Undermind: Nine Stories (16 page)

He saw the young blonde woman closing the rear
passenger door on the driver’s side of the car she and her daughter
had been approaching, and then she quickly opened the driver’s
door.

Daniel turned off his headlights and came to a
stop. The woman was startled and turned around, fearing that the
young attacker had returned to inflict more harm upon her and her
daughter.

“Please, don’t!” she exclaimed as Daniel quickly
rounded the front of his truck and ran toward her. She backed up
against the passenger door and held out her hands in front of her
as if to ward off this Halloween evil and protect her hurt and
scared little girl in the backseat. Daniel approached the still
open driver’s door and tossed the bag of candy onto the passenger
seat.

He wished he could say or do something to help
them, but he knew there was nothing he could do. Besides, he had
just committed a violent crime and it was stupid of him to have
stopped and returned the stolen candy to the little girl.

He ran back around his truck, got in and took
off, leaving his headlights off until he rounded the corner, hoping
that his license plate numbers were not too visible. As he drove
away, he was eventually able to unclench his jaw and his breathing
slowed to a normal rate. Still later, his adrenaline wore off and
his hands stopped trembling. And when he thought about it late,
late that night, lying in bed, he felt good about what he had done.
He felt really good.

That Halloween was the first time.

###

Have you ever noticed how sometimes just
before your life changes in a really big way, you kinda sense a
change coming, but you don’t know what it’s going to be exactly?
It’s almost like there’s a hint of something in the air, but it’s
not really in the air. It’s something you can feel, but you don’t
know how. At least that’s the way it is with me, so I’m guessing
other people might experience it too.

Sometimes I feel it in the weeks before I’m
about to lose a job, or shortly before the end of long-term
relationship but at a time when everything seems to be going just
fine. I feel like something, somewhere behind the scenes has
changed, like in a copy of our universe where the designing takes
place, but the effect hasn’t reached our world yet. It’s as if a
grand architect made a decision and now it’s just a matter of time
until the execution takes place.

And since the change is inevitable and it’s
going to happen no matter what, it’s like there’s a ripple that
moves through the ether and you can sense the pending change. Or
maybe it’s just people who are sensitive to that sort of thing -
whatever it is.

I don’t know really, but the thing is – I didn’t
sense any upcoming change in the weeks or days before the aliens
came and
everything
changed.

I really shouldn’t be referring to them as
aliens though. The word is actually banned. The Guardians, as they
prefer us to call them, say it causes division. They’re really
smart about a lot of things, but I wonder how they can be concerned
about the possibility of problems arising between us and them over
a mere word, but they don’t seem to care about everything else
they’ve done that divides us - like banning words for example. I
don’t know about other countries, but in America, we’re used to
being free. Well, we were anyway.

They also say that we shouldn’t refer to them as
aliens because they claim they aren’t aliens, and that they lived
on earth long before we did. They even offered proof. They showed
us some of mankind’s oldest hieroglyphics and drawings of
spacecraft and cosmonauts and then compared them to images of their
ancient pilots and ships.

They also pointed out where they’re mentioned in
our Bible and demonstrated how easy it was for them to build the
pyramids, the heads at Easter Island, and explained other things
we’ve never understood like the Nazca lines and stuff like that.
 But that doesn’t change the fact that when they arrived, all
we saw were alien space ships coming down from the sky. You can’t
just order people to not think the way they do or to not have the
feelings they have.

I think they know that though, so what they do
is make changes that result in us thinking and feeling differently.
 Like using buildings for their operations centers instead of
their ships that they used when they first came. And wearing suits,
which is kinda funny. I mean, sure, they already look a lot like
us, and wearing suits and ties kinda makes them look like typical
office workers – except for the fact that the shortest among them
is eight feet tall. But you can tell they’re trying. When you see
them walking down the street or in restaurants sitting in
custom-made, oversized booths, they’ll be doing things like walking
Great Danes or reading  newspapers.

As for our freedom, or lack of it really, they
say we’re not responsible enough to govern ourselves and that if we
were, they wouldn’t have come and taken over. So for now, we’re not
exactly living like slaves, but we live under a lot of
restrictions. In some ways, nothing is like it was before, but in
other ways, everything is like it always was, but better. I know
that sounds confusing, and it sounds like what they’ve done hasn’t
been bad for humanity.  I mean, why am I complaining if
everything is better, right?

Everybody who is able to work has a job now, if
they want one. There is always something that needs to be done, so
there’s no shortage of work. Just retrofitting houses and buildings
with their energy efficient technology will take decades. And
speaking of energy, we’re still in the process of replacing the
entire electrical infrastructure, and that’s a enormous job.

No one is forced to work, but if they choose not
to, they are only provided with the bare minimum essentials for
sustaining life. And I mean seriously bare minimum. When they told
people that they were free to work or not work and either way
they’d be provided for, a lot of people didn’t want to work and
they celebrated. They thought life was going to be a party.

As it turned out, a lot of people who had never
worked before suddenly changed their minds and developed a work
ethic. Instead of food stamps, cash and free housing of their
choice, non-workers get a “nutritious and edible substance in
sufficient quantity to satisfy their biological needs.” I’m not
kidding. They don’t even use the word “food” anywhere in the
description.

The housing, if you want to call it that, was
just as dismal. All of the “non-producers” were relocated to areas
far from the cities where the Guardians built large structures to
serve as living quarters. I’ve never been in the military, but I’ve
seen barracks in movies and these places were much worse. Rows and
rows of cots separated by some kind of partition to make separate
living quarters and a few wooden chairs in each partitioned
area.

