The Alien Manifesto

  * * *

  The alien helicraft was right on time next morning. The six of us piled in, sleepily, each with our own suite of thoughts, feelings, visions, memories, and expectations. The sky was filled with dark storm clouds, the chill morning air nipping at our faces. We arrived at the top of the mountain in less than five minutes after a breathtaking ride over a forest of pines and rocky outcroppings. Cosmo Kincaid, our pilot, dressed in a fashionable ski outfit, left immediately in the helicraft after dropping us off on the mountaintop.

  The wind howled around us as we stood in the clearing waiting for Nebula Jones to show up. The summit of Mt. Humphreys is the tallest point in Arizona at 12,600 feet. It was cold up there, and we were underdressed in our clothing issue, dark sweatpants and red sweatshirts,

  Suddenly Nebula Jones materialized on the clearing. He looked much different than the last time we saw him as a holographic image; now he was wearing, instead of a pinstripe suit and red tie, a shimmering silver one-piece spacesuit. He greeted us with a nod, and then started talking as if he was in the middle of a lecture.

  “…So you see, although the idea of a black hole is based on Einstein’s general relativity theory, he didn’t really believe they could exist. He himself said black holes were too weird to be real. What we are waiting for up here is what we call a sentient black hole, but in reality it is an A.I. construct that we use to keep order in the cosmos. We can control it remotely. At its core is a huge microprocessor which will make the necessary spacetime adjustments once your Earth is dropped into it. Surrounding its mass is a—”

  “What on earth is…that?” sputtered Greta, pointing to the west and jumping up and down with fear and excitement.

  Off in the distance, at the far edge of the horizon, was a spectral vision: a huge, black, circular cloud, spinning madly like the eye of a hurricane, passing in and out of existence. It was fast approaching our little pied-à-terre.

  “That, my friends,” said a grinning Nebula Jones, “is Uncle Albert on his way to our rendezvous. You can’t really see the black hole itself because light cannot escape its gravitational pull. In the vastness of space it is invisible to the eye. What you are seeing now is merely refracted light from the background of mountains and green valley below—the outline of Uncle Albert.”

  “Does it have consciousness?” I asked.

  “Does it have a soul?” asked Greta.

  “It has consciousness in the same way an android has consciousness. It does not have feelings. And no, it does not have a soul. It is a super-intelligent entity that does what we tell it to do. We feed it the necessary algorithms to achieve our goals. In this case, the recycling of your Earth and all of its inhabitants. Except for these three,” he said, indicating me and my two gal pals.

  “Now then,” he continued, professorially, “surrounding the black hole is a region of space called an event horizon. In a natural black hole, this is the point of no return. Once something enters the event horizon, the pull of gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can break free. For Uncle Albert, the event horizon is merely a device that will translate every living thing on the planet into beams of pure light.”

  “Yeah, yeah, we heard that before, Mr. Jones,” said Hacker, who had been strangely quiet up to this point. “But what will this thing look like up close? Just what are we jumping into?”

  “When Uncle Albert arrives, for a second or two it will look like a giant spinning vortex. Its event horizon will look like a rainbow. But all of this will happen very fast. You will feel nothing if you follow my instructions. Simply walk through the portal, which I will create for you at the appropriate time, the three of you together. Take a deep breath and keep walking. Next thing you know, it will be the year 1990 and your lives will go right on as if nothing had happened.”

  “What about us wormhole people?” asked Jill. “What are we supposed to do?”

  “Same thing, Miss Appleton. “I will create your portal, and you and Marty and Leela will walk through it together. The only difference is, you three will create your electromagnetic force field before you walk through. Otherwise you will be, as they say on Earth, toast. The wormhole should appear a split second after the black hole appears. It will look like a long, rounded passageway. A tunnel. It will probably be alive with brilliant white light and throbbing with an electrical charge. It will be silent. It will be very, very hot.”

  “You have said the wormhole is theoretical, Mr. Jones, and used qualifiers like ‘should’ and ‘might’ and ‘maybe.’ What if the wormhole doesn’t work? What will happen to us?” This was Leela’s question, valid and frightening as hell.

