I stood at the picture window of my Golden Triangle penthouse, gazing down at the pathetic nobodies driving on the streets or boating on the Volga River, when my eyes were drawn to an enormous dark form materializing over Saint Petersburg.
By which I mean to impress upon you once again, I, William Griftovich Meritsky, proved my superiority over the rest of you. For I was witness to the very first appearance of the Oocheetselya. I didn’t hear about them on Twitter or Facebook. I watched the first starship emerge from its wormhole in real time.
As you know, I’m one of the five richest people in the world. But you may have forgotten I am only human. Like Jesus, I reached my achievements despite a flawed and imperfect biology. And so my stomach lurched with the same existential dread that you lower classes felt—though, of course, I felt it first. As the sleek black ship, the size of a small city, appeared over the Baltic Sea, I perceived that not only was this an alien species, but they were advanced enough to destroy us in an instant if they chose.
In the low-brow entertainment you common folks deaden your brains with, it’s always sexy girl scientists who discover the alien’s weakness just in time to save humanity. Or the equally sexy male president, who just happens to be a jet pilot, miraculously decapitating the alien command with a few missiles. Such stories looked ludicrous against a real alien invasion.
This unbelievably immense shimmering form glided effortlessly through the sky, taking a position above St. Petersburg. Just before the internet shut down, I confirmed the same thing was occurring over other great cities of the world: Berlin, Hong Kong, Chicago. With my superior intellect, I saw no glimmer of hope.
A panicky din rose from the street, and I shuddered to think of the chaos and mayhem engulfing everyone below--including my cousin, Vanya. And my sister Alksandra. They were probably overwhelmed in a purgatory of panic even now. My phone screen had gone blank, so I went back to the picture window and peered as far as I could in the direction of the Fortress. There were no apocalyptic plumes of smoke rising yet.
If only we’d had more time to prepare. I could have flown to my castle in New Zealand. Maybe invited a few friends. But all the meticulous planning I’d poured into my escape home was for naught. Like the other thirty-seven trillionaires, I was a gold-plated prepper, even down to the gold bullion hidden in the safe room. And now none of it could do me—us—any good.
Meanwhile the spaceship hovered, motionless, above the city. Waiting for something.
The din of street noises had died down. But why? What was going on? Had everyone been hit with poison gas? Had their minds been controlled? At last, curiosity overcame caution, and I stepped out onto my penthouse deck.
“...we come in peace. Do not panic,” a distant voice was saying. “It is pointless to attack us. Citizens of Earth. We are the Oocheetselya. We are here to represent the Most Benevolent Galactic League. We come to help you, not to harm you. We come in peace. Do not panic....”
The voice repeating this was calm and soothing. And also, somehow, right next to my ear. It was probably repeating the same message above Berlin, Hong Kong and so on. I stood, astounded, and a feeling of acceptance finally began to seep into what had been dumb panic. Could it be? Were they really a peaceful race, bent on serving mankind?
That was when the first Air National Guard Sukhoi Su-27s appeared. One of my companies makes their missile guidance, so I poured myself a scotch and hoped for a decisive victory. Below, the masses began to cheer wildly. Except for some of the people directly below the alien ship—they seemed to be screaming in panic. As well they should, because none were going to survive if that monstrous ship was shot down right above them.
“Oh, well, that’s only the South Side,” I reminded myself.
The National Guard jets began to circle around the alien craft, and I realized with a pang that missiles weren’t the first move. They were probably trying to communicate with the aliens. Their efforts didn’t last very long, for a dozen sparkly rainbow beams came out of ports in the side of the alien ship. They caught all our jets in midair, and then slowly lowered them to the ground, extinguishing each of their engines in small, barely audible pops. The aircraft were set down in a neat row on the New Port, their pilots scratching their heads as they took off their helmets and climbed out of the cockpits.
The disembodied voice never stopped chanting its refrain of peace and reassurance.
Next, a squad of gigantic Mig-35s from the Federal Air Force came onto the horizon. But once again, the jets were slowly, carefully lowered—this time onto Highway 3CD, where they were arranged sideways, amid traffic already stopped. As the last of their engines turned off, the only sound left was that alien broadcast, which had never ceased throughout the confrontation: “Do not panic. We come in peace…”
***
The crème de la crème of the world were the first to be invited to meet with the Oocheetselya. My invitation came in the very first week. Of course. I’d been a major donor to most major political parties around the globe for years. And those politicians were obviously out of their depth. They clearly needed the competence and brains of people like me, which was why they got private enterprise involved.
