We Love You.

We Are Sorry.

[Writing Prompt] We receive an extraterrestrial message. It simply says “We love you. We are sorry.”

In the heart of the Amazon rainforest there once lived a breed of Monkey called a Pied Tamarin. The Pied Tamarin has almost no natural predators except for a small breed of jungle cat known as a Margay.

You’ve probably never even heard of these creatures let alone seen one before. The  Pied Tamarins have faces that look drawn onto their heads – these really silly, cartoon faces. Margays look drawn by the same illustrator as the Tamarins – they have these cute kitten heads with thick spotted fur – like baby leopards that never grow up.

There aren’t a lot of large, meaty animals in the part of the Amazon which these two species cohabitate, and as a result the Margays rely on hunting the Tamarins in order to survive. This has never been easy.  The Tamarins are quite smart, or at least, smart for a monkey – smart and nervous. They’re quick to hide up in the trees at the slightest sound and wait there for danger to pass.

But the Margay has a trick up its sleeve. The Margay has learned to make a noise that sounds sort of like a Pied Tamarin. The Pied Tamarins hear this noise and think there is no Margay at all, only another Tamarin out there in the dark. This makes them relax and leave the safety of the high branches. Sometimes, the Tamarins even call out to the Margay in the darkness. In doing so, they give away their location and, right then, the Margay strikes.

To sum up, science has discovered a cat that pretends to be a monkey in order to trick other monkeys into being eaten.

This is fairly entertaining trivia about the natural world. Fairly strange. But it also raises an important question: why do the monkey’s fall for such a simple trick?

The monkeys know their pack and they know their neighbors. They hear a sound coming from the deep dark jungle, which they also know to be filled with danger. The Margay, meanwhile, sounds sort of like a monkey, but not really. In truth, the Margay sounds more like a cat pretending to be a monkey. Nonetheless, the Tamarins take the bait.

Why?

Humanity, you’ll remember from biology class, is a distant relation of the great apes. Go far enough back in time and we all come from the same stock. Go back only ten thousand years and we too were living in those same dark forests.

In a sense, we still are – only the scale has changed.

One day, not long ago, humanity heard something up there in the dark. A message from a stranger, but one we recognized, albeit a bit out of context:

“We love you. We are sorry.”

We triangulated the message with ease. It kept repeating for half a year and it was of unbelievable strength. In that time humanity debated whether to respond. The dilemma split the scientific community. Roughly half argued against it, while the rest lobbied for contact.

We analyzed the alien signal with extreme care. There was no consensus. The most popular theory was that an alien race had been watching us. They listened to our radio transmissions. Eventually, they’d heard enough to assimilate a rudimentary baseline of human language. Then they formulated a message we would find non-threatening and sent it our way.

This theory was not entirely incorrect.

The UN voted on the question. “RESPOND” won by a long shot. The plan was to start a conversation. We aimed our transmitters at the point of origin and sent a single high-powered message. We repeated that message for a full year.

They never responded.

12 years later, they arrived. 11 light years for the message to get to them, 1 year for them to get to us by means no one understands. What we do know is that the powerful, repeated signal of our response led them right to us.

There was a minimal orbital bombardment, but most of the invasion has been on the ground, and it is brutal. They use war machines.  No one has ever seen the aliens themselves, if they exist. But everyone has heard the death squads’ unnatural call in the midst of the chaos:

“We love you. We are sorry.”

It isn’t clear why they still say it. Even while they fight. Even while they disintegrate our cities, and massacre our people. But they do – say it, I mean – over and over and over again.

But forget about all that. We’re done, humanity. All that matters now, the only thing we can do, is try to achieve understanding. Why did our species fail? When the darkness called, why did we answer?

Why does the Pied Tamarin respond to the call of the Margay?

Because, by their nature, Pied Tamarins are hopeful creatures. It is inborn in them to believe they are not alone in the deep, dark jungle. They hope for contact. They hope for companionship and camaraderie. They prize these things. And, in the end, hope overwhelms their fear and it costs them everything.

Humans put great stock into hope. We prize it. Hope as a universal ideal.

But ascribing illusory objective value to a subjective concept is always a dangerous game.

Which is why, as go the Pied Tamarin, so too goes the human race.

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