Graham Parke's Blog

Imagine traveling the 27 catrillion million light-years to earth without a single problem, then turning on the landing lights way too early and scaring the inhabitants of several major cities – already the people of earth were talking up a storm about those ‘strange lights in the sky’.

Not the best way to start a stealth interplanetary mission.

But this was exactly what Gryx had done. And he’d done it just before parking his spaceship rather permanently inside something that other pilots, better pilots, commonly referred to as: the ground.

Yes, he had miscalculated the elevation of the landing site and crashed the ship, but he had a good reason. It had to do with the 50.000-year-old whisky he’d opened to celebrate his first inter-dimensional jump precisely on the edge of the ionosphere of a planet. That was like hitting a bulls-eye with your first dart, when throwing it from five blocks away, standing on a balance ball, in a hurricane.

How often did that happen?

Well, probably quite often with other pilots, but that didn’t count. They had their fancy academy degrees and had logged the required flight hours. There wasn’t much honor in doing a good job if you knew exactly what you were doing.

In fact, to Gryx that had always seemed like cheating.

What he did, traversing dimensions without a clue as to what was actually happening, now that took skill.

After a modest countdown the emergency return capsule detached itself from the crashed craft and shot up into the thin, earth atmosphere. There was a momentary shudder as the capsule reoriented itself, looking for the perfect angle out through the firmament and back into space.

Gryx settled back in his seat. He couldn’t wait to get off the crappy, overheating, overcrowded, prehistoric planet. But he struggled to get comfortable. The capsule was little more than an egg-shaped hull surrounding a single seat, and whatever space was left was crammed with tech.

And this was the bad news.

Although the available space had been used to a degree of efficiency never before seen in the universe, it still couldn’t accommodate anything near the size of a dimensional drive. The capsule was conventional propulsion all the way, which meant the journey home would take over four hundred years.

Gryx peered out the viewport to see if he could still make out the broken remains of his craft. It proved impossible. Already the desert was shrinking, looking more and more like a child’s sandpit.

Somewhere in there had to be a tiny spec denoting his passenger, Grzq. A little dot that was the researcher who had contracted Gryx to take him to earth so he could study the humans.

Well, Gryx, thought, I did get him there.

Whether the poor bastard had actually survived the ‘landing’ was still somewhat of a mystery, but Gryx would definitely send for help as soon as he got home. Using dimensional drives the rescue team should arrive in approximately four hundred years and an hour.

True, he hadn’t actually discussed this plan with his client. He hadn’t even looked for the fool to make sure he was alright, but what good would it have done? If Grzq was hurt in any way, Gryx wouldn’t be able to help. Not only did he have no medical training, the sight of blood, even a tiny drop of it, made him hurl violently. How much fun would that be for a client? Gryx assumed that any client, no matter how crazy, would prefer his wounds hurl-free. That was just common sense.

As the view of the planet below became obscured by cloud cover, Gryx switched on the in-flight entertainment system. It was time to plan out his next four hundred years.

He could finally learn some alien languages.

Get that ever elusive engineering degree.

And figure out a way to stop drinking.

Then again, was that really the best way to start an extended vacation? Perhaps not, after all, there would be plenty of time for all of that later.

For now, maybe he should just watch some instructional videos about making babies. He’d always felt it was in his species best interest if he kept abreast of the latest techniques. You never knew when they might be needed.

As he browsed the capsule’s extensive electronic library, though, he experienced an unexpected twinge of guilt. Which made no sense. In no way was Grzq special. The man was just as annoying as any of his other clients. All he’d done was complain.

Why are you activating the landing lights already?

Why are you flying so erratically?

And why are we so close to the ground?

It was always something with his clients. It was either ‘we’re nowhere near close enough’, or it was, ‘we’re too darn close, pull up you cross-eyed moron we’re going to crash!’ It was never, ‘what are you doing? You’re flying too darn fabulously. Too perfectly distanced from the planet’s surface. Stop being so amazing.’

Nope. That never happened.

Granted, Gryx could have started drinking a little later. All things considered, he was ready to admit, but only to himself, that the results of his early partaking of his celebratory whisky had led to somewhat regrettable results.

Suddenly, Gryx was awoken from his musings. The onboard entertainment system was beeping. Some kind of alarm.

