Sord in Prosperity - Hope Beyond the Apocalypse: Predictable Paths, #7

By Blade Cort

Sord in Prosperity [eBook: #postapocalyptic #dystopian #longevityfiction] - A Genetic Engineering Science Fiction Novel by Blade Cort; Book 7 of 8 in the Predictable Paths series

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Sord is a typical teenager who attends high school in Prosperity, the domed nation-state arising from the ashes of a second Great Debacle that left the species clinging to a tenuous edge. Prosperity is humanity's last gasp at establishing a long-lasting society based on principles of compassion and kindness.
Although he is sheltered from the harsh conditions and violent encampments beyond the safety of the dome, Sord yearns for something more. He wants to experience the world as previous generations did before the Debacles destroyed everything they knew.
To help him learn about those times, his mother gives him a diary written by one of their ancestors. At first, Sord finds it tedious and boring, but he soon recognizes key parallels and senses there is more to the diary than meets the eye. 
Trouble seems to trail the poor boy, however, just like it did his ancestor. After a near-death incident, he finds an ebullient new girlfriend, and together they embark on an edgy adventure to uncover the truth behind his father's mysterious disappearance. Will their quest lead them into even greater danger? 

 

PREDICTABLE PATHS episodes, in sequential order:

#1. AGENESS - A Longevity / Age Engineering Science Fiction Play on Our Imminent Ageless Dystopia ; Six Acts, Episodes -22 to -17

#2. CLIMATIC - A Climate and Genetic Engineering Science Fiction Novel; Episodes -16 to -2

#3. AMYGDALA HIJACK - A Genetic Engineering Sci-Fi Novel of Impending Dystopia (a Trilogy) 

  3.1 - Amygdala Hijack - The Waening, Part 1 of 3; Episodes 1 - 9

  3.2 - Amygdala Hijack - The Warning, Part 2 of 3; Episodes 10 - 18

  3.3 - Amygdala Hijack - The Wasting, Part 3 of 3; Episodes 19 - 28

#4. THREE GUYS IN A POST-APOCALYPTIC BAR - A Longevity / Age Engineering and Genetic Engineering Sci-Fi Novella ; Episodes 47 - 54

#5. INFINITY CURVE - Lamentations to Unseen Friends Across the Vastness of Space ; Episodes 56 - 78

#6. PATH TO ENTROPY - An Apocalyptic Climax ; Episodes 79 - 93

#7. SORD IN PROSPERITY - Hope Beyond the Apocalypse ; Episodes 118 - 159

#8. DAISY THE DUMPSTER DOG - A Sordid Tale of Dystopian Hubris and Convenient Canine Rationalizations (But Not a Supreme Court Satire or Parody) ; Episodes 311 - 337

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blade Cort
• Release date: May 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201848392

Blade Cort

Blade Cort writes Age Engineering and Longevity Science Fiction as well as Genetic Engineering Science Fiction novels and plays that are mercilessly littered with pedantic discourse, pointless diatribes, and persistent droning about humanity's pervasive derelictions. The pulp drivel exhumed from his keyboard is as terrifying and graceless as overcooked cafeteria peas. Visit https://www.bladecort.com.

Book preview

EPISODE 118 – SORD

SORD WAS ANGRY AT his mother.

Why should I read this crap? he wondered. Nothing in his ancient prose has value for where I am today. Some flipping ancestor from a hundred-plus years ago? Doesn’t make sense she’d force this penance on her overburdened son. I have enough to read with school alone.

He stared upward toward the only source of natural light in his room, reflected from a series of mirrors that began at the bioplas rooftop twenty meters overhead.

At least this guy could venture outdoors whenever he wanted. He had freedoms I can only imagine. I’m sure he never appreciated them like I would.

Sord grabbed his vidscreen pad and pressed on the file icon. The story appeared in plain text on his reader.

MY FRIEND. THIS IS a start; my intended message to you. In telling you these things, I’ll assume you are a direct descendant, though you don’t have to be that for any particular reason. It just makes it easier to recall these tales as if I was sharing them with my own grandkids many generations later.

Since I as yet have no grandchildren, I’m projecting a bit on probability metrics. For context, it is the year 2021. What a year! Perhaps I’ll give you one man’s picture of what it’s like, living in this time of great uncertainty, small dashes of hope and courage, and astounding cowardice, greed, entitlement, and fear on many fronts.

