When Everything Changed

When Everything Changed

by Edward M Wolfe

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters,
organizations, and events portrayed in this story are either products of the
author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

When Everything Changed © 2013 by Edward M Wolfe
Cover photo by Edward M Wolfe

http://edwardmwolfe.com

All Rights Reserved

ASIN:
B00BWH9KMO

Have you ever noticed how sometimes just before your life changes
in a really big way, you kinda sense a change coming, but you don’t know what
it’s going to be exactly? It’s almost like there’s a hint of something in the
air, but it’s not really in the air. It’s something you can feel, but you don’t
know how. At least that’s the way it is with me, so I’m guessing other people
might experience it too.

Sometimes I feel it in the weeks before I’m about to lose a job,
or shortly before the end of long-term relationship but at a time when
everything seems to be going just fine. I feel like something, somewhere behind
the scenes has changed, like in a copy of our universe where the designing
takes place, but the effect hasn’t reached our world yet. It’s as if a grand
architect made a decision and now it’s just a matter of time until the
execution takes place.

And since the change is inevitable and it’s going to happen no
matter what, it’s like there’s a ripple that moves through the ether and you
can sense the pending change. Or maybe it’s just people who are sensitive to
that sort of thing - whatever it is.

I don’t know really, but the thing is – I didn’t sense any
upcoming change in the weeks or days before the aliens came and
everything
changed.

I really shouldn’t be referring to them as aliens though. The word
is actually banned. The Guardians, as they prefer us to call them, say it
causes division. They’re really smart about a lot of things, but I wonder how
they can be concerned about the possibility of problems arising between us and
them over a mere word, but they don’t seem to care about everything else
they’ve done that divides us - like banning words for example. I don’t know
about other countries, but in America, we’re used to being free. Well, we were
anyway.

They also say that we shouldn’t refer to them as aliens because
they claim they aren’t aliens, and that they lived on earth long before we did.
They even offered proof. They showed us some of mankind’s oldest hieroglyphics
and drawings of spacecraft and cosmonauts and then compared them to images of
their ancient pilots and ships.

They also pointed out where they’re mentioned in our Bible and
demonstrated how easy it was for them to build the pyramids, the heads at
Easter Island, and explained other things we’ve never understood like the Nazca
lines and stuff like that.  But that doesn’t change the fact that when
they arrived, all we saw were alien space ships coming down from the sky. You
can’t just order people to not think the way they do or to not have the
feelings they have.

I think they know that though, so what they do is make changes
that result in us thinking and feeling differently.  Like using buildings
for their operations centers instead of their ships that they used when they
first came. And wearing suits, which is kinda funny. I mean, sure, they already
look a lot like us, and wearing suits and ties kinda makes them look like
typical office workers – except for the fact that the shortest among them is
eight feet tall. But you can tell they’re trying. When you see them walking
down the street or in restaurants sitting in custom-made, oversized booths,
they’ll be doing things like walking Great Danes or reading  newspapers.

As for our freedom, or lack of it really, they say we’re not
responsible enough to govern ourselves and that if we were, they wouldn’t have
come and taken over. So for now, we’re not exactly living like slaves, but we
live under a lot of restrictions. In some ways, nothing is like it was before,
but in other ways, everything is like it always was, but better. I know that
sounds confusing, and it sounds like what they’ve done hasn’t been bad for
humanity.  I mean, why am I complaining if everything is better, right?

Everybody who is able to work has a job now, if they want one.
There is always something that needs to be done, so there’s no shortage of
work. Just retrofitting houses and buildings with their energy efficient
technology will take decades. And speaking of energy, we’re still in the
process of replacing the entire electrical infrastructure, and that’s a
enormous job.

No one is forced to work, but if they choose not to, they are only
provided with the bare minimum essentials for sustaining life. And I mean
seriously bare minimum. When they told people that they were free to work or
not work and either way they’d be provided for, a lot of people didn’t want to
work and they celebrated. They thought life was going to be a party.

As it turned out, a lot of people who had never worked before
suddenly changed their minds and developed a work ethic. Instead of food
stamps, cash and free housing of their choice, non-workers get a “nutritious
and edible substance in sufficient quantity to satisfy their biological needs.”
I’m not kidding. They don’t even use the word “food” anywhere in the
description.

The housing, if you want to call it that, was just as dismal. All
of the “non-producers” were relocated to areas far from the cities where the
Guardians built large structures to serve as living quarters. I’ve never been
in the military, but I’ve seen barracks in movies and these places were much
worse. Rows and rows of cots separated by some kind of partition to make
separate living quarters and a few wooden chairs in each partitioned area.

No televisions or radios were allowed or provided. The only
activities for people living in the residential centers were either sleeping or
learning in the education pods, or I suppose, they could twiddle their thumbs
or stare at things. If they didn’t want to work or live in the residential
center, they could choose to be exiled to a non-inhabited location of their
choice. The point was that almost nothing would be given to anyone who was
capable of providing for themselves but chose not to. So if they wanted to
rough it in the Amazon or the Sahara, they could. It only took a few months
before the residential centers emptied out.

In the beginning, no one at all had television. They announced
their presence over every type of electronic communication available; TVs,
radios, computers and cell phones. Then when they released their control over
most of those devices, they didn’t give back television and said it would be a
while before we would be allowed that privilege. A lot of people were outraged
at that and riots broke out. But the rioting only lasted about two minutes
before people began falling to their knees and vomiting. Some people passed
out. A few in every crowd died.

