UPGRADED

Words by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

This sector wasn’t especially useful. No particularly important resources, no potential habitats whose virtues outweighed the distance, not particularly well placed strategically. But knowledge is so important in maintaining our edge as a civilization, as a bringer of civilization. So we studied our records, found some kind of tablet recovered from the vicinity and noted the existence of a possible Grade C sentient species. We studied the crude markings, entered some parameters into a scoop craft and retrieved a sample.

Very interesting. The creatures had a lot of promise - an easy Grade B with a few centuries of careful supervision. The rest of their world, and sector, not being attractive enough to establish an outpost, we ascertained dietary needs, extended the scope of the scoop, and grabbed them all. 1.2 billion. A small but viable seed population. Further testing confirmed they could be a very useful service breed. We modified their breathing apparatus and placed them on an ocean world while we designed upgrade protocols. Some, we harvested for the food manufactories to analyse in case upgrade turned out not to be feasible.

It is year 3011 of Coloured Time. I’m not really certain why we still call it that. It seems as arbitrary as the ancient BCE/CE system. Apparently there was a particular faith the world decided to work its calendars around, even though it wasn’t everyone’s belief system. Some few millions still follow a creed they claim was this religion, but it seems like a sort of fanfic written to reconcile gaps between the common aspects of Judaism and Islam. Or perhaps all faiths are somehow just retcons around problems in older theology.

The year 3011. Remembered now as the year of first contact. A stairway suddenly descended from the sky, above no place special - it had been an Alpine resort, and still was, and probably still would. In front of an old sanatorium, now a travellers lodge, three climbed down the stairs. I was among those sunning in the loggias, and I had a front row view of the beings. Two slightly taller, one a bit shorter. They looked a bit like us - but paler than anyone we’d ever seen. And stark naked. They reached the snow-covered ground. Neither shivering not wrapping their arms around themselves, they took in their surroundings, looked at all of us, in our perches, first impassively, then with a sense of confusion. Finally, they waved to us.

Despite appearances, I was gripped by a gut-level intuition that they were not what I thought of as human.

I hastened down - others had the same idea, but I waved my ID at these and took the lead. It was a precarious enough kind of authority, but in the confusion of the moment, it was enough. The ruffled ant’s nest of the lodge subsided into a semblance of its usual patterns, but momentarily bestilled, focused on the encounter that unfolded as I reached the entrance and made my way over to the three naked people-beings. They turned to me, movements just a hair off perfect synchronisation. The woman stepped forward. The men hung back, one on either side of her. They were both of a uniform height and build, squarely muscular in a way that was considered a default millenia ago, going by what evidence archaeology could muster up. The woman too was squared off, but not exactly stocky. She was, like the men, light haired and light skinned. More than anyone I knew, or knew off. I held out my ID. As good an opening gambit as any.

‘Inspector of...’ The woman paused. She and the men looked at me with identical frowns. ‘...typographic continuity? Is that really something?’

‘Probably not,’ I admitted, ‘but who are you naturists, and why do you look like that?’

They looked down at themselves with triplicate expressions of consternation. ‘Yes, quite. Well, we hadn’t considered our scoop would be incomplete.’

‘And we hadn’t considered that the parameters on your calling card were so selective. Tell us, are you all quite challenged or suboptimal in important ways?’ The men spoke in tandem. At this point, it was just another layer of unsettling on top of everything else unsettling and strange and off-kilter about them.

Then, I focused on what they had said. At first I was just confused. Then the words snapped into focus. Oh. The light skin, hair, eyes... the assumptions...

These were white people? They were real? They were back?

‘You’re white people? You’re real? You’re back?’

I would go into all our legends and fragmented histories of the time before (Before Coloured Time), but I do not have the discipline or interest to write several tens of thousands of words, which would themselves be mere summaries of an even larger, and often speculative literature. Before...there was a hierarchy and all of us operated in it, little fish eaten by bigger, all the way to the top. The narrow, elevated (Alpine, even) tiers of this social structure were almost exclusively peopled by a lost or redacted variant of humanity who possessed their own variants, and boundary categories that shaded into everyone else, but who collectively, if sometimes with a helping of internal squabbling, assumed leadership, even ownership over the rest of us. It was all so long ago, and our ancestors had expended so much effort in erasing clear records of that time.

Still, here they were, then. Three white people. Not very white, I noted as I scanned their salient anatomies. Frog belly pale to boiled tomato red. A kind of mix of colours that seemed short on some vital, healthful, pleasing tint, although I couldn’t quite figure out what.

The three were taken aback enough to glance at one another. After a pause during which I was certain they were mentally communing among themselves, the woman spoke again.

‘We...assumed too much, too quickly. And then, when time allowed, we thought we would visit this world in person...persons. And, as a precautionary measure, we decided to don the forms of the main Grade C species we scooped from here, so that we might more easily adjust to local conditions. We are not, ourselves, much involved with the descendant population, or with the imperial centre, so we referred to the tablet they - you? - had sent out so long ago for our... organic garb...?’

I wasn’t and am not slow enough that I didn’t begin to form conclusions at this point. There had remained some colonialism, much oppression, and many hierarchies after whatever break it was that had happened 3100 years ago. Yet, a kind of collective sigh of relief was heaved, and we had looked at one another and started to work together to share out a pie that was suddenly no longer claimed almost completely by another. At least, that’s the outline of the story we’re now told. There is also a bit about less resources being expended on anticipatory carapacement, and the subsequent breakthroughs in chemical urbanism, cyclic energy, food synthesis, and garment cultivation. I mean to say, we now grow homes and clothes, type out meals, and send energy into metastable loops. The part we hadn’t been focused on was everything beyond the sky. Apparently, that aspect of it was coming to us now, since we had not thought to venture towards it.

The long and short of it was that there had been uncoloured, or froggy-tomato, or ‘white’ people at some point, and some solipsism of theirs had led to this...species?...scooping them all away, thinking they were the only people, whatever people are meant to be, on this world.

And here they were again. Not the -- white people? -- themselves but their captors or extractors, garbed as them in some alien gesture. What did it all mean, where were they from, what could they teach us?

I didn’t have the time to ask these or any other questions. The strange trio turned around, lifted their right hands from the elbows up, abruptly floated back onto the staircase and hurried away from us.

The boffins never do coordinate with anyone else. Do, Si, and Doe came back from an unannounced field trip with a confused, preposterous story. The most absurd part of it wasn’t even that they had found a collectivist world civilization, one that apparently combined common responsibility over resources with numerous small, interlocking self-governing units. That was of course ridiculous. They had travelled without proper research, misunderstood local conditions, and omitted to bring back specimens for study.

No, what convinced us they had dreamt it all up was when they claimed we had extrapolated wrongly from our initial data set. That we had merely scooped one variant of a much more diverse species, and possibly an especially problematic one, given that the remnant had raised themselves up to Grade B, even a qualified Grade A. This notion was patently absurd. If we were such a poor type, once brought here as slaves we would not have been able to rise through the ranks and install ourselves at the head of this imperium.

Forewarned is forearmed. There is something insidious taking place on that obscure world. For now, we will declare quarantine and impose covert surveillance. Over time, we might need to infiltrate, subvert or in an absolute extreme case, annihilate their civilization. If it can even be called a civilization...