I prefer to start off with something fun because those topics are too heavy and burden my somatic energy. To pique your interest and keep you reading, as I’m sure segments of this long tome will readily lull you to sleep, I will begin with aliens and the possibility of other sentient beings in the universe.

Part of my intention in projecting who you are is to envision where you might be as you consume this word flux. For my convenience, I’ll assume you live a hundred years from today. I’m hypothesizing that you are in a time after humanity has suffered utter devastation and near-extinction due to its inability to control the burgeoning, dynamic technological change in an otherwise diseased and dysfunctional societal state.

At this time, in fact, our species is not even remotely aware of the need to manage such change. You will encounter this perspective as a recurring theme throughout, and it is likely a foregone conclusion, a forlorn reminder, by your time.

I’m a realist, I believe. Not stupidly hopeful that humanity will muddle through this next stage or filter somehow as it always has, despite its ignorance. Our collective languor was only a minor hindrance in the recent past, but that changes quickly as annihilation technologies are democratized.

We don’t get a hall pass on this one. Not this time.

In the relative near-term, I place a high likelihood on the virtual extinction of our species. Indeed, the fact that the sky is devoid of tangible signals from alien life forms, whether dead and gone or still around, is evidence that a final, conclusive Great Filter hides in wait a few clicks ahead for us.

Our species and those from which we descended have certainly passed multiple Great Filters already. RNA and DNA precursors in the primordial ooze. Cells combining symbiotically with other cells to produce mitochondria. Random evolution to multicellular entities. All the way through to fish and dinosaurs and mammals, including this not-so-great ape typing away. My species of ape is doing all it can to evade and ignore an obvious and painful future, though time now runs short.

I find no driving force in humans to ensure we have a strategy to overcome and surpass the looming menace in the next few decades, the most challenging we’ve ever faced. The approaching Great Filter is not associated with chance like the fortunate combination of those two ancient single-celled entities or the six-mile asteroid that wasted the dinosaurs. It is not one of fate, independent from human decisions.

No, the Great Filter just around the next bend will be a direct result of human indifference, denial, rationalization, laziness, short-sightedness, faithlessness, lack of discernment, poor planning. Oh, and my recurring theme as always: fear and entitlement.

Unfortunately, we humans do not and cannot perceive ourselves as just another species on Earth. Another species with a finite lifespan like the ponderous multitudes of previous earthly inhabitants forever lost in time.

For me, this fact has always been abundantly obvious. We assume we deserve this planet and all its wonders, yet we mismanage those aspects of Earth and our nature that might ensure the longevity of our species. Indeed, species longevity has never been a goal for humans.

As a species, we are bereft of any goals, much less the most important one. Perhaps I first recognized this issue while shaking uncontrollably beneath my third-grade desk, the nuclear fallout siren blasting at our ears and scaring everyone in class.

In the 1960s, Fallout Shelter signs were posted everywhere in grade school. I was befuddled. Why should I fear the Russians? Why would they want to burn me to a crisp, some eight-year-old, freckle-faced, crew cut kid from Williams, Arizona? Don’t they have kids in third grade just like me? Even if the bomb doesn’t hit our little town directly, will the nuclear fallout poison our water supply from the nearby mountains? What will the radiation do to us? Will we become mutant monsters like the sci-fi movies we watch at the theater?

I’m not sure every kid recognized the weird irony in this, but I did. It made no sense that any person or nation would overtly and actively endeavor to render the Earth unlivable for humans.

How does the existence of aliens relate to this topic? It can’t help but relate. Nuclear annihilation is directly attached to our species. You don’t see orangutans plotting self-destruction, do you? And alien visitors are indelibly linked to humanity as a species on Earth who sport a foolhardy penchant for self-annihilation. Read on to understand.

Are we the only sentient beings in the universe? Will we hear from aliens soon, or are we simply not listening correctly? Does the fact that we’ve found no others as yet either prove or disprove the existence of a Creator? Does that even matter? And closer to home, closer to that which I will impart to you – what have been my experiences regarding aliens? What do I believe, and how much of my belief is influenced by my desire to believe?

