Chapter 1 - The Story of First Contact

Deja que yo te busque y si te encuentro
Y si te encuentro vuelve otra vez

The young historian leaned back into the wicker chair on the balcony of a quaint but large home in the small tropical coastal town as naked people strolled by in the street below and a shuttle descended in the distance. From the look of him I knew he was still a student. I was his thesis. He was just a little older than my granddaughter, who’s nude photo he had been admiring before we’d sat down. He in his wicker chair and me on my granite one. She was away at university, or I would have introduced them.

He waved a strand of blue hair out of his eyes as he glanced over to me, a nude old woman relaxing in a granite chair, though I still looked not a day over twenty, and asked; “Tell me your story. We’ve collected so many official accounts, but I was surprised to find that in all the archives and records, no one has ever taken the story of First Contact from you, despite your role in everything.”

And so I began to recount the tale, with a little AI help where my memory was rough; but we do as we can.

I remember the day my parents went away. We had a funeral for them out in the park, and then Teacher walked me home and put me to bed. It was a strange day, none of my friends were there. Just Teacher.

The next time I woke up, I was a year older, and I came to realize that my parents had actually passed away millions of years ago, long before I had been born. It was time for me to begin learning the truth, and my purpose.

Slowly I learned history, math, biology, poetry, and so many other subjects. I discovered I loved to paint and watching romantic movies that in time I learned had been made eons ago before the world had died.

When I was old enough, I was told we were the last of humanity, floating through space on a giant colony ship towards a star people believed might have a planet that could support life. A fleet of seed ships had been sent in different directions, all there had been time for. The odds were most of them would find nothing but lifeless solar systems, but if even one made it to a new world, humanity would endure.

In the end, as those with power played games for wealth and status, the world burned in a climate disaster. When we were sent away, the very atmosphere itself was in the process of burning away as the Sun itself started to die.

We were sent as frozen embryos; products of the last and desperate, randomly mixed with others for as much genetic diversity as possible. Half morbid eugenics, half lottery. The Arks of the wealthy and powerful having left long before ours. By the time I was born, Earth had long since become just another cold dead rock in the vast emptiness of space.

But also by that time; we had already arrived. It was a star not unlike our dear departed Sol. with a planet almost the same size, full of water and lush green forests. Full of life.

Or at least it had been. In the millions of years since we had left, flying as close to light speed as we could, life on this new planet had evolved. Intelligent life had thrived, built a vast civilization full of many cultures, much history. Love and conflict together had shaped the people we would now have to appeal to. But they were also dangerously down the path to the same crisis we had been too slow to conquer.

There was no other choice. The ark ship had no ability to go any further. Teacher; our great AI nanny, was just a complex algorithm with a mission to fulfill. Not a true mind of her own, she only had two choices to pick between.

Sleep, and wait for the aliens below to burn out their candle, hoping the planet was still habitable after their extinction, or contact, pray for peace, and teach them how to overcome the disaster.

That I had finally been born was testament to the choice for contact. At least limited. The Ark was hidden behind a distant gas giant at the far end of the system, and a small number of us had been birthed. A mere hundred thousand. An even smaller number were sent to make Contact in waves. If successful we would be able to form families and await our brothers and sisters in the next generation. If not, most of us were to be held back, to produce new embryos before going to sleep, never to wake again.

So with that heavy burden, that the lives of so many people were on my shoulders, I and four of my sisters were put in a small ship as the First Contact, sent to land in an urban center with a lot of exposure. The plan was to ensure the whole world below us knew we were there, and gauge the reaction as we plead for refuge. I felt wholly unready and incompetent for the task.

At this point I was still in the dream, the reality simulation that had been my whole life up till now. I had just hit the age for an adult woman back on Earth. This new world passed it’s star much slower, so by their standards I would have only two thirds as many years to me, twenty of their cycles.

Teacher explained that many of our sensors had been lost in the long dark of space, that we did not know what kind of alien lived on the planet below. We could sense the chemistry of the planet, and tell that just like us, they lit up their night sky with electric lights, but we had been unable to decode their broadcasts, and I had not even a camera to see outside.

