Chinese New Year

A man from this planet once asserted that prisoners in a cave have a limited ability to understand reality. Isn’t it ironic that while all humans on Earth are oblivious prisoners right now, the only ones who do know what’s going on are inside a cave?

I shouldn’t be, though. Alti and Longti told me to guard the entrance. But it has started to rain, so I shelter slightly inside. In the far distance, beyond acres of rice fields and pastures, I can spot the pipes and smog from Wuhan—an Earth-city that, thanks to us, has become famous on two planets. I don’t have a good view of the immediate surroundings, but so what? No Earthers will come up here now anyway—it isn’t the best weather for a hike in the hills.

I’m bored. I sometimes feel that since I’m young, my colleagues treat me like crap. I do see why we had to come back here, though. Alti and Longti call it a clean-up operation. I glance at the wheel tracks leading further into the cave. When we landed, just before dawn, the first thing we did was push the spaceship 20 yards inside the cave to shield it from sight. For every trace we’re trying to erase, we leave new ones.

It’s the middle of the day, but as the sky is crammed with clouds it isn’t very bright. Wearing only a thin jacket, tailor-made to match the fashion of Earth rather than to keep me warm, I’m making small jumps. My body feels heavier here than at the spy-station. Rather than acknowledging I’ve gained mass from 27 months of ingesting energy in pill-form and binge-watching TV, I blame gravity.

I made a mistake. Few Earthers would leave their house for a hike in the rain, but those who were already outside would of course seek somewhere to shelter. Due to the tapping of the rain, I don’t notice her approach until she stands right before me at the entrance. A young Earth-female, about my age. Slender and in a red jacket. Black-haired, like all Earthers around here. Not only does she spot me—her look slides past me and, despite that it’s dark in there, her face leaves no doubt that she sees the spaceship. Her look goes down to the wheel tracks on the ground, then up again to meet my face.

If only she knew what a historic moment this is.

**********

Dear Earther! I’m Lati, and I’m not an alien. My colleagues and I come from a planet we call Girth, and we’re humans. Girth is very distant from Earth, but we’ve made great achievements in space exploration. Twenty-five years ago, we discovered your planet and learned that it’s almost identical to ours. Our astrophysicists believe the galaxies were created as one symmetric unit in the Big Bang but were split and slung in different directions. So similar are Girth and Earth that it even makes sense to talk about “a year” as a common unit of time (yes, we have an equivalent term that corresponds to the time it takes our planet to make one lap around the closest star).

Both planets have a favorable orbit within their respective solar systems, ensuring a narrow range of temperatures. Further, both have a mass that gives a gravitational pull that is sufficiently strong to stabilize an atmosphere and thereby enable the presence of liquid water. For these reasons, close to identical life forms have developed. Not only humans, we also share certain simpler forms, like cats and dogs (we thought you had them as pets too; however, from our research in your region of China, we’ve learned there might be some differences).

Since we discovered Earth, we have spent enormous resources researching you. After 15 years, we managed to establish a space-station just outside your atmosphere—the so-called spy-station. With our preeminent light-absorption technology, we’ve made the station itself, as well as the vessels we use to send staff there, invisible to your detection systems. The station is so close to your satellites that we can tap into your communications and consume it on our monitors. For a decade, we’ve sent people to the station whose sole job is to sit there analyzing Earth satellite TV and Internet traffic. In the beginning, we comprehended only tiny pieces from images and video—nothing from text and sound. Making sense of things was a tough process; imagine learning from pure observation with no teaching material available (it took us a full year to understand that you speak different languages). Nevertheless, we made it. When some of us had learned the Earth language of English, we could start learning about your development as a human race from watching your history programs. The boundary to fiction was not always clear to us, though (Game of Thrones conned us to believe you had dragons).

Owing to the vast distance, physical media carried on a spaceship serves as the only way that information can move between Girth and the spy-station. Each time we replace the station’s crew, the ship also carries loads of hard drives. This not only keeps Girthers updated on the Earth Program and brings the station crew news from home, but it also enables us to learn Earth English from Girth. Children do tend to pick up the language more easily, but we don’t send children to the station (we are humans, remember).

I was sent to the station 27 months ago, when I was 18, together with my far elders—Alti and Longti. Shortly after we arrived, we went on this special mission to Earth—the first-ever travel to Earth. It was only a daytrip; after completing the task, we went back to the station to watch the outcome on Earth TV.

**********

Twenty-seven months later, we’re back. We didn’t meet any Earthers on our previous trip, so my encounter with this girl, who I’m right now standing just a few yards away from at the entrance of the cave, is the first encounter ever between the two flavors of humanity.

That she’s seen me doesn’t matter, as I do look human. However, she has also seen the spaceship. I reach one hand inside the pocket of my jacket and touch my gun.

