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vandahlcourte · 7 years ago

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If And Only If: Time Tear unedited materials. Part 5

Brenda

“You don’t get to meet him, ever.“

Brenda could tell her new friend was a drama queen and maybe had traces of histrionic personality. So, real meaning: he’s a dude; he’s young; if he’s in the mood to talk to a girl irl instead of just online, I will meet him, when and where the two of us choose, and what you just said is completely meaningless. But humoring her right now would cost nothing.

So: “I understand,” was Brenda’s reply, plus: “it’s too big of a security risk. Furthermore, the less information we know, the less we can spill in an interrogation if we’re ever captured.“ This had her friend Madhvi at ease. Brenda at first made the mistake of considering her to be very “Americanized.”

Brenda had in fact misunderstood her. Madhvi had been born here. It was her parents, each of them, who immigrated with their families from Madras and Tamil when they were both roughly preschool age. Madhvi was as American as Brenda or Irving. For some reason, she had never met any American-born ethnic Indian people in San Antonio. Austin was too distant right now – that was middle school. The ones she knew of were all immigrants, at universities on student visas, or otherwise resident aliens born in India.

Austin was a slightly different social climate, she’d always been told and vaguely remembered but now noticed it, as she was finally back. You could see it in parts of S.A. You could see it at La Sardiña and Mud Hutter‘s and in the SAC area. But in Austin, it was everywhere. And that included at the Ligustrum Café location on South Congress near her old neighborhood.

It sounded like a good idea at first: communicating like it was pre-telegraph 1800s. No electronic signals whatsoever. Only snail-mail and only physical meetings. Written documents only. Okay, the three of them had cheated a bit and used their disconnected phones, in airplane mode, to photograph each other’s written documents.

Irving had suggested photocopying them. They agreed that in the future, that would be the procedure. But for the first meeting, it was just too much information to spend a couple of hours driving around and then making copies. The documents would be printed when they returned home, and the original photos wiped.

Luckily, all three of them had shown up to their meeting in possession of their old, deactivated phones as well as their real phones. It seems like everyone has an old one gathering dust somewhere. But in airplane mode and with WiFi off, this couldn’t really be counted as online. Right? But it was electronic. Only now, the plan was to go online. With the help of Madhvi’s genius hacker friend known only as “Cryptomancer.“ A great idea, if he wasn’t an NSA agent. Now admittedly, she was being somewhat dramatic.

Supposedly, large files would be sent both encrypted and then steganographically hidden in video files. Each of us liked our own particular kind of anime. The videos would

be some scenes from Made in Abyss, perhaps an interlude with Inuyasha and Kagome, Chunibyo... mixed up with some of the recent Ancient Magus’ Bride, and maybe even some old Ah! My Goddess! So pretty much anything we like, set to music that we selected – in other words AMV. Except before sending them to each other, we would apply a program to them that would imbed the encrypted files into the video file. Anyone observing our activities would merely see some people exchanging their AMV creations. To add to the realism, we would use our existing YouTube channels to upload them, but the YouTube versions wouldn’t have any data hidden in them if someone were to download.

If this oddball Cryptomancer wasn’t some kind of plant, it would be an excellent alternative to all the pussyfooting around like it was 1839. But in truth that had been Brenda’s idea , inspired by Renaldo, to thwart the electronics spooks by going low tech.

It was those nights that she had first spoken to Wheeler and Renaldo. On the one after Wheeler’s mom couldn’t remember and after an hour of sleep, then another hour of tossing and turning, Brenda remembered Intergalactic by the Beastie Boys and went to the garage! That silly vid of their dad that she and Rosa had thought was such a riot all those years ago: it triggered the memories again and plunged her immediately back into full consciousness sitting up in bed.

Her older sister was home from college. Right. All the way home from UT. Brenda had wondered why she bothered living there in a dorm when she could’ve just saved money and lived at home and commuted... that was when she was still 17 and a high school senior and didn’t get it yet. She’d graduated and actually did get it now. Anyhow, Rosalinda still had laundry going out there in the machine. It reminded her of stuff Renaldo said about using some ideal white-noise-to-pink-noise ratio to hinder maser or laser window attacks. His voice droned on in her head, like an audio Tetris effect.

In a hermetically sealed – or at least plastered with packing tape – dollhouse box that was never unpacked since their last move, were papers: artwork, sketchbooks, some class notes, doodlings… And hopefully the Stalko-Taco writers’ guide!

Weird Shapes

It was Eileen, before the humans had captured her and held her in a psychiatric facility, who had coached them on using ceilings. Since gravity didn’t really have to matter to them, they could hang out while plastered to a ceiling just as easily as they could blend in with wallpaper, paneling, stucco, or whatever else on a wall. It worked superbly if there were no lighting fixtures on the ceiling. Brenda’s parent’s garage had been perfect.

She did not see them at all that night and had no idea they were watching her every move. It wasn’t until later meeting an actual Superhero

from the future who could fly, stay under water as long as whales could, and heal wounds like a Whitelighter from Charmed... that she was fitted with a type of implanted device that not only allowed her to see their every move, but also make herself invisible to them.

