Graham Parke: Welcome To Earth

Part 4

Alien castaway Gryx sat in his broken emergency return capsule for days, trying to work out the best way to get the humans to build him an inter-dimensional beacon using their nuclear capabilities. It’d be his only way off the earth.

According to the local InterNet, the easiest way to get access to nuclear information was to be the president of a nuclear capable country. As it turned out, being the president of a nuclear capable country was also the best way to get humans to do stuff for you.

But compromising an actual president would be difficult. Apparently there were only a few of these president creatures on the planet at any given time. They accounted for less than a tenth of a tenth of a percent of the global population, and they also looked very similar to the non-president versions of humans, so they’d be hard to spot. Gryx wasn’t even sure how the humans could tell them apart. Perhaps this was why most presidents plastered their faces all over their cities and their currencies.

Another problem was that the presidents were hard to get at. They were surrounded at all times by a heavily armed entourage and they were constantly being recorded. Everything presidents did, everyone they met, it was all committed to digital storage. No matter what shape Gryx took, he doubted he’d manage to compromise an actual president. He’d have to think of something else.

By noon he’d discovered that his situation was even more complicated than he’d feared. Not unlike the bee creatures on Aldercon, who could morph into the queen when the reigning queen perished, these president creatures could morph as well. Not perhaps from male to female, but they could definitely morph from citizens into presidents. In fact, some of these creatures would automatically morph back into citizens after a set number of years. Not all of them, though, Gryx discovered. Some presidents (also referred to as dictators) managed to hold on to their presidential forms for a very long time, right up until the point their subjects finally had enough of them and shot them to pieces.

And this gave Gryx his second excellent plan in twenty-seven hours.

Although it was impossible to compromise a president in its fully matured state, it might just be possible to compromise a president while it was still in its larval stage. Before it had been fully instated.

True, the larval presidents already had an entourage, but they were unarmed. And they already suffered from a mild form of the ‘always being recorded’ virus, but there were still plenty of hours in the day when they were completely unobserved.

Compromising a larval president was definitely the way to go.

Gryx ordered the return capsule’s entertainment system to follow the news cast on the InterNet and identify the closest electoral area that was about to shed one president and take on another.... Continue reading.

Similar posts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7