by (AJ) Eric

So we were supposed to restore sanity to government here after Trump, his successors and all their lackeys imploded.

Then the aliens invaded.

If you believe what they’re telling us, a Veil opened up in this part of our galaxy and suddenly all sorts of creatures from our myths and old scriptures have forced their way in, and their races of Good Guys are selflessly saving us from the more obviously evil ones like dragons and demons and harpies and giant spiders and so on and so forth.

A couple of problems there. One is that they get to define who the Good Guys are: trolls are evil; succubi aren’t. The other is that there’s an unfortunate similarity here to the old story about the traveling glass repairman who sends a gang of kids ahead of him to throw rocks through windows and assure him of some business. None of those monsters seem to have shown up until our new “friends” were here to take them on, to our great relief. I guess we’ll see about the repair bill.

The aliens in ultimate charge bear suspicious resemblance to the old pantheons of gods and goddesses here on Earth. Maybe it’s just because the new leader of the Free World — that’s me, I guess, at least for now — read a lot of “classic” science fiction a long time back. But I can’t help thinking about Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, where the invaders set themselves up that way as the gods of old as part of the Shock-and-Awe thing that kept them in control.

They’re talking about magic. Another of those SF writers, Arthur C. Clarke, noted an even longer time ago that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So I suppose it doesn’t really matter whether I believe it’s supernatural or not.

What I do know is that an immense number of our family members — wives, children, siblings — seem to have been replaced by aliens who belong to these new races, who try to convince us that they’re the same people as the ones they replaced. Are they even people, as opposed to constructs of some sort? They’re certainly not human, as we understand the term.

Some of them take the form of the humans they’re trying to replace, but they generally can’t hold it for more than a day or so. At least, it doesn’t seem as though they can. If they’ve succeeded, I guess we wouldn’t be able to tell them apart from the originals, since they’ve imprinted the memories of our loved ones, unless they’re seen using nonhuman powers.

It’s weird and somewhat disconcerting that all the crazies and paranoids suddenly seem to have had the right idea. The “you will not replace us” chant from Charlottesville some years back really seems cogent here and now. Scary.

But perhaps even more worrisome: for well over a century, we’ve been hearing absurd claims that loyal American citizens outside of our mainstream are really just waiting for the word from somebody elsewhere (who might not even exist) — a Masonic Grand Master, the Pope, the Elders of Zion, some Muslim leader like the Ayatollah or a sheikh somewhere in Arabia — to rise up and try to take us over. Suddenly it seems really plausible that this self-styled demigoddess from Canada who calls herself an empress can do precisely that, with hundreds of thousands if not millions of nonhumans in households and workplaces all across America.

We can take some of these fake family members to remote sites and try to take them apart and find out what they really are. At least, we could do that until their attack forces found them and stopped us.

We can attempt to disrupt them. Apparently one of our clandestine agencies sent someone to try and assassinate their empress at a public appearance alongside a human celebrity who’s upset that we’re not treating these “family members” as the humans they claim to be. It went as badly as I would have expected if I’d known about it: not only did she turn out to be bulletproof but she or her minions extracted whatever information the agent had and then turned him into a walking advertisement for their side.

I honestly don’t know whether or not I’d have tried to stop it if I’d known about it in advance. On the one hand, if it succeeded it’d be a Pearl Harbor incident for them, and whoever took command there would start that takeover we’ve been fearing. On the other, waiting for the ax to drop isn’t any more rewarding.

Anyway, after they toyed with things and people at Langley — to demonstrate how easily they could terminate everyone and everything there if they had a notion to — they’ve offered to negotiate.

Trouble is, we were on the other side of this kind of thing back when we had the tech superiority, and the Native Americans ended up in reservations on worthless land, with our side casually breaking promises whenever we felt so inclined.

