BY ADAM STONE
First published in Corner Bar Magazine. Copyright is held by the author.
ON THE day he was elected President of the United States of America, Peter Burton sent a group text to a Russian general, a Venezuelan oil magnate, the crown prince of a minor Arab sultanate, and a ranking member of the Chinese politburo.
VICTORY!
He expected a torrent of celebratory replies and was a little put out by the echoing silence. Amidst the hoopla at campaign headquarters, he excused himself and locked himself in a bathroom stall. Dialled the general, the prince . . . voicemail all around. It was peculiar, but not overly worrisome.
***
The trouble on Sprktn-7 was a lack of labour. Everyone had gotten so evolved, so intellectually mature, no one could be bothered to work anymore. And workers were needed: To manage the hydro-farms, maintain the vast computer arrays, oversee the automated factories that turned out everything from disposable diapers to rocket parts.
Nobody wanted to get their hands dirty and there was Earth, ripe and ready, with nine billion pairs of hands that could easily be subdued and put to the task. Close study had revealed that humans were overwhelmingly miserable, every man, woman, and child caught up in a perpetual cycle of worry and want. Place a few Sprktns in positions of power, and it would be small work to subdue the inhabitants, round them up, herd them back to the home world and set them to work. Their permanent state of misery made them argumentative, unable to coordinate or cooperate. They were, in the view of the High Council, ripe for slavery.
So a plan had been set in motion, with Sprktn operatives put in place around the globe. With their vastly matured intellects, the agents had been able to rise to places of prominence with ease. And now, with the American presidency secured, the next phase of the mission could begin: Subjugation and transportation.
“So,” President-Elect Peter Burton lay in bed wondering, some hours later. “Why isn’t anybody answering their phones?”
***
Life in the politburo was a grind. P?tè Bódùn has sat through thousands of hours of tedious meetings, swatting flies and listening to agricultural reports from the provinces. At the last monthly conclave he’d rubber-stamped an ambitious program to reduce the smog in Nanjing, but what did it matter? In a few years there’d be nobody living there, or anywhere else on Earth.
He liked being in the politburo. It got him a nice house and everyone was terribly afraid of him. China’s authoritarian brand of Communism had generated an amazing amount of ass-kissing and he liked to have his ass kissed. Balding, fat, with heavy pouches under his eyes, P?tè Bódùn ate well and bossed people around. But he was bored, bored, bored. No wonder humans were miserable. Back home the days lasted 37 Earth hours and there always plenty to do, fun to be had. But here . . . how much fried pork could a person eat?
So he’d taken up badminton, with a couple of the other politburo guys, and it had changed his life. The geometric challenge, the blood pounding in his veins, the crestfallen looks on his adversaries’ faces: All highly satisfying! He’d risen to the highest level of skill, waiting for PB in the U.S. to crawl to the top of the political heap, and on the big day he had traveled to Guangzhou in Guangdong province to take part in an elite competition. When the President Elect called, P?tè Bódùn was passed-out drunk on the floor of his hotel room, placidly snoring off the effects of his victory celebration.
***
General Petr Bërtón has liked Russia very much for the first few years. The blistering cold reminded him of home, and the people were grumpy and adversarial. So was he, which was why the High Council had selected him to assume a role in military leadership. As a new recruit he’d marched and sang. Then he’d picked off fighters in the hills of Afghanistan, curried favor with political bosses, and risen gradually through the ranks. It was easy to outsmart humans, to tell them what they wanted to hear, and as a military tactician he was second to none. Sprktn-7 had fought all its wars a thousand years ago, but he’d read up in preparation for the mission, and knew all there was to know about the game.
When subordinates undermined him or politicians interfered, as happened from time to time, he’d simply kill them. Humans were expendable, singly — but not en masse. Sprktn-7 needed warm bodies. Petr Bërtón had on more than one occasion pulled the world back from the kind of global nuclear confrontation that would have run distinctly counter to the High Council’s larger plans.
