CULTURAL RELATIONS

"Ambassador, the ship is two minutes from orbit. The command is waiting for you on deck.”

The officer politely retreats and motions me to the door. I go out, in a hurry to follow the invitation. The Great Moment is approaching. Emotions churn my stomach. I'd delay the deck to go to the toilet, if it weren't for the Big Moment. Although I have been in the profession for over twenty years, before the mission I am overwhelmed by the same emotions, only to leave me definitively at the moment of action.

The commander greets me briefly and points to the central porthole. The planet Analitia occupied the entire panorama – a ball of tar wrapped in golden nets. The view is overwhelming.

"Can we open the channels, Commander?" I ask unable to look away from the picture.

Within seconds, the deck is filled with creaks and pops. A broken-sounding voice begins a long litany in the language of analytics. Hearing her reminds me of the refugee ambassador.

The first contact was made half a century ago, in an unpopulated solar system, by the M-class ship - "White Bird". The first form of intelligence we have ever encountered in our cosmic wanderings. Following the relatively unsuccessful attempt at communication, they were called 'analysts'. Their ways of thinking and communicating are based on a mathematical system with no correspondence to our way of thinking. And their math is so 'alien' (the government has banned the use of the term 'advanced') that the only results from that encounter were finding out the position of their planet and concluding that they are a friendly, civilized and technologically advanced race, only somewhat different by us.

The computer translates a few seconds after the message is finished: "Message equivalent to greeting - Welcome! Six units – time to guided surface contact.”

The commander looks at me questioningly.

"In six hours they will send a guide to pick me up from the trajectory and lead me to the summit point. I have to start…”

The words stick in my throat. The commander turns to his officers in surprise. I motion for him to relax. The music of the analysts wafts through the ship. Doubtful, I say to myself at first, then I am amazed by its complexity and beauty. Some individuals who talk math probably also sing math, and the result takes your breath away.

"Ambassador, do you think it would be wise for me to disconnect?"

"No, not yet, Commander. It could be interpreted as a hostile gesture. After all, it's just a gift from them. Leave it for another half hour, so that she realizes that I have received and accepted their gift. I'm going to prepare for the trip. In exactly 5 hours and 54 minutes I must be at the point of contact.”

I leave the deck feeling my emotions evaporate.

A decade and a half after contact we received a visit from their ambassador. He managed to make us understand that he wants to undergo a process of human cultural impregnation. A gesture welcomed by us, because only in this way would we have been able to establish effective communication. After the first two years he began to discern the power structure of human society and address the proper authorities, assuring them of the peaceful and diplomatic intentions of the civilization he represented. In another five years he had managed to assimilate the conceptual basis of human culture. One day he appeared in Parliament and officially declared that he was resigning from his position as ambassador, requesting cultural asylum. He declared that he was not and would not be oppressed by the political system of his civilization, since there was none. But as a result of the cultural impregnation of the last 7 years it has lost its identity and any analytical social characteristic. Even though he was physically distinct from humans, through his new spirituality he had become an earthling. Thus, the role of representative of his civilization of origin had become incompatible with him. His return to Analitia had also been pointless.

The only plausible explanation for the loss of the 'analytic' identity was that "it used to be a system of mathematical values ​​in a matrix of individual physical existentiality. Through the process of human culturalization, it lost its character of analytical universality and with it, an enormous baggage of mathematical operations and procedures at the nervous level, becoming an individual physique, endowed with individual personality and ascension character towards spiritual instinctivity. Through the prism of the new acquired culture, he too can no longer understand the civilization that originated him."

After another two decades Earth decided to send its own representative to the analysts. I mean me.

* * *

The shuttle moves like a bolide towards one of the luminous agglomerations on the surface of the planet. At the chosen moment, the on-board computer leaves the vehicle in the 'power' of the analysts, to guide and assist it. I am in constant contact with the ship in orbit and note with satisfaction that the link is maintained in good conditions. I try to describe everything I see, although the video camera works, but words are unsatisfactory for the strangeness of the place and the speed of travel.

The urban agglomeration I assume I'm heading towards is starting to look more like a giant laboratory. I have no other terms of comparison. Structures several times higher than the tallest terrestrial skyscrapers, curved in miraculous spirals, are pierced by intense lights. Metal blocks with fine bas-relief work spill over for miles without the slightest visible opening to the outside. Tubes that connect 2-3 structures stretch through the air for tens of kilometers, without being supported at the points of tension by support poles. Their entire architecture defies the laws of physics as we know it. I see no sign of vehicles or movement outside, which makes me think that all their physical activity probably takes place inside the buildings.

The shuttle is facing the wall of one of the metal blocks. I wait for a gate to open to allow me inside, but I perceive no movement. I suspect they'll hook the shuttle up to the wall and I'll have to leave it outside and enter through a camouflaged door.

I stifle a cry as the shuttle is pushed against the wall allowing penetration with a viscous consistency. The vehicle goes through the wall without any difficulty and in a few minutes we are on the other side. Dark and yet I can make out surfaces like runways with access lanes to them.

The shuttle is delicately placed on one of the platforms. I revise my outfit, take my luggage concentrated in a backpack and open the outer door. A capsule is waiting for me at the exit. Actually a transparent sphere, diffusely lit, or rather filled with a kind of fog. I apologize to those on the ship for my descriptions that probably sound like an imbecile to them, but I don't have time to search my words right now for things that have no correspondence in earthly reality.

