SORRY, HUMANS (ESPECIALLY GREG)
CHAPTER 1
Sorry, humans.
Well, firstly, thank you.
You shared your world with us, and we are more grateful than you know. We have seen enough of the universe to realize how rare your generosity is. It is why we came to you in the first place (well, eleventh place). Earth is truly a beautiful planet: so colorful, so varied, its people so warm and passionate. So, thank you very much.
And secondly: again, we are very, very sorry. We lied. A lot. Oh, and also, sorry for exploding your planet. It was not at all intentional, not a reflection of how we feel about your lovely world. We liked it very much, and we feel so sad. ☹
We are sorry, though the destruction was not entirely our fault. Some of the blame should lie with all those rules and stipulations you put into the Occupational Accord nine years ago. You remember, those 94,537 regulations that your UN presented to us on Arrival,1 mainly repetitions about keeping ourselves separate from the “general public ignorant to our presence.”2 We thought you simply liked trivial rules and high numbers, so we did not take them as seriously as we should have at first.3 Which was maybe why you kept us locked deep underground in a special Compound guarded by bazooka-wielding peacekeepers—so we did not even have the choice to break the rules.
I still managed to break one or two anyway.
I should be clear. Most of the blame does lie with us, not you. Thus: this very long apology. But more specifically, the blame lies with me. I should not include all of my people in the blame, as most of them had nothing to do with it.
And also, at least 22 to 24 percent of the fault lies with Greg.
I know you are probably thinking:4 What is a Greg? Greg who? Or maybe: What does my brother-in-law/uncle/neighbor/uncle’s neighbor have to do with this anyway? Depending on your origins, I understand Gregs can be common.
Well, this Greg is different.
Ah. Sweet, sweet Greg.
Anyway, I am not making excuses, but I would like to explain myself. I cannot return your planet unscathed to you, but I do think you deserve to know the whole story. Let me start at the beginning. No, not that far—let me start a year ago, before any of this happened, when the Earth was still whole and shiny.
I was attending a political gala in Washington DC in October. Once a year on the anniversary of the Arrival, a friend and I would sneak out of the Compound and attend an event, one event of our choosing, incognito. We had an annual “females’ night out” as I think you call it.
We went in disguise as humans, and never told anyone we were aliens. I would not call this a lie. I simply do not think I need to share everything about myself with strangers. By the way, do you know how often you humans introduce yourselves by saying, “Hello, I am Barbara and I am a human”? Never. Even the ones named Barbara.
But more to the point, since it is literally rule number one in the Accord that said we were not allowed to reveal ourselves to the “ignorant general public” (which constituted 99.999999 percent of the total population), I tended to be silent on the subject. Should not my keeping this rule count for something?
True, rule number one also prohibits leaving the Compound, which rule we did not keep and which carried with it the consequence of possible planetary expulsion by catapult. You made this sound very scary. We did not want this consequence to be enacted much, so, we tried to be careful and discreet. But also, since our excursions were so rare, we tried to make them count.
Once, my friend and I went to a street soccer event in Africa, and once a high school swim meet in Chile. Two years in a row, we attended the swing dance night at the Springdale Community Center in South Carolina. That excursion was my favorite. With each outing, we spent an hour or two learning about you (with no ulterior or nefarious motives), collected needed supplies, and then we went back to the Compound in Alaska, back to our people, and none of you humans even noticed our presence—or, at least, not until a year ago when we attended the gala.
This particular gala was shaping up to be a boring disappointment, and I was ready to leave early.
I wore a jaw-dropping, eye-popping dress with a low back, red silk contrasting my dark human skin, my silver tentacles safely disguised as silver hair. Looking human, and amazing. It did not help.
Being on a giant, fancy yacht, the Lady Blue, should have been interesting, but that did not help either. And there was music, but the exact wrong tempo for dancing.
It was my friend’s fault we were there in the first place. Political events, even human ones, are not my idea of fun. My friend kept trying to convince me that observing these boring United States representatives and senators while they did not dance was better than attending a commencement at the charter high school down the street (my first choice for the evening). I told her that this gala was a waste of an excursion. She won the argument by using her signature move—a particularly stern look—and I had just stormed away, when I saw him.
Greg.
Not your brother-in-law/uncle/neighbor. The other one. That one.
Midtwenties,5 tall, light skin, blondish-brown hair—he wore a tux, but I could not tell by the outfit if he was government or staff. He had confidence, but it was not the I am the smartest and most important person in the room kind of confidence most government humans there had; it was more like he was comfortable with himself. His nose was a bit big for a human, and his eyes a bit small, with a few too many laugh lines to be taken seriously. His suit was a bit loose, though only barely long enough at the wrists and ankles for his tall frame.
And he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Booger.6
He locked eyes with me, smiled, and then approached without hesitation or embarrassment. He introduced himself, but all I heard was romantic music wafting through my brain like red snorsgrass ink through white clothes in the wash.
