The Alien Manifesto

  * * *

  We were at least an hour behind the chopper that had transported Wolfgang Maximus, his security detail, and a lass named Jill to their secret destination.

  The Black Swan launch site was no secret to our two aliens. They used a powerful GPS device that homed in on the energy trail of the other chopper, and tracked it across the pale blue sky, across mile after mile of bleak desert landscape and endless fields of white gypsum sand dunes called the White Sands National Monument. At the southern end of this national park is the White Sands Missile Range, where the United States government has been secretly testing missiles, rockets, and laser weapons systems for decades.

  “Look down,” said Nebula Jones, “but look quickly because we don’t want to be detected. I don’t think Mr. Maximus is expecting us, but I don’t want their radar to pick us up.”

  We arrived at the launch site. What we saw, right in the middle of sand dunes, scrawny vegetation, and scorched brown earth, was a bunch of small wooden buildings arranged around a huge, spectacular launch pad. A mighty spacecraft array rested on the pad, apparently copies of the rockets and orbiting shuttles that the Americans had used for years to carry out their expensive but senseless missions.

  Nebula Jones landed our helicopter several miles away in the middle of an endless sea of sand dunes, assuring us the dunes could prevent radar detection. But just to make sure, he set up a magnetic field around our chopper, basically making us invisible.

  “Relax for a few moments, friends, and watch this,” said Nebula Jones as we settled into the comfortable seats of the chopper. A huge, flat-screen video monitor unfurled in front of the pilots’ section. We had a clear view of the launch pad and the lettering on the rocket being readied for blast-off: BLACK SWAN GALACTIC III.

  “What happened to Galactic One and Two?” piped up Hacker, suddenly alive and kicking again.

  “The organization has been conducting unmanned orbital test flights,” said the alien. “This is the real thing. There are about a hundred Black Swan members on the spacecraft, mostly men but a few females. Several of them have been trained in space engineering and technology. The captain of the vessel is a former astronaut. Oh, and your friend Jill is also on board.”

  “Wh-a-a-at?” said Leela. “Of course she’s on board, you idiot! She’s in this situation because you allowed it to happen! Now maybe you can tell me why I can’t establish a connection with her!”

  Leela, I can see the situation through Jill’s eyes, I flashed. She is on that ship and unable to move. They must have her strapped in. But I can’t scan her mind, not at all.

  I know, darling, flashed Leela, I tried too. But we’ve got to get her off that space-thing. And soon. Otherwise she’s going to be part of the breeding farm for a bunch of crazy drug-addled supermen living on a space station two or three hundred miles from Earth.

  “Synaptic derangement,” said Nebula Jones calmly. He of course had been listening in to our private telepathic conversation. “Her mind is still in a deranged state from the energy bolts that leaked through our protective force field. Black Swan operatives are keeping her drugged. Her mind is very foggy right now. Please do not attempt to communicate with your friend. The Black Swan people have software on board that can read and interpret human thought forms.”

  “What do you expect us to do, Mr. Jones?” howled Leela, “just sit here while our friend gets shot off into space?”

  “Please don’t worry, Mrs. Powers,” assured the alien. “I have a plan. Meanwhile, please watch the monitor. Our satellite cameras catch every detail, and will also follow the orbiter into deep space.”

  We watched. We were appalled. The launch pad was a beehive of activity. Men in white uniforms ran around frantically, checking the launch site for defects and preparing the rocket for liftoff. A voice sounded over the loudspeakers: “T minus two minutes….”

  “What does that beast run on, anyway?” spat Hacker. “Liquid hydrogen? Oxygen? High risk of exploding. That is so early twenty-first century. How long before they are in orbit?”

  “Please calm down, Mr. Hack, and I will try to explain. The twin solid rocket boosters that launch the craft, each producing more than twenty million horsepower, actually run on vortex energy. I see you are shaking your head. I am serious. Instead of the dangerous liquid hydrogen or liquid oxygen that was used for liftoff propulsion for decades, the Black Swan engineers have learned how to harness vortex energy using superfluid and an electric field to create incredible velocity. Voila! The vortex drive. Very advanced.”

