#therelay

In a place not far away from our own solar system, A small house-sized metallic orb hurtles through space. A distant galaxy’s sun reflects off it’s aluminum-like carapace. It travels at a speed almost undetectable to the human eye. Besides a strange shooting-star like streak in the sky, one can hardly make out what it is from afar. It’s traveling seems to be that of a fluid mercury, rotating like a boomerang and subsequently moving forward. No portholes dot it’s foreign structure and whether a pilot is present at all remains debatable.

It’s speed starts accelerating and like a hot, molten metal, it turns bright orange. It spins in a way no human pilot could possibly tolerate. Then in an instant, blinks and vanishes. It appears somewhere off the dark side of the moon, a place or portal usually obscured from eye and telescope by both darkness and planetary positioning.

It starts rotating forward away from the moon’s pull and into our own. Spinning through the air like a giant silver boomerang.

Far below, a place called Cal’s bar adorns it’s usual late-night three customers. One of these customers, in a leather jacket, younger man, hair as black as his jacket. He sits outside the bar smoking a cigarette and holding a beer. He gazes off into the night sky with a sort of vacant stare. Bruce Springsteen’s, “Hungry Heart”, blasts from the bar radio. He holds his cigarette up to take drag, eyes still locked on the sky. Right where he was gazing at, a sort of metallic object flashes through the clouds. It looks a bit like lightning. It travels right over the bar, at first appearing in the distance like a spinning trash can, then nearing the size of a small plane as it was right above. No lights emanated and a strange wind swooshed after it passed.

The orb, now below the clouds, speeds over a river-side town. Not one inhabitant besides the aforementioned bar customer notices it’s speedy descent towards the banks of the Mississippi. It crashes through the rushing river water like a heavy boulder. Branches, fish and all sorts of organic life get sucked and shredded in it’s forceful pull. For a moment, the river above reflects a crimson red in the late moonlight. The crimson feeds from a whirlpool rushing in the middle of the current. Like a bell-mouth spillway back-feeding, the middle juts out a spray of blood and black flesh as a Volkswagen sized catfish found it’s way into the orb’s rip current. Below surface, the orb fights the pull of the river and travels to the river bed. Metal spikes then shoot from the sides and affix themselves like hooks, firmly embedded at least 10-20 feet into the riverbed.

At that moment a belt-like opening appears near the middle and a red glow comes from it. It starts making these strange sonar-like noises underwater and it tunes to “Hungry Heart”, by Bruce Springsteen. The bar’s radio at Cal’s starts to flicker, then the volume turns really loud. The bartender tries to turn it down but it doesn’t budge. He smacks the radio in frustration, when he contacts it, it makes a theremin sort of noise and his pupils grew to the size of his iris. In a sort of trance he walks to the back of the bar, prepares three beers. In his mind he could just hear the song and a voice telling him to ‘burn it down, cleanse yourself in the river’. He grabs the rat poison they usually use for the rats and mixes it into the beers with some pills he usually took from his pocket. He brings the round out to the customers and hands it to each of them without a word, just a strange smile. None of them question his strange generosity or why he left immediately after giving it to them, or closing the bar an hour after it should of been. Still in a trance, he walked to the River’s nearby rushing. It was so close to the bar, you could faintly hear it’s noise all day. He sits on a vacant park-bench in the black of night, his old grey hair kind of floats in the winds blowing off the shore. His eyes fix to the middle of the rushing black water and in his vision he sees a stark Red cyclone, deep below the surface of the water to the shore. It’s colors dance about his trance, entertaining his conscious self back into a lodge in the back of his head somewhere. The thing now controlling his old body, was foreign and no longer himself. It longed for the thing hiding in the rushing water.

It was the alien.

He returned to the bar to find it empty, everyone had apparently left, but the radio was still blaring. This time it was a strange noise like a high pitched frequency, with an old 70′s like song kicking in on increments, almost writing itself over the airwaves. At a certain point the lyrics were something like “I’m always down when I’m in your town”, and an old depressing piano followed their disdain, as it speeded the voice lowered instead of going higher with the rest of the instruments, as if it was bending. The lyrics in this new speed morphed to something that sounded like “Burn it down”, on repeat. The bartender smashed his most expensive liquors, cutting his hands without even flinching or noticing. He then went to the back-shed and grabbed his can of gasoline he usually saved for people who were stranded on the road. He emptied it on the bar’s old wooden counters with the message repeating over and over again from the radio, it’s amplitude and pronunciation becoming more demonic. He pulls an old matchbook from his pocket and lights the matchstick, throws it behind the bar and exits out the Saloon’s old wooden gates one last time.

