2. Beers, Blonds, and UFOs.

I lay in bed for an hour checking emails on my Omniphone until its battery died. I assumed the backlog would have been longer but there was mostly spam, and a few from Army buddies who hadn’t heard about my unfortunate accident. I thought about calling my parents but they had sent out a mass text about a week long boating trip down to Puget Sound. I was on the list of recipients for some strange reason. That was fine with me, as I had absolutely zero ideas about what I was going to tell them. Hi mom, hi dad. An alien woke me up from my coma and he wants me to do a secret job for him that involves the mysteries behind all life on earth. I needed to work on that speech a little bit.

The wing of the hospital where they kept vegetables like me was normally pretty quiet, but it felt unusually still. I was kind of hoping to see that blond nurse again, and ask her just what the hell was in that shot she gave me, instead I just sat in my bed afraid to move and not sure at all if my legs could even handle a trip to the bathroom. The bathroom! Where the hell is my catheter?! Not that I missed the tube, but why would anyone have taken it out? It was as if someone was inviting me to leave, but still I wasn’t sure if I should. I needed more time to process.

I turned on the tv and flipped through the channels but every station was an infomercial or the latest on the Cartel Wars in Mexico. I didn’t need to see any of that, so I turned it off and looked around the room aimlessly. I noticed that someone had set a red flannel shirt, jeans, boots, and a big fluffy winter coat on the chair in the corner. Suddenly it occurred to me that I could leave. But my muscles aren’t going to work! I’ve been in bed so long they must be atrophied and stiff as glass.

After twiddling my thumbs for what seemed like an eternity, I got up. My body responded perfectly for the first time since being blown up. God it felt good to scratch myself! After taking a leak in the bathroom and splashing my face in the sink I took a moment to think about my next move. I put on my coat, grabbed my wallet, and left for the bar.

The Golden Beaver was a dive-bar for winter people. Where as so much of Alaska had been mowed and manicured for tourists, this was a place for the locals who endured the hard seasons and the men who came to escape the easy life in the lower 48. The cruises did not put it on their handy tour maps. The mountain bikers did not stop by for microbrews or to satisfy locavore food fetishes. The patrons drank Coor’s Light and they ate smoked fish, sometimes pizza. They watched the weather reports and they talked about the local basketball team or about the fishing season.

Degenerate gamblers funneled welfare money into video-poker machines and everyone smoked, despite the posted signs. I liked this place. It was a good place to be quiet and and think. It seems weird to me, looking back, that the first place I went was a bar, but it was close to the hospital, and it had been a damn long time since I’d had a beer. I’d really never been a true alcoholic, just a man who shouldn’t drink but did anyway.

I came in and shook the snow off of my boots and coat. I was shivering because it was ball-freezingly cold out and whoever had left me the clothes I was wearing had neglected to outfit me for a proper Alaskan winter. No thermal underwear. My legs felt like purple Otter pops wrapped in chicken skin and my penis had retreated into my abdomen like a frightened mollusk. I made my way to the bar and ordered a beer. A low voice made a sonorous wheeze to my right.

“Hey, pal. Looking a little chilly. Need some whiskey. Warm you up.” The man plopped down clumsily on the stool next to mine. A big guy with a bulbous red nose that was criss-crossed with varicose veins. His long black hair hung in ropey locks and he smelled like he hadn’t bathed since his last trip out to sea.

“Yeah, it’s uh... really cold out there.”

“Hey, whiteboy, you don’t know the half of it,” he said nodding absently before lighting a cigarette. “Cold ain’t killed me yet, not for lack of tryin’. You, though. You look like a wet dog in a blizzard.” He was gruff, but not confrontational. I felt like I was doing pretty well for my second conversation since coming out of my coma.

“Just... uh, couldn’t sleep last night. Took the day off. I kinda... saw an alien.” I was surprised how quickly I divulged my secret. I must have been more lubricated than I thought.

He took it like most Alaskans take strange news. He drained his beer, took a drag of his cigarette, and nodded sympathetically. They are a hard folk to surprise and even harder to impress.

