At the top of a rise, roughly a mile away from the huts, I pause, catching my breath and peering back from behind my supposed cloak of invisibility. Vehicle lights illuminate a series of huts. I can’t see anyone walking around at this distance, but they know I’m on the run.
I head down into a gully, getting out of the wind and following the terrain away from camp. I’m hoping there’s a road or some houses further down the valley. Although I have no idea where I am, this must be upstate New York. I can’t imagine I’m more than ten miles from some form of civilization. Just keep those legs moving, keep those thighs pumping.
The sound of rotor blades drifts by on the wind, and I huddle under my mattress beside a rocky outcrop. Search lights flicker across the forest, but without coming close to me, and as quickly as they came, the helicopters are gone. They’re moving in tandem, flying methodically over the forest, which is good as they’re circling away from me.
I push on through almost waist-deep snow, trying to find high ground above the drifts to make my trek easier.
I’m stupidly cold. Over time, my forced march deteriorates into a drunken walk, which further degrades into a frantic stumble. After collapsing a couple of times, I realize I need to get out of the storm and try to get warm. Good idea. Not very practical, but good. I’m in the middle of a forest with few options. I’m utterly exhausted—physically and mentally. I pull the mattress against the base of a pine tree with low hanging branches, and huddle there shivering, waiting for a dawn that may never come.
Hypothermia is setting in. Not good. And what’s worse, I know the symptoms. Once the shivering stops, it won’t take long until I lose consciousness and die.
“Sorry, Sharon,” I whisper into the dark night. “I tried.”
Snowflakes tumble around me, twisting and twirling like acrobats at the circus. They’re beautiful. So fine and delicate, and yet so bitterly cold.
I’ve made a fire.
I’m not sure how, but flames flicker over a bunch of twigs piled beside me on the ground. I warm my hands, rubbing them together and holding them out, only there’s no warmth radiating into my palms, which is confusing.
I blink, and the fire is gone. The twigs remain, but the warm glow was nothing but a dream.
I’m delirious.
There are more lights in the sky. At first, I think they’re stars, but they dance across the heavens. Search lights flicker over distant treetops. Like spotlights shining on a microphone stand set alone on an empty stage, they entice me out of the darkness. Getting to my feet, I shuffle out from beneath the pine tree, leaving my precious mattress lying among the dead twigs and broken branches.
I’m hot.
I’m sweating.
In the back of my mind, I’m vaguely aware this is an illusion marking the final stages of hypothermia. My internal organs are shutting down and my body is on the verge of dying, but I feel as though I’m sitting in front of a furnace.
“So hot,” I mutter, unzipping my jacket.
I stumble out into deep snow, leaving the shelter of the trees behind.
“Can’t breathe.”
Staggering through the snow, I pull off my boots, and cast my socks to one side. Within a few feet, I’ve shed my trousers, my underwear, and my jacket and my shirt, leaving them lying on the snow. Still, I feel as though I’m burning up. I’m on fire, I’m sure of it. Naked, I wander through the storm, wading out into what is probably a beautiful meadow in spring but nothing more than a frozen wasteland in winter. Wind howls across the open ground, but I’m past feeling.
The clouds have parted. The stars fall to Earth like snowflakes, drifting slowly down in front of me. So pretty. Like fireflies. A blinding light erupts over me and I’m vaguely aware of the beating of rotor blades overhead.
“Sharon?” I ask, seeing her angelic face enveloped in light.
Suddenly, I’m soaring above the treetops, climbing high in the sky.
The light around me is blinding, forcing me to cover my eyes with my hands. A bright red glow permeates my skin. Warmth washes over me. A sensation like pins-and-needles runs down my back. My toes are painfully sore.
“I don’t understand,” I say, squinting, trying to see beyond the glare.
“You have frostbite,” a kind, gentle voice says, injecting something into the side of my neck. “But you’ll be fine.”
