Skyquakers

by Conway, A. J.

  ‘No, hang on,’ her dad said. He was reaching into the fridge for the jam to make a sandwich. ‘You had a toy when you were three that you called Baba. It was a bear, but you had trouble saying ‘bear’ so you called it ‘Baba’.’

  ‘What happened to the bear?’

  ‘We threw it out ages ago. It was so ratty and old. Why?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I think I remember that bear though.’

  In her dreams she could talk to Baba. He answered simple questions with a plain, monotonous voice; deep and melodic, like that of a fondly-remembered school teacher.

  ‘Am I with you right now?’

  ‘Yes, Lo.’

  ‘Have I been here long?’

  ‘No, Lo.’

  ‘Should I be afraid of you?’

  ‘No, Lo.’

  And then eventually, as a child, she integrated the bear. When she met Baba again, she held the toy out to him.

  ‘Baba,’ she said, the plush toy outstretched in her arms.

  Baba did not understand. He took the toy, examined it as though it was foreign to him. And then he handed it back to her, saying, ‘No, Lo.’

  Her grandmother claimed it wasn’t a bear: Baba was what she called Dorothy the Dinosaur on tapes of The Wiggles that she used to dance to when she was about two years old, right up until five or six. She loved Dorothy, and would bop along to the songs on TV all day, captivated by the green monster. She had no idea what to make of dancing dinosaurs, but whenever they put the tape in the VCR, little Lara would start shouting, ‘Baba! Baba!’

  So she went back to Baba, the one in her dreams. As a child, she held out a video tape to him, a big, chunky, black VHS device from her childhood. He did not know what that was either, probably even more so than the teddy bear. He shook his head at it.

  ‘No, Lo.’

  Whoever Baba was, and wherever the name originated from, he loved her very much. She could feel – sense – his affection in her dreams. Dylan said she sometimes smiled in her sleep, although he was convinced it was for him.

  ‘Baba, do you love me?’

  ‘Yes, Lo.’

  ‘Do you love me very much?’

  ‘Yes, Lo.’

  VVEE

  Lara’s interest in the paranormal stemmed from some unknown inkling in the back of her mind that she and the supernatural were pre-determinedly linked, as though it was genetic. From an early age, she began with unicorns and fairies, spirits and talking trees. When her mother took her grocery shopping, she was always allowed to get one new wishing stone from the incense store on the way home. Her collection was vast, containing one stone of almost every possible colour and polish, and she kept them all in a little velvet bag in her sock draw.

  In her teenage years, she was obsessed with Ancient Egyptians and claimed she was going to be an archaeologist, so that she could go digging for treasures and mummies in the Valley of the Dead. Their colourful representation of gods, with bird and jackal heads, their mysterious hieroglyphs, their extravagant funeral rituals and their magnificent empires were all captivating to a girl destined to become a scholar; far more magical than the boring, mundane world she lived in. She had travelled to Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Japan, and had witnessed the enormous temples built in honour of the gods and the spirits; ethereal beings which were once – and in most places around the world, still were – accepted as physically present amongst them. Even today, their existence was not questioned amongst a vast majority of the world’s population, no matter the form or name that this existence went by, and yet she, deep down, knew that her belief, if ever uttered aloud, would most certainly be laughed at above all. The belief of this particular entity, as invisible and as untouchable as all these other gods, had, for more than fifty years, been made a mockery of, and now the true believers were not classed as pilgrims or humble followers of a higher power, but as nutcases whose hilarious anecdotes were explored satirically in Louis Theroux documentaries.

  Lara was amongst millions of people worldwide who believed in aliens. More so, she believed they had visited her numerous times, back when she was too young to fully remember it. Dreams of these bizarre events – being with an older man, sitting in a classroom, learning nouns and verbs on flashcards – came and went fleetingly, but that year, in the months leading up to Veteran’s Day, they intensified rapidly, as did her need to understand them.

