Where Am I And How Did I Get Here?

Chapter 1

The warning signs were apparent at the beginning of the 20th century. Isolationism and nationalism occupied much of the discourse of Western nations. Racism and ethnic bigotry were rampant. Spiritualism and religious fundamentalism were on the rise. The means of conducting war were rapidly becoming mechanized. The Industrial Revolution was well underway. Man had learned to fly. Man had learned to kill faster, better, and in vastly greater quantities.

Two hot world wars reshaped political boundaries, followed by a cold one. Holocausts, genocides, and massacres were planned and carried out with ruthless efficiency. Propaganda was systematically employed, enhanced by new insights into human psychology. As mankind learned to study itself scientifically, men turned on men in new and more effective ways. Exploitation became easier, quicker, and more widely practiced. Film, then radio, then television, and then the Internet expanded the reach and the power of information, storytelling, and myth. Humanity had more facts at its disposal, but it became harder to distinguish from fiction. Mankind was drowning in a sea of information and disinformation.

Radio was the first form of mass communication to exploit Earth’s electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves facilitated long distance communication, allowing a single broadcast to reach an audience over dozens, even hundreds, of square miles. Radio networks expanded the reach of any given program to a potential audience spread over an entire continent. Listeners joined a virtual community separated from each other by thousands of miles simply by flipping a switch and tuning a dial. Less than 30 years after radio networks went nationwide in the 1920s, television followed suit. In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke published an essay titled “Extraterrestrial Relays” in the magazine Wireless World, which proposed the concept of the geostationary communications relay satellite. The first active repeater satellite was launched in 1960, and the era of instantaneous global communication was born.

The following audio recordings were discovered in the year 2192, embedded in a data stream that failed to transmit from a damaged reconnaissance satellite. These transmissions arrived too late to warn those on Earth.

{Begin Transmission 001}

I hope this message gets through. My name is Adam Valentine, and I was last on Earth on February 23, 2017. I’m not sure what today’s date is because I don’t know how long I’ve been gone. I don’t even know how I got here, but here I sit, on a planet that seems far away from my own. I have absolutely no idea where this planet is. The creatures that manage this compound informed me that they don’t know where I come from either, or how long ago I left my home planet. I’ve been here for a few days, but the days seem much longer than on Earth. I was dropped off, apparently like many other creatures, by a far more ancient race that the caretakers call The Old Ones From The Deep. These caretakers look after specimens that seem to come from several planets.

You can probably imagine my shock. I wake up one morning and find myself in completely unfamiliar territory, wearing a type of one-piece coverall thing I don’t recognize. Where am I? How the hell did I get here? Where are my clothes? Where are my glasses? Why can I see perfectly well without them?

An impossible looking creature was hovering over me, like something from a nightmare or one of the movies I worked on. It resembled an upright muscle-bound armored pig, or a cross between a silverback gorilla and an Ankylosaurus. It extended its paw… well, I guess it’s a paw, because it sure didn’t look much like a hand. So it reaches it’s paw-hand-whatever toward me, and I freak the hell out, trying to scramble to my feet so I can get the hell out of there. Then the dizziness hits me like a Mike Tyson uppercut, and the paw-hand tries to steady me as I flail around and stumble. The creature struggles to get something like headphones on me as I try to gather my senses. Suddenly, I can hear the creature speak, and this seems even more impossible. How can this thing speak English? It tells me to calm down, that I am not in danger. I beg the monster not to eat me. Then the pig-gorilla-thing makes a sort of chuckling noise, which throws me. Wasn’t expecting a monster to laugh at me. The monster assures me that it’s only there to look after me, that its job is to take care of the new creatures, and that it understands it’s going to take me a while to adjust. I just need to give it some time, it says. Then it grabs the headphones and lumbers off. I didn’t know what the hell to think, except that there was no way any of this could be real.