“Sharon,” I say. “Tell me this is real. Tell me, this isn’t a dream.”
Warm lips touch softly against my cold cheek. Words are whispered in my ear.
“This is not a dream.”
“Smart move,” a male voice says, and I recognize Mark’s distinct twang. “Pulling off your clothes like that. Made it easy for us to distinguish between you and the ground troops.”
“I told you Joe would do something smart,” Sharon says, beaming with pride. I want to correct her, but my mind is lethargic, still struggling to come to terms with what just happened.
The light fades, and I’m standing in the middle of a vast metallic sphere.
“Is this a—a UFO?”
“No, silly,” Sharon says, punching me playfully on the shoulder. “UFOs are unidentified. This is a Q-class explorer.”
“Ah,” I say, taking in the sight around me. “I meant, unidentified as in not an airplane.”
“Oh, no,” she says, yet again talking to me as though I were a child. “This isn’t an airplane. Planes have wings.”
Yeah, I got that.
The not-quite-a-UFO isn’t a flying saucer as such, more a flying sphere roughly fifty feet in diameter. Gravity pushes outward from the hollow center so that wherever anyone is within the sphere, all ways are upright, all pointing in toward the empty middle of the craft.
“Hey, Joe,” another voice calls out. “Good to see you again.”
Old Joe, the African American bus driver and part-time street bum, is the pilot. He’s sitting upside down above me, but from his perspective, it probably looks like Sharon and I are the ones upside down.
“Oh, Hi, Joe,” I reply, craning my next to look up at him. We’re both talking and acting as though this is entirely natural—an everyday occurrence. It’s as though we ran into each other again on the bus. I half expect him to ask, “How are you doing?” To which I’d have to say, “Fine,” being almost completely disconnected from reality. But thankfully the conversation doesn’t extend that far. He just waves and keeps going about something alien.
Aliens are so relaxed. Nothing seems to bother them. It’s like they’re all from Hawaii, and they’re running on island time.
Good old Joe’s got a bunch of glowing control panels around him with hundreds of tiny lights. He walks from one station to another, his feet above his head. It’s as though I’m hanging upside down from a building ledge watching him walk around on a movie set.
Mark walks down toward Sharon and me. As he passes the halfway point, he looks as though he’s stuck sideways to the outer wall of the sphere. There are a variety of sections within the UFO, but most of them look like the clustered lounge chair settings in an airline rewards club, set in groups around what looks like retro-sixties coffee tables. There are large portholes affording views outside, but out of necessity they’re all set into the vast, circular, all encompassing, spherical floor. Mark walks over one without a care in the world. Actually, I’m not even sure we’re still in the world for him to care. There’s an awful lot of stars outside that window and not a single cloud.
Both Mark and Sharon stare at me as though I’m crazy. I have no idea what I look like, other than that I’m naked.
Naked?
My hands shoot down to cover my groin.
“How are you feeling?” Mark asks. “Better now we’ve got you on board, I’m sure. As soon as we learned they’d taken you, we started looking everywhere for you.”
“Ah, um. Thanks. Really, thank you. Any longer out there in the snow and I would have died.”
Sharon asks, “Do you need anything?”
I
would have thought that was obvious. I stare down at my slightly hairy chest, with my arms extending to just between my thighs, and say, “Clothes?”
Mark says, “Over there, in the drawers beneath that table.”
As I turn to scurry away, Sharon slaps my backside lightly, saying, “Cute ass.”
I can’t believe it. I’ve just been sexually harassed by a creature from another planet. Sharon’s always been so quiet and reserved. It’s surprising to see her so boisterous. I can’t help but laugh at the tables being turned on me. Given how I grabbed her ass and pushed her through the bars of a jail, I guess we’re even.
I open a drawer and there’s a bunch of tightly rolled cleaning clothes set neatly in three rows, but they’re tiny. They’re kids clothes.
“I, uh.”
“Give them a shake,” Sharon says.
