The original note, as written at the time
A comedy/satire where a member of a superior alien species comes to earth and shows off his advanced tech and knowledge. However, he refuses to share it with the world powers if they do not grant the “Great Sharing” - a phenomenon where wealth is redistributed to all persons and arms are dropped among other things.
Ongoing development
He arrived in a shuttle that landed on the lawn of a hotel in Geneva, which he later admitted was chosen entirely for the photograph.
He was courteous, unfailingly, and he had a habit of answering a question with a better question, and within a week every serious person on the planet had agreed that he was either the most important thing that had ever happened or a confidence trick of unprecedented scale.
What he wanted was not complicated. He wanted the Great Sharing. Wealth moved, in a way that could be verified and could not be reversed, so that the floor was lifted everywhere at once. Arms given up — not reduced, given up, with the accounting published. And he would not trade a single line of his technology until it was done.
The negotiators thought this was leverage. They assumed that a being with superior capability must have superior wants, and that the wants could be located and met. They spent four months looking for what he wanted and found nothing, because he had told them on the first day.
He was not interested in a treaty. He was interested in whether a species that had built the means of plenty for the first time in its history would distribute the plenty or continue to sit on it while the water rose. He said it plainly, once, in a room with no cameras: I am not testing your science. I have your science. I am testing the only thing about you I cannot read from orbit.
The comedy is in the delegations. The agriculture bloc wanted the landing rights. The security council wanted the shield. A finance minister from a country of four hundred thousand people asked for his technology as a category and was told to come back with a number for the floor. Everyone, in the end, wanted exemption.
And the satire is in the fact that he stayed for eleven years. He sat through the drafts. He attended the subcommittees. He brought the technology as a bundle to the last meeting and then took it away again, exactly as he said he would, and the world wrote a joint communiqué expressing disappointment and promised to keep talking.
I was in the room. What I remember is that he never once raised his voice. He simply would not move, and it turned out that immortality is mostly patience, and that we could not tolerate being asked the same question for eleven years by somebody who could afford to wait.