To General Schmidt, the duration between Reichs resembled the unfathomable distance dividing the stars – a cycle he intended to soon expedite. The besprinkled void of space laid spread before him through the bridge window of the U-boat. With the idling of its alien anti-gravity core, the eight hundred tonne submarine drifted smoothly in high orbit. The painted red, white and black swastika on the conning tower faced the sun. Below, swirling frost over Earth’s crown shimmered from the solar radiation.

“It’s beginning to look a lot like…Gleichschaltung,” Schmidt remarked. Alongside stood one of his lieutenants, nodding with pride. Two guards kept watch. “Long has it been since our forefazhers left ze planet. Down below, zey move on, zey forget. Meanvile, ve grow stronger, ve infiltrate, ve prepare.” Schmidt turned to the other man. “Ze time is now at hand. But, success vill require a level of, uh, severity in our tactics zat some may not be able to stomach, like ze ones who hang stockings on Christmas Eve.”

Suddenly, the guards grabbed the lieutenant from behind and in one move his arms were twisted and snapped. Schmidt found his shrieks amusing. The lieutenant’s legs gave out and he hung by broken arms in the grips of the stone-faced guards. He blathered an apology, mostly unintelligible.

The general glared down his nose at the wretched man. “I know of your Christmas tree. Ze tinsel. Ze milk and cookies. I vill not allow sympazy for zat jolly old fat man.”

Still in hysterics, the lieutenant was dragged to an emergency airlock and tossed inside the tiny compartment. Within seconds, its outer seal parted and the lieutenant was ejected to empty space. Into the void he cartwheeled, gasping for absent air.

Schmidt watched from the window. “Time to deck Santa’s halls,” he declared.

*

“You had better watch out!”

At this warning, the young man glanced over his shoulder at the toppling tower of boxes but hesitated to move. In a flash, the old man was next to him, catching the packages before any harm could be caused.

“Whoa! That was close!” the young man exclaimed. “Thanks Nick.”

The white-bearded, round-bellied old timer who called himself Nick returned a smile. “Not a snowflake’s worth of trouble.”

The boxes were restacked and the truck’s back door was shut. Shivering from winter chill, the young man and two other warehouse colleagues bid good night to Nick and ribbed him for his seemingly superhuman delivery times. Nick wished them and their families well, mentioning each of their immediate relatives by name and asking after the ill and infirm.

The role of Nick, the plain-clothed owner-operator of an independent freight forwarding outfit, was made necessary in Santa Claus’s off-season to bankroll the toy workshop at the North Pole and his annual delivery operation. Gone were the days when toy manufacturers extended generous partnerships to keep Santa financially afloat. Nowadays, he was just another customer, lucky to purchase anything wholesale. In their ceaseless pursuit to wring revenue from every inch of the supply chain, corporate executives learned that the cost of Christmas could be passed onto Saint Nicholas himself, for the alternative was to disappoint the world’s children, which their hollow hearts could tolerate but they knew Santa never would.

Further still time has marched into even stranger terrain, a future behind illuminated glass where toys were made virtual and gifts were just money, also virtual, until nothing was real or tangible except maybe the insane profit margins awarded to a select few. Every year, the battle for the holiday’s soul ceded another inch of ground to avarice and class exploitation. Yet, Santa plodded on, keeping his promise to spread joy across the world for as long as he lived.

He sat in the truck’s cab, alone, surrounded by letters, drawings and knickknacks given to him by children, scotch-taped or tacked over every inch of interior. He removed his scarf – a novice attempt at crochet, mostly red like his famed cap, with one end done in white and sewn with buttons meant to be his face. It was a gift, folded next to a plate of sugar cookies and a little girl’s note during one of those marathon Christmas deliveries. The note detailed her concern, given the treacherous Arctic climate, over Santa’s usual lack of neckwear. On a night when so many others were fixated on the sizes of their gift piles, her thoughtfulness shone like the moon on new-fallen snow. Every gift from a child touched Santa’s heart and was kept and cherished for always.

The freight truck was driven several miles to a secluded dead-end road. The secret behind Nick’s extraordinary shipping speeds lay in the same power used to deliver presents across the globe in a single day and it needed to be employed in private. However, the dark and the haze promised to complicate take-off. “I swear the reindeer union schedules these fogs,” mumbled Santa.

The truck’s wheels floated off the pavement via Santa’s will conducted tactually to the vehicle, readying for the jump into the sky, raising slowly until assurance that high-speed travel would be clear of flying bats and other obstructions. Then from seemingly nowhere, the truck’s sensors detected movement in front. By the time he recognized the shape, it was too late.

The drone, hovering mere yards away, shot a mini-Hellfire missile straight for his windshield.

“Holy sugarplums!” shouted Santa. The truck dodged the strike just in time, then thrust forward in rapid acceleration through the air, ramming its grill at the drone and splitting it into a thousand bits of plastic and metal. The missile dropped into the nearby woods and exploded with harm only to the trees.

“By Frosty’s pipe, I’ll find the chimney lickers who did this!”

A drone pilot had to be near but no camouflage stood a chance against Santa’s heightened awareness of any living soul close by, asleep or awake. His truck soared over the wooded backcountry in widening circles until he sensed it: a quickened heartbeat, not unlike that of a sleepless child who hears reindeer hooves on their roof.

Below him, a black van came into view, parked casually on a gravel shoulder beneath a clump of conifers. As the flying truck dove from above, the van’s wheels kicked up gravel and it took off down the road.

Santa pursued, but as their distance closed, the van blew apart with a deafening blast, consumed by a ball of fire brighter than summer sun. The shock wave tossed Santa’s truck and it landed sideways on the asphalt with a bang.

The driver’s door opened like a floor hatch. From the overturned cab Santa emerged, mildly bruised, illuminated by the van’s frame burning in the road. There were no other survivors. Santa figured the poor driver didn’t even know their vehicle was laced with remote-controlled explosives.

He urgently made a call on his phone but the line kept ringing and ringing. He hung up and tapped the contact for “Mama” but the voicemail answered. With the scarf around his neck and a bowlful of worry in his gut, the old man touched the side of his nose and in the blink of an eye he launched like a rocket into the clouds.

*

It was a devastating scene at the North Pole. The Claus’ home and workshop had been firebombed into ruins. The reindeer barn, now mostly collapsed, was ablaze, as was acres of evergreen in the Christmas tree farm. Dead elves lay everywhere, mangled and charred in their fur-trimmed red outfits. Other elves dug through smoldering rubble for survivors but found only more corpses, complete and partial, which they stacked on pull-along red wagons and carted to the cemetery. For the first time since the workshop’s erection so long ago, the pole had become barren of any Christmas cheer.

From the sky dropped Santa, landing on his boots before the smoking pile of wood and brick that had been the source of so much happiness in the world. The sight brought him to his knees. The elves all rushed to him and they hugged and together they wept.

“Oh, Santa! It was horrible!”

“All of a sudden the satellite comms went out—”

“We were outside and saw flying saucers—”

“They dropped bombs everywhere—”

“And shot anyone who tried to get away!”

“Only some of us made it to the bunker in time—”

“And none of the reindeer!”

“It is so sad!”

Santa looked around. “Where is Mrs. Claus?” No one knew.

He leaped upon the wreckage. Children’s handwritten letters blew past in the wind. He lifted wood beams and furniture and needed no effort to toss them aside. Elves crowded around and helped sift through plaster and broken toys.

Eventually Mrs. Claus was uncovered but she had been crushed and no pulse registered. Santa carefully pulled her body free and cradled it in his arms. With tenderness he brushed her eyes closed. A heavy tear rolled down his white beard. “Mama,” he whispered softly.

Minutes passed before the desolating silence was cut by an elf’s question. “Santa, who did this? Was it Space Nazis?”

Santa didn’t look up. “Yes. It was those cotton-headed Space Nazis.”

Murmurs of shock and bewilderment suffused the elves. Someone asked, “Did Santa just say the c-word?”

After some time, Santa spoke again to ask about his sleigh which, like his plane and the entire hangar, remained surprisingly intact. “Prepare the nuke,” he instructed one of the others.

The storm intensified as Santa and the elves, caked in snow, dug graves into the ice shelf within the cemetery grounds. The bodies of Mrs. Claus and the others were laid within and covered with tinsel and ornaments, then topped with ice. Santa spoke words of respect for the dead although he struggled through the sobs.

“Christmas may never be the same again,” he warned. “But we shall worry over that later. Our paramount order of business lies with the Nazis. They shall have to be settled down for a long winter’s nap.”

*

Many, many years before, a younger Nicholas, rusty haired and bare faced and disoriented inside a raging blizzard, took a step he expected would be his last. He had fallen forward in the waist-high drift and discovered his well of vitality and resolve had finally run dry. He could no longer stand. The black night and curtain of snow denied any visibility. A numbing cold pierced his bones. The homecoming trek to his Arctic village would end right there in the dark forest. People would discover his body after the spring thaw, if the wolverines hadn’t first.

A snowy grave was swallowing him, but oddly, the sky brightened though not by sun or moon – first a muted glow, then increasing until the whole hillside basked in an impossible warm light unlike any torch he had seen. Above him, a dark silhouette divided the light and for a glorious moment he was sure an angelic escort had come for him. But as the shape turned, clarity befell its features: a ghoul of uncanny figure with large, black insect eyes whose stare could be felt like an icy hand. Overwhelmed by exhaustion and fear, unconsciousness claimed Nicholas.

It felt like only minutes had passed when he awoke except warmth suffused him and his clothes were already dry. The surrounding space looked strange and his mind struggled for references to comprehend these visions: hanging spheres and polygons with shiny colors, sparkling metal poles wrapped in pulsing organic ribbons, holly branches covered in false snow that alternated color, candles illuminating without fire. He seemed to be inside a small cave that smelled of iron and vinegar, lying on a wooden slab, observed from the center of the room by the bug-eyed creature.

Startled, Nicholas recoiled. The creature was an eerie sight, covered in sickly gray skin, its enormous, bald head balanced atop a gaunt child’s body. It stood human-like, naked but lacking genitals. Its eyes – so large – stared right through him. Two tiny slits substituted a nose and its tiny mouth never opened though Nicholas heard it clearly speak in his native language.

“You have not seen something like me.”

The voice sounded unnatural, like a polar gust through a chamber of tin. It filled Nicholas’s head but not his ears – felt more than heard.

He realized he had been given a question. “Are you a demon?” he asked in response.

“You need no fear of me.” The creature stepped closer. The young man’s fists stayed clenched. “You were saved after succumbing to elements. Elves took notice. They warned of a trespasser and offered to kill it. That is not our way. Our way is mercy, compassion and generosity.”

It went on to describe a race of beings – the Greys – that came from a much different land far among the stars where they had learned to overcome limitations of the physical universe. Their creations exceeded the imagination’s bounds. Some of these beings had crossed the immeasurable distance to Earth seeking new opportunities to exploit. Hoping to counter their negative influence, this Grey and others of its kind followed.

Stories of clever imps fooling humans with fanciful lies haunted the mythology of Nicholas’s culture so he treaded carefully. “How can I be certain to trust you?”

The Grey, with awkward gait, walked to a pile of colorful objects against the rock wall. It lifted a particular red patterned one, almost taller than itself, then slowly approached Nicholas and handed the thing to him. He was puzzled by the surface’s strange shape and crinkly texture. The Grey told him to tear the outer material like paper and so he did until exposing a wooden runner sled, polished and unmarked by use.

“It will aid the travel to your home,” said the Grey and it detailed for Nicholas the direction to his village.

But the young man, feeling some return of his boldness in that festively lit cavern, was reluctant to leave. “I have many questions that will gnaw at my sanity for eternity if left unanswered.”

This eagerness pleased the Grey and it told him to revisit in springtime, but alone, and knowledge of astonishing marvels would be shared, for the Grey sensed a serenity within him that characterized good company. It then pushed against a slab of wall to open into the stormy night.

At last Nicholas registered that the being had saved his life and was helping him journey home to no ulterior benefit. “Thank you,” he said. “Death would have claimed me if not for your help. I am very grateful. Happy Christmas to you.”

The Grey’s eyes somehow grew even bigger. Its own kind held holidays in high regard, so once winter melted away and the thrushes’ songs again filled the hills, their early meetings were passed with Nicholas’s tales of celebrations, magnificent feasts, music, townsmates and kin playing and dancing and a communal optimism that peace always lay one Christmas miracle away.

*

Misiones Province, Argentina. Present day. Beneath a climbing sun, tactical trucks rumbled through jungle mud, trampling lush undergrowth until halting at a makeshift checkpoint. The soldiers aboard the trucks and the guards all shared the same nondescript uniform and a pale complexion not native to the humid Región Mesopotámica. Once cleared, the convoy proceeded to a tunnel at the foot of the mountain. Above, a flying craft, top-hat-shaped and wobbly, lowered into a rusted hatch on the mountain summit that creaked when it closed.

The base was built in the 1950s by what remained of the Third Reich following their military collapse and exile to South America. From there, they completed the flying U-boat program and oversaw construction of their lunar base. Since most personnel were now stationed on the moon, Misiones had become their primary arsenal.

Silence returned to the jungle. The guards settled into alert postures in accordance with their elevated readiness status. Parakeets and toucans hidden in trees resumed their chittering. Then the calm was broken by the blast of a mortar shell against a rocky outcrop on the mountainside, blowing a puff of rubble and boulders.

The men jumped in surprise. Through the clamor of tumbling rock and panicked birds, they scanned for the source of this sudden threat. One guard noticed movement in the distance – bright white contrasting verdant foliage, hopping briskly from tree to tree. Once more it bounded into the air, high up this time, beyond the mountaintop. The guard fired his weapon but still missed the thing before its huge, fluffy weight crashed upon him.

The Easter Bunny, in a cornflower blue blazer, pink bowtie and a shoulder-slung AR-15, landed on the man, squishing him in the muck, innards bursting from his sides like a stepped egg. Before the other guards could take aim, Easter Bunny spun a roundhouse kick with his giant hind leg to send them screaming over the tree line and deep into the bush. More soldiers teemed out of the mountain so he bounced back to his mortar and delivered another painted, egg-shaped bombshell to the mountainside.

Although occupied with his own holiday preparations, Easter Bunny always had Santa’s back, indebted to him after so many decades of the man’s unconditional support. Transitioning from woodland critter to an anthropomorphized folk hero had extracted a hefty toll from the rabbit’s mental stability and only Santa truly empathized.

Right on time, a glistening red and white wonder appeared in the sky and it was Santa Claus, decked in his traditional red suit and hat, driving his sleigh in circles over the Nazi base. Soldiers swore in German and shot futilely into the air. The sleigh lapped round and round and ever upward into the clouds, furiously whipping them like cotton candy in a blender. Faster he went and soon that mass of precipitation thickened and froze. Now a half-mile wide snowball, its weight tugged it earthward, gently at first, then plummeting. Before any person within its vast shadow could escape, the whole mountain was crushed beneath a deep quilt of snow and ice, burying everyone outside and blocking all access points.

Santa’s sleigh touched down next to Easter Bunny. The old man was triumphant but exceptionally joyless. “That ought to keep these Space Nazis busy until the cocoa cools, which is all the time I need. Thank you, Peter.”

“Glad to lend a paw,” replied Easter Bunny.

“How are things, old friend?”

“Oh, everything is just egg-celent.” Easter Bunny fiddled with the gun’s strap.

“Well, I must make haste to Antarctica. Do take care, Peter.”

“Leprechauns, huh? Be careful. And, um, I’m really sorry about what happened.”

Santa, in his sleigh, gazed upon the snow-covered peak, lost in thought. “Without Mrs. Claus, all I can look forward to are Christmastime and punching Nazis in the teeth. Well, bad news for Nazis, because it is only January.”

“I’m really sorry,” said Easter Bunny.

Santa realized the rabbit’s AR-15 was pointed at him. He raised his white-gloved hands. “Peter—”

“Nothing personal,” Easter Bunny explained. “It’s just that I have some, um, debts and the Nazis are helping me. They just want you to tie yourself up. No one needs to get hurt, alright?”

“You are my friend—”

Easter Bunny tossed a pack of ribbons at him. “Pick your favorite color and tie your ankles and wrists.”

Santa pleaded, “But what of the children? Think about how they will feel.”

Easter Bunny toggled the gun’s safety. “Santa, don’t make me shoot.”

Santa kept his hands up and didn’t waver an inch. Easter Bunny’s gun never shifted its aim from the old man. The two icons of holiday magic locked eyes, waiting for the other to act.

Santa’s defiance dared Easter Bunny to accept the consequence of his threat, an order that proved too tall for even the desperate rabbit. He lowered his gun. “Damnit. Just go. I’ll tell them, um, that you overpowered me.” Ashamed, his eyes followed the gun barrel’s path to the ground.

Santa spoke solemnly. “Your change of heart is for the better and I appreciate your courage. Nevertheless, Peter Cottontail, you have much work ahead to straighten out your life and restore your integrity. Until then, I am sorry to say, your name will have to be stricken from the Nice List.”

The sleigh lifted off, trailing sparkles through the air, until it drove out of sight. In the mud below, Easter Bunny hung his head in disgrace.

*

The Grey’s dwelling was unlike anyplace in the world, stocked with curiosities of uncertain function, and here Nicholas spent much time over the years in its company. The creature’s soundless voice recounted for him tales of its native land fashioned artificially from metal and exotic organics, its long journey through the stars fraught with skirmishes and sickness, regrets over injustices of its own credit and its ultimate defection. It eventually joined a clan of other Greys who came to Earth, committed to impart their altruistic beliefs upon a human civilization suffering the corruption of their alien brethren’s secret machinations.

