The Governor of Earth

by Catfish Russ

part 2 of 3

May 4, 2041

We heard from Kansas City. They have a nuke and have placed it under the Port of the Empress’ docking station north of St. Louis, in Alton, on the Mississippi River. We just whooped and hollered, and I had to shut everyone up so some Ceratopsian guard patrol wouldn’t gallop down with their flak guns and shoot into the bunch of us for violating congregrating rules.

Here’s the deal. The Pleiadeans trade in gold just like us. They have found technological and biological uses for it, apparently no more interesting than the explorers that traded in salt and pepper. Doesn’t really matter because it’s just money to them.

You see they are basically carpetbaggers. Taking whatever they can trade for money wherever they travel. They have taken gold off of buildings, out of Fort Knox, off of people’s bodies.

That said, a huge shipment of gold is secretly being shipped to Alton to give as a surprise ass-kissing gift to a huge Pleiadean dignitary coming next week.

Who could be so big that they are getting most of the mined gold in the world? Well, Intelligence either knows this or they are speculating, but we think the Empress Herself is coming. Why? Who knows? Who knows if we’re even right? The point is, the armada is going to be surprised when one of their main bug bitches is vaporized.

We are going to drive these insects off of our land, and out of our air and out of our space. The Ventura gang leader, Chinchin, says it’s a bad idea. He says they’ll retaliate and kill everyone. Therezina, M113 boss, says she would rather die than live as a slave to an insect.

I hate that bitch. Regardless, truer words have never been spoken.

Alton is a great target too. Mostly aliens and only a handful of humans, highly vetted and tracked are allowed into the main docking port in North America. They don’t know that we have a one-man sub that a Navy SEAL secured for us, and the strike team is living under the river in a cave pocket. Bugs hate the water. That’s the big difference between our bugs and their bugs. It’s a backpack nuke, only three kilotons, but enhanced with hafnium pods on it that should extend its heat and kill radius to almost two miles up.

I couldn’t even sleep last night. It doesn’t help that we are in a large culvert under a tributary that empties into the Hudson. It’s cold down here, and Pleiadean heat tabs are running low. I am tired of this crappy place. The rats. The bugs. But I am seething in anger, that at a time when people on this planet finally got their act together, these bugs showed up and ruined what took millennia to create: peace.

Their cruelty knows no bounds. There is nothing in the world I wouldn’t do to rid our home of these devils. I take Mazul to ease the depression. They say it drives people psychotic. Yeah, they said that about pot too. I love the effect it has on me, I just don’t like eating grey flatworms grown across the universe and frozen for the trip here. I’d rather eat a bowl of warm sheep mutton. But warm sheep mutton doesn’t quite have the high as Mazul.

Tana is still hitting on me and I am beginning to break down. I hate leading a small group while bedding one of them. It leads to jealousies and infighting. It’s a bad idea. But man, she has the nicest tush, long iridescent hair, tight jeans, pierced tongue. Body tats. Kind of old-fashioned. Just like me.

Today she brought me a steak grown on a Pleiadean meat truck. It was awesome. I was so hungry. I just thanked her and hugged her and when I gave her a peck on the lips, her lips were a little too soft. Her eyes looked a little too deep, and her hug lingered a little too long.

I loved every second of it. She lost a leg on a mission with us, but Tylaxian Meds grew it back in weeks. Tylaxians are a subspecies of Pleiadean insect, eight long appendages with dexterity and reflexes measured on microscopic levels. They are genetically engineered surgeons. They are engineered to be inured to slavery as well.

Just like the Ceratopsians, who are basically Centaurs, a biped torso and head engineered into a quadruped body with sinewy thighs and three-toed claws that allow them to climb, run and even swim. Their bony crowns make them look like dinosaurs, and the crowns glow and change color like a squid. They are big and tough and intimidating, and of course genetically engineered to be obsequious killers, and I guess to protect themselves, the Pleiadeans engineered them to be dumb as rocks.

A lot of people are loyal to the Pleiadeans because they like the great meds and the free life and some topsiders are trading their freedom and humanity for genetic tricks: long lives, longer legs, eyes that can focus down to a single cell. And I think Tana is hitting at the very people who gave her health back because she is not made for a life as a slave.

Give you an example. When the occupiers decided pornography was bad, it just disappeared. I mean boom, it was off line, off the air, out of bookshelves, out of massage parlors. Gone. Tana is a porn freak, and she hates the notion that someone else would take away her vice. She would rather go without a leg than without porn.

That’s something the occupiers don’t understand. They don’t get people like Tana and I do. Tana is beautiful, and completely unable to be happy under any regime. There is no cage that can ever hold her and no structure she will ever fit into. And it is people just like her that make us exceptional.

The Pleiadeans are insects. Their species and sub-species all act according to the talents bestowed upon them by way of pre-wired circuitry adapted to one specific role and racial memories. Pleiadeans watch old Science Channel documentaries about the enormous hidden order and discipline in massive ant colonies while they masturbate.

We, on the other hand, like a little randomness. To a Pleiadean, joblessness would be the ultimate psychological horror. To not have a specific role and instinctively know specific routines and times is a Hell worse than Hell itself to the occupiers.

A human being will gladly quit a crappy job without one in waiting because freedom is as wired into us as order is wired into them. So what happens between them and us is written in both of our genetic codes. Who will win? Who knows? I just know that there is one human instinct the Pleiadeans never imagined: when people see bugs, we crush them.

Thadius, Free4All.

