“Well,” I say. “That’s kind of horrifying.”
“Only if you cross them,” he says. “Or walk through a field of the red ones humming a ditty after you were told not to.”
“That’s on me,” I say. “But I don’t get it. If they’re so big and powerful, why am I here?”
“Because for the first time in their billions of years existence, they feel threatened.”
That can’t be good. “By whom?”
My mind conjures images of alien conquerors, slaughtering their way across the universe. Maybe they’re shape shifters. Or have Cthulhu faces. Or—
Brick raises an ‘Are you serious?’ eyebrow in my direction.
“Oh,” I say. “Shit.”
It’s us.
Humanity is the alien conquerors slaughtering their way across the universe.
It’s the Union.
It’s me.
Suddenly feeling a whole lot less safe, despite the Europhids’ calming effect, I glance back at the tunnel. I could make a run for it, but I don’t know where I am or how to get out. Best case scenario, I manage to go back the way we came…and into the warm embrace of sphincter-face Basil. Worst case scenario, I get lost in the subterranean maze and slowly starve to death.
What’s the point in running? I’m either here because a past me that no longer exists nearly defeated the Europhids’ enemy a thousand years ago, or because I am that enemy and they’re going to liquify me or something. Trying to sound nonchalant, I say, “And I’m here because…”
“That’s for them to tell you,” Brick says. “Honestly, I’ve been preparing for something. This whole planet has. For hundreds of years. But none of us know exactly what yet. I’m kind of hoping they’ll tell you.”
“You realize that none of what you just said is reassuring, right?”
“Very much so,” he says in a way that makes me realize all the discomfort I feel about putting my faith in a bunch of glowing jumbo-sized hotdogs, pales in comparison to what the Undesirables have experienced.
With a sigh, I turn to face the field. “Hello!” I wave. “Uhh, greetings, Europhids.” I give Brick my best, ‘I’ve got this’ wink and nod. “I am Dark Horse…uhh, Moses Montgomery.” Honesty seems like the best policy here, hence my full real name, but I haven’t heard it aloud in a very long time. Still makes me cringe. Sounds pretentious. Like it should have a ‘Sir’ at the beginning and a ‘the third’ at the end.
“Moses,” Brick says.
“I’m just getting warmed up,” I tell him. “Trying to make a good first impression here.”
“They don’t have ears,” he says.
“Oh. But the humming?”
“Basil has sensitive ears. They heard you through him. The red Europhids sometimes develop symbiotic relationships with creatures they encounter…not always voluntary. They’re all instinct. The blues are more civilized. They speak mind to mind, but they won’t do so without express permission.”
“How do I give them permission if they can’t hear me?” I ask.
“They can feel you, even now, but the only way to really experience them is to submit. Make yourself vulnerable.”
“Okay…” I say. “How do I do that?”
He motions to the path ahead. “Follow the yellow brick road. You’ll know what to do by the time you get there.”
“Kind of cryptic, don’t you think?”
“It’s different for everyone,” he says.
“Anyone walk down this path and not come back?” I ask.
He nods. “On occasion.”
“Were they bad guys?”
“Depends on who you ask,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing safe about what you’re about to do. I’m the only one to do it more than once, and I don’t enjoy it. At all. It’s…invasive.”
“But necessary,” I say.
“Very.”
Goddamnit.
I turn to Chuy. “If I don’t come back—”
“—I’ll take care of the boys and Hildy,” she says.
Not what I was going to say, but now that I’ve had a fraction of a second to doubt myself, I’ll take the out. “Thanks.”
“Brick…” I offer my hand. He shakes it. “Nice seeing you again.”
When I start down the winding path, he says, “Won’t be the last time,” but I can tell he’s not sure. I’ll do whatever I can to gain the Europhids’ trust, but if they take the past five years of my life into consideration, that might be an impossible target to hit.
The path is just a few feet wide. If the blue Europhids reached out with their little string tendrils, they’d have no trouble snagging my legs.
Feels like summer camp. I’m doing a slow-motion trust fall, but the people waiting to catch me are blue, jelly-cudgels.
“You guys aren’t going to let me fall, right?”
No response.
“No ears. Right…” I stop and look around. The path stretches out before and behind me, weaving through the cavern in which I’m already lost. Chuy and Brick are out of sight. How long have I been walking?
I think I’m alone.
With a super intelligent hive-mind.
A song crashes into my mind.
I can’t.
I have to.
If they want me, they’ve got me, and this is who I’ve always been. The first time I sang this on mission, Chuy and I were separated from the rest of the team, behind enemy lines, hiding in a bush in the middle of the night. I sang it in a whisper, and stopped when Chuy punched me, but that small bit of fun helped get us through the night.
I start humming the peppy tune, skip the opening, and launch right into singing the chorus of I Think We’re Alone Now by Tiffany, directly to the little blue guys.
I’m lost in the jive, bopping my way through the blue field that doesn’t react at all to my humming, my snapping fingers, or my singing. They either really can’t hear me, or they’re indifferent to my singing, or the song. Can’t be the song, I think. No one can resist the dulcet tones of—
A sheet of blue stops me.
