Stars, Shooting Across The Bow

The cashier of the Tex-Am gas station slammed the side of the crackling television set. The signal, which seldom reached this far into the deserts of New Mexico, began to fade again, before buzzing momentarily back into life.

“40 days on, and theories on where June’s comet landed are still abound. We’re here in Artesia New Mexico to ask local people their thoughts on the phenomenon.” The news reporter announced, approaching an elderly woman in the street. “You - miss - any theories on June’s comet? A sign of good things to come, perhaps?” He asked, with a beaming, news reporter smile.

“W-well,” she began feebly, “I didn’t like it. It could be quite the opposite: you know, some people see shooting stars as omens. A-a-a warning about something, from g-god.”

“Well, that’s one way of-“ the news reporters image was superseded by static, buzzing across the screen in a wave of interference.

“Three hours left”, the cashier sighed to himself, staring cheek-on-palm at the clock above the automatic sliding doors. He began the debate that he’d held with himself every day for the six weeks he’d worked here: “If more customers come in, the shift will go quicker… but on the other hand, less customers means less work. It’s a win-win. or is it a lose-lose? A win-lose? A lose-win?” He flipped a pen between each of his knuckles thoughtfully.

Before he could decide, in futility, whether or not he wanted customers, the automatic doors slid open. This took him by surprise; the arrival of a customer was usually marked by a car peeling into one of the gas pump bays, but there was no car, and the gas station wasn’t walking distance from anything. A man, around 30 years old with a sunburned face sheepishly made his way across the store until he was close enough to place his palms on the counter. In his eyes, the cashier thought, was the promise of a madman: the air of a stray dog’s unpredictability, savagery, strife. “He’s going to ask me for money”, the cashier instinctively thought to himself.

“Listen, I’m sorry to ask, kid”, the man began, “but I need to borrow $40. I’m stuck out here, and it’s too damn hot and too far to walk back to the city.” His voice was gruff, but simple.

“I knew it”, thought the cashier. “I’m not allowed to give money to beggars, sir” he said. “It’s company policy, sorry.”

“Look, I’m not a beggar. I’ve never asked for a single goddamn cent my whole life, and I can’t even begin to explain the day I’ve had, kid. I just wanna get in a taxi and get home.”

“That doesn’t change anything, sir. I’m sorry.” Said the cashier with purposeful insincerity.

The man’s gaze dropped to the counter, his wild eyes darting around furiously, buoyed quickly by the thoughts that appeared to be rushing through his mind at a hundred miles an hour.

The cashier broke the silence, curiosity gaining the better of him: “How did you get here in the first place, without a car?”

“I think - this is going to sound insane, man - but I think I was abducted by… by aliens, or something. I don’t know. But I think it was aliens, man, it frickin’ had to be!”

The cashier’s hand moved closer to the panic button, wondering if it even worked, and what even happened once it was pressed.

“But” the man continued, “it all seemed so surreal, but I’m telling you man!” The confidence with which the man spoke seemed to grow and shrink with each passing word, and his lack of eye contact with the cashier gave the impression that he was more thinking-out-loud than having a conversation. “And I picked up a newspaper outside, it’s August! How is it August, how does that make any sense at all? It was June yesterday. How do you explain that, man?” he asked, almost out of breath and now looking directly at the cashier.

“Look, dude, if you’re not a customer I have to ask you to leave.”

The man’s gaze followed the cashier’s pointing finger, aiming out of the window, into the baking midday desert. "It was only yesterday that I was driving not far from here. That’s where it happened, there was a flash, turned night to day, the last thing I remember before I disappeared.”

“I saw that” the cashier said, an abrupt change in his tone.

“What, really? You saw me disappear?”

“No, no dude, I mean I saw the comet. Everyone did. Have you not been watching the news?” he asked the man.

“Are you listening to anything I’m saying? No – I’ve not been watching the news - there was a flash of light and then I was there, on their… ship, I guess. God, I sound like a nut! I swear to you kid, I’ve never touched a drug in my life – apart from a little grass in high-school – but no real drugs in my life, not ever.”

“Yeah, that stuff with the comet was weird.” The cashier’s hand, almost imperceptibly, began to withdraw from the button. “Nobody could find where it landed, but the scientists on TV said that it was too big to have burned up in the atmosphere. I went out looking for it, me and my classmates, for three days through the Boonies.”

“What did you find?”

“We didn’t find shit, man. Nobody did. All kinds of government agencies were out there looking too, but they didn’t find anything either.”

“Well, I guess I did. Not that I wanted to. As soon as that thing was above me, I couldn’t see shit. And then I was in a chair – a big metal one – and my hands were stuck to the armrests, felt like my hands were magnets, man. It was fucked up.”

