Elbies - part 1

own – everybody with a boat in the tri-state area was converging on Lady Liberty and her guests. By sunset, the Coast Guard had to clear people away so that the U.N. reps could get in for the party.

  Everybody I knew talked about ways we could crash what was easily the party of the millennium, but nobody could figure out a way that wouldn't get us shot down by the Air Force, so we settled with watching the various phone broadcasts of the people lucky enough to get in. There were hundreds of those, so we got a pretty good close up of our slimy new friends, something I could have done without, as well as the event itself. It was kind of an expo, or world fair, with lots of booths demonstrating C.O.I.L. culture and technology, and inviting the human attendees to sample various tasty bits from other worlds. From what I could see, most of the food was barely on this side of inedible, but there were a few items that passed muster with the guests. A couple of fruits were addictive, judging by how many people kept coming back for them; of course, they may have just been the oasis in the midst of the desert.

  The drinks were a different matter altogether. Alcohol content was something C.O.I.L. delivered with panache, and people were asking for those recipes right and left. In fact, the aliens needed to learn how to cut people off, because a lot of those beverages were more potent than they seemed at first. Quite a few diplomats were passing out, causing some consternation among the hosts, who promptly called for medical attention to care for the soused. I don't think anybody died, but there were plenty of people who left that party in stretchers.

  Once you got past the shock of their looks, the C.O.I.L. representatives were pretty banal. They loved to talk about aspects of human pop culture, which made them sound like the nerds that everyone else was used to ditching at parties. As one of those nerds, I thought they were pretty cool, but I was in the minority. Video of diplomats falling asleep at conversations over the minutiae of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Nigerian cinema were all over the net, but before long, all the videos began ignoring the actual aliens and concentrating on the demos they'd brought with them. (Although that one alien's take on the parallels between Buffy Summers's early slayer career and Harry Potter's late teen years was pretty cool.)

  The demos were astounding. What the aliens were promising us was nothing less than godhood; matter transmutation, body modification, faster than light drives, immortality – nothing was outside of C.O.I.L.'s science. Transhumanists the world over were seeing the Singularity flash before their eyes. It looked like we were finally going to be able to get off this rock and see the universe.

  It looked too good to be true.

  Now, there was a catch. Before they handed us the keys to the car, the 'rents wanted to visit with us a while and make sure that we weren't going to go crashing it into the first pulsar around the corner. After drooling over those demos, the politicians were ready to grant them access anywhere – I think the American ambassador told them they could use the White House as a base if they wanted. Frankly, I don't blame them. I don't think anybody could, honestly. They were offering us everything we'd ever dreamed of, and just wanted to make sure we could handle it. It was a reasonable condition.

  The evening ended around three or four in the morning, and the few sober individuals carted off the ones who couldn't move on their own power. Those of us watching at home tried to decide if we were just going to tough out the next day or try to catch a nap before work. I opted to tough it out, which was a big mistake. I fell asleep three or four times on the day after.

  I mean, I wasn't alone. Half my office called in sick, and the other half of us should have. The U.S. probably set a record for least productive work day in history. Even the news guys looked exhausted while they rambled on about how nice the slimy, hideous aliens were once you talked to them for a while. Then they showed video of the slimy, hideous aliens without audio, totally ruining the effect. It was not the kind of thing you wanted to see when you're nodding off and half-entering REM state. I jerked awake more than once hoping I wasn't about to be eaten.

  My boss had been one of the people calling in sick, so a bunch of us decided that, just like kindergarten, the afternoon was going to be nap time. The others were going to make up the time after normal hours, but I just decided to blow off the rest of the day and head home.

  Traffic was the lightest I've ever seen in D.C. I was home and in bed in no time, and I didn't wake up till two A.M. I got up, peed, ate a little something and debated checking the net or going back to sleep. The net won out. The top story across the aggregators was that the aliens had a name that could be pronounced by human beings without doing anything disgusting. They were the Fhh-bop-uh, and their home planet was about a thousand light-years away. They had been chosen by the C.O.I.L. to contact us because they were considered to be the most like us out of the many different species of the Coalition. That set me to shuddering.

  A few Fhh-bop-uh had done a little tourist spin around New York City, including taking in a Broadway show, and the pics were everywhere. My favorite was the one visiting a game shop and holding a D&D rulebook in its pseudopods; that common interest became the turning point in my life soon enough. But, I'll get to that later.

  Less cute was that several of the C.O.I.L. ships had been taking surveillance trips around the world's hot spots – checking out human starvation, wars, oppression, and all the other horrible things we do to each other. P.R. people from those countries tried to put a positive spin on it, but it's hard to make starvation a net good.

  More meetings between the C.O.I.L. and the U.N. were scheduled for that day, and some of the committees were insisting on privacy that everybody else in the world was adamantly against. Half of the Security Council's members – including America – flatly stated that they would refuse to convene if the meeting was public. When the Fhh-bop-uh agreed, protestors crowded the U.N. building and Liberty Island. This worried me a lot, but the aliens didn't seem to take any offense; they didn't seem upset by it, at all. They just slithered into the council meeting, the doors shut, and the fate of humanity was discussed without anybody being held accountable for it.

  At least not then.

  When they came out of the seven-hour meeting, the Fhh-bop-uh headed straight for their shuttle, and the politicians headed straight for the press. The American ambassador, who was being seen more often than the president, was all smiles and good hair. She said, "I want the American people and the world to know that, in spite of any ugly rumors currently circulating around the world, that we at the United Nations are vigilantly standing guard over the rights and well-being of the people of Earth. The main thing to remember is that the Coalition is not our enemy, and the Fhh-bop-uh are truly trying to be our friends. There are differences of opinion in how they can best do that, but we all share that common goal – that we will be friends and neighbors.

  "Having said that, the Coalition has raised some concerns over how the Earth is governed, and they wish us to address them in the coming days. We believe that membership in the Coalition is extraordinarily important, but it is also important that humans maintain sovereignty over our own planet. We will not cede that sovereignty for material wealth and possessions.

  "There is, however, ample room for us to maneuver. The Fhh-bop-uh, proving themselves friends, will help us navigate our way through these choppy waters at the beginning of our venture into the greater galactic community. They have assisted many other species in stepping out of the adolescence of intelligence into mature adulthood, and they have said that they're optimistic about our chances. This should give all of humanity optimism."

  She didn't take any questions, but just let the Secret Service clear the path to her limo and sped out of there. All the other ambassadors who were in the meeting did the same, giving just as little information in their respective languages. What they'd said was disquieting, though, and the media wasted all of the electrons speculating about what it all meant.

  I was following the conversation that was going on behind the
scenes as best I could, but there was maddeningly little that the major players were communicating electronically. Ambassador Trevors was practically living in the White House when she wasn't at the U.N. building, and President Davis's schedule had been cleared of anybody that didn't have something to say about alien life. I tried to hack into the surveillance devices that monitor the president's offices, but you would not believe the security levels they invest in.

  Still, I was able to piece together some of the story in the few emails and instant messages they were sending around. The C.O.I.L. evidently thought of us as a fixer-upper species that needed a lot of work, and the work they were thinking of was something that a lot of people were going to associate with names like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the like. Most of the plans that I could see them working on called for a much lower number of people living on earth, but there were very few references as to how we were supposed to achieve that number. In the hopeful portion of my brain, that meant that we were going to move most of the people currently on Earth off Earth. I did see some discussion of human colonies, but not enough to account for the huge reduction in