Job Interview
Round peg in round hole. Square peg in square. Triangle in triangle. It easily accomplishes these simple tasks. The aliens in the room make a joyful noise in unison. One of them picks up the candidate and turns it around in space, examining its features. The candidate responds almost flirtatiously by adopting a flattering camouflage matching the skin coloration of that particular alien. Tentacles graze bodies, graze tentacles, assessing. Neither the interviewer nor the candidate is physically shy. A lot of touch is happening both ways. The alien’s skin is fuschia with dark blue ocelli, eyespots like the tessellated patterns on peacock feathers. Moments after these spots change their color on the alien’s body, they start to change color on the candidate’s body. The candidate is clearly doing the best it can to match the interviewer with its chromatophores. It’s a pretty good match. All the aliens in the room release an ecstatic coo. It’s a sort of electronic whistle with a metallic grating sound mixed in. The interview is clearly going astonishingly well.
Humans have already been removed from the earth. It happened with a swiftness and an efficiency that would have been unimaginable to the bumptious bipedal ones. They had been sure the universe held a special “forever love” for them. Humans had been helped long ago by these same visitors. A little tinkering in the genes had allowed the primates to achieve dominion over this planet. But lately things had not been going so well. That was obvious enough to any outside observer with any degree of impartiality. So now the planet was getting a mulligan. A do-over. And today was interview day.
The aliens put the candidate back into its aquarium and conferred. It didn’t take long to decide. The fact that each tentacle had its own brain. The highest brain-to-body ratio of any invertebrate. The aliens approved of the fact that the ocean was its home, potentially sheltering the species from extinction events that would occur long after they had departed and left earth to its own devices again. They discussed the facility with which the candidate solved its maze challenges, remarked on its tool use, and heaped praise on its surprising deftness and imagination in building structures with the materials at hand. It didn’t take long to come to a decision. The genetic upgrade was planned and begun. This candidate clearly had the right stuff. Octopus would be promoted. The aliens began gathering up the select number of the various species and giving them a range of genetic upgrades. It gave the aliens a good feeling of being nurturers. Some of them had felt bad for having had to extinguish a dominant species gone bad. These aliens now felt warm fuzzies in making of the sea (filled with so much human garbage! disgusting!) a new nursery.
And the aliens blessed the octopi and said unto them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” The air would be purer every day. The climate change challenge was no longer a challenge. The Doomsday Clock would keep that ridiculous hour frozen on its face for only a few centuries and then crumble to nothing. This planet was on new time. Earth was still violent, but now in a more manageable way. Octopi found their capacity for abstract thought greatly enhanced. Joy blossomed through their many brains. They loved exploring the bits of the land closest to the ocean now. It was much safer these days. Language would begin soon and develop in earnest. This time it started in a tactile form, as a series of objects arranged on the sea floor.
And the aliens saw all that they had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning — a new day. They had a good feeling as they left the earth, even better than the optimism they had felt the last time they had visited this solar system. “Sometimes it just takes a while to find the right one for the job,” one of them opined. And those present all joined in a vociferous round of assent, which in their language sounded rather like a bunch of metal fold-out chairs dropped from a great height and hitting the earth. As they drew away from earth in their craft, they watched the little blue and green marble shrink to a dot, and then nothing, the nothingness of interstellar space, as they picked up speed and entered the wormhole being maintained by several grumpy aliens (everybody hated this job). They went into the wormhole highway and it closed behind them. The quietness of earth’s solar system after that would have been noticeable, remarkable, had there been anyone around capable of noticing it or remarking upon it. But that would have to wait.
