There it is! In between the static.
It’s faint, at first, buried deep in the hiss, but after you hear it, after you know it’s there it becomes so loud you want to cover your ears and scream. I can sound the words out for you, but that’s it. We never got the romanization down. It sounds like:
Ip thoc ko ial preg iad tow dez vago tet.
There are images in the snow. Ones beyond the bisected face and blank eyes that see in dimensions we can only dream about. In the static, I’ve seen across the universe. Spindly stick figures with no noticeable head and arms that bow out, reach almost to their pointed feet. Diamond storms that rip the skin off ugly dogthings scavenging in a pure white desert. I’ve seen former colleagues from the mountain. I wonder if they were taken or given. Mull and Eggers dying slow asphyxiated deaths on the barely air of some blank and purple alien planet. Lots of experiments. Jun, Bledsoe, Schwartz, Candlowe, Ronni, others. Vivisection, of course, hours of it. No anesthetic, but they don’t die or pass out. Dying is for later. Dying is for the bio-weapon testing using diseases we shouldn’t have had to worry about encountering for centuries. Candlowe was ripped apart by mold. Just a few airborne spores and in days it was growing everywhere. Skin bulged, eyes bulged, couldn’t close his mouth because it grew on his tongue. Then, he just burst. Blossomed into a bloody hill of deeply grooved fungi.
Gases, artificial gravity, abrasion tests, brain surgeries, amputations, organ transplants with strange creatures as donors. Unit 731 stuff. Hours of experiments in the static. Hours in minutes. They have this way of. . .folding information. Like a note folded into a tight square, but you can still read every inch of it.
They bring the static with them. Radio and television. They don’t have to, they do it on purpose. It’s stimulus. I hear the hiss and start to cry. In the beginning, I used to lock-down the house. I bought every kind of lock and bolt and chain I could. Put them on the windows and door. A few times, I boarded everything up, used my furniture to barricade any entry point. It’s useless. Their fingers, they get through. They flatten, stretch and slip through the cracks. Long, thin worms that wrap around whatever’s keeping them out. Sometimes, they make me watch. Sometimes, my cabin fills with burning light. When it fades I’ve lost time and there they are. Watching me.
Eventually I stopped. No more locks, no barricades. I just sit and wait. But not tonight. Tonight, I’m making them work for it. When the static screams and the voice comes on, I don’t think, just run to the door and slip outside. Finally wiping the tears from my eyes, I look up. Jesus, there’s so many of them. They don’t look like they should fly. It’s all weird angles and counter-intuitive design. In space, it doesn’t matter, I guess. Here, though, they should be falling out of the sky. Back at the mountain, we could use the internal tech, but the design was too radical. People would get suspicious, things would change. Completely silent, they hover just barely visible against the gloam. I head for the woods.
They’ve been here for a long time. We’ve gotten some things from them. Technology, mostly, obviously, but it’s like beads for Manhattan. We always knew. We always knew that we weren’t in the driver’s seat. Always knew how it would end. You’ve seen the things they can do, even if you don’t realize it. They can level buildings like they’re made of balsa wood. They slip in between, I don’t know what to call it. . .dimensions? Realities? They go and they rip the tiniest piece apart and on our side the whole thing comes down. They can do it to whole cities.
August 9th, 1945. That wasn’t a bomb. That was simple mimicry.
The last light of dusk is almost gone. I didn’t bring a flashlight, I thought it would draw too much attention to me. Now, I’m just barely trotting, groping in front of me with one hand and keeping the other on the nearest tree trunk. This was stupid, they’re going to catch me. I’m just drawing it out. They found me here after I left the mountain. The other side of the country, in the middle of nowhere. It was a message: I’m not going to tell anybody. Didn’t matter. I look back and watch the edge of the forest. My heart beats so loud they could probably find me just by following the thumps. A tall pillar of bug zapper blue light flicks on where my cabin is. It moves so slowly it takes me awhile to even realize it’s gotten closer. I turn and run. Crashing and flailing, kicking leaves and snapping branches. There’s no where to go. My foot drops into a hole. Crazed rabbit panic fills me and I wrench my leg around to see what kind of trap from beyond the stars I’m caught it. It’s just a god damn hole made by some dumb animal. Pain shoots up my calves. I gingerly take my twisted ankle out of the hole and limp forward. Time to give up. What a stupid idea. I could gimp my way into the darkness, maybe try to cover myself with leaves, but that’s just entertainment for them. A funny note in their catalog of human behavior. I ease myself down against a tree and just watch the light. When the light hits them the tree trunks bend outward like they’re elastic. They’re bigger than we can see. They exist in every direction.
