[ WP ] You have just been sworn in as President , and are being told the truth about alien life ... but it 's incredibly far from what anyone had ever imagined .

`` Our best guess is that it was some kind of lifeboat, but again, we have been completely unable to establish communication beyond charades and hand gestures. We've all tried - us and them. Both sides have tried to cooperate as much as possible, but we've found very little common ground. Pretty early on, they were able to express that they were uncomfortable with the living space we provided them, so we gave them the land you see here.'' 
 
 `` So.. this is.. uhh.... their home? Did something happen to it? Is this how they intended to build it?'' 
 
 `` It's hard to tell. They reconfigure it constantly, but it all seems deliberate when they're doing it. It has n't looked the same for more than a couple days since they landed back in the seventies. Oh hey there goes one now! Look - he's got a stack of those weird geometrical bricks. Over time we've given them a wide variety of materials and tools to see what they would do with them. As we came to expect, they immediately started dismantling everything and reconfiguring it in increasingly complex ways, but never saving any particular form for more than the span of a single task. We've noted enough stylistic trends to conclude that they do have a sense of aesthetics, though not in any way we can comprehend. Their machines are generally crude but elaborate, often involving complex sequences of interlocking shapes which we understood to be a very abstract form of gears. We can hardly even tell what the machines do half the time. I mean we'll see the mechanics of what they do, since they have been very willing to let us study their machines, but the product at the end always baffles us. In one case, a long sequence of augers at different sizes, spinning at various speeds and directions, managed to transform sand into a much coarser form of sand made up of hardened crystalline forms seemingly made by combining the component grains somehow. You can actually see a pile of the stuff over there to the left.'' 
 
 `` Oh my god what is it doing with that pile of sand?!'' 
 
 `` Ah yes, another of their eccentric habits. Seemingly for recreation, they like to jump on these piles of their processed sand and wriggle their way into it and then, once fully submerged in the sand, they will start shaking violently and wailing. After a few minutes usually the sand will spontaneously erupt over the uhh individual, allowing them to hastily crawl out of the sand. This one looks like it's in the wriggling phase. It's got some kind of tool with it.'' 
 
 We watched as the creature dug itself into the sand. When it normally would have started shaking, it sat still instead. Mostly still, that is. We could occasionally see slow, small movements. Out of the pile came a sound like ripping fabric or maybe like an old man clearing his throat. Kind of a cross between the two, really. It repeated several times with slight movements in the sand before we could see any effects. After a few minutes, wafer thin plates of compressed sand started forming on the top of the mound but gradually encompassing the entire mound. The creature dug its way out and started bringing the plates to various places. The machine it used to do it was nowhere to be seen, though any of the miscellaneous parts lying around everywhere could have been part of it. 
 
 `` I have to tell you, sir, and I wish I could tell you something different, but we have learned startlingly little from them. Many very diligent scientists spent considerable portions of their careers trying to make heads or tails out of anything the creatures do or make. Successes are few and typically isolated - there was nothing like a Rosetta Stone to connect all the dots. At this point it's basically just peaceful cohabitation and even a sort of baffling form of entertainment, just observing them in action. Luckily, they seem to either understand the need for secrecy or perhaps really are completely content in a 3x9 mile encampment with no outside contact as far as we know. 
 
 < < End of Part 1 > >
