It was a perfectly ordinary Thursday afternoon when, through his window, Poliphilos saw the massive spaceship appearing above the city.

The vessel hung silently in the sky, its enormous form seeming to dwarf both the ancient domes and modern office buildings below.

As he watched tourists and scooters scurry to all possible directions from under it, his phone rang.

The caller ID showed ‘Unknown Number.’

As he stared at the screen, Poliphilos noticed the signal bars had been replaced by an unfamiliar symbol that seemed to pulse in sync with the gentle humming now emanating from the ship.

‘Hello?’, Poliphilos answered.

‘We need your help,’ the voice said.

‘And more importantly, we need your music. Meet us at the ruins of the ancient baths outside of the city at midnight. Come alone. And bring headphones – you’ll need to be playing your music constantly for protection. We’ll explain why when we meet.’

Poliphilos considered declining – midnight meetings with mysterious callers weren’t typically in his schedule – but something about the massive ship still hovering silently above the city suggested this wasn’t a prank.

He packed his most reliable headphones, loaded his phone with his entire discography (just in case), and, when the time came, headed to the ancient ruins.

The night was unusually still.

His footsteps echoed off the massive brick walls as he made his way through the ruins.

In the moonlight, the ancient structure’s shadows seemed to move with an otherworldly quality.

Then, Poliphilos noticed a soft glow emanating from the central chamber.

‘Please put on your headphones and start playing “Landscape Fantasy” before approaching,’ a voice called out. ‘For your own safety. And… perhaps set it on repeat.’

Poliphilos did as instructed, the familiar beat of his own song filling his ears as he walked toward the light.

There, in the heart of the ancient baths, stood three tall figures whose edges seemed to shimmer with a strange, luminescent quality.

‘These must be the aliens!’, Poliphilos thought to himself.

‘Greetings, Poliphilos. We come in peace.’, one of them said.

‘Uh huh? That’s what they’d say before they blast you with ray guns”, Poliphilos answered.

‘Very funny’, the second one replied. ‘No guns here. Just tea.’

Tea, indeed. Over cups of suspiciously luminescent tea (which made Poliphilos equally luminescent after a few sips), the aliens started explaining their mission.

They were part of the Galactic Cultural Exchange Program, tasked with connecting different civilizations across the universe.

Earth was particularly interesting because of its rich cultural diversity, but their attempts at first contact had been… problematic.

They’d been observing humanity since ancient times, trying to find the right approach.

‘We’ve had some unfortunate incidents,’ one alien admitted, their edges glowing a sheepish pink. ‘Remember Pompeii?’

‘That was you?’ Poliphilos nearly dropped his headphones.

‘A complete accident,’ the alien sighed, releasing a small cloud of embarrassed yellow spores that turned the other two equally yellow, then approached Poliphilos, too, but which dissipated harmlessly against his musical shield.

Now he knew why he had to keep the headphones on. “The music is a shield!”, he thought to himself.

‘We tried to introduce ourselves during a local festival. Our emotional spores mixed with the wine. Next thing we knew, the whole city was experiencing our excitement about first contact. The collective euphoria was so intense it… well, it sort of awakened the mountain.’

‘You made Vesuvius erupt with good vibes???’, Poliphilos exclaimed.

‘We may have gotten a bit too enthusiastic,’ another alien added, turning a mortified shade of purple. So did the others.

‘That’s why your music is so important. There’s something in the pattern of your melodies, lyrics and how they are combined with the sounds that somehow neutralizes the adverse effect of our spores! With the right emotional stabilization field based on it, we could approach other civilizations without accidentally triggering any geological events”. All turned a nice shade of navy blue.

“We’re especially interested in speaking to your producer, because he and his technology seems to be the key. It’s something in your producer’s mysterious technology, your compositions and the fascinating background vocals that really could revolutionize interplanetary diplomacy here!’, the third one said who had been silent so far.

While the fifteenth round of “Landscape Fantasy” started, Poliphilos couldn’t believe his ears, but he kept listening and they continued.

The aliens, it turned out, had a unique biological feature: they communicated through emotional spores that made everyone around them feel what they were feeling.

On their bioluminescent homeworld, this created a beautiful symphony of shared emotions and colours.

On Earth, however, it posed a significant diplomatic challenge.

Their second test landing had turned a routine Chinese military observation post into an impromptu group therapy session. With guns.

‘Not a pretty sight that, either’, the first one explained while they all turned yellow again.

But they had discovered something interesting while monitoring Earth’s cultural broadcasts. Certain harmonics in Poliphilos’s music, particularly in “Landscape Fantasy” seemed to neutralize their spores’ effects while preserving their ability to communicate. The song’s irresistibly catchy beat together with the backing vocals created a kind of emotional stability field.

