Moody Space Aliens, The Worst Kind
The science fiction movies have presented to us pictures of the ultimate space alien invasion of Earth, whose main characters – these space aliens that I speak of – are fearsome and while considered handsome on their home planet are overall abhorrent to our senses.
This fierceness and generally hostile attitude are taken for granted, but this may be a product of lazy writing rather than an honest tallying of personality.
Though it is a big universe with billions of worlds and what not, informed observers have concluded that it is all made up of the same basic components, in the same way that however varied the items on the menu at a truck stop diner it is a good bet that Campbell’s condensed mushroom soup plays in important role in each of them.
It is hard to conceive that there is anything out there that doesn’t take as its building blocks hydrogen, helium, neon, nitrogen, iron, sulfur, silicon, and all the rest, but it is surely just as unrealistic to imagine that certain fundaments of personality aren’t also distributed evenly.
Pitiless fierceness is there, yes, but it can’t be the only characteristic to persist and endure.
Take irritability.
We can imagine a scenario where an emissary from Earth is meeting with the new alien overlord for the first time.
This huge door swishes upwards noiselessly and the human steps into this vast space where he is to meet this tentacled individual whose eyeballs, all 24 of them, are free of their sockets and are roaming rather freely.
You, the human, have in mind that you and the rest of the human race are not just going to roll over and submit to enslavement on a worldwide scale, but on the other hand you see no reason not to open things up as pleasantly as possible.
You: Good morning.
Alien Overlord Guy: What’s that supposed to mean?
You: Why, it simply is a common greeting that humans….
Alien Overlord Guy: I know what it is! What I’m saying is that you come in here practically shouting your precious ‘good morning’ without a thought to how I might be feeling today. How am I supposed to get my thoughts in order when you’re running around more or less bellowing this damnable greeting of yours? It’s a wonder that I get anything done at all around here.
You: I had no intentions of…
Alien Overlord Guy: Of course not. Oh, of course not. That’s what they all say. They all say “Xeruxinius, don’t take things so personally.” They have no idea what it is like to sit here and listen to your prattling on about your good morning.
You: (Starting to have about enough of this.) I don’t see how I can both be bellowing and prattling. Oh, and shouting too. If I was to characterize it, say in a novel, I would simply say, ‘this fellow walked in and he said good morning.’
Alien Overlord Guy: OK, fine. Maybe I was being a little sensitive. I just don’t see why it always on me to be the one that has to answer you. You could have come in and waited for me to speak first, you know. I could have had something I had practiced for the occasion. But no. Nooooooo.
You: Well, I just thought I’d get things off on the right foot…
Alien Overlord Guy: So now it’s all about my right foot, is that it? (He hauls this right foot out so you can examine it at leisure.) Go ahead, have your fun. So it looks like the clawed appendage of a creature now extinct on most worlds. Many women find that an attractive feature of my species. I was feeling pretty good about until you came along.
You: Maybe we can talk another time. When you’re not so….When you’re in a better frame of…When you don’t have so much on your….
Alien Overlord Guy: So now I’m so impossible to deal with that you’re baling on this entire meeting, while I sit here and have to…
You: Let’s pencil in something for next week. Tuesday maybe? Are you going to be OK by then or are you still going to be so…so…
Alien Overlord Guy: So what?
You: Well, since you ask me, so moody.
Alien Overlord Guy: There’s that word again. Do you know how many time I have heard the word ‘moody’? It’s exactly the type of thing that people say about a fellow when in reality he is just a hard charger who wants to drive the people around them to be their best.
You: Next Tuesday it is then.
And the conversation goes on from there, or if you are lucky, it doesn’t, and maybe this alien overlord is prepared to be a little more personable at your next meeting.
Or take the occasion of a lunch date with another member of the alien overlords.
This individual may be only a separate brain floating in a bath of nutrients, he may have many of the bodily and facial characteristics but none of the inherent charm of the South Asian gigantic sea slug, he may take the form of a kind of glowing lavender ball floating a few feet off the seat of the chair.
