The Ranger

Chapter 1

I've been here before. The same purple planet towered behind me, the most magnificent Milky-Way-like cluster of stars was in my right eye, and the orange sun hung high above my head. That was hard to forget.

The purple of the planet appeared to be clouds suspended above the marbled surface of ocher, blue, yellow, and green. I marveled at the colors. As if Tibetan monks worked their patient magic to create a sand mandala, only to destroy it in the end, symbolizing that life was never static. Sooner or later, the destruction was inevitable if something new to be born. Would the planet's winds and earthquakes ever reshape the landscape back into a mandala? I wondered.

The corner of my eye caught a bright flash. A sphere . . . a star? It seemed so nearby that I involuntarily lifted my arm and poked it with my index finger, my finger catching dark matter.

Another sun that I didn't notice earlier? I studied it for a spell. I was certain that space was empty a moment ago, and, to my knowledge celestial bodies didn't just materialize out of cosmic ether looking . . . so complete. Did they?

Space was a funky place for eyeballing distance with certainty. Heck, forget certainty, a remote approximation more like it. The size of my height, five feet or so in diameter, the blazing sphere could've been a few-hundred feet or a hundred miles from me. Was it really a sun?

Its orange surface spewed violent tatters of red, blue, and orange in all directions, broadcasting aggression, as if my presence polluted its space. I've seen celestial bodies before shooting all sorts of nuclear biproducts, but only a living creature, sentient or not, would instill in me that much anxiety.

My heart thumped; my thoughts stretched and contracted like a sling, slamming my mind with scares. What would happen to my physical body, which was comfortable and in my bed on Earth at the moment, if the sphere collided with my ethereal body, or decided to shoot at me?

I can bolt at any time, I reminded myself, shaking off the fears. As a hostile alien, if the sphere, indeed, detected me it would've attempted to capture or destroy me by now. So, it either didn't see me, or it didn't plan on killing me. Or, I had no perception of distance, and the sphere was so far away that it'd take years to reach me, if it were to get me.

As soon as I thought that, the blob of fire moved to my right. It was a slow and heavy move as if it were a massive animal making its first step from a resting position. The sphere locomoted again, and again, and it kept progressing along an imaginary straight line to my right in a steady but jerky rhythm, like a beginner swimmer who moved in pulses with every stroke.

Then it stopped and hung like a balloon, pulsating ploddingly—expanding and contracting, as if breathing with laborious and slow puffs.

Oh. The sphere turned. I knew the sphere turned because the fire and coloration patterns of the sphere changed—from blazes to more delicate streaks and from orange to mostly yellow.

Which way are you turning?

As if it read my mind, a second sphere emerged from behind the first one clockwise, both were identical in size and moving at the same time as if they were bound by a harness. Was the second sphere always there, or did it just materialize?

Aligned, they finished their rotation, then stopped again. If they traveled toward me, I didn't perceive them moving at all. In the vastness of space and with the objects being so far away from each other and appearing static, there was no point of reference. Just the two burning eyeballs suspended in the blackness of ether, staring right at me.

As that wasn't enough, four fiery lines that looked like reins grew out of the spheres’ hinds as if a picture drew itself in moments. Rendering further, the reins stretched upwards and into the humanoid looking fists that held them. Two legs emerged and stretched down on to a platform suspended slightly above the spheres. A body, a long neck with a head, and two huge round and dark orbs, where eyes should be, materialized last.

Fuhh—

I moved back, and then some more, and then much more. I had lots of room behind me and above me and . . . the whole damn universe, to be precise. Yet I felt trapped in my own indecision of making a choice on what to do next.

We stared at each other for a few heartbeats as if we were both put on pause. Only the spheres' inferno was alive, casting their fiery tatters on to the ET's reflective, black orbs and spacesuit, the closest they would come to touching their master.

The ménage jerked from its apparently stationary position and heaved toward me with steadiness.

