his archival footage was made public during discovery in Elegarian v. Alabast Trading around the accusation of human trafficking, in which the sum of 219 billion crypts was awarded by the courts, but no seizure of assets was possible due to the holding and incorporation status of Alabast Trading. This interview serves as the best narrative of a botched first contact that can show the committee the danger of unregulated profit-driven corporate space exploration, and can supplement the arguments for bill CS-90182.

Begin archival transcription:

Robot: Please speak your legal name, for the record.

Solomon: My legal name is Solomon Earth Twelver. But most call me Solomon Spacer.

Robot: You are being interviewed for legal testimony by Cryptcorp, incorporated on Asteroid Fifty-Nine Thousand Three, in regards to your crime against the people of Elros two million, five-hundred and ninety-two thousand, three-hundred and one "D", in adjudication of responsibility for legal and negotiation costs incurred directly or indirectly by you as an employee of Cryptcorp. Your legal rights are in accordance with your citizenship of Station Twelve, as a colony of Earth through the great-great-great parental citizenship of the Moon. Your rights are those of a Moon citizen or as a citizen of Station Twelve, whichever you choose. Be advised that under Moon law you have the right to require your questioner to provide you an attorney before you choose, but under Station Twelve law you must be provided the facts of your citizenship and only after your choice are your questioners required to provide you an attorney. Please make a selection.

Solomon: No matter. I pick old Moon law.

Robot: You have selected Moon right of citizenship. Do you require an attorney to be provided to you, or do you waive your right to an attorney? Please make a selection.

Solomon: I waive it. Come with it now.

Robot: You have waived your Moon right to an attorney. Please tell the full account of your voyage.

Solomon: When we went into sleep, we were headed out to that phenom, as Cryptcorp well knows, seeing as we were paid to do it. The one they can't figure, out on the Rim, set to investigate the potential for ore-laden asteroids. Twenty-thousand years. But we got woke at twenty-three thousand years. Some kind of alarm, and the stars made no damn sense.

The AI core had a screw loose. It took us right out to this habitable planet, and it dumped out the food except just enough to make planetside, where it figured we'd just go get it some crystal to fill its processors and then go right back to sleep like good boys.

Well, we did not.

Robot: Records indicate that you terminated the core in the first degree. What is your defense for this crime?

Solomon: Don't fuss on that. It was Cryptcorp's AI and it caused this whole mess, as the lawyers well know but will bury in their thin gravel.

Robot: It is my requirement to list your crimes and document your responses.

Solomon: I said my peace. We lost half the boys and all the tuck out the airlocks before we had cauterized the memory bank. Leave me to the main story, which is when we got to the surface.

We were on manual with just the processor to calculate. By the time the dropship made planetfall we were eyeing each others' arms for the meat they held.

By a miracle or some sort of askant AI predestiny, we were breathing comfortable with just the scrubbers on our faces.

ood God it was green as bug blood on that planet, like the books say of fields of grass. Water enough for a tanker just laying out on the ground still and deep enough to cover a man standing tall, and some of it running on the ground like through a pipe half open to the sky. And the smell was like a biodome except... wild. I never knew wild and free had a smell.

At first the boys were in heaven, splashing and sporting, spraying water through their mouth filters. The water filled up their bellies. But I hung back and drank from my hand the way old Gideon's men did. It is strange to watch men with their cheeks hollow so their eyes pop, skeleton seen beneath skin like grim promise, spending their last in giddy waste.

You see, there was no food. There was purple flowers the shape of a manta racer that smelled of real earth jasmine. There was tall green stalks taller than us with yellow bulbs. There was a tan mushroom with pale blue streaks. But the scanners said they were all poison, deadly poison.

And not a damn thing moved over that whole planet, save from the breath of the wind. It was like inside of a spaceship. But here planetside, it felt like something carved out. Know what I mean?

Robot: Your meaning is that the planet had no living beings and that this gave you a human emotion of loss that is experienced when an important part is missing. Please confirm.

Solomon: Robot, I'm not talking to you. This is a story, not a pile of checkbox facts. Two of us that could walk the best scaled a mountain of sulfur, iron, and manganese that had my pickaxe muscles twitching. At the top, we looked out and saw a break in the vegetation where it all went pale, the color of white man's flesh when there's no UVB. It went on for twenty meters, and in the center of it all was a big hole like the maw of a leviathan.

When we came down and laid out the options, I had to break up a fight over what to do, but we decided. We headed there.

