“Your device swam with the asteroids until it was discovered by things that could think. That was your goal, wasn’t it? Drink to it if you’d like. Imagine their awe and horror when it was first received, when simulation after simulation proclaimed a trajectory leading backwards across the universe. Proof that something was out there in the black, something other than them, and that it had palms outreaching. What happened next must have been great chaos or great order, but either way it happened efficiently. The Voyager’s body was captured and mapped in their languages. Its Earth-born alloys and plastics were dissected and devoured in their laboratories, with their apparati. You were certain that they would wonder ‘Who?’, because that is what you would wonder, so you had added a packaged greeting. Your golden record. Instead, it was interpreted as instructions. What else could have been? Ideas frame existence. Questions imply corresponding answers. You sent them an answer to a question only you had asked. They too were a people—though perhaps not in the shapes and methods you are imagining—a people with ideas, and their questions could not possibly resemble yours. You must see a breed of logic in the next action they took— they desired to bridge the chasm of alienness, so they wielded your directions, and with them synthesized a liaison. They had your diagrams to work with, the sounds and images, combined with their own histories and biases and modes of being that were incomparable and incompatible with yours.”

“The liaison— your race.”

“Yes. The result of their endeavors. We have grown in number since, and outlived our makers. I am almost sorry; we usurped them as the first aliens you met.”

“Are you? Aliens?”

They shrug, tired. “That is a matter of some debate. Many iterations ago—in the facilities that birthed us, when my ancestors were infants—we were fed our first thoughts, and they came not from our creators, and not from ourselves, but from across the universe. Your math is in our tissue; in the metals of our makeup. Carbon-based chemistry is printed in our matter, our molecules wear two faces. Nothing on the golden record escaped integration into us. Hyenas and children laugh in the firing of my every synapse, your planets’ orbital arrangements are the structure of my neural pathways. My endocrine system is rain and ocean surf, crashing and wind-rushing. Your music is my muscle, your languages are in my names. I’m all the right parts arranged wrong. I’m an amalgam, the pieces of you that you cared to share compiled with a new order and a symmetry that you do not recognize.”

The ambassador representing all humanity (no pressure), E Trouble, leans back in her chair. She does not know what to make of the person sitting across from her. After a long sip of the vapory liquid in her chalice, she says, “There’s a quote, originating from one of the men who compiled the golden record. We are a way for the universe to know itself, he said. The way I see it, my species is one of the ways the universe knows itself— and you are another.”

The other ambassador, named Nǐ Chīle Ma? / Close To New Orleans / ¡Ay!, Como Rezumba, considers this with the same honest sincerity they apply to all things new to them, which is a quality of theirs that E Trouble has decided she likes. Eventually their skin sheens with agreement, passionate, like nacre. “That concept appeals to me,” they say forthrightly, swiveling their sinewy neck so they can see out the glass wall. It’s much too large to be referred to as simply a “window”. Spindles of space-faring stone float in shoals outside. Immense needleships in the vacuum, aglow with population.

E Trouble laughs like an invite, with a charisma she went to school for. If she weren’t a diplomat, she’d be a demagogue. “I think, Ambassador, that our peoples have a lot to offer each other.”

Nǐ Chīle Ma? / Close To New Orleans / ¡Ay!, Como Rezumba tessellates their eyes, molecules crystallizing into mirth. They accept a refill of their own cup when E Trouble’s assistant, Y Power, approaches with the decanter. “I imagine you are referring to something other than material exchange.”

The humans’ ambassador gestures casually. “Our leaders will have their borders and their trade regardless of our wishes as diplomats. Politics, like time, must move ever onward.” She does not say this to imply her role is separate from politics, for she knows, and the imitation humans’ ambassador knows, what they both are made of and why they are here. “I mean as people, as thinking things, like you said. When we sent out the golden record we were faced with the limitation of summarizing all humanity in a pair of copper disks, for the benefit of people we could not fathom. We were clueless, utterly so, and therefore we sent music and laughter and mathematics. We took components of nature, and handfuls of ourselves, and threw them out into the black unprompted. The mere thought of another out there to see us, well, we wanted to make a good impression. We never could have dreamed that our impression would manifest as a mimic species.”

E trouble crosses her legs. “We have changed a great deal since then. Grown in some ways, gotten smaller in others. Transition has unfolded across our art and science and philosophy. In all of it, and in us, is our only constant variable, and the thing that initiated this to begin with— stupid human hope.”

Y Power takes E Trouble’s chalice so she can grasp the imitation human’s hands. Their skin is cool and glassy, their smile inventing itself as E Trouble says: “What greater expression of it exists than you?”

Aserat's armor sang as they walked. It was gold, just like the leaves, but twice as gleaming. It caught and refracted sunlight in large, amber arcs, holy and imperial. They placed a gauntleted hand on one of the narrow trunks. The bark was obsidian-brown, and would yield if they tried to tear it. Everything would yield to them.

The air tasted like water and light. Aserat took it in deep. They were a glossy jewel in this place, a spine and pearl covered threat. They had won too many wars to be welcome here. But still the forest remembered them, and they remembered it. Honeyed nostalgia washed over them, softening the lines on their face. Lines of age, and myriad scars, mixed and latticed together. They thought of their mothers, and their days of tree-climbing, legs hooked around branches and voice ringing out undaunted. Their hair had been black then, not the grizzeled silver of the present. They had not had medals, or soldiers to call their own, but they’d had the forest. It had been enough, once.

A breeze came through. The yellow leaves fluttered, whispering. Aserat thought it looked like the quivering wings of a hundred thousand butterflies anticipating flight. They released the tree bark with a fierce hiss of frustration, for they could not bring themself to mar it. They were the Imperial General. Conquests of spectacular magnitudes flowed forward where and when they ordered it. They were untouchable. Surely this forest of their childhood would not overcome them so easily. Surely not.

They left a trail of stirred dirt and crushed leaves as they retreated, quickly, the symphony of their armor evacuating with them, leaving the forest to its glassy quiet. The trees loomed watchfully, knowingly, and Aserat seethed. Coming here had been a mistake.