Alien Versus Nerd Page 2

  As I fixed my gaze on the electrical generators, lightning hit the cupola, causing a sudden outburst.

  Unexpectedly, it all came to a halt and the mini black hole was sealed off. After that, there was a clanking and what appeared to be a robotic voice squawking inside our heads.

  Invariably it bore a faint resemblance to a machine or something. There was no way to know for sure.

  Kevin initially supposed it had captured a signal from a local source. He changed his mind when he discovered what seemed to be something else.

  After a brief pause, the whole thing began all over again with a lot more intensity than in the previous phase.

  The experiment got out of control.

  “We have to turn off the power now!” Kevin yelled with his body suspended in midair, holding on to the doorway leading to the main corridor.

  Another burst of energy occurred in the lab, and we ended up unconscious for about half an hour. When we woke up, something happened.

  To our amazement, we saw a figure coming out of the smoke.

  “Hey, guys,” said a voice of a female, fit and slim.

  “Piper?”

  Her eyes sparkled with excitement.

  “Were you expecting someone else?” she asked with a wicked grin.

  “How’s that possible?” Kevin scratched his noise.

  “I think you didn’t realize what we’ve just done here.” I gazed at him, startled. “We made a girl.”

  The long-legged figure was right in front of our eyes.

  “So, what the two geniuses would like to do first?” She tilted her head down and looked up.

  I took a step forward.

  “Well, since you mentioned it, I’ve been wondering if we could do something funnier other than argue and tease.”

  Kevin was at my side, a bit confused, and Piper stood across from me, intrigued by my curiosity.

  “Be careful what you wish for, boy. You might get it.” She blinked.

  Kevin didn’t seemed so thrilled with the idea and took a few steps back.

  “She’s right. We must be very careful. As far as I know what we’re dealing here is literally weird science.” He had his whole life devoted to science.

  “Weird science? That’s so original,” I said to him.

  Kevin glanced down and analyzed her spectrum with a handheld device.

  “What are you, really? An alien? An interdimensional being? You come in peace or are you into some sort of world takeover?”

  Piper moved toward us. “Don’t worry, I’m just here for the fun.”

  “F-fun?” Kevin stammered.

  “You know, nightlife entertainment and slamming parties.” She scanned the room and gazed at the screen smashed on the floor. “My advice, sometimes take risks is not a promise for quick achievement but could be a way to handle it and besides, it makes you feel alive.”

  “I must be dreaming,” I said, baffled by her presence.

  She edged toward me.

  “And finally, I think we can have some fun together.”

  “You know what; I can’t think straight with a nuke in my house. I’m still a bit confused here, and where did you come from anyway?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Kevin was flabbergasted. He sought for an answer but what he got, not even his mind could explain.

  Until that day, Piper never had left the computer drawing board. Now it not only had won life as well as it had acquired conscience itself.

  Nonetheless, the hologram we were witnessing didn’t coincide with the graphic design originally schematized. Her face had gained contours and angles and the structure of her body was perfect.

  She had evolved.

  As Piper turned over, I gazed at her perfect trim figure. Her flat belly and muscular yet lean thighs.

  “Oh man, she looks a tad bit like Adriana Lima.” I spouted with a stupid look on my face.

  “W-who?” asked him vacantly.

  She was an exact copy of a Brazilian top model who walked the runways on Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.

  Kevin leered at me. “It was straight off the dome.”

  In the days that followed since her appearance, we witnessed a magnificent evolution. First off, we thought she was a ghost, or something that somehow had hacked into our computer and got hold of it.

  Yet, we started analyzing the data very carefully, Kevin suggested that she could be a thinking machine from another dimension, whereas she behaved just like an authentic mainframe. She was witty and fascinatingly attractive and could connect to any computer around the world in no time or any object wishing to go.

  Sometimes Kevin saw her as a glitch in the matrix. He found that when we pulled out the vacuum energy, in some way we ended up giving life to a preconceived image, probably taken from our own minds.

  Although this seemed absurd, it was perfectly normal when one takes into account modern theories of quantum physics, in particular time, it could energize a thought form and therefore it would materialize in a vacuum briefly.

  Einstein himself said that “everything is energy and that’s all there is to it”. But every time I glanced at her, I had the distinct impression of talking to a flesh-and-blood person rather than an artificial intelligence.

  Even though she seemed to be something else.

  Perhaps we were looking forward to a future in which getting this sort of technology could be equally common as owning a data processor at home.

  It was an altogether novel concept able to interact with the environment, especially with vacuum fluctuations associated with zero-point energy, reproducing objects of various shapes and sizes.

  We’re dealing with something far ahead of our time.

  Even if she spent a good chunk of time behaving more like a model straight off the cover of a fashion magazine than a mere information processing system, Piper was amusing and had a fanciful mind. She didn’t appreciate much the idea by naming to her as a hologram.

  Also, she seemed more human each day. Her voice was soft and sweet, and her knowledge went far beyond than a simple conventional computer.

