Theme-Thology: Invasion

by Inc. HDWP

  “Place me in Bob’s hand” I heard “It is time for the understanding to be shared.”

  As I reached out with the object he took it from my hand and considered it with wonder in his eyes. “It is warm and it seems like an old friend.”

  I joined Bob on the lounge and we both listened as the object spoke to us.

  “You and your companions are now on a journey of your own. The rest of your people have all arrived at their destinations. You shall never see them again, for your destiny is not theirs.”

  Bob and I looked at each other in shock. Questions were exploding in my head. Bob started blathering nonsense and slowly quieted as the images in my mind started to explain what was just said.

  “We knew you were coming to visit our place long before you arrived. It was not so much a vision of things to come as an awareness that our next existence was upon us.

  “We needed you and your kind to come for a visit, to see our perfect place. It was known that a people would lose the place of their origin and they would travel far and wide to other places. Eventually in the wanderings you would come to us.

  “When your vessel arrived we saw you observing us from above. You could only see what was there on the surface and had imaginings of all else that was there. You wished for a place of comfort. A safe place. We gave you one. You wished for a place with no competition. We gave you one.

  “From the day I came down to meet with you, there were concerns that your expectations could not be realized. It was nice to see that there was no fear or anger in you. Fear and anger are forces that drive beings to do what should not be done. You accepted me. You accepted the others. There was nothing in you that offered a reason not to accept you as an equal existence.

  “We went back in your existence close to your beginnings and saw how you marveled at that which was around you. You explored and studied things and other beings. At all times you offered respect and understood the reason for them to live was as yours. It just was. You shared this with others about you and they understood as did you.

  “At all times in your places there was a companion, as you refer to us, alongside. Present but unobserved and unknown.

  I sat as I absorbed all of this. I tried to look back in my life to a point where I might say I know that this was a truth that could be confirmed.

  There had been that dream when we were at the water to study the life from below the surface. It wasn’t a dream, it had really happened. “Bob,” I blurted out. “Are you hearing anything? A monologue of sorts?”

  “Bob!” I said again with urgency. “Are you with me?” I looked carefully at him. He was quiet, a peaceful look was on his face.

  “Bob is fine,” I was told. “He is being educated as are you. There is much you need to know, but it will take time for you to accept it all.”

  Slowly I was aware of the future of my kind. Those that landed at my last survey were indeed fine. The transport ships had arrived intact and the first crews had completed the community compounds. ‘Temporary’ structures that would last up to 10 years, sanitation modules that would digest wastes and vegetation into useable soil enrichments. The water cycler was in place, it would collect excess moisture from the atmosphere and the digester and provide the water needed within the community.

  I watched in amazement as all of the other survey vessels landed, each with it’s own transport community. The crews assisted with the transition of the transports to community centers.

  I saw the passengers slowly awaken from stasis and take their place in building their new homeland into a real community. As they explored they discovered the companions and life was forever different. One by one each group accepted a few companions and they changed. It was subtle and took much time.

  I asked out loud, “Is this is really what happened.”

  “It is in part, and will be in part,” was the reply

  “We are in a way you cannot be. Your's is a linear existence ours is a fuller presence. We are not as you are. To us ‘here & now’ are no different than your ‘there & then’ or ‘when & where.’ We experience them all together and separately in the same instant over many centuries. We are merely allowing you to experience parts of it.

  The viewing continued and I was part of the daily grind. I could follow along with people as I desired, watching them, hearing them, smelling them. What I could not do was touch or speak with anyone. As I wandered I could see that there was a calm atmosphere. Everyone, while not bursting into laughter or doing a song & dance, was happy, jovial even.

  I wandered though the community and became aware that there was an object. It was just like the one in Bob’s hand right now. I dashed into the transport ship and headed for the control center. There it was. The object sitting in a niche overlooking the crew. How did it get there? Why has no one noticed.

