First Time They had landed and were trying to fit themselves into the world. At least that is the rumor an old Soldier of Fortune pal passed on to me in a kind of amazed state of mind. Well, you'd think anybody would be amazed if it had actually happened. There were no headlines about the event. A few people had come out of it and made reports. But how could you possibly believe what seemed to be so... not just crazy, but unbelievable! Why in God's name would they do it this way? And maybe they were just some sort of crazy human cultural/political experiment that got a start there. I mean, you hear the flying saucer reports all the time. But there is no good evidence. But this was a concrete place where they were supposedly living and taking in visitors! It was too insane. I put it aside for some time and went about my normal business. Then, late one night, late December of 1976, she called. I've got this copy of your book in my hand, she said. We would like you to come and visit us. And a friend and I would like to come visit you for a few days. Sure. Why not. I mean why wouldn't they come and see me? Is the President or the United Nations more important? Nah. They would come to me first of course. I hung up. Some kind of nut who, by chance, said something that was connected to what I'd been hearing. Could have been one of my friends playing some kind of joke on me. The phone rang. We're coming to Boston, she said. Ok. Sure, come on up. She hangs up. I hang up. End of story, I say. Well, that wasn't the end. It was the beginning of some- thing so unbelievable, so incredible, I still can't say to myself that it really happened. They visited and explained the whole story to me. Sure I listened. What do you do with two people who so clearly tell you a story that is either all true, or you are sitting with two of the biggest psychopaths in the history of mental illness? I was not going to disagree with these two kids! The guy with her was 6'5" and must have weighed 250 pounds--and not a lot of fat. There idea was to try and do something about the violence. That seemed to be the big thing with them. And that made sense. Part of the speculation about why we haven't been visited yet is that all the possible visitors destroyed themselves in some sort of post-post-nuclear sun-smashing war or suicidal urge. So they would all put an end to themselves before they managed to reach us. But that had not happened to them, they explained, because nature, in their own evolution had made enough of a compromise in the drives to dominate and destroy competitors, that they had just managed to scrape by the sort of intersection point of the curves where you are not so competitive and don't destroy your- self, and the point where you are destroyed by the harsh nature of the physical environment, or even another intelligent species from another planet or galaxy. They scraped by and made enormous advances in technology and control of the material world. On the other hand they couldn't be exactly sure about what might happen if they just handed all this future capability to a violence prone species that might not make it past the point of those two intersecting curves. So what should they do? They began their first experiment, their first approximation/attempt, as they often referred to it, on an old abandoned farm outside Vienna, and not far from the Hungarian border. They decided to model it after some of the social experiments/communities that were forming around that time and, had, in fact, been formed at various times and places in history. Nearly every country has examples of this. The Hutter- ites had gotten their beginning 500 years ago in Austria. They were now living mostly in Canada, with some moving down into North Dakota, and so forth. They had managed to stay the same for 500 years against all sorts of odds. They were quaint, God fearing folk, who, while dressing in the old and original fash- ion, were not averse to using the latest science and technology in their agricultural enterprises. Ok, so they might seem a little extreme even compared to a lot of other examples. There were three big things, she explained. And they all made some sense. The first was common property. That's what you might call the way we handle material things in the world, she explained. We have reached a stage where there are no jobs for practically anyone. The control of the material world is nearly complete, along with the ability to meet the demands of the most voracious consumers. Now, she went on, we have some people who get their kicks in life by going out and transforming entire galaxies. With that kind of capability, do you think anybody needs to own anything? We can transform the rawest of elements into anything you might want to consume. Go out in the desert with a couple of machines and design and build a city for a million people. So what? Your species is approaching something like that. Think about the roads and sidewalks, she explained. Do you think about who owns them? Of course not. They are the equivalent of "common property". And as your world advances, she continued, material want for more and more of your species will disappear. Ok, I could see that and imagine a future with that kind of possibility. I mean modern society already supports a large welfare and retired class. It seems reasonable that our science, and then our machines, will one day be able to create an abundance for every human on the planet. You can see that it is the general direction of countries all over the world, in any case. I had never thought about it in quite that way before, but it wasn't totally unreasonable. Then she hit me with the second