Most of us left when you started exploding nukes. Only a handful of historians and specialists remained, and I was one of them. Explaining the horror we felt is probably beyond my abilities in your language. Suffice it to say that we have been around, on your world, for at least half a millennium of your time, but this was beyond all the horrors we had seen before. Worse than the sack of Beijing, worse than Borodino, worse than Verdun, even worse than Stalingrad. Wanton destruction of a defenceless “enemy”.

Still my job was, my job is, to bear witness, to observe, document and ensure that all the evidence is collected, so that one day, perhaps soon, a decision can be made; should we let you continue killing each other, or should we put an end to it, for the sake of the rest of us? It has happened before, but, of course, you have no knowledge of it, as this was well before you, and far away…

That year I was researching what you call “modern history” in a small town, in the middle of what has been, through your ages, a battlefield. Humans have been butchering each other on that plain since the Stone Age. Savage battles took place there a mere few years before, when you started using the nascent power of your new industries to forge weapons. Already we were appalled, silent witnesses to inept massacres. But what you later called the First World War – although it was more of a sinister civil war in our view – was merely a harbinger of worse to come.

So it was that, one evening, I was musing around the town, looking at buildings, taking scans of artefacts buried in the ground, and listening to the rich electromagnetic and psychic mix that always arises from human settlements. I came across a little lane, and immediately I could hear the familiar sad tune – a dying human being, in the thralls of a violent end. How often have we been there, listening to the cacophony of death? I know you would not understand: our perceptions are shaped by the quality of our sensors, and in that domain there is simply no comparison between us. You still have differentiated limited senses that, at this stage in your evolution, allow you to ignore most of what goes on around you. It’s fortunate since your brains are not yet able to engineer the filters necessary for clarity and processing.

I easily located the soon to be dead being, a young woman lying in a pool of her own blood, in an unlit corner of the lane. The mix of pain, longing, and desperate fear she emitted surprised me, even as a veteran of many such observations. Her forearms had been cut deep, and she had already lost a lot of blood. Some beast had strangled her and she was hardly breathing when I arrived. Even I could not have saved her from death. I knew that, within perhaps a few seconds, she would die, and all those memories, thoughts, and beliefs would disappear. I made a snap decision to save that precious load, and scanned her mind, an operation that took longer than I thought. I had to sustain her a little, to ensure that I’d captured everything.

She had beautiful green eyes: human beings are sometimes stunningly attractive. Whether she realised I was there, I am not sure, but suddenly her body was quieter, and before her heartbeat disappeared, I took a sample of her genetic and endocrine material. Other humans were around nearby and I had to leave. As a rule we avoid unnecessary contact.

We rarely intervene: we are, as you would say, mere scientists. Doing good, as you understand it, is a concept we don’t fully comprehend. Not in your context, even now. How can the most ferocious and pitiless species in the known universe have, at the same time, that travesty of “morality?” 

In any case we cannot fully recreate a human being, not perfectly. We can restore her mind, recreate the body, but there is always something missing. As if, at the time of death, something had escaped, irretrievably.

Her name is Melissa, she was about twenty human years old when she was murdered. We get on well. She has a fatal longing for that boy she knew, and step by step, she’s coerced me into finding him. I am not sure it is a good idea. But she was so excited when we did. I helped her with the technology. So much had changed by the time she reached again the age at her death. Surprisingly, not many of you have yet realised the power of some of your own creations. For example, the fact you have developed simulators, evidently still quite crude, that mimic real life. In my experience this is just the beginning. As a matter of fact, as so often happens in your short history, it starts with “games”.

Poor girl: I am fond of her. Her fragility, even now, amazes, when she is, by human standards anyway, pretty close to being immortal. I know that she’s trying to contact him, to see him, and it worries me a little. I am, after all, responsible for bringing her back from the dead.

Picture source: britannica.com

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