Aliens, Tequila & Us: The complete series

by Michael Herman

  “Damn you, Soliloquy! You nailed me that time. Guess I deserved that.” He turns away in embarrassment and says softly, “Guess I’ll never stop missing her. Sorry about that.” Before I respond he’s almost to the front door. He stops, unlocks the door, glances back at me, smiles and tips the imaginary hat once more, then exits.

  His albino companion says from behind me, “Excuse me, miss, but there’s no soap in the bathroom soap dispenser.”

  I whirl to him and say, “Sorry, we’re still prepping for opening. Haven’t gotten to that yet. If you’ll wait a moment, I’ll have it refilled.” Without waiting for a response, I’m past him and on to the men’s restroom. He follows me into the tiny room and stands off to one side watching silently. When I finish filling the dispenser, he says, “Soliloquy, thank you very much. I apologize for the inconvenience to you. I look forward to the food that your uncle has raved about. And...” he stops, peeks out of the door and then turns to me. In a quiet voice, he whispers sincerely, “I admire your family more than you can know. What you personally managed to survive separates you from the rest of us. You’re special in ways I would hazard you’re unaware of.”

  “Mischa!” Messenger’s Uncle Ted calls from the dining room.

  The albino man smiles. “Ted calls. Mustn’t keep him waiting. Says he has a surprise for me as a belated Christmas present.” He moves to the sink and the soap dispenser, turns to me and says, “Thank you once more for the soap.”

  It’s rare for anyone in our family to pass along our story. I can only conclude that Mischa must be someone very special for Ted to reveal both himself and us to him. I make a mental note to corner Ted about it. In the meantime, I have a diner to open and the clock shows I have only fifteen more minutes. When I walk towards the cash register at the front of the diner, I see Molly is already taking orders for breakfast from them and that Ted is making strong recommendations about what they should order. In the center of the table is, what appears to be, a gift-wrapped wine bottle with a ribbon tied around its neck. If it contains what I think it might, then someone at the table is destined for eye-opening inspiration. What was formerly an orchid tequila enterprise within the family has become an orchid champagne enterprise for Bob, Ted, Maggie, Forbes, and Twizzle. Only truly gifted people are made recipients of the custom bubbly with an orchid floating in the champagne.

  When Mischa seats himself at the table, I notice Ted shoving the wrapped present his way and whispering into his ear. I realize that in short order Mischa will become a member of a very select group. “Welcome to the club, Mischa,” I say to under my breath, and then I wonder what his specialty is that makes him so valuable to humanity.

  Soliloquy’s Sacrifice Chapter 19

  Back to David

  David leans back in his chair. “The Whiteman,” he says and looks off in the distance. “Did he try to kill me? It’s so strange. And time travel is even harder to digest.”

  “The Whiteman was an albino?”

  “An albino...of course. That would be the proper description, but his eyes were... his irises were white and his pupils radiated blue. As Messenger said, hallucinatory best describes what I saw.”

  “What about age?”

  “Difficult to say. He was middle-aged, but old at the same time, with deep lines under his eyes. And as mesmerizing as his eyes were, a black spot under his right eye distracted me. It happened so fast. Was it a speck of dirt or a mole or just my imagination?”

  There it is. David’s description matches Uncle Ted’s friend, Mischa.

  Ted bestowing an orchid champagne gift on Mischa was an event Ted and I never got around to discussing, with him being enormously busy taking my mother’s place in the Gi (Global Intelligence alien) scheme of things. (Where my deceased mother used to travel the world dispensing orchid tequila to selected minds, Ted now moves within that rarified atmosphere of brilliant minds.) He is the silver-tongued charmer who brings minds of great technical ability together. He always manages to be standing in the background at press meetings of some new scientific breakthrough if it pertains to the advancement of our knowledge of the solar system or space travel or understanding the forces of nature itself.

  When NASA announced they were funding studies to clean up the lower orbital area around the earth from all the debris that threatened all the satellites and the space station, his head could be seen behind the dozen or so people behind the speaker.

  And when a consortium of private companies announced the launch of a satellite telescope to reach the Lagrangian point, L3, he was off to one side of the speaker, out of camera view, but still there.

  Then when the existence of EDEP, Entangled Dark Energy Points, was postulated by a renowned mathematician, he was in the back of the audience in deep conversation with the mathematician’s aides.

  He has managed to be involved, if only peripherally, in virtually every major breakthrough made public.

  But time travel? That breaks every rule known to physicists and scientists. It’s simply not possible. Yet my experience inside of David’s mind says otherwise.

  “Tell me about your world at its tipping point, David,” I request.

