Just a Minor Firmware Upgrade
by Bill Kowaleski
part 1
Despite their deserved reputation as lotharios, Sirians really can be good drinking buddies. Now admittedly, not too many people know a Sirian, at least they believe they don’t know any Sirians. Let me explain... no, let me just tell the story, and all will become clear.
It begins when Inkohatum visited me in my little apartment high above Michigan Avenue just north of the Loop: my sad, lonely, post-divorce home. He was a he that night, wearing his male skin, looking like a handsome, well-groomed college student, maybe a member of the Young Republicans.
I’d insisted that he stop trying to seduce me with his female skin, which was admittedly pretty sexy. He’d patterned it after a famous porn star and gotten all the details right, but I knew there was a little green man — or, to be precise, a little green hermaphrodite — under all that gorgeous cleavage, perfect curves, and supple smooth female skin, and that knowledge more than killed any possible arousal. So he’d pretty much given up on me and treated me like a comrade. Or so I thought.
“Hey, Inkohatum, how’s things?”
He strode into the apartment, fashionable bag over his left shoulder, three thousand dollars of casual clothing on his firm young ersatz body, oozing confidence, athleticism, and charm. He sprawled on my leather couch saying, “Hey, Gerry, life is wonderful! So what have you been up to?”
“Well, I wish I could say every day of my life was as wonderful as yours. Unfortunately, today was not so good. I spent an hour in a community outreach seminar. To tell you the truth, my friend, it got me so angry I just wanted to scream at those people!”
He reached into his high-fashion shoulder bag. “I can sense your tension. You need some of this.” Out came a bottle of my favorite single-malt scotch, special limited edition. I’d been eyeing it for weeks at the liquor store in the lobby of my building, and how he found out, well that was one of his mysteries: he always knew more than I told him. But there it was, ninety dollars a bottle, and he was already pouring substantial amounts of it into two glasses that he’d also pulled from his bag.
“I bought this to celebrate my latest deal, but clearly you need it more than I do. So tell me, why did you want to scream at those community outreach folks?”
“It was some religious group, Chicago Area Fundamentalist Society, I think it was called. They came to us, actually. Wanted a dialog between scientists and pastors. But all they did was grill us on what proof we have of evolution.”
“You should have contacted me. We have video sequences over hundreds of thousands of years of the changes in land mammals on this planet among other things.”
“Right, they’re going to believe that someone was making videos a hundred thousand years ago...”
“Oh, forgot about that little detail.”
“They believe in this drivel they call intelligent design. They think humans, in particular, were designed by God and put on this Earth all at once. What nonsense.”
Inkohatum sat silently, tilting his head.
“Did you hear me?” I asked.
“Sure, sure, Gerry. Uh, bit of a problem here, I’m afraid. Don’t know how to break this to you but...”
“What are you talking about?”
He gulped two fingers of scotch in a single swallow, poured another glass, and sighed. “Well, here it is. Those pastors are right.”
You should know that Sirian disguises are not just costumes. They’re as far beyond Hollywood-quality makeup jobs as stealth bombers are to paper airplanes. Sirians can communicate the slightest emotional nuance with their perfect face masks, feel the lightest touch, and convince anyone that they’re really human.
I gave him a close look to see whether he was joking, but his perfect artificial face revealed nothing. “Is this one of those misunderstanding things we have every once in a while? Like when you told me that you were a drug dealer?”
Inkohatum laughed. “That was and still is true but, of course, oak resins aren’t considered drugs here on Earth.”
He took a deep breath and continued. “Those pastors told you that humans did not evolve randomly, right? That what you are today is the result of conscious design, and that the designer then put that pattern into your genome. Is that a good summary?”
“Well, it’s a lot more magical and mystical for them of course...”
“Sure, they don’t understand reproduction at the genetic level, but they claim that an intelligence, which they conclude must have been God, designed you.”
“Right, but of course I explained to them that we know today about all of these intermediate forms, a continual chain in the fossil record...”
“Etcetera, etcetera. I know. But for each of those intermediate forms, how many individuals are there in the fossil record? Oftentimes, less than one. It’s just a jawbone, or some other small part.”
“Sure, we extrapolate from what we find. Over time, we find more, and it’s always consistent with the overall concept.”
“And how do those pastors explain that fossil record?”
“They claim that God put it there to test us.”
“Really!” said Inkohatum. “Clever people. Very close to the truth.”
Now I was mad at him. I stood and walked to the apartment door, opened it, and pointed to the hall. “If you want to mock me, you can leave. Come back when you better understand the concept of common courtesy.”
“Gerry, my profuse apologies, but I was just getting excited because I never knew that there were people who had stumbled upon the truth about the origin of your species. Yes, of course, all the other species on Earth evolved as science explains, but humans were designed.”
