by Hugh Howey
“Exactly,” she replies. “We give them false memories. Usually, we let them pick. Anal probe, alien space tentacle porn, things like that. You’d be surprised how many people opt for a field trip to Mars, but there’s nothing to see there other than rocks. Seriously, you humans have the most interesting planet in the system and everyone wants to go the dry, cold deserts of Valles Marineris.”
She laughs, adding, “We give them something just crazy enough that no one will ever believe them.”
“And no one ever does,” I say, astonished at how immersed she is in her role-play. I had no idea Mark and his sister were this wacko. That her delusion can contemplate yet another layer of delusion is meta. That scares me more than the gun.
“But I won’t do that to you.”
Oh, that sounds like good news. I hope. I relax a little.
“So,” I ask, my curiosity getting the better of me as I wonder just how thoroughly deluded she is, “Where are you from?”
Sharon points into the darkness. With the lights out, the stars are just visible through the light pollution thrown out by the rest of New York. She’s pointing at a star just above one of the buildings. Like an idiot, I follow her gaze. What the hell am I looking for? What am I expecting to see? There’s a faint hazy dot, barely visible in the sky. It could be Venus for all I know. I feel stupid.
“Artellac,” she says, as though that’s supposed to mean something, but I’m pretty sure she just made that up.
The bus takes a right, and it’s only then that I realize the driver isn’t stopping to pick anyone up or let anyone off. There’s even the occasional couple at a bus stop frantically trying to wave the bus down as it drives on.
“We’re here,” Sharon says as Joe the bus driver finally pulls over, stopping in a taxi rank outside Baconhaus, a fast food joint that is quite possibly a crime against humanity in its own right.
I grab Mark, surprised by how heavy he is. Having had a few minutes to recover from running down the alleyway, my muscles revolt at the thought of carrying him again. I hoist him over my shoulder. Icy cold water runs down my back and trickles down the inside of my leg.
“You take care,” Joe calls out after us.
I step down onto the pavement and say, “Which way to your lab?”
This ought to be good, I think. I doubt she really has a laboratory, and I peer around, looking for someone I can signal for help, but the street is deserted.
Sharon walks down the alleyway next to the Baconhaus.
I see a teenaged boy walk out of a nearby 7-11. He’s looking down at his phone. He glances up at me and stops in his tracks.
I point at Mark draped over my shoulder and mouth the words, “Call the police.” He gets it. I see him instantly dialing a number on his phone. He backs up, returning to the store. He peers out the window at me as he holds the phone to his ear.
“Hey,” Sharon calls out, waving with the gun.
I turn and walk down the alley, knowing the teen just got a good look at the ice packed around Mark’s head. If that doesn’t freak him out, nothing will. I relax my grip on one of Mark’s arms, allowing it to slump to one side and hang loose. I’m sure the boy has seen that. Hopefully he thinks I’m a mob hit man disposing of a body. I can just hear the 911 call: “A mobster wearing a tinfoil hat just dragged a dead body into the Baconhaus.” That’s believable. I wonder if he’ll follow up with, “Send Mulder and Scully!”
“In here,” Sharon says, leading me into a storeroom behind the Baconhaus. The smell of fried bacon causes me to salivate, which is insane considering I’m carrying a dead man.
Sharon turns on a dull light and closes the door behind me, flipping a deadbolt lock.
“So this is the lab, huh?” I ask, looking up at the lone incandescent bulb. At a guess, it’s twenty watts, max. I couldn’t read in this light, which makes it a strange choice for a storeroom-cum-laboratory.
“It’s got everything we need,” Sharon assures me. “Lean him against the wall. Get those ice packs off him.”
I try to lower Mark with some dignity, but he falls from my shoulders like a sack of potatoes and slumps against the wall beneath a small window.
Sharon hands me a pair of scissors and I cut away the Saran Wrap, puncturing one of the bags by accident. Freezing cold water runs over my hands.
Mark’s face is blue. His skin has shriveled. He looks more like a waxwork zombie than someone who was alive less than quarter of an hour ago.
“Dry him off,” Sharon says, handing me a towel.
I don’t want to touch him. I’ve been carrying him, but this is different. He’s staring at me.
I stand to one side, not wanting his dead eyes to look at me as I pat down his head and shoulders.
Sharon steps over to the far side of Mark with a roll of duct tape. She’s holding the tape out in front of her like she’s about to pull the pin on a hand grenade.
“Ready?” she asks.
“You bet,” I reply with mock enthusiasm, having no idea what she’s about to do. Gagging a dead man with duct tape doesn’t seem entirely necessary.
Sharon moves with surprising speed. She tears a two-foot length of duct tape from the roll and slaps it on Mark’s forehead. Ice? Guns? Duct tape? I should have called in sick and stayed in bed.
“Mechanoluminescent,” she says. “We’d get a better result in a vacuum, but this will have to do.”
Each time Sharon rips a length of duct tape from the roll she does so with a rapid burst of strength. Apart from the very obvious sound of the adhesive tearing from the roll, I notice a slight burst of blue light.
“What was that?” I ask as Sharon slaps another length of duct tape on Mark’s head. She’s slowly covering his entire skull—his brow, his face, his ears, his neck.
