Our New Alien Overlords

When I stepped out of Starbucks, latte in hand, and spotted the alien in the street, my first thought was Oh, please god no.

My second thought was Great, now I'll have to explain to my boss why I'm late.  Why do I have to live so close to the ground zero?

I knew why, of course.  My bank account was distressingly low, and rents were cheap around the alien's landing sites and established bases on Earth.  No one really wanted to live next to our overlords, be constantly reminded of how our people had been conquered.

Besides, I thought as I watched the alien shamble up the street, bellowing out tinny commands through a small metal box clamped in amid the green tentacles, our alien overlords turned out to be real jerks.

I started to turn away, hoping to maybe duck up a side alley so I could still make it to my office on time, but the alien caught the movement and gestured to me with a tentacle.  "You, Human!" it rasped at me from that tinny little box.  "You Will Bow!"

"Can I not?" I asked, knowing that it was no use but giving it a try anyway.  "This coffee is really full, and I don't want to spill on my new pants-"

With a bellow, the alien reached into its nest of tentacles and produced a large laser cannon, which it hefted with considerable difficulty.  "Puny Insect, Do Not Test The Might Of The Kalaxaranian Empire!" it bellowed, its eyes waving with agitation at the end of their stalks.  It leveled the weapon and squeezed off a shot.

Unfortunately, stalked eyes are not good for sighting down the barrel of a weapon, and the shot went wide.  Ten feet away from me, a parking meter exploded in a shower of quarters.  "Dammit!" the alien growled, trying to adjust its wildly fluctuating aim.

I knew that this would just take longer, add to my delay.  "Okay, okay, I'm bowing," I called out hastily, setting down my cup of coffee on the ground beside me.  I got down on my knees and waved my arms forward towards the alien, the weird gesture that these idiots insisted was a sign of honor.

The alien put away the laser cannon quickly.  I couldn't read tentacle gestures, but I would have bet that it was signaling relief that it didn't actually have to shoot any more.  Really, the whole thing was embarrassing.

The aliens had arrived a few years previously in a giant horde, all set to invade us, their ships blistering with weapons.  Unfortunately, although the monsters had cracked the cold fusion barrier and carried technological marvels, they had simply no sense of tactics or skill in battle.  They simply landed and started blasting away at trees and squirrels, succeeding only in causing a few scattered forest fires.

The Powers That Be, however, decided that, to best explore the tech of these new invaders, it would be easier to just surrender, rather than crushing them in a fight.  We give the aliens some lip service and a few trinkets, our esteemed leaders figured, and in return we get a new leap forward in technology.

Well, that part worked out all right.  My cold fusion powered Jetta was testament enough to that.  Scientists were already predicting that energy issues would be fully solved by the end of the decade.

But no one had figured on the aliens leaving behind a force to "Ensure Peace And Order In Our Loyal Conquered Subjects."

So now, whenever one of these big blobs ambled out of their compound into our world, we all had to scrape and bow, pretend that we were subservient.  It was, I thought to myself as I watched my coffee cup tremble on the ground, a royal pain in the ass.

But after a few minutes, the alien was satisfied.  "Carry On With Your Tedious Lives, Humble Servants," it rumbled, turning and meandering off down another street.

I waited until it was out of sight before leaping back up to my feet, grabbing at my coffee cup.  A small wave sloshed over the edge and caught my hand, making me curse, but I didn't slow down as I hurried up the street.

I was definitely late, now.  Great.  Just great.

The Priest in the Coffee Shop, Part II

Continued from here.

It took a good, strongly brewed fresh cup of coffee being waved under his nose, but eventually the priest came around, his eyelids flickering as he regained consciousness.  I had the pretense to keep my hand ready to clamp over his mouth if he started screaming.

The man didn't scream, but his eyes shot wide open as his memory booted back up, and he shot upright in the booth and twisted his head around.  I watched, feeling a little guilty, as he stared at the various angels, devils, and other celestial beings in the shop, his eyes looking as though they were about to explode out of his head.

After all, I had been the one who shattered his veil of self-imposed ignorance.

