I didn’t want to get stranded. We immediately headed out, and we were back on I-10 before we heard about the complete lockdown on the radio.
We had crossed the Florida-Georgia line when I checked for radio news again. This time there was a retraction. There had been no missing passengers after all. It was all a big mistake. The Jacksonville airport authority was calling for an investigation of the airline and their lousy accounting of passengers that resulted in an unnecessary lockdown. And the Feds were going to be investigating the situation with the plane itself.
I, myself, didn’t believe any of this. To my mind that plane had been hijacked by grays/pinks, maybe even hunters. And several passengers really were missing. I knew there was going to be a cover-up. Nothing, in the end, ever pointed to the truth, not for long anyway.
We drove all night without stopping in order to get back home the next day. Grover was a pleasant sight, and home and farm looked even better, even though the fields were in a mess. At least they didn’t have crop circles…or ovals with tongues full of aliens floating out of them. I settled down to make up for loss of sleep. For a change I didn’t dream.
Chapter 11 - THE MAGIC SCREEN
Days after that were uneventful. Sue refused to talk anymore about anything connected with Jim Drake, or the missing night, or the cruise, or Jacksonville. Although she seemed her normal self, the extraordinary events all seemed blocked from her memory. I wished they were blocked from mine. Instead, they were jumbled, and while I could remember bits and pieces clearly from time to time, there was little that seemed contiguous. I started my book, my piece of fictional nonfiction, or not so fictional fiction, and worked as best I could to make all the pieces fit together in the right order.
I wondered what happened to all my notes that the men-in-black had taken away. Or the government men? Or Pickering men? All humans had blurred in my memory…even some fake humans. Some friends told me that Drake’s place had burned down while I was away, both the cabin and the shed out back, even down into the basement. So there was no point in my going back there, and Sue would forbid it anyway. The Jacksonville plane event vanished from the news. No one ever told us what had happened. It seemed that nobody cared, and it was forgotten. You’d think something like that would be important enough for a follow-up.
I read all the missing person accounts I could find. Usually they were found, but not all of them were unharmed. Some were never accounted for. Nobody claimed an alien abduction, not in the U.S. Elsewhere in the world…well, American news sources didn’t care much about the rest of world unless we were in a war or about to be in one.
I started looking at foreign news sources on the internet…the ones in English at least. And then it started to appear to me that I was being watched.
Was it the pause that occurred before some pages would load? Was it the “server is being used by another administrator” messages I would get with my email? Was it the mysterious characters that would appear instead of the requested page? I kept checking for viruses and detected none. But I felt watched, and I wondered who was watching.
Before long the watching seemed to be taking place outside cyberland. Cars that seemed to follow. A presence I felt, in the woods, or among the withered corn stalks waiting to be plowed under. I needed to get on my tractor soon. I reasoned that if the stalks were no longer there, nobody could be stalking me from them. I chuckled at the pun. I shouldn’t have.
I was composing my book on a laptop that had no connection to the internet. I didn’t want my book accessible to anyone, clandestine or not. Then one day I opened this laptop to continue writing, and the freshly booted computer displayed a picture I hadn’t seen…of my cornfield! The corn was fresh and green and loaded with ears. But in the very middle of the screen, seemingly parting the stalks, peered a gray head with big eyes. I could barely see the slender body without arms or legs. It was floating there. Just like the others did before.
Where was this image coming from? I was using this laptop for word processing, for my book. It wasn’t connected to any other source. The hard-drive had been reformatted before I started using it for its one simple app. There was no wireless card, no camera, no connections. It was just for my book. I sat there staring at this picture…until I noticed that it moved.
There were no components for video on this computer. So this continuing and non-repeating motion was impossible, and yet I was surprised that I didn’t react more strongly. After all the mundane events that triggered high anxiety, I found myself mostly numb to this impossibility staring me in the face. Except that I knew it wasn’t impossible, not any more than ovals with aliens and rocket ships to quantum gates. The Gray disappeared, back into the corn I supposed. The picture couldn’t be in present time, because the stalks that I saw out the window were all brown and wilted.
I wondered what this meant. Was I being reminded? Or warned? Or targeted? Maybe the Gray wanted peaceful relations. I chuckled to myself once again. It wasn’t like I could create economic sanctions in order to force them to the peace table.
I opened the file that was my book. My book was intact. I checked a thumb drive that I was using for a backup. Yup…it still worked. I powered down and powered up again. The damn picture was still there. No more aliens but fresh ready-to-be-harvested corn on stalks that jiggled lightly in the breeze and were visited by birds and bugs.
I started playing with the keys on the laptop. I found that I could navigate in and around the stalks. I turned around and there was my home, right where it should be. I couldn’t see much when I went into the cornstalks, but it looked realistic, just crowded, close, obscured, just as it should be. I approached my house. I went inside.
