The Book That THEY Do Not Want You To Read, Part 1

by Andy Ritchie

  Odd, isn’t it, that I found myself talking so easily to him, as if he was a mate who had just come up from London to stay for a couple of nights. It never even occurred to me that Tukaal may simply not have a clue as to who or what ‘Sainsburys’ is...but then again, he had said that he had gotten some Corn Flakes without even a glimmer of uncertainty as to what they were, so I suspected he was as well-versed in the issues of consumerism and he clearly was in cereal products and meals to start the day. No, if Tukaal knew enough about Corn Flakes and tea and milk and such shit, he would almost certainly know about Sainsburys.

  ‘So when are you meeting your friend?’ I asked as I tucked into my toast.

  ‘Ah. There has been a little bit of a complication there,’ Tukaal responded nervously.

  My eyes narrowed as I asked what sort of complication we were talking about.

  ‘When I retired to my room last night,’ Tukaal explained, ‘I contacted my colleague using my URG...’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘Sorry, it’s a powerful communications device that is the standard hardware for sub-space communication. URG is the name of the company which produces it.’

  ‘Oh,’ was all I could manage to say.

  I gestured for him to continue as I began my second slice of toast.

  ‘I contacted my colleague, who’s a Life-Form Researcher...’

  I did think about interrupting again and actually opened my mouth to do so, but thought it better to let Tukaal get to the end of his ‘complication’ before asking any more questions. I closed my mouth.

  ‘...in accordance with the First Contact Protocol, Postponement sub-section...’

  Again, I opened my mouth to say something, but once more thought better of it.

  ‘...to confirm that I had arrived on Earth and that I had secured safe lodgings. He told me that, unfortunately, he was currently not in Manchester but was, instead, some distance away and that it would take him all of today to travel back. Therefore, he suggested that we meet at his home in Manchester on Sunday at 1.00 p.m.’

  I feigned choking on my toast.

  ‘Sunday? What do you mean Sunday?’

  Tukaal’s expression became one of slight embarrassment.

  ‘I’m afraid I am going to have to ask if I can impose on your kind hospitality for one more night, Jethro Postlethwaite...’

  What could I do?

  I couldn’t exactly tell him to bugger off, could I.

  And it did provide me an extended opportunity to test him, to try to gain as much information from him as possible, not because I wanted to learn about what went on out there in the heavens, not initially anyway, but because I still had this fairly sizeable nagging doubt in my mind that Tukaal was not everything he was claiming to be.

  If there was a hole in his story, I was dead set on finding it.

  ‘Stay as long as you like, it’s not a problem. I’m off to take a shower and then, perhaps we can have some more tea and you can tell me all about what it’s like out there in space.’

  And with that I made my way back upstairs and began to prepare my brain for the challenge of finding the truth about my mysterious guest.

  Oh, and by the way, that’s the reason why, when I’m old and grey, my memory will be of having an alien from outer space in my house for a couple of days, rather than just the one!

  It was a brilliantly simple strategy, a ‘cunning plan’ as Baldrick would have called it.

  It involved interrogating Tukaal about a number of aspects of this Confederation of his, noting down all the things he said and then cross-checking one thing against the other until I could begin to see inconsistencies and irregularities in what he was telling me.

  In fact, there was only one problem, one single, tiny flaw in my brilliantly cunning plan, but it was a flaw that started to become apparent almost as soon as I began grilling him.

  There were going to be no obvious inconsistencies in what he told me.

  In fact, there wasn’t any guarantee that there were going to be any inconsistencies at all in what he told me!

  I mean, not only was he able to answer every question with an air of utter confidence and conviction, he was actually able to provide me with copies of documents which corroborated what he said.

  Copies of documents, for Christ sake!

  And I’m not talking about one or two sheets of paper here, I’m talking about thousands and thousands...which leads me nicely on to the clincher, the incident which, in my mind at least, proves beyond doubt that his presence in my house was not part of some elaborate ruse and that he was indeed ‘the real deal’.

