We use sub-harmonic vibrations of infinite subtlety and depth. Running through an octave, using relative stellar positioning and the broad chromatic spectrum as enhancements, we can communicate more in a second than you lot can manage in a lifetime of hooting around with your ape noises, blabbing with your fleshy faces, tongues lolloping all over the place. Or scratching your little marks on every available surface. You poor dears. Evolution is the very bugger isn’t it? Takes an absolute age! You are persistent though, I’ll give you that. Even when words have once again demonstrated their inadequacy and your nascent dreams of mutual comprehension are shattered, you won’t give up on them. Still there you go, dragging your words along behind you, wrapped in old sheets like the contents of bombed-out houses. Broken, second-hand and insufficient. Your personal collection of rickety consonants and squashy, unreliable vowels which you’ll rake into piles and clamber on top of time and again, hoping to be seen and understood. Battered but relentless, like a child who keeps looking for love from the worst kind of parent. I’m not mocking, though. You do have my sympathy. After all, if you lacked any redeeming features, I wouldn’t bother hanging around so much. This one street could keep me occupied for hours, riding the currents of alcohol-enhanced emotion rising from the pavements like thermals. Blasts of anger, humid bolts of lust, the chill whistle of despair. Like a fairground ride. I travel unseen, of course. I’m quite invisible to the human eye. Technically, I’m working. But I do enjoy it as well, just best not to let on about that. Close association with humans is discouraged. If The Powers even knew I was talking to you, and in your own atavistic language, what’s more, I’d be in serious trouble. They could revoke my privileges, or worse. Our official mission here is to research energy, in all its forms. The orthodox reason for all this study is to expand our knowledge and abilities; to ready ourselves for the next Great Leap. As a species, we evolved long ago, attaining what a few of your more advanced thinkers and scribblers have hypothesised – a plane of existence beyond the limitations of the merely physical. It didn’t happen overnight though, I can tell you. You’ll have to be patient. If it’s any consolation, you appear to be on the right track, or at least the same track as we were on, once upon a time. Millennia ago, we advanced our technology, decanted more and more of our thoughts and dreams into light and energy. We could travel faster,
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