But wait… she might not grasp what she’s seeing. For travel between Girth and the spy-station, we’ve got big, super-fast crafts, but this one, built only for travel between the spy-station and Earth, is tiny and looks like a helicopter. Maybe I can spare her.

She utters some words in what I assume is Mandarin.

“I’m sorry that I don’t speak your language,” I say. “But you should GO!” I’m using hand gestures I believe are universe-al.

She lights up. “HEY—you speak English…”

With a finger still on the trigger, I almost misfire the gun. Fortunately, it’s in my pocket, so she doesn’t know. “YOU TOO,” I say. “How come?”

She grins. “I was preparing to move to the United States to study. Then came the Coronavirus, and they banned all entries from China.”

I smile back. Apparently, she has taught herself from home—like me. For a moment, she seems happy she’s got someone to practice with. Then she glances past me again and recalls that the situation is weird.

“Is that your helicopter?” she asks.

Unable to think of a good lie, I nod.

She scowls at me with her big, dark eyes. “Who are you? And where are you from?”

“It’s complicated!”

“You look American!”

Not knowing whether it’s a compliment, I don’t respond.

“Anyway, you’re obviously a foreigner. How come you’re here when our country is basically closed due to the pandemic?”

Before I’ve had time to say something stupid, I notice that her look slides past me again. This time, it’s not the spaceship that catches her attention.

“Hands up—both of you!”

It’s Alti’s voice. I turn and see Alti and Longti coming out of the cave, both carrying a flashlight in one hand and their guns in the other. “Saved by the bell” might not be the correct phrase in this case (I’m not that good with idioms yet).

“Who are you?” Alti asks the girl in his thick accent. He’s in his late 50s; having started learning Earth English later in his life, he doesn’t nail the American accent as I do.

“I-I, I live in the village down there.” She tries to point, but as her arm shakes it isn’t very precise.

“And what are you doing here? Are you a bat hunter?”

When she hesitates, he points his gun at her.

“It’s C-Chinese New Year tonight. M-my friends and I h-have got nowhere to party. W-we’re not allowed to party, you know. B-because of the pandemic.”

Alti frowns. “So you plan to party in the cave?”

She nods. “I k-knew there was a cave somewhere around here, but I couldn’t remember exactly where it was. T-thought I’d locate it beforehand, so t-that we wouldn’t have to search for it after dark.”

“That’s so cute! I can understand you—you haven’t gotten to party in a long while.”

“Maybe you can help us, girl,” Longti says. A mellow man in his 40s, he doesn’t speak unless he’s got something to bring to the table. Many see that as his strength; when he eventually speaks, people listen. “Maybe you know why we couldn’t find a single bat in the cave. They should be hibernating now, shouldn’t they?”

Not being questioned by Alti this time, the girl seems more relaxed. “I heard on the news that our authorities have treated many of the nearby caves with toxic chemicals,” she says. “It’s thought that the Coronavirus started with bats around here, so they’ve wiped out entire colonies.”

They’ve basically done what we came back here for, I say to myself. Too bad we’ve watched the news in English only. I knew we should’ve focused on more Earth languages!

“Thanks!” Alti says before he points his gun at her again and … and … fires!

BANG!

Hit in her stomach, she falls to the ground and makes some noises before she turns silent.

“YOU’VE KILLED HER!” I shout, my voice reverberating off the walls.

“I just did YOUR job,” Alti snarls. “We had ONE clear rule if we encountered Earthers, and we caught you standing here CHATTING with her, risking our very existence.”

“I was interrogating her for information!”

Alti points his gun at me. Now I can see that it’s not his real gun. “Calm down, boy,” he says. “I just gave her a sleep bullet—we’ll need her alive!”

I glance at her body on the floor of the cave and confirm that she’s still breathing. Then I turn toward Alti and Longti. “For what do we need her? If the Chinese authorities have done the clean-up for us, I assume we can return to the spy-station and then go home?”

They look at each other, smirking.

**********

Since we Girthers learned that we’ve got a twin humanity, the question has been what we should do about it. Three camps have crystallized, and the reason it was Alti, Longti, and I who were sent on the first mission to Earth, was that we’d marked ourselves as front figures for each of the camps. While I’m just a young campaign leader, they also represent our two proudest scientific fields—Alti’s a doctor and Longti’s an astronaut. Alti, Longti, and Lati are not our real names; they represent our respective camps and are to be used only while on the mission.

My camp, the Lati-camp, advocates the idea of introducing ourselves to you with the aim of eventually building a bridge through space (aka wormhole) and merging as one humanity sharing two planets. Like, “Hey, we’ve discovered you—let’s see what we can do together!” The reason why I, when I was 18, rose to prominence within this camp, was that we’re supported almost exclusively by the young generation (I’m our Greta Thunberg).

