The Trimedian

by Dangerous Walker

  Jason could have argued, but there didn't really seem any point, and he could do with more booze. Milk sat there staring at the back of his huge hands, he slowly turned them over and let his eyes follow the lines of his palms, more like crevasses than lines really. He sighed; he would miss Earth and this thought surprised him, he was disappointed to come here five years ago, hidden away from the rest of the Universe, but he really didn't have much choice if he was honest with himself and it was a cushy gig. That was what he couldn't work out, and still hadn't, why those in charge had let him come, done something so, well, nice. It was out of character.

  Still he'd grown to like the planet; it was famous for a number of reasons, despite its backwardness. For one, Earth seemed to have a regenerative effect on those who did not live there and so had many famous (and hidden from Earthens) spas. Just a week on Earth could have you looking and feeling a year younger.

  Secondly, the thing with Earthens was that their backwardness meant they concentrated on things no one else did. Like perfecting a good pint, inventing the guitar, jokes, TV. No one else in the Universe bothered too much with TV because if they wanted to escape, wanted adventure, they just went out and found it rather than get it vicariously through a box. On the other hand, you'd never find Jimi Hendrix on any other planet as no one would spend that much concentration on a musical instrument. He was glad Earth was as it was for this reason; the Universe without Jimi wasn't really a universe at all.

  Jason plonked himself down with two pints and a packet of pork scratchings.

  "So where were we? Ahh, yes, you were drivelling on about wiping my memory. I'd think you were joking, but you don't really get jokes do you?"

  Milk was aggrieved. "I think I've gotten a lot better at understanding them over the last five years, I even made that girl laugh last week at the Jamestown Club!"

  "Well, I'll give you that; it was pretty funny, though I can't actually remember what you said."

  Milk sighed, no he couldn't either, damn his penchant for vodka jellies. He just remembered the warm surge of pride as they all laughed and now he was glad he had got one good one in before they left.

  "Anyway, we're getting away from ourselves."

  "I'd like to be getting away from you."

  "Not going to happen anytime soon. Listen your name isn't really Jason Wellgood, you're not really a writer, and you don't even really come from Earth."

  "Excuse me?" Jason didn't really believe his ears, his friend had always been a bit odd, but it seemed he had finally snapped.

  "Your name isn't really Jason Wellgood, you're not really a writer, and you don't even really come from Earth."

  Best to take this calmly, don't freak out, help your friend, listen to his delusions and then ever so gently suggest some help.

  "So what is my name?" this was an ever so wrong moment to take a sip of his pint.

  "Chase Darkstaar."

  Jason splat his pint across the table, gagged and coughed at the same time, belched and then laughed. "Chase Darkstaar? That's ridiculous!"

  "Yeah, I know," said Milk somewhat gloomily.

  "You're serious aren't you?" Jason frowned.

  As previously mentioned Milk wasn't the greatest punster and this kind of trickery would be beyond him even if he had gone mad. Jason didn't know why, but something in his friend's face convinced him that Milk was telling the truth. I guess that is what friendship is, isn't it? Being willing to trust your friend on a look; believing the most farfetched truths.

  "Your name is Chase Darkstaar and you are an intergalactic hitman. Basically you hid something very important and then came to Earth and had your memory wiped so that even if someone found you, you couldn't tell them where it was."

  "Er? why?"

  "That I have never been able to work out."

  "Right and so a/ where do you come into all this, b/ why are you telling me now and c/ what did I hide?"

  Despite the obvious lunacy Jason kind of wanted it to be true so that he would not lose his friend to an asylum and so that his life might be somewhat more exciting.

  "Well, c/ I don't know; a/ I'm your friend and assistant in all things, when you chose this job I had to come and make sure everything was OK. Make sure you settled into Earth life etc. and b/ I'm telling you this now because there is an intergalactic WAR brewing and it is very possible that people will come looking for you to get whatever it is that you hid."

  "Right. Sooo?" He took a long gulp of beer. "What's the plan?"

  "Well, I have to prove all this to you I suppose."

  "Good place to start."

  "Then we need to try and get your memory back so that you can find whatever you hid and divert the WAR."

  "Right. So how come nobody on Earth knows about said intergalactic shenanigans?"

  "It's a long story best told in space, but you will quickly discover that Earth is a very backward planet, heck Earthens still war against themselves. Idiots."

  "But we are Earthlings."

  "Well yes and no. We are Human, our ancestry is on Earth, but neither of us were born there. Again I will fill you in in space."

  "In space?"

  "In space." Milk got up and Jason followed suit.

  "Tell me one thing."

  "OK"

  "You say I was a hitman?"

  "That's right, the best."

  "Was I a nice guy?"

  Milk blushed and looked at his canoe-esque feet. "Erm, no not really."

  "Oh."

 

  There is a race of Aliens called, well you wouldn't be able to pronounce it, but the Humans just call them Greys. I'm sure you know what I mean, otherwise skip forward to the chapter entitled 'Other Life Forms You Will Meet'.

  So the Greys came to Earth during the Victorian era, just to poke about, see what was what. You're basically neighbours, you know? No, I don't suppose you do. Well, you do now.

