She went to the bathroom and washed her grey skin and looked into the mirror. Her great, black-jewel shaped eyes blinked. I am pretty, aren’t I? The hottest female specimen in Sector 2.3. Why won’t he go out with me?
"He is a mindfragmentor," her mother had said, "What do you expect from him? They are all alike, these dreamers of the golden disk. He mindwrites disk stories for a living. He always has his brain hooked up to an idea machine. He does not care about anyone but himself."
Emily Alien stared up at the blue star Earth and made a wish. "God, make Will love me, make him fall for me," she thought. "I am awfully lonely. There is not much for a girl specimen to do on Prospero but make lifepods and unite with a waysayer. Or maybe mate with one of the humans, but they are so dull and ugly-looking." She could never love a human.
Crying herself to sleep, Emily pulled the chromesheets over her long grey sexless body and cried black tears out of her enormous black eyes, her nostril slits quivered. She was 16 and completely without hope.
"I will never be happy, never!" She wept, Emily cradled her human doll and sobbed into it. Around her neck, a blue orb pulsed and swallowed up her grief. It was collecting memories so that one day she would be able to share them with her grandchildren.
That was the way it went generation after generation. Nothing changed.
Will sat among the sugar lillies and dreamt ideas, pouring them into
his mindware disk. There was nothing he liked better than to dream all day
long. All the ideas were stored and brought back to Idea, Inc. where they
were turned into TV shows and movies which debuted that night or as soon as
possible. No one read printed words anymore; that was too boring. They liked
ideas flicking before their eyes at a rapid rate with no plot or moral lesson.
Will dreamed of writing paper books one day. There was a man whom the humans read whom he found utterly fascinating: William Shakespeare. His language was so dramatic, his stories so powerful--. Here on Prospero ideas were filtered for consumption. Several times he had been put on warning for being "too creative" because his themes were complex social or moral issues.
"Greyskins just want to be entertained, they don’t want to be forced to think—or question their surroundings. Think of how the humans world fell apart. We abducted the last good ones. Have you seen the old films showing how they lived? Like mental incapacitates, they warred with each other for thousands upon thousands of centuries. Chaos was their God. Greyskins like order and monotony, that’s why we are the oldest living race in the universe."
"I understand, sir," Will said, and stepped back into line ashamed of himself for questioning the supreme order.
Who was he to challenge the God of Sensibility?
Prospero was a Utopia above all planets in the universe. When Will thought of all the warring races in the galaxy it made him sad to reflect on all the rampant plagues on other worlds. They were like space junkies looking for a quick emotional fix, living millenium by millenium.
As Will worked, the human Tom came. Tom was naked, according to the custom of the greyskins, whose bodies were grey and smooth and without any gender distinguishing features. The humans had grotesque body hair and the males had dangling floppy sex organs covered by fur. They were indeed strange-looking things, but Will enjoyed the company of this particular human. He was intelligent for his race and frequently mated with many of the greyskins. He enjoyed having mindsex with both male and female greyskins. The only difference between male and female greyskins was that the females were born with hair on their scalps and the males had none.
"How goes the weather?" asked Tom, trying to be casual.
Will took off his headset and said, "To probe or not to probe; that is the question."
"Did you just quote the human writer, Shakespeare?" asked Tom, amazed.
"Slightly mutilated but yes, you know of this man?"
"Yes, they taught us about him on earth school before I was abducted, but that was a long time ago. I barely remember my life on Earth now."
"Was it beautiful there?" asked Will, "I have seen videos."
"Well, it’s like any other place. It has beautiful spots, ugly ones, good people and not-so-good people. It was very flawed and ruined by the tme I was born into it. The people got too ahead of themselves. They weren’t like you and your people. We didn’t have patience."
"I hope you like it here," Will said, "Things are changing, slowly. Human discrimination laws are better; you are not just science experiments anymore. You can vote now, and two humans may actually be able to marry one another someday."
"I hope your culture doesn’t change too much. I actually like it the way it is."
"Change is necessary," Will said, wiping his sweaty slick grey forehead, "Without change we grow bored and die."
"You seem to be a peaceful people. I don’t see why other interdimensional leaders won’t trade with you."
"Some galaxies are afraid that if they strike a deal with us they will be labeled as traitors on their homeworld and some are just afraid to trust anyone who looks different from themselves."
"That’s stupid."
