I, Alien

LIFE HAPPENS by Ralph Roberts

LIFE HAPPENS. It’s not my fault. When it started, I was looking at stars. The stars within my own body to be precise; so small, so many, so beautiful, so clean of contaminating Life in all their hundreds of billions! I perceived them through magnifying fields of my own devising. Bright and pristine in their many colors—the planets orbiting around them existing without blemish. No infections in me, I set a fine example. It’s good for business.

I never should have taken the call.

“Doctor? Doctor. Huh? Huh? I have another referral for you and this one is loaded! Another referral. Is a very, very good referral. Needs big help. Has much credit. Can pay lots. Reward. I get reward?”

Quarble, he’s a dwarf—a dwarf in both size and intellect. I move my perception, focus on him. He’s dancing around me as usual, sucking up to the great physician—well, so I am and it is well that he should. He has his uses. He’ll do any menial task and he does have an uncanny talent for finding patients. Some of them even pay their bills.

“Good one, good one, Doc!”

“Quarble, do NOT call me ‘Doc,’“ I said without real rancor—after all Quarble is Quarble and one should not fight that which is not worth changing.

“Sorry, sorry. Over there. Over there. He needs help. Charge lots, give Quarble some. Yes?”

I favor Quarble with a disapproving perception, but it fazes him not at all.

Quarble has been in my employ some few hundred millions of years to use units of time understood by Life (damn their slimy little, short-lived existences that I am so dedicated to eradicating). Quarble’s what they classify as a dwarf spheroidal galaxy and designated in their Messier catalog as MHO.

I know all too much about Life these days, or at least this one particularly nasty strain—lessons hard learned, but the fight is not over yet. I even know that the Messier method of cataloging us began in their year 1773 by one Charles Messier. Funny names, Life beings have—puny monikers to match their puny selves, not like ours. My name lilts through one’s grasp of reality, lovingly redolent of many hundreds of digits of prime numbers and mathematically expressed highly complex molecular chains.

“Reward, Doc, reward,” Quarble reminds.

“In a moment, Quarble,” I said, continuing to put away my force field tools and generally tidy up before exchanging perceptions with a potential patient.

Quarble does have a few good points, I must add. He is somewhat unique, being not your usual generic dwarf elliptical galaxy but one of a very few known dwarf spheroids and, to boot, brighter than most dwarf spheroids. Well, at least in light emitted.

Additionally, and in spite of his small size, Quarble, or MHO, has a remarkable system of eight globular star clusters in a halo around him. The brightest of these is called G73 by Life. Quarble is quite vain about all of that.

“Doc!”

“All right,” I said, hurrying.

I cast one final glance in a reflective field to check my appearance. I AM handsome. Life knows me as M31, the famous Andromeda galaxy. The Life unit Al-Sufi was aware of me about ad 905. Had I been aware of him at the time, he would be but a few drifting molecules of scorched gas now. I owe him, I really do. I owe all of Life. They have HACKED me off!

But I am a looker, I am.

The Life unit and famous astronomer William Hershel wrote this of me in 1785:

“…undoubtedly the nearest of all the great nebulae… The brightest part of it approaches to the resolvable nebulosity, and begins to shew a faint red colour; which, from many observations on the colour of and magnitude of nebulae… There is a very considerable, broad, pretty faint, small nebula [MHO] near it; my Sister [Caroline] discovered it August 27, 1783, with a Newtonian 2-feet sweeper. It shews the same faint colour with the great one, and is, no doubt, in the neighbourhood of it…”

Yes, Quarble is always horning in, bumbling about and getting in the way.

“Doc! Doc! Doc!”

“Where is the patient, dear Quarble?” I asked politely, now in the mode of the highly respected physician that I was until Life tripped me up and left me looking foolish. For THAT, they shall PAY!

He throws his perception but a short way.

“Where?” I ask, seeing only our neighbor, the odd one. Mostly we just ignore him, but I hear he has been highly successful in his field, something to do with confections, nothing healthy that I would consume, but many a galaxy likes a bit of sweet nebulosity now and again.

“Him? You’re kidding!”

“Yep, yep, yep, no, no, no,” Quarble affirmed.

I sighed. Never ask Quarble more than one question at a time.

As to the neighbor, I’ve never liked the guy, never had much to do with him. But a patient’s a patient and I did swear an oath of healing so very long ago. I projected a smiling and confident perception to him. Better I should have turned and expanded away at best speed. But how was I to know the extent of the infection that still racks his body?

“May I help you?” I ask.

He replied with a torrent of ailments and symptoms, a few of which I sensed as legitimate and… disconcerting. Especially the constant migraines he was now suffering. It was all too familiar and all too ominous.

“Say ‘ahh,’” I said, pushing a quick view field into his mass.

