Visitors 101 Our most distant cousins have been visiting us for millennia. It is only in relatively recent history since the invention of the camera that their surprisingly friendly visitations have been documented on film. Previously humans relied on written accounts or artistic depictions, some of which we hope to show you should they be released to us soon. However this evidence, when it occasionally surfaces is quickly confiscated or ridiculed and labelled as a hoax, so amazingly these visits remain merely a myth until this day. In dusty boxes hidden in shady museums and secure facilities these pictures are mostly hidden away indefinitely until someone discovers them and is brave enough to leak them onto the internet and into public consciousness. Here is our first batch of pictorial documentation of these visitors throughout the ages. Visitors 074 - c1800-1900s ? Unamed (Vapourstrings) Frank’s Journal: The Sing-along Anarchists (An entry from the scattered and highly irregular field notes of Frank Enstein, defector from Earthly bureaucracy and reluctant cosmic wanderer) ________________________________________ Earth Date: Approximately 1901 (maybe, who knows? I gave up on keeping track) Thanks to their technological prowess in interstellar travel I have left behind the Mecha-Melibrax, with their tangled bureaucratic nightmares and lunar jellyfish typists, I had to get back to my wife on Earth, however, I first had to deliver a message from the Melibrax to another planet and so I drifted into the embrace of something entirely different. The beings I now find myself among have no name for themselves, since names are a form of categorisation, and categorisation is the first step towards rule making. They prefer to be called whatever I feel like calling them at the time, but since I am bad at naming things, I will refer to them as The Vapourstrings until a better idea presents itself. Physically, they resemble clouds or smoke, their forms stretching and shifting, occasionally sprouting a shadowy leg or arm or two for amusement before dissolving back into drifting tendrils. They hum constantly, their bodies vibrating with some unheard frequency that affects the mind like music but does not travel through sound. They do not speak in the way humans do, nor do they project thoughts directly. Instead, they suggest impressions, their language manifesting in waves of shared understanding - sometimes it is felt as warmth, sometimes as a strange pressure behind the eyes. They exist in constant, joyful anarchy, ungoverned by laws, yet entirely in sync with one another, an unspoken cooperation flowing between them. No one hoards. No one dictates. No one suffers needlessly. They sing when they feel like it, they drift where they please, and they resolve disputes with elaborate communal storytelling contests, in which the most compelling narrative wins the day. They once had a rigid bureaucracy but accidentally got rid of it when someone misfiled a planetary ordinance, deleting the entire government. Instead of chaos, they realised: 1. Nobody actually liked being in charge. 2. People naturally cooperated when left alone. 3. Singing made everything easier. So now, everything runs on consensus and spontaneous group chants. Instead of police or councils, they have impromptu musical numbers where everyone harmonises their grievances until a solution emerges. • Want a road built? Get enough people singing about it, and it just… happens. • Disputes? A three-minute choral battle determines the outcome. • Corruption? Impossible - no hierarchy means no one to bribe. Upon being inducted into their ways by one of their community I struggled to process this - like the rational scientist I am; "So you’re telling me you’ve got no rulers, no taxes, and no regulations—yet somehow, everything works?" "Yes," the Vapourstring shimmered. "And this is all thanks to… singing?" "Mostly harmonised group decision-making, but yes." "And what happens when someone refuses to sing?" "That’s their right. They just don’t get to vote on decisions until they contribute a verse." I stared in disbelief and wonder. "And this works?" The Vapourstring hummed, "Well, we have occasional rogue jazz musicians, but we manage." --- I interviewed many in the community, learning about past visits to Earth by the Vapourstrings and noted down this story. ________________________________________ The Tale of the Earth Visitor (As told by a Vapourstring Elder - if such a thing can exist in a species that ignores linear time.) “A long time ago (which is a meaningless concept, but let’s pretend it isn’t), one of us went to your planet.” I was startled by this revelation, for I had assumed that Earth, in its drab and over-governed state, held little appeal for creatures such as these. “Why?” I asked. “To study the difference between human childhood and adulthood,” they said. “To understand how humans lose the joy they are born with, why your species does not remain as it is when small.” The visitor, known by no name but remembered in song and swirling vapour, arrived on Earth some centuries ago, disguising itself as a morning mist in a quiet town. It watched the children - how they played without purpose, how they questioned everything, how they did not yet recognize the walls of their invisible cages. And then, it watched them grow. Watched as their spirits bent under meaningless systems, their questions replaced with obedience, their play abandoned for schedules, debts, and expectations. It watched, as laughter became an indulgence rather than a reflex, as curiosity turned to resignation. The visitor returned to its people horrified and enlightened, bearing the most important piece of research their species had ever received. It concluded: “Earth’s adults are not real people. They are remnants. The child is the true self, but it is systematically dismantled.” This finding was so profound, so unfathomably tragic, that the Vapourstrings held an emergency sing-along, the first and only of its kind. Every member of their species gathered in a great swirling storm of vapour and shadow, and for seven days, they sang. By the end of it, they had sworn - in the way one swears without rules, without punishment, without consequence, but with absolute conviction - that their society would never succumb to Earth's sickness. That they would remain children forever, free, playful, questioning everything, rejecting structure and expectations. ________________________________________ Frank’s Thoughts (written on a conveniently floating rock) They were right about Earth’s adults. I had been one of them, once, though perhaps not a very good one. I had played the game, filled out the forms, lived by the invisible rules that suffocate minds before they even know they are being strangled. But here, among these beings who are both ancient and forever young, I begin to wonder - is it too late to go back? To unlearn the sickness of my home-world? The Vapourstrings have no answer for me. They only drift and hum, suggesting nothing, imposing nothing. I will stay among them for a while. Soon, I continue my journey back to my wife.