I'm trying something. Abstract, impressionist short stories and sonic sketches. Written, recorded and published within a morning. No AI involved.
This is the first.
“So, did they like, do stuff to your butt? I hear they do butt stuff.”
“No, dumbass. They show you things.”
“Like what?”
“Alternate realities. They showed me a universe where I had built the first quantum super-computer capable of teleportation and won the Nobel prize. And another where I was the architect behind the world’s largest building, which was this massive tower made entirely out of tungsten.”
“That’s so. Fucking. Rad.”
High school had never been the same since the first visitation. The alien encounters started happening so frequently and so fast that the novelty of another appearing in the news wore off within weeks. Never adults, never children, always adolescents. There’d been at least one visitation per country, but the United States had just crossed into triple digits while even China, India, and Russia had barely reached a dozen.
What worried me was the emergent trend in these encounters. Joshua was a prime example: his dad was an executive at Palantir, his mom was a life coach, and they all lived in a mansion an order of magnitude larger than the shack I shared with my mom, my sisters having escaped to Andalusia and Amsterdam more than a decade ago.
Wealthy? Absolutely. But not boarding-schools-and-private-islands wealthy. We’d been in the same public schools since kindergarten, only my tuition and lunches had always been covered by stipends instead of dividends.
I’d never been jealous of Joshua before. Not of the estate I’d been to for his eighth birthday when Mom and I got accepted for Section 8 housing in town. Not of the Riviera Blue Porsche Boxster he drove up in on the first day of sophomore year. Not even when I overheard he’d be a legacy admission to Columbia, where Ursula K. Le Guin—the author whose work emboldened me to embrace my gender identity—did her graduate studies.
But now? Now I was a goddamn jungle I was so green with envy. What solace had he ever sought in The Sirens of Titan or the Earthsea series? How many nights had he spent drinking public-librarian-brewed Folger’s coffee, re-reading Parable of the Talents? Or Seveneves? Or The Dark Forest? Or Exhalation?
Somewhere, a UFO was showing someone from Earth the infinite possibilities inherent in their existence. And I wondered if that someone, somewhere, could ever be me.