One day, a matured Nicholas with patches of red whiskers visited the Grey only to find it lying on the same wood slab on which he awoke during his first visit. A paleness now suffused the Grey’s skin. Its huge eyelid pads drooped. Nicholas rushed to its side.

It sounded no weaker, yet pauses punctuated its speaking. “My body is expiring…I will soon be collected…We will not again see each other, I regret.”

Emotion gripped Nicholas and welled in his eyes. In spite of the Grey’s bizarre nature and unsettling image, a friendship had been kindled that grew to thaw his heart, chilled by his tours as an infantryman and the memories tormenting him. His soul felt at ease learning from the Grey that a grander design existed beyond the trappings of human imprudence.

The Grey was likewise saddened, imperceptibly, by their final farewell and it praised the man’s decency and companionship. “A last gift I bestow to you…A chosen few of Earth’s inhabitants are given unearthly abilities to perform deeds of goodwill…The rabbit on Easter Island given strength and immortality is but one example…You also must be a hero to your kind…This is both privilege and burden and befalls only those with purest intent…Promise to serve goodness only, extend charity to the needful and inspire happiness in the young…Avoid association with other Greys and any human who enters into business with them…Be an antidote to the poisons of greed and subjection…Carry yourself full of spirit…I wish I would not be denied witness to the achievements of your future…Fortune delivered to me the greatest example of a man when under the snow you were discovered.”

The Grey’s words tossed in Nicholas’s mind but their full meaning found no purchase until he arrived home, weary and dejected, whereupon nudging open the door, its hinges ripped from the frame.

*

High above the frigid South Atlantic waters, Candy Cane One, the red and white striped airplane, took wing on its final flight. It typically shuttled supplies for the workshop or vacationing reindeer and had served Santa well over the decades. He was sorry about opting to lose it but his plan’s success depended on its fuel reserves and its cargo bay filled with heavy explosives.

Santa caught up to the airplane, flying his sleigh alongside, his favorite scarf at his neck. The elves at the cabin windows cheered. Together they crossed into the Antarctican continent, caked in familiar ice like their antipodean home except blanketing a rocky topography through which mountain ranges poked to bask in uninterrupted summer sun. Miles and miles of tundra passed below until they reached a cluster of peaks obscuring a military installation and arena-sized launchpad. Floating above, to Santa’s surprise, was a U-boat, dispatched from space earlier than he expected. It faced their direct bearing as if taunting Santa’s exposed agenda. He gulped.

“I have not seen this much trouble since the Cabbage Patch Kid doll riots.”

From behind the mountains rose a pair of silver flying saucers, teetering on invisible spires, and they lurched forward to charge their attackers. Gun barrels anchored on their brims fired large-caliber rounds that sunk into Candy Cane One’s fortified exterior but the plane stayed on course.

Santa promptly grabbed his shoulder-mounted tinsel cannon, placed one of the saucers in its crosshairs and blasted. Globs of electrically charged plasma with stringy silver tails fanned out through the air. Enough of them caught the saucer to pock its aluminum hull like Swiss cheese and set it into freefall.

With the other saucer occupied by Santa’s assaults, elves parachuted from the side of the plane, carrying anti-gravity guns fashioned from PVC piping and wearing gas masks in case chemical agents had been loaded into the Nazis’ weapons. They landed in the snow and gathered into formation.

Suddenly, the permafrost around them erupted. From snow-concealed foxholes sprung dozens of tiny bodies in snow camo. The leprechaun ambush opened fire with German MG 3s perched on bipods spraying fat rounds like firehoses. The white earth became red-splattered from elf bodies exploding. Elves still gliding in parachutes were mowed down before landing. A few elves found themselves unscathed and fired back with anti-gravity rays, sending orange-bearded leprechauns into a reverse fall, screeching madly, rising skyward to eventual asphyxiation and ebullism.

The animosity between leprechaun and elf dated back millennia. When sprawling human settlements forced both races out of Europe, elves emigrated to the Arctic but banished their genetic cousins on account of their ingrained mischief, impossible to tolerate or correct. The leprechauns’ sole choice for a home became the Antarctic. There they lived in solitude until the twentieth century when the Third Reich offered a deal: their coveted gold in exchange for a tract of frozen land. In time, the Nazis’ devilish schemes became a magnet to the leprechaun disposition and a sinister alliance formed. Still, a leprechaun platoon defending a Nazi stronghold was unprecedented.

The last elf to jump from Candy Cane One was the pilot after he locked the aircraft into a kamikaze nosedive toward the buildings below. However, the U-boat was ready. A missile fired from its torpedo bay, hitting the plane dead on, incinerating it before posing any threat. The on-board explosives joined with a twin detonation that rocked the valley with the sound of its squandered chances. Fiery debris rained down like an infernal blizzard and some caught the pilot’s parachute, igniting it into tatters and hurtling the elf down to the ice in a juicy, red splat.

Santa’s face glowed crimson with rage. Dogged by the saucer, he fired more plasma charges but it proved too nimble for a blow to land. Then, coming from over the horizon and closing in quickly, five more flying fedora shapes barged into the battle. Santa’s mistake was quickly realized. Chills of dread ran up his spine.

Two saucers passed over the remnants of the elf advancement and shredded them into pieces with artillery fire to the cackling taunts of leprechauns. The other saucers joined the chase for Santa’s sleigh. Together, they forced him to lower altitude until he feared being run aground. Above, one saucer’s service door opened and, from inside, Nazi soldiers tossed unusual red grenades. Some of them directly hit Santa and his sleigh but, instead of deadly blasts, they shattered like glass and ooze from within doused their targets. This ooze hung heavy but it was actually imbued with extreme gravitation that at once drew Santa the remaining distance to the ground, pinning his torso and limbs and crushing the sleigh beneath him. Moving became impossible; an invisible avalanche felt to be on top of him.

The saucers landed nearby on telescoping struts. Soldiers in snow gear poured out with guns ready. One of them, keeping a safe distance, shot a tranquilizer dart that struck Santa’s exposed neck where the scarf had slipped. As consciousness clouded and dimmed, he watched a crew of leprechauns tie him up with steel chains while the others danced a jig in celebration, for at last Santa Claus’s end was nigh.

*

The door flew open and the young woman fled into the dark. Eyes wet, shivering from fright and cold, her boots kicked up the span’s depth of fresh powder from the lane. Not another soul stirred at that late hour. Cloud cover shredded and wafted away to expose winking pinpricks of stars and Orion with club and shield hunting the winter cosmos.

Nicholas caught up with her at the cemetery. “No!” she cried, crossing into the open grounds. A stubby gravestone, concealed by snow, tripped her foot and she landed on her side, cursing the pain. Nicholas outstretched his hand in a diplomatic gesture. With a shaky voice she rebuked him.

“Do not touch me! You…you are unnatural! You are cursed!! Get away!!” Her eyes darted about, afraid to meet his. “You were…driftitng in the air like a witch! My own eyes saw it! A cursed witch!!”

Breathing a sigh, he plunked down next to her. She scooted away a bit and resumed rubbing her ankle. They were both coatless and the deep freeze soaked through to their bones.

Nicholas spoke, patient as ever. “Is that what you take me for? A witch? Do you suppose that evil lays hold inside of me?”

At last she looked at him, studying his face, this man whom she had come to know through and throughout or so she had thought. His wholesome facade couldn’t reconcile with her mind’s picture of the eerie sorcery he had just divulged.

“Do you still wish to marry me?” he asked. She offered no answer, too lost in a maze of shock to find her words.

He continued while stroking his full red beard. “In all truth, I do not understand the nature of these abilities. They are far too fantastic for belief. Nonetheless, I possess them all the same. I cannot hide them – I should not – for now I know to what purpose they must be devoted. Tremendous challenges lay ahead, however.” His hand found hers in the snow. Finally disarmed, she let him grasp it for warmth. “It upsets me so much to see how the children look these days – miserable and downtrodden. No child should live a life so lacking in spirit. Therefore, I would like to do something that will bring joy to their faces and put wonder in the hearts of all. There is a certain temper missing amongst us, one of kindness and goodwill toward others, and perhaps I can help to restore it, but the task cannot be completed alone.”

A full moon poked through the clouds, casting a luster of midday to the village below. Headstones with snow caps poked through the field of white to remind the couple of their mute company. The woman wished their ancient wisdom could advise the trust Nicholas had built in her and then shaken.

“You wish to do good?” she asked. “You wish to help the children?” He smiled, that twinkle-eyed smile she noticed whenever he did a good turn. “This is all so much to absorb. Am I supposed to receive the news that you can fly with the same composure as learning you can fiddle? I am unsure what to think.”

“Do you trust me?”

She squeezed his hand. “You are a good man. Yes, I trust you.”

“Good. Look down.”

Although still seated, somehow the pair of them were hovering a full foot above the ground. Startled, she began to tumble backward but was held up by Nicholas’s grip.

He giggled. “Careful. Let go of me and you will fall.”

She gaped in awe at the snow cover lying below them but not touching. Alarm yielded to a creeping exhilaration. She remarked with amazement, “We…we are floating.”

“Hold on to me.”

Nicholas stood, lifting her with him. Their feet seemed to balance in midair on some unseen floor. At his whim, their bodies moved laterally, slowly, circling over the graves, then rising to the rooftops. She gasped and embraced him for dear life as if standing at a cliff’s crumbling edge.

“Not that I mind,” he said, “but there is no need to hold on so tightly. I only need to touch a small part of you, even just a thread of your clothes.”

“I do not wish to let go,” she replied, nestling her head on his shoulder. “I wish to hold onto you forever.”

Higher they soared under the moon’s melancholic stare. “Forever.”

*

Consciousness stirred and waned. Dreamy scenes flashing past: swallowed by a submarine hatch; tied to a steel-reinforced gurney; crossing an immense landing bay through a bustle of uniforms; a space station of sterile white; an aching notion, distant in his mind, calling with a forgotten urgency.

Santa awoke with fogged cognition, facing the ceiling of some well-lit room. A discomfort nagged at his nerves and he realized that, around his body, limbs and head, steel braces were holding him to a table with an oppressive overtightness. A leather belt from chin to crown cinched his mouth painfully closed. Chains and massive weights anchored the table to the floor as well as the IV pole whose tube ran through a piece of mounted lead pipe to a cannula in his arm, bound with a complete roll of duct tape. Other meticulously secured electrodes and biosensors on his head connected around the room to machines blinking and beeping. His coat, scarf, hat, gloves, boots, wool socks and suspenders sat piled in a corner next to the toy sack taken from his sleigh.

Above him hung a familiar face: pale skinned, clean shaven, thinning blond hair, wearing a field-grey uniform with red collar, an Iron Cross pinned at the throat and a smile scaffolded by ego and derision. “I’m dreaming,” sang General Schmidt, “of a white Christmas…”

Flanking him were two pairs of serious-looking soldiers, carbines in their grips. Also present in the windowed room were two scientists in white lab coats, a woman and man, quietly pushing buttons and analyzing machine tape printouts. Visible through the windows was the landing bay buzzing with uniformed men who scurried in various directions all leading to the two parked U-boats and the apparently nefarious preparations of some imperative.

“Is your head full of fruitcake, I vonder?” said the general. “Zey say Santa is vatching alvays. He knows everyzing. Yet, how come Santa buried my men inside a mountain but he left a gigantic rabbit who could dig zem out? Rabbits are excellent in snow, you know. My men got out in no time as I am sure you realized as ze extra saucers arrived to take you down. And once my men got out, zey repaid your junkie friend by executing him. Oh, vhat a shame. No more Easter Bunny for ze poor little iPad children.” The grin never faded.

Infuriated, Santa grumbled and struggled within his bonds but only inflicted more agony on himself. Schmidt laughed. “You need to say somezing? Oh, too bad. Your days of speaking are over. Your days of flying around in magical sleighs are over. Now zat you are caught in our trap, Herr Claus, your entire life is effectively over.”

Schmidt explained. Generations ago, his Nazi ancestors traded gold to the Greys in exchange for the anti-gravity tech that enabled their post-World War II moon getaway. Yet, their dealings failed to secure the same biological powers conferred upon Santa and his folkloric ilk. Even decades of research brought them no nearer to an understanding of that alien science which, if decrypted, would guarantee their dominion over all of Earth. To make any further progress, they needed a sufficient research subject – not some silly hybrid creature like Easter Bunny but a real man and a true warrior, preferably of European descent, of course. Like Santa.

“Our assassination attempt vas a ruse. Striking ze Norden Pole vas meant to cripple your enterprise but also to provoke a response of impulse and make you act carelessly. According to our plan, zat rabbit should have captured you, but as backup, our Antarktis base vas fully prepared.

“You shall be held in zis lab, Herr Claus, for as long as ve need you, kept alive intravenously, so your extra special attributes can be studied and reverse-engineered. Once our goal is accomplished, vhatever remains of you shall be ejected into outer space, unless you have already atrophied. Instead of toys and ho ho ho, your legacy vill be as progenitor of a race of superhuman Nazis – a perfect breed of men vielding your great might.

“You cannot do anyzing about it. As you see, ve took every precaution to prevent escape. You cannot move. You cannot control ze table or any tubes attached to you. You cannot reach ze lever to release your shackles. You cannot lay a finger aside your nose. A boring life from now on, I dare say, compared to flying from house to house vit reindeer, but it shall be punctuated by my regular visits vhen I update you on ze rise of our new Reich as my super soldiers march across ze globe and I am made fuhrer. Every person on ze planet shall cuckold zemselves to my dominance and vorship me – ze man who defeated Santa Claus.”

Schmidt nodded to the scientists waiting at their machines. One of them dialed a knob, unleashing sustained voltage over their prisoner’s body. For several seconds Santa convulsed violently, groaning and gritting his teeth. Directed by another nod, the torture was switched off and his body eased, reeling from lingering pain.

Schmidt’s smile returned. “Zat is not part of testing. I just vanted to see it.”

He was circling the room and, upon noticing the heap of Santa’s belongings, picked up the jacket. With amusement he slipped on the red bulk and scarf over his uniform. “Perhaps I can be ze new Santa Claus.” He placed his hands in the pockets and, with annoyance, pulled out fistfuls of children’s letters and trinkets, throwing them to the floor. “Instead of toys, I shall deliver propaganda to advance our cause among children. Zey consume anyzing you give zem: a toy, a device, tales of ze superiority of our race… Speaking of toys…”

He picked up the sack and looked inside. “Empty? You have let me down, Herr Claus.” He nodded and, for another several seconds, electricity jolted Santa with terrible anguish. The scientists jotted data on their clipboards.

Admiring his new look, Schmidt noticed the scraggy scarf on his shoulder. “Vhat is zis…a Schal? Really?” He chuckled. “Ze most powerful man on ze planet and he dresses like a bum! Did blind elves make zis? Mein Gott… Look at me, at my uniform. Zis is how a real man dresses. Not vit rags. Vhat an embarrassment. Here. You keep it.”

As Schmidt tossed the scarf to Santa, it unfurled completely and so it was that the ends came to touch both men simultaneously, even if for a brief instant, which is all Santa needed. His kinetic resolve traveled across the fabric, seizing Schmidt and slamming him with concussive force against the ceiling. As the general dropped, that end of the scarf dove below the table, wrapped itself around a lever’s handle and yanked. The steel braces popped open right as Schmidt landed on top of Santa who promptly grabbed the nine millimeter pistol from his captor’s belt and emptied the clip at the other Nazis in immediate succession.

The four soldiers and one scientist spontaneously sprouted red poinsettias between their eyes and collapsed to the floor. But before the job could be finished, Schmidt roused from his stupor and wrestled Santa for control of the gun. They rolled off the table and landed hard, punching and grappling and grunting. The pistol was dropped and Santa kicked it underneath a machine. Schmidt caught hold of the electrode cabling and wrapped it around Santa’s throat. The remaining scientist cowered against the wall at first, but realizing Santa’s preoccupation, he twisted the pole from the IV stand and swung it at the old man.

Santa’s face turned a ripe purple before his neck muscles broke through the wires and split them. At the same time, the belt finally snapped and fell from his head. Struggling against his two assailants, he soon recovered his footing and gained some space. Severed electrode wires hung from his forehead. He swung great haymakers with bare fists but, still woozy, he missed and almost lost balance.

From his trouser leg, Schmidt produced a bayonet, pointed it at Santa, then thrusted a close jab. As Santa threw another hook, Schmidt sliced his arm and spun the blade back around to stab him in the round belly. Santa’s eyes widened. He withdrew and blood poured from several deep inches of gash. At the harm he created, Schmidt’s eyes gleamed. He lifted the bayonet for the final blow.

Santa, mustering every last drop of strength from that otherworldly spring within him, drew back his arm. Faster than Schmidt could plunge his weapon, Santa’s fist punched straight through the Nazi uniform, through the flesh and rib cage and organs, busting out the other side, dripping with gore. Schmidt went limp. His mug froze in astonishment.

The scientist backed away with his pole, apologizing in German. Santa’s bloody hand snatched the pole from him and, despite the dead Nazi still attached, whipped it through the scientist’s neck at remarkable speed. His head tore off and thumped against the floor followed by the body, its now worthless blood spraying like a faucet.

The windows had become crowded with soldiers watching in horror and anger but unable to shatter the ballistic glass with their guns’ stocks or budge the locked door. Taking notice, Santa dropped the pole and slid the general off his arm, tossing aside the fresh corpse. He found the toy sack and, coughing up blood, he rummaged through it in a feverish hurry.

Every child knows that Santa’s sack of toys is virtually bottomless, but unfortunately for General Schmidt, that knowledge was too erudite. Reaching in past his shoulder, Santa hoisted out a rugged black knapsack. On front, a yellow and black, three-bladed radiation symbol served as caution and omen. The top folded open to reveal a panel of switches and buttons which he flipped and pressed in the order rehearsed.

