Aliens, Tequila & Us: The complete series

by Michael Herman

  The person in the suit says, “We can take no chances.”

  “Alfred, he’s been here for over a week. Whatever he’s infected with has already spread to the four corners of the county. It’s in the wind, Alfred. Out of the bag. There’s no stopping it. My God, you are probably already infected right now. Weren’t you at the diner yesterday morning for breakfast?”

  Alfred gives Ted a blank stare.

  “The diner, Alfred. Our family owns and works the diner! You’re already one of the zombies!” He laughs as he says this.

  Alfred steps back, raises his hands to the hood-like part of his clothing, fiddles with something at the back of it and then shoves the head enclosure forward onto his chest. He is a meek-looking man, wearing brown glasses, clean-shaven and now wearing a half-smile of embarrassment. “Shit!” is the first word out of his mouth.

  “Shit is right, Alfred. Come in and take that nonsense off. I don’t want to spook our man, David. The poor bastard has been mistreated enough by men in hazmat suits. The last thing we need is for you to greet him looking like that.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In the guest house with Forbes who will be accompanying him with you every step of the way. The man is damaged. Forbes will be his reassurance that we mean him no harm.”

  After Ted helps Alfred divest himself of the suit, he leads him to the guest house where he meets David and Forbes. David is surprisingly compliant and seems more interested in learning more about his Whiteman than fearing for his own safety. Apparently, Forbes’ presence and his trust in us is enough. As Alfred and Forbes and David exit the house, Ted announces that he’ll be following them in his car.

  “Where are you taking them?” I ask Ted.

  “You’re familiar with the Antiquities Research Center north of here?”

  “I’ve seen it,” Messenger tells him. “There’s a small info building with a gate at the entry. Never knew much about it. We’ve had people from there at the restaurant sometimes. I’ve gotten requests to cater lunch there, but we don’t cater.”

  “That’s our destination. I’ll have Forbes back by nightfall...and David too, depending on how things go.”

  Soliloquy’s Sacrifice Chapter 21

  The Next Day

  Today is my day to make the poet’s flight, a wondrous journey that starts in the lightless depths of the abandoned man-made gold mine near our home. It’s a journey that begins within the small pools of Gi phosphorescent light crystals buried deep within that mine.

  Giving myself over to the maternal care of Gi, I allow Gi’s ensorcelled light crystals to envelop me in an illuminated protective globe as the first step to my cerebral linkage to Gi’s avatars—the same breed of creatures I became when we fought the aliens who destroyed our Organic Tequila Distillery and Ice Caves agave farm. Once the fearsome black-winged creatures are birthed and I’m them—looking through their many avian eyes and flexing their many feathered wings—I gather the “many” that I am and swoop out of Gi, past the lake-of-light, and into the earthen tunnel leading to the mine opening. I navigate the twists and turns easily, flying in orchestrated mass upwards and out of the ancient mine to wing my way up the glittering sunlit snow-covered mountainside over the frozen trees. At the mountain’s apogee, I bank east towards what used to be our family agave farm.

  It’s a miraculous journey, one I always look forward to, one I sometimes relive in my dreams—the flight of a bird being so breathtaking. Soaring high above the wintry earth, I catch thermals to carry my crew of sharp-eyed avatars out over the Anza-Borrego Desert.

  Today, instead of Messenger, I’m the one to navigate the arid wind currents because it’s my turn to perform aerial reconnaissance, something he and I have been alternating at systematically since the alien craft explosions devastated the agave farm. We search for evidence of the return of the invading creatures that destroyed the first Gi. The ever-vigilant offshoot of that Gi we now work with has Messenger and me make periodic forays over the area looking for signs of rebirth of the invading alien creatures. The agave farm was the beachhead of their assault and it will be their nursery if any managed to survive the cleanup Forbes, Maggie, Ted, Bob, and I performed while Messenger was hospitalized in recovery.

