by Thomas Zman
“Evvie, please,” cried Mother. “We need –”
“It’s not right,” Evvie explained, having calmed herself. She looked to me, nervously fumbling with her gold cross. “I don’t think this is what God has planned for me.”
“Evvie, my dear,” said mother, soothing, “You’re part of our family. You just can’t –”
“I’ll go with her,” I said.
“Are you nuts, Jimmy?” Angela had come into the room, Braxton beside her. “Evvie. You have to stay! Brax has been telling me more and more of what a wonder life we’ll all be part of. Everything will be just fine.”
“You won’t last long out there, James,” said Grandpa. “Despite what you may think you know. Brax – “
“I’m a step ahead on matters. I know their game plan,” I said.
“Who’s they?” Evvie asked.
“The Aliens.”
A visible tremble ran through her. She moved a couple steps further from the doorway, which continued to shimmer and wriggle, the remaining walls around it having faded away.
The monitors around the complex continued to broadcast the news – all of it bad: Local law enforcement unable to stem the widespread violence and civil unrest, looting, arson, murder. There too were reports of nations now launching limited, tactical nuclear strikes around the globe. One station even reported of flying saucers dotting the Earth -- that news feed abruptly going static . . .
The family continued to plead with Evvie, explaining that they all needed to stay together. That it was ‘meant to be’. Grandpa provided his insight, gesturing demonstratively with his newfound vitality. But to no avail. Evvie wanted to go.
I explained that I would go with her, though I asked if she could give me some time. I had one last responsibility before the Portal finished its absorption of the house. My fingers blazed across the consoles as I brought up the video feeds from all the Transport Chambers in our region. I studied the most recent information the Intellect had gathered from around the globe and decided that all was ready. The time had come.
I sent out the command that all Futurists were to now enter their Demolecularizing Cubicles. I then activated the cryptic sequencing that would automatically carry out the remaining steps in the complex dematerialization and transfer process. There seemed no hesitation on the part of any of the Futurists. The children too were even excited, eager to join in the game that their parents had prepared for them.
No doubt each Futurist had been following the global calamities, knowing it was now only a matter of hours before such events would reach them.
They hugged and kissed one another, saying their ‘temporary’ goodbyes, full well believing that they would reunite in the Collective. And it was only a matter of minutes from when my command had gone out, before all the Futurists had entered and conformed dutifully to their Cubicles. Their minds were then extracted; their thoughts, souls, the essence of their lives encoded into the Orbs. They then sped off to join the hundreds of others on their journey towards Assimilation; their lifeless bodies left behind, entombed in their Chambers -- time capsules to be unearthed by some obscurant future generation.
In closing out my official duties for the Intellect I became informed that all Neuphobian cities had destroyed, though the Chosen were safe. They had arisen skyward and delivered unto Heaven. In counterpart, I had just transferred a portion of the Technocracy unto eternity.
Shaking myself back to the grave situation in my own household I turned away from the monitors, away from these now completed responsibilities, and approached my family, kneeling before them. I took up my mother’s hand and recited unto her, and to my entire family, my love and adoration for them all. I was moved, nearly to tears, but restrained the emotion, knowing this was my chosen fate; one that I would at least experience with the person I now realized I loved.
I looked to the doorway, which had grown unstable and arced with energy. I looked over to Evvie, who had moved herself still further from it. I then joined her. She seemed indecisive, her eyes pouring over me, she no doubt grappling with emotions. She then looked to my family -- her family that she had decided to leave, and stood motionless as I took up her hand in mine. She could not remove her eyes from them, our family, her heart heavy, her eyes welling with tears.
“Wait!” Evvie cried. “I -- I . . . “
Suddenly a great swirling motion took hold of us as the entire house swooned. The vacillative doorway flashed away and we were tossed through it to the outside. Into the gloomy daylight we found ourselves, the skies above clouded over in gray. Here and there a light powdery ash had begun to fall.
Chapter Twelve
Reunion
“Oh my God No!” Evvie screamed. “We have to get back in! I’ve changed my mind! We have to stay!” she was frantic. “We have to stay with your family!”
The front porch had morphed into a gelatinous mass of scintillating colors and arcing energies. The house, broad, towering and bemoaning, continued to undergo its transformation. We stood clear of it, off to the side yard.
“We’ll try the back door,” I shouted, and led the way.
“I’m sorry!” Evvie cried hysterically as we ran. “I’m so
so sorry . . .”
It was hot, sweltering, and the air thick with a tinge of acerbity. The sounds of cicadas were prominent, though eerily muffled by the fall of radioactive particulates, now accumulating around us. As we rounded the perimeter the whole house was as energy, save for the small back porch, which somehow remained unaffected. We ran to it and tried opening the door. But as the door was just parting the house again shifted, swayed, and expanded. Before we realized, Evvie and I found ourselves far back in the yard, at the edge of the property.
