Rieko, 2023
Urs Fischer
Untitled (Hole)
2007
Bronze
200 x 200 x 200 cm
"Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace."
Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost
You can’t break someone who is already broken. But what you can do is add to their pain. So thank you for being that person. You only broke me more than I thought you would, and more than anyone else ever has.
"The reaper had a scythe. I have a combine harvester."
Arlach tapped his fingers nervously. He’d have gladly given up his life for the liberation of his people. A combine harvester (even a deluxe AI driven model) was a pittance compared to that. Still, he didn’t really understand what he was hearing.
“I uh… heard you’re hooking up my strawberry picker to an air defense cannon?”
Hunting
It is unlikely that humans are the only predator species to achieve sapience in the galaxy.
In order to be a successful predator one has to be intelligent enough to learn your prey's movements and be able to think ahead to what they're going to do next but also be flexible enough in your thinking that you can improvise if the situation chances. If you don't have this elasticity, you won't be a very successful predator.
Humans are very successful predators.
****
Greg bent down low and spoke as quietly as he could to the worried Senmites next to him. "I need you to stay as still as you can. I'm going to go around, and try and surprise the Gren guarding the exit."
The three Senmites, caught between wanting to obey Greg and staying silent but also trying to communicate that they thought it was suicide to do so started shaking.
"No, no, it'll be fine. I've been watching him. He's not really paying attention." Greg stood silently and put one finger to his lips, then smiled.
Moving much quieter than one would think given his mass, Greg crept away, hunched down just a little to keep motion out of the tops of the bushes they used to hide. The Senmites watched in horrified fascination as Greg would take a few steps and then freeze, not even breathing while he watched the Gren.
As he walked, he made no noise at all over the soft sand, his feet finding purchase slowly. The Senmites, a small furry prey species from a rocky mountainous world felt very old fears from the most early parts of their brains while watching him hunt the Gren.
The Gren guard was panning slowly as he guarded the exit, his fur flat, his eyes dull and his mouthparts drooping. If one knew a bit about Gren physiology one could easily see that he was bored and tired. His shift wasn't due to end for another 3 demi-cycles and nothing usually ever happened on this exit.
When Greg was no more than 2 meters away, he reached down and picked up a stone, no larger than a comm badge. He raised his arm and in one silent fluid motion, tossed the stone high and far over his head, to hide its origin. It clattered against the wall on the far side of the pen, opposite to where Greg was standing. The noise and motion caught the Gren's eye and his whole body swung over to where the stone landed.
His back was turned to Greg.
Greg bent his legs low building energy and took two steps and lept onto the Gren's back. His higher mass bowled the taller but much lighter Gren over and the Gren's head hit the stone with a hollow thwack.
Greg jumped up off the Gren and checked him quickly. He was dead. Trotting quickly over to where the Senmites were still hiding he motioned for them to follow.
Still terrified, they followed this... ambush predator they were scared of and by the time they reached him, he had gotten the comm out of the Gren's pack and was fiddling with a ring that had complicated studs all around it, fitting them against the door until one clicked and the door hissed open.
Minutes later they were all running across the desert to the canal below where they had hoped to cling to the side of a barge and float to the spaceport.
"Human Greg! Human Greg!" The smallest Senmite called as they jogged down the sandy hill towards the canal.
"What is it Li? Can it wait?"
"That was amazing! I've never seen a human hunt before! Is that how they all do it?"
"Not really? Humans developed as persistence hunters, not ambush hunters, but as you well know, skills can be taught."
"Persistence hunter?"
"Yeah, my ancestors would pick an animal out of a herd and run after it. As long as we didn't overexert ourselves we could just... run until it died."
The three Senmites looked at each other as they jogged. Greg wasn't breathing heavily as they went towards the canal, but all three of them were nearly at their limit and would need a long time to rest when they were safe.
"Human Greg, you scare us." The tallest Senmite looked back at the holding compound and then back at Greg. "But, not as much as we were scared of what the Gren would have done to us."
Greg smiled showing his wide, large, white teeth. "In this world, sometimes you need to be scary." He looked at the canal. "Come on, the water isn't too cold, let's get in and swim towards that barge. It's not too far."
Humans Are Space Orcs: Vestigial Systems Edition
What if aliens don’t have the concept of vestigial systems? And so while they are a much, much older species and their bodies don’t really have cure-alls, when the problem solving thing kicks in, it pretty much just works.
Take the most obvious example for humans: appendixes. The prevailing theory is that it used to be important (like for digestion or immunity), but now we know it’s largely useless. So maybe a human has an appendicitis, they get taken to the med bay, the other humans are a little worried, but not overly so. Alien gets told about it and they flip.
“Human Barbara’s organ has exploded?!”
“Okay, not exactly exploded, but it got all swollen and filled with goo. So they’re taking it out.”
