Copyright Steve Merrick 2012

THE FAULTY ALIEN

BY

STEVE MERRICK

The universe is just like old Sherlock Holmes and hides all of its goodies in plain sight. Its like a riddle in a puzzle that is reflected in a mirror, all of it is in front of you but figuring out the extensive and minute complexities can drive a guy quite mad. I guess these words are all about insanity, but although I am writing them I am not the subject of this story. You are. The whole species of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Yes you are quite insane but then again so is any other organic or inorganic life form I have ever encountered. That’s if I exist at all, and even though I cannot satisfactorily prove to myself that I am typing these words, well that’s just another elongated cosmic puzzle to play with isn’t it. I won’t start at the beginning though, I will just tell you about the first day of this unexpected journey.

Death stalks all of us by default, even a rock will be eroded into non existence over a very long period of time. It started for me when I died. My legs were twitching and my whole body failed, I remember the muted light in that oriental hospital, and my eyes locked onto a nurse in another room calmly sucking on a Marlboro as I left this existence behind. Her blood red lip stick was cemented like glue to the filters of discarded cigarettes in an ashtray next to her, but the smoke she exhaled was what got to me, it was so reflective of our limited life spans, whisping web like through that softened light much like my last conscious thoughts. I would like to have enlightened you with something mind blowing, but I was thinking about my broken Snoopy watch as I lost my life that evening. I liked the watch it had been a present from a GI, It was on the floor of the crash room with a smashed face, like me it wasn’t going to be ticking anymore. I was a spectator to my own death and very much aware of the rhythms of the emergency team around me, back then we didn’t have the beep beep machinery, it was all very primitive, hell I was only eight, I hadn’t even seen it coming. It had been explosively beautiful, The bomb had done what it was designed to do, and I flew slowly through the air, watching light expand and contract in that ocean of broken glass. It was a tidal wave of energies and my small frame had been plucked up and thrown with a massive force by that maelstrom of household goods that became shrapnel. So I lay there, and died.

I hadn’t anticipated that river of dimensionless time, it engulfed what was left of my mind, dying is a bit of a shunt to your consciousness. It is not what you expect, irrelevance never is, yet in that space of time as you switch off from breathing is a moment. How it is expressed is up to the individual but there in that small space inside of you is a truth. Nothing you have done really matters, unless it has made you happier. None of it is important anymore, life hinges on the tomorrows and the ideas, death is the end of all of them. I said one word before leaving it all. “Thank You.” Eight years is a long time subjectively, I had seen a lot and knew that that short span was all mine. Good and bad as it had been, it belonged to me. Wow was the last coherent thought I had. It was then that I felt it entering me. Something alien, different, not me.

It was disorientating enough to be passing away without some gibbering quantum life form babbling away in your head at the same time. It had been exploring the quantum foam that surrounds the real world (?) that we inhabit. It had no name but it was an explorer of kinds, a sort of microscopic sub atomic scientist. A probe created by a distant alien race, and I suddenly had my head full of information. I wasn’t even frightened, it wanted to hitch a lift and study our species and then told me I was not going to die. It wasn’t as big a relief as you may think, I had accepted it and now knew there was going to be a longer spell on planet Earth for me. Yet for all of that I had perversely learned more in those dead micro seconds than at any other time in my life. I will tell you how it all works, not that you will fully comprehend it but because I am feeling mischievous.

Imagine a tennis ball, hold it in your hands, now the little ball is not everything it’s just a bouncy toy. Your hand links the ball to the greater potential. The reality that we inhabit is the same. Its measurable in just two units, the relativistic is like a massive elephant and the quantum is like a tiny weeny mouse. Squeak if you feel the need to. Look at an upside down triangle and you have as good an idea of the inter connectivity between the two, energies transfer back and forth, powering the whole thing. My new friend had been created to travel the smallest measurable region of our space, its called the quantum foam. It contains the largest of storms imaginable, and it is utterly unnavigable, micro wormholes open and close in an infinite and random process, it is also where time ceases to perform with too much coherence. That is before you take on board the tears within the whole structure. So my complex sub atomic friend was one of millions launched into the microcosm of our universe. His creators had realised the many impracticalities of normal space time, if I put it to you simply, where’s the fun in one thousand years of inter galactic travel, especially when you realise that they lived shorter life spans than we do. In fact their solution was the simplest possible, none of which helped me because I was dying and my questions were interrupted by an over eager doctors defibrillator unit.

The man looked completely shocked as I sat up clutching my chest, then I looked at him and asked. “What’s Occam’s Razor?” I slipped back down and fell into a fit full sleep. Everything hurt, I was drugged and slept for four days, somehow my body survived. My new alien regulated many of my functions and speeded up my healing process’s. It was about day four that it dawned on me and everybody in the ward that I was deaf, my Doctor was talking to me and I smiled because his mouth moved but there was no sounds coming from it. It was really funny to see, but he started writing little notes and I replied on one, “Fine apart from having an alien in my head.” He wrote back, “Its the concussion but just call him Harvey it works for all imaginary fwiends.” and I said. “w= t/4MG”he said. “HUH?” to which I replied. “Its a Rindler spatial equation for dimensionless time at the event horizon of a black hole. I thought everybody knew that?” For some reason I didn’t see much of him after that exchange.

Adults are weirder than a black hole at a party, I told them all that I had an alien called Harvey in my head and it was politely ignored, the only two people that believed me were Harvey and Nguyen and he was ten years old. It was the beginning of our long journey together, I was the eyes and he was the brains in a way, yet it is a collaborative relationship that was happily going strong until yesterday. You see I worked out that life on Earth will cease at 12.45pm on April the 23^rd 2021. In ten years time its all over, for me and Harvey and you. I have a plan to save the planet but nobody is listening to me, so I will have to go it alone.