Chapter 1

Victor was sitting in his room, transferring some old tapes to DVD on his laptop. He'd heard there were faster ways than hooking up his VCR to it and playing it while the software he'd downloaded did its thing, but he just didn't have the equipment. No matter, it gave him the time to enjoy fond memories dredged up by the programs. The tape he was working on was an old one ... an original broadcast of several episodes of the anime TV show Gatchaman from international television. His mom had brought this tape and the other one that came with it down from Syracuse as a souvenir from Aunt Aileen. The tapes were still in the original Japanese, the only editing being that Aileen pressed "pause" during the commercial breaks. There were two other anime on this tape other than Gatchaman. There was an episode of an anime called "Iczer-1" which, while a little confusing to non-Japanese-speaking types like Victor, involved his favorite kind of anime action: Mecha combat, or giant robots. Victor was glad the Japanese weren't as shy about nudity as Americans were as he watched the scene with blue-haired Nagisa in the shower, and again as he watched the mecha-combat scene where she was naked in some kind of fluid, tubes or wires or something sticking into her flesh to help her control the mecha-functions which were her responsibility. Her tiny, pink nipples were barely discernible on the tiny screen of Victor's laptop, but they were there.

A crash in the living room brought Victor's attention back to the real world. Cautiously he moved to investigate. An orange body next to the window caught his attention. It was unarmed, wearing only what appeared to be a pair of blue briefs. It was well-muscled, not quite "Ah-nuld" but far from the skinny greys he'd heard about on the Roswell documentaries. It was definitely alien. Its overlarge head raised off the floor and it tried to crawl away. It was bleeding from a wound in its leg. Victor bound the wound using the left sleeve of his shirt.

"I say, a little help with the inhibitor on my neck would be appreciated." the alien said.

"Um, okay." Victor said, examining the device the alien indicated. It was roughly the shape of a chocolate candy like the kind he used to eat when he was little--round from the top, with the top narrower than the bottom. There was a seam along the top he could pry open with the right tools. "There's a toolbox in the bathroom if you think you can make it."

"Help me up." the alien said. Victor complied, lifting the muscular being, putting one of the alien's arms around his shoulder. The alien's wounded leg left a neon-green trail as they made their way to the bathroom. Victor put the toilet seat down and seated him there.

"Sorry about the smell." Victor said as he opened the cabinet under the sink, pulling out the little black toolbox.

"It is to be expected." the alien said, covering the nostril slits near the top of his head. "This is a lavatory facility, yes?"

"Among other things." Victor replied, retrieving a blade screwdriver. "Now lean forward, I need to pry that thing open." The alien complied, and the young man opened the inhibitor. Inside he found two wires which looped up from the etched circuitry. His first impulse was to rip them out, but then he noticed the tiny button, small enough that a pin would be needed to activate it. "Button or wires?" he asked.

"Excuse me?"

"I see a tiny button about the size of a pinhead, and two wires. It could be rigged to explode if we pull out the wires."

"For all we know it could be rigged to explode if we press the button."

"Right. Okay, if you believe an any form of deity, pray to him or her now." Victor said, wedging the screwdriver under the wires. With a yank and a couple of sparks, they were gone.

"I say, that's ever so much better!" he said. He unbound the wound, and it began to close. Then the inhibitor detached itself from the back of his neck, and that wound too began to close.

"My tax dollars at work." Victor sighed. "I wish they'd spend as much money on healthcare as they probably do for extraterrestrial containment."

"Our studies have shown you to be rather wasteful." the alien said.

"No arguement there. I could give you statistics on that. We've got a long way to go before most races will think of us as anything other than a savage, pathetic child-race." The alien laughed.

"Self-honesty? Quite refreshing."

"I call it realism." Victor said. "We're still using nonrenewable resources and fossil fuels, so we must be millennia behind you."

"The first step to solving a problem is the admission that there is one." the alien said with a smile. "You are wise for a human."

"So what do I call you, anyway?"

"The names my people use are inpronouncible with your vocal and resonating structures." the alien replied. "The only syllable of mine which you could possibly emulate is the final one: Zak."

"I'm Victor. So, Zak, what do we do now?"

"I require a temporary refuge while your planet's extraterrestrial containment team searches the local area." Zak said.

"I've got an extra bedroom." Victor offered. "It's an interior room, so there's no windows for anyone to peek in through."

