As I walked through the subway station an alien hand grabbed my arm and brought me to a halt. I turned and found myself gazing at the top of a bulbous gray head. Damn Grays, I thought as I flashed the tourist the nicest smile I could manage before I've had my coffee. It tugged at my arm and pointed to another group of Grays, each of them holding another human being obviously pulled from the crowd on their way to or from work. Well, except for the Gray with a firm grip instead on the tail of a struggling subway tunnel rat. "Picture," the Gray said, tugging at my arm again.
"Of course," I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. The two of us joined the group where the Grays packed the humans together with a few of their smaller kin (possibly children?) spread between us as well.
"Damn Grays still thinking that we're part of the attraction," sneered a tall man through a wide smile. Seeing his pressed suit, I assumed he was also on his way to start his shift.
"They're the worst," I replied through an equally broad grin and brushing back my long black hair. "At least the Reptilians have more class than to just grab random people for a photo op. Though probably because they lived so much longer amongst us."
Eventually the Grays just walked away without saying another word, one of them dropping the rat at our feet. The teenager and I let out a scream as the rat scurried past his sneakers and my heels to disappear back into the subway tunnel. In the brief moment of panic, our group ended up in a loose circle staring at each other in confusion at the situation but accepting of the reality. I nodded at each of them in turn. "Survival is," I said.
"Survival is," they repeated back, nodding in agreement before parting ways.
Outside the subway tunnel, I found myself walking through streets bustling with people hurrying from one place to another while aliens of all types stood out in the open, gawking at everything that passed-by. If the aliens were out of the scene, the city would look like those pictures my grandparents had from before the Galactic Alliance's arrival. Except humans were no longer the ones in control but, as much as we hated to admit it, now a part of the attraction. We were a tolerated nuisance, and to make us more tolerable to the tourists, the Galactic Alliance put all of humanity under their employ. Now 90% of humanity danced, toiling at jobs that don't matter, everyone from CEOs in the tallest towers to homeless folks wandering the streets, farmers, shepherds, woodsmen, even as tribal villagers in the remotest of regions.
Finally I got to the building entrance. Tourism is a hard industry to manage, even harder when it's the only real business on the planet. To control it all, the Galactic Alliance set up monitoring stations across the Earth: in major metropolises, beneath the snow of frost-covered tundras, tucked against sand dunes in vast deserts, planted amongst trees of the jungles and forests, and even deep in the waters of our oceans. If it was a place the aliens liked to visit, there was a monitoring station close at hand. And the aliens loved every bit of planet Earth.
I immediately headed to the body-scanner before going further into the building. Though the Galactic Alliance saved our planet, saving humanity was just a byproduct of their efforts. A growing resentment was building amongst the humans, angry at being relegated to dancing monkeys in gilded cages. The frequency of attacks on off-worlders was steadily increasing. In response, the Galactic Alliance required all humans working in close proximity to their representatives be banded. I watched as a metallic collar fitted around the necks of the humans in line. At the press of a button, the metal band sent a pulse through the wearer's body and rendered them immobile. As I got to the front of the line the Slenderer reached toward my neck with the collar, a task that appeared impossible based on the thinness of the creature's arms. Before the band contacted my skin, a Reptilian stopped the Slenderer's hands, shaking its scaly head as it did so. I held out my arm. The Slenderer looked from the Reptilian guard to me and then back, somehow managing to convey confusion despite having no facial features. The Reptilian pointed at my ID badge and the Slenderer nodded and secured the band to my wrist instead. With the press of a button, the band tightened. I nodded my thanks to the Reptilian and continued further into the building. I saw the other humans with collars around their necks and felt thankful that my boss found it unsightly and cumbersome, especially if we needed to go out into the field for inspections.
I walked through the doors of a large conference room to find my boss already sitting alone at the table. The Reptilian hadn't donned the usual flesh-mask she typically wore when we walked outside. "You're late," she said sternly, not looking up from her files.
"Sorry, ma'am. I got held up for a photo shoot in the subway," I said truthfully.
She looked up from her papers. Someone once told me the Reptilians could smell a lie, something about pheromones. I still had no idea if that was true. After a few seconds she just shook her head. "Damn Grays," she muttered as her eyes went back to her paper. Then, with an absent wave of her hand, she motioned toward the small kitchen in the corner of the room. "Help yourself to something if you haven't yet eaten. We've a long day and I know how you humans get when you're hungry."
"Thank you, ma'am," I said as I made my way into the kitchen. I grabbed a bagel and cream cheese from the fridge and placed them on the counter.
Suddenly alarms went off, blaring sirens deafening to my human ears. Before I could ask what was going on, two men barged into the room, one with a handgun and the other with a device wrapped around his waist and a small remote in his hand, finger hovering above a button. They herded the Reptilians and a couple of Slenderers and a lone Insectoid into the room. They paused when the saw me standing in the kitchen. The gunman motioned to his partner and pointed to his neck. I lifted my arm, flashing the metal collar, and the two men nodded and went back to the other alien hostages.
My heart raced as I stared at the scene in unfolding in front of me. I was a witness to history. After all, no human had ever gotten so close to an alien official and demand change, though it might be with the barrel of a gun and the threat of destruction. I grabbed a kitchen knife and took a place just behind the man with the gun. The gunman turned toward me and I again raised the metal band. "Survival is," I said, and he nodded, returning his attention to his partner delivering an impassioned speech about freedom.
With the distraction and against the trust assumed in me, I lifted the gunman's chin with my free hand and stabbed my knife into his throat where the neck meets the jaw. His hands lifted in confusion and I pulled the pistol from his flailing hand. Placing a foot to the back of his leg, he dropped to his knees.
The room went quiet. I leveled the barrel to the bomber's chest. He just stared at me, confusion and anger alternating on his face. "What are you doing? This is for our survival. For our freedom."
I took a breath, and then another, before I pulled the trigger. Two shots struck him in the chest and he dropped to the floor. I let the gun dangle from my finger by the trigger guard for a Reptilian guard to take from me, which he did so with a nod. The other aliens just looked from the dead humans to me.
"Survival is." I said staring at my bloody hands. In the quiet of the room, I could feel the other eyes still on me. "It's a saying we humans use to get through our new lives. To me, survival is about compromise. We almost destroyed ourselves on our own and it was the Galactic Alliance that brought our planet and ourselves back from the brink of destruction. If this is what we need to do to make it another day, another generation, another millennium, then it's what we need to do to survive."
So, not a story I'm particularly proud of but one that I still needed to write if only because I'd gotten so far on it that it felt like a waste to discard. From a 2 month old Reddit Writing Prompt about aliens being angry at humanity for destroying the Earth through climate change as Earth is the galaxy's favorite tourist destination, or something like that. The worst part is that I originally had roughly this same storyline for another prompt about aliens taking over the Earth. In that original version, the main character actually joins with the terrorists, seeking freedom despite the aliens essentially saving humanity. If you read this and thought "Wow, living under an alien dictatorship is horrible and I'd join the terrorists" only to be surprised in the end when the main character chooses alien rule, congratulations, you also fell for the plot of Marvel's "Civil War" comic special. Obviously I said in the beginning that I wasn't too happy with the way this one turned out but I can't fix it now because I don't have the skill needed to flesh this out better, but mostly because I'm bored of it having thought on it for about two weeks and I just want to write something else already. Hopefully something better is on the way but if you follow this blog with any sort of regularity, you know that's not true.