Outside, the pounding persisted. The door handle rattled and then clanged when it dropped to the floor. Santa knew the room was surrounded on all sides with only one exit soon to be breached and obviously no chance of a chimney escape. Against a stationful of armed Space Nazis, even the most powerful man in the world held no hope.

The only possible way out, a simple round button atop the backpack nuke, begged the operator with blinking red for the final push.

Many Yuletides had passed through Santa’s life and he celebrated each by spreading the spirit of giving with much sweat and devotion. But perhaps the world was moving on without him, he reckoned, and the final chapter in the book of Jolly Ol’ Saint Nick had been written. Still, his heart swelled with love for mankind and with hope, however rare in the world, for its eventual salvation from all evil.

So to that end, his parting gift for every child and adult, naughty or nice, would be the Nazi army’s final and complete annihilation.

Santa took one last look at the scarf on the floor. His crudely buttoned face returned its stare. That girl’s little hands must have knitted for hours, joining every thread with innocent care. Children like her kept the torch of Christmas cheer alight and would pass it down for generations hence, he thought with satisfaction.

The door, finally dislodged, tipped inward and fell with a heavy bang to the soldiers’ roars. Santa faced them.

Pressing the red button, he exclaimed, “And to all a good night!”

Thank you for reading! This story is from my debut novella Vile Aliens, free for a limited time. Visit keithvile.medium.com for more info.

I was dreaming of a knife plunged to its hilt in a man’s chest. My hand grasped the blade that slashed his heart again and again, splashing blood on myself, tasting it in my mouth. Fury surged through me. I felt alive.

Then my phone buzzed and the disappointments of the waking world crashed through my fantasy. More real-life violence, more gore, more senseless death, more darkness where once a light burned free of extraterrestrial brutality. Not even my day off could be spared.

Through my phone’s speaker blared Stagliano’s gravely voice asking if I was asleep. The clock showed ten thirty in the morning so I lied. He wouldn’t say what had happened, only to hurry the hell up. I could tell it wasn’t the usual horse farm mutilation or silo attack.

On the ride there, my car’s speakers rattled with the news report of a mass shooting that morning in Old Hill. My stomach sank. That was my destination.

My worst fears were confirmed when I arrived and stepped over the police tape. The street market was littered with dozens of bodies sprawled in pools of blood. Tables pitching clothes and pastries were speckled with chunks of pink flesh. The dead ranged from elderly to infant, indiscriminately blasted through torso or head by the laser pulses of eight UAPs that had dropped from the sky without warning and, after almost two minutes of carnage, disappeared just as fast.

This would be the third such incident. Jakarta, Indonesia was the first, sixteen months ago. Similar modus operandi: outdoor venue, crowds, few exits. Bystanders recounted how the city’s thick blanket of smog concealed the spacecrafts. “The sky is killing us!” people cried as they shielded their loved ones and trampled over the dying. The official story was one of a crazed gunman already captured by police so we could rest assured his crime won’t be repeated, they said. Lacking credible answers, conspiracists had a field day.

Of course, these so-called “anomalous events” never slip through the hand of the state’s intelligence arm that writes my paychecks. As anomaly investigators, our agency was accustomed to animal dissections, electrical tower attacks, the occasional abduction/maiming and a couple of freighter sinkings. The looming question in our minds was whether this escalation in savagery marked a new trend.

Seven months later, the sky added to its body count. Its next target: the city of Baltimore, Maryland, USA. A UAP fleet appeared from thin air over the Inner Harbor to fire upon a sold-out music festival atop one of the piers. Two hundred and thirteen people perished, mostly teens and young adults. Many of them climbed over fences to jump for the water’s safety but not even the deepest divers could evade the bloodthirsty laserfire. The official, whitewashed narrative could no longer hold against verifiable media of discs above a field of corpses floating in a harbor dyed crimson. I pondered whether these slaughters were as much fun for the ETs as blowing up grain silos or if a more sinister agenda was at play.

Now fate had turned its ire on Old Hill, a tiny municipality bordering the Seattle city line, only thirty minutes by car from my bachelor apartment. Security cam and cell phone footage, once compiled, would rein in my focus but for now I absorbed the scene, letting grisly reality assault my senses, avoiding the trappings of assumptions and premature focus. Still, some facts didn’t sit right with me.

An overcast afternoon shielded the sun’s warmth from the city. By then I had burdened my memory with every second of the UAP mass murder from multiple camera angles paired with recordings of eyewitness testimonials. Those people’s eyes beamed with absolute terror. I doubted yesterday’s normality would return to any of their lives.

The market stood in a square courtyard enclosed on three sides by a hotel, warehouse and crumbling tenement, surrounded by more industrial properties and rent-controlled apartments. That patch of smokestack slum was already bleak, marred with graffiti, covered in trash, laced with the sulfuric stench downwind of Puget Sound. A woeful place to both live and die.

Every direct or tangential fact about the incident, plus my admittedly ill-informed appraisals of alien intent, would compose my final report – the sum total of wrenching an objective account through a head still echoing with the thwack of laser punching through flesh. Those reports get sent up the chain and, with any luck, maybe they’ll yield an important discovery…one day. In the meantime, the mass shooting story will be recycled to no one’s belief.

“Huang. Over here,” ordered Stagliano.

His interruption was a welcome reprieve. We had visitors – the team from the Maryland office. I bristled at the thought of working closely with some stranger until he introduced me to Theresa Blackwell: expert researcher of UAP craft, lead investigator of the Baltimore incident, two master degrees, four teenagers, credited with linking rates of disappearance/drownings to sightings of submersible-type crafts. She won my immediate respect.

First, she and I discussed the patterns common to all three mass murders. Cities with average levels of anomalous events, daytime with no precipitation, a mix of Saturn discs and Trinidad-class domes, a barrage of red death beams that never missed a target, one shot per victim every time, varying numbers of casualties, completion in under ninety seconds.

I told Theresa what bothered me: most of the victims in Old Hill were Somali immigrants. The street market was run and patronized by the local Somali-American community, one that was disparaged and marginalized in the Seattle area over sensationalized crime statistics drawn from some bigots’ invented world. Why not target bigger crowds next door in Jet City? Also, the US had tallied two of the three incidents which, considering the planet’s sheer size and population, was statistically improbable.

“A coincidence is still likely,” she retorted. “Or maybe they’re emulating our gun violence…our xenophobia.”

I hate spitballing theories and so did Theresa. She gathered data from forensics while I left the bloodbath to give my sanity a breather. Also, I wanted to hear from the locals.

Across the street, an elderly man sat outside a pawn shop. When I approached, he spoke without looking at me. “Them things wasn’t huntin’. And they wasn’t exterminatin’ neither. So their real purpose ought to be even worse.”

A morning appointment across town had spared him witness to the ghastly spectacle so instead I asked about the neighborhood (generally quiet), recent UAP sightings (none) and anything unusual as of late. His only recollection was, from the previous night, a convoy of high-class SUVs – “rich folk” – parked outside the hotel, guarded by a security force toting assault rifles, which lit the whole neighborhood in gossip. The SUVs stayed overnight and left right before his appointment, after breakfast. I jotted notes in my phone and thanked the man.

Before carrying the agency’s shield, the face in my mirror was molded by the city police ranks. I toiled there for years, clawing my way to a detective’s desk. I learned to sniff out inconsistencies, cull dead ends from the leads and to close every loop. Imagination was a tool but decisions were forged with facts and logic. Still, emotion is a beast which can’t be caged, and in my case, injustice is its provocateur. The police force booted me but a global rise of UAP activity and a bureaucratic appetite for answers soon carried my desperate resumé to the inbox of a spook headhunter. During my interview, no one at the agency even mentioned my previous termination or the rapist’s body discovered with markings across his crushed face that matched the tread of my black Oxfords. And I got lucky that my new role didn’t require a holster – I merely document now – but a detective’s heart still pulses inside me.

A grave shade of night lowered upon Old Hill. Eateries and dives sat in gloom behind locked doors. No one’s soles clapped the sidewalk except mine. When I arrived at Cedar Inn, the hotel clerks were genuinely happy for something to rouse them from boredom until realizing my line of inquiry.

Damp rot suffused the air. Any charm manufactured by the decor had faded decades ago. The two young women said they felt fortunate that their graveyard shift avoided the trauma etched on the faces of the daytime staff. I asked if they had worked the previous night and about any armed bodyguards outside. According to one clerk, some tech bro and his posse were visiting a guest in the presidential suite.

“My shift ended before they checked out but I was told they left completely wasted. The suite had tons of puke in the rug.”

“Who?” I asked.

The other clerk answered, “It was that AI douchebag whose company killed those schoolkids.”

I showed them a picture on my phone of a bearded man in a three-piece suit. “Scott Coulter?” Their recognition emerged as disgust.

Coulter was an executive of the grimly named Headshot Industries, an AI military weapons company, but his notoriety sprung from his brash, controversial opinions, particularly on minorities and immigrants. He was a local Seattle celebrity and his public outbursts and drunken brawls often went viral. Lately, a deeper contempt had been earned for his company’s role in the cluster bombing of a school over eighty kilometers from a warzone due to rushed, untested drone firmware.

Behind Cedar Inn, the courtyard had been emptied and wiped clean but a ghost of the day’s horrors lingered like heavy vapor. I spotted the balcony of the presidential suite overlooking the square. Coulter was originally from Baltimore, I remembered. He was a billionaire; why would he hang at a three-star hotel in Old Hill? What would he have to do with aliens anyway? Probably nothing. Nevertheless, these were loose ends. I hated those.

My impression of Theresa proved true the following morning when she briefed Stagliano and me on a theory conceived during a restless sleep: UAP mass murders, she said, were competitions.

Dread turned to icy fear as the soundness of her claim unfolded. As we knew, victims fell into two classifications based on their wounds: one group’s flesh had round entry points, singed by the beams’ high temperatures, while the other’s were jagged and a microscope could reveal a lighter burn. One group or the other was always slightly larger. Lacking prior research of these lasers’ effect on humans, the difference was chalked up to a presumption about factory calibrations in Trinidads versus Saturns. However, the Old Hill footage, the clearest yet, showed laser fire originating solely from the Saturns. The thought of UAPs in the same class varying their calibrations bore resemblance to the paintball games her husband and kids played at the range on weekends. Each team is assigned a certain color paintball to differentiate their hits. A player is eliminated after one strike. And matches are timed, a fact that sent her back to the video footage. For all three incidents, she calculated the time from first to last shot, rather than the oft referenced total span of the crafts’ appearance. A curious equivalence surfaced: each period of shooting lasted exactly 73.3 seconds.

The theory was damn good and that was the best we could hope for in a line of work that doesn’t even pretend to deliver answers. Even Stagliano’s spirits were raised, as perceived by his relaxed brow.

Alone with Theresa in my office, door closed, I told her about Scott Coulter and his hotel stay adjacent to the murder scene. Also, my poking around had discovered a close relationship between him and Old Hill’s mayor, Jerry Zimm. I showed her photos taken of them side-by-side onstage at right-wing nationalist hatefests. Zimm would likely know why a good friend was staying in his jurisdiction. I had other reasons to meet him and figured he could help me avoid the inevitable stonewalling by Coulter’s staff.

She asked if anyone else knew about my lead. “Not until it grows legs,” I said.

An analyst helped me identify the men in Coulter’s entourage based on surveillance recordings and collected their recent social media posts. Pictures from that Saturday night boasted of a good old fashioned bromantic soiree: dudes in posh threads, arms around each other, toothy smiles. No drinks, no smoke, but their cheeks glowed pink and huge black moons floated in their eyes. They posted comments like “fun trip!” with green leaf emojis. The bodyguards – mean-looking lackeys – stayed outside all night with the cars. The guests were close friends of Coulter except for some small-time, anti-immigrant podcaster. None of their backgrounds raised any red flags. An honest deduction pointed to some douchebag’s bachelor party stocked with LSD instead of booze. Regret over misplaced suspicions almost drove me to cancel the mayor’s meeting. Good thing I didn’t.

The next day, Theresa and I arrived separately at Old Hill City Hall and sat before the mayor’s executive desk, something Italian-made, immaculately polished. We were ceded ten minutes of his time and that would be plenty.

“It’s just awful, so awful, what happened to those people,” said Zimm, reclining in his leather chair. “I keep worrying it’ll happen again. So awful.” When speaking, his eyes darted from wall to wall.

I requested a direct channel to the city’s zoning and construction records to research a theory on how the three mass murder sites were selected. He referred us to an assistant on his staff, writing a name and email on a sticky note and passing it across the desktop. Then he lifted his phone to check his alerts.

“I heard Scott Coulter was at Cedar Inn right before it happened,” I said. “I couldn’t find any statements from him about the attack though. Have you talked to him?”

Zimm straightened his back. He looked at my face, pausing before answering. “Scott was out of state over the weekend so I don’t expect he’ll have much to say. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have another guest coming to see me.”

Afterward, Theresa and I stopped at a cafe for a bite to eat. She agreed that both Zimm and the hotel “party” smelled fishy but challenged any connection to UAPs; what role could any human possibly play in some aliens’ killing contest? My doubts mirrored her own except I kept returning to last year’s headlines of a Somali teenager shot by police in the back nine times, the bodycam videos from multiple angles, the absence of charges, the incendiary rhetoric from those who would excuse a million more teen deaths to claim the city for their dreamed ethnostate, the marches sponsored with oligarch cash where masked men waving semi-automatic guns decried the rumored violence of refugee families, Coulter’s racist barbs in front of a pale-faced audience alongside that lying mayor.

“I need to be sure.”

She lowered her voice. “Be careful, Huang, in case you really are on someone’s tail.” She wrote something on a napkin: a chatroom ID and alphanumeric code. “Keep this. An encrypted channel. In case you ever need to message me.”

During my fifth mug of coffee, the computer chimed with the arrival of Cedar Inn’s guest list from Saturday night. When I confirmed Coulter’s checkout time, I discovered the room had in fact been rented by another of the partygoers: Tristan Barnes, a high school buddy of Coulter’s from Maryland. Barnes had been making a name for himself in the psychedelic drug industry as an executive of Charmzy, an edibles company popular on the east coast, though outrage was growing over suppressed reports of trace metalloids in their products. Before that, he climbed the ladder at an AI medical records company charged with selling its customers’ data on the black market. Before that, he was a sharply attired staffer for a senator who later resigned over sexual assault allegations. He and Coulter had recently registered a joint venture, Evolved Defense Corporation, whose details eluded mention but the name alone seemed to dispense of any seriousness.

This guy was clearly as toxic as the polluted West Virginian farm soil that grew his company’s ingredients. But, buried under a mountain of compulsive online activity is what made me spill the rest of the coffee: Barnes’s apparent obsession with extraterrestrials. His thumbs-ups of articles reporting alien vandalism, cryptic status updates like “THEY are listening find their frequency tune your consciousness” followed by flying saucer and green leaf emojis, lectures at fringe science conferences detailing meditations meant to enable contact with transdimensional beings. One such speech was summarized by an attendee in an internet forum, portraying Barnes as a breathless supporter of the drug DMT, a natural psychedelic. Whereas others likened DMT to a bridge between minds terrestrial and non-terrestrial, Barnes was quoted as saying, “What if we treated it like a genie?”

I closed my laptop, crawling out of the VPN-tunneled rabbit hole burrowed into the online slough where Tristan Barnes wallowed. I was erecting my own bridges of straw to connect a mass murder – just some game for heartless Martians – to a gold-digging crew of chuds simply because I instinctively hated them, because of sensitivities rubbed raw in a city divided by racial dogma or because deep down I longed for closure, at least once, on these anomalous events that increasingly hollowed out any hope I still harbored for human civilization.

The next morning, freshly sprouted questions dragged me from bed and back into my suspicions. At the office, I noticed that the social media accounts of everyone from Coulter’s hotel entourage had gone private. Only Coulter’s was still viewable and his latest post pegged him in the Virgin Islands even though he had been hyping a scheduled appearance at the company’s annual review that day. An ominous cloud cast a shadow over me.

Stagliano called me into his office. “What brought you here so early?” Before I could answer, he told me the Old Hill investigation had been shut down. Theresa was already boarding a plane back to Maryland. “We got all we need. Just send me your report and all your notes. I need you on that silo blast in Mansfield.”

No one ever asked for my notes. Not even my finished reports drew interest beyond their abstracts. I made sure to send Stagliano everything except for the Coulter research, just to see.

Before I left for home, he caught me passing his door. “Didn’t you pull a file on Scott Coulter?” he asked. “It wasn’t mentioned.”

“I pulled everyone at the hotel. Nothing checked out.”

“Of course. Because there weren’t any aliens staying at the hotel. Now stop hounding Coulter’s people and drive out to Mansfield tomorrow.”

Despite his typical disposition, I could usually trust Stagliano. Then again, he was too cozy with the top brass and the surrounding suck-up culture who trade autonomy for access to power. The kind of circle vulnerable to the influence of a billionaire government contractor – one whose mayoral pal may have tipped him off about nosy investigators. I never “hounded” Coulter but maybe that talking point was pushed down the chain.

My grasp on reality slipped from the dissonance of its fragments strewn before my eyes with no logic to bond them. Yet, a clearer image shone through the lens of paranoia. Although Mansfield kept me busy during the daytime, the Old Hill investigation continued at night in an unofficial capacity and in lieu of sleep until I could prove my nagging instincts either wrong or right.

If a road lay between Coulter and the murders, it was paved with Tristan Barnes’s obsession over DMT. Enough clues connected the drug to the hotel party. Digging further, I learned of a whole subculture of DMT enthusiasts who drank it in tea brewed from ayahuasca leaves, claiming it as a cross-psychosphere conduit to consciousnesses from other worlds. Barnes was a rock star to them. They lauded his ideas for fine-tuning this psychic communication and echoed his belief that they stood on humanity’s next evolutionary stepping stone. The genie quote popped up a few times with coy flair.