To understand the foundation of the Lati-camp, you need to know a little about our history. Girth has not followed the same phases as Earth. For some reason we still don’t know, our planet hasn’t been subject to continental drift. Our landmasses are concentrated as one gigantic island located primarily within our northern hemisphere. We don't have any concept of nations—in the central part of this bulk of land does our entire population live in one big city (since it’s the only one, it doesn’t have a name). The rest of the land we use as farmland, and on the coast, we’ve got some recreational resorts (farms and resorts are operated by seasonal workers from the city).

Our demographics have had huge implications for how we’ve developed as a society. First, living densely, we’re vulnerable to contagious diseases. Therefore, we’ve become masters in medicine. We’ve also focused on space exploration so that we’ll be able to escape the planet one day, should we need to. Second, by living in urban areas, our lives have been industrialized for centuries. As such, we haven’t had the population explosion Earth has seen. We’re only 100 million people, just above one percent of your population. It seems a huge difference; however, remember that your exponential growth has come in recent centuries and has been driven largely by a few regions. Third, having not gone through an evolution where nature and humans have adapted to different habitats, we’ve got little biodiversity and basically no racial diversity—we’re all white.

We Latis think both humanities deserve the best of both worlds. It’s our damn duty to share with you our medicinal advancements, our understanding of ourselves (and of you) in the bigger picture, and our resource abundance stemming from a sustainable take on population growth (your region of China has tried, but then it was already too late). On the other hand, we want your diversity. Seeing all the same and being all the same is boring.

The Longti-camp, dominated by the middle-aged, advocates that it’s too early to launch an irreversible action like reaching out to Earth. The Longtis want to wait things out while keeping up the research efforts to make a better-informed decision somewhere in the future.

The Alti-camp, dominated by the elders, advocates the destruction of Earth Humanity while we still can. The moderate Altis argue that we’re better humans and therefore shouldn’t mix with you. We live in harmony—ironically, the only divisive debate we’ve had in ages, is how to deal with you. We speak one constructed, common language, something you haven’t achieved despite a long evolution (that you gave up Esperanto shows how uncooperative you are). While we’re egalitarian, you’ve created structures that reinforce disparities between the rich and poor. While you spend lots of resources inventing ways to kill each other, and waste even more by having your smartest brains tied up in high-earning but useless bullshit jobs, we have a science-driven society that has solved cancer and is utilizing solar panels in space.

The hardliners among the Altis put forward that you can destroy us. We haven’t had wars for hundreds of years, so we’ve got no military. We’ve also got a much smaller population, so we’ll stand no chance against you. You’ve got a history of destroying each other, so why would you leave us alone? While the Altis’ main adversary is the Lati-camp, they also criticize the Longtis. Waiting is dangerous, as you might find us. With your launch of the James Webb telescope, our experts believe that you, with some luck, are only a few years away from discovering us. If you were actively looking for us, you’d find us. That’s why hiding the clues of our operation on Earth is so important that we came back here.

So what’s this operation about? A referendum 2.5 years ago resulted in a tie between the Altis and Longtis. They each got 40 percent of the votes, while our Lati-camp got 20 percent. While we’re smaller, we’re growing. The new generation is more positive about the idea of mixing, and the Altis know that. Fearing future referenda, they’re lobbying to have the Planet Parliament raise the voting age, arguing that those of us who were born after the discovery of Earth are too naïve. They’re also hurrying to have their alternative implemented. Fortunately, the Longtis have stopped them till now. The tie between the Altis and Longtis led the Planet Parliament to demand the two camps to sit down together and negotiate a compromise. That’s how Covid 19 came about.

It wasn’t something new. It was a virus that had threatened our planet a few decades ago, but that we had soon developed an effective vaccine against. Except for basic handguns, medicine is our only weapon—it was the Altis’ idea to launch the virus on Earth. It would bring your population down directly, but also indirectly as we knew you’d develop first-generation vaccines with the long-term side-effect of reducing your fertility. It would furthermore force you to tie up resources fighting the virus, and the bonus effect in terms of how much you’d fight each other over it, not even the Altis had anticipated. The Longtis could live with this compromise as it catered to their goals of buying time and testing Earthers’ behavior. As a minority, we Latis had to accept. However, to ensure the integrity of the mission, the Planet Parliament decided that I’d join in as an observer.

It was in early November 2019 (Earth Common Era) that Alti, Longti, and I traveled to Earth for the first time. It was Alti who picked China as the destination. He saw the possibility of a third Earthly World War as the United States at that point had a leader whom he knew would accuse China of a lab leak if the virus originated here. We came here to this cave; I kept watch outside while Alti and Longti went in and infested hundreds of hibernating bats with the virus. While hunting hibernating bats is illegal around here, we knew that locals were doing it and that they’d sell their game as food on the black markets of downtown Wuhan.

