DATE: Year 487-A, Sol 11

  LOCATION: Themisto

  Psychic projection was not something every Europa alien knew how to do. While they were all capable of it, without a regular practice or ritual it became rare. Long ago, the aliens used psychic projection to amuse themselves and each other, even to live entire second lives through their psychic avatars. So much effort was expended into the psychic projection that the relatively mundane business of keeping a society solvent fell to the wayside. So the aliens, with some difficulty, largely abandoned the practice, retreating into private, inner lives.

  Fesster Sypherd and the other aliens who had drifted from Europa to Themisto thought that that had been a mistake. The arrival of humans in the solar system, they believed, had been a sign to return to psychic projection. Here was a captive audience. A sister species. Maybe it was the way it was meant to be.

  Their first exposure having been to the Saganites, the consensus among the Europa aliens was that the humans were too grounded in the material for any kind of substantive psychic projection. It wouldn’t track with them, the conventional thinking went. The arrival of the other humans changed that, but the alien ruling class didn’t think so, keeping disclosure to humans strictly prohibited. Curious Europa aliens settled for toying with the humans on the outskirts, fueling a range of myths and tall tales.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  A rare few went to spend their lives living as humans. But things had been getting worse, and the aliens like Fesster Sypherd thought they could do better. They barely had time to mobilize when the alien-led Saganite force arrived for them.

  The Europa aliens insisted the faction on Themisto had to be exterminated but the Saganites demanded they be taken alive and returned to the Sagan City. They did not know what they would do with the aliens, but there had been enough death already.

  Because Fesster Sypherd and the other aliens had lived through their psychically projected avatars for so long, they could not easily return to their original forms. The Europa aliens were counting on this, providing the Saganites with technology to scan for the bodies.

  Sypherd denied he was an alien. He tried to blame the MTC. The Saganites were not well-known on Themisto, and Sypherd and his cohort cultivated that distrust, and the sense Jovian humans had about how the Saganites looked down on them.

  It didn’t make a difference. Much of the technology on Themistos had originally been built or provided by the Saganites, and they used it to land on Themistos like it was theirs. It didn’t take long to overpower the security forces and for the Europa aliens to dissipate Fesster Sypherd and

  The Europa aliens helped in locating the alien bodies on Themistos and provided containers for the Saganites to collect them and return them to Jupiter. Unsurprisingly, they all died en route back.