Although, when I say, horribly wrong, I mean as in me being caught out as a con man impersonating someone from another planet. Dear God, that would be embarrassing. Yes, Mr. President. I lied... April Fools? I’m sure I’d cringe and grin like a clown, shackled in chains, but for now, I keep a solemn face.
I offer him my hand in friendship. He accepts. His fingers are shaking. He’s going to be so pissed if he ever figures out what really happened here today.
“Have a good day, Mr. President.”
“You too, Joe. And thanks.”
I nod and take my leave, walking slowly away from him. The Secret Service agents eye me with suspicion, mumbling into tiny microphones, saying something about being on the move, but they let me pass.
My heart pounds in my throat. I have got to get the hell out of Dodge, and I have to cover my tracks. That means withdrawing bucket loads of cash and taking a variety of different types of transport going in different directions, all the while watching my tail. I’m thinking—Bus to Baltimore. Backtrack to Philadelphia. Grab a rental and drive to Harrisburg. Switch rental companies and drive down to Atlanta. Fly to Nashville. Grab another rental car and head to Florida. From there, I’ll try to get passage on a boat to Cuba, by way of the Bahamas. Gee, fun!
I’m so busy planning my escape, I barely recognize the woman standing at the bottom of the stairs outside. She has tears in her eyes.
“Sharon?” I’m thunderstruck. “But I thought?”
Sharon throws her arms around me, holding me tight and kissing me on the cheek. She’s sobbing.
“I don’t understand,” I say, watching as she wipes her tears away.
A heavily modified black Cadillac pulls out of the lane beside the museum with motorcycle cops riding along on either side. Several black SUVs form a convoy around the president as he races away.
“You,” she says, stepping back and looking at me, still holding both of my hands.
“Me?” I say only because I don’t have anything else to say, and I’m not sure what’s going on. “I thought you left. I mean, the planet. I thought you were going to go back to, you know, to that star above the building.”
She laughs at my awkward description of her home.
“We were preparing to depart, but then we heard you.”
“You heard me?” I say, reaching into my pocket and pulling out the banana. “On this?”
“Yes,” she says, laughing and resting her hand affectionately on my chest.
“And you stayed,” I say, losing myself in her beautiful brown eyes.
She nods, saying, “You’re not bad for an Earthling.”
“Well, you’re not bad for an alien. I mean, I haven’t met very many aliens, but you all seem quite nice.”
She laughs, saying, “Walk with me.”
Sharon slips her hand in the crook of my arm as I zip up my jacket against the cold.
“Where are we going?” I ask, wondering if we’re about to assault more police officers. I don’t know that I could handle that today.
“Trust,” she says, as we make our way along the icy sidewalk, crossing the road at the lights.
“Trust is good,” I say, but I can’t help myself. I have to know. “So what are we doing?”
“You’ve convinced Mark,” she says, picking up the pace slightly. “I’ve been saying we should trust you humans more, but Mark wanted to stick to the mission, running things by the book. The last few days, though, he’s seen a different side of you crazy Earthlings.”
“And?” I ask, wondering where this is leading.
“And he thinks we should trust more of you.”
“That’s great,” I say. “I agree.”
Sharon urges me on, quickening her pace.
“So you’re going to reveal yourselves?” I ask, wanting to be sure I’ve got this straight.
“Yep. But only to world renowned scientists.”
“But what if they won’t keep your secret?” I ask. “What if they expose you to the public?”
“I’m betting they won’t,” Sharon says. “Firstly, they’re going to love being on the inside, and secondly, it would be professional suicide to go public with such a crazy, convoluted story. I think they’ll keep our little secret. Besides, we’ve always got a dose of alien space tentacle porn if anyone gets too vocal.”
“Ha,” I say, quietly reminding myself not to become too outspoken.
“We’re following one of them now.”
“We are?”
I knew there had to be a catch. I don’t mean to, but I can’t help but peer around, looking past the heads in the crowd, trying to pick out who we’re following.
“Oh, you won’t see him,” she says. “He’s behind us.”
“How can you follow someone if they’re behind you?” I ask, genuinely confused. “Don’t you have to be behind them to follow them?”
“No, silly. If we were behind them, they’d know we were following them. By staying in front of them, they’ll never know we’re following them.”
“Because we’re not,” I say, still trying to wrap my head around Sharon’s alien logic.
“But we are,” she says, pointing at a store front window in front of us. The glass on the recessed entrance provides a brief glimpse behind us, and I catch a glimmer of a tall African American dressed in a suit about five yards back.
“Who is he?” I ask, starting to turn my head.
“Don’t look,” she says, squeezing my arm.
“See that bus?”
“Yes.”
“He’s about to get on it. We can’t let him.”
I don’t ask why. I’ve given up trying to figure out why aliens do anything, it’s enough just to follow along and figure it out after the fact.
“I need thirty seconds,” she says as we walk up to a line of people boarding the bus. “Distract him.”
I spin around, almost bumping into a jovial, older African American man with a neatly groomed mustache and a warm smile.
“Neil?” I ask, astonished to realize I recognize him from TV.
“Yes,” he answers in a suave, deep voice that has an unusual air of elegance. Somehow, Neil makes that one word sound refined.
