Founders' Choice: Strange Fiction, Then
Don't blame me
Today, we’re featuring the first of a few Founders’ Choice stories coming this summer. Today’s story was requested by one of the Founding Members of Stars Thoughts, Trevor S. The other stories will be actually about hockey, but today’s is…special. I think.
Founding Members get to request an essay to be published on Stars Thoughts of at least 1,000 words on a topic of their choice, subject to my approval and modification. As you’ll see, that approval is granted probably more broadly than it should be. Today, we have a bit of fiction for you, so if that’s not your jam, I understand.
(If you don’t know what fiction is, just imagine the Sabres making the playoffs.)
If you would like to become a Founding Member, you can do so at starsthoughts.com/subscribe.
“Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter”
Those words were sacred to our kind long before a little green goblin spoke them to a farm boy. Our species comes from the stars, and we carry that starlight into every corner of the universe.
We know as well as you do that stars are largely made up of what you would call hydrogen or maybe helium. But to know something’s composition is very different from knowing what a thing is.
Take me, for example. I sit here, writing in this journal nobody will ever read, covered with sticky popcorn juice (which apparently exists) after enduring a gauntlet of children with hands sticky from the same popcorn juice, having heard my cowboy boots repeatedly peeling and unpeeling from the soda-soaked steps I know as well as my own room, which is just big enough for me and the Zamboni ice resurfacing machine.
It’s a good thing my species only needs two hours of sleep, on account of the difference between our solar cycles.
It’s been thousands of those cycles since I left home, but my memory remains clear. Sometimes I wish it were easier to forget, like after every time a 14-year-old kid pretends to punch me as though he’s the first one to ever think of it. But even with the ignominy I endure every day, it is still my duty to light up the odd concourse, and I like to think I do so far more magically than any amount of hydrogen or helium ever could.
But whatever I may or may not have become, how I got here and have stayed here is a tragedy as dim as a 20-Watt bulb.
“Okay, we have a placement for you. Well, two actually, but as the other one is in New York, so we’d better stick with this one. Unless you carry some kind of hidden weapon like the guys in Philly, you’ll never survive MSG. Your kind doesn’t…have a weapon…right?”
I stare back at the government official for a moment, then respond by slowly shaking my head from side to side—a gesture my cursory Earth research had taught me would be intelligible among those who spoke his language.
Much later, I would learn what he meant by “weapon,” though if you’ve ever seen a picture of the Philly Phanatic, it’s not hard to figure out how he finds his meals.
You don’t have a lot of time to read a planet’s entire history when you’re sitting in a smoldering wreck that used to be a spacecraft, but our terminals are made of a material that is practically indestructible, so I was able to do two things: Signal to my home planet for help, and learn a few things about where I was.
If I’d done the second thing first, my subsequent call would have been much more frantic.
Back in the present, I break out of my reverie, straightening up as the official nods at my confirmation of apparent harmlessness. He resumes doing what he apparently did far too often to find it interesting anymore: he fills out some forms. Before long, he gives me a one-page dossier with four simple bullet points:
Make them laugh to allay suspicion.
Never speak.
DO NOT TELL THEM WHAT YOU ARE.
Taxes are due every April.
Every solar year, the members of my kind who have reached their fiftieth solar revolution are sent out to learn about the rest of the universe. It’s a silly tradition, really, but there’s an inescapable noblesse oblige that goes with descending from the stars.
Back on my home planet of *ೃ*ೃ༄—the ༄ is silent, obviously—you can simply ask a fallen star about any galaxy in the cosmos. They’ve seen it all, and heard about even more from passing comets. The idea of having to actually go somewhere to learn about it is as absurd as a human on Earth actually knocking on a new neighbor’s door and introducing themselves, rather than just gossiping on Next Door.
But even fallen stars tend to get surly when you ask too many questions, as it reminds them of what they’re not, anymore. More often, you tend to ask your question about the universe to someone who knows someone who once asked a similar question to a star when it had only recently fallen and the malaise hadn’t quite set in. It’s not scientific, but you don’t need much science when comprehensive knowledge is always at your fingertips.
Eventually, however, you realize that even our planet’s vast knowledge is far from comprehensive, and you begin to narrow down options for your journey. Besides, it’s nice to get away from home once in a while.
