Cranton Stanley Watched with a Grow....

Thousand+ Words a Day for Dec 16, 2025

Cranton Stanley watched with a growing feeling of helplessness as the back gate of the primary containment chamber slid open and a dozen or so confused-looking Blue Vimili tumbled out. They were the ones who had been pushed up against the gate’s inside surface; the chamber was full of them now, their breeding having been stopped only through the mechanism of having no more room for additional growth.

Now that the gate was open and the little creatures had access to more space–the secondary confinement constituted by the sterile room in which the primary box sat–they would start up again, and if unchecked, they’d continue breeding, creating layer after layer of little creatures, specialized into 15 subgroups, until they ran out of room once more.

Besides being members of a hive community, the Vimili were essentially little organic chemical factories, and surprisingly efficient and flexible ones, given their relatively limited access to material on which to operate. They absorbed raw materials from the environment and dissembled them into their constituent elements to rearrange them into new products, including their own bodies, tools of different kinds, odd mechanisms by which they accomplished things, and strange lumps of this and that which didn’t do anything at all, as far as could be determined.

They seemed to occupy a stage between sentience and nonsentience: the hive was clearly sentient, and could even be communicated with, but no individual member of the community seemed to be. There was no identifiable ‘queen,’ as in the case of hive- oriented creatures on Earth.

There were five different body orientations among the Vimili, labeled for convenience’s sake by colors. The vast majority of Vimili were of the blue orientation, but there was also red, green, white, and yellow, the most rare. Each bred exclusively, but the pairings resulted in offspring in any of the five orientations.

The two consulting Phaldish had advised against the project from the start, arguing from their spacecraft in orbit around Mars that the Vimili were nothing more than pests. “There is nothing to be gained from this work,” the computer translator’s flat mechanical voice said in response to the breathy wheezing that was the Phaldish language. “Vimili are pests, vermin, and the green ones–”

The other Phaldish interrupted. “The green ones do not concern us,” the computer’s voice intoned, “and none of the Vimili need concern you.”

The Phaldish were the first alien species–and so far, the only one– to have contacted Earth, having announced their existence and established relations nearly fifty years ago. They were zero-gee creatures, thin and waspy, with vestigial legs withered to mere tendrils after thousands of generations in zero gravity. They had at one time had wings, apparently, but those too were withered through disuse and now were only tiny hair-like projections less than an inch long, curled and stunted.

The Phaldish operated from their ships, which remained in orbit around Mars–these two, who allowed themselves to be referred to rather comically as Lucy and Ethel, were the only of their kind that had ever interacted with humans. It had been Lucy, who was the larger of the two, who first appeared in a video feed transmitted to seventeen world leaders simultaneously; it had been Ethel who had directed the construction of the Portal, through which Phaldish equipment and materials were occasionally made available on Earth. Although 48 years had passed, Lucy and Ethel looked the same as they did on that first day, January 14, 2033.

A recent discussion between Ethel and Dr. Robertson Stargill’s graduate xenobiology students at Princeton University highlighted some of the difficulties that had been experienced as communication and relations had been established between humans and the Phaldish. Ethel’s breathy voice was heard for a while through the linkup between Mars orbit and the classroom, and then the computer’s voice took over: “It is difficult for us, as it is for you, to make a common understanding,” Ethel said. “Even with our translators, we cannot always be sure we are being understood accurately.”

“Ethel, can you tell the students here today how the translator works?” Dr. Stargill asked.

There was a pause as the Phaldish computers translated the question, and again, Ethel wheezed for some time before the translator had enough to work with. “The translator is not our technology,” she said. “We have it on loan from a race of beings that developed on the fourth planet in our home system. They are advanced in these sorts of things, although they do not leave their own planet.”

“What sort of creatures are they?” Stargill continued.

“They are evolved from plants,” Ethel said. “They gained some mobility and they evolved a tool-making capacity using specialized leaves that can move and grasp. They are anchored to the ground, but we have helped them develop movable anchors so that they can move themselves around somewhat.”

“And they have a technology, then?”

“Yes,” Ethel continued. “They are highly advanced in computers and, of course, in translation equipment.”