Superf***er Vol. 05

Superf****er Volume 5: Trapped

I could barely pick my head up from the bar far enough to order another double scotch. Not because I was drunk, although I was trying very hard to become such, but because I was despondent. Nineteen years from today, the Earth was going to be hit by an antimatter comet and the entire inner half of your solar system would be obliterated. I was the only one who knew about it, I was the only one who could hope to do anything about it—and so far, while my plan was working, it wasn't working anywhere near well enough.

I come from a planet 300 light-years away. I have lived among you for more than a century (in your time), undetected, because of the striking convergent evolution between our species. However, because my planet is much larger, less hospitable and with heavier gravity, I can do things humans can't—in fact, some might consider me to have super-powers. If there were more of me, there are things we might be able to do to avert the catastrophe. Unable to get help from home, I hit upon the idea of cross-breeding with humans, hoping that some of my abilities would be inherited and we might still save this planet—and ourselves.

For more than a year, I had been diligently seducing at least one earthling a day. Since in my biology male sperm carries the hormones that induce ovulation, I was counting on being able to counteract oral birth control and reproduce with a high rate of success. I was hoping that by now a hundred halflings would have been born—but the latest report from the foundation I created to provide financial assistance to the mothers of my children showed that to date only sixteen half-human babies had been born. I estimated that I would need to father some 400 children; since I figured that at most half would inherit any given extra-terrestrial ability, that would give me an "army" of 200 or so to try to save us, myself included, when the comet came. Instead I was looking at maybe having eight.

Sure, there were others that were still pregnant, but the yield was far below what I anticipated, and my time was running out. I figured that my children would have to be at least 16 to be of any help, so I had about three more years, but the older the children would be, the better. I had to step up my efforts at seeding human females—and frankly, I wasn't sure if I was up to it, because I was just plain TIRED. Not from the sex—don't misunderstand me, I LOVE having sex with your women. The pursuit, however, is a different matter entirely. Seducing females was consuming all of my time, energy, and a lot of the money I had accumulated in a century of wise investing. I was having a harder and harder time turning on the charm and seducing a new partner. It was just so much WORK, even if abilities such as the ability to create tiny, pleasurable electrical currents between my thumb and my fingers were extremely helpful. It was contrary to my nature to just throw in the towel and accept certain death, but at least tonight I was not in the mood to try to put on yet another happy face and play Mr. Debonair yet again.

I raised my finger as the bartender passed.

"Buddy, I think you've had enough," he told me. Great—he also interpreted my indolence as intoxication. Oh well, there were plenty of other bars—I was not about to raise a ruckus and risk being arrested, at which point the police would, to their surprise, find that no records of my birth existed anywhere. I shrugged, slid off the bar stool, and glumly headed for the door.

I squinted as the late-afternoon sun hit my face as I left the dark bar. I turned left and headed up the street, unsure where I was or where I was headed—I knew the Las Vegas strip well, but I was lurking far from the glitz and glamour among the working-class bars of the city itself, and felt lost. Still, this wasn't Utah, so it couldn't be very far to the next bar.

I guess I'd had more to drink than I realized...I was a bit unsteady on me feet as I headed up the sidewalk, and it took a LOT of alcohol to get me drunk. I gazed down glumly, feeling sorry for myself as I headed up the street.

"Bill!" a voice behind me called, seeming slightly agitated. Maybe if I hadn't been drinking I would have realized I should pretend not to hear—after all, I'm an alien, I don't really have friends and certainly no family that I might run into. But before this thought could process, I had already reflexively turned around. About a half-block behind me, pushing a baby in a stroller, was Crystal. If memory served correctly, she had been just the second earth girl I'd fucked—interesting, both of my first encounters led to viable babies, leading me to wonder if somehow I'd done something different—and now that I had turned around, I was trapped.

"I thought maybe you'd at least like to SEE your son at least once, Bill," she hissed as she closed the distance between us. "You've made it amply clear that you want nothing to DO with him."

My foundation was surreptitiously providing financial assistance to all of the mothers I impregnated, but now I was faced with the part I had been avoiding—actually meeting them. "Crystal," I stammered, "I thought you lived in L.A..."