“You really believe that?”
“No, I don’t believe it. I know it. Look, do you have time to come over to my place now? I need to show you some videos.”
* * *
Inkohatum owned a penthouse on the Inner Drive, a trophy of his success as an interplanetary drug dealer, but also his business office, his transportation center, and his communications link to his home planet. He swooshed through the door, while I panted and huffed, feeling my forty years, trying to keep up but trailing a good dozen steps behind.
By the time I’d crossed the threshold, he’d disappeared into an inner room. I paused in the foyer, empty except for two knotty pine tables that would have been more appropriate in an up-north cabin, then passed into a large, ultra-stainless, granite-clad kitchen, then into a massive living room with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the dark lake in the distance. A river of car headlights on Lake Shore Drive was just visible at the very bottom of the windows.
He stood among his precious, tasteless, Early American furniture next to something electronic that was attached to a screen with a striking three-dimensional image. As I neared, I could see that it showed a laboratory with undisguised Sirians moving about. Their bulbous heads and thin bodies always creeped me out; these were the little green men everyone made fun of, only they really existed, and they were really smart, and one of them was a good friend of mine. On a long table, like one you would see in a hospital operating room, was a humanoid figure — not human, not an ape — something in between.
“See the running time stamp in the upper right?” he said without taking his eyes off the screen. “That number corresponds to two hundred eleven thousand, six hundred and fifty-seven years before today.”
He then pointed to the upper left. “That location stamp puts the video on Earth, in what is now central Africa.”
“What are Sirians doing in central Africa then? And how did you get this video?”
“It’s in our archives, any Sirian can access it.”
Sirians are the Instagram-generation tourists of alien species. They record everything, and have been doing it for roughly a million years. Long before humans ever existed, they’d invented their own cloud — a vast storehouse of information with associated tools to easily access knowledge they’d gathered from thousands of planets and dozens of intelligent species.
We spent three hours studying the video. This was no home movie. It had layers with bench notes, scientific papers related to the experiment, explanations of why and how they did it. I’ll give you the short form.
Some influential Sirians had gone to Earth to see the wildlife and noticed the hominids. They found them interesting, and imagined what they might be like with less hair, bigger brains, the ability to talk. Scientists were paid to discreetly create such a creature. The result was Homo sapiens sapiens, an animal the Sirians found irresistible.
For a thousand years, a few elite families made fortunes bringing the wealthiest and most perverse of their kind to Earth to frolic with their creations, at the same time assuring the humans that these were gods that must be obeyed. In return, the human colony, ever growing, was fed, housed, and pampered. To cover their tracks, the Sirians planted some fossils to show a more gradual progression in the development of their designed species.
Then, a thousand years later, the whole sordid business was exposed to the Sirian public when a major revolution on Sirius Prime overthrew the ruling elite. The humans were cast adrift, forced to make their own way, always yearning for the lost land where they’d been housed and pampered that the Sirians had called Eden-iwak, always looking to the sky for their gods to return.
“Oh my god!” I said as the clock chimed midnight. “No pun intended, but, wow! I’m knocked off my feet by this. Are you sure this isn’t some elaborate hoax?”
Inkohatum looked at me with the tilted head that I’d come to know meant, We’re not like you humans.
“We should show this to your pastor friends,” he pertly suggested. “I imagine they’d be delighted to be proven right.”
“Oh my, I don’t think so! Their God is an almighty being, all-powerful, invincible, all-knowing...”
I stopped because, to tell the truth, I hadn’t said anything that wasn’t technically true about the Sirians. They recorded everything, so they were all-knowing; they wore disguises that doubled as body armor invincible even to artillery shells; their technology was so far advanced compared to ours that it easily surpassed the Clarke definition of magic equivalence.
“I see you’re arguing with yourself,” Inkohatum said. “We really do fit their definition of God, don’t we?”
“Well, not completely. You didn’t create the world and everything in it.”
“No, not your world, though we’ve done that hundreds of times in other star systems.”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. The U.N. Secret Commission on Sirian Affairs would never grant approval for those pastors to meet you or any Sirian.”
“We could bend the rules,” he said, sporting the impish grin I usually saw before he went for a sexual conquest.
“Oh no, not me! I’m not losing my grant and the opportunity to learn from you guys!”
“Don’t worry Gerry, I won’t involve you.”
“Please, Inkohatum, don’t!”
He grinned again, dare I say it, impishly. I sighed. There’s no telling a Sirian to back down once he’s taken a notion to something.
* * *
Two weeks passed before the other shoe dropped. I had just finished teaching my senior-level quantum mechanics class, a class I was within a year of obsoleting once I got all the things I’d learned from the Sirians into proper scientific papers.
