Welcome To Earth - Excerpt 2

After an alien researcher crash lands on earth, he discovers his missing pilot has taken the place of the president of one of the most powerful nations on the planet.


This is the story of that Researcher.

This is the companion Grow Novel to the Yellow Edition about the Pilot. I’ll be adding chapters to it from time to time so make sure to update.

Excerpt:

You never fully appreciate how bone dry and scorching hot the desert is until you hit it with your face.

From above, flying over it leisurely, you just don’t get that same visceral experience. It takes getting bits of sand between your teeth and seeing a particularly upset scorpion dancing millimeters from your eyeball to really understand how inhospitable and dangerous the place really is.

Not to mention how vast.

When the world stretches out to a sandy horizon in every direction with no signs of life in between, well, that’s when you really start evaluating your life choices. Like the one where you tried to save a few bucks by choosing the slightly scruffier pilot, the one with that weird, droopy left eye.

***

After a long and painful trek through the desert, Grzq eventually reached civilization. Here he quickly learned he couldn’t do much on this planet if he didn’t partake in the humans’ elaborate bartering system. In fact, he wouldn’t be able to drink so much as a drop of water if he didn’t first find a way to get something called: earth money.

The reasons for this were twofold. First, all human interactions were directly or indirectly governed by the exchange of money. From friendships to work relationships to families, in the long run every single interaction somehow ended up with one human having more of this money and the other having less.

Second, in a clever financial move, humans made all their natural water undrinkable. The only way to avoid dehydration was to buy bottled water or to buy a house connected to a series of pipes and then rent the water in those pipes from the city.

Moreover, finding out how to get hold of money would apparently cost Grzq money. More than half of the InterNet was dedicated to explaining how to get more money and all this advice had to be paid for.