Chapter 11: Evolution

The next afternoon, Thursday, they were all back in the gloomy, secret little stone house with the aliens, and this time Grace’s mum was there too along with their erstwhile quarry Claude Simon. Grace knew the story, the basics anyway, and was waiting to see what Mia made of it and to hear it from the aliens themselves.

Dr Simon had smiled at them, with his longish hair and little beard, and told them to call him ‘Claude’. He was obviously a kind person. He’d said it was rather clever how they’d known he’d taken this turning without even being there for him to spot. He spoke slowly with a delicious French accent, saying ‘ze’ instead of ‘the’ all the time. Grace had liked him immediately, and had been glad to come in his car with Mo and Paul, while Mia went with her mum for a wild ride with the roof down.

Now Mia’s long hair was wild too, as she sat on the other sofa with Mo and Paul. The three looked relaxed about touching knees and shoulders, and Mo was even smiling; Paul too. Mia winked at her! What did that mean?

“Alright, we’re going to explain everything,” said her mum, sitting in the middle between her and Claude, “so that you understand why you cannot tell anybody. Anybody at all.” She looked at Rose.

“We’ve studied Wikipedia for a long time,” Rose began, in her almost-natural American voice that was really from Claude’s translator. “Do you know about Easter Island?” She was ensconced in the plump old armchair, with Cyan and Emerald each perched on a huge padded arm.

“It’s an island in the Pacific,” Grace remembered. “They cut down all the trees and died out?”

“That’s right,” Rose nodded. “Well, almost died out. They cut down all the palm trees to make rollers to move huge religious stone statues. So the soil blew away, they lost their agriculture and they had no trees to make canoes for fishing either. Eventually they turned to cannibalism.

“Then Europeans found the survivors and introduced rats and disease, and slavers found them too. It’s a classic tale of your species’ collective stupidity with superstition, as well as how you form tribes that compete brutally with each other. It was a beautiful island and people ruined it.

“Well our species is no different.” She paused, looking round at the visitors, “Our planet’s ecosystem is pretty much the same: each species evolves by reproducing and dying, and we have two genders, one more aggressive and one more nurturing, like you. It’s an effective combination, of course, that’ll be why our two ecosystems converged.”

“Can I ask,” Mia was trying to understand something, “how old you are? You look the same age as us, but you sound so much older...”

“Yes, well,” Cyan answered hesitatingly, “that’s part of the problem. Mostly females have to serve the males, because we’re smaller, but there are exceptions, because that’s so inefficient of course using only half the talent in the population. We three worked in genetic engineering and, well, we found out how to switch off ageing.”

“Oh?” Paul gasped.

“Ageing is part of evolution,” Emerald explained earnestly. “If you think of it - our bodies, yours and ours, make bodily cells from food - bones, organs, every kind of cell tissue. It’s just a chemical process and we can do that indefinitely, in principle. But obviously we have to die in order for evolution to work: for each generation to be new, and a selection of the more successful genes. So dying is something we evolved.”

“Wow, so,” Paul sat forward, “it’s like a switch?”

“A genetic switch?” said Mo.

“And you turned it off,” finished Mia, with an admiring grin.

Grace thought those three were acting like a bit of a trio now. It was making her a little jealous.

“Exactly,” confirmed Emerald. “We started experimenting on ourselves. We got our skin cells to begin renewing themselves, but making perfect cells from the original DNA data, instead of imperfect copies which is what normally happens. And so our skin looks like children’s skin now, though we’re about 240 of your years old, in awake time.”

“You must be proud of it...” Mia smiled at their semi-clad bodies with one breast and one leg completely exposed...

“Oh, we can lend you some of my clothes if you like, can’t we Mum?” Grace had to offer. Though they seemed quite relaxed about showing all that skin.

“Yes of course we can,” Zara smiled. “It might be culturally sensitive, is all.”

“Oh,” Grace realised, “sorry! Yes of course, you all look lovely as you are!” She smiled at the cute, colourful aliens and they smiled back. Well the tits were pert and the legs were nicely shaped as well, any girl would be proud of them.

“The males make you dress like that?” asked Mo. He’d been able not to stare, after last night!

“Yes there are many parallels,” agreed Rose, “because we, I mean both our planets, both share the functions of evolution. Like using superstition - to be selfish, basically. The bigger, more aggressive gender has more power, to help ensure they can breed. We split into groups, like you. Small groups and larger ones - societies. There are conflicts, so in this way even a dominant species continues to evolve, by competing with themselves, in groups. Some groups developed cohesive, cooperative societies. They were successful.

“But they were vulnerable to attack from the more aggressive groups that had a more selfish culture. The selfish groups are jealous, of course, because they have more crime and corruption, and half the people are restricted, so they achieve less together. They’re poorer.”

“The instinct is to dominate other species and other groups,” Emerald shrugged her little shoulders, “That is the system, how it works. Diversify and select. That is evolution. But now...”

“The aggressive groups have nearly destroyed the planet,” Cyan lamented. “Superstition means the system is easily corrupted, naturally, because everyone is just told what to do without being able to argue with evidence. The most selfish ones rise to the top in this way and then the uncaring culture spreads down from them. They kill other species for fun, they don’t care about their habitat, and they breed to gain a numerical advantage, so they can outnumber other groups.”

“We have reached an Easter Island situation,” sighed Rose. “As the resources run out, it places a higher survival value on aggression again. It’s what you would call a death spiral, that feeds on itself.”

“So you left?” asked Grace. “What about being immortal?”

“Well we’re not really immortal. We can be killed by accidents or disease. It’s just that we don’t age. And that was why we had to leave.”

“Because the superstitions depended on myths about an afterlife,” explained Emerald. “So not actually having an afterlife would be a huge problem for them. And they’d all been saying their gods basically managed life and death, and so for us to show we could manage it was a big blow too.”

“So when people started to notice our skin, we decided we’d better get out,” Cyan continued. “Once our computers were checked we’d be got rid of, we were pretty sure. They weren’t going to give up what you call Heaven and Hell just for us. And the planet is finished anyway, it’s wrecked. So we stole a ship - a spaceship - and set a course to follow the beam of your Wikipedia transmission.”