“X-rays,” she replies. “We’re exploiting an electron discharge to produce x-ray radiation. It’s just like pulling a woolen sweater over your head and getting static discharge, only this will allow us to build a three-dimensional model of Mark’s brain in its current state. I’ll need the computers on Luna One to reconstruct his quantum presence, but we’ll capture them on the tape.”
Luna One? I think that’s a stupid name. I want to ask her: Is that the best name you can come up with? You travel dozens of light years to get to Earth only to suffer from stifled creativity when naming your super secret moon base? Is there a Luna Two? I’m tempted to ask just to be snarky, but Sharon cuts me off.
“We can save him.”
We? I shake my head.
Sharon is nothing if not diligent in wrapping Mark’s head in duct tape.
Someone pounds on the door.
“Open up!”
Sharon looks terrified. She finishes the final strip of tape, pressing it firmly in place. Mark’s head is covered in shiny silver duct tape. He looks like a storefront mannequin.
“You’ve got to hold them off,” she says, handing me the gun.
I’m dumbfounded. I stand there, holding the gun, pointing it at her simply because that’s the way she handed it to me. Does this woman have any grasp of reality at all? Does she have any idea what she’s doing in any given moment?
Sharon turns back to Mark and presses the tape firmly over his nose, eyes, and mouth as the pounding continues.
“This is the police. Open up!”
I’m still pointing the gun at her as she crouches and starts pulling the duct tape from Mark’s head. Bits of skin come loose, revealing dull red flesh, but there’s no bleeding. Great, I think. Now we’re interfering with a corpse.
I’m stunned on so many levels. I’m trying to figure out just how many laws I’ve broken. Am I an accessory to something? How is a judge going to see this? Juries are supposed to consider what’s reasonable. What is reasonable given I’ve been held at gunpoint? But now I have the gun. How am I going to explain that? She just gave it to me, your honor.
“Please,” Sharon pleads, turning to me as she pulls another strip of duct tape from Mark’s head. “
You’ve got to do something.”
And she’s right. I’ve got the gun. I’m in control now. I’ve got to do something, and I will. I’ll let the police in. I walk over to the door and fiddle with the lock, but the pounding has warped the door, causing the lock to jam.
“Open the goddamn door!”
“Hang on,” I yell back. “I’m trying.”
The only way to open the door is to push against the police officer, relieving the pressure on the lock so I can twist the catch. I push my shoulder against the door and flip the bolt back.
The cop comes charging in, knocking me backward on my ass.
“Drop the gun!”
My eyes go as wide as saucers as the realization hits me: I’m the one holding the gun. In his mind, I’m the bad guy. For so long I’ve wanted to get ahold of this gun, but now I can’t let go of this chunky hunk of black plastic and hardened metal fast enough. My hands shoot up in the air as the gun bounces off my thigh and onto the concrete floor.
“Stay where you are,” the officer says. “Kick the gun over here.”
He shines a bright light in my eyes. I can just make out the barrel of his gun next to the light, and I know his finger is on the trigger.
“Quit stalling,” he says.
I don’t think the officer has thought this through. I’m sitting on the concrete with my legs outstretched before me. The gun is sitting in front of my crotch.
“Now!” he demands.
With my hands still in the air, I shimmy backward in little bounces until I’m far enough away from the gun that I can reach it with my shoes.
“Hurry up,” the officer yells.
I want to plead with him and tell him I’m doing the best I can, but that’s probably not wise. I get the side of my foot on the gun, and with a couple of awkward kicks the gun slides over to him.
“Face down,” he yells, gesturing with his gun for me to lean forward and lie prostrate before him.
Again, not thinking it through, Officer Whoever. The way I’m seated, without months of Pilates practice and yoga training, the only way I can lie face down is to turn around. I decide this is what he really wants and turn away from him only to have my head slammed into the wet concrete floor as another cop pounces on me.
Mark’s body is slumped against the far wall. His eyes are staring at me again. The duct tape is gone. The window’s open. Sharon’s gone too.
I wonder if Sharon was ever real. Is this me having a psychotic breakdown? Did I fabricate all this as part of some shock-induced delusion? Is this whole episode a fantasy of my own dark mind?
My hands are wrenched behind my back. Steel cuffs lock in place around my wrists, keeping my arms pulled tight behind me.
“What have you done to him?” one of the cops asks.
“Nothing, I swear.”
“Wise guy, huh?”
The last thing I hear is one of the cops saying, “Taze him.” Fifty thousand volts surge through my body and into the wet floor. The tinfoil on my head burns my scalp and my eyes roll into the back of my head.
* * *
Doctor Not-Quite-Rock-Hudson pulls my right eyelid open and shines a bright light in my eye.
“His pupils are constricting and dilating,” he says, pulling the light away momentarily and then flashing it back in my eye again. He does this several times, which is really annoying. Just when I think he’s satisfied, he switches to the other eye.
I’m not sure what happened over the past few minutes, but I feel like I’ve just relived the entire day while lying here on the hospital bed. But there was no running through Central Park naked. No alien space tentacles probing the various orifices of my body.
