

ELBIES (Part 4)

A 250 Word Project

by

Robert A. Taylor

Copyright © 2013 by Robert A. Taylor

Published by

Taylor-Made Publishing

1st Smashwords Edition

April, 2014

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes written in connection with reviews written specifically for a magazine or newspaper.

There's plenty of room in Los Angeles these days. Of course, that's true everywhere, I suppose. Ever since they fixed all of our problems for us.

Back then, I was living in Washington D.C. I'd scored a job in the Justice Department's IT division, and I was on top of the world. I wasn't really a cop; all I did was check computers that were brought in as evidence and crack the security on them. There usually wasn't any, so the job was pretty easy most of the time. Occasionally I got in a PC that somebody with a clue had owned, but the full resources of the U.S. government provide all the tools necessary to crack whatever encryption a civilian might be able to come up with. I was 25, making good money, and loving life.

People in the government really do find out things before your average Joe Citizen. I heard about the objects being tracked in the fall of 23 – the official announcement didn't come until after they couldn't shut up the amateur astronomers anymore. One of those amateurs started contacting every reporter on the planet, and the White House decided it needed to get out front on the issue.

Since there was no real information, even in the classified channels, the press conference consisted mainly of saying that the objects might or might not hit the earth, we had plans in the works for deflecting them if needed, blah, blah, blah. I'd checked some of the servers I wasn't supposed to have access to, and it was true – they didn't know whether or not the things were going to hit the planet. But they did have some better close ups, and the things weren't natural.

That made most of the people I shared the information with either completely petrified or oddly calm. I have to confess that I was one of the ones in the calm camp – I didn't think aliens would be hostile. There's plenty of room in space, and plenty more resources in the rest of the solar system that they could get at without having to kill the natives first. But I could completely understand my petrified friends, too. I had grown up on alien invasion movies, after all.

Emotions got more manageable after the announcement, at least among the general population. Those of us with a little more access remained high-strung, but we had non-disclosure contracts to keep us in check. I violated mine, but only with people I trusted, and I never shared files with anybody who wasn't also cleared to see them. Anyway, I was more excited than scared; it was cool to think that we were finally going to see aliens.

Once the ships hit orbit and were close enough to be seen with hand-held telescopes, the pretenses dropped and the U.N. started demanding access to all of the information that America, Russia and China had gathered on them. It was quite a bit, and China had even attempted opening preliminary talks with the ship's occupants. Nothing had been transmitted back to them, though, as far as the people listening in from America and Russia could tell; and they were listening hard, let me tell you.

There was surprisingly little worry in the streets. I'd half-expected riots and governmental overthrows, as did most of the intelligence community, but people seemed to be taking the arrival of a couple dozen alien spaceships in stride. I think we took it as a matter of pride. "Alien armada in orbit? Ain't no big deal."

The U.N. acquired the frequency that China had been transmitting on, and sent their own message of welcome. Secretary-General Aguilar promised a peaceful reception and the first return message crackled through to her. "We shall land a small shuttle in the harbor next to the statue of the human female. That shall be our base of operations while we negotiate diplomatic relations with your people. We require a meeting with your general assembly within twelve hours of our landfall. We look forward to cultural exchanges with humans and other residents of the earth. We are excited to meet you."

The initial message was in Spanish, Aguilar's native language, and it was repeated in the language of every U.N. member nation. It was a flat, robotic voice with no emotion or inflection, and alien-watching forums exploded with speculation that the aliens themselves would turn out to be robots, something that made a lot of sense to anybody watching NASA's missions for the last few decades. The forums figured that the aliens were robots; that whoever created them was long gone and the next stage of evolution was a brain in a tin can.

They were really wrong.

Permission was granted, but every missile in the world was trained on New York Harbor as that shuttle came down. It was a perfect sphere, nearly a mile across, and it settled down next to Lady Liberty as gently as a soap bubble. A smaller vessel just sort of blooped out of it after they had landed, and it floated over to the U.N. building, parking itself in front, under all the flags.

It must have been nice to have been a crook in New York on that day, because all the cops were parked around the alien ship, along with every news organization that could operate a camera. There were specific orders not to draw on the things coming out of the ship – nobody wanted to replay The Day The Earth Stood Still – but you could see every one of those guys reach for their holster when the hatch opened and the first of those things slithered out.

I'm not saying that you could hear the gasp of every single human on the planet, but I could definitely hear everybody in my vicinity become short of breath when that image hit our retinas. If H.P. Lovecraft were alive that day, he would have proclaimed his vision had been given form. I nearly didn't make my SAN check. There was just something primally awful about the aliens that made us all think we were about to become the main subject in a To Serve Man cookbook.

About twenty of them slimed their way into the U.N. and occupied the area in front of the podium in the general assembly. The minute the news feeds went there, you could feel every representative edging as far away as they could without looking like they were, and everybody watching completely understood.

One of them inched its way up to the podium, where Secretary-General Aguilar was watching it in undisguised disgust. When it came within a few feet of her, she backed away, and it took to the podium. It pulled some kind of doohickey from someplace I don't want to think about, and every security guard's hand went immediately to a firearm. It plopped the object on the lectern, fiddled with it for a minute, and then that robotic voice from the spaceship said, "Can everyone understand me?" There was about thirty seconds of stunned silence, followed by a low affirmative murmur. "Thank you," it went on. "To the people of earth, greetings from your fellow beings of the Coalition of Intelligent Lifeforms. After close observance of your species for the customary seventy-three local solar cycles, we are privileged to make contact with you on this day of," and here it made a sound that was a cross between someone clearing their throat and vomiting, "in the time sector of," this one was like warm honey burping as it boiled in a pot. "C.O.I.L. believes that as new members you will make valuable cultural contributions to our society; we are particularly interested in shijing and blues music, as well as the games of White Wolf and Feder and Schwert. For our part of the cultural exchange, we will provide certain helpful technologies to be specified later, as well as cultural structures of our own that humans may find appealing." It looked over at its compatriots, spoke in their own sloopy-goopy language for a minute, then finished off with, "Thank you for your attention. We shall schedule further negotiations with Secretary-General Aguilar, and of course you are all invited to a social event we are conducting aboard our main shuttle in the harbor at local sunset. Human refreshments will be provided." And with that, it took its translator off of the podium and slimed its way over to Aguilar, who accompanied it down to the main group to talk for a few more minutes.

The assembly erupted into life as every member tried to shove his or her way down to the floor where the aliens were still talking to the secretary-general. The ultimate chance to advance your political career is superb motivation to overcome physical revulsion. All the talking head types butted into the broadcasts, too, giving their views on what had just happened, even though there really wasn't much to talk about yet. I was going to join a UFO hangout on Google, but their servers crashed because everybody in the freakin' world was trying to join in at the same time. I found out later that the stock market value of White Wolf and Feder & Schwert skyrocketed past Apple before the day was done.

Once the aliens were done with Secretary-General Aguilar, they didn't mess much with the other representatives. I saw a couple linger around, but not for very long. They scooted back to the shuttle and returned to the harbor, which had become ground zero for an invasion of our own – everybody with a boat in the tri-state area was converging on Lady Liberty and her guests. By sunset, the Coast Guard had to clear people away so that the U.N. reps could get in for the party.

Everybody I knew talked about ways we could crash what was easily the party of the millennium, but nobody could figure out a way that wouldn't get us shot down by the Air Force, so we settled with watching the various phone broadcasts of the people lucky enough to get in. There were hundreds of those, so we got a pretty good close up of our slimy new friends, something I could have done without, as well as the event itself. It was kind of an expo, or world fair, with lots of booths demonstrating C.O.I.L. culture and technology, and inviting the human attendees to sample various tasty bits from other worlds. From what I could see, most of the food was barely on this side of inedible, but there were a few items that passed muster with the guests. A couple of fruits were addictive, judging by how many people kept coming back for them; of course, they may have just been the oasis in the midst of the desert.

The drinks were a different matter altogether. Alcohol content was something C.O.I.L. delivered with panache, and people were asking for those recipes right and left. In fact, the aliens needed to learn how to cut people off, because a lot of those beverages were more potent than they seemed at first. Quite a few diplomats were passing out, causing some consternation among the hosts, who promptly called for medical attention to care for the soused. I don't think anybody died, but there were plenty of people who left that party in stretchers.

Once you got past the shock of their looks, the C.O.I.L. representatives were pretty banal. They loved to talk about aspects of human pop culture, which made them sound like the nerds that everyone else was used to ditching at parties. As one of those nerds, I thought they were pretty cool, but I was in the minority. Video of diplomats falling asleep at conversations over the minutiae of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Nigerian cinema were all over the net, but before long, all the videos began ignoring the actual aliens and concentrating on the demos they'd brought with them. (Although that one alien's take on the parallels between Buffy Summers's early slayer career and Harry Potter's late teen years was pretty cool.)

The demos were astounding. What the aliens were promising us was nothing less than godhood; matter transmutation, body modification, faster than light drives, immortality – nothing was outside of C.O.I.L.'s science. Transhumanists the world over were seeing the Singularity flash before their eyes. It looked like were finally going to be able to get off this rock and see the universe.

It looked too good to be true.

Now, there was a catch. Before they handed us the keys to the car, the 'rents wanted to visit with us a while and make sure that we weren't going to go crashing it into the first pulsar around the corner. After drooling over those demos, the politicians were ready to grant them access anywhere – I think the American ambassador told them they could use the White House as a base if they wanted. Frankly, I don't blame them. I don't think anybody could, honestly. They were offering us everything we'd ever dreamed of, and just wanted to make sure we could handle it. It was a reasonable condition.

The evening ended around three or four in the morning, and the few sober individuals carted off the ones who couldn't move on their own power. Those of us watching at home tried to decide if we were just going to tough out the next day or try to catch a nap before work. I opted to tough it out, which was a big mistake. I fell asleep three or four times on the day after.

I mean, I wasn't alone. Half my office called in sick, and the other half of us should have. The U.S. probably set a record for least productive work day in history. Even the news guys looked exhausted while they rambled on about how nice the slimy, hideous aliens were once you talked to them for a while. Then they showed video of the slimy, hideous aliens without audio, which totally ruined the effect. It was not the kind of thing you wanted to see when you're nodding off and half-entering REM state. I jerked awake more than once hoping I wasn't about to be eaten.

My boss had been one of the people calling in sick, so a bunch of us decided that, just like kindergarten, the afternoon was going to be nap time. The others were going to make up the time after normal hours, but I just decided to blow off the rest of the day and head home.

Traffic was the lightest I've ever seen in D.C. I was home and in bed in no time, and I didn't wake up till two A.M. I got up, peed, ate a little something and debated checking the net or going back to sleep. The net won out. The top story across the aggregators was that the aliens had a name that could be pronounced by human beings without doing anything disgusting. They were the Fhh-bop-uh, and their home planet was about a thousand light-years away. They had been chosen by the C.O.I.L. to contact us because they were considered to be the most like us out of the many different species of the Coalition. That set me to shuddering.

A few Fhh-bop-uh had done a little tourist spin around New York City, including taking in a Broadway show, and the pics were everywhere. My favorite was the one visiting a game shop and holding a D&D rulebook in its pseudopods; that's a session that every gamer I know would have given his eye teeth to be part of.