But on this night they were free to observe Brenda as much as they wanted. Not that it mattered too much; they were basically just relieved to learn that things were going exactly the way they were hoping for.

Back to Brenda

It was at a five-day long creative writing camp one summer, enough years ago that she still felt a morbid fascination with Creepypastas. A few other kids there also wanted to choose a CP as their topic, so she had to participate in a drawing, and the character whose name she pulled out of the basket was none other than Stalko-Taco.

She was to produce a writer’s guide: set of conditions that open source writers could use when creating Stalko-Taco stories. For example, an old Star Trek writer’s guide would contain basic information: there’s a Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans, etc. It would prevent an amateur writer from committing a faux pas such as having a captain violate the prime directive – one who wasn’t Kirk, anyway – or using a cloaking device on a stardate that was before encountering Romulans in Balance of Terror, and so on.

Brenda got about as far as “It was a dark and stormy night.“ Maybe not quite that bad. But after one line and five minutes of staring at paper, a boy named Travis offered to switch with her and let her do Zalgo. She and Travis exchanged photocopies of everything they produced by the end of the day. In addition to his most excellent storyline in which he went above and beyond the assignment to give an example of an actual story that might have been written by someone using the cannon restraints of his writer’s guide, for reference, he had just stapled on a print out of the original creepypasta story on Stalko-Taco.

If any of the packet she’d received from Travis was still there, it would prove that Stalko-Taco existed. Not that the real one existed of course, but at least that there was once a creepypasta story by that name, and that she wasn’t just losing her goddamn mind!

Electrified by the moment, she cleared away other papers from her hand and found that she was holding it. Brenda silently gave thanks that there were some old fashioned teachers remaining in the world who still insisted on primarily using paper. If there was an organized covert operation to erase Stalko-Taco from existence, it had just been foiled by a bunch of stuff printed on paper and assembled by a brainy middle school kid.

It was as she remembered. A bit silly; not something that she found to be very entertaining. At this point the most fascinating thing about it was that someone had bothered to attempt erasing it from existence. Oh, and the fact that they had all but succeeded. Three Days of the Condor, anyone? The obscure book getting translated into too many languages… was she the condor here and she stumbled onto a plot? Was this original Stalko-Taco story a book to be used for some kind of book code, as Renaldo had suggested? And as the forgetful Wheeler had pointed out, the story was not even very scary. Stalko-Taco was a gentle giant who didn’t seem capable of hurting anyone.

Lucy

So “Stalko-Taco” was a cop killer! No longer just the hilarious vision that Keith had told everyone about. They were all still in shock I guess. My mind raced with a bunch of thoughts in different directions. One small cul-de-sac it went down was: how am I going to get these wrist ties off? As soon as I thought it, they broke free somehow. The strong plastic ties that cops sometimes used so they didn’t have to carry around a dozen pair of handcuffs each, were nowhere to be found in the vicinity around me.

Did they disappear the same way as the cops? The cops! Yeah, back to that. The far more serious matter than my wrist ties. You lay low for a while when you have warrants. But for a cop killing… and a quadruple cop killing no less? They would never stop. There was no state that wouldn’t extradite back to California. We might have to leave the country, permanently. And no, the ties hadn’t vanished in the same way as the cops, I was now pretty sure, because the melted plastic would’ve burned my wrists. All four cops simultaneously went white hot before they were vaporized/disintegrated, whatever. They had vanished in less than a second.

Weird Shapes

Out at the edge, in the trees amongst the shadows they moved freely. Though they had been working on their concealment a bit more since the parking garage rave, they were still not as well-camouflaged as the predator had been in the movie with Arnold that many humans had enjoyed. If any of the skaters or the cops would have looked over and seen them? They might’ve registered simply as people wearing dark clothing milling about within the bushes. It would’ve led the cops on a merry goose chase if they had seen them and decided they wanted to pursue.

It would’ve been about like pursuing a cartoon; they could simply disappear back into their own dimension or some pocket realm as fast as Stalko Taco could morph back-and-forth between a taco and a boulder. Had they understood the physics of this universe better, they could’ve simply dispatched some drones to observe the event they were so interested in.

These people in the mid 1990s most likely wouldn’t have even understood what a drone was and thought they were weird insects like big dragonflies, or bats or something. So their plan B was just to run away if approached. Under no circumstances though did they want to interact with humans in this time. Everything was a delicate balance and up until now it seemed they were forestalled at every turn by the chronopolitans, including their newest edition whom Marco had nicknamed “Timecop Girl.”