  Unfortunately they rather underestimated your average Victorian Briton; you see the Victorians were in the process of conquering most of the known world, and in fact finding new bits; just so they could conquer them as well.

  Being as that was, rather than being scared by aliens (the Grey's fake beards and glasses were not as convincing as hoped) they simply saw space as a new place to conquer, a new place to bring a good slice of Britishness to.

  And so a group of ten or so convinced the aliens to take them, a number of tea plants, and a picture of the Queen with them.

  Between them, the aliens and the Humans set out discovering new worlds, sharing the Grey's technology with others in order to set up a trading network. Most species found that when the Greys had given them a step up they were quite able to come up with their own technology which they shared again with the Humans and Greys.

  All along the Humans, who called themselves Victorians, planned to get back to Earth and bring to Queen Victoria a whole universe in which to rule. Unfortunately it all went a bit tit's up.

  From: A Brief Guide to the Universe for Earthens

 

 

  WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSE

  Well it didn't look like a spaceship, well it kind of did, but not when your sole experience of such things is Star Wars. Which Jason would have to now admit had stirred some strange feelings in him; well not so strange feelings when he watched episodes I to III, those feelings we all know: disappointment, disgust, incredulity, anger, despair.

  The fact with space ships in films is that they are generally aerodynamic in shape which is kind of stupid due to the whole no-air-in-space and what not. It's a vacuum; the only thing that will stop you moving is your brakes or a large wall.

  This spaceship was a cube; it was this shape, Milk informed him, simply because it is the cheapest shape to make, and this was a very cheap spaceship. Still, it was a large cube, the size of a decent bungalow; though let's face it the only decent bungalow is one with a second storey.

  "Ahh, so we'll be flying in a Rubik's Cube then?" asked Jason.


  "Oh, you're a comedy genius aren't you?"

  Having driven an hour or so they stood in a storage bay in a warehouse just outside Essex. After having lived on Earth for five years Milk decided Essex probably wasn't the best place to have left a spaceship, locked up or not. As he fumbled around his chasmic pockets for the keys he was surprised it had never turned up on Camden Market. Jason was wondering how they got it into storage in the first place.

  "How are we going to get it out?"

  "Fly it."

  "Right; of course, I mean that won't cause too much of a fuss will it?"

  Milk located his keys under a 6 inch baguette and pulled them out. "It doesn't matter; a welcome party is on the way."

  "A welcome party?"

  "Yeah, Welcome to the Universe.

  "It's been decided that it's probably better just to get Earth in on the game, what with war brewing," he pressed a button on the key fob and a door opened toward the top of the smooth silver side.

  An escalator descended which at first was surprising as even in Sci-Fi films spaceships had stairs, but then if you have the technology to fly from planet to planet, escalators aren't really a stretch.

  They ascended up into the interior of the second floor and Jason was pleasantly surprised to find that it was rather cosy. In the films spaceships are always rather drab, generally with the pipes showing so that someone could blast them with a laser and escape as the boiling steam trapped their pursuers. But again if the local council could build houses with pipes behind the walls, why not aliens with their spaceships?

  They walked along a corridor that had a number of doors leading off of it; the corridor was pretty musty, though due to the whole got-to-be-airtight-for-travelling-through-the-vacuum-shenanigans it wasn't dusty. Milk would later point out that the bottom half of the cube was engines and such like and give a brief explanation of how it all worked, but it's not a conversation worth going over now or even later when it happens. Booooring.

  At the end of the corridor was a short staircase going up to the bridge and as they wandered up Jason looked back and appreciated the delightful maroon carpet of the corridor. Maybe this wasn't going to be so bad after all.

  ***

  After some tricky manoeuvring of a large cube out of a storage facility and a lot of help from the security guard they were off into the atmosphere and then space.

  One of the strengths of the average Londoner is the ability to be blithely unbothered by even the most astounding things; they tend to grab hold of the nearest aspect that is normal and then treat it like that. So when the Underground was bombed in 2006 most people forewent the whole shock of nearly being blown into small bits for the fact that they would be late for work and then got on with dealing with it. Bombing London these days is pretty pointless, people have being doing it for decades and Londoners are as impressed by it as the goddess Kali would be by multi-tasking.

  When the security guard saw the great flying cube he was dumbfounded until he realised that it really needed some help getting out and that rational part took over and he started shouting and waving in the same way he would to help someone back into a tight spot down his road. If they lived there of course, he hated all those gits who parked there and then went off to get the tube into the centre, leaving no room for residents.

  Gits.

  Ten minutes after the spaceship had flown into the clear blue sky, the security guard was still thinking about the gits and how to stop them parking on his road. If anyone would later ask him why he hadn't reported a space ship, he would tell them that it wasn't his concern, but street parking was.

  ***

  It was after the horrendous feeling of going through the atmosphere that Jason asked how the ship worked, more in order to take his mind off his stomach. It's this conversation we'll be skipping and instead fill the time pointing out that physically the trip through the atmosphere isn't really a problem as nothing outside affects the inside artificial atmosphere of the ship, no g forces, no heat or cold etc. Seeing the atmosphere burning around them however had been enough to throw him into mental disarray and in that state his mind, not wishing to go through it alone, decided his stomach should join the party.