  Initially, she wanted to know if what she had seen was even plausible. The Internet was simultaneously the best and the worst source of truth one could possibly hope to find, since any possibly real cases of abduction were a needle in a haystack of drunk farmers stumbling through the woods and being blinded by flashing lights. Among the more well-documented and famous abduction stories, there was a former president of the Kalmykia region of Russia, who claimed human-like beings visited him and told him that they invented the game of chess, of which the president was quite skilful at. There was a logger in Arizona who was witnessed by five of his friends to have been zapped by a blue beam of light. The police, failing to find the logger, began investigating his friends for murder, but five days later he reappeared suddenly and found himself lying on a pavement with little recollection of what had happened. In one documentary, professors and doctorate-level engineers from prestigious universities had been hired by the U.S. military to identify the components of spacecraft debris during the 80’s, crafts which they described as being ‘designed for beings much smaller than humans.’

  The multitude of stories she read contained few, if any, details which mirrored her experience, and the reoccurring factors in most of these anecdotes were absent with hers: the farm-like terrain or the long highway, the floating orbs of light, the experimental table of torture, even the various descriptions of glossy-eyed, balloon-headed beings. Baba was not like that. From what Lara could recall, he looked entirely normal to her, just a very tall man with a deep, soothing voice. He played games with her. He taught her the names of things on colourful flashcards. And Lara grew up in the city all her life, significantly deviating from the cliché.

  ‘Fake, fake, all fake,’ she sighed, clicking through them all. ‘Nope, nope, nope.’

  But it didn’t deter her from finding someone, anyone, who was like her. Internet forums on conspiracy-based websites allowed her to watch real people connect with one another and share their stories. There was one popular website titled Veni, Vidi, Edi Edisti, which translated to: I Came, I Saw, I Ate Ham. The VVEE was run by a series of anonymous computer whizzes and conspiracy junkies, the head of which was convinced he was abducted and was forced to eat various foods at the aliens’ table for their scientific studies of the Earth’s fauna and flora, so that they could document what ate what. He called himself the Ham Hamster. Everyone posted under these nonsensical codenames, and often they spoke of their experiences as though it was being written in the log book of an undercover military operative.

  At 2300 a light appeared at my window and I knew that it was the OWL ONES again. I proceeded aboard, where, once inside the COOP, I was taken to the CONTROL ROOM via LEVITATION, and came across the TRANSMUTATOR. Before I lay down, I proceeded to remove my pants, as instructed by TELEPATHY...

  They were comical at best, but there were no jokers here: each and every user was adamant in their beliefs, and each ranged from outback to townhouse to suburbia, from blue guys to lizard guys to guys wearing clown masks, and from probing to levitating to mind control. She felt stupid to be resorting to this, but the VVEE had one of the largest audiences catered to this one niche of interest, a global encyclopaedia with millions of contributors, so it may be the best pond to cast her line into.

  And so, on a quiet Wednesday night, with nothing much to watch on TV, Lara stretched out her fingers and, under the light of her laptop screen, reached out to the world with her story.

  When I was very young, about 2, perhaps as old as 5, I went repeatedly missing from my bed. I remember floating up towards a bright light, and up there I met a tall man who I called
Baba. He showed me cards with animals, numbers, colours, and plants drawn on them, and I recited words with him. I had long forgotten about these lessons until just now, when these memories, in the form of dreams, have become more and more frequent, to the point where it has forced me to come to awkward and humiliating sites like this. No offence, Mr Hamster.

  I just want to find someone who has had the same experience as me, because it’s beginning to drive me insane.

  -Fructzul een.

  She went to bed after writing it, and tossed about in her sheets for hours, wanting to delete her post out of sheer embarrassment.

  ‘This is stupid. This is really stupid!’

