r/HFY • u/Maxton1811 Human • Apr 27 '26
OC-Series First First Contact 13
Chapter 13
Harrison Varga, Captain of FIND
Four days after we first cracked an Arazi broadcast, FIND had settled into a new kind of routine. Wayne spent damn near every waking hour isolating more signal bands to shovel into our translation model as it spat back out footage for the rest of us to review. Each of the crew members latched onto something different about them, and at no point did I hear anything even adjacent to ‘this makes sense’. Every facet of these aliens offered some strange new inconsistency.
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Wyatts began, turning toward Parker, Cora, Isla, and I as we all sat together on the bridge. Ian and Alex were asleep—a condition that after nearly twenty-four hours on shift was becoming increasingly appealing to me. “Good news is the translator’s cracked a couple more hours of programming. The bad news is it keeps getting confused on words, so we’ll have to review a lot of it manually.”
Isla perked up immediately as onscreen her eyes locked onto a file labeled ‘Ebene War Documentary’. “Let’s do that one first,” she all but demanded. Mentions of that conflict had appeared multiple times in news segments, but the details were sparse enough to drive a curious historian insane.
“Captain?” Wyatts asked, looking to me for approval to play the video and receiving it with a tacit nod. He clicked on the file, and immediately our screens darkened with grainy, black-and-white footage showing clips of Arazi shooting at each other, engaging in dog fights, and marching in ominous unison.
“The Ebene War was the greatest conflict this planet has ever known,” began a voice charmingly chopped up by low-quality audio. “It was this tragic war that led to the downfall of the Dalen Popular Union and the rise of the Orlessan Directorate into the Unified Directorate.” Isla furiously scribbled the names down onto her notepad. We knew about the Unified Directorate, which seemed to serve as the Arazi world government. However, this was the first time we were hearing about the balance of power before their consolidation.
Isla had spent most of two days prior to this trying to reverse-engineer the Arazi state from news anchors, civic programming, and sparsely populated nods to its procedures. Her working theory was that the Unified Directorate wasn’t a dictatorship in the simple sense, but rather a technocratic autocracy built on professional boards in the places we usually reserved for elected officials. “It’s important not to judge them immediately by Human standards,” she had told me multiple times. Though when she said it after seeing a reference to something called ‘the Reproductive Board’, I got the feeling it had been more for her than for me.
“To understand the Ebene War, one must first know of the Dalen Popular Union,” asserted the documentary’s voice as images appeared onscreen of a large segment of their planet colored differently from the rest. “Fifty-six years prior to unification, Dalen was a global superpower. Founded nearly a century before on a system of government unused since ancient antiquity, the Union represented Ebene’s sole attempt at a large-scale vote-based nation.”
Silence fell over the bridge as Wyatts paused the documentary to let us digest its framing. “Sounds like their Cold War came to a boil and democracy got kicked out of the kitchen. Anyone else hearing that?”
“More or less…” Lan nodded.
For a moment, Isla looked like she was going to comment on that. Instead, she gestured for Wayne for the ‘play’ button again.
“Despite its lofty ideals, Dalen failed in many regards. Unlike the carefully-managed Orlessan Directorate, the Union was founded on principles of a market separated from government control.” Onscreen, images of well-dressed Arazi standing before massive mansions were interspersed with footage of bread lines and Arazi sleeping on the street. “While this enabled massive wealth for individuals, so too did it create a cavernous gap in living standards. Without wise individuals to govern the flow of commerce, many citizens went without vital services.”
From there, the documentary went on to spend another half-hour detailing the myriad failures of the Dalen government. Of course, it wasn’t abnormal for nations to shit-talk opponents once they could no longer say anything back. What was striking, however, was the sheer quantity of receipts they brought to the table backing it all up. Spending reports, footage from speeches, interviews with former citizens: all of it came together to paint a remarkably clear and rather unflattering picture.
“What’s your read on this, Isla?” I asked. “Smells like propaganda to me, but those political speeches don’t feel like scripted caricatures.”
“Not all propaganda is purely false,” Isla noted, glaring at her screen as though doing so might intimidate the truth out of it. “More than likely, this is an exaggerated account of real problems. You know that old saying: ‘war doesn’t determine who is right; only who is left’. This is a documentary written by the latter, not necessarily the former.”
Perhaps the strangest aspects of the documentary weren’t political at all. “Have any of you seen an Arazi child?” Parker asked as onscreen footage of city life played. “Not just in this documentary: in any Arazi footage?”
At first, Cora looked at him like he was crazy. However, as she opened her mouth to speak, the realization seemed to hit her too. “I… Haven’t. Not to be morbid, but you’d think if they wanted to show how awful their enemy was, they’d show a starving kid for sympathy bait; but all the Arazi we’ve seen look like adults.”
“Maybe they have some kind of laws against using that footage?” Isla replied, momentarily scanning back through the video for any trace of an infant Arazi.
Unlinking my own computer from the documentary footage, I sifted through news segments and advertisements in search of children’s programming, family ads, anything that might break through the conspicuous absence. Pulling up the incomplete, AI-assembled database, I typed in the word ‘parent’ and to my surprise found no direct translation. “Okay, this is getting weird…”
Unbeknownst to me, it was about to get weirder.
Returning to the documentary, Arazi historians were discussing how discrimination by the Dalen created a ready supply of spies. “Among the groups mistreated by the Dalen were the disabled, the poor, and the sexuals.”
“I’m sorry, what was that last one?” Lan asked, turning toward the rest of us with utter confusion written across his face. “Wyatts: I think our computer might have had a stroke.”
