"You Are Not Alone."

            I looked to the sky one fateful day and saw that God had not made us the center of the universe. 

Our world spun around the opposite assumption. Try as I might, I could not convince the others of our error. They peered through my glass with stained eyes, seeing only what they wished. No longer possessed of Blessed Centrality, the Holy Order heard the pillars of their society lurch a creaking, groaning topple. Their supremacy over creation threatened, the Chosen deemed me subversive and locked me away in my study, far from the other Acolytes. If this was my punishment, however, it was ill-conceived. While I mourned the sacred sharing of Fellowship, I had all I needed in that lonely tower to keep the larger world within my grasp. A modest library of books gave me glimpses of other lives both lived and imagined. At night, I could step onto my balcony and improvise new melodies on the ocarina, now my only friend in the world. The Great Texts continued my complex relationship with God, although there was much to reinterpret in the wake of my discovery. Most important of all was my telescope, though. Extending my gaze to the cosmos, I could observe them. 

Our distant neighbors bore a peculiar visage. The creatures had small, angular faces, most of their features foreign to Earthly biology. They were not humanoid, per sé. Their slim, gray bodies sprouted six long legs and what appeared to be durable shells. A basic skeletal structure, an arrangement of limbs, and a layer of skin were just about all their bodies shared in common with ours. However, one trait had me convinced there were people within those bizarre forms: their large, expressive eyes. The creatures lived in holes in the rusted ground of their homeworld, arranged in what appeared to be small cities. They greeted each other by rubbing their antennae against one another, much like earthen insects. Through my glass I observed the structures of their families, apparent friendships, even stances of prayer implying unique spiritual practices… These were more than beasts.

The longer I stared, the more I yearned to commune with them. Unlike the others of my order, I could not care less if I sat at the center of it all. They approached religion as imperialists, making conquest of soul and land and capital with immutable truths of gilded stone. If our goal was to search for higher truths, our spiritual traditions would be better served with the empiricist’s willingness to change course now and then. To interact with our new neighbors would unlock the higher truths we sought, but to deny the existence of extraterrestrial life would better coax our pious narcissism. I lived in service of discovery with nary a whim to human pride, but that was not the way of the Chosen. My order would prefer that we proud, naked apes be the sole heirs to creation. The gallows would have me soon or late. I’d be damned to give my final breath before attempting contact. 

I needed to send a gift to my newfound fascinations from afar, and I knew just what. My lonely musical nights on the balcony had begun to bear fruit, improvisation giving way to consistent composition. What better way to greet our new friends than with a gentle lullaby? If I succeeded, my music could reach someone beyond our grounds. Far, far beyond. My order could cut off my head, but a piece of me might live on. Years after my death, my oppressors might hear a response from that distant planet. A great reciprocation the Holy Order could not deny. Perhaps a military invasion from the stars. I cracked a sneering grin, imagining the Palatial Sept crumbling. At the center of the Grand Mall, the great hermaphroditic statue of our God would be set aflame. I had but to urge the recipients of my message to attack, perhaps threaten them with fabricated military aggression. My will would carry past the flickering of a vengeful mortal coil. In reverie, I felt the power of influence burn cold within my chest. To create art circulates symbols in the collective consciousness. If my message positioned my captors as an enemy, there was one last chance at sweet revenge. Then they’d see. 

I blinked.

The fantasy now a distant memory, I was beleaguered by those moralistic presences of the superego, including God Himself. 

After a life devout in Me, you think such things? You spurn ‘human pride,’ yet you are a creature of it. I shivered in recoil.

“Yes, Lord,” I said aloud. Perhaps the God of my higher brain had a point. I was indeed a creature of pride, as were the Order. The difference from me to them was from whence pride came. I was possessed of hubris, yes, but had always thought of my discoveries as part of my species’ grand narrative. In expanding my horizons, I expanded those of my fellow man. The Order at large sought to find new ways to stay atop the throne they insisted their God had created for them. The Chosen were the gods of Ancient Greece, birthplace of much surviving mythology from the Mother Planet. I was Prometheus, now suffering peck-peck stabs to an exposed liver. Greedy gods withheld fire while I sought to spread it like Pentecostal tongues. The two were hardly comparable.

You wish to achieve greatness as a hero of the people. To be systemically great is much the same. Both the revolutionary and the autocrat seek a place in the histories. Individualism demands recognition from other bodies. Whether by rising in the ranks of the hegemonic power or in defiance of it, you seek to be acknowledged as exceptional. An exceptional conformist or rebel; an exceptional government official or freedom fighter; all come from the same cloth. You cannot simply be, then not. You must stave off mortality. If not through copulation, you spread the genes of your ideas. The symbol of your name, your face, your actions, all in a great effort at myth-making. Whether through government or the toppling thereof, all ‘great people’ seek to replace old myths with their own. You long to be the virtuosic innovator, discovered by historians as a master. The philosopher whose theories achieve posthumous pervasion. The researcher remembered as ‘ahead of his time.’ Facing your death, you fantasize about immortal martyrdom. Do you not see the humble seeds of the Holy Order in yourself? 

