by Don Cook
Eggers quipped cheerfully, “Don’t you mean, ‘person-on-the-street’ —?!”
“TO HELL WITH POLITICAL CORRECTNESS FOR NOW, DAMNIT!” Stanton snarled at Eggers. “Downey’s been the worst thorn in my side, and I can’t seem to get rid of her!”
“Can’t we discredit her? Everyone’s got a skeleton or two in their closets.”
Stanton stopped pacing, sighed heavily, and said with vile regret, “Austin, if there was some way to discredit Downey that wouldn’t backfire on us, we’d have found it by now. Whatever her past sins are, they’re not worth airing. Even our attempts at using Donovan Turnbull’s past against him backfired, and I’ve got enough dirt on him to make a cornfield!”
Khraa/Astra saw that both were silent, as Stanton resumed pacing. Stanton’s dark mind came up with an evil idea, and she wondered aloud, “You know that strung-out hype-actress, Jessica Carla Bueller?”
“The actress who played that butt-kicking, soccer-playing PK from that old TV series Heavenly Home?” Eggers asked, puzzled. “What’s she good for?!”
“She wants help with her hopeless situation so desperately, she’ll sell her soul to the devil to get the help I’ve promised her — help that really doesn’t exist. She and Downey look so damn much alike… Yes! That’s it!”
“But Downey looks healthier than a horse!” Eggers said. “And Jessica Bueller’s sicker than a dog. Even the world’s most rabid dog looks a lot better than Bueller!”
“Well, in the looks department, my boy, there’s nothing some good movie makeup couldn’t fix. We could remake her to look so much like Astra Downey… Why didn’t I think of it before?! But first, I think I will grant that upstart half-Canuck an interview, eventually.”
“But won’t Downey use some sort of tactic to thwart you, like she did today?”
“It’ll take time, Austin, but I’ll devise some way to make Downey slip and fall on her butt. I’ll brew up a plan to bring Downey over to our side saying more mea culpas about me than all the Catholics combined since the days of Saint Peter — and I may not even need that mainliner Bueller. But if the interview fails, I’ll use Plan B — B for Bueller.”
“But just how will you locate Bueller?”
“I have my ways. I’ll put you on hold for a minute, Austin.”
Stanton walked back to her chair, put Eggers on hold, and removed her cell-phone from its charger. Khraa/Astra, having become familiar with telephone technology, heard the cell phone’s faint tones as Stanton dialed Bueller’s number. The phone rang for 30 seconds.
“H — hello?” spoke Jessica Bueller at the other end, in a sickly weak, faint voice.
“Hi, Jess,” Stanton said, with satanically ersatz maternal compassion. “It’s me, Mallory. I’ve got a booking for this progressive treatment center in your home state of Colorado, a few miles just outside Boulder. It’ll cost, but I can and will pay the whole shot if you’ll meet with me, say, around ten to midnight? I know you live in an artsy ghetto in New York, so I’ll have someone pick you up at 11 tomorrow night. Okay?”
“Cool!” Jessica said, her voice sounding slightly stronger.
“Good, it’s a date!” Stanton said. “Bye.”
Stanton, smugly satisfied, ended the call, placed her cell phone back in its charger, and took her speaker phone off hold.
“What’s the plan?” Eggers asked in an eager voice over the speaker phone.
“Let’s just say, Austin,” Stanton said, pacing deviously, “that a near-future headline involving Astra Downey will involve a recant-fest by Downey herself, Downey’s obituary, or…” Stanton “dum-da-dummed” the opening fanfare from the Dragnet theme, with the last three notes punctuated by a hellish, increasingly fuzzy echo before —
APARTMENT 1214, BELLA VILLA APARTMENT COMPLEX
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, USA
31 OCTOBER 6:00 AM CENTRAL TIME
“Get Up and Boogie” sounded from Khraa/Astra’s smartphone, as it did every morning. She rolled over in bed to face the smartphone and turned off its alarm.
“Oh, well” Khraa/Astra said wearily. “Another day, another podcast...”
