The Test

 

The little pink...person? I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's a person. I won't begin to guess at pronouns, I don't know how many genders these things have. Those lumps on its front might be boobs, dicks, or even noses. I can't tell. But the little pink person is blinking up at me with these huge eyes that are full of what appear to be very human-looking tears.

It has gorgeous eyes. They blink and it sniffles - they ARE noses! - and it starts to ask questions.

Yep. I can understand it. It's speaking English of all things. I'll be damned, Stargate was right. The entire universe speaks English.

"...you will not _believe_ how many rules I'm breaking but I have a Human Studies final tomorrow and my grades are right on the edge and you were all by yourself and..."

"Whoa. Hold up. Slow down."

Sniffle.

"Hi, I'm Andy."

HUGE sigh. The noses flutter with it. The person looks relieved. "I'm SO glad you're not mad or freaking out. There's been way too much freaking out!"

"Hi, I'm Andy?"

"Right! Sorry! I'm...uh, actually I'm unpronounceable in English."

"Try me."

"No, really. There's some radio frequency overtones, if you say my name in English without those it's a _very_ rude word."

"Huh. Well, how about Rudy?"

It cocked its head at me and for a moment looked like a slightly mushroom shaped pink cocker spaniel. "I guess that would do." Rudy looks around. "Are you going to get in trouble? Do you have some time to spare for me? I really need this help. I can put you back exactly where I found you if you can't stay but it would really mean a lot."

"Sure. My shift is over, nothing interesting on the TV this evening, nowhere to be. It'd be nice if you could return the favor, though."

The noses turned white. I couldn't tell if that was a blush or a fear response or what. The person was quite naked and aside from its head, arms and legs - some extra elbows and knees going on there - eyes and mouth, the body appeared to be more or less featureless. Kind of like My Little Pony but, you know, REALLY wrong.

"I just have to say, Rudy, you speak my human language very, very well."

"Thanks! I took the advanced courses when I was younger and I stay current by watching sitcoms."

"That would do it."

"I didn't like the first season of Parks and Rec, though."

"Don't sweat it, nobody did. It got better."

"Okay. I really only need help on one thing. Just one thing. I can muddle through everything else.

"Okay, fire away. If I can answer it, I will."

"Are humans evil?"

Whoa.

"Humans in general? Humanity as a species?"

"Yeah!"

"That's a tough question. You can find individuals you might describe as evil but usually those folks are suffering from some kind of mental or emotional pathology. They're sick, not evil.

"Sometimes you look at some of the ways we behave and think it might be evil but what it really is, is short-sighted and uneducated. The more people understand the repercussions of their behavior, the more likely they are to behave better. But even then sometimes circumstances just force their hand and they do things that could be described as evil, but they don't have a choice. That isn't really evil, it's just survival."

"What about war?"

"The people who start wars often do so for evil reasons, or at least evil in my opinion. Fighting over religions, territory, ideologies...that's unsupportable. And generally those people with bad ideologies eventually lose their wars, get killed by their own disgusted troops, or otherwise yanked out of power. Wars are a problem we have but I think we're getting past it, kinda. Sorta."

"Who decides what's bad?"

"Heck if I know. General consensus, I guess. History gets written by the winners. Winners of the wars, that is. The more important histories, like who loved whom and who invented the chocolate chip cookie, that kind of stuff doesn't get recorded."

Rudy shuddered.

"What'd I say?"

"Chocolate is violently toxic to my people. It's, uh...it's pretty bad."

I didn't mention the little bag of M&M's in my pocket.

"Well, I'm sorry to hear that."

I suppose there are things that are amenable to my metabolism that would be bad for you, too."

"I wouldn't be surprised. Then again humans evolved on this planet to eat more or less anything we can catch, and some things start out dangerous but we treat them so they aren't. We're opportunistic omnivores, we'll eat anything that doesn't kill us and some of the things that should."

"It seems to me that most humans generally aren't as broadly informed as you."

"A lot aren't. I'm a little weird that way."

"How come?"

"Hmm. I guess some of it would be because in my day job I'm a professional handyman. That takes a certain amount of problem solving skills and some curiosity. And the rest is because when I'm not at work I like to write science fiction stories. You pick up a lot, researching to provide backstories for characters, trying to better understand circumstances, that kind of thing."

"I guess I got lucky."

"That's one way to look at it." I wondered if he suspected the awful truth.

"Did you have anything to add to the evil question?"

"Not really. 'Evil' isn't a clearly defined concept, it requires context. I generally think of 'evil' as doing bad, while knowing what you're doing is bad. There's been lots of people and groups who would be described afterward as evil by their survivors, but in the moment I would imagine those evil parties thought what they were doing was moral and right.

"How does that even work?"

"I have no idea. I'm not evil. At least, I don't think I am now and hope nobody thinks I am at some time in the future."

At that Rudy took out a little notebook and made a tickmark on a page already dark with notes, using an actual, honest-to-goodness pencil.

"I guess that is the answer I'm looking for." They flipped the notebook and tucked it away again - I did mention Rudy was naked, right? No? Well, anyway. Don't ask me where they put the notebook or the pencil, I didn't really understand what I was seeing and don't want to explore the question further. I'm okay with some mysteries staying mysterious.

Rudy cleared their throat, a very human sound but it may have been more than just what it seemed to be because then they said, "The answer is: we don't think so, but we can't know at this time."

From somewhere came a strangely huge but also tiny *ding* as if a hotel counter bell forty feet across had been gently tapped.

Rudy smiled. "Okay! That answer has been accepted. We'll be back in about five hundred of your years to ask again."

"Ask what again?"

"The question, of course! The Human Studies Final is to take a quick survey to determine the moral value of humans and determine whether to allow the experiment to continue. We ask a few folks here and there and aggregate the answers and reassess. The Human Studies Final has had unanimous extensions for over four thousand years.

"So we'll be back in five hundred years and check up on you guys. Good luck with capitalism!"

And with a flash of light, he was gone like a page out of a typewriter.