“Listen,” the army officer says, appearing on the edge of my vision. “Answer our goddamn questions, or I swear you’ll spend the next decade sunbathing in a chickenwire cage at the Hilton, Guantanamo Bay.”
He grabs my shirt as the doctor steps away. The officer pulls me half out of the bed, making deliberate eye contact.
“The aliens. What do you know?”
“Nothing,” I reply.
“Get him on a waterboard,” the navy officer says.
“What the hell do you want to know?” I yell at him. I’ve lost it. I’m pissed. I’ve done nothing wrong. I can’t take any more. “You want to torture me? Go right ahead. What do you think you’ll learn? Do you think I’ll tell you about the blue/green midgets from Mars, or the lovesick sirens of Venus? Seriously, you think torture is going to give you anything even remotely accurate?
“You want to know about aliens? I’ll tell you about fucking aliens. They’ve got ears like Dr. Spock and acid for blood. And tentacles, lots of goddamn tentacles. But the porn. Oh, the porn is exceptional!”
The officer lets go of me, but I’m not finished.
“Congress is full of reptilian aliens. Go on, peel back their skin and take a look. But you know that already. You’ve been covering up this shit since Roswell.”
“I think we’ve heard enough,” the doctor says, ushering the officers out of the room.
“Wait,” I yell. “I’ve got more to tell you. I haven’t told you about the Jedi Knights yet, and Yoda—Yoda comes to me in the shower! Clean, we must be. Dirt leads to grime. Grime leads to filth. Filth leads to the Dark Side, where they have cookies!”
The nurse closes the door behind her as she leaves. I sink back into the mattress feeling frustrated. I’m in so much shit and I know it. I have a bad feeling my life will never return to normal.
Someone claps slowly from out of sight in the bathroom.
“Bravo,” a man’s voice says.
I’m confused.
“See, I told you we could trust him to keep our secret,” Sharon says, stepping into the room.
Mark walks in behind her, only he has long scruffy hair. He’s still clapping slowly, which is more than a little creepy given he’s dead.
“Wh—what? How?”
I sit up on the bed. My feet hang over the edge as I turn to face Sharon and Mark.
“You’re alive?” I say.
“Thanks to you,” Mark replies, reaching out and shaking my hand.
“I—I… What the fuck?”
I’m hallucinating. That’s the only possible explanation. None of this is real.
I push off the bed, only my feet barely touch the floor. My inner ear is still swirling. I feel as light as a feather. The world around me seems to twist and turn. I reach out and grab at the bars on the window to steady myself as I step forward.
“Easy,” Sharon says, but I’m distracted by my feet. Rather than walking, I’m drifting, floating between footsteps.
I look outside. The light is blinding. It takes a few seconds for my eyes to focus on the craters. There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands stretching out into the distance. The ground is dusty and grey, covered in tiny pits and boulders.
Where’s the grass?
In the distance, a vast mountain rises up from the plain, but in a smooth curve. There are no cliff faces or sharp angles. Everything looks old and worn. The sky is black. The ground is white, but I’m not looking at snow. The surface looks like ash. The blinding light reflecting off the rocks makes it hard to keep my eyes open.
Sharon says, “Welcome to Luna One.”
She slips her hand around my waist and kisses me on the cheek again, only this time she lingers a little longer.
“One question,” I say.
“Sure.”
“Do you have tentacles?”
Sharon laughs, hugging me affectionately as she says, “No.”
“Good.”
A Word from Peter Cawdron
Thank you for taking a chance on The Alien Chronicles and for enjoying/enduring “Alien Space Tentacle Porn.”
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. This short story explores a silly angle, that these abductio
ns could (hypothetically) be a deliberate form of 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, they really did use aluminum foil on the Apollo docking hatch.
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 arts and music than our rectal contents. And as for tentacles, well, we’ll just have to wait and see.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this fun 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 name @PeterCawdron. And be sure to subscribe to my mailing list to hear about new releases.
Thank you for supporting independent science fiction.
Trials
by Nicolas Wilson
One
The captain called me on the comms routed through my cochlear implant. He wanted to talk. He never used his office, so I found him in the hall. Louise, our head of security, was finally back and out of quarantine, so I was no longer acting head of our division. But I had been, for weeks, so I was used to the routine.
“How do you feel about taking a sabbatical?” he asked as we started walking.
He was talking about taking one of the pods to make first contact with an alien race. Idly, I pulled up the most recent reports from Louise’s pod on the heads-up display on my eyescreen. It detailed the damage to her pod, as well as the changes the engineering division was nearly through implementing to prevent a recurrence. “Mostly, I’ve been focusing on preparing for the Argus,” I told him.
“Well, with your boss back, I need you to think about this now.”
“Why do I feel like I’m being pitched?”
“Because this is important. It’s not common knowledge that Elle’s—” He caught himself; it wasn’t her name, and he knew it was weird for me. “Louise’s ‘sabbatical’ hit more than technical snags. Most people don’t know she was nearly eaten by a giant, octopus kind of thing. Haley instituted a danger rating for planets. Retroactively, she rated that planet an eight. The world I’d like you to take is a nine.”
