20 years earlier

“Welcome, listeners, to another episode of ‘What’s Going On With the Aliens?’ with your host, me, Jack Cobb. Today, we’ve got a special guest for you. True, we’ve had him on the show plenty of times before, but he’s got something special to reveal today. And I’m super excited about it. I don’t know what it is but he’s been hinting about something since he got here. One of the leading experts in alien communications and theory: The young, handsome prodigy himself, it’s none other than Salt Lake City’s own Doctor Jim Gorne. Hey, Doctor, how’s it hanging?”

Jim sits across the podcast table from me in my tiny studio and cannot for the life of him figure out how to turn on the mic. For all his genius in communications technology, my friend is a bit of a lump when it comes to managing basic audio equipment. I mute my own mic and point to a button on the switch pad next to the base of his stand.

“Right there,” I say. “See it? Nope. Nope. Almost. There we go.”

“Got it,” says Jim into the mic, so all two-hundred-thousand and two listeners can hear. “Yes, Hi, Jim Gorne here. Thanks for having me again, Jack. It's been a while.”

“For those of you who don’t know, Jim and I were old college buddies,” I say. “We had a YouTube channel talking about science and space and I don’t know: a bunch of other crap.”

“You say ‘old’ like it was forever ago,” says Jim. “What was it, like, five years ago?”

“Five long years. Now you’re a famous communications engineer working for the freaking military and I’m still doing conspiracy clickbait.”

“With millions of followers,” Jim adds. “You’re no small potatoes, Jack.”

“As if that compares to making contact with our visitors.”

“Attempting to, anyway,” he corrects, putting a cap on the self-deprecating banter.

“How’s that going by the way? Any update? Is that what you came here to tell us? I mean, it's been two months since those massive things appeared all over the world, and they haven’t moved or done a thing. And I know there are some things you can’t say, I get it—” I cup a hand next to my mouth and motion to the two big military brutes standing next to the studio door— “but is there anything, anything at all you can give us?”

“So, what I came here to tell you today is that … we’re still working on it,” he says with a sigh, a cringe, and a shrug all at once. He pulls his ball cap off and runs his fingers through his thick black hair. “Also, just a side note, everyone should continue to remain indoors as much as possible and stop shooting up at our guests or doing anything at all to provoke a response. Please.” He glances at the pair of Army men at the door, then back at me.

“Right,” I say. “So … still no progress? At all?” He starts to talk but I cut him off. “No contact with any creepy, bulbous-headed creatures who want to probe our rectums with tentacles? No invites from any slimy lizards up for fish and chips—nothing? Still?”

Jim visually deflates. “No, unfortunately. And I would know.” He glances again at his army escort and it starts to bug me. I mute my own mic and lean over the table to address him in a whisper. “Jim, what’s going on?”

He shakes his head, looks down. I’d never seen him this reluctant before. It was out of character.

I unmuted my mic and rolled with it. “Well, so much for a great reveal,” I say. “Or for my hopes of this episode going viral.”

“Sorry, Jack.” He adjusts himself in his rolling chair and sucks in a breath. “They’ve just not responded to any form of communication we’ve thrown their way, and we’ve tried everything. Believe me. But we’re getting closer, though, I can feel it.”

“Uh huh,” I say, raising an eyebrow. “Well, I’m glad someone’s feeling it. Because I don’t think the listeners are.” I gesture to the quickly declining number of active listeners on my monitor.

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“Look,” he says, putting his elbows on the table. “These things take time. When Columbus landed in the Americas it took months just to establish some kind of basic rapport with the natives.”

“And then we conquered their lands and stuck them on reservations.”

“Yeah, okay, bad example,” he concedes, tapping his chin. “Okay. I’ll borrow a phrase from Edison: ‘I’ve not failed. I’ve just found ten-thousand ways that won’t work.’”

“Oh, I was talking about the aliens, Jim, not your love life.”

Jim snorts a stifled laugh and lets out a dramatic moan. “Jeez, Jack,” he says.

“You know,” I say, changing the subject, “It’s so weird how we’ve gotten so used to them just … being up there in our atmosphere. Isn’t it, though? When they first appeared the world came to a crashing halt, remember? Because of course it would. It was like Covid but way more exciting. Then chaos broke out everywhere. But then everything, all the horror we’ve been bred to expect from Hollywood … it simply didn’t happen. It’s almost a disappointment they haven’t tried to blow us up yet or something.”

“I know, right?” Jim starts to get animated with his hands and I sense a remnant of the old Jim I know starts to bleed through. “It didn’t take long for the public sentiment to shift from, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ to ‘What’s their problem anyway?’ Now, the massive things in the sky are nothing more than mundane background scenery. It's insane.”

“Humans, man,” I say. “It’s freaking amazing how quickly we get bored, adapt to novelty, and normalize the extraordinary.”

“To be honest, Jack, the leading theory internally right now is that …” he pauses, glances at his escorts, presumably for approval, then continues. “It’s that not only do we not know how to communicate with each other, but that they’re completely uninterested in it.”

I lean forward. “Why? What do you mean?”

“Think about it: When’s the last time you squatted down over an anthill? Did you try to talk to them? Did you have any consideration or curiosity for their well being, politics, history, cultures, or perspectives on the universe? Or did you just examine for a moment and walk off to more important things?”

I paused for a moment. “That’s a sobering thought.”

“We think we’re so important,” says Jim, leaning back in his chair. “We think they’re here for us, to offer us something, or to harm us and take our resources, or who knows what?”

“Or impregnate our women to create a superhuman cross genetic species?”

“My point is,” says Jim, ignoring my suggestion, “is maybe … maybe we think too much of ourselves.”

“Maybe they’re just messing with us?” I offer with a firm point of the finger. “Or maybe they’re on a galactic safari to see the Milky Way wildlife and their engines broke down.”

Jim lets out a one syllable belly laugh. “There we go,” he says. “I’m sure that’s it.”

“You know, I heard they were able to accurately measure the one right above us here in SLC,” I say. “It’s the size of Rhode Island, can you believe that?”

“I did hear that.”

“I also heard they’re building a base on top of the one over Washington? They’re going to try and drill into it.”

“Nope,” says Jim. “They already tried that.”

“Not with diamond tipped drills they haven’t.” I say wiggling my eyebrows.

“Wouldn’t make a difference,” says Jim.

“Why not?”

“There’s a strange field that surrounds each craft,” he says. “People can’t get within a few hundred yards without puking their guts out.”

“What?” I say, laughing. “I haven’t heard about this.”

“It’s a recent development,” he says.

“And there’s no way around it?”

“Nothing we’ve discovered yet.”

I sit back in my chair. “And here I was just posting online about how weird it would be to have a base on top of an alien spacecraft before we had a base on the moon.”

“Who says there’s no base on the moon?”

I point at him, he points back, and the bantering explodes. There’s a round of back and forth that’s mainly nonsensical. Finally I close the subject for the listeners by explaining this particular topic has always been a great debate between us that’s turned into an inside joke.

“Anyway,” he says, “Did you hear about the complaint from the Aggie’s farmers guild? Apparently, our friends in the air are blotting out so much sunlight it’s affecting crop growth. And they want the military to do something about it.”

I chuckle.

One of Jim’s eyebrows lifts. “Is that funny for some reason?”

“Sorry,” I say. “I just had this image in my mind of little ants furiously shaking their antennas at us as we squat down over them, casting a shadow on their hill.”

Jim smiles. “Yeah, can you hear them squeaking at us?” He raises a fist and shakes it mockingly at the ceiling. ‘Get out of the way you big jerks! You’re blocking the sun!’”