"Insulated?"

"This house was designed to be as energy-efficient as we know how to make." Victor said. "So heat shouldn't be escaping for your hunters to detect through the walls. And I had each room soundproofed last year because my brother decided he wanted to bring his girlfriends over while he was in town."

"Ah." Zak replied. "It should suffice, I suppose."

Victor came home from work hearing the sounds of Julia Ecklar's "Born Again Trek" emanating from the speakers of his large sound system.

"I see you found my audio cassettes." he said.

"Indeed." Zak replied, gesturing to two piles of tapes on the table beside him. "This is a facet of human culture we have not seen. Our preliminary team recorded a vast quantity of music from your broadcasts, but never before have these--I believe you call them 'songs'--been documented, although their labels indicate that some of them are two and three decades old."

"I don't think those songs have ever been broadcast." Victor said as he glanced over the tapes. "Freedom, Flight & Fantasy," "Quarks & Quests," "Heralds, Harpers & Havoc," "Space Heroes & Other Fools," "Genesis" and the empty case of "Walkabout" occupied the table. "Those aren't what you'd call mainstream music. I purchase them at science fiction conventions. Sometimes I think our fantasies are as telling as our history."

"Indeed." Zak replied. "You are very wise for a human. Perhaps I should send those idiot humans who captured me a fruit basket for allowing me to escape and find you." Victor chuckled.

"How is it you speak English, anyway?"

"My people can understand any written or spoken language." Zak said. "Simple ones like yours can be spoken with a modicam of ease."

"Interesting." Victor said.

"I've made contact with my people." the alien continued. "A covert-observation team is diverting to evacuate me. Their cloaking device will prevent their being detected."

"Cool." Victor said. "When will they be here?"

"Tomorrow, when this continent is halfway through the nocturnal portion of its cycle." Zak said. Victor went to his laptop and began copying disks. "What are you doing?" Zak asked.

"You were supposed to learn about us, right?" Victor remarked. "I don't want to send you back to your people empty-handed." He slid copies of the DVDs he'd been transferring into the sleeves of a zippered binder. He added some CDs he had made of his old audio tapes and a couple containing scans of pretty much every American comic ever made (part of a city-wide cooperation by the town's comic nerds) and a great many Japanese manga. To this he added a copy of Encarta Encyclopedia which had come with his new computer, but he didn't need because it was the same version he had on his laptop. His eyes fell upon his personal music collection and he began copying it to his remaining blank CDs. Four albums of "Weird Al" Yankovic, two of jazz, three classical, two hip-hop and two rock. He slid his extra copy of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Premier Collection into the final empty space and zipped up the binder. "This should serve as a primer." he muttered. "We'd best pack up some things in case we have to leave on short notice."

"Wise." Zak admitted. "There is what you call a 'cold front' approaching from the northeast, according to your meteorologists."

"Been watching a little TV, have you?" Victor teased.

"I am many things, human, but not a slacker." Zak replied. "I also made use of your internet connection. I learned a few things about you via your favorites."

"Oh, dear." Victor sighed. Zak chuckled.

"You are a socially vigilant intellectual who remains mindful of the grand scheme while doing your best in your small dominion to effect changes and inciting others to do the same." Zak said, much to Victor's relief. Then the alien continued. "While your taste in women is varied, your preference seems to be for those from the region of your planet known as Asia. You apparently are as strongly aroused by the sight of an artistic rendering of a female form as by an actual photographic image of one." Victor was blushing now. "You are also an imaginative and creative person who prefers his chosen mates to show their devotion to him by permitting him to make use of the psychological backdoor you humans call 'hypnosis' to subvert their decision-making faculties to your own. Despite your grasping of concepts we originally felt were too advanced for your culture, you are still subject to the primordial urge to spread your seed by impregnating several different females simultaneously, despite your species's conscious attempts to self-evolve into a monogamous society. You are, however, mindful of the several overt disadvantages to the polygamous lifestyle, chief among them being that the females must be provided for, secondary that they still require sexual satisfaction even if you are busy with another, and third that in order to ensure that the children they bear are indeed your own you must ensure that you are the only male they desire. Your literary solutions to these problems are, shall I say, fascinating. The hypnosis phenomenon alone bears further investigation--sadly, this must be done by another body, for I am to be taking an extended vacation from this planet to recover from my traumas here."