“Okay, let’s try to find a solution to this, shall we?” Guillermo said in a patronising tone. He was really worried for a minute. Zeezy was notoriously flaky, which was the precise reason he was hired to handle her. Her friends were laughing, Bobby was goofing around with a milkshake and a straw, making a mess and streaming it online to their fans. They were quasi-celebrities themselves, nowhere near Zeezy of course, but with respectable audiences. Guillermo ground his teeth and checked his watch.
He leaned down to whisper in her ear. “Hey, here’s an idea: Why don’t we move up the meeting, now that your friends are here? We can call it a surprise, she can meet both you and them. Won’t she love that?”
Zeezy mumbled, “I guess… But what good will that do?”
“You can let Bobby entertain her. Instead of having to chat her up for an hour yourself, you’ll just have to talk for a while and snatch a few selfies, then pass her on to the others.”
Zeezy thought about it for a while. “Hmm. Okay. Call up my people.”
Guillermo did nothing.
She turned around to look at him. He simply frowned at her. Then she said, quietly, “Please?”
Guillermo smiled, “Of course,” and called up the PR office.
“Get that freak away from me,” screeched Zeezy as she saw the mega-fan coming over.
Guillermo gripped her arm, “Five minutes. Give me five minutes, that’s all.” The fan ran over to Zeezy, squealing loudly, her mascara running in tears of happiness. She was dressed like Zeezy from some popular video, but she lacked the charisma to support it. It looked awkward on her, trying to be sexy in those bold designer choices.
“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!” the fan yelped and touched Zeezy’s reluctant handshake. “I’m never gonna wash that hand again!” she said, excited.
Guillermo winced. She was a walking cliche. A simple girl who worshipped someone who didn’t deserve it at all. Cameras flashed, the production crew filmed the moment, selfies were snatched and uploaded in extreme efficiency like a manufacturing plant. Zeezy fake-smiled and yelped back at the fan, who seemed ready to pass out.
Bobby saved the day, by swooping in to get to know her and keeping her entertained. He was attractive enough for any girl to get excited, Guillermo admitted. She squealed for the ‘zumongus surprise,’ in her own words, and the party dragged on back to the hotel suite.
Guillermo took the time to rest for a while, he was on the job since early morning, doing some damage-control with the PR firm. He never actually got time-off, so he had to weigh the situation and steal as much time as he could for himself. This particular near-shipwreck seemed under control for now so he went to his room and took a shower. He hit the pillow and was asleep in no time for a blessed hour before his wake-up alarm rang.
He got into his three-piece suit once again, combed his hair and hurried up to check on Zeezy. The celebriteens would have shooed the fan out by now, it was way past the allotted hour. They weren’t going to spend another minute with that mega-fan if a contract didn’t say so. He walked inside the suite saying, “I got to admit, you were very good there Zeezy. And Bobby…” His voice trailed off.
The sight made him stop. The fangirl was in the middle of the room, barefoot and tiptoeing on broken champagne bottles. Zeezy’s friends were around her, filming and laughing at her, having written their names on her thighs and forehead. A profanity was written on her chest. She had left little footprints of blood on the thick carpet. “Come on! You said you love Zeezy. You’d do anything for her! Get across the room, now!” one of Zeezy’s friends said.
“What are you doing?” Guillermo said, barely containing his anger. He ran inside the circle, crushed glass under his shoes and picked up the fangirl.
She fought him back. “No, let me do this! I have to finish it.”
“Shut up you deluded-” Guillermo groaned and sat her down on an expensive couch. He inspected the soles of her feet, they were slashed in ribbons of skin and bleeding profusely. He pushed her back to lie down, despite her protests and pulled her feet on the handrest, above the heart level.
Zeezy rolled on the other couch and slurred, “Come on, don’t be like this. She’s fine, she likes it. We weren’t gonna upload anything anyway…” She was clearly drunk again and it was still noon.
