“You reading my mind too?”
“No, I can’t read your mind, but I’m getting input from you every second, and from Johnson every second, and from three or four dozen fish milling about in the water around us.”
“Too bad we humans can’t do that,” says I.
“But you can, you do. You’re receiving data from other humans and other animals every second. Even plants. Unfortunately, you haven’t developed the neuron capacity to absorb and process the data. Humans vaguely understand that a baby is absorbing the mood of its mother whether the mother says something or not, or whether the mother touches the baby or not. But most other signals from other humans are lost in the clutter of ‘reality.’”
“I’ve been ordered to take you into custody,” Agent Johnson broke in, striding toward us with manly determination after finishing his iPhone chat.
“I prefer boating,” says Louie.
“Let’s take him to our launch,” says Agent Johnson, and he and his remaining muscle-bound pal began slowly approaching Louie, neither agent looking like they thought it was going to be a piece of cake.
When they were a foot away they both reached down and tried to take a hold of Louie, but suddenly it was as if Louie were all jello: their hands couldn’t seem to get a grip on anything.
“I’m going,” says Louie. “But I warn you—if you arrest or do any sort of harm to my friend Billy, the things I’ll do to your NSA files will end your ability to spy on even your own mother.”
The two agents were still playing with the hairy jello and getting nowhere when Louie squirmed free and bounced off the stern into the sea.
Me and the two agents looked aft and saw that instead of sinking out of sight as I expected, Louie assumed the sort of human form that Molière had shown and began doing a backstroke around the sterns of the three boats. He was soon twenty feet in front of them and moving away.
“Follow that… that… that swimmer!” ordered Agent Johnson, and he and the thug clambered back into their launch.
The crews of the two launches brought in the lines attached to Vagabond, restarted their engines, and threw their boats into gear. The engines roared.
They sped off at zero knots nowhere. The Coast Guard launch continued to bounce up and down against Vagabond, but Johnson’s launch began to drift away to leeward. I saw the helmsman on Johnson’s boat shift back to neutral then into forward again, but nothing happened—although the engine was working perfectly. The propellers weren’t spinning.
Just then a porpoise, a hairy porpoise, leapt out of the sea, sailed over Johnson’s launch, dropped something into the boat as he passed, and plopped back into the water just in front of Vagabond.
When I quickly looked forward, Louie was still doing his modified backstroke away from us. The porpoise was Molière.
“What the fuck’s happening!?” Johnson barks, fully on top of the situation.
Next thing I knew, Molière came flying up over the other launch, dropped another something—some sort of bomb?—before sailing over Vagabond to plop into the sea to my leeward.
When I saw the crew of the Coast Guard launch looking with annoyed surprise down at their cockpit floor and heard no explosions, I realized that Molière must have dropped something else.
“The prop!” someone shouts from Johnson’s launch
Yep.
Good old Molière had removed the props from the two boats. Then kindly returned each of them. A gentleman.
I wondered whether mine was gone too, so I ambled forward, got the engine going, threw it into forward gear and… off we chugged, good as new, if you can call anything on a forty-year-old boat new.
Well, Molière gave one more spectacular jump over Johnson’s boat—just to say “sorry” I guess, then appeared up beside Louie, where he began swimming with a modified breaststroke. I knew both these FFs could swim ten times faster shaping themselves as fish. They were using human strokes just for the fun of it.
Some cowboy on Johnson’s boat then shot a round at the two FFs lazing along now sixty feet away, but Johnson ordered him to cease and desist, or something like that.
Old Vagabond and I spent an hour towing the two boats back toward Plum Gut—until the Coast Guard arrived in a bigger boat and took over the tow.
Last I saw of Louie and Molière, they were back in porpoise shape but each with one arm, and leaping up out of the water, bumping bellies, and giving each other high fives.
ELEVEN
(From LUKE’S TRUE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT OF THE INVASION OF THE FFS, pp. 78–83)
Aliens from outer space or from another universe were the greatest gift God has ever given the Western media. And aliens who were somewhat of a danger but not that threatening was icing on the cake. Ted Brookings’ story broke in the Riverhead newspaper on the same day that the London Daily Mirror reported a two-minute interview with a hairy sphere who British intelligence was after for spying, but who talked exclusively about modern movies. And the next day the Los Angeles Times published an article about two shape-changing spheres cavorting on the beaches of southern California, with two photos, one of something leaping out of the water looking like a skinny furry porpoise, and the second of several children chasing a hairy beach ball along the water’s edge. They had a video of that one too. The Times reported that the spheres seemed only to talk to children and in childish voices.
That day every newspaper, blog, cable channel, network news, Facebook and Twitter feed, and every other social media outlet in the world could talk about nothing but the “invasion of aliens.” Oh, it was a fun time for the whole world, or for at least those who had enough to eat and a roof over their heads, and access to the media. The possibility (at first) and then the certainty (certainty!) that actual real aliens had at last arrived on Earth went viral worldwide. Humans had been panting after aliens for hundreds of years, and now at last we of the twenty-first century were lucky enough to have them actually show up. And they weren’t blasting us with ray guns! Halleluja!
