9 Tales From Elsewhere 6

by 9 Tales From Elsewhere

  But it wasn’t long before doubts set in. We kept finding irreconcilable anomalies in the numbers. We wracked our brains, argued, posed theory after theory, but just couldn’t put our finger on it. When we expressed these concerns to our now-overly-generous benefactors, they told us, with disturbing nonchalance, not to worry. They had absolute faith we would sort it out. It was nothing compared to the even greater discoveries yet to come.

  When we somewhat jokingly asked if they knew something we didn’t, they just smiled.

  The knowing smiles and cryptic clues were all too theatrical for my liking. Far too keen to see the looks on our faces when they finally herded us, under tight security, into a private viewing room to glimpse video footage of something potentially explosive that hadn’t been made public yet.

  The astronauts had come into contact with Others. Yes, intelligent life on another world.

  It’s safe to say we were unanimously gobsmacked.

  What were they like? A century or two of bad science fiction had skewed our expectations. They were not little green or grey men with forbidding insect eyes, nor purple squid people with tentacles for arms, nothing particularly ‘imaginative’.

  They were more or less human-like, with differences, some marked, some subtle. That alone was enough for a kind of immediate interplanetary kinship, for them, however many light years removed, to seem strangely close to us.

  And their civilisation, too, was in a shambles. The very crust of the planet had been gouged, as if by the hands of some tantrum-prone giant, and thrown up into the air, creating a great accretion of debris swirling in low orbit. We’d never seen anything like it. Even weirder, in places, were twisted cone-shaped elevations of earth, like clusters of warped, mini-mountains, pockmarking the surface like the world itself had some sort of infection. And they looked recent.

  Of course, we asked if the astronauts had had time to do even a rudimentary geological study of the phenomena, or if they’d had any luck communicating with the natives. Anything? All we got were variations of “We don’t know” or “We’re not at liberty to divulge that information yet” before being shown the door.

  We were still debating why they’d given us this information first and what we were to do with it when the news suddenly went public, kicking the media storm into a higher cyclone category. Nothing would be the same again.

  We weren’t alone in the universe after all—a culture-changing revelation in itself. If they’d been stranger-looking and/or more technologically advanced, we might’ve been threatened by them. But the fact that they were so similar to us (well, similar enough), and their world was in an even sorrier state than ours, further helped us overlook own problems, and not just in a Schadenfreude way.

  The eyes that stared up at the astronauts’ cameras were alien, but the forlornness, the shattering loss in them was unmistakably akin to our own.

  The outpouring of hearts and flowers was global. Charity foundations sprang into existence almost immediately. It was quite touching to see, in spite of still having so many issues at home, how widely and fervently people wanted to give aid. Save E.T. funds multiplied to the hundreds over the ensuing months and they did a roaring trade.

  But for many, it wasn’t enough to give money. They wanted to go; they wanted to help in person. They set up more fundraiser campaigns; they nominated the most eligible applicants.

  Government spokespersons formally thanked them for their interest and compassion and charitable largesse, but, with the technology still being relatively new, so many dangers were still a factor and they had no plans to send civilian volunteers on missions just yet, but they would take their proposals into consideration, and . . . you get the idea.

  It was virtually identical to the message we got. We had been harassing them for months to permit a high-ranking Scitech member to accompany a follow up mission (I’d cut down on my drinking and began behaving myself especially admirably in public—hint hint) and we’d been given the same runaround.

  Of course, not everyone was so enthusiastically altruistic. Their rhetoric was nothing new: why are we spending so many precious resources on interstellar foreigners when we still had so many problems at home? How do we know they’re as harmless as they seem? Blah blah.

