Prologue: The Secret

The secret of the cosmos is to amount to nothing.

     I'm sorry, that was rude of me. I forgot that you humans like to start at the beginning.

     What I meant is, life would be so much easier for people if they only understood how to accept things the way they were. The cosmos gave you your lot in life, and if you simply took it instead of asking questions and giving everyone a headache, everything would be so much simpler. You all could learn a thing or two from me: my species are born drifters, with permanent ties only to the vacuum of space we travel through. For us, it was obvious from the start that to make a differences in the world was pointless and pathetic. But you humans just can't seem to get it. Somehow, you expect the universe to actually pay attention to things; to care about what you're doing, to remember your contributions after you're dead and gone. The fact of the matter is, it doesn't.

     In the whole scheme of things, it doesn't matter at all whether you succeed in life. It's all very well if you complete the earthly tasks you feel you've been appointed with, if you will profligate centuries of future generations who carry your loving memory within their hearts—but ultimately, people die. One by one, slowly, surely, the day will come when not even a trace of you and your kind will remain. The greatest accomplishments of humanity will inevitably fall into ruin and cease to exist, and there is nothing that can be done to prevent it.

     Yet no matter how blatantly this fact presents itself before you all, you never notice it. You turn a blind eye to it as if you were above the iron laws of the universe and continue to nurse your foolish egos. This is why you keep smashing each others' heads open, why you're utterly incapable of living a life of peace and harmony despite often professing to try. If you could just stop agonizing over the past and see how ludicrous the notion of hope is, if you could only slow down a moment and think—!

     The secret of the cosmos is to amount to nothing. To stop trying to connect two points of infinite and instead float through life wherever it chooses to bring them; that is the secret.

     I suppose it's too late now to go back to this way of thinking. If only I had stayed true to my old way of life in the first place, my existence would have come and gone exactly the way I liked it: nothing would have happened. I would have simply survived, mindlessly, pointlessly, happily. But by this point, such a life is just wishful thinking for me.

     My first impression of planet Earth was that I could get by reasonably well on it. The creatures there didn't seem the incredibly observant type, after all, even if they were rather hostile to outsiders, and this was reassuring because blending into the environment was what my species always did to survive; it was our specialty. Looking at you from outer space, it seemed easy enough to pretend to be human.

     But as I soon discovered, first impressions don't last long for things like the entire human race. I possessed one. I should know.

     And when the first human words you ever hear spoken are, "We are so dead," you usually hope they don't.

Practically Human

Chapter 1: The Accident

Chapter 2: The Open Palm

Chapter 3: The Vultures

Chapter 4: The Spoken Word

Chapter 5: The Lie

Chapter 6: The Truth

Extras: Halloween (take 1)

Ocean (uncut script)

Alex Martinez (Alexandra Martinez)

The Big Funk (George Funk)

Shelly Ho

Marcelle Freedman

Kent Silverstein

Ms. Catawumpus (Yang Pu Kai)

Vincienna Wei (alien)