Actually, I don't know that that's true. I don't live in Peru, never did, and the people in the area they hovered over hardly had running water, let alone video cameras so there's no way to really know. But that's always the way I imagined it.

Really I live in North Carolina, in the U. S. A. and I've never seen one of them, except on TV, of course. Once word got out every station on the planet had reporters covering the situation in less than 12 hours. Everything I know came through the news.

So they showed up on our doorstep one day in late January- probably why they chose a place in the Southern Hemisphere- and made their proposal. We didn't know who, or what they were, or what their proposal really meant. We didn't know much of anything.

We all tuned in when we were finally offered our first chance to see who or what was inside these ships. We turned on our TV sets and each tried to find the channel that seemed to broadcast best, no one wanted to spin through channels in the middle.

We sat there, watching endless hours of coverage waiting, waiting, for a glimpse. Then the it was time; TV cameras from around the world jostled their way into position. Not an eye flickered as the images found their way to the screen.

Panda bears.

They weren't really panda bears, but at first glance that was what everyone saw. Later everyone laughed about it. Panda bears flying space ships? Who would have thought? Panda bears with a business proposition? Never.

But they wanted a chance to make a deal. Not just with the United States, though in some ways the reporters and politicians acted like it was, but with the world. I don't think they fully understood the way the world works for us.

Weeks of debating went by before their proposition boiled down, eventually, into understandability. They wanted Mars. Not only that, they were willing to buy it from us. They wanted to terraform it. Make it livable. And they'd be willing to let humans live there too.

Some people argued the obvious- who really knows what they mean by that? They're aliens and we can't trust them. Others argued that it was good business sense. I don't even know what they were offering in payment. I don't think it mattered. UFO enthusiasts were staking out Roswell or flying to Peru, whichever they could afford. When they couldn't afford either of those they'd hold rallies in their own hometowns. Sometimes anti-alien fanatics went and disrupted the rallies, spurring riots.

Most people hoped that things would calm down.

The United Nations met to discuss the possibilities that this would bring to Earth. Presidents and Kings and Dictators from every country discussed what to do about this new proposition. The bottom line was that there was no way to divide whatever the pandas were offering equally. Who could decide what equal even was?

However they managed to work it out, Earth accepted the pandas' offer. They moved in.

Pandamobiles, as they came to be called, became a regular sight in the skies of Earth. We'd see them shooting by at night too, silver streaks of light shooting past the moon. Kids no longer wished on shooting stars, they wished to be on shooting stars.

Then it began. No one knew what it was at first.

Each day people would wake up and check their pulse, their temperature, then look in the mirror to check their eyes.

Suicide rates shot up.

Until the pandas figured out what was wrong.

"Panda Sickness" was more feared even than AIDS within a month of its naming.

Those who survived the first outbreak were given a vaccine, but by then Earth had lost nearly 1/4 of its total population. Luckily the pandas made sure everyone was vaccinated.

Me? I got sick in the second outbreak.

I woke up just like any other morning, only, I thought, it was unseasonably warm. And then I saw my eyes, the blood vessels all showed and I knew something was wrong.

I could hardly pick up the phone but once I finally did I had to hang up several times. My fingers hit the wrong numbers so often, but I finally dialed right.

Then I sat, trembling, unable to even watch TV. Thinking I was going to die. Somehow, I didn't.

That's how I ended up here. I guess it's an okay place, and they mean well, I know. Still, I feel like an animal caged in a zoo- or a science experiment.

Still, for humans to survive they need the genetic code for survival, and that can only come from one place. Survivors.