When Everything Changed Read online

  When Everything Changed

  by Edward M Wolfe

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this story are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  When Everything Changed © 2013 by Edward M Wolfe

  Cover photo by Edward M Wolfe

  http://edwardmwolfe.com

  All Rights Reserved

  ASIN: B00BWH9KMO

  Have you ever noticed how sometimes just before your life changes in a really big way, you kinda sense a change coming, but you don’t know what it’s going to be exactly? It’s almost like there’s a hint of something in the air, but it’s not really in the air. It’s something you can feel, but you don’t know how. At least that’s the way it is with me, so I’m guessing other people might experience it too.

  Sometimes I feel it in the weeks before I’m about to lose a job, or shortly before the end of long-term relationship but at a time when everything seems to be going just fine. I feel like something, somewhere behind the scenes has changed, like in a copy of our universe where the designing takes place, but the effect hasn’t reached our world yet. It’s as if a grand architect made a decision and now it’s just a matter of time until the execution takes place.

  And since the change is inevitable and it’s going to happen no matter what, it’s like there’s a ripple that moves through the ether and you can sense the pending change. Or maybe it’s just people who are sensitive to that sort of thing - whatever it is.

  I don’t know really, but the thing is – I didn’t sense any upcoming change in the weeks or days before the aliens came and everything changed.

  I really shouldn’t be referring to them as aliens though. The word is actually banned. The Guardians, as they prefer us to call them, say it causes division. They’re really smart about a lot of things, but I wonder how they can be concerned about the possibility of problems arising between us and them over a mere word, but they don’t seem to care about everything else they’ve done that divides us - like banning words for example. I don’t know about other countries, but in America, we’re used to being free. Well, we were anyway.

  They also say that we shouldn’t refer to them as aliens because they claim they aren’t aliens, and that they lived on earth long before we did. They even offered proof. They showed us some of mankind’s oldest hieroglyphics and drawings of spacecraft and cosmonauts and then compared them to images of their ancient pilots and ships.

  They also pointed out where they’re mentioned in our Bible and demonstrated how easy it was for them to build the pyramids, the heads at Easter Island, and explained other things we’ve never understood like the Nazca lines and stuff like that. But that doesn’t change the fact that when they arrived, all we saw were alien space ships coming down from the sky. You can’t just order people to not think the way they do or to not have the feelings they have.

  I think they know that though, so what they do is make changes that result in us thinking and feeling differently. Like using buildings for their operations centers instead of their ships that they used when they first came. And wearing suits, which is kinda funny. I mean, sure, they already look a lot like us, and wearing suits and ties kinda makes them look like typical office workers – except for the fact that the shortest among them is eight feet tall. But you can tell they’re trying. When you see them walking down the street or in restaurants sitting in custom-made, oversized booths, they’ll be doing things like walking Great Danes or reading newspapers.

  As for our freedom, or lack of it really, they say we’re not responsible enough to govern ourselves and that if we were, they wouldn’t have come and taken over. So for now, we’re not exactly living like slaves, but we live under a lot of restrictions. In some ways, nothing is like it was before, but in other ways, everything is like it always was, but better. I know that sounds confusing, and it sounds like what they’ve done hasn’t been bad for humanity. I mean, why am I complaining if everything is better, right?

  Everybody who is able to work has a job now, if they want one. There is always something that needs to be done, so there’s no shortage of work. Just retrofitting houses and buildings with their energy efficient technology will take decades. And speaking of energy, we’re still in the process of replacing the entire electrical infrastructure, and that’s a enormous job.

  No one is forced to work, but if they choose not to, they are only provided with the bare minimum essentials for sustaining life. And I mean seriously bare minimum. When they told people that they were free to work or not work and either way they’d be provided for, a lot of people didn’t want to work and they celebrated. They thought life was going to be a party.

  As it turned out, a lot of people who had never worked before suddenly changed their minds and developed a work ethic. Instead of food stamps, cash and free housing of their choice, non-workers get a “nutritious and edible substance in sufficient quantity to satisfy their biological needs.” I’m not kidding. They don’t even use the word “food” anywhere in the description.

  The housing, if you want to call it that, was just as dismal. All of the “non-producers” were relocated to areas far from the cities where the Guardians built large structures to serve as living quarters. I’ve never been in the military, but I’ve seen barracks in movies and these places were much worse. Rows and rows of cots separated by some kind of partition to make separate living quarters and a few wooden chairs in each partitioned area.

  No televisions or radios were allowed or provided. The only activities for people living in the residential centers were either sleeping or learning in the education pods, or I suppose, they could twiddle their thumbs or stare at things. If they didn’t want to work or live in the residential center, they could choose to be exiled to a non-inhabited location of their choice. The point was that almost nothing would be given to anyone who was capable of providing for themselves but chose not to. So if they wanted to rough it in the Amazon or the Sahara, they could. It only took a few months before the residential centers emptied out.