“Hey, they can be bad, this time of year.” He said and ordered another Coor’s. “Some folks won’t talk about it. I don’t see what the big deal is, I don’t. When you spend the kind of time on the sea that I do, out there, you end up seein’ things that you just can’t explain. We seen a UFO, one time. Was as big as a Panamax, one of them big tankers? We seen it though. Clear as your ass. Hanging over the swells and lightin’ up the night like fireworks.” He looked lost in thought, or maybe just toasted out of his mind. I wasn’t sure so I stayed on topic.

“Maybe it was my friend’s ship?” I asked, a bit too much in earnest. Even I wasn’t sure if I was joking or not. He took another long swig and drained the bottle. He wiped his mouth and then made a stern face, looking me in the eye.

“Hey, that ain’t your friend, sailor. The only thing them aliens want with us is to probe our asses and steal everything worth stealing. The fish and the gold. They’ll take it all and then zoom, right back to outer space.” He made a childish pantomime of a rocket with his beer bottle and accompanied its take-off with a swooshing noise.

An even older and drunker man in the corner came to life when he heard us discussing alien spacecrafts. He stood, knees popping audibly, and came to the bar with his beer.

“Billy, you seen it too?” he asked, his face a wrinkled mix of fear and red-eyed inebriation.

“Seen what, Norton?”

The old drunk held up a finger and then dug his Omniphone out from his coat pocket. When I first came up north it surprised me how many fishermen and cannery workers had the latest model Omniphones, the kind that came with the ten terabyte data plans and the biometric security lock. But these days everyone had one. Mine had been like an external organ, never far from my hand, I even slept with the damn thing next to my head like a teddy-bear.

After drunkenly manipulating the device for a few minutes Mr. Norton finally found what he was looking for and he flashed the screen at us.

“See that?”

“What the hell is it?” I asked him.

The photograph was obviously taken from the bow of a ship, probably sometime around dawn. Hanging above the waves was a metallic yellow sphere covered with a web of black markings that almost looked like the design of an integrated circuit. It was hard to tell how big the thing was but judging from the size of the swells it had to be enormous.

Billy the Fisherman frowned at the photo and said, “Where’d you get that?”

“Took it last July. When we went out to do some repairs on the Freddie Mercury. They was far out in the Bering, crabbin’. This big circle thing just dropped out of the sky and stopped right in front of us. Sounded like a hummin’ bird. Buzzin’ like it was.”

“If I’m crazy then I guess you’re crazy too, right?” I said to the old man, and laughed weakly.

The old man did not laugh. He put his Omniphone back in his pocket, downed the last of his beer, and nodded.

“And I know a dozen men that seen it too.”

When both the men had left the bar I remembered something that happened when I was a teenager. Some kind of spherical UFO in Boulder, Colorado, that so many people witnessed the government was forced to label the event a genuine mass hallucination. They blamed a mold in the drinking water or some such bullshit, though no one became ill or complained of any other symptoms that might go along with a whole city tripping balls.

I searched for videos of the UFO but they had all been systematically removed from the mainstream websites. There were a few conspiracy sites that were alleging a cover-up and a few that called it a clever hoax. In the archives of a local news site I found a video that was labeled “Hoax Spaceship Crash!” The link was from back in ‘02, the year of the “mass hallucination”.

I tapped the link. The video was grainy, with poor sound quality. I could see a stand of trees and maybe a mountain in the background. The camera swung around and then up and a big golden sphere filled the screen, dwarfing the trees. It was falling, or maybe gliding, down to Earth, somewhere beyond the tall pines. There was an explosion, accompanied by an intense flash of light. The camera operator, who had been close to hyperventilating, now swore out loud.

Through a haze of smoke a few figures appeared, coming from the crash-site. As things became clear, the camera operator zoomed in on the people walking towards him. An Asian man in a dirty suit and tie. A handsome white man with a well trimmed beard. A tall blonde woman in military fatigues, her hair askew, pistol in her hand. I paused the video.

I know that woman. The nurse!

“What are you watching, Isaac,” someone said behind me, in a tone implying they had caught me doing something I shouldn’t.

I turned to see the nurse, the same woman from the video, dressed in her work scrubs and a light jacket, as if she was impervious to the cold.

“Oh, uh, hi! I was just thinking about you,” I said, even as my Omniphone’s screen was paused, showing Ana’s own face. I noticed then that she looked about the same age in the video as she did then, standing in front of me. She hadn’t aged a day in twenty years.

