Visitors come to London and explore their new home. Although, trying to remain inconspicuous has disastrous consequences for the Kin. Are they aliens? or almost human?

It feels good to finally be visible. Ever since we landed a few months ago, we have been unseeable, although not through any magic of our own. The humans simply decided that we were too improbable to be real. Hiding in plain sight we went unnoticed, people saw us arrive but thought nothing of it. Perhaps they thought we were foreign. We moved among them unseen, they only saw what they expected to see. It was easy to appropriate human-ness, after a little practice of course, almost like slipping on a different coat. We didn’t even try to hide home-ship. We left it where we landed, many people saw it, but it is never difficult to convince them to forget, to unsee.

It was a long journey, to get here from our home planet, so long that we can’t fully remember why we left. Overpopulation, dwindling resources. Only the vaguest memories remain. All we know for sure is that hundreds of us woke from a period of stasis on what we now call home-ship with random coordinates punched into the flight deck. Many of us had never been up to see it, space that is, despite the day trips on our home planet that would take you up into orbit for an almost reasonable price. Now we had unlimited time to contemplate the view.

I think we drifted, not through an inability to fly the ship, but through a collective numbness at the situation we found ourselves in. We moved through the ship in a mindless fog, just shuffling along. As homeship drifted we could see planets and stars through the windows, some far, some close, but never close enough to reach. We sent out some drones to the closest ones but the distance was still too far. Several times we received signals when we passed particularly close to a world, quickly we learned these were warning signals after several of our drones were destroyed.

Eventually, there was a planet of average size from which we could detect activity. They didn’t know we were there. By now we were beyond hoping for help, beyond wishing for a new planet we could call home, by now we were merely curious. One of our last fully functioning drones was sent into the planet’s atmosphere to collect data. What it brought back delivered us from the temporary existence we had been leading on home-ship, it restarted our lives.

I would introduce myself in the human way, but I can’t. Our society functions as one entity. There is no I, or me, only us. We are as worker ants in a colony, all members subservient to the whole. Our new home, however, brought about changes in our society, I’s and me’s developed as a by-product of our life here, so instead of an introduction, I will simply tell you our story. Perhaps you will understand.

When the drone returned to home-ship, it was filled with images and footage of the planet we were now tentatively hovering over. Knowledge of the drone’s return spread as a susurration through our collective consciousness. As one, we absorbed the images from the drone and let them flicker behind our eyes. Too many images to count, too much information to comprehend. After our long confinement in space, we wept with joy to see such life. As each image appeared in our mind’s eye, it felt as if we were being filled up. We had been empty, so much so that we ached inside from want. But these images were changing that, they had a richness to them that made us feel… different. The ache was going away, we felt a warmth inside us that hadn’t been felt in a long time. We saw colours, red and yellow and grey and green, so much blue! There were so many creatures, hairy ones and smooth ones, some with hide so thick it couldn’t be pierced. They were all engaged in such fantastic activity we could hardly believe our eyes. It wasn’t until later that we learned what it was that we saw, trees and flowers, the sea, buildings and animals and humans of all kinds.

At the sight of such beautiful scenes, our curiosity towards the planet soon turned to desire. From this point on it became our mission to reach this planet. We sent as many drones as we could and even managed to send a few manned ships to bring back as much information as possible. Each time a drone returned, we fed off the information it brought like addicts. There was so much life and colour in the image that our collective mind was almost overcome with desire. After so long living in the confines of home-ship, we were desperate for new experiences. Soon we learned the name the bipedal creatures gave this planet. The place that had so captured our mind. Earth.

I don’t remember when the decision was made, that we would land the main ship of our fleet on Earth. At some point it just became known. Finally, we would descend on the world we felt we knew, the videos and images had almost become a part of our own memories. The hollowness that had characterised our time on home-ship was being fixed somehow. It wasn’t disappearing, but the information from Earth was helping the hollowness feel less cavernous. The actual descent took almost no time, we glided gently down through the atmosphere. We had meticulously planned where we would set down, at the southern edge of an island in a small archipelago. The small expanse of water separating the island from a larger expanse of land gave us comfort somehow. A watery barrier to protect us while we were ‘finding our feet’.
The humans saw us, saw us quite clearly I’m sure, they thought we were a solar eclipse. It was even reported in the news. A freak planetary event that no scientist had predicted, they convinced themselves that it couldn’t have possibly been a spaceship in the sky. After all, if you see a giant floating object covering the sun, you’re not going to believe it. You’ll convince yourself you didn’t see it, that it was, in fact, something very ordinary and explainable. We didn’t even need to try.