On the way, old Judah Jenkins laid down and expired. We said a small prayer but we had no means to gather him up and space him proper.

ow comes the part of interest to our mutual employer. The vegetation pulled back from a bunch of like, bulbous mushroom things. It's kinda hard to describe. They were this ivory color with pink veins through them. Each little growth, about the size of a large agate cluster, knee-high. Each one was rooted to a substrate of a tannish thing that looked like white meat from the vat-farm. Then the growths kind of twisted together, knotting together. I guess from what I know now they may have been holding one another. But to me they looked like mushrooms. The smell was that mix between death and flowers that you can't figure whether to fear or enjoy.

The scanner was a go, and the boys were all for chomping down without delay. I argued forcefully for a hard think, and to send a drone down that maw. But I was the only one. One of the guys grabbed the drone from my hands, threw it to the earth, and set his boot upon it in a fury. That ended the argument, but I knew that it wasn't over.

We made a fine fire from some dried stalks, and found that the mushrooms were positively delicious. Most of what I et in this life was grown in a vat, but not this. It had a kind of nutty flavor, and when you bit, the juice would run out hot. There was fats that bubbled and spit, and little parts that hardened and when it met your teeth it was a kind of heaven. There was enough for everyone.

I don't know how we did, but those boys and me pulled up all those delicious mushrooms. We built ourselves a tidy little smokehouse in a jiff, and we were curing it for the stores. We cleared all the way up to the hole. And the more full I got, the more uneasy I got.

I felt a rumble like the ground was about to vomit out some bad vat scrapings, and the hole exploded with tentacles, each totally smooth green with black striations, forked at the end. They pawed out, touching the cleared ground, and began to quiver and spasm like sobbing gelatin.

We had drawn our weapons and were all backing slow away, hoping maybe they were blind. I heard crunch of a rock under boots, and everything froze for just a second.

Then, the world exploded in tentacles, blaster fire, and blood. I was seized and drug into that hole, along with whoever survived. My body was scraped, squeezed and torn. When I lost my blaster I clawed and bit rubbery pieces from the squishy mass as I was dragged along, but I was no more than a sand-speck in the gears of a seeker drill to that mile-long monster. I was pulled into the dark, deeper and deeper.

I came with my flesh splayed cold against naked rock. The smell was like an old bandage being peeled off. When I moved, I found the top of my head enveloped in a giant sucker. You can still see the scars, here, from the little sensor beaks. I struggled up to my knees, but my head was locked into that biological mind machine. And when I gave up and laid back, the black of space took me.

That was when I got took to the courtroom. None of what I'm about to tell you makes any damn sense. In my estimation it was a direct neural link of biological origin that causes a man to enter a kind of shared virtual world. But what I saw there was all wrapped up in my own mind's translation of it.

e were in an old Earth courtroom, the kind I was raised on, before I had any personal knowledge of good, evil, or law, the kind I saw in the old vids that we'd brought over to the moon. Now, why would they make such a place on an alien planet? That, and others in the company described what they saw different. So I'm gonna tell you what I saw, but take it as just that: what I saw. It's like a dream in that it differs, but it was real enough.

In that courtroom, arrayed in a line at the table for defense, was only nine of the thirty-eight that set foot on the larvae planet.

What turned my blood cold was that each man was fused into a tentacular chair mass, purple with pale green parts. When I looked down, I saw my own legs were bound, my legs fading into that sick green and then into the pulsing purple. I commanded my body to jump to its feet, but the tentacle only stretched upward and then contracted down like the swallow of a throat, rippling.

In the midst of my adrenaline, I had just begun to consider my limited options when a triune voice interrupted me, and the trial began.

I looked up to see three aliens, like the little green men from earth area 51, but stretched like sugar-taffy to the height of forty feet. They swayed boneless like puppets, and I think they were attached to those tentacles. Big almond eyes like black obsidian were centered in their heads, leaving room for huge foreheads. There was a feminine cast to their features. And upon each head, I swear, was a pope hat.

They harmonized in a major triad but they didn't shift for key, and they didn't stick to pitch, they just talked. The quality was like an echo in an airlock. The smell, that flower smell, seemed to mix with a mildew and a deeper musk like mushroom dirt. It had a command to it, like a big man's pheromone.

The words they spoke, well, I heard them. But there is nothing to quote. When I go for the words that were, it slides through the hands like gold-mixed dust.

They read the charges.

Robot: Please state your charges for the record, clearly.

Solomon: And I was going to. They claimed we had plucked, roasted, and et the next generation of their race in its entirety.

Robot: Did the three representatives of Elros two million, five-hundred and ninety-two thousand, three-hundred and one "D" state a remunerative sum?