It would be even nicer to get back, though.
I’m still not certain what happened. Personally, I suspeect a piece of space junk wandering into a hyperspace pathway. All I really know for sure is that one moment, I was traveling roughly 31.4𓇼 [blorgons] towards Andromeda, and the next, my spacecraft was smoking, its quasar drive unresponsive, spinning so fast even our species’ exceptional ability to withstand G-force was nearing its limit.
That’s when the gravity of an ominous blue marble began to reel my ship in, and the emergency stablizers brought me back to full consciousness. My ship plummeted through the atmosphere, eventually crashing into the parking lot outside a history museum. Needless to say, nobody saw me land.
Thanks to the dark matter powering the safety features we build into all our vehicles, I landed without too much discomfort, which is more than I could say for my ship. I felt annoyed at having trashed my spacecraft right before I got to try some of the famous moon cheese over in Andromeda. I would get stuck on an empty stomach.
I popped out the remote uplink from my ship’s terminal, and I waited, trusting (rightly) that the beings inhabiting this planet would find me first. I figured it was the better course of action, rather than approaching them. If possible, it would make these primitive beings less afraid of me, and I turned out to be right.
It’s a simple system, as I understand it. The government consortium that detects interplanetary travelers like me assesses a few things upon arrival, then decides whether to expel us (impossible, given the state of my spaceship), neutralize us (thankfully much less common now than in the 20th century, when government propaganda largely depicted any non-Earthlings as flesh-eating monsters), or integrate us into society as best they can.
First, they determine how dangerous we are, relatively speaking. A planet like Earth (or Terra or Thulcandra or whatever you choose to call it) is more vulnerable than most, given how primitive your space travel still remains. Anyone capable of getting here first clearly has more advanced technology than Earth does, and by the reckoning of your governments, that means any such species must possess more advanced weaponry, too.
But back on *ೃ*ೃ༄, we have little need of weapons. Our many rivers teem with nutrients, and we could go an entire year simply foraging nearby for vegetation that springs from the banks. It is not lavish, but it is entirely sufficent for all of us who live there, and that means the only reasons for fighting are those common to all sentient beings: stupid ones.
Next, they determine how likely we are to survive, and in what climate. It’s an awkward thing best avoided, I’m told, for humans to stumble upon a dying alien. The suited officials who first approached my downed craft wrongly concluded that I came from a cold climate upon seeing my thick, gray coat. But our species processes heat much differently than yours, and our epidermal layering is more about form than function.
Once I understood their language, I was able to disabuse them of their arctic notions. Learning a new language is much easier for our species, which largely communicates telepathically, and learning a new language on one planet is, for us, like a master musician learning a simple new drumbeat. Give it to us just once or twice, and we’ve got it.
If option three is arrived at, the consortium has to decide where we can fit in the most inconspicuously, which is almost (but not entirely) dependent on our appearance. In my case, my juvenile height (I am only 50 solar cycles old, after all) rendered me less terrifying than other travelers who have had the misfortune to land on earth. Some of them, like your Yeti, escaped to barren wastelands, but many more were far less fortunate.
For my part, I still think the distinctive shape of my antennae put the idea “mascot” in their heads from the start. It was obvious that they found my appearance more humorous than intimidating, and that was perfectly fine with me. It would be a shame to have to commit an act of violence right after arriving in order to ensure my survival, so I pretended meek ignorance rather than mentioning that I could swallow three of them whole with a simple unhinging of my jaw. There’s a time and place for these things.
Thus, a few days later, they started plopping different sweaters over my head, and the photographs began. Perhaps it was the crude drawing of the same celestial body that our kind came from that made me perk up a bit, but they said I “popped” the most in the green sweater. That’s the first time heard the word “Dallas.”
No amount of linguistic inference helped me with the word “Dallas,” but it turns out that nobody in Dallas knows where the word comes from either. Apparently some guy named John Bryan came up with the name in honor of his friend, but he died in an insane asylum1 before anyone thought to ask him any follow-up questions, like “wait, which friend, exactly?”
