LJ Idol Week 14 entry - "Shoot First, Shudder Later"
If you are trypophobic, read this with caution - no photos, but there are descriptions relating to it. If you don't know what "trypophobic" means, this website will give the definition without subjecting you to any images unless you explicitly click on a link to view some. I would not recommend doing a Google Images search first; read the definition and if it's no big deal to you, then proceed to Google. Just some friendly advice.
"It wasn't like that!" shouted Nilda, stopping just short of slapping both palms onto the metal table. "I was trying to help all of us!"
"You don't get it, Miss." Major Morton Fenzworth, ranking tactical Earth Allied Command interrogator, reminded her of nothing so much as a dusky-skinned version of the iconic image of Teddy Roosevelt, complete with bristly mustache and round glasses. He stopped in a far corner of the small formerly sterile room and stared at her. "You were caught colluding with the enemy. We found evidence of communications equipment at your-"
"YOU don't get it." Nilda kept herself from shouting this time, and offered her hands palms up, sliding her arms halfway across the table, trying to hold down panic and righteous anger. "It was all ... backhanded. Double-agent ..." She fished for the word in her befuddled state, not finding it as easily as she should have. "Covert! I was just being covert. But on our side."
Fenzworth held up his a hand and extended the first finger. "You were in contact with the alien force; we've found an electronics trail going back weeks between you and their scout cruiser." He held up another, ticking off the crimes she'd probably hang or be fried for. "You were feeding them information about our vulnerabilities-"
"Did you bother to read the transmissions?" she asked, cutting in desperately. "Do you see what I was saying to them? Do you know why?"
"About our vulnerabilities and where to attack specifically," he kept on, ignoring her. Up came the middle finger. "Third, if you were working in Earth's interests, as you claim, why did you not notify the authorities of this?"
"I TRIED TO!" Nilda couldn't help it. She slumped back in the chair and shook her head, grinding her teeth. "I told the police, the sheriff's department, I called my Congressman, senators' offices; I even tried to get a call through to the FBI - they all treated me like I was a whack job, one of those loonies who gets on the History Channel to chant 'ALIENS!' All they wanted to do was know if I'd been overdoing the Star Trek fanfic lately!"
Fenzworth appeared not to know to what she referred; she wasn't going to explain it. "Look, the messages they sent me self-expired ... somehow, in under half an hour. Every time I got one, whether I replied or not, whether I even got to open them or not. That's why all my transmissions, the emails I sent, look like I'm just tossing them out into the ether answering nothingness - there's no signature of theirs or a mark on them."
"Convenient," he countered.
"I know. But I was obviously right about the aliens." Nilda sat up straighter, smug. "Besides, you've destroyed them all; there's no more ships detected. You know this. Why do you need me here?"
"Because, Mrs. Racall, the commission of treason does not rest upon a successful outcome of it, only on the doing of it."
"It wasn't treason! I saved us! You didn't even give those ships a chance - you were able to knock the bulk of their weapons right out of the sky. And then you blew up the ships. You know why? Do you even understand why more people weren't protesting it? ME. What I told the invaders left them vulnerable and helped you do that!"
"And what did you tell them?" Nilda sighed; she'd already tried to go through this with the MPs and the intake officer. She shouldn't be here. I should be getting a god damned parade, she thought miserably.
"Look." She made a show of patting down emptied jeans pockets, then pointing at her interrogator. "Can I borrow- You military types, you've got tablets, right? Can I get a tablet with some wifi, or my Galaxy back? Please? Do you have a laptop? I swear I need one to show you what I mean."
He continued to eye her levelly, but approached the table slowly, then looked up above her at the camera she'd noticed when being shoved inside. A nod, and mere seconds later, the door opened on the other side of the room and some functionary came in briefly to pass Fenzworth an iPad. He turned back to look at her while the uniformed woman shut the door from the other side again. "Why were they communicating with you?"
"Because I deciphered their signal." She didn't bother explaining further. This was the military; she took it as given they already knew about her MIT and CalTech connections.
"But you couldn't figure out how to keep their incoming transmissions from ... self-destructing?" A very faint trace of humor in Fenzworth's voice.
"I can't know everything, of course. It's still alien technology; the fact I learned a sliver of it, enough to apply a translation program for basic communications, is probably a fucking miracle." She thought about checking her language, then shook her head and held out her hand. "Can I have that? Just for a minute; less." He moved slowly, clearly skeptical, but to give him credit he gave it over.
Nilda swiped the screen, then navigated a webpage to Google Images. Cracking her knuckles, she use the keypad to slowly type in TRYPO - She only got that far before the field auto-completed with suggestions, the one she wanted at the very top. Repressing a shudder, she touched the word and tried to not make a face as familiar photos from her research marched across the screen. Phone photos from the alien ships were already uploaded to the Web, replacing some of the skin-related grotesqueries she'd pulled up when she was first researching this. Well, that was no surprise; they were perhaps the largest, most traumatic visual inflicted on humans, and just this week.