Fuck. I finished my thought.

I lifted both of my hands and looked at them, turning palms up and down, checking if I could see them. I could see the extraterrestrials, and the stars, and the sun above me, but I couldn’t see my hands or my feet or my body. The aliens shouldn’t have been able to see me either.

But they moved toward me and no one else. As far as I could see, I was the only one there.

In panic, my thoughts elongated into a sling again. I didn't like anxiety slamming into my mind. I breathed in and out with slow and controlled breaths, reminding myself that the aliens would've killed me by now if that was their goal, and, I could bolt at any moment.

I didn't want to run. I wasn't about to quit in the middle of unfolding of something interesting. I was scared and my heart thumped, reverberating in my ears, but, my god, I was curious. I stopped backing away and made an effort to hold my position, then watched the spheres hauling their master, one jerk at a time.

Space and time must have played tricks with my mind, because after what seemed like a long stretch time, the ETs didn't get closer to me, at all. And, despite their hiccuping through every step of their journey, which looked disarming and even funny, watching them move with such a monotony almost put me to sleep. Bored, I moved toward them.

Imagining myself ice-skating, I drew invisible zigzags on an etheric floor. I took my time changing direction to see if the extraterrestrials followed my pattern. They did. When I floated to the left, the aliens turned to their right toward me. When I switched to the right, they proceeded to their left. Obviously, they could see me.

Braved-up and impatient, I floated toward the aliens at the top of my speed. As their shapes grew larger by the moment, I thought in excitement, Wow, I'm moving fast, and, Stop-stop-stop. I would've rendered the spheres head-on if I didn't regain control of navigating my ethereal body, halting my momentum. (Was it even possible to manage a momentum in frictionless space at all and without engines?)

The two globes of fire turned out to be enormous. They might've been at least twenty feet in diameter. Were they animals, machines, or artificial biosentients? If they were biosentients, why did they move so slowly? But then what do I know about aliens and their way of life. Maybe their locomotion appeared slow to me, but as far ET's speed limit was concerned, they were speeding. And, what if they were designed not for speed but for sustainability and efficient upkeep.
If the globes had eyes, I couldn’t find them. But their supple, funnel-like noses probed the surrounding ether in tireless motion, curving and rotating in some hypnotic dance. As their noses completed a full circle, they bulged with mass; the mass seemed to disappear inside their body, inflating its globular size; a pause; then the spheres jerked forward.

"Wait a minute," I said to the globes and watched the whole cycle again just to make sure I was getting this right.

Was this how they moved? Whatever gas or matter entered their nose, it bulged inside the pipe then disappeared inside their spheric bodies, inflating them, as if filling a balloon with more helium. The globes toiled through a sort of jet-propulsion process, expelling something through a bunch of hind––which I just noticed, stiff-looking tubes.

“Are you farting out a slow 'propellant'?” I imagined the following instructions: 'Inhale dark matter on one, fart on two, advance ten inches on three with a jerk. Repeat.' Did they move in reverse?

As I was mesmerized by the spectacle, one of the suckers grew very big right in front of my eyes. I scrambled away from the globe's nose but all I managed was to remain in the same spot. I moved so fast before, why didn't it work now? Maybe moving backwards didn't work as well as forward? I recalled the sensation of creating powerful velocity and, imagining myself a spaceship flying faster than the speed of light, broke free from the sucker’s pull.

I was certain that the globes didn't attack me. I just smelled like a fuel to them. Staying clear of their suckers, I floated up to take a good look at the bipedal.

Holding burning reins in his huge tridactyl hands, and very tall, he (or she or it) stood on a worn and uneven platform, which hung above the spheres. That way their fart discharged under the platform, I surmised. He was clothed in a tight black suit, which was patterned with faint thin lines, as if thin wires were woven into its fabric. Or maybe not a fabric at all, but a thin metal sheet, as it appeared to be reflective. His head and face were, too, covered with the suit, which might be a solid, head-to-toe piece. And, what I thought were his insect-like orbs, were his dark, oversized goggles.

