by Marc Landau
Henceforth? What’s going on with my mind? Are aliens messing with my brain again?
Women being called “crazy” or being told to “calm down” or asked if it’s “that time of the month” used to be insults that would drive women crazy and definitely not calm them down. Now “that time of the month” is an auspicious celebrated occasion.
Auspicious? There I go again.
“That time of the month”,“crazy” and “calm down” became adulations and compliments when Jira Helmsblock single-handedly saved the Eastern Hemisphere from the Kulvians. In fact, it was “that time of the month” and her boyfriend had told her, “Calm down and stop acting crazy.” That was when she slaughtered an entire Kulvian armada on her own. Ever since then, it’s been an honor to call a woman crazy.
Kat certainly looked crazy with her blood-red, smoking plasma eyes. Her hands had turned crimson and her body was shimmering and vibrating at a speed that made the fringes of her shape blur, so she looked like she was wrapped with a red aura.
Again, an image of the cocoon came to mind. She was reverting. Leaving us to our own devices, of which we had few, and none effective. She was letting us fend off the sphere on our own. We had no chance. No defense. No offense.
How could she leave us now? No way we’d last much longer. Soon we’d be sucked into the orb. Just particles. Part of the galaxy. Back into space dust.
The aura grew thicker around her body. Now she was encased in a viscous gel bubble, like a giant fetus in a red womb. I watched in awe and still couldn’t bring myself to believe Kat would just let us all die. Couldn’t she at least grab Poka and sneak her inside her protective bubble?
The bot was almost completely shredded into its component parts. It still looked like the bot, but I could see daylight through its billions of bits and pieces. A light breeze would send it floating into mist. Suddenly, I got an itch in my nose and wanted to sneeze. Better hold it back, or I’d scatter the bot across the ship.
Has anyone ever been able to hold back a sneeze? Usually trying just makes it worse. The closest I’ve come was still a violent head shake with a muffled “achoo.” The more I told myself to stop the worse the itch became.It was a losing battle. The best I could do was quickly turn away from the bot and pray for the best. I was quick, but not quick enough.
ACHOO!
They say the sneeze is the fastest function of the human body. I read somewhere that it can travel at a hundred miles per hour and go as far as thirty feet. Some have put it at half that much, but even a fifty-mile-an-hour burst of boogers is still pretty impressive.
The wind sheer from my sneeze blew the bot’s arm appendage away from its body. At least it hadn’t been a direct hit. That would’ve sent all its tiny particles spraying everywhere. It sucked to lose an arm appendage but it wasn’t like a human. The walrus had backups. I just hoped that wasn’t his favorite arm. It would be pissed. Even though it wasn’t programmed to get pissed because it couldn’t feel emotions. But it could.
“You destroyed my most useful arm appendage.”
“Sorry. I tried to move. At least I didn’t blow you to smithereens.”
Another itch hit my left nostril, and this time I was able to avoid the bot altogether. I turned my head and blew apart a section of the command console, watching as it broke apart and vanished into thin air.
I hoped that was an unimportant piece of the ship. I could hear the bot in my head.
“You destroyed the navigation system. There is no way the ship will ever be able to return to Earth Prime.”
I missed the bot’s tinny annoying voice. It was still trapped. Its lights barely glowing, its metal pieces slowly drifting off into the ship's atmosphere. I hoped the sphere was giving it an experience similar to the one it had trapped me in. At least if it had to die (do robots die?) it would be a pleasant.
I’d be dying in excruciating agony as space ripped my lungs out of my eyeballs.
Kat’s red aura had expanded and engulfed her entire body. She was inside a blood-red bubble. It reminded me of a deep red, hard-boiled egg.
A flash of the hallucination I had before I brought it onto the ship flickered. I was trapped in red amber, gasping for air, breathing in fluid. As the moment passed, I was sure more than ever she was converting herself back into the cocoon.