  “That’s just peachy,” I said sarcastically. “And what takes our friends into orbit, Mr. Jones? I suppose they’ll be using Warp Drive. Or maybe they’ll find a wormhole and just land on their space station three hundred miles away in a nanosecond.”

  “After the rocket boosters have fallen away, the Galactic will reach orbit in about five minutes,” said Nebula Jones, ignoring my snotty tone. “The three engines riding on the back of the shuttle, which supposedly will take it into space and into orbit at nearly eighteen thousand miles per hour, run on nuclear energy. Antimatter catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion, to be exact. It is still in the experimental stage. It is based upon the injection of antimatter into a mass of nuclear fuel. The Black Swan people have already run several tests on this fuel. Only once was there an explosion.”

  “Oh, great,” muttered Hacker. “Only one explosion.”

  “T minus thirty seconds,” intoned the voice on the speakers at the launch site. The men in white uniforms withdrew to safe positions. A loud humming sound began to emit from the Galactic’s huge nuclear-powered engines.

  “Ten…nine…eight…seven…six…five…”

  “Do something!” screamed Leela. “Get her out of there! You’ve got to rescue Jill! Now!”

  “Too soon,” said the alien, nearly whispering. I thought I saw a bead of sweat on his bird forehead. “Wait…wait….”

  “…four…three…two…LIFTOFF!”

  Leela held her head and groaned. I had an ominous feeling deep in my stomach. Greta was sobbing softly. Hacker produced weird grunting sounds. The two ETs were silent.

  Galactic III broke free from its tower with a mighty roar and headed skyward, trailing a cloud of white water vapor. From the whirling vortex, no doubt. We humans all watched the monitor with rapt and fearful attention. For a few precious seconds we could see the spacecraft from our helicopter windows, blasting through the pale sky like a shooting star. Then it disappeared and the monitor was our only connection.

  A minute passed. Two minutes.

  “Watch the monitor. The rocket boosters are falling away now,” said Nebula Jones softly. Was his voice at all sad? No, there was zero intonation. The boosters looked like huge metallic starships falling out of the sky. The cameras on the alien satellite gave us a clear picture of the craft’s progress. Or was it all an illusion? A holographic projection of the alien’s mind? Virtual reality?

  Transfixed, we sat with our eyes glued to the monitor. Silence; there is no sound in space. Then it happened. A mighty explosion. The Galactic became a huge fireball, its parts flying into space in all directions. And then it all dissolved into a mushroom cloud. The picture on the monitor went black, with a few points of light—stars, apparently—piercing through the blackness. The silence of space was total.

  “JILL! JILL! NO!” It was Leela, seeming to disintegrate, her hands covering her face, sobbing.

  I too was wracked with sobs. I couldn’t believe it. I refused to accept the death of our dear friend.

  Hacker stood up and started walking down the center aisle of the helicopter, his fists clenched, a look on his face I had never seen before. Menacing. Beyond rage. “You— you evil sonofabitch,” he spat at the alien. “You killed her. You killed her!” Literally snarling, he reached out and tried to grab Nebula Jones by the throat.

  Suddenly the a
lien wasn’t there, leaving Hacker grasping at air.

  The white dove too had disappeared.

  Silence.

  33 The Manifesto Will Be Televised

  Once again the interior of our helicopter sounded like an Iranian funeral. Two gifted psychics, two brilliant computer scientists—we all lost it completely over the presumed tragic death of our friend Jill, crying, caterwauling, and carrying on like a posse of tomcats on a three a.m. fence.

  For about thirty seconds.

  Then, about the same time as we heard a loud banging noise in the ’copter’s tiny restroom, I…felt…something. Jill?

  Leela, I think I feel Jill.

  Me too, sweetheart. Could her spirit be with us already?

  “Hi, guys, whassup? What’s all the sniveling about? Turn off the waterworks already and give an old friend a hug, eh?”

  We all screamed in unison: “JILL!!!”

  “What the fu—” sputtered Hacker.

  Jill danced gaily down the narrow aisle, stopping to give Hacker a kiss on the cheek, a high-five to Greta, and a huge group hug to her two psi buddies waiting at the end of the aisle. We kissed and patted and petted and hugged tightly and dry-humped until we were out of breath. Then we all four gathered around Jill, waiting for her survival story.

