Mad Worlds Collide (26 page)

"Yahoo, we’re here!" yelled Frick.

Robert walked out with Gill and Frick. The door closed behind them.

Gill looked up and pulled the cigar from his mouth. "This ain’t Club Heaven Frick."

Robert shook his head. "No it’s not Gill, I think the Zok-moiety shit has finally hit the air conditioning.  It’s about time to fucking absquatulate."

"What are you talking about Robert?" asked Frick.

"Nothing Frick, fergettaboudit…we’re fucked!"

Back in Colorado….

Joey read his earlier e-mail again:

DO NOT RUN REVERSE CARNIVORE THIS WILL GIVE YOU AWAY BECAUSE OF NEW MSAT PROGRAM. CHECK TO CONFIRM AT MILSAT-ONE. SECURITY UNTRACEABLE AT MILSAT-ONE.

The MilSat-One had the most extensive e-mail sifter in the world; a new version of carnivore that included neural net sorting and analysis. Everyone at the NSA used this program, but not Joey. Joey finished running a slower and less efficient program he’d just written. Better than Carnivore if Carnivore were hacked. The filter Joey ran took four hours just to bring out a list of the NSA top security e-mail and voice logs. The data was disturbing to say the least. Carnivore was controlled via a backdoor in a General Schwartz’s special CIA Psyche Ops division. The top NSA programmer, a fat man named Victor was involved. Joey knew Victor and knew Victor had gambling problems.  Probably needs the money to pay the mob, he thought.

Joey thought back to what his father had said as a kid, that you are who your friends are, and that if you stick around horse shit long enough, you’ll start to smell like a horse’s ass.

Joey pulled up Schwartz’s schedule and found him coming to Colorado to work for some new unscheduled missile tests. The location was the same as Joey’s!

The tests did not make sense and it looked like Schwartz was the main contact to the alien transmissions. Joey opened up his personal computer and started writing a special program. He called it Constitutional War, a modified version of his favorite game StarShip 2020.

Date:             February 15, 2021

Place:             Zok Warship

Location:        Parked 5 miles from the Moon

The aliens have made me immune to lung cancer.

--X-Files, The Smoker

When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room.
--Woody Allen

The inside of the Zok spaceship looked plain; not exactly what Robert thought a spaceship should look like, but close. The walls seemed to be a made of a very strong white plastic with no edges, not even edges for a door.

As Robert walked toward a wall a window sprang from nothingness. Robert walked away from the window and it disappeared back into the white wall.  Robert walked forward and back twice, watching the window come into view and then magically shut off into a wall. Gill and Frick sat looking at Robert. Gill did not like this bar.  It seemed too New Wave for his taste, plus there were no women. Nobody spoke but Robert was sure he could hear Gill talking to himself. Robert looked out the window.  Must be a LCD screen, he thought, not a real window but it sure looks likes a window.

Robert stopped to look outside.  Below he saw the Moon, and behind the Moon he saw the Earth. It looked more magnificent than he’d ever imagined -- bright, blue and green, shining behind the gray Moon with a dark galaxy surrounded by bright pin points of light which were other stars. Which one did these creatures come from? Why couldn’t they just stay home? They could not be too smart, but smart enough. The world had shrunk on Earth and this brought an understanding of different cultures and the transfer of knowledge. When some cultures discovered others their first response was to wipe them out of existence.  Were they here to wipe us out? No, someone smart enough to travel thousands of light years would have better things to do, Robert reassured himself.

Robert looked at Gill, drunk on Barnacle Bill, sitting on the floor next to Frick. Frick was chewing on a pencil and sweating. The room was warm, maybe 80 degrees or so, not good for Frick and his gland problem, and definitely not good for the rest of the team. A co-worker once played indoor racquetball with Frick and mentioned that Frick stunk worse than a dead rat caught in wall and rotting. Robert thought he’d smelled something foul, but being in an alien ship, the source would be hard to tell. Robert did not want to walk up to Frick and sniff him like a dog, not just yet anyway.

Gill looked up with glassy eyes and spoke. His words dribbled out. "Robie, this doesn’t look rike Club Heaven.  Dis place is fuckin’ borin’.  Lets a get outta here and go back to da girls."

