CRAIG MEDVECKY’S ORIGINAL:
2ND CONTACT
I.
Aliens voyage the cosmos eating microwaves for fuel and food. They live in a dark world, drifting across the void into the inferno—half in darkness half in light. Their jet engines are built right into their bodies. Like fish, they travel horizontally relative to the longest axis of their bodies, and their heads are cocked back like Pez dispensers—round mouths wide, alongside gigantic discoid eyes. The radio beams and microwaves on which they feed are shaped like pasta spirals. To them, nutrition and data are 1 in the same.
They watch us on earth through any 1 of 8 telescopic lenses, each of a different order of magnification. True, their loneliness and voyeurism make many of us a little paranoid, but to them there is nothing wrong with loneliness or voyeurism.
They are watching us from space—a very long long way from here. With 1 lens, their large blue eyes can see the silt running off the island of Madagascar and with another Lake Huron at night: candlelit axilla of our world.
As these creatures unravel their waves of tangles of spindles of hair-fine antennae—their axionic energy enhancers—they hear our tiny voices as light, spoken in rhythmic pulses, dendrite bright in their fiber optic mouths. They feel our words squirm for position and suction onto the pore holes in their dermises, voices that seem to be urging them to sleep, alternately to feed turning their vision from white to black to white, but they must stay awake and float on, following the tentacles of light; they must not sleep, but listen to our magnetic pulse. They come out of nowhere to stand there and watch us. 8 spidery eyes—double panes of glass, long hallways of aluminum—twiggy eyes bulge with sadness, some say fake, and compassion, fake, and innocence, fake, some say.
II.
Dr. José M. Delgado, PhD., suggests that the aliens have “no detectable signs of mental activity at birth”. Like or unlike human beings, “they are born without minds” and require extra-cerebral elements to trigger the genetic endowments of the individual. “I.e.,” he says, “*their babies are not unique*.” They need us as external experiences in order to define themselves against the void of space. Just as the channels and volume of a television set can be adjusted by depressing corresponding nubs of a small telecommand instrument, they learn to sift our microwaves.
Eager New-Contacters here on Winnebago Earth rush to attach Stimo-ceivers for radio transmission and reception of electrical messages to and from the brain. These new devices are marketed under the brand name: Gods’ Radios.
III.
Monkey Daddy, while free in his cage, telemeters the activity of his right and left amygdaloid nuclei to the Voyagers above the facility. Before long Instructions are implanted ‘subcutaneously’ via solid state instrumentation, which requiring no batteries or internal power source, can work indefinitely. Necessary electrical energy and choice of channels are provided with a transdermal coupling using a small coil activated by frequency modulated radio signals. An orphan child-volunteer has been instrumented with 28 neuronic electrodes, a two channel telemetric unit on top of the head, and a three channel radio stimulator around the neck. The child has learned to press a lever to obtain food. Meanwhile, some of the female New-Contacters have shown their natural inclination toward twenty-first century chic by fashioning attractive hats or wigs to conceal their electrical headgear. While confined, many such creative solutions allow them to enjoy the virtually normal life of an outpatient. As an added advantage, the direct brain-machine interface makes operation of TV Guide literally second nature.
Despite such gifts, we remember that the chronicle of human civilization is a story in which every advance is accompanied by equal and opposite increase in the efficiency of a violent corollary, yielding more and better means of self-destruction. Induced narcolepsy is a favorite prank of the alien stimo-ceiver operator.
IV.
One lens, a special viewer, protects and keeps the aliens warm, while they gaze down into our blue-eyed bodies of brain water. Looking over the mountains they can see through the caps of waves—chopping sine waves—the great North Sea a’mist of blue distance, haze, and ozone. The mountains fade just like waves, the Cascades into Pacific bliss. If they could, they’d cover the sea with life rafts. And to those who cannot swim, how unusual the sea must seem, especially if it is the only sea they’ve ever seen.
They hover around our planet with mouths agape, huge eye-dishes, unblinking, in frozen shock (the anthropomorphized opinion of some) digesting our phone calls. Radio stations get dimmer as signal leeches into their cavernous containers never to be heard again. Dimmer more distant, midrange events on the digital spectrum crackle and crunch, sticky static fills them with the stethescopic munches of a termite infested log. As we have said, air-space above phone company offices are a favorite feeding location.
Some say their purpose here is a secret.
The aliens, some say, have crossed the ocean of space. But how can they be so dumb? With expressions of horror, becoming heart-sick at the glory of human evolution, becoming the horror of unbecoming. With dumstruck glances, false actions, silly mistakes, they move like the humming birds of space, pointing their heads on axes, silly and go, with no visible propulsion. Finally getting tired, the nerve-wracking, sweat-sludging labor—some say they can’t take it anymore—they crash.
When the aliens die, they fall from the sky like sticks, bouncing Pez-headed, armless, legless, a’tumble, end over end, hard and dead as cicada shells. The debris rains down as their great bodies are plucked from the sky one by one. Through a veil of cloud, a smoky film descends. Like paratroopers or snowflakes they fall: beautiful, icy, wet and gone forever. Of all that falls, they are most graceful.
Oh, how they fall when they die, like buildings from the sky. Hitched like wires snapping around one axis, they jerk, then dangle, then drop. Sudden sparks snap from the nylon guy wires in the attic—_ex-machina_—from heaven. They plink and drop: 1, 2, 3. Like ornaments falling from a Christmas tree. Slowly, and then of course with more speed, 50 meters square of the inverse of the distance to Spaceship Earth. These towering objects head for San Francsico Bay to die. Right out by the Presidio, right toward George Lucas’ new multi-billion dollar animation studio. From deep in the bunkers of Fort Funston their deaths put Daly City on the map forever. The rain of bodies, like cigarettes from an ashtray, will they be evermore? Never a sign that they were alive in space. Alive or merely dislodged? From the sky, they fall. Somehow.