I looked out my window and it was like seeing a non-violent
massacre taking place. People were dropping to the ground and rolling around
covering their ears, but I couldn’t hear a thing. Bodies littered the street
until whatever it was stopped and people slowly got back up looking sick and
dazed. No one knows what the Guardians did, but there hasn’t been another riot
since that day.

One rioter I talked to said he’d rather die than feel that sick
ever again. People are still not happy about missing their movies, sports, game
shows, soap operas, and reality TV, etc., but they’re doing what’s expected of
them. They’re probably only doing it for the promise that everything will be
returned once the education is complete. The Guardians know this is a forced compliance,
but they probably figure that people will learn despite themselves.

 One of the greatest benefits we’ve had since their arrival
is that anyone who needs medical treatment gets it immediately.  And
they’ve cured most of the diseases that our doctors and researchers weren’t
even close to understanding. There’s no more cancer or AIDS or several other
previously incurable diseases that I’d never even heard of before. We’re
supposed to live nearly twice as long as we did before.

People often complained in the past that the earth’s population
was too much for the planet to sustain, and with our previously over-crowded
cities and the fact that seven billion people live on the planet, I always
assumed they were probably right. But the Guardians said that we only use a
small fraction of our land mass and that our real problem is that we’re overly
condensed and we try to support too many people in too few locations. So they
started an expansion project, building new cities and spreading out the
population.

They explained that having people live in smaller communities
instead of metropolis sized cities enhances the quality of life for everyone
and reduces crime and antisocial behavior. In a big city, everyone is anonymous
and doesn’t fear committing a crime against the strangers they live amongst.
But in a smaller town, everyone is at least familiar with everyone else and
they’d know for example if one of the residents robbed the pharmacy or raped
someone.

Another thing that’s really cool is that there are more artists
now than ever before. If you have real talent, or even potential talent, then
that becomes your job with full training and education – at no cost. But even
though you might call that “subsidized art” it’s not like people are putting a
crucifix in a jar of urine and calling it art. I’m talking about real amazing
paintings and music and sculptures and new forms of art we never had before. I
can spend an entire day in an Art Centre and not even notice the time passing.

When you go outside now everything looks fantastic.  It’s
like our cities are brand new with fresh paint everywhere and no broken down or
abandoned buildings. There’s no graffiti on buildings or signs. Trash doesn’t
blow down the streets or accumulate in the gutters like it used to. Everywhere
you go there are trees and flowers and streams and ponds and birds and animals.
 And fruit grows everywhere. If you get hungry while you’re walking down
the street, you can always grab fresh fruit right off a nearby tree.

The fact that we had people around the world dying of starvation
is one of the things that made them very angry with us. They said food grows
naturally, but instead of planting seeds everywhere that food could grow, we
constantly reduced and consolidated the number of food producers while always
increasing the number of consumers. And because of our greed and self-centered
way of living, in our country we literally threw away tons of good food every
day that no one purchased, while others would forage in garbage bins outside of
restaurants to stay alive.

Crime is practically non-existent.  The way they eliminated
crime from our cities is a perfect example of how they didn’t change us
directly, but they caused us to become different by altering other things that
affected us. They told us that personal crime and national crime were among the
primary reasons why they came here. They were disgusted by how we treated each
other. They called us “functionally insane.” They said we not only failed to
come up with solutions that should’ve been obvious to a child of average
intelligence, but even worse, we failed to adopt solutions that our few wise
ancestors gave to us long ago.

As far as violent crimes against people go, you could say they
have a zero-tolerance policy. And it’s not like the stupid version we had
before they came. They don’t arrest children for bringing plastic soldiers to
school because the soldier has a tiny, plastic gun, for example. In our
pretense at “doing something” about crime, we’d arrest harmless children with
harmless toys as if they were dangerous criminals, which did nothing but
demonstrate what awful role models we were and did nothing to solve real
problems.

At the same time we turned homicidal maniacs loose upon society
after they “served their time,” knowing they’d kill and maim again.

They say we are like blind, greedy children, only worse, because
children don’t typically act with such calculated stupidity. They said solving
crime and making people safe from criminals was an easy task that we never even
tried to accomplish. Then they proved it.  The first thing they did about
crime was abolish all of our laws. Sounds crazy, I know. But they said that
everyone already knows right from wrong and so our laws were nothing more than
a complicated bureaucracy to determine how much punishment a criminal should
get while maintaining an illusion of justice.

The new system would be easily remembered by everyone. The
punishment for violent crimes against other people was death. And they meant
sudden death. Not years of languishing in a prison at taxpayer expense while
teams of lawyers worked on over-turning the sentence of a guilty person on
either a technicality, or by confusing a jury.

Crimes against people that aren’t severe enough to warrant death
result in exile to a desert island populated by like-minded people who have
forsaken civility, or those who voluntarily chose exile over a free living
center.

When they are taken to the island, they bring nothing but the
clothes they are wearing. They are given a flintstone and a roll of twine. They
can never return - no matter how penitent they are or how much they say they’ve
changed, or found God, or whatever.

It’s hard to argue with their reasoning about how badly we did
overall on the subject of crime and criminals. The Guardians often use parables
or similes or whatever you call them, because they say we’re obviously too
stupid to understand simple things that other races less evolved than our own
have no problem grasping. Like sentencing murderers to prison and then letting
them go. The Prime Guardian, who is like a president or something asked, “If a
deadly snake slithering around in a preschool bit and killed a child, would you
box it up for a month as punishment, and then release it to prey upon the
children once again?”