The Pale Goddess of Our Dreams

NEW YORK, NY: From the beginning we thought we knew the script by heart. The cryptic clandestine warning given only to those in our highest government ranks. Ominous alien ships casting shadows on city streets from above and attracting throngs of mesmerized pedestrian onlookers, exiting cafes and office buildings. The ships showing instant aggression, releasing smaller pods, which waste no time vaporizing an innocent onlooker. Shrill screams ring out: “Aaaahhhhh!!” Someone points to the ship and yells, “Run!” Cars stranded in sudden gridlock are abandoned. People scramble chaotically in every direction. The camera pans to news reports on a television in a deli, conspicuously tuned to various news stations, the world over, letting us know this is a worldwide attack. A mother abandons her car, drops her Louis Vuitton purse, has one of her high-heeled Dior shoes jammed in a stormwater grate, and leaves both behind, as she frantically grabs her child’s hand and drags the kid down the stairs of a nearby subway station, trying to get her family to safety. But it never happened.

Something appeared in the sky alright. But that is where the similarities end. There was no warning by NASA that alien ships had been detected to make for a dramatic build-up, no ominous landing to heighten tensions, no disruption of our communication satellites to demonstrate how impossibly outmatched we were, and no vaporizing lasers to outrun. They were just there. A million ships—who could count them all. They blipped into the skies in the twinkling of an eye. 

The ships were silver balls that looked almost like jingly Christmas bells. They had a small seam or foil around the middle that was saucer-like, and along the bottom were crossed stripes with bulb-like openings toward the middle—just like jingle bells have. They were roughly the size of Spaceship Earth at Epcot—not small, but not so huge as to throw all earthly proportions out the window. These cross-hatched areas on the hull of the ships contained pulsing lights that blinked in greens, blues, yellows, and reds. 

The ships hovered for a moment, and then unceremoniously descended to their landing stations, in a gradual and disarming manner. Three tripod-like-legs reached to the ground from each ship and perched them all in place.

* * *

EDWARDS, CALIFORNIA: I was at Edwards Air Force Base with Connie, where we had been going over a test plan for the newest model of the NGAD fighter jet. By the way, NGAD stands for Next Generation Air Dominance. Wasn’t that a joke. 

Connie said, “Doug ‘Dogsbody’ Bader, recent graduate of baby pilot’s school, and destined to forever fly the safest flight plans and have all throttles, controls, and flight settings perfectly adjusted by his crack co-pilot—the best in the business.”

“Ok, Connie. I get it. You are the real hero of this story.”

Connie was my flight test engineer, and I was a naval flight officer of Lieutenant rank, whose entire family was ex-navy or air force. 

All I wanted was to be the youngest to make Captain on my detail and finally get some combat experience under my belt. Connie thought bigger picture and used to quote the Art of War where it says, “To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” Connie had other Yoda-like quotes that she sprinkled into conversation to pour cold water on my ambitions. I had begun to suspect she was a closet pacifist. But she would probably make Admiral while I soldiered away in obscurity and failed to meet my goals, just like I failed to heed orders. Or maybe she was a traitorous Lago in a sweet disguise, after all, manipulating me like a marionette and thwarting my ambitions at every turn.

You can imagine our surprise when Rear Admiral Colonel Mickey Davidson appeared in the hanger an hour before pre-flight inspections were set to begin.

“Uhh, sorry if I woke you two. But we have a situation,” Admiral Davidson said as we saluted, and the Admiral saluted back halfheartedly. 

“What seems to be the matter, Admiral,” I asked.

“I don’t know how to say this. But we’ve been invaded by aliens.”

“That’s good sir, very funny--now what is it?”

“Aliens, son. Hand to God.”

“When did this happen, Admiral,” Connie asked.

“About ten minutes ago. The report will be going out on the PA shortly, but I have a mission for you two. I hope you don’t mind Connie, but you’ll have to throw on a G-suit and go up with this ground pounder. Make sure he doesn’t accidentally initiate a war-of-the-worlds.”

“I can babysit the zoomie, but what’s the mission, Admiral?”

“Reconnaissance.”

***

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND: Dr. Fabiana Giancarlo had been sitting at her desk at her corner office suite in the upper offices above the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) when Luk had called her down to inspect a magnet quench in sections 3 and 4.

The dark corridors of the tunnel were lit by overhead fluorescent lights. It reminded her of the two narrow shoots of the Holland Tunnel in New York City. Fabiana donned a white hardhat and rode a one-speed Schwinn bicycle with a front-side basket through the tunnels toward where she was to meet Luk, calling to her mind the scene in the Wizard of Oz where the Wicked Witch rode a bicycle in the cyclone. What a day she was having!

The long line of segmented particle accelerators appeared to her as a giant Ouroboros. She thought of the strange dreams of the Chemist, August Kekulé, who saw that mysterious symbol and awoke to solve the chemical structure of benzene. Atomicity and valency sprung from a single dream, which in turn unlocked the vision of dynamic atoms and molecules, which drew into focus the weirdness of the microcosm and murky quantum mechanics, which for all its quirks looked oddly like the celestial plane in miniature—like a tiny constellation of stars. 

