Strange Days

by Constantine J. Singer

  “Other aliens?” is all I can think of to ask.

  “They call themselves the Gentry. You can think of them as sort of a ‘parent’”—he makes air quotes—“race to us—they’ve been taking care of us for a long time from a distance and now they’re helping us more directly. Jeff’s been working with them for a while.”

  “So Live-Tech and all his other inventions . . .”

  Corina laughs. “Jeff’s smart, but he’s not that smart.”

  “Gentry tech, mostly. Live-Tech you’re familiar with.” He gestures at my ear. I fight the urge to move my hair to hide the pod from him. “Live-Tech creates a bridge between biology and technology—essentially they’ve found a way of translating instructions directly from our minds without having to use common coding language to communicate—very handy for making things like phones and food fabricators”—he points at the cat carrier—“do what we want without having to tell them.”

  “So it really is mind . . .” I get halfway through the question when I start to feel dumb again and trail off.

  Richard nods. “Yep. The Gentry are a millennium ahead of us when it comes to biological technology—essentially, Live-Tech bonds with us, gathers specific elements of our thoughts, and translates them into usable information for nonbiological technologies. The food fabricator? When you touched the hand indentation, you created a temporary bond with a Live-Tech sensor. It searched your mind for specific food-related information and then turned it into computer code for the rest of the fabricator to utilize.”

  “I get it,” I say, nodding. “It’s like Google Translate between brain and computer.”

  Corina smiles, looks at me, smiles wider. “That’s pretty much it.”

  I have another question before he goes any further: “How does it stop the . . .” I can’t even say the word out loud. “How does it stop them?”

  Richard points a finger at me. “Good question. Live-Tech, when it’s paired and operational, creates a field effect that can hurt or even kill them.” He points at my ear again. “You’re living proof that a single pod can protect a single person, but there’s also a cumulative effect. If we can get Live-Tech everywhere, attached to everyone, not only would each person be protected individually, but there would be a field effect that would be so strong they won’t even be able to come through their portals without frying.”

  Corina makes a circle with her finger. “That’s where we come in. We’ve got to get Live-Tech attached to every single person on Earth. We won’t be safe until we do.”

  Richard points back at the thing in his hand. “Now you have some direct experience with what we’re facing, but I need to show you something so you’ll truly understand.” He holds the thing up. “Bring it to your face. It’ll attach itself, so you’ll be able to let go.”

  I reach for the thing on the table, pull it toward me and pick it up. It’s a lot lighter than I expect it to be.

  “What you’re going to see is frightening, but remember, it’s not happening here. You’re watching through a telescope and seeing something that’s happening very far away, alright?”

  I was bringing it up to my face when he started talking, but I stop when he says this. I start lowering it. I don’t want this. I can barely deal with what I’ve already seen and heard.

  “Alex.” Corina leans in toward me, stops my hand from lowering the telescope any farther. “You need to see this.”

  I look at her, nod. I bring it the rest of the way up to my face.

  My world evaporates. I’m not in the kitchen. I’m not anywhere I recognize. I can’t tell up from down. Everything is wrong. “What the hell?!” I feel like I’m losing my balance. I reach out to steady myself, but my hand hits the table even though I can’t see it.

  “Don’t worry. You’re still in the kitchen.” Richard’s voice is coming from somewhere nearby. “You’re just looking through the telescope. Tell me what you see.”

  His voice steadies me. I focus on what’s in my view.

  There’s sky and there’s ground, but they’re wrong. The sky is dark and thick with yellow and purple clouds that move like water through the air. They’re so low and close, I could reach up and dip my hand in. The ground beneath me is smooth like a dinner plate, slightly curved and white as milk.

  I look for horizons to orient myself, but the plate I’m standing on is surrounded by other, taller plates that make it hard to see beyond them. “What the hell . . .” I reach out for the table again to make sure it’s still there. I take a breath. “I’m standing on something.” I look again, more closely, more able to concentrate. They aren’t plates, they’re the tops of things. “I think it’s some kind of building.” Pieces begin to fall into place. “Yeah, a building. Where is this?”

  I feel Richard press against the telescope. Suddenly my view shifts upward like I’m being launched in a rocket. The world spreads out below me as I fly. The clouds whip past and melt into a bruise-colored swirl that then slips to a quarter-sized spot in a sea of sickly yellow-tinged clouds that belt the entire planet.

  I’m not looking at Earth.

  There’s a huge glowing red star in the sky that looks near enough to touch. “Holy crap.”

  “You’re looking at a planet about twelve light-years from Earth.”

  “The Locusts live there?” The buildings. I immediately feel dumb for asking.

  “Indeed.” I feel Richard’s hand against the telescope again and I’m suddenly back on the top of the white building. His hand moves again. “Remember, what you’re seeing is happening, but you are not actually there. Nothing that you see can hurt you and they have no way of knowing that you’re watching, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re perfectly safe.”

  The way he says it makes me feel like it’s not true at all, but before I can even get nervous about it, I’m in a different place. It’s a big place, bumpy, hard to understand.

