Fortunately, I was Saved by the Aliens
Unofficial Katy's formative conception
First, I should just say that if you are following my Immigration Control collection in order of the stories, then the previous one on the setlist is Ciao, SETI!, my intro and part 1/8 of which you can read at that link. There’ll be a link to the next one in the collection at the end - although obviously only once I’ve actually posted it. And you should also bear in mind that after this one, the rest of the collection is paid-only. I have to at least try and earn a living somehow, after all.
Those of you who have already read that story will get a little familiarity with the narrator of this little story, as well as the opening line, because this is where Unofficial Katy came from. You’ll also note that in both stories the first line talks about being in prison. So this is really where the character first came into being, before she got a name and started being a lot funnier. There are some ironic moments of humour in this one, but it’s a bit more vicious and serious than what Katy did next. Furthermore, don’t let the conspiracy theory angle put you off - Katy essentially just plays mischievously and sardonically with conspiracies, although to be fair she does believe in half of them. Which half, however, is for the reader to decide.
You’ll also recognise a fair amount of me in this one. Which isn’t surprising because as I may have mentioned before, of all my characters, Katy is the one who most closely resembles the real me. Sharing a wanton penchant for sedition is a case in point.
If you end up wondering about the flashback (or flashforward, even) in the middle, then this is a reference to the long novella from my book, Rejected Messages, where you can read the whole story (albeit with a darker alternative ending). I should probably point out that a lot of my stories make a lot more sense if you’ve read that book (although you’ll get more insights in the Paschats section as we go along into next year). There’s certainly a sort of development of ideas and themes going on in my sci-fi stories, for sure. Unless one would rather think of all this as a kind of crossover thing.
As for the title, I really couldn’t think of anything after I wrote the story so I went for the funny/silly/weirdness option. There’s also a bit of Event Day in the story, although as you are aware it didn’t exactly turn out the way it does in this story. More’s the pity.
At least, not officially it didn’t.
Anyhow, there’s a little intro for you. This story is around the 2,000 words mark, so it’s quite a quick read. And I thought I’d post it on a Friday so I could do the Sci-Friday thing - so once again I am giving a big shoutout (tag, that is) and total gratitude to Andrew Smith, and also to Von, for keeping this superb idea going.
And here’s the Great Image Generator with a scene-setter for you. As you’ll see, as always it’s done itself proud with a job well done!
Fortunately, I was Saved by the Aliens
When I refused to submit myself to being jabbed with your bioweapon they sent me to prison.
That was 23 months ago, December, 2022. I am now precisely 26 minutes into the witching hour on 16 November 2024. There are eleven hours left, according to the Wow! signal.
One of the upsides of being incarcerated here is that my French has improved immeasurably. I moved here to rural France from old England some fifteen years ago, to a sleepy old house with half an acre of garden in a quaint little commune perched near the top of an ancient wooded valley. We kept ourselves to ourselves, my companion and myself and our felines. Our gardening skills improved and we had solar panels fitted and our own, pure water from a well, and we bothered no one. And no one bothered us. We used to spend those hazy hot summers sitting in our beautiful garden and just talking, and drinking, and laughing. And no one saw us, because no one was watching.
But I was watching you. I observed and recorded your world descending further into dystopian hell. Some of you noticed, for sure, but most of you allowed it to happen. Now, as you have come to realise, to your shame, it is too late.
Would you like me to describe the events of the previous few years? At least in outline? Of course you do – you love hearing about your future, don’t you? I wish I could say you think about it all the time with all seriousness, but I don’t really think you do. Not in the right way, anyhow.
Well, here we go, then. Now we are coming to the end of your year 2024 you are perfectly well aware that you have been subjected to a devious, multi-pronged bioterrorist attack on a global level. When it first started most of you laughed at that suggestion and the oddball conspiracy theorists who tried to warn you. But your media did their work well, so you simply ridiculed them.
I laugh, sometimes. Here in this cell, to pass the time away. I laugh at you and find comfort in the thought that given the yearly exponential increase in the infection fatality rate of this constantly mutating bioweapon by the end of this decade there will be none of you people left. None of you to rape our second homeworld. None of you to threaten our beloved Danuih or our trillion friends in our little sector of this vast and awesome galaxy.
