January 16, 2010
Drone Wars: The Valleys of Terrabella X
A beautiful fairy princess from another planet stood over the reluctant astronaut. He lay on the metal floor of the spaceship and squinted his eyes up at her. She trailed colors like an erratic rainbow, as if she were dissolving in the warm sun. The girlish phantom had on a golden plastic tiara, and poked him with a juicy looking cherry flavored lollypop that matched the color of her lips, clearly trying to tell him something.
But when she opened her mouth the princess spoke a strange language he had never heard before. In fact, her gestures were utterly foreign to him, her vocabulary inscrutable, her tone filled with dread and animal brutality one moment, and singsong kindness the next. Sometimes her voice was low and deep as if slowed way down. At other times it sped up suddenly and without warning to a loud screech, as if someone had just kicked a cat down an alleyway.
Garbled sounds radiated out of her mouth in thick gushing torrents, but not in any particular order and with no rational end he could make out. He rolled onto his stomach to try and crawl away, but she easily outmaneuvered him and blocked his escape with a remarkably nimble step considering her strawberry red high-heeled shoes were at least a couple of sizes too big.
"Am I already on Terrabella X?" the reluctant astronaut wondered to himself. "Funny how these things go," he tried to puzzle it out, and quickly concluded the girlish apparition he saw before him was probably his welcoming committee.
The two of them exited the rocket ship hand-in-hand. The astronaut looked back over his shoulder one last time at the huge silver ship lying on its side, and remarked at the purple and pink sunset; how beautiful it was, "like an Earth sunset," he thought "but somehow way more haunting and strange."
Terrabella X was silent. Except for the occasional Chinese security patrol, streets were empty, devoid of people. The princess pulled him by the arm. She wanted to go into a big-box electronics store. A pimple-faced Asian kid was the only one around. 3D flat-screen televisions lined the walls. The reluctant astronaut noticed that every single one of them had a foreign brand name he couldn't read. "If that don't beat all," he thought. "The Chinese already have a forward base set up here."
Eventually, the beautiful princess' strange tongue began to make more sense to him. He ascribed it to some kind of advanced form of mental telepathy known only to the alien race of the planet. Words like "cool", "gosh-darn", and "nifty" floated out from the otherwise incomprehensible hisses, gurgles, and barks that had issued from her pretty throat up to that point. But when she pointed to the array of monitors and announced, "What a dumb-ass," he was elated. It was the first entire thought he comprehended from the alien species.
"To paraphrase the old song," the snarled voice of Top-Cop Stalker Flogum interrupted the reluctant astronaut's reverie "You don't count the dead when God is on your side..." His black-lipsticked face appeared in virtual 3-D on all the flat screens. "And," the five-star general thrust his leather bustier out, "You damn well don't ask questions when God is on your side."
Up on the podium Stalker Flogum reminded him of an Earth-type he had once known. The kind of irreconcilable bully that had made his service life hell -- one of those knuckle-dragger types who would rub your nose in his shit-stained panties.
Near as he could make out the press conference was called to announce the capture of some important dissident. For Drone Wars Version XVIII a pre-recorded videotaped confession was released to the major monolithic news networks.
"This is the kind of egregious over-reaching by the government that's gradually making our lives unlivable," the hangdog ex-Baltimore cop said. "First off, if you really think the government is going to roll back the program after economic times improve, that's never going to happen. The whole idea that we are going to be monitored to this extent... why don't they just have Predator drones flying over the entire country recording everything we do all day long, and then they can sit down at night and write tickets for people who spit on the sidewalk..."
The reluctant astronaut wondered what his wife was doing back on Earth: probably having another drink and screaming at the poor nannybot.
"Is this the kind of society we really want to live in?" the hangdog traffic cop on the 3DTV continued. "Where we are photographed and monitored every single thing we do just because all the morons in the government building have wasted all the revenue they taxed us in the first place?"
Somehow the wrong tape was sent out to all the stations. But Transvestite Top Cop Stalker Flogum remained oblivious to the mix up. He was too busy fixing his makeup.
"I don't support the government plan at all," the former motorcycle officer didn't mince his words. "I spent forty-one years with the Baltimore Police Department, I did thirty-three years active duty, I was a motorcycle supervisor, I supervised motor officers for eighteen years. It's exactly because the government of Maryland has turned to this kind of activity to bail out its budget, to generate money, that I finally said to hell with them and their corrupt thinking. Hey I got an idea for the maniacs in Annapolis: Why not just eliminate law enforcement officers altogether, eliminate the cost altogether, and simply put up 'Big-Daddy' cameras everywhere?"
The family joke was if the reluctant astronaut was in an airplane with his wife and it went down over a jungle rainforest it was only a matter of time after the plane crashed before she emerged from the forest fully in charge of the situation, whereas, if not for her, he might never emerge. After a while, so the family joke went, out of sheer impatience his wife would rush back into the jungle only to find her husband sitting against a tree and staring with great intensity at a Halloween yellow autumn leaf, or something equally obscure.
His wife could obviously survive and thrive under any circumstance. She was an "indestructible child" like Charlie Chaplin's "Little Tramp" figure. The reluctant astronaut, on the other hand, had no such resilience. He couldn't live for one second without his electric appliances. "How am I going to get along on Terrabella X," he suddenly despaired, quite disconsolate. His enthusiasm flagged.
"Transvestite Top-Cop Stalker Flogum didn't just use the expression 'silver-bullet', did he?" the reluctant astronaut perked back up. "God knows I can't stand that expression," he griped, and began to feel more like his old self again. "Back on Earth they go for it all the time, as if every problem is lunar, and the only solution is to kill a werewolf, or some other demonic hell-spawn."
"Silly-Billy," the fairy princess said in a magical musical voice, and added rather seriously, "I'm hungry!" She wanted to go to the food-court. "Don't french-fries sound really, really good right about now?" she asked. "And a quarter-pounder with cheese!"
"I'll be darned if they haven't," the reluctant astronaut thought as they walked through the empty mall. "They've created a near perfect facsimile of the Earth, by golly I believe they have. Everything," he marveled, "down to the smallest detail reminds me of home." He looked around. "All my favorite outlets -- and right here on Terrabella X!" He really found it quite remarkable what the Chinese had been able to pull off so many hundreds-of-millions of miles away in such a short period of time. "There's no way they could have done all this on their own," he thought. "The people of Terrabella X -- these fabulous creatures at the outer edge of the Milky-Way galaxy -- must have been in on the deal. They must have helped," there was no doubt about it in his mind. "Clearly their technology is far superior to our own Earth technology."
He looked at the little alien princess beside him with not a little awe. "If french-fries and a quarter-pounder with cheese are what she wants, french-fries and a quarter-pounder with cheese are what she gets," he said to himself. "Probably made from some exotic potato-like plant found only here on Terrabella X." He could barely contain his newfound enthusiasm.
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010