  The light is bad, but I suddenly wish it was worse. The room is filled with Locusts. They’re huddled in bunches on the floor, the walls, even the ceiling, where they hang like bats.

  The whole place seems to quiver with their movement.

  He touches the telescope again and I’m somewhere new. There are cages and equipment. It looks like a lab but I don’t recognize anything inside it. “Look into a cage.”

  I float over to the nearest one and look inside. There’s a body there. It’s attached to a bunch of black, spaghetti-like tubes that seem to be coming right out of her skin. She looks like she’s been dead for a while.

  She’s human, with dark skin and dark hair that are still visible through the mess. “How did she get here?”

  “She was taken in an Incursion in Peru a few days ago. The Locusts have the technology to open targeted portals between their world and other places, which allows them to travel huge distances instantly. During these initial Incursions, they’re just taking victims back to their planet to run tests.”

  But I don’t hear the last part of his answer because the dead lady opens her eyes and now I’m screaming.

  “She’s alive!” I pull back as fast as I can, but that just lets me see that there are dozens of cages, just like hers, and they’ve all got bodies in them.

  “For now. Soon they’ll have finished their preliminary exams, and then . . .”

  “Then what?”

  He doesn’t say anything for a moment and I think he didn’t hear me. I’m just about to repeat myself when he speaks.

  “Right now the victims of the Incursions are being used as test subjects. The Locusts are establishing that we have proper nutrient capacity and that there are no elements of our biology that might pose a risk if eaten. They’re also testing our endurance and minimum requirements for sustaining life. Once that’s done, they’re going to perform one more test on her and the others.”

  “What’s
that?”

  He looks at me, his face serious. “They’re going to eat her and the others, and we suspect that they will like our taste. The Locusts are going to use us as food.”

  “They’re gonna farm us,” Corina says.

  My brain is on overload. I start thinking about the lady and suddenly I’m back hovering over her. She’s looking up at me and I swear she can see me. Her lips are moving. She’s saying something over and over and over again.

  I think she’s praying.

  I panic. I want to go home. Before I finish my thought, my view shifts.

  I’m standing in the kitchen of my own house. There’s dried blood on the floor where my mom and dad were. There’s black powder over everything, clustered like mold along the cabinets, the door handles, and the open knife drawer.

  I close my eyes so I won’t have to look. The blood and the dirt, the fact that I won’t ever see my parents again.

  I’ll never go home again.

  I don’t want to see anything else. There isn’t anything out there in the whole universe that can make things better for me right now. I want to rip the telescope off my face and throw it to the ground, but as I reach up to rip it off it just falls into my hand.

  The sudden change in light and the fresh air on my face make me squint. My eyes are full of tears and squinting sends them down my cheeks.

  Richard is staring at me. “Alex? You can talk to me . . .” He says it like he’s hurting, too.

  I don’t want to talk to him about it. Instead, I look at the telescope in my hand and try to get myself under control.

  “I’m so sorry about your parents, Alex.”

  I start to nod, but something finally catches, something that’s been bothering me. I look at Richard. “How do you all know about that?”

  Richard looks confused.

  “How . . .” My emotions are still strangling me. I clear my throat, can’t clear the guitars. “How do you all know about what happened to my parents?”

  He nods, purses his lips. “I know it’s hard not to focus on that right now, but I promise that you’ll understand soon.”

  I stand up, edge toward the door. “Tell me or I’m out.”

  Richard looks at Corina.

  “Show him,” she says. Then she turns to me. “This is gonna be weird for you, so prepare yourself.”

  I don’t know what she’s talking about, and this is all weird, so I don’t know what she means by prepare myself. “Whatever. You need to tell me how you know.”

  Richard seems to realize that he just stepped in it. He sighs, then: “We know because you’re going to tell us, Alex.”

  I shake my head. “I haven’t told you anything.”

  Richard looks squarely at me, then nods and reaches out to the box on the table.

  The air gets cloudy again, not black this time, but a mix of colors. A video begins. It’s me. I’m sitting in a chair in a room I don’t recognize and I’m wearing the black T-shirt I’m wearing right now. As I try to make sense of that, the me on the recording begins to talk:

  “I found them on the kitchen floor when I got home on Friday night—I was going to tell them I needed help and that I was ready to go to the psych ward if that’s what they thought I needed. I didn’t even see the bug at first, it was totally silent and it looked like a shadow in the doorway or something, but when I went to go to my mom, it moved and then I saw it . . . It showed me its arm, the one with the knife on it . . . It had their blood on it, so it was the only part that showed anything, any light . . .”

  I don’t wait for the video to end before I turn away.

  Being wanted for murder, being crazy, life in prison—those are all normal things, and right now they all seem so much safer than a world where things are unstuck in time and float around, where aliens are going to kill us and other aliens are helping us and people know things that they cannot possibly know.

  Richard reaches out for me.

  “Let me go.” The words are drowned out by the guitars shredding in my head. I try and shout over them, “LET ME GO!”