  In the beginning, no one at all had television. They announced their presence over every type of electronic communication available; TVs, radios, computers and cell phones. Then when they released their control over most of those devices, they didn’t give back television and said it would be a while before we would be allowed that privilege. A lot of people were outraged at that and riots broke out. But the rioting only lasted about two minutes before people began falling to their knees and vomiting. Some people passed out. A few in every crowd died.

  I looked out my window and it was like seeing a non-violent massacre taking place. People were dropping to the ground and rolling around covering their ears, but I couldn’t hear a thing. Bodies littered the street until whatever it was stopped and people slowly got back up looking sick and dazed. No one knows what the Guardians did, but there hasn’t been another riot since that day.

  One rioter I talked to said he’d rather die than feel that sick ever again. People are still not happy about missing their movies, sports, game shows, soap operas, and reality TV, etc., but they’re doing what’s expected of them. They’re probably only doing it for the promise that everything will be returned once the education is complete. The Guardians know this is a forced compliance, but they probably figure that people will learn despite themselves.

  One of the greatest benefits we’ve had since their arrival is that anyone who needs medical treatment gets it immediately. And they’ve cured most of the diseases that our doctors and researchers weren’t even close to understanding. There’s no more cancer or AIDS or several other previously incurable diseases that I’d never even heard of befo
re. We’re supposed to live nearly twice as long as we did before.

  People often complained in the past that the earth’s population was too much for the planet to sustain, and with our previously over-crowded cities and the fact that seven billion people live on the planet, I always assumed they were probably right. But the Guardians said that we only use a small fraction of our land mass and that our real problem is that we’re overly condensed and we try to support too many people in too few locations. So they started an expansion project, building new cities and spreading out the population.

  They explained that having people live in smaller communities instead of metropolis sized cities enhances the quality of life for everyone and reduces crime and antisocial behavior. In a big city, everyone is anonymous and doesn’t fear committing a crime against the strangers they live amongst. But in a smaller town, everyone is at least familiar with everyone else and they’d know for example if one of the residents robbed the pharmacy or raped someone.

  Another thing that’s really cool is that there are more artists now than ever before. If you have real talent, or even potential talent, then that becomes your job with full training and education – at no cost. But even though you might call that “subsidized art” it’s not like people are putting a crucifix in a jar of urine and calling it art. I’m talking about real amazing paintings and music and sculptures and new forms of art we never had before. I can spend an entire day in an Art Centre and not even notice the time passing.

  When you go outside now everything looks fantastic. It’s like our cities are brand new with fresh paint everywhere and no broken down or abandoned buildings. There’s no graffiti on buildings or signs. Trash doesn’t blow down the streets or accumulate in the gutters like it used to. Everywhere you go there are trees and flowers and streams and ponds and birds and animals. And fruit grows everywhere. If you get hungry while you’re walking down the street, you can always grab fresh fruit right off a nearby tree.

  The fact that we had people around the world dying of starvation is one of the things that made them very angry with us. They said food grows naturally, but instead of planting seeds everywhere that food could grow, we constantly reduced and consolidated the number of food producers while always increasing the number of consumers. And because of our greed and self-centered way of living, in our country we literally threw away tons of good food every day that no one purchased, while others would forage in garbage bins outside of restaurants to stay alive.

  Crime is practically non-existent. The way they eliminated crime from our cities is a perfect example of how they didn’t change us directly, but they caused us to become different by altering other things that affected us. They told us that personal crime and national crime were among the primary reasons why they came here. They were disgusted by how we treated each other. They called us “functionally insane.” They said we not only failed to come up with solutions that should’ve been obvious to a child of average intelligence, but even worse, we failed to adopt solutions that our few wise ancestors gave to us long ago.

  As far as violent crimes against people go, you could say they have a zero-tolerance policy. And it’s not like the stupid version we had before they came. They don’t arrest children for bringing plastic soldiers to school because the soldier has a tiny, plastic gun, for example. In our pretense at “doing something” about crime, we’d arrest harmless children with harmless toys as if they were dangerous criminals, which did nothing but demonstrate what awful role models we were and did nothing to solve real problems.

  At the same time we turned homicidal maniacs loose upon society after they “served their time,” knowing they’d kill and maim again.

  They say we are like blind, greedy children, only worse, because children don’t typically act with such calculated stupidity. They said solving crime and making people safe from criminals was an easy task that we never even tried to accomplish. Then they proved it. The first thing they did about crime was abolish all of our laws. Sounds crazy, I know. But they said that everyone already knows right from wrong and so our laws were nothing more than a complicated bureaucracy to determine how much punishment a criminal should get while maintaining an illusion of justice.

