Creature by Heather Pollitt

14 October 2020  { Young Adult }


Jack couldn’t sleep. He hated being awake in the night when everyone else was unconscious. He started flicking around on his IPad and YouTube and channels that were previously unknown to him, when suddenly he came across something that looked like a spaceship. It was grey, spherical and with bright pink antennae-like appendages with spiky ends. Jack thought this looked interesting, to say the least, so he fine-tuned his device and put his wireless buds into his ears. He began to hear the strangest voice that sounded like it was coming through a metal pipe. The voice was low, breathy and echoing but after a few moments it made sense: sense in comprehension but no sense in its message or provenance or meaning. Jack felt as though he were at a biology lecture: but on another planet.

‘Coronovirus!’, droned the weird voice. ‘We’re a special kind of virus with a very regal name. Just think for a minute, Corono, implying crown, or monarchy. We are the kings of viruses since we launched ourselves into the wider, human world in 2019, almost by accident. Whatever happens now, we’ll have a place in world history. We’ll be as famous as William the Conqueror or Jesus Christ or Mohammed or the Great Fire of London, or The Plague.

‘Our job now is to perpetuate our existence by reproducing ourselves as rapidly as possible. This is called the Life Force, and we’re doing it very well, despite all the efforts by the humans to stamp us out. We don’t set out to kill anyone or to make anyone sick. Our job is to survive, and if death and illness is a by- product of these efforts then reluctantly I say, so be it. After all, this has become a fight to the death between us and the human race, but started by them. They want to kill us and all we’re doing is playing a defensive game of surviving their attack.

Another thing to remember is that by and large, humans are the only creatures that kill for killing’s sake. In that sense, we can claim some moral high ground. We’re like all the other creatures on Planet Earth. ‘All creatures great and small…’ as the song goes. Ok, so we’re small: invisible to the naked eye, but why should that make us exterminable? Sounds like ethnic cleansing to us and it’s not very nice!

If we could find some way to communicate with these humans, we could come to some arrangement whereby we only occupied children, who, we know now, don’t die because of us. We could agree to avoid elderly people who almost always die at our hands. But we can’t get through, even though we’ve tried to. Until now, that is. Until now, Jack. Pleased to meet you, friend’.

Jack’s eyes were staring at the screen like a mad person’s. What was going on? What kind of a joke was this? Some scam? Was someone going to ask for a donation to charity, or the down-payment for a special offer in binoculars? He waited and listened while the sonorous voice carried on.

‘If anyone can receive us, please broadcast this news from Coronovirus that we mean you no harm, and that we simply want to co-exist on Planet Earth. Tune in to this channel on your device, or just switch on at this time of night and we’ll find you’.

‘Jack!’ continued the virus, ‘That was the message that we’ve been sending out for about four earth months now but with no result. I may as well carry on and explain our position further, now I have your attention and you seem to be a sensitive person.

We have a consciousness. It’s different from yours but it’s there and we feel pain and love just as you do. Our consciousness operates through waves and beams that have not yet been discovered by humans.

That’s because you’ve been spending all your scientific resources on military weapons. deterrents, you call them, but they’re cold blooded killing machines. It would have been better to use them on developing life-promoting solutions. Humans kill for territory and power. All the rest of us kill just to survive, and only when it’s necessary.

The nearest you’ve come to this is via your concept of the ‘soul’. Religion’s gone out of fashion, and you’ve lost the plot. The miracles wrought by Jesus Christ, by the Bhudda and by the Greek and Roman Gods are the stuff that beams of communication are made of. ‘Our little lives are rounded in a sleep’, says Shakespeare, and millions hang on to his words. Have you ever asked yourself why? It’s because these ideas take us out of the here and now, out of the rational and into the blurred area that exists between material fact, and faith. Our contact beams are neither of these, but they are the shuddering, amorphous mass that holds the answer to life. You humans believe you’re rational. If that weren’t so tragic it’d be funny.

