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06 January 2059

Post-Encounter Deposition

Brother Michael Jablonski

Prior, St. Joseph of Cupertion’s

Monastery, Luna


What I’m going to tell you isn’t true. We met the Beings, yes, all one hundred of us, and convened wordlessly in a state of psychedelic intoxication—the only way they seem to be able to reach us. That much is true and agreed-upon fact. The rest? Lies.

I could say, for example, that the Beings and I conversed in English, with occasional lapses into my childhood Quebecois French, for certain terms best expressed that way. I could say that both I and the Beings were calm—stately, even—as befit humankind’s first encounter with an alien species, and that we took turns asking and answering all the important questions you’d expect at such a time.

Absolutely none of that would be true.

I could say the experience was disorienting, in the sense of there being no orientations whatsoever—no up, no down, nor a spacetime per se in which they might occur, nor (at times) even a coherent “me” there to inhabit them. I could say the experience was frightening, in the sense that I was bombarded with incoherent stimuli from which I would have liked to escape, but could not. I could tell you the experience was not an “experience” at all, in the sense of something that actually happened. Memories are episodic, with beginnings and middles and ends, with durations and narrative threads. I could tell you my experience of the Beings was not like that at all.

And again I would be lying, although this perhaps gets closer to the truth.

I could tell you the Beings were round, meter-high gremlins covered in kaleidoscopic patterns of visual static, against a backdrop of the same visual static. There were thousands of them, smothering their bodies against me, positively bursting with a bright, raucous joy. I could say they rifled through the events of my life as through a pack of cards, without asking, and that they bade me pull cards from their own packs. Or perhaps they compelled me to it, although the cards were simply made of the same flickering colors as everything else.

Or perhaps like this: On a moonless night, I stood on the deck of a storm-tossed ship, reading messages that flashed briefly on the screen of a rollup phone, while the rain hammered bathtubs down upon me. The messages perhaps made perfect sense, but I could only catch them in glimpses, while I grabbed at railings and wiped the water—both salt and fresh—from my eyes, and gasped for breath, and loudly begged for a hatch to open that might admit me to warmer, brighter spaces belowdecks.

And each of these details would be an utter fabrication. Psychedelic experiences are difficult to verbalize precisely because they touch the preverbal and averbal portions of ourselves, too deep to fathom and too raw to describe. It might be more accurate to say I was the ocean, or the storm, and so were they. But that wouldn’t make sense to you, ah?

I must of course say something, so perhaps let’s start with more agreed-upon facts:

The starship in which we traveled was called Intercession, although the mission itself is called Summit—a triple entendre. It means first an apex—the highest point one can climb on a particular hill. Having left the Sun’s gravitational influence altogether, Intercession was, for most of its journey, indisputably the highest point any human had ever climbed to. Second, a meeting—especially an organized diplomatic one. Since the Beings had issued a direct invitation, such a term surely applies. Third, a verb: to meet or to climb. A summit is both a thing achieved and the act of achieving it. As a verb, “summit” also implies a measure of aspiration. One hopes to summit, and summit well, so perhaps that’s another layer of meaning in the name. I have not questioned the trillionaire Igbal Renz about his choice.

The Encounter happened 1,700 Astronomical Units away from the Sun—0.05 light-years, or 1.2 percent of the way to Proxima Centauri, or 1,700 times the distance between the Earth and Sun. It happened in an inflatable polymer torus extended from the circumference of the ship for that purpose. The Encounter Bubble is similar, I’m told, to the spherical gymnasium at the Marriott Stars in Low Earth Orbit, although I’ve not the pleasure of any firsthand knowledge thereof. “The dark between the stars,” the Beings had called their proposed meeting place, and so we went out and met them there.

These corroborated bullet points are objective and not in dispute, and for at least this reason I’m obliged (by you: the corporation to whom I’m under contract, by the Church to which I owe my allegiance, by the God who created me, and by my own vanity) to describe, as best I can, what the Beings told me, and ninety-nine other human beings, on that November morning in the Oort cloud.

It should by now be well established that the account is a lie, but I shall hope it true in the sense that a song is true, if it communicates something to someone about the experience of being alive.


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