Whatever form this fellow comes in your first impression as you both order and then consume the fine dishes that are brought out to you – have I mentioned that this is quite a fancy place? And quite an expensive place? Hoo, boy – your first impression is that travel across unimaginable distances and traversings of the space-time continuum have done nothing to dull this guy’s appetite.
He’s really putting it away!
“Some bill this is going to be,” you think to yourself, grateful that you are the guest and not the host, until at the end, when your discussions, whatever they are, have concluded, you notice with growing unease, and then a dreadful sinking feeling, and then frank fear, that this guy is not making a single move to pick up the check. Not a one.
He doesn’t discreetly signal to the waiter with his two foot long forefinger that the bill belongs right in front of him and no other.
He doesn’t extend a coiled tentacle to quickly snatch the bill off the table and wave you away with the generous kind of gesture that says ‘don’t be silly. This is my treat.’
He doesn’t jerk one of his three heads towards himself in the universal signal of “I’m the guy, lay it one me.”
He doesn’t do anything like that at all.
What he does do is stare off into space, looking everywhere except at the bill on the table.
He doesn’t even do a pantomime of patting his pockets and claiming that he left his wallet back at the office.
He just sits there as though he has all the time in the world.
Well, I suppose if you have spent the last few centuries traversing the immensities of space, you’re not going to be put off by sitting there as long as it takes for you to pick up the bill, even if that is a period of days.
You do so, reaching forlornly out to pick it up, croaking out the words, “let me get this,” while you feel your internal organs seize up when your eyes light upon the final tally, and the alien guy responds, “oh, you don’t have to do that,” but he says this an automatic and inauthentic manner as he is pushing back from the table, as though reciting a line from a play.
Well, he is soon out of there, and there you are, wondering if there is some sort of indentured servitude payment plan spread over the coming centuries that you can work out with the restaurant, who, upon further examination of the bill, seems to have charged you for the very water you splash on your head to slick back your hair in the restroom.
They have charged you for the water you used to tamp down your unruly hair.
And so it is likely to go with all of your alien encounters.
The one fellow, fourteen feet tall with purple skin and a snail-like habit of leaving a trail of slime behind him wherever he goes, reaches over the bar where he is serving drinks, and instead of doing that, serving you a drink, the thing he’s supposed to be doing I mean, serving you a drink, he all but grabs you by the lapels and says, “This is just a pit stop for me. I’m not just another failed artist in a dead-end job. I’m only working long enough to get my guitar out of hock and start recording my second CD. Here, I’ve got some copies of the first CD. You ought to buy a few. Here, right here, see?” and so your five dollar happy hour gin and tonic ends up costing you $192 when it all said and done.
Oh, there’s the one gal from one of the moons of Neptune who sees you putting ketchup on your hot dog and says with a kind of hiss – she’s a giant snake after all – “You know that’s going to kill you, right? That ketchup. And the mustard is even worse. Worst of all is the hot dog. No, wait, I take that back, worst of all is the bun. From worst to least worst it’s bun, hot dog, mustard, ketchup. You might as well be putting gunpowder in your mouth and lighting a cigarette. Enjoy your lunch.” And then she slithers off, presumably to have a happy chat with everyone else she sees getting a bite of lunch.
And so it goes through all the characteristics that have come unmoored from their setting and have drifted over to the dark side of human nature.
You will meet aliens that are abrupt, that are bitter, that never stop talking, that are perpetually out of sorts, that make a point of showing how preoccupied they are with matters much more important than you, who are on their last nerve, who have a gloomy world view, who always give the impression of knowing much more about the topic at hand than you could ever possibly know.
There will be whole books to write about aliens whose home planet practice when engaged with people they particularly like is to see if they can bore them to death. And I do mean literally bore them to death. It’s considered a great honor to have conferred on you once you keel over once and for all, figuring death can’t be any worse than hearing about this creature’s childhood yet again.
We shall all adjust, I suppose, upon finding that irriatium, crankonium¸bitteranium, and lastnervium are just as well distributed throughout the known universe as are iron and sodium and all the rest, but it won’t be an easy path, for if we are to be invaded by alien overlords, we at least had hoped that they would have some new faults that we hadn’t seen before.