So I’ve been here for a few days, trying to get my bearings. It’s damned lonely, for one thing. There aren’t any other people here, but there are some strange, freaky looking creatures wandering around. I’ve had a few interactions with these caretaker monsters, but they leave me alone most of the time, except to give me food and point out a covered area where I can sleep. Sleep doesn’t come easy. The caretaker pig-gorilla-things told me there are creatures like me at other compounds nearby, but I have yet to see any of them. Maybe the caretakers are telling the truth, maybe not. How would I know? I haven’t left this compound or jail or zoo or whatever it is. At least, not so far. I’m still trying to figure it out. I’m trying to figure out a lot of things.

Let me go back to the beginning. Not the actual beginning, like my birth or whatever, but the beginning of how my ass wound up here, based on what I’ve been able to piece together so far. It’s all a bit fuzzy, to be perfectly honest. The last thing I remember before I woke up is walking home from the mom and pop convenience store near my apartment on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. I bought a couple beers, a bag of cheese curls, and a lottery ticket, and then walked a couple blocks to my apartment building. I wonder if I won. I wonder where that ticket is. Well, it doesn’t really matter now, I guess. Not a thing I can do about it. Anyway, I walked to my front door, put the key in the lock, and then nothing. Totally blank. Man, do I wish I had that beer now. I miss beer. Hell, I miss cheese curls, and tacos, and pepperoni pizza. I miss a lot of things I never would have guessed I could miss at all, but there ya go. I even miss the traffic, and there’s no way in hell I would have said something so blasphemous before I got here. I spent way too much time in traffic back in L.A., frustrated and always in a hurry. Hurry to work, hurry home, hurry everywhere else in between. And my car! My big, beautiful, run-down, old Pontiac. Man, did I love driving that beast! No cars on this planet. They’ve got these floating platform things here that seem to defy gravity. That’s how they move stuff around.

I’d had an okay day after a couple months of getting my ass kicked by life. Things seemed like they might be looking up. My girlfriend had moved out in a huff a couple months earlier, but we were still talking, trying to figure out if we had a future together. My job had vanished practically overnight when the show I was working on got cancelled. “L.A.P.D. 4 Life.” Remember that one? It wasn’t all that bad really, but it wasn’t different or unique or groundbreaking, either. It was your basic cop show, a procedural drama about the lives and loves of four cops at a barely functional precinct in a bad neighborhood. The good ol’ boy white dude, the sarcastic black guy, the sassy Latina, and the quietly noble Asian martial artist. I’d worked on worse shows. At least the crew was mostly nice, decent, hard-working people. Most of them, anyway. There’s always an asshole or three.

The white male lead of “L4Lulz” - that’s what some of us called it - was a monumental jerk. Relentlessly self-absorbed and so incredibly vain that you’d think his only love affairs were with mirrors. Audiences seemed to love him for a while, or at least enjoy him. They used to admire him once upon a time, when he had a career in big-budget action movies, but as he got older, he made some really poorly conceived trash. A string of drunken nightclub fights, a couple of totaled Ferraris, a relapse and a drug bust, followed by a shockingly racist and anti-Semitic Twitter rant, and then it all started falling apart for Derek Hughes. Hero to Zero in about 4 months, then the revelations came out that he’d been accused of sexually assaulting eight different young women. Classy guy, right? As he self-destructed, he took a lot of jobs down with him. One of those jobs was mine. The publicity and marketing gurus decided to euthanize the show. I was a film editor on a high profile network TV series in 2016, then suddenly I was back to the between gigs grind, trying to get interviews, make a good impression, and get on another show. But I digress….

I’d guess it was probably The Old Ones that grabbed me. Maybe it was another race of aliens, or robot servants, or who knows, really? The armored pig gorillas don’t strike me as the most likely suspects. I was sliding my key into my lock, and then everything goes dark. I vaguely remember a humming sound and the hair standing up on the back of my neck. Next thing I know, I‘m waking up from what feels like a week long bender, lying in a field of what I can only describe as mossy orange grass, and meeting a monster. After the pig-gorilla left me, I noticed a slow moving palm-tree-like creature pass by in the distance, creaking and croaking as its trunk-like lower appendages spread apart to cover about five yards of terrain. My fog started to lift, but I was pretty sure I had to be dreaming. I tried to take in my surroundings, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. Was I dead? Was I in Heaven? Was I losing my mind? Had somebody slipped me an incredibly strong dose of LSD? I couldn’t tell. And how in the hell had my eyesight been fixed? I’d been thinking about getting cornea surgery, but I never pulled the trigger.