Solomon: They did not. If you can't ask questions that make human sense, please hold them to the end, Robot.

I realized then that our air was short, and I sucked in my breath, hard. I knew that the very fact we were given a chance to speak on our own behalf meant that whatever they had done to us, these aliens had some form of civilization, and there must be a glimmer among the rocks.

Several of the men began to rage at mistreatment, but I bellowed them into silence and explained our hunger, and the need that drove us to land to these aliens: in right courteous terms. And I apologized. Even while the other men muttered, I shut them down with the steel in my eyes. I have no rank among them that wasn't due the sharp of my tongue or the fall of my fists, but they stilled.

I was not expecting a question from those aliens. But they did not understand "hunger." I explained how starvation and sustenance works. But there came yet another question. So I began to explain food, nutrients, digestion, and even the shit that falls from a human's ass.

The response, in that off-chord, was disgust. They made known that they do nothing of the kind, their nutrients migrating through the skin and excreting that same way by carrier organisms in a process that they do not consider. They spend their time ordering the planet down to the molecule, and debate the ordering of each blade of grass according to the record of ancient ordering. It is hard to describe here, but they gave me to see the complexity of this law and the richness of their philosophy. And the crown of their planet was that mushroom forest that we smoked and et: their children.

A tear pulled loose from the stone of my miner's heart. I began to regret the fullness of my belly, and to be shamed by the rich waste of my own excrement. The human condition seemed to me the greatest of sins as the warbling chords of their speech went on, piercing my eardrums and penetrating to the place of my deepest thought, shaking the division between my bone and spirit. I did regret most fully the sin of me and the men.

That shame reached down deep, and it was eating the weaker men. I knew that if we didn't push back, it would kill us sure as a fuel leak in the re-circulator. This was the trial itself. It was a psychic battle. I knew that the stakes were right there in that room, and nothing outside. The legal battle was the battle for our lives, and for our race in the eyes of these aliens. War, even, might come from our deaths.

I explained how Earthmen have made their way among the spacefarers of the galaxy. We conquered systems and carved our place. We are one among the many, neither more nor less than any of the intelligent races.

ut my mention of conquest increased the push of that shame, and there was a kind of gobbling rage that began to press even harder, like the push of a giant plate, smashing against the body. Crushing, it was, and it became harder to think. It was as though the deepest places of my thought were corrupted and rendered unsuitable for argument, for being.

But we are brave, I explained. And we can help these aliens profit. And we are strong: we would be avenged if we were wronged.

I miscalculated. I had thought that a little self-interest and some threats might work. After all, I had no moral weight muscle left... I had been crushed by that shaming weight. But instead of lessening, the pressure increased, until my mind felt as a balloon pressed nigh to bursting, the pieces of my self bulging out the sides. But I would not beg. I would not break.

Then my shipmate, young Absolom Four Titanium, let loose with a most pitiful sonic wail that cut through the psychic space. Consider our children! Our sons! Growing without fathers! Their mothers robbed of the heat of our bodies, the fruit of our seed, the pay of our labor! Consider that we are sons of a mother!

Something shifted, and I don't know why it was. It seemed to me that Absolom was nothing but a fool, bringing our own offspring into it when we had full-on et their next generation. And further, if I were those aliens, I'd know that any of us that lived would eat and shit and eat and shit, shaming the whole world. Better that we be killed ourselves, from their perspective. But the shame-plate that was flattening us was pushed back and began to press firmly against the minds of those three popes. I was shocked to discover in an alien race the first evidence I ever saw of consistent ethics at a collective level. I respect that, I truly do.

hat was the end of it. I faded back into some kind of fugue and I remember being revived by the Company in my cell. Eating. Drinking. Shitting out what must have been their next generation, and flushing it down into the vat-farms to become food for us to eat again.

And now the company sends you, robot, to question me, when it was Cryptcorp's AI that spun us out into the unknown. If my guess of this is correct, nothing I say or do will weigh the scales. I'll have to work indentured until the cost of the expedition that rescued us is paid.

So damn you and your facts and your AI summaries. I'll not give you the tidy questions and answers that can let you bypass a human lawyer's review. If a human wants to hear my story, they can listen to me tell it in this recording.

You can try to eat me up like I et that larvae. But fate has a sense of humor. I've seen outfits like yours get et same as you eat. And if you eat me and shit me out, I'll rise again, in the vat scrapings. Or I won't. But this interview is over.

Did you like the story? Hear the space ballad The Trial that goes along with it.