I was scared out of my wits, but I was chosen. Humanity’s last hope rested on me. The AI had picked me to be the first one out the door, simply because it felt my love of romance might make me less aggressive. I was not even a scientist, diplomat, or soldier. Just an artist by temperament alone. Not the smartest way to pick a leader I guess, but no one had any experience in this. Who was I to say?

We were all seated in a plain white room, looking at each other with a mix of fear and excitement.

“What do you think’s out there?” A girl to my left asked.

“I just hope their friendly,” I offered. “I ... I want to keep living.”

“What if they have tentacles and want to probe us?” Another girl let out with a grin.

“Ew gross, you watch too much porn,” the one next to her stated as she leaned away.

I realized I didn’t know their names. Then I realized I didn’t know my own name. I turned and looked at Teacher, asking “What’s my name?”

“That’s funny, I don’t know my name either,” the last girl, sitting on my right, blurted out.

“Time for that later dear, we’re almost through the atmosphere,” Teacher said.

“It doesn’t feel like we’re in planetfall,” the girl to my left said. “I studied this, shouldn’t we be shaking and isn’t it supposed to get hot?”

“You are dear, or at least your real bodies are. It might hurt at first when you wake from the Dream, but everyone’s doing well...”

Suddenly the girl across from me that had been grossed out by porn vanished. “Correction...” Teacher calmly noted.

“What’s happening?!” I demanded.

“Her pod is ... damaged,” Teacher stated in a neutral tone, then paused. “She’ll be OK, but I will wake her after the rest of you.”

Suddenly I was terrified. Teacher had run this as a simulation billions of times over millions of years, purposefully failing planetfalls over and over so that she had plans for every inconvenience. We trusted her, but I also knew this was the first time it had been done for real since before the Earth died. Even if the Ark had passed by some alien world on the way here, it just didn’t have the resources for test runs.

Everything faded out, and then a moment later there was a slight hissing sound and I felt cool air as my eyes began to open. My face was wet with tears, my body had reacted to my fear as we’d descended. A voice, not unlike but not identical to Teacher spoke from all around me, “Welcome to your real flesh and blood body, please exit the pod slowly, and be careful to get your balance. Local gravity is identical to Earth, so will match the simulation you were raised with.”

I stumbled forward, using a hand rail on the side of the pod to keep myself steady. I was naked, which was expected. I looked around us. We were in a large round room with displays all around showing either static or ship diagnostics. In the center a rounded hip high counter sat, with projectors above it in a ring broadcasting a hologram of teacher onto the counter top. Our pods were on one side of the room in a semi circle, designed as angled thigh high beds we could easily lie down in. A number of consoles and displays attached to and ringing around each of them. On the opposite side of the room was a sliding double doorway we knew to be the exit. It was designed to automatically open, with an emergency manual release if needed. If that door was the ‘12 O’clock’ then we would be at ‘6’ and at ‘9 there was a passage to the side rooms for body waste and hygiene, and at ‘3’ I was expecting to see clothing and personal kit lockers, however the area was empty.

“Where is the clothing locker?” I asked.

“Our stores of fibers and other materials for making clothing were lost in an asteroid strike... 1,327,243 cycles ago” Teacher calmly declared, as if this was not an important fact. “Your personal survey equipment was lost in the same impact, so you will have to resort to more primitive examination methods as per training.” She meant we would just have to put our fingers in the mud and see what it felt like.

“Don’t we have a whole botany pod with plants and trees to grow materials from? Don’t we have bots that can make clothes, and even oils to make plastics?” a girl I recognized as the ‘girl who had been to my left’ asked.

“The Asteroid strike destroyed a lot of ship systems. We have been limping along, for some time,” Teacher flatly stated. “We have seed vaults, DNA records, and embryos of some fauna; but these would take decades to deploy up to capacity and could be detrimental to their local counter parts.”

“So...” tentacle Porn-girl offered. We really needed names.

“I have been improvising to the edges of my programmed capacity. However as you were taught; this is our only chance. We don’t have supplies to sustain population in space. If you five should fail, I will have to...”