  “If it doesn’t work, Ms. Powers, then you and your companions will be thrown into a state of non-existence. You will be trapped forever between dimensions, beyond the space-time continuum, conscious of your surroundings but unable to escape. Each of you will be alone, but surrounded by the voices and images of all humans who have ever lived and died on Planet Earth. It will not be pleasant. We will be unable to help you.”

  “Good lord,” said Leela.

  “Holy shit,” said I.

  “Hey, let’s be positive about this,” said Jill. “It’s gonna work. I’m sure of it.”

  “If any of you wormhole people want to change your mind and go through the other portal, now is the time to decide. Uncle Albert is very close. The time is T minus two minutes. Time to say goodbye.”

  None of us wormhole people were about to change our minds. All six of us in our little group hugged amid tears and pounding hearts. Hacker and I had a mighty, masculine bear hug, wordless, but with a depth of silent understanding I had never felt before with my old friend. Benny was beautiful and crying, but he sucked it up and we had great hugs. Then we six all huddled together, hugging and kissing and whispering soft words of encouragement.

  We all felt it. This was an ultimate moment, a moment of absolute truth, like staring Death in the face as the void opens up below. Into the Great Unknown. Beyond the Beyond.

  “T minus ten seconds,” shouted the alien. “Assume your positions, please.”

  Two portals formed. They looked like fragile doorways of light. Uncle Albert was very close to our mountaintop. The vortex was spinning madly. The rainbow-hued event horizon sparkled and glittered.

  “Black hole people, go now!”

  Hacker, Greta, and Benny Bravo walked through their portal and disappeared. Uncle Albert disappeared. A long, seemingly endless passageway appeared beyond our portal. It was bathed in a deep golden light.

  “Force field! Psychics! Now!” shouted Nebula Jones. “Through the portal, quickly!”

  It all happened very fast.

  I love you guys, I flashed to my two psychic lovers, as I added my juice to the electromagnetic shield that would protect us from deadly radiation.

  The force field was in place. We walked through the portal shoulder to shoulder, firmly holding hands.

  It worked!

  Didn’t it…?

  Epilogue: Riding the Space/Time Express

  “Anybody know what the hell is happening?”

  It is Jill’s voice, tempered with just a touch of shrill, knifing through our cramped little space. I know for sure we are in a tall cylinder, a lift of some kind, and whooshing through space at an incredible speed. The darkness is total. I reach out and grab a handful of rounded female butt cheek with each hand, holding on for dear life.

  “Hey, it’s too tight in here for grabass, Marty!” scolds Leela.

  “Ouch! Not so hard, Marty,” complains Jill.

  The lift stops. A transparent door slides open silently and we quickly step out onto a platform, Leela leading the way. It is very bright. I focus my eyes quickly and scan the landscape. The land looks completely flat and barren, devoid of vegetation, hills, mountains, roads. Devoid of anything that reminds one of life. It is absolutely silent; even the air feel
s empty.

  Empty, except for the domes. They are everywhere, sprouting like mutant mushrooms, scattered hither and yon as if some giant god threw a bunch of marbles out into an empty landscape.

  “So this is what it’s like in the thirty-first century,” says Jill. “Pretty strange.”

  “Agreed,” I say, “but this could just be the reception station. Maybe the rest of the world now is all green and futuristic and sleek and everyone loves one another.”

  “One thing’s for sure, we’re not in Arizona anymore,” says Leela. “And I’ve got more news for you. I just did a quick remote viewing, and everything within about a thousand kilo radius looks like this. Could be the entire planet. And no people. Nothing moving.”

  “Think, guys,” I say, noting a tingle of panic starting to creep up my spine, “how did we get here? What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “We step into the wormhole together,” says Jill, slowly, remembering, “and it gets very bright and hot, but we have our force field in place, our shield, so we don’t get fried, and we get sucked into some kind of whirling vortex and then you are grabbing my butt in the elevator and we land here. It must have taken about a nanosecond.”

  “Something really strange is going on here,” says Leela somberly. “I’m starting to wonder if maybe those freakin’ aliens sent us to an alternate universe, either by mistake or on purpose. Or we are stuck between dimensions in some cosmic graveyard.”

