THE GUARDS ARE TALKING BACKWARDS

                Getting up there was easy. The UN had pooled resources to send a mission up to the vessel; we didn’t have a name it then, but a lot of folks in the Army were just calling it the Craft. Capital C—not ‘a’ craft, THE Craft. Real dramatic, those army boys.

                They came with me, Patterson and Trace—we were Contact Team Nine. Eight had gone inside, none had come out. Around this time, the UN -consul general finally admitted it was time to arm their “diplomats.” Took them too long, if you ask me. A twenty-mile-wide, alien craft hovering over New Jersey, and the welcome party didn’t bring any weapons? My brother is a hostage negotiator for the police, and he told me something: if you want something, manners are important, but a gun is easier—long as they don’t see it coming.

                We jumped up into orbit, on these sweet-ass space planes… retrofitted shuttle paneling, horizontal takeoff, the works. They were made for ferrying rich tourists to space. They were a little beat up from the first eight teams, but they were our only ride.

                Inside, time seemed to stretch… It’s still stretching. I’ve been experiencing events backward for some time now. You can’t see it, but that’s what I’m doing. Every moment and event begins with its own results, then folds backward into previous events… and that shape folds into itself, and on and on and on, without ever getting any smaller. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Who told me that?

                They told me.

                Not in so many words, of course. But I want you to understand it’s important for you to know I am experiencing all of this in rewind—did I say this already? My lips are flapping as they sound out a word that makes no logic to me, that my backwards mind cannot accept because every neuron is twisted inside out, retracing its own pathways. No, I wouldn’t call it strange.

                Together, we exited the space plane. It was damn dangerous: even though we were in low orbit next to the Craft, they didn’t give us an airlock to get into the thing. No. We were pushed from the opened hatch of the plane into a smooth, round hole in the rock of its side. We knew it was made of rock: that much was evident from the pits and crags on its surface. But how does a rock hover 20 miles over New Jersey, unmoving, for thirty days? Based on the imaging we’ve obtained from sonar, we knew the thing is hollow. It was understood prior to… prior to… God, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? We are fifty-three days before the day I’m talking about, the day we went in, but in the wrong direction. It’s all folded to me, the memories bunched into a sleeve… gotta work my way through the creases. Fifty-three days ago we made a solemn vow not to hurt anything we found inside. They got me in on this pact, even though I didn’t agree. Even though I thought it was a pussy to do. The last eight teams hadn’t made it out for a reason, and here these goddamn fools were promising to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. Well, I wasn’t drinking the Kool-Aid.

                We were heavily armed. We were supposed to defend ourselves, if push came to shove. They’re showing me my childhood, ever since that moment: Autumn leaves crunching dry-crisp beneath our feet. The backyard. The air is chilly and me, my sister and I, are jumping… in…

                The sun hung low-slung and deep-set, those days. In the days of apple cider and cinnamon shaved fresh all over glazed buns. The smell of molasses from the barn. It’s food I remember most, and I guess it makes sense. It’s the only thing I’m allowed to savor, from those days. Everyone is gone.

                The inside was smooth and curved up towards a green light. We approached it… we didn’t know what else to do. We were drawn to it, like deep-sea fish glimpsing an angler for the first time. We each wanted to be the big kahuna, the first one to talk to an alien species…

They aren’t better than us. They make mistakes. We went through, and to each of us the ecosystem inside was something different—superseded over our own perceptions and filters of reality. Our histories, laid out for us, woven from our own minds.

                You’ve been calling them “creatures,” the things that made the Craft. You would be wrong; they aren’t alive, not in the way we know. They are sentient light, beings made of frozen photons running through a certain type of ice, which naturally forms in cubist structures on their planet. Ha! I’m kidding. Just kidding. Sentient ice! Ha, the look on your face, you really believed me! I’m not telling you shit, you government goon. You put us in there. You did this to our minds!

                I’m sorry, have we met before?