By the way, I am recounting most of these experiences in first person. It seems a better way to allow you to jump virtually into my shoes, the sneakers of a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s Arizona. Much happened in those decades, so you’ll hopefully experience the situations as my memory serves.

Born in the 1950s, I’m now in my mid-sixties. My long-term memory is quite strong, though I might forget where I placed my keys a minute ago. Such is aging in today’s realm. I assume that wherever and whenever you exist, the problem of aging as an illness has been fully resolved, if not also legalized for use.

Assuming this is so, I imagine your society has come or is coming to terms with the astounding implications of anti-aging alone, much less many other technological advancements. Given today’s state of human intellect and its blindness to long-term species survival, eternal life will be one more amazing technological capability we stumbled into without a plan. Another feat of immediately available science for which humanity is utterly unprepared.

At this time, our technology advances are far outpacing our ethical advances. Beyond myself, I find few others who believe this is true. A recent, especially relevant example is the discovery of CRISPR gene editing technologies.

Yet this remarkable, new tech is not our only immediate risk. Multiple others have appeared in the last few decades including nanotechnology, monitoring tech, social media, and AI.

I contend we have already passed the critical, no-turning back inflection point to self-immolation. Self-obliteration. Technology has rocketed along an accelerated Moore’s Law curve up the vertical axis. Faster, cheaper, easier to create, easier to replicate, and virulently more capable of destroying humanity.

Concurrently, human ethics, decency, and morality slog along in thick, dry sand like a rotting donkey-cart groaning at every wheel turn across the long stretch of a Death Valley summer. Arguably, it’s late morning, the summer sun has yet to reach its zenith, and the cart’s witless human riders just sipped their last drops of water.

We face an intractable problem, an unsolvable dilemma, because we are an undisciplined, willfully ignorant, and short-sighted species. Nature rather blithely handles such evolutionary mistakes by eliminating them, assuming they don’t eliminate themselves first.

As much as it pains me to consider our situation, I have no doubt that humanity is drifting aimlessly toward the entropic, gravitational tug of the next Great Filter, implying a disastrous near-term future.

This future is one enabled by annihilation tech that doesn’t appear as if it is capable of harming anything right now. I only hope you are present in that future century to understand the dynamics of this time as we descend further into the thickening fog of this next filter. But before plunging into our idiocy and laziness, let’s finally get around to aliens.

IMAGINE 1963. BETTER yet, go back and review what was on video at the time. Movies on black and white televisions replete with stories of alien visitors, giant ants, and supernatural humans from nuclear explosions.

Coupled with what I watched on the tube, I was reminded on every clear night about the sheer vastness of space. Williams was no different than any other mid-sixties small town, but it had one stunning aspect that most did not – a magnificent blanket of nighttime stars and clear views of the Milky Way.

Mom, I requested as she turned the chrome handle of her meat grinder to combine the meat and cereal for her weekly, disgusting hash concoction that was only edible when doused with ketchup, can we sleep in the backyard tonight?

She craned her neck to acknowledge me and grinned. Her ruby lipstick was smudged from wiping her face while cooking dinner in the overheated Williams summer.

You kids are going to get electrocuted; you know that! Dahlia yelled. Didn’t you see the bolt emerge from the sink a few moments ago when the lightning struck outside in the street? I thought I was going to die right there, and I well could have. For God’s sake, Denise, don’t let them go out on an evening like this!

Dahlia lived across the street with Joe, her car salesman husband, and their son Curtis, my buddy. Marilyn Monroe was a big star at the time, and Dahlia was a voluptuous, dark-haired version of her. With waves of hair folded atop her head, false eyelashes, and a penchant to be the focus of attention, she was abrupt, boisterous, and sneezed loud enough to blow the roof off the house. My mom, who tended to keep to herself, was the polar opposite – except when Dahlia was around.

Alcohol and smoking were their vices du jour, their constant companions. Indeed, these were nationally accepted, ubiquitously performed adult indulgences. As is common even today, people visit friends in some part, even in large part, as a rationale to drink heavily, eat heartily, share opinions and stories, and laugh.

Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that in the sixties, drinking copious amounts of hard liquor was a regular event. Cigarette smoking was not only common, but people often thought ill of you if you chose not to partake. Inherent threads of the social fabric of those times.