"I did," she snapped, "until I discovered that Mr. Big Spender left me with this little...present. I moved here to work in the casinos—good tips, on-site daycare. Godsends for a baby whose father abandoned him. Say hello to your father, Edward, because you'll probably never see him again."

I already knew his name, but she didn't know that. Nor, I'm sure, would she have suspected that I was delighted to see my progeny. I didn't do this because I wanted to abandon my offspring—I did what I did because I had hundreds more to sire. I knelt down and peeked into the crib, hoping to play with the baby but he was sound asleep.

Crystal was shaking her head. "I can't believe you. You were so NICE that night at the bar, so attentive—you seemed so DIFFERENT from other guys. And then bam, you're gone, disappear into thin air—no way to contact you, no one seems to have heard of you. Pretty clever, making it impossible for someone to take you to court and force you to take responsibility for the child you fathered. Do you have any IDEA how much work it is to raise a child alone?" she hissed vitriolically.

"Surely, the checks from the Starr Child foundation help..."

She was suddenly taken aback. "How did you..." she began, answering her own question before even finishing asking it—I could only know about the foundation if I had been somehow behind it. Small consolation, but perhaps I hadn't abandoned my child as completely as she imagined. I put my finger in the stroller; still asleep, little Eddie (my sources told me that's what he was usually called) reflexively grasped it with his tiny hand.

"I see. You set up a cold, impersonal foundation to send anonymous checks to relieve your guilt about the women whose lives you destroyed. So just how many of us are there, huh? Ten? A hundred?" I didn't respond. "You are SO not what I thought you were," she seethed.

Without looking up, I adjoined "you have no idea just how much I am not what you think I am."

"You can say that again," she hissed, "Well, I have news for you, mister. Maybe you're behind the foundation, but your acceptance of responsibility is grossly insufficient. Now that I've found you, my paternity suit can go forward. I'll see you in court!"

I stood up and looked at her. She glared back at me defiantly. She was bluffing of course, her process serves wouldn't find me—I know for a fact that they had been trying. Maybe she thought that she'd find me through the Foundation, but she would soon learn that wouldn't work, either. But that's not what I was thinking about—maybe it was the scotch, maybe it was the despair, but I was just sick of it. Sick of the burden, sick of the time and energy spent seducing earth girls, knowing that each successful mating meant one more person that hated me. I was trying to save your skins too, dammit. And at that moment, I didn't care—didn't care if I was discovered, didn't care if I was apprehended and studied by science. There wasn't a jail on earth I couldn't break out of, anyway. And in that careless moment, I did what I'd spent a century taking great pains not to do.

I gave myself away.

My eyes narrowed. "Look in my eyes," I challenged coolly, "and tell me what color they are."

"What?" she replied testily, looking in spite of herself, "they're blue."

"Are they?" I persisted.

"Is this the best you can come up with to change the subject?" she sneered. "Yes they're blue...maybe a bit green too...and...oh my..." Her angry confidence started to crumble in the face of the unexpected—she had looked at my eyes long enough for the kaleidoscopic illusion to kick in.

I grinned ever so slightly. "Ever seen anything like it?"

"So what, so your eyes change color..." she argued, trying to regain her anger and return the topic to the baby and my failure to be the father she imagined I should be. Without a word, I effortless jumped straight up—and landed, on my feet on without bending my knees, on the roof of the one-story liquor store we had been standing in front of. Her head jerked, following me; her eyes grew wide and her mouth fell open as it sank in that what I'd just done should have been impossible. Just as quickly, I coolly jumped back down. I strolled over to the nearest parked car. With seeming no effort, although picked up the front of the car, tipping it on its back wheels at a 30 degree angle. I nonchalantly reached down to pick up a crushed soda can that had been under the car, then mindlessly set the car back down. I took the can and sailed like a skipping stone through the air, watching as it shattered the rear window of a hapless parked car two blocks away.