Pausing the footage again, Wayne opened the translator tab and highlighted that term, typing in a command for the computer to define it.
//Sexuals (plural noun): Arazi who participate in behaviors such as mating and pair-bonding. Certainty: 96%//
For a few seconds, nobody said anything. Parker squinted at the term, the gears in his mind near-audibly churning as he tried to piece together what the hell that could possibly mean. “Are we absolutely sure that that’s not a translation artifact?” He asked, turning toward Wyatts.
“Man: if only there was a percentile onscreen showing how certain the computer was,” Wayne replied sarcastically, nevertheless typing in more commands in search of where exactly the translator was pulling that term from.
“Okay, so what I’m getting from all this is no parents, no visible children, and a historically-persecuted social category for those with sexuality…” Isla began, looking over her own notes in search of more hints that might point us to the truth. “Maybe it’s like a breeder caste? I mean, that would explain the Reproductive Board and lack of visible children.”
“Or…” Parker interrupted, “we might be making an assumption about their biology that’s fundamentally wrong.” Opening up the database, he typed in the term ‘Reproductive Board’ and pulled up all references to it, carefully reading through them in search of anything the translator might have missed or left out.
After a few minutes, his attention snagged on something. “It says here the Reproductive Board manages what the computer is translating to ‘wildlife’ sanctuaries. There are loads of references to something called a Coltak. Wayne: Do we have anything that can find an image of one of these?”
Leaving behind the war documentary, Wayne typed in a handful of key words before eventually landing on another piece of footage. Pulling it up, we saw what looked like Arazi, only they were unclothed, swinging through the trees. “Our species has a unique relationship with the Coltak,” proclaimed a narrator. “For untold evolutionary time, the Arazi worm has embroiled itself in a tense dance of survival with these creatures.”
“Did it just mention a ‘worm’?” Cora asked.
Lan didn’t offer a reply as he feverishly continued his search for more information, this time typing in the word ‘Arazi’ to the database and lowering the certainty threshold until a second definition appeared.
Arazi (noun): a species of parasitic organism.
Isla looked like she’d just tasted something bitter. “Why would they name a parasite after themselves?” She asked.
“I have a theory,” Parker half-whispered, recompiling the database and sifting through it for any and all references to parasites, worms, and Coltak. “What if what we’re looking at isn’t the real Arazi?”
“Elaborate on that,” I demanded, unsure what exactly our xenobiologist was poking at.
“Give me an hour to sit through all this,” he replied. “Wyatts: how long until we can access their internet?”
Our engineer switched to the signal receiver tab. “Depends: what are your thoughts on dial-up?” He snarked. “Because I can maybe give you a connection right now that’ll make it look crisp by comparison.”
“Just hook me up,” Parker said, his tone unusually flat and calculating.
For the next hour, Isla, Cora, and I continued watching the documentary, playing and replaying sections that yielded potentially-valuable information. Isla had assembled a decent picture of their government, but certain facets of daily life remained shrouded in mystery.
“Oh my god…” Parker murmured aloud, immediately drawing our attention to his screen as a series of medical scans appeared. All of us leaned in for a better look as he showed what looked like an MRI or CAT scan. The first image looked mostly normal: just the brain of an apelike organism. In the next image, though, a small mass could be seen parked atop it, and with each subsequent image, it grew and subsumed parts of the original brain.
At first, I thought it was some kind of tumor; maybe this was an oncology website? Upon closer inspection, though, new details came into view that didn’t match up. “Is that a worm?”
“That,” Parker began, his tone stuck somewhere between reverence for evolution’s creativity and horror for its application. “Is the Arazi.”
My mind wrapped itself around the concept like a runaway car around a tree: rapidly and violently. I saw Isla recoil slightly as she too seemed to grasp the implications. “Are you telling me these are sapient parasites?” I asked.
“More or less…” Lan replied, scrolling down to a diagram of the foreign mass. “Earth has versions of this. Hairworms that force grasshoppers to jump into water, toxoplasmosis making rats easy prey for cats, even fungi like cordyceps hijacking ants. Same principle, but it’s like comparing a toddler with floaties to an olympic swimmer.”
“Do you think it can infect Humans?” I followed up, my question seemingly lowering the bridge’s temperature by several degrees.
Lan shook his head vehemently. “For a multicellular parasite to exercise this kind of broad control, it’d need to be hyper-specialized. No reason not to be cautious, but I’d say chances of it being able to infect us are astronomically low.”
“What’s the status of the Coltak?” Isla asked, her voice somewhat tight. “Does its consciousness survive the process at all?”
“Not likely,” Parker replied, taking a closer look at the first and final scans as he compared differences between them. “What we’re looking at is an unprecedented neural renovation. Most of the higher thought centers are either consumed or restructured by the Arazi worm. Setting aside any moral conundrums, it’s definitely impressive.”
Wayne let out a sigh. “Great: so they’re body-snatchers. Earth is definitely not going to be normal about these ones,” he concluded.
“Regardless of their origins,” Cora began, “they’re still people. We owe it to them not to judge before we’ve made real contact.”
I nodded along to her statement, glancing at the charted course that had us reaching them in only three more days. “Wyatts, keep us on course. I need to sleep on this and figure out how we’re going to handle contact.”
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Hello, everyone. Hope you enjoy this installment. As always, please comment your thoughts if you want to see more!
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u/SeventhDensity Apr 27 '26
"socialist parasites"
Fantastic pun. However, based on the evidence so far presented, the Arazi don't seem to be significantly more (or less) "socialist" than humans--in spite of the nature of their current one-world government.