Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox

by Resnick, Mike

  Nn argues that the creatures would have come in force. That there is no reason for them to behave as Ghh thinks they are doing. They have so little. Surely if they came, they would come to save. Or, if not, to conquer.

  “That wouldn’t punish us. They’d have to look after us then, to actually be hatchers. They punish and run.”

  By the end of the conversation, Nn is very tired. It asks Ghh how its degradation is going. Ghh says not long now. Nn wishes it well, leaves it knowing they will never see each other again. Nn leaves Ghh with no means of finding it, which makes sure of that, really. Nn returns to its burrow alone as the light is fading.

  Nn fastens its burrow and stands in the darkness, listening to the clicks and the hiss from down the tunnels. It stays in the third state a long time. It wonders if there is a sort of signal that can also be a creature, that can take a culture repeatedly, continually, across the universe, that is so proud that it does not have to hide and burrow. If they are coming here, it thinks, it’s good, in a way, because that means they must be striving to understand this place.

  The seed has been planted. Nn lets itself drift off into the second state, and finds itself again back at that night. It moves into the first state and sees the universe, consciousness inside it, spreading out, thinning, being wasted, maintaining coherence only through the stupid will of those who can close their eyes.

  Nn knows what’s coming. It shifts back into the second state, then quickly into the first, at unexpected light.

  They have entered through the wall. They stand there, imperious expressions filling the room, unknowable and yet insisting that they will be known. Here are Barney and Betty Hill. Nn doesn’t try to run. It wants to know what they bring. It only hopes they bring something, even if only meaning.

  They step forward and lay hands on Nn and lead it quickly over the border.

  The Ambulance Chaser

  Tricia Sullivan

  Faugh, the smell! I’ve only been here a few seconds and already I want to make my excuses and go. Your car has one of those petrol-station air-fresheners in the shape of a tree. It interacts foully with the scent of your chocolate-digestive-biscuit farts. That your intestines are hot and disturbed I notice immediately, but you don’t notice me. You are as blissfully unaware of my arrival as you are of the looming danger that I’ve been summoned to handle.

  I begin evaluating your physical thresholds, since in all likelihood I will be required to violate them in some way. I can trick any human body into high performance in an emergency.

  There must have been some dreadful mistake. Your body must be eighty of your Earth years old. And what have you been doing all that time? Smoking cigars and drinking scrumpy? Your arteries are a mess. Osteoporosis has compromised your spine, so that you can just about peer over the steering wheel as you wobble through the village at 20mph. At least you’re wise enough to drive slowly; you have the reflexes of a drunken warthog.

  Well. What a brave new world this is. For me.

  You leave the village speed barriers behind, finally accelerating to what seems to be your top speed of 40 mph on the rural A-road. That’s when the pocket of intestinal gas starts to swell your rectum. You try to lift your bottom off the seat to let the gas out, but it’s not quite. . . ready. Sometimes these farts need to be coaxed. You need a bit more leverage, don’t you? You take your left foot away from the clutch (where you have the appalling habit of resting it lightly – my sympathies to your mechanic) with the intention of bracing that foot on the floor so you can straighten your left leg and hold yourself off the seat while you bear down with your anal sphincter.

  There’s a lorry in your rear-view mirror. Much too close. You see it.

  “Bloody lorries –”

  You initiate what is surely a familiar torrent of invective as you press down with your left foot in an effort to get that wind out.

  I think it’s time to make myself useful. Now or never. I flow into your tendons and brainstem and the surfaces of your skin. Not a moment too soon, because your left foot has stepped on the brake by accident. Out comes the fart. The lorry sounds its horn, an immense bellowing that overwhelms even your dull senses and makes you startle. Now you’re all confused. You try to correct your mistake, but you can’t remember which foot is which. The lorry makes contact with your rear bumper even as you step on the accelerator to get away.

  You step on it hard, but the bump from the lorry has sent you across the middle of the road. You’re up to 70 mph when you come round a sharp bend. As luck would have it, a pair of cyclists are riding abreast coming the other way, and a Land Rover is gearing up to pass them, and –

  Fortunately I have already got into your brainstem. Hello, that’s me. *waves* Your sense of timing is atrocious and you are afraid of your own shadow, but I know what I’m doing. Getting out of this alive requires precision steering, a tightly locked feedback system between your eyes and hands, and judicious use of the brake. None of which you can do. There is no guard rail on the left. Just a thread of dirt and a lot of trees that you really wouldn’t want to hit.

  “Oh Mary mother of shit!” you’re shouting, eyes wide. I’m working the parking brake. Your Astra goes up on two wheels and then lands in a series of bounces. The Land Rover brakes and pulls in behind the cyclists, tyres squealing as its driver fights the wheel. In your rear view mirror it can be seen sliding off the road and into a hedge. Your hands are letting go of the wheel and seizing it again in a series of jerks so rapid that they seem digitized. You are now completely on the other side of the road, facing incoming traffic. I pump the brakes, I steady the wheel, and I get us back on the left. I slow the car and put on the indicator.