And yet he was miserable. When you stripped away all the fur hats and the caviar, even a Russian general was faced with a life that more or less sucked. You always had to watch your back. Sometimes there was constipation, other times diarrhea. Somebody always wanted something from you. And there was nothing interesting about humans. Sex, money, not dying: That about summed up the vast majority of his conversations. Until Chekov.
He’d stumbled on a raggedy copy of The Cherry Orchard and immediately gotten hooked. He’d lounge in his dacha with just one lamp lit, absorbed in the deceptively simple stories that went to the heart of the human experience and the Russian soul.
When the President Elect called to announce the imminent enslavement of all humanity, Petr Bërtón was sitting in his favorite leather chair, turning the pages of The Seagull. Having read it multiple times in the past, he knew of course that Arkadina would get away and Konstantin would shoot himself. But that didn’t lessen the pleasure, and he was so engrossed in the action that he never heard the phone ring.
***
Pedro Briceño was working his way through a plate of arepas filled with pork and beans, considering the colour of the sky. Why didn’t they have that at home? At this evening hour it wasn’t quite blue: The bluest time would come after the oranges and pinks subsided. The sun had slipped behind the hill, igniting this spectacular display that in a few more minutes would dim, leaving behind that cerulean that would deepen to cobalt and then to indigo, before fading imperceptibly to black. This shit never got old.
The life of a businessman had been entertaining at first, the cheerful absurdity of organizing vast armies of men and machinery to suck up dead dinosaur pulp from the ground and turn it into fuel for automobiles. It had been good practice: They’d need to organize these people into functional groups once they got them to the home world and put them to work. But after some years he’d lost the vision, gotten engrossed in the thing as if it were real — as if it actually mattered how many American dollars he could get for a barrel of crude. For the sake of the mission he needed to be successful in his work, which wasn’t a problem: His advanced mind could think rings around the competition. But as his successes multiplied, he found himself coveting that success, wanting more, needed to show everyone just how well Pedro Briceño could play the game. It wasn’t enjoyable anymore, and when he tried to remind himself of the larger purpose, of the mission . . . the labour shortage on Sprktn-7 had started to seem far away, and a little abstract. One day he awoke to the realization that his life no longer had meaning.
Then he noticed the sky. It happened all at once, on a night much like this. He’d been sitting on his back deck looking out over the hills and drinking a nice red wine, when the colour in the glass struck him. Struck him. Did they have red like that at home? He recalled muted rust-brown trees, orange clothes, mahogany rooves on the nicer dwellings. But crimson, rose, scarlet? He had lifted his eyes from the glass and seen the wine colour mirrored in the explosive panorama painted by the setting sun over the hills.
Colour.
After that the business had practically run itself, things became fun and easy again. No one else seemed to see what he saw: Day to day the humans appeared to take pigment for granted. Painters understood of course, but when he’d gone to the museums and galleries, he had the sense that the people around him were admiring the subjects — castles, women in hats, abstract shapes, tropical birds, whatever — and they were missing the point entirely.
Colour!
When the phone rang on American election day, Pedro Briceño was admiring the sunset.
***
Of all the Sprktn-7 representatives on Earth, Boutros Bartah probably was the most contented, those first few years. He got to wear long flowing robes, just like at home, and the ghutra secured to his head with a band made him feel like the royalty he was supposed to be. People treated him like royalty, too: If you have to live on Earth, he quickly surmised, there were a lot worse things to be than a minor Arab prince. He liked flying in his private jet, so much so that he learned to pilot it, and as a young man earned something of a reputation for obnoxious daredevil stunts. Strafing the Bedouin in the desert.
Unlike the other Sprktns, his mission brief included the call for a relationship with a female companion. It was expected of a prince, and in addition the High Council deemed it would be useful to have some direct insight into the domestic needs of their future slave population.
His romance with Amina had been a source of intense pleasure at first. Sprktns don’t couple in monogamous pairs, so there was a pleasing novelty in their growing closeness, and eventually in their marriage. Of course he couldn’t share his thoughts and feelings with her: There was no human language available to convey the inner experience of a Sprktn. But within the constraints of his assigned character, he and Amina had been able to construct a comfortable coexistence.