May 5, 2041

Official Record of the Governor of Earth

Oh Creator who rules from within, why? Why? Why? I get a report that the High Empress going to make a slipspace jump to the St. Louis port in two days. Oh my Creator. Burn me from within. Fill me with worms and allow me to be eaten alive.

This outpost is not secured. It is not safe. What is she hearing from her naïve and inexperienced crony-occupied inner circle that would indicate this is a level-one protocol?

I must telemetry a warning to her Praetorian Guards that this place is not secure and that violence runs amok amongst these fleshy vermin.

This will be the end of me. She will graft me into a Fallow Plant and place me in front of the Chancellery. My family will eat worms and die in front of me while I watch them in agony.

I have to stop this. I will instruct my aids to send a warning that an uprising is blossoming and I need time to stabilize it.

Record Pause... I will return to complete this entry.

Oh Creator. The end is near. Her Honorable Canonical Interpreter has just heard that the jump is already in progress and her High Empress will be here within a centicycle. I am sending my own Praetorian Guard ahead to receive her but most certainly to secure the docking station before her gold-encrusted tricallium armored fleet bus burns a descent arc into the atmosphere.

I will, of course, be late. I am having the gold on my carapace replated as we record this. Hopefully I will have a carapace to wear when she leaves.

I am so weary of being frightened.

Governor of Earth,

The Honorable Fourth Son of the Winds of the First Outer World Mathematicians Line.

May 5, 2041

A thin filament of spider’s webbing floated across the street and I could see the sun hitting it through the breaks in the trees. It moved ever so slowly maintaining its length. It made me think that the filament is a lot like the resistance. My own Mom turned me in to the bugs because she thought the free medicine and free booze and lazy lifestyle was preferable to being free. If you pull people in one direction, they are extremely strong. Pull in another and they break instantly. Like the filament.

I just left Alton where we met the strike team and had a cheeseburger in a riverside beer and burger joint only a hundred feet over the nuke. Kind of excited me. Me and Trudy and Bobble and Shantika are in a furnished boxcar in a train filled with aftermarket items of all kinds.

By the time the train flies through Nashville it should go off. We are guessing that the train, and all traffic everywhere will be instantly stopped. We will leave the train dressed as union workers and get into an electric van and program it to drive back to the Jersey shore. The van is filled with food and bedding.

It’s very quiet back here. The magnatrain is silent. There is little motion. No one is speaking. It’s like we sort of wish we hadn’t set this thing off. Earlier we had a conversation and it went something like this:

I asked, “Can we abort the detonation remotely?”

“It’s possible, but analytics would reveal who we are. And where we are.” Trudy did our IT and telecom work.

“So no then,” I said.

“Correct.”

“Nashville in ten minutes,” Trudy said. “Do you know exactly where the van is?” she asked Bobble.

“Row 5, level 5 slot 116” — or something like that — “in the parking garage.”

“You know they may kill everyone for this,” I added. “This might have been a mistake. This might kill us all.”

“We’re already dead. We just don’t know it yet,” Trudy said.

I really can’t take her negativity. She makes everything hard.

Shantika got all wild-eyed and started giving us campground lectures. “Jesus, I can’t take anymore of this,” she said. “We knew what we were doing yesterday and a year ago when we started this, and we know what we’re doing today. We’re going to drive them off of our planet. I am about to give birth, and I don’t want to bring someone into a world where every day their choices grow smaller.”

Shantika was 6 months pregnant which made our disguise work nicely, btw. That and the fact that the Ceratopsians are idiots. She was a radical’s radical. She was either fearless or slightly psychotic. I couldn’t tell.

But I argued that this might be a mistake and had felt this from the beginning of the whole nuke deal. “How do you know? How do you know how old they are, or how many other places they’ve conquered? They come from a place in the galaxy that’s very crowded, and they see a lot of other civilizations. And there is a lot of war. Their history is sort of like Europe’s but in three very close solar systems in the Pleiades. This might be nothing to them. I mean every bet is off the table. Hell, Therezina is right. Hate to say it.”

“I don’t care if they kill us all. I would rather have that than be a slave to these roaches.” Bobble awoke from his sleep, sitting up in a lounger.

“I don’t know. I feel sometimes like my Mom is right. Accept an easy life. Read books. Go to museums. Hell, the resistance probably isn’t even as big as we think it is.” I lit myself a cigarette.

The train decelerated rapidly.

I looked at my watch. “It went off a little early, apparently.”

As predicted, all transportation was shut down, and battle drones were flying all over the place. I stepped out to smoke, and a drone stopped about a hundred feet from me, scanned me, and then flew on. What the heck were they looking for?

At the station we were all ordered off of the trains and into the terminal (bad name, ‘terminal’). News monitors were on and all the anchors were in faux shock about the mishap that caused the Grande Dame Empress’s ship to crash at the port in St. Louis.

No one laughed or smiled given that biometrics would pick anyone out as a possible co-conspirator. The ticker floating above the picture read: “Pleiadean Monarchy vessel crashes at her Empress’ docking port. President promises full cooperation in investigation.”

We waited on the floor while airborne chemical-sniffing drones vetted everyone. Trudy got picked out and detained. We didn’t even look at her as she was put in a paralyzing collar and dragged off. After a few hours, they let us find our way back to our seats on the magnatrain and we all headed north, chaperoned by two guards.

Shantika sat next to me and folded her arms over her belly. She feigned sleep and whispered to me, explaining why they picked up Trudy: “She went down into the hold and stood by the nuke. It probably irradiated her. Idiot.”

Proceed to part 3...