                Alive… yes, they are alive. Alive and full of love. And rage. And confusion. They are the essence of thought, distilled and zipping around on air currents. They’re also astronomically large worms, each one as long as a solar system. They are anything that has ever evolved, in this galaxy: they have moved past us on a quantum level, they are entangled with everything. Everything! From the day you were born, they knew your name. “Even before I shaped you in the womb, I knew you.”

Dimensions lie in layers over them, baked into their tissue, their limbs. They are so far from us that we may as well be atoms under their microscopes. And yet, they love us.

                I knew we had to bomb the thing.

My wife? She had divorced me the month before I left the Revivalist movement in New York. The good brothers and sisters thought the Craft was Jesus, was His chariot come to deliver Him. Like a pizza! Ridiculous. We had a “disagreement,” and if I’m being honest, I knew it would come down like that. That damn cult split me from my wife. I needed to prove she was wrong about it… about the Craft being divine. You can’t kill God, right? He’s eternal. I wanted to test that theory. Why do you think I worked so hard—wormed my way into security detail? I killed one man—just one. He knew my secret, and I wasn’t having it.

No, Maria, the dishes are in the sink.

               

These things… see, they aren’t eternal. They aren’t immortal. They are the past, the instant flash-bang of a species’ final steps away from the one from before it, and before it, and before it. They are less than an instant of life. Their life-span ticks off in attoseconds.

                They showed me the technology that made them like this: they showed how to see inside a star, how to watch the sub-atomic dance unfold. They taught me that every single second happens at the same time, every moment of every world. They showed me things my mind could not have grasped if given a lifetime to contemplate the reaches of my irrelevance.

                Sir, I don’t reckon good human beings need to see things like that.

                Our power is in our brevity. Our short lives, our limited hands and limbs and eyes are what define us—what make us the clever, original, cunning and dangerous apes that we are. If we were handed this gift, this Pandora’s box, we would have lost ourselves. Any hope of identity would have disappeared—one human mind, one human spirit. One human moment spread across countless millennia, with no frame of reference for what is heroic, or evil, or the meaning of kindness. Kindness requires a physical shape.

                Kindness requires a soul.

                So yes, I killed it. A week inside the Craft, and then I blew it to pulp. You can blame me, call me a lunatic. You can say I sabotaged our only attempt at contact with another species.

                But I stand by what I did. Those idiots on my team stood around slack-jawed in the billowing infinity, consumed in the light of orgasmic comprehension. Transported by it. No different than the religious sheep my wife is following: the light made them blind. Stupid. We can’t worship these things; we simply can’t afford to. We didn’t evolve to interact with them: the human mind can’t survive it.

                I see. You want to know why they came? Why they taunt us with their presence, if we can’t talk to them in ways that don’t turn our minds to soup?

                I think it’s because one of us… one of our future versions… the Earth that could be, that Earth is ready for them, because it is so much like them, a brilliant mesh of infinite possibilities not held back by doubt or fear… And they are forever seeking Earths like this, and destroying the rest by contact with them. No, I can’t prove this. You can’t prove a feeling.

                You think you can contain the fragments… But they are loose now, no longer bound into one concept, one idea. And the human mind loves ideas: ideas are like candy, rotting your head to a husk if you have enough of them.

We are so lucky. Where am I? They will change us all for the better—no, be quiet, shut up!! They will change us all, each diaper-shitting child and crumbling adult, each schizophrenic and depressive and obsessive, they will mold us into the infinite forms beyond this single, dry, turd-reality. We are the chosen ones. We are nothing, we are everyone.

               

I stand by what’s done. Maybe, if I’d left them in the Craft… if I hadn’t scattered their ur-flesh all over the landscape. But I stand by what’s done. It’s all you can do, right? You have to stick to your guns, in time of crisis. God help us.

My mother says it’s time to get up. I never kissed that girl behind the quad—no, no way. Not her, Dad. It’s my fault, I burned the bread. Where’s my scar? I used to have a scar… The guards are talking backwards. You might want to hear what the guards have to say. The guards are talking backwards.

               

I bet you’ll find them quite illuminated.