I've got a list of names | Glowfic Constellation

Afen is disappointed in the universe. He bounds back and forth across his room explaining why to his wife, his infant granddaughter, the end table, and a reporter flabbergasted by her good luck and cringing silently against the wall in the hopes he won't remember she's there.

"There is no reason to suppose that a species evolving independently of Amentans, with their own evolutionary history and living mammalian species likely related to theirs, would end up looking like us. None. Every explanation every scientist has ventured to the press has been unimaginative and unconvincing retroactive refitting of bad models to baffling data. Aliens shouldn't look like us but with different hair colors. Aliens that are not made out of carbon at all would be unsurprising; aliens with only as much physiological dissimilarity as exists between us and animal species on our planet would be mildly surprising; aliens with opposable thumbs would be truly remarkable. This is not remarkable and biologically enlightening; this is just inconsistent with everything we understand about the universe. It doesn't teach us new things about evolution; it should make us rethink evolution. - don't quote that part, they'll take it out of context."

Reporter nods rapidly.

"All of that said, I've picked up three of the languages and I'm working on building a good machine translator, it's a challenge with as little as they've produced in the way of electronic records. I'm absolutely going there to meet them as soon as the politicians figure out what to do with themselves."

"Do you have any predictions about that?"

"About politics? Why would I have predictions about politics? They deliberately obscure relevant information, for one thing, and for another it's deathly boring."

"- I mean, sir, surely you hear from your son about -"

"I have seven children and some of them are very dense indeed but not quite dense enough to try to interest me in politics."

"I was referring to -"

"I know who you were referring to. If you want a statement from Aitim go bother Aitim."

"Thank you for your time."

"I did not alter my activities in response to your presence and therefore you can't yet be said to have wasted any of my time though you should go before you do."

...out skitters the reporter.

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He squints at her. "Uh.

What do your parents do?"

thesignalandthenoise

"...why do you ask?"

"I am trying to verify a hypothesis that you're going to consider ridiculous and considerably less ridiculous once you have some evidence of it. I have like six questions. I wrote down what I think the answers will be. I can email you my guesses, if you want."

thesignalandthenoise

"It wouldn't be that hard to look me up if you wanted to know what my parents do."

"I don't think there's a national database of 'do you ever drink' and 'what would you do if you were orange' and so on, though."

thesignalandthenoise

"...not as far as I know. Why do you need this?"

Sigh. "This is absurd enough I don't really believe it and I have access to a lot more evidence than I can really offer you."

thesignalandthenoise

"I'm going to go check on the inertial dampeners. It was nice to meet you." She edges back onto the bridge.

"Father's a cop, mother teaches young kids, no to the drinking, medical researcher if you were orange?"

thesignalandthenoise

"You read the footnotes, congratulations."

"The footnotes? Of what? - look, I could just make Aitim do this but the only respect in which that improves anything is that you'll probably give him ten minutes of attention no matter how stupid he sounds if only because it's worrying that the ruler of the planet might be insane."

thesignalandthenoise

"...the footnotes on my blog. I would be more than happy to talk to Aitim Neli if he would find that a good use of ten minutes."

"Fine."

He leaves.

thesignalandthenoise

...she goes and checks the inertial dampeners.

He looks up her blog.

thesignalandthenoise

The ship doesn't have full inflight subspace internet but it does have a dump of a major wiki. Pelape Milath operated a blog and podcast about statistics, mostly sports, currently suspended as part of an out of caste income investigation and some accusations of plagiarism by a yellow who maintained the website.

Okay. "But seriously, fuck you," he says to the ceiling, and once he has read everything about Pelape Milath available on the ship he mostly gets back to work.

When they've dropped out of warp and are approaching he emails Aitim.

Aitim's secretary emails Pelape Milath to inform her she's invited to a meeting at 7:50 local time and should arrive twenty minutes in advance as there's security.

thesignalandthenoise