The Aliens

“Es ist ein Vogel. Es ist ein Flugzeug,” the headline read. “It’s the Uber man,” I laughed to myself. That was my last day in Berlin. I was still a new intelligence officer, and I knew then, we were in a different war than our fathers’. This time we had to beat one actual Uber man. “Easy,” I thought, “We beat a land of them, one more would not be a challenge”

My pet theory was the Alien, or the Alien’s handlers, chose his appearance and his craft’s landing location to maximize safety. There was no safer body, and no safer place and time, than a White man, in Kansas, in 1946— the year we estimated he landed in that cornfield. My classmates at MIT disagreed with my theory. They hypothesized randomness and chance. But they disagreed with me often. To them, I too was an alien.

There was one popular op-ed about me and my obsession with the Alien. The author was right on the premise. I was obsessed. How could you not be? However, she misattributed my motivation. I was not angry. I was not a reverse-racist. The alien was not even a White man, nor a man at all, so that claim was always laughable. I was simply, and profoundly, disappointed. Here was a being who could end wars, secure the rights of all people, unite nations, and instead he chose to rescue kittens from trees and leap tall buildings. He held all the power, and chose to play dress-up. A waste.

The existence of the Alien was responsible for my first fortune. My research on the thermo dynamics of the alien element that fell to earth when his ship did, combined with my years of acquiring leverage and secrets at the state department, allowed me to secure the necessary contracts to build a monopoly on the cheap energy used to power many a metropolis. Again, the Alien could have provided us this technology himself, and instead he spent time squabbling with that other billionaire cosplay aficionado over what to name their group of friends. They never wanted justice. I did.

I recognized the psyop the Alien did to the US government. The only possible way to harm the Alien, we were aware, was the element that swaddled him as a child. Somehow, serious security professionals believed the way to defuse the Alien was to throw glowing green rocks at him. But I knew his real weakness. It’s the same weakness every great man has- love.

Love and another man with a plan aimed at you. That’s the greatest of great weaknesses.

I analyzed the Alien’s physiology from a single hair plucked from his pillow on the bed in his pillow fort in the Arctic. His body converts energy from the sun into more energy than he takes in. A Newtonian impossibility.

Thankfully, for us, he was taught to love. His parents. His coworkers. His inquisitive friend but incurious lover. He loves our shared city. He loves his country. He loves you. But what he loved the most was your idea of him.

The curdled love of yourself, and a man with a plan aimed directly at your softest point, that’s the greatest of a great man’s weaknesses.

An anonymous collective broke into my company’s servers and released the plans we developed for our uber-low cost, uber-massive generators. All it would take to power countries is a handful of our once proprietary designs and the greatest renewable resource in the universe to fly past and turn what amounts to a large hamster wheel. Somehow our security team was never able to identify those hackers. A shame.

For the first time, in the history of mankind, there was a global vote. Our firm handled the online infrastructure across our many platforms. My media channels reminded everyone that a man that could fly is a man that has a duty to us all.

More than five billion people voted. And the vast majority agreed, the Alien should hang up the cape and power their country, too. He would need to work nearly 20 hours a day, every day of the week. Such a small price to pay, to be loved by all of us, for as long as we could remember him. Plus, how could the defender of democracy turn against the people? All the people. All the people he needed to love him.

I also made sure to add surveillance to the columnist he spent time with when his glasses were on. And we kept a tail on his Ma and Pa in Kansas. Randomness or chance, I believe in neither.

I am a man, as always, with plans. Many plans.

You’re welcome.