They know, by the way. Perhaps I should’ve explained that to you already. They – that’s to say your dystopian conspirators – know perfectly well who I am and where I’m from and what I’m doing here. That’s why they’ve been far too scared to try and physically force their injection into me. They’re scared of repercussions, you see.
Obviously it’s a bit late for that now, but hey, sic transit Gaia and all that, eh?
So there you go – forewarned is forearmed. Exponential increase in lethality. The original virus didn’t seem like an engineered bioweapon because it hardly killed 0.5 percent. It was simply an excuse to inject you with part two. This occurred during the second year, when they’d gotten you so fed up of being fucked around with in lockdowns and all the rest of it that you even lined up obediently for your bioweapon jabs. And that’s when the lethality started increasing. As I say, exponentially. You want some science about this? Ok, I’ll give you science. Messenger RNA inserted into your genome using reverse transcriptase (that bit was in the booster) teaching your own cells how to produce the toxin itself. Part one. Part two, on encountering the wild virus, so to speak, your own body’s immune system overreacts and initiates a cytokine storm. You attack yourself, in other words. Multiple organ failure precipitating a slow and painful death over the course of several days.
I’ve seen that kind of thing before, by the way, albeit in one of QAI-TI’s simulations. Well, I say ‘before’, but it was actually even further into your strange future. One hundred and nine years, to be a little more precise. By which time your population had been happily reduced to a more manageable ten percent of what you know now. In that lifetime I was monitoring and assessing your Centaura fusion-powered starship from our colony station orbiting Mithra’ey’sa (apologies to those concerned if I transliterated the name inaccurately), the third planet of the Alpha Centauri system.
It’s intriguing, being here now, to think that you should’ve detected this planet at least ten years ago already. Then again, your oh so benevolent powers-that-be decided to make sure your James Webb Space Telescope wasn’t nearly powerful enough to detect Mithra’ey’sa, let alone her obvious atmospheric biosignature. At least officially. That would’ve given your people hope, after all, for a genuine future, made controlling you impossible.
Sorry, I digress. On your approach to the habitable zone your medical specialists were understandably concerned about the alien pathogen problem. Even a common little Mithrayan cold (not unlike your coronaviruses, ironically), would’ve been fatal to you within 4-6 hours. And we certainly didn’t want to instigate a kind of War of the Worlds type scenario, eh? So after your sample collector probes returned to your ship and sad-faced Dr. Chen presented the final, devastating analysis to Captain Grissom all your crew became distraught, and I myself, watching this unhappy scene unfold on our visiscreen (via nanosurveillance etc. – work it out yourself), finally capitulated into empathy and sympathy and all the rest of it and ordered QAI-TI to open up a communication channel.
Your brave, courageous crew had risked their lives, and the lives of their children, on that fourteen-year voyage to visit us and make friends, and I felt for them. I didn’t care what my mother or the Council said, I was in charge now and I would decide the fate of humanity.
And so we gave you the solution. The problem was your ship’s quantum-AI, Kay, didn’t have sufficient processing speed to reprogram the nanocytes quickly enough. Cytokine storm, as I said. So Kay needed an upgrade, and became Katy. Don’t worry, she didn’t go all HAL 9000 on you. Fortunately you’d already anticipated that, so alongside programming her with a young and sexy southern English female voice you equipped her with an SSR, or Simulation Subroutine. It constantly analysed the situation and calculated the probability of her logically having to take control over the ship in order to save the mission. Then warn your crew if it ever exceeded five percent and offer some solutions. I believe she got to double figures a few times, but that’s another story.
There was a young woman on your ship by the name of Katyusha. I didn’t realise she was me, in a different incarnation, until we started openly communicating. We’d both had dreams, of course, but we didn’t remember for sure until we met.
She told me about a life she once had a hundred years earlier, when your world was a hideous dystopia in which truth, and truth-tellers, were branded as dissidents and subversives and frequently incarcerated. But she knew the truth, and refused to be afraid to tell it.