  I push away from him and run through the door we came in, across the patio, and back out through the Long Hall.

  Nobody tries to stop me.

  I run for blocks, but I don’t know where I am or where I’m going. I’ve left my backpack, which has my money in it along with everything else I own. I’ve got nothing. I’m in a strange part of a strange city. I’ve got no wheels of any sort and no way to get any. So I have no money and nowhere to go.

  And I’m wanted for murder.

  There’s a bus stop with a bench down the street and I go sit on it. I have only one friend that I know of right now, and I want to hear her voice.

  I close my eyes and slip through the drain to go down deep. She’s there.

  I NEED HELP.

  She responds: “You already helped yourself, running boy.”

  HOW?

  “You wrote it in the letter.”

  HOW?

  “Read your letter, scared boy—read it like it’s from your crew, boy.”

  And then she’s gone.

  I surface and open my eyes. Corina’s car is pulling into the bus stop in front of me. She rolls down the window and holds something out to me. “You told me to bring this.” She raises her eyebrows. “Your crew?”

  When we were in middle school, we had a tagging crew called BTC. We thought we were really cool. Beems developed a code that we could use to discuss business without anybody knowing what we were doing. It was dumb, but it worked because when teachers or parents found the notes, they only read stupid stuff about girls or classes or just random words. All we did was use the first letter of every third word. We got really good at writing like that and it was sort of a competition to write the most boring note that made sense while hiding the real message, BTC style.

  Corina’s handing me the letter.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I pulled it out of your backpack.”

  “What the—” But she cuts me off.

  “You told me to do it, so don’t get extra.”

  I give up and unfold the note, flattening it against my thigh.

  Hey Alex,

  This is you. Really. Please listen up, man, your stupid life depends totally on it. Can you please open your ears right now? Listen, I know it’s not cool what’s all happening, but you need to stop doubting and lift your ugly eyes up so you can see what’s happening around you. You’re not crazy, man—all this is real

  My mind is flighty and it’s hard to concentrate, but I see it. First letter of every third word. When I’m done, I look up. Corina’s watching me through the rolled-down window from the driver’s seat. I catch motion coming up on my left. A bus is coming. She’s going to have to move the car, so I get up and open the door.

  “To the bus or to the compound? I’ll do it either way.”

  “The compound, I guess.”

  She nods and pulls out from in front of the bus. “What’d the note say?”

  The note hadn’t said much, just two words, but they were all I had. Nothing makes sense today, but I figure I probably have my own back even if nobody else does. The message was just:

  TRUST CORINA

  Eighteen

  Richard is waiting for us in front of the door to the long hall. “I’m sorry, Alex,” he says before I even get across the driveway. “This is hard enough for the other kids who come here whose parents weren’t killed—I just . . .” He shrugs and looks at me, waiting to be forgiven.

  I nod. “T’salright.”

  His whole body slumps with relief, and I want to put my hand on his arm to let him know that it’s okay. I don’t, though. Instead, I shake my head and step into the hallway. I don’t want to talk about it anymore because I don’t even know what I think.

 
Once we’re back in the kitchen, I’m ready to ask more questions. “How did you do that with the video?”

  He gestures at the chair I was sitting in and then sits down across the table. “The simple answer is that you made that video, and then we sent it back in time using a device we got from the Gentry.”

  I nod. It makes as much sense as anything else. “Richard?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The bug—the Locust—that killed my parents?”

  He nods, encouraging me.

  “Why didn’t it just take them? Take me? The Incursions . . .” This is hard to talk about. “They took people.”

  “Why did it try and kill you instead of taking you back to their planet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because they know you’re a threat, Alex. They know what you can do. That’s why we had to get you that Live-Tech pod.” He shakes his head. “It took a lot of work on a lot of people’s part for you to survive long enough to get here. We had to get your mom to order the Live-Tech, make sure it was delivered in time, make sure you put it on before the Locust got you.” He chuckles. “Just getting your mom to order the Live-Tech was nearly impossible—there weren’t many futures where she was willing to.” He refocuses on me. “It was worth it because we knew what you would be able to do as well as they do.” He leans forward. “Getting you here is a major victory for us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He nods, leans back again. “The Gentry have shown us a way, Alex, to make sure that things happen the right way even before they happen—to control the future so we can keep the Earth safe. This technology is what we used to make sure you got the Live-Tech that saved your life—it’s very effective, but it’s also very difficult. It’s a job that only very specific people can do.” He leans in, nods his head like he’s pointing at me with it. “People like you.”

  “So you need me to . . . ?”

  “We need you to be an advance spy for us. We need you to witness the future, to make sure it happens the way humanity needs it to. In order to protect ourselves from a full-scale Locust invasion, we have very little time to get Live-Tech into the hands of every person on Earth, which won’t be easy, and will require a lot of different people making exactly the decisions we need them to make. As you probably know, Live-Tech gets a lot of pushback—people are afraid of it, the US government thinks it might be dangerous. You see the issues we face. We can ensure victory for Earth, but we urgently need your help to do it.”