“We will all have funerals, and you will shut down, praying the planet can be occupied with the next batch to be born once it’s original inhabitants burn themselves out,” I said.

“Prayer is outside my programmed capacity. As noted,” Teacher interjected. “You can’t return to the Dream in full, I can let you see it, but the disconnect was one way. You would just be ... ghosts ... at your funerals. Unable to say goodbye.”

Porn-girl sobbed, trying to look brave I guessed, holding back a desire to cry. She wasn’t alone, my emotions were stronger than I’d ever felt before, and I was having trouble containing them.

“So um ... we’re gonna stroll out there naked like this, into a sea of whatever people we’ve set down in front of?” Left-sitting girl said.

“Yeah, we did land in the middle of an urban center right?” Right-sitting girl said.

“Well they’re aliens, it’s not like they’ll look anything at all like us,” I said. “That’s statistically impossible.”

“Yeah,” Porn-girl said. “They probably won’t even be anything fun like a tentacle porn monster.”

“Seriously one track mind there girl,” Left-sitting girl said.

“I’m feeling so horny right now too,” Porn-girl said. “Like, it’s really weird. I’ve never felt this much before.”

“Your emotions have been somewhat tempered in the Dream,” Teacher said. “You will find short term emotions to be quite intense. I’m sorry I didn’t prepare you for that, my instructions prevented it.”

“That’s weird, why would our parents do that?” Right-sitter glanced at Porn-girl, who was starting to visibly dampen between her legs.

Porn-girl clamped her legs shut. “This is so embarrassing, at least the aliens won’t know what it means. I mean, they’ll probably have three heads, shells, and radar instead of eyes or something.”

“I think they wanted us to um ... fuck like...” Left-sitter started.

“Repopulate as fast as possible,” I interrupted. “Yeah, and I guess that means leaving us a little hyper emotional. Be careful around the Aliens, we don’t want to set them off.”

“Well how am I going to ... repopulate ... if Teacher won’t send any men down with us. I’m ready to repopulate all over three guys right now,” Porn-girl said, sliding a hand between her legs.

I glanced over at the last pod, where I guessed ‘grossed out’ girl was. The glass was cracked and there was blood on the other side of it. “She going to be OK?” I asked. Something seemed wrong about that crack, but I put the thought aside for later.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Teacher’s voice said. “ten percent blood loss from a glass shard, but I’ve already sealed the wound. Look for some water once you get out there, she’ll be a little drained.”

We had been instructed before leaving the Dream that the ship had food to last about 50 of the local days, after which we would need to figure something out with the local aliens.

The side rooms for handling bodily waste and the other for sponge baths would be useful in case a local water supply was not clean enough. Left-sitter went and inspected the food supplies, while I inspected the toilet and bathing areas.

“Our food looks good,” Left-sitter said, “but we’ll need a native source soon. This stuff looks like it wasn’t made with flavor in mind. I really hope the aliens have good cuisine that we can digest.”

“Why did the Dream spend thirty cycles giving me wonderful home cooked meals and them dump me out to bland nutrition packs?” Porn-girl said with a shrug.

“Learning Earth culture is vital to creating a comfortable new civilization,” Teacher noted.

“The toilet looks to be working, and the bathing area looks like it will last us a half-cycle,” I said.

“How long is that by the local star?” Porn-girl asked.

“The planet goes around the local star once every two-thirds of a cycle,” Teacher’s voice noted. “For reference, each of you has spent thirty cycles in the Dream, while your bodies grew to adulthood.”

“So we’re twenty local cycles in age,” Porn-girl declared.

“Why don’t we have any weapons?” Right-sitting girl asked, looking around.

“You need to make peaceful contact,” Teacher’s voice said.

“We’re sacrificial diplomacy,” I said.

“So...” Right-sitting continued.

“We make peace, or we fail and get abandoned,” Porn-girl said.

“Exactly,” Teacher’s voice said. “I’m glad we know the parameters. Now, if everyone is ready make your way down to the door, go either way when you exit. It wraps around to another door and that is the exit. Once you are all inside the green square, the door will open and a stairwell will descend if necessary. My external camera appears to have broken off during re-entry,” Teacher’s voice said.

