skonen_blades | Entries tagged with contact

You’d expect a physically challenged, mentally retarded child born with a life expectancy of six years to figure out a crude way of getting around. Some simple crutches, perhaps. Or maybe a box to drag oneself around in.

You wouldn’t expect that child to build robot legs that worked.

That’s how the aliens saw us. They looked on us in pity and in fascination.

They came to us from space without the benefit of ships or space suits. They floated down on rippling bio-solar panel wings of unfurling grace. They were humanoid but much taller, bilaterally symmetrical like us. They had four more senses than us and were able to breathe in fourteen different atmospheres. Those solar sail wings could extend for fifty meters when fully extended in space. They were so very thin.

They looked like us for a reason.

And we didn’t look like them because we were deformed.

In this universe, they explained, there was only one dominant form of life.

Humans.

Planet Earth was seeded with that form of life but somewhere the replication got too many errors in it. A few missing pieces in the helix or a few too many where it counted. Our growth was stunted and our full potential squandered.

According to these superior versions of humans that wafted down from space, normal human beings kept every trait in the DNA that they’d gotten along the way and were supposed to flower in a second puberty around sixty years of age.

That second puberty would have us grow much taller, become psychic, kick all of our evolutionary traits into full-blown activation, and give us the ability to fly into space like a dandelion seed pushed by a gust of wind. And those wings could tesseract space. Living wormhole organs. The distances between stars made it necessary for them to have lifespans measured in thousands of years.

We felt jealous and ripped off. But also proud. These beings had no need for technology. They’d never invented radio or television. That explained the silence of space. They’d never had to invent spacecraft. They’d never had rocket technology or microwaves or chemistry or vacuum tubes. They could construct stable wormholes but they didn’t understand the math behind it.

We were a marvel to them. A doomed, stunted, tragic, tear-jerker of a marvel.

But they couldn’t read our minds. We lacked the broadcast and receiving apparatus. They learned our language in hours and communicated with us using their rarely used mouths. It was a novelty for them.

It gave us the time to mount an attack. Great minds must have thought alike because in a surprisingly effective military movement, as accidentally co-ordinated as it was spontaneous, all the countries of earth killed these super-humans.

The ones that could flee, fled. Around two-thirds. The rest of them fluttered like moths in jars, trying to get out of our buildings as our bullets tore holes in their paper bodies.

The brutality shocked them. They felt the trapped ones die in their minds. We haven’t seen them since. It’s likely that they have marked our planet as a no-go area.

Suits us fine.

However, we’ve been busy researching those bodies. Every country on Earth is in a race to see who can get the first patents. The first stable wormholes, the first space-faring wingsuits, the first immortality drugs, the first psychic warriors, the first amphibious soldiers, etc, etc.

And when the time comes, we’ll spread out amongst the stars ahead of schedule because of them. We’ll see who’s superior then.

tags

First contact went very well. The neutral meeting point on one of Saturn’s moons was a good point for everyone. They had faster-than-light travel and we didn’t so it was deemed fair.

The aliens were ‘paired but one’ as they called it. Separate entities that had in time become symbiotic.

Picture a green, gnarled four-legged bowl with a smooth glowing orb sitting in the bowl.

The glowing orbs were recorded intelligences that had been left behind when their race left the planet. They were a backup. The parent race never came back.

The four-legged bowls used to intelligent animals with a large, hard carapace. The glowing balls found that if they attached themselves to the animals’ backs while the animals were young, the carapaces would grow around the orbs.

The orbs extended nanotendrils into the walker’s minds, boosting their intelligence and uniting the two creatures. In return, the animals gave the orbs the power of sight, touch, smell, and movement.

They were fascinated by our ‘oneness’, the translator called it.

They invited our first-contact team back to their planet. We couldn’t say no. They whisked us away in their small ship. They said they’d bring us right back.

That was six years ago.

Twenty of us were on the contact team. There are thirty of us now. The aliens were disappointed that our females only gave birth to one or two humans at a time. They’ve been forcing us to breed. They put those nanotendrils into us and stimulate us like puppets. We don’t even cry or scream anymore.

We thought at first that we were honoured guests. Then we thought we were prisoners. Then we thought we were their pets. Now, I don’t think there’s a word for what they want us to be.

It looks like they’re interested in making us integrate into their race like they did with the four-legged walkers. They’re trying different ideas with our babies. So far the experiments have all been screaming failures.

It’s hell.

tags

It’s a very strange feeling, waking up after you’re sure you were killed. I remember thinking that this must be how people who were in car accidents feel when they wake up in the hospital. Shaky. Disjointed sense of time. It must all feel a little unreal.

Except I’ve never felt better. And that’s strange.

I’m an astronaut. I was in a vessel making a cargo run between the Sirius Lagrange point and Andromeda 6 when the stars went out. My instruments all flatlined and there were no more stars in the viewport.

I’d heard of this before. A little patch of black ice, the other pilots called it. A little hole in reality. I’d never experienced one but here it was, happening to me. This would be a good story to tell my friends. If I just kept on the same heading, didn’t touch the controls, I should come out the other side without a scratch.

That’s when they cut into the hull. The sparks came raining down. I slapped the evac button on the dash and was immediately suited up by the ship’s servos. The helmet snapped down and sealed in a millisecond. I looked out from the faceplate as the left side of my ship lit up with sparks and welding torches working their way in from the outside.

The aliens clambered in through the glowing edges of the holes they’d cut as the atmosphere from my ship gusted out into space. They looked metallic and dog-like but with too many legs. Sort of like robot centaurs crossed with werewolves with a bit of centipede thrown in. They were strange and I didn’t recognize their species from any of the sighting books I’d studied in pilot school.