  “Or maybe—” says Jill, then stops, her head pitched forward as if she is seeing some apparition off in the haze. Jill has great eyesight and remote vision. She sees objects before anyone else. “I think we have company, guys.”

  A humanoid figure is moving toward us very quickly, a walkway unfurling before it as it moves. It stands before us, studying us. We are looking at a young man, late twenties, unblinking blue eyes, wearing what appears to be a basketball player’s uniform: baggy shorts, tennis or some sport shoes, tank top. There is a big red number 23 on the front of his black tank top. He looks human, but he is definitely missing a human vibe.

  Leela, Jill, and I all do a quick scan of his brain. All we see are tiny mazes of wire and receptors. Sparks fly around the inside of his skull as electrical activity lights up the cranium. There is no visible mind, no memories. Databases are there, but inaccessible.

  “You are carbon-based humans, yes? From the Early Days. Circa Earthyear two thousand one hundred, is that correct?” His voice is young and strong, the words are crisp and clear, spoken without intonation.

  “Is this Earth?” I say in a rush to learn the awful truth.

  “This is Terra,” says our visitor, “what you called Earth and some called Gaia, third planet from the star.” Big outbreath from the three of us.

  “And the year is…is…” stammers Jill, hand covering her mouth, afraid to find out.

  “The year is, well, I would call this New Year five twenty-one. Actually, we restarted the calendar when we reached one million. So the actual date right now, based on your old Earth calendar, is one million, three hundred five thousand, five hundred twenty-one.”

  We three gasp, almost in unison. “One million plus!” says Leela angrily. “We were supposed to go a thousand years into the future. Instead we went more than a million! Those freakin’ orbs really screwed us up! Now what?”

  “I assume you are talking about the entities your people called Nebula Jones and Cosmo Kincaid. They were sent to Terra to avert the so-called Terran Tragedy, which they achieved with the Singularity, but which tragedy was merely postponed and occurred anyway in 2030. Quite an event, according to the Archive.”

  “Creeps. With their manifesto and their computer models. Bunch o’ nonsense. What happened to ’em?” This is Jill.

  “The Council decided they had made too many errors and they were retired in Earth year six thousand four hundred and one. Actually they were converted to galactic dust and sent into the cosmic slipstream.”

  “Serves ’em right,” I grumble. “Actually, too little too late, if ya ask me. By the way, what’s your name? Do you have a name?”

  “Jordan is my name. I am of a race of android, a synthetic life form, that has occupied Terra for many millennia. Our only mission, our only purpose, is to serve humans. Unfortunately, until now, there has not been a human presence on Terra for one million, three hundred five—”

  “Okay, okay, Jordan, we know the stats by now.” Jill is speaking. Impatiently. “But what are all these domes? Where are all the people?”

  “This is what is left of Terra. Much has changed in the last million or so Earth years. These domes are indestructible, impervious to weather or geologic shifts or cometary intrusions or super weapons. Humans lived in these domes and in underground cities until, well, a long time ago. Now the domes sit idle, waiting for evolution to bring new humans. That should occur within the next twenty million years. Perhaps thirty million. When the oceans return, perhaps.”

  I look at my two lady loves with resignation. “Looks like we might be stuck here for a few million years, girls. This ain’t exactly party town. Maybe we could settle into a nice dome, rent some furniture, and play Adam and Eve and Eve.”

  “You are not stuck here, my friends. Far from it. In fact, you are more free than you could ever imagine. Soon I will show you how to break through the space-time continuum. But first, it is vital that you view the Archive of Human History. This will give you a context for your time-traveling adventures. Follow me.”

  An elevator appears out of nowhere and a white door slides open. We all step in. The lift is pure white and seems to move at supersonic speed. Is it going up, down, or sideways? In seconds the thing stops and opens into a bare room. Leela, Jill, and I slip into comfortable seats and our new friend Jordan turns on a holo projector. We witness what no human has ever witnessed before: the whole of human history. Correction: Human history from the moment of the Singularity.