Back to Lucy

Lucycat wondered if they felt any pain. But only wondering in a detached sort of way. After her father plus everything in her own life, she had no love for the police. Of course her dad was a criminal. He had said out loud: “the only good cop is a dead cop.” A hippie from the late 60s, occasional commune-dweller, and participant in an SFSU takeover... in the early 70s he and his merry band had caused all kinds of chaos. They reunited in the 80s to address a witty retort to those shoot pool bumper stickers. They read: shoot cops, not people. Then they paid kids in different neighborhoods to run around and stick them on bumpers – of cop cars, naturally. No one ever figured out what happened and traced the prank back to them. Thinking about her deceased father calmed her a bit; he was atypical for a hippie. Most of them had animosity towards the cops for sure, but they didn’t think the cops were war criminals who deserved to die. So she supposed this would’ve been a pretty good day for him and his radical friends.

Batgirl had not done anything to deserve her awful treatment. But although awful, it was probably not serious enough to warrant the deaths of four officers. Their suffering was obviously way out of proportion to Batgirl’s suffering. Still, they had tried to reason. Since her sexual assault and rape by multiple men in one night, the so-called gang rape, the one they called Batgirl had become what you might call a “touch freak.”

She couldn’t stand to be touched by anyone, even casually. The fact that they had her tied up during the rape did not help. So of course she couldn’t tolerate being in handcuffs. The other girls desperately tried to explain this to the one female officer: that she was a rape survivor and that being touched at all, let alone restrained, could freak her out. They blithely chose to ignore this and tried to handle her anyway. Batgirl’s psychological and physiological response to all this was to simply “go limp.” She just completely fainted from the stress. So the bonehead – and soon to be ghost – cops cuffed her hands behind her back anyway and loaded her unconscious body into the back of one of their cars; still thinking perhaps that she was faking?

Lucy couldn’t recall her actual name, but it was ok; she liked being called Batgirl. They were only putting Keith and Batgirl in the backs of cars. That is, the two people in their group who were “holding.“ And they were also the ones who got the actual handcuffs. The four of them only had two cars, so that worked out well for them she guessed. Everything was relatively peaceful until Batgirl sort of regained consciousness.

Then she was batshit crazy girl. Emerging back into reality to find her hands restrained behind her back, in the back of a car, was too much. Screaming! Thrashing! Kicking! At first the taco remained a boulder. It stressed Lucy out because she knew what was happening to the poor girl. Her still stoned and somewhat clueless boyfriend, Keith quietly sat handcuffed in the back of the other car, still looking around to see where the ruckus was coming from. He finally managed to scoot around and look over his left shoulder.

She could see the look of realization sweep over his face, and then the stress too. It was Keith’s stress that triggered the taco. It was indeed reading minds… his. Now that she replayed it in her head it made sense. At his moment of frustration over what Batgirl was going through, the boulder shape-shifted back into Stalko Taco, recovered from its prostate yoga pose, leaped through the air a distance of about 60 feet like a monster from a Godzilla movie, landed between the two parked cruisers with a thud that reverberated through the ground and through Lucy like the ‘89 quake, then punched in the metal roof on the front passenger side.

Weird Shapes

If anyone from this universe could have understood their psychological make-up, they would have noted the creature-shapes were experiencing something close to awe as they saw the taco leap into action. Their translation of the phrase they used for Stalko-Taco would have been close to “the progenitor of the universe.”

They were badly in need of an interpreter in this universe. About all they had been able to do so far was scare the shit out of normal people or make stoned ones think they were having wild hallucinations. The physics of this universe was so foreign to them that they couldn’t really tell which humans were or were not stoned.

One that was mildly intoxicated that night – the one who currently went by Batgirl – had long been a target of their investigation. It was on this night that they realized she wasn’t really the one they wanted. They needed one of her old craft teachers. A woman who, in Wicca, went by the name Omneris Araxes. She wasn’t present that night (couldn’t skate or dance, among other things) and Batgirl had written her off months ago as untrustworthy, a con-artist, and a cult-leader wannabe. Batgirl wouldn’t have acknowledged her craft name, but when she warned others about her she used it – also using the woman’s real name: Eileen Canales-Villanueva.

The shapes were however, able to read enough in Batgirl’s troubled mind to know how to make contact with Eileen and how to entice her into working for them, willingly and enthusiastically.

Back to Lucy

The sequence took place in a fraction of a second, from thud to punch, with all four of the cops’ backs turned. The thud startled everyone, but I guess some of our group were looking up right before the thud... at the giant leaping taco, no doubt. So many of the cops’ eyes turned to the sky just briefly, as if to scan for thunder or an explosion up there. The first one to figure it out was also evidently the quick-draw artist of the group. He spun around in time to see the roof of the car getting peeled off like a sardine lid.

Would shooting it have done anything? It was either demonic supernatural or some kind of alien technology. We��ll never know it seems, since he got vaporized before he got off a shot or even yelled anything. The other three instantly moved their gun hands to cover their sidearms and were vaporized as well. Looking back, it was nearly simultaneous; the first one had not finished disappearing yet when the others started glowing. But close enough. I didn’t actually see the taco pick up Batgirl and move her, but at some point she was on her left side, reclined, and slightly in a fetal position – hands unbound, of course. The taco went ahead and ripped open the roof to the patrol car Keith was in and he very rapidly ended up about twenty feet from Batgirl.