By this point, I’d seen Oocheetsel videos. We now knew what they looked like. They were short—much smaller than us, at only about a meter in height. They wore no clothing or armor of any kind. And they had no visible sexual organs. Their epiderms were a kind of coat of something shimmery and soft, which one might call fur, though it didn’t seem to be made of hair. They looked like large, rainbow-colored plushy hedgehogs, as you surely know also. They had heads, a pair of eyes, and a snout-like opening. Our atmosphere was breathable to them, which is why they didn’t need any special apparatus to breathe. However, they don’t speak through their snouts. Instead, they use some kind of telepathic power.
We were to go into their ship for the first meeting. This was my first tip-off that we were going to be talking to Oocheetselya businessmen and not politicians, because a lopsided meeting place advantage like that would have been a major diplomatic blunder.
We were brought up to the entrance dock of their ship by Air Force Kamovs. I had always thought of the Kamov as a sleek machine, but landing on that otherworldly dock on the Oocheetsel ship, I felt like a Cossack on a horse, riding up to meet the Imperial Russian Army. Apropos, some might say, since as you probably know, I have at least two Cossack ancestors.
We stepped off the helicopter onto a huge platform that seemed to be made of some shiny and black substance, like a polymer. Or maybe black composite stone. The size of a freeway ramp, it stuck out of the ship like a diving board. Where the ramp emerged from the ship, a small huddle of Oocheetselya stood waiting.
They came forward cautiously after the helicopters had departed. A human was with them and came to introduce us. It was Senator Nogudnik, that talentless party hack. I’d only given fifty K in donations to him—that should tell you how little I thought of him.
He and one of the aliens came straight to me. “Bill,” Nogudnik said, “you’ll enjoy getting to know C-Minor.” A greenish-pinkish Oocheetselya walked up and bowed. I glanced at his long sharp claws, decided against a handshake, and bowed back.
Nogudnik said. “They are in the same line of work as you. Technology.”
I turned from Nogudnik to C-Minor with some interest. “Really? Did you come here to Earth for venture capital?” I asked.
The air near my ear began to vibrate, and I could clearly make out the words, “Ha-ha. That’s a funny joke. No, actually we’re here for other ventures.”
Only his mouth never opened. “Don’t mind them,” Nogudnik said. “They don’t talk like we do, but they have a device to project air vibrations.”
“Don’t presume to tell me his technology, Nogudnik,” I said with my sternest voice.
He made a smug little grin and announced, “They aren’t a ‘he,’ they’re a ‘they.’ I’ll leave you two to chat. Get acquainted a little. Just remember, we’re meeting in their main hall in forty minutes.”
Nogudnik introduced other Oocheetselya to the rest of our party, and then we were asked to follow them up the plank and into the ship before the helicopter returned with the next load of Earthlings. After everyone had been brought on board, there was going to be a big meeting. In the meantime, we had less than an hour to make some kind of personal connection with our alien counterpart.
“Would you please follow me to my salon?” C-Minor said, and gestured with one of his—their—limbs toward the opening in the ship.
“Uh… yes, that was what I was going to suggest.” I began feeling a little less of the thrill and honor of being one of the first to meet these things, and wishing I could send one of my bodyguards instead. Still, I was a Meritsky, through and through! I boldly let the little critter lead me into the passageway. Behind us, other Earthlings and their Oocheetsel hosts followed me. Elton Mosk eyed me with fear all over his face. I gave a satisfied snort; if we were going to be eaten, I was going to go before that presumptive nobody—his net worth was only half mine!
The hallway was cylindrical in shape, with even the floor curved. It’s difficult to walk on a curved surface without any sort of carpet. It formed a tube about three meters in diameter, the walls and ceiling lit by spiraling stripes which snaked ahead in a confused jumble. C-Minor led me down the cylinder, apparently perfectly comfortable walking on a curved surface, and stopped after a minute when we got to a door opening into a dank little hole. I took a breath and followed him in.