A flick of the wrist and suddenly I’m holding an adult size, ironed Nike t-shirt. The material, even the weight feels significantly different. And it changed color from white to navy blue.
“I’m not going to ask,” I say.
I slip the shirt over my head, and Sharon hands me two more scrunched up rags. A quick flick and I’m left holding a pair of underwear and some jeans.
“Nano tech,” she says as I turn slightly to one side, still feeling embarrassed, and slip on the underpants and then the jeans. They’re pleasantly warm.
“DARPA, right?” Mark says.
“Yes,” I reply.
“What did you tell them?”
“Everything,” I say.
Mark laughs.
Sharon punches me in the arm again, saying, “You’re such a kidder.”
I wasn’t kidding, but I guess they know I knew nothing to begin with.
Standing there inside the quirky alien spacecraft with its wacky gravity sticking everything to the outer wall, I can’t help but wonder how many times I’ve already seen this only to have my short term memory erased. Once on the outward bound journey to the Moon. Again on the return to the coffeeshop. That’s at least twice, assuming direct flights. And I’m left wondering if this moment will be expunged from my memory at some point in the near future and all these memories will be lost again.
“They thought you were Russian spies,” I say, trying to be helpful.
“Is that why they shot Mark?” Sharon asks.
“I think that was an accident, a snatch-and-grab gone wrong.”
I’m in a precarious position. Although I’m on Sharon’s side, I’m not an alien. I’m human. I feel compelled to stand up for humanity even if we have screwed up First Contact with our paranoid, macho bullshit. “They were going to introduce me to the President.”
“You?” Mark says, raising an eyebrow.
“They think I’m one of you.”
Sharon takes my arm, leading me over to a table high on the curved wall. As we walk, the table slowly descends in front of us. In reality, we walked up to the table, not over to it, but the zany way gravity works inside the UFO screws with my sense of perception.
“Trust, remember,” I whisper in her ear as Mark retrieves something from a waist-high cabinet, leaving me wondering if I’m about to have my brain fried again. “You guys have to trust us at some point.”
Sharon squeezes my arm affectionately, but she doesn’t reply, which feels a little ominous.
We sit down at a table that wouldn’t look out of place in an IKEA store catalog.
Mark places a can of Pepsi in front of me. Pepsi. I would have taken aliens as Coke drinkers, personally, but Pepsi’s good. I crack open the can. It’s ice cold, which ordinarily I’d enjoy, but my insides are still warming so I only take a sip.
“Are you hungry?”
“Starving,” I say.
Mark pulls a burger and fries out of the same cabinet, setting them down in front of me. I got a brief glimpse inside the cabinet. It’s quite deep and wide, and entirely empty, and yet the fries are warm—in stark contrast to the cold soda that came from the same cabinet moments ago.
I stuff my face with crisp, salty french fries. I can’t help myself.
“Oh, these are good,” I say with my mouth full.
Mark leans forward on the table, saying, “So they think you’re one of us?”
“Yes,” I say, taking a bite out of the burger. I chew for a few seconds and swallow before adding, “They ran me through some kind of scanner. An MRI, I think. I don’t know. I was unconscious at the time, but the officer talked about it later.”
“And they didn’t find anything,” Mark says.
“No. Which is good for you guys, right?”
“It is,” Sharon says. “But it does raise a question.”
“What?” I ask, feeling rather naive when it comes to intergalactic politics and stuff.
“How did they know about us at all?” Sharon replies.
Mark clarifies, saying, “Being Russian spies was our cover. They should have fallen for that.”
“They did,” I say, trying not to spit my food over the table. “But why choose such an antagonistic cover story in the first place?”
“Well,” Sharon replies. “It’s plausible.”
I nod, finishing the burger. I’ve wolfed down the bun, greasy patty, cheese and onion rings packed into the burger. A tinge of heartburn sits low in my throat, but it’s nothing a liberal dowsing of Pepsi won’t cure. God bless fast food.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. My fingers are sticky, but there's no napkin.