While all of this was still sinking in, Stalko Taco scampered back over to its rock position, crouched down, and morphed back into its boulder form. Keith was looking at his hands like I was; only the indentation marks on his wrists were there to prove they had been bound. Castadiva went over to help Batgirl up and I ran to Keith. Some of the other guys, I noticed were actually applauding Keith and cheering him on. I was pleased to find out that he thought more like I did.

Instead of cheering on the deaths of four cops, his first words to me were about how much trouble we could be in if we were implicated as cop killers or even accomplices. I asked him if he knew anything about a mind link with the taco and if he could tell whether their cars had the new dashboard cameras. He knew what I meant. Rather dramatically for Keith, he placed two fingers over his temple and spoke out loud: “I want these police cars gone… and never to be found again.”

Both cars vanished instantly, with the same kind of flash as the cops. The last phrase had insured that Stalko-Taco transported the cars into an active volcano, on Io. The taco had used its own discretion in dealing with the cops.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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vandahlcourte · 9 years ago

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If And Only If: Time Tear unedited materials. Part 4

The Sphere / Ambraluxia

The AI, a registered sentient being and citizen of the amphictiony, had chosen to absorb the sub AI sphere’s research progress and all its experiences before it was decommissioned. It was determined to essentially be a comedy of errors are not the fault of the manufacturer or anyone aboard the sphere’s mothership. Still, it had made all the right decisions according to regulations, but produced a colossal cluster vulpecula… she recorded in her equivalent of an online blog that was publicly accessible to all other member-species. So the company issued a voluntary recall. Ambraluxia now instantly comprehended the sphere‘s actions: she saw that its first priority had truly been the welfare of the “child,” even if it meant neglecting to follow certain environmental regulations.

The computer had assumed, by brain activity only, that Alex was an Altairean toddler. The fact that its parents had changed it into a human body while on Earth was not at all surprising for Altaireans. It was their absence that was cause for concern.

When it asked Alex where his parents were, he only knew the location of two of them, and he gave their coordinates in terms the computer couldn’t decipher. When asked about his Ardhanari parent, Alex’s answer was incomprehensible... curious, since at this age the Ardhanari parent would be handling most of the nanny-type responsibilities and spending the most time with the child, according to the customs of Altairean society.

What the sphere’s computer had failed to grasp, was that Alex was saying he only had two parents. Humans would have two, Altaireans would have three. An actual sentient being would have reasoned that Alex was an inordinately intelligent human with some abnormal imbalances of neurotransmitters, receptor antagonists, and receptor site blockers – and then backed off. Not getting involved and caring for the “lost child,” feeding it, entertaining it with toys, and sending it back in time to wait for who it felt was its family.

Ambraluxia did think it was adorable how Alex played with the math games. He had been in the chair for about an hour before his appetite took over, but he enjoyed the educational toy in precisely the way that an Altairean child of his perceived age would have been predicted to. Then he had wanted Earth food, and wanted to play with the giant food-advertising character outside and see it come to life. The sphere had naturally obliged him and then, it even sent his toy back in time with him, to New Year’s Eve of 1991.

Brenda

Could memories be erased? She’d researched, or at least googled, different types of amnesia. Retrograde and anterograde amnesias, Korsakoff's syndrome, or Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, other neurological conditions, etc. It all made perfect sense how one person could forget things. But it was beyond absurd to think that it could be orchestrated so as to make a large population – in the millions – all forget about the same thing.

Wheeler not only couldn’t remember, but later that week he could not produce pictures of himself from when his mom had tried to make him the outfit for cosplay. Brenda had had him on FaceTime, looking at the strangely oversized cork board in his room, pretty much as she remembered it. The thing had pictures from the past half-decade-plus, gathering dust and pictures layered up in some cases on top of older ones. There had at one time been old-fashioned Polaroids of the attempted Stalko-Taco outfit which he pinned up in his room. Those were now missing, and predictably, he had no recollection of them.

And this next part totally blew her mind during the FaceTime call: She located the actual vacant spots where she was sure they had once been, guiding him to exactly where she wanted him to position the phone’s camera. When she asked him why those spots were vacant, his answer was bizarre!

After babbling for a few seconds in a way she couldn’t understand, he got some words together. But they suddenly sounded like the speech of a person who’d just been abruptly awakened and asked a question while they were still half asleep. He was wide awake, but the words that came staggering out were: “Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it.”

“Dude!” she managed to choke out a response, trying not to laugh and cause the cranberry-grape juice she’d been sipping the moment before to come spewing out of her nose, “you just quoted Andy Warhol!” She paused just briefly to swallow and catch her breath. “I thought during your, uh, critical diatribe last year that you made it clear you, um, didn’t like him? To put it mildly.”

