The Meaning of Life

Author : Townsend Wright

“Alright let me see if I can explain this to you,” I wasn’t very good at deciphering the aliens’ emotions, especially with the monotonous voice of the translator machine, but I was fairly certain this was condescension. “What do you know so far?”

“Well,” I said, thinking over what the scientists I employed had said, “we know you come from the planet just closer to the sun than ours, and that your biology is based on entirely different levels than ours.”

I waited for my words to translate, for the alien to speak, and then for the translator again. “Both true, both true. But here’s what you don’t know: we’re your—”

“Uh—sorry, that last word didn’t didn’t translate properly.”

“Oh, what, you don’t have the concept of—? Well, that explains a lot. Anyway, basically we created you.”

I heard gasps from my people. I tried to find meaning in the alien’s words. “You—you mean at some point in our development you visited us and somehow affected our development?”

“No. We created you.” I looked at the alien. It had pale, dull skin, and its body was just—odd.

“You didn’t create us. No body created us! We started out as single celled organisms, which mutated over and over and slowly developed into the ecosystem on our planet today!”

“I’m impressed, you figured out evolution! And again that’s all true. But your missing a few details.” It paused, almost like it was waiting for me to say “like what?” like I was some idiot who had no idea and was extremely eager to know what it had to say. I didn’t comply. “Namely,” he said as if there was no pause, “where those single celled organisms came from. You see,” it continued now thinking I was incapable of interrupting it, “a long, long time ago our planet became very crowded, actually much as it is right now, unfortunately. It became so crowded that we resolved to move some of our people to Mars—that’s what we called your planet at the time—well, now too. But, at the time, there was very little air, and no liquid water, which we need, and it was very cold, so we made a nanite—er, a very very small machine, which we sent to Mars where it would self replicate using Martian dirt and terraform—uh, make the planet like our own. That would be your single celled organism.”

“You actually expect me to believe that?” I said. The problem was I sort of did. It was still all just speculation about where those first cells came from, and this sort of thing was one of the theories.

“Actually, I couldn’t care less. Those nanites were only supposed to be active for twenty of our years, after that we’d deactivate them from Earth and make our way over here. But, right after we sent it off we had a massive war, centuries of rebuilding, another war, blah blah blah,” I had no idea what that last part meant, “anyway you got left alone for a few millennia and a bit out of hand, so much so our signal couldn’t take out your complex forms all the way from Earth. So, here we are.” It turned to the other aliens, “Geoffrey,” one of them took out a small box with a red button.

“Wait, what?!”

“So long, you four armed, sparkly pink freaks!”

“Wait, you can’t—”