"My name is ------," I said calmly, telling an earthling for the first time my real name. Sorry, as I've said before, it can't be written or pronounced in any terrestrial language I've ever learned. I calmly walked back to the stunned mother on the street. "I was born on --------, a planet some 300 light years away. I have lived among you since your 1908, arriving through a wormhole in the wake of the Tunguska impact. For fifty years I've been waiting for another impact so I can go home. This machine," I continued, pulling out my IMS (Interplanetary Motion Simulator) "tell me when the next collision will be. I just plug in the coordinates..." which I did as I spoke. Of course, the entire device was covered with symbols she had never seen before, so I could have been showing her a Korean calculator for all she knew. However, I had her attention. Numbers quickly spun across the dial, but of course she didn't recognize our number symbols either. Then there was a graphic depiction of a small circle intersecting our location, along with probability vectors for where it might veer. And then the screen suddenly started blinking in large red letters and making a warning sound—she didn't need to understand the device to recognize that this was probably bad news.

"What's it telling you?" she asked, dumbfounded.

"It's a warning," I explained, "nineteen years from now today Earth will be struck by a comet. Only this isn't an ordinary comet—it's an antimatter comet."

"What does that mean?" she asked, no longer confident.

"When matter collides with antimatter, both are annihilated in a flash of pure energy," I replied matter-of-factly.

"So when this comet collides with earth...the planet will explode?"

"Not exactly," I explained. "More like it will simple cease to exist—almost like being vaporized, only vapor is still matter, and all matter will simply be erased. It will release a prodigious amount of energy when it does, though, so it will look like an explosion to a casual observer. Enough energy to take out every planet between Mercury and... oh what do you call it...Juno?...no, Jupiter!. Between Mercury and Jupiter."

"We're all going to die?"

"You won't have time to die—you'll just cease to exist," I explained, with a flourish "myself included. Unless we can divert this comet—something that can only be done using a pure force. Magnetism, for instance—I have control over my magnetic properties, which humans do not. That's how I can do this." I aligned my magnetodes and shot with feet into the air, then allowed myself to drift slowly down. "But obviously one being can't exert enough force to divert a speeding comet. That's when I had the idea—I couldn't get help from home, but I thought our biologies are so similar, maybe we can crossbreed. If some of inherit some of my extra-terrestrial powers, well then maybe we CAN divert that comet. If not...we're all going to just...disappear," I concluded with a snap of my finger.

"So you've been trying to cross-breed?" she muttered, zombie-like. It must be pretty shocking to learn that the father of your baby comes from outer space.

"But it seems I have failed," I complained, "little Eddie is but one of sixteen—that puts me about 80 behind schedule. At this rate, there's no way there will be enough of us. So, I'm giving up. Sue me if you like, but don't be too hard on Eddie if he gets in trouble when he's a teen, because he'll not live long enough to see legal drinking age."

"Oh my god," she burst, holding her temples, finally overwhelmed. She raced over to a concrete embankment by a gas station a few yards away and sat down. "This can't be real. This must be a nightmare, right?" She slapped her own face "come on, wake up, wake up."

"Sorry, my dear," I sighed, "I'm afraid that sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. Do you want me jump up to the roof again?" She shook her head. "I'm sorry, it must be quite a shock to learn your baby is half-alien," I said, trying to be sympathetic, "it must seem pretty freaky right about now. Do be careful, though—Eddie may be able to lift the sofa before he can walk."

"That explains the picture," she said distantly.

"Hmm?"

"The picture...a few weeks ago, I had given Eddie a bottle, which he was holding—everyone said they'd never seen a baby hold a bottle at three months—and realized I'd forgotten a burp cloth, so I laid him down on the floor with his bottle and went to fetch one. I was gone maybe 20 seconds, but as I turned to go back I heard a crash. I raced back in. Eddie was lying on the floor, perfectly fine, playing with his feet. But his bottle had somehow gotten across the room, knocking over a picture of my parents and shattering the glass."

"I thought maybe it was a ghost. I called my parents right away, before I even cleaned up the glass, to make sure they were all right—I was sure one of them must have died. But no—they both spoke to me on the phone. I've been looking for a new apartment, because I've been freaked out to be there ever since." There was a bit of a pause, then she finished "that's the only reason I was out walking—to get out of my haunted apartment."

"Not haunted," I reassured her, "there's no such thing as ghosts—trust me on that one. Little Eddie must have gotten sick of his bottle and launched it across the room." I crouched down to look at the sleeping tiger, whispering "good boy Eddie! Way be strong like dear old dad!" My enthusiasm was genuine—if Eddie had inherited my superhuman strength, that mean that my characteristics could indeed be passed on through an earth mother.

