Dei Verbum

A peculiar monstrosity: it floated so gracefully to the ground, implying an otherworldly sophistication that went beyond mere arrival. Yet, it was obvious that Earth was its destination and Earth's people assumed to be the reason.

Its shape was one that could only be conceptualized by anatomy so alien that no one could pretend to guess function from form.

That was 43 years ago.

It sat, inert and impenetrable, occupying most of Piazza San Pietro in Vatican City. It had alighted perfectly equidistant from all of the Doric columns of the colonnade. In fact, the Egyptian obelisk was no more, as if the craft had absorbed it on descent.

It's landing spot was subject to heated debates. Politicians, think tanks, and the clergy of all religions weighed in. Yet, imagining an alien sentience that appreciated the significance of religion seemed a stretch.

There were noises emanating from within the craft. Metallic noises, arrhythmic, and seemingly random. Sometimes they beat out imagined patterns, but the best AI could not come up with a plausible analysis regarding the possibility of communication.

The Vatican Observatory Jesuits, by decreed edict of the sovereign city-state, were the first to officially evaluate the strange spacecraft. After four years they gave up, the ship's hull being completely impervious to any type of man-made breach.

Invitations in all the world's languages, on all bandwidths, went unanswered. Stroboscopic lights invited replies to mathematical sequences, but the visitors remained deaf, blind, and mute.

Four years after the Jesuits had given up, the inquiry team from CERN returned to Meyrin, Switzerland, with no information.

Then the noises stopped.

Perhaps whatever machinery was at work had finished priming itself and the craft would finally open.

But the silence continued long past the visiting team from Pasadena returning to their Jet Propulsion Laboratory—no wiser to the craft's details other than what could be seen with the naked eye or measured with calipers.

The Pope himself, in his weekly addresses from his apartment balcony, always closed with the following:

"We've been patient and faithful for two millennia now for the Second Coming. Certainly we can muster patience to out-wait our visitors."

The people were haunted: What if neither ever happens?

At first, the societal upheavals were tumultuous. evoking the many theories. Why had the aliens landed so ostentatiously in a place synonymous with Christianity? Was it a scout ship for a planned invasion? Was it a calling card, an introduction for more to come? Was it sent by God? Were the unseen visitors dimensionally aphasic and we simply missed each other due to some myopic existential blindness?

Why no doors or windows—not even a seam in the unknown metal? We knew the craft was not solid; we all heard the noises for a few years before they abruptly stopped.

Why the hell hadn't they come out? Why the hell wouldn't they? They came all this way (a long way, indeed), only to hide themselves from us. Was it some test that only made sense according to some alien cognitive sensibility?

We waited.

Could they have been waiting on us? For some societal milestone? For some evolutionary rite of passage that finally would deem us worthy?

We wanted to meet them. Learn from them. We wanted a cure for death, solutions to climate change, perpetual motion machines, and free, limitless energy. Certainly they knew! We needed them.

Yet, they chose to remain unavailable.

Some mysteries were not worth the effort.

So the people of Earth moved on.

While at first there were promises of a new age of understanding and brotherhood among Earth's peoples and nations, after a decade and realizing once again we were on our own, the old grudges, feuds, and holy wars re-surfaced.

But also, total human knowledge continued to double faster than an in-winding Fibonacci curve.

It, one day, came to be: we were finally able to open the craft.

With much holographic media coverage and fanfare, seams were rendered where there were none before. That's when we discovered that the door header wasn't level: the jamb's slope could be freed from the outside, but from the inside would have been impossible.

The smell was awful.

What was left of them were smudged, gelatinized stains on the craft's floors. Many alien contraptions lay about evidencing the occupants' efforts to clear the doorjamb, open their portal, and exit their craft to meet their new friends.