ALIEN OBSERVATIONS

They were amazing little critters. He could almost forget he had a life of his own and become consumed in watching their activities to detect what all those indecipherable, seemingly extraneous tête-à-têtes and activities they indulged in could mean. The convoluted maze through which they went just to satisfy the prime motive was already enough to put anyone off their appetite, and yet there was all this extra flitting about. He’d found the perfect place to be a fly on the wall in their lives, but there was so much he had yet to understand about them he was always at risk of sudden detection and loss of all relevant continuity to his studies, not to mention their maniacal hostility toward anything seeing them doing whatever it is they are doing. They were the only critters he’d ever come across that got so disturbed by his existence.

This place he’d been observing since before he could remember was a continuous spectrum of variety with a pattern of opaqueness based on the adaptability of the manifestation. That is what first attracted him to this particular opaqueness, this extremely dense population of critters whose prime preoccupation is creation of encasements to protect them from the same environment in which all the other variety of opacities thrive. It is the foremost challenge in his analytical mind.

More than half of them seem quite capable of living out their lives as well on the bounty of their world as simply as the bounty does without stealing its gifts, but less than half of them were willing to. The rest seem intent on stream lining paved arteries through colonies of other manifestations to connect the growing hives of permanent encasements for the most expedient transmission of their portable, exchangeable encasement capsules. The closer they lived to the largest hives the more they seem to be accustomed to using techniques to supplement their mobility for expediency of their lives until the traffic becomes saturated in portable capsules by the time the artery enters the hive. So he really can only gain direct evidence from the ones that spend parts of their life independent of their encasements and glimpses of the rest scurrying from capsule to hive.

There exist other densities of critters whose variety of manifestations were either born within their own encasements that traveled with them wherever they went or they broke out of and left behind as part of growth. Others built encasements for the protection and satisfaction of the prime motive for the results of the secondary motive, or inhabited the encasements of those who had died in the encasements of their birth. There was also the variety that built an encasement to inhabit for the end of their lives as ground bound critters. After a period of outward stillness a completely new critter emerges to unfold amazingly large artlessly beautiful sails to dry in the light of the closest star. But these anomalous curiosities he’d been so intent on didn’t seem to stay still in any one encasement for the amount of time required for their relative metabolistic scale to result in such a metamorphosis as the critters he found ground bound no more.

Of the rest of them that stayed outside long enough for him to observe there was a spectrum from those living as harmoniously with their environment as the rest of its bounty in appreciation of the wealth of the amount of things one can afford to enjoy living without to those that seemed wounded by the amount of things they felt without, a portable capsule being at the top of the list.

But it was the strange ritual they imposed upon themselves in order to satisfy the prime motive the closer to the hives the critters lived that really defied the logic of his honest enquiry. From what he could observe these critters lay waste to thousands of densities just to propagate four or five favored varieties for their ritual over giant expanses of the spectrum. Even with the huge amounts of the kind they favor gathered this way they still do not satisfy the prime motive, but lock it away, mix it and measure it and put it in containers. To gain access to the sustenance each critter had to perform some variety of service to gain the code to the dispensary. In the less dense areas of these critters in the spectrum there were some who still walked their neighborhood, picked bits of other densities where they live and combined energies as required by the prime motive just as all the other varieties do.

It troubled him a great deal to imagine that all their developments were characteristic of a critter which is either flailing and failing in nature’s ongoing experiments in the adaptability of varieties by petulantly refusing to adapt from within the impotent, debilitating techniques of their isolation or … that the entire population he could hear noisily scurrying about within the hive shuffling orders to rearrange the planet to accommodate another billion guests in the near future is actually undergoing a metamorphosis distinguishing them, splitting them from their still planet bound kin as distinctly as any master and slave recognize one another.

Both see themselves as the masters and the others as the slaves. From within the encasements and capsules the masters gaze upon their grazing slaves being fattened for market and yoke. Outside the masters of their own existence in symbiosis with the nature of their environment look upon the hives full of atrophied slaves of their own prosthetic devices with appreciation of the difference.

It was the most intriguing ignorances of karma he’d come across in his entire visit to earth. He’d never been around for a species split before, that is if the agoraphobes actually survive.