20. Cultural Exchange (Patreon)

"Wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that you don't have any fiction? At all?"

I'm doing the dishes after feeding Tara. Again. She really eats like crazy! After I fried her some crickets she asked if I had any more crickets, and if she could have them raw. I don't have any more, but I will be sure to catch extra later for her. If my alien friend is interested in eating raw bugs, who am I to tell her she should have PB&J instead? Any excuse to hunt more bugs is welcome anyway.

But then she goes and says something super-duper crazy! After asking why I wasn't more frightened or surprised about hearing that she was from another world I started recounting some of my favorite sci-fi stories and she suddenly got really confused. We asked each other a few more questions and it turns out her home world is way bleaker than I ever thought.

“Fiction? That's your word for stories about things that aren't real, yes? It's not like I'm not familiar with the concept, I just find it… somewhat morally indefensible? Why would you create such an elaborate lie?"

"Oh my gosh, Tara, I'm sorry but you're just in a dystopian space future and you don't even know it!" I lament, pacing around the room. "I don't know, maybe your species is really different but to me this sounds super bad! Like this is some Fahrenheit 451 bullshit! You don't burn books where you live, do you? I mean, I guess the warning signs were there from some of the other things you talked about. You had some 1984 vibes, but—"

"Evelyn! Slow down, I have no idea what you're talking about! Why are you the one worked up about this? You're saying these stories are lies, of course I wouldn't want to hear them!"

"No! They're not lies, Tara," I insist.

"But you explicitly said they aren't real."

"It's different!" I say firmly. "Lies are things that you tell with the intent to deceive. With fiction, everyone knows the story is not real. You are never at any point attempting to give the impression that it actually happened."

"People could still be confused," Tara argues. "Sharing untruths is a serious problem, Evelyn. If people go around believing things that aren't true and thinking that's okay, you get all sorts of problems! Weren't you complaining earlier about societal issues you face because of people who don't believe in medicine?"

I'm about to respond immediately, but firm lessons from my father managed to make me stop and consider that instead. She's not wrong. A lot of people say and do terrible things because they believe something stupid. Or… misguided, at least. And other people exploit those who are willing to believe in those particular kinds of nonsense, which is arguably even worse. But still…

"So, for starters, you are absolutely right that the truth is very important. If you think the world works a certain way, but it doesn't actually work that way, you can end up doing super terrible things while thinking that they are good."

Tara relaxes a bit, muscles untensing.

"Exactly, yes," she says.

"But… that's not all there is to it," I continue carefully. "Firstly, I should establish some important cultural background here. On Earth, fiction is well-established, well-respected, and distinctly quarantined from real things. Almost all of the places where you can get fiction, it's clearly marked as fiction, and if you can find both in the same place then the non-fiction is marked too. This isn't always the case, but we are all just so used to it that even the places which don't mark the difference still have a distinction between the two that is inherently obvious to us."

"You say that, but we still have countless examples in your history where atrocities are committed due to lies regarding some group of people or another. What about your 'Holocaust?'"

"Godwin's Law!" I declare, shooting finger guns at her.

Silence stretches between us for a moment.

"What?" Tara asks.

"Nevermind, I'll tell you about it later. Anyway, that example is totally different. The people who did those bad things either thought those lies were true or they were too scared of the ones that did to say otherwise. But nobody thinks that fictional stories are true, unless they are already crazy or the writer goes out of their way to try and deceive people, which is definitely lying and still considered wrong."

"I understand what you're saying," Tara answers hesitantly, "but it just seems like such a hard-to-define distinction, which bothers me. It's a very blurry line, and I don't know why anyone would go to all the trouble to draw it just to create a culturally acceptable form of lying."

"It's not—" I begin, but cut myself off again. I can't allow myself to just give knee-jerk responses. I have to think about it from her perspective. Talking with aliens is stressful!

"Sorry, can I take some time to figure out how to explain this?" I ask.

"Please do," Tara answers amicably, crawling into and starting to nibble on more of my pantry. Geez, she's got to have eaten like three times her weight by now.

"There are two main reasons I think we go to all the trouble of making the distinction," I answer eventually. "The first and more basic reason is that humans just find stories enjoyable. If I'm being honest, this is the biggest reason and because of it hardly anyone ever really questions this. Fiction is fun, and nearly everyone likes it, because I guess over time people that enjoyed paying attention to information about other people got to have more sex or something. I don't know, I'm not really an evolutionary biologist. Culture may have evolved beyond that a lot, but it's part of who we are as people. We need entertainment to alleviate stress, and nearly all of us find fiction entertaining."

"Okay…" Tara murmurs thoughtfully. "It's not as though my people don't have any fun, though. Surely you all have things you find entertaining other than… fiction."

"Of course we do, yeah," I agree. "But that brings us to reason two! This is one that people don't really think about, but in my opinion everyone should. Stories are an incredible tool to teach with and learn from. They can give you outlooks on life you couldn't otherwise come across, and they can deliver those outlooks in a more nuanced and effective way than just flatly telling someone about it. You can teach someone about, say, the moral framework of utilitarianism, but it's going to be bland and boring and miss a lot of nuance that could be better conveyed by immersing someone in a story about someone who believes in utilitarianism. You could show how that affects the way they interact with the world and the consequences in their life that result from that belief. You could even have the story be about the character initially not understanding the framework and learning about it slowly over time and growing as a person as the ideas they encounter change their thinking. The people reading or watching that story will see the process on a more intimate level and understand it more completely."

"Why not just do the same thing with the true story?" Tara asks. "People who have had those experiences could simply write autobiographies."

I shrug.

