#anthropomorphic problem

In movies, books, and stories written the world over, science fiction has captured the minds and imaginations of countless people. Telling of new technologies, new civilizations, and new wonders it has given humanity a way to try to explore the universe before we get there.

That's the problem though, isn't it? That we're trying to explore something that we really don't even understand yet, and we're projecting only what we can imagine onto something we can't.

We're bound to be wrong.

And were we ever.

The problem's root comes from the fact that everything we could conceive was based on what we already knew. It is difficult to imagine a creature without analogue on earth, which is quite a testament to Earth's biology, but also to our inability to leap beyond extrapolation. We, quite simply put, lacked the imaginative ability to leap.

So when... They? It? The best pronoun probably doesn't exist in any language on Earth because they (we're going to go with that) don't exist here. Well, didn't. They do now, although we're still not sure if 'here' even has any meaning for them, or if they have a concept of position.

The arrival event was easy to identify, even if it isn't easy to describe. There were no ships, no radar contact, no offensive act, and no warning. All that humanity can agree on was a sudden sense of... Companionship? It was like a sudden feeling that a friend came home from a long time away, and moved in next door.

As you can imagine, fear spread like nothing else ever has. When five billion people all feel the same thing at the same time, you don't get the opportunity to defend. Controlling media and communication doesn't work because people aren't relying on that to spread their panic anymore. You can't tell people it isn't happening, because their own experience says otherwise.

Everyone has a first-hand account, and every spin doctor on the planet was utterly useless.

After a week, you could colour the earth with one of two colours: calm, pleasant acceptance would be in blue, and chaos, fire, and anarchy would be in red. The global map was a patchwork quilt of hot and cold like it came out of a paintball arena.

It took a long time for things to settle down, but they haven't left. Individual experiences differ now, almost as though different groups share a Friend, with geography being no obstacle to how these groups were selected.

We've come to accept it, that there's nothing we can do. With acceptance comes a certain amount of happiness.

What options do you have when an entity with no concept of a border arrives? We were never consulted, and we never consented to this.