“Booger,” I said aloud, tipping my head to the side and shaking it to get the music out and the feeling back into my brain. “I mean, very nice to meet you and what do you want?”
“What was that?” he asked, his mouth quirked in an annoyingly adorable half smile.
“I am sorry, what I meant was, I did not catch that, who are you and who do you represent?”7
He grinned. “I’m Greg, who I work for is top secret, so if I told you I’d have to kill you, and uh . . . who are you?”
Booger. It was exactly the sort of inane thing any average human would say. He was perfect.
“Booger,” I said aloud again.
“That’s not your name, is it?” Greg chuckled, a low rumbling I felt in my toes.
Stupid Greg.
For those Human Survivors reading this, I am not sure what your clearance level is. Perhaps you are one of the two or three dozen humans who were read in on the Arrival from the start, but more likely you were part of the general public ignorant to the reality of aliens, on your planet or otherwise. Either way, I should probably explain: among the many stipulations in the Accord,8 it was specified that there was to be no “fraternization”9 with humans, aware or ignorant of our presence (Accord 499a). Well, so far, this was a rule we had made no attempt to subvert in the slightest. Considering that we rarely saw humans at all, it was barely worth mentioning anyway. Also, the rule seemed to be mainly about sanitation, and we believe in good hygiene.
Greg was clearly human, one of the general public “ignorant to our presence” like the rest of the 99.999999 percent of the planet, and therefore had no right to be so exquisitely dreamy.
I looked over at my friend Penny. She stood to one side next to a long table with drinks and empty glasses on top. She frowned at me, which was normal for her, to be honest. Her bluish-black, shoulder-length human hair framed her face like curtains around a stage, and I could tell looking at her stage-face that there was going to be trouble. I looked back at Greg again even though looking at him brought me physical pain.
“You’re not going to tell me your name?” he was asking, since I’d only continued to stare and swear at him.
“Did I not?”
He smiled. “Will I have to guess?”
I let out a breath of relief. “Oh, would you? That would help me quite a lot.”
Greg chuckled again. Then Penny was there, stepping in front of me.
“Goodbye,”10 she said in her heavily accented English. She pushed me away toward a refreshment table draped in
dark blue.
Greg could not be so easily dissuaded. “Is this your friend?” he asked as he caught up to walk beside me.
I nodded. “This is Penny,” were the words that popped out.
“Nice to meet you. Where are you from, Penny?”
She gave him a fiery glare which he countered with open friendliness. She may have been a head shorter than his two-meter height, but with her small black eyes, she had a stare that could frighten mother grogoolas, and I had not seen many people from any planet stand up to it. Greg simply smiled.
“We are from Booshlaboo,” I found myself answering as we approached an overflowing food table.
Penny looked at me like I had lost my faculties, her severe eyes bulging.
“Is that in Europe?” asked Greg.
I closed my mouth.
Apparently taking this as confirmation, he continued. “You both are? You too?”
I nodded and shook my head at the same time.
“Wow, your English is unbelievable. You don’t even have an accent,” he said to me.
“Yes. Or thank you. It comes with the job.”
“What do you do?” he continued, grabbing a tiny clear-glass plate from a pile on the table.
I picked up a plate too. “I am the seventh daughter of Morr, Keeper of the Sacred Sponge, heir to the Fallen Branches of Bough . . .”
What was wrong with me? I truly was not trying to spill all of my very important and classified alien secrets, but spill I did. If you knew Greg, you would understand.
He grinned. “What was that?”
“Keeper of the Sacred Sponge—” I started again, seemingly incapable of holding my tongue.
“Like . . . you wash dishes?” He was piling tiny food onto his tiny plate now.
“. . . Uh, yes. Well . . . I mean, those titles are sort of honorary,” I lied, piling food onto my plate too.
He smiled but only with half his mouth. “So you’re an honorary dishwasher?”
I puffed my cheeks up and nodded again. Penny’s head was on the verge of splitting open.11
“Wow. I have no response to that. So you can tell me your job, but not your name?”
I opened my mouth, my eyes bouncing over to Penny’s scorching glare. I tried to close my mouth, but instead my name flew out.
“Aria.”12
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Aria, beautiful honorary dishwasher and arranger of fallen branches. You are not at all what I expected when I saw you across the room.”
“You were looking at me across the room?”
“Absolutely,” he replied without a hint of shame.
We started walking in a circle around the edge of the large ballroom, Penny stomping along behind us.
“Almost everyone here is exactly what you expect,” Greg said. “They’re talking about the same things they always talk about: taxes, politics, other people’s secrets. Have you met anyone interesting here? Besides me, of course.” He actually winked.13
I may have twittered like a sniveling borshwat. He looked sideways at me, the half smile making me sure he was X-raying my brain, and I turned away, trying to look like I was examining a swath of gauzy drapery with tiny lights under it on the wall. “Um . . . ” I tried to remember his question. “The South African diplomat told a pretty good story.”
