Pandora's Noah's Ark Box
The Alien

My understanding is that to these people, to this slightly variant humanoid species (NASA knows all about them, and where they are located), well they believe people, humans, even they themselves, are kinds of well, fruit. Any particular sentient species develops over thousands of years, and it grows into something, harvest-able.

The only reason they have been active here in preventing nuclear conflagration for example, over the last seventy or so years, is that they view the human race as being somewhat like a patch of briar berries of particular flavour value to them. ...And which they don’t want to gratuitously lose for lack of doing something at least, by way of protection. Which is also why they really have had the rare co-operative instances involving certain US military and intelligence operations. Baltimore academic Munro Leaf ran a small ‘pod’ of hybrid humanoids back in the late Fifties and early Sixties. His operation linked with the Eastman High Altitude Laboratories secret projects with liaison from somewhere pretty covert inside the US Army because of where the experimental project was being conducted – which was on friendly land somewhere but not on US soil.

As for any other sort of reason to be helpful or co-operative with the human species, they laugh at it. I’ve seen them do that. One of them told me, in their own language, when I asked about it: ‘Su-ei-tah.’ Which the linguists at CIA suggested to me might have meant ‘waste of time.’

These guys do speak ordinary human languages, but they mix it all up with all other kinds and forms of communications and language and language tools variants, some basically which are mere derivations of really ancient Earth languages, some actual strictly ancient Earth (human) languages -, and other elements coming from them being highly evolved and possessing sophisticated language and music forms that are so clean and clear anyone is able to understand what they are saying at a level. But too, they are very terse and economical in their conversation. It’s a ‘purpose and needs’-based thing. Sometimes you will just get a micro shake of the head and that means that they are not going to answer you at all or that maybe it’s something you ought not to know about.

It’s very frustrating sometimes. I mean what does that even imply – something we are not entitled to know about?

...So it is a factor what they ‘believe’ or ‘believe in’ regarding areas of thinking such as Cosmogony, and Cosmology. Which is, I think, where they get the ‘not allowed to know’ aspect from.

Even within the run-of-the-mill religious Right, say, in Western developed countries, you will quite readily encounter a number of people in top levels of government, intelligence, active serving military, who have a certain, let’s say almost Gothic and certainly less-than-Baroque view of these things, and who with some facile agility will opine about ‘demons’ and ‘fallen angels’ and all other kinds of nonsense like that. So those of us close to what is going on in this matter, are circumspect about what we say to such people.

The off-world beings have a good clear record of what happened in our human past. They know all about our religious philosophies, they know all about the facts behind all of the ancient narratives. But I have also realised, along the same lines of the off-world people, that it is a pointless exercise attempting to procure sense from out of irrational and emotional modern bodies of belief in various uncertain things coming from out of the dust of our ancient human past. Sᴇaʀch Thᴇ FɪndNøvel.ɴᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

For instance, how would you tell 1.2 billion people that the physical material identity (IE person) they all know as ‘Muhammad’ was actually a real historical man called Iyas ibn Qabisah al-Ta’i, and that the title ‘muhammad’ that occurs only four actual times in their Quran (one of those not even being the full word ‘muhammad’ but only ‘hammad’) refers to Jesus Christ as taken directly by phrase, word-for-word from the Diatessaron, and not to ibn Qabisah certainly, nor to any other Arabic person in the Hijaz; which is why the Quran only ever refers to ‘a’ single ‘Gospel’ and not to multiple versions that actual canonical Christians have. No Muslim believes – as a matter of their orthodox faith – that ‘Muhammad’ can forgive sins, yet in Chapter 47 verse 2 of their Quran, the putative ‘Muhammad’ (Praiseworthy One) in there, ‘forgives sins and descends from above:’ and this can only be referring to ‘Isa;’ their ‘Jesus,’ according to all standard narratives. But subsequent ‘dust from history’ - combined with much violence from rampaging bloodthirsty warlords rolling through Christian lands - has messed with that though to produce the present-day Irish Stew. And procuring ever more violence...

You would have a huge fight on your hands, if you attempted to rectify such Islamic exegeses, and no amount of mysterious little white Tic-Tacs flying swiftly overhead above the Masjid Al Haram in Mecca would satisfy the droves of ‘believers.’

Indeed, were those beings inside, to even step out of their tiny craft – as would be the demands from all the muftis and sheikhs, in order to see the proof and to witness the evidence themselves – would it be that many would want to ‘have their way’ with those beautiful creatures because it seemed that humans were the physically stronger... And then five hundred thousand dead people later...