Less cute was that several of the C.O.I.L. ships had been taking surveillance trips around the world's hot spots – checking out human starvation, wars, oppression, and all the other horrible things we do to each other. P.R. people from those countries tried to put a positive spin on it, but it's hard to make starvation a net good.

More meetings between the C.O.I.L. and the U.N. were scheduled for that day, and some of the committees were insisting on privacy that everybody else in the world was adamantly against. Half of the Security Council's members – including America – flatly stated that they would refuse to convene if the meeting was public. When the Fhh-bop-uh agreed, protestors crowded the U.N. building and Liberty Island. This worried me a lot, but the aliens didn't seem to take any offense; they didn't seem upset by it, at all. They just slithered into the council meeting, the doors shut, and the fate of humanity was discussed without anybody being held accountable for it.

At least not then.

When they came out of the seven-hour meeting, the Fhh-bop-uh headed straight for their shuttle, and the politicians headed straight for the press. The American ambassador, who was being seen more often than the president, was all smiles and good hair. She said, "I want the American people and the world to know that, in spite of any ugly rumors currently circulating around the world, that we at the United Nations are vigilantly standing guard over the rights and well-being of the people of earth. The main thing to remember is that the Coalition is not our enemy, and the Fhh-bop-uh are truly trying to be our friends. There are differences of opinion in how they can best do that, but we all share that common goal – that we will be friends and neighbors.

"Having said that, the Coalition has raised some concerns over how the earth is governed, and they wish us to address them in the coming days. We believe that membership in the Coalition is extraordinarily important, but it is also important that humans maintain sovereignty over our own planet. We will not cede that sovereignty for material wealth and possessions.

"There is, however, ample room for us to maneuver. The Fhh-bop-uh, proving themselves friends, will help us navigate our way through these choppy waters at the beginning of our venture into the greater galactic community. They have assisted many other species step out of the adolescence of intelligence into mature adulthood, and they have said that they are optimistic about our chances. This should give all of humanity optimism."

She didn't take any questions, but just let the Secret Service clear the path to her limo and sped out of there. All the other ambassadors who were in the meeting did the same, giving just as little information in their respective languages. What they'd said was disquieting, though, and the media wasted all of the electrons speculating about what it all meant.

I was following the conversation that was going on behind the scenes as best I could, but there was maddeningly little that the major players were communicating electronically. Ambassador Trevors was practically living in the White House when she wasn't at the U.N. building, and President Davis's schedule had been cleared of anybody that didn't have something to say about alien life. I tried to hack into the surveillance devices that monitor the president's offices, but you would not believe the security levels they invest in.

Still, I was able to piece together some of the story in the few emails and instant messages they were sending around. The C.O.I.L. evidently thought of us as a fixer-upper species that needed a lot of work, and the work they were thinking of was something that a lot of people were going to associate with names like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the like. Most of the plans that I could see them working on called for a much lower number of people living on earth, but there were very few references as to how we were supposed to achieve that number. In the hopeful portion of my brain, that meant that we were going to move most of the people currently on earth off earth. I did see some discussion of human colonies, but not enough to account for the huge reduction in human population that I was seeing the aliens suggest was necessary for earth's advancement.

They talked a lot about earth's advancement, human advancement, but there were indications all over the place that the advancement wasn't going to take place for most of humanity. To their credit, this was a major stumbling block for our leaders. I didn't see any that were ready to commit genocide in order to gain the miraculous things that the C.O.I.L. was offering.

And, oh, how miraculous those things were. Where the demos played for the public at the alien reception were implicit godhood, the pictures painted for the politicians in private were explicit. Even in the driest reports that were being filed, you could see the temptations being dangled before these men and women, and how hard they were working to suppress their desire to just say yes to whatever the aliens wanted us to do. Satan was sitting on the shoulder of each of them and offering them the world.

The Fhh-bop-uh were nice Satans, though, and that made it even worse. Everybody liked them. Even on the attack talk shows that scored interviews, the Fhh-bop-uh were unfailingly polite, respectful of human culture, and filled with admiration for humans themselves. What were these guys planning behind the scenes?

I actually got my chance to ask one of them once. It was about three weeks into their stay, and several of them were touring pretty freely around larger cities like New York, Los Angeles and Washington. I was in the Dragon Lord game shop on 54th because hey, I'm a nerd, when one of them just saunters on in and starts browsing. You could have heard a pin drop. I didn't think I was ever going to get another chance, so I walked over to it and looked at its choices.

"So, you like Old School Renaissance, huh?" It had a copy of OSRIC 3rd Edition, so I figured that was a safe opener.

"I do enjoy the reinterpretation of the original Dungeons and Dragons rule set." It had one of those translators and its robotic voice carried over the whole store, because everyone was being quiet enough to hear. "The actual original set is limiting, in my opinion, whereas the OSR takes advantage of the decades of gameplay since then to build a truly magical experience."

"Have you guys had a chance to play very much?"

"Regrettably, I had to leave behind my fellow gamers when I accepted the assignment to join the embassy. It has been nearly a full lunar cycle since I last played."

That was the opening of a lifetime. Some people talk about when they got to bed a movie star; I will always be famous as the first gamer to bag an alien for his gaming table.

"My group meets tomorrow night. Would you be able to make it?"

The Fhh-bop-uh considered for a moment, then answered me, "I believe I have recreational time I can schedule then. Can you give the location?"

I shook more than the first time I asked a girl for sex as I wrote down my address for it. "Uhm, is there any special kind of food or drink you'll need?"

"I shall provide my own refreshments, but thank you for the offer." It scanned the piece of paper I'd given it with the translator and then handed me back the scrap of paper. "Excellent. Should I bring a character, or create one once I arrive?"

"You can bring one. Fifth level. The party already has a fighter, a ranger, a cleric, and a paladin."

"No thief, then?"

"No, and it's been a problem for them."

"Excellent. I shall arrive with a fifth-level thief. That should enhance the party's abilities." It made an expression which was frankly hideous, but I think was an effort to smile. "This is truly exceptional. I appreciate your extension of hospitality."

"Hey, I know what it's like to lose your group and have to go without. No sweat." I thought about it for a second, then said, "That is, if you guys sweat."

"We do not perspire. Our bodies have been modified to create less execrable waste than humans in order to reduce the amount of pollution we would be leaving here."

I nodded. "Very eco-friendly of you."

"We wish to be good neighbors."

"And we all appreciate that down here." I had about a jillion more questions, but decided to save them for the gaming table. "Well, I'm gonna go see if there's anything new to buy. See you tomorrow."

"Yes. See you."

As soon as I was a safe distance away from the Fhh-bop-uh, I was swarmed by other gamers eager to find out what the alien was like, what game the alien played, how the hell I found the nerve to invite it to my group, and sycophants telling me how awesome I was for doing so. I basked in it for a while; I'm not ashamed to admit it. Nobody else even talked to it until the clerk rang up its purchases and bid it a good day. We all watched it leave and I pulled out my cell to call all the guys in my group and tell them they were in for one hell of a surprise on game night.

Every one of the four other people in my group showed up in their Sunday best, more excited than I've ever seen them. This beat the time we all got to meet Brent Spiner; it beat the time Rory played Ticket to Ride with Wil Wheaton. I say it even beat the time that Cindy went on that date with David Tennant, but she didn't agree. Judging from the spark in her eye when she talks about it, she may be right.

The Fhh-bop-uh showed up right on time. I showed it to the bench I'd gotten for the occasion – it was too big for one of my chairs – and it settled down and brought out a character sheet with meticulously neat hand-writing. "Would you like to examine my thief? I have named her Bilbette; she is a Halfling." That hideous smile crossed its face again, and for just a second, my guests had second thoughts about their participation in the evening's entertainment, but I just looked down at the character sheet.

"Halfling thief, ring of invisibility, plus one dagger named Stinger..." I shook my head and wore my own hideous smile.

"Ha, ha, ha."

The robotic sound of its laughter cracked everybody up, and we all felt at ease. Derivative character concept and horrible punning? We had before us a true fellow gamer.

Cindy, as she usually does when we're presented with new people, took the lead in starting the conversation. "We usually just do low fantasy, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser kind of stuff, Bilbette. How do you guys roll up in space?"

"We had been playing a Modern campaign for seven cycles, until I had to leave for my assignment. We used human civilization, circa nineteen-fifty, as our inspiration." I could almost detect the nerdly shame when it added, "We all enjoy B movies very much."

Rod chimed in, "Man, I'd love to play in a bad sci-fi campaign next, Cal. Killing giant bugs from outer space? Sweet!" He glanced ashamedly over at our guest and dropped his head. "No offense."

"None taken. That actually was part of our campaign."

"Was it fun?"

"I found it thoroughly entertaining." Its eyes roamed around my living room, taking in my lack of decorating skills, humming a small tune to itself. At this point most of all, I wished that I'd set up my cam, but hindsight is twenty/twenty. "Tell me, do you perform the ritual sacrifice before, after or during gaming here?" As five wide-eyed, shocked faces stared back at it, it said, "Ha, ha, ha."

Rod laughed harder than any of us, but shouted, "Man, don't do that! It took four years of my childhood to convince my parents I wasn't meeting with Satanists every weekend."

"Yes, I have watched Monster & Mazes, CBN and other anti-gaming propaganda." The robotic voice had no emotion, but the words were coming so rapidly out of it that my Fhh-bop-uh friend had to be excited. "I had hoped to meet someone actually affected by it. Can you tell me of your parental unit's actions?" It produced a tablet from the same place that it had taken the character sheet, which I didn't want to spend too much time thinking about, and fired it up.

"Um," Rod said, his eyes darting around wildly. He hadn't expected to be the one on the end of the interrogations tonight. "Well, I had to be at church with them every Sunday... oh, and I had to do Bible study, and vacation Bible school, and I had to talk with the youth minister once a month. Thank God I don't have to do any of that sh-crap anymore." He looked embarrassed at having almost sworn in front of the alien, and the alien picked up on that.

"What is sh-crap? I have many expletives in my translation dictionary, but this one does not translate."

I picked up the ball for Rod while everybody else laughed. "Rod was about to say shit, but was obviously uncomfortable swearing in front of you until we know whether you're OK with it."

A shudder moved through the Fhh-bop-uh's body, which I figured is how they shrug. "I have no objection to the use of expletives in my presence. In fact, I have often enjoyed the George Carlin routine of the seven words. Would you like to hear it?" It tapped a command or two on its tablet and we were suddenly sitting in the audience of a comedy concert that had taken place in the Seventies.

"Whoa."

"Next game, dude," Rory said, marveling at the detail around us, "you're the DM."

"I have not run a game before," the Fhh-bop-uh said. "I would need some time to prepare."

"Hey," I said, my feelings a little hurt, "I'm right here."

"Do you have a portable holodeck? I think not."

The show started and we were lost for a few minutes in Carlin's hilarious routine and its not-ready-for-prime-time language. The alien stopped it after a few minutes, and we all gave it an "Awwwwwww."

"I came to game," it said.

"All right, then," I said, trying to reassert my bruised authority, "you guys are sitting in the tavern when Bartoculus finds a halfling's hand in his purse..."

