Chapter Six

After a few minutes he nodded and then asked if this was a joke. One alien said “If this is a joke, then what is this” and a window appeared in the wall of the spaceship and a picture of the earth hanging in space appeared. Jaden said “That’s just a photograph!” so the alien made the spaceship move and, in a blink of an eye, we were looking down on Mars where a red dust-storm was raging.

Jaden was halfway between passing out with excitement and fear but held himself together, asking how the ship moved so quickly. He was asked to lie down on a bunk and a device was put over his head and he found out how the spaceship was propelled and how they managed to keep the interior static while hurtling around the universe. When he was allowed to stand up he held me close and told me that he was so glad he had met me as he was now the best propulsion engineer in the world, married to the best programmer in the world.

The aliens then took us on a quick round trip around our planetary system before parking behind the moon and transporting us back to our picnic spot. When we woke up, having to be asleep being one of the side effects of transportation, we had that trip to the moon that he had thought was on offer and thus our family was conceived, twins that were born in 2006. I really had no plans to bring any children into the world that I was helping to create but it was a joyous arrival and I started thinking about keeping them safe. If I had been my old self still I would have been close to sixty five or dead already and the fact that I was still just under thirty, and a wife and mother, made me start to question what I was doing.

I could not change things much as they had gained such a point that I was just there to provide a little push now and then. Our company was now employing thousands and I was now a vice-president of the R&D division of nearly six hundred who were working through the logistics of making multi-player, real-time, real-life experiences happen. As far as the plan went, after Red Lake in 2005, things had gone quiet again but Nickel Mines in October with six dead and five injured made the aliens happy again and Virginia Tech in 2007 with thirty three dead and twenty three injured had them leaping for joy, or whatever the equivalent action for a green blob could be. By this time, Playstation 2 had sold a hundred and fifty five million and number 3 had hit the market with our latest versions of Swat Raid still one of the most purchased games and the Terrorist version outselling almost anything else on the market.

We carried on as usual through to 2009 with the shootings going a little quiet in the USA. I suppose that a Global Financial Crisis made sure everyone was thinking of other things. In Germany there was another one with fifteen killed in Winnenden and then we had a resurgence with Geneva (ten dead and six injured); Binghamton (thirteen dead and four injured) and Fort Hood (fourteen dead and thirty two injured). There was a quiet period now (except for sixty eight dead in Norway) until 2012 when Sandy Hook (twenty seven dead and two injured) and Aurora (twelve dead and seventy injured) made headlines again. The New York Times ran an article which linked our games to the killings and, as a hook, showed a picture of a female silhouette asking “Is the Gamesmistress the Deadliest Woman in America?”

In 2013 my twins were already looking forward to high school (being extremely gifted) and my third arrived as well as Playstation 4. Jaden was now heavily involved with NASA and JPL working on his concepts for an interstellar propulsion drive and getting around some of the things the aliens thought would stump us. He also had a team working on cabin design with the tweaks that he now knew would work. It was all very hush-hush and he did not speak about it much. 2013 also saw the shooting in Washington with twelve dead and eight injured.

Through the 2015 to 2018 period I fell for my fourth child and Jaden made Major General while I became Vice-President of the company. We were living the good life and I was increasingly worried about the world I had helped create. On the shooting side we had Roseburgh School (ten and nine) and San Bernardino with fourteen and twenty four in 2015. 2016 was just the one big one with the Orlando incident that had forty nine dead and fifty eight injured. 2017 had the Rancho Tehama Reserve with six dead and eighteen injured while the shooting at Sutherland Springs saw twenty six dead and twenty injured. 2017 also had the biggest toll so far with the Las Vegas shooting that killed fifty eight and injured a total of eight hundred and fifty with four hundred and twenty two being the direct result of gunfire.

In 2018 my twins were doing well in High School and the next was in primary, all were brilliant students, no doubt due to alien intervention to their parents. The aliens celebrated Stoneman School with seventeen dead and another seventeen injured; Thousand Oaks with twelve dead and ten injured; the Pittsburgh Synagogue with eleven dead and six injured and the Santa Fe School with ten dead and fourteen injured. An incident in the Crimea where twenty died and seventy were injured had the aliens smiling. Well, I think they could be smiling but who knows what a blob smile looks like.