It haunted Fabiana to think that if the macrocosm was filled with life, as now appeared to be the case, then was the microcosm also teaming with life, which could be destroyed just as pitilessly by their mundane experiments? Was she the real destroyer of worlds—ignorant of the massacres she was committing? Or was it possible that she would magnify these demons and bring them forth in our world? She wondered where the boundary of science’s stable conceits finally ended and gave way to unbridled magic. 

Kekulé had written poetically, “I turned my chair towards the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes… all twining and twisting in snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes.” And so, in the wake of visions of snakes, sausages and molecular charts, a few scientists had dreamed a further dream of cataloguing the irreducible subatomic world—which with every discovery became smaller and vaster still. If only Kekulé could have known that protons could be smashed as if by a hammer and their shattered pieces seen by human eyes!

Fabiana was haunted by the vision she’d seen two days ago, after which she changed the settings and ran the collider successfully, achieving a result she’d never hoped for. But at what cost?

Luk said, “It’s like what happened in 2008, but worse.”

Breaking hard and putting her arms akimbo as she balanced on one leg, Fabiana said,

“What?”

“We’ve got radiation and magnetic leaking.”

“No, no we don’t!”

“Afraid we do Doctor.”

* * *

CASTEL GANDOLFO, ROME, ITALY: The nametags on the dais read: Ross Coulthart, Investigative Reporter, David Grusch, Intelligence Officer, Pasquale Borgomeo, Vatican Radio, and Brother Guy Consolmagno, Pope’s Astronomer.

The learned guests were seated in a circular assembly room, with some reporters with cameras and microphones kneeling or sitting in the central area. A large statue of Shiva like the one at CERN was at the front of the room at the head of the table, where Brother Guy sat.

“Nonhuman biologics,” David Grusch said.

“Officer, do you believe these are the same aliens that have shown up at our door,” Ross Coulthart asked.

“Who can say,” David said.

“But let us remember, God proves science, not the other way around,” said Guy Consolmagno.

“Indeed, they are our brothers every bit as much as the saints,” said Pasquale Borgomeo.

And like a scene from King Arthur’s Court, where the Green Knight appears to present the challenge of a Christmas Game, two aliens in long black robes and clean bald heads, that otherwise looked like Hollywood actors strode into the televised roundtable event and stood directly in the middle of the assembly.

One of them spoke: “We have much to discuss, but first we must ask for a favor.”

“First, what are your names,” Coulthart asked.

“Ohh. You’d never be able to pronounce them,” the male said. And then with a sly smile he said, “You can call me Carey Grant.”

And the female shot up to say, “And I’ll go by Audrey Hepburn.”

The group of scientists, journalists, and priests looked at one another in shock. One doesn’t expect their gods to covet personas from Hollywood’s Golden Age. And everyone assembled for the event immediately doubted the wisdom of these far-off travelers.

* * *

The sound of the B-52H Stratofortress Bomber was like the low rumbling of thunder before the lightning reached your location with sharp crackling rattles.

“Dogsbody, your target is Castel Gandolfo in Rome. Deploy the nukes.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said into the comm.

“Afraid so Dogsbody. Orders from the commander-in-chief.”

“But sir—”

“You wanted battle duty, son. Well, this is what it looks like,” Rear Admiral Davidson said in a stern tone, but I could hear his voice crack as he tried to maintain composure.

It occurred to me that the commander-in-chief was senile and probably couldn’t remember what he had for breakfast if the fate of the world hung in the balance—which it did. I turned to Connie and flipped off the comms.

“We aren’t really going to do this, right?”

“Orders are orders,” she said. But we were supersonic, and her face was squeezed to the seat like a lemon which made it hard to take her seriously, and I waited for her to return to form.

* * *

The assembly walked out onto the long dock of Lago Albano Lake, which for all its majesty had the distinct look of a meteor’s crater.

Brother Guy Consolmagno, the Pope’s Astronomer, with his professorial mien and stately gray beard, dressed in a friar’s frock and Catholic collar, was waste deep in the cool blue waters of the lake.

Carey and Audrey jumped into the lake holding their noses, and arose like two pink babies, with dew still on their brows.

Brother Guy, dunked Carey first, then Audrey, saying the rites in Latin and then English, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” As each of them emerged with glee, the attendants clothed them in large terry cloth towels from the gift shop at the observatory.

In a moment of high fervor, Brother Guy said in a whisper to them, “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...”

The two aliens looked at him in wonder, and said, “now where on Earth can we find this Christ of yours?”

* * *

Dr. Fabiana Giancarlo said, “can we reverse the protocol?”

Luk said, “it could make the entire collider unstable—it wasn’t built for those forces.”

“Worst case, we blow ourselves up, no?”

“But doctor, that is unacceptable.”

“I’m saying, no civilians would be hurt, right? We’ve taken precautions in the case of a system failure, that’s why we are so deep underground.”

“Ok. But why are you entertaining this. What is going through your mind?”