It was a fun night. The Fhh-bop-uh stayed in character way more than most gamers I've played with, and the robot voice was a little jarring, but I'd rank it in my top five, easy. If the snacks it brought had smelled a little better, I'd say top two.

The Fhh-bop-uh itself smelled really nice, which surprised all of us. Kind of a cross between cinnamon and ginger, with a hint of raw steak thrown in. That almost made up for the roasted garbage smell of the kibbles it brought to munch on; almost.

After "Bilbette" left, the rest of us went to the pancake house to come down from the high. "I so wish I'd been live-tweeting that," Rory said, digging into a tall stack. "I'd have about a million followers now."

"We need to be cool about this," Cindy said. "We talk about how we're gaming with an alien, and Cal's place is gonna be surrounded by news crews and weirdos."

"Yeah, now it's just weirdos," Rod said, cackling at his own humor.

"Bilbette probably appreciates a break from dealing with the crowds, too," I said. "And if we want to keep her at the table, we'll need to be respectful. No blabbing about this to the world."

Everybody agreed. Having an alien gaming with us was cool enough for now; we didn't need to shout it from the rooftops. Rory had a thought or two extra, though. "We all know we're going to talk eventually," he said. "I don't think we should hold it against anybody who breaks the news."

"Okay," I said. "But we've all got to try. Like, only tell if it's gonna get you laid or something."

"Well, at least we know that Will won't be telling then," Cindy said, shoving Will.

Will pouted at her. "It's easy for you; you're married. Some of us have lifetimes of nerdity to fight against."

"Will definitely gets a free pass if it gets him laid," Rod said. "Hell, I'm willing to take a vote to authorize all of us using it to get Will laid."

Everybody but Will raised a hand, and then Will did, too. We now had a mission.

I'm not sure that anybody succeeded, because Will didn't kiss and tell, but he did have a little spring in his step at the next week's game. It was a little embarrassing, really. Especially when Cindy said, "You're welcome."

Although our pact of secrecy had obviously been breached, there weren't any news teams camped outside my apartment, although a few of my neighbors were taking video with their phones as Bilbette slimed its way up my stairs. "Hello," it said, holding out a small bag. "I brought something special tonight."

"Hey, you didn't have to," I said, but I took the bag and looked inside like it used to belong to Santa Claus. There were 5 tablets of the kind it had been using last week, and my knees went weak. "Holy God. Are you allowed to give these out?"

"I requested permission for each of you specifically. You will need to acknowledge the receipt of the tablet and run through the short tutorial, but otherwise you may use them as you wish." It raised a tentacle and waved it at me. "Except you may not sell them or give them to others."

"No problem on my end," I said, trying to keep from drooling on the tablet I pulled out for myself. I stepped out of the way and let it inside, following with the bag like the god of swag. "Guys, Bilbette got us presents!" I was mobbed and everyone was loudly thanking our Fhh-bop-uh friend for its generosity. We all agreed to the terms, and then started messing around with the machines.

"This is so cool," Cindy said, stroking the surface of hers fondly. "Bilbette, I will never, ever share it with anyone, I promise." She grinned evilly.

That made me think of something I'd been meaning to ask. "Hey, 'Bilbette', does it bother you that we don't call you by name? I mean, do you have a name?"

"Yeah," Rory said, looking up from his tablet for the first time since taking it out of the bag. "And, are you like, a dude or a chick?"

"You are such an advanced representative of humanity, Rory," Cindy said, punching Rory in the arm.

'Bilbette' thought for a moment. "I have a sound that identifies me among my own kind, but I doubt that it would be pronounceable by humans. Bilbette is a name that I chose to be identified by you, my fellow gamers, and therefore I would be pleased if you would continue using it to signify my identity."

"So, you're a chick?" Rory winced at another punch from Cindy.

"As we do not copulate or reproduce in the human fashion, your gender terms are somewhat meaningless if applied to the Fhh-bop-uh. But, since I have chosen to be identified as a female character, I will accept feminine language modifiers being applied to me." She turned her sensory stalk to Rory. "So, I'm a 'chick'." And with that, she reached out a tentacle and popped a good one on Rory's arm.

Rubbing his aching limb, Rory whined, "Hey, just cuz she does it doesn't mean you have to."

"My apologies. I assumed it was something we ladies got to do." Brief pause. "Ha, ha, ha."

I have to admit, Bilbette was definitely on my good side. But the things that I was reading about her people weren't giving me a lot of warm fuzzies. This was hard to bring up at the gaming table, as hard as I looked for opportunities, so I brought it up after gaming when she was helping me clear up.

"That was an enjoyable game, Cal." She swiped up everything on the table in one tentacle and deftly separated the trash into my trash can while the plates and other stuff I needed to keep plopped back onto the table. She was handy, that was for sure.

"Thanks." I took a deep breath. I mean, it was now or never. "Say, Bilbette, I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I work for the Department of Justice in the U.S. government, and I get access to a lot of documents about you guys." Even though she was an alien species, my lifetime of watching women tense up when I talked to them told me that she was not eagerly anticipating what I was about to say. "Um, I'm all for interstellar progress and human advancement, don't get me wrong. But, some of the things the Fhh-bop-uh are saying kind of sound like humans have got to prune their numbers." I kind of shrank in front of this alien creature and squeaked out, "Is that a fair assessment?"

I had begun thinking of Bilbette as just another gamer; her appearance had become nothing special to me. Now, though, the sheer otherness of how she looked fell down on top of me. Her sensory stalk, betraying no human emotion, regarded me with clinical coldness, and I felt a lot like our distant ancestors did when they came face to face with a huge predator. Finally, she said, "It is fair."

Now I felt worse.

But there was more. "Do you wish to know if you are among the extraneous?"

"The... the extraneous what?"

"People."

"I..." My mind was a total blank. "I don't think I do."

"Very well." She went back to cleaning up. "This is one of the points of contention with your human leadership. They all have different criteria they wish to consider, usually to make themselves necessary. We do not wish to cause disharmony, therefore we are willing to work within the parameters that humans set, but our best estimates require a ninety-five percent reduction in the human population in order to keep your species viable." Her sensory stalk turned back to me, and I could almost hear an apologetic tone in that robotic voice. "I am sorry. I enjoy humans and one of the reasons you are so fascinating is the mighty press of your great numbers. But you must be viably sustainable in order to join the C.O.I.L. and you cannot sustain the majority of your population for more than one more century of your current civilization."

I had been guessing all this from the information I had intercepted, but hearing it baldly stated like that made me light-headed. The fact that Bilbette regretted it made it all the more real. She was getting her time among the natives while the natives were still here.

"What if we decide we can't do that? We're not gonna get rid of everybody on Earth? Do you still deal with us?"

"Possibly," she said, considering. "But mainly in cultural ways. We will not share our technology with you if it will be destructive in both inward and outward ways."

"Outward ways?" That threw me for a minute. "You mean, you're afraid we'll use what you give us against you?"

"Of course. We have to plan every scenario we can think of into our negotiations, and all of the Fhh-bop-uh have been familiarized with your alien invasion literature. Especially in the event that you are persuaded to part with the majority of your population, we anticipate retaliation from the rest of you. There are contingency plans in place to destroy you all if that should happen."

My light-headedness wasn't going away. "Yeah, that seems fair."

"I do not wish this to happen, you understand." Bilbette extended her tentacles out in as human a gesture of pleading as she could make, but it just made her all the more alien to me. "As I said, I enjoy humans. I argued for minimal cultural contact; employing a Prime Directive, if you will. But, the leadership of the C.O.I.L. feel that humans have real potential and wish for you to be joined with us."

"But we have to pay a price for it."

"Yes."

I sat down. It was completely unfair that the world had achieved Nerdvana and my alien saviors were demanding that most of us die in order to ascend to their level. "How long do you think the negotiations are going to take?"

"I am uncertain. The human leaders are understandably reluctant to accept that condition."

"I bet."

"They will come around, of course. We have done this with many other species, and it is very rare that we are refused."

"Maybe we'll surprise you."

I had no idea they were capable of witheringly sarcastic stares, but she laid one on me then. "Really?"

"No, we won't." Every bad stereotype about politicians flooded my mind, and I knew that simple human empathy could only hold out so long against godhood. Hell, would I refuse godhood to save nine other people? Even if I knew all nine of them, even if I loved all nine, I'd be a freaking god!

And that really scared me.

"How will you do it?" I wanted to know what my probable fate was going to be, even if there was nothing I could do about it.

"Our method is very, if you will pardon the expression, humane. The extraneous are given a set amount of time to say their farewells, backed up, and then are peacefully and painlessly deconstructed into their component molecules."

"How much time?"

"It varies from species to species. We are considering two lunar cycles as a proper amount for humans."

Two months to say all of your goodbyes. While almost everyone you knew and everyone you didn't know was saying theirs. "Will you provide transportation for people who need to travel to say their farewells?"

"Of course. Any of the extraneous who need assistance will be granted it. We are not without empathy."

"Ninety-five percent of the population might beg to differ."

"As I stated, my view is in the minority. I wish for you to have your home and live your own lives." She sat down on the floor, giving up the pretense of cleaning that she had been keeping up for me. "It is perhaps that our leadership loves humans too much; they wish to embrace you and absorb you whole. The humans that will be left behind will enjoy lives such as your species has only dreamed of. This planet will be a paradise, and the rest of your solar system shall be your playground. Humanity will be assured of survival; indeed, it will be assured to flourish."

"Did the Fhh-bop-uh have to go through this?" It might have been unfair to ask, but I wanted to know if she had any inkling of what this was going to be like for us.

"Oh, yes. I was the only survivor in my region. This is why we were chosen for this mission. It was thought that we would have the greatest empathy for you."

I was a little flummoxed. I hadn't really expected her to say yes; in spite of my interactions with Bilbette, the Fhh-bop-uh seemed too alien to have needed restraining. "How much of your population was... extraneous?"

"Over ninety-nine percent, but to put that in perspective, our population was much larger than yours."

That light-headedness was overwhelming me. "How... how do you work for them? They wiped out your entire species."

"Not entire. Obviously, there are still many of us left."

"Not as many."

"No." She slithered over to her bench and sat down. "I will be honest with you, Cal. I harbored feelings of ill-will towards the C.O.I.L. myself. I also felt a great deal of what your psychologists term survivor's guilt. But everything that I have experienced since then, everything that the rest of my people have lived... I have to think that it was worth it. My people were sacrificed for this, and our existence has been dedicated to proving that we were worthy of it." She directed her sensory stalk back at me. "I believe that we were. Can you believe the same?"

I shook my head. "I don't know."

She rose from the bench and headed to the door. "Start believing. You will not be on the extraneous list. See you next week."

And after dropping that nuke on my head, she left.

I didn't sleep the rest of the night. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw everyone I knew and loved turning to dust in front of me, while I, god though I was, was powerless to stop it.

I didn't share this information with anyone else. I didn't know how to say that I was about to be ascended in the alien rapture while most of them were going to be turned into fertilizer for the paradise to come. I tried to keep up my spirits but it was hard to get up most of the mornings that week. A lot of people were feeling the same way, including the criminal element. I wasn't getting any work that week, giving me plenty of time to do my illegal hacking.