LOL... If you now see what I mean. How it all works in reality. This is the reality about human beings. Always has been. They want to kill things right off the bat that disagree with them. Human beings themselves all die, and so they are facile to deal in death; in one respect, potentially, they are death.

*

I stood up and positioned the phone so that it was lying against my seat back so Vera was able to see most of the lounge area, including parts of the two foreign agents, the stewardess Amy, Alon standing right next to the step-ladder -, and slightly obscured towards the rear of the inner lounge, the thin, svelte, dark figure of Xan, with her/his headband covering the ears, the pashmina shawl encircling the neck and riding up over the mouth.

“Now.” I said, addressing principally the two foreign spy women. “Being women, it may be that you will have a certain, longer-term perspective about what you are about to be shown and told. You might have deep feelings of concern about the future of your children, your prospective children, your grandchildren, and generally in all events, you might just plain care. About people.

“Males, see, well, they will be motivated possibly by some misguided sense of their own heroism, some testosterone-fuelled peremptory urge to take some action or other which in all of the circumstances would be really ill-advised.”

“Eh, Jean...” It was Charlotte.

“Yes?” I raised my eyebrows.

“Get on with it, eh, bébé.”

“Oh. Right.”

So I decided that would be a pretty good idea too, and just went behind the inner lounge area bar to retrieve the hard shell Pelican case that had been tucked away there by me earlier.

“...Right.” I tapped it on the outside, and then laid it down onto the teak table top right in front of the two key women. And I opened it. Displayed to them the contents, and turned the box around so that Vera could look at it briefly as well.

“So this is a drone, yeah?” I confirmed to all of them. “Alon, see?” I made an aside to him. “You need to be in the drone business. This particular kind of drone business.”

I looked straight up at Xue then. “Xue. You must report this directly back to the highest levels that you can go. You see, this drone, once it is programmed and launched, from anywhere in the world at all, it just goes and goes and goes, but at night-time. In the daytime it sits somewhere innocuous and unseen, and recharges its battery with solar power. And then it gets up again at night, and woosh, off it goes, again. And if I program in say, the digital facial image of say, Xi Jinping for instance, with some other critical GPS way-point co-ordinates and data-set updating schedules, the thing will go and locate Mr Xi, and kill him.

“But the way it will actually kill him, you won’t be able to stop it. Within range, this casing opens up automatically, and hundreds perhaps even thousands if you spend enough money, of tiny little drone swarm things with microscopic piston injector tubes filled with, um, for example adjuvant and preservative-treated inland Taipan venom in them, get spilled out into the sky and they all swarm around, honing in on the target, and striking. Maybe they don’t have lethal snake poison in them, maybe something like Ethiopian Medusa resiniferatoxin, and then the pain just drives the victim mad.”

Xan was edging closer to us, and stepping out of the shadows.

“All the design plans are in these USB sticks here.” I pointed to a side square cut-out segment in the grey foam inside the Pelican case. “I’ll give each of you one of these.”

Charlotte shifted her weight around on the chaise, uncrossed her legs, flashed her icy eyes.

“So maybe if you look at it from another angle. Say you are Joaquín Guzmán. And you have a lot of rage and a big grudge. And just a little bit of money.

“Or say you are 14 million Uighurs, and you have a lot of rage, and access to a whole lot of money.

“Or maybe you are a private billionaire in the Kuomintang in Taiwan.

“Or, maybe you are the Iran mullahs. Iran has a huge and ultra-advanced high technology capability. All home-grown, with a little bit of Russian software and some Chinese and Russian components. Who’s to say they haven’t already built a hundred thousand units like this one, all standing-by, ready to be deployed from some patsy proxy location, like inside Turkey?

“Or maybe,”

“We get it.” Charlotte murmured.

“I mean look, this thing can be deployed any one of a hundred ways. I can stick it in a V-Halt-i payloader too and drop it at Mach 3 into anywhere. You don’t have any systems to detect it, or to stop it. Well maybe you could detect something in some circumstances, but let me not give everything away right here either though. Trust me, you cannot stop this thing.

“And the other thing. Cost. Cheap as chips. I mean, not like nuclear devices, right? I mean you can have a nuclear weapon, and that’s like, a ‘statement weapon.’ Right? Hugely expensive, and not anything you can actually use in any real tactical sense against even an almost equal opponent if you expect to live very long yourself afterwards. But these things – anyone can have ’em. And they’ll still kill you. No matter who the fuck you are. In fact, if you’re a particular person and they want to kill you specifically, well that’s exactly what they’ll do. And you’ll be dead. No matter how fucking egocentric or arrogant or tough or big of an actual smart-arse you think that you are.