What the aliens didn’t know – and what Poliphilos himself had only recently discovered – was that this effect came from some mysterious technology his producer, Juho Isomäki, used during recording sessions.

Poliphilos had noticed that Juho would sometimes connect an odd-looking device to the mixing board, its casing marked with symbols he’d never seen before.

When asked about it, Juho would just smile and say something vague about “frequency optimization” so Poliphilos decided not to push it.

Where Juho had acquired this technology was anyone’s guess, though Poliphilos had noticed his producer occasionally gazing thoughtfully at the stars during late-night recording sessions.

“With your permission we would like to talk with him about how he does what he does”, the aliens asked.

“Be my guest!”, Poliphilos replied.

A week later they started the pilot meeting preparations and one of the first things Poliphilos realized was that they needed to further strengthen the emotional stability field. He called his vocal coach, Emmi, to add background vocals to another song he had started working on.

Her response was surprisingly immediate: ‘Ah, they’ve finally arrived.’

‘You knew???’, Poliphilos asked.

She did, indeed.

It turned out Emmi had been preparing humanity for inter-species communication for years through her vocal coaching.

Her Complete Vocal Technique’s ‘Necessary Twang’ principle, which she used to help singers find optimal resonance, coincidentally created frequencies that helped humans develop resistance to unexpected emotional influences!

When Poliphilos mentioned this coincidence to his producer Juho, he just nodded knowingly and adjusted his mysterious frequency device.

The combination proved perfect: Juho’s enigmatic technology, Emmi’s precisely calibrated twang frequencies in the background vocals, and the catchy beat of “Landscape Fantasy” created an emotional stability field so effective that even the most excitable diplomats maintained their composure – though they couldn’t stop humming the tune during coffee breaks.

After measuring the spores’ effects under various conditions, Poliphilos suggested a pilot test: a small group of world leaders would meet the aliens in a controlled environment while “Landscape Fantasy” played softly in the background.

And a few weeks later they did, in Cannes, France.

There, the song’s infectious rhythm proved perfect for maintaining emotional equilibrium, though they had to pause the meeting twice when several diplomats couldn’t resist dancing to the beat.

The global solution became clear: Poliphilos’s music would need to become the standard background soundtrack for all human-alien interactions.

Streaming services began offering Poliphilos’s special ‘Alien Interaction‘ playlists featuring his and other songs found to help maintain human-alien communications.

As the successful pilot meetings concluded, the aliens had one final gesture for Poliphilos.

‘We want to share something with you,’ they said, producing a small crystalline sphere that pulsed with shifting colors.

‘This contains the emotional journey of one family from our world – how they evolved from tiny floating spores to cosmic consciousness across three generations. We’ve translated it into human emotional patterns.’

‘Is it safe to experience?’ Poliphilos asked, eyeing the sphere cautiously.

‘With your music playing, yes. Consider it our thank you gift.’

The alien’s form shimmered with the kind of pink that Poliphilos had learned to recognize as their version of a smile. ‘Perhaps it will inspire something.’

That night, with ‘Landscape Fantasy’ playing softly in the background, Poliphilos held the sphere and let the alien family’s story wash over him.

He experienced their journey: the first generation’s simple joy in floating around the alien planet forests sharing emotions, the second generation’s struggle with evolving abilities, and the final generation’s transformation into beings of pure consciousness.

Yet through it all, they remained a family, bound by something deeper than either biology or technology.

These alien memories began to coalesce into a new melody in Poliphilos’s mind.

Not the emotionally stabilizing patterns of ‘Landscape Fantasy,’ but something different – a song about adaptation and transformation across generations. A song that would tell a parallel story of human evolution, from Earth to stars, from individual emotions to universal consciousness.

The aliens were delighted when they heard the first demo.

‘You’ve captured it perfectly,’ they said, their emotional spores creating a gentle multicolor aura of appreciation around them (safely contained by the background music).

‘The story of one family becoming more than themselves, while remaining exactly who they are.’

And then it was their time to return to their home planet.

‘We and a few more will return when the time is right’, they said.

As the spaceship departed, leaving behind a faint trail of iridescent spores that dissolved in the evening air, Poliphilos sat at his desk, the crystalline sphere now dark but warm in his hands.

The aliens’ gift had given him exactly what he needed – a way to tell humanity’s story of evolution and transformation through one family’s journey across generations.

He titled the new song ‘Stand By You,’ knowing that somewhere in the universe, an alien family’s emotional journey would forever be intertwined with a similar human one.