of the three big punches. Free Sexuality, she called it. No fixed couple relationships. No personal ownership of one person by another. You didn't have to swear fidelity. No. Yes. I mean no, it doesn't work. And yes, I can see how I wouldn't want to be anybodies sexual proper- ty, but how can I manage to keep control of them without being a hypocrite? I mean people kill each other over sex and who be- longs to who! It is as old as writing, and as old as any of the stories about our species. How can you avoid that? Its not pos- sible, I informed her. She asked me to consider two of the primate species that were here before humans. Chimps and Bono- bos, or Pygmy Chimps. Chimp males are very sexually aggressive and possessive. They sometimes kill females in their attempts to control them. Bonobos, on the other hand, have sex with each other all the time, without regard to controlling the behavior of another. Homosexuality is not uncommon. They even mimic many of the sexual positions of humans. A Male Chimp is likely to grab a female and bang away till he's done. But Bonobos are quite different. From this, she reasoned, you can see that something else just might be possible in this area for your species. We know, she elaborated, that Bonobos are genetically closer to humans than Chimps. We suspect that you have some things from both of them. The two species, she informed me, live very close to each other, separated only by a very wide and long river. Well, I didn't really know anything that detailed about Chimps, and had never heard about this other species, the Bonobos. From my own personal feelings and experience I was skeptical of the whole idea of how she explained "free sexuality". On the other hand, the possibilities intrigued me. It was a really exciting idea. I mean, who doesn't want to have sex with more than one person? There were clearly times when I'd thought about it, even came close to cheating on someone a couple of times. But it was a fear of the cost--of being rejected by the one I had that made me hold back. Some people, of course, never let anything hold them back. I'd known about people who cheated since my early teens. Often everybody but the people being cheated on knew it. The results when somebody found out, however, tended to be uni- formly unpleasant. Well, this was something to look forward to--with fear and excitement. How the hell this was going to work was an absolute mystery to me. But this is what we have, she said flat out. Ok. I'll believe it when I feel it, I joked. She smiled. So now the third and last whack on the side of my head. I mean, was I in a dream, was it food poisoning from the oysters a few days ago or what? Had I taken some mind altering drug and forgotten about having done so, and this whole thing was just a... not a bad trip, but a SO STRANGE trip? She wouldn't give me the time to figure that one out. Number three, she begins. It seems they have this peculiar institution known as the struc- ture or hierarchy. All the people involved in their project have a position in the organization managing this project. And she later informed me that all of them were volunteers for this project, carefully tested and selected over some number of years. Everybody had a clear position in the organization or group. Group is a better word since it doesn't really correspond to what we would think of as an organization. Of course, it really looks like a commune to people on the outside. But they were not really political types and group was, to them, a more reasonable word. But they used other words from time to time, also. Now this was a really interesting part with the language. It was constantly changing with the conditions and with things they learned about our species, and also about themselves as they tried to manage this project. After all, humans were the first species they'd encountered on another planet with appropriately high intelligence for the experiment they had in mind. They could not have done this experiment with Bonobos. If they had gotten here 2 million or more years before, the whole thing would likely have been impossible, Brooke explained (that was the name she would be using here, I later learned). The window of ade- quate intelligence is very small is how I came to understand it later. Space is so big, and species are so fleeting, it seems, from all the evidence they've gathered, that their being here is nearly mathematically unlikely to happen in billions of years. But here you are, I shouted with great excitement, and a moment later realizing that those words and the feelings behind them had, unbeknownst to me, made a believer out of me before I was actually aware of it. Well, anyway, back to the structure, where everybody has an exact position. There is a number 1, a number 2, a number 3, and so on, all the way down to the last person. Christ, that person must feel like total shit, I said. Oh, come on, she responded, do you think someone could really feel so bad in an enterprise of this sort? Ok, it is really an incredible thing--but catching myself this time, and adding that it is incredible only if it is really so. Damn if she didn't give me that smile again. Eventually I came to see the hierarchy in quite a different way. After all, most of society is really organized in a similar fashion. There is a hierarchy at work, at home, with the rest of one's family, and so on. With these people, there is no dis-integration of those very things. Every- thing is integrated into their group. So only one hierarchy is needed. And another thing, really unbelievable, is that a per- son's position could change daily. And then there was the way they managed to