“I dropped by your room this morning. You weren’t there. Guess you decided to take a little walk? What’s up?”

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“Yeah, I wanted to stretch my legs,” I muttered..

Ana pulled up a stool next to me, waved to the bartender and said, “So you know our little secret. Bad boy, Isaac, snooping can get you into big trouble.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s only fair to tell you, normally if someone discovers who I really am, I kill them.” Her smile never faltered but her eyes flashed a menace that I had never seen there before.

“I didn’t mean to...” I started to make excuses but then remembered that it was she who owed me the answers. “Listen, it’s only been two days since a one-eyed alien broke into my room. Now I discover that my nurse is some kind of freak who never ages and flies around in a golden spaceship! You’re the one who’s in trouble! You need to tell me what the hell is going on!” The few patrons in the bar looked up at me like I was crazy.

She didn’t flinch, “All true. But now the question is, do you want to ride around with this freak in my spaceship?” She gave me a raised eyebrow.

I cowed, “Listen, I... I’m sorry for calling you a freak. I’m kind of an alien-virgin, er. Wait, that came out wrong!”

Ana made a sweet, dulcet laugh and said, “No need to apologize. Actually, it’s good that you know who I am. Things are already starting to happen so fast. We need your help, Isaac.”

“You’re an alien, too?” I asked.

“That’s ridiculous. I’m a human, stupid. I just... have a little help when it comes to aging. Consider it a perk of working for Plop ‘ik,” she said and smiled. As strange as this situation was, my feelings for her were still first in my mind. That smile could get me to do pretty much anything. “You will too, if you take the job.”

The shock, that should have been setting in, shutting me down so that I couldn’t think of anything but to run, it just wasn’t there. I was nervous, but more than anything else I was electrified with an excitement I hadn’t felt since I got back home. “Why does he want me? I’m about as special as a billion other people.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Isaac. You have something very rare, a kind of natural talent. Something buried deep in your brain. Let’s worry about that later. For now just know one thing. A war is starting. There are those of us who want to protect the Earth and it’s people, and there are bad guys who want to tear it apart. Take the job and help us. You always wanted to save the day. Now’s your chance.”

“What...” I had a million questions that all bottlenecked on the way from my mind to my mouth. I sat there in silent stupidity.

She took up her beer from the bar and said, “It’ll be fun. I promise.” She drained the beer in one great swallow and slammed the empty bottle on the bar. Then she left.

I sat there, a cocktail of intrigue and shock coursing through my brain. After a while I made my way home through a blizzard of sideways snow. I bought a six pack to-go from the bar and by the time I got halfway down the block the beer was slushy with ice. There were about eight hours until the promised return of Plop ‘ik.

I decided to go to the apartment my parents kept off of Tongas Avenue, a nice little two bedroom with a view of the waterfront. I had heard them talk about it all the time. The door used a four digit code and the place was empty when I got there.

I had almost convinced myself that it was all some kind of night-terror, but the experience had been so vivid that if I did admit that it was all in my mind then I was also admitting that I was going completely nuts. Especially after Ana admitted to me that she worked for the alien too. Trying to give my aching mind a rest, I drank my half frozen beers and watched the news.

Mexico, again. One thing about having a Republican president was constant and endless military engagement. I was glad that I wasn’t down south fighting in the Cartel Wars but I knew people who were, and I wished that I could help them. The past three years had been some of the bloodiest since the Civil War but things were starting to turn our way thanks to the President’s scorched-Earth policy.

Western Mexico, especially the state of Sinaloa, had been reduced to burning cinders with illegal phosphorus missiles. The level of nastiness on both sides was enough to make one give up on humanity, but my thoughts were with the men fighting the modern day equivalent of Aztec blood-warriors, the cultists of Santa Muerte. Mean cartelistas and ex-Mexican army, all outfitted with heavy energy weapons and military tech stolen from the U.S. They were six times as many as the Afghan insurgents and a thousand times better equipped and funded. I told myself I’d never go back. Those days in hot triage tents covered in gore felt like thousand years ago

I started thinking about a Ranger that I had stitched up in a tent back in Zacatecas, Lt. Juan Morales. He caught a three centimeter piece of shrapnel in his thigh but fought for a day and a half before he called for a medic. I dug out a big chunk metal but when I removed a smaller shard I nicked his femoral artery. I think I must have made a face conveying some serious panic but Jose just grabbed me by my collar, pulled me in real close and said, “I don’t fail my men, ever. Now take a breath, fix my leg, and get me back into the fucking fight.” I followed his orders and the last time I saw him he was sitting in a bird’s nest with a 30 cal, killing militia men and cartel assassins like it was going out of style.