I looked around, hoping for some idea to pop into my head. Some way to save the ship and Poka. Something to do. But there was nothing. Duct tape wasn’t going to patch the bot or the ship back together. This entire place was seconds away from going full-on Humpty Dumpty.
But that’s not what happened.
Chapter Ten
The red gelatinous egg formerly known as Kat began growing. A couple of milliseconds passed, and it looked like it had doubled in mass. Great. I wasn’t going to be sucked into space. I was going to be smothered by a giant Easter egg—not to be confused with Easter Island heads.
But that’s not what happened, either.
The Kat-alien egg floated up and right through the hull of the ship.
Holy frak!
Once out in space, it moved towards the sphere. Now there were two giant spheres floating out there. Was the sphere alien-Kat’s ex? Maybe he, it, or whatever you call a giant sphere, had come to pick her up and take her to dinner. And the ship was the main course.
All of it must have been happening in micro-milliseconds. Time had slowed to an almost imperceptible pace. Everything had frozen in place. One blink of the bot’s eyeholes took what seemed like an eternity.
Again it reminded me of the moment of death, when people talk about seeing their entire lives flash before them in seconds. This was the opposite. It was like watching time stuck in pudding.
Kat, the red egg, was now almost touching her boyfriend, the purple mirrored sphere.
Are they about to kiss?
The outer edges of the two spheres touched, and the boyfriend sphere suddenly went electric.
It was like the ancient artifact they found in the Arizona Dig of Twenty-Two Hundred and Eighteen. A crystal ball with an electrode thingy inside. When it was plugged in, a little pulse of electricity would glow from its core. And when you touched the crystal, little bolts of electricity would come out from the middle and follow your fingers around.
My mother took me to the exhibit to show me how “primitive people” lived back in the twenty-first century. It was pretty funny how lame all their technology was. They thought they were so advanced. I almost spit up my bacteria-infused Bluvian smoothie when I saw people doing “texting.”
They had these little squares that looked like bars of soap, and they did this thing called “typing.” To spell out words! Holy hellvian. Too funny.
I won’t even get started on their so-called “medical advances.” People taking antibiotics when they were sick and injecting botox to look younger. It was almost as primitive as leeches from the Dark Ages.
The witches knew better. More alien knowledge bestowed on humans at some point in time. The specifics got miscommunicated and the stories crazier as the years passed. At the core, some cool aliens told people a bunch of words and gave them herbs they could use to cast “spells.”
It wasn’t magic. There were no “witches.” It was science, but like some old famous guy said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I wish I had a magic science spell to make these fraking spheres disappear. “Alacadabra! Shaboombala! Poof, you’re gone.”
“Venti Grande Venti!” Poof, I’m back at home on Earth Prime with Mom baking her faux lasagna primadorti.
I shouldn’t make fun of people from the past. I’m sure a few hundred years from now, people will laugh at nanobots and symbiotic pairing with Kongian sea slugs.
It was good to know there would also be robots in the future that would put my bot to shame. Someone needed to put that arrogant know-it-all in its place. Too bad I probably wouldn’t live to see it. I’d pay good creds for an advanced robot to prove th
e walrus wrong. Seeing that would rank high on my bucket list.
Outside the ship, the two kissing bubbles continued their deep-space alien lovemaking, or whatever the hellvian alien bubbles do when they meet up.
I was still half in shock at the sight of Kat turning into a big red egg and floating through the eight-foot thick metal hull of the ship like it was recycled tissue slices. The other half of me was in shock about dying again so soon, after almost dying earlier in the day. Note to self: Stop almost dying.
Small comfort, I could die knowing I’d brought these two lovers back together again.
But it turned out they weren’t making love.
The mirrored electrified sphere was vibrating faster than a hummingbird’s wings, and the red egg was growing even larger. It must've been the size of a small planet by now. If it got any bigger, it would crush the ship.
I felt completely useless watching these two giant forms do whatever they were doing with little or no regard to what was going on around them. It was like being an ant next to two elephants.