  “Because we planned for it to be aboard the ship.” Came the reply. “There is one in every transport or survey vessel that departed after your arrival at what you referred to as home.”

  “You mean I brought them home? I infected my whole planet?”

  “No, there was no infection. It was as intended all along. You merely delivered yourself and your ship. We did the rest. Did you not notice how much calmer it was as the last transports were filled? No one was unhappy, and those that remained behind had no concerns?”

  “We have been there through your planets entire existence; we just needed you to provide the first spark of presence.”

  “Likewise we are everywhere. We are universal in the fullest sense. All that is needed is a first spark of presence.”

  I sat back and considered this. Bob looked over at me and gently smiled. “We are going to have a family that will see the universe. I was told that the survey ships will depart soon. They will begin by visiting the other colonies and insuring all is well. Eventually we will spread to other places not even in our charts. We will have a child soon.“

  I looked at Bob with steely eyes, “What do you mean child?” As part of the protocol for doing survey work we were made fully infertile. To have a child, or long for one would have created a disruption to the tasks at hand. Out of thousands of survey teams there had never been a pregnancy. Never a child.

  No! It could not be!

  “Bob has spoken rightly,” came a reassurance. “It is because you have much to do. You and the rest of the crew will be emissaries for us. It shall be your duty to insure we have a presence everywhere.”

  I was calm. Yes, it is so. It was determined long before that this would be my destiny.

  Epilogue

  Red looked out over the valley before and saw all was at peace. There was a new community to direct. The walkers were at task in setting out the vegetations of their preference. Soon they would ripen and be consumed. A cycle that was to repeat endlessly.

  Yellow stood by watching as well. It was his task to insure the safety of the herds and these new ones were going to require much work to insure they stayed calm and where they were needed. The walkers had a tendency to stray away and he had no desire to lose them. There would be a need for them some day, but until then he had to insure they were contained.

  An Invasion of Ideas

  Jeremy Lichtman

  On résiste à l'invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l'invasion des idées - Victor Hugo, Histoire d'un Crime

  The Lemmings were damn cute, and they knew it too, although they were far too introspective to revel in their cuteness. From their wide eyes and whiskers, right down to their furry, expressive tails, they exuded a certain joie de vivre, a love of life, that was most appealing.

  Their planet had the usual mixture of picturesque and bucolic scenery (perhaps a bit better preserved than most), wide, deep oceans teaming with tasty finned creatures of many kinds, and comfortable, well-proportioned towns and villages.

  Unusually, their development had focused more on the aesthetic than the practical. The Lemmings, in short, were artists and aesthetes and philosophers, not
engineers.

  The crisis began in the tourist bazaar on the Lemming's home world.

  Their planet had been discovered right under everyone's noses, although later on there were dark whispers that certain Powers That Be had known about them all along, and had made sure that others didn't find out. Certainly, their discovery had sparked a lot of interest, and beings of every shape and size just had to come and take a look. As a result, a bit of a resort town had set itself up around the point of first contact.

  Lemmings were reluctant performers at the best of times, but cold hard currency worked its persuasive charms, and the bazaar was soon staffed by fuzzy, bewhiskered artists and singer-songwriters and master chefs, serving up the best and most nostalgic kitsch possible for the tentacled oddity in the floating bubble (camera firmly in suckered hand), and the florid, wheezing, nasal-voiced, bipedal being, sparsely furred on top of its head, dressed altogether distastefully in a shirt clearly intended as camouflage for stray condiments.

  Perhaps staffed is the wrong term though. Drafted. Arm twisted. Persuaded in strong language by a sympathetic (but stressed) Lemming government to look happy and do their duty for the greater good of all.

  The trouble started when some tin-eared tour-being had the temerity to ask Farshpritz, the greatest poet of his generation, to write some drivel in its praise. Instead Farshpritz wrote a poem that induced unaccustomed - and uncomfortable - self-reflection in the poor tourist, who went home and enrolled in a course of philosophy at the Galactic University, and later became a famous ascetic.

