Tag: aliens

Restane Connect

It was Saturday and I was enjoying a lazy day window shopping in the mall. I had just finished eating a slice of pizza in the food court when I noticed a new store off to one side. It was barely a store; just enough room for a glass display case and an employee. There wasn’t even a register on the counter. The girl behind the display case smiled as I walked up to it. Inside was a single brand and style of smartwatch I hadn’t heard of before.

“Restane Connect,” I read from the top of one of the boxes, “I wonder what it connects to?” I smiled hoping she hadn’t heard that joke too many times.

She smiled and began her sales pitch, “Well, it can connect to your phone of course but it works best if it connects directly to the alien implant in your head,” the salesgirl said. I laughed but she didn’t. “I have a demo model if you’d like to try it.” She pulled out a sleek silver watch from under the counter and handed it to me. I took the watch and slipped it on my wrist.

“Now what?” I asked

“Sync activate,” she said.

“I’m sorry what?”

“Sync activate,” she repeated in a stern voice.

“I don’t know what that is.” I took a half-step back and considered leaving.

She rolled her eyes and sighed, “One of these days it’ll go smoothly. Come here.” She motioned me closer to the display case. I took the watch off and offered it back to her. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward her. Her other hand touched the side of my temple and pressed against it until I heard a click.

Then things got weird. It was like someone was playing with the color saturation and contrast of the world. Colors popped and glowed then muted to shades of gray. I shut my eyes against the strobing effect.

“You can open your eyes now,” the salesgirl said.

The watches were gone, the display case was gone, the door I came in through was also gone. We weren’t even in a store anymore, it was just a poorly lit alcove. Outside the alcove was not the food court of the mall. The long tall room looked more like a cafeteria with rows of tables and bench seating. The people all wore the same brown clothes and had metal collars around their necks. I looked down to see I was wearing the same brown clothes and could feel the collar dig into my chin. At the end of the room, there was a line of people with empty trays setting them into a hole in the wall. Something poured unto the tray and the people walked off with it.

Nearby one of Them stood by. Its scaly face and body spoke of something ready to lash out. Their true height was hard to guess at because of how they slouched and folded their bodies but even at rest they towered over us by several feet. I remembered now seeing them run through the streets grabbing people and tossing them into their flying drones. Tearing houses and buildings apart to get to the people. I remembered the horrifying moment when I was grabbed by the ankle. The second of flailing while falling then the air thickened around me and I was pulled inside the drone.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. The salesgirl, really just another prisoner, pulled me back into the dim alcove. I noticed the side of her head was shaved and a strip of metal with lights protruded. A quick check verified that I too had one.

“Do you remember now?” she asked.

“Yes, we’re –”

She put her hand on my mouth, “The security in this store is really good.” I nodded. “Have you decided to buy a watch?”

“Yes. I think one of these would suit me very well,” I said playing into the false reality I was not a part anymore.

“Excellent. Let me finish setting it up for you.” She took the watch I had a minute ago been trying to hand back to her and strapped it to my wrist. It too looked different. No longer a sleek pristine silver, now it was scratched and scuffed with wires peeking out. She pressed the dial buttons and a segmented green circle appeared around the edge of the face. “When it’s all green it’s safe to talk.”

“What is going on? Why didn’t I remember being captured by dragon aliens? Why are they doing this to us? How are you?” I asked.

“They’re using us for slave labor. The implant creates a false reality. You can’t fight back against something you don’t even know is happening. I’m part of The Resistance. Welcome to the fight.”

I was a Translator for NASA

That probably doesn’t sound too impressive since NASA is part of an international space initiative but I don’t speak any languages other than English. A translator was what they called me but I was more of a conduit. The said my brain structure, the actual folds of my cerebellum, is “conducive to extended range communication”. They never said who was communicating with us or how they got scans of my brain. I heard there were more “translators” but I never met them.

After I was hired they implanted a web of filaments under my scalp to “focus energetic transmissions”. At the start of every session, I was sat down in a reclining chair and given an injection. The NASA interrogators would then start to ask questions. “Where are you from?” “What is your name?” “What are you?” “What does the sky look like?” “How fast does a rock fall?” “What stars can you see?” I would answer their questions but not with information I knew. The answers were coming from somewhere else. Another planet or maybe another dimension. The NASA people were pretty tight-lipped about it. They didn’t want to “bias the experimental subject”. Sometimes the others would ask questions through me but the NASA interrogators never answered.

There were other effects of “translating”. The first time I translated for NASA, I relived my third birthday party and forgot the letter S for a day. The second time, I spoke in Seinfeld quotes for an hour. The third time, I remembered every place I had ever set down my keys. The fourth time, I heard my mother singing to me while I was in the womb. The fifth time, I don’t remember anything. There were a lot of sessions after that time but they started to blend together.