I caught a movement of his left goggle. Its glass part, or whatever material it was made from, was rotating either clock- or counterclockwise. It was difficult to discern, with all the visual noise of dancing fires reflected in his goggles from the spheres. Now the right goggle was turning. They both stopped at the same time.

The alien was looking at me, and I at him.

Khlisshokh . . . Nuermeen . . . Tsitza-aza, a bleak, masculine voice resonated in my mind. I was still processing what I've heard, when some clicks and sounds were narrated with the same voice. More strange words or phrases or letters sounded in my mind, until I heard "Hello".

"Yes," I exclaimed, "Yes. English. Hello-hello." I waved my invisible hands to the alien in excitement, as if I spotted a friend in the crowd. He didn't say anything else.

As I levitated higher, his goggles following me in silence, I noticed that his covered head and face looked flat. There were no contours or mounds of his mouth, nose, and ears, and nape. "That's not a good reason for a silent treatment," I told him, but he didn't reply.

Except for his rounded arms and legs, his whole body was flat, as if cut out from a dough with a cookie-cutter, like a ginger-bread man.

His arms and legs appeared to be much longer than of a human. I thought at first that maybe vacuum was playing some optical trick on me, as I didn't know yet how my ethereal body functioned, and how it was capable of seeing and moving through space, among other things, in the first place. But as I fixated on his legs and arms, I realized his extremities had extra joints and extra bone-lengths. Each leg had two knees with additional and very long femur, and each arm had two elbows with extra humerus.

I flew around to see his back. What if he had wings, folded or not, or more extremities? His back was as flat as his chest and no place for his wings to materialize from.

But something was missing. I circled his platform twice before I discovered that he operated without a life-support unit. There was neither a tank with breathable gas on his person or the platform, or a head-piece, except his tight suit and the goggles. How did he breathe, if he breathed at all? I stared at his chest for a few moments. It didn't rise or fall. My eyes traveled down from his smooth, granite-like chest to his long legs.

" Oh." His boots looked like ski-boots but bulgier and with a bunch of lights and a small screen on both of his toe-boxes––an interface?––that gave off a blue light. Maybe his boots were two tanks and he breathed through his feet?

The alien's platform was worn, with rugged sides and corners, as if a large chunk of cement with some wires mottled through its surface yanked out of an old, concrete building.

The globes stirred forward, the front edge of his platform producing flickers of light that formed an almost translucent wall. The platform didn't move at all. A forcefield? That way it would stay put and never shifted back and forth while traveling?

The alien tightened the reins.

Again, the globes stirred, this time from side to side as if feeling uneasy, and the alien's whole body tensed. He freed his right arm by transferring the reins in to his left hand, his motions precise and quick. The act looked composed but aggressive. As if he was a hunter who drew a bow and arrow from behind his back with an amazing swiftness to kill someone before that someone had chance to escape. His black impenetrable goggles never left my face, and I hoped I wasn't the target.

I backed away, panic in my feet. The globes almost swallowed me whole some moments ago. What if my ethereal body was my soul, and it was vulnerable to alien's technology and his domesticated animals?

My reasoning put a dent in my perky mood. I should leave.

"Why did you free your right hand?" I asked instead, hoping to be included in his internal contemplation about my persona, and why he wouldn't continue with the first contact routine. In the end, he was the one who farted toward me on his fart-mobile.

The ether to the alien's right quivered in small waves, as if a smooth surface of a lake was disturbed by a wind. That spot grew rapidly in size, changing color, from pitch black to dark grey, then to light grey, then to intense white light. I lifted my arm to shield my eyes. A bright and massive whirlpool-like opening formed, then spewed out another alien, who was identical to the first one but without a platform or the globes. The new alien wore thick, cylindrical cuffs on his forearms. As the portal closed behind him––I assumed that was a portal––he pressed something on one of his cuffs, then navigated toward the old alien, while training his asynchronously rotating eyewear on me. He hovered over the platform, his goggles fixated on me.