“As always, before I close,” Khraa/Astra spoke into her webcam, preparing another podcast from her apartment den around 7:10 AM, “I urge you to pick up some Freedom Tea from Frank Ben’s Patriotic Foods among other survival stores. They help pay the shot for these podcasts, and like I always say, what Frank Ben’s sells is stuff you’ll need for when the manure hits the fan big-time. I believe we are living in what the Bible calls the end times, and I don’t know how long we’ve got, but we’ve all got to stick together, and each of us do our part to keep America strong, free, and indivisible under God. So, until next time, this is Astra Downey saying be well, keep safe, stay free and God Bless!”
Khraa/Astra ended the podcast and uploaded it.
Afterwards, Khraa/Astra pondered the dream she had the night before, more deeply than she had done with any other dream she had in her life. Back in her own Known Universe, dreams had a legal weight that they did not have on the secularist Earth on which she currently lived. The dream troubled her to no end, for she knew that Stanton was after her, and that Stanton’s enemies had a nasty habit of dying from inexplicable causes. Was she next?
Khraa/Astra decided to make a log entry, after she inserted a special linguistic protocol in future versions of her distress-beacon, which she had properly assumed had not reached Known Space back home.
(Several factors — other than irrelevant intergalactic distances, which were instantly and easily spanned by standard Known Universal neutrino-based communications technology — could have readily explained the lack of any response to Khraa/Astra’s neutrino-based distress-beacon, which were most likely:
1)Earth and her home-space were not properly or sufficiently aligned, which could have been exacerbated by;
2)Unfathomably extreme light-eons of space between Earth and her section of the cosmos;
3)Various cosmic phenomena, both known and unknown to her civilizations’ plethora of astro-sciences, which caused mortal dread within Khraa/Astra, and;
4)The possibility that her distress-signal was received, but that Minister-In-Chief Trudierre back in Kannatika might have turned over her native star-realm to the Shrions in a manner not unlike Nazi Germany’s Anschluss takeover of Austria on the Earth. Similarly, Trudierre might have handed Kannatika over to the Shrions, as Earthlings would say, on a proverbial silver platter, and was waiting for the optimum time and/or specific orders from his Shrion overlords to strike at Earth.
There were others that Khraa/Astra had not considered, but she had concluded that these four possibilities were the most likely.)
Upon her pondering of the first three scenarios, and, if possible, avoiding the fourth, Khraa/Astra decided to create a unique friend-or-foe protocol.
“Computer?”
“Yes, Captain?” spoke Blue 1’s computer through the ship’s external speakers, which sounded tinny like a small portable 1960s Japanese-made radio, the space fighter in its presently-miniaturized state uncannily resembling a science fiction-themed model spaceship.
“Temporarily cease information-bearing distress-beacon until further notice and switch to basic Amkerian-coded universal distress-signal mode.”
“But Captain —”
“Do it!” Khraa/Astra said insistently. “And standby for new instructions.”
“Yes, Captain,” Blue 1’s computer spoke.
“Meanwhile,” Khraa/Astra said, “I want you to come up with a protocol, and find a lost language of which only a relative handful of Known Universal beings are aware, complete with language tutorials. And formulate a trick question.”
“Yes, Captain,” Blue 1’s computer spoke. “Will get to work on it right away.”
“Initial draft of new distress-signal pre-protocols created, Captain” Blue 1’s computer spoke around 5:57 PM, after Khraa/Astra had come home from an extended intel-gathering lunch interview at her usual h
otel restaurant/media haunt. “Further input and suggestion still required, though.”
“Computer,” Khraa/Astra said, upon that observation by Blue 1’s computer, “Does your memory storage still contain my complete proto-Rubiaarian theoretical constructed language mega-file; dictionary, thesaurus, grammar-file, the whole works?”
“Affirmative. Recall how the main expeditionary transmitter on Rubiaar IV failed the day before the invasion, and that your husband Commodore Elheem suggested that you fly into space and transmit the file from orbit.”
“Yes, and that I was going to transmit the full language file to KERC HQ that way on the day of the invasion, but Mephistula obviously had other plans. I take it the proto-Rubiaarian language file is still stored within your memory?”
“Affirmative. Why do you want that particular mega-file?”
“No one, other than me, my husband and six other people on our Expedition’s linguistics team had any knowledge of my proto-Rubiaarian theoretical constructed language project. My love-lord and the other six on our team are dead, but I’m not. And with that language mega-file, I can have the signal and its distress-message translated into proto-Rubiaarian for retranslation into Tarsonic upon its reception by friendly receptors. In other words, the proto-Rubiaarian mega-file is perfect for the task I have in mind.”