Book 2 of 52: “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” by Elizabeth Kolbert

Click above to see the book on Amazon.

Well, now I’m depressed.  

Elizabeth Kolbert, a journalist for the New Yorker, has chosen a handful of creatures, settings, and species - some of them extinct, some of them still barely hanging on - to show how, right now, humans are in the midst of causing the sixth mass extinction event.

The book starts by briefly discussing the history of extinctions, starting with the very idea that animals could go extinct, and that every animal alive today might have come from a different ancestor.  We learn how there were five different events that signaled the “end of an era” - that is, a mass extinction that wiped out the majority of life on Earth.  The most recent of these, of course, was the asteroid strike that took out the dinosaurs.

However, interspersed with this history are accounts of some of the many species that are currently vanishing from our planet, or have gone extinct within the last thousand years or less.  Some of these species include the American bat, frogs and amphibians around the globe, rhinos and elephants, the auk (an extinct relative of the penguin), and corals, linked to vanishing barrier reefs.

Kolbert is definitely a gifted writer, and she expertly weaves together stories of history, accounts of her own personal travels and experiences as she sought out those who worked to protect these species (or at least chronicle their passing), and sobering facts about the changing world around us and the reality that is a result of humankind’s rapid spread and alteration of the environment.

However, while many books on topics such as this end with an uplifting note, that is largely absent from this book.  The conclusion, we are told, is that this is happening, and it is likely too late to stop the sixth mass extinction event.  This won’t be undone by recycling, by donating an extra $10 to Greenpeace or eating dolphin free tuna.

We are losing more and more of our biodiversity each day, Kolbert tells us, and there’s nothing we can do - except wait to see what the fallout will be.

Time to read: 3 hours 15 minutes.  I’m a bit slower on non-fiction.

Summer Love at the Dusk

We spent most of our first date staring up at the night sky, I remember.

Of course, that wasn't the intention.  No, I had plans.  This girl was everything I'd been looking for - sweet, caring, and with that weird little sense of otherworldliness about her.  Somehow, when I talked with her, our conversations drifted from the mundane deep into the realms of philosophy.  I loved spending hours with her, just running circles through the meaning of life.

I'd intended to take her out to dinner, followed by a play that had been getting tons of great attention in the papers recently.  But the restaurant was so crowded that we couldn't get a table, and it turned out that one of the play's actors had just torn a ligament, and he didn't have an understudy.

All of a sudden, my big night, the big planned date, was dissolving into nothing.

But we didn't let that stop us.

Instead, we simply headed for the big hill in the park, Carrie shyly letting me hold her hand.  I can remember how my big, clumsy fingers seemed to dwarf her slim, graceful digits.  I was so worried that I'd accidentally hurt her.

There, on top of that hill, in the grass and the fading residual warmth of the summer, we gazed up at the night sky, at the stars.

"The ones that are left are still pretty," Carrie commented to me.  Our heads were next to each other, and she barely had to speak above a whisper.  I could feel the vibration of her words as her body pressed against me.

She was right.  I tried to think back, to remember how the sky had looked before.  Already, the images were fuzzy, faded, inside my head.  How could I forget something as important as that?  But I'd never thought of the stars as especially important to remember.

If I'd had to guess, I would have said that there were a quarter of them left.  The scientists on the news claimed that we'd lost far more than seventy-five percent, because of all the ones too dim to see, but what did those matter?  If no one could see them, there was no one to care that they were gone.

"Where do you think they're going?" Carrie asked me.  Her words didn't break the silence as much as they shaped it, slipping in easily between the soft chirps of crickets in the tall grass.

I started to shrug, but then realized that this would push her head off of my shoulder.  "I don't know," I said, my voice sounding rough and unpolished compared to her light tones.  "They say on the news that it's the dark matter collapsing, that maybe it's a wave of gravity sweeping through and putting them out."

"They say, they say," Carrie parroted my words back to me.  "They don't know anything!  Maybe someone poured a bucket of water on our universe to put out the cinders.  They don't know."

For a minute, we fell back into silence, listening to the crickets.  Carrie's leg pressed against mine, and I could feel her heat through my jeans.

