“I see,” he said, glancing at the smartphone screen. “You have provided much data of interest. I had rather hoped that you might be one of the evolving Sensitives that some of us feel will develop from your species, ones with whom we can communicate more fully.” Frowning, he tapped the touchscreen. “But though the music touched you at times, you unfortunately are not progressed enough.”
“So the music wasn’t uplifting enough? Now what?” I asked. “Do I look at a little red light and you wipe my memory, make me forget all of this? I mean, an alien at the Alamo, a cowboy from the stars? Who would believe?”
He recoiled as if I had spat upon him. “There is no reason for me to do such an uncultured thing. Go tell everyone. Few will believe you. Of those who do, maybe some will be candidates for further testing.”
I went on, “So, our deal was, I can ask you any question, and you will answer?”
“Seems fair enough, pard’ner,” he said, downing another brew. “You answered all mine, and more.”
I had turned on the voice recorder of my own smartphone when we sat down. Hoping all of this conversation would withstand any unseen alien erasing technology, I asked anxiously, “Where do you come from? And how?”
He smiled, the not-quite-human-keyness much evident in the musculature. “From all over; out there in the sky are googols of stars and other sentience-inducing environments, plus an infinitude of alternities, truly countless intelligent species, more multiplanetary civilizations than there are grains of sand on all of Earth’s beaches. We originate from planets, from gas clouds, from electrical fields, from various potentialities, from other dimensions, from different parts of the time/space continuum. And other places that are not really places at all.
“How do we get here? Some have always been here.” Now that surprised me. But he didn’t stop there. “None come by physical space ships—entirely too primitive. Some ‘arrive’ by what you might call quantum displacement, others by spacewarps, and others by simply, er, coalescing certain eigenverses, you might say.
“And we are here in the tens of millions.”
I had always suspected as much. I gulped again and asked, “Are all of these species more intelligent than humans?”
His voice was very cool, distant, pedantic. “Put yourself in that ant’s place and ask the question.”
My many beers had somewhat prepared me for that answer, prepping me for a kind of intergalactic bar fight. I said loudly, challenging, “But with all this knowledge, all this intelligence, why haven’t you shown yourselves?”
He didn’t smile. “You don’t pay attention. Our—what you call ‘vehicles’ or ‘craft’ but are actually not for travel at all, but for—you wouldn’t understand, couldn’t know—they are seen in your Earthly skies and seas all the time. Those who see and report them are called ‘kooks,’ but we don’t care if we are seen or not, or what the witnesses are called. It is of no interest.”
I was adamant, defiant. “So what are you doing here?” I hoped the voice recorder was catching all of this. It did, as everyone has since heard.
His emotional reaction was very human. “Do?” he snorted, “We don’t do; we are. We have always been involved in precisely the activities on Earth that we wish, interacting with only those humans we choose, if we choose, as we choose. Most of the interactivities would have absolutely no meaning for any of you. Though some of us do wish to communicate more completely with you, to share more than you are able to accept now. We influenced one of your famous motion picture productions to show music as an advanced form of communication, to no avail. And even though you yourself have shown some small improvements, our musical interventions have not yet accomplished sufficient enhancement. But we will keep on with its development.”
Sensing an alien impatience, I saved the big question for the last. “One final question: why don’t you land on the White House lawn? Why don’t you reveal yourselves to the whole world, once and for all?”
He rose from the table as if to leave, but turned to me, his gaze from under the white cowboy hat more frigid than the icy pitcher. “My dear fellow,” he said in quite an upper class British accent, totally at odds with his cowboy persona, “didn’t you understand me? We are all doing exactly what we desire to do.
“I will repeat: every single ‘alien’ individual and group mind and collective on Earth is extremely intelligent, beyond the dreams of Earthlings.
“So exactly why would intelligent beings ever want to talk to a government?”