When I first arrived in that selfsame city—it would have been September in the year A.D. 2014 by your reckoning—more of those suited officials met me at a private airport to answer any final questions I might have before loading me up in a panel van to drive downtown.
At least, they said they were there to answer questions, but I suspect they really just wanted to remind me one more time that I was required to file my taxes in April. Given that I had no use for human currency, the menial task of giving some of it back to them was nothing more than a small annoyance. But their insistence upon it was odd. One thing I am grateful for is that I didn’t have need of much education, because the way they talked about coming after people who “took out student loans” was downright terrifying. Weird place.
Anyway, they asked me to recite the four points of the dossier I had gotten previously, and that was little trouble for my superior memory. Making people laugh would be easy, so long as they continued under the illusion that I was one of their kind costumed as a “weird alien.” And as the job of “mascot” required no speech whatsoever, the illusion was likely to long endure.
I was assigned a handler—a perpetually bored government employee named Kelly—and reminded one last time about not revealing my true nature to any civilians. Then I was reminded twice more about paying taxes.
Finally, they did me the ultimate indignity of hosing me down with flourescent green paint to enhance my comical (they said) appearance.
Now, they said, I was ready to get to work.
I had called for help upon first crashing, and for a while, that hope kept me going. Surely that distress call would reach home, and I would receive a response signal on my remote uplink (which wasn’t powerful enough to transmit that far when removed from my spaceship’s terminal) with instructions of where to wait, and what to do. Surely, aid would come in due time, with due discretion. I would not be lost forever.
In the intervening time, as I thought of it then, I brought joy to these simple creatures. I even got to visit children’s parties and hospitals on occasion, which brought a glint of meaning to my existence. But the inescapable fact was that I had become a court jester for tens of thousands, paid with official protection and a modest (taxable) income in exchange for bringing amusement to people who would have screamed for help if they saw me as I truly was.
It was a far cry from charting the corners of the universe in the name of my stellar ancestry.
But after nearly five of your Earth years, my hopes would culminate in a fateful meeting. Because it turns out my kind already had a secret point of contact on this planet, and the response to my distress call had been relayed to him in order to help me find my way back home without disrupting the planet too much. This is what he would tell me—telepathically—the first time I met him.
That might sound like a relief, but it struck me as exceedingly odd that any creature capable of interacting with our kind as an equal would have chosen to remain on this planet.
But it turns out the term “exceedingly odd” was more appropriate than I could have known.
Gritty, as you know him, is not an ambassador, or even a refugee. He is most closely analogous to what you would call a pirate, someone who travels from galaxy to galaxy looking for everything he can find to plunder, consume, and plunge into abject chaos.
Chance, if you believe in such a thing, brought him to a city called “Philadelphia,” a name whose meaning is far clearer than “Dallas,” and ten times more ironic. Maybe it was the welcoming barrage of batteries that captured Gritty’s fancy, but after lurking in the Schuylkill River for years, consuming whatever unfortunate beings happened to walk along its banks or fall/get dumped into it, he finally got captured by the same suited officials that greeted me.
He had, however, covered his tracks well. And despite the unending gaze of his predatorial eyes, he managed to convince them that he would be more likely to amuse people than to devour them. This should have been a more difficult task after the horrific event at a baseball field years earlier, but these Earth people have short memories.
Instead, the Philadelphia Ghoul (as those who lived near the Schuylkill had called the dark creature that lurked in the riverbed) was given carte blanche in the halls of Wells Fargo Center. And to what I think was even his surprise, the role satisfied him, slaking his thirst for blood and terror more effectively than he ever would have guessed.
By the time I met him, his eyes had become hollow shells, gazing perpetually into another dimension, seeing things nobody ever should.
This was my ride home.
In the end, I had no choice. Not really.
Gritty made it clear that I would be allowed to return home—he didn’t say when—so long as I obeyed him. And while his own telepathic powers made it easy for him to see I wasn’t sincere in my initial agreement, it was my discovery that he had somehow managed to find my burrow next to the Zamboni ice resurfacing machine that finally crushed my will to resist.
In the dark of night, he had somehow crept into my one safe place while I was sleeping. And rather than devouring me, he had killed me far more completely.
He had stolen my remote uplink.