  Then I leave you to it. You manage to have a small crash trying to get yourself into the layby. This is a sort of afterthought; you’re not hurt, but you do take out a bit of hedge. The lorry piles past you as though nothing’s happened, but your pine tree air freshener has flipped up and is wedged between the rear view mirror and the ceiling of the car.

  After this there is a lot of standing around by the roadside, officials in hi-vis attire, you dazed and curiously exhilarated. No one has been hurt. Everyone is astonished at your performance. You blame the lorry driver for everything. Of the fart you mention nothing.

  Well, it’s time for me to leave. Your body is exhausted. You are shaking and sick. My work is done.

  And then. . . and then. . . but this can’t be right.

  I can’t get out.

  I can’t get out.

  Your nightmare is over but it would seem that mine’s just begun.

  The police drop you off at Rose Cottage, a semi-detached stucco residence beside the village post office. They offer to call someone to come and stay with you but you brush them off. The moment the door shuts you’re pouring… what is that? Tell me it’s not Pimm’s.

  “Why do you have to be such a piss-taker?” You say this aloud, and then you suck down a fairish slug.

  Piss-taker? I’m afraid you’re too thick to realize that the manner in which I present myself is limited by your inboard parameters of what constitutes a being, and yours are defined by some queer mixture of ITV and the Queen’s Christmas Message. If I’m a piss-taker it’s because you’ve made me that way.

  You shudder as the drink goes down. “Don’t blame me. Mind your manners.”

  You pour another one and reach for… oh, not the chocolate biscuits. You wouldn’t.

  You would. You run a bath and take the bottle and biscuits with you. You start ringing everyone you know and telling them all about your exploits.

  I’m feeling a little panicky myself by now. I’ve never, ever got stuck inside a human. I didn’t even know it was possible. You lower yourself into the bath, aching all over.

  “I don’t care,” you say to the phone. “It was worth it. Never knew I had it in me.”

  You don’t have it in you. I overrode your thresholds. Your body isn’t meant to do any of that.

  You put the phon
e down.

  “What do you want with me, anyway? I’m not religious, you know. If you think you’re going to control me you can just bugger right off.”

  I’m not interested in controlling you. I’m not good with fine motor skills, anyway. I couldn’t, for example, make you type or speak. It’s not in my remit.

  “Your remit. And what would that be?”

  Not allowed to say.

  “What is this, Star Trek? My love, we’re stuck with each other now. Might as well come clean. I know you’re an alien, so what gives? I assume you’re not here to knock me up!”

  At this point you emit a cackle so piercing that it hurts your own ears.

  What makes you think I’m an alien?

  You laugh and laugh and laugh. It’s unsettling, actually.

  Days pass. We lie on your settee watching Escape to the Country and Fat Families. When the teenager next door practices drums, you turn your volume up past the distortion tolerances of the equipment. You beat on the wall with your shoe.

  It seems the cyclists have been talking. The local paper phones to ask if they can do a piece on your remarkable piece of stunt driving.

  This is a very, very bad idea. Drawing attention to us this way.

  “Us?” you say, interested. “I didn’t realize we were an us.”

  Then you tell the reporter to bugger off. She rings back the next day. Then she comes to the door.

  You stagger outside, still aching and a bit bruised, and show the reporter the bit of pavement where the traffic tends to mount because the road is so narrow. You tell her she should be writing about this in the paper and not about you. But she’s not interested.

  “Do you think postmenopausal women are underestimated?” she asks you, earnestly.

  You shut the door in her face.

  “Where do you hail from, mate?”

  You did not just call me mate.

  “You heard me. Where do you come from?”

  I come from inside your consciousness.

  “You saying I’m delusional?”

  I’m a mathematical being. Mathematical intelligence permeates everything around you. It’s in the leaves and the ocean and the magnetosphere; you just don’t have a way to sense us directly. In time your descendants may evolve the ability to perceive beings like me. Mind you, at the rate we’re going I wouldn’t wager money on it.

  “Rubbish. You’re an alien. What planet. What star? My niece had a star named after her son when he was born. Do you come from the star David Mcgillicutty?”

  How long is this going to go on? I have to find a way out.

  “No, I suppose you’d call it something else in your language. Grvtthhzzng.”

  You wipe spittle from your lips.

  “Anyway, I’ve been thinking. These powers I’ve got now. I could use them. Get a few things done.”

  You start by dying your hair black. I watch you do it in the mirror. You make a terrifying sight.

  Then you get out a pad of paper and a red biro.

  To-Do List

  1. Install spy camera to catch Grant McKenna letting his dog poo on the football pitch at night

  2. Sort out those awful drums

  3. Get tattoo

  4. Get Piercings

  5. Mount campaign to slow down lorries near bus stop

  6. Buy those boots what the punks used to wear

  7. Put comfort insoles in boots

  8. Storm Parliament

  First you order a spy camera on the internet. That’s easy. You feel well warmed-up after that so you decide to take on a more physical challenge.

  You march next door to the house where the drummer lives. You pound on the door but no one answers. You’re weighing options.

  1. Purchase one of those ghetto-blaster radios. Are those still around?

  2. Forget the idiot teenager. Drive into town and hit the tattoo parlour.

  3. Wait a moment. No car. So both of those are out.

  4. &%!* Aha! An idea.