Except they weren’t making love.
The mirrored sphere shook and quaked. Sparks flew from the inside out and shot out into the universe. A few jolted through the ship. My eyes bugged wide as I watched literal space lightning bolts rocket past me like laser bullets. I literally felt the heat on my flesh.
Luckily, unlike Earth lightning bolts, sphere bolts weren’t really lightning. I don’t know what they were, but if they were electricity, even such a close call would’ve turned me into a burnt marshmallow. More realistically, it would’ve turned me into a slab of well-done beef. A Wil-kabob.
The mirrored sphere undulated, quaked, and spit out billions of electric particles.
Was it having an orbgasm?
The little man inside my head spoke up. Stop making stupid jokes. This is serious shat.
“I know! I can’t help it. These aliens are messing with my brains.”
Focus!
The alien-Kat’s size had stabilized at the diameter of a small moon. Deep red, smooth and solid, like a marble. Whatever was going on, she was all business. She was definitely focused.
The other sphere had turned into a ball of purple electricity. I watched, hypnotized by the light show. There had been so many beautiful light shows lately. The planet. The rock. The spheres. All so stunning. And again, like the saying goes, beautiful but deadly.
I was over them. No more light shows for me. If I got out of this, I’d never watch fireworks again. I’d run for Planetary Congress and ban them from my sector of the universe. And I’d definitely ban the display on Frill Seven for the National Day of Universal Harmony.
They called the light festival on Frill a “next-life experience,” and tourists who went to view them often returned with a new outlook on life and renewed inspiration.
The effect wasn’t as intense for me, but it was the most amazing emoto-drug induced, dream vision-quest experience I’d ever had. Until yesterday. Now, there were psychedelic light shows everywhere. And all of them were deadly. I longed for the days of watching normal sunsets. I’d kill for a boring old sunset, a beer and some nachos.
My mind went static like the electricity shooting out of the sphere. Thought clips fractured and flowed faster than I could see them. The light was so intense and bright, I should’ve closed my eyes.
“Never look directly at the sun” was said for the first time by Erma Krouts to her niece, Elizabeth, on September third, Sixteen Hundred and Fifty-Four, and everyone still says it today.
One of the old presidents (back when we had those) looked directly at the sun during an eclipse and temporarily went blind. Afterwards he banned the word sun. It was later repealed but the word Sunday was forever changed to Magaday.
That was back when we had names for the days of the week. What a stupid idea. Who came up with that? Wednesday? What the hellvian kind of word is that? It’s spelled all crazy. The president was probably right to call it something else. He was the first, but not the last.
Presidents started changing the names of the days of the week, and even the months. One president from the Ultra-Left-Socialist-Healthcare-Snowflake party renamed June to…
“The month Mother Earth weeps tears of blood for her impoverished children all over the galaxy.”
Luckily it didn’t last long.
People were crazy back then. All emotional and opinionated. Science only mattered when someone got sick. No one ever claimed the cure for Alzheimer’s didn’t exist, the way they did with most other “facts.”
When you get sick your political affiliations take a back seat. Except for what were called the Christian Scientists. Weird that they called themselves scientists because they didn’t believe in science or medicine, but like I said, people were kooky back then.
They still are now. It’s in our nature. Even all the augmentations, tech-bots and cure-bacterias can’t stop people from being emotional lunatics. It’s actually kind of reassuring to know that’s how we’re hardwired.
Of course, there were the experiments back during The Third Renaissance of the Dark Ages when they used brain-bots to regulate human emotions and turn everyone into “balanced” citizens.
It didn’t work. It never does. Unless you remove the human brain and heart, they’ll always be emotional creatures. And if you do remove those things, we lose our humanity. Love, passion, rage, loyalty. They all go out the window. We become flat, dead things. Zombies.
Stop ranting. Pay attention!