  Today, like every other aerial reconnaissance, I surveil through the eyes of my hundreds of airborne avatars. Like hungry bats leaving their cave at sunset, my avatars journey to the crater that weathers and flourishes with replacement native vegetation. To the naked eye, my avatars appear much like a murder of small dark-winged crows. But on close inspection, one would see they have little in common with that earthbound avian species.

  On arrival to our destination, we dive down in controlled patterns over the area scanning every inch of terrain for the telltale signature of alien life only I can see. In the entire ten years of searching, Messenger and I have found a total of two instances of rebirth. For us, their life signature is like an iridescent greenish-blue beacon in the night, easy to hone in on and easier to root out and destroy the alien larvae.

  But this day is like almost every other day of searching, with nothing to see except the dazzling beauty of the brumal desert. Even the crater has its merits as a uniform singularity in a world of natural organic chaos. I never tire of this and am never bored.

  Back home, I left four surveillance avatars outside of our snowed-in house as well as one protectively inside with Zed and Sonnet. Our regular babysitter, fifteen-year-old Scarlett, plays with the children as well as the fifth avatar I left in their room. The benefit of the fifth is twofold: the children and Scarlett are always entertained by my playful avatar and it affords me a one-on-one watch with them.

  On this day, the musically inclined Scarlett brought her small ukulele to entertain the children with. As she sings and plays, her melodic chords and sweet songs fill my head while my many eyes pore over every nook and cranny of our former family farm.

  The songs are bittersweet love songs, odes to the abhorrent parents who brought her into the world. I know of them personally because she’s a Forbes rescue that I’ve read—someone our family helped rehabilitate from the sad, discarded child she was to the confident, strong, and reliable teenager she is now. The songs, a testament to her musical ability, are medicine for her. Few singers can make you cry and laugh at the same time like her. Her music makes my hours-long task go quickly.

  Once satisfied with the absence of aliens at the crater and surrounding area, I collect my desert avatars and swirl upward inside of a dust devil to rise high up into the air. When the proper loft is achieved, I shoot back towards the distant mountains, towards Julian to return to the mine shaft from which I came. The return flight is usually a leisurely one where I soak in everything below, taking in a lone coyote prowling through the rocks, a hawk floating over some intended prey, a car winding up Highway 78, a...

  I’m startled to see the bluish-green light of an alien signature in the Volcan Mountains Wilderness Preserve. Its location is unexpected because it’s so far from the family farm. I swoop down and follow the signature trail to a narrow crevice near a ridge. From there one of my avatars breaks off from the group and flies down inside of the crevice, following the trail, to come to a hole the size of a small mouse. It can go no further, but the alarming presence of the enemy alien is discovered and its hidden location noted for return.

  Shocked at finding Alien presence so close to our home in Julian and so far removed from the agave farm, I take my hundreds of avatar eyes and wings and scour the immediate area for further signs of the deadly creatures. Hours later, after a thoroughly fatiguing search and finding nothing more, I regroup and fly back to the mine.

  The discovery is disturbing and its distance from the farm is telltale. It means the aliens have probably been on the move out of sight beneath the earth. My searches in the future will have to cover larger areas and be cleverer. The romantic poet’s flight has devolved into a grim military mission.

  Soliloquy’s Sacrifice Chapter 22


  The evening air is filled with silent falling snow tinted by the amber glow from the windows of our mountainside home. Inside, a wood fire snaps and crackles as it works its way through the hand-cut logs stacked inside the brick firebox. The subtle fragrance of burning pine spreads conspiratorially throughout the room. Nestled into cozy, thick, down-filled blankets, Zed and Sonnet lie passive in semi-sleep before the brick hearth. Beyond them, Messenger and I snuggle up into our large leather overstuffed couch. With wine glasses in hand, we speak softly about the day’s events.

  “You have to wonder whether they’re flourishing underground. Maybe what you saw is just the tip of a very frightening iceberg,” Messenger comments.

  I sigh. “God, I hope not.”