  Then there was the foil-hatted wingnut brigade: nameless newsgroupers, infesting the Grid like worms, who saw conspiracies everywhere, insisting the whole thing was a hoax. The Falcon was a prop; there were no aliens. They posted poorly-edited ‘documentaries’ that exposed supposed inconsistencies in the (limited) footage transmitted from the missions: false shadows, similar-looking locations used to fabricate the alien world, the aliens themselves actors obviously digitally-enhanced, if you looked closely, pixel by pixel, at key freeze frames. All set to ominous, sinister music lifted from spy thrillers or video games and such. Some even had interviews with ‘Scitech whistleblowers’ whose faces and voice tones had been scrambled to ‘protect their identity’.

  Truth is, we were about as in the dark as everyone else. There were gaps in the incoming data we were desperate to fill, but the authorities balked our nagging requests, claiming that the Falcon’s capabilities to communicate with us, using the same ‘warp’ technology that had flung them to far reaches of space, was still limited, and the information they’d given us was all they had access to at this time. Well, let us work on the technology, we said. We could come up with better solutions if we put our collective brains together on the problem. As usual, they said they’d get back to us, but never did.

  The Falcon’s return was as triumphant as you’d expect. Every news service live-streamed the landing, disembarking from the ship and the whole tickertape parade, our heroes waving at the traffic-blocking droves of fans like visiting royalty.

  We made a point of boycotting the coverage, mercilessly teasing anyone that didn’t, guessing the kinds of insipid questions the reports would ask.

  We campaigned heartily to interview them ourselves, but after the initial press conferences, conducted via video feed from quarantine, access to them was extremely difficult. They were subjected to a long regimen of tests—how their bodies coped with the entanglement process, the alien world’s gravity, among other things—that they couldn’t seem to find time away from to speak to us. They wouldn’t even let us in on the testing, claiming we would “inadvertently influence the data”, thus hedging the findings in favour of our theories. The studies needed to be conducted ‘impartially for accuracy and experimental integrity’.

  I only ever met one of the astronauts in person, much later, at some boring back-scratching schmooze staged by some senator or other. The Cute Nerdy One, I think (though it could’ve been the Nerdy Nerdy One—they all looked too damn cute to me), with whom I was permitted a few minutes of small talk before he was whisked away by a phalanx of sinister-looking officials.

  “Oh, nice talking to you,” I called out loudly and passive-aggressively enough for some of the other partygoers to look up from their hors d’oeuvres to cast me reproving glares. “You play table tennis? We must catch up for a game some time.”

  In the meantime, we had to swallow the insult and be content with the scraps they deemed to toss our way.

  All the faculties involved put on a front of benevolent cooperation while being quietly competitive with one another, hoarding their data. So many ground-breaking discoveries were being made, we suspected a secret tally was being kept. The greater the number, the bigger your grant for the next fiscal turn. So info-sharing was hesitant due to widespread fear that other divisions would steal the glory and you’d get stiffed for funding. Far from bringing the sciences together, as I and many others hoped, we were divided by paranoia and fierce rivalry.

  I killed myself for months working on a means of operating the SDPS-entanglement (i.e. ‘warp jump’ mechanism) by remote control from base command should the crew be incapacitated, but my funding was abruptly cut with little explanation and I was moved to another project. I had no say in which on
e.

  There was no point complaining, not to my colleagues who, with the field expanding at such exponential rates, were up to their eyeballs in their own work; nor to our illustrious benefactors and leaders whom you could never get a straight answer out of for anything anyway.

  I started venting my frustrations online. The messageboards had no pretensions to being polite gatherings and were a safe haven for my bilious screeds. I could get hammered and pick as many fights as I liked under the relative anonymity of my username LastCurmudgeon.

  I knew I shouldn’t, but the online punks were such easy pickings. Their flimsy conspiracy theories were so many fish in a tiny barrel that I could blast away at with ferocious glee.

