E.L.E. - Page 2

He looked out of his window into the sky. The ship still loomed over the city, pulsing lights chasing each other over the rounded hull, creating a broken Rorschach design in the skyscraper windows, towering thousands of feet into the air. There were only a couple of cars left in the apartment’s parking lot. One was his; he guessed the other one belonged to his now-silent/now-crying neighbor. Apparently, the rain had stopped somewhere between the TV fruitcake and the anchorman’s sign off. The lights playing about the ships edge were refracted beautifully in the beads of water covering the vehicles below, ironically, to Roy’s eyes, considering the destructive power they contained.

When Roy watched old science fiction films as a kid, the plots had always seemed so predictable. Whenever aliens arrived on Earth, they were surrounded by the military, and invariably some misunderstanding would seal Earth’s fate, until the space beings were destroyed either by random bacteria, the kindness of a woman, or, in one strange take on the trope, the extra high notes sung by legendary yodeler Slim Whitman. But when these ships arrived exactly 30 days ago, there was no misunderstanding. It took Earth scientists about a week to gain a rudimentary understanding of the message the beings had given them. They discovered that all indigenous life had one of Earth’s months to vacate the planet, as these beings needed to change the atmosphere to be largely sulfurous to grow their food, and the buildings were in the way of the best crop growing land.

By the time the aliens understood that not only had people no way of leaving, but no intention of doing so, they expressed their regrets, but there was nothing they could do. If civilization was so backward that Earthlings could not make it to the stars, they would be at the mercy of the universal majority. Earth, which was called something else in their language, no longer belonged to humans, and the beings would be cleansing it in about one week. Most people didn’t believe it at first, not really, making comments like “Someone will figure it out, they always do.” or “Sure, I can meet you next week, but I might be a little late. That’s after the end of the world, you know.” And they’d have a good laugh.

Soon after, the government stopped trying a diplomatic solution and started firing at the ships. How the world had hoped mere days ago that the nuclear missiles launched toward these targets would solve their problems. How the world had feared when the missiles were atomized when some strange light erupted from the hull of the ships. How the world had despaired, finally, seeing no way out.

The aliens quickly became a poster child for just about every single cause on the planet. Some Christians claimed that these being’s very existence proved God; that this was a test of faith. The atheists were sure that if there was a God, the aliens never would have showed up. The environmentalists said if people had taken better care of the Earth, this never would have happened. Oil company PR men gleefully pointed out that no amount of global warming or holes in the ozone would have changed the current situation. All of them seemed to feel vindicated.