decide who went up and who went down. I ex- plained to her that while people placed themselves and each other in hierarchies, they didn't want them to be clear and unambigu- ous. It was often very hard for a person to accept such a seem- ingly absolute judgment about their life and their position in life. Yes, she knew that. But pointed to other species that had very clear and unambiguous hierarchies. The difference for us, she explained, is that we don't kill off the group member we are displacing, whether we are going up or going down. And sometimes during my time there I could see that even some of them had difficulty with this. But it made for a very interesting dynam- ic, where change was always possible and not that hard to bring about. So when do we start, I asked. There is one more thing she said, with a simple, serious, no-nonsense tone in her voice. My skin started to crawl with flashes of hot and cold. Are these people really the devil from hell and I'm going to have to give up, sign over my soul? This was my first introduction to the SD. We travel through space in a ship with a hull to get here, she began. It surrounds us, protects us, makes it possible for us to do everything else. It is all encompassing and enveloping. Going on, she explained to me a kind of existential spaceship, a sort of psychological hull that encompassed and protected them. A hull that made their project possible and livable. SD was from the German word Selbst-Darstellung, which translated literally means Self Presentation. They had come to see the universe as a giant machine in which intelligence and consciousness, while remarkable qualities, had a kind of evolutionary quirkiness that they knew could cause problems. A particular consciousness, or individual, can come to see the universe in a particular way--and can go off in that way and cause real problems for others. They know about maniacs and tyrants at all levels, just as humans do from our history. Their history is very long, very long, and long enough to present some unmistakable patterns about human- like behavior. And so part of their long history was an attempt to find a way to overcome this seemingly inevitable and intracta- ble problem. Now, I tell you, at this point I really didn't know what the hell she was talking about or just what this thing, this SD, was. It seemed to be like some kind of therapy, or something like how tribal people would get together and sing and dance together at the end of a day. Or maybe it was like learning to give speeches, or public speaking of different kinds, where you might emphasis humor or seriousness, or physicality, or, God knows what. It could involve one person, two, any number, the whole group, and "everything" you could theatrically drag into it. I don't know. At this point I had had no experience of any sort like this, so it was not at all clear to me exactly what she was talking about. But the spaceship hull that made everything possible and enveloped them and protected them, sort of made sense. The SD would also be a mechanism through which they would try to determine if humans were a savable species. Or would humans be on a point on the curve that turned toward self de- struction? That was the big question that brought them to this place. Ok, let's move along here since I didn't think any amount of explanation would make it a lot clearer. So now I am at about the point of being thrown into some- thing that can't really exist, at some geographical location way out on the edge of nowhere, and almost a believer, but in a state of shock. I can feel the state of shock. But I can't get out of it. Like waking up from a dream, where you are, for a moment, halfway between wake and sleep and then you either wake up or fall back asleep. But I kept lingering at the halfway point and could not, for the life of me, bring myself forward or backward, or out of this halfway state. I am, it seems, halfway to no- where. How can you possibly get there then? Or back where you started? A sensation that everything is out of control, on the edge, dangling from a precipice. Why am I doing this? Something was screaming at me inside. Well, I don't have the feeling of somehow I'll accidentally step in front of a train, or hurt myself in any way, or that this is a particularly dangerous situation I'm getting into. I mean, if they wanted to make trouble for me, they could just do me in, or something. But that roaring inside continued. On the outside I could feel myself becoming numb, almost comatose. I did and I didn't want to go look at this thing that was supposed to exist. I was afraid and thrilled. I was dreading starting and couldn't wait to get going. I was beginning to feel insane. As though something was about to explode inside me. And moments of more calm than I can ever remember feeling. Was I going to the place that would be the first time for human beings? She had one more thing for me. It was about the writing I'd planned to do. Her suggestion was a very simple one. Write something like an introduction to the place. Maybe a short one, and a longer version. Explain it as a social experiment, a move- ment that came out of the 60's. Vienna had quite a history. The home of Freud, Hitler, Reich, and all sorts of social experi- ments, all the way back to the Hutterites of 500 years ago. Just another wacky social/psychological experimental commune. They are oriented to therapy. Pretend you are going there to live with a bunch of people who started a commune and who are always interested in new people. Ok. I'm off to join the commune and find a new way of life. And I'm going to write about some of the things that happened to me there.