  The new system would be easily remembered by everyone. The punishment for violent crimes against other people was death. And they meant sudden death. Not years of languishing in a prison at taxpayer expense while teams of lawyers worked on over-turning the sentence of a guilty person on either a technicality, or by confusing a jury.

  Crimes against people that aren’t severe enough to warrant death result in exile to a desert island populated by like-minded people who have forsaken civility, or those who voluntarily chose exile over a free living center.

  When they are taken to the island, they bring nothing but the clothes they are wearing. They are given a flintstone and a roll of twine. They can never return - no matter how penitent they are or how much they say they’ve changed, or found God, or whatever.

  It’s hard to argue with their reasoning about how badly we did overall on the subject of crime and criminals. The Guardians often use parables or similes or whatever you call them, because they say we’re obviously too stupid to understand simple things that other races less evolved than our own have no problem grasping. Like sentencing murderers to prison and then letting them go. The Prime Guardian, who is like a president or something asked, “If a deadly snake slithering around in a preschool bit and killed a child, would you box it up for a month as punishment, and then release it to prey upon the children once again?”

  Obviously we wouldn’t. We’d protect our children from known dangers. Why then, they asked, do you box up your murderous psychopaths and other predators for a time, and then release them once again to prey upon the innocent?

  What can we possibly answer – that we require child predators to voluntarily report their presence to the local authorities whenever they move so we’ll know who to suspect when a child disappears? Sometimes I think we are as stupid as the Guardians say we are.

  They have only shown us a small amount of their technology, and that little bit makes our most advanced developments look like Legos. But I do think we should get some credit for how far we got on our own with technology in just a short time. A hundred years ago, many people didn’t even have electricity. And just before the Guardians came, we were all walking around with miniature computers that also functioned as telecommunication devices. That’s something, isn’t it?

  In the official talks between heads of various nations and the Guardians shortly after they arrived here, leaders of developed countries tried pointing out our technological prowess in response to the Guardians saying that we were uncivilized. It’s not like we were cavemen before they got here.

  The politicians admitted that there was work that needed to be done in many areas, but, they argued; look at how well we’re doing on the positive side of things. Every day billions of people have good food and shelter; we have hot and cold water in safe and comfortable homes.

  Most people have access to education, they pointed out, and the majority of people are law-abiding citizens who have recourse through legal systems where they can safely confront those who are not law-abiding, and justice is obtained. Legal representation is provided for them if they can’t afford their own. We have gone to the moon and back, and sent probes to nearby planets, and have the technology to send high-definition images through space hundreds of thousands of miles back to earth.

  Wireless technology has come so far, they argued, the entire world is interconnected and in communication and sharing knowledge. In the field of medicine, we’ve made many advances in just the last ten years and are close to miraculous breakthroughs.

  The Guardians listened patiently as the chief earth representative tried to build a case for earth sovereignty. But the Guardians, even with their unnatural patience had heard all that they could stand before the Secretary General of the U.N. had even finished readi
ng the first page of his prepared speech.

  “Enough!” spat the Prime Guardian. “When the food you eat has any nutrition remaining, it is incidental and rarely by design. The water you drink is either extracted from your own waste products, or when fresh, is deliberately poisoned in treatment facilities. The education you provide is ridiculously lacking in substance and efficiency. After twelve years of what you call education, many of your people cannot even write in their own language.”

  “And why you spend twelve years “teaching” the same subject matter over and over while omitting anything useful is a mystery even we can’t figure out. And it’s a criminal waste of time. Your system of “justice” is a façade and is not concerned with justice at all. Your space travel is akin to a child first learning to walk and then progressing to the point where he can jump. Your computerized technology is the only arena in which you’ve shown any promise, but this accomplishment was only possible due to greed on one hand, and the desire to be continuously entertained on the other.”

  “Nearly everything you do is for profit and amusement. All of your accomplishments mean nothing in the face of all that you have failed at. How well is a family when the father is blind to one child randomly stabbing the other children while yet another child is starving to death, and another is being drowned by its mother, and another is eating itself to death while yet another one purposely poisons itself with drugs? But you point to the roof of the house and say, ‘But look at our satellite dish – we’re getting great reception on our television.’”

  “Enough. You’ve tried and failed. Being that we are responsible for you, we must take responsibility for your failure and correct your ways. If a father teaches his children how to survive and prosper and then takes his leave, then returns much later to find that his children have become dangerously incompetent adults in need of restraint, feeding, education and supervision, does he allow them to justify how and why they should be allowed to continue on a path of self-destruction?”