To my left, right, and straight ahead, are walls of blue Europhids. The path forward ends in their embrace.
“Are you serious?” I ask, understanding.
And with understanding comes hesitation. “I’d really rather not.”
No reply.
“C’mon…there isn’t going to be probing involved, right? Because I don’t know if you realize this, but you’re shaped like— Never mind. Super intelligent. You know what you look like to people. Or maybe just to me. I know, I know, I’m rambling because I’m nervous.”
I snap out of a trance. I was speaking to the Europhids. And I felt a reply. My eyes snap wide. I’m just a few inches away from them now.
“Can I keep my clothes on?” I ask.
I take their lack of reply to mean yes. “Fine. Just…don’t get too frisky, okay?” A deep breath, and then I step forward. There’s a moment of consciousness where I have just enough time to think, Feels like a cushion of boobs.
Then the world disappears.
36
“Wake up, Mosey,” a nearly forgotten, but intimately familiar voice says.
“Where am I?” I ask, my voice coming from nowhere and everywhere. All I can see is white. I can feel my body, but it doesn’t exist. Looks like the fourth dimension, but it doesn’t feel right. This is more like a dream.
“You haven’t decided yet.”
“Max?” I ask, even though I know that’s impossible. Max Wells, my childhood friend, died before I joined the Marines. Heart complications from Down Syndrome resulted in several surgeries, the last of which went sideways. The last time I saw Max was in his backyard.
And then, suddenly, I’m there.
The grass has been freshly mowed. The smell is intoxicating. I take several sniffs, feeling bits of my memory flash back to childhood, creating an intense longing for home. The swing creaks, snapping me back to the present.
Or
is this the past?
My feet skid on the worn earth, slowing me to a stop. Puffs of gray soil coat my white Converse Chucks. I’m young again. A kid. I’ve been teleported back in time, into my old self, but with my adult mind intact.
How the hell?
The flower garden buzzes with yellow-striped pollinators. Birds chirp in the maples surrounding the fenced-in yard. Somewhere, a dog barks. I don’t remember this particular moment, but there were dozens just like it during the years Max and I had together, talking movies, music, and babes. He liked Twiggy. I was partial to Sharon Tate.
A distant roar draws my eyes to the sky. A plane emerges from a cloud, leaving a contrail behind it. People heading somewhere. Life as usual. Long before things went to shit and got flushed and spewed into a fetid Nazi sewer.
“Hey, Mosey,” Max says. He’s seated above me, in a treehouse we built with his father. It’s just six feet off the ground, but it was our castle for a while. His short legs dangle. His belly bulges under his too-tight T-shirt. Everything about him is exactly how I remember it, including his bottlecap glasses. Except…he’s not smiling.
Max, like many people with Down Syndrome, experienced intense emotions, joy being the most prominent. Didn’t take much to make him smile. Just looking him in the eyes was usually enough.
His voice sounds enthusiastic, but there’s no trace of a smile. Or any other emotion for that matter. Max was a lot of things. Indifferent was never one of them.
“Maxwell,” he says, using his self-given nickname merging his first and last names. When our parents weren’t around, I called him SFB—shit for brains—which is shockingly not politically correct, but it made Max laugh until his face turned hot red and I thought he might pass out. “Maxwell Bond, at your service.”
Max was a Bond fan, mostly for the skimpily-dressed Bond girls. Saw himself as a dapper lady’s man and had no problem approaching the fairer sex as Maxwell Bond. He never had any luck, but he was also approaching women three times his age.
The Max sitting above me forces a wide smile, but it’s all wrong. Joyless. His teeth are bared, but without an upturn to his lips, or a squint in his eyes.
This isn’t Max.
And I’m not home.
I’m in a cave, motorboating a wall of blue Europhids.
“This isn’t real,” I say.
Max shrugs.
“You’re not going to speak in riddles, right? Because I don’t think I can take being bullshitted right now. Just say what needs saying and ask what you want to ask. Be direct.”
“Like a man,” Max says, and he attempts smiling again. “Chuy would appreciate the sentiment.”
If they know about Max, and they know about Chuy, the Europhids have full access to my mind. It’s unnerving.
“Anything you don’t know about me now?” I ask.
“About your past? No. Our memories of your life are more complete than your own.”
“That’s…pleasant,” I say.
“Your conscious mind is not capable of storing the data from a single childhood. Unpacking your life and experiencing it through you allows us to fully understand what motivates you. And to predict what you will do in the future.”
“Like what you found?” I ask.
“Not particularly,” Max says. “But you are not entirely to blame. The mission to bring you here, to this time, was…experimental. What human beings in your time would have called a ‘Hail Mary.’”
“Hail Marys are desperation plays,” I point out. “High value, but low odds of success. Which kind of makes me think arriving in the future thirty years late might not be the worst outcome.”
“Far from it,” he says, kicking his feet, watching the clouds. “But it is suboptimal.”
“But better than arriving thirty-thousand years late inside a star,” I point out.
He nods. “Much.”
“So, you, an all-knowing, supreme being that’s existed for billions of years and colonized the universe, are desperate for help because…of the human race?”
