I thought this was a lovely short story. And a lot of the reason is for what it didn't say, opposed to what it did.
The first person narrative was well done, and it obviously tried to lead you to come to your own conclusions, exactly as the narrator was left to do, thus creating a bond between the listener/reader and the character.
The story really impressed me for a number of reasons, and I felt a number of influences coming from it. Listening to it I got a mental image of Gene Roddenberry having a bull-session with Franz Kafka - a sort of Star Trek meets philosophical existentialism.
It also immediately reminded me of the Twilight Zone episode "The Invaders" except we know all along that the travelers are earthlings. What may be the twist though is that the narrator is too.
Let me explain that. To me it seems as though perhaps the travelers were actually finally home - they themselves, their generation, from a different planet but they found their "ancestor" planet, after their ancestors traveled the stars both usurping and absorbing other earth-like planet's cultures, terraforming and gentrifying more environmentally harsh and culturally primitive planets, and eventually somehow losing their own identity as humans, or at least becoming anxious to rediscover their roots.
This idea also explains why Jared (or Jaret? Sometimes it sounded like a d, sometimes a t - but otherwise the reading of the story was superb) appeared upset at the lack of the narrator's ability to give an encompassing history of the world she lives in.
The focus on the hand movements also had me intrigued. Perhaps because of the technology to adapt to other planets and alien languages, they became deaf along the way through evolution - that would explain the hand movements and the ear pieces.
A great story overall, one with a lot of thought put into it. There is much more going on here than what appears on the surface. And I felt a bit of darkness to it, suggestion we are all doomed to repeat a large and endless cycle.