In addition to these vices, adult pill popping was just as common – mostly uppers, downers, and sleeping pills. This color. That color. Scientific evidence had not yet emerged on the long-term effects of these drugs, and the media at the time had good reason to avoid any negative exposure since the various adult vices were large advertising contributors.

Let’s see if these clouds clear and the lawn dries out, my mom replied. You know how these things pass quickly, Dahlia. I won’t let them sleep outside unless the skies are sparkling.

Starry Williams. The famous astronomer Percival Lowell placed his observatory in the slightly larger town of Flagstaff some thirty miles to the east, due to the elevation and generally clear nights in Northern Arizona. While staring upward at the wonderland above, we’d scream out at every odd movement in the sky – and there were many odd movements.

Unlike the skies today, satellites and space debris were relatively uncommon, so if you saw a light moving erratically or in a straight line across the night sky, our elementary school minds would easily conflate every sighting with a flying saucer or hostile alien. To add to the credibility, the town newspaper regularly reported on sightings that quoted individuals we knew by name, with graphic descriptions of unexplained lights in the sky.

My father was an auto dealer, a nice name for ‘car lot salesman and owner.’ He had a small dealership and sold mostly used autos and farm equipment. Working six days a week, Dad was almost always away from home. This left five rowdy and rambunctious kids to my poor mother.

Like other moms at the time, many with three or more children and fathers who were away much of the day at work, the most rational approach for managing their kids was to relinquish us to the risks and rewards of the generally kid-managed, unsupervised, fun, and often dangerous neighborhood and surrounds.

This ‘get them out of the house’ strategy worked fairly well. It was the days before any widespread birth control pills, leaving moms overloaded with many unplanned children.

And the houses lacked modern conveniences that might give them time to manage their own. Some women were still washing clothes by hand or with a washboard and wringer. Dryers were high-end items, so sheets regularly flailed in the wind on the clothesline, even in winter.

Refrigerators were terminally small, and freezers had enough space for a few pounds of hamburger. Electric dishwashers and microwaves were nonexistent. When fathers finally got home, they were too tired or annoyed to interact with rambunctious children, letting the mother shoulder the tremendous burden of child rearing throughout the entire day.

The town was a heavy mix of World War II veterans, Catholics, and Mormons. Large families were an expected part of life, reinforced in the media, and we had a reign of freedom that few children in America have today.

In summer, kids were found everywhere in the neighborhood except at mealtimes. The very accessible national forest, replete with innumerable discoveries, was literally yards away. Ponderosa pines dropped needles that inhibited competition from undergrowth bush, making the forest accessibly ours. And when we tired of the forest, downtown was only a few miles away via bicycle.

Life was generally good for us kids, though it could sometimes get very bad, very quickly.

We slept outside many summer nights. Lacking affordable telescopes, we used high-powered hunting or wartime binoculars to scan the skies, stare at the moon’s craters, and spot occasional moving objects. And we loved to scare each other with horror stories.

Vampire bats that came in the middle of the night, cutting through cotton sleeping bags with sharp teeth, slicing imperceptibly into big toes, and taking turns as they bled the body dry. Ghosts of Native Americans whose land we now lived and slept on, their centuries-old pottery shards strewn about the small streams just yards away.

C’mon kids, Dad commanded one evening, his husky voice calling us to attention. We’re driving out to see the UFOs.

Lord’s Ranch, a few miles north of town, had become a local hangout for watching strange lights during the summer of ‘63. Dad knew the Lord family well, given connections with many of the town’s leading businessmen and ranchers through his dealership.

My little sister and I were donned in our usual summer clothing – shorts, t-shirts, and no shoes. It’s not that we lacked shoes but only that our tennis shoes were typically nonfunctional given shredded, unhelpful laces or detached soles. So, we went barefoot everywhere in the neighborhood, with the exception of the forest. Weekly bee stings were the price paid for romping on clover-infested bluegrass lawns.

This night, however, my dad was not about to be delayed by a lack of kids’ shoes. He grew up in East Los Angeles. On his mother’s side, he was the son of a son of a son and so on, back to the first mulatto mayor of Los Angeles in the late 1700’s and land-grant owner of a large chunk of the dry, sparsely populated San Fernando Valley.