  “Ah, the four horsemen of the apocalypse: pestilence, war, famine and death. Add to that global warming that started in your times and you have the Holocene extinction event come true. Life as we know it changes rapidly. I’m not much of a global warming historian, but I do remember the oceans have risen 10 feet from what they are in your time. The average earth temperature has increased about five degrees from what is in your time. The American east coast in your time is very different from what it is in my time. In fact, coastal communities all over the world have been driven back inland by the rise of the oceans. There is a mass exodus from coastal areas that has been ongoing for decades, maybe centuries—refugees from water inundation. Certain island chains are gone forever. Storms are more severe in our time than in yours. Droughts are more extensive in temperate areas. As a result of the scarcity of resources, local wars are a constant. But what is even more devastating is an ongoing pestilence in my time. Disease is wiping out entire communities, doing more damage than wars or famines. It’s an extinction event the Chosen have been working to survive for years.”

  “It was predicted by your Messiah?”

  “It was predicted by society at large. The data pointed to an ecosystem collapse. The Chosen simply took it seriously. The Chosen knew, instinctually, they would be the ones to survive.”

  “Instinctually. Your choice of word implies something more than an agreed-upon concept or idea.”

  “Of course, the Chosen look to the life force for inspiration. It’s what our gatherings, that you might call church services, were all about. The services tapped into something greater than the individuals attending. During a gathering, one had a sense of communal thought, of communal intelligence and communal insight. It was immensely satisfying.

  “Once you become Chosen, the urge to band together with other Chosen is overwhelming. A Chosen person, isolated and kept from other Chosen, suffers a great hollowness. We need each other. We sacrifice for the common good. Yet the Chosen are not tribal like the unselected. There is no desire to eliminate the unselected. The Chosen simply carry on where the unselected fail to survive. We thrive where they die off. It’s evolution.

  “An example would be the rise of super children in some of the most polluted quarters of the earth. Almost every child who managed to thrive where others were sickened and weakened by toxic and squalid living conditions was found to be Chosen.”

  “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” I say.

  David frowns and ventures a guess, “Shakespeare?”

  My laugh in response garners an even deeper frown from him. “I’m sorry to laugh. Your answer caught me by surprise. No, it’s the postman’s creed. It just seemed apropos to your Chosen. Nothing stops you. But now you are removed from your
time. You are possibly removed from being one of the Chosen. Why?”

  David twists his lips and shakes his head.

  Soliloquy’s Sacrifice Chapter 20

  Messenger’s Uncle Ted was sometimes like an onrushing wave. You either were buried under his weight or carried along exuberantly on the crest of his force. He could sweep into a room and trail people like a mother goose with her goslings. Fifty years old, he is tall and radiant and magnetic. When he speaks to you, it’s as if you are the only person in the room. His delivery is intimate and his ideas are presented with an air of inevitability. You listen and are converted.

  Far from being just another successful huckster, he knows what he’s talking about, understands the gist of extremely technical concepts and is able to add to the conversation rather than hang loosely on the fringes. His ability to bring people of sometimes dichotomous disciplines together to accomplish what none of them could do alone makes him popular. It opens many doors for him.

  When he favors an individual with a gift from the orchid champagne cellars, the already talented individual experiences new enlightenment. They typically skyrocket to fame when they announce a new technological advancement they’ve made. Forever indebted to Ted for his help, they always make room for him at the table when it comes time for cross-pollination with other disciplines.

  Because Ted is always in the right place at the right time, money comes his way—lots of money, money he sinks back into research and development. By all rights, he would be a multi-billionaire if he just rested on his laurels, but that was never the game plan. Progress is the mantra, more progress, faster progress, more understanding of the world and the universe around us. To an outsider, it appears to be just knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but the reality is knowledge for the sake of man’s survival. The ultimate goal is the complete understanding of gravity and interstellar radiation and how it can be controlled by humans.

  When the LIGO—Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory—Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration teams announced the observation of gravitational waves originating from a pair of merging black holes using the Advanced LIGO detectors, Ted was there. When the second detection of gravitational waves from coalescing black holes was announced, Ted was already behind the scenes working with mathematics theorists on what it meant to the Entangled Dark Energy Points theory. He was there nudging them towards developing technology that would prove the existence of the EDEP; he was convinced that when mapped, the EDEP would lead us into a new age of understanding about the universe we dwell in. In his mind, it was a necessary step towards saving the earth from the coming interstellar calamity 100,000 years from now.

  So when he paced in our kitchen, swearing a blue streak after listening to the story of David and how he came to be part of our household, I was shocked.

  “Ted, Uncle Ted! Calm down. You’re frightening us. Why is this so terrible? Are we infected with some awful disease because we’ve made contact with him? What’s the story? Please!” Messenger implored him.

  Ted, with fire in his eyes, turned to Messenger. “Infected? No, for God’s sake. No, that’s not the problem. And yes, it is a problem, but not the kind you might think. Infected! Aagh. Snatched from the future and brought here. What the hell was he thinking? He’s out of control. There is a much better use of what he’s capable of than something as useless as this. My God! All this just to make a point. He should never have done this. I expected much better from him. And to abandon him to be discovered by the two of you? Irresponsible! Much too risky. David’s place is in the future, not here in your guest house. What the hell is Mischa’s mad plan? He is off the grid. Dangerous. Needs to be reeled in.”