She cleared her throat and laid the tablet flat on the table, fingers still touching the edge of it. "Trypophobia," she began, "is one of those things that you might never hear of it, but once you do - and when you look up what it is, and see examples of it - you'll feel like you have it. I don't fully know why. I'm not a psychologist."
Fenzworth made a face for the first time as he looked down and spotted the photos. "Trypo-what?"
"Trypophobia. It's a fear of holes." He cleared his throat and against his professionalism she could sense both the disgust and perhaps the cough covering a chuckle at something so preposterous. "It is stupid, isn't it? But like I said, I can't explain it. It's this irrational, primal, whatever you want to call it, fear of holes a lot of people have. Rows or circles of regimented, gaping holes. Or clusters that look like holes. My brother told me about it, last year. Someone worked up this Internet meme and it showed up as a virus on his Facebook, and it would just randomly drop in on people's view with pictures like these." She scrolled, reminding herself she'd gotten used to the photos of lotus seed pods, honeycombs, PhotoShopped skin conditions, hollow bird bones, fungus, alien ships from this week ... and on and on. Finally, she minimized the screen and sat back in relief, abandoning the iPad.
"What does this have to do with the charge of treason?"
"Look, I don't mind explaining every bit of it later if you want background, but the part you want right now is this." She scratched at an imaginary patch of - whatever, on her arm. Those damn photos always put her in mind of swollen pores able to easily fill with dirt and itch. "I told you I could decipher their signals; it took me a while. I'll tell your programmers how I did it, whatever - point is, I did it. I really did not know if anyone else had been contacted, if anyone else had figured it out. I didn't find indication of it. I'm not bragging when I tell you I'm better at this than experts three times my age. Including my professors." Fenzworth, intent on her confession, said nothing.
"So once I figured out what was going on and messaged back, and waited for a reply, and then I got one - They were depressingly stereotypical. I mean, I figured all those action movies were just dumb pap. Why would advanced beings travel light-years just to terraform and do nothing else? But that's exactly what the Screenans came here for."
"Screenans?"
She waved a hand. "What I call them. Not very inspired. Like a computer screen, since that's how I talked to them- Anyway, it became clear fairly soon they didn't want to make first contact. They didn't want to be peaceful. They'd found Earth, they were coming, and they were going to take over. They bragged about their weapons complement - I mean, I had no idea if they were telling the truth, but I figured it was better to be too careful than not enough, you know what I mean?
"But - BUT - and this is the thing - I figured out they weren't able to fire long-range weapons. They didn't have the kind of energy input magnifier to power an attack from outside our atmosphere AND keep life support on their ships ... which were also capable of changing shape as needed. That's important; you'll see. So I made up this story about how I hated Earth, hated humanity, my pet cat, ex-husband, all of it, and would be glad to see it all to go hell in a handbasket. Played it up like I just wanted amnesty in exchange, could be useful to them once they got here, in terraforming the landscape, since I knew how to communicate between them and any leftover humans as slaves - and that's not something everybody could do."
She paused to make sure he wasn't going to jump on this last part and start a fresh line of questioning, but he let her go into her homestretch. "So I tell them if they want to get close enough, into the atmosphere, they've got to look friendly so they won't be stopped before they can coordinate mass attacks. Jim - my brother I told you about - I remembered him wigging out last year over that trypophobia meme. To gauge it with some other people, I posted anonymously about the condition to this one forum and linked up pictures. They were all just fucking disgusted. Sorry." She cleared her throat, wishing she had water. "I mean, violently disgusted. By pictures!" She remembered coming up with her idea, carrying it out, and despite her circumstances, grinned at Fenzworth. "I told them if they changed the appearance of their ships as I described, they could get close enough to be seen as friendlies. That people are just ape over sci-fi down here and waiting with bated breath to greet aliens all day long.
"And THAT is why as soon as they came into view, people started making calls and screaming on the news for them to be shot down. Not nearly as much pleading for 'first contact' as you'd expect, right? If you think this grosses people out-" She gestured at the tablet, "try to think like I did - that something thousands of feet in circumference is just hovering up above you, with all these nasty, deep, dark rows of holes pockmarking it, like monstrous-sized lotus pods, is about to fall on you." She made a face as she added, "For good measure I suggested they program some of the holes to wink closed and open every so often, too."
He waited until she was clearly finished, then said, "And you expect me to accept this story?"
"You have scientists to study the pieces of ships that managed to survive the missiles, right? See if they're shapeshifting. Check their computer logs if you can find someone with the training to do it; hell, I'll help and do it under supervision. Give me a polygraph. I am willing to go to whatever length to prove not only did I not sell out my planet, I saved its blue-marbled ASS."