“By the way – this thing here is just a basic example, with a very basic engine. There are much more advanced units still, with super-powerful brand new types of propulsion units. But still absolutely tiny. Literally go circling around and around the Earth very high up, round and round and round non-stop if they wanted to. You all already have 'loiter munitions' but nothing like these ones. These can go way way higher up than the highest cloud. Or just flit away down to the nap of the Earth when you send some high altitude air-plane up there to take the thing out where you though it was.”

Over one side of the boat, there was a big bright light emanating from beneath the surface.

There were a lot of frothy bubbles coming up as well.

Xan had moved a few steps further forward again. It was easy to make out the highly upwards pitched, straight eyebrows, and the sharp-ish nose.

“Now. Vera, if you are still there. I told you a lie. We maybe are going to abduct the Chinese deep cover operative...”

Xue reacted by pushing herself hard backwards into the soft chaise. Charlotte patted her leg. She was onto it already, I guessed. “Not you, chérie.” She breathed.

Up from the out of the black waves of the late night river water, came one of these white Tic Tacs. And it just hovered with no obvious sounds of engine or anything else, and moved slowly to right up next to the port side of the boat.

Maybe they used slush hydrogen engines inside of Earth atmosphere, or maybe some gravity technology, I didn’t know but whatever it was, it was absolutely silent.

The way these things moved, there was a massive amount of G-forces being applied to any organic occupant: 9, 10, 11 G’s.

It takes a very special body type with excellent vascular conditioning, to be able to even just be a passenger in one of these things at such great levels of momentum through ordinary above-sea-level atmosphere and inside the bulk of the Earth gravity field. Sure, they did have other systems of moving around too, ones that completely maintained their own internal gravity field, but those were used in order to go very great distances away from the planet. These white Tic Tacs only went to somewhere around the Lagrangian points @: Earth and Moon.

So they only picked up human beings who were either very slim, even thin, but with good vascular conditioning, like distance athletes, or those who were diminutive and yet also very fit; jockey-sized, ‘race-conditioned’ more or less, or else very young people. It just avoided a lot of physiological problems developing from the travel at that great of a speed and potential angular momentum G-forces.

Xan had the ‘glassette’-style headgear already in hand. Two of them.

I stood up and turned to look directly at Amy, the short stewardess. “Amy...”

She darted another quick glance at Xue, the Chinese operative.

“Amy, my dear. I want you to go with Xan now. In the Tic Tac. She – or he, I’m not actually quite sure...” I scratched my head. “Is going to take you up -, up there.” I pointed into the starry night sky. “Up into space. It’s part of your job, Amy. We all know who you are. And you need to go and learn what is going on up there and then come back down and tell your bureau chiefs,” I lied. She wasn’t going to be brought back down. They were just taking her away because they wanted her; it’s the type of thing they did.

Xan was already sedating the girl. You could see something happening, like she was going from an anxious, but alert state, into a deep trance. Which was good because to go in the Tic Tacs you have to remove all of your clothes unless you were wearing the special skin-tight thing that Xan had on, a covering much much ‘worse’ than the over-sexed attire they stuck that Star Trek character ‘Seven-of-Nine’ in most of the time. And when these ‘other place’ people did their ‘trance you out’ thing, there was a distinct odour of something hospital anti-septic, but also deep tropical green and moist.

Xue lifted an arm without thinking, holding it outstretched toward the compact, fit girl, whose stiff pressed white blouse top was being un-buttoned deftly by the other creature standing right up close next to her. Amy must have been able to realise that this was not your ordinary ‘normal human being’ that was undressing her. Her mind would have been fully functional, except the ‘sleep spindles’ were all running through her nerves by now – you could see they were, because some of her extremities were twitching; fingers, wrists, one forearm too, slightly.

Everything was coming off. Bra, skirt, shoes, socks, everything.

I watched with amazement and some amusement, as Xan thoughtfully folded items of clothing and handed them over to Charlotte.

A slit opening in the side of the Tic Tac opened like a mouth. Xan took even the panties of the girl off. And folded those too, handing them to Charlotte.

She took the girl’s limp hand and manoeuvred her cleverly forward by small stuttering steps, calmly and deliberately, towards the opening of the Tic Tac. And then she fitted the headgear over the girl’s head, and very quickly after that she placed one hand underneath a leg and helped her enter the egg-like thing. You would have supposed from the superficial impression presented by the physique of Xan, that he, she, it, was not all that strong, but that was simply not the case.