“Ugh!” escaped from me involuntarily. Not the most reassuring manner for a healer to project, but I had never seen an infestation so horribly progressed as showed on my instrument. Inside him swarmed, teemed, slid, slithered Life in incredible numbers. Only a blur of activity on the rudimentary examination device I was using, but enough to cause me great concern.

I swatted Quarble’s nosy perception away and reached out to assemble more powerful diagnostic and treatment fields. No time to waste in an emergency case like this! The guy should have come to me sooner, a LOT sooner. Well, it was going to be nasty, but I always won.… At least, at one time, I always won. Cursed LIFE!

As my talented and nimble manipulative fields prepared the drastic but necessary medical procedures, I examined the patient visually. From the outside, he looks healthy enough, a handsome enough spiral galaxy. No signs of the rot within. He’s larger than normal, almost a giant. In fact, almost as large as I am and I’m the largest galaxy in this neighborhood.

I spared a glance to one of my instruments. Yes, a healthy male, about 15 billion years old. Good star count—somewhere around 200 billion to 400 billion at first guess, the instrument will refine that shortly as the processing completes.

“Is he a goner, Doc? Dead? A dead one?”

“SHUT UP, you idiot!” I said, but the patient is in too much pain to pay attention to Quarble. Quarble has all the finesse of an imploding black hole, but he’s cheaper than hiring a trained nurse.

I pushed my manipulators harder, feeling a real sense of urgency now, but continued the look over. All these observations give a physician the data needed for effective treatment of an infection. Usually they do, anyway.

Hmmm, I noted in my treatment log. The patient has a good distribution of hydrogen clouds, what the Life unit Hubble typed as a Sb or Sc galaxy. Which means he has both a pronounced disk component yet exhibits a spiral structure, and a prominent nuclear region. The latter is part of a notable bulge/halo component.

“What does it mean, Doc? Is he sick, is that what it says?”

I abstractedly brushed Quarble’s perception away from the log and thought about what other descriptive facts to add.

“DOCTOR?” the patient said, moaning.

“Just a moment, I’m preparing a procedure that will help you. Nothing to worry about.”

See, doctors he to patients.

“Will it hurt, Doctor?”

Of course it will, it will hurt like hell. He’s too far gone for anything that would not hurt. “No, not a bit,” I said. See above comment about lies. “Er… you might feel a slight sting, just a tiny bit of discomfort,” I modified, feeling just a little guilty because I was planning on unleashing several hundred supernovas within his body. No half measures when Life is so virulently established. He’s going to be spewing fire from all orifices!

Too bad. Like I’ve already said, he’s not a bad looking guy—not as handsome as me, but so few are. I examine his spiral arms and look inside his body again. A normally hale and hearty mix of interstellar matter, diffuse nebulae, and young stars. Good growth patterns with open star clusters emerging from this matter. But he’s been partaking a bit too much of his own confectionery. His bulge component is rife with old stars and fatty globular clusters; very concentrated toward his center.

I see some supernovae have occurred in the past; spectacular events to Life units, but nothing unusual here in frequency or magnitude—just one of the ways our bodies have of keeping infection down. But… speaking of spectacular… I was planning and preparing to give THESE Life units something to REALLY gawk at. In the few brief moments left to them, that is.

“You sure it won’t hurt?” the patient asked again, nervously.

“No, no—not a bit,” I lied.

The instrumentation had gathered vast amounts of data now, giving me all the information needed to proceed. Even the Life units’ many communications among themselves were analyzed and interpreted and a comprehensive history presented. All absurdly simple— killing infection, after all, is not brain surgery.

Still, this case was very advanced and the patient not at all likely to survive it. “About payment,” I said.

The necessary transaction was concluded, the patient desperate and making no demur at my exorbitant rate. It’s the very best time to ask for your fee—wait until after the cure and they haggle or fail to survive, which is the ultimate negotiating ploy.

Quarble and I continued, perceiving all the data now spread across the perception-rendering screen on one of my force terminals, expanded out to the size of a galaxy itself. Every bit of datum required there for our instant reference. Well, at least I understood it—you never knew with Quarble, but he did surprise me at times.

“Bad, Doc, bad,” he actually whispered. “Worse, the worst I’ve ever seen.

“Yes,” I said just as quietly, “in fact, I’ve only seen or heard of one case with a greater infection.”

“Who? Who?”

“In a body we dissected in medical school. Already long dead, of course, and the Life that caused it, too. But you could see how it ravaged her before she succumbed. Nasty little buggers, Life!”

“Fast, fast, Doc. Hard to stomp them!”

Quarble, as usual, was stating the obvious.