I decided to slap myself across the face. The pain was real, so I figured I probably wasn’t dead. All other bets were off.

Right now, I’m torn between passing along what I’ve observed here, what I think I’ve learned so far, and my desire to find out what’s been happening on Earth. Has America burned to the ground yet? Did we go to war with North Korea or Iran or Russia? Is our government really going to pretend climate change isn’t happening? How did “Guardians Of The Galaxy 2” turn out? I really wanted to see that movie. What’s happening with the industry? Does my girlfriend miss me? Does my agent know I’m missing? Is anybody looking for me?

Crap! The caretaker gorilla pigs want me to wrap this up. I‘ll send another message as soon as I can. Maybe someone will figure out where this one came from and come pick me up. Ah, who am I kidding? I’m stuck here unless my cosmic kidnappers decide to take me back home. I can’t figure out what they would want me for, though, and that’s got me worried. I’m no great philosopher or rocket scientist or neurosurgeon. I’m just a fairly normal guy. Guess I’d better try to make the best of it. Send beer!

{End transmission 001}

The United States was on the verge of an unprecedented existential crisis in the early 21st century. Religious bans were proposed. Fake news and propaganda were crowding out genuine information and reasoned public discourse. Politically and religiously motivated extremism was firmly entrenched and drowned out moderates and centrists. America was at war with itself, imagining enemies at every gate. Russian oligarchs, the preeminent masters of espionage, disinformation, and subterfuge of their day, were winning an asymmetric culture war with the West. The highest echelons of the American government were colluding with their former enemies. Wealth became increasingly concentrated into the hands of a tiny transnational elite. Poverty increased rapidly and pervasively. The majority of humans lived as an underclass with few opportunities to improve their lives.

A man later identified as Adam Clayton Valentine was discovered unconscious and unresponsive outside his front door on February 23, 2017, according to local police records. He was pronounced dead three days later. A routine autopsy determined a cerebral hemorrhage to be the cause of death.

{Begin transmission 002}

It’s been about 10 days since my first message. I think I have figured out a few things that eluded me before, but before I get to that, let me tell you what I’ve been able to observe about this planet I think it’s probably much larger than Earth, but quite similar in many respects. There are two moons, though. They don’t always appear at the same time, but when they do, the view is absolutely stunning. I doubt I’ll ever fail to be impressed by the sight. One moon is larger than the other, or maybe it’s just closer to the planet. The smaller moon has a slightly pinkish hue, and its orbit is at a roughly 90 degree angle to the larger one, or at least that’s how it appears to me.

I have a view of an incredible mountain range that seems much larger than anything I’ve seen on Earth. Then again, I rarely traveled outside the US, so my frame of reference is the Sierra Nevadas and the Rockies. This mountain range is absolutely massive, with considerable snowpack. There’s got to be some very intense skiing there, if anybody skis on this planet. There are lakes and rivers and a single massive ocean, I’m told, but I’ve only seen a couple streams here in the compound. Maybe the gorilla-pigs will let me do some sightseeing before long.

The gorilla-pigs communicate with the aid of small translation devices they wear on their torsos. I didn’t notice these gadgets at first. The translators seem to be made of a dull grey metal, and are decorated with a kind of ornate filigree trim. Maybe the squiggly interlocking lines are a written language. I don’t know. The gorilla-pigs told me they didn’t invent the devices. The translators are given to them by The Old Ones, whoever they are. The devices let the caretakers communicate with the various intelligent creatures that are deposited here. The gorilla-pigs wear headsets that connect to the communicator thing, and when they want to talk with me, they hand me a similar headset that is shaped to fit my head. The headphones are made from a very light metal that seems to be quite hard, because I can’t bend them at all. I tried to test it the last time I used a pair, and even though they’re no thicker than a typical wire hanger - nada. When the pigs are done chatting with me, they take the headphones with them.

