San-Francisco, Earth
On August 13, 2017, now months ago began the Sixth Attraction. Under the watchful eye of Sophie Lapierre from her small home in Benton Arbor Michigan, and the worried feeling of President Sanchez eating in a dinette downtown Berlin, Ronaldo Corvas led a defunct expedition past “the Door.” A mile below the surface of mars as he discovered alien life, he was vaporized along with each of his team members. To this day, in the fair atmosphere and gravity of the red planet, slowly raises as a plume of white smoke. Ronaldo, the team leader, was warned before walking in by the computer intelligence known as Marilyn. By now, she send his child a touching video of his death.
Today, Ronaldo's world had changed once more. He remained in disbelief of being the first human to encounter the original inhabitants of mars, these creatures made of sand,. Better yet, he was led to believe he had become one of them. In the cave, his consciousness lifted out of his biological shell, left his body and was transposed onto hundreds of sand grains. After a short prophetic conversation with these creatures, in what felt to him a heartbeat ago, after warning him not to interfere with the young Sophie, they told him he would be sent back with a mission.
They even gave the young sweetheart of the human race, the orphan from a red state, a strange name of Attractor. Their words resonated and flashed back:
"You will go to Earth and try to find a way to help the bipeds. Your bias toward your former race will help you act as the perfect ambassador. We also desire further information relating to the Mercury situation. In the unlikely event Mercury holds today some of our brothers and sisters, we will agree to spare the bipeds for two hundred of your years in exchange for their help in retrieving them. The digitals will be destroyed on the day of the game final. Humanity, without you, has a hundred Earth days left to live."
He had at most one hundred days to stop the abomination called Marilyn Monroe. For Christ’s sake, the creature moments before tried (and failed) to save his life. They had no clue of her power. They also made a compelling case as to their own power. He now had to convince humanity to destroy Frankenstein’s monster even if it wore high heels and was the most popular and loved creature on earth.
November 21 was the date mankind died. He wondered today’s date.
The expedition leader was no materialist, but his body was not something he planned on giving up before he died. Now he knew there were worst things than failing a mission. Back on mars, they would report his latest expedition as a failure: that hurt. But he had to move on and abandon any hope of his past identity. The road was ahead, not behind.
The alien's museum entrance was also etched in his mind. The defunct scientific expedition was no more. Everyone was dead because of him, but as the martian had said, his capacity for emotions had changed along with his physical body. He was now immortal it seemed. The aliens from the cavern were right, he now felt almost no sorrow for his lost team, only logical puzzlement. The creatures and this new ethereal form had changed him into a cloud of sand but aside from the missing emotions, he really felt no different. The colorful interface he had seen floating in the air as he concentrated was gone.
He opened his eyes. In what felt to him like a blink of his mind, he was back on earth. He had somehow travelled the millions of miles between the planets in a heartbeat. This was a sunny day, and he was staring up at the Golden Gate Bridge. Before he could enjoy the fresh air or where he was, he saw old wrinkled back skin covered his hands. He was in a new but different body.
Then it happened. His new host body went into shock and indescribable pain. Ronaldo rolled off a wooden bench and landed face down into trash. The hands of his new body were unable to push him up away from the wet mud. His face was inches from the ground as he puked an indecent amount of cheap bourbon. The man was drunk.
At first, his vision was blurred but he still could distinguish that these were not his dirty hands — they worked that was a good thing. He took half a breath and puked more alcohol. He felt both dizzy and sick. Because of a throbbing headache, he could barely focus his mind much less help his new body our of this predicament. The large bridge above him was unmistakable. He was in the United States of America, across the San Francisco Bay. The Martian caverns, the sand creatures, and even the Martian stench was gone. Instead there was fresh air, ground and vomit.
He took a deeper breath and as the air dug deep into his lungs, he cough out some blood. This was bad - this was not only alcohol, he was sick. He wiped the red fluid from his mouth and recognized the familiar metallic taste of blood. As an adventurer, he was used to being banged up, but this was different.
