Galaxy of Stars 2/5

Madsby’s mind floated down the hall as his legs charged out of his apartment. As soon as his feet hit the sidewalk, he broke into a run toward the nearby Metro station. What kind of aliens were these going to be anyway? What kind of ship was he dealing with? He didn’t want it to come to violence, but he still had a few contacts in California that could give him some sway with the National Guard... What in the world are these creatures thinking, anyway? His mind carried no thoughts of his abandoned apartment or new acquaintance. Mostly just one, overriding, question: how is this possibly happening to me?

His legs, for belonging to a fifty three year old, actually held out pretty well for the first block. After that, Madsby decided to bring his planet swift justice at a brisk walk instead of a running jog. His mind was buzzing as lengths of sidewalk passed beneath his feet. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. When Madsby was working, he knew he was never a major player in his party, but when you work in the nation’s capital, and you get a fancy title and some people working beneath you, it’s easy to feel like you’re on top of the world. Or at least right up there. Since that experience, he’d run low on hope that he would see aliens land and make contact. Especially considering his recent life expectancy.

But it’s not supposed to be like this! He never worked with NASA much, science was never his issue area, but he knows the politics of any situation, and this has all the makings of a bad first impression. This is no small thing. You don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with the rest of the universe.

Once he reached the station, he rode the escalator down to the platform, injecting himself into the main artery of his city. Of course he considered hubris. He wasn’t a major player in the party. It’s not like he could command a press conference, or really any news coverage, anymore; his last couple of missteps had seen to that. But he also knew that no one else was going to stand up to this.

Based on latest events, it wasn’t just him. There was a condition, a syndrome at work in the country. This was not a time when people were ready to stand up and declare what this nation, or what this world, would be about. Madsby didn’t have all the answers but he knew this wasn’t it. The alternative to doing something to stop it was to return to the letter he was writing.

A canned voice blared off tile walls heralding the oncoming train. As he boarded, along with a peak crowd, he found a spot to stand and stared around for some place to try to focus his gaze and repress the quiet urge to hate those around him. The irony struck him instantly as the creeping feeling of not being able to stand the people next to you clouded his thoughts. His temperature raised and he rued the fact that no one could appreciate that he was planning to save all of their universal reputations.

“Have they come out of their spaceship yet? Are there any new photos? I wonder if they’re really green...” A young boy, buzzcut, around ten years old, rained questions down on his mother. It was obvious by her disturbed look she was glad she didn’t know the answers - she was barely sure she knew how to answer them.

“Well, they’re probably not green. I mean, they might not even have skin for all we know.”

“What?!”

Elsewhere a pair of young girls, who would have been in school if it were a weekday, were hunched over their phones, calling out updates from god knows what social news site. “The theater is Grauman’s Chinese in Hollywood, can you believe it?”

“Of course it’s in Hollywood, we already knew that. That’s the one where they have all the premieres.”

“Not all of them. Every movie in the world doesn’t premiere there.”

“I know, only the top ones, the mainstream, the best of the best. That’s why they landed there.”

“Well maybe it is, but I think that’s putting a lot of trust in their events manager.”

“Oh! Here we go: Department of Defense spokespeople are saying that what can only be called a ‘forcefield’ has made itself known. All attempts to make contact with the ship have been unsuccessful.”

This was the first combination of words that had risen above banality and made it to Madsby’s ears. They hadn’t made contact. There was still time for his first impression.

“What kind of forcefield is it? Does it disintegrate you or just lightly bounce you off?”

“I’m sure that whatever it is, it doesn’t resemble forcefields from Star Wars.”

“Who knows? Maybe they’re fans. Those movies could have even influenced technology on multiple galaxies.”

“Even ones far far away? Think of the distance they’ve traveled. These guys didn’t discover forcefields when they saw our summer blockbusters.”

The two friends’ pointless bickering quickly descended to African swallow references before it was drowned out by someone else. A man who looked like he’d lost his fastball awhile ago, a few too many straws had broken his back. You smelled him before you heard him, but his voice filled the train car.

“You say aliens, I say: his holiness. The lord almighty, potato: tomato. Every religion in the world has predicted this moment. Every religion. And now it’s here. I don’t care, I’m ready. I’ve lived an honest life. Can any of you say the same? This is literal divine intervention. We’ve just been going along, living our lives. You know. We’ll have a few drinks, we’ll do a few drugs, we’ll indulge a few sins, and we think we can just write it off like it’s nothing. It’s not nothing. These little green men are here to tell us that. Mark my words. Now, who’s driving me to church?” Madsby arrived at his transfer just in time, he had to get away from this crowd if only because the stench of this man’s breath had become insufferable.