  It came at about 11.30, not long after he had begun to explain the catchily-titled Threatening Species First Contact and Awareness Development Protocol. We’d already spent part of the morning discussing the way the Confederation was structured and had moved onto the issue of what the Confederation was doing here on Earth.

  He’d watched me scribbling notes for almost two hours as I sought to record as best I could the details of what he was telling me, references made, pieces of supposed galactic terminology used, that sort of thing. Our discussions had been briefly interrupted by a toilet break (for me) and the preparation of a couple of cups of Costa Rican Tarrazu ground coffee, and he had just begun explaining the complexities of the role of the Planetary and Life-Form Classification when I said:

  ‘I don’t suppose you have a copy of this First Contact Protocol, do you?’

  I had waited quite a while to ask to see physical evidence corroborating what he was saying. Asking for a copy of the process he was supposed to be following seemed an ideal opportunity to strike.

  ‘Of course I do,’ he replied, almost indignantly.

  A-ha, I thought to myself, this is where I start to pull it all apart, to reveal Tukaal as nothing more than a fraud. I think I licked my lips in anticipation.

  ‘And can you give me a copy of this Protocol?’

  ‘Of course. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a hard-copy...’

  Got him!

  ‘...but I do have it electronically, if you would permit me to download it to your laptop computer.’

  I put down my pen and paper and hurried over to switch on the laptop. Let’s see him do this, I thought to myself.

  I was expecting Tukaal to nip off upstairs to the spare room to get a memory stick or something from his metal case.

  But he didn’t.

  Instead, he just sat there, sipping his cup of Costa Rican coffee and licking his lips as he diligently savoured the flavours.

  After about a minute, the laptop had settled itself down and finished all its start-up routines, so I put it on the coffee table in front of him like a medieval knight laying down a gauntlet. As I did so, I flicked the button on the front of the laptop to disable the wireless network connection; after all, I didn’t want him simply downloading stuff off the internet from www.intergalacticfantasistsrus.com.

  I needn’t have bothered.

  He didn’t need the wireless internet connection.

  In fact, he didn’t need any sort of connection at all.

  He had his own.

  In what was one of the creepiest and most surreal things I think I’ve ever seen, he simply looked at the laptop (he didn’t touch it, not the mouse pad or any of the USB ports, not even the plastic body) and Microsoft Word suddenly opened all by itself...and then a document, a very official looking document at that, appeared on the screen, followed by another and another and another.

  ‘I’ve loaded a number of documents onto your laptop which you might find useful, as well as the First Contact Protocol. There are copies of the minutes of Classification Council meetings relating to Earth, as well as the Confederation’s official Glossary and an Index of Acronyms. I’ve also given you a copy of the Confederation’s official membership invitation to Earth — you’re the first to see that, by the way - and some general information about the Confederation as a whole. I’ve put all of these items in a folder on
your laptop’s hard-drive which I have entitled ‘Alien Shit’.’

  He took another sip of his coffee and smiled. I’m not sure if he was smiling in smugness or because he thought he had made a joke. If it was the latter, then it wasn’t very funny.

  ‘I can also download a transcript of our entire conversation, if you’d like...it’ll save you spending all your time frantically scribbling notes.’

  It was a spectacular 1-2 combination of punches to my scepticism and, to be honest, it laid it out cold on the canvas. I think my mouth must have been so wide open in astonishment that it probably looked like a tunnel.

  Eventually, my sheer amazement at what I’d seen eased enough for my brain to tell my mouth to close itself before some workmen turned up and did a sewer inspection on it.

  ‘You can give me a transcript...how?’

  ‘Simple, I’ve been recording everything that has happened to me since I arrived.’

  The gormless look of bewilderment on my face must have encouraged him to explain a little further.

