We were invited to roam from room to room, or chamber to chamber, and sit comfortably here or there as we chose to watch the transmitted motion pictures coming in from the planet. And all the motion pictures playing out on the walls in our dwellings on Bravenna were of life on Earth.

For thousands of years, we were told, Bravenna had been sending Replimoids like us to set up and maintain the transmitting stations that gathered the film footage we were to watch at our leisure. There were transmitting stations everywhere on Earth where there were animals or humans to watch. And we would soon see revealed all aspects of earthly life simply by roaming Home at our leisure and selecting different film streams to watch according to our inclinations.

We began to do this, unattended, often sitting for hours on a comfortable couch to watch a stream of films originating in a jungle or woodland or a village of human beings. And when we tired of one stream we did seek another. In all the rooms through which we wandered there were Parents watching these films, Parents on the same couches that we enjoyed or sometimes up in the branches of trees that filled the room, or simply standing there transfixed by what they were watching.

We occasionally saw other creatures, creatures more nearly similar to us, though we didn’t linger near these creatures and never were told what they were. I wish I could remember these creatures more clearly, but I can’t. I have a sense, looking back, that they were a new wingless version of the Parents, with even tinier feathers, and a penchant for clothing such as we wore, and the people of Earth wore. But I could be wrong on this. Whatever they were, they were as drawn by the film streams as the Parents were and as we were.

The film streams deeply absorbed us. We saw endless footage as it were of animals hunting in nighttime jungles, or humans in small bands or packs roaming plains and mountains or living together in small hamlets of grass huts or villages. We saw great “close-up” images of birds building nests and feeding their young, of snakes devouring the eggs of birds, or of huge lizards foraging amid insect colonies for food.