First Contact – Naked Alien Arrival

Fernanda spoke up, "Treating them like dolls, like pawns, that is something the Americans would do to people they see as beneath them. Teacher, I would beg of you to never do that to one of our guests, your children, again. Not in my house." Fernanda hugged Tashaiya close to herself in a protective gesture as she looked at the torn paper still in her hand. "Now, I have some spineless politicians to yell at, If you will excuse me." Fernanda let Tashaiya go and left the ship, I followed out and watched her enter the prefab that served as her office.

I heard someone from the other side of the barricade yell out, "are you OK? Is she OK?"

I walked close to the barricade and called back, "We're fine. Scared... but fine. So... that? That's an American I guess?"

A sea of voices replied around me and I couldn't make it all out. But that was the day I decided I was not going to let any of our ships land in the Northern country. I just hoped Teacher was of the same opinion. That was the day I realized that even if we had made some friends, it would be a long time before we were really safe on this new world.

Eventually almost a fifth of us would in fact settle in another country, just north of that northern country. But that was a story for another time, after Teacher had figured out how to keep us warm despite being naked.

"They're not all bad," Carmine had told me. "My cousin lives in Los Angeles, one of their cities. Lots of nice people there. But Americans are used to taking what they want, not asking or cooperating. Especially not with the people south of them."

Despite her attempt at soothing things, in the end I would be a grandmother before the first one of us ever lived in that country. My own granddaughter Jacaranda would someday go to college there, at a school with a then long history of female nudity.

We were all a pack of nerves in the days that followed, but the strange northern soldiers never returned. As I later learned, a Mexican politician had been blackmailed into signing one of us over, without approval from higher up. The American had thought to just walk right in and take the first one of us he got his hands on, but it was filmed on news all over the world. Within a day the Americans found themselves on the defensive in front of the world body. After all, we had been cooperating with the local Humans on every level, handing over vast troves of data about ourselves. The international community vastly over-estimated Teacher, and feared turning it hostile could lead to some form of planetary bombardment. In the face of that, they had no hope trying to justify their plan to dissect one of us.

Fernanda and a few of our handlers, like Carmine; chose to pretend a double narrative. Among each other and us they pretend to believe Teacher had no weapons and we were just five harmless naked girls. However I did chance to overhear them express doubts about this. "The scientist in me says Teacher has to be holding back on us with whatever is still up there. But if she meant harm, we be dead before we even saw it coming," Carmine whispered to Fernanda one day, unaware I could overhear.

"She is correct," Teacher spoke into my head. "In time you'll understand. I am programmed to play a long game for peace, but the capacity to take other options is there."

Whatever our handler's concerns, they not only kept their silence for their own reasons, together with Teacher they kept up the ruse by revealing to the public that the drones were in fact harmless. Considering that there were statues of Fernanda and Tashaiya posed as mother and daughter in universities around the world by the time my granddaughter went off to college, they had made the right choice.

Venus wasn't much help, or maybe she was in her funny way. For the next week she kept running around to the scientists and asking them, "if you really want to give me a cavity probe, I'm ready to go. It's for Science!" and then bending over and spreading herself open to everyone's laughter.

"She has a really strange sense of... sex, I suppose," Carmine noted while looking at Venus displaying herself to a very nervous male scientist. I introduced Carmine to tentacle porn from our old Earth movies and discovered they also had the same genre of fiction. "But it's almost never girls that like that stuff," Carmine said.

"Venus was all talk of how we'd land on a world of tentacle monsters," I giggled out. "Before we landed. Up to the moment the ship's door opened, she was ready to... be the noble sacrifice and do her part for her people."

"And I still am," Venus called out as she got up after her scientist ran away with some random excuse and a comment about being married. "We need some guys in here Carmine..."

As silly as Venus' games were, it proved to be the key for that final barrier. Playing teasing sex games with the scientists meant teasing out the language for a lot of emotional context. That finally gave us the words, and the concepts, to get across the full scope of our differences.

These 'local' Humans were more like our parents and the people who had once lived on Earth. Not conditioned, just who and what they were. But as Teacher would increasingly let us know, we had been fine tuned for survival of the species.

The expectation was that would we land on one of two possible worlds. An empty planet with a harsh reality where our survival depending on a lot of sex and a lot of pushing out babies about as fast as pulling the trigger on an automatic weapon. Or at least that was the analogy Tashaiya came up with to put some laughs on the idea. In that world, we'd be living short and harsh lives where we needed to be constantly mating and never fighting. So, we were horny and a little too compliant.

And as I would learn later, even our men were as silly and cute obsessed around babies as the 'local' Human women.

The second possible world theory was a scenario a littler closer to where we actually landed. The idea was we might land on an already inhabited world that we could either conquer or integrate with. What Teacher did not tell the 'local' Humans is that the choice between these options had almost gone the other way, and most of the Arks that had been sent out had in fact been 'armed to the teeth' for conquest. Especially the early ones that were filled with the families of Earth's ruling classes.

But our Ark's builders felt that a people who came to conquer would have the mindset that would just repeat the cycle that had doomed Earth. We in fact had come from very war-like ancestors, and Earth had only managed to unite in the final years when the Ark project was underway.