  The tourist's angry relatives sent missive after angry missive to the Lemming government, with no response.

  Taking their search for recourse on the road, several emissaries traveled to the Lemming world. One bought a painting of themselves in the bazaar that subtly - to others, but fortunately not themselves - made their breathing apparatus appear overly large. Another purchased a recording of a wonderfully locomotive, tentacle-stomping tune, that embedded itself in the heads of their friends for weeks, causing immense irritation. A third came home and almost immediately opened a fine-dining restaurant, and -- astonishingly -- banned patrons from throwing food.

  Word of this puzzling phenomenon filtered gradually up the social pecking order of the Galaxy.

  Grand Poobahs, Supreme Potentates, and umpteen humble bureaucrats consulted, with recursive self-important humming and hawing. In the due course of time, the Legate to the Lemmings was summoned home with some urgency, and briefed in detail of the problem. A great deal of consternation was invoked when the Legate declared the situation to be ultimately beneficial for all.

  After preemptively sacking the unfortunate diplomat, in order to prevent further infection, the Galactic Government sought and found two stalwart delegates to deliver a formal complaint to the Lemmings. Both were as thick-brained as they were thick-skinned, and the metaphorical ear-stoppers in their hearing appendages were indeed worthy of veneration.

  And thus they came, mincing, mealy-mouthed, with all of the thousands of years of cultured insincerity of the diplomat's art to the Two Great Halls of Government of the Lemmings. And delivered there their message: stop stirring the pot; quit planting odd notions in the heads of innocent and undeserving tourists; do not, under any circumstances export great art, brilliant ideas.

  Or else.

  On pain of force majeur.

  When the delegates returned with thoughtful looks on their emotive surfaces, this was the final straw. Plans were drawn. Draftees drafted. Volunteers sought. Finally, the great invasive force of Galactic Retribution circled its wagons in orbit around the Lemming's home world. Earplugs and blinkers were issued in various regulation sizes to the soldiery. Uniforms were polished and then polished again, and medals draped with precision on chests and appendages. Generals harrumphed, drill sergeants drilled, and green privates fecklessly did whatever they are wont to fecklessly do.

  And then nothing happened.

  The Lemmings kept one eye on the sky, and went on with life. The tourist traffic dropped to a trickle, and then even that trickle dried up as the embargo took effect. Many enduring poems were written contrasting the quiet with the vast and yet quiescent firepower overhead. Exquisite paintings were painted. A cooking festival went off with neither a hitch nor a burned recipe.

  The circling army sent a heavily blinkered and stoppered messenger, bearing a flag and a missive - "If you promise not to do anything like that again, then we can all just shake hands and go home friends."

  The Lemming's response really did it - "We actually rather like the peace and quiet, and wouldn't mind at all if you stay."

  The general who received the response was found sobbing inconsolably in the shower. He had made the near-fatal mistake of thinking it all through, and had then become stuck in a loop. The colonels who finally pried the story out of the general required weeks of counseling.

  Once word reached the lower decks, panic ensued.

  The white flag was run up. Deserters deserted. One entire faction fled willy-nilly. Nabobs and dignitaries of many kinds resigned, or fled one tentacle-step ahead of the pitchfork-bearing mob. The Great Force of Retribution collapsed utterly.

  The Galaxy hasn't been the same ever since.

  Famine, with Fries

  Jefferson Smith

  The apocalypse is a young man’s game. Least, that’s how Hollywood likes to tell it. But the truth is, if things are so bad you’ve gotta send Balls O’Manly Steel in to save the day… Well, you’re probably already nipples up. Or you soon will be.

  Nah, in the real world, it’s us older folks who’re gonna save your bacon. Not by lifting a car off your damsel in bikini distress, you understand, but by making sure she don’t wind up under that car in the first place.