No televisions or radios were allowed or
provided. The only activities for people living in the residential
centers were either sleeping or learning in the education pods, or
I suppose, they could twiddle their thumbs or stare at things. If
they didn’t want to work or live in the residential center, they
could choose to be exiled to a non-inhabited location of their
choice. The point was that almost nothing would be given to anyone
who was capable of providing for themselves but chose not to. So if
they wanted to rough it in the Amazon or the Sahara, they could. It
only took a few months before the residential centers emptied
out.

In the beginning, no one at all had television.
They announced their presence over every type of electronic
communication available; TVs, radios, computers and cell phones.
Then when they released their control over most of those devices,
they didn’t give back television and said it would be a while
before we would be allowed that privilege. A lot of people were
outraged at that and riots broke out. But the rioting only lasted
about two minutes before people began falling to their knees and
vomiting. Some people passed out. A few in every crowd died.

I looked out my window and it was like seeing a
non-violent massacre taking place. People were dropping to the
ground and rolling around covering their ears, but I couldn’t hear
a thing. Bodies littered the street until whatever it was stopped
and people slowly got back up looking sick and dazed. No one knows
what the Guardians did, but there hasn’t been another riot since
that day.

One rioter I talked to said he’d rather die than
feel that sick ever again. People are still not happy about missing
their movies, sports, game shows, soap operas, and reality TV,
etc., but they’re doing what’s expected of them. They’re probably
only doing it for the promise that everything will be returned once
the education is complete. The Guardians know this is a forced
compliance, but they probably figure that people will learn despite
themselves.

 One of the greatest benefits we’ve had
since their arrival is that anyone who needs medical treatment gets
it immediately.  And they’ve cured most of the diseases that
our doctors and researchers weren’t even close to understanding.
There’s no more cancer or AIDS or several other previously
incurable diseases that I’d never even heard of before. We’re
supposed to live nearly twice as long as we did before.

People often complained in the past that the
earth’s population was too much for the planet to sustain, and with
our previously over-crowded cities and the fact that seven billion
people live on the planet, I always assumed they were probably
right. But the Guardians said that we only use a small fraction of
our land mass and that our real problem is that we’re overly
condensed and we try to support too many people in too few
locations. So they started an expansion project, building new
cities and spreading out the population.

They explained that having people live in
smaller communities instead of metropolis sized cities enhances the
quality of life for everyone and reduces crime and antisocial
behavior. In a big city, everyone is anonymous and doesn’t fear
committing a crime against the strangers they live amongst. But in
a smaller town, everyone is at least familiar with everyone else
and they’d know for example if one of the residents robbed the
pharmacy or raped someone.

Another thing that’s really cool is that there
are more artists now than ever before. If you have real talent, or
even potential talent, then that becomes your job with full
training and education – at no cost. But even though you might call
that “subsidized art” it’s not like people are putting a crucifix
in a jar of urine and calling it art. I’m talking about real
amazing paintings and music and sculptures and new forms of art we
never had before. I can spend an entire day in an Art Centre and
not even notice the time passing.

When you go outside now everything looks
fantastic.  It’s like our cities are brand new with fresh
paint everywhere and no broken down or abandoned buildings. There’s
no graffiti on buildings or signs. Trash doesn’t blow down the
streets or accumulate in the gutters like it used to. Everywhere
you go there are trees and flowers and streams and ponds and birds
and animals.  And fruit grows everywhere. If you get hungry
while you’re walking down the street, you can always grab fresh
fruit right off a nearby tree.

The fact that we had people around the world
dying of starvation is one of the things that made them very angry
with us. They said food grows naturally, but instead of planting
seeds everywhere that food could grow, we constantly reduced and
consolidated the number of food producers while always increasing
the number of consumers. And because of our greed and self-centered
way of living, in our country we literally threw away tons of good
food every day that no one purchased, while others would forage in
garbage bins outside of restaurants to stay alive.

Crime is practically non-existent.  The way
they eliminated crime from our cities is a perfect example of how
they didn’t change us directly, but they caused us to become
different by altering other things that affected us. They told us
that personal crime and national crime were among the primary
reasons why they came here. They were disgusted by how we treated
each other. They called us “functionally insane.” They said we not
only failed to come up with solutions that should’ve been obvious
to a child of average intelligence, but even worse, we failed to
adopt solutions that our few wise ancestors gave to us long
ago.

As far as violent crimes against people go, you
could say they have a zero-tolerance policy. And it’s not like the
stupid version we had before they came. They don’t arrest children
for bringing plastic soldiers to school because the soldier has a
tiny, plastic gun, for example. In our pretense at “doing
something” about crime, we’d arrest harmless children with harmless
toys as if they were dangerous criminals, which did nothing but
demonstrate what awful role models we were and did nothing to solve
real problems.

At the same time we turned homicidal maniacs
loose upon society after they “served their time,” knowing they’d
kill and maim again.

They say we are like blind, greedy children,
only worse, because children don’t typically act with such
calculated stupidity. They said solving crime and making people
safe from criminals was an easy task that we never even tried to
accomplish. Then they proved it.  The first thing they did
about crime was abolish all of our laws. Sounds crazy, I know. But
they said that everyone already knows right from wrong and so our
laws were nothing more than a complicated bureaucracy to determine
how much punishment a criminal should get while maintaining an
illusion of justice.

The new system would be easily remembered by
everyone. The punishment for violent crimes against other people
was death. And they meant sudden death. Not years of languishing in
a prison at taxpayer expense while teams of lawyers worked on
over-turning the sentence of a guilty person on either a
technicality, or by confusing a jury.