Alien Versus Nerd Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  ALIEN VERSUS NERD

  First edition. January 9, 2018.

  Copyright © 2018 Luciano de Souza.

  ISBN: 978-1387502004

  Written by Luciano de Souza.

  ALIEN VERSUS NERD

  Luciano de Souza

  Luciano de Souza

  Visit my website at https://lucianocasd56al.wixsite.com/alienversusnerd

  To her, whose prettiness inspired me beyond my wildest dreams.

  It’s all written in the stars.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Supernatural, Gamers and Cylons

  The First Signs

  Made of the Future

  Recalling the Nerd-Gaming Room

  The Phantom of Bayville

  Breaking all the Rules

  Counter-Strike, Fight the Aliens and Mean Girls

  Close Encounters, Spooky Places and Stranger Things

  Star Trek or Independence Day

  Roswell, Electromagnetic Weapons and Phantom Aliens

  Operation Phantom Shield

  The Last Line of Defense

  Holding out for a Hero

  Battleground: Bayville

  Piper, Skynet and Robotic Wingmen

  Game Over

  Prologue

  I’m Lucas Finch and this is my story. To understand how it all started, we must go back to that day. I recall slightly apprehensive and checked my watch, “It’s almost 4 p.m.” Guess what? I’m now preparing for the uncertain battle.

  The same dilemma as ever; girls. Hit back or stand down?

  Very strange things have been happening lately. It’s just a phase, but I think I’ll get over it. It’s only a matter of time until the right girl appears. To begin with, I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, all that’s left in a place like this is to dream and believe that one day something is going to happen.

  The problem is when things begin to look like a Wes Craven movie and you have to confront your darkest fears. At one point, you end up surpassing everything even if you have to face the entire army of interstellar monstrosities.

  Halfway, you get a few bangs here and there until happens, an unexpected and unusual twist ending in which your prospects start to increase.

  And then you switch over from punching bag to the main protagonist, and once the end credits roll up, you know it’s over.

  I don’t know about you, but something tells me the future is now.

  Supernatural, Gamers and Cylons

  Right now, I’m on the main street and that’s exactly where a new chapter in the mega-saga of the year unfolds, where a lone hero seeks for his better half. That’s awful.

  Well, I think this is my battlefield.

  Sometimes it looks like a movie, but without any definite plot. This place is also the location of many a geek intrigues. Usually, most groups used to gather here. This side of paradise, we have a group of preppy girls popping out into the world, and the unsuspecting nerd-crew crossing over into the twilight zone.

  There are all kinds of people here; gamers, geeks, nerds, jocks, townies, and those uncanny outcasts you only see on Sundays. I think this supposed paradise is about to collapse at any time. However, nobody realized it yet, what makes me the only one seeing the future for a while. It looks like a mix of Supernatural with... Dawson’s Creek, I guess.

  For now, it doesn’t look bad at all. I am staring at a stunning setting on the lifestyle of Capeside. There’s this girl, straight black hair, tall and skinny. Probably our aspiring Joey Potter, drooling over there with pricked eyes straight next to her, you can see this hilarious guy dressed like Dawson Leery in our fictitious plot.

  They seem to be enjoying every second and have no idea what lies ahead. He’s simply trying to impress his friends. She, on the other hand, seems to want to get more than he does from their relationship. Probably is the third or fourth time they come together.

  Something tells me it won’t go any farther. I think the kiss will only happen in the middle of the second season. The girl will find that it was all a mistake and will ask him to give her some time. He’ll see it quite uncanny and not understand exactly why she’s doing that.

  In the third season, rules will change completely.

  There will be no happy ending and both will go their separate ways. The fourth season will never exist because this relationship will be definitely over. Accordingly, most stories end in Bayville this way, I think. Badly and quickly.

  Phone ringing.

  It’s Kevin. He’s a science whiz. He loves to talk about relativity and quantum physics all the time.

  “Where have you been, anyway?” Kevin asked.

  “I had to sort a few things out. I’m heading to the mall.”

  Then I see her. The girl who will change my life. A thrill shoots through my body. A mysterious girl straight out of a hitchkonian plot, walking as if she were in a slow-motion scene. Her name: Amanda Henderson. Silence is deadly.

  “You won’t believe, Amanda is here.”

  “She again? I had forgotten. She’s now your new obsession. Hey, she’s way out of your league.”

  “Not in my future. Damn, she walked in the Kmart. I need to hang up.”

  For starters, I should quit playing the lone Jedi Knight and do something. She’s leaving the store. Heart pounding, breathing heavily. She just passed me by.

  Anyway, back to the realm of mortals, in close to 2000 years, someone will speak of the day that shook the world when I came across Amanda Henderson. She is awesome, but I think it’ll take some time before she knows I exist.

  In this place, people are acting strangely. Sometimes I think we’ve been going through the same event that happened in Mill Valley in the impressive sight of Jack Finney. Maybe some of these people are being replaced by identical impostors. But you didn’t hear from me.