"Well, firstly, I find autobiographies super boring, and while that sounds like a silly complaint it actually matters a lot. The type of person who goes out and looks for nonfiction about moral philosophy or whatever probably isn't the type of person that needs to know more about moral philosophy. Right? They're going to learn about it anyway, but it's good to also have a way to reach the people who weren't originally thinking about it. The way you do that is to make it fun!"

"And secondly?"

I grin.

"Well, secondly, you can't write an autobiography about the best ways to talk to aliens if no one has talked to an alien before. I have read all sorts of stories in which first contact with someone from another world goes horribly because people just don't think about all the problems that could occur and their carelessness, ignorance, or selfishness causes a lot of pain. None of those people are real, but I can still know about and try to avoid their mistakes."

She's quiet for a while after that, occasionally shifting her many legs as she munches away at more food.

"By that same method," she responds eventually, "could you not influence people with false lessons, negative outlooks that seem good, and portraying cruelty as heroism?"

"Yeah, of course you can. You can also get stories with no real thought or message behind them beyond entertainment, as well. But can't you do the same with stories of things that actually happened?"

She rapidly taps one leg like a woodpecker, and what I think might be an irritated gesture.

"I… yes, I suppose you could. But do you really think this story strategy is working? Your planet still has no end of problems."

I tilt my head to the side.

"Well, yeah. Doesn't yours?"

She stops eating, turning to face me.

"I suppose it does," she admits. "We have many. No wars, which I think is a rather big deal, but we still have terrorists. Murderers that attack Haslken-Rkito administrators in broad daylight. It's rather terrifying."

There is something I immediately want to ask about that, but it might be risky and dangerously personal. It might disgust her. I've seen stories go both ways. But I have to trust her friendship, or what's even the point?

"Are they in the right?"

"What?" she asks, startled.

"The terrorists. Are they doing the right thing when they fight hazel-ken ricky-toe?"

"Wh—no, they're not in the right!" Tara snaps. "They're murderers, Evelyn! They kill people!"

"So do governments, a lot of the time," I say. "And a terrorist group certainly risks being killed themselves if they fight your government. So why do they do that?"

"How should I know? They're insane. Self-defense is one thing, but aggressive, targeted murder is… it's inexcusable! Indefensibly evil!"

I smile, setting the last dish on the drying rack and pulling a chair up next to the counter so I can sit next to my friend. I offer her more crackers. She takes them, grumbling quietly and what I assume is her native language so I don't catch a word. It's so cool that I can do this. Yeah, I'm a little worried about things going wrong. There are all sorts of thought experiments I've read about arguing morality with alien, generally as a representation of something totally inhuman in personality and perspective. But Tara isn't like that, not really. She's just a friend with a few different opinions. Not to mention she's also an actual fucking alien, which continues to be the most incredibly amazing thing I could ever imagine.

"I don't know these people, or really anything about them," I tell her soothingly. "I'm absolutely not saying whether they are or aren't in the right. There are some horrible, awful terrorists on my planet that attack people for crazy reasons, and I certainly don't think anybody should be murdering anybody else. But I can think of a dozen situations in which someone might try to fight the government anyway, and a lot of them are pretty good reasons. They come from both real life and fiction. These people from your home might very well be evil, but like my dad always used to say..."

I clear my throat so I can do a proper impression of my goofy old man.

"It's not enough to think you know something, Glowbug! You have to know why you think you know it, because until you get into the habit of asking that you’ll find you don't have a good answer more often than you'd like to admit!"

Tara chuckles.

"He seems like quite the interesting man, which I suppose is to be expected for the father of such an interesting woman." I turn away as I feel my face going red, but thankfully Tara continues speaking so I don't have to. "Still, while I agree with the advice in general, it's not as though I can walk up to the terrorists and ask them why they do what they do. My whole family could go to jail if it looks like I'm sympathizing with terrorists."

"Wait, so you can be punished for things that you had nothing to do with as long as your family did them?"

She shifts her weight nervously.

"Well, it's not as though anyone in my family would do something like that, but hypothetically yes."

Yep, that's a solid point in favor of a dystopian government if I've ever heard one.

"I have some stories that I think you would find really, really interesting," I tell her. "Think of it like a cultural exchange! To help you get acclimated to life on Earth, for however long you're staying here."

She lets out a hissy sigh.

"I suppose I will consider it," she relents. “But I—”

Her words are interrupted by a sudden knock on the door.

"Yo, dork!" Samantha calls from the other side. "I got the rest of your notes!"

I jumped to my feet, grin on my face.

"Oh, that's Sam!" I tell Tara. "She's super nice, you'll like her!"

I jump up to get the door.

"Wait!" Tara yelps. "Wait, I…"

I stop, looking back at her. She's… shaking.

"Do you not want to meet Sam?" I ask. "We can pretend that you're still Blubie if you want."

She doesn't respond, and Sam knocks again so I go and answer the door. I retrieve her diligently-copied notes, chatting with her in the doorway for a little bit before politely excusing myself and returning inside. I don't invite Samantha to come in. Walking back into my room, I find Tara exactly the same place, so I sit down next to her again.

"I apologize for my rudeness," she says quietly.

"Hey, it's fine," I assure her, holding out my hands. After a brief hesitation she crawls on and I move her to my lap. "Trust me, I know social anxiety when I see it. If you want to talk about it, I'm happy to listen. If not, that's okay too."

She doesn't respond at first, opening and closing her armor and mouth a few times without letting out any words.

"I don't know if I would call it social anxiety, per se," she says eventually.

"Oh yeah?" I ask, encouraging more elaboration.

Again, she's quiet for a while.

"It is nothing of real importance," she eventually mutters, with a quiet fear tinging her voice. It's as if she's afraid the words themselves might rear up and attack her.

Her species really must value the truth a lot, since she's even worse at lying than I am. But I won't press until she's ready to talk about it.

I may not have many, but I know that's not what friends do.