True to Bilbette's prediction, the leaders were folding, as long as they were the ones who got to be gods. The C.O.I.L. was agreeable to letting some of them stay, but apparently a lot of them were not C.O.I.L. material. This was the real snag in the negotiations; they had reached a point where they were OK with billions of people dying. They just wanted to make sure they weren't in that number.

Game day rolled around and I was undecided as to whether to say anything to the other humans in the group or not. I decided to keep quiet, and so did Bilbette. I just went with it, and we had a fun night. For a few hours, I was able to forget about the world outside and live in the fantasy.

Bilbette left early that night, but Rod stayed behind to help me clean up. He was obviously curious about what Bilbette and I had talked about the week before, and asked, "So? Did she give away any of the secrets of the universe?"

"Maybe one or two." I thought I could hold it in, that I didn't want to say anything, but it all came spilling out of me, because the guilt and excitement and embarrassment were all just churning around in me and couldn't be contained anymore. "We've got to drop nine-tenths of our population if we want to join the C.O.I.L. The only thing that's stopping them from vaporizing all of the 'extraneous' people now is that our frickin' leaders all want a guaranteed spot in the one-tenth and the Fhh-bop-uh won't give it to them." God, it felt good to say that.

Rod, on the other hand, didn't seem to be feeling too good about it. "Nine tenths?"

I handed him a beer from the fridge. "Bilbette said that the Fhh-bop-uh were forced to kill off over ninety-nine percent of their people, but their population was larger than ours."

He sipped at his beer and stared into space. "Then, why are they here?"

"They've got sympathy for us. They've been there, done that." I shrugged. "Want to make their sacrifice worthwhile."

"Are they... are they just gonna round us up?" He chugged the rest of his beer down to dull the thoughts that were now zipping through his brain, just as they had been through mine for the last week.

"I'm not sure how it goes. She said that it's painless."

He set the empty bottle on my counter and I handed him another. "How long do you think we have?"

"She wasn't sure, but – and you can't tell anybody about this, cuz I'm not spending the end of the world in jail – I've been looking through some classified documents, and I don't think the human leadership is gonna hold out much longer." I got myself a beer and took a good swallow. "The White House is drafting their statement for the public right now. They've got it tentatively scheduled for the end of next month."

Rod's hand holding the beer was shaking, so I took it from him and set it down on the counter. "So, a month and half to live. You better wind up this campaign." He gave me a weak smile.

"Well, we've got a little bit longer than that." I walked him over to the couch and sat him down; poor guy was shaking so hard I thought he was going to fall over. "Bilbette said that all the people who aren't gonna become gods get marked first, so I'm sure that takes a while. Then, they get time to say their goodbyes. She said that's probably going to be about two months. Then, uh..."

"Then that's it."

"That's it." I sat down and took a good long pull. "The ones who are left get to explore the universe, and everybody else is fertilizer. Earth becomes a paradise."

"Wow." He curled up on the couch, pulling one of my pillows to him like a teddy bear. I half-expected him to stick his thumb in his mouth, but he retained some dignity. "I always thought I'd have time to have a family, you know, man? I mean, I'd find a lady, and we'd have kids and we'd grow old and have grandkids and then we'd die, but the kids would go on. My family would go on, so I'd go on." He closed his eyes. "I'm not going on, now."

I put my hand on his feet and patted. "Doesn't mean you can't find a lady in the meantime. Bound to be people looking for somebody to spend the next few months with. Hell, you might be able to find more than one lady."

He snorted a little. "How hard is it gonna be to find girls whose bucket list has 'orgy with nerds' on it?"

"You've got four months to see."

"I don't like my odds."

"Never know if you don't try."

"I suppose not." He closed his eyes. "Mind if I sleep here tonight? I don't feel like driving home."

"No prob, man." I went and got him a blanket and a pillow. "You don't work in the morning, do you?"

"No, I'm off."

I lay the blanket over him and put the pillow under his head. "Do you need a bed time story?"

"Not from you," he said, indignantly. "Now, you find me one of those orgy with nerds girls..."

I hit him with another pillow and left his beer where he could get the rest of it, then showered and got myself ready for bed. I didn't work the next day, either, but I was suddenly very tired. Confession is exhausting.

The next morning, I swore Rod to secrecy, but who would he tell? He worked at a convenience store, and none of his old Army buddies owned a TV station or newspaper or blog or anything. He could tell the rest of the gaming group, which would make game night a little weird for Bilbette, but have little impact on the rest of the world. Rod was the perfect person for me to spill the beans to, because he was just as powerless to change things as I was. We had each other for misery-loving company.

I composed an ad for a singles dating site – 'Looking for company at the Singularity' – but I didn't know if I wanted to post it. How depressing would it be to finally get a girl and then find out she's on the extraneous list?

Of course, I didn't know if I would even feel depression anymore. I didn't know if I was going to feel anything at all. I had a million questions, but the only person I could ask was Bilbette, and my questions might end both my access to her and my pending ascension, and I was becoming used to the idea of being a god.

This was the point where I wished that I was a millionaire, or at least comfortably well-off. There were lots of people that I wanted to visit before the end of the world, and I didn't know if two months was going to give me enough time. The other problem I had was that I didn't know how many of my friends and family were going to be extraneous, and it would probably be a major faux pas to ask Bilbette for a complete list.

Not that I didn't think of asking her.

I called up a lot of old friends that week, trying to say goodbye without actually saying it. It was a lot of awkward conversations, which made me feel OK with never seeing them again, but then that made me feel guilty. I thought about calling family, but in the state I was in, I was afraid I'd burst into tears as soon as they said 'hello'.

I decided on game night that I was going to ask Bilbette if it was all right to let out the secret. I'd talked to Rod, and he agreed. I didn't know if I was going to reveal the fact that I was in no danger, but holding it in was going to give me a heart attack if I did it any longer. The pressure was too much.

Bilbette arrived last, as usual, and I asked her to for a minute out on the stoop. She agreed, and my neighbors filled a few megs on their cell phones taking footage of the alien visitor. "Bilbette, uhm, I want to know if it's OK to let the gang know about... about what's going to happen."

She considered for a minute, then asked, "Do you wish to reveal their extraneous status?"

"No," I answered quickly. "Well, not unless they ask."

"Agreed."

I let out the breath I'd been holding. "Thank you so much. You don't know how hard it's been to keep that secret."

The sarcasm she was able to convey with a robotic voice was amazing. "I believe I have some idea."

The gang took the news a lot better than I thought they would. Rod, having had a week, had moved into the acceptance stage of grief; Will was nearing catatonia. Cindy and Rory were both pretty quiet. I found out later that Cindy had been thinking about having kids with her husband, and Rory had just bought his girlfriend an engagement ring. Bad timing.

"There is one more thing," Bilbette said. "We have reached agreement with the final governmental bodies and will be announcing humanity's entrance into C.O.I.L. this Monday. This moves up our timetable by a lunar cycle."

"How long will it take you to mark the extraneous?" Cindy couldn't look at Bilbette; she kept her head down and sounded on the near side of suicidal.

"We are working on the procedure now. It may take as long as a lunar cycle before the marking begins."

Everybody looked over at Bilbette. Three months. Rod asked, "Does everyone get marked at once?"

"Yes." Bilbette's sensory stalk gazed at each of us. "One of the programs we will assist your governments with implementing is free travel for each of the extraneous, so that they may visit loved ones in their final days. There will also be communication and locational services provided."

"What if," Will said, his voice trailing off. "What if the 'extraneous' decide to take some of the others with them? What if we decide that instead of gods, they're just going to be dead?" A really ugly emotion sat on his face, and I didn't want to look at him.

Bilbette didn't waver. "This is something I didn't want to talk about, because it might seem like a violation of your rights, but one of the effects of the marking is to eliminate violent tendencies. We will also be monitoring the planet for large-scale violence in case an unmarked leader decides to initiate hostilities against others. That should be an unnecessary precaution, but we prefer being thorough."

"Will we be able to kill ourselves?" Will's plea was barely audible.

Bilbette's attention was all on him, now. "If you wish, as long as it harms no one else. I think it is best to live the full length of your days. If you leave too early, you will never know what could have been in the fullness of your time."

I put away my books, because I knew that there was no way were gaming after this. Cindy looked disappointed. "We're not going to play?"

"I didn't think... I mean, after all this..."

Much to my surprise, the others all wanted to play, too. "I told you," Rod said, "you need to wrap this campaign up quick."

I didn't wrap things up, but we went pretty late and everybody was really into it. Exhaustion finally got the better of me, and I asked everybody if we could finish the next week. All eyes turned to Bilbette, who said, "I will be here."

"Me too, then," Cindy said, and the guys all agreed.

"I'll make it the best I've ever run."

"You better," Rory said. "Or else we'll have to continue this in Heaven."

"OK," Cindy, the group's atheist put up her hands. "If there is an afterlife, we all have to make a pact to game together in it."

"Screw that," Rory said, indignant. "I'm finding Gary Gygax and Dave Arnett and making my own group."

"It's a deal," I said, putting my hand out. They all slapped their hands on mine, with one exception. We all looked over at Bilbette.

"I do not believe in the human afterworlds."

"Like that matters," I told her. "It's not like you're gonna die, anyway." I didn't mention that I wasn't either. "Slap a tentacle down here, girl." She slithered over and flopped an appendage on top of ours. "Gaming forever."

"With Gygax and Arnett."

"Yeah, Rory, if we can convince them to join us instead of the millions of other gamers who are going to try to convince them."

"Hey, we played with an alien – I think we're one up on everybody else."

We all had to nod at that. "All right, be sure to stress that advantage when we see them, guys." I pulled my hand down, and the others followed me. "And – break!" We all threw our hands into the air except for Bilbette, who simply withdrew her tentacle. I grabbed my stuff and started laying it out again. "OK, last time you guys were trapped in the pits of Anansi..."

Monday's announcement was not received well. There was widespread condemnation of the C.O.I.L. and the Fhh-bop-uh and every government that had agreed to the deal. Christian fundamentalists considered the marking of the extraneous members of the human race to be nothing less than the mark of the beast, and refused to allow it. When they were told that there would be no physical mark, it deflated them a bit, but genocide gave them enough high dudgeon to keep their outrage machine going.

The only thing that saved the deal was that nobody knew who was going to be marked, and who was going to be a god. Although most people realized that they were extraneous, everybody secretly hoped that they would make the cut. There was still a lot of unrest, especially from the south, but the Fhh-bop-uh gave governmental agents a lot of support, and after the initial hubbub, people calmed down.

Part of it had to do with the odd promise that everyone was going to be backed up. We asked what this meant, but the Fhh-bop-uh just said that it would be a shame if people weren't backed up because of fear or superstition. Bilbette, who teleported into my apartment rather than walking up to my door from concern about troubled people taking potshots at her, told us that it was vitally necessary to get through the entire marking period in order to be backed up. She said that getting backed up was like being a Cylon, which almost made me give up being a god, until she explained that it was more like being in the Matrix.

"So, we're going to be batteries for everybody else?" Rory had been particularly upset by that aspect of the movies, and was a little frantic.

