The creatures who shared your art with us had to explain many things to make it minimally comprehensible. This by itself made sense. You are who and what you are, and we are who and what we are, and the physical differences between us are profound. We belong to different orders, and this means that our minds are also different, our philosophies are different, our ways of measuring and of comprehending the universe are different. It requires several layers of translation just to render a narrative you find simple into terms that make it a narrative we find simple, the nature of your lives being so odd, in the context of ours. We have sent this message back, also through multiple layers of translation, in the hope that it is not so garbled in the interim that the very point of communication is lost. This is a problem that will always exist between us, and we have no choice. Nevertheless, your arts have been shared: the careful arrangement of sounds you call music, the designed arrangement of visual elements you call illustration, and the orchestration of hypothetical events you call fiction. We felt that we must respond.

This much we do understand: that you have a thought experiment you call “telephone,” though we have no idea what that word means. In this experiment, a series of events is relayed to an individual, who must relay it to another, who relays it to another, and so on. By the time the report is delivered to a final individual, so many distortions have crept in that the original meaning is lost. You somehow find this amusing as well as illustrative. “Laughter” may occur. We do not understand “laughter,” but we understand the premise of distortion, and we are aware of how much may occur by the time your “art” is returned with our response. It may well look alien to you, as it has been filtered through the minds of so many alien cultures since it left you, both on its way to us and on the way back.

What we comprehend and what we wish you to understand is this. One of your celebrated creators, a William Faulkner, explained the nature of your art in mathematical terms that we were able to process. He said that a human life—and here we extrapolate his observation to the lives of creatures like ourselves—comprises a vast store of pain and that a work of art that must express the nature of this within a finite space must compress this quality in order to fit not just a fair representation of that feeling but also its totality within the truncated space.

We do not understand the societal context in which an individual must spend his entire adult life fleeing retribution for once stealing sustenance he needs to survive. Nor do we understand how an immature specimen of your young must take to a waterway with an individual who has fled his ownership by others. Nor do we understand being an aging individual with failing cognition who can no longer fulfill his function of brokering goods and must terminate his own existence in order to complete payment for the shelter where his family lives. We certainly do not understand needing to make an alarmed noise but being transformed by a machine designed for calculation into a creature with no vocal orifice. But we understand that these are representations of conflict within your very selves, set against the conflict your interaction creates for one another, and we understand that the pain is compressed for the purposes of comprehension and that this makes the illustration you intend easier to convey to others. This, we feel, is a defiant declaration of who and what you are and a profound gift of communication to the universe, and while we do not understand all the particulars, we understand what this Faulkner individual, with his reduction of the art to mathematical formula, posited: that the pain must be compressed. This has enabled us to understand such primal concepts as “To Be or Not to Be, That is The Question,” the tension between existence and nonexistence, survival and surrender, as your kind sees it.

We therefore return the gift with as profound an expression of what pains our kind, as we are capable of providing.

This is a myth about an individual of our sort, with only limited access to the resources that makes our lives possible. This individual endures the intense disapproval of others because of a sin not yet committed, that may indeed never take place, that is indeed a sin erasure for others, the prevention of a certain ritual carried out by strangers that will doom yet another sub-population to irrelevance in a globally produced cultural artifact that will render them non-sapient and worse less than nothing in the perception of the whole. The suffering lies in the failure to reach potential, the betrayal of past expectations, the corruption of an ideal and the very physical price that the posited individual will pay, for falling short in such a tragic way. This summary suffers from our inability to provide specifics comprehensible to your species. Inaccuracies have crept in. All that is necessary for you to understand is that this is a primal agony for the posited individual, a trauma that cannot be borne, that is here expressed in the most fraught terms, with an empathy that has rendered many of us overwrought on contemplation.

We have chosen this particular work even though you would find it alien and incomprehensible in specific because we believe it is, of all we have, the one with the greatest potential of accessibility to yourselves. We know that you will find the details incapable of translation, and most of the emotions impossible to relate to. But we also think that the most basic element will get through, this compression of life experience, as the most basic foundation of what may, with luck, become a future basis for communication.

It may not. You may not still exist. After all, the translated samples provided to us come from originals of much antiquity, and even you still survive in some form it is still possible, even likely, that something of a terrible nature may happen to you by the time the translation through many other sapient sources gets back to you. The same is, of course, true of us, and it remains possible that this message will end up being a dispatch that is the only manifestation of two voices that no longer sound in this universe. But the intent is here, and if nothing else this is evidence that we heard you, and possessed hope that you hear us.

Here is the minimum.

We know you have felt pain. We are alike at least as much as we have as well.