  ‘I have a neural net fitted inside my skull. It’s a self-powered pseudo-organic net developed by URG, with a storage capacity, in your terms, of about six hundred thousand terabytes. It automatically stores information from all my sensory organs so that there is a record of everything I see and do and feel. As an Ambassador, it’s important to have a permanent record to fall back on as evidence of what transpires during any negotiations.’

  [Collator’s Note: In amongst the CDs, the great mass of paper, the memory sticks, napkins, beermats and Post-It Notes which JP passed to me, there was a bundle of DVDs marked ‘Tukaal’. These contain, in total, about 90 hours of video footage, complete with sound and a strange side-display which seems to measure a host of other parameters that I can’t even begin to understand. I’ve watched it all and, where it features JP, it corroborates all that he has written in this diary.We thought long and hard about including excerpts of this video footage as a DVD with the book, but eventually, we decided against it, primarily because we couldn’t really see what value it would add. We also thought about putting the video on something like YouTube, but we knew that no sooner would we get it on the Web than THEY would make sure it was taken off. Besides, without the context of the diary, it is all pretty meaningless.]

  ‘And the computer mind-control thing...?’

  ‘Oh, that,’ he replied with a theatrical waft of the hand, ‘that’s just the...what would you probably call it...the wireless interface mechanism that’s built into my neural net. The systems on your laptop are quite simple, simple enough to enable me to access them and manipulate the programs, as you saw. More complex systems may require me to ‘hard-wire in’ as you might say.’

  ‘And how would you do that?’ I enquired with a mixture of childish awe and trepidation.

  ‘Oh, there are several ways,’ he answered enigmatically...and that was it. That was all he would say.

  ‘And those are...?’ I prompted, but without success.

  ‘Oh, come now, Jethro,’ he laughed, ‘I can’t tell you absolutely everything. Men from outer space have to retain some air of mystery about them, don’t you think?’

  And with that, he flashed me another enigmatic smile.

  We decided at that point to have another little break during which time we had a top up of Costa Rican coffee and a couple of McVities Chocolate Hob-Nobs.

  I have to admit that, with the revelation that Tukaal somehow had the ability to record everything we said and did, and was also able to provide it for me in the form of a transcript, I did begin to wonder whether there was any real point in my writing anything else down. After all, Tukaal’s record would be more accurate, more complete and, dare I say, more dispassionate than anything I could ever produce...but that, I think, is exactly the reason why I needed to keep writing my notes, why I needed to keep doing what it is I am doing this very moment.

  You see, what I’m writing now isn’t simply a chronology of events; such a thing would be, I think, extremely dull, like reading a shopping list or a car repair manual. No, this is an account, my account, of what has happened, what is happening and, maybe, what is yet to happen.

  It is not meant to be a perfect record of every word spoken and every action undertaken; instead it is meant to relay my feelings, my thoughts, my emotions...

  One way of explaining it would be to think of the D-Day Landings. You could read a book which tells you who landed on which beach, at what time, how many men there were, how many Germans were defending, how the Allies established their bridgeheads, how they moved inland, etc, etc. But whilst such a book can provide you with the facts, it cannot even begin to convey to you what really happened that day. In order to have even the slightest understanding and appreciation of what really happened on that day, you would need to read the accounts of the men who were actually there, read about the fear they felt as they approached the beaches in the landing craft (or saw the landing craft approaching if you want a German perspective), the horror they felt as they saw men cut down by a hail of machine-gun bullets, bodies ripped open and blown apart, blood everywhere, the smells, the tastes, the sounds of the chattering machine guns and wailing of dying men, screaming in agony...only when you read about those things can you truly appreciate what happened. Only then does the event become real.

  I guess that’s what I’m trying to do here; keep it real, keep it human, make it something more than just a dull documentary because, to me, this is something really important, something really special, something I want to be able to read about when I’m 90 and still be able to feel what I feel now because what I’ve written here makes it all come alive for me again...

  Shit, why the hell have I just written all that...? As if I haven’t got enough stuff to write up without going off down tangent boulevard...