She was not afraid, because she was me.
This is how it comes round again. The trick as far as avoiding paradoxes is concerned when you’re time-travelling is to simply, well, forget the future. At least, forget the important, specific bits. Only remember what you need to know.
Why haven’t they forced their bioweapon into my arm? Why haven’t they got those petty little fascist screws to lock me to the ground and kneel on my neck and all the other things you’re surely familiar with now?
Because I remembered. And because I said so.
Of course, the other little problem which France has had for the last two years is a lack of prison space. When Le Regime fasciste du Macron finally, inevitably, ordered mandatory injections on top of their totalitarian Pass Sanitaire, without which you couldn’t even buy food, the French protests became impossible to control. Six million, seven, ten? Once they got that high people stopped counting. The first few hundred thousand, like me, who refused to pay their fines for rejecting the injections and burning their health passes were promptly crowded into the country’s jails until there was no more room at the inn. The next few hundred thousand kept the entire armed forces occupied guarding them in the hastily-established concentration camps, but well, that still left six, seven, however many millions it was.
And so now it’s Macron himself whose putrescent corpse sways epileptically halfway down La Tour Eiffel like a demented pendulum, pecked clean to the bone by a murder of crows. Them clean-pecked bones will soon be gone.
It was a deterrent. You think any other so-called world leader would risk such a fate? Obviously not. So then, no forced injections, no Covid-passports, no quarantine.
Only resistance.
What they don’t tell you about the storming of La Bastille is that there were merely a handful of prisoners there at the time. One of them was incarcerated for incest or some such, and another was an Irishman convinced he was Julius Caesar, on good days, on others the Almighty Himself. Hardly the great blow to authority people remember. Still, symbols mean something, don’t they?
Seven hours to go.
In precisely eight minutes neither the raging virus nor the fascist prison guards will be able to stop the mob descending on this ineffective correctional facility and tearing down these walls. All of us will be released.
Amongst us, the condemned, petty thieves and vagabonds, dissidents and draft-dodgers, history will record that there is one who is different. An Englishwoman, me, considered by the trial judge to be delusionally convinced she was an extraterrestrial entity who once, in your future, went by the name of Shari’ana, an exo-psychologist of a leonine species called ‘Eyani’, originally from Sirius until our star turned white dwarf and we were forced to find a second homeworld, who greeted your descendants with a loving smile in a docking bay on a colony station, orbiting a planet which, to all intents and purposes may as well be your own planet’s twin. It was, after all, she insisted in her testimony, designed that way, some 600 million years ago.
The prosecution, ironically, implored the judge to reject what was clearly some kind of insanity plea. ‘The defendant is trying to avoid our rapidly overcrowding jails, Madame President de la Cour, she means to escape justice in some psychiatric institution!’. ‘Then fine,’ says Madame la Justice, have her assessed by a psychologist!’
And lo it came to pass that said psychologist, by order of the court, assessed yours truly and in the greatest of ironies proclaimed me as rational as himself, ‘or even your good self, Madame la Justice!’’
Meaning, logically speaking, as far as the court was concerned, every bloody word I told them was true.
Oh, I nearly forgot! How remiss of me. You’re intrigued as to what’s going to happen in seven hours, at precisely 11.26 UTC on 16 November 2024, aren’t you?
Well now, what happens then, my dearest things, is entirely up to you, and the choices you make, between now, and then.
Tick, tock.
But I’ll tell you this for nothing. If you do not accede to Shari’ana’s demand and release me, The Messenger, unharmed, by the time she steps out of that time-ship shimmering a metre or so above the ground in the shadow of the UN Building in NYC, strides purposefully up to your Secretary General and looks him venomously and furiously in the eyes, then you can take your worsening cytokine storm and shove it up humanity’s collective arse.
Then we’ll show you what a ‘great reset’ really means.
And don’t you dare, ever, say we didn’t warn you.
There will be more. There’s always more...!
And for the next story in Immigration Control, which is Shipyard Ahoy!, click there.
Kay is a good name, fictional, futuristic or otherwise. also Arthur's foster-brother, Kay/Cei.