Well, I had gotten it off my chest. I couldn't tell you what my goal had been in dumping the whole thing on Crystal's lap like I did, except maybe to not feel so much exactly like such the selfish shmuck as she thought I was. I looked up and down the street—fortunately, no one else was on the sidewalk, and the cars were passing too fast to really have seen any of my foolish stunts. Still, I had let myself be goaded into giving myself away, and now for the first time there was a human who knew who I really was...one who wanted to sue me anyway...

"How can I help?" she said softly.

"Huh?" Now I was bewildered—I don't know what I was expecting her reaction to be, but that wasn't it.

"How can I help?" she repeated, more loudly. "I don't want to see the Earth obliterated in 19 years either, what can I do to help save it?"

"No...I appreciate the thought," I replied, grabbing the stroller and pulling it closer as I moved to sit down next to her, "but there's nothing you or anyone can do..."

"You said you were giving up," she persisted, "why?"

"Because my best just isn't good enough," I explained. "Every single day since the day I met you in that stupid bar I've seduced at least one earth woman—and there aren't anywhere near enough babies to show for it. I'm tired—I can't do any more. So I'm giving up."

"So what you need," she answered, "is help finding mothers."

"If only," I sighed.

"Did it ever occur to you to tell us the truth, like you just did to me? That maybe we'd WANT to help if we knew it was the only way to save the Earth?"

"No," I admitted, "because in the hundred years I've been here, you're the first human I've told my secret."

"Me?" she asked with surprise, "why?"

"Guess you caught me at a bad time," I sighed. "You know in the movies, how when they find the aliens they put them in sterile tanks and research them with hazmat suits. I don't think it would be that far from the truth, but I just don't care anymore. You know my secret, go ahead, call the FBI. Funny, 19 years is really kind of a long time, but when you KNOW its your doom, it feels like tomorrow."

"Yeah right," she retorted, "I tell a story like that with no proof, and I've got myself a one-way ticket to the funny farm. Someone has to take care of Eddie, and it doesn't look like it's going to be you."

There was silence for a while. "I'm sorry," she continued, "it helps to understand that there's a reason, but it doesn't make being a single mother any easier."

"I know," I said quietly, "I'm sorry."

"If I'm going to have to sacrifice, I don't want it to be for nothing," she said with sudden resolve. "We're going to have to find a way to breed more halflings. I think that there are some resources that could be tapped—if you think you are up to your part."

"Depends," I replied, still disbelieving this conversation was taking place. "If you mean inseminating human females, sure. If you mean cruising for women to inseminate, then..."

"You might need to be a little less picky," she interrupted, "but I think I could find some ways to help you find partners with less effort. Do you have an email address?"

"Of course," I answered, "it's the only way anyone can communicate with me. If anyone knew where I was, I'd never be able to avoid all the process servers—like the ones you send out searching for me, for instance."

"You knew about that, huh?"

"My sources actually keep me very informed—I'm actually very interested in what happens to my offspring, for reasons you now understand. But I can't become involved in their lives no matter how much I may want to."

She stood up suddenly. "Come on," she said, "my apartment isn't far from here, and now that I know its not haunted I'm not afraid to go there anymore. I have an idea, and there's something I want to show you."

-----------------------

No sooner were we back at her apartment when Eddie woke up—hungry. As Crystal fed Eddie, she directed me to turn on her computer and browse to a singles website. I clicked around for a bit—I suppose maybe this would be less work, but I didn't think I'd be able to keep up my one-a-day pace like this. It wasn't until Eddie was fed and Crystal could get up and shoo me off of her chair that things started to click.

She logged in as a user, explaining with a little embarrassment "it's pretty hard for a single mom to get dates." Once inside, there were all manner of chat rooms and forum boards; some for finding relationships, some for certain interests, one for non-dating matters—and one that said "Trying new things." That's the one she clicked on, saying "I've not really hung out here myself, but some of my girlfriends have." The subject lines caught my eye right away: "Interested in trying a little light bondage?" "Looking to try a three-way." "Anal virgin looking to learn."