Still, Prince Boutros Bartah experienced minor annoyances. For example, he understood the notion of Allah (they had a similar idea on Sprktn-7) but prostrating to Him multiple times a day was both demeaning and dull. And the dietary restrictions were a drag.
Worse, though, was the slow deterioration of his connection to Amina. She changed after they got married. He didn’t much like the changes.
Then, just by chance, Prince Boutros Bartah discovered masturbation, unknown on Sprktn-7 as both a concept and an act. It was a revelation! His Sprktn anatomy allowed for it, and in fact responded to it with a delight that he suspected went vastly beyond what most humans experienced. It became a habit, which in in turn blossomed into an obsession. When the President Elect called to declare the imminent servitude of all humanity, Boutros Bartah was in the bathtub scouring the internet for a particular scenario he’d invented. Surely someone had tried that? They had! And when the phone rang, the prince was deeply engaged in ecstasies of self-pleasure that far surpassed the experience of any Sprktn before him.
***
In the days after the election, Peter Burton could hardly get a minute to himself. Beyond the press briefings and meetings with supporters, he had to ramp up his transition team and meet with the press. He needed to discuss potential cabinet appointees, review drafts of his initial executive orders, take personal calls from the biggest donors who now were looking for payback. And so on. He grabbed private moments when he could and still it took him almost two weeks to make contact with all his field agents. Slowly a picture began to form, and their reports caused him restless nights. As he lay in bed, his superior Sprktn mind turned over and over the information they had shared, examining it from all sides.
His subsequent urgent memo to the High Council was necessarily brief, given the constraints of interstellar communication.
Peter Burton reports. Complications have arisen.
Their response was terse. What went wrong?
The President Elect chewed his lip, uncertain how to word his reply.
Badminton. Chekov. Colours. Masturbation.
The High Council were uniformly baffled. Except for “colours,” the rest of the words had no meaning on Sprktn-7. Had the team leader gone mentally askew? Was there a problem in the communication protocol? The members debated for hours before drafting their response.
So?
Team leader Peter Burton replied almost at once: Recommend more observation.
The High Council didn’t really have much choice: No one was willing to proceed until the team leader gave the all-clear. The full-scale subjugation of humans would have to wait a while longer. Sprktns understood the value of patience, but the Council members agreed overwhelmingly that a bit more clarity was required. In their next communique they urged the team leader to be just a bit more expansive in his explanation. What exactly was the hold-up over there?
When the message arrived, however, President Elect Burton was not available to receive it. He’d taken the rather unusual step of abdicating his position before ever taking office, refusing to answer any questions and then dropping out of sight. As the frantic follow-up memos from the High Council piled up in his interstellar transponder (now buried at the back of his sock drawer) the team leader was paddling his surfboard out past the breakers.
Peter Burton tasted the salt spray on his lips and reflected that he probably should have kept in closer touch with his agents. He might have been able to keep them on track. On the other hand, they had over these recent phone calls made some very compelling arguments regarding the possibility that one could enjoy, rather than endure, life on Earth.
He’d been mission-focused for so long, it had never occurred to him to explore that angle.
With his Sprktn ability to calculate physical motion at intuitive speeds, to sense and respond to even the most subtle variations in wave volume and direction, surfing had come naturally to him.
He felt the gentle pressure of the waves rolling under him, the subtle lift and then subsidence as he rode the swells. He came to the point where a half dozen other surfers lay on their boards, each watching for the perfect wave that would carry them inward. The sun warmed his back, he trailed his fingers in the sea, waiting with Sprktn patience for the perfect wave that would lift his board, curl in a mass of white foam, and propel him forward toward the sandy shore. He paddled, watched the water, and sighed contentedly. There were still Sprktn-7’s labour problems to consider but, after all — he began to paddle faster, turning his board to align with the direction of an oncoming swell — there were lots of other planets out there.
***
Adam Stone’s fiction has been published in Altered Reality, Corner Bar Magazine, Bewildering Stories, Freedom Fiction Journal, Whiskey Island Review, A Very Small Magazine, and [forthcoming] Farthest Star, Mystic Mind Magazine, and Harvey Duckman Presents.
Brilliant! Makes me wonder…