On his father’s side, he was the poor great, great-nephew of one of Los Angeles’ wealthiest landowners. Not that he ever saw a penny of it, as money, possessions, land, wealth, and power are fleeting things when not managed carefully through generations. We descendants sure as hell were not heirs to the tremendous wealth that occupies that same ground today.

Can’t find your shoes? he groaned, shaking his head at my sister and me. Hop in the back anyway and let’s get going. These saucers come out just after sunset, which means we’re late already.

We piled into the bed of his pickup and headed north on the old road toward Lord’s Ranch. As we jostled up and down on the bumpy two lane, wind whipping our hair, nothing of the spectacular scenery was new to us. It was just a part of our lives and places to explore in future days. Another dark road lined with graffiti-damaged aspen. A stream we hadn’t yet traversed in bare feet. Some mysterious metallic glint in the forest that required inspection.

Our relationship with the forest was akin to the joke about the fish being asked – ‘how do you like the water?’ We were the forest and the forest was us. Nothing could uncouple us from each other. The smell of the pines permeated our earliest existence with every breath. The wind in the pines was our elevator music. We knew each tree by its height, branch strength, and climbability.

After a few miles, Dad swerved onto a dusty dirt road, almost jettisoning my sister and me from the truck bed. Lord’s Ranch was a mile off-road, and we were well-experienced by that time to know enough to hang on tightly to the rusty edge of the pickup. We knew of instances where somebody stood up in a truck bed at an inopportune time and was flipped overboard onto the hard ground while bouncing slowly to a painful rest, akin to being bucked from a galloping horse.

The Lord’s ranch house was a quaint two-story, sewn from forest logs. As we drew closer, I carefully half-stood up in the bed and saw Mr. Lord and two dogs bounding out the door.

George! Mr. Lord yelled. Good to see you and your family here.

Mr. Lord appeared well-versed in his reaction, as he should have been. Multiple reporters and curiosity seekers had visited his ranch in the previous few months, and all the town locals knew of the mysterious sightings.

Uh oh; they’re bare-footed, Mr. Lord warned as he gazed into the back. We’ll need to pick up the little ones, George. Too much broken glass on the barn stairs.

He grabbed me around the waist and my mom snatched my little sister in her arms. I recall it being an uncomfortable jaunt up the stairs as he held me like a sack of beans, placing enormous stress on my ribcage. But I was awfully glad he carried me since the barn stairs to the rooftop were littered with glass shards.

And I was keenly aware of the pain involved in a single misstep on glass. The previous month, I had severely impaled my right foot while playing in the street, which in those days was our primary playground. When I got home, arms flailing and lungs screaming, the large glass triangle remained embedded in my foot.

My mom, ever the makeshift nurse for childhood accidents, quickly found the shard amid the torn flesh. With one quick flick of her wrist, she dislodged the beast and placed it on the table next to me. Blood was squirting profusely from the one-inch wide, half-inch deep hole.

Call a doctor to stitch it up? What? Not on your life. That would cost money, and her experience informed her it might heal by itself at some point.

After making the assessment to avoid the professionals and the expense, she wrapped my foot tightly using gauze from a twenty-year-old World War II medical kit, circling multiple times, round and round my bleeding foot. The sheer pressure from her dressings was enough to discourage additional blood cells from ever attempting the journey outside.

Don’t you dare walk on my carpet with that, she warned, half angry, half-joking, or we’ll both be cleaning up the blood stains.

After a few days of hopping around on one foot, the bleeding and throbbing pain finally subsided, and the injury scabbed over within a few weeks. Despite lingering heel pain that lasted another four years, that day elevated my kidhood status and made me a neighborhood macho celebrity of sorts.

Wow, there’s your bloody footprint, my friends would say as we’d play in the streets. I’d beam with pride, knowing the entire traumatic event was well worth the suffering.

That night at Lord’s Ranch, my sister and I shared a ratty aluminum folding chair placed there for UFO gazers, among other random chairs. It was the kind with shredded green and white crisscrossed plastic slats that always itched on bare, sweaty skin. Despite jostling and wrestling for position with my little sister, it was at least a temporary but comfortable place for us to sit with feet up and off the glass-strewn, flat rooftop of the barn,

The view was resplendent with the typical Northern Arizona night sky. Out on that dark ranch, the Milky Way was even more beautiful than in town. And because the ranch sat on a rise above the meadow’s tree line, you could peer westward unobscured for many miles.