“Neil van Brahe?” I say as my eyes go wide in surprise.
“I don’t give autographs,” he says, apparently reading my mind.
Damn, that’s not going to work.
With a wave of his hand, he signals for me to get out of his way. How the hell can I stop him from getting on this bus? I have only fractions of a second to come up with something. What could possibly stop this giant intellect in his tracks?
I blurt out, “Star Wars is the most accurate science fiction movie ever made. You can’t argue with that.”
I’m not sure where that idea came from, but it works. Neil looks at me as though he’s staring at a child.
“That is ridiculous,” he says. He waves with his hands, making as though his fingers are the wings of an airplane banking through the air. “You think spaceships move like Tie-Fighters and X-Wings? Swerving as they turn? There’s no air in space. No air means no aerodynamics.”
“What about the Force?” I say as though I’m getting one up on him.
“Pfft,” he replies, almost spitting on me. “I’ll take the electromagnetic force over your imaginary force any day. The electromagnetic force is what gives atoms all their characteristics, including their size. Without it, we’d be squashed into nothingness. The whole Earth and everyone on it would be squished into a blob the size of a football stadium, with temperatures and pressures like those in the heart of a neutron star.”
His words are majestic, evoking a sense of awe. Neil clearly relishes the challenge, even if it means he might be a little late wherever he’s going. A gauntlet slapped across his face could not have worked better.
“And there goes my bus,” he says, his hands dropping to his side, but he still has a smile on his face. Neil is irrepressible.
Sharon joins me, stepping
in beside me and saying, “Look, here comes another bus.” And I watch as a 1950’s style coach with highly polished chrome and an immaculate paint job pulls up to the curb. The door opens and old Joe smiles.
“After you,” I say. I can’t believe we’re about to kidnap Neil van Brahe, one of the world’s leading astrophysicists and science communicators.
Neil steps onto the bus, still laughing at our Star Wars banter, saying, “And don’t get me started on the Millennium Falcon doing the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs.”
Sharon can’t help but giggle as she follows me onboard, whispering in my ear, “This is going to be fun.”
“It sure is.”
The End
A Word from Peter Cawdron
Thank you for taking a chance on Alien Space Tentacle Porn.
The first chapter of this novella originally appeared as a short story in The Alien Chronicles, an independently produced anthology that has lots of great stories by a dozen other awesome indie writers.
UFO sightings and alien abductions are modern folklore. Thousands of people claim to have been abducted, and abduction stories are remarkably precise and share many common characteristics that have turned them into something of a cultural phenomenon. This novella explores a silly but semi-plausible angle to these stories, that these abductions could be a deliberate cover story designed to discredit those that get too close to the truth.
Yes, bananas really are slightly radioactive.
Yes, you really can produce x-rays with sticky tape.
Yes, NASA really did use aluminum foil on the Apollo docking hatch.
Yes, Michelson and Morley observed that the speed of light never varies almost two decades before Einstein figured out why.
Yes, Charles Darwin really didn’t notice which island each of his famous finches came from and had to piece that together long after the fact by talking with other crew members from the HMS Beagle.
Yes, Darwin sailed to the Galapagos, but he discovered natural selection in his own backyard, digging up plots of dirt and watching how weeds grow, looking at the differences between wild and domesticated ducks, considering the role of earthworms in ecology, observing how breeders varied pigeons, and watching ants fight on his garden path. Darwin even opened On the Origin of Species with a detailed discussion on “variations under domestication,” presenting artificial selection as the basis for understanding natural selection.
Yes, you really can break handcuffs by working the brittle links back and forth.
Yes, if you’re small enough and slippery enough, you can slip between the horizontal section of some jail cell doors.
Yes, upwards of twenty million North American Indians were killed inadvertently by disease when Europeans began settling the continent.
Yes, the Declaration of Independence ignored slavery and the rights of women, although to be fair to Thomas Jefferson, this wasn’t by his choice. Jefferson wanted to include a reference to slavery in the Declaration of Independence, but concern for the support of southern states had his proposed clause removed. Women, though, had to wait for the suffragette movement of the early 1900s before they were recognized with the right to vote.
Yes, the electromagnetic force gives atoms their structure (outside of the nucleus) and their chemical properties.
Yes, this is a silly story and shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but it has some foundation in fact.
But no, there’s no alien lunar base on the far side of the Moon, at least none that I know of.
One day, we will make contact with intelligent extraterrestrials, but they’ll be far more interested in our science than our bowel contents. As for tentacles, we’ll just have to wait and see.
If intelligent extraterrestrials ever do visit Earth, I doubt they’ll keep their presence secret. Such concepts work well in fiction, but I suspect ET will be quite open and transparent about dropping by for a cup of coffee and a chat. There’s one aspect of our culture, though, that is sure to perplex ET—porn.
Porn is a complex subject, making it easy to adopt an over-simplistic position that it is either good or bad. The reality is… porn is porn.
Is porn unhealthy? That depends on a number of factors including the type of porn, along with the mindset and maturity of the individual. For some, porn is a source of positive reinforcement, for others it’s detrimental.