Around the sixty-seventh time, I started having “memory leaks beyond safe parameters”. So I was retired. It was good money and free healthcare while it lasted. They left the filament web in place because “nano-mesh half-life is expected to be less than two years”.

I still get the occasional blip of connection. I’m supposed to report to them if that happens but I stopped writing the reports. Sometimes as I’m falling asleep, I glimpse someplace else and remember swimming deep under an ocean. I’m working on extending that moment between being awake and asleep that opens me up to them. I don’t know what I want to say to them. Maybe I’ll tell them about Earth.

Alien Neighbors

Yup, I saw them land, eh, fifteen years ago. Susan was three and Johnny was still in the oven. Big light show over the old Gordon’s farm. I left Maria with Susan and five or six of us drove out there with our hunting rifles ready to fight the ‘Martians’ and send em packing. Everyone was waiting at the front gate for enough of guns to show up. I was the last one there and I guess I was enough cause Lonnie opens the gate and we all start walking up the long driveway to the farmhouse.

This whole time the lights had been swirling around lighting up the farm and everything for a couple of miles. Suddenly the lights cut off leaving us in the dark. None of us had brought flashlights or lanterns. So we stumble on up to the farmhouse in the dark except the farmhouse isn’t dark. It’s got lights on, regular lights inside like someone’s living there. The porch light’s on too and we can see a new four-door pick-up parked up front.

I don’t know about the rest of those fellows but I started feeling a little foolish standing outside a neighbor’s house with a hunting rifle. I’m about to turn around and head back to my truck when the front door opens and a skinny gray alien with a big bald walks out. It’s wearing pants and a flannel shirt. Rob starts to raise his gun but Josie slaps it down.

After a minute, I can’t take the silence and start rambling, “Hi neighbor, you just move in? We saw the lights and thought the Martian Army had landed. Do you come in peace?” The alien smiles and shows off its pointy teeth. Rob starts raising his gun again and Josie pushes it back down again. Then it started talking.

“Well howdy neighbors. Nice to meet you. So sorry about the lights but it won’t happen again. It’s just me and my mate here now. We’re planning on farming corn.” Lonnie laughs and the alien stops smiling and squints something fierce at him. “Did I say something funny?”

Now back then we didn’t know these aliens squint when they ask a question. To us, it looked like the alien was mad at Lonnie. I step in front of Lonnie and start rambling again, “Not at all. Lonnie didn’t mean anything mean by laughing. Did you Lonnie?”

“Not at all. I just got tickled thinking about this little guy farming corn,” Lonnie says. Everyone gives a little chuckle now that they’re thinking about it too. And that is when my water broke.

Everyone, human and alien, just stares at the wet ground. They all knew what that meant. Well, the alien didn’t but everyone else knew. Then the first contraction hit. Josie took charge and before I knew it I was in the back seat of the alien’s truck being driven to the hospital. The alien kept looking back at me and Josie kept yelling for it to keep its eyes on the road. It had a lot of questions about human reproduction, I really wasn’t in the mood to answer them but Josie has a couple rugrats of her own so she filled in the alien on what I was going through.

At the hospital, we decided it would be better if the alien stayed in the truck. I didn’t see it again until the next day when Rob and Josie snuck it into the room to see baby Johnny. By that time the others had had time to talk to the alien and while a few were still a little wary they were convinced it and its mate just wanted to live in peace and grow corn.

We’re a small community and it wouldn’t be right to shun a fellow farmer so we did our best welcome them. There was a little upset in their third year when the government showed up. Probably because Alien Bob started flying around with a “phased energy array generator” mounted on the back of its truck. Alien Bob was using it to disrupt tornadoes from forming. I bet it was those storm chasers that got pissed off because there were no tornadoes to chase.

Luckily by that point, Alien Bob and Alien Javier had “combined genetic information” and “incubated an offspring” which meant they had an “anchor baby” when immigration showed up. We all chipped in and got them a good lawyer. Their lawyer was able to argue that Alien Baby Daria was a citizen since the Constitution doesn’t exclude extraterrestrial aliens. They had work visas a year later and green cards several years later. We’re not sure if they’ll ever get sworn in as citizens but they’ll be our neighbors for as long as they want to be.

Lost Culture

aliensnow

The elder’s house was on the side of a mountain at the end of a long dirt road. It had taken me months to find this elder. It wasn’t the only one still around but it was the most accessible to me even if I had to spend several hours of driving on poorly graded roads. Many had died off in the previous fifty years since the crash and others had simply disappeared.