We waited anxiously for a few minutes as the evening sky grew darker. My father was engaged in active conversation with Mr. Lord while my mom sat nervously waiting for the big event, knowing she left a few kids unattended back home. Her mind was no doubt burdened by the usual chores – dishes, laundry, and baths she had yet to oversee before her night concluded.

There you go. There’s one on the horizon! Mr. Lord exclaimed, pointing in the distance.

We strained our eyes, peering directly westward where the sunlight had all but faded.

That’s it? Dad queried with subdued enthusiasm. That red, blinking light?

Yes, isn’t it great? Mr. Lord replied unquestioningly. Just wait and see what it does.

The light was roughly ten miles off in the distance, and once it appeared, we held to radio silence as if the object deserved an element of religious reverence for what the unearthly vision might mean to humanity. To me, it appeared no different than the blinking red and white radio towers on the hillsides.

Radio tower lights didn’t typically move, however, and this one did. In a few minutes, it slowly rose up a thousand feet, stopping momentarily to cut a perfect right angle turn to the left. As if drawing a square in the sky, the light stopped again after a thousand-foot horizontal trip, then descended to the ground and out of sight.

We stared at each other. Mom and Dad were no doubt trying to reconcile if this was a human activity that someone was engaged in off in the distance, like a helicopter with a pilot in training doing night maneuvers, or an extraterrestrial mystery. Whispering started.

Shhh! Mr. Lord demanded. It’s not over.

In silence, we waited another minute until the object made the exact same sequence of moves at the same speed, only in reverse.

Mr. Lord beamed proudly as it dropped below the horizon. That’s probably all we’ll see tonight, so I believe the show is over.

My dad was somewhat miffed. Don’t you think that’s a helicopter?

Not likely, Mr. Lord replied. This has been a nightly occurrence for months now, as we discussed earlier. We’ve contacted everyone who would know, from the private and public airstrips to Army to police to weather forecasters. You name it. Nobody can confirm this is anything like a normal helicopter or other piloted ship. We’ve had to conclude it’s not of this world.

I stared at my dad’s face of incredulity. He’d been through a lot in his thirty-plus years. Growing up poor, seeing action in the war, scraping his way to a modicum of success in a small-town business. Wheeling and dealing. Working over and under more cars than he’d care to remember.

He shook his head, not fully convinced. Look, I’ve got my four-wheel drive back at the house. Let’s head out there after taking the kids back. This thing can’t be that far away, and the Scout can easily work the back roads. As a local dealer of this first SUV, he was known to invariably brag about the vehicle.

Mr. Ford put out his hand, withered and wrinkled from working years on his ranch. Done that, he advised. Traversed lots of Forest Service roads in Jeeps and even the most impassible fire break paths. It’s very remote out there. Lots of small hills. No place for a helicopter or any other craft to land. We suspect the saucers are going underground after they do their nightly maneuvers.

Humph, Dad shrugged. Given that Mr. Lord was a good friend and customer, he was forced to give him the benefit of the doubt, though mentioning ‘Jeep’ as a proxy for every four-wheel drive vehicle was not to his liking. Okay, kids. Now you can tell your friends you got to see a flying saucer at Lord’s Ranch. His ranch is famous for this. It’s been in the national news and on television.

My mother was utterly bored at the entire goings-on. When kid management is your primary concern, you become very pragmatic.

George, she interjected, we should let Mr. Lord get back to his house and wife. Besides, I’ve got to get these kids ready for bed. And the laundry.

Dad nodded begrudgingly. He wanted to see it again, as if another round trip in the sky might confirm his suspicions. Okay. Let’s get going, he conceded.

My father died not long after that, so I’ll never know what he was thinking at the time. He was a World War II Army Air Corps radioman in the North Pacific and spent a lot of time in the air. I must assume he was as interested as I was, but also skeptical. What are these lights? How do they move? Are they government-created? Why Northern Arizona? Something to do with the above-ground nuclear testing a few hundred miles away in the Nevada desert? Such questions were never resolved.