Even for my deconstructed understanding of my God, He remains wise. A deconstructed God is one more easily trusted. Mine had shot piercing truth through the armor I so expertly forged. I was an ant upon a spinning rock. How absurd to feel a swell of pride at my own humility! Such as it was, my life was spent slaving away at experimentation with light, color, and sound. I had often received quips and jabs from other Acolytes, that my novel area of study paled in importance when compared with more pressing matters like growth of crops to feed the faithful, or charting secular social trends to appropriate to the will of God. However, did not our God create beauty, and delight in its glow? 

Music and light-paintings were my life’s great love, and in my creations I saw God. Creation has intrinsic value that the utilitarian fails to see. To create is arguably His image itself. Are we to sleepwalk through life, or delight in novelty? I had discovered a method of capturing the splendor of aurora borealis, packaging it with correlating musical notes, and transmitting it across massive distances to the sky itself. To create something so raw can express wordless truth, a sensory pollination of the soul. However, as with most of my spurned innovations, this was deemed “irrelevant to the Holy Plan,” which demands uniform supplication. 

A man in possession of fire no longer needs to partake the bonfire’s communion. Former parishioners might gaze upon manmade combinations of sight and sound, in place of the flames at our Holy blood rites. The Carnal Pyres saturated the brain and slowed its cognitive waves, making more space for God in a state of trance. As a calf’s throat was slit upon the simmering bonfire and the hooded frocks led the masses in uniform prayer, unity was built on sacrosanct bedrock. With my practices absorbed into the culture, people might become their own Gods. When I was rejected by the High Priests, I felt kinship to their sacrificial calf. I stowed my surviving materials away in my quarters, forgotten by my captors before they could be understood. 

Reflecting on the memory, I saw a blessing in disguise. My quarters were riddled with the leavings of past experiments. Now seeking a stake in a future beyond my flesh, here were the scraps of my transmortal vehicle. I could gladly greet death knowing I had sent myself far beyond the Order in space and time. Perhaps, my flashing sounds might spawn a religion of their own. Shaming myself for that hint of blasphemous pride, I released a single bitter laugh. I was the product of theocracy just as much as the rest. Piety had colored even my most agnostic discoveries. But a man walking dead had no time for socially-engineered guilt. Stripped of physical and circumstantial power, only my greatest thrusts of ego sustained an ounce of pride. If hubris would be my deliverance, so be it. Any further schemes be damned. All I wanted was a connection. An embrace. To say hello. 

My resources, time included, were scarce. The transmission device would be crude, but I was determined to find a way. I gathered my materials and got to work.

***

My tongue tasted of dirt and blood and decay as I dragged my feet across the rusted desert of Qandar. 

Our species had prospered for millions of years, starting as multi-limbed crustaceans with only antennae to communicate. Then we assigned meaning to the sounds pouring from our developing mouths, and language was born. Our caves turned to hovels, the hovels to houses, and the houses into buildings great and small. We learned how to walk on two legs and eventually lost all but two arms. From humble roots, our species took bloom. Spear gave way to sword gave way to increasingly sophisticated weapons of mass destruction… How ironic that our progress be measured by the very tools of its undoing.

At a glance, the streets appeared vacant of any life. Only a blackened effigy remained. Billions of bodies were buried, but our conflicts eventually yielded corpses at a rate too fast for proper burials. The dead now littered the streets and countryside, former allegiances irrelevant. There was something peaceful about it. Alive, they warred endlessly. Now, foe held foe in the embrace of deep, endless sleep. I had been walking aimlessly among them for the better part of a month before I realized I was never going to see another of my kind alive again. Since that day, I had stopped eating or drinking. I did not wish for a sudden end. I wanted my coda to come slowly, giving me more time to enjoy my planet’s newfound peace and quiet. At times, blade or bullet proved tempting. However, I resisted them and continued my long walk. This had carried on for about a week before I decided I was ready to join abyssal nonexistence.

To die alone was always my fate. A death among corpses was an unsavory notion. What good was the company of familiar faces if they were already decaying, their day come and gone? Their appearance only made me miss the vitality their shells once hosted, their stench a sickening reminder of my own grim fate. In my final moments, I would escape such woes to the best of my ability. The citydwellers’ slumber was forced upon them én-masse; mine would be a private affair. They of the mass metropolitan grave were taken with dispassionate brutality, united in death by the devices that make man God. What remained of my illusive free will, I saw fit to defend with one last choice to remove myself from the rabble. Dignity was a radical phenomenon borne of one’s own say in the matter. Even small, spiritual victories were won with agency. These deteriorating fellows were a solemn monument to the lack thereof.  In my absurd last act of defiance, I would choose a grave all mine own.