I can’t help wondering if this government is going to end up on some farmed-out land on the Great Plains, with a replica White House and Capitol building, demonstrating to nonhuman tourists how the government used to run the country, while people like me, after we’re turned out of office, are working at souvenir shops on the highway, selling American flags and native artifacts mostly imported from Southeast Asia.

One thing in favor of our stalling this further: we’re hearing that these god-types have factions that are on the verge of fighting each other. Apparently up in Ottawa the one who calls himself Zeus started throwing thunderbolts around, violating their rule of not getting directly involved with us lowlifes. The second-level aliens who really are dealing with us, like this alleged empress, seem to think that may lead to open warfare up in their version of Asgard or Olympus or wherever they’re hanging out — far enough away from us that collateral damage isn’t much of a concern.

That could be good news: it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll all kill each other off, but they probably won’t be inclined to worry about us while it’s happening. If they do think of us, it’ll be because one side or another gets desperate enough to think we can be of value to them somehow. We’ll cross — or burn — that bridge if we come to it, but it might give us the leverage to make them take all their nonhumans away and bring our loved ones back if they’re still alive.

OK, there are other factors here that need to be considered. They apparently have some kind of machine that can turn humans into some of these alien races: elves, animal-human hybrids, pixies, heaven knows what else. It seems that they even provided some of those machines to a multinational role-playing game company, something which later got the company sanctioned as an enemy of humanity.

It’s our impression that the versions that the machines create are more powerful than the ones that infested our families: the creatures we took away generally couldn’t stop us, but the ones sent to rescue them —and to destroy our research on them — were more capable, either stronger or with much better “magic” technology.

Their “empress” is one of the ones who used the machines; she seems to have started out as a human play-tester in Vancouver B.C., though after her transition in the machine she eventually got herself adopted by one of the ruling “goddesses” and promoted into the leadership role. Some of our people think the reason that active hostilities haven’t commenced is that she has a soft spot for humanity, as a former member.

She and her cohorts are saying that leaders here like me simply have a blind determination to stay in power, and that we are demonizing nonhumans who aren’t actually invaders but loved ones who were transformed through no fault of their own. Self-serving as that assertion may be for them, let’s acknowledge the possibility that the aliens are telling the truth: that these fake family members really used to be the humans that they say they are, but they had ancestry in those other forms and it’s suddenly showing through, just in time for this confrontation.

The trouble is that it still doesn’t tell us that their alien counterparts can’t use their “magic” tech to take them over when the aliens are ready. I mean, they’ve taken over our own human agents when they’ve felt they needed to; it ought to be much easier for them to control the fae and wolf-men and shapeshifters now in our midst.

And that’s even worse. Say your spouse or your daughter suddenly sprouts elf ears, picks up a carving knife from the kitchen and comes after you. And say you have a loaded gun in the house and can grab it before she can strike. Are you ready to shoot and kill her if that’s the only way you can save yourself? I don’t know whether I could, or what kind of shape I’d be in mentally afterwards if I did.

So I guess we need to accept their invitation to negotiate, and hope that we’re not signing our death warrant, or at least a license to shove us under a convenient rug somewhere so that they can deal with our (or their) “changed” relatives instead.

Actually, now that we have our Constitution back, it’s up to our Congress to ratify any treaty we come up with. A century ago they wouldn’t join the League of Nations. They thought we’d be giving up our sovereignty if we gave up any rights to act unilaterally on issues like war and peace. Our side had won World War I. Whatever we come up with here is likely to be even less friendly.

But if the alternative is to go to war against them, I certainly don’t like our chances. We do outnumber them, but this whole continent is bring run by descendants of invaders who were greatly outnumbered. I’ve heard that Pizarro took over the Incan Empire with 300 soldiers. He captured and killed their emperor. If these invaders decide to turn their mind control on leaders like me, that may be an even worse fate.

If I’m remembering that Zelazny book right, the people did prevail over those so-called gods, but only because one of them took our side, and then left us for his version of Nirvana after we won. We should be so lucky.