I’d spent my whole life as a sort of alien ethologist in my own right, watching the world behave, gleaning patterns and protocols, learning the rules that allowed me to infiltrate Human society. It had always worked before. Somehow, though, the presence of real aliens had changed the dynamics of the equation. Mere observation didn’t satisfy anymore. It was as though the presence of this new out-group had forced me back into the clade whether I liked it or not; the distance between myself and the world suddenly seemed forced and faintly ridiculous. Yet I couldn’t, for my life, figure out how to
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