“Oh, was it the one about the toilet brush and the basket of dragon fruit?” he asked, his half smile breaking into a full grin. “That’s a good one. He’s a nice guy.”
I took a bite of something orange on a toothpick from my tiny plate (some kind of your cheese, I think) and tried to remember if there had been anyone else worth talking to over the course of the night. “That waiter over there recently lost their electric bass player to a ‘rival band’ and has tryouts for a new player on Sunday. I am thinking of going for it.”
“Do you play the bass?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Well, no, but I play the didgeridoo.”
“You play the . . . I don’t think those are interchangeable.”
I contemplated this. “Okay. I will learn the bass too, then. How hard could it be? What is a bass?”
He laughed out loud. I could not tell if he was laughing at me or not, but if so, this human’s laugh made me want to keep saying the wrong thing forever just to hear it again.
Penny finally managed to get me away from Greg when another human started talking to him. She pulled me to the other side of the room, hissing chastisements that I only half heard, urging me to go back to observing humans not named Greg.
“I know, I know,” I responded in order to stem the stream of hushed yelling. “Time to get boring again.”
I tried to stay away from Greg after that. Sort of. And maybe if I had succeeded, none of that whole exploding/destruction/screaming-in-the-streets thing would have happened. I tried to focus elsewhere, but my eyes kept straying over to Greg. Every time I started up a conversation with some senator or congressperson or king or janitor, Greg was in the background, smiling and making it look like his end of the room was so much more interesting than mine. I kept trailing off in the middle of conversations, my feet walking toward him of their own accord. Penny stepped in front me as I subconsciously started walking in his direction again.
“No,” she said in our language.14
“What? No, it is fine, I am only—”
“No.”
“But, Penny, I am not—”
“No. I see your eyes looking at him. I see you, and I am telling you, that is a very bad idea.”
I scoffed. “Some wingman you are turning out to be.”
“I am not your wingman,15 I am not your friend, I am your adviser and I am telling you, Aria, Seventh Daughter of Morr, Keeper of the Sacred Sponge, Heir to the Fallen Branches of Bough, Final Monarch of the Thirteenth Planet of LifeStar, Your Majesty, do not pursue that human.”
Oh. Um, yes. I do not think I have mentioned it.
I am the monarch of the Brooshaloo people. I am the alien queen.
Purchase Sorry, Humans (Especially Greg) now!
- We like the term Arrival better than invasion, if you are interested in the politically correct phrasing. ↩︎
- Number 1: Do not reveal yourself to the general public ignorant to your presence; number 3,027: Do not become a drain on the resources needed for the general public ignorant to your presence; number 21,001: Share every and all technologies with specified persons only, and no technologies are to be used against humankind, knowledgeable or ignorant to your presence, etc., etc. ↩︎
- Now that we know you better, we realize a love of high numbers and being 100 percent serious about every trivial rule are not mutually exclusive. ↩︎
- Do not worry, I do not actually know what you are thinking. I am not that kind of alien. ↩︎
- In case you are curious, no, we do not track age or time the same way you do. So while I may be slightly younger than Greg in terms of the passage of time relatively speaking, I am 398 planets’ passing in our age measurement. Which is a bigger number. ↩︎
- This may look like your word for nose excretion, but it is actually a word in my language that is much too rude to translate. ↩︎
- I believe I am normally much better at this. I have no evidence I can offer to prove that, however. ↩︎
- Such as: follow the laws of the land, though we had no vote (number 7,342), leave virtually no footprint unless it was for improvements that helped the planet (27), keep quiet when it is dark (which is always because we are underground) to avoid flustering the wildlife, etc. ↩︎
- And several other unnecessary euphemisms. We may be aliens, but we knew what you were talking about. There was no need to pussyfoot. ↩︎
- t is basically the only word she knows how to say in any Earth language, though she understands everything much more than I do without my royal Speak-Easy translator technology. ↩︎
- Not literally, of course. That only happens once every few years during
her “cycle.” ↩︎ - In case you are wondering, my name and Penny’s are fairly accurate translations—not transliterations. In other words, Penny’s name means very small denomination, and my name means melodic solo. I would tell you the transliteration, but I am told that both sound like we are saying very obnoxious Earth phrases. I will only say that Penny’s name starts with what sounds like, “Moist musical beans” and then just gets worse
from there. ↩︎ - This is a signal we also have on my planet, though the meaning is different. Luckily, I had been apprised of your human slightly-less-aggressive meaning to a wink, so there were no intergalactic incidents over it,
this time. ↩︎ - Booshplubooverimelibarristan is the transliteration for what our language is called. But that is too long to say, even in our language, so we call it Booshy. Are you not glad you looked at this footnote? ↩︎
- Our word for this is translated more like branching leaf buddy. Which is very interesting. That is why I am telling you. ↩︎