Lurkers Read online

  ‘Okay,’ Marge said, coming out of the kitchen, ‘I’m all clocked in and ready to go. Have you got all your sidework done?’

  ‘Most of it,’ Jessica said, ‘I’ve got three open tables here, since George is comped out.’

  ‘Well, don’t you want to get started?’ Marge asked.

  ‘We got slammed,’ Jessica said, ‘I just want to sit here for a few hours.’

  ‘Well, you’d better not let Larry see you sitting out here.’

  ‘Ffft. He’s a pud.’

  ‘And Mike’ll be here any minute.’

  ‘He’s off today.’

  ‘Are you sure? I’d better go check.’

  ‘He’s—nevermind,’ Jessica said, ‘Mike’s in Montana for the weekend.’

  ‘Larry’s here until, what, four?’ I asked.

  ‘Ten,’ she said, ‘The other two split the morning shift. Which was stupid: Carl coulda come in. Though that would suck if he were about to get here.’

  ‘Carl sucks?’

  ‘Carls retarded. Like, literally. You’ve seen him. That one eye looks up and to the left, and the other kinda jiggles?’

  ‘Eight minutes!’

  ‘Look out,’ I said. Then my watch beeped and planes fell out of the sky.

  Working my way to the alarm, I set it for 6.08. Just for the hell of it.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘Oh. Carl. Yeah. The chameleon. He’s weird. And, yeah: retarded.’

  Leslie hurried back in and sat down, excited. ‘Okay that was weird. I was out there smoking and the birds stopped chirping. Just like that.’

  ‘So?’ I asked.

  ‘Just all at once. They stopped chirping. Think that means anything?’

  ‘My watch beeped,’ I said, ‘It probably killed them.’

  ‘So, when’s dawn supposed to be,’ Leslie asked, ‘Because it’s really bright out there.’

  ‘Six minutes,’ I said, ‘But, by now, the sun’s just over that hill out there. And it’s not perfect anyway: sunrise over town is in, uh, five and a half minutes. Out here, between the curvature and the topography and...I dunno: sometime today.’

  ‘It might not be in five and a half minutes?’ she asked, disappointed.

  ‘George is counting down to...hang on....’

  ‘Cue George,’ I said.

  ‘Seven minutes!’

  ‘So, if I go back out and smoke slowly,’ she said, ‘I might get back just about exactly in time.’

  ‘You might miss it entirely,’ I said, ‘Whatever it is.’

  ‘Is there anything in there I can read for seven minutes?’ she asked, eyeing my laptop.

  ‘I could tell you the basic story,’ I said.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay. Sitting comfortably?’

  She had an elbow on the table and the heel of her hand propping up the skin behind her eye more than the skull within, mouth open in gaspy boredom. ‘No.’

  ‘Right. So. Once upon a time, the Lizardpeople of Altair Four were scanning the galaxy—’

  ‘Wait,’ she said, ‘What? Lizardpeople?’

  ‘Yeah, the—oh hell. No. The millipedes. That was odd.’

  ‘Maybe you should switch it to lizardpeople,’ she said.

  ‘I like the millipedes.’

  ‘I hate millipedes,’ she said.

  ‘That’s why I like them,’ I said, ‘They’re all scary. No one cares about lizards. Snakes, maybe. Bugs, entirely.’

  ‘Six minutes!’

  ‘I could live with snakes,’ she said, ‘I just hate bugs. A lot.’

  ‘What about spiders.’

  ‘Spiders are bugs,’ she said.

  ‘Spiders are arachnids,’ I said, ‘Not insects.’

  ‘Don’t care,’ she said, ‘They’re still bugs.’

  ‘You sound like those idiots who say that whales are fish.’

  ‘No one says that anymore,’ she said, ‘Everyone knows that whales are mammals. And everyone knows that spiders are bugs.’

  ‘Only because “bug” doesn’t mean anything,’ I said.

  ‘It means “bugs”,’ she said, ‘And we hate bugs.’