I knocked on the door and waited. The door swung open and the elder alien inside glared at me. Its outer mandibles flared wide with annoyance. A string of hisses and coughs were yelled at me.

“I’m sorry I don’t speak our language,” I said. I tried to angle my mandibles in submission but years of keeping them tightly closed except during eating and speaking made it difficult.

“What do you want?” it said. Its voice was hoarse and choked. One of its eyes dilated as it turned to look at me.

“Were you on the ship?” I watched body language that I only half understood. Should I raise my secondary arms? Should I look away from it? How should I act? I didn’t know. I had been born – hatched – on Earth. My parents – egg nurses – had raised me, like the rest of my generation, to fit into Earth society as much as humans would let us.

“Of course I was on the ship. Anyone older than forty was on the ship.” It raised its secondary arms to its sides.

“Can you tell me what happened?” It closed both sets of its mandibles with a hard click.

“No.” It slammed the door in my face.

I knocked again and waited. After a couple of minutes, I started continuously knocking. The door swung open and the elder alien stepped outside hissing and coughing at me. Its primary arms pistioned forward as it walked right into me forcing me back off its porch. I lost my footing at the edge and fell backwards.

“Please, I just want to talk,” I said. The elder alien stood over me.

“Why?”

“My parents won’t tell me about before the ship crashed. I don’t know our language. We were forced to fit in with the humans but as much as we try we can’t really fit in. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be.”

The elder alien lowered both sets of its arms. Its eyes stared at me. “We didn’t crash. We landed.”

“What?” I asked. It lowered itself into a crouch beside me.

“We came from so far way that by the time we reached earth, humans had become the dominate species. The ship wasn’t made for a return trip. We set down on what we thought was isolated terrain. The humans got to us much faster than we thought they could and that’s when everything started to go wrong.” Its eyelids closed then half opened. “Come inside and we can talk.” The elder stood and extended a primary arm. I grabbed it for support as I got to my feet.

The elder turned and walked back inside its home. I followed, closing the door behind me.

Plague Ship

The alien ship lit up space with its lasers. Our mirrored hull deflected most of the laser’s energy allowing us to sit quietly as our small barrage of missiles streaked toward the ship. The aliens managed to destroy five of the six but one was all we needed. There was a muffled cheer from the crew through the network as it impacted. A jet of gas exploded from the side of the alien ship.

“Infiltration has begun,” the communications officer said aloud. At the start of the war, our weapons could not defeat the alien threat. So, new weapons were made. Nanite swarms that could be injected into an alien ship and take it over. The nanites formed a hive mind, the colony, to control the new zombie ship.

I sent a signal of acknowledgement through the network and said aloud, “Acknowledged.”

We watched as the lasers firing pattern became erratic and then stopped. I felt the shiver run through me as the new colony connected through the network.

Of course, there was always the danger that the nanites could be accidentally released on our ships. To prevent this we purposely released them and inoculated ship and ourselves with nanite colonies. We became plague ships spreading to any alien ships we encountered.

“Communications established,” she said again aloud. LT Marson’s internal colony was still new and integrating with her biologicals. In a few weeks, she would be be able to communicate perfectly through the network, until then we gave her the courtesy of speaking aloud. “Ship is under our control. Crew has been deconstructed. Entry hole patched. Awaiting orders.”

Nanites are hard to handle at best and disastrous at worst. An out of control nanite swarm could reproduce exponentially devouring a ship in hours. If this happened on a planet, it would the end of life there. For this reason, we can never return to Earth.

“Transmit target coordinates and mission parameters.” I tuned into the ship network. The magnitude of data was more than even my enhanced senses could truly understand. I let it flow over me like music. Somewhere in the flood our ship’s colony was relaying the locations of alien bases to the zombie ship’s colony. The colony on the ship would use its natural camouflage to infiltrate alien space and attack before they knew an enemy was in their midst.

“Alien ship is preparing for FTL. Leaving … now.” We watched as the ship folded in on itself and vanished. Another cheer came through the network.

“Good work people. Now, let’s find another ship. The war ain’t over yet.”

Early To The Party

The lights are on
The table is set
But no one has shown up

There are no precursors
There are no forerunners
There are no ancient aliens

We were here first
We are the “wow” signal
We are the alien probe
We are the future ruins of an alien civilization

Someday there will be life out there
Someday they will look up
Someday they will hear our signals
Someday they will find our probes
Someday they will study Earth

Maybe if we work together
Maybe if we get off this rock
Maybe we will be there to say
“Hello.”

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Author note: This was inspired by this NPR blog post that suggests that Earth may be the first place intelligent life has appeared in the universe.

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