“How is ... even ... like, come on...” Left-sitting girl rolled her eyes.

“My apologies,” Teacher’s voice offered. “I miscalculated the local fauna. A small flying animal of some kind collided with us. She displayed some footage of the final descent. The camera coming out now that the burn was done, it panned around showing clear blue skies, then down to a city below where it looked like mechanical objects were moving around. Small dots that ... weirdly ... almost seemed like they could be people, were stopping in place as we became obvious. Then there was a knock, the camera shook and filled with something gory and feathered, before turning to static.

“I will have recharged sufficient power to deploy surveillance drones in 5 local days, but as we are in an urban area it would be unwise to wait too long,” Teacher added. “If I recycle the biomass of the injured crew member and 2 others, I may be able to regain enough power sooner.”

“Lets ... not take that option,” I stated. Sure waiting might be sound, but not if the locals started trying to break their way in. Waiting too long would give them time to be more paranoid and have a hostile reception ready. And I was not going to let Teacher ‘recycle’ some of us.

“Is it just me or did that look like a bird, only the color was really strange,” Porn-girl said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Well if you’re gonna fly there’s only so many shapes you can take I guess. And how is it that we have technology to cross the void of space and yet can’t avoid a small local animal?”

“It does seem a little too convenient,” Right-sitter whispered to me.

“I don’t think I’m so horny now,” Porn-girl said. “That was seriously disturbing. Poor creature. We land from out of space and the first thing we do is kill some helpless little animal.” She was starting to cry. Our emotions must be on hyper drive if she could flip states so fast.

“Right, now or never girls,” Right-sitting girl stated. “Hope we’re still alive in an hour, if not, see you on the other side.” She marched to the door and went ... left.

Left sitting girl went right, of course. Because now I’m gonna really need names for us all. I got to the door and went left, wondering just why this pod was made in so silly a fashion. Before I left I glanced back at our still sleeping sister.

Soon enough we were all gathered in the green square. Nothing happened. “Um, Teacher?” I said.

“Don’t tell me,” Left-sitter said. “It triggers when five of us are here, and Teacher didn’t think to change the setting.”

Porn-girl stamped her feet. She’d cycled emotions again and had a scowl on her face as she rolled her eyes. I wondered why it was even more intense for her than the rest of us.

“I’m ... almost ... there...” a weak voice called from back behind as the last of our number came stumbling over. “Sorry, Teacher just woke me as you were leaving and told me to go out here. Is it, is it happening?”

I looked her over, she had a mark over her belly where the cut had been cauterized, and lacking anything to clean up with, there was drying blood around it pooling sideways to her back as she had been lying down when it happened. “You OK?” I asked, looking at her scrunched up tearful expression.

“I think so, but I’ll try to stay out of sight so I don’t scare the locals,” she said. Gross out girl was in fact, actually a bit gross with her injury.

“No, better idea. We need sympathy and fast. Stand in front of me and stagger a little when the door opens,” I said “Hopefully something out there will want to help you.”

“Or eat me,” she said. “Wounded prey, easy pickings.”

“Well at least then you’ll suffer the least of us,” Porn-girl offered by way of support.

“Um ... Teacher didn’t explain, but ... why are we all naked?” Gross-girl asked.

“Well,” I started, but she had stepped into the green square when she spoke, so I was interrupted as the door slid down and open.

I was very grateful that it went down and not up, or whatever was out there would have gotten a full look at my naked body first. I’d barely had a chance to see it myself. I could see that like all my sisters I was bare of any pubic hair, and we had a decent variety in breast size with me coming in right around the middle of the group. Left-sitter was the busty one, and ‘Porn-girl’ was the smallest but also perkiest.

We all had shoulder length hair except for Right-sitter, who seemed to have her hair spiking up in very frizzy curls. She was the darkest skinned of us too, and I was sort of a light medium tone while ‘Porn-girl’ was the lightest in tone. Left-sitter had a large round butt, and I was right after her in that department, but mine was ‘tighter’ in the curve. Otherwise, we all had a bit of tone to us as if our real bodies had been worked to match the exercise we’d been doing for years in The Dream.