As I flexed my manipulator fields and prepared for surgical entry into the patient, I reflected on the real problem we face in fighting infection, speed! Life is quick. The time scales they operate on are far more compressed than ours… Living for hundreds of billions of their years, we tend to move and think a good deal slower then them. When means Life can explode into existence and become technologically advanced in what to us true beings is little more than a short nap. A mere blink to us is hundreds of years for them. We must be ever vigilant to avoid such infections. My patient was not and is now paying that price.

“My brain is SPLITTING, Doctor!” he moaned. “Do SOMETHING!”

Yes, therein lies the problem Life causes us. When they become sufficiently advanced, they devise methods of traveling and communicating faster than light. This dirty little strain of Life called their FTL radio “Karsen waves”—after its discoverer. But the problem is that the esoteric wavelengths enabling this faster than light communication are the SAME as we think on. Life’s inane and petty garble drives us crazy like— to use one of their own metaphors—a thousand heavy metal bands jamming all at once inside your brain with NO way of turning down the volume.

“DOCTOR!”

“Just a moment more,” I said, projecting my most reassuring perceptions to him. “We are now starting the procedure… . Ah… You might want to brace yourself, this might hurt somewhat.”

“You said it wouldn’t.”

I ignored him and turned my perception so that only Quarble was aware of it. Quarble has assisted me in many such procedures, albeit not on this scale. But, then, I had never been faced with such a massive case of infection myself. I quickly consulted the medical literature one more time, steeled myself, and slapped Quarble’s limited attention over to the steps we would be following.

He was aghast. “Millions! Doc! Millions of super-novae!”

“Keep it down, Quarble,” I admonished, then relented and explained. “His infection is too far advanced, we have to apply maximum force and quickly! Destroy all their major hives and breeding planets.”

“It will kill him, Doc, kill him dead!”

“Very possibly,” I agreed. “But what would you rather have, a patient—cadaver or otherwise—free of infection, or to have that infection escaping him and starting an epidemic, perhaps even infecting us.”

“Burn him, Doc, burn him good!”

That Quarble, he’s ever a realist.

“Attend closely now,” I said, indicating the salient points to my treatment procedure. “And here we go. We start at what they call the Inner Frontier and work outward.”

With an anticipatory grin of glee, I initiated the first supernova. “Sizzle, little Life, SIZZLE!”

To Quarble and I, these actions were close to instantaneous; to the Life units, it was a century or two.

“Look, Doc, look! They are escaping!”

With irritation, I realized Quarble was correct. The screen clearly showed a mass evacuation—millions of huge ships carrying billions of Life units. Scurrying away from the cleansing flame.

Well, we’d fix THAT.

I waved my perception over the screen, activating 10,000 supernovae at once.

“Yes, YES!” Quarble screamed in delight. “Burn them, Doc, burn them!”

The patient screamed as the pain of the Life units communicating increased in internal volume.

With sudden horror I perceived that the 10,000 supernovae were NOT occurring. “This is impossible,” I said in disbelief, quickly checking the command I had issued. I had made no mistakes.

“Something’s wrong, Doc, something’s messed up, something’s…”

I slam Quarble’s dim mental presence aside as my fingers of perception fly over the screen trying this, trying that, performing all the emergency procedures in my long experience. NOTHING! The damn sequence has fizzled. Those slimy, slimy-miniscule-air-sucking-dirty-LITTLE Life units have somehow ABORTED my firing sequence.

“Oh, so we want to play games, do we?” I said, gritting the words out as I moved perceptions faster than I had in tens of billions of years.

“Here go,” I said, “HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of simultaneous supernovae!”

Yes, it would kill the patient, but it would end THIS Life infestation, that’s for sure.

WHAM! Incredible pain coursed through my body and, judging by his screams, Quarble’s as well.

We had failed… incredibly we had failed… and Life had struck back in a blow that left me weak and reeling and Quarble whimpering.

Time for desperate tactics! “You’re going in, Quarble!” I said.

“NO!” he yelled in protest. “Not ‘throw the dwarf again!”

Despite all the heat of the moment, I could not help but smile—even Life units found throwing dwarves funny for some unknown reason. Well, let’s see just how FUNNY they would find another galaxy ava-lanching through their own and destroying all stars, planets, and Life units in its path.

With a mighty PUSH, I launched the terrified and screaming Quarble on his way. Good-bye, Milky Way. Hello, milkshake!

Yet, my own horror suddenly grew as I saw Quarble being batted back toward me. It took all my strength to divert his hurtling body, sending it off in a safe tangent away from me. But while I was managing that, a cascade of energy hits me, my defenses are weakened, my body is being invaded!

In sheer desperation I called out for help to my fellow physicians.

Perhaps had I been nicer to them in the past and a bit less arrogant? They make no effort to save me. The quarantine walls go up quickly.

Inside, I feel the first stirrings of Life.