“This iteration of the human race, yes.”
“I’m guessing you don’t care much about how humanity treats itself, otherwise you’d have stepped in a thousand years ago. So, this is what, territorial? The Union is encroaching on your turf?”
Max looks me in the eyes. The seriousness in his gaze, something I’ve never seen before, makes my stomach churn. “Yes.”
“Really? It’s that simple?”
Max sighs, stands, and then just falls forward off the tree house. He faceplants on the ground like fucking Wile E. Coyote dropping off a cliff.
Instinct drives me to my feet. “Holy shit. Are you okay?”
I help my friend up. He’s covered in dirt and debris, grass stains on both knees, but not injured. Then he flashes that unholy grin at me again, and I stumble back.
Max takes a seat in one of the two swings. Waits.
Max—the real Max—would do the same thing. Sit in the swing, sullen-faced, waiting to spill the beans, until I sat down next to him. It was usually nothing serious—complaints about Batman, or Thunderbirds, or Star Trek—but we had a chat like this the day before that last surgery. It was our serious place, and the Europhids know that.
Once I’m settled back in the swing, Max says, “Imagine, if you can, that the universe is not simply an open void pocked with occasional stars, surrounded by a smattering of planets, all of them essentially alone in the endless black. Imagine that it is, in fact, your body. Seen from a distance, it is a marvel to behold. A singular being of light. A miracle of time and physics. Beyond precious. That is how every human sees themselves, is it not?”
I don’t reply. Feels like a trap.
“Your body, like all living things, is host to a myriad of other living things. Bacteria mostly. Some of it beneficial, some of it detrimental. And your mind is largely separate from such things, operating independently of the body. You following me, Mosey?”
“Please stop calling me that.” Only Max used that name. It belongs to him.
“Imagine now, that someone, anyone, drove a nail into your skull. You survive, but part of your brain dies, and all of the knowledge, experience and connection contained in that segment of gray matter is lost forever.”
“I’d kill them,” I say without missing a beat.
Max nods. He already knew that.
“Now imagine that the being wielding the hammer, is a species, a virus, living inside you, attacking your mind.”
“Wait a second…” I rub my face, expecting stubble, but I feel the smooth skin of youth. “Hold on. Are you saying that humanity is the Alzheimer’s of the universe?”
Max nods. “While it would take a million years to exterminate our kind—humanity excels at extinction. And to us, a million years is but a day. The human race, as it exists today, is a terminal disease. You wield the hammer, and you are the nail.”
“But we’ve only encountered you twice before, right? On Europa. In another dimension?”
“On those occasions, one thousand years ago in two different dimensions, contact was made—not without some violence—but in the end, balance was restored. We first encountered the Union here, on what you call Beta-Prime. That was hundreds of years ago, but to us—”
“It’s still the present,” I say, putting myself in the shoes of a being who might experience years like minutes.
“Those of our kind living on the surface, what you call red Europhids, among several other more colorful names, were seen as a threat and eradicated. It wasn’t until the ‘Undesirables’ arrived that contact was made and a peace established. It was also then that we began to understand the threat represented by the Union. Over the past several hundred years, the Union has taken three planets hosting Europhid colonies, one of them fledgling, the others ancient and deeply rooted. All three Europhid colonies were destroyed, from orbit. The most recent assault took place three years ago. It was a world you discovered.”
Max takes hold of my h
and before I can apologize. Scorching pain cascades from his touch, washing through my body and exploding from my mouth. My scream isn’t just of pain.
It is the scream of a man whose death is inevitable.
Consumed by fear.
And then fire.
37
I can’t see Max anymore. Or hear the birds. Or smell the grass. My mind is overwhelmed by searing pain. Every nerve in my body burns. I can feel myself melting. My bones char. My insides boil. As the anguish spreads, my mind is awake and aware, experiencing the death of every cell, until after what feels like months, I am undone.
“This is what being on the receiving end of an incendiary bomb feels like. We no longer retain the knowledge of the Europhids destroyed by the Union, but we remember the excruciating pain of their deaths. What you just experienced was a blink…but I hope you will not forget it.”
I open my eyes. I’m on the ground, curled in a fetal ball. Max is on the swing still, kicking his short legs. He stares down at me, no longer attempting a smile. His eyes flicker with blue light, reminding me that none of this is real. Despite that, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the pain I just experienced.
And that’s the point.
The Europhids know who I am. Know everything about me. Now that I’ve felt their pain, they know I’ll stop at nothing to keep it from happening again.
“We don’t know that, yet.” Max hops off the swing. Stands over me. “More than anything else, you are motivated by kinship. It is the driving force that makes you a good commander of men, but it’s also a great weakness, allowing you to turn a blind eye to injustice.”
I want to argue the point, but I can’t. This is a lesson I’ve already learned. And he’s not wrong. If I had to compromise my morals to save one of my people again, I’d do it without a second thought, and I’d deal with the repercussions later.
“That is why—”
“Can you stop reading my thoughts?” I push myself up and dust off my not-real shorts and T-shirt.
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