EPISODE 119 – SIGHTINGS

AS THE NEXT DECADE passed, I heard a few stories that seemed so credible, I had little doubt they were anything but the truth.

While in grad school at Arizona State, I shared a house with one other mate and two young women, all students, and we got to talking one night about our various UFO experiences. As the conversation proceeded, Ellen became agitated.

What’s up? I asked, noticing she seemed unusually tense. Does this discussion bother you?

She nodded her head. Not me. Doesn’t bother me, except my godfather told me something he experienced about an alien sighting. Didn’t scare me, but it would scare the shit out of you guys. It happened when he was in the military.

We were beyond interested.

He’s coming over soon with a friend who was with him at the time, she added. I’ll see if I can get them to talk about it.

A few weeks later, I was in my bedroom and heard a knock at the door.

Guys, Ellen yelled. My godfather Carlos and his friend Jimmie are here. Do you want to hear the space alien story we talked about?

We met in the family room and introduced ourselves, then sat together after the beers were opened. I clearly had doubts about alien stories, as I’m sure my roommates did. We were halfway going along with it because Ellen seemed insistent that it was very credible, and we should hear the tale.

Carlos was short, stocky, and carried a Southern Arizona Latino accent. Browned and physically hardened from years of outdoor life, neither he nor Jimmie were the kind of guys you’d ever want to mess with. Jimmie was a foot taller and lanky thin, with a matching accent.

After the introductions, we indicated that Ellen let us know about their UFO story. Carlos was noticeably surprised at the mention and stared intensely at her. It was as if he was being asked to share a deep, dark, state secret with people he had just met.

Hey, girl, you should have warned me. I don’t go telling your average nobody about this stuff. Think your friends can keep quiet?

Ellen smiled, glanced at us, and nodded. I believe so.

He stared intently at the three of us. I’m telling you this secret shit because I trust my goddaughter Ellen, so I’m trusting her friends. This is classified military matters I’m divulging, from when Jimmie and me were in the Army and stationed at the Yuma base. It’s balls-cut-off info, man, so you’re not going to read it in the papers or hear it on the news because shit like this never gets to civilians like you. And if it ever does get out, you’d wished they only cut your balls off for the trouble it caused.

Given the seriousness of his tone, we collectively pledged that our lips were sealed.

Carlos paused as if he was surveying our psyches.

You guys know nothing about what we saw while in the military, right? You can’t, man. You’re in college, something most of us down where I come from never get to do. So Jimmie and me, we were doing base security at what’s now called the Yuma Proving Ground. But we didn’t call it that then. We just called it ‘the Base.’ They tested all kinds of shit there, man. New weapons and explosives. Probably the only shit we didn’t test was the big nuclear stuff since that’s been done in Nevada until recently. Ellen, honey, can you get us another beer?

It was college and the refrigerator was stuffed with cold beer. With fresh brews in hand, Carlos sat back and relaxed a little.

He took a deep breath. So, Jimmie and me were out one fucking hot summer afternoon in the Jeep. Pretty late. We’d been doing our rounds all day. I can’t tell you, man, how many times we were forced to do rounds because some drunk hokey from town phoned up saying they saw strange lights hovering over the base or the testing grounds or wherever in the desert. People drink fucking way too much, and who hell cares what they see, huh? They should keep their crazy-ass thoughts to themselves. And what the fuck do you expect to see in the sky over a weapons testing base? Firecrackers? M-80s? We lit-off all kinds of shit in that range over a huge amount of fucking desert desolation, so strange lights were just a normal part of our business. Get what I’m saying?

We nodded. Despite the air conditioner blasting at full steam, beads of sweat were dripping from Carlos’ head. Jimmie was stone cold quiet.

So this one late afternoon, we get a radio report that a few soldiers on base reported seeing strange lights. I mean, not only lights, but an actual flying disk of some kind. Do you think if they’re soldiers they’d get themselves in trouble by spouting off insane crap? How do you think a report like that looks to the officers? They’ll think you’re goon like a loon or doing drugs while on patrol, so those poor suckers knew what was at stake by reporting, right Jimmie?