  You return to your own property and change your outfit. You go out through the back door and march down the garden to where your shed meets the garden fence. You push the wheelbarrow against the fence and stand wobbling inside it, peering over into the garden next door.

  “I’ll need some help with this,” you say to me.

  I have no intention of helping you break into your neighbours’ house.

  “Well, won’t it be fun for both of us to spend the next two weeks in hospital if I fall and hurt myself,” you say as you don a pair of gardening gloves to protect your hands from splinters.

  Fine. With a growing sense of disbelief (and perhaps shame), I boost your neural activity. It’s a bit like trying to get the Millennium Falcon into hyperspace: you feel like you’re held together by sticky tape and wishful thinking. With my help you heave your hips over the fence, flinging yourself into the flower bed on the other side. You land on your feet (I’m that good).

  Breathing hard, you approach the back door. No, that’s out of the question.

  “Do it, Alien. Do it or I’ll do it myself, and I’ll probably fall and get hurt.”

  I’m not actually sure I can do it. You’re not a very large person, and it’s a solid door, deadbolted because the neighbours are at work all day.

  You start looking around for something to smash the window with. It occurs to me that I could calm you down, put you to sleep, if I were any good at that sort of thing. It’s not my area. I usually work in war zones and natural disasters. Besides, if you were to fall asleep in the garden in the cold and the rain, well – oh, I’m losing my grip now. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. Not ever.

  “Stop moaning and help me.” You take a couple of steps back and address the door, head down like a bull pawing the sand. If a bull were wearing a lavender tracksuit.

  Oh, all right then.

  It’s not that you’re too old – your species is related to apes, and all of you have untold strength that lies untapped. No: it’s that you don’t have a strong enough impression of what your body needs to do. Given a clear impression and the right neurochemical juice, even your stringy unused body has the necessary resources.

  I light you up. It’s your rate coding that determines your physical capabilities, and I can make your body release the neurochemicals that characterise psychotic rage or the euphoria of PCP. I give your CNS the neural impression of you taking out the door, and it calculates force vectors and chains of joint angular alignment without conscious effort from you. Your brain takes care of business. Me, I’m there in your tissue, overriding the Golgi tendon reflex that prevents your muscles from over contracting lest they be ripped to shreds – a big enough electrical impulse coming down that muscle can tear it and even break a bone, but you claim you don’t care and I know you’re going to need every bit of power you can get. I give it to you. You push your upper body back and your hips shoot forward; your right leg hits the door and, at just the right moment, I throw the extra impulse into your muscles so that your foot accelerates through the plane of the door. You reel away, watching as the whole thing flies back with a whoof! Right off its hinges.

  That was rather well done, though I say so myself.

  Upstairs in the teenager’s room, you have a good snoop around. You take a box cutter out of the pocket of your tracksuit. You eye the drums. Then a shadow falls across you from the doorway.

  “Get out of my room or I’ll call the police.”

  You laugh.

  “Whose side will the police be on? Yours? Look at the state of you. I can’t even tell if you’re a boy or a girl. I seem to remember you were a girl.”

  And you actually poke at the teenage drummer’s chest to try to prove it to yourself. She slaps you away and the movement jogs the computer mouse. A screen full of code comes up. Hmm. Someone’s more than just a drummer.

  “Mrs. Mcgillicutty, put the box cutter down.”

  You realise you’re still holding the box cutter. It would have been so satisfyin
g to slash those drums. Thwarted, you feel like crying and then remember that you’re a superhero now.

  The code is a phone app. It’s a game. Not the addictive kind that makes people crack their screens with their fervent thumbs. A new kind. And there’s a beauty to it. It’s striking. I’m transfixed. I’m sure there’s something to this. This young person is special.

  The teenager is furious, though. She stands between us and the screen, blocking our view.

  “How did you get in? The back door’s been broken down. What’s going on?”

  “These bloody drums are a menace. I’ve had enough of them.” You hold up a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. “It’s all very well for you, isn’t it? You put these on, but what about the rest of the neighbourhood? How about passing some of these out to all of us?”

  “I thought you were hard of hearing. Sorry.”

  You are a bit hard of hearing. Remember the time you thought the councilwoman on your doorstep was an anti-pornography campaigner and gave her an earful?

  “You –? You thought –? How bloody hard of hearing would I have to be? I’d have to be in Ecuador not to hear your godawful racket!”

  Out comes the box cutter again. No, I’m not helping with this. I quite like a drum solo, myself. Besides, you can’t win here.

  “Mrs. Mcgillicutty!” shouts the drummer. “Put that box cutter down! Put it –”

  Second time this week for you and the police. Luckily no one is hurt. They take your box cutter away. They look at your jet-black hair and murmur to one another. You get a phone call from your GP asking you to come in for a check. In case there was an undiscovered head injury after the collision. You refuse. You hitch a ride on a moped and get tattoos on Tuesday. On Wednesday you pierce your nose. This puts you at number five on the list, so you go out to the shed and get some old plywood and a can of black spray paint that’s been there for years. You start working on your protest sign.