  She looked great, all rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed, wearing a Spandex spacesuit that hugged every luscious curve on that tight hardbody. “Sorry for all the commotion when I landed in the, uh, loo,” she said. “But I landed upside down right next to the commode. Good thing the lid was closed.”

  We cracked up. “Okay, Jill, take a few deep breaths and please tell us why your atoms are not scattered halfway around the galaxy,” said Leela.

  She grinned as she breathed, eyes closed. “Okay, here’s the story. I’m on this spaceship, see, and strapped into a very uncomfortable chair, and we’re going really really fast, and I wake up like out of a dream. Nothing makes sense. My head clears. I hear a voice in my head, ‘Jump. Jump. Jump.’ I go, Oh, yeah? Jump from where…to where?

  “Then my psychic sense kicks in. It’d been missing for awhile. I remembered that you, Leela, my dear, once took a jump from the top of that sacred mountain in Tibet to the Ganges in India, riding on the wave of all that vortex energy. This thought process was happening in accelerated time, in fractions of nanoseconds, like it does on the psi level. I felt all kinds of powerful energies swirling around that spaceship, and I also knew that some kind of huge explosion was just around the corner. So I closed my eyes and jumped, riding an energy trail that just happened to be there, and that just happened to land me on my head in the lavatory of a fancy helicopter.”

  “Nebula Jones,” said Leela. “The voice in your head.”

  “Dude’s got a sense of humor after all,” said Hacker.

  “He must have sent a signal to the Galactic that fixed Jill’s synaptic derangement,” I contributed.

  “My what?” said Jill.

  “You were deranged, girlfriend,” said Leela, gently. “We all were. Thanks to Big Mama’s energy bolts. You never would have gone after Wolfgang if you hadn’t been out of your friggin’ mind. But the alien fixed our brains. Now, we’ve all got our marbles back. I hope.”

  “So how ’bout we get out of this friggin’ hellhole?” said Jill. “Where’s our pilot? Where are those cute birdmen, anyway?”

  “The birds have flown the coop,” I said. “Mr. Jones just up and disappeared when Hacker tried to commit mayhem on his person. He and his buddy must be around here somewhere. Remember, those orbs are not your ordinary shapeshifters.”

  “They’re probably hiding out as cockroaches on the chopper,” said Hacker. “That would be appropriate. Hey, anybody know how to fly this whirlybird? I’ve gotta get back to Sedona pretty quick. I’ve got an assignment from a certain alien to set him up for a worldwide all-media broadcast of a certain manifesto. Fucker’s gonna go ahead with it against my advice.”

  “Assignment…?” I questioned. “After all that negative energy you threw at him on the bus, you took an assignment?”

  “It’s strange,” said Hacker. “He must have planted that whole idea, the assignment, the details of it, when he put his hands on my skull and brought my brain back from Derangement City. Encouraged me to take on the job, too, with enthusiasm. Impressive! Hey, Greta, interested in writing some code with me?”

  “You bet, handsome,” she replied, snuggling up to the big guy. Greta had come a long way, personal growth-wise, on this craziest of adventures. She had been through hell, and come out a bigger and better person. “Take us home, Marty!”

  So I was the chosen one. I climbed into the pilot seat, pushed a couple of buttons, pulled a lever or two, and we were airborne. Somehow I knew exactly what to do. And somehow I knew the chopper’s computer responded to verbal commands. “Straight course to Sedona, Arizona,” I said with authority. “Top speed. No stops. How’s our fuel supply?”

  “Please be more specific,” said a ghostly voice through the helicopter speakers.

  I looked at the fuel gauge. The pointer was in the middle. “Is the fuel tank half full or half empty?” I said mischievously, paraphrasing a famous Zen koan, trying to blow the computer’s mind.

  “Meditate on this,” said the disembodied voice. “There is no fuel tank.”

  Marty, please cut the crap and get us out of here. I am hungry and horny as hell. The transmission was from Jill. Leela nodded in agreement, a crazy, crooked smile on her face, still beautiful after all we had been through, but showing some signs of wear and tear.

  Jill, you are one oversexed little bitch, I flashed.

  Marty, you know I am anything but little! Jill flashed back.

  I pulled a mysterious lever all the way back and we were at top speed in ten seconds.