I couldn’t understand. “There shouldn’t be any portal shift at the back of the house. It was a neutral zone,” I was explaining this to Evvie. Then I tried to smooth over the situation, redirecting with memories of my childhood. I told her that the tall trees and thick shrubs surrounding us were the perfect hiding place for a game we used to play called ‘man hunt’. She cried harder, aptly reminding me the situation we now found ourselves in was “No child’s play!”
The summertime sounds around us had now stopped, the cicadas ceasing their cadence. The gray clouds above us, and the ash falling from them, were no doubt the after effects of a nuclear event above New York City. There were likely others be spreading the East Coast, and for that matter the World; their radioactive fallout, that invisible death, would be slow in coming.
“How can we get back into the house?” Evvie asked, having calmed, some; though she still trembled, standing by my side. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, you know. I was going to change my mind.” She took up my hand in hers.
I just looked at her, and caressed her hand.
“Something is glowing over the ridge,” Evvie whispered as we lowered ourselves down behind a large evergreen. She was right. Emerging from the horizon, from the thin clouds that masked the daylight, was an immense Mother Ship, its own black clouds clinging to its perimeter. Silently it floated into full view: Good God, I thought.
I remembered the news about the flying saucers. The alien vessels had left their moorings to begin their sweep over the face of the planet. I then heard a slight buzzing sound. Buzzing like that of distant locust. Buzzing, an erratic buzzing, which slowly
became louder and louder.
I remembered a meeting and what Stardom had said, transposing it in my mind: a slow, methodical destruction shall the locust bring upon whatever human life had not yet been eradicated by natural or manmade disasters.
“What’s that noise?” Evvie asked, her voice tightening.
“Aliens,” I said, the sound moving closer. “They’re searching.”
I felt a tremor in her as she hunched up close to me. “And they can read minds from close distances,” I whispered, remembering what Brax had once told me. “We will be found out if they see us, or get close enough link our minds.” “The only way
to escape them is to confuse their thinking,” I said, seeing two tiny figures, distant; they must have been walking the roads up here, their ship trailing them. Who knew how many swarmed about the countryside?
The two had entered into our yard, way at the front of it, at the side of the now glowing, wriggling house. They were barely discernable, their translucent wings folded across their backs, visible upon their turning, searching. They would vibrate these wings, intermittently -- thus the sounds we were hearing. They began to walk towards us, each carrying a glowing staff.
“Start thinking of cricket sounds,” I said. “Of the night’s buzzings, crickets chirping, frogs . . .”
Evvie looked upon me with horrid, unbelieving eyes; though I’m sure she did what I had said. I did so myself. And we remained still, our minds working, full of ‘night sounds’. For it certainly appeared to be nearing nighttime -- or in the very least, twilight -- as the sky before us was darkening; the great Mother Ship approaching, its extreme girth eclipsing all that lie beneath it.
The creatures neared, clutching their staffs, which glowed like their uniforms, exoskeleton armor; I could partially distinguish their faces, humanoid, remembering the faces of the others I had seen. My mind chirped and croaked with ‘night time sounds’ as the aliens came to the edge of our backyard and turned; the long wings across their backs trailing on the ground, they sweeping past, twitching insect sounds. They separated in the midst before us and proceeded in opposite directions, looking about, listening intently, all the while searching.
For an instant one creature looked back in our direction, into the thick bush where we hid; the buzzing’s in our minds, a cacophony of cicadas and chirping crickets (hopefully) confounding its suspicions. It then looked askance, moved away, joining the other in heading back towards the house.
Distant rumbling storm clouds rolled forth and stationed themselves above the yard. The Mother Ship had arrived. It blackened the entire sky, sending forth lightning and peels of thunder and a wind, which swayed tree limbs and bushes from side to side. At this point the two aliens had moved far from us, to the center of the yard; Evvie and I now thought it safe to move, so we carefully rounded the side yard, hidden behind dense shrubbery and under the cover of trees, until we found ourselves just even
with the back of the glowing house.
The winds became violent, an intermittent lightning spreading across the underside of the Mother Ship, demarcating its evil. The ship, The Inter Galactic Vessel, had now stationed itself above my property; the two alien figures beneath it, glowing, were unable to detect us with the storm raging all around. For a moment it seemed they would enter into the house, but stayed their place as a tremendous bolt of lightning, an Armageddon Flame, arced down from their ship and held its illumination -- the back porch plainly visible.