(This cringeworthy little piece has been my contribution to Week 14 of LJ Idol, Confession From the Chair.)
"It wasn't like that!" shouted Nilda, stopping just short of slapping both palms onto the metal table. "I was trying to help all of us!"
"You don't get it, Miss." Major Morton Fenzworth, ranking tactical Earth Allied Command interrogator, reminded her of nothing so much as a dusky-skinned version of the iconic image of Teddy Roosevelt, complete with bristly mustache and round glasses. He stopped in a far corner of the small formerly sterile room and stared at her. "You were caught colluding with the enemy. We found evidence of communications equipment at your-"
"YOU don't get it." Nilda kept herself from shouting this time, and offered her hands palms up, sliding her arms halfway across the table, trying to hold down panic and righteous anger. "It was all ... backhanded. Double-agent ..." She fished for the word in her befuddled state, not finding it as easily as she should have. "Covert! I was just being covert. But on our side."
Fenzworth held up his a hand and extended the first finger. "You were in contact with the alien force; we've found an electronics trail going back weeks between you and their scout cruiser." He held up another, ticking off the crimes she'd probably hang or be fried for. "You were feeding them information about our vulnerabilities-"
"Did you bother to read the transmissions?" she asked, cutting in desperately. "Do you see what I was saying to them? Do you know why?"
"About our vulnerabilities and where to attack specifically," he kept on, ignoring her. Up came the middle finger. "Third, if you were working in Earth's interests, as you claim, why did you not notify the authorities of this?"
"I TRIED TO!" Nilda couldn't help it. She slumped back in the chair and shook her head, grinding her teeth. "I told the police, the sheriff's department, I called my Congressman, senators' offices; I even tried to get a call through to the FBI - they all treated me like I was a whack job, one of those loonies who gets on the History Channel to chant 'ALIENS!' All they wanted to do was know if I'd been overdoing the Star Trek fanfic lately!"
Fenzworth appeared not to know to what she referred; she wasn't going to explain it. "Look, the messages they sent me self-expired ... somehow, in under half an hour. Every time I got one, whether I replied or not, whether I even got to open them or not. That's why all my transmissions, the emails I sent, look like I'm just tossing them out into the ether answering nothingness - there's no signature of theirs or a mark on them."
"Convenient," he countered.
"I know. But I was obviously right about the aliens." Nilda sat up straighter, smug. "Besides, you've destroyed them all; there's no more ships detected. You know this. Why do you need me here?"
"Because, Mrs. Racall, the commission of treason does not rest upon a successful outcome of it, only on the doing of it."
"It wasn't treason! I saved us! You didn't even give those ships a chance - you were able to knock the bulk of their weapons right out of the sky. And then you blew up the ships. You know why? Do you even understand why more people weren't protesting it? ME. What I told the invaders left them vulnerable and helped you do that!"
"And what did you tell them?" Nilda sighed; she'd already tried to go through this with the MPs and the intake officer. She shouldn't be here. I should be getting a god damned parade, she thought miserably.
"Look." She made a show of patting down emptied jeans pockets, then pointing at her interrogator. "Can I borrow- You military types, you've got tablets, right? Can I get a tablet with some wifi, or my Galaxy back? Please? Do you have a laptop? I swear I need one to show you what I mean."
He continued to eye her levelly, but approached the table slowly, then looked up above her at the camera she'd noticed when being shoved inside. A nod, and mere seconds later, the door opened on the other side of the room and some functionary came in briefly to pass Fenzworth an iPad. He turned back to look at her while the uniformed woman shut the door from the other side again. "Why were they communicating with you?"
"Because I deciphered their signal." She didn't bother explaining further. This was the military; she took it as given they already knew about her MIT and CalTech connections.
"But you couldn't figure out how to keep their incoming transmissions from ... self-destructing?" A very faint trace of humor in Fenzworth's voice.
"I can't know everything, of course. It's still alien technology; the fact I learned a sliver of it, enough to apply a translation program for basic communications, is probably a fucking miracle." She thought about checking her language, then shook her head and held out her hand. "Can I have that? Just for a minute; less." He moved slowly, clearly skeptical, but to give him credit he gave it over.
Nilda swiped the screen, then navigated a webpage to Google Images. Cracking her knuckles, she use the keypad to slowly type in TRYPO - She only got that far before the field auto-completed with suggestions, the one she wanted at the very top. Repressing a shudder, she touched the word and tried to not make a face as familiar photos from her research marched across the screen. Phone photos from the alien ships were already uploaded to the Web, replacing some of the skin-related grotesqueries she'd pulled up when she was first researching this. Well, that was no surprise; they were perhaps the largest, most traumatic visual inflicted on humans, and just this week.