“Not exactly. What I said was,” Wheeler intoned with a now news-anchor-perfect voice that he could’ve made money with doing voiceovers for ads, “that I thought he was way overrated and that I could name at least ten other artists of the twentieth century who made more artistically significant contributions, and then I proceeded to do just that... along with detailed reasoning for why I thought so in each case. But I don’t exactly dislike him. I simply –“

He paused again and she was worried that maybe the expression he saw on her face was one of “Oh no! He’s going to repeat the whole gawdawful long lecture again!” So Brenda in that split second tried to look pleasant and slightly raised her brows as if to appear quite interested in what his next words would be. But her look wasn’t what had caused him to cut himself off.

“Wait,” he ventured in a less lecture-y tone, “did you say I quoted him? I don’t even know any quotes from him because I’ve never really studied him in that much depth. Oh hold on, the one about the greatest art... great art versus good art,”

“Good artists borrow. Great artists steal?” Brenda offered sweetly.

“That’s it! That’s the only quote I know from him. But I didn’t quote him. At least not that I’m aware of,” Wheeler said with utter sincerity.

“Nah. First of all that was Steve Jobs, not Warhol,” she tried to correct helpfully.

“No shit? I always thought it was an artist.”

“Steve Jobs said it a lot and liked to blame it on an artist. It doesn’t matter which one because it was none of them. But no, it actually goes back to San Francisco in the 60s when – Nancy! And Entropy!” Brenda said gleefully, and then rápidamente to Wheeler: “I’ll tell you later about Haight-Ashbury.”

His mom hadn’t barged in or anything; the door to his room had been open and Wheeler was walking in and out multiple times as he went to different spots looking for the old pictures.

After exchanging happy greetings with Nancy, she scribbled a word furiously, without looking, in her paisley-shroom-brain-book, determined not to forget: hypnosis!!!! A bit more shorthand followed but Brenda didn’t want it to be obvious and appear to be ignoring her, preoccupied, or whatever.

She asked Brenda “Haight-Ashbury? You two couldn’t have been talkin’ about me – I’m old but not quite that old.” Wheeler’s mom, a self-described “aging hippie” insisted that no one should ever call her Mrs. Wheeler even though she was still happily married to his dad. All the other kids they knew in Austin were asked to address her by her first name; not especially rare for their part of the city.

Brenda honestly didn’t want to be rude, and smiled genuinely at Entropy, their odd little chihuahua-yorkie-dachshund mix whom they’d rescued when they found him as a stray near SoCo.

She got her chance to scribble more, which she could easily do without looking at the paper. Exactly two more words. Altogether it was enough to keep her aware of the situation and the idea. She thought initially that Wheeler had been trying to come off as goofy, to mock the way Warhol was in most of his interviews. It wasn’t quite how he used to sound. But she realized he truly hadn’t studied the guy that closely.

When pressed about where the things had gone which should have been there, he’d given some kind of almost pre-programmed sounding, canned response. It was also as if he’d momentarily gone into some quasi-trancelike state. That, and the memory anomaly were starting to scare her. As in “oh shit, I may actually be right” sort of scary.

She talked a bit more with Nancy, watched as she picked up Entropy’s paw and had him waving at the camera, and thought about the dozen or so older experiences they’d been rehashing in their conversations. She’d had to table the discussion, understandably. How would you go about saying to Nancy: “Hey, by the way, it looks like someone is messing with your son’s mind and putting him in a hypnotic trance... and oh yeah, they’re breaking into his room and stealing stuff.”

Wheeler wasn’t just alright with his last name, he wanted to be called by it exclusively. Enough boys at school and some male teachers did that anyway, and the rest were mostly convinced to go along with it. Come to think of it she couldn’t even recall his first name; beginning of the sixth grade possibly, some teacher in the class they had together may have called roll using it. It was so common, she remembered the woman approving of the decision because three other boys in that same class also had the name. She’d resorted to calling them something like “Name K.” or “Name R.” So using “Wheeler” simplified things by avoiding a fourth one.

Brenda realized she’d been lost in thought and hadn’t heard the last couple of things Nancy had said. She tried the old “I’m sorry you cut out just now” trick, and asked her what was it she said after the part about Entropy eating the pillow while they were gone. “Entropy... you were a bad boy,” she said in her silly pet voice while tapping his nose as he wagged excitedly.

Well, it was understandably difficult to focus, considering the level of weirdness that might be going on with Wheeler’s memories. Brenda was almost finished reading The Cool War by Frederik Pohl, and was suddenly struck by the memory of how they wanted Hake, when his general orders were read to him, to only respond to each one with: “I understand and will comply.” Maybe that trance state was what they were going for. And perhaps that character’s tendency to ramble, ask questions, and at first just forgetting to respond as ordered, explained why he was never fully hypnotized – even though another character made a point to say that he was acting like he was.

Listening to Nancy would have been a pleasant diversion from this if Brenda could’ve gotten her head all the way in the game, so to speak. A bit too young to have been part of the original movement in the 60s, Nancy had managed to not only find but become a resident of a genuine hippie commune when she was 19. And this happened at a historic point that was practically the nadir of popularity for all things hippie in America: 1986. As far as the “aging” adjective she chose to put in front of it? If she was doing it, she was doing it in a very Cher kinda way!