So the gorilla-pigs seem to be able to communicate with whichever creatures they want to, but I can’t. I haven’t seen the caretakers talk with the walking palm trees yet, but then again, it doesn’t seem as though the trees have anything resembling ears. I’d love to have a chat with one of these tree creatures, but haven’t figured out how to make that happen. I’ve tried, but the tree critters just ignore me. I can hear them croak and groan at each other, though. They mostly keep to themselves. There’s at least one other kind of creature in my compound, but I seldom see any of them and have had no luck having anything like a face to face interaction. These things are kind of like a cross between a very large worm and something like a naked mole rat, and they seem to spend almost all of their time burrowing underground. I’ve seen these worm-things on two different occasions, or maybe it was the same one that I saw twice. I can’t tell. They’re weird as hell, but they leave me alone.

The gorilla-pigs reminded me earlier today that I’m in this compound in order to give me time to adjust to the change in my life. They seem to think that I should consider myself fortunate, and they keep assuring me no harm will come to me here. My conversations with them are pretty limited, so maybe the gorilla-pigs aren’t all that smart. I asked them if I can leave, and they said that I would eventually, but not yet. I asked where I would be taken, and they told me they did not know. The Counselor will explain everything I need to know later.

I’m fed twice a day. The food is a nondescript, brownish loaf with the consistency of hard bread or a large Italian sausage. I have no idea what it’s made of, but it leaves a lot to be desired aesthetically. It doesn’t taste bad, though. It’s kind of bland, but it seems to serve its purpose. It’s filling, but it’s a damned boring diet after a few days. Maybe this is their version of prison gruel. God, what I wouldn’t do for a fucking bacon double cheeseburger. Or lasagna. Or some barbecue. I’d settle for a Caesar salad.

What’s that? I haven’t seen one of those before! The gorilla-pigs are approaching with what looks like a very tall, thin, bald, blue humanoid. They’re telling me to wrap this up. Gotta go.

{End transmission 002}

Environmental degradation, pollution, deforestation, and the contamination of water resources were observable and verifiable threats to the habitat of Earth by the latter half of the 20th century.

By the first decade of the 21st century, the scientific consensus was nearly unanimous that humans were damaging Earth’s climate through the continued and sustained burning of fossil fuels. Nuclear power was promoted as a clean energy source in the late 20th century, and considerable investments were made to build nuclear reactors around the planet in the hope that fossil fuels could be phased out. Disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima revealed that nuclear power came with considerable risks, and potentially catastrophic consequences.

Corporations with vested interests in the exploitation of petroleum and coal marshaled their considerable resources. Political opposition to addressing the impending climate crisis became deeply entrenched and resistant to efforts to develop, improve, and deploy more sustainable sources of energy. Solar, wind, tidal, wave, radiant, biomass, hydroelectric, and geothermal means of generating power were developed and deployed slowly, deprived of significant governmental subsidies in research and manufacturing. The polar ice caps began to melt at ever increasing rates. Weather patterns became increasing turbulent and difficult to predict. Glaciers melted faster. Sea levels began to rise. Oceans choked on plastic, debris, and spilled petroleum. Landfills overflowed. Mass extinctions of wide varieties of species accelerated.

As Earth was being slowly poisoned, scientists looked for signs of life in the cosmos. The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence scoured the stars for evidence that humans were not alone in the universe. The United States landed men on the Moon and robots on Mars. Various human space programs launched probes and space-based telescopes throughout the Solar System. In 1977, the United States launched the Voyager probes to gather data in the outer reaches of the Solar System and beyond. Each Voyager probe contained a Golden Record and instructions on how to use it. The Golden Records contained photos of Earth and its life forms, scientific information, and audio samples of natural sounds, music, and spoken greetings in a variety of Earth’s languages.

