Page 16 of Them

But, funny or not, I was oath-bound to treat that threat as the last straw. I shut the door in his face, uploaded the audio, and sent an email as fast as I could. It took eight minutes. I’m sure some people could’ve done it faster. I was never very good with the tech stuff.

Smith/Jones never got reelected. In fact, he died in a car crash two or three years later. I guess that means he still meant to leak it, after all that time. That might’ve made him a good person. Someone with a stronger moral compass than I had.

No. I think he just wanted an excuse for why he couldn’t do it. For why he’d failed. An explanation as to why his reelection was so futile. I don’t think a guy like that, a high, loud voice in a thin soul, can ever handle that kind of failure unless everyone knows why he failed.

The crash took his wife too. I bet he told her. She had to know. Of course she had to know, because Mr. Smith/Jones couldn’t let her go on thinking that he wasn’t good enough. No, that was the women he lay with slept with crept with. I mean for God’s sake she’d soaked up his seed and spit out some small something not that long ago and how would he tell his kid? Tell his kid that Daddy used to be a big shot, a real gunslinger around DC ’cause he was a big man but now a hotshot no more.

I think men like that always need a reason. An excuse.

But I’m getting flowery now. Rambling like one of my books. Does it even matter? Will anyone ever read this? Probably not. Why not have a little fun with it, then?

Have to remind myself how, after all. Need the practice. Fun is an artifact.

The point is, reader, that I’ve always known how to cover my ass. And the asses of those above me. They liked me for that. Cherished me for it. I guess that’s how I maintained my position until the end. Until they had no choice but to come for me.

So when we finally brought back a specimen in one piece, I knew that we had an opportunity to get bitten in the ass. Even have a whole stinger shoved up it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisbrot, standing over the corpse of the fallen alien, the same one who’d been taken away from its home in the blink of an eye and killed two of us nearly as quickly, named it “Adam.”

Telling, isn’t it? How much we thought of ourselves?

Weisbrot. He wasn’t another kid we’d lured into the basement with false promises of wildest dreams. He wasn’t one of the hundreds of hyper-brilliant minds that got tricked into classified obscurity. This time it wasn’t a ruse. The promise was real, and he had enough data, bleeding-corpse data, to apply the work he’d outlined in his thesis. Project Artemis wasn’t done. Sure, the towering teleportation turret didn’t fire off much after that initial incident, but it didn’t have to. We already had what we needed.

And there was still plenty of work to be done. The extraterrestrials’ armored skin was of great interest. Lightweight, rigid, near-impenetrable natural polymer produced inside their bodies. Mass production of “Scorpion Steel” would’ve changed shipping and travel worldwide. Lighter planes and ships would’ve meant less fuel and faster travel. Lower costs and less pollution. Stronger tanks and Humvees, fewer troop deaths.

Weisbrot eventually hypothesized that they evolved from a geological-based life-form, tempered into organic metal over millions and millions of years spent on a harsh and lonely planet. Only by devouring one another could they replenish the biological material needed to regrow their scales. But these were only educated guesses. Shots in the dark that left us with no direction. Without a greater understanding of their life cycle or home world or food chain, we were lost.

Yet, all of this would’ve been rendered moot if we could’ve answered one question. The big one:

Is it possible to mutate an extraterrestrial creature, one that needed an entirely unearthly air to survive, into something that could walk among us?

Not that the intention was ever strictly assimilation, but there was no other way to study them alive, as frightening of a prospect as that was. We’d seen the sheer ferocity within them. What they were capable of. Of course, our ultimate intention, as all good science fiction teaches us, was to weaponize them. Why would we send tanks or infantry units decked in monsters’ garb into battle when we could send the monsters themselves?

Oh, I had many phone calls regarding that possibility. Those Washington men must’ve been hunched over their desks with such hard-dicked passion that an unfortunate onlooker may have mistaken it for sexual gratification. Their voices were different when we talked about them. Different from their usual, willfully impenetrable tones. That matter-of-fact tenor of voice that thinks you’re dogshit and lets you know it. That cruel rumble that came out of the depths of their throats and etched their opinion deep into the stone of your bones… but suddenly, now they were different.

For the first time, they listened. No orders. No debriefs. Just hungry static words that begged for more: “What was that thing? How big was it? It broke through the chamber glass? How? How can they do that? With its head? Its skull? Jesus, Buxton, what was it? Was it fast? It was plated? Plated how? With what? Like an armadillo? Like a tall, mean armadillo? With a what? A stinger? Like a tail? What the hell was it, Buxton? Could it survive small arms fire? Is it intelligent? Could it be trained? No? Controlled? Reined in? Be our boots on the ground? Where the hell did it come from? What was it? Are there more of them? Can you get more? Make more? What do you call them? What in God’s name was it?”

What was it? That was the only one of their questions I couldn’t answer. Alien, extraterrestrial, monster… no word seemed to satisfy the stiffs who spoke like they were on the receiving end of a sex line, their marbly pale, wrinkled hands working to get the most out of their mail-order Viagra. Men like that wanted a name. An answer.

The next day, we codified them as “Scorpions.”

Despite public speculation, it wasn’t because of their stingers. Rather, their home planet, Gliese 667Cc, was located within the constellation Scorpius. The Washington men liked that name. It was as intimidating as it was colloquial. Obtainable.

“Scorpion” was lacking, if you asked me. The little scorpions, the real ones, have always been here. And the invaders—though they’re more like an invasive species—don’t bear much resemblance to the small, low desert arachnids whose stingers are raised and coiled. The monsters walk on bladed stilts, mutant water towers sprung to life. Our scorpions scuttle on tiny quiet legs.

But I’ve seen them float. Like knives through the air. They fight like ghosts in suits of armor.

It wasn’t about the constellation, not really. Scorpions, the earthly ones, were familiar. It was a recognizable word that painted a meager, manageable thing. Little scares that popped up in Harrison Ford movies. The name was a trick. An illusion. Most names are.

Do they ever look up at the night sky? Have they gotten over their fear of the dark? Could they see the stars from the surface of their old world? Did they see constellations? Do their chittering vocal patterns ever speak of ancient gods embedded in the cosmos? Of old stories witnessed by old people? People? Are they people? What do people do when the stars change? When the cosmic order is uprooted and replaced by a new perspective? One separated from the old by uncountable light-years of emptiness? What would the ancient Greeks have done if one night their star-stories had been erased, replaced by something newly unimaginable and utterly different?

I wonder if they ever crane their high necks and examine Constellation Scorpius. If they see not a scorpion there in the heavens, but themselves.

I think they do. I think that’s how they know how much wrong we have done them. They look to the skies and see a Scorpion of infinite size that twinkles with gaseous dust, like when the rising sun bounces off their living metal, and they are reminded, maybe even told, of their old world.

A shadow drifted over the sun as the man trudged through the corn, startling him. He half expected to look up and see some giant horned head eclipsing everything, but it was just a cloud.

Shake it off. Can’t fix it. Play along with your own mistakes.