Thirty years of “intelligent and informed vegan eating” according to Nancy, plus seaweed extract, plus a tendency to “shun the Sun” directly on her skin for more than a couple of minutes here and there, may have contributed. It gave her ample chances to wear her beloved collection of floppy hats. She also wasn’t a heavy drinker, preferred her weed eaten rather than smoked – and moreover, she practically went into some sort of toxic episode and had to leave the room if anyone ever smoked a regular cigarette.

Whatever she was doing was definitely putting the brakes on the whole aging process. When she was 43, other kids used to think Wheeler was being dropped off at school by his older sisters. Plural of course, and not his mom and sister.

Then a dark thought intruded: Marky Mark. Not the ‘90s singer or rapper-turned-actor himself, but a movie of his that was hitting cable tv at exactly the time she was just thinking of in their childhood. Brenda and Rosa couldn’t understand why their parents wanted to always refer to him that way when the actor clearly had a different name. Then YouTube appeared when they were in elementary school and they immediately understood.

The movie was a bit later; too scary for her, they said. Not until she was older... but what was it called? She thought she might have to goog– Never mind! She got it. The Happening. By the time she was “old enough” Brenda had already seen way scarier shit, in her opinion: the Chucky movies and the Pinhead movies for example. The Marky Mark one had mainly caught her attention because she’d always been a Zooey fan.

But this formed the basis of a new idea: As an alternative to someone physically invading Wheeler’s room, what if some kind of mysterious signal or combination of chemicals went out all over the world?

Instead of a suicide command, like in The Happening, that made them jump off buildings or throw themselves under heavy duty lawnmowers, maybe it’s simply telling them “take everything you have that’s related to Stalko-Taco, including not just files but pictures and memorabilia, and destroy it all.”

Okay, she thought, “if I kept a top ten list of silliest ideas I’ve ever had, I’d need to take every one of them down a notch and bump one completely off the list, because this would be my new number one entry!” Worth scribbling down a note in paisley-shroom-brain?

She did, as she changed the subject with Nancy and changed position in her chair to get more comfortable. Just three words would do. And she hadn’t made it obvious.

The new subject had just been a “covering-all-bases” line of subtle questioning, and for some reason hadn’t prepared her to expect more weirdness for an answer. Nevertheless it caught her off guard: his mom couldn’t remember having attempted to make the outfit for him either! Fortunately Wheeler had to go and needed his phone to take with him, so it stopped Brenda from visibly commencing a freak out, or at least looking stressed out, on FaceTime. They exchanged their goodbyes with her and agreed they’d talk again soon.

What the fuck!? Did the “forget about Stalko-Taco” signal apply to Nancy too? But then why not Brenda? She had been physically there for part of the project. The yellow-ish taco shell color had been a little off. Wheeler’s older sister Sherri had walked through the room and said, during try-ons and pinnings, that he looked like the wrapper from an always overnight jumbo pad. It was at a time just before Brenda became “aware” and was not yet requiring any products, and it wasn’t a brand that her mom or sister used. So since she didn’t get it right away either, fortunately, it ended up being Sherri who had to elaborate.

After explaining to Wheeler what it was, he didn’t say “ew!“ or “gross!“ or anything but he did seem less than enthusiastic about wearing it. Anyway the idea got back-burnered for awhile when his mom ran out of some kind of elastic material and shortly afterwards he started to think about the mascot resemblance. Her point being though, that he remembered the conversation, the outfit, his sister’s bad joke, and other associated events for months afterwards… Not anymore he didn’t! And neither did his mom, the seamstress, apparently.

A little later she told Renaldo about her hypothetical mass memory erasure. Like the flashy-thing, in Men in Black she said, while leaving out The Happening kind of scenario.

“You mean the neuralizer that that guy was using, um, Jaden Smith‘s father?“ he seemed to strain to remember. That was typical Renaldo: knowing the correct technical name of the flashy-thing, but not able to recall one of the most well known actors of our time by name. He was very focused on tech. Well, good, Brenda thought, that’s what she needed right now.

“Is a neuralizer really technologically possible? I feel like it probably shouldn’t be, but I’m not sure…“ she asked tentatively.

“For humans,“ he asked, “or for aliens?“

That kind of took Brenda by surprise. She hadn’t thought of an alien angle on Stalko-Taco. He explained the Drake equation in detail and why it was statistically almost certain that there were extraterrestrial civilizations if one expanded the search to an intergalactic scale.

Her mnemonic from school paired things up just so she could recall the order of the sizes correctly: cities, states, nation, the world... are as planets, stars, galaxies, the universe.

So his use of the word intergalactic meant travels to the farthest reaches of the universe. It reminded her of the song by the Beastie Boys that her father had been dancing to in a silly vhs video of himself from the 90s that she and her sister used to laugh hysterically at. This triggered another spark of memory and she made a note to herself with her last mechanical pencil that still had graphite, not wanting to get up and rummage around on her desk during her FaceTime with Renaldo: look in garage for doll house box full of middle school papers. She double underlined the words enthusiastically.