"Ca sera, sera.." said Will.
"You really have been studying human culture!"
"There isn’t much. Most of it is banned and illegal; they say it gives greyskins bad ideas. I love the witticisms of your writers for their grace and subtlety. Even your so-called hate writers: Poe, King, Bradbury. They claim Bradbury invokes alien racism."
"I’m actually sorry to say I didn’t read a lot when I was on Earth. There were too many distractions like TV, movies and video games."
"It is the same with us. A greyskin would not read paper if you put a taser to his cranium."
Tom winced. "I had better get back to work before I get zapped."
"Good day my fleshy friend," said Will and put his helmet back on.
Then a strange and scary idea began to cross his mind. He started to feed his memories of human lit to the computer---lines crossed his mind---
Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
Sarah Conner?
It was the best of times, it was the worse of times---
The man in black travelled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.
---fuck me gently with a chainsaw---
The idea machine began to pump faster and faster until it felt ready to explode.
God------is--------Dead, his mind said and the machine inserted the line into a character of a sitcom during breakfast.
The revolution was about to begin.
He sat in the corner and polished a silverblade.
"And what does this do?"
"You can cut with it," sid the small dirty human boy at his feet.
Mr. Zero giggled, delighting at his reflection in the silverblade.
He went over to the naked human woman chained to the wall.
"Hmmmm. Cut? What is this cutting?"
"You just put the thing against her skin and she’ll bleed."
Mr. Zero opened his black-green eyes wide. He was a rare greenskin to be born with black-green eyes.
He plunged the blade into the woman’s chest.
"You killed her, man, your only supposed to brush it against her skin to show her whose boss."
Mr. Zero wasn’t listening though. He was watching the blood pour down the woman’s chest in a thick, bright red stream.
"Beautiful" he said. "Amazing! Now what does this do?"
"It’s a chainsaw."
"Oh."
"What are you doing?" the boy said, "Stop! Get away from me!"
Mr. Zero giggled.
Emily’s Mom served her red pancakes and pink gerbils for breakfast.
"I am not hungry," Emily said.
"Are you still dreaming about Will the mindwriter? Forget him; he is worthless. There are other fine greyskins out there with handsome large black eyes, oval mouths, and long thin stick legs."
"Oh mother, creator of my loins, please do not give me that speech about the joy of mindsex again. It is Willy I love and I always will and that is final!"
"Fine, waste your lifespan, see if buy you a wedding toaster."
"To Neptune with wedding toasters! What if I want to be a starship captain or a mindwriter myself, there is nothing to stop me!"
"Emily Ann Alien, no progeny of mine will pilot starships or be mind pumped by a sophisticated computer system. Females are not to work male jobs! Why can’t you accept that fate?"
"But you raised me alone by yourself after Dad died in the war."
"That was different, Emily, times were different. A lot of women had to raise children on their own after fathers went away to war and died. Oil was discovered on the moon and everyone had to have it. Humans killed your father, Em," her mother began to sob, "I hate them! Those god-damned, meat-eating human monsters with their warguns, I hate them! They are the arbitors of death, the scum of the universe, animals of annihilation."
"Not all humans are bad."
"Show me a good human and I’ll show you a meat-eater plotting death."
Emily sighed and ended the subject.
That day she ditched school wand went to the garden where the mindwriters thought, and pontificated while machines processed their ideas. She watched the TV all night sometimes imagining which programs were ideas of Wills or lines that he had dreamt up.
"Hello Will," she said and plucked a sugar lily. They were sweet, tasty flowers that you could eat.
"Hi," said Will uncomfortably, "I have a lot of work to do, how important is this on a scale of one to ten?"
Emily pouted, "Why do you do this?! Why are you so mean to me! Why can’t you tell me how you feel?"
"I’m not an emotional being, Emily, we are greyskins. We are not supposed to be emotional. I have nothing to say."
"You are a liar! I know you better than you know yourself, you have a heart and a soul and I know you read human literature in your spare time!"
Will gasped and clamped a hand over her mouth, "Silence! Are you trying to have me killed? You know almost all human literature is illegal except for the useless stuff."
"’Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ ‘Kiss me and give me my sin again..’," Emily said.
"You have read Shakespeare?"
"Yes, I got a bootleg disk at a club. He is delicious! I love him. He is so passionate, so human yet so profound. Why can’t you talk to me like that? Tell me how you feel?"