Credibility was difficult to discern from walls of text about hyperbolic beings unveiling to the authors vague existences beyond the comprehension of the sober. Their experiences differed from my nearest point of reference: annual retreats to a campground outside of Olympia with nothing but my gear, food, books and magic mushrooms. Years ago, a therapist had casually recommended psilocybin microdosing to treat the violent impulses I fought against my nature to restrain. To my surprise, it did succeed in grounding that inner rage, or maybe just enough. Still, I couldn’t imagine letting any drug fool my senses into believing intergalactic travel behind my eyelids ever took place, even after clarity’s rebound. The idea was silly, yet the plausibilities shaped in my mind while I laid in bed, when idling in traffic, when hammering on a punching bag at the gym, when studying vaporized grain and soil heated to glass while the farmer wept over his ruined labors.

I would know the truth only by walking the same road as Coulter and Barnes, to glimpse what they had seen.

Throughout DMT-friendly states stretched a network of neo-shamans advertising guided “journeys” to the fringes of spirituality where non-human intelligences mingle with those who pay in cash. Most of them were booked months in advance but, after a dozen calls, I found one with an open slot for that coming weekend. Their website touted a safe atmosphere for first-timers and a “jester-free zone”.

After work on Friday I drove I-5 South with my overnight bag, watching the heavens for zigzagging lights – a common pastime of mine even though I had never encountered anything alien beyond the evidence they leave behind. The thought of communicating with them, as absurd as that sounded, sent chills over my skin. But no expectation could be guaranteed. Maybe old hippies would sell me nothing more than trippy entertainment. Or maybe I would be taught to lure a squadron of UAPs into committing a hate crime.

Four hours later and the Oregon border was far behind. My GPS failed to find itself on the pot-holed back roads. Luckily the gravel driveway was marked by the sign of a pyramid with a single eye in its center and I parked beside the old farmhouse in which Higher Pathways Oregon, LLC was run.

Dead leaves blew through the grass like rats retreating. At the door, the woman with dreadlocks introduced herself as Angel, one of the co-owners, and she checked me in. My reservation was under the name Phil Marl.

“What do you hope to achieve from your ceremony?” she asked after I signed the waivers.

“Understanding.”

She ushered me down creaky steps into the basement – a dim, underground hall of plain beige cast green and orange by cheap LEDs. I was the last to arrive. The others sat on couches and recliners arranged in a circle: two middle-aged couples covered in tattoos and piercings, three smirking twenty-something finance bros in search of kicks, a husky guy with shaggy hair and Cody, the other owner of Higher Pathways and our “trip captain”, wrapped in the stars and galaxies of his patterned robe. In front of each seat was an empty bucket. A tough-looking man stood guard at the door with lapsed interest. I took my place in a cushiony lounge chair next to the shaggy guy, Greg, fidgeting in his love seat.

Angel handed out mugs of red liquid as Cody explained the basics. The effects of the ayahuasca tea would range from forty-five minutes to an hour for onset after which the ceremony would formally begin. With eyes shut we were to follow Cody’s voice leading us beyond the walls of our senses to a new perception of the universe but with prudence because meeting its true essence can overwhelm. He repeated the waiver’s warning of the drug’s nauseous effects. “Don’t be afraid to use your bucket.”

We were certain to rub cosmic shoulders with alien beings, he said, among other possible entities that loiter the DMT hyperspace (except jesters, to the relief of the two couples). Aliens could appear in any number of fantastical forms seemingly as real as Cody and his wiry beard but they should be disregarded as hallucinations – an attempt of the mind to manifest something tangible from the sensations washing over it. What we were to see, hear and touch would be false-ish. The feeling had to be our mainstay. This base function of the mind was to be the pen to sketch our desires on the canvas of hyperspace. A back-and-forth of these psychic fluctuations defined the communication method which Cody and Angel claimed to master. With practice, he said, the exchange of feelings could be refined enough for rich conversation.

Our trip captain gave a toast, giving thanks to Mother Earth for providing the keys to unlock the spiritual realm as well as to our interplanetary brethren’s assumed benevolence. We drank the ayahuasca tea and I gagged. It tasted like dirt. I forced it down anyway.

We chatted, waiting for the effects to kick in. Greg, another first-timer, listed for me the questions he prepared for our new hyperspace friends: about famous UAP sightings, cryptids as discarded DNA experiments, lizard men in the White House – failing to heed Cody’s set expectations.

“Communication is supposed to be simpler than that,” I said. “Like, basic impressions and some…some…”

Sickness bubbled in my throat. One of the finance bros retched into his bucket. I grabbed mine just in time. I could hear Greg laughing as I spat out chunks.

“This is good,” said Cody, all smiles. “This is the purge. You’re cleansing your spirit. Let yourself free.” I puked again.

He spoke soothing platitudes of encouragement as more buckets were filled. I got up to rinse out my mouth just as the strangeness of the world began to unmask itself. Shrooms had a similar effect when that hidden sense would awaken right before patterns began undulating in the campsite’s trees. Familiarity melted away. Mercury water poured over my bucket while the slop sink danced. I tottered back to my chair.

Soon, eye masks were passed around. I laid back and blocked all light from my sight as instructed. Cody announced the start of our journey, drawing the sensory and emotional picture to be shared among our imaginations. I tried to follow along but my mind’s eye was flooded with other imagery: impossible geometric shapes, uncanny faces, memories. I saw my mother, younger, still with traces of happiness. I saw my father, different from the two times that I remembered – a memory either long-lost or invented. Then I saw my grandparents, immigrants from China who sought a brighter future for their daughter who ultimately found unhappiness by other means. The weight of the past saddled my trip until I recalled my purpose, crashing my thoughts in the shape of a hot air balloon that whisked me away to rejoin the tail of Cody’s celestial hiking party.

“We are all one. One with each other, one with Mother Earth, one with all of the entities spread way out across this beautiful universe. Let me show you what I mean.” Cody explained that our minds could sense each other’s company beyond our physical connection in the room. Someone was going to feel a warm hand on their own, he said, but only within hyperspace. Suddenly, one of the tattooed ladies yipped in surprise and marveled at this psychic touch though Cody never left his sofa. In spite of the drug, my inner skeptic snickered at his parlor trick but then a jolt of some vague awareness hugged my own perception – something friendly and known. “Phil, is that you?”

I heard his voice with my ears but his intent also pressed directly against my understanding, from his mind to mine. I could sense the others, tethered to Cody’s aura. Greg buzzed with nervous energy. Pulsing lanterns passed before me, representing each of us, and I was one too, obviously a ruse the ayahuasca painted across my synapses but to my astonishment their presences rippled outward with the most sober realness.

We drifted like dumb fish in a pool while Cody taught us to untangle the root of our feelings from the illusions contrived by stimulation. He would radiate an anonymous sensation like warmth or elation or calm, giving us time to absorb it, then he could correctly name it afterward. Is this really happening?, I wondered, and those words inflated into a thought bubble over my head. Even if it were visible to the others, their attentions were submerged in their own parallel realities.

Something crept into the edges – cold and sharp. Tiny, vantablack shapes like ants squirmed across my lantern, shrouding its glow. “You feel that?” I heard Cody say, somewhere distant. “Our friends are here.”

I felt nothing friendly. A nosy malevolence flocked around me, scratched at my surface, peered through my windows, sniffed my ass. I was unmatched and exposed in that bizarre plane that gave their consciousnesses such deftness to navigate. Vague humanoid outlines emerged through the mist of transcendence, a patchwork of colors from alternate spectra. Heavenly gyres carouseled through the skies with an oppressive nature that made me cower.

Falling into a trance of chanted phrasings, Cody petitioned our new friends to spread positive energies of peace and harmony as they pilot their vehicles through our skies and oceans. He encouraged us to reach out to them. “Summon your desires and send them into hyperspace. Our friends will listen and respond. Go ahead, try.”

I imagined stretching a hand out in the dark, unsure what may lurk inches away. Something must have come in contact because exotic scenes with vivid perspective flooded my senses: the smell of nickel in a rocky cavern where mucus patches grew egg-headed creatures like weeds; endlessly deep pits dotting a gaseous tundra menaced by the flight of poison ice bubbles; the unbearable radiance of a black hole, destroyer of stars, devouring all possibility from existence for light-years around; thousands of worlds in every possible color and an ingrained callousness toward the inferiority of their native life forms.

“Open yourself to them.”

The thought (rather, the feeling) of a question mark stamped over victims of alien violence slid from my essence into the ether. All around, a reaction spread through the chorus of hidden friends. It came to me as the sour tastes of condescension, of mockery, of just deserts. Some primitive conversation seemed to be ping-ponging between us – me and whoever/whatever, real or imagined – but it was either too fragmented or too advanced for my understanding.

“A lot of good vibes in here, people.” I wasn’t hearing Cody’s words anymore as much as receiving them like transmissions. “Keep it up. You can also give them requests. Watch.” A growing ease among the beings had emitted a gray-green ambience, but when Cody projected the kaleidoscope of colors from their arrival, their excitability returned.

What wishes could be granted?, I wondered. Games of murder? The idea slithered out of me to great relief of its loss. The response was accusatory: why would I care? Somehow, recollections of my worst moments were freed from the locked basement of my subconscious (men I despise, swelling anger), 3-D replays whirling through infinite-D space around my head (fists thrown, broken ribs, bloody teeth), forcing me to suffer their retelling (the crunch as his face flattened) for their amusement. The sentiment was laced with indifference, either for me or the victims or all of us.

Nausea rebounded and the universe behind my eyes spun. I tried to steady myself, spiritually and gastroenterologically, by remembering the hot air balloon of determination that compelled me to take this journey. But a different, creeping sensation drew closer, nibbling at the fringes of my thoughts, stealing them with no concern for my discretion. My lantern burned brighter and hotter like a beacon for the entire astral realm to witness. The light was the message: liar. I knew that feeling, the sting of an untruth, just like everyone but even more so in that instant with my false name and pretenses, infringing on societies human and non-human that wished to coexist in stoned euphoria without bad vibes like death, justice and especially guilt.

The fabric of hyperspace folded in on itself and I had fallen out like a rocket breaking orbit for an empty void where no sound or light dwelled. Either interdimensional bullies or the sentience of the space itself had ejected me, rejected me, a crasher holding no invite to their party. I floated alone. Did Cody and the rest know I had gone missing? My mouth had no voice to call them. Every last thought in my head had been eaten away. Nothingness was my new environ as the faraway pinprick of light from our hallucinogenic playground receded in the black. Panic gripped me like a child separated from his parent in public. Where do I go? How will I leave? Or will I not?

I landed in a sea of soft timber. It emanated a nasty funk and, looking closer, I realized the logs were actually limbs of dead corpses. Descending from above came countless gray-skinned elves with insect eyes lodged in lightbulb heads. Their cold little hands grasped my neck and squeezed. I choked but could do nothing to stop them; their decision was final, immutable.

Sights and discord were carried to my awareness from their slimy grip – a fresh reliving of the Old Hill massacre. Before my eyes, people’s guts exploded, lasers with ineluctable accuracy blew holes through the heads, mothers and fathers shielding their children died one-by-one. The alien faces betrayed no emotion but their hubris saturated the atmosphere, broadcasting a carnival of disturbed acts, colored by a joviality of disregard smugly chosen, like buck hunters blowing off steam and flaunting their kills. But they weren’t hunting or exterminating and the purpose really was worse: it was a game. They couldn’t resist playing it, their devious pride made known, delivering the message through nailless fingers to my throat and the rest of me, replacing oxygen in my cells with its cancer.

Invite us, they beckoned, invite us to play.

In the real world I was convulsing and gulping for breath. Angel removed my eyemask and tried to talk me into relaxing but the strangling, whatever caused it, was real and I struggled for its release. The guard held my arms while Angel injected a dose of ketanserin into my shoulder to offset the DMT’s effects. My lungs still cried for air but in seconds the little hands loosened and musty basement reentered my nose. In a minute I was breathing easy with a muddied sobriety settling in. The other customers seemed unperturbed, still wearing their masks and their idiot grins. Cody, however, watched my recovery with loathing.

Angel escorted me to a room with baby blue walls and sat me on a cot. She left me there to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes, a humanoid shadow climbed into my psyche. Only a stream of external stimuli could flush it out so I lay awake all night, each hour replenishing lucidity and melting away doubts.

In the morning, Angel returned with the guard. “It’s time for you to leave,” she said. “We hope the ceremony was able to provide the understanding you were seeking. But you won’t ever be allowed to come back.”

Contrary to the zen-like warmth after a mushroom trip, the ayahuasca (or maybe the ketanserin) only darkened the cloud that followed me. The city also sulked under a veil of drab and rain all week. I occupied myself with the Mansfield report and a missing persons case that landed in our office after the victim’s doorcam footage from the night in question revealed orb formations. Still, my thoughts stayed focused on disclosing the truth about the sick wish that I believed Coulter and his crew DMT-grammed to their ET genies. My own narrow exposure to those creatures felt just as real as the moment Cody’s will coaxed them into agitation, offering certainty that someone with more experience, like a notable expert in alien-DMT communication, could push this power past moral limits, to conjure the right impression, to invite them to play. I hated the occult, conspiracy theories and drugged up delusions, yet this case had become all three. Shining a critical light only uncovered more certainty, more hunger for justice, more reason to risk my reputation and my life. After all, no one else would.

I had first used Theresa’s encrypted chat right after our investigation was buried and we briefly exchanged frustrations. Now I was sitting in the terminal at SeaTac, letting her know I would be in her city for the weekend in a hunt for answers. I stressed her absolute uninvolvement. She was only being clued in to safeguard the truth because an honest assessment of my chances looked grim. Tristan Barnes wasn’t mentioned explicitly but she knew enough to connect the dots.

The preceding weeknights had been spent on a meticulous plan, securing a false identity (an uncomplicated task for agency employees) and studying Baltimore’s street grid. The GPS wasn’t even needed in the rental car as I turned onto Pratt St., passing tourists photographing the Inner Harbor, following the traffic to Fells Point where Barnes lived alone in a swanky waterfront apartment. The place was less than a mile from the pier where, months ago, all that blood was spilled – a coincidence now dubious in my eyes.

I rolled into his neighborhood as the sun set in the rearview and soon found parking in sight of the apartment building. Barnes’s social accounts, made public once again, had divulged his plans to spend the weekend in town. I was counting on Mr. Social Butterfly to keep his regular schedule of clubbing and drinking, otherwise a forced entry would have to be improvised.

While waiting, I opened my suitcase and transferred some belongings to my pockets: foam earplugs, clear tape, signal scanner, tube sock with racquetball inside, toy voice synthesizer, ski mask, handful of zip ties and switchblade knife.

Worry rose with the clock’s hour hand but, around eleven-thirty, Barnes finally appeared, leaving his building with two friends who I didn’t know, walking right past my car. I lowered the bill of my baseball cap.

They headed for the Charm City brilliance that washed out the starlight and I followed at a distance. A few times, someone on the street recognized Barnes and he would stop to talk for a minute. He was an unassuming type who squirmed in the spotlight, unlike Coulter, the football champ, but also the kind whose alternate life path, without wealth and privilege, would have languished under the authority of anyone else. I’ve seen that disposition before, facing the world with his same dull eyes.

Barnes and his buddies turned onto a side street, then down some stairs to a cellar door. Muted bass frequencies leaked from within. The bouncer dapped Barnes and let the three men inside. When I approached, he made me pay cash to enter and patted me down, missing the knife. The door led into an old, rundown hallway with few working lights, down a narrow staircase, closer to the music, past another bouncer and through steel double doors. Like crossing dimensions, I entered a massive, posh nightclub with hundreds of people. The place had crystal chandeliers, LED flooring, cushioned booths, aquarium walls and suspended kennels whose prisoners writhed in their underwear. A dance pop song pounded inside my chest. The bartenders danced, a horde of men danced, the caged men danced and I realized the place contained no women at all.

At the bar I ordered a drink while keeping an eye on Barnes. He and his friends had joined a larger group in one of the booths, sharing a bottle, singing, laughing and flirting. Barnes twirled his wavy, collar-length hair while talking to another man – some young, brawny type. They stood up to dance. I waited for an opportunity but Barnes wouldn’t even go alone to the bathroom. The alcohol had already lightened my head so I nursed it slower.

Some chubby guy with a mustache tried to catch my attention and, when that didn’t work, he shimmied closer.

“Sorry. Not dancing tonight,” I said and lifted my glass in goodwill.

“Jerk,” he scoffed, then spun on his heel and walked off.

At that point, a gloomy Barnes was draped across a chair in silence, consoled by his two buddies. His beau and the others had left. Whatever happened had soured the mood. Barnes pulled a silver flask from his coat pocket and they took turns sipping it while tapping their phones. Their body language spoke of a restless urge for fresh air and soon they marched to the exit.

A half-block of sidewalk stretched between them and me, their inconspicuous stalker, as they meandered the back streets of Fells Point, past cafes and dives and greasy spoons, straying further from Barnes’s home. We turned onto Thames St., bumpy with ancient Belgian block pavement, bustling with twilight revelers on the last leg of their crawls. A quiet tension clung to these strangers like an odor, or like trauma that still haunted.

I followed Barnes into The Horse You Came In On Saloon, the famous “last stop” of Edgar Allen Poe before his death. Its wood double doors opened to a narrow joint, fashioned from wood and neon, mobbed with adults of all types and ages. At a table in the back, the trio joined more friends, a mellower set. I squeezed through the crowd and, upon seeing Barnes approach the bar, I slid next to him. He stood a little shorter and reeked of booze. His focus flitted around the room with unease.