His mind enslaved by the messaging, gravitated toward the source of this thing broadcasting to him. As he neared the shore of the river, the broadcast he heard earlier, now embedded in his conscience, grew in volume with the river’s flow. He heard things he could not describe to anyone else, glowing things. These things kept his conscious-self rooted in a state of perpetual automation.

This is why as his body drifted off into the Black abyss known as the Mississippi, no one else found what anyone else saw at Cal’s night. The whole thing was lost in the currents of a river.

As three family’s awoke to their two working father’s not waking up for work and one college level son as well, news broadcasters from a nearby bigger town over the bridge in Iowa, rushed with their cameras and vans to be the first reporters on scene. The strange story broadcasted throughout most of the state of Illinois. What appeared to be a triple homicide and disappearance, also the destruction of a historical bar by it’s owner, for unknown reasons.. Everyone was confused. The Bar owner’s wife Connie Miller went on local access news testifying for her husband, “All I hope is he come home safe and whoever did this brings him back. It just breaks my heart to think of him in pain or in trouble. He would never do a thing like this.......... it’s just not like him”. Any surveillance records burned with the bar.

Many of the news broadcasts blacked out, even on nearby networks. Interference would kick in on some of the TV’s and reports of strange voices being hidden in the broadcasts were beginning to surface. Most of the mainstream media neglected to mention this as the broadcasters didn’t possibly suspect that by reporting at ground zero, they might also be spreading whatever caused the bar to burn down that night.

Below the river’s rushing currents nearby, the broadcasts parallel feed into the strange orb. Using the river as a sort of antenna as the sun goes down, these strange electric bursts happen incrementally, sending droves of dead fish upstream. It seemed to be powering itself.

By the next morning, reports of many electronic devices as well as violent behaviors in dogs started to come up. One local junkyard owner had to put his own dog down because, in his words something from the radio, made it so crazed, that it tried to kill him after killing 2 of his other dogs randomly, no signs of that kind of behavior beforehand. Stories like this showed up all over the county, but as it usually goes also did men in Black suits, waving badges and telling people they didn’t see or hear anything showed up as much as the stories did. The broadcasts grew in intensity with the bursts, mainly affecting analog tv and radio waves, also anything antenna based. People’s TVs and radios turned themselves on broadcasting strange messages in the middle of then night, then shutting themselves off. People’s waking dreams and nightmares became the alien as they awoke with constant flu’s and unexplainable vertigo. As most aliens go they aren’t in little Grey men, but in us or however much we let that in us. People were afraid to buy things, even the bars that once seemed to be the lifeblood of this river-town were no longer active. Kids and adults were sick daily from the broadcasts, absences in work and school were on a mass level.

A general unease stained the air of Bordeaux.

People of the town began to blame the outsiders who have been trying to feed outside commerce, that they were intentionally trying to sabotage it. The most developed arguments all led to a conclusion that the town could no longer sustain itself and much of the businesses would have to be abandoned if another major flood occurred. The structural damage was too far out of control already and with these broadcast based sicknesses, people began to think that this was really the end times for the town.

As the towns leader’s adjourned their meetings on a possible evacuation, the vote was to try to stay out whatever else might come, despite the growing waters and concerns of the townspeople. The night following this meeting, a big storm came to Bordeaux. It appeared as if the sky was day with how strong the lightning flashes were. Thunder shook and rattled the town’s old buildings about. The businesses stood closed, most people had left or were getting ready to. People were allowed to stay at their own expense, glued to the TV watching updates about the flood.

All the code signals for ‘flood’ and ‘abandonment’ as well as ‘success’ began to distribute to the neural network of the pod. As these signals activated it started out-feeding subliminal messages into the broadcasts about the flood, strange messages like ‘leave’, ‘reap’, and ‘harvest’. Something in the pod then clicked on, a jolt happened and everything electrified in a bubble around the pod. A pressure then emanated from its armor blowing out a field of suspension in the bubble surrounding. Everything rushed at thousand of miles of pressure around, like being caught in the pumps of a monumental dam. Fish corpses fell from the water wall above, flapping on the wet ground. As the bubble of air grew around it, generators within the pod ran with the strength of suns, holding the rushing water above. The river then began to spill way over it’s shores in what was to be reported as one the worst floods of the Mississippi.

028. What makes them laugh out loud?

      Leti does not laugh out loud often. When she was little and still living on Roame, it often came from the shenanigans of her brothers. They always knew how to make her laugh even when she didn’t really want to, usually because what they were doing was so ridiculous she had little choice. Now, though, she sometimes laughs at ridiculous ideas (especially when they’re presented as ridiculous, such as with a goal of making her laugh), and she laughs at some of the behaviors of her crewmates, namely when things are extremely innocent or there’s a harmless misunderstanding. It’s never with malice, though.