Once Upon A Little Blue Planet

Once upon a little blue-green planet, a horde of ninja aliens started with my toes. One by one they were snipped off with some strange looking bolt cutters. These aliens were nice enough to let me regain consciousness between amputations. As soon as the lights came back on, I would lose another appendage. There was blood everywhere. Without gravity the spurting blood would spray in every direction. Some on the walls, on the floor, on the ceiling, on the aliens, and some even sprayed me in the face. There is something eerie and surreal about getting sprayed with your own blood. The problem was that there was less and less blood inside of me. I begged them, “Please, just put me out of my misery!” Apparently, they understood English perfectly well, but they did a poor job at speaking it. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they kept right on going. Toes, fingers, feet, hands, other stuff, one thing after another I was not only losing body parts, and my sanity. After being angry, after that I was also losing my will to live.

Seven years earlier, I was teaching in an expensive private school in the suburbs of Massachusetts. The school was small, with only a hundred students, but it seemed as though there were a lot more than that. It was an intense place to work since there were so many students with such extreme challenges. I hadn’t paid much attention of the diagnosis of this one particular student at the time. He wasn’t as aggressive, or as large as the other students. I was informed that he suffered from schizophrenia, it wasn’t until it was too late that I found out that the diagnosis couldn’t have been any more off than it was. Kyle wasn’t hallucinating, he just knew more than the rest of us.

Kyle’s institutionalization made sense at the time. A person that has violent tendencies and hallucinates may require some specialized attention. Unbeknownst to us, this was the beginning of the end for us Earth dwellers. It seemed like a harmless decision, but our arrogance as professionals and experts was our downfall, we actually believed to have some authority over another life form. For too many years did we decide the fate of others, hiding behind laws and excuses to make us feel a little safer by incarcerating those that were “different.” It is ironic that in order to feel safe, we doomed ourselves.

The decision was made to take this person, believed to be a teenager with psychological issues away from their home environment for the safety of the kid and his family. He had been sent to live and go to a private that catered to students with multiple extreme issues. He was in the program for years. From his point of view he was being incarcerated against his will. His outbursts could be explained by his perspective. I guess I wouldn’t like it if I was born into royalty and hid on Earth for protection since it is so far from anything resembling civilization.

One particular time Kyle was throwing what appeared to be just another immature teenager tantrum. With his face reddened and his voice cracking between normal and the wail of a dying whale, he almost let slip his secret. It slipped out, but we were all too naïve to realize its implications. He was furious with me because I would not grant him time to play video games. It was an earned reward, but I had to postpone his reward because the game was already in use. This rationalizing was insufficient at curbing his emotional flow. With cold steely eyes and an unusually deep raspy voice, he told me that “When my ninja-alien family returns to Earth to enslave the planet, I will make sure that they target you specifically for torture because of the way you have treated me.”

I shrugged off his comment without an afterthought. With his history, or what we knew about it, there was very little to worry about once he eventually calmed down.

It wasn’t long after that when they came. They started at night in the rural areas. They would sneak up on the farms, the ranches, and those houses where people lived where they didn’t have to bother with other people. Whole areas were wiped out in a single night. City dwellers were too preoccupied with their own hectic lives to even notice the genocide that was taking place. It was too late when the first news reports came in. Even then, they were as inaccurate as weather forecasts, until it was too late.

Me, they hunted me down. I was 2800 miles away from Massachusetts when they found me. It was a small town with not much protection from an invasion. They came at night through the forested areas that surrounded Mount Rainier. I don’t know if they tracked me down, or if my house was the just the next one to be cleaned out, but they found me all the same. I was hiding in a discrete cubby hole in my basement when I first saw one. At first, I mistook it for a moving shadow, like when your mind plays tricks on you late at night when you are all alone and the room was really still the whole time. He blended into the shadows with his black outfit. I couldn’t see too much of it, but it covered his whole body including his third leg, which allowed him to move gracefully around the room because of his adaptive center of balance. The cloth of the outfit was like nothing I have ever seen, and only that one, large, red eye was exposed. I held out as long as I could, but there seemed to be some other way that they found me. They never explained much to me, and I wasn’t surprised. I was dead quiet, holding my breath, inside a concealed compartment. All I had with me was a baseball bat that I had used in high school. As the small door swung open, I started a swing using all my might. I did not connect with anything but the wall next to me. As I followed through with the swing, My lights went out. I felt a warm rush come from the back of my head and my hearing went fuzzy. My eyes were no longer following my direction, focusing became something that was out of my control. I stared at those three feet in front of me until the lights dimmed. They carried me to their ship like a sack of potatoes, I definitely felt like a vegetable after that.

Once I was aboard their ship, I never saw another person again. They asked me some questions about the population density of several areas, but I wasn’t cooperating. It wasn’t that I was being heroic, I didn’t know anything about the area anyway. Nobody in Massachusetts knows where Maple Valley, Washington is. They know Seattle and that is it. I get the feeling that east coasters are surprised we have roads and mail since the only area history they know is from Lewis and Clark.

I did not know what was happening until my former student appeared. He had a large grin stretching from ear to ear as he nodded his approval at the rough manner they had delivered me in. “I told you,” he said. “I told you what would happen and now you will never make that mistake again, neither will any of the other ones from this stupid little planet.” My mouth dropped open. My mind began swimming around the notion that I was personally responsible for the end of humanity. It wasn’t the pollution of microplastics, the melting of the ice caps or the dying off of the bees. It was one relatively innocent choice to postpone a video game for half an hour that would cost billions of lives and our extinction. If only I had let him play his earned twenty minutes of Grand Theft Auto on the PlayStation. I guess we found the unlikely possibility where video games would save the world and we blew it. I swooned and hit the floor, only to awaken all strapped up on an examination table.

Awake, I lashed out with all of my strength. I broke free from my restrictive straps. Immediately, I lunged for the nearest alien, landing a punch directly in his big fat eye. I felt the structural integrity of his eye squish around my hand and gush past it. I pulled my hand back and knocked it into another alien and darted out the doorway. I ran down a corridor, not knowing where to go. I was desperate, and willing to do anything. I came upon a control panel. I was going to have to learn by experimentation. I started pushing buttons. The ship started to falter and began to fall out of the sky and out of control. I figure out the transporter just before the crash and managed to get into the beam just in time. I was bathed in light and my surroundings were difficult to ascertain. The high intensity beam had put me… I was still on the examination table! “Great! Now I don’t know what is real!” I cried to the delight of the aliens. I guess it was time to accept my fate.

As bit by bit of me was separated, the pain faded, as did my will to continue. No hands, feet, ears, eyes, tongue, or other stuff, it seemed cruel that they wouldn’t end my suffering. Once I begged for death, they returned me to earth. I was kept alive, as the only non-slave. I could not talk, hear, see, or taste. My only sensations were smell and touch. I could feel the ground shake as building after building fell. I could smell the rotting of corpses as my fellow humans died from overwork and began to decay. Finally I was the last human. It was only then that those aliens cut my feeding tube. I am guessing that once everyone was dead, the aliens figured that there was no other way to torture me. I disagree, every day that I was alive was worse than the previous day. The torture stemmed by the isolation, not just from people, but from everything including the aliens. I was in too rough of shape to be prejudiced against anything. Maybe that is why they let me slip away. I could feel the fluid from the feeding tube drip down my body and onto the ground. The next few days were the longest ever. I was trapped in darkness, drenched with what I needed to survive until at last the light on humanity dimmed for the final time. Who would have believed it, Grand Theft Auto really had corrupted the youth. “Stupid video games!” That was the final thought of mankind.

FaucherM4tt