  ‘So the aliens are bugs,’ I said.

  ‘I know. And I hate it. Because they scare the hell outta me.’

  ‘You’re slipping,’ I said.

  ‘I’m what?’

  ‘You’re about to fall down,’ I said, ‘Sit up before your palm loses traction on your face.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, sitting up and blinking.

  ‘Also you’re drooling.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘How do you know.’

  ‘I’d feel it.’

  ‘You look numb,’ I said.

  ‘Five minutes!’

  ‘I’d still notice,’ she said.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘the bugs scanned the universe for millions—well, for...now I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter, I guess. They scanned the universe for a long time.’

  ‘I still think it should be lizardpeople.’ She said, ‘If you’re gonna tell me a bedtime story, I want lizardpeople.’

  ‘A bedtime story,’ I said, ‘at a restaurant.’

  ‘Sleepy,’ she said.

  ‘Okay. The...okay. Once upon a time, the lizardpeople scanned the universe for millions of years, from side to side, and from front to back, and from top to bottom, and from beginning to end. They scanned the universe inch by inch and second by second, possessing the technology to do that sort of thing. Until one day, way back in the past, they caught a signal: humans, on a planet the humans called Earth, watching television, because they were a planet of idiots; the humans mostly watched reality television and gameshows and talkshows and ESPN and MTV and whatever else sucks on television these days.’

  ‘Four minutes!’

  ‘The aliens watched the televisions—not directly, but through the eyes of the humans whose brains they were scanning. And they monitored the pleasure centres of the humans’ brains, discovering that humans, watching this meaningless bullshit, were actually happier while watching television than they were while making burgers and assembling machines and even mating with people they’d been married to for too many years. The aliens saw that the humans were for the most part happiest when they were ignoring everything apparently important in life. The humans would stay up late watching infomercials, then sleep too little before waking up and being too tired to enjoy being productive at the office the next day. So: do you know what the aliens did?’

  ‘Three minutes!’

  ‘The aliens decided that humans, wasting their lives watching television—not even good television—were too stupid to survive. Because, one day, uh...they’d become a threat somehow. Maybe by broadcasting this shit so much and so often that the universe would be clogged by the signals. And the aliens, evolved to scan the universe for signs of intelligent life, would instead get caught up in soap operas and gameshows and talkshows and shows about shows and shows about fishing and shows about angry people who hate their jobs cooking food and building motorbikes and being Paris Hilton—whatever she does—and...and the aliens watching all this through the eyes of the humans watching it, and the eyes of the humans making it, might get lazy too. They might stop scanning the universe for intelligent life, instead making television shows about intelligent life, slowly but inevitably becoming more and more human: more and more lazy and complacent. More and more lifeless.’

  ‘Two minutes!’

  The sky really bright out there now, the sun hiding just behind the hill across the street, I got my sunglasses out and put them on, continuing: ‘So the aliens plotted out a course to the planet of Earth, preparing to exterminate the entire planet in a single deathstar blast. But, being an advanced, civilised society, the aliens had committees and ethics and other things already dropping them within dangerous proximity to human stupidity, so they argued and considered and, in the end, settled on a proposal to invade Earth, on the ground, seeking out and destroying only the stupid, leaving the smartest to surv
ive in a new twist of natural selection. And so they did. Flying to Earth would take billions of years; but, being that advanced, they were able to teleport here instantly: wonk!’

  ‘Wonk!’ George agreed.

  ‘Wonk; wonk; wonk,’ I said, ‘They teleported in and opened fire, killing their approved targets and making the world a smarter place one moron at a time.’

  ‘One minute!’

  ‘Eventually,’ I said, ‘They’d exterminated the stupid and the lazy and the satisfied, leaving alive only those ironically enough most likely to pose a real threat: those willing to get up off their asses and fight back. But, of course, by then, that was no longer necessary. Because the aliens were done now. They’d invaded and accomplished their goal and were ready to go home now, back to their homeworld, back to scanning the universe for other intelligent life.’

