The Digestion Cooperation

"Ted!" Melissa yelled.

He was third from the opening in the shiny silver craft. The line of men behind him extended out and wrapped around the craft in a circle. Ted turned his head at the sound of Melissa's voice, looked away, and kneaded his hands as he waited for his turn to enter. A lock of his blond hair fell across his forehead.

"Ted," she screamed. "Ted, don't do it!"

The line moved forward a step as another man entered the craft.

Melissa tore her way through the human wall of protesters that surrounded the craft with homemade signs that read, "God will judge thee," "Aliens=Hell!" and "Think of your families."

"Let me through!" she cried. "That's my husband!"

She shoved aside a portly man, causing his sign to slip out of his hands and fall to the ground. She trampled the hand-painted whiteboard that referred to the men going inside the craft to being like dimwitted cattle. She broke through the outer circle in time to see Ted duck inside the doorway to the craft and disappear into shadow.

"Ted!" she screamed.

She ran for the opening, pushing aside the docile men waiting in line.

"Don't let her get in!" one of the men yelled.

"She will ruin everything," another man said.

A few men tried to grab Melissa as she rushed past, but most stood back with detachment.

"No worries man," she heard someone behind her say. "They don't want women anyway."

Melissa dove headlong into the doorway to the craft and came sliding across a cool, polished metal floor. She rolled onto her knees and brought herself up into a crouch. A tall, handsome man in a charcoal suit with an equally attractive woman by his side stood before her. Together they looked more like funeral directors than aliens.

"Hello," the man said. "I overheard the commotion. Your husband just came in a moment ago, correct?"

"Ted!" Melissa yelled. "Ted! Where are you?"

She saw only the doorway that led back outside. There was no place that her husband could have gone. No corridor stretched out beyond the small room where she stood with the two alien beings.

"Please let me express my condolences to you," the female said.

"Oh, there are no condolences," Melissa said. "He will be coming out with me or there's going to be hell to pay."

"Your husband was the tall man with the blond hair?" the man asked.

"Where is he? Where did you take him?"

A man poked his head in from outside and asked, "Can I come in yet?"

'Uh, not yet, please," the tall alien in the gray suit said. "We will call you when we are ready. Thank you."

The man withdrew back outside and yelled back to the line, "Told you a woman was going to screw everything up."

"Ted!" Melissa called again.

"Miss," said the man.

"TED!"

"Please, I can assure you--"

"TEEEEEED!"

"He is already passed."

Melissa felt the weight of the words like a physical blow hit her chest and she could not draw breath to call out Ted's name one more time. She slumped against the cool metal of the wall behind her in resigned disbelief.

"No," she said. "He just came in. You couldn't have… Not that fast."

"Oh, it's very quick," the man said. "And completely painless. In fact, it is the most--"

"Yes, I know," Melissa said, "the most pleasurable experience of his life."

She turned away from the man. "He left me. He chose to die instead of be with me…"

"What is your name?" the woman asked.

"Get away from me," Melissa hissed. "Was it you? Was it someone that looked like you? Is that what you offered my husband to make him come in here?"

The man held out his hand to Melissa. "It was not her," he said. "Nor was it anyone that looked like her. We only assume this shape to be aesthetically pleasing to the indigenous population. You might be interested to know that your husband was it was not with another being at all. Would you like to see?"

A surge of revulsion pulsed through Melissa as she thought of witnessing Ted's death.

"No, I don't want to see him die."

"Oh no, we wouldn't think of showing you that. Come here, look."

The man put his hand on Melissa's shoulder and guided her toward a corner of the pale metal wall. Slowly, the wall enclosed behind them and opened before them into a circular corridor.

"My name is Greg," he said. "And yours?"

"Greg? Really? Is that a typical alien name?"

"Of course not," he smiled. "Again, it is the name we assume to be more approachable to humans, and you name, miss?"

"Melissa."

"Pleased to meet you, Melissa," the Greg said. "Now, you see the entire human experience is contained solely within the brain as a series of neurotransmitters, hormones, and electrochemical reactions. We do absolutely nothing to the body of our, um, volunteers. It is all done in the brain, and the brain is reached by a device that sends frequencies through the skull, meninges, and cerebrospinal fluid to trigger specific reactions in the cortex and limbic system. In effect, we put a helmet on their head, and in one second they are receiving whatever it is that we have programmed for them to receive."

"Like imaginary sex!" she said.

"It's their choice, but yes, many men elect for the sexual experience."

"We were married 15 years," Melissa said. "We have a daughter, and all he wanted was to die having sex."

"He didn't really have sex," Greg said. "He just puts on the helmet and two minutes later--"

"Two minutes? He threw away our life together for two minutes of pleasure?"

"Oh no," Greg answered. "Certainly not two minutes. The men are dead within ten seconds, the experience is so extreme it stops the heart. No, but after they die it take about two minutes to drain the fluids from the body and process the dry material left behind. Nothing goes to waste. One human male can sustain an entire colony on our planet for a month."

Melissa felt her gut twist in grief and disgust as she thought of Ted, processed and drained and stored in a tank in the belly of the silver craft, ready to be delivered as a meal. The man she dated, loved, married... the father of her child, now reduced to liquid.

"Why did he do it?" she muttered, slumping against the wall as the crushing loneliness began to weigh on her. She had to raise their daughter--alone. She had to make a living--alone. She had to care for the house, the car, the dog, the bills--alone, alone, alone. "And it's not just Ted, is it? There's men lined up all around this ship waiting to get in."

"More then we can take," Greg said. "There will be some disappointed men left behind."

"Disappointed men? There are way more disappointed wives and mothers and families."