At first the media was filled with speculation about where the aliens had come from and why they had come to Earth. Sightings of spaceships crashing into the Borneo jungle, Mongolian desert, and several different oceans took up a lot of space for almost a week and then disappeared when no wreckage was found. A leading professor of weather at Iowa State College advanced the theory that FFs were created by lightning strikes during Arctic vortex outbreaks. Others wrote that the FFs weren’t aliens at all but creations of advanced artificial intelligence labs. Most such writers criticized the labs for creating such useless entities.
There was also much speculation about the physical characteristics of these creatures. Did they have a computer built into a very muscular body? Did they have pain sensors? Hearts? Sexual inclinations? How did they communicate with each other? Were they somehow allied with some sect of Muslim jihadists?
Since reliability is not a strong suit of modern media, it was difficult to know what was true and what was sensationalist exaggeration. The aliens were soon called Proteans by much of the media, after the Greek sea-god noted for his ability to change shape. And the Proteans seemed to be doing a lot of senseless things that made it difficult for the media to get a handle on them. Traditionally, aliens arrive on Earth determined to conquer helpless humanity, or, because they got separated from their countrymen, they just want to go home. Or they’re here to do scientific research on humans by snatching them off the street and taking them up into spaceships where they do nasty things that the survivors can’t quite remember.
These Proteans had so far shown no weapons, no spaceships, and no desire to conquer anyone. None of them had yet indicated any desire to go home. They were mostly doing things that seemed playful fun, but sometimes did other things that seemed threatening. Some Protean was apparently responsible for posting a doctored video on YouTube of Vladimir Putin making love to a polar bear. Everyone loved that, with the possible exception of Vladimir Putin and the polar bear. And some mischievo
us Protean in the US was managing to get printed in newspapers, both digital and paper, items that at first blush seemed true, but upon mature reflection—something often beyond the capacity of many good Americans—could be seen as nonsense. For example FFs often managed to get items published that appeared to originate from oil companies:
The Earth Institute for a More Pleasant Planet, partly funded (99.44%) by Russia’s Gazprom and British Petroleum, announced today that they are doubling their investments in alternative fuels, from $922 a year to $1,844.
Proteans were also paying for advertisements for products that may or may not exist, but the ads themselves were clearly a joke:
Buy Powerpunchiagra!
Guaranteed to increase your potency thirty percent, length ten percent, duration fifty percent! Possible side effects: cancer, stroke, heart attack, mild indigestion, and insanity. If you get an erection lasting more than four days please notify us and let us know how you did it.
Besides this kind of playfulness several Proteans were apparently showing off their swimming and acrobatic skills in pools, rivers, lakes, and oceans in several places around the world. One appeared suddenly at a school in Indiana at recess and began playing games with the children.
On the other hand, it was claimed by an anonymous source that a Protean was behind a drone in Syria going way off course and almost hitting a navy destroyer in the Mediterranean. Another Protean allegedly hacked into a Walmart bank account and transferred all the money to the accounts of Walmart employees. One of the Walmart owners had a stroke. However, he owned three hospitals, so got reasonably good care. Most Walmart employees spent a lot of money in a very short time, but claimed they were unaware of any unusual deposits in their accounts.
One Protean apparently got kindergarten kids in Switzerland to refuse to end a recess because they were tired of school. Rumors spread that the Swiss government was considering declaring a national day of mourning.
In that first week various countries were reacting to the Proteans differently. In Great Britain the government and the right-wing media mostly described two Proteans as Muslim terrorists in disguise. Pretty deep disguise we’d say. They claimed they had video evidence that the two had entered a mosque and prostrated themselves on the floor and practiced the Muslim pushup thing that they do to honor Allah. British MI5 claimed the Proteans had erased all the data in one of their important anti-terrorist files. So some British tabloids played up the danger of these creatures.
On the other hand, there was an alien in Brighton who, after entertaining people at the beach with all sorts of water tricks, organized a mass dance-in one day and a group beer fest the next. And another in Newcastle organized a protest march favoring longer pub hours. These the tabloids loved.
In China there was one long article in the Beijing Times Herald proving that Proteans were robots created by the Japanese to infiltrate China, destroy its economy, and then take over four or five rocks in the South China Sea that both countries claimed as their own.
In France, the intelligence agencies saw danger at every turn—that was their job—and at first convinced themselves that the aliens were allied with the jihadists: why else would they hack into government spy agency systems? However, the media took a liking to one Protean, who they named “Pantagruel” after some mischief-maker giant in the Middle Ages. They publicized him as a cool guy always clowning around and having fun. Many Frenchmen loved him, although most were disappointed he didn’t seem to like French food. And even worse, Pantagruel tended to pour any wine they gave him all over his body rather than smell it, swirl it in the glass, and hold it in its mouth for ten minutes before swallowing, as civilized people do.