Guillermo grabbed the first aid kit from the bathroom and tended to the girl’s feet. “This was too much,” he pointed.
“She’s fiiine…” Zeezy waved away.
“No she’s not fine. Look at me, stand up straight.” He waited for Zeezy to comply. “Good. Listen, this was too much. You went too far. It was nasty, and dangerous. I can’t work with you any more,” he said with finality, and picked up the fangirl again on his arms and walked out.
“Guilly, come on. Don’t go! Guillermo.” Zeezy’s voice faded. She screamed, “Fine then, go away you fucker! You’re fired. You hear me?”
Chapter 4
“I’m so glad you changed your mind,” Joaquin said and greeted him warmly.
“Yes, profesor. You could say I had an epiphany.”
“Excellent. Now, this requires verbal confirmation, so we can move forward. Do you accept the job?”
Guillermo hesitated, only for a second. He trusted Joaquin. And now that his previous contract had been dissolved… “Yes, I accept,” he declared to the mediating e-person standing next to them and placed his palm on the surface it presented, effectively signing his contract.
Joaquin exhaled and sank in his chair. “Thank God for that. I was running out of options. One more hour, and I’d have accepted to go through a de-ageing process the Ekrignontes had offered.”
“Wait, is that so bad? Looking younger with alien technology?”
“Of course it is!” Joaquin spat out. “I’ve spent years perfecting this intimidating frown, young man! I’ve told you, age equals gravitas. How would I establish authority with a baby’s forehead?”
Guillermo laughed. “Okay, Joaquin, I never thought about it that way!”
“There wasn’t enough time anyway. Even these aliens with their exotic technologies can’t do these things in so little time.”
“Wait, what did you call them?”
“Ekrignontes. And the royal family is Diairetis. The one visiting us, is the princess Kyveli Diairetis,” Joaquin said in his familiar teacher’s tone.
Guillermo sat across his teacher, taking it in. “Profesor, I don’t know anything about these people, their customs, their protocols…”
“Don’t worry, Lorenzo and Pollux will fill you in. Lorenzo is Earth-human, a xenobiologist and physicist, who will tell you what we know about these aliens, and Pollux is their liaison, who will inform you about the princess’s ever-changing protocols.” Joaquin stood up and pressed on his shoulder. “It’s nothing you can’t handle.”
A man walked in at that moment, and introduced himself as Lorenzo. He was short and geeky, wearing glasses and had a friendly face.
“Well,” Joaquin said, walking towards the door. “I’ll leave you to it. Remember the lessons, Guillermo?”
The pupil spoke by heart, “Clear boundaries, clear commands, clear hands.”
The teacher nodded and walked out.
Lorenzo rubbed his hands together. “So, you’re the famous royalty handler?”
“Hardly famous,” Guillermo shook his head.
“Humility. Nice, I like you already. Okay, we’ve got a lot to talk about, tell me how much you know about what’s out there, and AC?”
“AC?”
“After Contact. You know, when the world changed and the foundations of our society were uprooted.”
“Uprooted? We still have kings and princes. And from what I hear, so do the guys out there,” Guillermo said, gesturing at the heavens with his glass of scotch. “Nope, I hardly know anything about them. Too much stuff going on down here already,” he shrugged. “I kinda missed the whole thing.”
Lorenzo was speechless. “Seriously? Aren’t you curious? Wait, you ca
n’t have missed the First Contact?”
“Well, of course not. The frickin world halted. It was all everybody talked about. I did watch the news, got drunk, partied with the neighbours. But, you know, it happened in America. Generals and scientists were handling it. After three days, my only concern was that I couldn’t fill up my car with gas or buy groceries. But, finally, people came to their senses and realised that the Earth was still spinning and that they had to go back to work and buy milk for the cat. It didn’t really affect us, in the end.”
Lorenzo started, “Didn’t affect us? It changed our understanding of the universe! Okay, okay, I get what you’re saying. You’re a more, down to earth kinda guy. So, you don’t know anything about the aliens we’ve contacted?”