Now cut off from my home until such time as he deigns to let me return, I live a life bifurcated into equally nightmarish tasks: Playing the fool, and feeding the monster.
I will not write even in this journal what unspeakable things I have done for Gritty. While the sheer amusement of his job had for a time satisfied his old cravings, my subjugation no longer forced him to choose between his equally strong desires to feed, and to be feared and admired.
No longer does Gritty have to risk skulking among alleys and dank waterways, not with me here to do it for him. He simply transmits one word when his ghastly cravings strike, resulting in an utterance somehow both telepathic and guttural:
RAT
ARMADILLO
LAWYER
Whatever he chooses to feed upon, I must fetch the filthy prey for him. I cannot risk incurring his wrath.
I’m no fool, of course. I know full well that he has no plans to release me, but I know also that I had best stay close to him, as he is my last and only hope of return.
Maybe his grisly activities will finally be found out, and I will be able to return the favor he paid me, creeping into whatever horrible lair he stashed my remote uplink in and retrieving my lifeline.
Until then, I remain here, serving two masters, holding onto no hope.
Only once, so far, have I thought my fate was changing. I will record that tale, and then I shall sleep, if I can.
It was a little more than a year ago that I felt the reverberations of odd frequencies. Something unearthly. I couldn’t have been happier, at first.
Someone was coming. Someone from out there.
I reached out with my mind, asking, pleading. I felt a momentary quiet, then a response.
I AM HERE TO RULE.
Any vestigial hope died in that moment. I knew that voice all too well, and it meant nothing good for me.
Even across galaxies, radio waves can echo. And sadly, space has no film critics.
As best we can figure, at some point another being caught wind of one scene from one Earth film in 1994. And like someone who recently returned from Barcelona, he promptly made it his entire personality.
My friends back home named him a word I can roughly translate as “Exhaust Port,” for he truly was best understood as a freakish approximation of an old MegaMan villain, vainly attempting to conquer whatever worlds he could find.
For a few brief weeks, he thought he was ruling over Dallas. My theory is more prosaic: the suited officials quickly sized up how dumb he was, and they convinced my same employers to humor him, for a little while. And as it was the playoffs, I guess they figured a little extra energy wouldn’t be a bad thing.
It was a smart move, really, given that his whole life had been changed by a film clip. Giving him a little screen time would intoxicate his ego and render his rational capacity helpless just long enough for them to dispose of him, and it did. He occasionally appeared, walking around, muttering his inscrutable orders to bemused onlookers before clouds of smoke took him away again. It didn’t last long.
I don’t know exactly what happened to him, but I do know that Gritty asked me to bring him the creature the very day after he disappeared. It was the only time I failed to meet his demands, but a quick bit of soldering and ductwork sprayed with Essence of Animal Carcasse (Chanel No. 147209) was enough to keep him happy. To this day, I don’t think he knows.
As for myself, I stopped caring. That first day when Exhaust Port arrived was also when I discovered that whatever green substance they sprayed me with on my first day wasn’t permanent. When my spirit sagged, my coat reverted to its natural gray hue, a sort of emotional camoflauge common among my kind. Fortunately, there were so many neon lights that nobody noticed, or else they wrote it off as confusing pageantry to complement the anthropomorphic public address system trying to conquer their planet. Some people even complimented me on my “daring” choice, though I could see what they really thought: What the heck is going on here, man.
And so I wait, no longer hoping for any more visitors. I am alone here, in the crowds, under the awful orange thumb of a dead-eyed thief.
All I can do is stay in his good graces, and wait. One day, my chance will come. One day, I will get back home.
In the meantime, I’ll keep leading the chants, keeping handing out high-fours. The hugs don’t take away the pain, but they do quiet the longing for a moment or two, so I appreciate them as much as I can.
But if anyone ever finds this journal after I’m gone, please do one thing, for the good of everyone:
Destroy this monster.
This is true, by the way.
...and here I always thought that Victor was the bastard child of the Philly Phanatic and the San Diego Chicken....
That was a fun read. Reminded me of an assignment I wrote in high school, which had to contain the phrase, "Gasping, Cranston clutched the furry creature off his back." Your furry creature is an alien, mine was radiation exposure. Cue scary music.