Jaden and I now moved to Pasadena to be close to his work at JPL and the children were all enrolled in schools where the security was high. I still attended company meetings but left the development to others as they were now well into virtual reality and I had absolutely no idea how it worked but was able to see the advantages. 2019 had shootings at El Paso (nineteen dead and another nineteen injured) and Virginia Beach with twelve dead and four injured. The biggest shooting of the year was on the other side of the world where a single gunman killed fifty one and injured forty nine in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The company was making lots of money now with our new game ‘Invasion’ which was an on-going affair with thousands playing it at any one time. We were being accused of destroying teenagers sleep patterns as they did not want to be away from the game as they may come back to find themselves flattened by a tank. I was now a multi-millionairess with my shares in the company making up much of my wealth. So, when I got the news that my father was very ill, I took the children to meet him for the first time. We were in time to see him for a few days and he said that he was extremely happy to see them and that he was proud of me and what I had made of my life. He was just sorry that he had not met my jet fighter husband.

After the funeral there was a lot for me to do to tidy up his estate. I sent the children back home in the company jet for Jaden and the hired help to look after. I stayed in my old home, in the main bedroom as there were no beds in any other rooms. I realised that my father had lived a very lonely life since my mother had died and had a very short period of guilt before realising that I had no true link to him except DNA.

I met up with a few of the old gang and they were in awe of my position and wealth so we did not spend much time together. I got workmen in to bring the house up to sellable condition and we put it on the market. The lawyer who held my fathers’ will told me that I was the sole beneficiary of the estate so was able to sign all the paperwork to sell the home and clear out his bank accounts and investments. Once all that had been achieved I went back to Pasadena and my own family.

Late in 2019 the aliens told me that they had been accelerating the final downfall by ‘kidnapping’ various people who they could see would be world leaders and altering their brains so that they would become the leading aggressors when the word is given. They told me that the count-down had been started in 2016 and that the end would begin in late 2020. I now had real fears for my own family so I told Jaden and we put out a contract for a survival shelter to be built in our back garden with a bonus if it was ready by October 2020. It should have been able to withstand a nuclear blast but we did not have the time to build such a structure.

2020 was a year like no other. We were in a state of urgency to get ourselves safe when the virus started working around the world. We had been stockpiling for our shelter so we just carried on as usual but it did slow the building work down. We did not tell anyone about the impending doom as that would have caused either ridicule or chaos and neither was a situation that would help us. It was strange that the mass killings stopped during the year, probably because there were no collections of people in public, hardly any schools open and any disgruntled sacked workers had no-one left in their old workplace to shoot. The aliens were also happy that people were dying in the tens of thousands all over the world. I personally thought that the easiness that would-be shooters could parade in public with their guns may have just supplied a bit of a dampening effect.

I had an odd communication from the aliens one evening. They told me that they had been kidnapping likely leaders and aggressors but thought that they had picked one who was sick as they were not feeling so good. They told me to hold everything until they contacted me again. A week later there was a report on the television news of a strange green fireball that shot across the sky and the commentators wondered if it may have been secret space junk as no country claimed ownership and there had been no comets or asteroids heading our way.

When I tried the communicator there was no response and I wondered if the fireball could have been three very sick green blobs. I told Jaden about this and he said that this was a relief as the final order would not be given. We agreed that we were still being led, around the world, by a bunch of mad men and hoped that we could live through the time until they died or stepped down. We got in touch with our builders and told them that it was all right if they didn’t finish the shelter by the time scale we had set but would still like it to top end specifications. If nothing else we would end up with a games room like no other.

After a while we both started feeling as if a weight had been lifted from our shoulders. I started to put more time into the company, pushing it down the path of virtual reality for teaching and training purposes and slowly pulling back on the gaming side which was shrinking anyway. I had gone a long way in the company in my twenty five years there; from a newbie to a Vice-President and some said I was a likely successor to the current President.

Jaden was getting on well with his projects. Who knows, one day we may be into deep space ourselves. One thing will be certain; we have been trained so well through simulation shooting games we will be locked and loaded when we do go out there. Any little green men we come across won’t know what hit them!

The end.

Marianne G 2020