In The Dream, I knew I at least had had a regular gymnastics and swimming routine. And when I’d been paired with other girls, none of whom were here today that I could remember, we’d played a game of bouncing a ball over a net.

It was at this moment, as the door came down, and I was realizing how naked I was, and as I laid eyes on the first alien that had been moving up the landing stairwell, that while I had been given lessons on them many times; I had never actually met a boy before.

Until now.

It was really strange and my first instinct was to cover my boobs with one hand and my crotch with the other. Standing there, right in front of me, was a boy. He almost looked human.

If it wasn’t for the fact that he, and every other alien out there, had skin ranging from pink to brown, and that his hair was a light brown rather than a normal color like my violet locks, and his eyes also. If not for that I’d have sworn he was human. Well, his ears were stunted with no points, and his pupils were strangely round. But yeah; otherwise he looked human.

But why was he sort of a tan color, instead of somewhere between green to blue? And why was the grass under where we landed green, rather than pink? Even the trees were green, the ones that should have been purple or magenta.

Looking at my first real male in my life and not a diagram from biology class, I suddenly realized I was feeling damp between my legs.

“What?” Left-sitter said. “It’s almost like we’re back on Earth, but the colors are all wrong.”

“Look, there’s only one moon,” Porn-girl said. “This is not Earth, it’s like some kind of...”

“Parallel evolution?” I said. “Teacher said that in all the vastness of space there’s a chance that two worlds might evolve so similar that things would look almost the same. But the odds of us landing on one are just too slim ... a statistical impossibility.”

Gross-girl played her part with a little stagger, but I’m not really sure she was acting. I was worried Teacher pulled her out early just to hope for a reaction.

And it worked.

“Sejiwokk! Hnat, fni tki desretrenin lel tcha kor?” An older female standing behind the boy said, and then moved forward and caught a slumping ‘Gross-girl’.

The boy just let his jaw drop, as his eyes were doing a rapid dance between our boobs and pussies. “Aza gah!” he said in a way that could only mean some version of ‘check out the naked girls.’

There were a bunch of people behind them, and I realized some in the back had uniforms and seemed to be holding weapons.

The woman supporting Gross-girl said “Hin debasi, hin debasi,” and poked the boy in the shoulder as she rolled her alien brown eyes.

The boy, dressed in pants, t-shirt, and a light open sweater quickly removed his sweater and handed it over to Left-sitter, who was closest to him. Several people in the crowd below started removing outer layers of clothes.

Left-sitter quickly wrapped the sweater around herself and crouched into it. Then she screamed, and fell over shaking. “Get it off her!” I yelled as I pulled at the sweater aided by Porn-girl.

We got it off and I noticed that as I was holding it my hand started to itch, a lot. “Get everyone back inside,” Right-sitter said.

I gestured to the two aliens with us, and made to start picking up Left-sitter. The boy got the idea and helped me. Another two aliens followed us in. One of them was a tall, muscular male in a uniform, with a hand on what I guessed was a sheathed weapon. The other was a second boy, helping the alien woman with Gross-girl.

They were all rapid fire talking to each other in their language and it seemed like the woman was trying to calm the armed male down. As we pulled back I noticed a second uniformed alien, this one a female, made herself a guard at the door, which did not close as we moved inside.

“Well, that was a smooth first contact,” I said.

“Put the alien garment on the table,” the voice of Teacher said as a flat small table sized platform slid out of a wall, causing the boy who’d given over the garment to jump in surprise. The armed male was staring at the pod that Gross-girl had been in, the one that had broken glass and blood on it. He looked to be smart enough to be figuring out the basics of our situation. As I turned away I noticed him glancing up to the opposite side of the room at a light fixture near the ceiling.

I put the sweater down and a transparent cover slid over it and sealed it inside, then the chamber it was in hummed, filled with gas and lights. “It appears you are highly allergic to whatever this is made of,” Teacher’s voice said. “I will keep looking at the data, but I have enough to be able to return it to them. I believe it’s a composite of artificial and plant fibers and ... animal hair from a non-predator species.”