  Forbes, Messenger, and I sit silently waiting for the rant to die down. Messenger slowly shakes his head and frowns. Forbes sits like a guilty child, worried and waiting to be chastised and punished. Impatient, I hop off my kitchen stool, grab a pacing Ted by the arms and threaten him with, “Ted, either you tell us what’s going on or I’ll read you, here and now, in front of Messenger and Forbes. God only knows what I’ll find in there.”

  That gets his attention. I’ve never read him, nor have I ever wanted to read him. It would be too personal an event to do with someone so close to me. For all I know, I might end up being inside of him when he and my mother are having sex. No! Too much information. It’s an empty threat that I’ve never made before, but, once made, has the desired effect. He jerks in my grip, shocked I would suggest such a thing and says quietly, “You wouldn’t.”

  I release him and say quietly, “Tell us what’s going on, Uncle Ted.”

  He deflates and sags onto an empty bar stool. He looks around at us, one by one, and then says to me, “Remember when I showed up at the diner about a year ago with friends?”

  “I do. One of them was the Whiteman, wasn’t he?” I say.

  “Mischa, the only albino in the group. He was genetically selected to work with something discovered years ago in Israel—something outside the laws of the universe as we understand them. He, in some ways, is much like you, Soliloquy. He is a reader. He is able to read a unique object that may be alive as the sun is alive—only more curious. He works with what some have called a fragment of an alien being that fell to earth. Others believe it to be no more intelligent than the sun, but just as volatile and once you get to know it, predictable. By making physical contact with the object, he can read the past and sometimes the future. But, and this is a huge BUT, he reads only what is shown to him. He does not manipulate it or control it, and what it reveals changes in regular predictable periods. It’s like a book that turns its own pages. He is able to read what those pages present.

  “At least that was how it started, until minds brighter than mine were able to hack into it and use those openings or revelations as portals to what was being shown. In other words, one could, with the use of massive technology, transport backward or forward in time, never to return.

  “In Mischa’s case, with the help of our technology, he’s somehow able to enter both the past and future, but rather than remain where he’s sent, he’s able to bounce around, trapped within the pages to appear briefly somewhere and then go back within the book, so to speak. No one knows why or how. No one knows what he’s up to. Grabbing David from the future and depositing him here is a new development. We’ve seen nothing like that before. It’s a dangerous precedent and I’m unclear what it portends. If the object is an unthinking device, then it seems Mischa is the one in control. Yet if the object is another life form, then one has to wonder what the creature’s intentions are. Unfortunately, it’s giving us no clues.”

  “Mischa is the only one who can read it?” Messenger queries.

  “No. There were others before Mischa and there are others after him. He is, like them, genetically selected. But it seems he’s surpassed them somehow, or maybe the object has chosen him as its servant. We don’t know.”

  “So you were aware of the future collapse of the world as David describes it?”

  “Vaguely, without as much detail as David and you have given me.”

  “And the presence of the Chosen?”

  “Yes. Humans must evolve to survive. Homo sapiens will vanish to be replaced by a different branch of humans. It’s evolution.”

  “They’ll look different from us?”

  “Everything changes over time. Species come and go. We’re no different.”

  “What of the Chosen? They’re no longer part of the human race?”

  “Most assuredly they are very human, just different from you or me. They’ll pass also, to be replaced with another species. It’s nature’s way.”

  “So what will be here 100,000 years from now to bear the brunt of the coming mass extinction event?”

  “You mean what will be here to stop it?”

  “Your time-traveling or time-seeing readers haven’t seen the future there?”

  “No. Whenever a reader discovers pages from the future, they�
�re limited in scope; nothing that far.”

  “So why do you think David is here? Forbes is convinced it’s for some reason.”

  “Well, I can’t fault Forbes’ intuition. I would not expect it to be the random act of a madman or mad alien object. But the ‘why’ escapes me at the moment. You’ll excuse me a moment. I have to make a call.”

  He pulls out his cell phone and paces again as he makes contact and then explains about David to the person on the other end of the line. After a moment of silent listening, he finishes and turns to us. “Forbes, you made the first contact with David. How is your relationship with him?”

  “We talk. He’s a nice man. Why?”

  “I’m going to need you to stay with him when they come to get him. He’ll need reassurances that we aren’t like the monsters who tortured him. Your presence should assuage him.”

  “Who’s coming to get him?” I ask.

  “The people who Mischa works with. They need to return David to the future, if possible. They’ll quiz him about his experience with Mischa. It could provide valuable clues to what Mischa is up to.”

  He turns to Messenger. “If David carries infection, it’s already out of control. We’d all be infected, as would every person you made contact with since meeting him, and every diner in the restaurant, and every person you’ve spoken with. They’d be spreading whatever David has. It’d be too late. But based on what I’ve heard, it doesn’t seem likely.”

  In less than thirty minutes, a white van drives up our driveway and parks behind our SUV. A figure dressed in full yellow hazard material garb knocks on our back door. When Ted opens the door and sees the person, he bursts out laughing. “Alfred, you can’t be serious. You think that will make a difference?”