  I looked at my watch, seeing that I had about twenty seconds to go; and I concluded: ‘In the end, of course, those humans remaining alive advanced in leaps and bounds, idiots and politicians and other speedbumps out of their way. Earth became a eutopia, with only smart, sane, useful people, progressing, ever after, into the future of mankind.’

  ‘That’s stupid,’ HippyGuy said.

  ‘Showtime!’ George announced.

  Tick.

  Tock.

  BeepBeep. BeepBeep. BeepBeep. BeepBeep. BeepBeep....

  EPILOGUE

  No one ever reads the epilogue.

  Someone told me that once. I’m not sure I believe it; I might still be too optimistic for that. But, statistically, ninety percent of books purchased become owned by people who never bother to read beyond the first chapter [whether they bother to read the prologue in the process is something after which I can’t really guess] before relegating the thing to a bookshelf or a coffeetable for people coming over to watch a football game to see and be fooled into thinking the owner of the house was clever enough to have read through. Maybe so.

  Maybe, though, this book will have been different. Since, in a real sense, this book is all about the epilogue; it’s really why you bought the thing, even if you never knew, while buying the thing, that this book was going to be that book.

  I could have written it differently, of course; there was a time when I’d have had to write it differently, my publisher not letting me get away with this format. I could have written the ending first [in a sense, of course, that’s exactly what I did; I just happened to write the ending first as the epilogue, saving it in a separate file until the rest of the book was written] and skipped the backstory explaining what I’d been doing there in the first place.

  But that’s not the way I do things: I don’t write down to people; I don’t make it easy for the masses trying to use my stuff to learn to read. I write books for myself, if only to see what they look like once I’m done. I do as I write consider that there will eventually be an audience: I’ve been known at least to strive to limit the internal gags. And yet there’s only so much I can do with that before atrophying into Ernest Hemmingway for the illiterate masses able somehow to find their ways to whichever eatery I happen to occupy on a given night.

  No one ever reads the epilogue.

  This time, I think you’ll read it. Here’s what you already know: the attack came at dawn.

  Here’s what happened next....

  From orbit, as the sun begins to appear from behind the planet, North America resembles a massive, chaotic LiteBrite set, one of its larger clusters being Denver, Colorado; reentry to this spot at 9.81m/s2 [or, for the pedants, may = -kvy -mg] approaching terminal velocity as we used to know it, the blob of white light would shatter, resolving to various colours, identifying this structure once known simply as a diner but in recent months perverted into the politically contentious Ground Zero to make it sound somehow more important.

  In fact, it’s what it always was: a greasy spoon with a trademarked name, albeit with international attention. Not so much an eatery as an attractive nuisance in the night, calling to weary travellers like a Siren with Ebola. Some of which, it seems, travelled more lightyears than others.

  At 6.08 in the morning, on Saturday 8th August 2009, two minutes after the official sunrise, Sol’s beams first crested the smallish hill east of the restaurant, rounding down through the windows in front of me and to my right before Marge, replacing Jessica for the morning, could drop the blinds and keep the sunlight out of everyone’s eyes for the next hour or two. Leslie squinted at the stark fireball reflected in the framed corporate artwork behind my seat, and in my sunglasses, shifting to avoid staring at it; Chuck settled for shielding his eyes with his hand.

  HippyGuy and HippyChick basked in it, of course: Gaia greeting them with warmth on this meaningless morning in a series of meaningless mornings—their evidence that Earth was to be worshipped, if only for being within a hundred million miles of a small, forgotten star in an anonymous arm of one of an infinite number of galaxies in the universe.

  Hutch was facing the eastern windows, watching George haloed in the sunlight now that his countdown had run out. I’m not sure what he’d have been thinking at that moment—possibly that, if They were coming, They might let him talk to Them.

  George was catatonic, but silent. Which, thinking about it, should sound redundant. Except that he always looked catatonic, even while talking, and especially while chanting the slowly draining ETA for the Lizardpeople of Altair IV.