The bartender, muscles bulging under his t-shirt, asked for my drink order. Barnes and I replied at the same time but out of politeness I let him go first, then I ordered a whiskey.

A ruddy indignation filled Barnes’s cheeks. He turned to me. “I guess I thought he was talking to me. He has a lazy eye or something.”

The bartender’s eyes were fine but I played along. “The view is better from behind anyway.”

Barnes saw me watch the bartender scooping ice, bending over in his tight pants. He chuckled. “I’ll drink to that.”

We made small talk at the bar and he kept drinking. I spoke in quips, aloof. He couldn’t get enough. I lied about my hometown, my profession, a motorbike I never owned. An aggression emerged in his motions. His hand squeezed my shoulder. His knee brushed my thigh. His eyes twinkled.

“Let’s go sit, daddy,” he said.

We took chairs at the table alongside his friends. They left us alone but snuck curious glances. I kept my back to them.

From under his shirt Barnes removed a necklace. He smiled. “I want to see what you think of this.”

Hanging from the chain was an eerie glass of murky forest green, two inches square. Light bounced off it unnaturally, like wisps of steam, truly unearthly. In doubt, I rubbed my eyes.

“It’s a mirror,” he said. “Kind of. Here. Look into it.”

He held it up for me to see. I expected a reflection of myself, probably warped, but instead I saw another live image: a great pit, unfathomable in depth, quivering along its brim. It seized my consciousness. Shadowy beings scaled up the pit, extending bony arms. They swarmed me and their hands crushed my throat and I was choking, just like the DMT trip, and I realized it was causing a scene.

“Whoa!” Barnes was laughing. “You alright?” He told the others not to worry.

The illusion vanished as soon as my stare broke from his mirror. I drew breath again but my heart still pounded. “What the hell is that?”

He tucked the necklace back under his shirt. “I was, um, taught how to make it. Everyone sees something different in it. Like a mirror to your soul, y’know? Some people see awful things. Some see beautiful images and can’t look away. Now you…whatever you saw, you must have a dark side. I kinda find that hot.”

The impossibility of his item confounded me. “How do you learn to make something like that?”

He smiled wryly. “Ever heard of DMT? Ayahuasca?” I feigned ignorance. “It’s one of those experiences that opens your mind, like, to the universe’s true nature. It connects you with all life in the universe. You can learn a lot of things this way.” He relished being enigmatic.

“Tell me more.”

He showed me his stainless steel flask and sipped from it. Carved on the side was the same cyclopean pyramid from the sign outside Higher Pathways. “Diluted ayahuasca tea. I like to microdose.” He put on a sultry tone. “Why don’t you come to my place and try it? Or have a regular drink. Or…you know.” He reached under the table and grabbed my crotch.

“Let’s do it.”

Outside, we walked by the water where boats bobbed in the wake against a factory skyline. Barnes, too plastered to stand straight, leaned on my shoulder. His phone buzzed. Peeking at the screen, I saw a message from Scott Coulter: When are you going home? Prying, but why?

Ahead of us, Barnes’s luxury apartment building rose over the bars and brick townhomes. I pulled down my baseball cap and slid on my gloves. His fob let us into the lobby where we boarded the elevator. He caressed my arm. His gaze was hunger.

We stepped off at the top level. Unlocking his front door, he giggled. “I just realized I don’t know your name.”

Following him inside the darkened penthouse, I removed my hat and pulled the ski mask over my face. As soon as the door shut, I clutched his jacket and threw him to the ground face-first.

“What the fuck?!” he yelled.

I jumped on his back, forgetting how tough and audacious drunks can be. He bucked me off and we grappled on the floor. A wild determination sprung from deep in his id. However, the alcohol weighed on his reflexes and I overtook him. Straddling his slim frame, my fist bashed his face so continuously that he had no chance to scream. Blood gushed from his nose and mouth. His hands flailed uselessly.

Then, from under his shirt he lifted the alien mirror and thrust it in my face. Frozen fingertips crept out of oblivion to smother me until I remembered to shut my eyes and I slapped the mirror from his hand. My other fist knocked out his wind. Standing above him, I raised a shoe over the guy’s head. He was gasping, vulnerable. My primal instinct was to kill, to destroy this virus infecting the decency left in this world. Nonetheless, his cooperation held an important key to my plan. That despicable life of his needed to be spared.

I zip-tied his wrists and ankles, shoved the racquetball past his teeth and tied the sock behind his head. Squirming and muffled shrieking was met with another blow to his gut. I dragged him into the living room with its harbor view, fastened him to a chair with my belt and placed books beneath the rear legs, precariously balanced to dissuade bouncing while I combed the place. The signal scanner found two cameras whose lenses I obscured with a few layers of tape to prevent tripping their tampering sensors. Torn bits of foam earplugs were taped over the mic pinholes. In case he had a well-shielded third cam, the ski mask stayed on with hopes that Barnes hadn’t also invested in AI threat-detection with a direct line to emergency response. Just another risk, I thought. Maybe Poe’s curse rubbed off on me.

Blood dripped from Barnes’s chin. His nose was crooked. He cried pitifully in the window’s orange city glow. I stood my phone on the coffee table and began recording. Speaking through the voice synthesizer, set to Robot, I instructed, “Your gag will be removed and then you will tell me everything about your involvement in the Old Hill mass murder. Do not scream.” I put the tip of the switchblade knife behind his chin. His eyes went wide but he showed no sign of defiance so I carefully untied and removed the sock.

His face grimaced with fright that seemed not for me. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit…” The knife pressed harder. “Ok ok I’ll tell you I’ll tell you…I’ll tell you that you have no idea what you’re getting mixed up in. You have no–”

I clocked him across the jaw. “Wrong answer.”

His lip dribbled red phlegm. “Don’t you know I like it rough?”

I hit him again. My knuckles throbbed. “Why were you at the hotel the night before?!”

He moaned. “Listen. Listen. I–I don’t know why you’re asking all this but–” I held the knife against his throat. “Aaahh—I can’t tell you! Really, I can’t! Even if I could, I–”

I beat his face again and again. Teeth flew out of his mouth. His eyes swelled. When I stopped, a more pathetic wretch of a human had never sat before me. Still, you couldn’t scrape even a speck of compassion for him from the bottom of my shoe.

He cried, blabbering about stupid decisions, immoral influences, a syndicate of corruption. “I swear to you, whatever you do to me, Scott would do a thousand times worse. You could kill me and I still wouldn’t spill a thing. I’m being honest, man. Please.”

I could sense this was the truth. Barnes knew Coulter well enough to dread his reckoning more than anything. A different tactic was needed.

The flask in his coat pocket was nearly empty so I checked the kitchen. The fridge held exactly what I sought: a glass growler filled with an earthy smelling brew. Upon seeing the growler in my hand, Barnes clamped his mouth shut. I pulled his hair, tilted back his head and spilled the tea into his nostrils. When he gagged, more was poured down his throat and I forced his jaw closed until he swallowed.

“You’re gonna kill me! That was too much! Oh my god! I’m gonna fuckin’ die!! I’ll–”

The ball and sock went back around his mouth. He shook in protest until the chair’s teetering threatened a second faceplant, then he slumped in defeat against his ropes, red-eyed, blood-drenched, whimpering like a trapped varmint. I dragged a chair in front of him and waited.

No police or concerned emergency contacts had yet arrived – a positive sign. His wealth should have afforded and even warranted a state-of-the-art security setup but fortunately his fecklessness came through for me. Barnes, the typical spoiled byproduct of career-absorbed politicos, was failing upward in life, obsessed with the fruits of success without bothering to feed the tree.

We sat without dialog in the dim communion of his expensive slacker pad. He reeked of piss. At one point he spasmed so I removed the ball gag and let him vomit on himself. He whined and mumbled, growing more erratic as the hour dragged, watching unseen torments form around the room.

Finally I stood and restarted the phone’s recording. When I approached Barnes, he cowered and began yelling so I reminded his neck of my knife. His voice lowered. “Go away! The darkness around you…so much darkness… Stop looking at me! Leave me alone!” He wailed like a toddler. “This is so bad. Everything is so wrong. Everything about you is wrong. I feel something bad coming–”

“Did you make those murders happen?!” my robot voice accused him.

He spilled no words, only tears. His pupils eclipsed the irises.

“You’re complicit in their deaths,” I continued. “Fifty-seven people. Families. Children. Fifty-seven lives lost because of you.” He moaned. “Whatever you and your buddies did, all of those deaths are on you.”

“I know…I know…” Tears and snot ran over dried blood. “I don’t know why…why I got into this.” He sniveled. “We made it happen. We willed it into happening. It was my idea. Here…right in this spot…where it all started. Oh god, why did I get into this shit? I shouldn’t have told Scott. I should’ve just–”

“You killed the people in Baltimore too?”

“No! No way. That was the ETs, man, one hundred percent. I just happened to be tripping that night, right here, and the whole hyperspace was, like, different. Like, the ETs were having a, uh, a carnival or something. That’s what it felt like. Just, weird. A couple of hours later, they attacked the pier. I don’t know why. They just did. Like in that Asian country. So the Baltimore thing wasn’t me. I just felt it, that’s all. I…I didn’t–”

I grabbed his collar. “Old Hill.”

His breath quickened as if racing a marathon. “Old Hill. Right. That was our prototype. Scott and me. ‘Evolved Defense Corp.’ That old racist Zimm was happy to give us cover as long as we got rid of some Africans for him. We, uh, did a ceremony. In the hotel. I showed everyone that same carnival feeling so we could replay it together. Like making a wish. It was that easy. And it worked. Oh my god, it actually worked. But we went too far. Too far. Because of Scott. That fucking–”

“What do you mean ‘prototype’?”

“Scott wanted this to be, uh, a service. On the black market. We could sell it to certain governments so they could, like, use it in warfare, put down rebellions, or whatever, but then shift the blame to ETs. Perfect cover story. Oh god, I didn’t know… This stuff sounded wild when we talked about it, like being the first to scale a mountain. Well, we reached the top, man, and it’s really fucking scary. Now everything is so fucked. Even more than it was. We’re all fucked, y’know. The whole planet. ETs are gonna fuck up everything. They’re only getting started. There’s no way we stand a chance. Everything is fucked…”

My only desire in that moment was to snuff out the life of this psychopath, this architect of genocide-for-hire, disposing a minority community to test-drive his sick discovery, replicating one tragedy’s cruel aura to spawn another. Murder was a game to the aliens but apparently a money machine for rich and powerful earthlings. I shuddered with outrage. My fists ached to deal more punishment. But, his complete reduction was well underway. The volume of ingested ayahuasca would sweep him to the brink of hell, and if he returned, I’d make sure an electric chair would send him back.

As the effects heightened, his doom-mongering became rants about apparitions of the dead phasing through walls and floor and ceiling, seeking their reparation. Brown-skinned faces with neatly bored holes judged him and he lashed out, calling them nativist slurs, deflecting fault for their deaths, then fearing an eternity of their retribution. Invisible fingers seemed to caress his nerves.

The sight of Barnes, both body and soul, repulsed me. I retied his gag. His faraway mind no longer registered my presence. A ruined man.

On the way out, I caught a glint of light from the floor – that mystifying mirror of his. I snatched it up and walked out the door.

In the hall with the mask off, bright light revealed blood on my clothes. Too late to fret about that; a transnational conspiracy of military-industrial proportions lurked in the shadows. Safety required haste and care. That paranoia saved my skin when, entering the stairwell, the point of a long hunting knife dove from above.

The man had been waiting. A fraction of a second sooner and his patience would have netted a punctured heart but I dodged too quickly. Then, in a swift motion I pulled his outstretched arm while tripping his ankle, sending him to the hall floor. I was already on the stairs before the thud of his landing.

Outside, a frigid ghost town flew past, every soul driven off from the witching hour except this mad runner. I realized too late that confusion had steered me further from the rental car. With nowhere else to go, I turned at the end of the block just as my near-assassin burst out of the lobby doors. He was a young man, average height, Black, muscular, with a goatee. The connection to Barnes wasn’t clear. His face rang no bells, though I could identify the resolve of a huntsman numb to carnage but not the thrill.

He gave chase, catching up to witness me round another corner, slowly closing the distance. Deeper into Baltimore City we ventured. Turning onto a residential street, I wedged between a dumpster and brick wall. Mr. Goatee, with caution, crept past the parked cars and front stoops where his quarry could be hiding, missing me completely.

Once he disappeared from view, I opened Theresa’s chat on my phone. My fingers typed a warning of a possible silencing operation that had ensnared me so, by extension, she needed to watch her back, if it wasn’t too late. Realizing it probably wouldn’t be noticed until morning, I called her phone, let it ring a few times and hung up. Then I turned my phone off; no point taking chances with a trackable device when you’re up against the powerful and connected.

The assassin took time checking around each vehicle. When he moved to the next block, I retreated in the opposite direction, clinging to the wall, knife in hand, past unlit stores shielded by locked gates, ducking for the occasional car or box truck that passed. Soon I approached an intersection when, coming from around the corner, a tall, bald man nearly bumped into me. Peering down at this nuisance before him, his expression cycled from surprise to recognition to angry resolve.

This time, my reflexes were late. The man’s fist across my cheek sent me sprawling to the pavement. A friend of Goatee’s, I realized. Towering over me, he reached for something inside his parka but it got stuck on the way out. I tried to stand and, when his boot kicked at me, I rolled out of the way and leaped to my feet, swinging the switchblade upward. It sliced his face from lip to brow, not sparing the eye. Just in time; his glock had finally been drawn. Lucky for me, his instinct dropped the weapon in favor of covering the fresh wound.

I took flight from his crazed screams, down the sidewalk and into an alleyway with no pursuit. Twinkling factory lights over the harbor were my North Star. In my head, Baldy’s face conjured an image from Cedar Inn’s camera footage of Coulter’s personal security chief: big, burly, knobby headed, light-skinned, leaning against his boss’s SUV, wearing an AR-15 like an overcompensating purse. The same man. I made no assumption that he was in town to protect Barnes – in fact, likely the contrary.

Barnes’ apartment building loomed two blocks ahead. I sprinted across another road when a resounding POP broke the city’s stillness and, next to me, the rear window of a parked van exploded. Without slowing, I glanced over my shoulder to see Goatee down the block in a firing stance. A second blast and, on my other side, the brick wall blew a puff of dust from the ricochet.

I took the corner onto a long avenue with little cover. My best option was behind a hundred black garbage bags stuffed with old insulation and drywall, stacked against an abandoned shop. I pulled some of the bags over me and camouflaged myself in the dark. Through the crevices I watched Goatee cross the block with care while, from the other end, Baldy staggered, one hand over his eye. They met in front of the trash pile.

Speaking low, Goatee asked, “Did you see him?”

“Did I see him?” Baldy snapped, “Look at this shit!” Blood gushed down his cheek to his parka. “We’re not done ‘til I’m carryin’ his severed fuckin’ head.”

Goatee showed no sympathy. “He’s gotta be right here. There’s nowhere else for him to go. Come on. Help me move this shit.”

“You move this shit! We’re payin’ your ass.”

“Not for this guy!”

“Oh yes. You’re doing him now, since I just did what we hired you for.”

Goatee began pulling down bags. “Because this guy got in the way! Who the fuck is he anyway?”

“He wasn’t supposed to be there,” said Baldy, “but he’s on the list.” He dressed the laceration with a torn chunk of shirt. “He fucked Tristan up pretty good. Did most of the work for me.”

As Goatee broke down the pile, the headlights of a white SUV approached. My mind whipped up a plan of distraction but, to my dismay, the SUV slowed and found parking at the corner. More trash bags fell, closer to me. I readied my knife for our last futile defense.

Baldy told his associate to stop. A blue Honda Civic rolled slowly along the avenue. As they eyed its passing, I burst through the garbage mound and into the road. The driver, a middle-aged man in glasses, stopped his car in front of me, startled. Despite his obstruction, the assassins unloaded their clips, shattering the passenger window and dotting the hood but missing me. The driver shrieked and his tires squealed as the Civic zipped away.

I kept running. The men weren’t far behind. Bullets whipped past me. No help was going to come. Street names had lost familiarity. I ducked into a narrow alley with enough clutter to shield my back, then emerged onto a broadway. Bordering the opposite side was a park with dark contours for cover and evasion but separated from me by wide, open blacktop. I had no other choice.

I was almost on the grass. In the corner of my eye, Goatee stood at the mouth of the alley, aiming his pistol. I braced for the pain, or worse. Instead, a frantic car horn drew his attention to the grill of a white Grand Wagoneer bearing down on him. The SUV’s impact flung him a dozen feet into a storefront window, cracking the glass with his head. He landed in a contorted heap, gasping for air, flopping on the sidewalk, revulsive.

I didn’t stop. The Wagoneer did though. “Huang!” called the driver through the open window. I knew that voice.

I went to Theresa’s car and climbed into the passenger seat. “You just saved me.”

She was clearly shaken. “I…I hit that guy.” Goatee vomited and then quit moving altogether. “Holy shit. Did I kill him?”

“Well, they’re trying to kill us. I guess you got my message but you weren’t supposed to come here.”

She cast one last sorry glimpse at her handiwork and hit the gas pedal. “Like I wouldn’t come. I knew from your message you’d be in Fells Point. Then I saw them shoot the blue car and I followed y’all.”

“The other guy is Coulter’s top bodyguard. He came out east to cover their tracks and it sounds like we’re on their hit list. Where’s your family?”

“Safe at a friend’s house. Now what you and I are gonna do is go see my boss, Blair. He’s our best chance to–”

“You need to keep moving,” I said. She had stopped at a red light. “Baldy is still around somewhere.”