  There’s an art to a good flame war. Just barraging your opponents with reams of opinionated bile was for amateurs. I picked my prey. Not necessarily the loudest and most abusive—arguing with them was like shouting at a toddler, or a clump of fungus (or anywhere in-between, they ran the gamut of mental ineptitude). They were no threat, hence no challenge, easily ignored. I focused on the self-appointed voices of reason, amateur science boffins with no credentials who fancied they knew better than the experts. I’d set them up, prod them, draw them out, get them nice and high on their own self-righteousness before tearing them to pieces. It was wicked fun.

  Too much so. Once you get really good at it, it becomes addictive. No matter how celebrated I was in the ‘real world’, I felt like a functionary, a stooge, a prop to hold dinners for, a clammy hand to thrust meaningless awards into, kept in the dark and fed bullshit. But in the gloomy halls of the Deep Grid, I was master of my domain, utterly in my element. No one fucked with the LastCurmudgeon. I could manage several debates at once, taking on all comers and destroying them with aplomb.

  Sometimes I’d get so embroiled, I’d miss work. Time flies when you’re sozzled and tearing some random punk a new arsehole.

  Even at work, toiling away at some problem I didn’t really care about, my mind would be continuing the arguments. I was in a near-constant pugilistic simmer, a hair-trigger bomb waiting to detonate over the pettiest things: theories, tests, whoever took my pen and neglected to give it back, and so on. I’d fight tooth and nail until the other party was exhausted and/or reduced to tears. My colleagues started hoping I wouldn’t show and avoided me when I did.

  So did everyone else. I was bitter at the program, where it was going and I was not shy about letting people know, be they random people on the street or dignitaries at fancy public functions. The more polite and prestigious the event, the worse my behaviour. There was nothing I hated more than a ballroom full of well-dressed idiots, falling over themselves to express their admiration for me and everything I had done for the space project.

  This made me increasingly unpopular, which made me feel increasingly betrayed and more liable to make a fool of myself at the worst possible times.

  It wasn’t long before a getting-nowhere uselessness started to pervade my online battles. The same subjects kept coming up no matter how many times I shut its uninformed perpetrators down.

  There was continual speculation about the cargo the Falcon brought back: a lot of artefacts from the alien civilisation (most of which you can view in museums now), some exotic materials, significantly less rare on their planet than on ours, which were of little interest to anyone but chemists and planetologists, but still the source of much wacky online speculation. Like crystallised ‘dark matter’ (I know, right?), or toxic plants or bacteria that the aliens were immune to but could wipe out all human life with which the government would hold the world to ransom—you name it.

  But by far the most persistent myth was that they’d brought back some of the natives who were now languishing in security-sealed bunkers kilometres below ground. The women impregnated with human semen; the men subjected to all manner of sadistic experiments, trying to find what made them tick.

  ‘Concerned citizens’ picketed Scitech’s offices, admonishing us to keep our damned scalpels off their intergalactic brothers and sisters. and so forth. You can imagine what this did for our collective mood, and my alcohol intake.

  Despite many impassioned, remorseful promises, most of my colleagues knew I was still drinking. No one brought it up with me anymore, knowing the good it’d done in the past.

  As often as I (sometimes vocally) wished a freight truck might casually plough into the picketlines, I found myself sympathising with their cynicism of the government, their scepticism toward the information it fed them. They just couldn’t realise that, in many ways, we were as in the dark as they were.

  Being a senior member of Scitech’s aeronautics team once seemed to have some public clout, even if it turned out to be illusory. I missed feeling as if I mattered.

  My online anonymity started to chafe at me. Humiliating boneheads online wasn’t as fun anymore. I got bored with the endless arguing, or just impatient, but I couldn’t seem to stop. I’d swear off it for a few days, then a frustrating day at work would send me back again, replicating the same battle I’d had with drink for decades. Just one won’t hurt. Let some faceless troll have it for an hour or two, you’ll feel better.

  But I never did. Uncountable hours and whiskeys into the night, knowing I should be getting rest for another testicle-crusher of a day on the morrow, I’d still be at it. Why was I doing this?

  I went through the motions, hating myself, but doing it anyway.