"We forced no one to come."

"I know," Melissa spat. "You just offered them a chance to die from orgasm and they came running. Did you even think about the families they are leaving?"

"Of course," he said. "That's why we didn't just take the men we wanted and leave. We opened our doors and offered them the opportunity to volunteer. You must understand, even though they are leaving their families, in our world they are helping our families survive."

"Then why not take animals?" she said. "You wouldn't be breaking apart homes and leaving children fatherless."

"To be honest," he answered, "humans are so much easier to work with. Animals are unpredictable. They speak no language, they may or may not respond to pheromones, they may become violent, but with humans, all we had to do was make a public announcement and they came in droves."

"Then take me."

Greg cocked his head and stared at her, confused. "Pardon?"

"Take me too," she repeated. Tears began to stream down her cheeks and drip from her chin. "I am volunteering. Hook me up to your machine, give me an orgasm, and feed me to your kids. You already took my husband. Take me too."

"Oh," Greg responded. "Well, I'm afraid that won't work. You see, the device we use to stimulate the human brain is specifically designed for males. We started trying to make one for females as well, but…."

"But?"

"To be honest, we could not figure out their brain chemistry. Whenever we hooked a female up, we didn't know if she would have an orgasm or fly into uncontrollable rage. There was also the trouble of luring them in. With males, all we had to do was advertise the ultimate sensual experience in exchange for their lives. There was no trickery, no dishonesty, no cover up. It was simple and it worked. However, there was no tactic that uniformly appealed to the mass of human females. To lure in females would require an elaborate scheme that had to be changed for each individual female. Frankly, it was just too complicated."

Melissa crossed her arms and planted her feet. "Well, I am not leaving this spot." She wiped tears from her eyes, but fresh ones gathered and spilled down her face.

The alien shifted his feet and rubbed his hands. "But there is nothing more you can do."

"I don't care. I'm not leaving here. Hook me up to your machine."

"You may not even have an orgasm," he said.

"Don't care. You want humans. I'm a human. That's all that should matter."

"But your daughter," Greg said. "You would be leaving her the way your husband left you. You do not wish to cause her pain do you? Tell me your daughter's name. Is she waiting for you outside?"

"Don't talk about my daughter," Melissa said through tight lips and clenched teeth. Anna was seven years old and she was outside, waiting far from the crowd around the ship. She was waiting for Mommy to bring Daddy back.

"I have a daughter as well," Greg said. "In fact, I am here because I want to provide for her."

"By killing fathers."

"Humans raise animals specifically for food," Greg said. "You slaughter entire herds of them, process them, and serve them in supermarkets. We at least honor our prey by allowing it to come to us and by offering it something in return. Now please, Melissa, go back to your daughter. Take her home."

"You justify murder so easily."

"Everyone dies," Greg said. "To enjoy dying, and to give your life in behalf of others, that is noble."

"Those idiots outside don't care about being noble," Melissa said.

Greg shrugged. "Idiots taste the same as noblemen."

"We will have no home without Ted," she said. "We will have to move, live with my parents."

Greg smiled. "Terrific. Let me show you out."

"No!"

Melissa raised her arms and crouched in a fighting stance. "You can either process me with my husband, or I swear to god I will kill you. Your choice."

The alien hesitated, but then clasped his hands together and bowed his head. "As you wish. Please follow me."

He led her through a silvery corridor that opened on a room almost empty except for a reclining chair, a small console with a cable feed that connected to a black helmet, and what resembled a vacuum hose coming out of the floor with a tapered tip. The woman that Melissa had met at the entrance was standing next to the machine holding the helmet in her hands.

"We have another volunteer," the man told her.

"Sir," she said. "Our tanks are full now. We don't need anymore. We have already closed the entrance and the human males are banging on the door to get in."

"Well, this volunteer is a female. Please hook her up."

"Sir?"

The man nodded. The woman blinked, and then motioned to the recliner. "Please," she said to Melissa.

Melissa eased into the chair and waited while the woman fitted the helmet over her head.

"The process is completely painless," the alien woman was saying. "Just relax completely and--"

A whisper hissed and Melissa felt a pinch on her neck.

"Hey," she said. Unconsciousness swallowed her before she could say another word.

***

Melissa opened her eyes in time to see the reflective sliver of the craft in the sky high above her. The aliens disappeared.

It took her a moment to realize that she was lying in the grass beneath where the craft had been. The sluggishness in her body told her that she had been tranquilized and dumped out the bottom of the ship.

A man came to stand over her.

"Thanks a lot," he said.

"Told you that a woman would screw everything up!" another man yelled.

"They… they were full," she tried to say. "They didn't need anymore."

"You just couldn't let us choose for ourselves, could you?"

The man shook his head and walked away from her.

Melissa struggled to prop herself up and look around. The long line of disappointed men had broken up and they were streaming away, followed by the protesters that shouted out how ashamed the men should be.

As the tranquilizer released its hold on her nervous system, Melissa made it to her knees. The place where once had stood an alien spaceship that had been the sight of so much death, protest, ecstasy, and heartache was now a deserted park.

Melissa slumped and rolled onto her back, staring up into the infinite blue mystery of the sky. She heard the sound of soft footsteps rustling through the grass, coming closer. Anna's face appeared over her, staring down through the long strands of blond hair made shiny in the afternoon sun.

"Mommy," she said. "I'm hungry."

THE END

Bio: Mr. Kuban splits his time between three jobs, knocks out some weird fiction, drinks a lot of coffee, and combs the internet for funny pictures which he then plasters all over Facebook. It's the life he dreamed of.

E-mail: J. Cameron Kuban

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