  She was certain readers on the other end of her post were having a good laugh at her right now for her ridiculous story. Either that, or her post was being completely ignored and outshone by the ten thousand more interesting cases on the net. It was difficult to rationalise: she was a student of science, an intellectual, well-read, worldly, and above all, logical. To resort to something so obscure was a new low for her, and if she was ever found by her colleagues or family to believe she was a victim of extra-terrestrial mischief, they would no doubt consider committing her. Even if she ever shared her story with Dylan, he would probably laugh at her. She had heard his views on aliens before when they once watched a documentary together about crop circles on the Discovery Channel.

  ‘If aliens were close enough to reach us, which they just aren’t, they would announce their arrival with trumpets and sirens,’ he said. ‘I mean, they would know from all the radio broadcasts and satellites that we were an intelligent species. I don’t think they would come millions of light years just to abduct a farmer and stick a probe up his bum.’

  But there was one line in her story, one additional mark of brilliance, which may allow Lara’s post to be noticed: Fraczul een. It meant nothing in English, but it was a word, a word she knew would perhaps help her find, in the vast interconnected cyber world, someone who understood her mental anguish.

  It was not until the next night that she sat down at her laptop again, rugged up in pyjamas and sipping hot chocolate, and she decided to check in on VVEE and see who had responded, if anyone, and what they had to say about her story.

  To Lara’s surprise, she had over a dozen responses from codenamed users who swore they too had been through the exact same process and were taken by the same beings. The overlapping screens were all personal chats other users had attempted to start with her, to express their compassion towards her story and to add details of their own.

  Yes! Yes! That happened to me too! And these guys were a silvery colour, weren’t they? With horns on their heads?

  Nope.

  The same thing happened to me, Fructzul. It’s the government who are hiding these things and keeping everyone quiet. They’ve tried to tap my phone twice now. I’d be careful, because they probably want you now too.

  Highly doubt it.

  We need to talk.

  -Fructzul een mrauu.

  Lara sat up, startled.

  ‘Fructzul een mrauu,’ she said. ‘No way.’

  She stared at that little comment on the bottom of her page. She stared and stared and could not believe her eyes. The words were there, the correct words. Someone had actually passed the test. This meant… well, this meant Lara was not alone.

  PSYCHO

  The one who responded to her post – the only correct responder – went under the codename Psycho, for some dark reason. She located him on VVEE and found he had been a periodic contributor to the site for six months now. He did not appear to be one of the overzealous, obsessive, crazy ones, but instead was a quiet observer who only rarely published his thoughts on others’ stories and theories. By the nature of his posts, Psycho was interested in the evidence-based logic behind the existence of aliens and subscribed to the Ancient Aliens theory: the belief that aliens had been present here long before modern humans and had in fact been an integral part in many arms of human civilisation, from the passing of knowledge of farming and tomb-building, to the chemical structure of DNA. Psycho was not afraid to acknowledge published scientific articles in his arguments, and, like a true scholar, was not afraid to alter his beliefs when others, in turn, presented evidence to him. In a bold piece he had written on VVEE, Psycho expressed the scientific reasoning behind what he called ‘Bullet Train Evolution’, where he pointed out that humans had gone from Neanderthals to building pyramids in less than ten thousand years; an evolutionary step that was impossibly short by all known measurements, unless other intelligence had helped ‘speed up’ the mutagenesis of the human genome which resulted in the emergence of modern Homo sapiens.

  We are all gene-spliced products of their making. We always will be. But to what end: that is the question.

  -Psycho

  It was Psycho who was the first to make contact. He left her a message on VVEE, a simple, ‘Hi,’ to see if she still existed.

  The first night, Lara didn’t respond. All she kept wondering was why he had called himself Psycho. It was a fairly bland codename compared to others on VVEE, like Lethal Lynx, or Megaxus, or Those Without Noses, among her favourite weirdos. What would she call herself in return? She hadn’t thought of a proper name yet; her story had been posted under anon.

  Frankly, only one codename came to mind.

  ‘I’m Lo,’ she wrote back.