With this I jumped! There was Sue, sewing away, mismatched fabrics everywhere. I was looking at the past, through this isolated laptop. I tried other keys, and, zoom, I was moving into the more recent past. The house was empty. Sue was gone, and who knows where I was, maybe on my way to the rocket ship. I zoomed way out, spatially, and I was looking at the earth from space. I moved south, over the Antarctic, to a point over that dry, cold desert, with its extinct volcano. I moved forward quickly in time. From high above I could see the great rocket blasting out of the mountain. The rocket that I was on. I moved into the rocket…and there I was, strapped into the last seat of the “movie theater”, the Gs distorting my face inside the helmet I couldn’t remove. I moved forward from that, and backed off, and there was the tip of the rocket approaching darkness. It was a darkness with an outline of writhing, multicolored lines of light, twisting about. The ship entered the darkness. But I could not follow it. My laptop vision was excluded from entering its vastness. In time sped up, it wasn’t long until the ship was ejected from the great mass, or was it a lack of mass? It seemed that there was nothing inside those borders. What was in there could not be known from the outside.
Finally, I returned, in this latest vision, to my house, to myself in near present time. I was there watching myself watch my laptop, traveling into the gate and back out. And then, I pushed past the present time, into the future.
The pictures disintegrated into tiny pixels, pixels into which I could zoom on an individual basis. I picked one and zoomed only to find it full of still more pixels, and each attempt showed me more and more pixels that were full of pixels. For seeing the future, this was no help at all. The time from the now was a vision of infinite possibilities. Any view from any one of them showed the infinite possibilities created by that point, as if saying to me, in a very visual way, that everything that can happen, happens. Nothing is excluded.
I found this thought to be particularly troubling. It said to me that from any given point, I could remain much the same, or that something wonderful could happen, or that I could be stricken with some disaster, some disease, some affliction imparted by nature, or by my fellow man. This many possibilities was impossible to grasp.
I wondered, whimsically, if there could be a whole different reality that extended from my wearing a particular tie
on a particular day, everything else being the same. Or maybe my tie caused the destruction of world, or of the universe. And that was only from my perspective. Every individual who ever lived had infinite possibilities for all good and bad and in-between stretching out beyond them. Ha…not just humans, every living creature or being, maybe even nonliving ones.
There was revealed to me an importance to every moment, an infinite importance. And yet each tiny fraction of a second, for which infinite possibilities stretched out beyond, was completely insignificant, only one of many, many, many, and forever. I was mesmerized by this discovery, while at the same time, my mind was rejecting it all. This made no sense. It was, after all, absurd.
I shut down my magic computer. I could take no more. I walked to my field to look closely at the comprehensible reality of dead corn stalks.
And then one comforting thought. Out of all these possibilities, there must be someplace where life is fair.
****
One day I finally plowed under the corn stalks. I was half-expecting to find something unexpected out there, but there was nothing, a perfectly ordinary cornfield with perfectly ordinary dirt as far as I could tell.
I continued to write and also continued to play with the magic picture on my laptop. I could re-live, as an observer, some of the events of late. It helped me fill in some of the holes in my memory, but I was disappointed that I couldn’t view any scene that I was not a part of. I couldn’t go back and see historic events, so I couldn’t find out who killed JFK. Then I thought, that must be a good thing because if I could, and anybody found out about this device, there is no way I would be allowed to keep it. So I strengthened my password and kept that laptop out of sight to anyone but Sue, who just saw me writing my book on it.
But I couldn’t track any UFO sightings that I hadn’t already seen, or track down Jim Drake or Dr. Pickering, real or fake. Heck, I couldn’t even see the parts of the glass cave that I hadn’t already seen. Why couldn’t I zoom out on that as I had with seeing the earth from space, or watching the launch of the rocket I was in? I finally decided that I could see what it wanted me to see, and that was all.
Then one day the page vanished. I was returned to my ordinary desktop and screen saver. That was not nearly as much fun, or as useful.
All this time I’d kept myself isolated…a lot. Friends were trying to talk me into getting out more, and so was Sue.
I was reluctant about it, but I did manage to go to a couple of movies, to the grocery store, and even to one party. I still kept to myself, and nobody was actually interested in anything I had to say anyway. I’d always hated discussions of politics and religion, and that was even more uncomfortable for me now. I shared no frame of reference with anyone. I felt that I knew that some things couldn’t be and that others occurred, or can occur, along with everything else. If only the great and powerful knew that their grandiose plans occupied but one little pixel on my magic screen.
Then one day I sneaked off to Jim Drake’s old place. It was burned out all right. It was as incinerated as it could be. Nothing was recognizable and most of what was left was black and shapeless. I kicked around in the ashes, wondering what had happened to Col. Jim.
Well, I did find something. There, in the back, amid all the burnt, and returning, vegetation was…a Gray! It was staring, or at least seemed to be staring, at me with its big bug eyes and what appeared to be remnants of a nose and mouth. There were small holes where a nose and mouth would be, but they were flat on its face with no actual nose or lips. But this one had long, skinny arms and legs on its skinny body. What did that mean? The others I’d seen had no appendages.
This Gray scurried, which it could do with its hands and feet with their long skinny fingers and/or toes, all on the ground. It reminded me of a TV show that had aliens called skitters. This thing skittered all right, like a big flying bug but without wings, back into the vegetation.