It was through one of those Sirian scientists that I’d met Inkohatum, the disreputable nephew who wanted to harvest oak logs and ship them back to his planet. Little did I know at the time the implications of that seemingly innocent enterprise.
As I walked back to my office, chuckling while remembering how Inkohatum had latched onto to me like a deerfly in the Wisconsin forests he trolled for wood, I felt a light tap on my left shoulder, turned, and there he was, in his male skin, prancing lightly alongside me.
“You really need to learn how to walk like a man when you’re in that disguise,” I grumbled, embarrassed.
“Are you kidding? I get much more sex this way,” he said with his best Cheshire cat grin.
I sighed. He could be so mature and interesting, and then in the next breath, so childish and degenerate.
“I wanted to discuss something with you,” said Inkohatum.
“Let’s wait until we’re out of the corridor.”
Once in my office, door closed, he said, “I met with your pastor Washington. You need to explain this man to me. We just don’t understand your species at all sometimes, even though we designed you. How did you turn out so irrational? What did we do wrong?”
“You met with him? Well, I’d love to hear what happened,” I said.
“I showed him the videos, explained everything. Even told him I was one of those little green men wearing a disguise. He didn’t believe any of it. So I tore off my mask, showed him my real face. He jumped back and started praying... loudly.”
“Wow, you revealed yourself to him! Total breach of U.N. rules. I hope he doesn’t report you. Your drug business would be over.”
“No worries. My cartel would just send a replacement, but he’s not going to report anything because he believes it was some kind of magic trick that I did. Same with the videos, he can’t believe they’re for real.”
“Well, it’s a very simple thing really, Inkohatum. We humans, faced with evidence that contradicts what we believe, don’t just throw our beliefs in the trash. We doubt, we test, we investigate further.”
“But I showed him the evidence. There’s no doubt, there’s nothing to test, nothing to investigate.”
“You didn’t build us from scratch, you know. You modified a hominid that already had many of the traits we humans have today, and you added a layer of god-worship on top of the superstition, deceptiveness, casual cruelty, loyalty, sense of justice, and so forth. We’re just not a rational creature.”
He shook his head. “We really screwed up, didn’t we? Never really checked out the animal we used as a base, just added a few things and assumed it would all turn out perfectly. Typical, really. We Sirians tend toward laziness.”
His eyes lit up, and the impish smile returned. “Uh, oh, I don’t like that look,” I said.
“We can still fix you. Really, it’s our responsibility to do it. I’ll get right on it.”
He turned, opened the office door, and ran down the hallway at the speed of an Olympic sprinter. I prayed no one would open a door in his face. As I sat contemplating his words, my alarm grew. What did he mean by “fix”? The possibilities all seemed quite frightening.
* * *
Months passed, and I received only the most cryptic of messages from Inkohatum. He said he was working on “the problem we’d discussed” and “I enjoy much progress, but cannot yet disclose details.” I had no clue as to where he was or what he was doing.
And so, curious, and more than a little fearful, I asked his uncle, the scientist who led the team that was teaching me and a few other prominent human scientists Sirian physics, just what Inkohatum was up to.
“Nephew has finally taken up something respectable. I knew that drug dealing was just a phase. Nephew sends his warmest greetings and is saddened that you haven’t inquired about his whereabouts,” said his uncle, the Learned Nefer.
“And what, your Most Learned, is the respectable endeavor that my good friend has engaged himself in?”
“My relation studies viruses, their alteration, and their eradication. Nephew’s goal is to ensure the health of your planet by developing an ecosystem of beneficial viruses that will overwhelm those that cause disease and other undesirable conditions.”
Biology was not my field, but I do read science headlines voraciously. Something disturbed me. Couldn’t viruses be used to...
“Your Most Learned, what might these undesirable conditions be?”
“I suggest you visit Nephew yourself and discuss this. My relation wishes very much to see you, but does not want to communicate about the aforesaid work over your hopelessly insecure email or phone systems.”
Learned Nefer was a nice enough Sirian, but formal and precise to the point of aggravation. For example, he never used the personal pronouns “he” or “she” because Sirians were hermaphrodites, and thus both at the same time. Their language had a single sound that meant “he/she,” but Learned Nefer, the amateur linguist, somberly corrected me when I tried that approach — not proper English. While Inkohatum, for all his quirks, treated me like a good friend, Learned Nefer saw me more like an intelligent lab animal, something his people had decided to train but certainly not something he’d ever have any feelings toward.
“Would you be so kind, Most Learned, to tell me how I could accomplish such a visit?”
“Nephew resides at our secret facility in the Sinai desert. To reduce the fatigue of travel on your most uncomfortable air transports, I suggest you use our teleport facilities.”
Well, that was a new one. I had no idea they’d installed teleporters, but I was certainly happy to know I’d be able to travel halfway around the world in a few seconds.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Bill Kowaleski