  It took two nights for him to respond, which meant he was either too busy to check his VVEE page every day or he was too nervous to talk to her. In the open chat box, a little green dot appeared next to Psycho’s name when he too was online, a red one if he was absent.

  Lara decided to tread lightly at first, despite the continuous butterflies in her stomach. She was wary of whom she was speaking to, as if this invisible person was not to be trusted with the information she possessed. It was moronic to think someone on the other end of an alien conspiracy theory website could be a threat. He was probably some fat guy in his thirties who slept in his Naruto doona set and still used Proactive on his face.

  But nonetheless, the two began to talk. Initially, it was difficult to co-ordinate things. Lara still had to keep track of her studies and was required to be up very early. She left brief messages to Psycho during the day, which he would not respond to until late at night, but these were shallow and left timidly, as though both were equally as embarrassed to commit to anything more than small talk. Once in a while, perhaps during brief instances when she would stay up past eleven, both would be online at the same time. When that little green light appeared on her screen, indicating Psycho’s presence, Lara would jump almost in anticipation. He was here, staring at her through another screen, separated from her by an unknown distance. At last, they could communicate.

  ‘Lo,’ Psycho wrote. ‘Hmm. I like that. I like Lo.’

  ‘Uh, thanks,’ she said. ‘What’s with Psycho?’

  ‘Ha, yeah. It’s an old video game thing.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She tapped her fingers against her laptop keyboard for a while. She was about to type again, but he beat her to it.

  ‘I saw your post a few days ago. How long ago do you think this happened to you?’

  ‘Um, perhaps 19 or 20 years ago.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He paused for a moment. His chat bar appeared as ‘Typing…’ Eventually he wrote, ‘I liked the ‘fructzul’ thing. Completely threw me off-guard for a moment.’

  ‘Okay, this is already weird. I need to know. What happened to you?’

  ‘Basically the same. Some guy taught me words on cards and we played games in a square room. I played with figurines too. Did you do that?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I was really young.’

  ‘Yeah, I think I was about six. I played with action figures, like soldiers and doctors and fire fighters and even Barbies, I think. And trucks and planes and ships too.’

  ‘What did you call the guy that taught you these words?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he respond
ed. ‘I don’t think he had a name. He was just a tall man with big hands.’

  Lara was hesitant. She sat back from her keyboard. His story was a little different from hers; she never played with figurines, and surely his teacher would have had a name, like Baba or something equally as fatherly. But, she could not ignore that inkling in the back of her mind, that predisposition that forced her to believe that, despite these little variances, she and Psycho were one and the same.

  She asked, ‘Do you think they hurt us?’

  ‘No!’ he typed rapidly. ‘Of course not, Lo. They were nice to us. This guy was like my life mentor. He took care of me. He was tough but fair. He wouldn’t let me go back to sleep until I knew all the words. And then he put me back to bed, completely unharmed, until the next session.’

  Hours crept into days, which crept into weeks. Lara and Psycho became entwined in each other’s stories, attempting to bounce ideas and memories off each other until something new clicked. He too was struggling to remember details from such a young age, but six was much older than two or three, and so he often had more to tell.

  ‘That beam, it was really bright; you’re right on that one. I remember seeing zaps of electricity, and it kept pricking my fingers when I tried to touch the edges of the beam. And the room? It looked like a classroom, from what I can remember. It had posters on the wall of parts of the body, of animals, shapes, the Solar System, and even a map of the continents and oceans. Maybe I was in a higher grade than you. Ha-ha.’

  Lo asked Psycho, ‘Have you ever told anyone? Other than me?’

  ‘Yeah, of course!’ he typed. ‘I’ll tell anyone who listens. They all think I’m ridiculous, but hey, it’s a great icebreaker at parties. I mean, people believe crazier shit, don’t they? The Earth being only 6,000 years old, angels and psychics and Sasquatches… It’s not all that hard to consider aliens as plausible, but those who haven’t experienced it will simply never understand people like us.’