"No, no," Bilbette said. "There is no need for batteries for those who will be converted. I am not quite sure how to explain it; all I can assure you is that your existence will continue if you allow our process to reach its conclusion."

I tried to keep the questions down by getting our game going as soon as she showed up, but there was always time to talk in games, and they peppered her with questions whenever there was a lull in the action. They didn't get much out of her other than wait and see – the ability to translate what she meant by 'backing up' was beyond her.

Part of me, the deeply cynical and pessimistic part, thought that the 'back-up' concept was brought out by the Fhh-bop-uh as a method of crowd control. Just like religions used the afterlife as the ultimate carrot for followers, C.O.I.L. was waving an afterlife over our heads to let us all go peacefully to our end. Once word got around that the extraneous were going to live on, the riots calmed down, except for the luddites and religious fundamentalists who were offended by the very idea that they might get some kind of tangible hereafter.

Three weeks into the process, the Fhh-bop-uh announced that the marking process would begin on the first of October, giving us all five days to speculate on who was going to win the galactic lottery, and who was going to lose. Every community had a teleportation station installed in a central location, and more were set up in isolated areas so that no human was more than a couple hours walk from a teleporter. For those who had some unusual bucket list items, there were also stations set in a few places around the solar system, along with environment suits that could withstand the atmosphere or lack of one anyplace in space. This was reserved for the people who were marked – those of us who were going to be moving on in our evolutionary track had plenty of time to see those spots later.

Game night fell on the night before the marking started, and I hadn't managed to wrap everything up the week before, so we had agreed on one last game. Bilbette thought she could make it, but on the night, she was late. We were all worried that she wasn't going to make it, and we all knew down in our hearts that this was our last gaming session. I'd hugged each and every one of them when they showed up, even Will, and none of them objected. This was going to be the cap to not only my campaign, but to our entire gaming lives. I wanted everything to be perfect.

Thirty minutes late, Bilbette materialized in the room, and we all applauded. "Forgive my tardiness," she said, sliding over to her bench and pulling out her tablet. "Our schedule at the moment is somewhat unforgiving."

We all laughed. "I can imagine. Can you stay late?" I planned on going into the wee hours, but I had a contingency of killing off Bilbette's character if she needed to leave.

"I will not be expected back at the embassy until the morning."

"Sweet." I laid out the map I'd quit my job to hand-draw, and placed their minis around the cavern they were delving into. "After the unexpectedly tough fight with the cloud giants, you enter the cavern of godly delights..."

Three in the morning found my adventurers at the brink of disaster or triumph and Rory needed a natural twenty to pull them through to victory. He shook the numbers off the die, then threw it on the table, where it clattered to a stop. He looked down, then raised his fists into the air. "Nat twenty, baby!"

We all high-fived and hugged and I started crying as I took them through the denouement of our story. They took over the kingdom from the evil rulers, spread benevolence over the land, and lived happily ever after. I couldn't help the big weepy sobs that came out of me, and the only other one who wasn't crying with me was Bilbette. She was quiet though, and I could tell that she was moved.

"That was the way to go out," Cindy said, wiping her face while trying to hug Will and Rory. "Hell of a roll, baby." She kissed Rory on the cheek, and he broke down like a starlet on Oscar night, and as I brought out tissues for everyone, we all dissolved into a maudlin scene of tears and hugs. We even got Bilbette to wrap a tentacle around us.

"I shall miss you all," Bilbette said, pulling away from our little mass of humanity. "These last few weeks have been some of the most enjoyable of my entire career with C.O.I.L. I could not have asked for better friends. You have shown me why my fascination with humans was so justified." We all hugged her and cried some more.

Nobody wanted to be the first to leave, but Cindy had a husband she needed to get back to, and Rory had to start his eight state, three country tour of relatives he had to say goodbye to, so they tore themselves away around five, and then Rod had to give Will, who was falling asleep in front of us, a ride home. As the morning sun rose, Bilbette and I were the only ones left.

"When do you have to be back?"

"Before nine o'clock. I am needed to run the dispersal of the marking nanites."

"Wow," I said. "I'm impressed. You're in charge of the mark of the beast?"

"I designed the nanites," she said, which impressed me even more. She really was a nerd. "I have dedicated my life for the past century to human culture, and my experience befriending humans in a social context made me uniquely qualified to create the process and imprint it on the devices."

"Am I the only one of us not getting marked?"

"Yes."

I'd heard about survivor's guilt before, but I didn't think it was going to be such a crushing sensation; I didn't think I was going to be able to breathe for a minute. When I found my voice again, I asked, "Why did you choose me?"

"You have the qualities that we wish to see humans going forward with," she said. There it was; my justification for existence. And mom said that D&D would never do me any good. "It is our belief that you will integrate into the C.O.I.L. while maintaining enough human identity to enhance our society with your perspective. After coming to know you, I have no doubts of it."

"Thanks." The sky was orange and beautiful. The beginning of the end came on a nice day, at least. I wondered idly if they could arrange something like that; now, I know for certain that they could. "You should probably get going," I said. I didn't want her to rush off, but I didn't want to delay my impending godhood, either.

"The next two months are going to be very difficult for you," she said, turning her sensory stalk to me. "I know this from personal experience, so believe me. If you have not already made a list of people to say goodbye to, make it now. The time you have left with them will be too short. It is always too short." She wrapped a tentacle around my shoulders and squeezed. "Goodbye, Cal. Perhaps one day we can play together again."

"I'd like that."

She said nothing else to me; she activated whatever it was that let her teleport, and poof, I was alone in my apartment.

Exhausted as I was, I didn't want to fall asleep. I made myself some coffee and walked out of my little fourplex into the parking lot. I wasn't alone, either. Half of the neighborhood was outside, although there was very little talking. An expectant hush was over all of us as we watched the sun move up the sky. I don't know what we were expecting to see; I didn't know what the marking would look like, in spite of the fact that I'd befriended its designer.

A couple of people around knew that, and they walked over to me. A short woman accompanied by a tall man said, "You're that guy that the alien was seeing, right?"

I nodded. "Yeah, she played games with me and some friends of mine."

"She?" The tall man looked down at me. "I didn't think they had any, you know, parts."

I was at a loss as to how to respond to that. "She just told us we could think of her as female to make things easier on us when we were talking." Awkwardly, I added, "You're right, they don't have our 'parts'."

"Thought so." He looked up at the sky and his arm fell easily across the short woman's shoulders. She leaned in against him and my eyes misted over. I can't really say if it's because I was sorry for them, or because I envied them. I checked my phone to cover my emotional state, and saw that we only had three minutes. The tall man saw me and asked, "What time is it?"

"Eight fifty-seven." I looked down again. "Fifty-eight."

"I think it's gonna be like being raptured," the short woman said. "We'll be here one minute, then gone the next. Gone with the Lord." The tall man nodded and squeezed her shoulder.

I looked down at my phone. "It's time."

There was nothing visible, but it was like a wind rushed through us all, and we all could feel the change. Looking at the couple next to me, I knew that they were both marked, and I knew that they saw that I wasn't. They kissed each other and she wiped a tear away. She touched my arm gently and said, "I'm sorry."

I shook my head. "Why?"

"Cuz you're gonna be left behind. It's going to be lonely for you."

I patted her hand. "Thank you."

She turned back to the man and said, "C'mon, Earl, let's get going. I say we visit your mother first..." I stopped listening as she and her husband made their final plans. Almost all of the people around me were doing the same; hurrying off to make the last two months of their lives count. Out of the hundreds of people in the parking lot and the street, only a handful of us were left behind.

We all walked towards each other. Two guys and three women. I stuck out my hand. "I'm Cal Minkowski."

"Kevin Rodriguez."

"Lorraine O'Brian."

"Jane Xiao."

"Michelle Barrett."

"I do computer forensics at the Department of Justice," I said, after all the hand-shaking was done. Then I added, "And I played D&D with one of the aliens for the last couple of weeks."

Jane laughed. "Of all the ways to get ahead in the world, I never thought of D&D!" She mock-slapped her forehead and I was instantly in love. I didn't know how sex was going to work in the brave new world, but I really wanted to find out now. With her. "I'm an admin assistant at Piers and Morgan, but I swear I'm not evil." Her beautiful brown eyes lingered on mine, and I forgot how to breathe. "They lobby for the coal industry." She shook her short, silky black hair and laughed again. "Not any longer, I guess."

Michelle was looking around at the marked people, wandering off to their houses or to transportation. She looked anything but happy. "Two white people, a Hispanic, an Asian and an African-American. That's almost comically diverse." She looked back at us, and she didn't seem overly impressed. "Why were we chosen to go on? Why weren't we marked?"

"We have the qualities that the C.O.I.L. wishes to see in humans going forward," I quoted. "Bilbette – the Fhh-bop-uh I played D&D with – told me that was why she'd placed me in the 'left behind' category."

"You knew?" Lorraine, an older woman wearing a hemp blouse, looked outraged. "And you didn't tell anyone?"

"I knew about me," I said. The others didn't look outraged, so I just directed myself to Lorraine. "She didn't give me any details other than to let me know I was going to be lonely."

"Doesn't look like it'll be too bad," Kevin said. "We're left behind, I'm sure there'll be plenty of others in the city. I mean, it's ninety-five percent of the population, not a hundred."

"Not to mention that we're going to be dealing with the aliens in the C.O.I.L." Jane was very happy about that. "I've read science fiction my whole life, and now I finally get to go into space." She grinned, and my thoughts abandoned the defensiveness they'd had a minute ago with Lorraine. "I didn't think I'd ever be able to do that unless I won the lottery."

"We're supposed to be enhanced, too," Michelle said, looking at her hands as if she expected them to turn into tentacles. "To make it easier for us to travel in space."

I looked at Lorraine because something was changing about her. "Lorraine, how old are you?"

"Rude," Jane whispered.

"No, no," I quickly said, "you had fully gray hair when you walked up to us." I pointed at her head. "You're almost blond, now."

Lorraine reached a hand up and pulled a lock in front of her eyes. "Son of a..." She touched her face and looked at the back of her hand. "My wrinkles are gone, too." She had been a little stooped over, and straightened her back with a smile. "No more arthritis. That's an enhancement I can get behind."

"Fountain of youth," Kevin said. "So, we live forever, now?"

"My alien friend was pretty old. I don't know about forever, but I think you'll have as long as you want."

"As long as I want," Lorraine muttered. She'd been youthening in front of us, and now she was looking like she could have stepped off a fitness catalogue. She started walking away, I suppose to her home. "Excuse me," she called back to us. "I guess I'll see you around." She waved and skipped off.

"Wonder what else we can do." Michelle looked up into the sky as if she was going to take off, Superman-style.

"I already tried that," Jane said, guessing her thoughts. "Can't fly yet."

"Shucks." Michelle looked over at me. "So, what are the qualities the C.O.I.L. wants to see going forward?"

"Acceptance of the situation," I said without thinking. My mind went a little blank as I kept reciting. "Willingness to participate in cultural exchange, a certain degree of friendliness, some intelligence, wisdom and curiosity."

Michelle looked at me as if I was growing a new head. "You're getting all that right now, aren't you?"

I nodded. "Yeah." I didn't know how I was getting it, but all of that information was being relayed directly into my brain. I grinned and looked over at Jane. "Do you know how to fly a helicopter?"