They noticed me. I was sweating and hyperventilating in the pilot chair. Two of them pulled out what looked like eggbeaters from their backpacks and pointed them at me. There was a flash of light.

I very clearly remember being torn apart. It was warm and wet and sudden and I didn’t have time to feel pain before the memories end.

That worries me.

Right now, I’m walking through a park. The sun is peeking out. It rained a few hours ago and the droplets are still dangling off of the leaves of the trees. It smells wonderful.

But it’s disturbing. This park is like the park I used to walk through with Angie back on Mars. The last time I was there, however, the park was paved and turned into living units because of the property value. This can’t be that park. But it looks almost exactly like I remember it.

The aliens come to visit me. They are the same shape as the ones that broke into my ship but they don’t hurt me. They are gentler and, in a way, almost apologetic. I understand them perfectly when they speak even though their mouths move nothing like ours. If I had to define them, they seem to be like doctors while the ones that broke into my ship were more like soldiers. The doctors that visit me seem ashamed but it’s hard to tell.

Every time I ask them where I am, they offer me more delicious fruit. Every time I ask them where the other humans are in this strange park that I remember from Mars, they offer to have me a race. Every time I insist on seeing my ship, they give me puzzles to figure out.

It’s becoming apparent to me that I’m being held in a prison. Or a playpen like a child.

I’ve been on a hunger strike for two weeks. The aliens are worried. I’m worried, too.

I’m worried because I’m not hungry and I haven’t lost any weight and it’s been two weeks.

Right now, the aliens are walking across the park to me. There is another doctor alien that I haven’t seen before at the front of the pack. It is taller than the others and it has a larger head. It also has another pair of arms except that they end in serrated clusters like a bush made of praying mantis arms.

The cluster of doctors stops in front of me.

“You are here because we are sorry.” Says the tall doctor. I see his mandibles flutter and click but I hear it as English. “We are distressed that you no longer enjoy it here. We want you to be happy. Perhaps it is time to stop fooling you. My name is unpronounceable to your mouth but you but you can call me Ronnie, like your friend from your memories of flight school.”

I picture Ronnie in my head. Red hair, always getting us into trouble. He’s married and living on Ganymede now. I haven’t talked to him years. I’m sorry about that now.

“I am smarter than the lower caste beings that have taken care of you so far and kept you here. I recognize in you an intelligence that is higher than theirs. I am about to see if you can handle the truth.”

The alien named Ronnie flexed his mantis-bush forelimbs and the air shimmered in front of me. A small window appeared.

In the middle of the window, I saw what looked like a small pile of steaks that had been burned to a crisp. It was floating in pale blue water. Blood clouded around it faintly. Thousands of small wires snaked into it and through it.

Understanding hit me.

“That’s me, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes”, said Ronnie.

“I see. So this is all fake and I have to spend the rest of my life here.” I replied.

“Yes”, said Ronnie.

The doctors looked at me with a stillness in their eyes. This had been a gamble for them. Diplomacy for meeting the new race of humans had been shot to shit when they nearly killed me. This construct kept me alive and happy.

“Can I have an apple?” I asked.

The aliens breathed out and twitched their back legs. I knew now that meant relief and happiness.

“And some friends?” I asked.

They stopped twitching their back legs.

“There was only one of you on the ship.” Said Ronnie.

“I know.” I said “Let’s get busy. I have some designs in mind. Let’s get to work.”

Ronnie looked at me, stunned, and then started twitching his back legs.

I smiled, too.

tags

Hands on the dials and tears in my eyes, I administered the shock that ended her life.

She was a painting come to life. The ghost of Alphonse Mucha. Her laugh was a nail being pried out of a plank of wood. She became a flowery, broken-wristed hot plate. She needed polish and all I did was keep on tarnishing her. It would have been kinder to let the world do my work for me. It was just plain old garden-variety irony that I was the executioner for the state and she’d knocked over one store too many to feed her arm.

I got out. When the killin’ ain’t thrillin’, they say, it’s time to start drillin’.

That’s how I became a pilot. In Tuscon, Jacksonville and Red Deer I was known as The Stork. It was a joke because everywhere I flew, I’d bring babies. Plus I had long legs and a big nose. I figured if I couldn’t shape life, I would create as much of it as possible. At last count, I had over twenty-one bastard children. Screaming Jay would be proud. I must be a broken mirror because I did that for seven years. Women gave birth to shards of me while cursing my name. My red hair and too-far-apart eyes are sprinkled all over America. I see myself on buses sometimes.

I packed it in as a pilot. I figured that if the evidence presented by Life So Far was accurate, my principles needn’t be furthered. I’d settled for spreading my genes.

My responsibility to procreation assuaged, I knew politics was out so I got into watchmaking. I ran a little S&M film studio in my basement of the watch shop. I fed the underground pornography hunger of my customers and hosted late-night friends-only parties, occasionally for very famous people. My basement became known at the Brickhouse in certain circles. Nice dresses, expensive suits, and blindfolded spankings. I got to know quite a few women and men of ill repute that were up for anything and didn’t ask questions. The money was immaterial. They lived for the thrill.

Between making films and repairing timepieces for the town, I occasionally felt like a Jekyll and Hyde fuel source for the city. I felt like I was running the world. I felt like I should put out feelers and find other watchmaker pornographers and that we should form a society.

So that’s what I did.

It’s why you’re getting this letter and why there’s no return address on it. Go to the café on the corner of 5th and Main at three o clock on Tuesday afternoon. A man with a fedora will come in with a newspaper under his arm. This will be your contact. He’ll sit across from you and talk to you like you’re an old friend.

Join us.

tags