  See, that’s what an old crust like me’s got that your twenty-something chisel-chin doesn’t―a bit of common fucking sense. Averting your average Armageddon isn’t about testosterone. It’s about subtlety. And I oughta know.

  Because I averted one.

  * * *

  It was one of them first warm days of early spring and the sun was finally starting to get some bite to it. Me and Four-Bit was pulled over to the shoulder out front of the little school, waiting for the tykes to clear on back inside so I could finish sweeping the streets. Didn’t want to have to keep watching nine ways from Sunday for some tiny pair of shoes to come skittering up out of Four-Bit’s big front broom, so I figured it was as good a time as any for lunch.

  There was a time, on a day like this, I’d have been out on the tiller, breaking up clots and getting ready to seed. Knowing me, I’d have been frantic about getting it done before the rain blew in, too. Or maybe still flinching with worry about a late frost. Turns out, farming had been a more fearful life than I’d ever accounted, but testosterone-me had been a real stubborn prick. Took a heart attack, a foreclosure, a divorce, and twenty-five years of bellyaching before I’d finally admitted the simple fact I should’ve faced up to in my twenties.

  I hated farming.

  Four-Bit rumbled a grumpy fart and I cocked an ear to listen. She sounded a hair lean. Wasn’t my job to check it really, but it takes a dull kind of man to let his tools rust, just because it’s somebody else’s job to wipe ‘em down, so I made a mental note to take a look before I signed the keys back in at the end of my shift.

  Anyway, I was sitting there eating my sandwich and idling away, enjoying the sun, when some godawful bang from behind my head nearly made me lubricate my shorts. I twisted around in the swivel and there it was. My first sign of the apocalypse to come―a big orange chicken woman staring in at me. The paper bag she was printed on was pressed up against the glass, waving and flapping at the edges, held there by one of them sudden spring gusts. Lotta. The Chick-a-Lot lady.

  “Jesus!” I said, talking to Four-Bit like I sometimes used to do with Rhonda. “That kind of startlement ain’t healthy for a man waiting on his second attack!” Four-Bit purred her sympathy back at me in
complete agreement. But keeping Saint Croix tidy is kinda my job now, so I swung the door open and leaned out, grabbing the stupid bag from the window before Lotta could change her mind and go gallivanting off to blow some other poor sap into an early grave.

  I climbed back in and jammed the fool thing down into the gap between the swivel and the heater. Junk food trash. Never could understand why they let this crap blow around like it does. I’m sure some whip-smart college kid down at franchise HQ figured that Chic-a-Lot saved a ton of advertising dollars, having their name blown all over God’s back yard like that, but seeing it all scuffed up and torn didn’t exactly put me in mind of eating now, did it? The message I got was more along the lines of, “This here eyesore is brought to you by the good folks at Chick-a-Lot.” Didn’t make any kinda sense at all.

  Anyway, by the time I got their spokes-chicken lady jammed under my seat, the kids had all disappeared, so I put her in gear. Four-Bit jumped up like a prize bull, and with a snort of diesel, we were back on the job.

  * * *

  The second sign was something I heard on the radio, a day or two later.

  “Democrats in the House of Representatives approved the measure easily, carrying the vote with a significant 62 to 37 percent majority, but with several key members abstaining. So far, there have been no reactions from the public, and from what this reporter has seen, it is still business as usual at most Burger Duck and Chick-a-Lot outlets here in the tri-county area, but that’s all likely to change when the bill goes into effect next week. Now, moving to the weath―”

  I snapped it off. I’d spent too many years chained to the weather man to waste time listening to one now―not when I didn’t have to, and especially not for weather happening down in the U.S. Guess I was still pretty riled about weather folks and how much I’d lost listening to them instead of trusting my own damned eyes. But it was the part before the weather that turned out to be the important bit. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know that, but as near as I can remember, that was the first I ever heard about Bill Thirty-Three, the so-called “Clean Roadways” act.