Renaldo went on to expand on the book code, using microwaves for surveillance (the photons from the region of the electromagnetic spectrum known as microwaves- not microwave ovens as that one government imbecile had misinterpreted the word earlier that year), and why playing loud continuous music with speakers against your windows was a good way to mess with listening devices that could be pointed at your house or office from a long distance away. She felt like she should be going for Sarah Conner-mode after the first movie and picking up whatever knowledge and skills she could learn from these dudes. She listened as intently as possible whilst sipping her third coffee, but her mind kept drifting to that dollhouse box.

Alex

The Z. C. Ploughman’s Trophy was supposed to be the mathematical analog of a Nobel Prize. Or so they said. Alex did grapple with the moral – or was it ethical(?) – dilemma of whether or not he deserved it. It was a prize for human mathematicians, right? Although no rules specifically stated this.

He had already been a fairly bright young amateur mathematician in his time, and had access to branches of math that hadn’t been invented yet in 1991. These things alone would’ve allowed him – starting in 1992 – to phone in his performance as an undergrad, to breeze through grad school, to be a fountain of brilliant publications; tenured professorship would only be a matter of time.

But the Z. C. Ploughman’s Prize? That was alien technology. Whatever that chair was that they had put him in aboard the alien spacecraft way back in – or rather way ahead in – the year 2137. It had sorted out his thoughts. Not just mathematically, but logically in all areas. It made him, in his opinion, the world’s smartest human…

He hadn’t met Prajina lately.

Not in 27 years by his reckoning. It was 2018 in the local calendar and he had done well for himself in his chosen time and profession. Prajina was more of an abstract concept now, like a fictional character he once read about. One whom he knew would live happily ever after with young Padmanabhan long after Alex was dead. He would be chronologically 100 years old in 2083, though he would be born in 2119. Since no radical advances in human life-extension beyond the age of 130, were going to be forthcoming, he could easily expect to have lived out his natural life before they were ever born.

What Alex failed to realize was that “the aliens” had in fact been an automated device. That a moronic, by alien standards, computer moiety had misread him to be a child from Altair. It had placed him, for about an hour, in a device that was the alien equivalent of a leap pad for toddlers. And yes, until Prajina’s arrival last year, it had made him the world’s smartest human. Well, one of them anyway. If Alex had accepted the philosophical premise of IQ theory, he might’ve been amused to know that his was equivalent to that of the extrapolated IQs of Stephen Hawking or Leonardo da Vinci.

What he was also unaware of was that the spheroid’s computer had elected to repair and upgrade his human body. It’s sent in nano-robots to make repairs to his telomeres. In the spheroid-computer’s analysis, the human body that his parents had dressed him in was a temporary job. Since the spheroid wasn’t sure how long the child would need to wait, it extended the life of the child to, effectively 2000 Earth years. The body would grow to an apparent age of around 55. Alex would be a distinguished looking scholar, but would continue to live for a couple of millennia if necessary.

Had the sphere’s computer been equipped with a more thoughtful intelligence, it might have pondered why all humans didn’t repair their bodies in this elementary way. The repairs to Prajina had been more extensive than an infomercial gadget’s computer could fathom. There was every reason to think she would still be around to see this environmental disaster averted in 120,000 Earth years.

Cufflinks had been a gift from the department, to wear to the banquet. He was regarded as an all-around good guy, in an environment that could get a bit competitive; he was the go to guy – the sounding board to bounce ideas off of. Colleagues who hit a rough spot on some proof they were working on could come by after office hours with a bottle of Jack Daniels Tennessee sipping whiskey… And do just that. Bounce ideas off him through the night. His suggestions had a way of saving the day.

Obviously any person who says they think better drunk than sober is an fool. But this wasn’t always just about logical thought; it was creative energy as well. People would wake up in the morning and suddenly find that they had scribbled down some brilliant gems of wisdom that seemed to solve all their problems. Alex of course, being from the future, knew all of their work. He knew what they were going to publish and when.

His head cloud was invariably neat and organized, and like clockwork, as was his eccentric habit, he had physically backed up everything all the way up to the Friday morning before the rave at hellhole. Optical chips, each the size of a starburst fruit chew, with many terabytes each of data storage capacity, contained all the mathematical journals that his parents had bought him subscriptions to… which meant all the journals. Even though money didn’t exactly mean as much in his century, there were still some advantages to being a baby billionaire.

So he knew precisely what everyone was supposed to publish, and when they would publish it. The cufflinks reminded him of the prolate spheroid form of the “odd sphere“ in the rave’s light show. The aliens aboard that craft had been surprisingly flippant about the prospect of him “changing history,“ but as he understood it, this had to do with their ability to comfortably navigate betwixt parallel universes. He was simply adding another universe to the multiverse, so to speak. That night at the banquet he caught a glimpse of a girl who he was sure had to be an ancestor of Prajina.