She grinned back at me. "I do now."

Kevin looked at her in surprise. "Really?"

"Nah, it's just a line from an old movie," Jane said, waving a hand at him. Yep, I knew who I wanted to spend eternity with. "We won't need helicopters, right, Cal?"

"I don't think so. My friend Bilbette teleported or walked wherever she went."

Jane smirked at the mention of my friend's name. "Bilbette?"

I bobbed my head around like an embarrassed doll. "Yeah, she was a Halfling thief, so, you know..." Jane snickered, but to the other two, I might as well have been speaking in Klingon. "She said we couldn't pronounce her real name."

"Okay," Michelle said, slowly. I could see that she was the kind of person who likes to stay on track, and this conversation was so far off the rails we couldn't even see the track anymore. "So, we're going to be able to teleport?"

"That'd be my guess. I'm sure they'll have some kind of orientation for us." Michelle was wondering how the hell I made the cut, and thinking that it was obvious that eloquence was not one of the qualities the C.O.I.L. was looking for. I didn't have telepathy, yet – you could see that in her face. "We have time to figure things out, anyway. After we say goodbye." That brought everybody down, which I was sorry for, especially in Jane's case. "Do you guys have plans for the... the next two months?"

"Most of my family's in town," Kevin said. "I got some friends I'm gonna say goodbye to, but I don't know what I'm gonna do with myself for most of the time. I'm a plumber; nobody's gonna care if their plumbing don't work now."

"Depends on what plumbing you're talking about," Jane said, nudging me in the ribs with an elbow. I was so glad she was left behind, because she was going to have my babies and we were all going to live in space together. "I really haven't got anybody. My folks are dead, my sister hates me and I don't know any of my parent's families in China. Most of my friends have already made these elaborate plans to tour the world with their families, but I don't think that's gonna be fun, you know?"

"Yeah, my gaming buddies are doing the extended tour thing, too. I need to see my family back in Omaha, but I'm thinking that might be near the end." That made me mist up, and the others were quiet for a minute to let me get my composure back.

"I've got a lot of people to say goodbye to," Michelle said after my lips stopped wobbling. "But the visits might be kind of boring, when you come right down to it. Who's going to want to work in a restaurant or theater in their last few weeks on earth?"

"I'm sure there'll be some people doing that to the bitter end," I said. "Especially the live theaters. Actors are crazy."

"Man, can you imagine being people working on a movie now?" Jane shook her head. "Or writers who haven't finished their books? Not having the time to finish your dreams." We were all quiet again as the new world order became real to us. You couldn't go out and buy things if the people who sold you those things weren't around to sell them. Who was going to wait tables when they had two months to live? Who was going to run the Internet? Who was going to keep the power on?

"Do you think we're going to be able to handle the transition period?" Kevin's face needed some blood, and I patted him on the shoulder. "Who's going to be going in to work?"

"I'm sure the Fhh-bop-uh took all this into account," I said, trying to sound reassuring and failing. "They've done this before." I concentrated for a minute, and the plan starting coming to me. "Power will be kept on by Fhh-bop-uh generators, although people will have to start using the teleporters as soon as possible, because fossil fuels will no longer be shipped. Internet functions will transition to the nanite cloud that is C.O.I.L. standard. Food and other necessities will be available from matter transmutation units that are currently being stationed around the world, no further than a thirty-minute walk for any human. Congregation centers will be made available in every concentration of at least 100 humans for purposes of socializing. Schools will..." I faltered at the thought of all the children that were marked, and Jane picked up for me.

"Schools will be closed until a new educational system for young humans can be devised. There may be little need of this, due to the changing nature of human existence," Jane finished for me. "This will be evaluated post-transition."

None of us could look at each other.

Michelle finally broke the silence. "I know that none of you are intending to go to work, but would you all like to get together later?" She smiled widely, and it made a huge difference in her appearance. She had a severe face, but as soon as you saw her pearlies, Michelle could have been a movie star. "Maybe we can plan the future of the Earth."

"I'm free tonight," Jane said, and that decided me.

"Me, too."

Kevin pulled his phone out and looked through his schedule. "After seven?" The rest of us agreed. "I guess I'm in."

"Great." Michelle looked down the street. "Wish we could have gotten Lorraine, too."

"Maybe by tonight, we'll have telepathy," I said. They all laughed, but I wasn't joking. "If we do, first one to realize it gets hold of Lorraine, deal?"

"Deal," they all said.

I asked, "Should we all put our hands in a circle and yell 'Break'?"

"No," Michelle said with a roll of the eye. "But, where are we going to meet tonight?"

I pointed up at my fourplex. "Right over there, unit forty-seven D. I'll have snacks."

"Sounds good," Jane said, moving off to her own home. "See you guys tonight."

Kevin waved and said goodbye, and then Michelle and I were left alone. I asked, "Want some breakfast?"

"What have you got?"

"Eggs, bacon..." I tried to picture the contents of my refrigerator, which was surprisingly easy. "Some mushrooms, spinach and cheese; I could make a couple of omelets."

"I'm sold," she said, waving me forward. "I wonder if we'll change enough to where we don't eat any more."

"Bilbette carried snacks with her every game night, so I'm guessing we'll still like to eat, even if we don't have to." I smiled. "Plus, I'm pretty sure we won't have to worry about how healthy something is."

"That'll be nice." She patted her backside, which didn't look half bad to me, but I'm not picky. "No more worrying about a gym membership." As we walked up the stairs to my place, she asked, "So, you played D&D with one of the aliens." I nodded. She finally gave in to the question that had probably been bugging her since we introduced ourselves. "What is that?"

"Dungeons and Dragons. It's a roleplaying game."

"Oh, a computer game?"

"No, it's a tabletop game. There are computerized aids for it, but we actually played OSRIC, which is a throwback to the earliest forms of the game. Bilbette and my group enjoyed the old-school style of play, which was more focused on imagination and less on the rules and..." I had lost her at tabletop. "It's fun. We'll play it sometime." I thought of my friends and sighed. "I'm gonna need a new group, after all."

She touched me on the shoulder. "It's going to be strange while we figure out the new world; new universe." We arrived at my door and I let her in. She looked around and nodded. "No food or underwear lying on the floor; you have a girlfriend?"

I snorted. "What part of computer nerd did you not understand about my introduction?"

She laughed, flashing her smile at me again, and I have to say that my fickle little heart was having second thoughts about Jane. I went into the kitchen and attempted to pull things from the fridge with my mind, which gave Michelle another chance to laugh at me. I gave up and assembled omelet components the old-fashioned way, and she walked over to give me a hand. "I'll grate the cheese," she said, looking through my cabinets and drawers. "If you'll tell me where the grater is."

I pointed above the sink, where I had it hanging on a peg. "If it'd been a snake..."

"I'd have screamed and run from your apartment."

"Like so many women before you."

I was totally killing with her. I'd pegged Michelle as a severe, serious person when I saw her, but she was guffawing the entire time we cooked the omelets. It might have been nerves, but the laughter sounded genuine to me. Once the food was done, I poured us some orange juice and we sat down at the table to eat.

"So, what did you do?" She was digging into her omelet with a good appetite, which did my heart good. "For work, I mean."

She wiped her mouth and held her hand in front of her face as a shield to keep me from seeing her chew, which I've never understood, but is supposed to be polite. "I teach business administration at Howard." She paused, swallowed, then added, "Taught. Will we even need businesses after the change?"

"People had businesses in Star Trek."

"You're not making me feel better."

"Well, they were a post-scarcity society, too, where all necessities and most other things could be made out of thin air using waste atoms and their limitless energy supply. People still had vineyards and taught and performed live theater and wrote and ran restaurants and tons of other things."

She set down her fork and reached a hand over to pat mine. It was condescending and endearing at the same time. "You do realize that was just a TV show, right?"

I stared at her in grim silence for a minute before sighing heavily and saying, "Yes, Miss Buzzkill. My point is that we've got a role model to look at, and draw ideas from."

"Role model." I nodded. "Star Trek." Another nod. "I am not going to be Uhura." Then she cackled madly, and I had to join in, because, yes, damn it, I had already envisioned her in the short skirt. She calmed back down in a minute and returned to her omelet. She considered what I had said, though. "So, intellectual property. Methods and procedures of doing things will be very important – a hand-made item will be of more value than one we can make with a machine."

"As long as there's creativity involved in the making, or some kind of unique quality that only you could bring to it. That's what we're going to value, now; the unique qualities of each individual."

"Sounds a little utopian to me," Michelle said, finishing her last bite and swigging down some orange juice to chase it.

"That's what we're building," I said, "a utopia."

"On the bodies of the rest of the human race."

"That's why it's got to be a utopia," I said, finishing my own breakfast. "It's got to be worth that sacrifice."

After breakfast, Michelle and I turned on the TV to see what kind of news was coming out. I know it was recorded and you can play it any time you want, but I'm glad that I caught the president's news conference live. Seeing her struggle with the reality of what had just gone down, with her desire to comfort the nation as opposed to her own desire to just step away and be with her family, because she had been marked – the way she handled it all made me proud to be an American. I had to grab a box of tissues a couple of minutes in, and Michelle and I needed another before she was done.

"And to those who will be left behind," she said in her conclusion. "You now represent us all. You are our legacy to the universe. Do us proud." She looked over at her teleprompter and then back at the camera. "That's all the prepared remarks, folks. Depending on how well we're all doing in these last couple of months, I may or may not be back in front of you. I would just like to say that it's been an honor to lead this great nation as its final president, and I hope that the American left behinds will be a force for democracy and freedom in the Coalition; show 'em how it's done, y'all." She let out her breath, gave the people at home her highest-wattage smile, and exited with, "God bless us all. Goodbye."

Well, I was a wreck. Michelle wasn't much better. We sat on my couch, holding each other and wiping our eyes for a good ten minutes after the speech was over. It was cathartic. "You know it's only going to get worse," Michelle said, getting up to throw away the mound of used tissues around us. "That was someone we don't even know. I don't even want to face my family."

"I'm saving mine for near the end, and I'm not sure how I'm gonna get through that."

She flopped back down on the couch next to me. "Well, at least we left-behinders have got each other."

"That's what we're goin' with? Left-behinders? Really?"

My disdain made her cross her arms over her chest and lean back. "You think you can do better?"

"Maybe." I thought about it for a bit. "The un-raptured? The remainders. The Tomorrow People – no, that's way too geeky for most people." I conceded. "OK, but I reserve the right to change it once I think up something better."

"Deal." She leaned back in, a lot closer to me than she was before, and I felt the pleasant heat of her body next to mine.

I'll just stop here to say that, in spite of all nerd stereotypes, I have gotten laid. I've had girlfriends. I just didn't have one at that time, is all. I had a lot to do at work, and my social life was usually just gaming with my buds. But, I have talked to women before.

Still, sitting there next to Michelle, I suddenly turned into my fifteen-year old self again. That part of me wanted to do the yawn thing where my arm would end up around her shoulders, but the adult part of me was screaming at me to just chill out. It was an emotional situation, we were both worked up, and I was reading too much into someone just enjoying simple human companionship.

That's when she did the yawn thing and put her arm across my shoulders.