Let’s stop the ravages of this so-called ‘pandemic’, - a very disrespectful term you gave to a whole species of virus, as a sudden knee-jerk reaction to visitors from outside the planet. You’ve been getting excited for years about flying saucers and little green men. Well! Here we are! Here are your little green men! But you don’t seem so pleased to see us! How about ‘Live and let live’? How about the rainbows you’ve been painting denoting an all-inclusive egalitarian planet?’

The virus now seemed to have run out of steam, and hovered on Jack’s screen, bobbing up and down as if waiting for an answer. Jack was terrified, but spoke back to the creature.

‘But you’ve already killed thousands of people’, he said. And you’ve disrupted life on Planet Earth as we knew it. Kids can’t go to school: families can’t touch each other, and we can’t travel or meet our relatives and friends. And we have to wear these awful face-masks.

And why are you messaging me? I can’t do anything. Why don’t you target our government and let them know what you’re offering?’

The virus bobbed up and down again for a few moments then said ‘I visited you because I thought you’d understand our situation. You’re just at an age where your mind’s open to lateral ideas. In a couple of years, you’ll start believing you’re rational and that nothing exists until it’s proven. If I spoke to your prime minister and he passed the message on, his cabinet would call him bonkers and stick him in the Tower of London. I assume they still do this to kings and rulers whom they consider to be a danger.

Anyway, as I was saying, you seemed the best choice, and whatever comes of this, I’ll be happy that we met. I just hope that you don’t get into too much trouble when you try to explain what happened tonight. I need to go now. Things are getting fuzzy and there’s a party on in Soho. There’ll only be young people there so we won’t be doing any harm, but we need to feed ourselves constantly or else we die! Goodbye for now!’

***

‘Dad. Something weird happened last night. Well, about two o’ clock in the morning’.

‘Jack, I’ve told you umpteen times not to stay up so late with those devices switched on. That blue light’s bad for you. I think I’m going to ask you to leave your phone and your IPad outside your room through the night’.

‘But, Dad’, said Jack, with some frustration in his tone, ‘This was mega weird and I didn’t have anything switched on’.

‘Oh, right’. So now you’re asking me to believe that you’ve been buzzed from outer space’. Jack’s father glanced at him quickly, as he did when something important distracted him from steering the car. They were on their way to drop Jack off at school. They now arrived and Jack was rooting in his pocket for his face mask.

‘Well, not exactly’, said Jack, ‘but it was something like that. And…’

‘Look. Remember what I’ve always told you. Nothing exists that can’t be proven. That’s rational. You can’t be letting your mind wander into fuzzy areas.’

The words that the virus had spoken now came back to Jack in full force. It seemed that they made sense. Why close our minds to something because it can’t be scientifically proven?

Jack next tried to share his nocturnal experience with his physics teacher, Mr Bolton. He wasn’t quite as dismissive as Jack’s father had been. He did say something like ‘The more we know, the more we know we don’t know’. But as the day wore on and Jack had tried to raise the topic of communication between species and with unknown media, he knew it was a losing battle.

At the end of the day he met up at the school gates with his girlfriend, Emma. They’d been keeping the mandatory distance for months now but she could tell, despite the mask, that Jack was feeling very despondent. They were sitting outside their favourite café having milk shakes and fixing each other with masked looks and smiles.

Suddenly, Jack launched into his account of what had happened with the viral visitor.

‘…and so when it had said all that, it said it had to go to a party in Soho’, said Jack, wrapping up his tale. ‘Go on, Emma. Tell me I’m even more of a nutcase than you’d thought’.

‘Jack: I believe every word of what you’ve just told me and the whole thing makes me realise what a very special person you really are. I won’t try to rationalise it. I’ll just accept it as an authentic account of a very strange happening, and I’ll keep it in my heart along with my love for you, which is another irrational phenomenon’.

Jack was happy that night as he put his phone and his IPad outside his bedroom door.


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