“If we’re allergic to everything on this planet, we wont’ be able to survive,” Porn-girl said.

Gross-girl began sobbing, then crying. The alien woman hugged her. “We’re going to die aren’t we? After all of this, and we’ve only just gotten our real bodies, and we’re all going to die.”

“Humanity can’t end like this,” I said. I stepped forward. Gross-girl was OK being hugged by one of these aliens. I noticed the alien was carefully keeping a distance between Gross-girl and the alien’s clothing. She seemed to be the smart one, and had figured things out even without Teacher explaining it to her. The boy in front of me only had a t-shirt on, his arms were exposed.

I grabbed his hand and lifted it up. The armed male pulled out his weapon and pointed it at me, yelling something alien at me. The boy looked terrified, but a bulge in his pants also said he was very interested. The other boy took a step forward towards me. The female alien let one hand loose from Gross-girl and held it up with the palm pointing towards the large male and yelled a single short alien word. He froze and glanced between us.

So ... I grabbed the boy’s arm. He looked to be my age, as did the other boy. So they were young adults, roughly 30 cycles. A man really, not a boy. “Only one way to be sure,” I said, as I put his hand the one place I knew he’d have a lot of trouble wanting to remove it from; over one of my tits. I’m sure he would have preferred my crotch, but that was a bit much, and might have spooked him if he was at all like a human male.

“I think I’m OK,” I said. The other young male looked at my crotch and said something. The wetness I felt down there didn’t need any translation. “Maybe I’m too OK,” I added. Porn-girl giggled, then the boy looking at my crotch started to laugh. Next thing I knew all of us, human and alien alike were laughing. But the first boy still had his hands on my tit and he and I looked at each other as he discovered my hard nipples poking his palm. His tan face turned a red shade, which I guess was their version of a blush as he quickly moved his hand back and stepped away. The other young male said something with a laugh, to which the armed male joined in as he holstered his weapon and slapped the boy who’d had my boob on the back.

“We can touch them, but not their clothes?” Left-sitter said. She seemed to be recovering, but her skin had a bright green welt over it. “That makes no sense.”

“You’re specifically allergic to these compounds,” the voice of Teacher said. A display appeared in the room around us. All of the aliens bounced back and the male had a hand on his weapon again.

“Teacher be careful, we don’t want to spook them,” I said.

“Apologies, but this here, these molecules are reacting with this part of your DNA,” the voice of Teacher said.

“I remember this from biology,” Right-sitter said. “That’s what determines our sex, boys have a QT, and we have QQ.”

“Exactly,” Teacher said. “It looks like the bond holding double QQ together more or less sees these molecules as mildly acidic.”

“So, this problem won’t affect boys?” I asked.

“No, once we start bringing down males, they will be able to wear local clothing,” Teacher said.

“Oh they’re going to love that,” Porn-girl said. And I guess she was the expert on kink. “We’re going to be living in some low-budget amateur porn flick.”

“You can probably hug one of them for a brief period. It will itch, I believe less so if their wearing the plant-fibers than the animal or synthetic. But get them naked before any long term contact,” Teacher said.

“Somehow I think their males will really like this,” Porn-girl said, pointing at the crotch of the young male that touched me. He looked down and seemed to blush. Porn-girl put her hand over her mouth and did the same. If their anatomy was at all like a human; he had a raging hard-on. And, if their anatomy was at all human, ideas about what I could do with that hard-on were flooding my brain.

“Real subtle there girl,” Right-sitter said, elbowing Porn-girl.

“I think we just found your tentacle,” I said, glancing at Porn-girl.

“I think I really, really need to be abducted and probed right now,” she said back.

“Well if this is a porn flick, could somebody please rewrite the script and give me a dress,” I said.

The aliens were walking around the display now. The woman and the younger male that had not offered up a sweater where talking excitedly and gesturing at the hologram of a molecule. the younger male pulled a small device out of his pant’s pocket. A screen lit up on it and after some fiddling he showed us the screen. It looked ... weird. But kinda like a picture of a molecule.