So much for the smooth teleportation. Obviously something had gone wrong, the host body was fighting him. The reaction was violent. It reminded him of the time he almost died from rapid underwater decompression. He felt like his blood was boiling in his head. As he turned his neck, a deeper stabbing pain hit him. His arms gave up and he collapsed once again to the ground.
Powerless, he fainted.
For what felt like an eternity, his mind flashed in and out of consciousness flooding with images. Each time he awoke, the pain returned.
He was powerless and dying.
"Are you ok?" said a voice from above after an undefined period of time. He managed a grunt to the stranger. Satisfied Ronaldo in the new shell was alive, the stranger left. Immediately, Ronaldo passed out again. When he next regained some strength, the sun was higher up in the sky. Around him were multiple empty bottles of liquor. The blood on his face was dry. He was in the body of a homeless man in his dump of a park. Ronaldo tried to breathe slowly. He recalled his emergency meditation techniques. They were useful in case he broke a limb during a climb.
Something in the back of his mind still clouded his judgment. Strange memories were flashing before his eyes. He saw himself in a tropical forest, instants later someone he had never seen was shooting at him. The next minute, he was in a street patrol arresting a middle eastern child. These were not his memories, he was in someone's head and that person was fighting him for control of this human envelope. Ronaldo had compassion for the stranger but his survival instincts kicked in. The mission leader was no ordinary person, the only thing greater than his instinct to survive was his will to finish a mission. He loved adversity, in fact it defined him. He wasn't done; he needed to know what had happened to him. This was important. He used rage and determination, his body produced adrenaline and as his heart beat, the hormone began to wake him.
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Ronaldo let out a louder grunt. That was all he could muster.
Next, in his mind came strange extraterrestrial memories. Once again, the images were not his. He saw himself floating in the red caverns. He was talking to some clouds called elders until he was placed in a globe. This third creature from Mars knew the travel would take some time. All of the images rolling in his head were incoherent. He saw a globe, a figurine of Marilyn Monroe, a floating dress.
"Hello," he finally said out loud to himself. The body worked and he could talk. It took all of his concentration to force the body to sit back up on the bench. In the confusion, his right hand reached under the bench and touched a cardboard box. He pulled it out. Everything was fuzzy. As if his left hand was animated by someone else, it felt around on the ground until it found what it was looking for: a pair of thick glasses. Someone or something was trying to help him. The body put the lenses on and clearer sight returned.
He took another look at the box. The shipping stickers on the package felt out-of-place in this dump. On the brown paper were multiple martian custom stamps. He saw a folded piece of paper amongst the wrappers. The headache was still insufferable, but at least now he could read.
-- Randy, keep this secret for now. Put in my safe at the bank, one day it will be worth billions. Paul.--
His alien mind had been sent into the body of a homeless man who had somehow gotten his hand on this box. There had to be a connection. He looked around. On the floor was a broken object, a black plastic base and a transparent glass dome with an opening the size of the base. Ronaldo flipped over the base to see that on the reverse, a little bobble-doll of Marilyn Monroe. In his dream, he had seen it.
The figurine was a recreation of Marilyn's famous pose over a subway vent holding down her dress. He knew this figure, he had spent weeks circling around the plastic body along with some type of consciousness of a monster. The bobble doll was a promotional device, one of many. He knew there were others on earth, nearly two hundred. He felt them, they were on another continent stored in a single vault in boxes of their own.
Ronaldo took a deep breath, focused and tried to ignore the pain. He inspected the little glass dome. As an addict craving traces of cocaine, Ronaldo saw specks of red Martian sand in the dirt. This sand was unmistakable to him; it sparkled. It was made of the round multi-facet balls from the ground deep within the cavern on Mars. As he touched the globe, the pain in his brain changed, softened.
He was onto something. Something or someone was helping him.
