Miscommunication

 His father had always told him that someday his mouth would get him in trouble. He talked too much. No filter. If it popped in his head it came out of his mouth. He had two ears and one mouth. Listen more, talk less. Like his brother always did.

His brother was like his father, but without the cruel streak. He was a big listener. Didn't say a lot but when he spoke people paid attention. And agreed. Yes! That is exactly what they were trying to say. He was good at managing unruly groups of people. He would say that oftentimes what was happening was violent agreement. They all actually felt the same way but just had different ways of expressing it. Once you got people unlocked from those patterns they could work together.

He knew his brother would have handled this differently. Just another way he didn't measure up to their father's expectations for them both. He didn't resent his brother, infact if it weren't for his brother he wouldn't have even gotten this job. His brother recommended him for the work. Told everyone he was a good solid worker. Could be trusted. He didn't resent his brother for being better at things than he was, it wasn't his brother's fault he was the favored child any more than it was his fault that he wasn't.

Honestly though he really was the lucky one.

Not like, completely lucky, after all he was trapped underground in a cage with no real belief he was going to survive but still luckier than some.

When his exploration party had been captured it had all happened too fast for him to really understand exactly how it happened. After all the planet wasn't populated with anything they considered dangerous. There was life, but it wasn't like them so they had dismissed it as something to study not something to be worried about.

At least until the first few parties were abducted, now the rest of the settlers knew that they needed to be on guard and take some precautions. Apparently they had sent back messages to Earth for more weapons and they were experimenting with isolated burns, trying to eradicate the life without exploding their own homes.

He had picked up this information from his captors. They told him things. He wasn't sure if they did it on purpose or if it was just a side effect of the way they communicated. But he knew about what was happening on the surface. He knew what they needed from him. He knew what their plans were.

They needed him to learn how to speak. They didn't communicate through vocalization. They just knew what each other was thinking. Telepathy, but more than that. They were tied together, not just with each other, but with the entire planet. It was one giant organism in a way. Like mushrooms, or some other fungus. But that seemed sort of derogatory in his mind so he tried not to think of them like that. But that's the closest he could come to understanding them.

It was how his party had been taken. They knew where they were. They knew where everyone was, where everything was, and when they decided to take them the ground under them moved and swallowed them up. Brought them down under the surface, who knows how far, into this room. He and the others were put in cages, mud rooms really, and then the experiments started.

Like he said, he was lucky. The first person they tried communicating with they literally melted his brain. There was the smell. Like roasting meat. Then the smoke coming out of his ears. It would have been comical if it hadn't been terrifying.

All humans are is electric pulses. Every thought they have, every heartbeat, every nerve impulse. It's all electricity. These beings are the same. But they are at a much higher amperage than humans are. Putting all of that energy into a human brain did not work. It took them four tries at converting and reducing their output so human minds could handle it.

Luckily he was the fifth person they experimented on.

Their plan was simple. At least for them. They were going to travel to Earth and explain to the population that they were destroying the planet and that they needed to take care of the ecosystem that they were a part of before it was too late. Earth of the past. They were trying to decide when they would need to arrive to make the change before it was too late.

Apparently time is just a map. You could pick any spot on that map and go there, if you understood how the energy waves worked. And they did. He really wanted to get back to Earth and share that information with his brother. The things they could do with that knowledge. It was dizzying to think of.

But they didn't want to exploit the system, what they wanted to do was go back in time and stop the destruction of Earth. Stop the need for colonization of other planets. Stop them from destroying things they didn't understand.

For months now they had kept him in his cage. They had taken supplies when they took his party so he had food, though they all left the area when they would feed him. He could feel their disgust at what was in the MREs. He couldn't really blame them, they weren't the best tasting, but also it was deeper than that, it was what was in there.

They took their nutrition from the soil of their planet. And gave back to the soil what it needed through their waste. Honestly, he was disgusted at the thought of essentially eating poop so he couldn't blame them for being disgusted with him eating beef stew. To each their own.

But they had taken decent care of him. For awhile when there were more of his party still alive, he had had people to talk to. Now it was just him. And them. And they had learned how to communicate directly with him. He could understand them and they could understand him. They were just working on how to vocalize the words. They wouldn't be able to just tie into every Earthling's head the way they had with him. They wanted to be able to speak to them. To reason with them.

And that's where his mouth got him into trouble. Just like his father said it would. Though this time it was his mind. No filter. What he thought he shared.

He told them that there had been people who had tried that but it hadn't worked. That for decades before they used up all of the Earth's resources there were a lot of their own scientists that said it was happening. But nobody was willing to change. The thought that it was easier to just start going to other planets took hold and that was that. Infact, it had actually sped up the destruction of Earth when they started testing rockets and mining for the minerals needed to power them.

They spread a blanket of calm reason across his mind and explained that they would be able to make his people understand. They would show them how to care for the planet and what the damage they were doing would cause. Reason was the way to reach them.

He had laughed. And reminded them that when his people discovered that they were sentient beings, sentient beings that were not happy with the colonization of their planet, his people had sent messages back to Earth, not that they needed to leave, but that they need more weapons. Reason wasn't really going to work.

He felt it then. The first shift. He had gotten through to them. Just like his brother would have. He had listened to them and explained to them why what they were saying was flawed. He had done it. He had a moment of feeling proud.

Just a moment.

He wasn't sure what would happen to him now. They tried to explain to him. It would be instantaneous. And painless. But he couldn't wrap his head around it, even with their help.

Instead of trying to save Earth they would be going back to destroy it.

They didn't view it as total destruction, just a little alteration in the timeline. When that first being pulled itself from the primordial ooze it would be met with a life that was already formed, and it would be absorbed and then given back to the Earth to try again.