“Do you wish a test protocol to ensure Trudierre’s forces do not decode your beacon?”
“Good point, Computer” Khraa/Astra said. “Can you generate…?” Khraa/Astra paused, and then came up with a brilliant idea. She then said, “I got it! Computer, when it comes to the North Amkeric Border War of 1742, which side do most Kannatikans believe won that war, other than myself?”
“Kannatika, of course” Blue 1’s computer spoke.
“And which side do the Amkerians think had won?”
“Theirs. Why do you ask?”
“And what was the actual outcome, based upon the Treaty of Ghengium?”
“An agreed-upon stalemate, with neither the then-Tarsonic Kannatikan colonies nor the then-fledgling United Star-systems of Amkeria gaining or losing jurisdictional space.”
“And how would anyone with Trudierre’s forces likely answer that question?”
“Kannatika.”
“See?” Khraa/Astra said. “Computer, I want you to generate a multiple-option text-question program to precede the decoding protocols that would ask for the victor of the North Amkeric Border War of 1742. If the receiver answers ‘Kannatika’, all files on the receiver’s computer systems and their cyber-hardware and firmware will be completely destroyed, and therefore prevent my being detected. But if the receiver answers ‘Stalemate’, ‘Amkeria’ — or gives an elaborate answer where the receptor states that the Treaty of Gendelborq officially ended the war in a stalemate, but the Battle of Naulinstron gave Amkeria the practical victory — the safe downloading of the language file and the filtered decoding of the distress message and the information on Earth gathered thus far would commence.”
“I see. But what if someone has already intercepted the earlier beacons?”
“That’s the risk I’ll have to take. But if they have not, at least we might keep Trudierre from discovering Earth. And one more favor, Computer.”
Khraa/Astra paused, trying to word her next order in understandable terms. She finally came up with the right wording.
“Stanton’s people are expert computer hackers, cyber-falsifiers, cyber-distorters, you name it. I know you are capable of cyber-infiltration/defense. I want you to create a covert cyber-antivirus program for Internet penetration and cyber-guardianship and stoppage of cyber-hacking by all of Earth’s pro-Stanton groups, transmit the antivirus up to Alouette 1, and use the beacon-scanner satellite network to disperse the antiviral program to all sectors of Earth’s Internet. Meanwhile, prepare daily updates on details regarding all cyber-attacks by Stanton’s operatives and/or their colleagues over any means, Earth-based or otherwise.”
“Code name for antiviral program?”
“Codename is Operation Salk,” Khraa/Astra said, before spelling the codename in Tarsonic lettering, “that’s ‘Sig’ for ‘Star’, ‘Alph’ for ‘Alkie’, ‘Lamm’ for ‘Lunch’ and ‘Kapp’ for ‘Kidney’: Salk. Copy?”
“After Terran Dr. Jonas Salk, who developed Earth’s early polio vaccines?”
“Yes, Computer, that Jonas Salk. Begin transmission of Operation Salk cyber-antivirus and reconfigured distress-beacon.”
“Affirmative, Captain,” Blue 1’s computer said, as it began to quietly carry out Khraa/Astra’s orders.
SNEWTON ESTATES, WESTERHILLS CITY, PLANET OXMIDIA,
SKANDARIO PROVINCE, KANNATIKA (LIGHT-EONS FROM EARTH)
7 NOVEMBER (EARTH-TIME)
A “Pleasant Valley Suburbia” in space was the norm for Snewton Estates.
The ever-bland, bovine-smug Oxmidian Westerhills City neighborhood of Snewton Estates was the all-too cushy place that Drs. Torakk and Velbya-Koyne ven-Kylae called home. Their bland paradise was so comfortably boring that one of Kannatika’s most famous ex-patriate writers had described Oxmidia overall in sardonic jest as a world where “the blandest could thrive, but where others would either die or go mad from its blandness.”
The Snewton night, in all its starry glory, gorgeously graced this cosmic suburban region that was spared most of the horrors of urban light pollution that often closed off the splendors of the heavens to naked eyes. All its smug residents were sound asleep, except for one constantly-insomniac local adolescent male who, as was his habit, looked up from his bedroom into space through his zoom-lens stereoscopic telescope-camera, enjoying the view of celestial creation with serene abandon.