  For now, it’s just a theory.

  Maybe I’m just overacting. This is real life, people change. On the other hand, if this is an invasion, I’m just hoping to get through fairly unscathed.

  On the way back home, something weird just happened. For a moment, it felt like I shifted into another reality, living someone else’s life. A group of girls assembled around a car and apparently noticed my sadness and belted out a song.

  The daylight had already gone when the first chords of Limp Bizkit, Behind Blue Eyes, started softly, coming to my ears, bringing about bond memories of a world that no longer exists.

  The First Signs

  It all started with Amy Hackel. It was a Monday. I was starting out toward college when I glimpsed Amy Hackel entering the campus, head down, tapping her cell phone.

  I sneaked up on her, fairly hesitant.

  “Amy?” I fixed my gaze on her and went in her direction.

  She froze and said nothing.

  Amy barely noticed my presence. She simply stared back at me with a chilly glance. It was as if she were in another world, and I couldn’t reach her out. At the same time, I felt a strange presence around us like we’re been watched.

  It has been two weeks since our last meeting, and now she was acting if she had never seen me before.

  “Two days ago, you texted me saying you wanted to see me,” I began. “You looked pretty scared about something and...”

  “You don’t understand. Something has changed.” She stared at me, indifferent.

  We have all heard of spooky encounters and scary stories now and then. I had mine when I met her that day.

  “You’re right. I don’t get it.”

  Amy and I stood facing one another.

  It turned out, we couldn’t stay toge
ther, not in this place. I thought about taking her to another place and say how I felt about it, but I couldn’t open my mouth to speak anything. I kept on staring at her. She whispered a few words and then everything went off around me like an atomic bomb.

  Strangely it was as if I had stumbled upon an invisible barrier between us, like some sort of force-field in this town, preventing us from coming together.

  Amy clicked off.

  Her eyes weren’t green as usual but hollow and cold, disturbingly indifferent as if something inside her had been torn apart forever.

  She continued with her strange account.

  “I feel like a piece of me had been taken away and another was put down in its place.”

  Every word spoken seemed to lead into something much more threatening and dreadful than darkness itself.

  “I’m pretty sure we’ll figure something out.” I said in a hushed voice, still left in the dark.

  “Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. Right now, this place, this town, it all looks so unreal to me.”

  There was something different about her, it was as if she wasn’t the same person anymore. Then I realized that the girl I knew was no longer there. She had been replaced by something more pragmatic, devoid of emotions.

  At first, it left me a bit confused. In a certain way, I didn’t want to hurt her any worse than she already had been.

  “If this is a crisis, you should...”

  “You just don’t get it, do you? I’m over it,” she said as the scenic landscape and the surrounding area morphed into something dark and dreadful.

  Suddenly the world I knew ceased to exist about two minutes ago.

  “I’ve just woken up.” When she said it, her eyes shone again and her face was awfully beautiful.

  The words that came out of her mouth didn’t make any sense.

  She talked about our first date. The way she described the scene drew my attention. She seemed confused at her memory, and the narrative sounded boring and unsettled. Each word had a foggy meaning.

  Each thought, each phrase made out of a devious mind.

  Amy set her eyes on me.

  “It’s over.”

  All words died away.

  I left there a bit tad baffled as if I had lost a war or something, wondering how I always screwed up with the girls I liked.

  Things didn’t turn out as I had planned. I can’t believe this whole battle was because of a single girl. If this was a game, then all my lives were over.

  Definitely over.

  She went her way, I went mine. I think it was just a succession of errors.

  From now on, I need to reevaluate my best strategies. Otherwise, I won’t survive the next level. Trust me, it was better this way.

  Amy was looking like one of those puzzling and weird Cylon girls who lost their memories. If we had remained together, I probably would wake up in the next day with a thermonuclear warhead inside my underwear.

  Made of the Future

  Next day, I headed out for Kevin’s lab and found him ducked behind a desk. He pulled off his cap, the only piece of clothing not covered with dust, ran a finger down on the screen and dragged an icon to a window.

  “Hey, what’s up?”

  “It’ll take weeks before this mess is cleaned up,” he said, pushing the bill of his cap back. “Are you still tweeting to that famous actress?”

  “Yep.”

  “Man, she’s so hot.”

  “She’s not like any other girl I’ve ever seen.”

  I made my way up to the pile of junk scattered on the floor and tripped over a tech toy.

  “I saw Amy Hackel yesterday, she was very strange. I think something’s happening.”

  Kevin leaped to his feet and looked at the cell across from me. “Last week you said Emma Johnson saw a doppelgänger.”

  “Here comes my theory. People are being replaced by cyber doubles.”

  Kevin frowned. “You mean like body swapping.”

  “What if this crazy theory turns out to be true.”

  “There’s just one problem with your theory,” Kevin said. “People change all the time and...did you hear that?”