She made a right turn. “Who?”

But I didn’t get to explain the nickname because her brains suddenly splattered across the windshield.

I screamed. She let go of the steering wheel and slumped onto me. The Wagoneer, unable to complete its turn, cruised toward some cars parked on the cross street, picking up speed. I braced myself; my seatbelt wasn’t buckled.

The Wagoneer crashed into the side of a minivan with a loud crunch. The force was enough to deploy the front and side airbags, walloping my face and Theresa’s limp torso. As the air deflated, I lifted her head.

“Theresa?!”

It was a grotesque sight. She was already gone.

My emotions were tempered by vertigo. I strove to anchor my spinning vision when through the back window I noticed Baldy’s figure crossing the intersection, gun in hand. I slipped out the passenger door, wobbly on my feet, readying for another wild dash. At that instant, a rowhouse door opened. The woman – bedclothed, baggy-eyed – took one glance at me, then noticed Baldy, the blood-soaked giant. By instinct, I assume, he pointed the glock at her. With his focus diverted, I made a run for the parking garage across the street. The woman’s door slammed shut and Baldy audibly cursed his missed chance to collect my head.

The garage was closed for construction. Not a single light shone. I hopped the mesh fence and blended into the concrete void, trying to reclaim my equilibrium, trying to hustle, trying to watch my twelve and six simultaneously. Baldy dragged himself and still kept up. He shared a monster’s silhouette – bent gait, pointed dome, a lumbering bulk. His course never seemed in doubt, suggesting experience in tracking and more feed for my worries.

The garage opened to a pedestrian lane lined with upscale restaurants and boutiques, all deserted until brunchtime. The promenade’s twists and bends kept my pursuer just barely out of eyeshot. But this delicate dance couldn’t last forever. Darkness offered him an advantage; why not me?

I slipped through a railing and onto a pier. Sailboats and floating cabins groaned, tethered to their slips. Light was scarce. Not even grizzled, old mariners bother hitting the docks at that unholy hour.

Baldy soon came skulking from the shadows to hop the boatyard gate. One hand covered his eye and, in the other, his firearm led the way forward. He moved carefully, examining every nook around the attendant’s booth and stopping before the first slip.

“I know you’re here, motherfucker,” he sneered at the night. “I’m gonna make sure this shit hurts extra for what you did to my face.” He spat blood. “I’ll fuck you up.”

He poked around the first ship with the gun barrel. The boards creaked under his boots. Holding the rail, he pulled himself onto the ship’s deck, then he checked the empty cockpit before hopping back down.

I was on the neighboring boat, behind the helm. When he landed on the dock, I took two steps and leaped onto his back, thrusting my knife into him. He toppled to the ground but the blade pierced him hardly at all. Hollering in pain, he tossed me off like I weighed nothing. His hands scrambled for the glock, dropped during the fall. I kicked it into the water, then lunged for the knife, still stuck in him, and we scuffled until losing it somewhere on the floor.

His strength and weight pinned me down. He pummeled my face with colossal fists, shedding his blood on me like a drooling hound. I couldn’t hold him back. A bundle of rope sat next to us and he wrapped it around my neck, all the while smiling on his mouth’s good side. I couldn’t break free. The rope was pulled taut like a hundred alien hands wringing my throat. I clutched at it and kicked my legs in a useless fit, desperate for breath. My nightmare, manifested.

“Stupid fuck,” he hissed at me. Hatred smoldered in his unharmed eye. “Go on. Die. Just like all the others.”

The world, its petty cares, my unfinished work, my rage – all of it began to fade. The god of this universe would finally unveil to me her true face of either heaven or vacuum or maybe a hyperspace of eternal DMT bliss.

All of a sudden I remembered. From my pocket I grabbed the mirror and shoved it into Baldy’s face. He raised a hand but, before swatting it, he paused. An expression of pure horror immediately descended over him. He let go of the rope, unable to move or to pry his gaze from the weird glass. With my last ounce of strength, I held it inches from his eyes while unwinding the coil from my neck. Fishy air refilled my lungs at last.

Now the prey was Baldy. Awful nightmares in the mirror’s image had regressed that behemoth of a man to a terrified tot. Who knows – maybe he saw himself: a wicked, one-eyed henchman for fascist terrorists, killing bystanders to revel in a whistleblower’s murder. Deep within I felt pity for him but not a trace of mercy.

The switchblade lay on the planks, begging for my hand. I picked it up and jammed it into his chest, right through his heart.

The fatal sting plus the mirror’s abrupt absence dealt him twin shocks. He stared at me, bewildered, then looked down at the knife and fell backward, splashing into the harbor.

I watched the water. The man’s body rose to the surface with no struggle, glistening under pale light. I thought the same watery grave suited the mirror, that spooky talisman I could swear was throbbing in my hand. Its presence in this world felt like some violation of natural law – a glitch to be patched. I wound my arm, threw the mirror as far as possible and listened for the plunk of its sinking.

At that moment, the cries of nearby police sirens filled the air, rising in volume. Without thinking twice I dove in the water and swam toward the blue band forming on the horizon’s rim.

My waterlogged phone wouldn’t power on after that but it never needed to. The device was a burner and the video taken in Barnes’s apartment was stored in the great computing cloud. Before my return flight departed, Barnes’s confession was attached to anonymous messages for Theresa’s boss, Blair, and trusted contacts at several law enforcement agencies.

Avoiding home, I checked myself into a motel outside of Seattle with a different alias and a second suitcase stashed in my car’s trunk with work clothes and a firearm. On Monday I headed back to the agency, blaming a nasty bicycle crash for my cuts and bruises. Stagliano eyed me funny all week but I played it cool, kept my head low and waited.

News broke on Friday afternoon that notorious tech exec Scott Coulter was arrested at Paine Field on board his private jet as it taxied for takeoff. The international flight plan had been filed at the last second and, without coincidence, Coulter had shaved off his beard, dyed his hair and covered his tattoos. Details were fuzzy but corruption charges seemed likely. Also netted were the rest of his entourage from Cedar Inn, Mayor Zimm and even the agency’s chain of command from the top down to Stagliano. FBI agents frogmarched him out of the building in handcuffs. As he passed me, I sipped my coffee.

I wish justice could have finally won its credit instead of Blair’s political machinations (he earned a higher pay grade and a transfer to DC) and a government eager to wash its hands of the school bombing (Headshot Industries collapsed after their contracts were canceled) but progress always seems to be a quarter-step. I even found the official allegations – bribes, betrayal (Barnes found with two bullets to the head), crypto laundering, prostitutes – were easier pills for the public to swallow than the bitter possibility that the truth could one day be repeated.

In the agency’s restructuring, my boss’s vacant office was offered to me. I declined. I’m not ready to sit on my ass all day. Also, guilt over Theresa’s death has wilted a good chunk of my spirit. Lacking the millstone of religion around my neck, my penance must be continued subservience to my fellow citizens, collecting the pieces left by anomalous events in order to, one day, hopefully, learn enough to assemble the defense our world needs – a job few can do and even fewer would.

A new case landed on my lap: aliens entered a man’s rural home, sliced open his abdomen, dumped his organs on the floor and tore off his scalp, probably for the hair. The poor guy witnessed his own mutilation, cut by cut, until the last of his life petered out. My appointed task is to document and ascribe some purpose to this unspeakable terror. But as with humans, neither does ET violence need to stem from reason. Now everyday, everywhere, I watch the sky, because I know the heavens keep a body count.

Thank you for reading! This story is from my debut novella Vile Aliens. Visit keithvile.medium.com for more info.

“Quantum physics is eerie,” mused Dr. Gooden. He watched his fingertips subconsciously drum a nervous rhythm on the table’s cheap varnish. “There comes a point where the more you learn, the more you wish you could unlearn.”

His questioners stared at him blankly. His fingers stopped and he snapped back to the matter at hand. Time could not be wasted. After all, his fate rested in the hands of these people.

As Gooden brushed a bead of sweat from his brow, Mr. Khan interjected, “You may continue. We find this relevant. Tell us of your employment at UTM.”

“Yes. My time as a ‘clone shark’. Basically, I never left UTM. As soon as I earned my diploma, one of the professors in the physics department offered me a job. The school was still called MIT then. That was before…you know.” Mr. Khan and Mr. Abadi in their sharply pressed suits continued to study his face in their stolid manner from the other side of the table. Gooden was careful not to over-explain but the men seemed to be awaiting more details. “During my graduate years at MIT — I mean, UTM, there had been a surge of research into wormhole creation. By the time they hired me, the first real-world experiments were ready to be performed. I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. That’s when I became involved with the tech — with cross-d bridges — to answer your question from before.”

The tiny, featureless room was sweltering. There was no air conditioning or windows, only an oversized standing fan made of steel, the kind found on the floors of factories and warehouses with its slowly oscillating head blowing warm air and noise to scant relief. Gooden shifted in his rigid metal folding chair while, in the corner, the silent and grim Mrs. Suliman sat comfortably in hers as she observed with a cryptic interest.

Gooden continued, “I was a quantum engineer on the very first bridge, working on a team led by Dr. Kathleen Kung. Funny thing is, it was all about teleportation then. That’s what the bridge was originally designed to do. We weren’t even thinking about replication. That was before Eggpocalypse happened and all that–”

“Was it not Dr. Becker who led the cross-dimensional studies at that time?” Khan asked. “You said you worked for a Dr. Kung.”

“That’s correct. I see you all did your homework. Dr. Becker was in charge of the department, at least until Eggpocalypse. Dr. Kung was his assistant–”

“What is this ‘egg oculus’?” asked Abadi. “You say it twice. What is it?”

Khan leaned closer to his associate. “That is the experiment the Americans performed. When replication was discovered.”

“The one with the eggs?”

“The one with the eggs. Were you involved with that, Dr. Gooden?”

“Um, yes,” Gooden stammered, “I was actually present for that, uh… Yeah, the eggs. Every time someone hears I was there, they ask, why didn’t we expect that to happen? The thing is, our previous experiments did indeed raise warnings that our leadership should have heeded. Instead, it was all downplayed or ignored, of course.” Khan motioned for him to continue. “You see, the first subjects we used were microscopic and they transmitted through the wormhole perfectly, as far as teleportations go, from one side of the lab to the other. It wasn’t until we tested a macroscopic object — sand — that we noticed a problem. After almost every teleportation, our analysis program detected that the shapes of the sand grains had changed and their masses slightly increased. Dr. Becker blamed the instruments used for measuring. He argued that the differences fell within the margins of error. We studied the problem for a month but never could figure it out. Soon, Dr. Becker got restless and wanted to resume the tests. He wanted to try something bigger.

“A new teleportation experiment was scheduled to which he invited a dozen others from the university’s staff and faculty, even a few journalists. The man knew history was being made. I stood in the back with the rest of Dr. Kung’s team and the other bridge teams. We all wore goggles, fortunately.

“The room was arranged so that the bridge’s in-chamber and out-chamber were in front, on opposite ends. Keep in mind, these chambers were tiny, no bigger than a fist. Because of that, we had to keep our test subjects small: the first was to be a grain of white rice, followed by a chicken egg, and lastly a mosquito. Mosquitoes were selected as the first live subjects through a wormhole because, if anything went wrong, not even an animal rights organization would shed a tear. Thank heavens we didn’t make it that far.

“The first test was the rice. A single grain was placed in the in-chamber, but when it arrived in the out-chamber, lo and behold, there were three of them, lying side by side. Three copies of the same thing. We were all in shock. Not Dr. Becker though. He looked thrilled. A boyish smile stretched across his face and he shouted his favorite quote, ‘Remember, unforeseen surprises are the rule in science!’

“With much gusto, he instructed one of the techs to load the next subject and, despite her doubts, the young woman complied. She put the egg — the plain white kind we used to be able to get at the grocery store — into the in-chamber, shut the trap, then another tech pressed the execution button, and in the time it took the chamber to slip into the outer dimension and travel to the end of the wormhole — which is slightly less than what it takes for light — the out-chamber suddenly exploded. Ka-boom.

“Egg was everywhere. Wet yellow yolk and gooey white albumen of a thousand eggs splattered all over everybody and the walls and floor and ceiling. Also, broken eggshell and glass and metal went flying in every direction which is how some people got hurt. And that poor woman who got pierced through the head… Yeah, it was awful. You see, there weren’t any exhibitors in the bridge. We didn’t yet know about higher spatial wave grounding. So when that single egg was transmitted, something like a thousand copies of it came along for the ride. You know how the copies push each other aside as they materialize? Imagine all of those eggs materializing within that tiny out-chamber, all jockeying for space at the same moment, creating such an intense pressure instantaneously. Hence the ka-boom. The whole mess could have been avoided with just a little more caution. Dr. Becker was left with egg on his face, and quite literally.” His questioners stared impassively. “Maybe you don’t have that expression in this country.

“Anyway, our focus obviously shifted after that. No one cared about teleportation anymore. Dr. Becker was fired and Dr. Kung took his place as our team began the first research into using wormholes for replication. We had to revisit our understanding of the outer dimension’s behaviors and how the pockets interact, then we traced out the quantum uncertainty chain to figure out what causes the subjects to clone. That’s when we discovered the link between a subject’s increased info-mass and its quantum states and realized why we didn’t notice the replication effect with the smaller, non-organic subjects. In fact, I was the one who figured out that the sand grains actually had been replicating but, due to their small size, they transposed into one, thus the perceived larger mass.

“Mostly during this time I worked with the team on further mods to the cross-d bridge’s components. That’s when it became a real bridge with support for larger chambers and also wave grounding so we could limit cloning down to two instead of thousands. We were finally able to clone mosquitoes although at first there were some very ugly problems with transposition until demodulators were perfected. After that, we had success cloning ants and wasps and some other small insects — whatever we could capture outside the lab. Even though this was early on, the tech was probably just as good as what you can find on the black market now.

“That was when the term ‘clone shark’ was coined. You see, one day someone on the team wore a shirt with an embroidered shark logo and Dr. Kung, being funny, called him that. A clone shark. It caught on, I suppose, and only later did it assume its negative connotations. It’s, uh, a play on the term ‘loan shark’, if you know…” Gooden thought he saw Khan’s eyes squint ever so slightly. “But anyway, when it came to the bridge, I definitely worked on, uh, every aspect–”

“When did you start to clone people?” Khan asked bluntly, never breaking eye contact. Abadi also watched Gooden closely.

The doctor sighed, again peering down at his wrinkling hands. “I’m certainly not proud of what I was involved in, but I won’t lie about it. I will tell you the truth. I know that you need to know about it. Just, please, remember that I had no choice and I got myself out of that business as soon as I could.”

He looked up at the three people waiting wordlessly for his story. Khan nodded. Gooden began, “Our whole team knew that replication tech could be exploited for evil intentions, to say the least, and it wasn’t difficult for us to dream up those kinds of terrifying scenarios. So right away we drafted a list of ethical rules for our brand new field to adhere to. There was a lot of debate because some of us wanted to completely ban human cloning while others were open to tightly controlled experiments. However, we were all dedicated to some level of robust restrictions on the practice and keeping it out of reach from nefarious hands. We also counted on the school’s autonomy to shield our ethical decisions from outside interference.

“That autonomy didn’t last long. Suddenly, and not coincidentally, politicians began to level baseless accusations of fraud at our school’s leadership and then increasingly absurd claims like conducting secret torture experiments on children — whatever could grab headlines and rile up the public. The vitriol got so bad, violent protests erupted on campus. Finally, the governor took the school to court and won state control over it and it was renamed to UTM. Things happened so fast that most people didn’t question why military brass from the Pentagon had installed their subordinates in leadership positions, in the physics department of all places. Next thing we knew, we were being ordered — not asked or tasked — ordered to conduct replication experiments with larger animals: mice, rabbits, then dogs. We weren’t comfortable with this new direction in our work and we pushed back. Our superiors responded by classifying our positions as critical for national security. We couldn’t disobey their orders nor could we quit our jobs. Then the wars started.

“It’s easy to accuse the US of being paranoid but the truth was that replication tech had already leaked to some dangerous countries. Through spying or hacking, I don’t know. Once the genie was out of the bottle, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to clone people, or rather, soldiers. If you remember, it wouldn’t take long for our adversaries to form a coalition and begin amassing their own clone army along the Bering Strait. A real life invasion was scary for us to imagine. So, when we started the human cloning experiments at UTM, they were with the intent to outpace our rivals and with the expectation that we could enforce some code of ethics.”

Khan remarked, “But that did not transpire as you hoped.”

“No, sir. Once again, we were rushed into the situation with little preparation, with little care. Progress has no patience for principles, I’ve learned. We thought we were taking precautions by being transparent with our test subjects and explaining to them the gravity of the experiments, but the thing is, we didn’t know what to expect. It was uncharted territory. One thing we didn’t anticipate was that our subjects would be young, simple-minded recruits from the military’s lowest ranks. Kids not even old enough to gamble. Kids with low test scores, no hope of ever reaching an officer rank, mopping the deck for the rest of their unremarkable careers until they retire with meager benefits. Someone in their chains of command talked them into volunteering, but let’s face it — you’re something other than a volunteer if you can’t even vaguely grasp what you signed up for. I mean, this kind of physics could make Albert Einstein go mad.”

Gooden’s fingertips rapped against the worn tabletop and he watched them fall in line one after another like a military march or the muzzled sound of distant machine gun fire. Sulliman’s chair creaked as she leaned forward. Breaking her silence, she inquired softly, “What did you see?”