“Human Barbara is having an internal organ permanently removed?!”
“Dude, chill. This happens all the time, no biggie.”
“You are telling me that your internal organs will frequently, and without warning, cease to function entirely?”
“Well, it’s not really ‘cease to function’ per se, ‘cause the appendix doesn’t really do anything. I mean, some scientists think it might? Or like, it did a while ago? But not anymore. We don’t really know anything about it, it’s kinda there.”
“…you have an entire organ inside of your abdomen that simply has no purpose except to malfunction?”
“I mean, yeah, pretty much. It’s called appendicitis.”
“This specific condition happens on such a regular basis that you have a name for it?!”
And maybe even weirder, it’s not just physical stuff. Our social-emotional makeup flaws are responsible for a huge part of humanity’s problems. Our pack-bonding instincts manifest in tons of negative ways, like our nasty habit of “us verses them” conflicts. The fact that we define entire cultures and lifetimes by our dissimilarities is whack.
“Human Bob, I have just heard mention of something called ‘The Crusades.’ What is that?”
“Oh, they were these huge wars that happened during the Middle Ages. Basically it was Muslims and Christians fighting each other for, like, two hundred years over some land that was considered holy.”
“Two groups of humans systematically slaughtered each other for roughly eight generations? Why did they not just share the land?”
“They didn’t want to.”
“I do not understand. Why did they not wish to share?”
“It’s sort of a territorial thing. We don’t like other people near what’s ours. It’s how we survived when we were a developing species, by making groups and fighting off outsiders. That’s why a crew has to do a test run before they get sent out to space. When we first started sending out explorers, we didn’t do that, so lots of missions went to shit because crew members couldn’t handle living together and, in a couple of cases, ended up murdering each other. Pretty bad for PR back then.”
“Humans will become violent if someone they are not pack-bonded with comes near them?”
“Not even near. A lot of colonisation and wars happened because one group didn’t agree with another, so they went out and killed them all.”
“What?!”
“Yeah. Pack-bonding is super super important to us. Human infants will actually die if they don’t get enough physical affection.”
“What?!”
“Uh-huh. Remember when Brian and Steve weren’t talking to each other for a week because Brian’s favourite sports team lost to Steve’s? We don’t even have to belong to a group to get crazy about it.”
“…I must go update the Human Interactions Manual.”
I forget who I am sometimes
Then I remember
All I am is pathetic
A waste of space
I am nothing
ONE of the most important rules of the Galactic Federation concerns humanity. If a human ever says “Hold my beer”, either stop them, or run.
Two of the most recognized human warships have never fired a shot in anger. Their mere appearance once stopped a genocidal war, and they have been invited on peacekeeping missions simply based on reputation.
The ships’ names:
UNS Fuck Around And Find Out
UNS Hold My Beer
“Sir, there’s a ship approaching!”
“Name?”
“UNS Talk Shit Get Hit, sir.”
“Right, so, we will be abandoning this course of action posthaste—”
My favorite “humans are space orcs” idea is that trope where aliens kidnap some humans for their zoo, except it ends up like Jurassic Park. And the poor Alien Humanologists who were invited to the park are like:
“You mean you locked up a pack of curious, highly competitive persistence predators with NO enrichment in the enclosure? You FOOLS! If you had bothered to throw a basketball or half a box of Legos in there, KE-X9 would still be alive!
“Well of course they climbed the retaining wall! Did you think to study their evolutionary lineage AT ALL?”
The humans would find a way to use the basketball and legos to escape. I mean one time a guy somehow escaped from a prison in Mexico without breaking any laws so his escape would be legal so honestly given enough time the Jurassic park situation is inevitable.
Jurassic Park would be awesome, but now that I think about it I also kind of love love the idea of humans as the alien zoo equivalent of those octopuses that climb out of their tanks and wander around taste-testing other exhibits or throwing sub-par shrimp at handlers.
Like they’re totally unable to figure out what’s happening because the cameras keep going out, but every night things get moved, or stolen, exhibits are disappearing, WHAT IS GOING ON, they’ve moved facilities twice and it’s still happening, are they haunted, are the ancestors angry, WHAT IS HAPPENING!?
And then a weary humanologist is all ‘… your humans are getting out’.
“That is impossible.”
“They’re getting out.”
“That enclosure is COMPLETELY SECURE.”
“And yet somehow they’re getting out.”
“THE HUMANS ARE NOT GETTING OUT.”
“Oh yeah? I bet you twenty glarks they’re getting out. Stay after closing time with me and I’ll show you.”
*next day*
“… the humans were getting out.”
“… why did they keep going back in, then?!”
(In a deeply embarrassed mumble) “They said they weren’t going to escape until they finished their behavioural experiments. Uh. On us.”
satans-knitwear