We landed in an ugly place, it is ugly to us now we have seen so much more, but back then it was so beautiful to our eyes. There were empty warehouses and deserted docks, the very air heavy with abandonment and filth. It was awful. It was wonderful. We peered cautiously out at the world that we now found ourselves in. A hopeful thought passed through our mind. Could this place be our new home?

To begin with, we only left home-ship singly. It was easier to convince the humans that way. That they didn’t see us for what we really are, that we were one of them. I watched those early forays through the collective mind in a frenzy of awe and fear. Only daring to breathe when we were all safely back in home-ship. I watched our kin walk among the humans, tentatively at first. But we soon learned how to walk like them. Slipping on the human clothing was so easy. Talking like them took a little longer to get right, but it still wasn’t long before humans no longer gave us a second glance. It wasn’t long until they started treating us like we belonged. There was one thing, however, the humans did without thinking that shocked us to our core.

They touched each other.

Humans would greet each other with handshakes, take leave of each other with hugs, even just chatting they would casually touch each other’s arms. For us, we never have to say hello or goodbye. We are forever connected via our collective mind and are safe in the knowledge that we are never alone. The collective mind acts as a warm glow that forms a connection so tangible you can almost touch it. At all times you can feel the minds of those you are connected to. It’s not like mind-reading. Don’t jump to that conclusion. The collective mind of the kin is subtle, we share the essence of each other. We feel each other’s happiness, our pain, every feeling we have is felt collectively. We may be individual in body, but in mind, we are as one. Among the kin, touch is sacred. Touch is reserved for times of great joy or great sorrow, times when the collective mind must be strengthened to help us share at an even deeper level. I was too young to have been in a unity ceremony before we left our home and to see the humans grabbing at each other so freely deeply unsettled me.

When I first left home-ship, I was afraid. I had practised appearing human at first glance, but if a person were to scratch the surface of my disguise they would soon see straight through and know me for what I am. A fraud. A trickster. I walked with my new hands thrust deep into my pockets, unable to contemplate swinging them freely, terrified of an accidental touch.

And so, I walked. Skin hidden in pockets and under layers of clothing, body coiled to protect me. I walked and I walked, my constant anxiety sending ripples of unease through the kin; I walked until my body ached, drooping with exhaustion. I allowed my body to relax from its tense position. That is the moment that I felt it, something warm and wriggly was suddenly resting in my hand. I looked down and saw the scared face of a lost child, his hand in mine, desperately hoping that I was a responsible adult that would help him find his parents. All I could do was scream.

Gradually, more of us left home-ship in a slow but steady stream. Each day more of us took that terrifying step from ship to ground. After my first disastrous trip into the city, I was so nervous on my second trip, all I could do was stare. The buildings, the cars, the people. One human saw me staring and called me a freak. At first, I thought they had seen me, had really seen me. But they kept walking and I realised they only saw what they wanted to see; a strange human who hadn’t yet learned that staring was rude.

After that, I made sure to not look at the people directly, but I needn’t have bothered. For the most part, they didn’t want to see anything around them, they were content to ignore the world which ignored them back. When I walked the streets I felt like the only one awake to the world. The people had numbed themselves so they didn’t need to feel the sharp assault of other people or situations they didn’t like. I noticed this lack of seeing at its strongest when there was a human sitting against the wall, wrapped in blankets and usually with a cardboard sign. It was suddenly as if that space on the ground didn’t exist. As they walked, the humans would look nowhere, but they especially wouldn’t look at that empty space on the ground.

The humans still wouldn’t see home-ship. We had been on Earth for some weeks by then and we were still hiding easily in plain sight. Although occasionally a human would do a double-take when walking in the area. They always convinced themselves they saw nothing. By now, we had grown quite comfortable in the company of humans. We were able to walk among them with ease, share a few words without raising suspicion. The braver among us would strike up random conversations with people in queues, or on the bus. A favourite topic for these impromptu conversations was the weather. Some of our older kin were fond of sharing their life story, an imaginary life story that is. They invented tales of the life on Earth they wish they had to fill the vacuum that was created when we left our old lives behind. Some were even walking around with ‘Free hugs’ written on cardboard to force themselves to practice interacting, but they would quickly throw the sign away when humans actually took up the offer.

We were getting comfortable on Earth. We liked it here. And besides, we were no longer sure if we could get home-ship back in the air.

The decision was made.

We would stay on Earth.

The act of becoming an individual was hard for us, terrifying, in fact. We are one! But if Earth was to be our permanent home, then we would each have to develop a self, a persona, that could be presented to the human world.

