The Gods and the Builders

by Brandon Hale

  “Don’t panic,” Alice said. “We know.”

  Lauren got up from the couch. “Coffee should be done.”

  “I think I have some sugar in cabinet,” Arthur said to Lauren.

  “That’d be great,” Jerry said.

  Lauren walked back to the kitchen. “Alice,” she yelled as she sat the fourth cup on the counter, “Sugar?”

  “Yes, please,” Alice said. “Actually, sweetener’s fine if you have it to spare.”

  Lauren stepped from the kitchen. “Got plenty,” she said. “No creamer, though. Milk okay?”

  “That’s fine,” Alice said. As Lauren went back to the kitchen, Alice turned to Arthur and said, “She’s very nice.”

  “I don’t disagree,” Arthur said.

  Jerry added, “Yeah. You’re an asshole for cheating on her.”

  “I don’t disagree,” Arthur said.

  In the kitchen, Lauren looked at the telephone. The answering machine had twelve messages waiting. She hit the “play” button as she prepared the coffee.

  The first message was the unmistakable voice of her mother. “Hey, Laurie. Just checking to see how you‘re doing. Call me.” Lauren looked at the time of the message and saw that it was from the previous afternoon. So much had changed since that message was left.

  The next voice was from another minister at the church. “Lauren,” he said, “we need to talk. Apparently, some members were more than a little upset by some of the things you were saying at the picnic today. What exactly did you say? Anyway, give me a call. God bless.”

  Lauren reached over and deleted the message. If she had checked that message yesterday, it would have been intensely upsetting. Right now, it just seemed amusing. She just smiled as the next message began.

  It was her mother again. “Laurie, call me. Have you looked outside? Call me.” The fear in her mother’s voice was evident. Lauren looked at the time of the message. Eleven o’clock, p.m. It was after the big event. She looked at the clock on the microwave. Three-thirty a.m. Too late to call. She would call her tomorrow.

  Lauren didn’t bother to check the rest of the messages. No doubt, they were all similar to the last one her mother had left. Why else would people be calling her in the middle of the night. She carried two cups of coffee back to the living room, gave one to Alice, the other to Jerry, then went back to the kitchen to get the last two cups.

  “That’s good coffee,” Jerry said as she re-entered the living room.

  “Thanks,” she said as she gave Arthur a cup. “Anything new?”

  “Nah,” Arthur said. “Just various footage from across the world. Oh, and the President is supposed to speak at four.”

  “That gives me just enough time to get a quick shower and change my pump,” Lauren said.

  “When was the last time you checked your blood sugar?” Arthur asked.

  “Been a while,” Lauren admitted. “Been kind of distracted.” She sat her cup on the coffee table. “I’ll hurry. Yell if something new happens.”

  “Do you ever just relax?” Jerry asked.

  Lauren smiled. “No rest for the wicked.”

  Lauren’s Burden

  Lauren stepped from the shower, dried herself with a large towel, wrapped the towel around her body, and walked into her bedroom carrying her insulin pump. She sat on the bed, removed the towel, and pulled on a pair of panties. She leaned back onto her pillows and prepared her pump.

  The pump was about the size of a beeper. She took out a vial of insulin and placed it inside the pump. She pressed a button on the pump and watched it “prime” itself, running insulin through the long tube connected to it.

  Lauren examined her own stomach until she found a good site. She placed a small, round device onto her stomach and pressed the buttons on the side. She flinched slightly as the device shot a needle into her stomach. She pulled the device away, leaving the receptacle in her stomach. She took the end of the hose that was connected to her pump and attached it to the site on her stomach.

  Changing the insulin pump was something she had done every three days for decades. It was routine, and she hardly noticed that she had a piece of medical equipment permanently attached to her abdominal area.

  The pump was a necessary part of her life, and wasn’t the worst part of having Type 1 diabetes. Her pump gave her the ability to live a somewhat normal life.

  Lauren picked up another device from her bedside table. It was her blood tester. It wasn’t much bigger than the insulin pump. She took a small strip from a vial on the bedside table and placed it in the end of the tester.

  She laid the tester back on the table, then picked up yet another device. It was shaped like a thick pencil, but it had a button on the side, and it had a small hole on the end. Yet another needle hid inside the hole. It was her lancet. It was what she used to draw blood. She placed the lancet against the end of her middle finger and pressed the button on the side, causing the tiny needle to prick the tip of her finger.

  Using the index finger and thumb from her other hand, she squeezed her finger until she got a good drop of blood to form. She held her finger over the strip sticking out of the end of the tester. She watched as her blood was sucked into the tiny test strip.

  After a few seconds, the tester beeped. She looked at the screen on the side. One hundred and fifteen. A good number.

  Testing her blood, while sometimes annoying, wasn’t the worst part of having diabetes. It was a life saver and she appreciated its necessity.

  Lauren lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. She really didn’t feel like getting dressed. She didn’t feel like going back to the living room. She didn’t feel like stepping back into the insanity that was the world right now. She wanted to sleep. Just for a few hours.