There was a throb, throb, throbbing coming now from the big white squircle superellipsoid (egg.)

And of course, when he or she, whatever -, removed their headband and shawl, the gasps from the three other people on the boat were voluble. There, clear to be seen, were the sharp pointy ears, and the slightly odd, long-lipped mouth, and the striking up-angled eyebrows and dark almond eyes. The Star Trek creative people were not far off the mark at all.

Before donning the headgear, Xan turned back and walked deliberately over to me, right by the two seated women, who literally pressed back in their seats! It was quite funny to watch.

Xan extended one of those prototypical long almost scrawny arms out and down towards my cognac glass.

And then dipped a long scrawny index finger into the dark resinous amber liquid, and lifted that back to those strange but quite beautiful lips. The one thing the people Star Trek got completely wrong was the sense of humor:

“Traditsiya Russkikh pilotov.”

“Oh yeah.” I retorted. “Are you paying close attention, Charlotte? Did you see that? Went for the vintage grand fine champagne cognac.”

He, she, thing -, trailed a hand back as it walked away, and snapped fingers. “Something to numb the pain for y’all.”

The boat’s auto DJ playing deck burst into electronic life with little red and green flashing lights. Will Atkinson – Numb The Pain. Pretty heavy-duty trance music with some ‘strange’ vocals in context of right here and now... Right little smart-arses, these, these, ‘people.’

But then the headgear was swung on and the slim figure rapidly entered into the Tic Tac, stepping inside smoothly -, and the previously opened slit completely disappeared. The throb, throb, throbbing was now a deep sonorous roar.

I signalled to Alon: “Quick, Alon. Get the blower. Quickly.”

He retrieved the big black neoprene funnel-thing-with-motor that he had stowed as I had instructed earlier, from somewhere inside the inner lounge area, switched it on and began to blow off the river water moisture from the surface of the Tic Tac, until the throbbing became quite a bit more powerful and a little electronic signal noise was being emitted. That meant things were ‘all clear.’ Suddenly, complete silence from the Tic Tac.

You can’t go through the Kármán line into virtually zero pressure space at high speed with water droplets all over your vehicle – the oxygen/hydrogen will rapidly expand, heat, and be explosive, which would seriously destabilise your movement.

“These people have run exhaustive modelling on what will happen now, people. One side will pick off another side, across all of the many existing ‘sides’ that we have here, until there is almost total anarchy everywhere and half the population of the human race on the planet will have been laid waste. There is not a single goddamn thing any of your bosses will be able to do about it. I’m giving you people the details, all the specs and design-and-build technicals, so that you can try and work up some sorts of countermeasures. Won’t work though. Won’t be able to do it in any effective way fast enough. This is the end now folks. This is the end of the world as you knew it.”

The Tic Tac rose straight up, hung around for about five seconds, and then burst off into the night sky at a wild speed.

“And Charlotte, when your friends back at your chateaux have finished listening to your crazy story and watched your ludicrous film – which I’ll give you all a copy of from the phone camera by the way – I want to see you again to see if you want to find out what that ‘not to be opened for a hundred years Remy Martin’ is like. Because, it won’t be Malkovich and Shuya Chang who will be there, opening the thing a hundred years from now. But it might be you, and it will be me. And it sure as hell already are those people ‘upstairs’ in case you haven’t already guessed.”

I looked at her deep into those icy grey-blue never-before-fully-violated French eyes, and because I apparently had some substance to deal in, she let me inside them and stay in there for a while as I spoke.

“Thing is, Charlotte, we need to make us a ‘Noah’s Ark’ box, my dear. By which I mean we need to secretly secretly, and I do mean really cleverly secretly tuck away some of that Louis XIII so that those space elves don’t damn-well pinch the stuff. Which they are already going to do with your ‘highly secure,’ ‘not to be opened for a hundred years’ vault that you guys think you have.”

I noticed out of the corner of my eye, Alon just standing there, a little more forward now from the step-ladder, his mouth gaping wide open.

“Close your mouth, Alon.” I said. “And can you maybe go upstairs and ask the captain if he would please take us back to the dock now? Please.”

Alon closed his mouth and turned around and leapt up the step-ladder.