Frick stopped chewing his pencil and turned to look at Gill. "Yea, let’s get outta here.  It’s hot and I’m startin’ to sweat."

Why did Gill and Frick take the Barnacle Bill? It was Shun’s dad Mickey, he was the only one having fun. He was with the three girls and Robert got stuck with two geeks who looked like two pet hamsters wearing glasses. Two fucking drunk geeks.  Robert promised himself at that moment that he would get a life. The life of MI turned men into babbling fools.

"Guys, you are closer to heaven than you realize. Please just shut up and relax.  Take a nap, just leave me alone for a second." Robert had to think. "We’re in a company taxi.  We’ll be back at Club Heaven in a few minutes."

Gill did not like being told to shut up, but his head was in a daze and he was tired. There was a strange smell in the taxi and Gill was sure that it was Frick. "I’m kinda tired.  Wake me up wan we getta back to rub heaven." Gill dropped his head back onto the floor, into a position to nap. This was the strangest company limo he’d even been on.  He would complain to Betty about this. Frick followed Gill and lay down to rest. Frick was pretty sure this was not a cab, but he did not care.  He was sweating too much to care. The floor was cool, a good place to rest and sleep. Must be a bus, thought Frick as he dozed off.

Robert checked his CompuWatch.  Amazingly he could pick up a signal from a MI satellite. Robert punched in a few codes and sent a message to Jimmy.   He did not know why he did this; he just did it and forgot. As soon as he’d completed his message a sound came from a front wall. A line was being drawn, like an old game Etch a Sketchdrawing a rectangle out of thin air on the wall. The line cut out an image of a door, then the door dropped down with a small hiss from some small pressure equilibrium balancing between the two rooms. In walked a short man who wore a blue skintight suit. He had large, bulging, navy blue eyes and a pasty white skinhead. The nose was almost non-existent and there were no ears. Your typical gray male alien, but the head was not as large as the ones he’d seem on the Alien Discovery series. The man walked in carrying a device that looked like a Sony Walkman. Upon closer inspection Robert saw the words "Sony Walkman" printed on the device. What the fuck was an alien doing with a Sony Walkman?  The man put it on his head and then took it off, as if to show Robert what to do. He wants me to wear this thing? Sure, I put it on and wham! They either knock me out, or they control me like a lobotomized hamster. Ah shit, they got me if they want me, just a matter of time.  Put on the fucking Walkman
.
  Robert put on the headgear. He sat there thinking, OK now what?

Inside his head Robert picked up the words "We can communicate now".

The words didn’t come from the Walkman. Robert considered taking off the headset to get a closer look at the wire.

"Do not take off the translator, I will not be able to communicate with you.  We speak through telepathy and this device will allow your weak brain signals to be amplified
.

Robert heard the words as if there were buzzing in his head. He felt he could also understand things about the blue suited alien without words.  For example, Robert just thought, "What do you want?"  And it appeared that the alien wanted to hide something.  An answer came out but it did not feel honest to Robert.

To help you.

Robert could not help himself, but at the same time as thinking the words he blurted out "Bullshit."

The blue-suited alien moved his hands over the floor, and two round circles were drawn in the floor. Two round log shaped chairs came up like large pistons moving
. "
Please sit, the chair will adjust to your body."The alien sat first. Robert sat into the chair that felt like the space age pillows that slowly contoured to his body. The seats felt squishy like thick jelly but formed into position and then hardened. They made a comfortable chair with a soft backrest. The telepathy channel with the alien felt penetrating.  Robert could feel the inside of this man’s brain. There was stuff in this head that intrigued Robert. "Hey I’m Spock doing a Vulcan mind meld.  Kirk, beam me back down to the planet." Robert laughed to himself.

"Please don’t be afraid", said the alien, "not yet".

"I’m not afraid -- well not really", said Robert confused. "And what do you mean by not yet?"

"You giggled", said the alien.

Robert dug into the alien’s brain and pulled out a name, ZipIt. He quickly read the alien’s mind. Giggling meant fear according to the alien. Why didn’t the alien extract this from Robert’s brain?  Robert was getting more out of the alien’s mind than the alien knew.

