With Katsuro at our side, and even more importantly his daughter, that bright future began to seem like a true possibility. Having been put through so many institutions and having spent so much time on the street she knew a great many humans who needed our help, help that we were more than glad to give. Once again I lost track of time but this time from staying busy, not due to inactivity. It was still my job to oversee the ship and to make sure that our people could be put into the temporary symbiont bodies at a pace that could keep up with the demand. It was seven years after we landed that we built the temple at Taiji. At first it was a cleverly designed facade to hide the new machines we had built to help our souls disembark from the ship’s data banks and for the place that I rested, overseeing the work. By the ten year mark we no longer needed the facade as virtually all of Taiji was either melded or sympathetic human. Slowly, over the next two decades, we began to come out of the shadows in which we’d remained hidden for so long.
By year thirty after arrival nearly two thirds of the population of our island nation of Japan had been joined. Amongst those who were not most either dispelled the notion as modern fairy tale or saw us as some kind of benevolent spirits. We began to feel safe. How could the world deny us the basic right of existence if there were already millions of us?
As we continued our spread over the next decade, now far beyond the borders of our island with communities in over sixty nations, many more humans began to take the entire idea more seriously. You see they’d never been able to verify anything physically. They’d never found our ship or any of our technology and after a couple of days inside a human body the symbiont dissolved leaving no forensic trace that it was ever there. For years what had been seen as some mass delusion, conspiracy theory, or perhaps even a new-age cult began to warrant more thorough investigation. Finally, after decades of going largely unnoticed we were thrust into the spotlight when a government report out of France confirmed that there was indeed an alien takeover occurring on Earth. Details were sparse but over the years we managed to piece together data indicating that they’d been tracking a family of sympathizers and had kidnapped and experimented on them immediately after they'd undergone the meld. They presented the world with a body, the body of one of our symbionts, and worse still with a method of detecting, chemically, the after effects of the joining which could apparently remain in the body for several months or even years after the process completed.
Without the slightest warning we were thrust, on a very personal level, into the exact sort of human conflict that we had so desperately sought to bring to an end. Japan was ours, there was no denying that. We made up the vast majority of the population and at least half of those who weren’t one of us still sided with us. South Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Hawaii, Australia and most of the Pacific islands were with us as well, having large populations of our kind and many of them holding political power. I asked Hiro, my most trusted friend who was, by that point, beginning to show his age, to take office as Prime Minister and he did so dutifully. In an address to the United Nations he stood in front of glaring eyes and revealed, in detail, who we were, how long we had been on Earth, and what our future plans were.
As I watched data streaming in from all corners of the globe via the internet I could not believe what I was witnessing. For many the reaction was predictable, terror. Countless feared the end of days as predicted by their ancient, and I might add preposterous, religious beliefs. Many more simply wished to kill all of us for fear that we complete our “invasion” and that not a single human remain alive. Being as diverse as humans are, however, the reactions were not all so negative. Many were concerned for the people who’d already been joined. They wished to avoid violence so as not to harm them. Others accepted our explanation that we were simply refugees, a species who’s planet had suffered a catastrophe and who’d had to flee for their lives. I wish we could have given them more, but our computer records and personal memories told us little beyond the fact that we had been forced from our world. Still more were simply curious about us. We set up websites and telephone lines to answer questions and whenever our own kind called in with concerns we told them the same thing, the humans are your neighbors, answer their questions as truthfully as you can. Strangest of all was the fact that we were flooded with an equal amount of hate mail and requests to be joined.
Television feeds filled up with war rhetoric, talk shows about the “alien next door” and religious proclamations that the end of the world was drawing near. It was only their curiosity and their compassion for those they already knew, personally, that kept humanity from tearing us apart. The intense hatred and fear of a few drove them to madness. Mass suicides, unlawful militias, bombings...but in the end it all died down. We revealed to the Earth that a large percentage of its human population was inhabited by alien minds and they made a huge racket for a decade or two but ideals change, beliefs shift and before you know it we were just part of the landscape. Incredible how hard it is to hate the man next door who cuts your grass when you’re on vacation and has a great barbecue every other weekend. The peace endured.
It endured for one hundred and forty seven years after our public announcement in front of the U.N. We found hosts for all of our people. I still remember when they came to tear down the disembarkation equipment at the temple in Taiji. There I was, just sitting on a stone pedestal in an empty ship, a relic of the past. Oh I’d not been forgotten, in fact I’d been included in ceremonial happenings from time to time via a nifty holographic body they’d developed for me. My people had been surprised when I’d asked to stay in Taiji. I told them to bring me up to the ground floor and tear down the walls so that I could see the ocean. They happily obliged, especially since I’d finally given in to their long-time requests to tap into the Stellix so as to provide enough energy for all of the world, as a sign of goodwill.
As more time passed we discovered that if two joined individuals conceived a child with their human bodies that their offspring would have the same traits as any joined individual. Our march toward a unified “us” seemed to be unstoppable. One lesson we should have learned, however, is that humans are most unpredictable when backed into a corner. Doing so was never our intent, but that is how it was perceived.
Of the nine billion souls on planet Earth over eighty percent of them were joined. That left twenty percent of the most bigoted, most terrified and most hostile people around feeling like they were on the endangered species list. For decades they’d come from all across the globe to the deserts of northern Africa and the middle east, places where they thought we held little interest. People of all ethnics groups, those who would never have dreamed of cooperating before, now forged a new alliance and began to radicalize the nation-states that they held. New science, made available through the slow distribution of technology from our archives, what remained of them, had allowed for simple tests to determine who was pure human, who was melded, who was the child of melded parents or even who possessed any melded blood whatsoever. The world, content, well fed, educated, healthy and peaceful watched as they used that science to round up our kind. They exiled them at best, imprisoned them most often, and executed them at worst. Had they simply asked for a place where our kind would never set foot we would have gladly given it to them. The struggle, however, was more of an internal rather than an external one. We could promise to stay away, but that would never stop the small minority among their own population who sought to be joined. It terrified them, and us, like the humans before us had become complacent. We let it happen. I damn myself to this day for letting it happen for as long as it did. What began as harassment and imprisonment gave way to systematic genocide. The others would not act, but I'd had enough.
Chapter Six