Writing Prompt VII

[I couldn't think of any image to go with this, so stuff it!]

Aliens finally made contact with Earth, but after speaking with them and learning about their culture, people realize that they're not part of an exploratory or conquering fleet, using the best ships available. They're refugees in interstellar "lifeboats" and they've got nowhere else to go.

Kerry was a genius. There couldn't have been many people gifted in both programming and natural languages, but there she was. She'd developed this software that replayed the aliens' speech back at a frequency we could hear, then worked out the bare bones of their language and played it back to them at their super-high frequency. I had learned so much from being on this team; but now it was down to me. She was utterly petrified of the aliens, it might have been their jellyfish-like faces, that creeped a lot of people out. Well, that and she was allergic. So, guess who got to be the big brother that did the actual talking? Well, it was good experience, I suppose.

OK, here we are. They're big buggers, but a bit mushy. I believe their home gravity is lower than here. Voder on the table, where's a power-point? Ah, OK... plug in; now, flick switch, plug in the oscilloscope, right...

Oh, nearly forgot - GoPro, start recording. They're waiting, looking a bit purple on the edges. Never saw that before, get a good look so the monitoring team can analyse it later.

'Greetings, Friends,' I say carefully.

'Salutations, friends,' comes from the voder. This is so cool! Kerry is watching from the window, listening to everything. Addressing the aliens, I say, 'We can now communicate! I am happy!' We have to keep the words simple, until we build up more vocabulary.

'It is good,' comes from the voder.

'Yes,' I agree. 'I want to ask questions, is it good for you?'

'Yes, yes.'

Progress! Right, now just pull up the questions on my phone... 'Are you here to speak to us about your home world?'

'No.'

'Can you say why you are here?'

'Yes.'

The pause draws out... All right, this is going to take a bit of work. 'Why did you come?'

There is a confused gabble of words the AI doesn't know yet, then '... away from ngyushwa!x.'

'What is ngyushwa...'

'Bad.'

A chill runs up my spine. 'You go away from ngyushwak?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'Bad. Ships get broken, we come, away from bad people.'

Oh, crud. 'OK.'

I look at the window. Kerry says over the intercom, 'Next question.'

I look at the list. 'Can we speak about your ship, and find what it does?'

'Yes.'

Dammit, I'm going to have to ask my questions more carefully. 'How does your ship move?'

'We don't know.'

I look at the window. Everyone's sitting with a WTF face. 'Why...?'

'None are -' and another weird splash of consonants.

Kerry's voice comes over my intercom. 'I think he says "Engineers"'.

I look at my questions. I might as well throw them out, now. I key the intercom. 'So, it looks like they're refugees from space! And they don't know anything about their own ship.'

Then the walls shook; and the lights went out!