And so we attempted to contact them. But the response was unexpected ... for they didn't truly respond at all. They seemed either unable or unwilling to converse with us, and brushed off our attempts as if we were only annoying them.
It was finally decided that a face to face meeting was in order. We were among the welcoming party sent to greet our visitors. Those of us who lived to be able to regret it did so. The aliens attacked us viciously. In battle they fought like wild animals. As we nursed our wounds we began to wonder if they might only be animals after all. There was no reason when we thought about it why, on other worlds, animals might not evolve to walk erect without any sentient intelligence being involved. But that theory still left the question of why these animals were sent to us. For what reason would they be transported across the heavens to be abandoned on our shores? We were of many minds about the matter, and that in itself was disturbing.
Curiously and cautiously we watched them. They were senseless and brutal, often hunting their own. The violence which was visited upon the weakest of their kind was unimaginable. But there was a cunning behind much of it. In time it became apparent that the aliens were both animals and more than animals.
We did not know what to do. We had never had to deal with creatures like this before. They were destructive and intrusive and the rate at which they bred was alarming. They spawned progeny in the space of mere moons. We might have panicked had it not been for another somewhat disturbing fact: The beings killed each other off even faster than they reproduced.
We finally resolved to simply leave the creatures to themselves. If they kept dying at that rate, they would be gone in a generation.
And they did continue to die ... but they also continued to arrive.
THE END