  A few hours was all the sleep she ever got. About three, usually. Every night, she had to set her alarm clock for three hours. Having her blood sugar drop throughout the night was too dangerous. She had to check it regularly, and adjust her insulin pump accordingly. Lauren hadn’t slept for more than three to four hours at one time in over a decade.

  Lauren loved sleep, and she hated the fact that she never got to sleep for more than a few hours at a time. But as bad as it was, it wasn’t the worst part of having diabetes.

  Lauren continued to stare at the pale bedroom ceiling. She closed her left eye and looked at the ceiling with her right. Then she closed her right eye and looked at the ceiling with her left. The process of staring at her own ceiling with alternating eyes had become a tradition for her. She started doing it shortly after the first surgery.

  Of course, the doctor didn’t call it surgery. He just referred to it as a laser treatment, which was technically true. Nobody actually cut into her eyes. It was all done with lasers. First, they took a giant needle and injected numbing medication into her eye socket. Then they took a laser and burned the inside of her left eye over eight hundred times. That was the first treatment. The second was easier, with only about three hundred hits from the laser. The third treatment was done on her right eye. It was about seven hundred hits from the laser.

  As terrible as the treatments were, they were nothing compared to the blindness that caused their necessity. The first time it happened, she was at the grocery store. It looked like a curtain simply fell over her left eye. Within an hour, she was at the emergency room and completely blind in that eye. A week later, she was having her first laser treatment.

  The actual condition was called “prolific diabetic retinopathy.” Basically, the curtain she saw was blood filling in her eye. The doctor had explained it in a very cold and scientific way, which made it even more terrifying. “The condition,” he had said, “is caused by new blood vessels forming in the eye that can’t hold the blood they’re pumping. When they burst, the eye fills with blood, causing blindness.”

  The best treatment was the cauterization of those vessels with a laser. Lauren was lucky. Her treatment was very successful. She got almost all of her vision back.

&nb
sp; The laser treatment, however, did nothing to cure the fear. Since the treatment, Lauren lived in a constant state of terror. Every sneeze caused a moment of panic, followed by a terrified check for floaters in her field of vision. Every bump on the road caused worry. It wasn’t a logical fear, but it wasn’t entirely unreasonable. She had, in fact, gone blind in one eye. Although the blindness had been treated, the emotional impact of that experience was something she could not easily shrug off. The fear followed her everywhere. It never relented.

  The unending fear was, without question, the worst part of having diabetes.

  Lauren sighed and sat up. She put on a bra, then a t-shirt. She slid into a pair of blue jeans, then slipped on her socks. She chuckled darkly at the absurdity of what was waiting in that living room. Her husband was waiting for her, along with his girlfriend and her significant other. They were all in her living room, watching newscasters talk about the alien spaceships that had just landed all across the globe.

  In this particular situation, Lauren felt like her diabetes was almost a comfort. It was the only hint of normalcy she had left.

  As she stepped into the living room, Arthur turned around and said, “You came just in time. The President is about to speak.”

  The Press Conference

  The President stepped up to the podium and looked around the room. “My advisors,” he said quietly, “wanted me to give a speech from the Oval Office. They advised against a press conference. They wrote a very good speech for me about how we’re stepping into a new era and about how this is a time for hope, not panic. Everything in the speech was true, and I was impressed by the sincerity of it.

  “While they were preparing the cameras in the Oval Office, I kept reading over this speech. As I read the lines over and over, I felt something I did not expect. I felt loneliness.” He paused, looking into the eyes of the captivated reporters. “That was when I realized that a speech from the Oval Office was the wrong way to handle this. Yes, this is the most pivotal event in human history. Yes, panic is the wrong way to handle this. Yes, I do have a bad habit of speaking without thinking when I don’t have a teleprompter feeding me lines.” Most of the people in the room laughed. “But this isn’t a time for speeches,” the President continued. “This is a time for being together. And this is a time to be completely open with the people of this country. Again, my advisors are nervous because they think I’ll say something that causes a panic. I think they greatly overestimate my abilities as an orator if they think I can say anything that’s more worthy of panic than the thousands of space vessels outside.

  “Bottom line, right now is the time for conversation, not speeches. With that in mind, I‘ll let you folks lead the conversation. Ask anything.”

  The reporters immediately fell into a chorus of calling for the President’s attention. He pointed to a reporter in the front row. “You start, Sherry.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” the woman said. “I’ll start with the obvious. Have you met them yet?”

  “Yes,” the President said, causing various gasps in the audience. “We’ve met them. Communicating with them, however, is a different story. We’re having some difficulty.”

  “What do they look like?” someone yelled from the crowd of reporters.

  “These are the guys we’ve been hearing about for decades,” the President said. “Gray. Big black eyes. Small mouths. They look very much like the reports we’ve gotten for decades. The only difference is they‘re not short. For some reason, I always imagined they were short. Instead, they stand about seven feet tall. I‘m sure you‘ll all be meeting them soon enough.” This caused another collective gasp. The President pointed at another reporter. “Ben.”

  “What makes you say we’ll be meeting them, sir?”