In some New-Contacters, this sudden loss of stimulation in the temporal lobe produces the perception of music. In others, a kaleidoscopic synaesthsia of color and light. Occasionally these alien death tunes or death images can be hummed or otherwise reproduced by the subjects. The sound/colors do not seem to be recollections of the aliens but resemble a more closely actual experiences in which the instruments or patterns must have existed. We must remember the only way to be in touch with external reality is by transducing physical and chemical sequences at the sensory receptor level. The brain is not in touch with experiential reality but with a symbolic code transmitted by neuronal pathways. All the machines we build are copies of some part of ourselves. Self-destruction is the process by which we go back to the drawing board and redesign what are we preparing for. What fulfillment when we insert the plug in the last sliver of liquid crystal and control a human brain!
V.
The aliens are gone now. After the last one crashed, quite some time elapsed before we were able to get reception. I feel like a shade myself hovering in the smoky background with only a memory of a city that used to exist, of a person that used to live. Before all this happened I was an idiot carrying around my feelings on a sign. Now I am so tired, busy just cutting wood and keeping warm. White chemical smoke dissipates from the storm drains and manholes. Human beings live in fear of collapsing ceilings in hovels where water trickles down the cracks in the wall. Plaster matter settles on everything. My flat is so dusty, gaping, too desolate even for an arachnid. There’s nothing left to remind us of the past, nor any instructions for the present. When they closed their eyes, all they saw was torn into unmendable pieces. Tear the world like paper, and the sounds would be so satisfying.
All the time the horrendous smell of the tide. The water is full of their bodies drifted over and by now half rotten from Cuba. Skeleton spines and rib cages and empty-socketed heads wash up. The night horizon doesn’t just fade away. There are silent straight lines out there, a geometry. There’s an end. It’s a bright line of lights; of course there’s a black hole in the middle which is the mouth of the Thames leaning on London, the Channel lapping France. Everything is connected by the breeze that comes thick off the ocean, carrying sounds of waves booming in the deep North Sea.
When no one’s looking, I examine the corpses, if that is what they are to be called. I carry around the fragments of their burned out husks—make art—wait for their ghosts to return, to step into the broken silhouettes they cast upon the wall.
VI.
The individual may think that the most important fact of reality is his own existence; however the feedback loop of reason and experience is the means by which we modify our behavior and self-direct our careering course through space. This existential flow cannot occur without a continual and a priori flowing in of electrical stimuli, made not by the efforts of one man or even a hundred, but millions, most of them dead, but accumulated through the avatars of thousands of years graciously given us by the coincidence of resemblance that human blood shares with sea water.
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THE REMIX:
THE LONG AGO HUMMINGBIRDS OF THE LAGOON
I.
The alligators are gone now. Never gone: the horrendous smell of the tide. The water is full of their bodies, half rotten and drifted over from Cuba. Skeleton spines and rib cages and empty-socketed heads wash up. Everything is connected by the breeze that comes thick off the ocean, carrying sounds of waves booming in the deep North Sea.
When no one’s looking, I examine the corpses, if that is what they are to be called. I carry around the fragments of their husks—make art—wait for their ghosts to return, to step into the broken silhouettes they cast upon the wall.
II.
They live in a dark world, drifting across the void into the inferno—half in darkness half in light. Like fish, they travel horizontally, their heads cocked back like Pez dispensers—their razor’d mouths wide. Their yellow eyes.
They watch us in our towns. True, their loneliness and voyeurism make many of us a little paranoid, but to them there is nothing wrong with loneliness or voyeurism.
They watch us from their lagoons—a very long long way from here. Their yellow eyes witness the silt running off the island of Madagascar and with another Lake Huron at night: moonlit apparitions of our world.
They hear our tiny voices as memories of a world they have long known and devoured, of a civilization they have been.
III.
Dr. José M. Delgado, PhD., suggests alligators have “no detectable signs of mental activity at birth”. Like or unlike human beings, “they are born without minds” and require extra-cerebral elements to trigger the genetic endowments of the individual. “I.e.,” he says, “their babies are not unique.” They need us as external experiences in order to define themselves against the void of the lagoon.
Others insist they have heard the “articulations” of alligators through the leather of newly laid eggs. These insist the mind of the alligator is never newly formed, but crafted a “billion billion” years before.
IV.
The alligators, with expressions of horror, became heart-sick at the glory of human evolution, became the horror of unbecoming—
When the alligators die, they float with their bellies up, the leather homes of otters, of eagles, of squirrels. Their great bodies are plucked free of meat and bone and when the leather is punctured, the ancient structure entire descends. Like paratroopers or snowflakes they fall: beautiful, icy, wet and gone forever. Of all that falls, they are most graceful.
Oh, how they fall when they die, like buildings from the sky. Plunging ever into the green-black abyss.
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Remixer’s process: In keeping with the original goals of the project, I liked the idea of seeing how much text I had to remove or change from a Craig Medvecky “sci-fi” story to transform it into a Robert Kloss “alligator” story. When the decision came between substantially altering sections or removing them I always chose to remove. Changes in the language were always minimal (injecting “alligators” or transforming the void of space into a “pond”) as I wanted to keep as much of the original intact as possible.