“Not really, no. Oh wait, I remember a news segment, I liked those granite guys.”
“Everybody likes the granite guys. They’re so cool. Anyway, let’s focus. The race we’re about to meet are the Ekrignontes. They’re of panhuman race, which means they look pretty much like us, same average height and weight, two sexes, organs in the same places. The only difference is their skin.”
“What about it?”
“It’s red. Not like Indian-red. We’re talking, bright red. It’s actually very pretty.”
Guillermo raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, here’s the juicy part: A few millennia ago, their race was subjugated by another planet. That race was very powerful and despite their ingenuity, the Ekrignontes couldn’t revolt successfully for 400 years. Every revolution was crushed and the payback was bloody. Then, at a desperate point, they found an animal’s unique gene and spliced it into their population, with CRISPR gene editing.”
“Right… What did the animal do?”
“It exploded, when killed. Kaboom.”
“What the… Seriously?”
“They were desperate. But, and here’s a part I love, it was stupid to splice everybody in the population with that gene.” Lorenzo flailed his hands around excited. “Imagine a gathering, a single shot could make a chain reaction! So, they only put the gene into 1% of the population, randomly, with no pattern at all.”
“Huh. Clever indeed. That way the oppressors could have no idea which of them was dangerous to contain.”
“Precisely. So, with a lot of bluffing and desperate suicide attacks they managed to make their planet too high-maintenance for the oppressing aliens. So they pushed them back to their planet.”
“Making it too much of a bother for the bad guys. Nice. I assume they went on to forge an empire, judging by how they can include Earth in their vacation calendars.”
“Yes, an empire that reaches far and wide, because of a side-effect of that desperate genofixing.”
“They kept blowing up?”
Lorenzo winced and struggled for the right words. “It’s not how you imagine it, not like a keg of dynamite. It’s stable and random. Because all of the Ekrignontes have the gene, it’s impossible to know who can explode and who cannot. Also, the force of the explosion varies. It can be a soft bang that barely injures the next person, or powerful enough to take out a spaceship.”
“Holy shit! And they’re coming over? Are we worried they’re gonna blow?”
“I haven’t gotten to the worst part yet. Let’s see, imagine a society where murder is avoided. And because people will be people no matter which planet they shit on, whoever exploded the biggest was considered higher class.”
Guillermo’s face turned white.
“Yes. I can tell by your reaction, you see where I’m going with this. The royal family has the genes for the biggest motherfucking explosions in the whole race.” Lorenzo’s forehead gleamed with sweat, but he kept on, excited. “And there’s even worse news than that.”
“What could be worse than a ‘biggest motherfucking explosion?’”
Lorenzo laughed like a crazy person. “Oh, the universe is full of surprises. You know what they say, evolution’s a bitch. Okay, pay attention cause this one is hard to grasp. So, you have the most powerful members of the race, who explode big when killed. You could just snipe them from kilometres away, right?”
“Well, yeah,” Guillermo croaked. His throat had become dry. He couldn’t imagine what the surprise was.
“Wrong. Okay, it worked the first couple of times, the royal family was pretty much wiped out. But then, they evolved into a universe-destroying walking bomb.”
“I’m sorry, I thought for a moment you said ‘universe’ and ‘destroying’ in the same sentence.”
“Yes. There’s a process in physics, it used to be theoretical but the Ekgrignontes confirmed it for us. Listen, everything in the universe is moving towards a rested state. A ball on top of a hill has kinetic energy, and wants to roll down the hill and come to a stop, releasing that energy. All particles are like that, they are always trying to sit still, cool down. That’s entropy. Now, a Higgs field is a particle that holds matter together, you can’t get more fundamental than that, right? Are you with me?”
