Reflective, bitter. 

September 4th.

We welcomed them as friends. Of course we did, that’s what we’ve been taught to do for generations. And they made the right noises, too. A spirit of interstellar cooperation. A sharing of knowledge. A helping hand to join the pantheon of spacefaring species. It was when they failed to deliver that we started to become suspicious. They built their observatories in orbit but the secrets didn’t come. I’m not sure what we were expecting them to give to us. Quantum computers, maybe. Nanotechnology. Some kind of immortality serum. We waited months, then a year, and all they did was build. They didn’t tell us how they built it all, either. It just started appearing in the sky

There were always people who doubted them, but they were the crazies. We called them conspiracy theorists who were jeopardising the relationship with our benevolent space brothers. Then we started to think maybe, just maybe, they were right.