III

It took another four years before we started figuring out the machines. You'd've thought that once we got the language down we'd've started kicking ass and taking names on the rest of it, but that's now how it went. First of all, it goes without saying the Aliens are WAY more technologically advanced than we are, so we had a LOT of catching up to do. After all, they're the ones flying around the galaxy, maybe even the universe, in the large metallic can. OK, they didn't survive the trip, so maybe they needed some work themselves, but we still hadn't even gotten out of the solar system by the time these guys were knocking on our door. The biggest problem, though, was that the Aliens had 13 fingers (in total they had 27 digits, 13 in front and 14 in back), so all of their mathematics are Base-13. That means that when you see a Gibberish “10” on screen, it doesn't actually mean “10” in our number system, it means “13”. The NASA guys were so proud of themselves for picking up on that after only a year, but these were the same fuckers who lost a planetary probe because they couldn't be bothered to convert between English and metric units, so if you can imagine an entire organization getting a sarcastic pat on the head, that's pretty much what happened.

The Aliens seemed to walk around on all fours most of the time, like the one that crashed into the jogger in Central Park did. But based on the scale of the instrumentation of the ship, it was obvious almost immediately that the Aliens were perfectly comfortable on their hind legs as well, standing over 10 feet tall to reach the highest of the control panels. And from the look of the chairs, it seemed like they just positioned their center mass over a large raised cushion and flopped down on it. Their shoulders and necks were jointed pretty extremely, so they could swivel around and crane their visual field all over the place. Lying in a coffin, though, they look just like humans do – on their backs, arms crossed in front of their torsos, some Pharaoh style, some with hands clasped at the waist. There didn't seem to be any pattern to it.

Anyway, things were quiet until I turned 6. The same day I lost a tooth in a fight with Daniel Crabtree, some geniuses made a test flight of the first Alien-technology-based aircraft. The amazing thing about this craft was that it didn't use any kind of explosive force to propel itself like we'd been doing for the half century leading up to that point. No fuels were consumed, no poor fucker had to light a fuse and run for his life. Instead the craft was propelled by some sort of gravitational technology that, clearly, we didn't fully have a grasp on yet. And I'm using the word “flight” loosely here. What really happened is that a switch got turned on and a giga-bazillion dollar investment shot straight up, blasted through the roof of a test facility somewhere off the coast of Morocco and kept right on going, out of sight, out of the atmosphere, and out of range of any tracking system we had at the time. After a few weeks they'd given it up for lost, so you can imagine everyone's surprise when, exactly a year later to the minute, the craft came barreling back into the atmosphere from the exact opposite side of the planet, to the meter, from where it launched, and plowed heroically into the Sydney Opera House, flattening it completely, and mercifully ending what everyone at the time agreed was a woefully over-cooked run of Parsifal. When they found the remains of the wreckage, they were delighted to discover the Alien shielding had done its job perfectly, and had preserved the internals of the craft almost perfectly.

Except for the fact that all the decals were backwards, wiring, components, every last piece of the thing was a perfect mirror image of the craft that was launched, and all of the computers' clocks were set to midnight, January 1st, 1970, and to this day refuse to allow themselves to be set to anything else.