All too often, pornography exploits its participants, and skews the way men and women perceive sex and intimacy.
Porn dominates the internet, but not in the way you’d think. The actual number of dedicated pornographic websites is difficult to measure, but estimates range from 4%-12%, which is surprisingly low. But it’s how often these sites are accessed that’s the real measure of interest. A 2015 survey revealed 75% of Christian men polled in the United Kingdom viewed pornography on the internet at least once a month, with 41% describing themselves as addicted to porn.
Another 2015 survey conducted by the University of Sydney, Australia, revealed the average age of first exposure to porn was a shocking 11 years old, with 80% of 15 to 17 year olds being exposed to hard core pornography online, which can mold sexual expectations in an unrealistic and emotionally unhealthy manner.
Pornhub reported 18.35 billion visits in 2014, with the number of videos viewed during these visits reaching almost 80 billion—not bad for a planet with only 7 billion people, especially considering less than half of us have access to the internet.
Some consider porn and erotica as unnatural, perhaps even dirty, and yet our desire for sex is the natural result of evolutionary selective pressure. Just as natural selection leads to traits like faster cheetahs and stronger gorillas, sexual selection leads to ornate peacock feathers for attracting mates, and deer antlers for driving off rivals. Homo sapiens are not immune to these evolutionary drivers, if anything, we are the direct result of the same processes.
Natural selection is blind, whereas sexual selection is in the eye of the beholder. Sexual selection has shaped humanity so it is no wonder sex continues to mold our collective consciousness in the form of porn and erotica.
Is porn addictive? The brain is an active, dynamic organ that changes all the time. Repeated exposure to outlandish porn can rewire the brain’s sexual circuits, but that doesn’t mean pornography is addictive, or that porn is making irreversible changes.
Cocaine is addictive for one in six people. Marijuana is addictive for anywhere from one in ten to one in twenty people. If porn is addictive, it would be for one in hundreds of thousands, so it’s not in the same league as these drugs. Yes, porn releases the same feel-good chemicals, dopamine and endorphins, but so does chocolate and music.
The reason why porn seems addictive may lie with a phenomenon called supernormal stimuli, an evolutionary adaptation that means there’s no upper limit to a good thing.
Ostrich eggs, for example, weigh up to three pounds, or just over a kilo. They’re normally six inches in diameter, or about fifteen centimeters. Paint a volleyball so it looks like an ostrich egg, and even though it’s ten inches, or roughly twenty five centimeters in diameter, an ostrich will abandon its own egg and attempt to incubate the volleyball. Why? The reason is simple. Evolution hardwires animals to see bigger and more intense stimuli as better and more desirable. This is why we can never have enough cake or candy, and may explain the allure of porn as porn overstimulates our sex drive.
Supernormal stimuli may also explain our infatuation with size when it comes to curves, hips, breasts, butts, penis length, etc, and even the general muscle tone people obsess about when it comes to abs, legs, etc.
Porn influences sexual behavior. Teenagers that haven’t had adequate sex education can be unduly influenced by unrealistic pornographic acts, and these can distort attitudes toward women. The real issue is sexual confidence. Both men and women have to have the confidence to define what they like about sex for themselves, and not feel forced into acts they’re not comfortable with, or feel compelled to live up to unrealistic i
deals.
Perhaps if porn was better understood, it wouldn’t be a source of shame and would be recognized as satisfying natural desires.
What it means to be sexy has even been commercialized, with flirts and a flash of flesh becoming so ubiquitous they go almost unnoticed, weaving their way into entertainment, celebrity magazines, advertising, TV shows, and movies.
Sex sells, as the saying goes. Fifty Shades of Grey has sold over 125 million copies, putting it in the top ten best selling books of all time, a list this book will never make. And Fifty Shades is not alone, with alien/werewolf/whatever sexy romp novels dominating the Amazon charts. Perhaps, I’m a tad jealous as all the men on those book covers have six packs to die for, while I’m left with a single beer keg.
For better or for worse, we as a species have a love affair with porn and erotica. Alien Space Tentacle Porn is an opportunity for us to poke fun at ourselves and take a lighthearted look at the role of porn in society, looking at the subject through alien eyes.
If you’re a fan of Alien Space Tentacle Porn and you’d like to join the circus, you can grab a t-shirt for ComicCon or just for lounging around by the pool.
Both the men’s and women’s shirts come in tank tops and classic t-shirt styles.
If you are brave enough to grab a t-shirt, please post a picture on Twitter or on Facebook as I’d love to see you turning heads as you walk down the street.
If you got a kick out of this story and thought it was a bit of a lark and some good, clean fun, I dare you to post or tweet:
I love #AlienSpaceTentaclePorn
As that’s sure to get tongues wagging among your friends and family.
Seriously, I hope you’ve enjoyed this quirky little story. You can find more of my writing on Amazon. Feel free to drop by and say hi on Facebook or Twitter where I use the rather unimaginative but easily recognizable name @PeterCawdron.
Be sure to subscribe to my mailing list to hear about new releases.
By the way, Hello World is another short story set in the same fictional universe as Alien Space Tentacle Porn, focusing on our dependence on social media.
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