I'm reluctant to say that sweat instantly leapt from every pore in my body, but I will admit that my heart rate doubled and my mouth went a little dry. Just to test the waters, I put my hand on her thigh and lowered my shoulder into her armpit. She turned her head to me and smiled, and I no longer felt like the fifteen-year old, I felt like a grown man who had lucked completely out. I smiled back at her, and she kissed me ever-so-tenderly on the lips.

"Look," she said, placing her free hand on the one I had on her leg, "I want you to understand. We're both in a high-stress situation, we have the most important thing in the world right now in common, and," her voice lowered and octave, "it's been a while." My smile got wider, as did hers. "I'm not saying we're going to do anything, or we're going to have a relationship, but I need some human contact and so far, you've been a nice guy."

"I, I am," I stammered. Back to the fifteen-year old. "I am a nice guy."

"You're cute, too," she said, raising her hand from mine and stroking my cheek. I'm pretty sure my entire face turned red from the touch. She kissed me again, and I probably did that cartoon thing where the guy keeps his pucker after the girl has stepped away, because I was totally lost in the moment. When I noticed that no one was on the end of my lips, I opened my eyes to see her flipping through my music collection with the remote. "Do you have anything good?"

"I think it's all good," I said, pointing at artists I loved that she was idly flipping by. The screen was practically a blur as she vetoed my musical tastes. "Maybe you need to broaden your horizons."

"Maybe we can stream something," she muttered. Finally, though, she found something that she liked. "Here we go," she said, as something from my electronica phase started playing softly from the TV. It was sensual and rhythmic, and she wiggled her butt to it as she snuggled in to my arms. "I played guitar in a band when I was in high school. We tried to keep it together when everybody went off to college and real life, but I think we only played three or four gigs that year, and we all knew it was over." She sighed, her breath flowing across my chest like a warm summer breeze. "It's just hard to say goodbye to something you've loved that much. To make up for giving that up, I only listen to things that I would have been proud to play." Michelle rested her cheek on my chest and looked up at me. "So, I'm a bit of a music snob."

"You're gonna have to play something for me."

"I am so out of practice," she said, shaking her head. "Is that why I'm not marked? Because I played guitar?"

"Well," I mused, "our primary importance to the C.O.I.L. is cultural, so it makes sense that creative, artistic types would be the people they want to integrate into their society the most. I'm sure we'll find that most of the left behinders are going to be creative in some way." I shook my head. "That is way too much of a mouthful. What if we call it L to the B'd?"

"Do not make me hurt you."

"L-B'd. Elbied." I nodded. "Yeah, and we can be the Elbies." She raised her eyebrows at me. "E-l-b-i-e d or s. Biggety bam, baby."

She stared at me with the tiniest eensy-beensy smirk at the corner of her mouth. "It's going to take a lot of work to make that catch on."

"I'll put it on a picture of a cat, it'll be all over the net in no time." I pulled out my tablet and 'shopped 'I can be Elbied?' onto an adorable kitty, then posted it up on the appropriate cat-centric sites. I typed in an explanation, shut my tablet down and put my hands behind my head. "My contribution to humanity's future is complete."

"You can die happy now, huh?"

"Not even." She put one hand around my shoulders and the other went to a place that had been unvisited for a few months. "Maybe now," I squeaked.

We turned off our phones, and I turned off all messaging notifications on my TV and tablet. We were still on day one, and we took a couple of hours for each other. Yes, it was selfish, but we were hardly the only two people on Earth doing the same thing. There was time to devote to others later. That time, that morning and early afternoon, was ours.

Social obligations at the end of the world can't be ignored forever, though, and Michelle felt them tug at her too much to stay all day. At two-ish, she showered and dressed and kissed me goodbye. "See you tonight," she said, smiling down at my exhausted self. "We might make more progress than just coming up with a name for ourselves."

"Branding is a major accomplishment in the corporate world."

She slapped me lightly on the thigh and headed to my front door. "Bye, Cal."

I heard the door shut and the only power I wanted was the ability to move time forward to bring her back. I put my clothes on and went into my living room, turning on all the notifiers I'd turned off earlier. There were messages from twenty people, some of whom I hadn't seen in years. There was even an ex-girlfriend in the mix, and when I listened to her sweetly ask me to call her back, I could tell that she had been marked, and my heart ached for her pain. I listened to all of them, and none had been elbied, and I sat and sobbed for their loss before I began calling them back. I started with my dad, because that was the one that I knew would break me, and I wanted to get it over with before moving on to anyone else. I turned on my TV and the cam on it and told it to call dad for a video conference. I had just got him his TV cam the year before, and went back to Omaha to install it, but he didn't have the hang of the thing yet.

He was mostly off-camera when he answered. He looked like he hadn't bathed or bothered to pick out anything to wear; just sat there in a white T and his boxers. "Cal," he said, looking at the image of me on his screen. When he sensed that I was elbied, there was a rush of emotion to his face; pride, sadness, curiosity, even a little anger, though that quickly disappeared. "It's good to see that something of us is going to live on," Dad finally said. His voice shook a little bit, and I felt the sting behind my eyeballs that presaged the waterworks getting turned back on. "At least I'll be able to join your mother."

That was it. My vision blurred up as tears started running down my face. "I plan on being in Omaha at the... well, at the end." I choked out, "To be with you." I cleared my throat and wiped futilely at my eyes. "Have you talked to David?"

"He's been marked, as well. Melissa and Bobby, too." He pulled a tissue from a box near him and blew his nose loudly. "They've got a few people they wanna say goodbye to in Chicago, then them and Melissa's folks are going to come to Omaha and spend the last month here. We'll have a little family reunion."

I nodded. I hadn't seen my brother and his family since the last Christmas and the last time I'd seen his wife's parents was at my brother's wedding. "What about the Finches? Are they gonna come around, too?"

"They're going to visit, but they're not going to stay, except for your cousin Stacey." The corner of his mouth went up. "She said she saw enough of the world during her service and she just wants to relax with people she loves now."

"Relax." I shook my head. "Not exactly what you'd normally call the end of the world."

"Compared with some of the things she saw in Eritrea, maybe it is."

"Yeah, maybe." We sat in silence for a minute, just looking at each other. If I'd been with him, I would have given him a hug. I saw a tear fall from his eye, and I blinked hard, willing myself not to follow suit. "Dad..."

He sucked in air and steadied himself. "So, we'll see you next month." Control was restored, and he smiled at me. "Thanksgiving. I just realized." He laughed. "I'm not the cook your mother was, but I'll try to make a nice dinner for us all."

"We'll all lend a hand."

He nodded, his face falling off frame with the movement. "I'll let you get back to it. I love you, son."

"I love you, too, dad." I could barely force the words past the lump in my throat. He cut the signal, and I was returned to the dial screen on my video chat software. I whipped out my tissues and went through a couple. I hoped that would be the worst, but I still had my brother to talk to; my brother, with the four-year old son that he and his wife called their little miracle after he'd been conceived only through medical intervention.

I decided to have a drink.

After a stiff whiskey, I felt even more emotional. I should've learned the lesson from my college days that alcohol solves no problems, but you reach for any crutch when you need help standing up. I left the bottle in the pantry and went back to my TV. Making sure my tissues were right next to me, I told the machine, "Call David Minkowski."

My brother, a less-blond version of me with more facial hair, popped up on the screen. As soon as he saw me, he whispered, "Wow." He looked down, disbelief and shock taking his voice. I gave him a minute to find it, and he did. He looked back up at me and said, "At least one of us made it." I nodded, still unable to speak. "What's it like?"

"So far, not that different. There've been a couple of times I've felt like I've got Google in my head, but the telepathy and telekinesis haven't showed up yet."

David snapped his fingers. "Shucks, I was hoping you could do some tricks for Bobby."

"I'll work on it."

David looked off-screen for a minute, and I heard his wife Melissa say something to him. "Yeah, just gimme a minute, honey," he said to her. Back to me, he said, "Hey, we're gonna be hanging around Chicago this month, then heading to Omaha in November."

"Yeah, that's what Dad said."

"You gonna be there?"

My eyes were giving me trouble again. "Wouldn't miss it."

He smiled. "The Minkowski boys, back in town. We'll cause some damage." His small son, Bobby, toddled over and David picked him up and held him in his lap, hugging him tight. I couldn't help it; I sobbed loudly and uncontrollably. "Now, don't you start," David said, grabbing a tissue and dabbing at his eyes.

"Why's Uncle Cal crying, Daddy?"

That made me sob again. David hugged his little guy and told him, "He has to say goodbye to us and that makes him really sad."

"It's okay, Uncle Cal," Bobby said, leaning forward to the camera. "We're all gonna get backed up, the aliens said so. We don't gotta worry about nothin'." He smiled brightly, and I struggled to control myself. "You get to stay, so as long as you're around, we'll be around. Unnerstand?"

I blinked back the tears and nodded. "Got it. I won't be sad."

"Good." He hopped off David's lap and said, "I'm gonna go play now."

I hastily dried my eyes as David did the same. I tried to think of football or funny jokes or anything that would stop me crying. "Hey, so, uh..." I cast wildly around for any subject that wouldn't set us off. "What are you gonna do with your business?"

"I only have the three employees, if you don't count Melissa."

"You better count her, or she'll hit ya."

"Eh, she'll do that anyway." On cue, a fist appeared from off-screen and thwapped him a good one on the arm. He blew a kiss to the fist's owner and turned back to me. "Anyway, I already told them that accountants are probably not going to be necessary in the brave new world, so they can just consider the next two months their vacation time." He spread his arms wide. "The Fhh-bop-uh have taken care of everything. We'll have food, power, Internet, transportation, shelter, cuz who the hell's gonna foreclose on us now, and their little social centers all over the place so we won't be bored. We get to go out in style." He smiled sadly at me, and I thought about football again. "How many people get to do that?"

"Did I tell you I know one of them?"

He looked confused. "What? Who?"

"One of the Fhh-bop-uh. She played D&D with us."

He squeaked, "And you didn't invite me down? I thought we were brothers!"

"When was the last time you played?"

"College, like that matters. I would pick up the dice again for a chance to game with an alien. I mean, c'mon!" He threw his hands up in utter disbelief at my faux pas. He asked Melissa, "You'd understand a weekly trip to DC, wouldn't you, honey?"

From off-camera, I heard her shout, "What?"

"If I was goin' to game with an alien. What nerd could resist that?" He shook his head again at my churlishness. "I don't even know if we can be brothers, now, man."

I held up the tablet I'd gotten from Bilbette. "Alien technology. I'll let you play with this when I get to Omaha."

His eyes widened. "Okay, you're forgiven. What can it do?"

"Two words – personal-holodeck."

He gave out a shuddering breath and leaned off-camera. "Melissa, I won't be seeing much of you once Cal gets to Omaha. Fair warning."

Melissa appeared on my screen and shoved him out of the way. "Don't mess with his head, Cal. I only need it for two more months, you can give me that."

"You're taking away one of my great pleasures in life."

"Deal with it."

"Okay." I smiled at my sister-in-law, the woman who'd had to brave the sausage-fest that was the Minkowski family way too long to be normal. "How you doin', Mel?"