  The sun was up. It was daytime now. The night had ended on schedule.

  It happened in an instant, when it happened. A loud pair of noises, each really sounding like wonk, the air palpably sliding out of their ways; then, where the sound had been, there stood two lizardpeople.

  I suppose there’s no need to describe them, since you’ve seen them since: reptilian and bipedal, hunched forward and counterbalanced by vestigial tails. The scientists, including palaeontologists, posit that they could be highly evolved theropods, if not by that same description simply modern birds. The two I saw were about the same height—each maybe four feet tall, able to crane upright toward five. Like all of them, they wore nothing and had no weapons or other tools; if they are indeed an army, none has any insignia I personally can identify: they really do all look alike, to me.

  At first, no one said anything. I don’t even remember anyone screaming or trying to escape. I think we were all just staring at the lizardpeople. Then, things got confusing, one turning to George and one turning to Hutch.

  Hutch spoke first: ‘I don’t understand.’ It was of course a response to something I never heard.

  Then George spoke to his lizardperson: ‘I waited, and tried to tell them. No one ever believes me.’

  ‘You can just call me Hutch,’ Hutch said, ‘Everyone does.’

  ‘Thank you,’ George said, his lizardperson raising an arm and pointing a tridactyl finger—its index finger, really, between its thumb and pinky. Then, George faded quickly out of existence. It wasn’t quite that Star Trek teleportation thing, but it was clearly a form of movement; he seemed to shrink away, maybe slightly faster than his clothes, which disappeared as well. Also, he clearly wonked instead of booming.

  Hutch looked scared now. Maybe we all did. But Hutch was the one holding my attention just then, even if I peripherally noticed George’s lizardperson now approaching the hippies.

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ Hutch whimpered, ‘Why does it matter—’

  And that was the end of Hutch. He didn’t teleport anywhere. He simply flew. Everywhere. Hutch didn’t wonk: Hutch boomed.

  HippyChick was staring intently at her lizardperson, obviously concentrating strongly; Hutch’s lizardperson arrested HippyGuy’s mind and engaged him in another telepathic discourse I couldn’t follow.

  After a moment, the two lizardpeople gave each other something like a glance; they may have nodded, unless I simply got the impression that they should have just then. They looked back to the hippies for a second; then, in a pair of booms, the hippies exploded as Hutch had.
/>   The lizardpeople telepathed with Leslie and Chuck for a moment. I won’t bother relaying what I learned about that later, partly because it’s actually none of your business; it’s really barely any of mine.

  Then, one of the lizardpeople wandered off into the kitchen; the other turned to face me.

  Do not be alarmed, I thought—though of course it wasn’t I who thought it; the lizardperson simply didn’t have a voice of its own in my head, As I see you’ve surmised, we are the Lizardpeople of Altair Four; George spoke of us; you wrote of us; we are now here.

  ‘Um,’ I said.

  You have no need to speak in order to be heard. I know your thoughts before you think them. I know your brain. I’ve scanned it and seen what it contains. No conversation is required. I see you understand now. That’s efficient. I will now explain:

  As you’re beginning to understand, we have methods and technology beyond that of your species. We communicate through a form of thought not entirely unlike your fictional descriptions of telepathy. We travel through a process similar to your hypothesis for folding space. We monitor the universe from Altair Four; you are correct in presuming that we don’t call it that, while incorrect in presuming that our name for our planet defies pronunciation on your end: we communicate through bursts of images, including words as you might read them; your brain processes the sounds of those words as images, leading to the illusion of noise. It’s complicated, and irrelevant.

  You had presumed incorrectly that we on Altair Four would be unable to observe your planet across a distance of sixteen point seven lightyears; in fact, we’ve monitored your planet longer than your species has existed. In recent times, we’ve monitored your communications—television, as you’ve written, as well as your evolving methods of reposition; as you now presume, we can read the contents of your phone and laptop from our planet; we can in fact read your brain from the same distance.