Jimmie nodded and harrumphed, his whole body moving back and forth. He, too, was getting visibly agitated as Carlos continued, and he was scratching mercilessly at his chin as if he had contracted a bad case of poison ivy.

Hey, so we think it’s funny, right? And we’re about ready to head back to base, and we get this call from the CO to check out a place about five miles from where we were. We didn’t see no hovering lights or anything ourselves, and we were used to traveling all over that fucking expanse. I can’t tell you, man, but we got to know every square inch of that ground. Every coyote and fucking rattlesnake and crap-smelling javelina. You ever sniffed one of those dudes up close? Worse than a skunk. Worse than ten, man. Musk and shit. Anyway, we knew the place so well, I could drive those fucking roads with my eyes closed.

Tell ‘em about the thing they saw, though. We saw, Jimmie added.

Yeah, yeah, Carlos interjected. I was just getting there. So, this report from the commander was different than any fucking request we’d ever got before or would ever get again. You remember, Jimmie? He said ‘get your asses over there quick. These guys swear there’s a fucking giant, ten-foot, hairless dude staggering around the place and they didn’t want to get near the thing.’

I screamed ‘What the hell?’ back at him, like this was some kind of joke they were playing on us. But the commander said it was no joke and these two guys saw this wobbling disk for a few minutes. It hovered over a hill, and then they saw this giant living creature on the ground. Big thing, kind of stumbling around, next to the road.

That was an ‘oh, fuck’ moment for me, Jimmie admitted. Like, I was ready to shiver my ass and shit my pants. It was getting dark, we were hungry, and I didn’t want to meet no shitass alien monster out in the desert. We had our standard issue pistols, but that was all. Nothing to match a fucking ray gun.

Carlos laughed uncomfortably. Fucking giant, he mumbled. His head dropped down, and he stared at the floor for a few tense moments.

So, yeah, it was like dusk, like 7 p.m., and we’d had a long day already. I didn’t want to go chasing some fucking cougar or whatever these bastards saw. Far as I knew, those guys had been drinking out there and this kind of screwball report would get their asses thrown in the brig for a few days. And if that didn’t happen for some reason, they’d get the long end of my fist when we got back to base. But the CO told me who the guys were, and I knew one of them. He was like a brother to me, man, and we’d only bullshit each other when we knew it was cool to. He wouldn’t send me out with poor Jimmie at the end of our rounds to hunt down some fucking giant who didn’t exist, just to get a laugh later. He’d know I’d beat the shit out him for doing that, right Jimmie?

Yeah, Jimmie concurred. I knew the other guy as well, and he was a straight-up dude. No bullshitter. Classic military. Muscle and discipline. He wouldn’t say nothing crazy unless it was a military issue. Dude was always climbing for a promotion, then got promoted and transferred a few days after this. I don’t think they’d promote some soldier with psycho visions.

Carlos laughed. No, man, he was no nut job, and the proof is in what happened to us.

He paused to take a long swig of beer, and we were too intimidated by his presence to attempt to extract the story from him any faster. Beer frothed from his mouth onto his faded Hawaiian shirt.

Fuck! Hey Ellen, honey. Can you get me a towel or something? I can’t keep my hand steady while talking about this. Got me shaking like a fucking three-year-old.

Ellen sprang up and ran into the kitchen for a towel. We three stared at his hands which we really hadn’t noticed until that moment. He’d been hiding them from us, with one in his pocket and the other placed under his thigh. Since his secret was out now, he was open about it.

Not normally clumsy, he confided. When I think of the shit we saw that night, it gets my hands going and they can’t stop.

Jimmie was still rubbing his chin, creating a crimson mark the color of ruby lipstick.

I try not to think of it at all, man. Have to take a few shots of tequila whenever it crosses my mind. Helps to settle it back in the recesses. The memory and images. Beer’s not strong enough to do the job for that.

You guys want some tequila, Carlos? Ellen asked, handing him a kitchen towel.

Sure, baby, he replied.

Me too? Jimmie added.

Any of you guys? Ellen queried.

We indicated we were fine with our beers, and Ellen scurried back into the kitchen for shot glasses and tequila.

Again, a painfully long moment of silence. It was clear they didn’t want to continue until she returned.

How long? I asked.

What? Carlos retorted, somewhat perturbed by my question.

Sorry, I apologized.