Grafitti on a toilet somewhere: "I like to frack grils." "Don't you mean _girls_?" "Yeah, I meant _girls_." "But what about us grils?"
Legal Confusion Reigns -- Is Alien Illegal?
US Federal courts are puzzled by the legalities consequent to the birth of a 22-pound baby gril following the recent historic Arizona crash of a starship lifeboat.
Hir parents, so far as anyone has been able to comprehend them, don't seem to quite understand the technology that brought them to our world. Neither does anyone else, so far as can be determined through the wall of military secrecy. Intense security has surrounded the case, even since emergency court actions initiated by Amnesty International won limited freedom, amounting to house arrest as the only guests of a converted three-star hotel on the outskirts of Tucson. Attempts to interview the alien family have proved all but futile as the aliens and human beings have few common linguistic referents. The aliens learn very quickly and have excellent memories but considerable debate remains over whether the aliens fully comprehend what they are asked or say.
These are the facts as we know them: On December 22, 2006, automated astronomical equipment detected an intense flare of energy which seemed to appear out of nowhere about halfway between the surface of the earth and the orbit of the moon, only to disappear moments later, after being observed to traverse the distance between the points of appearance and disappearance slightly faster than the speed of light. Within minutes of this, military radars detected the ballistic entry of a missile-sized object into the atmosphere, followed by non-ballistic flight and then actual maneuvers resembling uncontrolled flight or a crash terminating in the Arizona desert. Response teams arrived to witness the final meltdown of the propulsion systems of a craft clearly not of terrestrial design. After about three hours, a portal opened and two aliens emerged carrying a third alien which appeared to be wounded, with three smaller aliens following in short order. The alien which seemed wounded was deposited on the ground where it promptly gave birth on live global television transmitted from a nearby blimp which had been on station to provide coverage for a football game.
The military promptly took the aliens and their artifacts into custody. Within hours, Amnesty International had launched their lawsuit on behalf of the aliens, on the grounds that if the aliens were held any longer than necessary to clear them through a point of inspection for medical quarantine, their detention would be unconstitutional. As this was tried in the Ninth Circuit Court, the judgement was swift. However, for the protection of the aliens, and at the insistence of the military, the aliens were to be housed as detainees for deportation in a hotel quickly seized under eminent domain proceedings. Subsequent appeals by the property management remain unresolved.
The aliens are quite different from human beings as they are not in the least related to any form of terrestrial life. They do have similar metabolisms and have a genetic system based on DNA. They also have three sexes and as near as can be understood, a dozen different concepts of gender, or maybe that's socioeconomic class, nobody seems to be sure. Two of the sexes seem to be a kind of a male and a kind of a female who is also kind of a male, the third sex completes the reproductive process with final gestation and birth after the semi-female implants her with the partially gestated result of the male's initial fertilization. For simplicity's sake, they are referred to as boy, girl, and gril. The aliens seem to be either somewhat taken aback or amused (nobody can tell which) with humans' astonishment with their reproductive scheme, though both of the femmish aliens seemed to be initially shocked and then saddened when told of the human system.
Even though the aliens are technically scheduled for deportation hearings, as a practical matter, no competent authority seems to have any useful ideas on whether these aliens can legally be deported nor for that matter to where they could be deported, or how to deport them if that is the final determination. Public opinion, of course, is widely divided as to the fate of the aliens. Some would prefer that the aliens be executed despite the lack of any criminal conviction or charges. Some would prefer that the aliens be given the opportunity to assimilate into terrestrial society. One contingent declares that because the aliens generally resemble very large talking ducks with hands, they should be served with lemon and cranberry sauce. Others debate proper basting techniques.
The courts, however, are debating whether or not the US Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment's Section 1 grants US citizenship to the newborn gril.
Aspects of the debate include whether or not the Amendment's use of the word "person" -- which has been held by the Supreme Court to legally include corporate entities -- can include intelligent non-humans. The Supreme Court's opinion including corporations has widely been characterized as "if it can hire a lawyer, it's a person"; as a result, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals initially offered use of corporate counsel to the aliens, then withdrew its offer when someone pointed out that their mission was not to protect people, but animals, which the aliens would no longer legally be if they became persons through retainer of legal counsel. Eventually the courts appointed both a conservator and a legal guardian pro-tem for the aliens, pending resolution of this issue. By default and lack of any extant classification, space aliens are considered _feris naturae_ or wild animals. The conservator is legal counsel for the State Department of Game and Wildlife, and the guardian is legal counsel for the State Department of Child Welfare.
Other elements of the debate revolve around whether or not the simple fact of birth on US soil confers citizenship. Arguments to the effect that the gril should be excluded due to being not under the jurisdiction of the US government have been countered with arguments that the aliens couldn't fall under the consular admissions exclusion as the US had no diplomatic relationships with the aliens' government. (The aliens themselves are notably reticent to discuss any aspects of their own home civilization or government, assuming that they have any concept of government equivalent to our own concepts.)
Another aspect of the debate concerns whether or not the gril should be considered to have been born here at all, as hir mother might be thought to have given birth to her sometime offplanet, proponents of this theory claiming that the mother's implantation of the partially developed gril into her parental gril itself constitutes birth, with some other legally undefined term appropriately covering the emergence of the baby gril from her parental gril with most of an Army battalion as witnesses. When called to the stand, most soldiers questioned stated opinions approximating "hell yeah she gave birth, blood all over the place, too".
