The Piano Key

It was Spring when I touched down on planet Earth and just after the turn of what they termed their twentieth century – a time of year when the natural vegetation began to flourish – never in all the years of my career had I seen a planet with so much greenery – mind you, neither had I seen a planet with so much water falling from the skies and my studies as a child had taught me that the two went hand in hand. Personally I think I would have sacrificed one in order to abolish the other.

The sky was bright blue – just like in the books. It seemed an unusual colour for a sky but I understood that here on Earth it was most coveted. I descended the steps of my small craft and set the projection mode to invisible. I had landed in a dense, wooded area, seemingly with no beings in the vicinity but I was always cautious, still remembering the tale of my predecessor who had allegedly landed on Earth some 60 or 70 of their years ago and never returned.

I looked down at the object in my hand. The smooth, white oblong with a smaller black oblong connected to the top of it. You could push the latter in to the former but doing so triggered no kind of incident. I stared at it and ran one of my tentacles over its polished surface, reminding myself to set my own projection mode to “Homo Sapien”. The rare and expensive relic had been in the family of the First Terra Perina for some time, although the story of how it had found its way on to Manna – my home planet was uncertain and often came in several variations, with different degrees of credibility. It was the Terra Perina who had approached my newspaper and we had struck a deal – I would attempt to find out what the mysterious object really was and they would allow the paper to photograph it and run the story, reaping in the financial rewards such an article would bring.

I started to walk through the woods until they thinned out in to fields smattered with buildings. I could have teleported but I wanted to savour the environment in order that I could depict it properly in my article. The object played on my mind. I had been convinced it was some kind of weapon – which is what the Terra Perina also believed, but now I wondered If it wasn’t something more basic – a tool perhaps? The Earthlings seemed a simple species, looking at their security systems which seemed to be comprised of gateways made of trees which I could easily scale even in my four limbed human form.

As I crossed a field full of silent black and white beasts I knew were “cows” yet not what purpose they served, I heard a strange sound coming from a stone building with a thin veil of smoke rising from a hole in the top. The sound drew me in – I had never heard anything like it before – it was like singing, yet mechanical almost, like all the sounds I had ever heard rolled in to one, on top of each other, vying to be heard. As I neared the human building, the sound became louder. I crept towards a glass panel in the wall – a window and looked inside. A human was making the sounds, yet not by itself. The human’s hands danced over white and black oblongs which looked so familiar.

I looked down at the object in my hand and drew in a very human breath.

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