  The President smiled. “There I go speaking without thinking again. I don’t have any inside information yet, Ben. It was just an assumption. They’re in every single town in this country. There’s got to be a reason.”

  “Can you describe your meeting with them, sir?” Ben asked.

  The President looked uncomfortable for a moment, then said, “It has been frustrating. So far, there has been no successful communication. Keep in mind, we didn’t have a head start on this thing. I’ve been awake about two hours. When I went to bed last night, my thoughts were on the economy. When they woke me up at two-thirty, it was because of aliens. We’ve spent the past two hours trying to communicate with them, and we think they’re trying too.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Ben said. “I mean, they have the technology to come here from another world, yet they don’t have the ability to even say hello?”

  “That’s what I said,” the President answered. “And here’s how it was explained to me. You’re more intelligent than a bee, right? I mean, they buzz around and land on flowers. You drive a car and write news stories and play on the internet. We’re obviously much more advanced than a bee. So let me ask you this… how do you tell a bee hello? How do you befriend a bee? You see, the problem isn’t so much that they’re not advanced enough to communicate. It’s that they’re too advanced. We’re too simple for them to figure out.

  “Bees communicate with their dances. As advanced as we are, we’re not able to replicate that. We communicate with language. To these aliens, language is apparently too primitive for them to understand. They can’t even grasp the concept.”

  “They don’t have language?” another reporter asked.

  “Keep in mind,” the President answered, “we’ve known them for about two hours. This is all just wild speculation. But we think they communicate in ways that are so radically different from the way we communicate, it’s difficult for them to even grasp that we do it through verbal communication.”

  “Do they communicate telepathically?” Ben asked.

  “We think that’s part of it,” the President said. “Honestly, I’m very under-qualified for these questions. After I’m done, I’ll bring out some experts that are better at explaining this stuff. I‘m just going to mess it all up.” He looked toward the back of the room. “Janet, you can go next.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” Janet said. “Do you have any sense of their intentions? Have you been able to draw any conclusions based on their actions?”

  “Not really,” the President said. “It’s too early. The only conclusion we’ve come to is that they don’t seem to want to cause us harm. Nothing they’ve done suggests it. The landings. The attempts at communication. All across the world, they’ve attacked nobody. That’s a very good sign.”

  “Have you heard from other countries?” Janet asked.

  “Most countries have had visitors,” the President answered. “All the leaders are having similar trouble communicating.”

  “Follow up,” Janet said. “If they can’t communicate, how did they know to go to the White House? Why are they attempting to connect to the world leaders? Again, that seems strangely inconsistent.”

  “We think they understand the basic structure of our society,” The President said, “but they can’t figure out how to speak to us directly. To fall back on my bee analogy, just because we can recognize the queen doesn’t mean we can automatically strike up a conversation. Some of our scientists think they can understand us, but are having difficulty getting us to understand them. I don’t really buy that, though. Even if they‘re not able to speak our language, they should be able to write. I think they simply don‘t grasp how we communicate. They know it has something to do with our voices, but they aren‘t sure how.

  “You have to understand, we’re dealing with a truly alien mind. They may not think in the same way we think. We might be too alien for them to understand. You also have to understand that right now, we have almost no information on them. It’s been a couple hours. By tomorrow, we may have a completely different view. By tomorrow, we may be discussing Shakespeare with them. This just happened.” He pointed to the another reporter. “Joe.”

  “Thank you, sir,”
Joe said. “You’ve referred to the attempted communications. What specific attempts have you made?”

  “So far,” the President said, “We’ve tried to communicate verbally and in writing. We’ve gotten no reaction. They simply stand there and stare. We don’t know if they’re observing us, or attempting to communicate. Again, with an alien life form, it’s impossible to know.”

  “What makes you suspect telepathy? Is that an educated guess, or simply based on science fiction?”

  The President laughed uncomfortably. “Little of both, I suppose. We’re pretty sure that telepathy is how they communicate. But we don’t think they telepathically communicate words. It’s more that they communicate knowledge, which is the reason this is proving difficult. Humans communicate with words, not pure knowledge. Our running theory is that they think on a level beyond our ability to comprehend. It‘s like asking our bees to work quadratic equations. They‘re just not capable. We‘re worried that we‘re not capable of understanding them because they‘re not capable of thinking on a level primitive enough for our brains to grasp.”

  “That’s a pretty damn specific theory, sir,” Joe said. “What are you basing these conclusions on?”

  “We’ve had some failed attempts to communicate, Joe,” The President said. “We’re evaluating those attempts and we’ll tell you about them in detail when we’ve fully evaluated them. Until then, I can only ask that you trust us on this one.”

  “You promised no secrets, sir,” Joe said.

  “And I’ll keep that promise,” the President said. “Right now, we think limited information is better than incorrect information. We don’t know when they’re going to start stepping down from their ships, Joe. We don’t want to be responsible for people doing the wrong things, or making conclusions based on incorrect assumptions we’ve made. That’s why we’re holding off on specific theories. To be honest, I know my advisors are probably cursing me as we speak for saying as much as I have.”