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There was a race of aliens circling the earth for many years, unknown to us. Oh, there'd be the occasional crackpot sighting or TV show about them, but we didn't really "know." It turns out that this race had some remarkable capabilities. Unlike us, they could do Lamarckian evolution, so that things they learned could be passed on to the next generation. And the way they propagated their species might possibly be described as accumulative auto-parthenogenesis, or maybe reverse mitosis. What they did was travel the galaxy to find other species that had characteristics they liked, and then merged with them, forming a new conglomerate species. Though dismissed by the scientific community, several researchers have pointed to the existence of the platypus as evidence of one of their previous visits to earth.
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[Photo by Heather Gallagher, "Camera Girl"] |
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Their lifespan is about 2500 of our years, and they must go through a reproductive cycle sometime in this period to remain viable. They can clone themselves if their numbers diminish, but the clones tend to run out of steam about the same time the parents do. So if it's been awhile since they've found a mergeable species, they get rather motivated to reproduce. Of course their lifespan is measured from their point of view. Since they travel the galaxy at high speeds, they would appear to live much longer from where we stand.
Because their merging operations can often be rather drastic, they like to be very sure about the species that they're merging with. Way back in the heyday of their culture, they would carefully select species that would enhance their species. But with their recent decline, they tend toward merging with what they consider the most powerful species they encounter on a given planet. It still takes a long time to determine which species that is, since they arrive at a planet with no common background of how life works down there.
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This is why they've been circling the earth for some significant potion of a century.
Unfortunately, recent events have proven disastrous for them. The great Rave-Act wars of 2006 have brought such incredible chaos that the aliens thought that society would completely disintegrate, with the national storm troopers in their riot gear being fought back by freaks in the streets with their giant subwoofers and audio cannons.
At this point the aliens decided that they needed to make their move or forever lose their chance. So they merged with what they thought was the most powerful species, the great crunching loud PA systems. As you can see, they now have speakers embedded in their bodies, and are forever tied to the electrical speaker wire umbilical.
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They soon realized their gross miscalculation, having lost much of their cognitive powers. It turns out that the only part of the PA systems that could hold even a small part of their intelligence was the DSP chips in the reverb units. They no longer had an independent voice, and the only means they have of communicating is to hear sounds through the PA systems' microphones, which they place strategically, and to process those sounds -- subtly or not -- and send them out their speakers. They've since developed a complex language consisting solely of modifications of existing sounds, but no one here has been able to crack their code, and they haven't yet learned to communicate directly with us. |
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