"Greyskins are a simple people, we don’t talk like that."
"Your not like them," Emily looked out at the field of greyskins wearing headsets, "Your special..you could write paperbooks. They can’t! They would be happy to die standing up in a field having their brains being sucked out by machines."
Will grabbed Emily awkwardly, their bodies were not made for affection. Children were grown in labs or though the mental birthing process. Touch was forbidden, considered icky or too "human".
Will felt spontaneous. He kissed her with his small oval mouth the size of a pencil’s width. Emily shivered as he ran his hands along her grey stick legs. She felt wonderful, it felt wonderful. Like nothing she had ever experienced before.
It was the best moment of her entire life. How could she put it into words?
"Thou art a villian!" she whispered.
"A plague upon both your houses!" he said, but the meaning of the words were lost on them. They were only a symbol of freedom, another life, another way of living that they had never dreamed of.
"Here take this," Will said and smiled at Emily. It was a silver disc bearing the title: ROMEO AND JULIET by William Shakespeare.
"It’s a film, actually it’s three, all remakes of Shakespeare’s play. There are only 3 copies in the known universe. I want you to watch it."
"Thank you, thank you," Emily said, "You don’t know how much this means."
"Shhh," Will said and kissed her again, her large black eyes throbbed with shimmering tears, "Just be careful. If they find that on you, it’s over for both of us. Will see you tomorrow?"
"Yes, yes!" Emily cheered and ran home skipping. She looked like a
mutant grasshopper but she didn’t care. She was in love, she was in love.
She wanted to shout it from the rooftops, she was in love!
She watched the films over and over that night, she fell in love with
the actors. Who was this Claire Danes? Leonardo Decaprio? They were so
passionate, so sweet and perfect for the parts. The older films were
excellent also. One was in grey tones, something she had never
seen before. Why would someone make a film without color? Why would anyone want
to dull the beauty of color, all the wonderful color in the universe?
Emily fell asleep while the disc was playing. In the morning, her
mother walked in and saw it spinning in mid-air while a film played on the
ceiling. She was horrified, she gasped and covered her mouth. It was a human
film with human characters. She watched it for several minutes until disgusted
she called the police.
When Emily woke up, Mr. Zero was standing above her smiling cruelly.
"I have an infinity to wait, my dear, until you tell me the truth---who gave you this disc? Was it this boy your mother mentioned---this Will?"
"No! I told you, it was sold to me by some human on the street. He asked me if I had ever seen an Earth film and I told him no. He gave me the disc in exchange for ten rubles."
Zero threw a mind-dagger at her head.
Emily screamed out.
"Must you hurt her!" Emily’s mother shouted.
"Madam, I’m doing my job," said Mr. Zero coldly and some droids escorted Mrs. Alien out of the room.
"Listen, you holycuntslutfleshbitchhuman-lovingpropagandaperpetuating piece of grey trash! You tell me who gave you the disk and I’ll leave---if not, I would adore to picking apart your mind piece by glorious piece."
"Go to Heaven!" screamed Emily.
"The correct phrase is ‘go to hell’, miss, apparently you aren’t as educated in human literature as I thought. Hell was a place humans believed the damned souls of a moral society would go to when they died. Which is much like our belief in the holy blackstar which takes away those who are disloyal to the government. Is that where you wanna go, Emily? To be sucked into a blackhole?"
"No," Emily cried. "I can’t tell you. He made me promise!"
"Who? This Will? A mindwriter!"
"..yess..."
"Thank you, dear, you just told me, now I’m going to kill him."
"NO!"
Mr. Zero reached into Emily’s mind and squeezed, she blacked out.
He gathered up his droids and left.
Emily’s mother held her daughter in her arms, "What have I done?
What have I done?"
"William Nebuli, you are charged with possession of illegal disks in the first degree. How do you plead?"
"Unguilty, your highness," said Will flatly, his grizzly bear lawyer standing next to him.
A group of squids sat in the jury box and gossiped among one another.
"Well, I think you are lying," said the King Judge, "Mr. Zero has far more evidence against you than you have to defend yourself. I pronounce you guilty. Jury?"
"Qrpztrlml!" they squealed in unison and it was settled.
"Death by memorization!" said King Judge.
Mr. Zero whistled and picked up his suitcase. Will’s grizzly bear lawyer apologized in low growls. Will had been accused, convicted and sentenced to death in three hours time.