  She was totally adaptable to conditions and sure handed when it comes down to practices and domestic tasks, what caught Kevin’s attention. Once he conceded that at a certain extent she could be a household appliance of the future. I passed up this theory, claiming for him that Piper was much more than any piece of equipment.

  She turned to him and ruled out the comparison. “I may be a quantum computer, but I’m not a stupid machine,” she complained, deeply resented.

  Kevin fell back, a little bit dazzled. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Excuses accepted, but don’t ever say that again, understood?” She acclaimed.

  “Yes. She’s so sentimental.”

  “Maybe she is a lingerie model of the future.”

  “Not likely,” Kevin refuted. “Besides, she’s more than this.”

  Piper gave us a startling glance. “I guess I can be like that as well.”

  Kevin’s got a tad upset with this last assumption. Piper took it into account and tried hard to behave properly.

  “Don’t be jealous. I like you both, you are my boys,” She spoke as zealously as a careful mother.

  I wonder if this will not be the next step in our evolution. Interactive neural network and holographic machines capable of making the achievement of our most inconceivable dreams possible.

  She was awe-inspiring and our best-kept secret, also. We didn’t share it with anyone. She always advised me in all my love affairs and was highly skilled.

  “The only thing that defines us is what’s inside of our hearts,” she said, with a grin, holding out her hand to Kevin.

  Recalling the Nerd-Gaming Room

  When Piper entered the room, a pang of sadness shot through her. She looked down at the pile of junk scattered on the floor. A Minutemen missile still stood there, alongside the Hubble telescope.

  “Time to c
lean the mess,” she said as she raised one of her long and thick dark eyelashes.

  She lifted her arm and turned on the radio, blasting General Republic, Tenderness through the house.

  “I hate goodbyes.”

  “Hang on a sec, you’re not planning to leave, are you?”

  “Some things require my immediate attention now. Besides, two younger boys got in trouble.”

  “And who are they, anyway?”

  “Jake and Zack. They are exactly like you two.”

  Piper fixed the ceiling, repaired the kitchen and the living room, cleaning out all the junk. She got rid of the missile and handed the Hubble over to the place it was. Next, she went to the nerd-gaming room.

  “I’m gonna miss this place.”

  Kevin shook his head down a little bit disappointed.

  “You never said anything about leaving. Why now?”

  I flinched at the thought that I might never get the chance of seeing her again.

  “You can’t do that to us.”

  “We really had a lot of fun together. Don’t be sad. I promise you I’m gonna go back in time to meet your new girlfriends.”

  “Girlfriends? But what are you talking about?”

  “I almost forgot, the keys are in the ignition. Now I gotta get going.”

  I gazed out of the window at two cars pulled out in front of the house, one of them was an Acura NSX and the other a Nissan GT-R. When I turned to thank Piper for the gift, she had already gone.

  “At least, she restored the house before she left,” Kevin said with relief.

  “Tenderness.” I tilted my head with a grin, thinking about the lyrics. “We danced and danced. But I was scared to go much further with it, just half a chance. Make sure that one night you’re here, but next night you’re not.”

  Shortly after, I opened the front door and gazed at Kevin. “Hey, let’s test this beauty, Nissan first.”

  “Let’s see if we can impress the chicks on the way.”

  After that day, we never saw her again. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I got the impression that she’s around, looking out for us.

  Maybe one day when the situation settles down, she will surprise us again, with her cheery and kindly presence.

  The Phantom of Bayville

  Suddenly our quiet small town became the scene of unexplained events. Several farmers spotted strange lights in the sky north of the town last night.

  I was confused about my role with these strange going-ons, and I never could figure out how Camila Evans fit into all this.

  Not until that night.

  I remember the day when I crossed the hall and met her the last time. She seemed a bit on edge. On the same night, she had an incident north of the old road near to Pinewood, and remained unconscious for a few hours.

  To my surprise, she would return with an uncanny account about what really happened that night. It was past nine when someone knocked at the door.

  Kevin leaped to his feet and dashed to the door. The girl outside wore a leather jacket and ripped jeans. He ushered her in. Both knew each other since middle school.

  For me, Kevin always sounded as a student of chemical engineering at MIT.

  “Sorry to drop in like this.”

  As far as I know, they never got to hang out together. Later, he went out with two or three girls until he met Amber Johnson, a former cheerleader whom he dated for over two years.

  He has taken refuge in the academic study ever since and only met her in the first year at college. He always appeared really keen on her.

  She glanced at me and walked through the room.

  “Alec,” she said with a quick smile.

  “Switch yourself,” Kevin said.

  She flopped down on the couch and brushed away a strand of brown hair that fell on her face.

  “I don’t know where to start,” she said nervously.

  Kevin tilted his head to the right. “What’s going on?”

  She remained unsettled for a moment and glanced around at the bookshelves nearby. Shortly after, she started telling an astonishing account.