“I guess. Go on…”
“The Higgs field has an innate asymmetry. The difference with other particles in the universe, is that when it rolls down the hill, it cheats. It lies still, for all intents and purposes with no more energy to expend, but it still has a little bit of way to go. We call that, being in the pseudovacuum. And there’s an infinitesimal chance that it tunnels through and goes to rest at the true vacuum, where it will expend its energy, for real this time. If that happens, it starts a chain reaction of a catastrophic vacuum decay. It’s the dissolution of matter back into its core elements, a wave going out at all directions at the speed of light, that breaks down everything it encounters, with no way to prevent it.”
Guillermo mouthed some silent words. “You’re telling me that can happen at some point?”
“Oh, it has happened. Many times, actually,” Lorenzo nodded.
“What? Why aren’t we dead then?”
“Because, the speed of light is not that fast in the cosmic scale of things. If you can outrun it, like all the Involved races can, you can simply go far away from the vacuum decay and die of old age.”
Guillermo rubbed his temples. “Okay, let me get this straight. The royal family, when killed, blows up and takes everything with them in an unstoppable explosion. But if you’re far away enough, that explosion can’t hurt you.”
“Yes, if you’re a light year away, it will take one year to reach you. Etcetera.”
“So how many royals are there?” Guillermo gulped.
“Four surviving members. Only princess Cybele is female, the rest are male. There’s big societal pressure for her to procreate soon, because the Diairesis genes are prevailing ones.”
“They’re passed on from the mother. Wait, the people actually want her to have children? Are they mad?”
“You could call them mad, but we’re not part of that society so we couldn’t know how it really is. When the members of your royal family wield the power to destroy star systems, I guess it’s too much. It’s awe-inspiring, you simply… Well, you just worship them, I guess. Think of a country’s president who has a nuclear arsenal, when he speaks, you sit down and listen. Crank that feeling up to eleven. But the Diairesis gene has a weird effect: It can trigger when the person is upset. Yes, if they get angry, they explode. The Ekrignontes race saw their royalty evolve into cosmos-busting petulant brats, and so they: A) Offered them whatever their hearts’ desired to keep them happy, and B) They invented FTL and spread their colonies as far and wide as possible. This fact has shaped one of the most powerful and far-reaching races in the galaxy.”
“Pamper them or they explode. Okay, I kinda get it. I think.”
“There’s more.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, man!”
“Princess Cybele is the most spoiled person in the known galaxy. We have to do everything she says, anything she demands must be given without delay. And she’s coming over, tomorrow.”
Chapter 5
; Castor’s brother watched the readings on the monitors. A new division. A black ball of death expanding at the speed of light. Starting right where his brother had died.
At least it was quick.
“Will this work?” he asked.
“Just make sure you get to the access under the throne,” the other man said and passed a device along.
“How am I supposed to do that? Just rip out a throne and hope nobody notices? Are you crazy?”
The other man shrugged. “That’s what it takes. Figure it out. If you are a truly devoted Catastrophist, figure it out.”
Castor’s brother took the device and then punched the man, dropping him on the floor.
“Never doubt my thirst for revenge.”
The fallen man touched his jaw. “A born winner, like your twin. You might just accomplish something here.”
Chapter 6
“Put these on,” the liaison said. It was hard not to stare at his red skin, but Guillermo was a professional so he controlled himself.
They were in a large fitting room that could easily dress up every theatre in France. An excess of frills, Guillermo laughed at his own thoughts.
“What’s wrong with my suit?” he asked.
Pollux opened his palms and frowned. “It doesn’t shift colour,” he said, as if to a child.
“Of course,” Guillermo said and put on the jacket. The fabric wasn’t tailored to his body, but he could make it work. Class wasn’t a problem for him.
Then the jacket squeezed around his body and became a perfect fit.
Guillermo choked a terrified scream, and composed himself. Aliens. Right.
Pollux tapped his wrist and both their jackets turned yellow with greenish stripes. He must have seen the questions in Guillermo’s face, so he explained, “It’s our national colours.”
“Fine colours indeed.”
The alien liaison raised a device, that looked medical. “Now for the translator microbes.”
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