When questioned as to how they themselves referred to the different "births", the aliens themselves managed to seem somehow prim as giant talking ducks could be, and declared that these were highly personal questions that they couldn't easily answer. The legal conservator from Game and Wildlife called to the stand the head veterinarian of the Agriculture department and asked him to describe the life cycle of fowl in general, and in conclusion the summary came forth that the gril was, in effect, a sort of giant talking broody hen with the functions of brooding being carried on internally. Thus, the male impregnated the female, the female laid an egg into the gril, and the gril brooded it until it was hatched. An _amicus curia_ from a Right to Life group somehow found their way to the witness stand and had the audacity to attempt to misdirect the debate to one on the morality of abortion and was hauled off in contempt of court, but not before evoking general agreement that the life of a fowl may be considered to begin not when the egg is laid, but when the egg is hatched. This being determined, it was generally agreed that the gril in question had in fact been born on US soil.
Unless other serious issues can be raised, it appears that the courts will rule in favor of the little gril's being a US citizen.
Rioting and Worse: For Wrong Reasons?
Demonstrations outside of the Federal courthouse turned ugly yesterday after the courts ruled that an extraterrestially-evolved intelligent being born on US soil is in fact both a legal person and a US citizen.
Various groups such as MALDEF, National Council of La Raza, and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a huge variety of lawsuits mostly alleging racism, discrimination, favoritism, failure to provide equal protection of the laws, and even as they did so, a huge crowd of protestors waving American flags and chanting "we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us" clashed with another group chanting "Ones, twos, threes, fours, we don't want no star wars!" The initial confrontation was merely of shouting, but all of that came to an end when one of the Chicano protestors knocked the aluminum-foil headwear off of one of the sunburned old men carrying a sign identifying himself to be affiliated with the Roswell NM chapter of the Minutemen. Riot police closed in on the resulting melee with batons, tasers, tear gas, 90mm radar nonlethal antipersonnel units, and sticky foam.
Once the combatants were removed, all that remained were two smaller groups chanting, respectively, "honey glazed basting" and "lemon or cranberry, we demand a referendum". Plainclothes made a few arrests from within these groups, mostly of those fraternity brothers who were too drunk to stand.
The Truth Comes Out, Sorta
Scientists interviewing the parents and siblings of "the Gril", as she's popularly called (nobody can pronounce any of the aliens' names and they are even less transcribable than they are pronouncable), have released more information on their findings.
Earth's space programs routinely use only the highest caliber of specialists for mission personnel. That's because human spaceflight is in its infancy still, and it's necessary that any member of any crew have the background in technology to be able to analyze any problems that might occur, and have the skills to make repairs if repairs are possible deep in the cold of airless Space.
The aliens apparently are far from being highly trained mission specialists. They are, in fact, the equivalent of agricultural labor.
Dr Thurlow Wilgood, head liason from the delegation of scientists, said "these guys aren't exactly rocket scientists. They're more like freight."
Asked to elaborate, Dr Wilgood continued: "They had us all fooled at first, because they're incredibly fast at learning languages. But that's just a knack they have, they're not really all that bright and definitely don't have much of an education. Once we had a common vocabulary, we tried to ask them how their propulsion system worked. We're pretty sure it's some sort of anti-gravity, and asked them about that, and they asked us what was gravity. We asked them if they'd ever noticed that if you stop holding something up, it falls down, and the adult male said something to the effect of now that we mention it, he'd kind of always wondered about that. Asking these guys how they got here is like asking a hobo for the design specifications of a steam locomotive."
This admission much deflates the expectations of those who thought that initial contact with an extraterrestrial civilization would result in the import of fascinating new ideas and technological innovation. But Dr Wilgood was quick to point out that just because the aliens weren't experts didn't mean they had nothing to teach us.
"We've been asking them a lot of questions and they generally don't mind answering us," said Wilgood. "We've learned a lot about their culture, or more precisely, the culture that was transporting them. All they told us, at first, was that they were some farmers who got impressed to fill a labor shortage on some planet being developed as a food source. What we thought was a lifeboat was actually a containerized transport unit, akin to our 'roll-off bins'. So far as they will tell us, they'd pretty much been locked into half of a sealed trailer and told that they'd be in transit for a fair amount of time, but they also had integral life-support, and the other sealed half of the trailer was their seed and tools for use at their destination. Apparently the containerized transports are shipped to their destination, and dropped over the side and their integrated landing systems bring them in slow enough to deliver the product."
What's the product? According to Wilgood, scientific analysis of the remaining cargo of the transport indicates that it appears to be some sort of fast-growing bulbous root crop. Wilgood tells us that the aliens had been settling in to their journey, apparently about halfway through their trip, when some sort of momentary drive failure occurred, throwing them violently around their habitat. Apparently it also knocked their transport unit out of the cargo bay. Wilgood surmises that the onboard systems looked for a habitable planet and here was our homeworld. The transport unit would have used up the last of the "subspace excited state energies" to bring them here to near-earth space, and then the standard automatic drop-shipment landing system brought them in.
So where does our little Gril come from? Wilgood says, "I can't tell you anything about their planet's location, but I can tell you that what happened was their turnip wagon hit a bump and they fell off and landed here."
Copyright December 9, 2006, all rights reserved.