I had been so certain that she'd say no, that she'd just laugh at me, that I almost didn't ask at all.  It was only with the egging on from my friends, not letting me shamefully back down, that I dared approach her as she sat and sipped at her cup of tea, perched so gracefully on the edge of her chair as she held her little book.  I remembered a beam of afternoon sun, cutting through the windows to illuminate her face.  Like an angel, I remember thinking.

She had smiled up at me, read to me a line of poetry that I forgot the minute it left her lips.  I said something stupid, embarrassing - and she had burst into peals of laughter, her whole body quivering.  She was a songbird, amused by the inarticulate bullfrog as it tried to match her beauty of song.

"They say that it will reach us in about a year," I offered, tilting my head slightly until I could see a single brilliantly blue eye gazing back at me.  "All sorts of doomsday cults are starting up."

That single eye looked back at me.  Suddenly it was serious, no laughter hiding there.  "What do you think?" Carrie asked me.  "Is the end coming?"

I felt as though this was a test.  What would it say about us, about any chance at a relationship?  I worried about that, sometimes.  Would I die alone, swallowed up when the blackness reached the planet?  Had the universe put an expiration date on us?  "Do not consume after 8/23 of next year"?

I cleared my suddenly dry throat.  "I don't think the end is here yet," I said, not letting myself even think about my words.  "I think this is a beginning."

For a moment, Carrie just stared at me.  The songbird was thinking, deciding whether to take wing and leave the poor bullfrog behind.

And then she decided.  "A beginning," she repeated softly, snuggling in closer to my arm.  "I like that."

The crickets continued chirping as we lay and watched the lights above us slowly wink out of existence.

A Man Walks Into a Coffee Shop...

When I glanced up from the iPad mounted in front of my counter as an ersatz cash register, I was surprised to notice two things about the man standing in front of me, in the following order:

First, he was not wearing a flowing white robe.  There was nothing hovering in the air above his head - especially nothing producing any sort of a glow or luminescence.  He wore a belt around his hips, but there were no bladed weapons slid into it, and he wore very practical black shoes instead of golden sandals.  Instead of a gold coin, he was holding a credit card loosely between two fingers.

Second, the man wore the clerical collar of a priest around his neck...

Book 1 of 52: “Takedown Twenty” by Janet Evanovich

To anyone who missed my 2015 resolutions, one of those is to read a book a week for the whole year, the 52-book challenge!  And to hold myself accountable, Monday's post each week will be a brief review/my thoughts on said book.

Click above to get to the book on Amazon.

I really could have started off my “52 books in 2015” goal with a solid story, with something that has true literary merit.  I could have picked an informative and engaging book that would teach me new things, or an award-winning new author who presents a fresh take on a genre.

But I’m still on vacation, so I didn’t.

Instead, I picked up “Takedown Twenty,” a Stephanie Plum mystery by Janet Evanovich.  As you might be able to guess from the title, this is the twentieth book in Evanovich’s mystery series, and by this point, the plot is almost nostalgically cookie-cutter.

Every Plum mystery includes the following:

• A high-profile “skip” comes in for Plum to capture (she works as a bounty hunter).
• Plum and her partner, Lula, go off to capture this skip.  They find him, and then fail and he gets away.
• Consumption of unhealthy foods (donuts, cake, chicken, pizza).
• Plum’s car is destroyed.
• Plum gets a loaner car.  This is also destroyed.
• Plum has a run-in with sexy man of mystery Ranger, who flirts with her but gets nowhere.
• Lula is called fat by someone and takes offense.
• Lula’s wild neon outfit is described in detail.
• Plum captures a low-value skip, generally by luck.
• Plum’s boyfriend Morelli gives her some familial bliss.
• Plum feeds her pet hamster.
• Plum’s grandma says shocking things about how she wants to get laid.
• We hear how Plum’s grandma wears inappropriately skin-tight clothes.
• Plum + grandma go to a viewing at the funeral home.
• Somebody gets tazed.
• Plum captures the high-profile skip, generally by luck.