I looked over again at the Chinese woman and then at Charlotte. Charlotte was another one of these people who had a strange mouth line. She often wore deep red lipstick to cover it and, well, okay, it had the effect of tending to make her look the part of an iconic French ’très BCBG’ woman... But it wasn’t getting past me. There was something distinctly, well, to say the least, odd about her. Another one, I guess. ...There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with my lip-line! I guess I’m way more across to the human side.

God, just look at the eyes... I thought.

The lean, hangry face. Smiles a lot yeah, sure, cute because female, that pretence of nerves in the slightly vocal fry voice, but hell – those long bow upper lips with the dip in the centre. Nah. Not getting away with that with me. The damn casting agencies would say ‘but we found her.’ BS. Total BS.

She nodded her head upwards at me. “Can you ask your Americans if they will trade something with me?”

“Sure. What? And her name is Vera, by the way -.”

“Give me their data files on the Epstein network and I’ll give them our, um, ‘amorous strata’ network.” She made a flat hand movement for the word ‘strata.’ “We’d like to see what cross-over there is. And I am prepared to open up our arrangements to your American friends here with this.”

“Woah. For serious? Did you hear that, Vera? What is this – the ‘Network In Heaven,’ Charlotte?

“...Waddya say, V.?”

I was sure I could hear Vera-Lucien fall off her chair.

But Charlotte pressed forward. “They don’t have to give me an answer right away. My offer is on the table and I will take an ‘unofficial list’ off the record – I suppose, via you, John-boy?”

Alon was coming back down the step-ladder.

I watched with some interest as Charlotte drank the young man in with her eyes.

Charlotte motioned for him to come over to her. “I understand that you would like to make some money?”

“Jesus H. Muhammad!” He blurted softly. He was shaking his head but at the same time slowly going towards her. “I think I’ve lost my mind. What did I see all go on here before? Please tell me the truth.”

When he was right up close to her, she extended a long arm, half getting up from her seat, and resting a warm open hand on the boy’s cheek, she parodied a scene from a recent Mick Jagger movie. “The truth? My boy!” She looked across swiftly to me and winked slyly.

“So do you want to make money then?”

“Okay. I do. How?”

“Do you know what is ‘gifting?’”

I almost choked.

...Because to me, gifting is what the rich, connected people do to pay their mistresses, and the big luxury brands exploit the exchange as part of a gigantic global money-laundering racket. How and why they even open stand-alone boutiques is because they have done the numbers on how many rich politicians and bureaucrats in any given city have whatever number of mistresses that is required for them to justify opening the shop there.

Alon answered: “You give things to people.”

“Yes, well you do do that. I would like you, Alon, to oversee, to run, a high end corporate gifting suite here in this town somewhere. I will give you some establishment capital, and also get you some management training – some intensive management training – and then I will provide you with a contact list and maybe you can add some of your own friends and contacts.”

“And then? What happens?”

I busted in on the exchange: “They come up to these secure, roped-off, kind of secret room, private suites, see, Alon, and then there are some well-dressed people there, some representatives of big big brand luxury manufacturing houses, and these, well -, they just give stuff to the people that get invited there. All kinds of expensive stuff. And then nobody makes any money but somehow everyone goes away happy though, apparently. Isn’t that right, Charlotte? Does that sort of cover it?”

“Oui, it is like that. More or less.”

I could see him struggle with a few of the concepts behind it all. “Now you see, Alon, why I said we had to bring the strong cognac. Would you like to share some with me now?”

Charlotte stretched a hand out once more, this time it was extended to not-so-far up... ...stopped at around his ass, really, if you wanted to be anatomical about it. “I give you plenty of capital to start. And of course all the companies will provide their samples for free.”

Her ice-cold gray-blue eyes stared up at Alon. “You will do this, for me, yes?”

“Go like this -” I advised Alon. And I shrugged that way that the French people all shrug when they mean to say ‘yes, maybe, okay, let’s see.’ “And say – ‘okay, sure, maybe, why not?’”

I quickly grabbed a cognac glass and filled it and stuck it in his hands. “It’s okay. You can say yes. It’s not illegal.”

So he kind of gestured ‘yes.’

And then Charlotte added: “And then maybe too, you can ask some of your beautiful local Australian girls if they would like to be presenters.”

It was fucking pointless trying to swim in the opposite direction to these people, right? I mean, wasn’t it?

There was Xue, too, all the time party to the whole damn thing. Oh and she knew what the message to her was, as well. And hell, if her bosses ever did stuff that she didn’t like and couldn’t live with from now on, well, she knew that she could just leap the fence and step across. To over here. And we’d ‘disappear’ her. Easy peasy.

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