by Dane Bagley
“Tammy, you look exhausted,” Kenny commented as she walked into the mess hall. Steve, Mike, and James were sitting at the table with Kenny as Tammy walked in.
Tammy rolled her eyes, and murmured, “I’m more hungry than tired right now.”
“Bob and Danny are watching guard?” Steve asked as he got up to give her his seat.
“Yeah, I think they’ll be fine,” she said as she sat down. She slunk into the chair, like she hadn’t been off of her feet in ages. “The creature has come to. It is stable, and seems to have recovered fine from the tranquilizer. It doesn’t seem to be aggressive at all.”
“From what we’ve seen, this ‘creature’ looks very human,” interjected Mike. “What are its alien characteristics?”
Tammy shrugged. She was feeling exhausted and hungry, so she was a bit snippy. But Mike had verbalized the thing that she was most frustrated about. “So far, I have not found a single characteristic about this creature that would make it distinguishable from a human.”
“You’ve given her a full body examination?” asked James.
“Every square inch. I’ve done full body MRI’s, too. Simple blood tests also reveal normal human levels on everything. Under the microscope, the histology is as human as it gets—even forty-six chromosomes. I keep looking at it from a distance, to see if I can detect something about its facial characteristics that indicate alien, but I can’t see a thing. If this creature were walking down the street in New York City, it would blend in perfectly. There is nothing about this creature that would stand out—that would give anyone pause.” She betrayed a little of her disappointment with this final statement.
“I beg to differ,” said Mike. “If I saw her walking down the street, she would give me pause. She is gorgeous.”
“Seriously, she is super-model material,” said James with a smile.
An exhausted smile crept over Tammy’s face. Steve returned to the table with a generous helping of the meal for Tammy. “Typical. I ask you guys to fetch me a fascinating alien creature for me to study, and you come back with a super-model!” She directed her glare and words at Steve. He shrugged sheepishly, and everyone gave a good chuckle.
“So, I’m finding this aspect interesting,” Kenny began. “On earth, we have multiple races of people. If we compared European descendants to African, Asian, or islanders, we would find an extremely wide range of appearances. There are humans—earthlings—that look more alien to me than she does. We travel several hundred miles on earth, and humans have a wide range of looks and appearances. We travel across the universe and the first alien we meet looks like a European descended super-model. Even if the creature is humanoid, shouldn’t there be some variation?”
Kenny had just verbalized the concern that everyone was feeling. Nods could be seen around the table. “Is it possible, that we just traveled across space to discover and abduct a human—an earthling, a woman?” asked James.
Tammy shrugged once again. “Her language, which I’ve recorded a bit of, is not from the earth. I’ve run it against every language we know, and it is one hundred percent isolated.”
“You said that she has forty-six chromosomes. Is it DNA?” asked James.
“Yeah, it’s DNA, all right. I don’t have the genetic map yet. That will still be several hours. But, it is definitely DNA.”
“What are the possibilities?” asked Steve.
“Clearly, it is possible for humans—earthlings—to travel through space and get from earth to here; we have just done that. So, though we have no records of this technology being known of or used before, it is possible that at some time in the past humans left and settled this world here,” explained Kenny.
“The language that she speaks requires that it must have been a very long time ago. This world has civilizations all over it. It appears ancient, not recently settled,” said James. “But the lack of variation in features would indicate a more recent settlement. Could it be that humans advanced a long time ago and then left the earth to the less advanced civilizations?”
“What about the opposite? Why couldn’t it be this world that produced the humans, and then sent some to earth to settle it? Maybe this is where life began,” said Mike.
“Why would they seem so much more primitive than us? We only found one small area with electricity. It appears recent. The rest of the world seems to be living in the before electricity phase. If they were advanced enough to travel, either to the earth, or from the earth, why do they seem to be just figuring out the light bulb?” asked Steve.
“We now know of two inhabited planets, this one and earth. Who’s to say that this is it? There may be many inhabited planets out there. Perhaps both of our worlds were populated from some third source. Maybe, it was an Australian type of thing. Send in criminals, or uncivilized, or uneducated people, and let them figure technology out, over a period of thousands of years. Maybe we just got there first, a few hundred years before this colonization,” Kenny explained.
“Maybe earth got the smart ones, and this planet got the hot ones,” Mike quipped, and everyone laughed.