Now Jose was probably in Mexico City fighting some of most hardcore members of the Santa Muerte death cult, if he was still alive. Santa Muerte was like a meth-addict sociopath’s version of voodoo, and they were led by a man who called himself Dragon for burning half of Mexico city with incendiaries in a single day. The cultists started out as cartel assassins but then found religion, the only thing that makes people crazier than money.

The Santa Muerte cult worshipped bloodshed in all of its forms and its members were known for methamphetamine fueled violence and rape campaigns. They killed as many Mexicans as Americans, almost as if they didn’t care who they were fighting or for what. They just loved killing. Even though I hated President Hearst, this war was one of the few that we actually had to fight, but here I was, sitting on my couch in Alaska, as far from Mexico as I could get.

I put on my three hundred dollar headphones and lay down on my parent’s comfy bed to listen to an audiobook about zombies on my Omniphone. I fell asleep listening to the end of the world.

3. The Building Blocks of Life

Plop ‘ik appeared at 3:33. He jostled me out of a particularly lucid zombie-dream and I awoke to his glistening eye hovering two feet over my face. Cascading arcs of violet light bathed the walls and ceiling. It was an impressive display of strobing pastel hues. I wondered if he wasn’t showing off. I wished that he would just turn off the light show. All of his wondrous shimmering was hell on my hangover and part of me wanted to roll over and pretend he wasn’t there. Another part of me was excited by the idea of befriending an alien life form. Another part of me wet myself like a toddler. I was still getting used to having sensation in my bladder, a downside to using a catheter for five years.

I meant to say ‘good morning’ but what came out of my mouth was the shriek of a sixth-grade girl upon seeing a big spider.

“Please, Isaac, you must remember. I am Plop ‘ik. We have met and touched hands. In my home-world this means we are as friends.” With his long and spindly forearm he reached for my hand and caressed it lovingly. If he wasn’t a giant alien I would have sworn that he was coming on to me. Mood lighting, mild petting, all we were missing was some jazz and red wine.

“No. Of course. I’ll try to stop doing that. It’s just...” I was breathing hard but calming down. “I remember. How are you, Plop ‘ik?”

“I am well. Thank you, Isaac. Have you considered my offer?”

“Oh you mean all that stuff about the meaning of life and power beyond all science and religion? And some kind of war? Yeah, I have been thinking about that a lot, actually.” In between getting drunk and watching television. “But I’m not sure what you want from me. What could I have to offer your... What did you call it?”

“A consortium,” he reminded me. “I use this term only so that you may comprehend the nature of my organization. We are many, united for a single enterprise.”

“Humans too, right? Today I saw a video of my nurse, crashing a giant spaceship in Colorado.”

“She landed the craft well, in my opinion,” Plop ‘ik said, unphased. “The goal was to place the beacon in an isolated region. Humans, as a whole, must not discover their extraplanetary origins. Not yet.”

“Wait. That can’t be right,” I said, perplexed. There wasn’t a scientist alive that did not believe in the basic precepts of evolution.

“Mankind is a product of a concerted effort by nine races. Designed for a single purpose,” said the glowing alien. He told me the secret of the origin of life in the same way a parent might tell a child the stork brought him in a white cloth.

“So your people, or whatever, created us. Like it wasn’t God and Adam and Eve but aliens from another planet?”

“Precisely.”

“Precisely,” I said and rubbed the stubble on my chin.

In all honesty I think that I was as accepting of this fact as any human could have been. There was no God or gods; I felt alleviated by the idea. There was nobody to blame for all of the horror and suffering. No superbeing causing it all. All our problems were own stupid fault. If that was so, maybe we could fix them.

Then I made a mistake. I asked for more details.