  “Have we been lulled into complacency by just concentrating on what appears on the surface?”

  “They need sunlight for the life and food it provides, just as we do. They have to surface to survive, even if they are proliferating underground. Surely they can’t live and grow completely underground.”

  “But the movement away from the crater is a surprise. And to move up into the mountains? That’s even more amazing. I can’t imagine them burrowing all the way there from the crater. Is this an airborne incursion? Are they attracted to the ocean? Is that why they’re moving westward? If so, what happens if they make it to the ocean and proliferate there? We’d never be able to track and kill them in something as vast as the Pacific.”

  I shake my head. The scenario Messenger depicts is scary, but probably misplaced. “Or they sense Gi and are moving towards it. If the abandoned mine is their destination, we need to alter our reconnaissance patterns.”

  Messenger’s eyes move to the children. “It’s not just our safety we need to be concerned with. We’ve others to think about, two very beautiful others, Soliloquy.”

  “You’re thinking we need move the children? I’d never leave them in someone else’s care for any length of time.”

  “No. Neither would I. But if something were to happen to us...”

  “I know. Who would take care of them in our absence? It’s a question every parent asks themselves at one time or another.”

  We hear the back door open and close and then, after a minute’s delay, Forbes enters the living room. He’s holding a can of soda in one hand and a box of crackers in the other. His long hair, still dripping with water from his shower in the guest suite, is combed back from his face. A thick flannel shirt covers his torso and stops at his worn jeans. His bare feet, clad in plastic flip-flops, belie the existence of the snow and freeze he had to traverse between the detached guest house and the main house. With mouth full, he extends the box of crackers in offering.

  Messenger shakes his head “no” and I say, “No thanks, Forbes.” He walks over to the chair next to the couch, drops down into it and puts his feet up on the end table.

  “Nice fire,” he says with food still in his mouth.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  When Ted dropped him off a half hour ago, he said he needed a shower before he filled us in on what went down with David at the Antiquities Research Center. After grabbing a sandwich from the kitchen, he headed out to the guest house to clean up and change.

  “I’m fine. David seems to be enjoying his celebrity status. He’s like some valuable artifact to them. They have him scheduled for a full round of testing in San Diego tomorrow: blood tests, CAT scan, MRI—the works.”

  “No one is asking for your blood?”

  “Oh yeah. They took mine and gave me a cursory inspection, but David is the Rock Star. They took him to a conference room where they asked endless questions he had no problem answering. Did you know that in his time, they successfully cleaned up the lower orbit space around earth? Uncle Ted beamed when he heard that. Said he was glad one of his pet projects was ultimately successful, even if he wasn’t around to see it. Here, I recorded some of the stuff.” He stands, moves to the couch and drops onto it next to us. From his pants pocket, he pulls out his phone and scans through his recordings. On the screen, we see David. In the background, we hear a man’s voice.

  “What of NASA? Does it still exist in your time?” the voice queries.

  “As school children, we were introduced to NASA. No, it no longer exists. It was folded into a new world consortium of private and public entities. One of its greatest achievements was to attack the Kessler Syndrome head-on. Are you familiar with that?”

  “NASA scientist Donald Kessler proposed a scenario in which the density of space debris in low earth orbit becomes high enough that collisions between debris and satellites render all space activities unfeasible for generations.”

  “Precisely. That is no longer a scenario. I’m not up to speed on the technical aspects of it, but they’ve cleared the low earth orbit area of almost all debris down to sizes as small as paint flecks. It was supposed to be an amazing feat. It happened decades before I was born. Now they keep a tight rein on what enters the low orbit area. It’s a big deal for all communications on earth—and space travel. Verbal threats by any nation to attack the satellites in the low orbit area are dealt with by the superpowers almost immediately. There have been forced regime changes due to threats to the low earth orbit area. All space travel must pass through the low orbit area and everyone wants a clean passage through it—not to mention the safety to all the satellites in the low orbit area, plus the five small space stations, and the one huge international space station.”