“And the little green men came and shoved a radar dish up your ass, right?”

“No, asshole, they started showing me shit.”

“Oh yeah, like what?” he asked, his confidence in the situation galvanised by the man’s lack of aggression, which he had fully expected but had never arrived. His hands had now forgotten entirely about the panic button.

“Like, uhh…” the man started to look out of the window, thinking deeply, his hands brushing over his short, unkempt hair.

“What happened to your hands, dude?”

“The chair, asshole, I just told you that. Anyway, they were showing me pictures of all kinds of people. Like, sick and dying people, and all these stupid diagrams that didn’t make no damn sense.”

“Sounds pretty messed up. So, these… ‘aliens’… that you saw, what did they look like?” asked the cashier, a mocking tone arriving with his new found confidence over the man.

“I never saw ‘em! That’s the weirdest part. The whole time-“

“So then how do you know you got abducted?”

“Let me speak damnit! The whole time, I was in that chair, and I felt it on my arms and it didn’t feel like no metal I’ve ever felt before. And after they finished showing me shit, the chair just lifted up off the ground, left the room with me still in it. That’s when I went through this… this tube thing. A corridor, I guess. And it had windows – I could see space, kid, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Listen, you’re a funny guy, but there’s a customer coming in, you’re gonna have to go. C’mon, you gotta go before I get fired.” The cashier said, peering out of the window at a woman closing the door of her car. A few moments later the automatic doors slid open, and the man stepped aside to let the woman pass.

“Hey lady, you got 40 bucks?” he asked her. She pretended not to hear him, told the cashier “pump six”.

The man paced up and down until he exclaimed: “Yes, yes that’s it I remember! It’s coming back to me in pieces!” The cashier shot a frustrated glance at him over the woman’s shoulder.

“That’ll be $40.13 please, miss” he told her.

“It was a… like… it looked like a sun, except it wasn’t. It was black in the middle, and all the stars around it were all fucked up, getting all stretched and shit.”

The cashier, midway through counting out change from the till, stopped what he was doing and looked up. “It was stretching the light around it?” he asked.

“Yeah”

“So it was a black hole?”

“No dude, black holes are like, invisible or something.”

“Yeah, in a complete vacuum” he said, handing the woman her change and receipt. “But they have a huge amount of mass, which means they have a huge amount of gravity, which means light bends around them. Didn’t you ever study this?”

“No, I’m telling you kid, it was some kind of black sun. It had orange all around it, and a big orange ring like jupi-“

“I’m in my senior year, majoring physics – I’m telling you, you’re perfectly describing a black hole dude. But I suppose y’know that, don’t you?”

Outside, the sun had begun bleeding into the horizon, a blood orange swell filling the store. “I should probably call the cops, if my boss shows up she’s gonna get so mad. But this guy is making time go a lot faster... I guess there's no harm letting him stay a little longer, ramble on about this alien stuff.”

“Whatever. I don’t need to explain shit to you, I just need $40 to get home. C’mon, they’re not gonna fire you for that. You’re smart, right? You know they won’t fire you for helping someone in great need - you’re a scientist, man.”

“Well, I will be, I hope.” Said the cashier, struggling to stifle his pride.

The man thought for a minute. “Then tell me what this is: they showed me a diagram, something I saw at school I think, it was these little round things, these blobs.”

“An island? On a map?”

“No dude, like from science.”

“A cell? Did it have smaller blobs inside of it?”

“No, nothing inside, just arms on the outside, tonnes of ‘em.”

“A virus.” He said abruptly.

“Sounds about right – whatever it was, it didn’t look like good news.”

“So let me get this straight, man” the cashier began, waiting until the woman had left the store. “These… aliens, they took you up to their ship, orbiting some black hole somewhere – a supermassive one by the sounds of it – and they showed you sick, dying humans, and a virus. And then they sent you back. Think about it man, what does that sound like to you?”

“I don’t know, but it wasn’t all that they showed me.”

“Sounds to me like they were warning you. Sounds to me like they took you up there, warned you about a sickness that will wipe out the human race, and then sent you back with the information. Maybe they put the vaccine inside you. They probably had no idea you wouldn’t understand what they were talking about. They probably saw that as a race, we’re super advanced in the fields of science, but I guess they didn’t know that not everyone has that level of intelligence.”

“Hey asshole, I’m not stupid!” said the man, contorting his face with offence.

“Well, did you understand any of it?”

