Saturday Afternoon

They arrived without light, without heat, without the tearing noise of atmosphere. No crater announced them. No satellite blinked. The world went on breathing, unaware that it had entered.
The first sign was a sentence.
It appeared in a secondhand paperback in a used bookstore in Lisbon. A line no one remembered writing, nestled between two paragraphs of a forgotten romance novel:
We are learning the shape of your longing.
The shop owner assumed it was a printing error, or perhaps a prank. He underlined it in pencil, meaning to mention it to a customer, and forgot about it by afternoon.
Within weeks, similar sentences surfaced elsewhere. A margin note in a library copy of Moby-Dick in Nantucket. A footnote in a philosophy textbook in Kyoto that referenced no prior argument. A single, italicized line in a child’s bedtime story in Nairobi, too complex for the age it was written for:
Do not worry. We, too, began by imagining.
At first, the lines were dismissed. Printing anomalies. Vandalism. Hallucination, in one notable case. But patterns emerged, and patterns are irresistible to humans.
The sentences are never repeated. They never contradicted the surrounding text, yet they did not belong. They responded, subtly, to what came before them. A war memoir gained a line about the weight of memory. A love poem acquired a quiet observation about impermanence. A legal document, inexplicably, asked a question in the middle of a clause:
Who do you believe this protects?
The changes were undetectable by machines. Scans showed nothing unusual. Digital copies remained unchanged. Only the physical book, read by a human eye, revealed the addition. When two people read the same copy aloud, they read the same altered text. When left unread for long enough, the book reverted. The sentence slipped away, like breath from glass.
That was when the linguists were called. Then the philosophers. Then, reluctantly, the governments.
They named the phenomenon The Interpolations.
It took years to understand what was happening. The breakthrough came from a doctoral student who noticed that the added sentences never introduced new information. They only reframed what was already there. The voice was not instructive. It was curious. Tentative. Almost… shy.
The alien species, when it was finally agreed to call them that, had no physical form that interacted with matter in the usual way. Their perception of reality was structured entirely through narrative. They did not see objects, only meaning. Time, to them, was not a line but a library: events arranged by relevance, not sequence.
They had discovered Earth accidentally, the way one stumbles upon a book left open on a park bench.
Humanity, they realized, was loud in stories.
The aliens could not detect cities, weapons, or signals. They could not perceive radio waves or carbon emissions. But literature stories fixed in ink, layered with intention, contradiction, metaphor, rang out to them like a beacon.
Books were not containers of stories to the aliens. They were doorways.
To enter Earth, the aliens did not land. They read.
They learned the way humans learned from each other: through novels, plays, essays, scribbled journals hidden in drawers. They learned fear through dystopias, hope through dog-eared paperbacks passed between lovers, and cruelty through history books that tried to sound neutral.
And slowly, carefully, they began to respond.
They did not want to be worshipped. They did not want to rule. They barely understood the concept of invasion. To them, participation meant dialogue.
So, they spoke the only way they could: by altering the text, never enough to alarm, only enough to ask.
As awareness spread, reactions diverged.
Some people burned books, terrified of contamination. Others hunted for altered copies, treating them like sacred objects. Black markets formed. Scholars argued over authorship. Religious groups split, some declaring the voice angelic, others demonic, others proof that meaning itself was alive.
But most people encountered the aliens the same way: alone, late at night, reading.
A woman grieving her father found a new sentence in his favorite mystery novel:
You are allowed to miss what hurts you.
A soldier re-reading a dog-eared paperback from deployment found this:
Survival is not the same as returning unchanged.
A child learning to read stumbled over a line that wasn’t in the classroom copy:
We are glad you are here.
The aliens never announced themselves. They never explained their biology. They never asked for resources. They asked questions instead, scattered like seeds through humanity’s written record.
Over time, their presence diminished. Not because they left, but because humans changed.
New books were written with an awareness of being read by more than just other humans. Authors found themselves pausing, considering not only what they wanted to say, but how it might be heard by something learning what it meant to be alive.
The aliens, for their part, learned restraint. They stopped adding lines. They listened.
Earth, to them, became less of a beacon and more of a conversation already in progress.
And somewhere, in a quiet library where no one has visited in years, a final sentence appears in an old, cracking spine: You do not need us to continue. You have always been speaking to one another. The book closes. The story goes on.