  "So that's how spaceships work," Milk finished

  "Well I can honestly say I wish I had never asked."

  He had spent much of Milk's explanation looking around the cabin. It was very comfortable; along one wall stood a bank of electronics that were really only there in case anything went wrong.

  Once upon a time you had to go down to the engines to fix it, but now you could go to this computer bank which was linked to the engines. What happens then is the same with all technology designed to make your life easier. You waste a considerable amount of time and patience trying to get it to work and when you finally do (generally by hitting it), it tells you either a/ there is no problem or b/ there is but it can't fix it. So you end up having to go down to the engine room anyway and probably banging your head on something because you are so irate. And so a five minute job takes a good half an hour due to our unfounded belief that there is a quick way to do anything. The only quick way to do anything is, in the end, the long way. Which, er, then becomes the quick way, and short cuts are the long way, which is the only way to do things quickly, and er? oh, forget it.

  Anyway the rest was a bit like a car, a sort of console thing with a keypad to type in destinations and such and two lovely big chairs which had joysticks on each arm for manual driving. They also hover so you can steer the chair around the room with little direction buttons. In front of the console was a six foot gap and then a huge window-like screen of outer space. This is incredibly dull to watch and so the screens are generally fitted to be able to watch films, play games or pick up the local TV stations of various planets.

  "So where are we going?" Jason asked making his chair hover to the left and then right, building up for a 360?.

  "We'll go and see a man called Eric, well Sir Eric; he'll sort you out with everything you need to know."

  "How long will it take us to get there?" Jason stopped messing with his chair having only got a pathetic one hundred and twenty degrees before the chair started to smoke lightly. "In fact where is there?"

  "He's in a space cruiser just outside the Milky Way."

  "Of course."

  "It will take us a couple of hours to get there at least, so I might as well answer any other questions you have."

  "Okaaaay, hmm, let me think. So, er, Grey aliens are real, not a figment of the red neck imagination. And they took some Victorians out into space where they basically transformed the Universe into a trading network."

  "That's not a question, but yes."

  "But now the Universe is split and there looks like there will be a war." He stopped and then changed to: "But now the Universe is split and there looks like there will be a war?"

  "Yes, it seems some of the races want more space, more control etc. Same old, same old."

  "But it also has something to do with Earth," he said and then added "?".

  "Yes, but I am only sketchy on such information, Sir Eric will tell us all," he stared off into space, literally. "I hope."

  "So someone is off to point out to the rest of Earth that there has been intergalactic travel and trade for a long time, we just failed to notice."

  "Basically."

  ***

  That someone was Sir Jeffery and he wasn't looking forward to it. Not least because Earthens were barbaric and everyone was well aware that Sir Jeffery's welcome party may come back very dead. Americans in particular seemed to be very well refined in the shoot-now-ask-later school of thought and to land there would no doubt mean to be surrounded by armed soldiers and tanks. Then again to land anywhere they would probably be surrounded by American soldiers and tanks. Not that this was a very scary prospect, the American military were a bit crap really, no one else in the whole Universe had managed to invent 'friendly fire'; that is accidentally
killing people who are on your side, certainly no one had had the gall to give it a name and pretend it was OK. No the American military weren't such a worry, but it only took one nervous young soldier to accidentally tighten his grip for the whole army to start blasting away. And that was true of anyone anywhere. No, he wouldn't feel safe again until he was back in space.

  Now they sat in flying saucers at the edge of the solar system in which Earth resides; they chose the Grey's flying saucers because it is what your average Earthen expects aliens to arrive in and will somehow seem a bit more comforting to their minds. They could easily have gone down and landed undetected except for the fact that then no one would believe they were from space. No it would have to be a big entrance and so there were three ships, though only with Humans. It was decided to slowly introduce all the different new species of life to the Earthens slowly so as not to overburden them or, frankly, panic them. No one wants a panicked Earth. Generally because that would mean them launching various missiles as a way of feeling back in control.

  Sir Jeffery picked up a telephone in his flying saucer and tapped in the number.

  ***

  Chet Knowles had secretly given up any hope that aliens would get in touch. He sat by the computer desk at the radar station letting the electronic whirs and clicks wash over him. It was, he had realised, a big waste of tax payers money to build all these space things, telescopes and radars and what not, there was nothing out there. He didn't care anymore, the job paid well and all the waiting gave him plenty of time to write his own space adventure novel. He was inspired to start by Jason Wellgood's series of novels, "Adventures in Space", rubbish name, but great books, they just seemed so realistic and Chet thought if anyone did contact them, space would be very much like a Jason Wellgood novel. Little did he know that Jason based his novels on a sub-subconscious memory of his life in space and that the Universe was indeed very much like the novels Chet so enjoyed. A fact he was about to find out.

  And if Chet didn't really believe aliens would contact the Earth, he certainly never expected that they would do so by the phone.

  It rings.

  "Hello," says Chet irritated he has had to leave the new 'Adventures in Space' book.

  "Good day to you, sir, could I inquire to your name?"