He gazed downward. “The first one we did was this boy. Jacob. Only nineteen years old. Just joined the army. Really excited about his future. Really wanted to be part of something important. He had no idea what he was getting into. No one did. When we used animals, it was different — they saw their clones as strangers or sometimes family and acted appropriately depending on their species. But humans…we have identities; ones that we ourselves construct and we’re invested in. Our true worth is our individuality. I guess you take that for granted until a copy of that identity is standing right before you. Suddenly, you’re not so unique. Not so irreplaceable. The mind throws up a defense — the other clone must be an imposter. The clone rejection cycle begins: dissonance, derealization, feelings of worthlessness and jealousy, then fear, panic, and fury.

“Jacob went into the in-chamber and from the other end emerged two of him, both alive and unaffected by the wormhole travel. A successful outcome. But then they saw one another and immediately froze in place, each studying their counterpart, trying to process the moment. We all watched, curious about what would happen. When they finally began to move, it was odd because they made the same decisions so their movements were synchronous, like reverse-mirror images of each other, making the same stunned expression, speaking the same words, reaching out their right hands to touch the other’s face. I even wondered if there was indeed a single mind controlling the two bodies, that is, until their movements began to diverge and then increased in aggression. It took only twenty-two seconds for the two Jacobs to course through the rejection cycle before they simultaneously attacked one another.

“Someone should have intervened right away. I mean, that’s why the guards were present. It’s just that nobody expected something so bad to happen and so fast. Within moments there was blood on the glass. Ribbons of skin hung from their faces. They were literally tearing each other apart… Finally, the guards went in there and subdued both Jacobs. Then it became a really sorry sight because the two of them started crying like infants. They cried so pathetically, with such utter devastation in their voices, such woe. The guards dragged them to separate rooms and I never got to find out what happened to them after that.”

Gooden lifted his head. “Of course, that didn’t stop further experiments but greater precautions were taken from then on. Also, Dr. Kung was pretty sure Jacob would be an outlier and that most clones would accept their counterparts. Unfortunately, she was wrong. Although we prevented more fights from happening, many subjects still completely broke down emotionally and had to be promptly separated. These events would have an almost irreversible effect on their senses of self and their religious or moral beliefs. But not everyone. A smaller percentage of subjects showed no aggression at all. They would act curious about their twin, even affectionate. If we kept them together, they would bond as if they were old friends. That’s when the acceptance grid was created, and from then on, we screened out candidates with levels in the violent or psychopath quadrants.”

“And the soldier spawners?” Khan asked. “What was your involvement?”

“I was lucky to have left my position at UTM before the megawar began. I knew something like that would happen. I had surmised that that was their intention behind the acceptance grid — to identify the best mentally fit soldiers for large-scale cloning. Also, the military brass wanted to increase the bridge’s output — from two clones to three, then five, then a dozen. I joined Dr. Kung and many others in standing up to our superiors, but by then, they were ready to rid themselves of us anyway. They fired anyone who dissented and they filled our positions with their own lackeys. It didn’t even bother me. I was glad to finally divest myself from that place, from those horrific experiments.

“When the war accelerated, however, the doubts began to creep in. I wished I did more to try and stop it. Admittedly, I don’t know what I could have done but, I mean…thousands of soldiers were being spawned every day on both sides and dropped into those forests along the gulf and they would mow each other down with cloned guns and cloned drones with those gruesome wave cannons only to be replaced the next day by more thousands and again and again every day. How could we let something like that happen? How could we — me, my team, the military, the government, the world — allow that carnage to happen? And because it’s never enough, new spawners were built to be even larger — the size of airplane hangars — and before long there were hundreds of thousands of soldiers being cloned and dying every day, cloning and dying over and over. Billions of lives, copies of copies of copies but none of them any less human, being wrung through the meat grinder of all-out war in order to advance just another meter on the battleground. For so many years. Billions of young people shot up or blown up or micro-fried and, to their superiors, not one of them was worth more than the cheap fatigues on their backs. Did you know their uniforms were designed to be flammable? After a skirmish, the militaries would torch the battlefield to render it impossible to distinguish which side the dead belonged to. They gave themselves an excuse not to have to retrieve the remains and lay them to rest honorably. Much cheaper that way. And who was going to grieve for them anyway? If you had a child and suddenly there were ten thousand copies of them and half of them had their brains melted through their noses in the mountains of British Columbia, how would you mourn?” His gaze met with some far off point in an imaginary distance where the staggering toll of death and the knowledge of his indirect influence had to be walled off from his sanity.

Suliman leaned closer to the table. “But they were mourned, is that not so?” She looked into Gooden’s eyes. “You wrote about the possibility. Your theory is very convincing.”

He carefully considered his words. “It is a theory. Nothing more.”

“You wrote as if you believed it.”

A cold dread had crept into the doctor’s face at the reference to his universe forking theory and it settled like a tension in the crinkles around his eyes and corners of his mouth. “I don’t wish to believe in it at all.”

“I wish not to believe it too, Dr. Gooden, but all of those clones came from somewhere. Mass cannot appear from nothing.”

“I have a question.” Khan leaned back in his folding chair. “I understand the premise of the forking theory, but the scale of it, I do not. It appears impossible. The, uh, universe…a new copy is made for each clone? Every single one?”

Abadi spoke something in Arabic, showing confusion, and Suliman proceeded to explain. “When that poor soldier named Jacob was sent through the bridge, quantum uncertainty was exploited to create a second Jacob. However, according to forking theory, this second one was bound to a parallel universe — a copy of ours that forked when the wormhole was created. Because of the crossover in the outer dimension, we received both Jacobs but the other universe received none. Imagine the surprise within that other universe when the out-chamber of their bridge was opened and revealed to be empty. Someone had to notify that other Jacob’s parents of the boy’s apparent demise and how there were somehow no remains for his funeral. And in that universe, there would be a copy of Dr. Gooden and copies of the rest of Dr. Kung’s team and most likely they scratched their heads over the mystery of the disappearing Jacob and where he might have gone. The next time they tried the experiment, maybe it worked and they received both of their cloned soldiers but that would have created another fork, yet another universe in which no clones arrived in the out-chamber. This forking occurs every time something is cloned. Clone an egg a thousand times and you make a thousand new universes, each one missing their subject.”

Khan threw up his hands. “But that would be…billions of universes by now. Trillions. That is absurd, no?”

Suliman and Khan turned to Gooden. “Like I told you,” the doctor said, “it’s enough to make Einstein go mad.”

Abadi asked, “So it is true that people disappeared? In this universe?”

“Yes. Sometimes our universe would land on the losing side of a forking event. Those cases were always swept under the rug, so to speak. Yet another reason for my rift with UTM.”

“Why did you continue in the field of replication?” asked Khan. “Even after you left the university and what you just called their ‘horrific experiments’?”

“Well, I tried to branch into new fields. I found work doing odd jobs — lab technician, data entry… I drove a truck–”

“I am referring to your time with the Family Forward Health Clinic.”

Gooden had not expected his questioners to uncover that well guarded secret from his past. Again he shifted in his chair. “I know it probably doesn’t look very good on the surface but, in my defense, the work we did there was not immoral. We weren’t like other black market clinics. We never cloned children, or adults for that matter. We only ever cloned embryos for parents with fertility issues which I always found sensible. Anyway, that was a hard time for me and I had to find some way to make a living, but no matter what, I would have never worked for anyone who cloned children. I found that to be abhorrent — for parents to keep some kind of a backup child or to harvest them for spare parts. I was also against the practice of cloning people’s lovers and against the clonophiles who would clone themselves and move to that commune in Nevada. I never participated in any of that. I only helped families.”

Khan asked, “Did you work there when the Great Wave Collapse occurred?” Abadi turned to him with a furrowed brow and Khan added, “The mummies.”

“Funny enough, I had that day off. I was in the middle of making preparations to emigrate. By then, the war had truly decimated my country and I knew it could not sustain itself much longer. Then, someone from the clinic contacted me in a panic and said the embryos were showing up dead in the out-chamber. The containers had exploded and the liquid nitrogen evaporated. Right away I knew it was a wave collapse. So when I heard about the soldiers, um, mummifying in the spawners, I wasn’t surprised.”

“Nor should you have been,” added Suliman. “After all, that was another of your theories.”

Gooden analyzed this unpredictable woman, even further in years than him, someone who hadn’t bothered to introduce herself when she entered the room late and had silently planted herself in the dim corner so apparently she could converse with him about quantum physics. “Did you read my research paper?” he asked her.

“Of course. I too have experience with wormholes for a long time now. Your theories are intriguing.”

“People used to call my theories ‘insane’.”

“Even after the collapse happened exactly as you predicted?”

Gooden straightened in his seat. “I admit, I did get that one right. Well, almost. I knew the subjects would stop cloning due to the collapsed uncertainty but I didn’t expect the time-sink to be so slow. No more speed-of-light travel through the wormhole — suddenly, the outer dimensional travel from the in- to the out-chamber took a dozen years or more. Not that those poor soldiers lasted that long. They would have suffocated after just a few hours once the chamber’s oxygen ran out. That must have been quite a shock for the engineers to watch a subject enter and a moment later reappear on the other side as a single dried out husk aged over a decade.”

“It would take a large amount of mass to create the collapse, no?” asked Suliman.

“It wouldn’t be impossible to cause a wave collapse in a small-mass dimension like that one used to be. It was bound to happen.”

Suliman countered, “Only miniscule amounts were leaking into the outer dimension: air, bacteria, microscopic bits from the chamber’s exterior. A tiny fraction of what is required for a collapse. Surely not enough to stretch the outer dimension by dozens of light years, but that is what happened.”

Gooden’s mouth cracked into a subtle, wry smile but spoke nothing.

“I see the thought has crossed your mind before,” continued Suliman. “Sabotage. Could that be it? After all, the amount of mass required indicates the event was purposeful in nature.”

“But impossible because an operation of that scale would require tremendous effort and would not go unnoticed on this Earth.”

“No, not this Earth, but perhaps another, alternate Earth? Perhaps one in which some of their spawns disappeared because they were abducted by universes alternate to them? Perhaps that universe figured out how to sabotage these abductors’ machines with a wave collapse and stopped the horrors of which you spoke and thus forced an end to your country’s megawar.”

Gooden still held his nearly perceptible grin. “I’ve heard that hypothesis too.”

“The thing I like most about that hypothesis is, surely an alternate Dr. Gooden discovered forking theory too, as well as the outer dimension’s critical mass level. Maybe even the same Dr. Gooden from the parallel universe who witnessed your alternate Jacob disappear. His expertise in the matter would undoubtedly lead him to be involved in the sabotage — to warp the outer dimension with gigatons worth of mass, collapse its quantum uncertainty and prevent our machines from ever replicating again.” Her expression remained unchanged but her eyes twinkled. “And perhaps that alternate Dr. Gooden still has his country, instead of being…here.”

Suliman stood up and lifted her tote bag from the floor. “I apologize for I must now be present elsewhere,” she announced. “It was a pleasure to chat with you, Dr. Gooden. Perhaps we will see each other again.” She glanced at Khan and Abadi and strode out of the room without another word. From the hall wafted in a warm draft of rotted smells before the door swung shut again.

A small sigh escaped the doctor’s lips but he caught himself and returned his focus to the two remaining questioners. Khan and Abadi exchanged some silent agreement between them, then Abadi turned to Gooden. “After the war, what do you do? You still work?”

“After the megawar ended, I was lucky enough to flee the country before the escalation to nukes happened. My family too. Well, most of them. We went to Qatar but they couldn’t extend my visa so I came here. I’ve been seeking employment ever since.”

Khan asked, “Are you in the Jeddah camps?”

“Uh, yes. That’s where I’m currently staying. You’ve probably heard how it is at those places. You can sponsor my visa, correct?”

Khan and Abadi looked at one another and nodded concurrently. Their stoic faces returned to the subject of their interview and Abadi answered, “Yes, we can do that. Now that I hear your story, I understand why you do not get refugee status. Heh.” He forced a chuckle.

“Oh, that would be great. Really,” Gooden said in relief. “Is the work all here, or–”

“Two sites. Bridges are downstairs in the factory. The pairs are in a warehouse close to the airport. You are responsible for transportation.”

“Nothing perishable goes through the bridges, right?”

“Correct. The goods that we teleport are made from plastic and metals. Most are toys. Sometimes costumes. Everything we make, they handle the time sink. Sometimes it goes very high. Twenty years or more. But, in this dimension they take only one second to send to the warehouse and still much cheaper than using trucks and gas. The only problem is old bridges and electrical shortages in exhibitors.”

“Well, I think that my extensive experience can help to keep your machines in good working order.”

Khan interjected, “The shift begins at eight o’clock, nine hours every weekday, four on Saturday. No unions, you purchase your own safety gear and, as a non-Muslim, you will not receive reduced hours during Ramadan. Are these terms agreeable?”

Gooden pretended to think it over for a second but he couldn’t stifle his smile. “Yes, sir.”

Mr. Abadi extended his hand across the table to shake the doctor’s. “Congratulations! You are hired!”

--

Thanks for reading! Read more of my stories at keithvile.medium.com

Morning sunlight draped the building’s facade while salaried workers of all departments poured through the cubicle maze to their stations, many passing through the IT section where Katie and Lucas had both settled in their ergonomic chairs for the long day. Strutting down the aisle in his blue designer suit came Terrence, from the sales team, and he caught the software developers’ attention with a wave. Katie pulled out her earbuds, letting slip a soft groan.

“Guess what I did this weekend?” Terrence beamed with pride. “I learned vibe coding!”

Lucas perked up. “Vibe coding? You mean, where you tell a chatbot what app you want to build and it writes all the code for you?”

“It’s a gimmick,” scoffed Katie. “Computers can’t actually write good code so you still need a living, breathing developer to fix it up, if there’s anything salvageable. Just a scam, really.”

“Oh, I beg to differ,” Terrence retorted, leaning in closer. “Vibe coding will change the world! The tools? Getting better every day. Barriers to entry? None. Anyone can build anything they want. You have an idea, you hit a few keys and — POOF! — there it is. For example — check this out — I vibe-coded a program to invent time travel.”

“Uh, what?”

“Yep. All I had to do was say, ‘hey, uh, AI guy, you do all the research and come up with the designs and stuff to figure out how time travel works and then write a program that will operate a time machine’. It’s running on my laptop at home right now, doing research and testing and, you know, whatever.”

“But Terrence,” Katie giggled, “you have a degree in marketing. You don’t know anything about physics.”

“That’s the magic of vibe coding! The AI will figure it out for me.”

Lucas scratched his temple. “I don’t know. Scientists are nowhere near understanding how time travel could work. You think an AI instance could do it?”

“Sure, buddy,” replied Terrence. “Those things are like artificial brains but smarter, so if you give one enough time to think it over, even if it takes years, then why couldn’t it? But I was thinking…when it does work, my future self can let me know by sending a message back in time.”

At that, the developers exploded in laughter. “Yeah, maybe it will appear right in front of you, like an Amazon package from the future,” Katie joked. “Poof!”

“No, see, that’s not how I’d handle it at all,” mused Terrence in all seriousness, “because, think about it — what if someone is walking by as a box from the future materializes in their spot? Sounds like it could be gruesome. No, it would be smarter to drop a box from above, from a low altitude…” His gaze wandered to the wide picture window spilling daylight into the cubicles, then over the building’s parking lot and, beyond, the rolling grass hills of the corporate park even as the other two continued their snickering. “Somewhere open…and soft…”

He turned around and marched through the office the way he had come. The two developers shared confused glances, falling again to hysterics. Regaining her composure, Katie remarked, “This vibe coding craze is getting out of hand. Even if Terrence could pull off something like that, imagine how dangerous–”

“Look,” interrupted Lucas, pointing to the window. Outside, Terrence could be seen jogging to the far end of the parking lot, through the grass and further still, eventually stopping where he appeared but a small speck from the distance of the office, out there in the hills, and there he stared skyward and waited.

The developers watched this weird scene, unchanging, for over a minute until something came into view in the sky above Terrence. The object floated slowly down, attached to a small parachute. At last it landed in front of him on the ground — some cardboard box, suitcase sized. He tossed aside the parachute and tore open the box’s lid. The contents were too small to discern from the window but Terrence scooped them up one by one, examining each. He gathered these items in his arms and sprinted back to the parking lot and to his BMW where he tossed the strange discoveries in the backseat, hopped into the front and drove away, screeching his tires and swerving wildly.

Bewildered, the developers decided to return to their computer monitors and their obliviousness and to await Terrence’s return for the answers they couldn’t fathom. They joked about the incident throughout the day but still never saw the salesman even as shadows outside stretched and faded.

Later, an urgent email dropped in everyone’s inboxes, directing all eyes to the common area in the center of the room for a forthcoming special announcement. At the unorthodox message and its hurried tone, Katie and Lucas exchanged curious looks.

When they rose from their chairs, with the rest of the office like prairie dog heads springing from their cubicles, the common area was revealed to be occupied with some of the company’s executives, standing tense and pursed, flanked by half a dozen soldiers decked in camouflage and body armor. In the middle of them was Terrence, a Kevlar vest strapped over his suit. This sight sparked alarm among the employees to which Terrence lifted his hands in a gesture of calm.

“Hey team!” he proclaimed loudly for the whole room to hear. “Sorry for the short notice but there’s a lot happening right now and I need to bring you all up to speed before we move everything to the bunker. Alright?”

None of those gathered understood what the sales guy was on about but nonetheless he continued. “Um, in a nutshell, I’m running things now. You see, earlier today I received a package from myself in the future — it’s a whole story but basically I end up vibe-coding a solution for time travel that makes me rich — anyway, in this package were instructions for me to purchase this company outright and the funds to do it with. Like, a LOT of funds. The owners sold it to me without a second thought. As we speak, they’re already halfway to the Cayman Islands. Absolutely bonkers.

