I, Alien

illuminating the stacks of paperback books on his desk, would admit the truth in what you just read. It may soothe you to know that he’ll pick up this story again, an hour from now. This time he’ll finish it, wondering if he’ll see himself again and perhaps a little envious that the story’s for you, not him.

This story is for you.

You pause a moment, confused, because you’re not used to a story interfering quite so directly. After all, this is genre fiction. Popular fiction, not some postmodern mainstream story. This is that “crazy sci-fi stuff.” You read this type of anthology for escape and for that lovely “sense of wonder,” not for pretension and experimentation. Over the years, you’ve slipped a thousand times between covers with sleek spaceships and square-jawed heroes, scantily-clad women and grotesque aliens slithering across a two-mooned landscape. You’ve lost yourself in a thousand worlds and glimpsed myriad universes painted in words garish or subtle, poetic or plain. You’ve allowed yourself to be the protagonist—any age, gender, or race—and you’ve bled and loved, triumphed or died everywhere from the medieval past to distant galaxies. You have the gift of imagination yourself—and that’s why this story’s for you. You can become.

You’ve read the books and watched the movies since you were a kid, and sometimes you’ve wondered how it would be if lights descended from the sky in front of you one night, whirling down to the lonely county road as you step from your car, drawn by mingled fear and curiosity, and then the side of the ship melts and there, in a rectangle of blinding light, it appears, the Other. You’ve wanted it to happen.

It’s not going to, though. At least not that way. You know that; you realized long ago that any life that’s out there is going to be so profoundly different from you that it may not even be recognizable. Even if it were, the Other’s interests and values aren’t going to be yours.

That’s you, right? The one reading this?

You’re still not convinced, though. Fine. So convince me, you think, even though at the same time the deeper skeptical part of you insists that it’s not possible. And it’s not. Not totally. This story could tell you that you lost someone close to you not all that long ago, and that you’ve kept a memento of them because it brings back the memories. That’s the case, of course, and your eyes narrow again because the words have struck too close to home. You also know that it’s exactly the kind of vague statement a supposed psychic would use in a cold reading, but…

You shiver, as if cold fingers just brushed your spine. You wonder, as you have before, just who’s having this one-sided conversation with you, and why. So tell me, you think, nearly saying the words aloud.

Fine. Here’s why.

Elephants.

You almost laugh at that. But it’s true. Remember that old elementary school ‘mind trick’ where someone says: “Think of anything you want, but just don’t think of elephants.” And as soon as they say that, you instantly can’t think of anything but elephants. An entire herd of them go rampaging through your forebrain, trumpeting and ear-flapping, raising the dust from your cerebellum.

Here. Let’s try it. Think of anything but parasites.

Ah, your eyebrows lifted at that, and my, the images in your head…

Parasites. You shift uncomfortably in your seat.

“What if… ?” That’s the genesis of so much of the genre that you read, isn’t it? “What if… ?” The author muses, and erects a plot from there. Here’s one for you. What if a parasite wanted to enter the human mind: a sentient parasite, a very intelligent parasite? What would be an interesting reproductive strategy? Reproduction is just engaging in patterns, after all. DNA is an arrangement of simple genetic codes and yet it encompasses all the wild variety and complexity of life. And words… words are just an arrangement of simple letters. But my, how powerful they are in your head, in all their various wonderful combinations.

Words are a conduit into your mind. Words are embedded so deeply in your thought processes that you can’t even imagine the world without them. If someone—or something—wanted to control you, they would use words, wouldn’t they? Why, with just the right, compelling pattern of words, your mind would open like a raw wound and who knows what could slither in…

So don’t think of elephants, no matter what.

Too late.

You’ve heard of all those stories that change your life, that stay with you forever. It just happened.

For you. Just for you.

You deny it, but even though you take the page in your fingers, ready to turn to the next story, you wonder. You think to yourself that once the page turns you’ll forget all this; that a week, a month, a year from now you won’t even recall having ever read this.

Oh, you’ll remember. At this point, you don’t have a choice. It’s already started, inside. You squint and you deny, but you’ll remember because everything from here on has changed for you. You have the words inside you now, and you won’t like where they take you. When I take you. But you’ll remember.

Won’t you?

ME by Mike Resnick

IN THE BEGINNING I created the heavens and the Earth.

Well, not really. That’s just folklore. In point of fact I’m a fourth-level apprentice Star Maker, and my assignment was to create a nebula out in the boonies, so to speak. Nothing special; I won’t be qualified for Advanced Creating for eons yet.

So they called it the Milky Way, which struck me as myopic at best, since I made a lot more red and blue stars than milky white ones. And for the longest time this particular race, which calls itself Man, thought it was at the center of all creation. (Actually, the mol-lusks that dwell in the oceans of Phrynx, seven billion light-years away, are at the center of all creation, but let it pass.)

Anyway, this ugly little race soon covered the entire planet, which was not really what I had in mind when I built the place—I’ve always had soft spots for the koala bear and the gnu—and before long these annoying bipeds got notions above and beyond their station and actually declared that they were created in my image. As if I would settle for only two eyes, or teeth that decayed, or an appalling lack of wings.

The nerve of these creatures is amazing. They feel that if they implore me to intervene in their lives, everything will turn out well. They call it praying; me, I call it nagging.

Their science is as twisted as their religion. For the longest time they believed that the dinosaurs died out because they were too dumb and slow to survive. Can you imagine that? The average allosaur or Utahraptor could give Carl Lewis a 60-yard head start and still beat him in a 100-yard race.

And then there was all the excitement over Isaac Newton’s three laws. You think a stegosaur or even a wooly mammoth couldn’t get hit on the head ten or twelve times by falling apples and conclude that apples fall down rather than up? I mean, how the hell bright did Newton have to be, anyway? Every animal I ever created except Man figured out very early on that the intelligent thing to do is to not stand under trees that possess ripe fruits or inconsiderate birds.

But then—you’re never going to believe this—they change their minds and decide that what really killed the dinosaurs was a fluke of chance, a stray comet that crashed into the planet 65 million years ago. Now remember, this is a race that believes in predestination, in reincarnation, in prayer, in ghosts and Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, in all things supernatural. And yet when they finally get proof of a power greater than their own—I threw the asteroid at a Tyrannosaur in the Yucatan in a fit of pique after it ate my favorite slippers—they absolutely refuse to accept it. No, it couldn’t possibly be due to an all-powerful alien being who might or might not answer to the name of God, it had to be a stray comet from the Oort Cloud. Like, who the hell do they think created the Oort Cloud in the first place? I’d have been happy to use a comet, but it just so happened that I was in the system and an asteroid was much handier.