Aliens Don't Dance
by
Michael D. Britton
* * * *
Copyright 2012 by Michael D. Britton / Intelligent Life Books
“OUCH!”
“What?” asked Diana, stopping in her tracks and leaning one hand on her hip, looking totally put out. She wore a tight, bright red dress that rested mid-thigh, with four-inch red heels. The other dancers continued to twirl around them as she frowned at Gary. “This has to stop – we only have one more chance to practice before the inaugural ball!”
Gary bent down and rubbed at his right calf. Stupid humans and their dancing. “I can’t help it! My leg keeps cramping up. It’s been happening every time we do the rumba.”
“Tell me about it – I’m the one who has to keep stopping, or tripping over you, because you can’t make it all the way through one dance. It’s been going on for three weeks now. What’s your problem with the rumba, anyway? It doesn’t happen on any other dance.”
“I don’t know. But I know I need to get over it, because I know the rumba is the only way to get close enough to the president-elect. She loves to rumba.”
“Then suck it up and get dancing, Gary.”
The two resumed their positions and stepped in time to the music, but after only a few seconds, the song ended.
“Look, let’s call it a day,” said Gary, stepping over to a table that supported a large crystal punch bowl filled with ice water alongside stacks of red plastic cups.
“Commander,” said Diane, pulling rank, “You will dance three more rumbas before the night is through. This operation must go off without a hitch. The Alliance Master Council will be very displeased to have sent us six thousand years into the past just so we could trip, fall, and fail because of a cramp. Now get back out on that floor and dance.”
“Yes, Captain,” said Gary reluctantly.
Six thousand years. It was hard to believe people used to do these crazy dances for fun. More like torture. Of course, their bodies were built very differently back then. In 2021, humans were just humans. By 8088, they’d interbred for so many generations with the other Alliance species – the Reshku, the Fendala, and the Gynst - that any resemblance to the ancient human ancestors was mostly confined to a few “pure-bred” elites – but even they didn’t look much like these primitive people.
These antediluvian animals could move in ways that seemed totally foreign to Gary. When he’d joined the Alliance ChronoForce twelve years ago, he figured he’d be using his history degree and alien cultural training to make course corrections to history through carefully strategized and nuanced interplay with the past.
At least that’s what the ChronoForce recruitment holo had said.
Now he found himself trying to gyrate his medically-disguised body to a funky beat, just so he could make physical contact with the woman who was about to take the highest office in what used to be the greatest superpower on Earth.
According to the Matrices, and confirmed by the Oracle, this was the only way – or at least the optimal way – to ensure that first contact with the Reshku was a success instead of a bloodbath.
By simply touching June Harrison on the neck, Gary would be able to transmit, through dermal osmosis, a set of simple protein chains imbued with Nanomite Thought Transducers, or NTTs – a way to implant some basic ideas into the mind of the host, which would activate when triggered at a specific moment.
Since the Master Council knew that the Reshku first arrived at Earth on November 27, 2023, the NTTs would simply lay dormant until that day.
There was actually some dispute over the actual date of First Contact – some saying it had happened in 2021 with a stray sighting of a Reshku scout. But full diplomatic First Contact was in 2023, so that was the date they were working with.
Gary held Diane and danced, practicing both the steps, and the part where he casually places his hand on her neck. It wasn’t part of the rumba, exactly, but he should be able to pull it off, as part of his dance movements.
“I don’t see why we couldn’t just implant the codes on Harrison when she’s in college. She had plenty of men groping her neck back then – and they didn’t have to get past the Secret Service.”
“You know that wouldn’t work – the nanomites will only stay viable for three years, at most. This was calculated to be the best opportunity to implant.” Diane gripped Gary’s hand tightly. Uncomfortably tightly. “And you should know better than to second-guess the Matrices, or doubt the Oracle. Don’t let me hear you speak like that again, soldier.”
Gary decided she was right. If not out of respect for the Great Ones, then because he never really knew when they were watching. Peering at him through their ChronoVortex.
As he shuffled his feet and wiggled his hips, gripping his superior around the waist, he decided that if these missions were going to be this onerous, he’d just quit when this one was completed.
If only he’d consulted the Matrices and the Oracle before getting into this line of work. Then he would’ve known how much he’d hate dancing, and working with the Captain, and having to speak in the strange dialects of ancient Earth.
“Captain,” he said, when he’d at last completed three more rumbas, “Let us return to our private location, where we can get out of these restrictive garments and drop the pretenses of this archaic language. I grow weary.”
Diane looked at Gary with undisguised distaste. “You are a sorry excuse for a soldier. I continue to be surprised that the Master Council insisted on assigning you to this detail. A mission such as this requires a disciplined mind and an agile body. You possess neither.”
“I will succeed. Do not worry. I just require a little rest. Please.”
“Very well,” said Diane, grabbing her wrap off a chair and leading the way to the door of the dance hall. “But do not fail. I do not need to remind you that sending another team will be costly to the Master Council, and deadly to us.”
Gary replayed the ChronoForce’s motto in his mind: FAILURE IS FATAL. “Yes, Captain. I know.”
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