The tones sounded as if they were coming from an old touch-tone pushbutton telephone handset. They began to play, very quickly, on a repeating loop. Then my father muted the audio and turned to study my reaction. But hearing those five notes from Close Encounters had momentarily thrown me off balance. I’d never liked that film—probably because of how easy it was for the main character, Roy Neary, to (spoiler alert) leave his family at the very end of the film. It hit a little too close to home.
I stared at the images. I listened to tones. I waited for him to continue.
“Okay,” he said, inching forward. “First, just think about the chronology of events. Think about how our first contact with them went down. The Europans orchestrated this entire conflict—they lured and manipulated us into it.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why else would they slap a giant swastika on the surface of Europa—it was a trap, and we walked right into it! Just like Admiral Fucking Ackbar!”
Under other circumstances, this might have made me laugh. But not then.
“So,” he went on, “humanity discovers this threatening message from an obviously nonhuman intelligence—placed in a spot where they knew humans would find it when our technology advanced to the stage where we were capable of sending probes to our outer solar system—sort of like the monolith buried on the moon in 2001?”
I nodded—not in agreement, but just to indicate I understood the reference. Internally, I was wondering if my father was experiencing confirmation bias or observational selection bias, or one of those other biases I’d learned about in my AP Psychology class. Maybe he was seeing patterns where none really existed.
Then again, maybe not.
“The Europans must have known we wouldn’t be able to resist sending a probe down to investigate its origin—and the moment we did, they suddenly declared war and their intention to kill off our entire species. According to the official story, the aliens never gave us a chance to explain our actions, or negotiate with them. But they didn’t kill us off right away—even though they clearly had the technological means of doing so. No, instead of attacking us, they lured us into some sort of weird arms race. Then they gradually let us close the technological gap between us and them. Over a forty-two-year period. And then this year, they finally decide to invade. Why? Their behavior doesn’t make any sense—unless they’re testing us. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
“We are talking about aliens here,” I reminded him “You can’t impose human logic on alien behavior, right? Why should anything they do make sense to us? Their culture and motives might be … you know, ‘Beyond our human understanding.’ ”
My father shook his head.
“This human understands enough to know when he’s being messed with,” he said. “These aliens have done everything they’ve done to us for a reason—maybe to elicit a reaction. Or to put us in specific kinds of circumstances, to see how we’ll react to them—collectively, as a species.”
“As a test?”
He nodded; then he sat down abruptly without saying another word, like an attorney who had finished delivering his closing argument to a jury, and stared at me, apparently waiting for me to respond, his eyes darting back and forth feverishly, hanging on my reaction.
“What is it you think they’re testing us for? To see how terrified they can make us? To see how difficult we are to kill or enslave?”
“I don’t know, Son,” he said, his voice still calm and even despite his expression. “Maybe they wanted to see how our species would handle itself during an encounter with another intelligent species? A potentially hostile one? That’s one of the classic tropes of science fiction. Aliens are always showing up to put humanity on trial. The Day the Earth Stood Still, Stranger in a Strange Land, Have Spacesuit Will Travel—and a bunch of different Star Trek episodes. The Europans might have a million different motives. On the eighties reboot of the Twilight Zone, there was this one episode, called A Small Talent for War—”
I raised my hand to cut him off.
“But this isn’t science fiction, General,” I said, feeling as if I were the adult in this conversation, while he had assumed the role of the starry-eyed teenager who won’t listen to reason. “This isn’t some Twilight Zone episode. It’s real life, remember?”
“Life imitates art,” he said. “And maybe these particular aliens do, too.” He smiled at me. “Does any of this feel like something that could happen in real life to you? Or do events seem to be unfolding the way they would in a story, or a movie?”