"NEXT!" shouted the King, "The case of The Planet vs. Lauryn Squiggle for prostitution of baby squids."
The jury looked at her sympathetically.
Will was scheduled to die the next day and already the memorization
process had begun. Several computers were set up in the room and they would
suck up all his knowledge, memories and thoughts until he was an empty shell.
Then they would use the thoughts for more TV shows and family
movies.
Ironic, he thought, that he would die the same way he lived.
Only last night he had begun the revolution. Dozens of greyskings watched in horror as their favorite sitcom character said, "God is Dead," casually over dinner and the other actors sat momentarily dumbfounded then went on with the ludicrous plotline as usual.
Then on 10 Squids & a Greyskinned Guy, in the middle of a sex scene one squid said to another, "Parting is such sweet sorrow." The programmers were so horrified recognizing the line from human literature that they took the show off the air and put a repeat of When Humans Attack! in it’s place. What made Will so depressed was not the fact that he was gonna die but that Emily had betrayed him. How could she after yesterday when he had professed his undying love to her?
So Will waited half the day to die when a warp portal suddenly appeared in his cell and Tom the Human appeared.
"What’s this?"
"A message from Emily, let it explain itself," said Tom.
Will played the holo-disk, Emily appeared in all her glory.
"My dearest Will," she said. "I am so sorry for all the trouble I have caused you. Mr. Zero manipulated me, please believe me. I would never have betrayed you like that! I love you! Tomorrow before your draining, Tom and I will rescue you and maybe get rid of that nasty Mr. Zero once and for all. Love and kisses, Emily. Oh and here’s another random quote from out favorite human author, Will, ‘I bite my thumb at you, sir. Well, that is all, goodbye."
So Tom left and Will waited for redemption and love but there had to
be a tragedy, there was always a tragedy.
"Are you ready to die?" asked Mr. Zero from the glass.
"Yes," Will said somberly and Mr. Zero smiled.
The machines began to suck him dry. They swallowed all of his thoughts, feelings, emotions, and memories at a rapid rate. He felt the image of kissing Emily yesterday be sucked away, he screamed out.
Oh god, Emily, come soon before it’s too late!
Then the portal opened and Tom was there, naked but for a razorgun. He shot at the machines and they exploded into a dozen small pieces.
Mr. Zero screamed for the guards to open the doors.
"Let’s go darling," said Emily and Will ran to her, just as Mr. Zero sent a minddagger through the glass and right through Will’s mind.
Blood shot out through his nose.
"NOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOO!" Emily screamed.
Will lay on the ground bleeding to death from the head.
"’I am Fortune’s Fool’," he said and then Will died in her arms.
She held his large oversized grey head in her lap and wept, "No! No!"
Tom shouted, "Emily, we need to go now! Now!"
Mr. Zero’s men were lasering through the glass.
"No," Emily said, "Go without me. I am going to stay with Will."
Tom looked at her sadly, through her the razorgun then jumped through the portal. It evaporated in thin air.
Emily wept as giant black thick, syrupy tears fell from her eyelids. She wouldn’t let Will die in vain, she refused it. She used all of her mind and heart and soul and reached into the master computer’s modem. Soon she was in control of the entire world’s TV sets. She broadcasted Will’s death live for them and the image of Mr. Zero killing him. Greyskins across the world cried and wept along with Emily.
"They did this," Emily said live to the cameras, "Our government did it because Will was great and had a voice that he wanted to share with the world. Now he’s dead."
Millions of greyskins watched in shock and screamed, their children watched also and felt their skin break out in chills, somehow they knew this moment was important. Everything was about to change forever.
Emily put the razorgun to her head and shot herself before Mr. Zero could kill her. Her dead body collapsed on top of Wills. She died with a smile on her face.
God is love, was her last thought.
It echoed in the minds of two billion viewers.
Mr. Zero screamed for the technicians to turn off the cameras.
They put on a mindless sitcom but greyskins turned their TVs off and refused to watch. A war was about to begin from the inside.
One thing Emily had never learned from her bootleg copy of Romeo and Juliet was that the best love stories ended in tragedy. Always in tragedy.
i'm a 21yo college student in whittier, california. I am an english major and hope to be a teacher someday. i write out of necessity rather than for hobby, only recently i have begun writing science-fiction.
E-mail: Aliensoul3@aol.com
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