I tried to collect my thoughts and my composure. There were still aliens around here. Were they widespread, secretly watching the area, perhaps waiting to…hunt? Maybe this one was all alone…had gotten left behind. It had to grow its arms and legs because it had no way to float around anymore. If so, what was it doing? What did it eat? Should I offer it hospitality, or get the hell out of there before I became its food myself? In the perfect world, somewhere, where life is fair, surely nothing is food for anything else. Maybe everybody is a plant.
So animals are screwing everything up. The plants could be quite happy and content, just feeding on sunlight. Could be a song… Feeding On Sunlight.
I was imagining Jimmy Buffett singing his new song. Buffett, the plant version.
This is very non-productive thinking, I thought. But I was used to aliens by now. Yeah, as long as they don’t eat me, or abduct me, aliens are cool.
Chapter 12 - PERFECTION
I went back to Drake’s burnt out ruins several times after that, mostly when Sue had gone somewhere. She knew where I’d been though. I guess she’d gotten tired of saying anything about it, and she no longer asked questions.
So there I was, being “unfaithful” to my wife by hanging out, alone, at a burnt-out shack, waiting to see an alien. I never saw one though. Not until….
Good heavens! It was one of the Drakes. Made me jump out of my socks when he walked up behind me!
“Are you the real one or the fake?” I stammered. It had become a customary question.
“I am both, and at once!” He proclaimed this in a very Drake-like voice.
“How did you manage that? You mean the Enlightened One has taken over your body? Did you give it permission to do that?”
“I did indeed. And it is truly amazing how enlightening this has been. I understand so much better how the Enlightened Ones think, how I, being they, see things. I also better understand what we would be up against if not for my, slash their, help.”
“Well, first of all, what, slash who, was the Gray I saw here? And why did he, she, it have arms and legs?”
“That was a hunter, Don. You saw a hunter. Except for my, slash our, directive, you would be meat on a plate. He was left here by his own choice. He’d had body modification done to restore arms and legs since he was existing beyond any energy fields. His plan…and I use ‘his’ out of convenience because Grays are actually several different sexes all in one depending on how each one decides to reproduce…his plan was to remain behind and live off the land, meaning off you and other humans mostly. Our interdiction put a stop to that, so now he’s stranded here for the time being without much to do. He has to settle for rabbits and rodents, farm animals, pets, anything else he can catch. Hunters have modified to be strict carnivores.”
“Animals again….”
“Animals?”
“I mean, in a perfect world, which has to exist somewhere since there is every other combination, there would be no animals, because they eat each other rather than living on sunlight like plants.”
“You seem to be forgetting fungi and bacteria. You used to think of them as plants. And they eat you, or at least inhabit you and your dwelling all the time.”
“This is no perfect world. And it’s not fair.”
“You might say it’s being unfair to that hunter too. All his plans have fallen through.”
“If he’s bright enough to get here, he should have planned better than that.”
“In a perfect world, he would have.”
“Damn it, Jim. Then it wouldn’t be a perfect world.”
“I see you’re wearing a red shirt today.”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
By now I was wondering if Jim Drake was pulling my leg. He sounded like Jim all right, but he seemed to have none of the wisdom of Fake Drake. His explanation of the hunter seemed plausible, I guess, but to make one of his humorous references, which I did catch by the way, to a 1960s sci-fi series with an egocentric lead, played by an even more ego
centric actor, was a bit more than I could accept.
That is, until he asked, “How did you like the game on your laptop?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Well, it was pretty enlightening to see representations of the possibilities hidden in space and time and surrounding you yourself wasn’t it?”
“It was a game? How did it get there? Who put it there? Why were all the scenes connected to me in my past and present, and I could see nothing beyond or in the future?”
“Not exactly a game. Placed there by moi, and my friends. It was your own crystal ball. You were seeing the crystalized possibilities, or rather probabilities, of your life as a fixed crystal out of an infinite number of fixed crystals that could have been, and in fact actually were. You could not see ahead. Space-time probabilities have not crystalized yet in your future, and so you could only see infinite collections of representations of probabilities resulting from and pertaining to you.”
“Now you’ve lost me. I guess you have been enlightened after all. I still don’t like your sense of humor though. Never have, never will.”
He sighed. “But in a perfect world you would love them.”
“OK…Pangloss. Whatever you say.”
Jim Drake/Fake Drake/Super Drake…disappeared. I looked away, and when I looked back he was gone. I was left to contemplate this fact, what Drake had said, and what would exist in a perfect world, to me, which would likely not be a perfect world to the hunter.
Chapter 13 - THE DOME
I never saw any sight of a Drake, or an alien, on subsequent trips to the Drake place. I inquired as to the status of the land. Technically it was still owned by Drake’s family, but nobody knew where any of them were. So it sat in limbo, forgotten by anyone but me. Then winter came, along with cold and rain, and I stopped going over there.
I wondered if the hunter was still around and what it was doing for sustenance. I was careful to keep everything secured, especially at night. I didn’t want any surprises, but I didn’t want to live in terror either. I tried to encourage friends and neighbors to be vigilant, but without being able to give them a reason, they seemed only interested in humoring me. Crazy Don, they all thought. They included Sue.
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