced enough to not consider every other species a food or threat source.
They are sending probes to the new moon to try to communicate and by communicate I mean penetrate, consume. That’s what all of that scraping and testing is.
I won’t be going. Neither will you. And what would we say to each other anyway?
They say it may be just a rock even though it stopped in a way a space rock couldn’t. Even though it sits there watching us. They detect no signals, no attempts to communicate. Even as we all re-order our lives to turn toward this dark silent visitor we can’t even see.
When the rock begins to rearrange itself into something else, when the rock begins to sing, to bleed, to communicate, someone should be there to witness. Someone with eyes or organs that can sense.