So we were raised by Teacher to be congenial, deferential, as well as very emotional and driven to an intense desire to get people to like us. It wasn't so much a genetic modification as they didn't want us becoming a servant race. They just wanted us to be 'too kind, too pleasant' for a generation or two, and slowly become normal. A mix of training in cultural norms, and nanites pushing out the right hormones for us and our first generation of children.

It was actually Carmine who found this the most offensive. I guess I had in fact been conditioned to think it was just fine to do that to me, but Carmine had scolded Teacher, "these are your own children, and you're violating them, not letting them really be themselves. It's just not right. How... dare you!"

"And if my makers had not programmed me to do this," Teacher stated, "do you think that American would have been the only one of his kind here? Would your own leaders have reacted as welcoming if we had come out of the ship armed and ready for a fight?"

"It's just... wrong..." Carmine said.

"This was Humanity's last hope, our Human that is, and maybe soon yours as well by my climate data." Teacher displayed an image of Earth side by side with... well, local Earth. "Ethics becomes a luxury."

What Teacher did not say, and perhaps only I and either Tashaiya or Paloma had been briefed on, is that our people had possessed devastating weaponry. While our planet had died from a climate disaster, we had lived on in the solar system for another three hundred cycles before our own weapons technology triggered our sun to begin decay into a supernova. We had escaped by riding out the shockwave. Our Ark had no weaponry and no data on how to engineer our native weaponry, but Earth's weapons technology could have destroyed this new Earth with a casual flip of a switch before we'd even come closer than the outer planets.

Not only that, but even without weapons all we had needed to do to conquer this system was let one small shuttle not slow down as it entered the system. A collision with a larger stellar body at those speeds would have set off a chain reaction of exploding planets, and we could have then built a new third planet out of the rubble within a mere handful of generations. As Fernanda had said, anything capable of crossing the stars could wipe out an entire solar system before it even saw them coming. Now that we had slowed down though, that tactic was no longer available.

As it began to filter out to the scientists and the uniformed types just exactly how much of a non-threat we at least were, focus began to shift to how to get us out of the park.

As in, when and how to go about bringing down more people, and where to put them.

This became both a concern of location and reception. Not to mention one of resources to make us self sufficient members of our new society. They felt they could easily integrate ten to twenty thousand of us into the city, and maybe that number again around more cosmopolitan parts of the country were it would be easy to ensure we were well received. Beyond that, as Teacher told them we had a hundred thousand ready to be woken from the Dream and brought down, other nations were brought into the discussion.

We found ourselves doing a combination of interviews and briefings. Tashaiya and Paloma would spend time speaking to representatives of possible host countries, while Venus, Maya, and I met with local media to present our case to the public.

Some interviews would start with some of the strangest questions until they realized we were so similar. No, I don't fly, I can't project dreams or read thoughts, my eyes can't shoot lasers. That stuff is silly anyway, even a really alien alien wouldn't have super powers. I got a lot of rashes proving to journalists that yes, we can't wear anything, we're allergic to it all.

Maya was the breakout hit in all of this and we slowly let her take over. She would quickly start interviewing the other person about their favorite music, food, or talk about a Telenovela she was watching.

"How are they learning about us when you do that?" Venus asked one evening.

As Maya flipped through pictures of a popular corridos singer she said "They're learning we're just like them, that's all they really need to know." She pointed to the singer. "Like him, he tells stories about the people listening to his music. They know it's the story of their own heart, it's why they love him."

"And he's sooo handsome," Venus batted her eyelashes at the tablet display of a young man in a vaquero hat and fancy ranchero vest.

After that we needed sleep, so the dildos came out to temper our allergies. What a life it was going to be on this planet.

Somewhere in the second month of this with Maya off giving yet another interview where she was winning hearts by acting the parts of a telenovela character, and Paloma was meeting with a diplomat from some place called Greece, I found myself walking in the enclosed part of the park.

I'd been thinking about what my life might be like once they let us out when I spotted an older man outside the barricade in a black suit with a little white square at the neck. He was holding a beaded chain in one hand and fiddling with it with the other. What drew me to him was his intense stare and look of concern.

But what really stopped me in my tracks was an ornament on that chain, it had a symbol that I recognized from our Earth.

I quickly found Carmine and had her escort me to the barricade. The man and I were separated by a plexiglass wall twice my height, but he still took a step back when he realized I was so intent on him.

"Carmine, who is that man?" I hurriedly asked.

"He's a Priest," she said. "I... this is difficult for me, I used to be very devout, but... well... it's just not rational and scientific now is it? And you... well... I can't imagine things will go well for them after all of this."

"I don't understand," I said. "And why does he have that?"

"Have what?" Carmine looked between me and the man. For his part he caught where I was looking and glanced at it and then me, taking a step forward. His expression went from concern to curious.

"I remember that from my studies of Earth, my Earth I mean. It's almost like the symbol of one of the religions we used to have," I pointed at the ornament on his chain.

"Used to have?" Carmine asked. "I guess your people abandoned faith?"