And people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia seemed to find their few Protean visitors to be interesting and fun. They never seemed to shoot anyone or blow up anything, a definite plus. Many Brazilians loved playing something they call futbol but more advanced nations call soccer, using one of the Proteans as the ball. And they didn’t mind that the ball didn’t obey the orders of the foot or head but might bounce crooked or ten feet high or roll across the entire length of the crossbar before falling into the melee of players waiting to get their heads on it. The Brazilians called this new game “Loco futbol.”
In the US, the Republican and Democratic candidates who had announced they were running for president and were seeking their party’s nomination for the election still a year away were miffed. They knew that the winner of their party’s nomination would be the man or woman who could get on the evening newscasts and cable talk shows most often, but their brilliant speeches and sensational PR stunts were being relegated to page fifteen of most newspapers and not even making it onto the evening news. All the people wanted were new videos or still photos of some Protean doing something crazy or something threatening.
The thirty-seven Republican candidates running for the Republican nomination were the most negative. Several of them argued in one of the debates that the playfulness of some of the Proteans was only to fool people into thinking they were harmless so they and the jihadists could take over the country. It was not explained how less than two dozen known aliens and less than thirty known jihadists planned to take over the nation. Several others cited the money disappearing from corporate bank accounts as evidence that the Proteans were trying to destroy the modern capitalist system. The Republican candidates considered that a negative.
And all the Republican candidates jumped on some new reports that indicated that some of the money the Proteans were stealing from banks ended up in the bank accounts of churches—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim. Of course, they all talked about the money being given to Muslims but neglected to mention the other churches.
The Democratic presidential candidates were more muted. They stated with firm conviction that some Proteans were good and some were bad.
The New York Times wrote that the Proteans were of “scientific interest” and that the best way to counter any “malevolent” intentions of the Proteans was to capture one and gently question it to see what made it tick. An op-ed piece The Times published a day later by a former CIA director suggested that if the gentle questioning didn’t work, it might be necessary to turn the creature over to the CIA for more advanced interrogation. The op-ed piece did admit that waterboarding might not be too effective with a species that sometimes liked to live underwater for weeks.
ITEM IN THE NEWS
Houston, Texas, June 3rd
The American Institute for the Scientific Study of the Benefits of Climate Change, partly funded (96.24%) by Walmart Oil and the State of North Dakota, announced today that polar bears had appeared in Central Park, where they were welcomed by everyone as a wonderful new tourist attraction. Unfortunately, naturalists believe that the polar bears are actually on a long migration to Tierra Del Fuego and Antarctica, where there are still large surviving ice floes. So, New Yorkers, enjoy the bears while you can! Another gift of global warming!
And remember, we have enough coal and oil and natural gas in the ground to burn them for another sixty years! And when we start to run out, it won’t matter! The planet will be so hot we’ll never need to heat our homes again!
TWELVE
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 77–82)
Back at the old homestead in the days after I’d talked to Louie and Molière on the boat, the shit hit the fan again.
Now we have lots of fans on Long Island in the summer and fall, but normally not so much shit hitting them. And personally, I’ve always wondered what happens to the shit that doesn’t hit the fan. Supposedly it flies on past the fan and then splatters against some wall or someone’s head or clothes. Not as bad as hitting the fan, I suppose, but still pretty bad. In any case, back at the old homestead things began to go downhill.
But shouldn’t the saying be “things began to go uphill”? Isn’t going downhill easier than going uphill? We sure have some stupid sayings.
First thing, Johnso
n and his agents did a thorough search of my boat and found the three hundred grand in Jimmy’s school backpack in the anchor locker. I had carelessly put the Bank of America tote bag (“The Giving Bank”) in a hidden compartment in the bilge and forgot to tell them about it. I thought I made a pretty convincing case that the three hundred grand was Jimmy’s lunch money, but they insisted on confiscating it. I said they had no legal right to the money, and they said “Neither do you,” which pretty much shut me up.
The kid reporter’s article in the Riverhead paper and other articles about FFs suddenly began appearing all over the place. This meant that me, Lita, and the boys were of interest again. We were apparently among the three or four people in the whole world who had interacted with an FF for more than a few days. We got over fifty calls from various TV channels, newspapers, and magazines for interviews. Although one television network offered me one hundred thousand dollars for an exclusive half-hour interview with me and my family, at first we turned down all offers.
But in the second week some of the media coverage about the FFs began to turn negative. A flight from New Zealand to Los Angeles had disappeared a month earlier, before anyone had even heard of the FFs, and so far no trace of the plane had been found. One of the passengers was some bigwig in the CIA.
At first, of course, the media blamed the Muslim terrorists, but then CNN gets some fella on the air who says he has evidence that a Protean had boarded the plane in a passenger’s luggage and may have whisked the plane off to another dimension. CNN showed a short clip of some guy dressed in some sort of uniform telling the expert fella that when a piece of luggage accidentally fell open he noticed a strange basketball that seemed to have hair. He didn’t think anything of it at the time, so he just put the ball back in the luggage.