We then beheld a man walking through the storm, walking out past the aliens – the aliens, who then retreated into the bolt of lightning, vanishing back up into the ship. From the small amount of light that remained off the vessel’s underside we could then see the man standing on the porch, at the back of our house. He was looking over in our direction.
The winds subsided, slowly, and the Mother Ship moved away, leaving silence and a gray light from the skies above. The man on the porch called, “It’s safe to come out now.”
I hesitated, then grabbed Evvie’s hand and questioned, “Who are you?”
“I think you know who I am.” He looked to the sky, his eyes following the Mother Ship as it was absorbed into the gray.
“They’re gone,” he said.
“Thank God,” cried Evvie, clinging to my arm.
“We’ll be alright, now,” the man called to us. “Our time has
returned, set right again.”
“It’s only us, now,” I said to Evvie.
She pulled me closer.
The man on the porch opened the back door and paused. From inside the house I could hear a commotion. Then Grandpa’s voice yelling out, “Dad! Is that really you?”
Evvie and I looked at each other. I kissed her. We kissed long and hard.
The man yelled back to us, “Well, are you coming in?”
Epilogue
When we entered the house, the Portal’s transformation had been completed. Our time, and the Intellect’s time had merged; had been ‘set right again’. My great grandfather had been the key lock to the Portal. “Did the aliens come to return my Great Grandfather?”
“In a sense, yes.” Brax explained. “He was the final piece of the equation. In fact, all the time he’d spent away from this world, it was as if he’d been sleeping. You see, the aliens needed to open a Portal in order to repair the timeline, which they had distorted in all of their time-travel dealings during mankind’s earlier history. Such became the state of human kind that the entire species needed to be reset. The chosen entered into Heaven – just as Scripture promised. The Intellect, overseen by Stardom’s highly-trained staff, then harvested souls to be gifted towards earth’s future humans. Once the next cycle is granted by the Almighty, after the Great Cleansing, a Second Genesis of humans will appear, retaining all the intelligence from its predecessors. But just when this Second Genesis will arise, God only knows.”
Did the aliens know of Evvie and myself, hiding? No matter. We were home safe, and Grandpa was walking around, introducing Mom and Dad, Angie and Brax; introducing everyone to his father, who was telling his story of that fateful night – which had started all this oh so long ago.
The reunion had just begun. Assimilation into the Collective happened without our ever even noticing it. Our Portal had acted as an oversized Demolecularizing Cubicle, and seemingly transferred the lot of us, via a single Orb, to the Collective, where we then continued to meet up with hundreds of Futurists from around the globe. Our spirits had morphed into a state of energy . . . as were Bethesda and Sinclair – I thought back to them, and so they too appeared, joining our celebration.
We mingled about in the surreal of the Collective: existing as unembodied spirits in a synthesized world. And whatever thought crossed one’s mind, it instantly became material, and an experience played out as to it. The fears Evvie had were unfounded, for we had our minds, and the great minds of many, as our own. She and I linked, emotionally, spiritually -- enjoining every nuance of mortal sensation, even though we may have only been shimmering waves of energy. Nonetheless, all our senses were at their sharpest, our faculties more complete than as when we had mortally existed.
And so began another journey, this one of time, which kept slipping into the future…
About the Author
For being one of those whose mind always slipped the present, I found my imagination to be a gift from a very early age. Able to escape the ordinary and ponder tangents of reality, I would borrow from the real to produce the surreal – a version of my reality. Always an outlet from a very young age, where it was creating toys from common, household items, to adulthood where ordinary situations suddenly spiraled into surrealistic stories of fantasy. I am now most comfortable in this imaginative world and plan on remaining there -- for the foreseeable future; there to create and share with readers what I had long ago envisioned.
As for my present state of being I currently reside in the quaint little hamlet called Bohemia (the essence of which I always found appropriate for my particular mind set) in the county of Suffolk, Long Island. I have retired after some 35 years in the baking industry, pursuant to a Great retailer’s demise. With my lovely wife focused towards early retirement too, and my children attending school, the two eldest in college and my youngest High School, I have the mornings to create, unencumbered -- save for the family dog, Toby -- my fanciful tales.
With forced early retirement, most would perceive it as hardship; though it completes a furtive aspiration of mine, from early on, long before life’s necessities had been satisfied. Fortunately, Life-Planned Investments have enabled me (with minimal management) to continue contributing financ
ially to our household while freeing up time to continue where I had trailed off my writings during my mid-twenties. Perhaps it all now coming together as if part of some great providence.
With writing now my full-time pursuit I look forward to work every morning. Still rising when the time is dark. Not to proof and bake breads for the customer, but to think and write for the reader.