As he left the train car, he made the split second decision to add his voice of reason to their absurd musings. “Just so you know, this guy, hygiene notwithstanding, has it the most right out of all of you. Assuming this isn’t one of the most epic hoaxes known to mankind, the time has come for all of our dirty laundry to be aired. This isn’t an issue of some new comic book, our species is officially on trial.”

With that, the doors closed on a crowd full of blank stares and the smelly vagrant’s parting thoughts: “Peace be with you, brother.” Madsby turned from the departing train and walked over to his next stop, wondering if a normal person would feel any remorse for saying what he just said. If he was hoping the next train he caught would hold a more elevated discourse, he was much mistaken.

This train was nearly full as well, but Madsby was able to take the seat of someone who had just left it. He saw a younger man making a move toward the same seat, but he just pretended he hadn’t and that problem floated away from his brain with each passing moment, never to bother him again.

The conversation here was similarly heart wrenching to listen to. “I just hope they don’t get in touch with the wrong people. Everyone knows only three to six corporations really matter these days. If the aliens partnered up with one of them and Amazon has the monopoly on alien technology? There goes our freewill as consumers.”

“They’ll be a digital marketplace for everything in the universe…”

“Exactly. And don’t think congress will have the balls to keep up with these rapid changes.”

Well, he might have been slightly right about that. The exchange was made intolerable when Madsby idly stretched his neck to see the conspiracy theorist but saw an insufferable boyfriend, posturing towards a disinterested girl.

Elsewhere: “It’s a space war. There’s no doubt about it.”

“Hmm, between good and evil, or more like internecine political conflict?”

“Isn’t it always a bit of both?”

“Well…”

“This is how it starts. First we make contact. Maybe all will be going well, then it’s: ‘we’ve got to colonize your planet and use every available resource to fund our costly war on the other side of the galaxy.’ This thing is bigger than all of us, man!”

“At least that last part’s definitely true.”

“What else can it be? We’re not capable of distant space travel. It’s not like we can help them fight the war, we’ll have to become a farming colony.”

“But for the good guys though, right?”

First mansplaining, now geeksplaining, surrounded by brash ignorance everywhere he looked. Madsby started to feel himself wondering what his big rush was anyway. Is this really what he wanted to stand up for? Were these people worth his advocacy?

For that matter, he asked himself, what is my advocacy worth anyway? What is my word against a population cowering before a predicted space war? What if this is just the way it goes. The machinations of the universe. There are forces which propel all things forward, they’ve now run planet Earth and all its inhabitants into this... UFO, ET, spaceman or woman, alien whosits. Now it’s time to let that take its course.

“I just hope they’re not trying to steal any of our solar system. I wouldn’t want any foreign aliens to make a habit of hanging around our planets. Who allowed them in our orbit anyway? Shouldn’t the air force have cleared them?”

With those words, Madsby was snapped out of his moment of self doubt. The train was pulling right up to his stop and that irritating voice, the one that had lodged itself deeply in his brain, began to announce the airport stop. It was a good thing he was getting off too, he had something to say to this man behind him, and judging by the amount of denim and grease on his person, there was a good bet Madsby didn’t want to stick around too long. But he couldn’t let this go.

“Listen friend. I hope you can eventually get yourself to a place where, everywhere you go, you don’t automatically question the trustworthiness of anything sorry enough to cross your path. Until you do, the rest of us are going to act like a group of people who knows a thing or two about hope, positivity, and the future. We’re going to greet any aliens that arrive from now on (or who turn out to have come in the past and we didn’t realize it until now) with hospitality. We will welcome them to our home because we can imagine - we can imagine - just how it might feel if one of us were to be transported to another planet, far from our own, where we know no one, and everything is strange. We can imagine hospitality being of the utmost value in that situation. You should try your damndest to imagine that, too. Or else when they ask for people to experiment on, we’ll volunteer you first.”

Madsby left the train. One person started clapping. No one else started, but he appreciated it anyway and he walked away, even more briskly than he had before. These people weren’t ready for aliens yet, but they would be. Well, they could be. He just had to buy some time.