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.

II

You can trace the first 20 or so years of my life by how we managed to plunder pretty much every part of the Alien’s technology and history. On my first birthday they managed to work out how the computer systems operated on the Alien craft, and so were able to download an amazing amount of perfectly useless Gibberish. Oh yeah, so somehow the official name of the Alien language was designated “Gibberish,” probably because it sounded so much like someone taking their index finger and going “bibbybibbybibby” against their lips. Pretty funny, until you start trying to really understand what the guy going “bibbybibbybibby” is trying to tell you, and then it’s not long before it gets frustrating as hell.

By the time I turned two, they’d found the other video you’ve probably seen which allowed us to start cracking the language, the one with Gordon Ramsay tearing some poor bastard a new asshole for not being able to properly poach an egg, only with the closed captioning equivalent of Gibberish rolling across the bottom of the screen instead of something truly incomprehensible, like French. How anyone managed to tie those symbols to the Alien going “bibbybibbybibby” I’ll never know, but not long after, right about the time I was potty training, they figured out what the Lonely Alien (this was what they were calling the Alien in the video by then – he wasn’t a mass murderer any more, since they’d figured out that the poor fuckers in the coffins all died from natural causes (and how they figured THAT out I’ll also never know)) was screaming at the dude in the park, and when they figured that out, they got a little bit creeped out. They spent a lot of time trying to figure out how he knew, and so far they don’t have a good answer, which is pretty much creeping the rest of us out:

“Send them back. Please. Send them back!”

I

I was born the day the aliens landed. You probably saw the footage on CNN, the one everybody has seen of the one guy’s grainy cell phone video running all Blair Witch through Central Park, past people screaming and running the other way, towards this enormous bank of bluish fog, and then right as he rounds a corner this huge fucking spindly limbed thing rounds the same corner and the two crash headlong into one another. It would have been hilarious if it were just two guys, but when one of the guys is an alien it sort of changes the vibe. I keep wondering how it’s possible a huge fucking space ship landed in Central Park and not one guy with a decent recording device was anywhere in the area. Even the vagrants have good media these days. It’s a good thing this guy was there, though, since the Alien immediately starts to gibber at the guy furiously, like “Dude, what the fuck, I’m running here!” And you got to give the guy credit, he didn’t back down at all, starts gibbering back at the Alien, giving as good as he gets, all “Where’s Elvis, man, and Michael? Send them home, we need those guys!”

It wasn’t until later, when the blue fog had merged into the rest of the shit which passes for air in New York City, and nothing else had come out of the ship for like a week, that we decided to go into the ship to see what was up, and found nearly ten thousand Alien corpses, all lying neatly in frozen coffins. You wouldn’t have believed the talking heads when they got wind of that. Alien Mass Murderer Loose In Manhattan, and Alien Death Cult, Are We Next? Classic New York media. The city stayed pretty calm, for the most part. A few folks got carried away and started looting and shit, but the only thing anyone really remembers now is that the birth rate enjoyed a nice little bump nine months after. I guess when it’s looking like the end of the world, it’s time to get busy.

One more thing you should probably know – the day the Alien landed was also the day it died.