  A rumbling sound reverberated through the walls near the nerd-gaming room. Part of the roof structure gave way, coming down sideways with the front wall, raising a huge smokescreen.

  In a ripple effect, the living room wall collapsed, culminating in the arrival of two solar arrays that mechanically jutted out from the main cylindrical body, dragging a LED screen along.

  As the monitor was smashed on the floor, the support system module slid smoothly up to the mahogany wood doors, leaving bookshelves squeezed flat between the two inner walls, and unleashing a flood of dusty and mildewed books from decades ago over the wire-brushed floor.

  It had been over two weeks since Kevin’s parents had traveled to a seminar in France. The trip back had been scheduled for the next weekend.

  He dusted off his cap, unreconciled to his losses, shaking it with one hand, and putting it back on his head with the other.

  “Do you have any idea of how I will explain NASA that their Hubble telescope wound up in the standing room of my parents?”

  “For now, the best thing to do is get rid of all this junk off the floor.”

  At the moment, I opened the door leading to the other room, I had a surprise. Suddenly a shimmering figure materialized in front of me, revealing endless legs and slender curves.

  A flock of long black hair fell on a thin winsome face.

  “Piper? Is that you?” I asked, a little bit dazed.

  Gradually a mysterious figure began to unfold. Her bluish-green eyes stared at me a bit hesitant.

  “Do you like me this way?” She whispered, letting me astonished at first glance with her sexy exotic outfits.

  “You are so perfect,” I gasped.

  Piper smirked. “Just as I thought.”

  Kevin sounded surprised, even upset.

  “She really likes you. Every time you come in here, she appears only in intimate apparel; in my case, she basically discusses concepts of physics and this sort of thing.”

  Excited with the idea, I focused on Piper while she displayed her gym-honed body.

  “You look so real.”

  “I am real.” She let out a sigh.

  I was taken in by her mesmerizing gaze, bearing in mind that she might be a hologram, although I had severe doubts about it. At some point, she noticed my sad look.

  “Still having problems with girls?”

  “Same as always.”

  She gently approached me. I stood still. Leaning against the wall, I watched each scene as a mere spectator, caught up in a trap of a virtual female, wearing only swanky lingerie.

  In a swift movement, she raised her both hands to her head, tossing back her long black hair and looked me straight in the eye as I gasped in a frustrating attempt to cringe away from her lungs.

  “Pretty soon you will find out what you want,” she told me, whispering in my ear.

  For a brief moment, our lips almost met each other.

  Most of the time she acted as if she was a real model strutting her stuff across the stage, and donning the dream of an eager audience.

  “You can bet on it,” she said, only clad in sleek black bodice.

  Although she wasn’t tangible, I could almost feel her pulsing between my fingers. Surprisingly, Piper was so much more than a mere cluster of photons.

  She might very well be a projection of our own kind in a not far future.

  It all began almost two weeks ago, Kevin was working on a newfangled variety of hyperdimensional technology when something obviously went awry.

  The moment the electromechanical apparatus, developed by his grandfather when he was working for DARPA, dated back to the Vietnam era, from a secret lab on the west coast, started extracting electromagnetic energy from the vacuum, there’s a great oscillation in quantum fluctuations, causing a huge amount of electrical energy to be released.


  “Impressive.” He described it before the first results. “What we are experiencing here is the Hutchison effect.”

  “Big Deal.” I disregarded the conducting tests and kept on leafing through a sci-fi magazine when the TV got cracked, switching through channels without stopping. Kevin went bonkers after he started seeing beams of light out of it.

  After a brief sequence of images running randomly, it got almost static. Then the screen froze on a model’s face.

  At that point, some objects began to gain manifestation while others even solidified briefly like a strange icy space rock that fell through the roof.

  “It came from outer space?”

  “It looks as though,” Kevin expounded, fairly amazed.

  The problem is the thing didn’t stop there, it went on giving rise to all sort of phenomena ranging from light orbs to spooky apparitions.

  Next, an armored knight appeared out of nowhere. The ghostly figure stood there and stared blankly at us, just thinking that perhaps it all was a mere act of witchcraft and then vanished without a trace. I couldn’t tell if the phenomenon originated from our minds or if was coming from the vacuum.

  Kevin, frightened, saw a light beam out of the domed structure, generating a very intense bright light while unusual objects of assorted sizes and hair-raising things began popping up all over the place.

  “A thermonuclear warhead, great. That’s all I needed.” He gasped, slightly puzzled as he watched a nuclear missile rising up through the house and get lodged in near the bed-sitting room, awkwardly squeezing all the gear.

  The Tesla tower, designated to function as a wireless system, amplified the electron winds, generating a mini black hole.

  “You’re the genius here. This thing will assimilate the entire lab unless you do something quickly.”

  Kevin looked back at me, stunned and bug-eyed.

  “I don’t know how to stop it. If the rip keeps up, it’s going to destroy all Bayville.”