"It's complicated..." I hesitated. I wasn't sure I wanted to tell her where he could overhear. But I felt I should. The locals would learn eventually. They already knew we had come here because of our own failings. "Um... They um... it wasn't pleasant. You know my people had many failings. They... when our climate began to collapse, they blamed the failure on the religions rather than on those of greed and power. Teacher taught us that while the people with faith were not the cause, they were in fact pointlessly irrational. But..."

"Your world suffered greatly child," the man said. "Your existence has me questioning everything I ever held dear, and yet..."

I had Carmine bring him inside the barricade. We spoke for hours after that, throwing questions back and forth about the history of religion on our two worlds. We didn't have the same religions exactly. Something that Carmine noted with a smirk, initially.

But between the differences we found too many similarities. Details would swap around. The faith I knew of that had used his symbol was somewhere between the faith he held and one followed in another land. The faith he described as his had elements from three faiths of ours.

What bothered Carmine the most was that when we got to the details of the teachings of our faiths, we found that anything that seemed mean spirited or dogmatic was not consistent between our worlds, but anything that spoke to living in peace was uncannily matched. I had Teacher pull up passages from my ancestors varied holy books and we would find that, correcting for translation, some lessons could be matched word for word. Particularly those in several faiths promoting treating others with kindness and understanding.

While we couldn't draw out an exact map to say a certain set of connections showed some faith as being true, it all seemed to imply that my people had been wrong to dismiss faith, and Carmine found herself crying at the end, declaring a desire to embrace the faith she had once followed.

The man was still highly disturbed by my nakedness and constant state of arousal, but he seemed to understand it better when he realized my own discomfort in the issue. "Teacher raised us to the fashions of our parent's generation, which were very utilitarian, as covering as your suit, and designed to downplay differences in the sexes," I told him. "Then we got here and found ourselves like this. It has been a shock. I will admit I am enjoying it now. But I understand, more than you know. Then again, this condition we have almost seems designed to get us to be fruitful and multiply."

In the weeks after that we found ourselves sitting down with local Earth historians looking for any other commonalities. I think Carmen was trying to find something scientific to justify why there were so many religious overlaps. But that was the end of it. Outside of that our histories had very few things that could cross-relate.

For my part, I became very interested in looking into matters of faith. And in the years that followed many of us 'old Earth' humans joined various local Earth faiths. Any that were not dogmatic, that taught their practitioners to seek their own answers to the spiritual, found themselves flooded with converts from our ranks. A few new faiths trying to merge 'old Earth' and 'new Earth' faiths did spring up, but these were less popular as we had arrived only with history of our old faiths, and copies of their main books in Teacher's records, yet no one who could carry on the living part of a faith's teachings.

Despite our nudity, it was leaders in some of the local Earth faith groups that helped push the tide in finding places for us to settle. By the end of our third month on planet, space for ten thousand had been set aside in Mexico City. It was a mix of host families, communal apartments with locals that had been carefully screened, and housing, mostly for males; supplied by the churches. The church groups may have understood that our females were stuck being nude, but it was still something that made them uncomfortable to be around.

It took Teacher another month to land all those people around the outskirts of the city. Bringing hundreds of ships down onto the planet all at once was too much of an environmental disturbance so it had to be staggered. Once the people were offloaded, the ships were then moved around the country and began remaking themselves into the beginning stages of a climate management system. Fernanda's First Contact group became the start of Alien Affairs, an agency designed to ease the integration of us interstellar refugees.

The five of us in the park were actually the last to get settled into homes. We were kept there, at our own suggestion, as a sort of display while people got used to their new neighbors.

Two years later, Settlement Day came, and Teacher brought down the rest of the hundred thousand of us, bringing the numbers in Mexico up to forty thousand. Ships were moved around the planet to set up a global climate system, and Alien Affairs was transitioned into a partner of the UN.

Teacher had worked out a system to keep us warm in colder climates despite being naked. So twenty thousand settled in a place called Canada, out on the western part in a city called Vancouver. She developed two paired systems. Once used nanites just under the skin that would create magnetic fields around the extremities and torso, which would interact to create mild heat. It was not perfect, especially under wind. But it made life bearable.

The second system did something similar using metal bracelets, anklets, a collar, and an optional belt. This system was useful for someone only needing it temporarily and more importantly, the local humans could use it for helping victims of hypothermia. The external system was also able to put out more power and became something even people with the nanites would wear in colder conditions.

Girls with the nanite system got the nickname 'glowgirls' because the nanites would make glowing bands of color on their skin. Once nudity laws started to include local humans both systems became popular with them as well.

Neither system was very good at helping with the problem of bare feet on snow. But despite this living in Canada became popular as the people there were so welcoming. Plus Canadian 'glow-girls' took to wearing metal spiked sandals when it was snowing as the metal could be kept warm where it touched the feet.

I moved in with Carmine and her daughter Yoana. Tashaiya was adopted by Fernanda, despite being an adult. Venus relocated to Italy for her short but brilliant career as a porn star, then returned to Mexico to be a mother and live a quiet life away from the public. Maya became a Telenovela star. Paloma eventually married and moved to a wildlife sanctuary for tropical birds.