THE LAST UNDERGROUND

EXCERPTS

Cass woke up with an awful feeling, like she hadn’t really slept. Clicking the faux Deco light, she stared at the shadows it flung across the pillow, burning and blurring untrodden paths, too close to see clearly, too vague to set out on. Her beauty slouched in an unlit corner of herself, carving a death mask out of a waking moment. Uncertain brown eyes, this way hot chocolate, that way black coffee, and lips so full and questioning they never really needed lipstick. Her not quite straight black hair was as tangled as her troubled thoughts – an explosion of darkness, like some wild expressionist had etched her night in a thousand lashes. Slicks of it polluted the cleanish white pillow.

The creamy core became more substantial nearer the ground, letting go of the ship. Liquid light forged an inverted droplet, expanding and solidifying as its thinnest point touched the ground. The unknown was making itself known. Or maybe it was like a feather, finding at last a windless world. I like that. It was like a feather finding at last a windless world.

The blue beam retracted, leaving only silence, and on the White House Lawn, an alien. Its pear-shaped head, out of proportion to its slender body, its impossibly thin neck. Large black almond shaped eyes, black as two drips of ink, elongated toward the side of its head where ears would’ve been, had there been any. Unblinking, it stared with a quiet, searing intensity, and as time ticked by it still didn’t blink. No nasal cartilage, just two tiny nostrils like apple seeds pressed into putty, and a tiny mouth, no more than a slit. Expressionless – or almost. Could it be gazing in wonder too? Everything about it was unearthly, a mind on a whole other wavelength trying to understand.

No more than four feet high, its arms seemed too long for its body. Three tubular fingers, all the same length and longer than its long palm, a dimple on the tip of each like tiny suction cups. The outer ones were opposable, like thumbs. Its feet were almost square at the end, no toes. No genitalia. Its grayish white skin looked like a seamless rubber suit. To the crowd, there was something so lost and fragile about it, yet troublingly familiar, like a fetus standing upright, staring at you knowingly.

Raising its long, delicate hand in a slow, gentle wave, Soh, my mentor, spoke telepathically. The fear and awe of the crowd was reduced to a single calming whisper, a thought, in any language that happened to be there.

“You are not alone.”

In a telepathic culture meaning is immediate, language redundant, facial expression obsolete, and privacy is an alien concept. Consider the speed of thought compared to speech, and then consider sharing everything with everyone, all the time. Imagine highly advanced minds doing this. 

I hear your thoughts when I’m close enough, or via an access point in someone else’s memories. A face on a screen will do it, a description won’t. But that’s just me. Others are more skilled. Telepathy has no tone of voice, you hear it like your own thoughts, but you always know who’s thinking. It’s become a source of comfort to me, to know what’s on your mind. It’s the thought that counts. I don’t mean to do it. Humans just don’t know how to keep their thoughts to themselves, it’s embarrassing.

Our makers and breakers were unprepared for our emotions. They’ll be as unprepared a thousand years from now as they were last night. Words I never heard: “How did you sleep? Did you have any dreams?” Dreams? We don’t have nights. Arbitrary in space, right? Our unspeakable dreams were left unspoken. They came from somewhere they never told us about, while we replenished. To them, dreams are aberrant traits to be excised. I don’t need fixing. I need letting loose.

They knew we’d inherit some human traits, but their scope ended at the reach of their objective. Our lives revolved around the breeding program, but our minds fixated on a dream world – rushes of conflicting scenarios launched by unaddressed wellsprings, like seeing our donor parents only once every few years. Unnecessary, apparently. They always behaved like it was an inconvenience, putting us together. It made us feel like we’d failed them. I know better now. They failed us.

But they let us work it off, I suppose. We played roles to placate abductees who had broken through memory walls. They always needed to feel special, chosen. Just feeling like an individual would’ve been enough for me. We did what we were told, and sold. Things could’ve been so different. We suffered a unique kind of abuse. Extreme detachment and obsessive attention in equal measure. We were well cared for. We were the future. Were. Well I am I suppose. I have to be.

