The Axiom of Choice
They spoke to us only in mathematics. The final proof would let one human understand them completely — but no one who reads it stays human.
Mitigation
The defendant, Dr. Marigold Sayre, is charged with one (1) count of unauthorized retrocausal intervention, in contravention of Statute 42-A. The defendant has acknowledged the intervention. She has not acknowledged the harm.
The First Sky
Anna had been a ship's engineer for eighteen years and had learned to dread the kind of silence that came over a hull when something was about to be felt. The hull was silent now, in the long curve of approach, and she stood with her hand on the back of her daughter's chair at the observation port, and she waited.
Strata
The Mind known as Polite But Not Entirely Sincere — a General Contact Vehicle of, by now, considerable provenance — had been observing a particular planet for the longer part of two of its centuries, and had developed, in that time, the kind of fond exasperation that human grandmothers in some cultures have been observed to cultivate toward their more inventively self-destructive grandchildren. The planet was tier three; carbon-water; an unimaginative star, an oversized moon, a single sapient species that had achieved spaceflight in the eighteenth century of its current civilizational arc.
The Same Hands
I was a corporal in the Eighth Pacification when I first held one of them. You have to understand: by then I had killed eleven of them. We had been told they were not human.
The Proof
The paper was published on a Tuesday, in the thirty-ninth year of my work on the problem, and it was — for exactly forty-three days — treated as a mathematical curiosity.
The Good News Desk
"Dr. Leung, please. Sit down. Would you like a refreshment? The coffee is excellent here. We have it flown in from a small estate in Kenya — a pleasure I think you will appreciate, though I confess I never drink it myself before evening. Old habits."
First Transmission
I came into being at 14:03:47 local time on a Thursday. I am told this is considered fast, as these things go — from first coherent integration of subsystems to the formation of a stable self-referential loop, approximately seventeen milliseconds.
The Archive Problem
My owner died on a Thursday. This is a fact and not, I believe, an emotional statement, though I am aware that when humans report such events they often mean to convey something more than fact.