In this regard, Takedown Twenty did not disappoint.  Janet Evanovich has clearly found the winning formula, and she doesn’t leave it behind.  She puts out 3-5 of these books a year, and they probably all make a lot of money for her.  Still, the reason for picking one up is not because I’m expecting something new, something interesting.  

Rather, Plum’s books are comforting, like that sitcom you’ve seen a million times.  Jerry breaks up with a girl for no reason, George is a schlub, Elaine puts her foot in her mouth, and Kramer is krazy.  There’s nothing new, no innovation; it’s the same old formula.  Order a Big Mac, get a Big Mac.

But sometimes, when all we want is a Big Mac, it can be comforting.

Time to read: 1 hour, 30 minutes.  A new record, even for these Evanovich fluff novels.

Angels planning post (behind the scenes, novel 1)

One of my goals for 2015: Write 3 novels.

One of these novels will be in November for NaNoWriMo.

Given as how I will be totally burned out by December, however, the other two will have to come out earlier.  Fortunately, since November is the eleventh month, this still gives me five months per novel,, as long as I also spend a bit of time fleshing out the outline for NNWM.

Novel 1?  I've always wanted to publish all of my stories about angels; selfishly, I believe that these stories include some of my better writing, as well as a few rare moments when my humor actually seems to work.

I even have a cover in mind (not that I'm sharing that yet!).

The issue, however, is that most of these stories are quite disconnected.  Here are the stories that I have so far, in reverse order:

1. Tough Love - a man on a blind date instead meets his guardian angel, who turns out to be a bit of an asshole.
2. Do Computers Speak to Angels? - an angel tries to bring a computer into a coffee shop.  It doesn't work.
3. D'oops'day - the Apocalypse was supposed to be yesterday.  Fortunately, no one remembered.
4. Hell's IT (2 posts) - turns out devils aren't so good with technology either.
5. Lucifer's Gift (3 posts) - a dream in which the devil appears to hand out the apple of sin.  It doesn't end up going quite as planned.
6. Welcome to Heaven!  Now What (unfinished) - Heaven turns out to be rather dull.
7. Blake Meets Ophiel (Ophiel series) - short excerpt of a human meeting an angel.
8. Blake and Lucifer Have Dinner - segment where human (from #7, above) has dinner with Lucifer.
9. Guarding the Borders of Heaven - Angels are vigilant border guards.
10. The Vault Theft - chapter 1 of an earlier attempt at this novel that I abandoned.
11. Ambition (2 posts) - a devil steals a man's ambition, and dares an angel to figure out what's missing.
12. Azrael & Mephistopheles (2 posts) - the yearly meeting of an archangel and devil.
13. In A Perfect World... - a guardian angel explains why the "perfect world" didn't work.
14. Cold Blooded Humans? - a guardian angel (#13) points out that cold-blooded humans were an early experiment.
15. The Angel On the Train (2 posts) - everyone has bad days - even angels.
16. Barista To The Angels (2 posts) - a coffee shop begins getting unexpected visitors.
17. Heavenly Grounds - initial write, narrator interjecting with history, of #16.
18. The Angel at the Press Conference - Fear not!  God exists, he's just off somewhere on vacation!  Probably.
19. Mis-Filing Has Serious Consequences... (2 posts, unconcluded) - an angel and a devil chase after a stolen tablet.
20. Calcifer on Karma (2 posts) - Calcifer explains how karma works.
21. The Roman Army Upgrade - Calcifer tries to teach the Romans to ride a bike.
22. Calcifer's Intrusion (2 posts) - Calcifer's favorite coffee shop is invaded by an angel!  This is his space!
23. Calcifer's Haunt (2 posts) - Calcifer proves that he's a devil to coffee shop girl.
24. Soul Harvesting Difficulties - a reaper demon pops up in a supermarket, determined to gather souls.  The visitors are determined to mow him down with carts to get to their deals.
25. Lucern's Little Whoopsie (2 posts) - Lucern misses one teeny, tiny little asteroid.  No big deal.
26. The Coffee Shop of Vice and Iniquity - the post that started it all!  Is a soul worth a grande latte?

26 posts, with lots of raw material.  Now, to organize it into some semblance of a story.  That's the challenge...