A man and his boy come up an unfamiliar walk to knock on a door that belongs to someone else. When it opens, the one who lives here is stranger than anything they pictured. They are the visitors on this step. They came up the path into a neighborhood that was settled long before they arrived, and the house and the street and the evening all belong to another. So the man does what a decent guest does at another's door. He leaves his airs on the sidewalk, holds his hands empty and open, and greets the resident plainly. The boy watches how a person stands at a door that belongs to someone else.

Many of the terms in common use were coined during periods of fear, speculation, or cultural panic, and they carry that weight into every sentence they appear in.

Retirement of the Term "Alien"

The term alien is imprecise and emotionally charged, carrying connotations of invasion, hostility, and non-belonging that misrepresent the range of intelligences catalogued here. The term is retired from use in this guide.

Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs)

The term Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) is used throughout this guide. It is intentionally broad. It encompasses biological intelligences, Earth-native or otherwise; synthetic or non-biological intelligence; interdimensional or phase-adjacent entities; atmospheric intelligence; and hybrid intelligences of mixed human and non-human lineage. The term intelligence indicates agency and leaves biological or physical form unspecified. NHI is already established in contemporary disclosure language and covers the full range of beings described in this guide.

"Non-human" is the functional simplification this guide uses for raw orientation but remains inaccurate. It marks where a being sits in the human-centered classification of bodies and lineages, and describes only that.

Citizenship vs. Allegiance

Citizenship in this guide means participation in a shared environment. Allegiance and obligation remain entirely at the citizen's discretion. Human citizenship remains terrestrial for now but that is subject to change.

Sovereignty and Consent

Personal sovereignty is the baseline condition: individual agency holds across every form of contact, physical, cognitive, and energetic. Consent runs deeper than any single exchange, operating at the level of the citizen's own field, and it governs communication, observation, engagement, and influence alike.

Conduct Expectations

Citizens are expected to remain calm during anomalous exposure, avoid provocation or performative behavior, refrain from mythologizing or assigning intent without evidence, and respect boundaries, human and non-human alike. The appropriate default response to anomalous phenomena is mutual respect, made of three things: no assumptions about who or what is present, no judgment of what is observed, and a calm, coherent internal field. Unnecessary escalation changes the nature of an encounter without improving its outcome.

Interaction and Discretion

Encounter, awareness, or communication leaves interpretation and response entirely at the citizen's discretion. Nothing in this guide obligates belief, cooperation, disclosure to others, or behavioral change.

Neutral Framing

Intelligences vary in intent, orientation, and interest in human affairs. Most are indifferent to human narratives. Moral binaries, good versus evil, threat versus ally, are too coarse a tool for a multispecies environment, and applying them in advance of an actual encounter produces more error than orientation.

Disposition varies across the catalog. NHI range from the benevolent and governance-aligned, through the indifferent and the strictly mission-oriented, to a small number operating with hostile intent. The full spectrum is set out entity by entity in Section 4 — NHI Catalog. The conduct principle holds regardless of where a given intelligence sits on that range: assess the specific encounter by behavior and field signature, and treat the catalog as orientation, tested against the encounter itself.

An encounter can assault the senses. A being may carry a smell, a visual form, or a sound that triggers immediate revulsion, and that recoil is a reflex of the citizen's own senses, separate from what the being is or intends. The discipline is to stay coherent through it, meeting the encounter with courage, keeping the mind open, and extending the same regard the citizen would expect to receive. Composure is also practical, since a present, coherent citizen meets contact on steadier terms, and the character of an encounter often shifts with the citizen's own state. Respect travels with discernment: the citizen holds their boundaries and assesses the encounter by behavior.

When Uncertainty Persists

Uncertainty is acceptable. When in doubt: observe, pause, maintain personal boundaries, and defer interpretation.

Conduct in Disclosure Conversations

The citizen who has engaged with this material will encounter people who have yet to. The conduct framework for those conversations is the same as for any encounter with beings operating from a different information state: accurate, non-coercive, and without attachment to the outcome.

The citizen has no obligation to educate or convince. Sharing information before someone is ready to receive it rarely produces the intended result. The citizen who presents what they know clearly, once, and then releases the outcome is operating correctly, holding the position afterward without defensiveness or retreat. The citizen who pushes, argues, or repeatedly returns to the subject is attempting to override another person's sovereign process.

Emotional Conduct

The conduct expectation is that the citizen remains the one making decisions in their own situation, with the emotional response present while the citizen retains the capacity to observe, assess, and act. The standard accommodates fear: a citizen who is afraid but holds their position is operating within conduct norms. The sections ahead, particularly Section 13, describe specific practical tools for maintaining that interior stability under pressure.

Practical Summary

The conduct framework in this section applies across all situations the guide describes:

• Use NHI, the term that leaves origin and intent unspecified
• Hold citizenship as a state of being, with allegiance kept at your own discretion
• Treat sovereignty as a two-way condition: assert your own, respect others'
• Offer information about this material once, clearly, without pressure
• Maintain decision-making capacity under emotional load
• When uncertain about what something is, describe what you observed; classification follows observation

Everything else in this guide is context for applying these six principles correctly in specific situations.

Whatever business brought them, they conduct it as guests and take their leave, and the strange house settles back into a life that ran long before they knocked. Humanity is the newcomer here, arriving late to a neighborhood already settled, and the first move at any threshold is the guest's: humility before the claim, the open hand before the question. The boy will carry that to his own strange doors, because he watched it done once, in daylight, at a door that belonged to someone else.