  Another voice in the background says, “Any major advances in understanding the cosmos?”

  “Yes, well that may be the irony of it for my time. While the earth is changing and humans are being decimated, our discoveries within the cosmos have been like nothing before. In our time there is the mapping of the EDEP. The EDEP was discovered before my time by using an array of five telescopes orbiting the sun.”

  “The Lagrangian points,” the voice contributes.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Satellite telescopes placed at the Lagrangian points, locations where the orbital motion of the satellites and the gravitational forces acting on them from the sun balance each other.”

  “And the EDEP?” another voice questions.

  David frowns and looks down for a moment as he tries to recall what the acronym is derived from. There is momentary silence, then he brightens and looks up. “Entangled Dark Energy Pathways, or Points or Portals, I’m not sure. It’s scattered over the entire universe, created shortly after the big bang. And it’s everywhere. It’s a huge discovery that, in theory, can be used for space travel. They describe it as tubes or bubbles of gravity that alter space and time. Enter into the tube at one end and be deposited in some other place faster than the speed of light. Physically impossible, according to old Einsteinian thought, but now there’s a whole new theory-set that people much more brilliant than me understand.” He drinks from his glass and then continues.

  “Assuming one knows where the pathways all lead to, we can navigate anywhere in the universe, all the way back to the big bang, in theory of course. The discovery of the EDEP created cults on earth that see it as a way of escaping a dying earth to find a more suitable planet.”

  “How close is the nearest Entangled Dark Energy Point to Earth?” the voice asks.

  “A spot near Jupiter is the closest point. Satellites have been sent in, but none have returned. As soon as they enter, all communication is lost. For all anyone knows, they’re destroyed by the journey. Just getting a manned craft from Earth to the point of entry is a long journey, too long for human survival.” He stops and laughs, then says, “Science fiction has been having a field day with it. Invasion by hostile aliens is now much easier to swallow. Cults have popped up that pray for friendly alien intervention to take them to a better world. The crazies are everywhere.”

  The video ends.

  Forbes pockets the phone and says, “Mostly they quizzed him about the Chosen. Uncle Ted said that bringing David here was the Whiteman’s w
ay of proving what he had said prior to his disappearing into time. The Whiteman claimed the Chosen were nothing more than human cell phones linked to a form of Gi that branched off from the original Gi and evolved to become the central tower of exchange for these Chosen links. Without that new Gi, the Chosen are disconnected from each other. The fact that David no longer senses any ‘Chosen’ is the Whiteman’s proof.”

  “How can he sense any Chosen when there are none in our time?”

  “There are Chosen at the center.”

  “What?” This is a new development.

  “Gi has been selecting people for years, according to Uncle Ted. Our family is selected. We’re part of the new breed of humans. Probably why whenever any of us get sick, it’s so mild and passes so quickly. But the future new Gi is linked to the Chosen in a completely unique way and it’s much more aggressive in its protection of the Chosen. According to Uncle Ted, we and our Gi are like Neanderthals to the future Chosen. David and his new Gi are the future hope for mankind, he says.”

  “So, Ted is right when he says David was brought back to make a point.”

  Forbes shakes his head. “No. I disagree. My gut says there’s more to it than that. I have no idea what, but...”

  My cell phone rings and I see it’s Ted. I ask Forbes to pause and then I answer the phone.

  “Soliloquy, I got your voicemail,” he says. (Right after I got back from the mine I left a message about my discovery of the aliens’ signature in the mountains.) “I’m shocked by these developments. For them to have gotten this far without us seeing them bodes badly for us. You and Forbes will respond, I assume, just as you have in the past.”

  “We head out tomorrow night. We’ll let you know how bad it was when it’s over.”

  There is silence, then, “I think Bob and I need to go back to the crater and take you and Messenger with us. We need to rethink our strategy. I’ll get him to catch a flight out of San Francisco tomorrow. This thing with David takes a back seat to the farm invasion.”