  Then again, there is a pretty good reason why I’ve written all that down. It’s so I can justify to myself why I’m sat here, well after midnight, writing something that I know, deep down inside:

  no-one, apart from me, is ever going to read;

  no-one is ever going to believe (maybe, in the future, not even me!)

  Anyway, after we had finished our coffee and our biscuits, we continued with our discussions and I, in spite of knowing that Tukaal was creating a perfect record of everything, continued to scribble my notes...and yes, late at night, I have been trying to put them into some semblance of order.

  We discussed in detail the Confederation’s view of the Earth and how it’s view of mankind’s development has led to the arrival of Tukaal for First Contact. After a lunch of cheese and pickle sandwiches with some slices of luncheon meat from Dave’s stall on the market, some Salt and Vinegar McCoys crisps and a pot of Earl Grey tea, we talked for another couple of hours, this time about more general things such as how different life-forms communicate, how time is measured in space (which led to much amusement on my part with regard to a particularly funny acronym), how distances are measured, how they work out dates and lots of other weird shit like that.

  Then we both decided we could do with a bit of fresh air and so, with the drizzle of the morning having given way to brighter, clearer skies, we went for a walk in Whitehall Park, during which time Tukaal took the opportunity to tell me a bit about himself (my notes on that are not so good — I’ve had to write them up from memory because I couldn’t walk and write at the same time!).

  It was interesting to watch him in the park. I’ve walked through there on countless occasions and I always thought I walked with my eyes open and my senses keen and alert, looking out and listening for birds in the trees, rabbits in the undergrowth, that sort of thing, keeping myself in touch with nature.

  But in the hour and a half that we were out, he examined almost everything with an extraordinary intensity that bordered almost on the obsessive. I mean, he spent at least two minutes just rubbing his hand across the textured bark of a tree, and another couple of minutes simply feeling the waxiness of a holly leaf
on his fingers.

  We then sat in quiet reflection for a while on one of the benches, watching people go by, some walking their dogs, others walking their kids, and he studied them all with the same disturbing intensity.

  ‘You can read about things,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘you can study, you can experience all the sensations of a place through a globe chamber*, but it’s never quite the same as feeling it in person.’

  (*apparently, a ‘globe chamber’ is a special bubble that someone can go into which then recreates a previously recorded world around them, complete with sights, smells, noises, sensations, everything. Ambassadors use them quite a lot to familiarise themselves with the world they are going to visit — I guess they’re a bit like the holo-deck on the Starship Enterprise...the new one, with Jean-Luc Picard).

  When we got back home we had yet another cup of tea (this time we decided to try the Assam) and then we talked a bit more about Tukaal and his role as an Ambassador. Then we got on to the subject of Researchers, but by this time I was pretty tired and so, I suspect, was Tukaal, so that was why I suggested we get something to eat. I could easily have ordered in a pizza from San Remo’s and had it delivered, but Tukaal was intrigued by the idea of eating in a restaurant and so, as he had offered to pay, I phoned up Sukhis to see if they had a table and fortunately they said they could fit us in around 8.30. So, in order that I could have a drink, we hopped on a bus (something else about which Tukaal was fascinated) and went down into town.

  Just for the record, after a few popadoms and relishes, we had a selection of starters which included onion bhajis, garlic mushroom puri, meat chaat and vegetable samosa (mostly because Tukaal insisted on trying as many different dishes as he could). For a main, I had chicken tikka balti with pilau rice and a peshwari nan, whilst Tukaal somehow managed to convince the waiter to bring him a small serving of jhinga rangeela, lamb tikka pathia, chicken jalfiazzi and rogonee sabzi, all with boiled rice and a garlic nan, all washed down with a pint of Cobra on my part and two large glasses of Coca-Cola on his. Tukaal then had a slice of Bailey’s cheesecake (I was simply too full for a dessert) and we finished with a couple of coffees (which unfortunately weren’t as good as the ones I made at home).