“Please, have a seat,” C-Minor—or rather, the air next to me—said. I eyed a hard metal platform that looked like a park bench, and the first suspicion that these guys were not really our superiors began to gestate in my head. C-Minor turned to a low cabinet and extracted a few things. When it turned around, it held a bottle of Stolichnaya.
“Picked this up on a reconnaissance mission here a few years ago, C-Minor said. “What do you think?”
“You don’t have any single-malt scotch?” These idiots came to Earth on reconnaissance and factory vodka was the best they could come up with?
“We’re partial to Siberia.” Something like a smile appeared on its snout as it handed me a glass.
“Well… here’s to your health,” I stood up. After we clinked glasses, I brought mine to my lips and then let out a strangled cry of disgust as a gigantic pink tube slid out of its snout and plopped into the glass. It strained and swelled as it absorbed the liquid in the glass. After the pink organ was safely back inside the snout, I downed my drink in one gulp.
“Okay, then,” I muttered.
“You seem to be a bit on edge. Perhaps we should get right to business,” C-Minor said.
“Fine.” I sat forward on my steel plank.
“We have come here to bring some of the most useful technology from our civilization and offer it to yours.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes. We intend to license it to you on a lease-to-own basis. We’ll need some of the best-connected businesspeople from your planet to handle the manufacture and distribution of these items.”
“Like me,” I nodded.
“Precisely. As a member of several industrial concerns on this planet, you are well established to oversee the production effort.”
“I’ll need to see a contract,” I said, literally licking my chops.
“The terms are very simple. We’re giving you this technology, not selling it.”
This confirmed my suspicions about their intelligence.
“That’s what we’ll be talking about in the big meeting. The reason we’ve broken out into these individual groups is to give you an opportunity to get any of your basic questions and concerns answered.” They poured another round of drinks. “Don’t you have anything you’d like to ask me?” they asked after we’d clinked glasses, and I pretended to have another swallow.
“Well, yeah. I guess I do,” I said. “Can we start with when you guys decided to make contact?”
C-Minor’s expressionless hedgehog face stared stupidly for a moment. “To be frank, we hadn’t heard of humans until one of your probes buzzed one of our relay stations. That caused a bit of a stir, I can tell you. We had done a sweep of this side of the galaxy only a few millennia earlier, and we hadn’t seen anything here. Your species has made unheard-of speed in reaching the nanosphere.”
“...the nanosphere?”
“You know. Small-tech. The knowledge required to split atoms and make computers. Most species approach it slowly, as their intelligence evolves. Which requires many eons. But you Earthlings appear to have developed the technology only in the past hundred years.”
“Oh,” I smiled, trying not to appear too patronizing. “Yes, I guess we’re pretty smart, aren’t we?”
“By all means, think of it that way,” C-Minor said. “Though one wonders,” they leaned toward me, “what a species as smart as yours was doing for your first million years.”
There was something in the remark I didn’t like. But then we talked about the Oocheetsel evolution and development of technology, which was apparently tens of millennia in the making. So, they were mere idiots compared to us. They just happened to have better toys.
C-Minor told me of their offspring, who were doing something like ant farming on a distant moon, if I understood them correctly. They were interested to hear of my daughter Blinky, the streaming star of St. Tropez, and my sons Bill Junior and Bohdan, whom everyone’s heard of because they are always in and out of rehab, according to TikTok. C-Minor said nothing, as all of this came spilling out of me, and I was surprised by how much I found myself sharing. But of course, I was probably dazzling them with my fascinating life.
It was time to assemble in the great hall. C-Minor led me out to our seats. The great hall itself was a cavernous room with a small elevated platform in the center, surrounded by concentric rows of benches—more of those damn metal benches. About half were already occupied, and people and Oocheetselya were streaming in from six doors set in the outer wall of the room. The lighting didn’t come from any one source, and a quick experiment with my cupped hands confirmed that the walls, ceiling and floor of the room were all luminous.
“Friends! Delegates!” a voice in the air boomed melodically as C-Minor and I made our way to a seat near the center apparently destined for us. “Welcome to our plenary working session on technology transfer and licensing. My friend Bob here will be discussing some of the first technologies we are sharing. Bob?”
A tall man with a grizzled grey beard inclined his head as he took center stage. I recognized him as Professor Bob Hawley, an American climatologist and pain in the ass to the entire fossil-fuel industry.