“What makes you so sure those are alien ships,” Fabiana said.

“What do you mean, Doctor?”

“Luk! Think! I adjusted the experiment the night before those ships appeared. What if, for instance, we opened up a portal to another world, another dimension. Do you follow? These may not be ‘aliens’ from outer space, but ‘aliens’ from inner space, or God forbid, somewhere much worse.”

“This isn’t science, Doctor—but pure speculation.”

“Oh, Luk. I’m afraid that’s all science is, after all—just rank speculation, with some corroborating proof and a good press kit. No one can search the depths of the cosmos, but God, and none knows the truth of existence but he who set it in motion. We grasp, but our reach exceeds our grasp—and I think this time we reached too far.”

“Tell me what to do.”

“We must reverse the magnification—we must run the entire experiment directly in reverse. God willing, we will send those hounds of hell back where they came from.”

* * *

Connie had regained her composure. And now she was in a sentimental mood.

“It was nice knowing you Dogsbody.”

“Do you really have to call me that?”

“Would you prefer grunt?”

“No!”

“Then Dogsbody it is.”

“We can’t do this Connie. We are going to be directly responsible for a war-of-the-worlds. Wasn’t that the exact thing that the Admiral told you to keep me away from?”

“He also sent us up in a BUFF armed with nuclear missiles—you think that was accidental?”

“Big-Ugly-Fat-Fella.”

“Exactly.”

“You are usually the voice of reason in these matters.”

“Not this time.”

“Connie! We are talking about nuking an area twenty-three kilometers from Rome, as the crow flies. That is well within the twenty-mile radiation cone for the nuclear fallout. The Colosseum will be radioactive for a century.”

“Better than mankind being dead forever.”

“Be reasonable, Connie. The Admiral’s report was that there are two aliens there. How is killing two aliens out of a million going to do anything but usher in Armageddon?”

* * *

“So, you are looking for Christ,” Brother Guy said from a leather chair behind his glass Alaska writing desk in the study of the observatory.

“That is why we came,” Carey Grant said.

“Really. And did you read our Bible and realize that he is a spirit, non-corporeal, not of this Earth.”

“Oh no,” Audrey said. “That is not what He said at all. Isn’t it true that if two of us believers are gathered together, he is here also?”

“My God!” the priest exclaimed, “you are evangelists!”

Carey and Audrey looked at one another and let out a maniacal laugh.

“Hell no. Skeptics… I believe is your word. It’s just that in all the universe there is no other species that claims eternal life as a birthright. Granted, you are cordoned off here in this backwater, a Nazareth of the cosmos, which is why no one ventures out here.” Carey grant looked down at his sandals a moment before continuing. “But Earth was on our way, and we had to pay a visit.”

“So, what is your interest in our religion then,” the priest asked.

“It’s just that, if your people believed that Christ’s return is imminent, if they were to see miraculous deeds being performed by veritable angels… I mean, your world is filled with believers… in that case, wouldn’t they bow down and obediently follow any command?”

The priest felt an ominous presence as if the room had filled with shadows, and then apprehended that, perhaps, this was the end of days that had been foretold.

* * *

“Ok, Luk. Run the protocol.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am sure,” Fabiana said.

The whirring mechanism of the Ouroboros hummed with the energy of a thousand stars. The lightning of smashing protons filled the chamber with an orchestra of colliding worlds. And Fabiana prayed a silent prayer.

“What do you imagine this will do,” Luk asked.

“If I am right,” she said, “maybe we will pull the demons of hell back into the pit.”

A few moments passed in eerie silence. Luk and Fabiana walked out to the front of the CERN laboratory where the statue of Shiva stood like a dark omen. They could see the lines of orbs stretching to the horizon in an unholy grid, like an army of monsters. And then, as if it were all a bad dream, they vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

“We’ve done it,” Luk exclaimed.

“Thank the Lord,” Fabiana said, not believing there was a Lord, but for the first time apprehending that maybe hell was real after all.

* * *

“T-minus forty-seconds,” Connie said.

“Jesus!” I exclaimed.

“Son, I’ve just received a report from the Vatican that the orbs are gone. But the commander-in-chief hasn’t recalled the order. I’m sorry son,” the Admiral said.

I flipped off the comms.

“What do we do Connie,” I asked, clasping the cross around my neck.

“You’re the pilot hotshot. It’s your call.”

“Hey, Connie, have you ever been to the Colosseum?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“You know, being that it’s the end of the world and all—and on the off chance I’m right and this whole nightmare is over—would you want to get dinner?”

“You’re kidding.”

“Dead serious.”

“Ok. Dogsbody. But you’ll be court marshaled.”

“So, the Gaeta U.S. Air Force Base is a few clicks from our position. I’m gonna set down there and we’ll rent a two-seater Vespa and its two-hours to Rome. We’ll dine by the Spanish Steps.”

“So, we’re going AWOL?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“You know this could be the end of the world.”

“That’s a chance I’m willing to take, if you are.”

“Ok flyboy. I’m in. But it’s your funeral.”