Plop ‘ik, in a way that only a being that lives billions of years can do, took his sweet time to paint a clear and detailed history of our planet. Which, for my my own purposes, I will paraphrase here.

About 3.6 billion years ago Plop ‘ik and a few of his closest business associates planted “seeds” on a freshly-hardened rock in a young star system on the fringes of the galaxy. These seeds were packets of genetic information, phospholipid bilayers, and other biological macromolecules. They built machines to oversee the evolution of life, machines that humans, starting in the 20th century, refer to as viruses. But our understanding of these little DNA delivery systems was spotty at best.

These microscopic machines, fabricated by the alien consortium, engineered and monitored broad leaps in biological development. To ensure that things went as they had planned the aliens would make subtle genomic corrections when required. Kind of like little gardeners. Prune a tree here, pluck some weeds there.

They worked with nature, or luck, or whatever, to create a factory of life. A factory that could sustain itself by feeding its workers to each other. The factory was also constantly becoming more complex, due to a healthy amount of reproductive activity by those same workers. Everything, down to the smallest prokaryote, was reproducing, and eating itself toward its own genetic destiny. The viruses made sure that this destiny was the one the aliens wanted.

If a species behaved erratically, or was no longer useful, then they would arrange its extinction. If they needed a creature to fill a biological niche then they programmed a virus to insert the DNA coding for the desired traits into the cells of the organism. An example of this would be the Giant Ground Sloth. A beast that was imbued, by means of a virus of course, with a docile temperament, thick heavy muscle, and aversions to heights and water. it was slow, stupid, and delicious. It served its purposes, which were to trim the hedges and feed tribes of bipeds and other predators.

Not all extinction events were caused by the aliens; natural selection played a more than pivotal role, as was planned for and expected. There was no place in the infinite expanse of existence where Darwin’s mostly perfect model did not apply.

So they brought frozen water from a nearby asteroid belt and they inundated the molten surface of the Earth. Then they used protocells and viruses to form a single celled organism, and for the next few billion years they gave life gentle nudges in the right direction. For Plop’ik, the goal was to create a creature as perfect and benevolent as any the universe had ever seen. I assumed, at the time, that the project had been an utter failure.

I could never have fully understood the extent to which they could control an organism’s development through viruses. We understand viruses only on a pathological level. The only viruses that humanity has ever deigned to observe or care about are the ones that make us sick, but there are other kinds of virus that humans had never even detected, let alone analyzed. What fascinated me was not the biological importance of viral-genetic manipulation, but it’s effect on human culture.

Once the brain was essentially complete the aliens made the second step in their recipe for the perfect being. The consortium released a new family of viruses that worked in our minds, that directed our behaviors, that warned us, or tempted us. There were viruses that encouraged musical aptitude and art. There was even a virus responsible for religious ecstasy. However, as I came to discover, the most important of all the programmed viruses, was the one that endowed humankind with the indefatigable desire to possess gold.

Every achievement that we can claim as a race can be attributed to beings only fractions of fractions of a micrometer in length. Beings whose only purpose was to deliver chemical messages to cells. Beings in the service of a tall glowing cyclops who would become my employer, for a time.

When Plop ‘ik finished his story I rubbed my eyes like a child awakened from an afternoon nap. The alien was looking at me with that great, strangely endearing eye of his, as if it was now my turn to tell Plop ‘ik something equally revelatory and world-shattering.

“So aliens designed all life on Earth with viruses so they could engineer a perfect being?”

“Precisely.” Plop ‘ik said and bobbed his great wet eye. “However, we do not feel as alien to your world. This quadrant has been my home for over three billion years.”

“If you guys are in control of everything, then why is it all so fucked up? Why do so many of your precious creations have to suffer and die? Can’t you change us or help us?” I was almost in tears.

“I cannot, but with your help we could change everything.”

“I hope you realize how hard that is to believe,” I said. “And I don’t see what your little fairy-tale has to do with me.”

“That is acceptable, Isaac. Faith is for fools and gods. I want you to function as one of many agents in our consortium, but you may decline. Act as you see fit. When we meet again I will show you something that might persuade you.”

Again, he reached for my hand; I felt a flush of warmth come over me and I fell into a dreamless, infantile sleep.