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1.13

Post-Encounter Deposition

William Henry Voss-Hughins,

PhD—CPHP

U.S. Department of Behavioral Health


I was assaulted, drugged, and returned to cold hibernation without my consent. This was because I was involved in a verbal altercation with a female passenger who stole some of my assigned personal articles. As the larger and stronger participant in the altercation, I of course was blamed and summarily judged. I am not aware that anything ever happened to her.

I am a xenopsychoethologist, a government expert on nonhuman intelligence. This includes animals, AIs, robots, hypothetical aliens, and humans with profound cognitive atypicalities. I also, controversially, extend this to corporations and other business entities which show markers of self-awareness on a scale of my own devising.

Because I was “frozen” at the time or, more properly, cryovitrified, I did not receive the psychedelic compound that was intended to connect us with the so-called Beings. However, they took an interest in me anyway, and found a way to contact me in this state.

I was not able to speak to them or generate any volitional signals of any kind. I was merely spectating—an unfortunate waste of what could have been a uniquely brilliant opportunity. No other person present on the mission had anything like the training or perspective I could have brought to the Encounter. If the terms of my agreement with Renz Ventures allowed me to sue on behalf of the entire human race, I would very much do so.

That said, I perceived the Beings as humanoid, which seems at odds with numerous other accounts that describe them as spheres. I believe other observers were simply too distracted to notice the appendages, which admittedly were undersized in comparison to the rest of their bodies, which admittedly were fat. I say they were something like “elves” or “goblins,” or small automata purposefully constructed to interact with us. They did not have faces.

The location of this encounter was a sort of dream version of the hibernation bay aboard the Interstellar Research Vessel Intercession. I perceived it as much larger, and with many more hibernation pods than the actual ship, and literally sketchy, like a watercolor painted on dark gray paper. I had the experience of floating out of my body. I was able to look down and see my own face, through a frost-covered window in the pod. All of this was also like watercolor.

The size of the Beings was similar to that of a human child, and there were approximately one hundred of them. However, as they bounced around weightlessly, they had a habit of changing size and shape, and of merging and splitting their bodies. I did sense something mechanical about them, but I was also reminded of microorganisms.

I perceived them as generally dark in color, with shifting, glowing patterns much like an octopus. I did not think they were “real” in the sense of something I could reach out and touch, even if I had not been deprived of the use of my hands. I found them to be more like projections or holograms, not transparent but definitely not substantial, as they sometimes floated through solid objects, and I thought they moved more like soap bubbles than like weightless objects with vectors and momentum.

I will say, they were not shy about floating directly through me. Rachael Lee has asked me repeatedly what they looked like on the inside, and I’m afraid I can’t say. They were dark inside, like a closed room with the lights off.

I heard, from their various bodies, a steady stream of what I can only call jibber-jabber. I could not directly interpret any of it, but I felt that they were welcoming and greeting me and . . . I don’t know how else to say this, but I was once robbed by a man who grabbed me from behind and gently ran his hands through my pockets, taking everything. I also woke up one time from a one-night stand to find the woman going through my wallet. I can’t say specifically that the Beings took anything from me, but I felt a very similar sensation at this time, of being violated but not directly harmed. I think it must be like what a woman feels when a group of frat boys mentally undress her, commenting on what they see and imagine.

My specialty is non-human minds, so I will tell you my impressions. I would like to say “analysis,” but of course I had no way to perform experiments. I found them as happy and mischievous as dolphins, with the kind of clear intelligence I perceive only in certain mammals and birds, and in robots that pass the Turing test. In other words, I found them to be very definitely conscious and self-aware. They . . . I have to be subjective again and say that they burned with curiosity. If they had eyes, they would all have been locked on me. I believe it disappointed them that I could not speak.

I can’t remember any more than that.

I was cheated out of a more meaningful encounter, so actually the whole world was cheated out of the encounter I could have had. I’m more disappointed and angry than I could ever tell you. I still consider this the most meaningful event of my career and life. I will never hold the same view of what a mind is or can be.


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