{Start transmission 003}

Fuck this shit! Fuck the whole damned human race! What a bunch of self-centered egomaniacs! Asshole idiots, the lot of ya!

You people are disgusting, and you really ought to know better by now, shouldn’t you? Admit it. You don’t give two shits about humanity. You sure as hell don’t care about other living creatures. You care about hoarding stuff for yourselves. You care about creating the biggest pile of worthless, shiny crap. Fuck the environment. Fuck the poor. Fuck the starving. They deserve what they get, right? If they didn’t deserve it, they wouldn’t be poor, would they? Just keep your filthy paws off my stuff, you damned leeches.

You just want to get laid, get drunk, and guard your shit from the rest of the thieves, because deep down you know that’s what you all are. Thieves! You preach all this lovey dovey crap, but you don’t practice it. The sermons are for the suckers. Keeps ‘em in line, tolerating this fucked up system we’ve built, just docile enough to turn the other cheek and say, “Please, sir, may I have another?” “Forgive me, Lord, for I am a worthless sinner!” Boo fucking hoo!

We’re a race of thieves, ruled by thieves, murdering each other to protect our stupid, filthy loot in the vain hope that maybe one day we’ll be able to wall off the rest of humanity, and keep them from taking back the shit we stole from them in the first place. We admire the biggest crooks, the most audacious thugs and punks, the slickest con men. Somebody comes along and tries to tell us to slow the fuck down and take care of each other, and what do we do every damn time? Bullet to the head. Stabbed in the back. Nailed to a cross.

Heaven help the first world full of life that we find. We’ll just rape it and rob it. You know it’s true. Raping and robbing is what we’re good at. The good guys are way outnumbered by the greedy liars that run shit. The good guys get beat down and worn out. Every damn time! They’re overwhelmed. The good guys aren’t willing to play dirty. They want everyone to fight fair. Fighting fair never won a street fight, did it? Life’s a fucking street fight, and the cheaters win. Don’t they? Well? FUCKING DON”T THEY?

And I’m just another hypocrite. I was a part of it all, telling these fantasy stories about noble saviors and fighting the good fight, when all around me it was plain to see that most of the people calling the shots were even bigger hypocrites than I was. Self-absorbed narcissists running a con. Humanitarians in public, vicious fucking backstabbing greedy assholes in private. I can count the stand-up guys who had any real power on one hand. Without ever getting to my thumb! And you ladies aren’t any better. You’re not off the hook. You’re even more vicious than men half the time, especially to each other. Maybe it’s because you’re hungrier. Maybe it’s because you’ve been shit on for so long you just can’t wait for your chance to climb to the top of the shit pyramid and rain down on the rest of us. Y’all make me sick. I make me sick.

Well, I have news for you, boys and girls. We ain’t on the top of the pyramid any more. Our pyramid is a fucking anthill next to what’s really going on out here. We’re in a lot of trouble. We better get our shit together with a quickness. This bullshit we’ve been getting away with for the last couple thousand years is gonna have to come to a stop right quick. We’re moving up to the big leagues real soon, whether we like it or not. You think you’re gonna fuck with The Old Ones? Ha! The Pranksters have been fucking with us for millennia, and even they can’t fuck with The Old Ones. These guys know every dirty trick we’ve ever thought up so damned well they’re probably bored shitless with us. The Pranksters taught most of those dirty tricks to us in the first fucking place! They’ve seen this movie a thousand times, and they’re gonna rewrite this script with a motherfucking vengeance.

You’ll see. I almost feel sorry for you assholes. But you know you have this coming, right? You know you deserve to reap what you’ve sown, don’t you? Karma’s a bitch in heat. You were warned a thousand times over, and you didn’t FUCKING PAY ATTENTION! Idiots.

{End transmission 003}

Next Chapter: Where Are We And How Did We Get Here?