I was confused. The old alien didn't use portal. I was certain I'd notice a massive bright whirlpool in the middle of the black ether. Most likely, he used a cloaking device to materialize in front of me one limb at a time.

If the species had a jumping technology, wouldn’t both of them use it?

I waved to the new alien a polite and tepid 'hello'. But what I wanted to do was to run. I couldn't rationalize it but my instincts warned me that there was something predatory and ruthless about him.

I retreated further away from the platform.

The old alien's right hand shot with lightning speed, grabbing the new alien by the throat, his three fingers closing on and crushing the neck bones. The new alien's extremities jerked and his body went limp.

My heart thumped.

While still holding the dead extraterrestrial by the neck suspended in the air, as if he was a lifeless chicken, the old alien lowered the body onto a platform and stepped on to dead alien's feet. The ET twisted corpse's neck clockwise and counterclockwise a few times, then pulled its head up until it was severed from his neck. A luminous-yellow and thick fluid rose to the surface from the ragged cavity, freezing, changing its color, crystalizing.

The ET tossed the head away without looking, as if it was a piece of garbage destined to find its way onto a pile of trash.

That pile of trash was me.

Aimed right at my face, the goggled head drifted toward me fast. In that moment, my only thought was how to dodge the head without moving from my spot. I apparently loved my spot, and I wasn’t going to move from it, and I was determined to resolve my situation from that very position. I was concerned with conserving my energy. It made so much sense to me at the time.

When it was too late to move out of the head's way, the deformed and luminous eyes in the goggles shoved themselves right into my eyes—what an alignment.

I screamed.

I couldn’t see anything for a moment. I was dazed, disoriented, terrified, and felt dirty. Then my own voice startled me, as my scream sounded too loud in my head. I screamed again.

The alien turned to look at me. His staring distracted me from my horrible and revolting encounter.

We . . . Plah . . . Help Plah––

Resonated in my mind.

The alien turned back to the corpse, clasping its shoulder with his three claw-like fingers.

A clear substance, with a few milky spots throughout, separated from the dead alien. Organic, shapeless, and trembling, it looked like a jellyfish but without tentacles. Looking at it made me feel sick to my stomach; my mind and body froze; and I felt hopeless. Never in my life had I experienced so many dreadful sensations and feelings all at once. I wanted to fight them but I couldn't act on my thoughts as they passed through me without sticking to my mind. I was stuck in a limbo with my will, my thoughts, my desires suspended in a thick, invisible goo right in front of my eyes.

Down in my bedroom and in my bed, my physical body couldn't move a finger. My body was only capable of breathing, barely.

I was violated. I was enslaved to whatever was going on in front of me, and not being able to fight it, let alone leave, made me furious. My fury was so violent that it almost dissolved the invisible goo where my will was trapped. I was a hair away from freedom, a speck away for my body to start moving. I needed a tool to fix the problem.

I imagined I was surrounded by a sun's halo. The halo hissed and sputtered tatters of deadly energy that would obey only me. All I had to do now was to will that energy to destroy the goo, and maybe the alien too.

As my mind worked through directing my imaginary weapon, my eyes watched the alien throwing the burning reins over the jellyfish and wrapping them around its almost translucent body several times. He squeezed the reins with the same force as he crushed his kinsman's throat. He didn’t let go until the jellyfish irrupted with screeching screams. Its shrieks pierced through my mind like a harpoon. Angry, I yanked the imaginary harpoon out of my mind, charged it with my halo energy, then threw it with all my fury into the jellyfish.

The jellyfish exploded into black dust, its lifeless particles projected in all directions, as if on a quest for finding its goggled head.

I was free, the helplessness gone.

Help . . . Leave not, the voice in my mind pleaded.

I bolted.