He browsed hurriedly through the menus, trying to locate the source of the problem.

A sudden pocket of dense air rocked the capsule and Gryx bounced in his seat. The ground below angled away precariously.

Gryx frantically checked the systems, pushing back horrible images of crashing a second time and spending the rest of his life on the miserable planet below.

Then he found it: one of the automatic scanning systems had discovered something interesting. He examined it closely. There was a strange signal coming from the planet below. A signal that couldn’t possibly come from down there. Not from a planet of barely upright chipmunks. But there it was, clear as day, emanating from somewhere deep within one of the mountain ranges.

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“You know,” the businessman said, “I never actually wanted to be president.”

He looked over at the stacks of campaign posters, streamers, flyers. “Believe me,” he said, “I just thought it would be good PR to run. I’d go on the trail for a few weeks, drum up some extra business, then announce I’d no longer fund my own campaign and that would be it.”

He seemed to have lost his fight. His eyes were dull and unfocused, his shoulders bore the weight of the world, and even his hair, normally rebellious and fiery, looked lackluster.

“No one in their right mind was going to fund this thing for me, right? And if they wanted to, I’d just say something racist and the deal would be off. This country can’t stand racism. Or at least public racism.”

“Your plan did appear to be foolproof,” said his trusted advisor, topping up the man’s thirty-year-old scotch.

“Are you kidding? It was an amazing plan. A terrific plan. A great plan!”

“Still, somehow, it failed.”

The businessman nodded. He’d never admitted defeat before. In fact, he was a master at reframing any kind of defeat as a victory. But today, with no other witnesses than his trusted advisor, he simply sighed.

“I’ve attacked every minority. I’ve threatened the people with the harshest policies. I even promised to take away basic human rights, like health insurance and that other thing…” he trailed off. Policies, especially his own, weren’t his strong suit. He liked simple words like Deal and Profit.

“You threatened to squander what little prosperity the current president coaxed back to life out of a failing economy on an impossibly large construction along the southern border,” the advisor chimed in. “And, if I may say so, that was a brilliant move.”

The businessman straightened his shoulders. “The border wall was actually a reference to the pyramids and the slavery used to build them.”

“It was?” The advisor looked baffled. “That was very subtle. Perhaps a little too subtle.”

“Maybe. All the voters saw was a plan for a spectacular structure. They never even looked at the calculations, the ones I commissioned and then leaked to the press. No one cared about the cost, or the fact that it’d wipe out half our economy and still leave our borders virtually unprotected.”

“No, they didn’t, sir.”

“So I had no choice but to reverse-robin-hood them.”

The advisor raised another eyebrow. “That’s a pretty big word, sir. Is it one of those things you’ve overheard and started using without knowing the meaning? Or is it one of those things you make up just to confuse people?”

“Actually, it’s neither. Reverse-robin-hooding is an actual thing. It’s when you steal from the poor,” he paused for effect, then continued, “and give to the rich.”

“Ah, reverse– Yes, pretty smart.”

“It’s like the smartest, greatest plan ever. Tell people you’re going to take something from 99% of them and give it to the remaining 1%, you’ll get 99% of the votes against you.”

“That would seem the obvious result, yes.”

“But again, it didn’t work. So I announce some idiotic plan to revert back to coal.”

“And you received even more support.”

The businessman shook his head, topping up his own tumbler. “I mean, what more do I have to do to get out of this thing?”

The advisor handed the businessman his cell. “It’s still five more weeks till the election,” he said. “Why don’t you try another tweet? You know how vicious the internet is against stupid tweets.”

The businessman sighed and typed out a tweet, read it back, changed a few words to make it even more ignorant and more offensive, then sent it off.

This was prime stuff, he decided. He’d just reached previously unknown levels of offensiveness with a mere hundred and forty characters.

He looked back at his advisor, “This better work,” he said.

“I hear you, sir.”

“And what if I really do become president? Did you ever think about that?”

“I try not to, sir. But, don’t fear, it will never happen. I have one more ace up my sleeve.”

The businessman looked up, cautiously hopeful. “An ace?”

The advisor handed over the file he’d been carrying. “If all else fails, we’ll spread the rumor that you’ve being compromised by the Russians. No presidential candidate could ever survive that. It’s foolproof.”