“No, but that wasn’t all they showed me, I keep telling you. There was more; pictures of doctors, people getting better, and pregnant chicks. Tonnes of pregnant chicks, at first they always had pictures of new born babies, but then they started having pictures of crying women afterwards, families consoling them. There was also doctors giving people injections, sometimes pregnant chicks but not always. None of it made sense, and it wasn’t anything like what you’re saying it is. I could feel the vibe man, didn’t feel a damn bit like they were trying to help us.”

‘Pregnant women?’ the cashier thought to himself. Having seen the fear and confusion in the man’s eyes, he had begun to believe that the man, at least, believed this story to be true. And if it were true, what was the obsession with pregnant women? With death? The answer had to be fertility, he concluded.

“Listen, listen: how long has it been for you?”

“What the hell does that mean?” said the man.

“Like, when were you were abducted?”

“Yesterday. But the newspaper outside says that it’s August. I don’t know, dude, it all happened quickly: there was that flash when the night sky lit up, I was in the chair, they spent all day showing me all those weird pictures, the chair left the room, that’s when I saw out the window, and then I was in another room. There was another flash, and I woke up about a half mile down the road from here an hour ago.”

“That comet can’t have been a coincidence; it never landed. We would have found it if it had. That means that that it flew back out – so that must be how they took you. And on the time thing, it being August, that can be explained too. Listen, man, what do you know about relativity?”

“About what?”

“Right, right, of course” said the cashier, pushing up his thick-rimmed glasses, becoming visibly excited. “So, because they are so close to so much mass, they experience time slower than us. So, let’s say it 30 hours for you, and forty days for us…” the cashier pushed a button, the card machine spat out a receipt, and he began to scribble down numbers. “so, 40 days… 40 times 24 hours… 960 hours on Earth.” The man couldn’t believe how quickly the gas station cashier was making these calculations. “so, 30 of your hours equals 960 here,” muttered the cashier. “30… to 3… 960…” He scribbled some more. “Okay, here. For every hour you were gone, 32 hours passed here.”

“That doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. And you thought I was crazy! Ha!” said the man. “Obviously, the flashes to and from that place took a hell of a lot longer than it felt like they did.”

“Maybe. Maybe. But if I’m right, imagine that over years. Decades even. Centuries. The gap between the time they’ve experienced and the time we’ve experienced just gets bigger as you extrapolate further. They could have watched our entire history in the space of months. Everything we’ve achieved, invented. Science, war… medicine. If they were advanced enough to move their entire species there, they must be very old - and as a hero of mine once said: ‘the old are often insanely jealous of the young’.”

The sun had now disappeared behind the distant ridges, and the harsh, artificial glow of the store’s lights flicked into action, unbeknownst to the two men.

“Anyway kid, you talk more than my grandmother. I’m trying to tell you that they showed me other stuff, too. But it was different from the rest – less real. It was Earth, and I thought it was deserts, but it was actually the place the oceans used to be. All dried out and shit. And there were little ships that looked like oil tankers, heading towards bigger ships up in the sky, I guessed that they were supposed to be hauling water off the planet.”

“I don’t get it,” said the cashier. “Why would they take the water? They can’t drink seawater, surely?

The man shrugged, and there was a contemplative silence. Slowly, the man followed the cashiers gaze out of the window, toward the gas pumps, before their eyes met again. The cashier winced.

“Fuel.” The cashier said. “Perhaps… maybe… well this is just a theory: but maybe we aren’t the only intelligent life they’re aware of. They could have shown you anything, but think about what they did show you. Probably, infertility. And a virus. The two of them are probably connected. And then they showed you human doctors curing people of diseases with injections, right?” The man nodded. “Vaccines, then. So, I think it’s safe to assume that they have a disease, and they’ve watched our species cure many diseases.”

“I don’t know man, it’s like I said” the man interrupted. “The vibes were off. They were meeting us for the first time, but no welcoming committee? Just blasted images at me and sent me back on my way. It didn’t feel right.”

“That might explain the second part. They must be desperate for a cure. They’ve parked themselves next to a black hole, so they can watch the rest of the universe move by on fast-forward. They’ve spotted a race skilled at curing diseases – us – and they came here. And they showed us one thing that hasn’t happened yet – how they will empty our oceans for fuel. Maybe they need it to travel to the next most promising civilisation that they’ve been watching.”

“I’m not following.” Said the man, furrowing his eyebrows.

“They didn’t think you could cure them, man. They’re desperate, they’re running out of time. An intelligent species up against the wall like that would do anything for survival. They’re using you as a messenger and you’re probably not the only one.” Said the cashier, his face dropping at the realisation. “You’ve been sent back to deliver their demands.”