I looked back to the screen and watched as the purple sphere quivered and shook and broke apart into beams of electricity. The mirrored sphere was tearing apart and Kat was becoming more solid.
She’s feeding on it.
Chapter Eleven
The sphere was a ball of sparks. It no longer had its core. It was breaking apart, just like we were. Kat was doing to the sphere the same thing the sphere had been doing to us.
I was right. It was trying to eat us! Disgusting. I hope Poka made it choke.
I was sure she would’ve given the purple ball indigestion. Luckily, it never got to eat Poka because Kat had turned from a human alien into a giant ball that floated through the metal hull of the ship, and was now devouring the sphere that had been devouring us. Just another normal day on the Outpost.
When she was done with it, would she turn on us for dessert?
I didn’t get that sense. Alien-Kat was protecting us. She saved us from the battle earlier, and now was saving us from being eaten by another energy succubus.
The thing out there was like her. It was probably one of her people, or whatever you’d call it. She was killing one of her own to save us. Why would the alien do that? Had it taken my memories of Kat that included caring? Did the alien care about us, and by us I mean Poka. Had human emotions saved us?
Don’t be so sure she won’t eat you next, the tiny voice in my head said.
“I’m trying to be optimistic. So zip it, will you?”
The voice didn’t reply with a sassy retort, and I appreciated that it had listened to me for once. I didn’t need another voice arguing with me all the time. I already had the bot, and that was more than enough for a lifetime.
The purple ball of exploding electricity crackled and popped. At least, in my mind it did. In space there’s not supposed to be any sound. But I could swear I heard a high-pitched hum and crackling.
It sounded exactly like the faux-retro-bacon Mom would make sometimes. Mom made good faux-bacon. I could even smell it now. Fake fat sizzling and spitting out of the pan, with its hot flecks of oil spitting onto my face when I accidentally got too close to it.
“Careful!” Mom would yell.
“I just wanted to see if it’s ready.”
“You sneaky Torvelian bird. You never wait until they’re ready.”
“Because you make them so good.”
She’d beam a proud smile. Mom loved being a good cook. It was evidence she was a good provider. Parents feel good ab
out themselves when they can feed their children. Seems simple and obvious, but it’s a big deal. No food, no kids. She didn’t care that everyone was provided with food, clothing and shelter. Did she think it was the Old West of Two Thousand and Twenty, with its rampant poverty, global warming, tornados, floods, insurance scams, and toxic waters that kept most of the world in poverty?
I shouldn’t be so hard on the Two thousand and Twenties. If it wasn’t for the total collapse of the world's economy and the revolt of Mother Nature, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
The Trels had to come and help restore balance. Funny how humans always think we’re such a big deal. Turns out, we are. We caused so much destruction that aliens literally came to help us fix it up. Like an ambulance racing to the scene of a multi-ship pileup on the 405.
Of course, we were so cocky we wouldn’t listen. We took their help, meaning their tech, and used it for our own advancement and pleasure—and we just made things even worse. Eventually a bunch of alien races teamed up and gave us an ultimatum. Join The Universal Commonwealth and abide by its regulations, or be “blipped.”
Blipped.
Such a cute word for being wiped out of existence.
Since then, we’ve been pretty good about abiding. And life’s been good and prosperous for the planet. Except for the occasional maverick alien invasions—and there’s always some radical human group trying to overthrow The Commonwealth—I guess you can’t totally evolve mega-ego-maniacal loons out of existence. There’s always someone, human or alien, that wants to rule the universe.
I don’t get it. Seems like such a hassle to have to rule the galaxy. I guess my ego just isn’t big enough. And I’m lazy.
Mom slapped my hand away from the frying pan.
“Nice try, Slick. Keep your fingers away. I don’t want to have to take you to the med-pod. Remember the time with the bacon when you were seven?”
“Yes. I remember.”
“Now you have a scar on that beautiful face.”
She kissed the little scar above my eye like a booboo that still hadn’t healed. “It gives you character.”