“Thanks, Harmony,” he said, and turning to us, asked “Can you all hear me?”
Despite the crowds and the bustle, there was virtually no noise in the room, and we responded affirmatively.
“Good. Now, the first technology we’re going to be discussing involves clean energy. So, I want all of you in the oil and gas industry to pay particular attention…”
The bottom line was that five of my subsidiaries were awarded licensing from the Oocheetselya that week. Within the month, my best factories around the world were re-tooled to begin producing the technological marvels that you and I now take for granted: Protein farms. Telepathic transmitters. Gene correctors. Psyche-brushes. And so on.
That poseur Mosk got the elastomer contract, so he’s the one who cashed in when we abandoned all of our nasty old buildings of concrete and steel—remember living in those? Everyone’s in elastomer sky-yurts and undersea palaces now, all warm and cozy. Of course, I had always lived in a palace. Kind of unfair, really, because I really should have been given a much bigger palace than the rest of you, but apparently the Oocheetsel licensing doesn’t work that way.
Another thing that’s a bust are the solarporters. My company makes them, and we’re richer than ever, but what good does that do me if I can’t go any faster than the rest of you, now? I used to love looking at the hoi polloi tied up in traffic jams as I flew above you in my chauffeured helicopter. But now even some worthless school teacher or farmer can go just as fast as I can. It’s almost like there’s no point in being a trillionaire, any longer.
I also find it risible that the tree-huggers no longer hate me. Oocheetsel technologies have made my companies green! All those years of complaining about how my companies were raping the Earth, but if any of those so-called eggheads had just spent half that effort doing some basic research instead of protesting, then maybe they would have invented para-thermal energy instead of waiting around like a bunch of beggars for the Oocheetselya to give it to us.
One day about a year after the new technologies were being deployed, Millicent Fierst-DuMenda, heiress to the arms and opiate dealer families, called and asked me to lunch. She invited me to meet her in her desert castello, and since her architects had won more medals than mine, I accepted.
“Bill, you know why I called you here, right?” she asked me over tea after we’d put on our hot-tub suits to take a spin over the Gobi desert.
“I’m sure I can figure it out,” I said, floating next to her high above the Tarim river. It was thronging with a fresh new herd of gazelles and ibexes.
“Let me ask you something, then. Aren’t you getting a little tired of the Oocheetselya calling all the shots? Doesn’t it get your goat that we’ve gone from being the Alfa species to the Beta species?”
“Speak for yourself.”
“I dare say you have been so distracted by trying to pass Mosk and Bozos for net worth, you lost sight of something.”
“Actually, the Oocheetsel patents have reduced their profi—”
“Patents! Ha! Don’t make me laugh. They were all just a ploy to conquer us. They’ve lulled us into a sense of security. And they’ve taken over control. They’ve subjugated us!”
“Subjugated? In what way? We’re more autonomous than ever. Look at the powers we now wield! The cancer vaccine. These solarporters—”
“What about Free Will?” she growled. “We’re letting the Oocheetselya upend the social order!”
I had to stop arguing—she was right. I had just been distracted, and didn’t stop to consider what their licensing requirements were doing to the distribution of power. Clearly, we were heading for a flattened social structure with no oligarchs on top. That was when Millicent and I formed Earthlings First.
You might remember that the whole point of Earthlings First was to fight the Oocheetsel plot to subjugate us. Of course, we had to make it look like a grass-roots movement, but that kind of thing is easy—we do it all the time. Then, once we got rid of the aliens, we oligarchs would be free to start charging fair market prices for the Oocheetsel technologies. And start restricting the best stuff just for us—the people who deserved it, instead of giving it away willy-nilly. Earthlings First didn’t telegraph our strategy to our supporters. We didn’t need to—we trusted our base to understand that freedom isn’t free. They were going to have to pay for it.
After we had a bunch of Earthlings First propaganda up and running, I called C-Minor to re-negotiate the licenses.
“Hey, Bill!” C-Minor said. His image was perfectly clear in my mind, as I imagine mine was in his. Hers. Whatever. They looked well. Sitting in their living room, playing with some kind of game on the table. “I know just why you’re calling.”
“How come you were so hard to get a hold of?” I asked. “My chief of staff says she was transferred twenty times before she found you.”