If you Earthers have watched a lot of TV during your pandemic, so have we. From the spy-station, we’d watch your news every day to see how you were handling things. We’ve learned a lot about the virus ourselves. Since we stopped the spread on our planet so fast, we never got to learn how the original strand would mutate into new variants. Alti and I have fought a lot at the station. While I meant it had gone too far and suggested we reached out and offered you our vaccine, he meant your handling of the virus proved his camp right. Not even when it came to distributing vaccines during a planet-wide pandemic did you abandon your failed system of capitalism and put cooperation before competition. You deserved to be wiped out!

A week ago, a spaceship brought us a filmed speech from the President of our Planet Parliament. We were ordered to end the operation; however, Alti, Longti, and I were given full autonomy when it came to deciding how. We got weighed votes corresponding to the result of the referendum, meaning an agreement between any two of us would settle it. Fearing that Alti was about to manipulate Longti (and realizing it was a bad moment to seek unification with Earthers anyway), I gave Longti my support. We’d go back to Earth to clean things up, then we’d go home. The virus would most likely fizzle out by mutating into decreasingly virulent variants until it was gone.

That was the plan. Or was it?

**********

Longti lights the way with his flashlight. Alti carries the sleeping girl over his shoulder. I walk behind them.

At the back of the cave, where a streak of daylight channels through an opening in the ceiling, they stop. Alti puts the girl down on the sandy ground.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“We’re going the Alti-way!”

“That’s against the rules,” I say. “I’ve given Longti my support—together we represent 60 percent of our population against your 40.”

“Confession—Longti gave me his support before we left the spy-station. Together we represent 80 percent.”

I look at Longti, who looks away. “Why did you lie to me, saying we’d go back here to do some clean-up?”

“We didn’t want to upset you,” Alti says. “And we are going to do some clean-up… we’ll kill all humans on Earth!”

“WE CAN’T DO IT! IT’S WRONG!”

“You must respect our democracy!”

“Democracy is invalid when those you’re killing don’t get to vote. And how are you gonna kill them?”

Alti holds up a syringe, filled with a pink liquid. “Do you know what this is, boy?”

Oh, no—it’s the Sarsulavirus! It’s a Coronalike virus, except it’s much more contagious and virulent. When injected into a warm-blooded creature, it’ll reach the creature’s body temperature and gasify. Then it’ll infest the lungs. Humans won’t have symptoms until weeks after they’re infected, making it impossible to stop the spread. The virus has never been loose on our planet—it was synthesized based on the original Corona strand. It’s so complex it even took us a decade to develop a vaccine. We’ve all had that vaccine, of course. Just in case the virus should leak from the laboratory.

Longti looks at Alti. “But there are no bats here… should we find another cave?”

Alti shakes his head. “Bats were actually a bad idea this time. If we’d found some, they’d be too deep into hibernation now; their body temperature would be too low. Moreover, people are probably leery to eat them now.” He smiles. “Luckily, we’ve got the girl!”

I stare at him in disbelief. “Are you going to inject the virus into a human?”

“She’s the perfect Patient Zero! She’s a party girl; tonight, she’ll be celebrating Chinese New Year with her friends. What a party that’ll be!”

“Do you really think she’ll be partying after this?”

“Doesn’t matter! Everyone she sees during the next few weeks will contract the virus. Soon, the whole Hubei Province will have it. Before the summer, the whole of China. Within a year, the whole Earth. The strongest half-percent might survive. We’ll return here, take them as slaves, and rule two planets.”

He crouches over the girl to give her the shot. I close my eyes.

BANG!

When I look, Alti lies on the ground, next to the girl. While a stream of blood leaves a hole in the back of his head, smoke leaves the barrel of Longti’s gun.

“I agree that killing them all would be an unnecessarily brutal approach,” Longti says. “We’re bringing the girl with us, but before she wakes up, I’m gonna fuck her. If she gets pregnant, the compatibility of our races is proven. I’ll be a legend!” He crouches down. “Come on, Lati! Help me carry her to the ship!”

BANG!

**********

I don’t know how to fly a spaceship, and if I knew, I wouldn’t expect a pleasant reception when I got home. Having buried my colleagues in a crevice, I’m still in the cave. The girl said I look American, so when she wakes up, I’ll tell her we were special soldiers from the United States, sent here to uncover the truth about the Coronavirus. I hope she’ll forgive me my colleagues, and that she’ll let me join her new year party. I need a new friend. Despite that she’ll no longer be a prisoner in a cave, I can wish that she’ll never grasp what she really saw.