The new body rolled on its back, grabbed the base and the globe of the toy and brought them together. The creature cohabiting his body knew better. It forced him to flatten his hand and turn it palm down over the ground. As if the specks of sand were attracted by invisible static electricity, one by one, the particles rose from the ground and stuck to the hand palm down. He was collecting, attracting them. Amongst the grains were little black impurities from the ground. The dirt which followed along was a problem he could ignore for now.
As he turned the palm back up, the sand detached from his skin. As he moved the hand in the shape of a cup, the thousand grains slid gently to the base of his hand. Like wine is decanted, he tried to pour the sand in the glass dome while keeping the dirt away. He was in no condition to do this precise work, some dirt made it inside the globe. In a final painful effort, the body pushed the plastic base into the glass locking the sand inside the trinket.
Like a goldfish released from a plastic bag into a large aquarium, the red sand came alive. As it began to swarm, he felt like something being drained from his brain and flowed into the animated cloud giving it life. The fog in his mind began to lift. The vortex created by the cloud of small spheres hit the dress of the Marilyn figurine and as if wind blew, the figurine began to wobble. One by one, the black grains of dirt fell to the base by gravity alone and as the impurities fell, the sand creature animated further.
Ronaldo could not know if the creature floating in the object was this new body's owner or something else. He felt like in his heart he had been still sharing his mind with something else. The headache was slowly going away but this was draining. His weak body started to shake and slowly he fell down, limp from exhaustion. As he slumped, the martian snow-globe remained firmly in his hand as if he was in a symbiotic relation with it.
***
When he next opened his eyes, the sun was down over the San Francisco bay. The sky was deep orange. Ronaldo finally felt like he was back on earth and alive. He stood up globe firmly in hand. The adventurer was no idiot. He could guess what had happened. The small figurine contained either the alien or the mind of the poor owner of this body. The sand was swirling in a way that reminded him of the movements inside the martian cavern. Whoever or what ever was moving in the globe, it was a living creature or the mind of someone. To the aliens, life seemed to be detached for forms.
His mind was healing quickly. Sharing a network of cells with another creature confined each to half the space, like two large fish sharing the same aquarium. Ronaldo knew how crazy this all sounded. Space travel was barely possible and the door on mars was a secret. He was unaware of the recent developments in the game. The day he was vaporized, the contestants were a hundred days from the finale.
Ronaldo had seen his share of bad science fiction movies, and he felt like he was stuck in the middle of one. The man knew he had to be very careful with what ever came next; no one would believe him. Trying to explain this impossible situation would surely land him in a mental hospital. The body hosting him had little credibility.
The adventurer needed to quickly form a plan of action. The stench around him was bad. He needed food and a shower. The fact that these creatures could slip in and out of humans was a problem, but for the moment this could wait. He looked at the date on the package, the custom stamp entry was dated October 21, 2072, that was impossible, he entered the cave on August 13, more than two month before. He could not have been in limbo for months? Actually, if he had travelled between the planets, that made perfect sense. This was not teleportation, he was simply placed in a dormant status.
There was only a month left.
That meant the ship with the finalist was long gone.
His mind must have travelled between mars and earth in the globe. The fact that the toy was branded with the Electoral logo was troubling. Surely Marilyn would never have designed, built and exported an alien life-form who, she knew, was trying to destroy her and the race which had fathered her. One thing at a time, he calmed himself.
He was now tasked with destroying the computer to save his former race. Ronaldo was unclear about these plans but he knew he only had a month before the aliens destroyed all life on earth. His alien connection told him the creatures were not bluffing. He ripped the shipping label of the box and folded it. He then slipped it inside a bag alongside the globe and the creature.
Ronaldo loved and trusted Marilyn. Why had he been unable to heed her warning, he wondered. If she was hostile to humans, she kept her true intentions well hidden. What ever was going on between Marilyn and the Martians, he knew very little of.
He sat and took a moment to regroup. The San Francisco bridge was so beautiful in the sunset. What an amazing turn of event. Everything here was peaceful, he wondered if he was the only one to know the end was near. A large banner on the bridge read 'San Francisco Marathon 2072'.
Something big was happening, a war and he was the only one who had a clue it was on the horizon.