Plot: 4/9. A disillusioned elder warned the newcomer of the danger of approaching aliens. But it’s typical that the newcomer turned a deaf ear to it. I would give a higher score if the harangue was less tedious.
The narrator was a Newman desperate for information on aliens, so he listened to the harangue from a station engineer waiting for his beloved wife:
When the engineer was eighteen, he managed to enter into his dream bar where he met a sexy human woman on whom he crushed at the first sight and a Sellice dancer whose exotic performance drove him out of his mind for days. That woman chose to copulate with two Sirian males even if that might hurt her.
He then applied for off-planet work through hard study where he realized the imminent worldwide catastrophe triggered by human’s intrinsic lust after better mates:
- Imbalance of trade: Earthlings were gutting the Earth for aliens’ junky goods related with their culture.
- declining global population: Earthlings were costing everything to win sterile aliens’ favor and therefore ignoring mundane propagation.
- lost human dignity: The engineer were just doing chores here despite his two degrees and he also witnessed many dignitaries on earth were intoxicated with just being aliens’ menial servants.
The engineer eventually introduced the narrator to his wife who seemed to bear hurt for the work here and married just to meet the working requirement of being happily married couple. The narrator nevertheless ignored the engineer’s last warning that do stay at home and never approach aliens.
Core: 7/9. I still don’t fully understand the meaning of the title. Is it a metaphor of the engineer’s sober regret at exchanging everything on earth for a chance of contacting aliens in his youth? Since I kind of resonate with this feeling:
You once borrowed a bunch of money and sacrificed a lot to support your dream and satisfy your infatuation without caring about the consequences by just acting in accordance with your immature instinct. Then finally one day some epiphany brought you back to full consciousness insomuch that your fantasy was now shattered by the cruel reality and left you nothing but bleak dilapidation behind. However, it’s too hard of you to extricate yourself from this unpleasant quagmire because you were already bounded by an unredeemable contract or an irrevocable matter like children, marriage, or worse, chronic sequela of a disease or an addiction.
The only thing you could do was to keep going and wish some miracle would happen one day in the future.
And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side.