by Subrata Das
The first billion dollars was easy. My girlfriend Ela and I built a universal language module, called InterLan. It translated from any language in the world to another in a flash. How did we do it? Ela put together a database of millions of samples of each language, both spoken and written, exploiting the ubiquitous internet. I used a supercomputer, applying our proprietary signal processing and hidden Markov modeling with adaptive neural network algorithms.
Within a month, we were ready to demonstrate the InterLan to experts from Alphabet/Google, Microsoft and Apple. They already had their own language translators, but their performances were poor and scope awfully limited. Ours simply blew theirs away. Right on the spot, their consortium proposed to buy the InterLan for half-a-billion dollars. We said one and a half. After a bit of haggling, we settled in the middle at one. Not that we care too much about money.
Ela and I are from another planet, called Clathion, almost five hundred light years away from Earth. Our civilization is eons ahead of yours, with technology that you’d only discover hundreds of years from now.
We could have picked another planet to settle down. But after checking out many planets in other galaxies, we like yours the best. Its blue skies, open seas, jagged mountains and green trees are nothing short of miraculous. In contrast, Clathion is dull and colorless. The whole landscape is gray, scorched by five suns in the sky.
So, one fine day, Ela and I got tired of the gray and commandeered a spaceship, traveling through a space-time warp and landing here on Earth. Our stealth technology easily evaded your radar surveillance. After that, it was a simple matter of studying human anatomy and psyche for a couple of days before molding ourselves into your forms.
Now we live like an ordinary couple in your society. Nobody suspects anything. Only our elderly neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Dabanowsky, found out about us, because one day they caught a glimaneuver andrue forms through their open window, when we were making love using the normal Clathionan maneuver, and forgot to draw the shades.
I fully trust Mr. Dabanowsky. He won’t betray us. Mrs. Dabanowsky? I’m not so sure, because she often looks at us in a meaningful way, winks and cracks a smile.
In any case, we now have a fifty-billion-dollar contract from the NOAA agency to build a weather manipulation system for them, called PermaWeather. It’ll constantly monitor factors, such as temperature, pressure and wind flow, in every cubic inch of the earth’s atmosphere and locally nullify any potential threats before they can build up to devastating storms. We’ll use the same InterLan signal processing, Markovian modeling and neural network algorithms, tweaking them for the ParmaWeather application. Once that’s complete, it’s goodbye hurricanes, goodbye snow and sleet, and hello to all sunshine days or whatever weather you may desire.
But first, we have another urgent task at hand. We need to build a defense system for the two of us. No, not against humans. You really can’t harm us. But the Clathion troopers won’t leave us alone. They are searching for us everywhere through the galaxies with their hyper-sensors. The early warning system we deployed on the moon a year ago has detected their spaceships in the area. If they catch us, we’ll be hauled away to the Supreme Commander and face trial and execution. So, I beg you, please keep your eyes and ears open and alert us, if you see or sense anything unusual.
I’ll stash this confessional in my desk drawer in case we’re suddenly missing one day, so you’ll know how much we loved your planet, the most beautiful one we’ve ever seen. Hope we leave it a little better with our modest innovations. And, in case we don’t see you again, Mr. and Mrs. Dabanowsky, have a great life!
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