I hesitate for a moment, then recall the conclusions of my contacts with them so far, as well as their ambassador's continued assurances—friendly, civilized, technological, interested in a peaceful relationship with Earth. "Just a little weird", I mutter to myself and while I explain to the commander that I haven't added anything, I take the two steps towards the capsule. I control my wide-angle camera, which holds the helmet on my head like a headband, then the microphone, all the sensors carefully glued to my body, and I feel more reassured that everything is working normally. "Nothing" tried to jam my contact with my peers. Stepping into the fog.

The inner space of the sphere is empty, without the slightest piece of furniture. I'm thinking of a chair or something similar. I hold back my cursing and the impulse to ignore her and move on. I am surprised to find that the so-called diffuse lighting fog forms like a protective layer between me and the walls, creating a kind of gas mattress. It slows down my movements but allows me absolutely any position I want. I smile excitedly at the practicality of the idea and try to explain the sensation to those in orbit.

Once inside, the capsule automatically closes and begins to accelerate towards one of the walls. Going through the wall at breakneck speed still gives me flinches, but I'm trying to get used to it. The ball-vehicle quickly runs through tunnels, falls on spirals of light that make me think of amusement park games, only the diffused gas that surrounds me removes any sensation of falling or too high speed, leaving only the eyes the possibility of perceiving these realities. I hope everything can be seen on the ship. The commander reassures me that everything is fine, that the connection is intact.

We pass over a - it seemed to me at first a huge hall - traffic area, as we found out afterwards. The area is full of analysts, which I see for the first time since I arrived. They move with studied movements, on predetermined routes, leaving aside the fact that they are all in a position to interact with those around them. I don't manage to perceive anyone moving randomly or walking at speed, I'm kidding myself, and only then do I realize the tension that gripped me. From time to time my path intersects with that of other traveling spheres. I can't tell if there are other analysts inside them or not.

My vehicle suddenly sticks to an opaque wall. An analytical text appears on the wall of the sphere, which the suit's computer immediately translates: “Welcome! The diplomatic attachment procedure follows”, in a rough interpretation of the notions.

The capsule slowly begins to penetrate the wall. Its black paste seeps through the walls of the sphere inside. I look around in surprise and try to push myself towards the opposite wall, but the gas pressured by the black substance pushes me back into a standing position, arms and legs outstretched. In the end I realize that the gas exerts a controlled pressure, and not at all random. Otherwise he would not have 'forced' me to this position. The commander shouts something into my headphones. I can hear the panic in his voice and a drop of ice drips down my heart in slow motion. I realized with amazement the calmness that came over me. It can only be out of stupidity, I explain nonchalantly, because I don't feel an iota of scientific curiosity at the moment. Only the burn patina on the heart alerts me to the unfolding of events. It's hellish noise in the headphones, I wish I could cut the connection, sit back, not have to pose in front of an entire crew now and later an entire planet.

The black paste is a few inches from my nose. Beads of sweat drip down my temples as I try in vain to move my hands. At first I swear at them, then I explain to them from my little knowledge of anatomy why it won't work, how we humans are made, I try to prove to them that they wouldn't accept this treatment, that if they think I can't survive according to the rules my physical here, I could act as an ambassador from orbit, from the ship. The computer reminds me that the notions I use are far too human-complex to be understood by analysts. That it could fulfill its function as an interpreter if I expressed myself more mathematically and with more primary notions.

My scream of horror stops halfway through. The substance incorporated me like a tar bath, which, however, was not content to just cover me, but filled my mouth, esophagus, stomach and slowly, slowly, the whole inside of my body. My eyes and nose were left uncovered, my mouth was wide open in the middle of the scream cut by the blackness that now holds my tongue frozen in the air.

I realize that I can still breathe, that nothing hurts, that I seem to have remained 'functional'. I just can't move.

The vehicle resumes its journey once it has passed the tar wall. We pass relatively slowly through a curtain of light that strains my retinas, my eyelids being hardened. I believe I will go blind. But it's not like that. It's all just the irrational fear of human thought before the pragmatism of analysts. Although honestly, I would have missed the 'diplomatic attachment'.

The capsule reaches the end of a horizontal corridor, slows down, tilts slightly, and then falls through a shaft several kilometers into the heart of the planet. I would scream if I could. My heart is pounding in my chest, but 'something' controls its beats, controls the rush of blood to the temples. That 'something' that keeps my body in optimal working condition. Analysts with their safe and accurate procedures.

I finally make out the end of the fall – a net that closes the tunnel. I free fall straight towards her. I'm screaming this time, screaming in my head, in my mind, in my heart, with all the terror and despair I can muster. We go through the net, through what I realized at the last moment was a graph. My whole body is probably in pieces now, yes it is, but I feel nothing, and I still think and I am still.

Hair-thin rays cut through the darkness and plunge into the cubes of my former body through the shroud of black paste. Phosphorescent information pulses arrhythmically in the hundreds of channels created by the rays. I see two small grids, two complex coordinate systems with fluctuating information, approaching my eyes. I no longer have the strength to feel fear. The grids with coordinates pierce my eyeballs, my vision is blurred, sparks play in my field of vision, only now I feel something stuck in my spine, I lose consciousness, or maybe my identity, and remembering their ambassador at the last moment I still have the strength to laugh in the still-human, still-personal part of my brain, I say to myself reproachfully—I may not have the skills to be a system of mathematical values ​​in a matrix of individual physical existentiality, and then I will probably be a simple number. Maybe seven, that was my favorite number… .