 Settling upon a comfortable-looking crevice in the desert rock lacing the city limits, I lay down and closed my eyes. Far from the sight or smell of all the rest, I was ready to slip away and finally know the one true peace. 

As my senses blurred, I had some second thoughts. What awaited me? War had hardened my heart, shedding any boyish notions I had of higher powers, or life after death. As a young man it was easier to convince myself that I still had time. Insistence upon insistence made the illusion fact, then my waking reality. I often feigned that unconscious nothing was as fine a destination as any after my stint in the material world. However, on the cusp of joining it, the void opened wide and revealed to me its fearsome depths and I was afraid.

Suddenly, the most beautiful of noises trickled through the firmament. It sounded like… notes. A beautiful, windblown melody, but not from any instrument I recognized. My eyes slowly cracked open, chancing one final look skyward. Strange figures danced in the night sky among the stars as the alien music continued to play. Call me crazy, but I could swear that I beheld a message in an otherworldly language, writ across the cosmos. The message shone with the brightest and most exuberant of colors. Reds, purples, and blues popped in my vision. Given the grim, colorless state of my environs of late, tears came unbidden at the sight. 

The display recalled fond memories of my fellow soldiers, my brothers. All our lives, our world had focused solely on the destruction of the enemy. In fleeting quietude, campfires and stars were our relaxation. We would often pass the füstcső pipe and stare deep into the flickering lights with minds awash in Inkbara Root. This ritual fostered experiential sharing within a unit after soaking one’s skin in blood of battle. Tranquility would come to all around the fire under the distant suns of night. Mind kissed by Inkbara, one could stare deep into the flames or far into the stars to perceive patterned colors in their aura. These communal experiences solidified our fraternity, momentarily expanding consciousness toward inner peace in a world of violence. Now, before my naked eye, those visions burst to life. It was far more beautiful, more real, than any conjuration of Inkbara ablaze within the brain. 

If only my brothers could see it. I began to weep for their absence. 

My mournful weeping heaved into steady sobs of joy. I became glad I chose life, even when death tantalized me from all around. I had bought myself a week, but what was a week to an eternity? What was a year? A lifespan? The notion of a lifespan was a lie one told their children to reassure both themselves and the more innocent that death has a natural date. Insulated from peril, my species was supposed to live something between 180 and 220 years. However, generations of war had persisted until the wanton rip of bombs became the norm. Adolescents of 33 went to war with hopes of glory on their hearts, only to be gunned down with the casual systematic cruelty of a tornado or typhoon. War was a force of nature, a reminder of our small scale. Even 10,000 years was a blink of an eye in that great expanse above me. My little life of 110… or was it 111? I lost count of the days. No matter. My life was half the “natural lifespan,” but even for this last hurrah, it was full to the brim. The point was that I got to live at all. It was nice to feel vindicated for the mere act of being alive.

The clear patterns and shapes taken by the light continued to suggest a deliberate message. I did not know what it meant, but given the soothing nature of the musical accompaniment, it had to bear glad tidings of some sort. Unbidden, a smile lifted the corners of my lips. As my eyes closed once more, I was not afraid. Whatever the nature of the unknown, it had just reached out and it was kind. In my final moments, I did not know all of the answers to eternity, but I knew one thing: 

I was not alone.

***

This story started as an essay for my Astronomy 101 course at the University of Texas. I wanted to explore what would happen if someone sent a message from a planet in one galaxy to another far away. I was most taken with the idea that such a message wouldn’t be received until much, much later (Fraknoi, Morrison, & Wolff, 2021). The human researcher in the first half of the story sent an original composition with a flashing message of the words “You are not alone,” hoping to reach a fledgeling world of simple-yet-sentient beings. By the time his words and song reached their target, however, millions of years had passed. While he sent his message to a primitive species, they had evolved and reached their extinction event by the time it met its mark. 

I don’t see this as a sad story, though. Because space-time bent the researcher’s message, he was able to make a dying being, millions of years in the future, feel less alone. Similarly, that being’s ancestors helped the researcher feel less alone awaiting his own demise. The mere existence of someone out there, observable and present, was enough to calm their nerves. This makes flesh some of the comforts of religious thinking. It’s a strange connection that could be possible if faraway extraterrestrial life is discovered and we have the technology to communicate with it at the exact right time. 

Ultimately, both characters are broken and battered by the darkness they face on their own worlds, but that darkness is less scary when they look to the stars. They feel comforted rather than threatened by their place in it all. That’s what I got out of my undergrad Astronomy class, and I hope it came across in this brief tale.

Thanks and keep reading,

Michael Payton

Works Cited

Fraknoi, A., Morrison, D., & Wolff, S. C. (2021). Observations of Distant Galaxies. In Astronomy. 12th Media Services.