Known by abductees as Mantids for their resemblance to Earth’s praying mantis, and Ant People, or Anu Sinom by the Hopi for centuries now, they had many names across dimensions. Their preferred name involves clicking which humans can’t reproduce. It sounds something like Sk’t’p’tuh.

Ssk-t cut an imposing figure at around eight feet tall. Its head was proportionately larger than Qua’s, and distinctly insectoid, with antennae down each side. Its mouth was even smaller than the Greys’ and nearer its pointed chin. Long, dark brown compound eyes shimmered with thousands of ommatidia catching the light like rusty glitter, each observing a unique perspective.

From a distance its exoskeleton suggested a crocodilian golden brown, but closer up the vertically rectangular scales were avocado-green at the center, flecked with dark, tiny pores. Shadows between the raised edges were laced with tiny dark hairs.

Its long hands, with three multi-jointed fingers, hung limply from short, skeletal arms bent tight against its chest. Although humanoid, its legs had an extra joint, reversed at a right angle between waist and knee, extending behind in a permanent crouch. A cloak swept away any casual scrutiny, with a high collar à la Ming from Flash Gordon. Like our body suits, it gave protection from Earth’s magnetic fields, gamma rays, light waves and gravity density, but I’ve always wondered if the design served a more dramatic purpose – to trigger mystical archetypal responses in human minds.

Implacable, searing eyes peered deeper into Qua’s Grey mind than Greys can into a human’s. At over a millennium, Ssk-t had held authority so long, assumptions of obedience seemed almost sentimental. Awkwardly, she stepped forward, feeling like an ice sculpture on a silver tray, about to melt.

Her home seemed to call out to her, the home world she’d left behind. Through an oblong window the two suns of the Orion constellation shone their familiar crisp white. Jagged scarlet mountains challenged long heliotrope clouds in the soft, lilac sky. Nearby, ashen pink rocks were veined with dark gray. Buildings like her own nestled like melting sugar cubes in unlikely piles under milky domes you could see right through to other domes full of homes, crouching in canyon deltas.

The landscape evaporated into familiar morphmetal, soft directionless light.

Ssk-t waved a telepathic invitation to sit. Such extravagant behavior only came with higher minds, and Qua felt initiated just by observing it.

Her long hands rested on her short little legs, as though restraining them from standing up and leaving. How dark my skin looks, she noticed, in comparison with Ssk-t’s absinthine scales. I must be getting older, she thought. How wonderful.

Please pick up, please pick up, Cass thought.

“Gott!”

“Hey doll. How’s life in the fast lane?”

“Style no content. How’s the daylight peeping through the curtains?”

“Discreet, like the truth that dare not say its name.”

“So good to talk to you.” Anything, get him talking about anything. “So how bout that huh? Alien on the Whitehouse lawn.”

“The media is a shit show. Owned up the ass.” He took her silence as a ‘do go on’. “What do the powers that beat us down get from a stunt like this? Fear, right? But what’s the second act? Where’s the cavalry? The news nosebag is the same everywhere. We could be facing a global coup by big business.”

“Yeah it reeks. Just wanted to hear your voice, see what you thought, try to hash things out.” Why did I say that?

“I love it when you talk office. Say interface. Say you want to touch base on the project.”

Cass laughed, finally.

“Come on, run something by me.”

You gotta love this guy, she thought. He makes it seem so easy. “Hey don’t make me set up a meeting and go granular on your ass!”

“Ooh baby, log me in your calendar. I need a briefing, a thorough briefing.”

“Well table it. No, don’t do that. Just hold that thought, I’m coming home.”

“You’re done already? Girls! Vamoose!” Sighing theatrically, “There’s no trust in this relationship.”

“Gott? I’m scared. Everything feels… off.” Finally, he picked up her mood.

“You said it. We’ll put our heads together and figure it out, like we do everything else.”

“Thanks babe, you’re an angel.”

“Hey, cryptozoological entity, please. Over and out.”

Pacing along like a stormtrooper, she fixed her mind on simple things, ordinary things. One out of three storefronts were either boarded up or had commercial real estate ads half peeling off. Everything looks so normal, but that’s not how it feels.