  I got into a particularly ugly altercation with one shitwit who claimed he was an astrophysics student, which, if true, meant that the education system was in an even sorrier state than I suspected. Poor sod couldn’t pour piss out of a shoe with instructions on the heel. When I pointed as much out to him, he immediately exploded into all-caps abuse and name calling. Just a barking junkyard dog, the type I’d normally brush off. But I couldn’t resist. Out of spite or drunken boredom, I baited and baited him.

  He actually went to the trouble of posting his scanned student ID, as proof of his ‘authority’ on scientific matters, thinking it would shut me up.

  I used to tell myself that I should’ve known that was the time to cry off, but the awful truth is, I did know, and I retaliated anyway. How much I hated and wanted to humiliate this kid embarrasses me to this day.

  So, yes, I posted my name, the department I worked for, even my security badge with my glum mug on it.

  I’m not sure how he took it. Next thing I remembered was waking, bleary-eyed with a dry mouth and a skull-splitting headache, croaking something like, “Fuck of a dream—” before retreating under the bedsheets for the rest of the day, skipping work.

  When I finally dragged myself into the office, I was greeted by the frosty silence I’d become accustomed to by then, but this was worse than usual.

  “What, did I take a shit in the containment lab again?” No one laughed.

  A new team member—a woman in her 30s who, upon arrival, breathlessly confessed to me she was a “huge fan” and jabbered with nervous excitement whenever in my presence—with shining eyes, silently handed me her Grid tablet, opened to a news page bearing the block-lettered headline: MR WARP DRIVE: HISTORY OF ONLINE ABUSE AND HARASSMENT.

  I didn’t make excuses. None of my co-workers would’ve listened anyway. I’d used up all the leeway my contributions to the faculty and the program had afforded me. For them, this was the last straw.

  They told me they’d give me until the end of the month; I said I’d be out by the end of the day.

  Now unburdened by the demands of spearheading a bold new age of science and exploration, I was free to devote all my time to online abuse and harassment. The username LastCurmudgeon had been blocked, as had my IP address, but I found a pirate proxy and changed usernames every few hours. Not that I needed to bother. My notoriety had already been shanghaied by other users: LastCurmudgeon01, LastCurmudgeon02, and so on; occasionally a RealLastCurmudgeon. There always seemed to be a LastCurmudgeon69 floating around. I had no way of knowing if it was the same guy every t
ime.

  I rarely got into arguments; I didn’t even post half the time. I just passively scrolled through the avalanche of obnoxious opining.

  Until I chanced upon a single kernel of wheat amongst the multitudinous chaff: a for-your-eyes-only government memo. It was long, much of it boring administrative blah except, towards the end, there was a reference to the Falcon’s discovery of the alien world, how the ship exiting ‘warp space’ in such close proximity to the planet had the “unexpected effect of effectively pacifying the recipient region”.

  “Pacifying”? My blood ran cold.

  I left the messageboards, got on the main Grid to review videos of the landing. I watched the crew walking through the disaster-struck extraterrestrial environment, interacting with the shocked, shattered natives, frightened and quite hostile at first until the beneficent, good-looking spacepeople, after having materialised out of nowhere and descended upon their decimated world like gods from the sky, dazzled them with their gadgets and coaxed them into a kind of cautious trust. Was this what they meant by “pacifying”?

  I watched every clip with eye-strain risking closeness and repetition.

  There they were, accepting offerings from what looked to be tribal leaders, thanking them in awkward sign language, even helping our interstellar brothers and sisters reërect their relatively primitive homes and bury their greatly-numbered dead. Every so often, the camera panned over giant ragged ravines cracking the planet’s crust, and in the background, those weird, twisted cone-like mini-mountains.

  Exiting warp space in close proximity . . . “pacifying” . . . holy fuck!

  I recoiled from the screen as if slapped, so hard and fast I almost pitched backwards out of my chair.

  The bastards, the fucking pigs, they did this!