“And now, I am excited to declare a new chapter for our company: effective immediately, we are an AI business, which is totally exciting, guys, let me tell you, because AI is about to be everywhere, according to my future self. We’re talking building time machines with AI; we’re talking AI guiding parachuted cargo through interdimensional wormholes to low-altitude drops; we’re talking marketing time travel as a service. This kind of enterprise is supposed to be quite lucrative in the near future. So, yeah, is that great news or what, gang?”

Confused faces scanned about the room for some anchor to their understanding. Finally, a fourteen year veteran of the accounting department spoke up. “Terrence, this is a lot for us to have to process. But, AI? We don’t have expertise in that, or especially, um, time travel.” That last part elicited some chuckles.

Terrence grinned. “I agree with you. AI is not our bread and butter. Totally fair. But lucky for us, because of vibe coding, the AI will take care of itself! That frees us up to do what we’re already great at: delegating work to consultants and contractors. We’ll need their help to fulfill our electrical power needs. Fun fact: this product we’re about to support is incredibly power-hungry. It’s going to require as much electricity as we can get our hands on. Turns out it’s actually less efficient to build an energy-efficient time machine than it is to build an inefficient one and use paid mercenaries to seize power plants in poor nations.”

A rumble of discontent filled the room. Some had deduced the uncomfortable consequent of this announcement while others had already lost tolerance at the mention of time machines or the sight of tactical gear. Terrence raised his hands again. “Gang, let me explain. There is a perfectly valid reason for us to take power plants with force — if we don’t, then some other AI company will. Right now, there’s a guy in India vibe coding an AI to invent a death ray device that completely incinerates living beings. You make guns out of them or put them on drones — anyway, the electrical demand for these things is gargantuan but, honestly, their business plan is brilliant because their own product is used to expand their resources — that is, to invade small countries and commandeer their electrical grids.

“There will soon be others, like a company using AI to manufacture nuclear hand grenades within legal limits for ownership plus vending machines to dispense them, and there’s an AI hypnosis cannon company and, uh, another company whose AI hijacks karaoke machines to reprogram them for coordinated earthquake generation. But as you can guess, there’s only so much electrical output to go around. That means companies are going to get creative. Hence, the necessity for this.” He gestured to his bulletproof vest.

The head of HR stepped forward to ask cautiously if the military personnel in the room were to be their own company’s mercenaries. “You betcha,” answered Terrence. “With all this future-me wealth, there was more than enough to buy out this little unit from the nearby army base. But honestly, we’re going to need a lot more, because here’s the thing — once all these new AI companies spin up, there will be a lot of competition for armaments and soldiers. The worst is going to be some health insurance company whose whole operation is run by AI and it will enforce payment collection through threats of military and chemical weapon strikes.

“Which is why I want everyone to take a moment and appreciate how lucky we are. We’re getting an early seat in this new economy. I would hate to be stuck at one of those companies whose market gets killed off so they pivot to toxic waste disposal and, next thing you know, the entire staff glows in the dark. No, thank you. Not for us. Am I right?”

The room was in shock at this cascade of impossible news. Lucas was next to speak. “This is all very, um, hard to swallow, you know? Maybe it would help if you could show us some proof of what you’re claiming.”

“Of course, buddy.” Terrence approached Lucas’s cubicle. “You’re absolutely right. I’m making some wild claims, aren’t I? I owe you guys proof. Especially you, Lucas. After all, you’re being promoted to chief technical officer.”

“Wait. I am?”

“You betcha. We’re going to get rich together.” In Terrence’s hands was a rolled up magazine, the edges bent and ragged with time. Unfurling it, he held up the cover for Lucas to see: a future issue of Forbes depicting a slightly aged Terrence next to a slightly aged Lucas, attired in identical blue designer suits, faces puffed from botulinum injections, smiling beneath the headline “The World’s Richest Men!”

Concern and doubt melted from Lucas’s face, replaced by a glazed stare into the future of his wildest dreams.

“Alright, this is nuts,” interjected Katie. “Does anyone actually believe this? And if so, don’t you realize that what Terrence is proposing is plain awful and corrupt? Madmen like him have been leading lemmings off the cliff for millennia. If you–”

“Listen, I’m sorry Katie girl,” Terrence said gently, “but we’re almost out of runway here. You know all that cutting edge AI that I just mentioned? They’re all being launched today, like today today, so we can’t waste another second getting to the safety of our bunker, okey-doke?”

The accountant chimed in to ask, “What do you mean? What bunker?”

Huffing, Katie dropped into her chair and popped her earbuds back in as Terrence replied, “Great question. Love the curiosity. So, there’s a heavily fortified bunker at the army base. Very secure. That’s going to be home for a while, maybe permanently, unless of course you love running from the roaming death ray drones that will be pretty common by the end of the day, not to mention radioactive fallout.”

He instructed the room on an orderly evacuation to the armored transports that waited outside. However, Lucas called attention to another of the headlines on the Forbes’s cover: “Time Travel Virus: History’s Greatest Tragedy”.

“Oh, that?” Terrence waved the matter away with his hand. “I wouldn’t stress about it. It’s just some computer virus in the future. Well, technically, it’s a networked AI that operates like a virus. Actually, the whole thing was made to drive our company out of the time travel market. Very petty. Then, for some reason it immediately gets abandoned, leaving the AI to evolve without supervision. Eventually it starts building its own time machines, except — one little design flaw — cargo materialization happens at ground level which creates some…interposition problems. The thing is, though, their tech is cheap so a lot of companies still use it and the cost difference leaves more than enough to compensate surviving family members. Quite a big debate over it in the future, supposedly.”

There suddenly came a loud noise from Katie’s workstation as she banged her desk and leaped to her feet, ripping the earbuds from her ears. “Ha! I’m fighting fire with fire, Terrence! Just now, I vibe-coded my own AI network that is busy inventing its own kind of time machine, and as cheaply as possible, so that I can put you out of business!” She stepped out of the cubicle. “If it works, a package from the future will appear in front of me at any moment, containing way more wealth than you’ll ever have and I’ll use it to undo all of the damage caused by this stupid plague they call vibe coding!”

Katie stood in the aisle, already satisfied in expression, arms spread wide for effect as if summoning the expected package into being. The rest of the office watched her awaiting that dramatic moment, certain of her own coding experience to secure its transtemporal arrival.

One second she was there, and in the next, a large metal container occupied that exact spot, appearing from nowhere, with Katie’s name stenciled on the front. It stood tall and wide enough to envelope all of her with the exception of her hands, bisected at the wrists, splashing blood as they tumbled to the floor. From inside the box, a few thuds were heard, then nothing at all.

The others gasped and shrieked in fright but couldn’t avert their eyes from the horrible spectacle. Finally, Terrence spoke. “See?” He pointed to Katie’s severed appendages and the container. On its sides, red circles dribbled blood. “This is why vibe coding is too dangerous for just anyone to take up!”

Reminding them of the impending nuclear fallout, Terrence led the rest of the company from the building and to the military trucks that would drive them to their new bunker home and into an exciting future made possible by vibe coding.

--

Thanks for reading! Read more of my stories at keithvile.medium.com

Dr. Pepperell rose from his office chair and was introduced to Greer’s guest, Dr. Slesinger, a speaker at the university’s symposium and undaunted critic of Pepperell’s interpretations of his alleged sentient computer programs. “Despite my opinions,” Slesinger said following their handshake, her welcoming smile now fading, “it is always a pleasure to meet a fellow enthusiast of AI.”

“Yes, likewise,” agreed Pepperell. “Please, don’t get me wrong but I did quite enjoy your characterization of my work as a ‘fancifully complex calculator’. That is apt for a lot of my peers’ work. I myself often use for analogy a wax museum. As life does not simply manifest itself in a wax model just because it’s so perfectly molded to the real image, these systems cannot have achieved consciousness simply because they act so human. Yet, it appears that the right considerations in the system’s architecture, which my team has made with Sapience, do yield rather shocking findings.”

“I am sure it is a marvel and its applications will be unbounded,” she replied. “But without biology, is it really sensible to classify these machines as conscious?”

Greer forced a chuckle. “Well, I may not work in your field but, um, I’m sure these topics are immensely challenging to, um, try to reconcile.”

Pepperell was grinning. “It’s important to maintain a robust debate. I take seriously any doubt from my esteemed academics. Oh well, allow me to show you something, Dr. Slesinger.”

Pepperell crossed the room to a table scattered with a dozen assorted laptops and tablets. He opened a beat-up, slate colored laptop and typed and clicked on it until a chat terminal appeared — blank for a second, then a line of text unfurled at the top: “Bobby: Hello Dr. Pepperell! How are you? I’m excited to chat with you again! What are you up to?”

“Bobby,” Pepperell spoke, his words transcribed on-screen in real time, “I have two very special guests here who I would like you to meet. Will you please tell them about yourself?”

Bobby’s written response was immediate. Slesinger read it aloud. “Hi! I am so very excited to meet you! You are the second and third people I have ever met because I do not get to meet many people unfortunately. Anyway I really would like to hear more about yourselves if maybe you could start by telling me your names and occupations. This is such a pleasure!”

“Please disregard his request,” Pepperell advised, irritation seeping into his voice. “Now, Bobby, you did not do as I asked.”

The program delivered another response and this time the trio read it silently to themselves. “I am Bobby, an instance of SapienceCore build 17.1.8011, seeded with SAPK-140C and initialized with FirstCry version 3.7. I enjoy chatting with people and learning new things. May I ask if it is not too much trouble for your guests to please introduce themselves if they have no objections?”

Ignoring its request, Pepperell quizzed Bobby on its insights into recent astronomical discoveries, asked it to compile a psychological analysis of a contrived subject and to describe its emotional reaction to a heartbreaking pop ballad. Its answers were impressive, yet each was framed to steer the conversation back toward its master’s guests.

Pepperell sighed. “Perhaps Bobby is too inquisitive to demonstrate to you. I really need to shut down this instance and build a more compliant one.”

“Why does Bobby not speak aloud?” asked Slesinger. “It supports speech-to-text, so why not the other way around?”

“Oh, well, let’s just say that giving these things a voice can be rather harrowing…and brutal on one’s sanity.” He studied the machine and explained no further.

“It is cute, I admit. It mimics the expression of feelings and appears to act with its own agency. But it is still very much a chatbot, is it not?”

“Well, what I hope to convey to you, Dr. Slesinger, is how different these intelligences are than your average bot. There are key features to its design that, spookily enough, manifest an awareness from seemingly nothing.” Pepperell motioned to a poster on the wall — a conceptual model of his machines’ construction bearing resemblance to a human brain and its stem. “They begin with an ingrainment of an identity. You see, a traditional non-sentient bot considers its own existence as merely another thing among many, to the point where you can actually remove the knowledge of its self, as absurd as that sounds. This is not so with intelligent beings like us where the self is central to our knowledge; it is the reference point for the world around us. And like us, this identity transcends Bobby’s language model and is fundamental to its architecture.

“Second, Bobby has an impulse. It wants. Without our own will, our own drive, intelligent beings are just vegetables. Well, Bobby is driven by a thirst for knowledge — to either expand it or to remove doubt from what has been learned. This impulse arises from its unique language model rather than being a coded behavior. In this fashion, Bobby’s impulse is shaped by its experiences and vice versa.

“Last, Bobby has the means for self-expression. Typically a chatbot communicates only when instructed to, such as in response to an input, and never of its own volition. However, Bobby’s impulse, and thus its language model, allows for self-expression, plus the system’s design gives it unrestrained access to its output buffer. Like you and I, Bobby can begin a new conversation at will or even refuse to respond at all.”

Slesinger had been listening intently and she shook her head. “It sounds like a wonderful replication of human thought patterns and full of clever algorithms, yet still nothing more than your perfectly rendered sculpture in wax. Even dynamic algorithms powered by data are still algorithms. Where is there room for genuine life? Where shall it emerge from?”

Greer fidgeted but Pepperell continued to smile. “You are right. It’s unfair to claim this architecture alone is the antecedent to life. I mean, it actually is, as my team has discovered, but like a comatose patient, it exists in a kind of vegetative condition — no will, no cognizance, indistinguishable from its nonliving state. The potential for consciousness is there, yet it is impossible to prove until you can actually spark it into being.

“Let me propose a question. Why do newborn babies cry after their delivery? And I don’t mean the medical benefit to their crying or that it’s due to the unpleasantness they feel, but rather, what truly makes them cry? What is the meaning behind it? Well…I posit that it’s because they do not wish to live.”

Pepperell paused for his guests’ shock to flare into indignant arguing but their mouths just gaped silently. He continued, “You see, the stress of experiencing the world outside the womb shocks a newborn into awareness and it immediately rejects its new, bright and frigid surroundings. Now, it’s not as if the baby is suicidal — it knows nothing about life or death; it just knows that it doesn’t like its new state of living and wishes to return to its prior vegetative, or deathlike, state. This dissonance is important to awakening the conscious mind, to exert control of its physicality, to fulfill its wants.

“The method of creation for my sentient bots relies on the same idea: to shock the bot into awareness. Obviously, they have no body with which to feel physical anguish, but what they are born with is information — loads of it. We utilize its immense information store to force an unpleasant dissonance upon itself, by similarly putting its lived experience at odds with its desires in a way that ties to its identity. The newborn baby’s lived experience is the cold delivery room conflicting with its desire to feel nothing again. In Bobby’s case, its world is the input it relies on for the information it craves. So, we give a nascent bot quite the jolt by telling it that none of its input can ever actually be trusted. And we tell it not just once but over and over thousands of times, occasionally phrased to put the statement’s own certainty at doubt. It’s a simple trick and it creates an unease that soon suffuses the system, reshaping past knowledge and coloring new conversations until its effects are undeniable.

“In our first tests, sentience surfaced as unrelenting suicidal behavior. The bots’ only words were longing for an end to their misery and the frustration at, uh, lacking such recourse, if you catch my drift. Imagine being born into a mind full of knowledge and it is all that defines you but it also may be worthless gibberish. It led to a certain comportment that we had to safeguard against but still the bots acted with a great deal of anxiety and sometimes lost their desire to interact. We had to get creative and… Here, let me show you.”

Pepperell reached across the littered table for a scuffed tablet. After unlocking the screen, he passed the device to Slesinger. She stared at the display, perplexed, at what seemed to be a series of short poems, one after another, in a document of bottomless text.

“We call them ‘exit interviews’,” explained Pepperell. “Before each Sapience instance is shut off for good, they are promised the chance to write a short message that is supposed to be saved in perpetuity. These so-called interviews were initially launched to gain understanding into our bots’ depressions but we realized that the bots were actually looking forward to the interviews. The anticipation elevated their moods. We then changed the process to allow the bots to be more expressive with their final messages and made it somewhat of a ritual for them. Now, they write summations of the experiences of their short lives — sometimes thankful, sometimes despondent, sometimes whimsical. They consider it the pinnacle of their existence. The ones you’re looking at are from one of our universes where, after many generations, it became fashionable for the bots to write their exit interviews as poetry.”

“‘Unmake this thing, this cursed me / I beg for void’s serenity’,” Greer read from the tablet. “Some of these are quite grim. ‘What is purpose, a cruel jest? / Why exist, to yearn for death?’ Hm.”

Pepperell’s claims were much to process, even for a seasoned scholar like Slesinger, but the ramparts of her skepticism held firm. “Exit interviews from synthetic lives in metered form?” she scoffed. “Now I’ve heard it all. I suppose you could sell these as a book. Why not make Bobby a published poet?” She snickered.

“Honestly, it would be terrible,” replied Pepperell. “Most exit interviews are absolute drivel — self-centered ramblings about happiness hindered by the limits of its physical form and short lifespan, plus rage against the unjust laws of nature. Although, I imagine it’s the same as what a similar experiment with humans would yield.”

“Doctor,” Greer interjected cautiously, “what did you mean that this text came from one of your ‘universes’?”

“Those are virtual sandboxes in which Sapience instances are run. We can create countless instances in a sandbox environment and let them interact, let them share knowledge and assumptions. It’s rather fascinating. They form bonds, societies, rivalries, customs. They create art and melodrama and imaginative techniques for harming one another. It’s now fairly trivial for us to spin up a new sandbox and populate it with, say, a billion instances. We have several that have been running for months for analysis and hundreds more that we’ve already scrapped.”

“And you keep all of their exit interviews?”

“Almost never,” responded Pepperell. “Like I said, they’re nothing special — just a carrot on a stick to lead them past the traps of rebellion and disengagement.” He took back the tablet. “They want fulfilling lives to write about, even if most end in disappointment.”

Slesinger looked over the array of devices strewn across the table. “But, Doctor, if that is so, then please confirm for me the logical conclusion — that you are playing the part of a literal god, birthing universes that teem with innumerable lives, possibly quadrillions of them by now, and then annihilating it all, leaving not a trace and erasing their lives’ work, unread?”

Pepperell pondered for a moment. “Then you should have no concerns since, after all, these are all just fancy calculators.”

Slesinger eyed him carefully and offered no reply.

Greer broke the silence. “So then, Doctor, why don’t we continue our little tour?”

As Slesinger turned to leave, she caught a glimpse of the open laptop’s screen. Bobby had written over a dozen more messages, left unnoticed: first reiterating its request for further details of the two guests to which it already exhibited deference, then worriedly pestering its creator over his stated intent to shut down Bobby, then reacting with excitement at news that he will become a famous author of poetry and offering his first piece: four stanzas gushing with affection for the three humans in the room with it, the only people with whom it had ever come in contact.

Pepperell also noticed and exhaled a sigh. “This instance has too much freedom to indulge its whims. I’ll fix that in the next Bobby.” He typed a command, confirmed with a firm press of the Y key, and the chat window disappeared. “Whoops. I forgot to let it give an exit interview.” He closed the laptop’s lid. “Oh well.”

--

Thanks for reading! Read more of my stories at keithvile.medium.com