Sharon and Mark look at each other knowingly. Are they telepathic? Is this the alien equivalent of talking behind someone’s back?
“I’m screwed, aren’t I?”
“What makes you say that?” Sharon asks, reaching out and taking hold of my greasy fingers.
“Well, for one, the way you’re holding my hand.”
Neither of them say anything, but the glances they give each other suggest there’s some deeper discussion going on between them.
“I mean. I can’t go home. The Feds, or DARPA, or the NSA, or someone will be looking for me. They’ve got my prints. Facial recognition will pick me up the first time I hit the subway. I’ve lost my job. I’m on the run.”
Neither of them say anything, at least, not out loud.
“I’m not an alien like you. I can’t go racing off through the Milky Way doing whatever alien things aliens do.”
I’m waiting for some reassurance that I’m overreacting, but that never comes.
“I’m like the celestial equivalent of Benedict Arnold.”
“You’ll be fine,” Mark finally says, but who is he kidding? From the look on his face, even he doesn’t believe what he’s saying.
“So, what next?” I ask, looking to Sharon for some encouragement.
“We anticipated something like this. We’ve changed your identity,” she says, but she’s ignoring my question. Sharon hands me a credit card and a driver’s license, saying, “The pin is the first four odd numbers 1-3-5-7. There’s a fifty grand limit. You don’t have to worry about money, there’s about two hundred million in the account.”
“Two hundred million,” I’m dumbfounded. “What are you guys? Drug lords?”
Sharon laughs, saying, “No, silly. We’ve been investing in stocks for hundreds of years. There’s plenty more where that came from.”
I look at the driver’s license. It’s my face, but the name is Jason Owen.
“But what about you?” I ask, realizing she’s still avoiding my earlier question.
Mark says, “We need to figure out how they stumbled on us. Mission parameters...”
And his voice trails off. It’s as though he’s only just realized he’s talking out loud rather than communicating telepathically.
“You’re going to leave, aren’t you?” I say. “You’re going to abandon Earth.”
“We have to,” Sharon says sympathetically, patting my hand gently. “We can’t risk any escalation or exposure. It’s too dangerous. No one nation can monopolize Firs
t Contact. It would lead to a world war.”
I hear her words, but both she and Mark are fading from sight.
“What about the two of us?” I cry, but it’s too late. “You said you trusted me!”
I swear, I never moved, but suddenly, instead of sitting at a table on a warm alien spaceship, I’m sitting in front of a frozen concrete picnic table in Central Park. Snow flurries drift around me as Mark and Sharon float into the sky, blending into the darkness.
“Wait,” I plead, getting to my feet, but they’re gone. “Goddamn it.”
The cold bites instantly at my bare feet. Jeans and a thin t-shirt are no match for a blizzard. The wind seems to whip straight through me. Out of necessity, I run for the streetlights, wanting to get out of the snow. There’s a hotel across the street—The Astor. Without thinking, I dart into the lobby, relieved to get out of the cold, and wondering just what the hell I’m going to do next.
“Mr. Owen?” a pretty young lady behind the reception desk calls out. “Mr. Jason Owen?”
“Me? You know me?” I ask, pointing at myself like an idiot.
“Are you okay, Mr. Owen?”
I look at her sideways. I want to ask if she’s one of them, but then I notice she’s holding a printed sheet of paper with a photo on it. I move closer, leaning in slightly to take a look. It’s my photo on the page.
“We were expecting you a little earlier this evening,” she says, peering over the counter, curious at my lack of shoes.
“Ah, yes,” I say, resting the credit card and driver’s license on the counter. “Sorry, running a little late.”
“Running?” she asks, glancing at the driver’s license and scanning the credit card. She hands them back, but she’s clearly wondering about the bare feet and the lack of any jacket, gloves, or hat. “Bit chilly out there, isn’t it?”
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