With brainy glee, the short, long dark-haired teenage boy meticulously mind-jotted down everything he saw into his psych-notebook, aiming to incorporate his highly-detailed stellar observations into his school science project due in seven days’ time.
It was a school project that the insomniac boy would never live to complete.
Suddenly, dozens of Kannatikan Armed Forces heavy-armored vehicles, both wheeled and maglev, rushed into the quiet suburb and came to a stop. Kevlar-type armored soldiers, mostly Shrion nationals assigned to Kannatikan units, poured out of the vehicles and onto the streets toward the homes of the unsuspecting suburbanites, three soldiers per home.
Behaving like Nazi Stormtroopers and their Soviet counterparts, the troopers split up and kicked in every front, rear and side door or window, dragged every last smarmy resident in this sleepy suburb out of his or her bed, and interrogated them by slapping each of them around so violently that most of the hapless residents died during the brutal inquisitions.
Even the normally sneaky stargazing teen male didn’t get away. When the goon-squads got to his home, the brave geekish boy fired a psych-mace beam at the goons who raided his parents’ home, then ran as hard as he could for his very life, but ended up getting ray-gunned in the back by three soldiers… and died.
Meanwhile, one of the subordinates in the pro-Shrion goon-squad trio who invaded Velbya’s Kannatikan domicile home found a note written by Velbya herself on a living room vanity.
“Look at this!” the platinum-haired, dark-brown-skinned, piercing blue-eyed subordinate said, with an Arabesque accent. “A note from the very person we seek!”
“Give it to me!” said the goon-trio’s leader of similar hair, skin and eye color and accent. “I want to read it!”
The subordinate handed his supervisor Velbya’s note, which read:
To the Goons It Will Likely Concern:
If you seek me or anyone else connected with the KERC Rubiaar IV Expedition, forget it. We are no longer in Kannatika. We are in a good place where you cannot reach us. If you did, disaster would befall Kannatika like you would not want to believe. And I will not tell you where we are! Glory to the god!
Hugs and kisses — and Trudierre mid-finger salute,
Velbya-Koyne ven-Kylae, HD
“Bah!!” shout
ed the goon-trio leader, as he crumpled up Velbya’s note and tossed it on the floor in anger. He then reconsidered, picked up the note, folded it, and put it in his pocket for evidence that Trudierre might be able to use.
Meanwhile, the third member of the goon-trio, whose hair, skin and eye color and accent were like those of his comrades, reported to his leader having completed a far more thorough than necessary initial search of the premises.
The third squad-member, in a winded panic, gave a devil rocker-Nazi-style salute as he reported, “Master! I have searched the entire property! Nothing remains of intel-value! Just the fixed items in the home-building, furniture, kitchen utensils, cookware, toiletries. Almost picked clean of everything else!”
“But how?!” the leader said.
A com-alarm sounded from the leader’s field-com within his helmet. He answered it by touching the right side of his helmet.
“Triad Delt-4? Yes? Yes, lord!”
He turned to his two subordinates and said, “Field-coms, Master-Channel!”
Each member of the goon-trio touched the right side of his helmet.
Trudierre’s voice spoke over the field-coms in each soldier’s helmet, “Loyal soldiers of Kannatika, this is your Minister-In-Chief. You are receiving this mass communique from my office because your units were sent to seek and either apprehend or exterminate potential unstables. From reports from all units across Kannatika, you have each done your jobs most admirably.
“Now for Phase-Bett: You are to scorch the neighborhood where you are now situated into ashes, right down to the foundations of anything with a basement! You are to gel-fire each entire neighborhood until the real estate in question is burnt down into history! Carry out your orders. That is all. Thank you.”
“Hail Trudierre!” shouted every goon-soldier with a devil rocker-Nazi-style, before Trudierre’s automatons burned down the bland burg with napalm-type weaponry.
North America’s balmy “Indian Summer” came and went that year as it did every year, as did Veterans Day in the United States (which was also Canada’s Remembrance Day) and America’s Thanksgiving Day (turkey-feasts, parades, football games, and all.) Also, as Mike and I continued to date each other, we disregarded certain people’s revulsions due to our age gap, and despite winter’s onset, it was still love’s springtime for us.