“Oh, I’m back in Oocheet. The last of our spaceships left a few days ago.”
“What? But then… how are we even talking? There should be a transmission lag from our teleponders!”
“I’m not using an Earth-issue teleponder.”
“You mean there are better ones?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Well, why didn’t you share those with us? I thought we had an agreement! My contract says ‘all telephony’!”
“Bill, we never said we’d share everything we know.”
“Like the hyperspace tubes that you’ve been trying to hide?”
C-Minor smiled their weird Oocheetsel smile at me. “Exactly.”
“But wait—if you left, then how are you going to keep us subjugated?”
C-Minor shook its head sadly. “Bill, we don’t do subjugation.”
“But… then…” My mind raced. Was Millicent so wrong about the Alpha and Beta Species thing? “How are you going to enforce the terms in the licensing agreements?”
“The terms were only set in place to keep any one minority from unfairly benefiting from the technology,” C-Minor said. “It’s too late for you to try to roll back on any of that now. So the licensing will be enforcing itself, from here.”
“We’ll see about that,” I snarled, and hung up. Then I rang my neural link. “Siri, call a meeting of the board. Immediately!”
But when the board convened, only eight of the fifty agreed with me that we should fight the licensing to assume patent control.
“What’s the matter with you?” I cried out to them. “Don’t any of you want our privileges back? Don’t you see that by giving this stuff away freely, we’re only serving the ends of those inhuman masters?”
One of the lesser Board Members, Kevin Day, spoke up.
“Begging your pardon, sir, but we’ve been serving inhuman masters for the past ten thousand years. We’ve never been so liberated as now.”
I glared around the room, and the universal nodding of those sponge-heads was a nauseating sight.
***
“Why don’t you at least give us the wormhole?” I said to C-Minor the next time I talked to them. “I get it that you aren’t trying to subjugate us. So, why hold out on the other stuff?”
“Listen, Bill,” C-Minor said in that annoyingly patronizing voice I had come to despise. “Earthlings will get none of the next level powers until they square up on the basics: violence, abuse, bullying… Once those traits are purged from your species, you’ll be allowed out of quarantine.”
“Quarantine!” I slapped my head. It all made sense. “Of course! You Oocheetselya aren’t some kind of galactic warriors, here to conquer us. Or even spaceman trainers, here to domesticate us.”
“No. We’re the galactic front-line workers.”
“You’re here to wipe out us out, like a plague!”
They sighed. “No. We’re only here to disinfect you.”
“Disinfect? From what? We already have the universal vaccine.”
“Yes, I remember. We gave you that vaccine. It’s not that kind of infection. This is a cultural quarantine. For a kind of a… a mental virus, still infecting the Earth.”
“A what? What are you talking about?”
C-Minor sighed in that annoyingly superior way of theirs. “Bill, I fully expect you to be the last person on earth to get this. So I’m not sure why I’m even bothering. But most Earthlings are still suffering from the condition of…” They paused, seemed to be accessing a neural link, and then shook their heads. “None of your languages even have a word for it. But I guess that figures. Let’s call it anti-altruism. Or Inequality-ism. Or, wait, maybe this is it: greedyfuckheadism.”
“Now you’re just calling names.”
“Believe me, this is very real. Here, Bill, let’s try a parable. Suppose you’re walking past a pond, and you see a little human baby drowning in the water. It’s only a meter deep, you could walk in there and save the baby, but it would cost you the expensive shoes and pants you’re wearing. Would you do it?”
“Of course I would save the baby! I’m not a monster.”
“Ok. Now, suppose that baby was in one of your so-called ‘third world’ countries. Dying of a childhood disease whose cure would cost you one tenth of the price of those shoes. Do you send the money?”
I blinked at C-Minor’s image in the monitor. Was this some kind of stupid joke?
Before I could open my mouth, C-Minor interrupted. “Don’t bother to answer. Your response is plain enough. Well, goodbye, Bill. We finished the inoculation. We’ll be back in a few hundred years to check on your condition.”
Charles Joseph Albert is a metallurgist in San Jose for his day job. His poetry and fiction have appeared recently in Caesura, JerryJazz Musician, Short Édition, & Fiction International. His latest poetry collection is “A Feel for the Water” (Dangeray Press, 2022).
https://charles0777.wixsite.com/charlesjosephalbert
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