Daily, we would go out into the world to practice our human lives, we developed our life stories. I had only just begun to work on mine when a lonely old man on a bus started asking me many questions, who I was, where I was from. These innocent questions threw me into disarray and in a fog of fear and exhilaration, I improvised. I’m from a small village in Wales, I told him, hoping the accent I now affected was convincing. Didn’t get on with my parents, I said, so I came to London to make my fortune! The old man nodded, I didn’t know what at, so I nodded too, hoping my story made sense. It seemed like he would ask more questions, ones that I didn’t have an answer to, ones I wasn’t skilled enough to improvise. Cutting him off, I abruptly stood, my stop, I said. The old man stopped his question before it left his mouth and settled for a nod and a smile instead.

As I got off the bus, I felt the strength and comfort of my kin through our collective mind. We were learning through each other’s experiences and already, others in the field were refining their human techniques based on my bus encounter. Our growing skill at independence had its drawbacks, however. Many of the older kin struggled to adjust to their new aloneness and began to forget themselves. Unused as they were to looking after themselves as individuals, they neglected to eat. They stopped going out and took to spending time alone in dark corners of home-ship. Some lashed out if we tried to reach out to them, they had withdrawn so far from the collective that our camaraderie felt like an attack. We left them alone. We thought it was best to allow these few elders to have time to learn individuality as the rest of us were doing.

But as it turns out, that was the wrong decision to make.

Eventually, three of the elders retreated so far from our reach that we could do nothing to save them. They forgot how to breathe. Alone and in the dark, their loneliness suffocated them.

We were broken. Never before had we had to cope with a terrible loss of any of our kin in such a futile way. We were immobilised with shock. We retreated to home-ship to cope with our losses, to absorb the shock and find comfort in us. After months of practising to be Me, it was a relief to return to the warmth of Us.

Despite being reunited as a collective, the grief threatened to swamp us. We needed a way to reinforce the collective once again, to remind us that even as individuals we were still connected. The only thing that we could do to bring every individual back to us was a unity ceremony, our first on Earth.

We sat in circles, ring upon ring of kin gathered in the biggest space in home-ship. A deep breath passed through the seated bodies as we reached up and clasped the forearms of those on either side of us. Electrified by the physical connection, our collective mind soared. Our bodies began to pulse and move in unison as the collective soared in our minds, rebuilding bridges we had thought lost. Together we moved, our individual selves forgotten as we became kin once again.

Time passed uninterrupted as we recovered from individuality. The empty spaces in the collective mind that were once occupied by our lost kin were dark cavities into which we could not see. We blamed ourselves. We blamed ourselves for the neglect of our kin, neglect which was the direct cause of their deaths. So wrapped up in our mission of creating individuality, we forgot to nurture the collective. Eventually, we got used to the gaps in our conscious, but the guilt we felt never went away and the gaps remained dark and brooding for a long time. After a while we got used to them, they served as a reminder. That no matter how things are in the human world, the collective must come first, otherwise we would not survive.

We were whole once again. But, in the recesses of our mind, we knew that an individual Self was vital to successfully navigate the human world. The world that we wanted to join. Despite being fully together again, we took the time to cultivate our individual selves while safely nestled within the collective. The proximity served as a reminder that we were not alone, it gave us courage in the face of our independence.

Becoming me took a long time to get used to. In the beginning, I kept getting muddled, especially with the Welsh accent which I eventually had to abandon. I would use the wrong phrases, the wrong pronouns. But I practised and I practised until I was truly able to become me, to slip into that persona whenever I needed. It became almost as easy as breathing. At this point, I and many others were finally ready to face the human world again. We had to reintroduce ourselves slowly, re-insinuate ourselves after our long absence. I left home-ship after so long an internment and felt at home. Expertly, I navigated conversations and scenarios, no human was able to see what I really was. Sometimes, an astute person would look at me with a tilted head and narrowed eyes. I would look right back at them and see the moment in their eyes when they convinced themselves they were wrong. I had even found myself a place to stay for nights away from home-ship, my flatmates had no clue. It was easy for them to unsee what I really was, for their eyes to skim over the parts of me they didn’t understand. And after all, by now I was more human than they were. We are still the Collective, but now, we are almost human.

We stopped hiding home-ship. Finally, when humans walked past, instead of doing a double-take at the not quite empty space, they saw a building. A huge building of glass with a pyramid on the top. They would walk past and decide that the building must have always been there. The other ships that had been floating around Earth’s orbit, filled to the brim with more of our kin began to descend, slotting themselves in until we formed a neat urban jungle, reaching for a sky that was no longer our home. The humans watched us colonising the spit of land, filled with water and warehouses, abandoned for so long. Convinced as they were that it wasn’t really ships coming down from the sky, the humans unconsciously invented a history for us. We are now known as Canary Wharf, apparently, we’ve become rather well known.