Alien Archeologist

            I dreamed I was a pterodactyl like archeologist. I had overseen the uncovering of a baseball park. (Though in the dream I was only dimly aware of what it was.) I had gathered a group of humans (Cloned from viable materials found in earlier excavations and now carefully nurtured and restored.) We'd discovered they were very curious as to their own racial history so we'd restored this ballpark from some educated guesses and images that were still available on various media. We enlisted the aide of the humans to try to figure out the rules of the game. We had found many such amphitheaters around the world, but mostly on some small islands and the center of one of the continental masses.

            We knew vaguely what the original language for things was and how things sounded. We had taught some of the terminology to the humans and were hoping by recreating what we knew we would be able to see what information was missing. It was strange, as the alien, I had no real idea what baseball was about, but as myself, in the back part of the alien mind, I could tell I was missing important information. It was like I could almost access what I knew as a human, as though part of my soul knew and loved baseball, but I couldn't quite access it.

            I also got to carry one of the human babies in my mouth to pass it from one parent to the other. It needed changing so I joked with them that I could not eat such a stinky baby. Everyone around laughed. I realized the humans were speaking a version of our language, highly accented, as their vocal cords were higher pitched than most of my race. (This caused many of my colleagues to mistakenly think of them as chicks. They were every bit as intelligent as us, and sometimes frighteningly more clever.)     The game progressed and we went over some of the writings we'd found and some of the images to fine tune what we were doing. I finally declared that although the teams were larger, it looked "right" to have nine people on the field. (My current self rejoiced at getting through to my dream self.) There were 11 for that other game, football, which with two goal nets and a single ball was fairly easy to figure out. This baseball game thing didn't seem to have any timed periods and I was uncertain that there could always be three outs. It turned out in practice that that wasn't an issue between teams that were fairly evenly matched.

            It was very interesting to see us through the eyes a very different race.

 

Ad astra per technica,

FF