Amidst the mandatory hobnobbing and mingling, he made futile attempts to move closer to her and hopefully strike up a conversation to ask her if her surname, by any chance, was Ranganathan.

ℏ♄

It was the human empire called the United States of America that seemed to be calling the shots on policy decisions relating to Earth’s exploration of space. One of their presidents, the one called Jack Black, did not seem to be directly involved at first glance. But at some point during his second term, a new cabinet appointee and two government agency heads were recommended to him. He wisely signed off on these suggestions and the synergy of these three women – correction, one was something called an intersex person and preferred to avoid using the gender binary paradigm – ℏ♄ made a mental note to acquire more information from agent Ranganathan about her society – had initiated a sequence of events that made Earth a truly spacefaring civilization within less than one of their centuries.

This needed to happen during his second term. That is, the term where he “Mooned Congress“ as Prajina described it. Although his mooning of the congress of this group of humans was one of the things he would be best remembered for, his actions during that particular legislative versus executive branch conflict were completely irrelevant to Earth’s future space exploration activities.

ℏ♄ was still at a loss to understand the nuances of human behavior and politics. She had seen the videos of the event from C-SPAN as well as some of the emotional news commentaries and interviews afterwards… And still understood nothing of it. But to move so many people to such enthusiastic and emotional responses on both sides, with such a simple and no doubt well-timed gesture… He must truly have been a master of communications. The humans obviously had chosen their leader wisely.

Eventually, when the mission was completed she would ask her deputy agent Prajina Ranganathan to explain the significance of this “mooning gesture.“ What, in particular, did it have to do with any moon? The Earth’s Moon? One of the tiny ones orbiting Mars? Not one of the Jovian Moons they’d only recently begun to inhabit in her time, right? She had been repeatedly assured that this had no impact whatsoever on space exploration policy. For now Agent Ranganathan regarded ℏ♄ as an all-knowing infinitely wise being. That would be a good state of mind to keep her in throughout the rest of this mission.

When humans of the future were interested in extracting energy from stars by way of Dyson spheres, they had been tinkering with a neutron star. Humans 120,000 ᪠Yrs in the alternate future had mastered the ability to move stars around from one location to another. Very well done to have advanced so far so quickly, she thought. ℏ♄ tried to dredge up the mnemonic from her childhood history class, for the member of her own species; the engineer of her distant ancestors who’d done the same thing 180 million ᪠Yrs earlier. It came to her: ᯒ ૯ ੬ ಌ. That was it!

Reviewing the report on their alternate future neutron star fiddling, she saw how they had accidentally fed the thing too much mass too quickly, forming a supermassive black hole that became a second galactic nucleus for their “Milky Way” galaxy. ℏ♄smiled and shook her head slightly, thinking out loud “rookie mistake!“

Keith

For the occasion on which he finally conjured it – in front of people, Keith was employing a combination of drugs, rituals from Wicca books, geography, breakbeat techno and trance music… anything that he could think of to help reproduce the same conditions as that first night. It was mainly the drugs that did it.

Of course they had staked out the same park again. The Moon was in the same phase again, and the time and lighting were identical. At that moment when the taco actually appeared for others as well as himself, it was as if he could hear a choir in his head loudly singing Ode To Joy like the scene from Die Hard where Alan Rickman is marveling that the safe is finally open. The rest of his party was in shock when the thing actually appeared. Finally, he thought, they can understand why I was so excited and babbling about this! Wild! It even smelled like a taco.

It was Keith’s fourth time seeing Stalko-Taco, but the amazement had not worn off at all, and at last having it appear for his friends was thrilling. Not just because they now wouldn’t think he was crazy; he cared nothing about that. But because now he could begin to have some serious intellectual discussions about just what in the hell this might mean. He wondered like every time, how is this even possible? Well, it was time for some entertainment; the taco danced for him on the previous occasion – like a little river dance move. It was just like it could read his thoughts.

He wasn’t thinking about disco dancing on this particular night. Perhaps the thing could pick up on other people’s thoughts as well. His friend Jared might have been having these images in his head. But it was definitely setting up something with strobe lights and a blue colored light. Then he saw some flashes of a red light in the trees above and realized… cops!

It wasn’t the taco preparing a light show for his/her/its(?) next dance number. The cops had pulled up at a leisurely pace, taking this group of stoners completely by surprise. There would be no point in trying to tell them about Stalko-Taco. As far as the police were concerned it was just a bunch of teenagers hanging out stoned in a park on a Friday night. Well, after midnight, so technically Saturday morning. Still before dawn though.

Stalko-Taco wouldn’t have cooperated anyway. It responded before the first car was even in full view, by getting onto its… knees he guessed? And then crouching into a yoga position and morphing into a boulder. The boulder looked like part of the scenery and seemed to belong there.

Had it always been there? Keith had been coming to this park since he was 12 and couldn’t be sure. Would everyone else believe it now? Or would they decide that it was a “consensual hallucination” they were all agreeing to have? Anyway, time to deal with the local fuzz.

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