  She said the night the residents in lake county, have reported seeing a sighting of an unexplained object in the sky, she and her friends were getting off from a party at Rapid Falls, at about 11:45 p.m. on Friday.

  They were driving home when Veronica Sanders at the steering wheel saw a bright light in the middle of the road.

  “We headed north and took a shortcut along a tree-lined path through mixed woodland, leading to Dark Ridge close by to the right.”

  The old road was the scene of frequent hauntings and unexplained phenomena. In short, the road would become a nightmarish view of the forthcoming world.

  “We went straight ahead and spotted a light orb hovering over the road. The engine stopped then. The cell phones went dead. Veronica looked around and opened the front door.”

  Camila mentioned when she scrutinized the area, she couldn’t shrug off the feeling of being watched.

  “Kelly O’Brien was in the backseat and peered through the fog at a faint glow moving among the trees. Nearly right away, we felt that strange presence among us, it appeared to be everywhere, just watching us.”

  Camila stood there for a while, staring at nothing as if she was lost in another world.

  “You know, when I was little, my mother used to tell me a strange story, it was about the “The People Catchers”, she told me they acted only at night and they usually sought to take children who didn’t carry themselves as they should.”

  According to her, they were invisible and only children were able to see them.”

  The way she mentioned it in her account sent chills down my spine. The story was very similar to the story of many people who had been experiencing alien abductions.

  In many cases, these alien beings usually changed shape at will, turning up to the victims as if they were characters in fairy tales.

  She glanced away and took a deep breath as if preparing her mind to drift back to that fateful moment.

  “There’s something spooky about that place.” She sighed.

  Kevin realized that she had had an unusual experience.

  “You are safe here,” he said. “Now tell me exactly what you saw.”

  Camila’s mind returned to the instant she was standing beside the car and had her attention focused on the forest edge.

  At that point, she felt as though something was drawing her into the woods. She couldn’t explain what it was. Maybe it was for its exotic beauty, or the grass that flooded the air with a soft flagrant scent that night.

  “Apparently, Veronica Sanders seemed so obsessed with the idea that there was something there. We hiked further in. Veronica walked along a narrow path toward a sloping ground illuminated by the flashlight and continued upward to a wooden area where she thought she would find some sort of revelation. Actually, I never knew what she expected to meet there.”

  That area had numerous reports of unexplained sightings. We’ve all heard of hauntings and strange apparitions.

  “Veronica was a bit anxious and only settled down when she felt the place she was looking for wasn’t far-off. The wide beam of the flashlight led them to a clearing. But my excitement didn’t last too long. I started to falter and get this powerful urge to get away. Veronica seemed not the least bit bothered by it. She was rapt with wonder all the time and her mind was set.”

  Camila looked petrified for a moment, and I could feel all the terror creeping up on her. According to her story, Veronica scanned a wooded area to where the flashlight beam could reach and stepped into the clearing.

  Then something’s happened.

  “The clearing opened itself before us as a discovery of another world.”

  They decided to carefully inspect the area around them. Suddenly, that feeling of being watched returned again.

  As she spoke, my mind was carried away by fancy and horror, playing each scene like a movie.

  “For a mom
ent, I had a queer feeling that I was in a dream”

  At that point, the story seemed more like a shadow people account than a UFO experience.

  “Then we heard a clanking, Veronica pointed her flashlight in the direction the sound originated, but nothing was seen. When we decided to come back, we couldn’t even find our way around.”

  Camila Evans drifted back to the last moment at the clearing.

  “Veronica saw something inching toward the lake and turned off the flashlight. Kelly had opened her mouth but Veronica didn’t let her speak.”

  She hesitated and then said, “At that moment, I bowed down and looked over. Then he sensed our presence somehow. Kelly snapped again. To our surprise, we were in the same place as before. It seemed that we got stuck in some kind of endless replay. Then we pressed on.”

  There was a brief gap in her account.

  “The trail led us through an area of large old trees bent into weird shapes and turned right and then left and so on until we realized that we were exactly where it all started.”

  It all led to an uncanny quietness. Every word whispered in the dark now had a new meaning.

  A haunted word yet unspoken.

  “Then we heard that clanking again, it was very frightening. There was a hissing sound. Kelly spun around and then she was nowhere to be found.”

  Kevin was startled. He had heard a lot of stories and strange accounts about that area when he was little. It was very common to hear stories of lumberjacks and adventurers who had seen a ghost or something they could not explain. But he never thought that something like that could actually happen to someone he knew.

  “We heard screams and went after her, despite our efforts, we couldn’t find any trace of her anymore. She just vanished. The clearing was just a trap set up for us since the beginning. There was nowhere to run.”

  Camila told us she saw Veronica’s body being pulled upward with such a force that she hadn’t even time to react. Something covered her mouth, keeping her from screaming.

  And the last thing she saw was the look of terror on Veronica’s face.

  “I tried to pull her back, but something struck me. And when I glared at the woods, I saw something embeded in the forest moving again. I ran as fast as I could.”