More Aliens

        I had another alien dream, this time the aliens were communicating by sending chemical signals from a dozen orifices in their “faces” to one another, essentially smell talk. It was very difficult for people to understand them, and though they had the ability to hear, hearing wasn’t connected to their language centers, as smell isn’t to ours. Some of them were able to learn our language, and some of us were able to learn theirs.

        You had to have a really good nose to understand their language. I had a really good nose, but limited ability to learn new languages.

        The aliens had four legs and two arms each covered with white fur and ending in four very sharp claws. They also had some mastery over DNA as they were altering people into copies of themselves. I witnessed one such conversion, it was not pretty and the person was so disturbed by the changes that they were unable to communicate, which was the whole reason for the DNA makeover in the first place.

        I found myself meeting with several brown and white aliens in an attempt to communicate with them. Writing was something that I thought might work, so we began with that, and sketching. Their text looked like Sanskrit almost. The alien woman I was working with was about as good an artist as I was which is to say, not much. We started to make some progress. The goal was to negotiate our way to a peace of some sort, as the aliens were not really trying to invade and take over, they just needed to stop and take on supplies.

        It turns out they had materials to trade with, not to mention the advances they could offer us on technology. We’d kind of gotten off on the wrong foot by attacking them first. They’d landed in the middle of North Africa, initially, as the climate there was closest to home. (Seems they came from a  large desert of a world, one with much less biodiversity than our world.) I found myself wondering how they had been able to grow so large. She explained that diversity didn’t mean paucity, and they were, in fact, the largest animal species on their homeworld.

        They had a true insect-like hive structure, where the breeding class was completely separate from the working classes, even though, if she were separated from the hive long enough, she would be able to breed as well. She seemed to be fascinated by the fact that we were millions of little hives (families) and still managed to keep everything working.

        When the alien started getting romantic, I started to worry, remembering how awful the DNA transfer was.

Ad astra per technica,

FF