She cleared her throat and laid the tablet flat on the table, fingers still touching the edge of it. "Trypophobia," she began, "is one of those things that you might never hear of it, but once you do - and when you look up what it is, and see examples of it - you'll feel like you have it. I don't fully know why. I'm not a psychologist."
Fenzworth made a face for the first time as he looked down and spotted the photos. "Trypo-what?"
"Trypophobia. It's a fear of holes." He cleared his throat and against his professionalism she could sense both the disgust and perhaps the cough covering a chuckle at something so preposterous. "It is stupid, isn't it? But like I said, I can't explain it. It's this irrational, primal, whatever you want to call it, fear of holes a lot of people have. Rows or circles of regimented, gaping holes. Or clusters that look like holes. My brother told me about it, last year. Someone worked up this Internet meme and it showed up as a virus on his Facebook, and it would just randomly drop in on people's view with pictures like these." She scrolled, reminding herself she'd gotten used to the photos of lotus seed pods, honeycombs, PhotoShopped skin conditions, hollow bird bones, fungus, alien ships from this week ... and on and on. Finally, she minimized the screen and sat back in relief, abandoning the iPad.
"What does this have to do with the charge of treason?"
"Look, I don't mind explaining every bit of it later if you want background, but the part you want right now is this." She scratched at an imaginary patch of - whatever, on her arm. Those damn photos always put her in mind of swollen pores able to easily fill with dirt and itch. "I told you I could decipher their signals; it took me a while. I'll tell your programmers how I did it, whatever - point is, I did it. I really did not know if anyone else had been contacted, if anyone else had figured it out. I didn't find indication of it. I'm not bragging when I tell you I'm better at this than experts three times my age. Including my professors." Fenzworth, intent on her confession, said nothing.
"So once I figured out what was going on and messaged back, and waited for a reply, and then I got one - They were depressingly stereotypical. I mean, I figured all those action movies were just dumb pap. Why would advanced beings travel light-years just to terraform and do nothing else? But that's exactly what the Screenans came here for."
"Screenans?"
She waved a hand. "What I call them. Not very inspired. Like a computer screen, since that's how I talked to them- Anyway, it became clear fairly soon they didn't want to make first contact. They didn't want to be peaceful. They'd found Earth, they were coming, and they were going to take over. They bragged about their weapons complement - I mean, I had no idea if they were telling the truth, but I figured it was better to be too careful than not enough, you know what I mean?
"But - BUT - and this is the thing - I figured out they weren't able to fire long-range weapons. They didn't have the kind of energy input magnifier to power an attack from outside our atmosphere AND keep life support on their ships ... which were also capable of changing shape as needed. That's important; you'll see. So I made up this story about how I hated Earth, hated humanity, my pet cat, ex-husband, all of it, and would be glad to see it all to go hell in a handbasket. Played it up like I just wanted amnesty in exchange, could be useful to them once they got here, in terraforming the landscape, since I knew how to communicate between them and any leftover humans as slaves - and that's not something everybody could do."
She paused to make sure he wasn't going to jump on this last part and start a fresh line of questioning, but he let her go into her homestretch. "So I tell them if they want to get close enough, into the atmosphere, they've got to look friendly so they won't be stopped before they can coordinate mass attacks. Jim - my brother I told you about - I remembered him wigging out last year over that trypophobia meme. To gauge it with some other people, I posted anonymously about the condition to this one forum and linked up pictures. They were all just fucking disgusted. Sorry." She cleared her throat, wishing she had water. "I mean, violently disgusted. By pictures!" She remembered coming up with her idea, carrying it out, and despite her circumstances, grinned at Fenzworth. "I told them if they changed the appearance of their ships as I described, they could get close enough to be seen as friendlies. That people are just ape over sci-fi down here and waiting with bated breath to greet aliens all day long.
"And THAT is why as soon as they came into view, people started making calls and screaming on the news for them to be shot down. Not nearly as much pleading for 'first contact' as you'd expect, right? If you think this grosses people out-" She gestured at the tablet, "try to think like I did - that something thousands of feet in circumference is just hovering up above you, with all these nasty, deep, dark rows of holes pockmarking it, like monstrous-sized lotus pods, is about to fall on you." She made a face as she added, "For good measure I suggested they program some of the holes to wink closed and open every so often, too."
He waited until she was clearly finished, then said, "And you expect me to accept this story?"
"You have scientists to study the pieces of ships that managed to survive the missiles, right? See if they're shapeshifting. Check their computer logs if you can find someone with the training to do it; hell, I'll help and do it under supervision. Give me a polygraph. I am willing to go to whatever length to prove not only did I not sell out my planet, I saved its blue-marbled ASS."
(This cringeworthy little piece has been my contribution to Week 14 of LJ Idol, Confession From the Chair.)