Robert answered the question, but not so accurately. "Yes, I had a little fear, I am fine now".

ZipIt looked out a window into the black space outside. "Our race requires your planet. We will upgrade our gene pool. Can you hear me?"

"Yes," said Robert using his voice and thinking the answer.

"You are wasting energy speaking.  Just clearly think the answer and the TeleTrans will send the telepathic message."

"OK", thought Robert.

"We need help to fix our defects from our cloning process."

Robert looked at the alien. "Yes you are pretty ugly" but quickly changed the subject. "What is your name?"

"I am thought of as a Zok called ZipIt."

"I guess you already know my name ZipIt, what do you want from me?" asked Robert.

"We will have you recalculate our clone sequencing. We are getting errors."

Robert dug into the ZipIt’s thoughts.  He felt ZipIt was hiding something.

"You want to steal Big Blue don’t you? Use him to fix your cloning errors and then use Big Blue to run the earth, don’t you?"

"No, Big Blue will not run earth. The Zok will."

In the background Frick was snoring so loud it felt like the walls were shaking. The sound woke up Gill. Gill got up and looked over to see Robert and a pale alien in a blue suit sitting in the chairs.

"Where da fuck are we?  This ain’t Club Heaven.  It looks more like a gay club Chip Tucker took me once.  Who’s the fellow in the blue suit?"

"Gill, I’ll explain later, just wait a moment."

Gill started to stand up and fell, slipping on the floor.  He got back up again, walked over to Robert and looked at ZipIt. "Holy shit partner, this looks just like the same fucking joint Chip took me in NY.  Half the girls in the place weren’t girls if ya know what I mean."  Gill tried to open his eyes wide to get a clear view of ZipIt. "This fucking Barnacle Bill has some nasty side effects.  Let me say hello to our new friend".  As Gill started to move toward ZipIt, a large glass tube came out of the floor and encased Gill. Gill bumped his head. From the inside of the glass a snapping sound like a summer electronic bug killer zapping a bug erupted. Gill froze as if in animation. The sloppy drunken stare stiffened on his face.

Robert turned from looking at Gill to ZipIt.  "What did you do ZipIt?"

"I don’t know. We inherited this spaceship over 50,000 years ago. It has a lot of security features we don’t understand. A bio-Zok created the original model.  We just duplicate spaceships like we duplicate Zoks."

Robert believed ZipIt. Kind of boring, thought Robert to himself.

"You think we are boring?  We are efficient."

Robert knew he had to watch what he thought.  Strong thoughts seemed to pass quickly through the Walkman.

"Yes, I guess you are efficient but this efficiency seems to have gotten you in trouble", thought Robert.

"Yes, but you will help us.  You have no choice."

Robert did not like the feeling of those last words.

"And if I decide I do not like the idea of helping you to take Big Blue, and control the Earth, what do you intend to do?" asked Robert.

ZipIt seemed to think hard. His face, although expressionless, twitched.

"I can tell from your telepathic blueprint that you will not give us what we want.  We will have to torture you into excruciating pain for a few weeks, and then at the end you will lie to us. After another few more weeks of torture we will probably get what we want. This should take no more than three to four weeks.  What would you like for dinner?"

Robert started to dislike ZipIt.

Play the game, hide your thoughts -- maybe joke with alien who doesn’t understand jokes.

"How about steak and potatoes? And when does the torture start?"

"It will start now. We have no steak and potatoes on this ship.  I’ll bring you and your friends our traditional Zok meal of Kripits. It is customary to eat this last meal before a torturous death."

"Really, what do you eat on a special holiday?"

"Kripits."

"And what does the average Zok eat for dinner?"

"They also enjoy Kripits."

Robert was starting to see a pattern. "Do Zoks eat anything else besides Kripits?"

"Yes, we sometime eat water with our Kripits."

"You eat water?"

"Yes.  Sometimes we can’t get liquid water when the temperature is low, so we eat the solid form.  I believe you call it ice. It tastes very nice with Kripits. Would you like liquid water or solid water with your Kripits?"

"Liquid please."

ZipIt stood up and left the room. A door from the floor raised back into its original position.