"Okay, considering." She gazed at me with a motherly eye and asked, "How about you?"

"Today's had its ups and downs, I gotta tell ya." I scootched forward in my seat and whispered, "I met a lady today."

"Met a lady or," she added some bass to her voice, "met a lady?"

"Both, I guess." I grinned like an idiot.

"Is she..." Melissa waved her hands back and forth, and even though my telepathy had still not kicked in, I knew what she meant.

"She's an elbie, too."

"A what?"

"Elbie. You know, left behind, L-B – elbie." I shrugged, embarrassed. "I'm still tryin' to make it catch on."

"I'll be sure to use it in all my correspondence," she said, waving her sarcasm flag proudly. "Is she nice?"

"She's great," I gushed, only then realizing how much I'd fallen for Michelle. "She teaches – taught business at a college here in town, cried with me during the president's speech, and she's... she's cool." I smiled at Melissa. "Totally not a nerd."

"I guess the end of the world makes people desperate," Melissa said, and David poked her for me. That's what brothers are for. "How'd you meet her?"

"Most of my neighborhood turned out this morning for the marking; when everybody who was marked left, there was a handful of us standing around, and we started talking. We all made plans to meet up at seven tonight, and everybody else rushed off to make plans or whatever, and Michelle was still there, and I invited her up for breakfast, and... you know." I refrained from spilling the deets in order to spare my big sis-in-law the image of her little bro-in-law getting intimate with someone. "We don't know if it's gonna be something permanent, but it was nice today."

Melissa was smiling at me, a wistful look on her face. "I'm glad that you have somebody, Cal. Nobody should be alone now." Bobby came running up to her and hopped in her lap. "Just in time," she said to him. "Say goodbye to Uncle Cal."

"Bye, Uncle Cal." He blew me a kiss, then slid off her lap and ran off to play again.

"We'll see you next month," Melissa said, blowing me a kiss, too. "Dave, say goodbye to your brother."

David's head poked back on-screen. "Bye, Uncle Cal." He blew me a kiss, and I cracked up.

"Love you guys," I said, choking up yet again. "See you next month." I cut the connection before I became a huge blubbering mess. I knew that Thanksgiving was gonna be one big sob-fest.

I checked the clock on my tablet and I still had hours before the meetup. Just for grins, I tried to contact Lorraine telepathically. I thought about her and whispered her name, and when I did, the tablet in my hands lit up. I was so surprised I nearly dropped it. A picture of Lorraine was on the screen, and I was freaked completely out. I had to fight down screaming like a co-ed in a slasher film when the tablet asked me, "Would you like to access the neural communication network for this human?"

"Uhmmm... yes?"

The image blurred and resolved into a nicely-furnished, clean kitchen. A delicate, lovely hand stirred sugar and cream into a cup of tea. I could feel satisfaction, but also a sense of loss. She was thinking about a man she'd known, and wondering if she would be able to find him again, and before the thoughts turned to something I was going to be embarrassed about, I said, "Lorraine?" The hand let go of the spoon, and, through her eyes, I saw her whirl around in the kitchen. Before she could start doubting her sanity, I said, "It's Cal Minkowski, from this morning. After you left, the rest of us decided to get together tonight at 7 at my place. The first one of us that developed telepathy was supposed to let you know." I could feel excitement and fear from her, her heart beating a mile a minute, the thrill of a superpower making her stand up and walk over to the door.

"Which place is yours?" She opened her front door and look down the street. I pictured my place from her vantage point, but didn't say anything. I held the image firm in my head, and I could feel her happiness when she looked straight at my apartment. "That one."

"Yeah."

"O, brave new world that has such people in it," she thought. Scenes of Shakespeare flooded into my head, along with cross references from her own life that I didn't understand. Too much was coming over for me to process.

"I think I'm going to disconnect and maybe practice some more, Lorraine. Telepathy's a little harder than I thought it would be. See you at seven."

"You're tellin' me." She chuckled, and an image of my thoughts flashed through her head. "That Michelle's a cutie, isn't she?"

"Okay, we're gonna have to discuss some boundaries on telepathy."

"Obviously." She chuckled. "See you at seven, loverboy."

I touched the tablet and the connection was broken; I was alone in my head again. Having someone else share it was definitely the weirdest thing that I had ever experienced. And I had played D&D with an alien.

Before I could stop myself, I thought of Michelle, and contacting her, and there was her picture on the screen. "Would you like to access the neural communication network for this human?"

My heart rate increased again as I thought about the huge turn-off stalking usually was for women, but my dry lips whispered, "Yes, please," and a book held by soft, dark hands appeared on the screen. She was sad; the book had been given to her by her father, whom she had just talked to. One of the hands reached up to wipe a tear from her face, and she suddenly felt like she was being watched, which of course, she was. Before everything got too creepy, I said, "Michelle, it's Cal."

She set the book down and touched her head. "So, we are going to develop telepathy."

"I think we are, but I cheated. My alien friend gave me an alien tablet, and I'm using it to access what they call the 'neural communication network'. It's freaky, I gotta tell ya."

"I can feel what you feel." She smiled at my apprehension at contacting her. "It is kind of stalkery behavior, but I know why you did it." Mischief popped into her brain. "Even if you did get hold of Lorraine first."

"Hey, we all agreed on that..."

She laughed, and the sparkle of her mirth filled my soul up. Before I could suppress the thought, I envisioned sex enhanced by this device, and Michelle's amusement overcame my embarrassment. "You're right, this could be very interesting to take into the bedroom. Maybe we'll try it tonight."

It was like having a warm glow spread through my body, that moment when I fell in love. I knew that she felt it happening to me, and she didn't shy away or feel discomfort. "I think we need to watch ourselves, when we use this," I told her. "Talk about being an open book."

She picked up her father's book again, and when she held it to her breast, it was like she was holding me, too. "You know, Cal, maybe once we can feel what it's like to be another person, we'll all fall in love with each other. Maybe all us elbies are inherently loveable by design. But I want you to know that even if I love every other elbie in the world now, you'll always be special to me." I felt my heart ready to burst from the feedback loop of my emotion to her, her emotion to me. I felt higher than any alcohol or drug has ever gotten me, and she was just as overwhelmed. "This is heady stuff."

"I know. I'd better cut off before we merge into one."

She chuckled at the image in my mind as I said that. "See you tonight, Cal."

"Bye." I cut the connection and tried to sort my thoughts back into some kind of order. I didn't want to try that again soon. I didn't know if we were going to go all Borg, but I still felt Michelle's thoughts in my head, still felt her presence in me, and it was both scary and amazing.

I'd had enough of baking my brain and making myself cry, and there was still time before the meetup, so I walked outside for a breath of air. From my upstairs apartment door, I could see the social center that the Fhh-bop-uh had dropped in my neighborhood, and it was packed. I didn't know how they'd react to me being there, but I decided to go see what it was like.

Imagine the loudest, most good-natured wake in existence. People crying, laughing, hugging, singing, drinking heavily – every form of celebration humanity has ever devised. Throw in food, music and anything that could come out of the matter transmutation machines, and that was the social center. I could smell the pot and alcohol yards away, and the contact high hit me as soon as I walked under the tented canopy. A lot of people spent their social time in churches at the end; most people were gathered in the social centers, having fun. Families had used the teleporters for the first time, and as I watched, someone zapped in to the huge teleporter that now occupied all of the road a block from my apartment. She blinked at her new surroundings, then pumped her fists and let out a whoop as she ran to the social center. "That was the coolest thing ever," she shouted at people who applauded and cheered her. Several offered her drinks, and she was surrounded by people who wanted to hear what teleportation was like. A couple of people hesitantly went over to try the machine themselves.

A man saw me and walked over. "Jim Brand," he said, sticking his hand out for a shake.

"Cal Minkowski."

After we shook, he looked me up and down. "What's it like?"

He didn't have to clarify; I was the only unmarked person there. "Sad, right now," I said. "I haven't gotten any super powers, yet. And I'm sayin' goodbye to a lot of people."

He sipped at his cup and nodded. "Yeah, I hate goodbyes. Called my kids this morning and cried like a little baby. I even cried for my ex-wife, and I gotta tell ya, I hate that bitch." He looked like the emotion was going to hit him again. "But, I ain't got nobody else now, and these places are all over the frickin' world. No work, no need for money, it's gonna be a two-month party, brother!" Jim let out a loud yell, which was echoed by several other people in the center. A few heads turned in our direction, and they all noted that I was elbied.

I don't know what it was that allowed us to tell whether someone was marked, but it was immediately apparent, whether you saw them or just heard their voice. A little sixth sense gift from the Fhh-bop-uh. Since violent tendencies were being suppressed, there shouldn't have been any danger. Still, it was a little unnerving to be the only one of my kind at that social center. Especially when people started crowding around me.

The most common thing they wanted to know was the same thing Jim had asked – "What's it like?" I wished I could have flown in the air or something, or that I'd brought my tablet so I could demonstrate telepathy, but there was nothing fun I could do for them.

The second-most asked question was the hard one. "Why'd you make it?" The first one to ask me that was a short, dark-haired mother with two children clinging to her legs, and I did not have a good answer for her. The official C.O.I.L. line sounded pretty pathetic to someone whose kids were never going to grow up. "How can they just say somebody's not what they want in their precious coalition when they haven't even had a chance to grow up, yet?" She hugged her children tight to her, and all I could do was bow my head and mutter my apologies.

Jim came to my rescue, though. "C'mon, lady, it's not like he made the choice. I mean, geez, even the president got marked, and you know that she had to have been lobbying hard against that!" That got a dry chuckle from everybody around us; Washington loves a good jab at the politicians. He gave her a hug, and her kids looked up at him and gave him a hug, and I didn't think I was going to be visiting a social center again anytime soon. "I'll get you guys something," Jim said, leading them off to the matter transmutation machine. "What kinda toys you guys like?"

The crowd around me thinned after that, which I was grateful for. I moved outside the big tent to look at the sky and try to get hold of myself, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. It belonged to a man who had about a decade on me, but was in much better shape and even better clothes. I shook his hand and he said, "Gil Worthington."

"Cal. Cal Minkowski."

He looked up at the sky, as I'd just been doing. "Can't say I don't envy you, Cal. But, and this may just be something the aliens did to us, I have some peace about it. I spent my whole life chasing the bucks, and now that doesn't mean anything." He wasn't sad; he was wistful, I think it's called. "I had a husband once, because it looks better to be paired off with somebody, but I didn't pay any attention to him. He left me four years ago for somebody who did." He had a drink that I could smell was very alcoholic, and he took a sip. "I called him today; he's one of you, but his new man isn't. He was heartbroken. Much more so than when he left me. It made me realize that I share something in common with you." He took a longer sip. "All my money, I couldn't buy any more love then, and I can't buy any more life now. All the power you guys have, and you can't save anyone, no matter how you feel about them." He drained his cup and stood there, letting the alcohol take him away.

I had to ask, "If you're rich, what are you doing in this neighborhood?"

"Went home with a guy last night," he said, pointing at one of the condos down the road. "I didn't want to be alone. I just wanted some human contact." He looked at his cup and then at the matter transmutation machine, obviously wanting more. "Can I buy you a drink?"

"No, thanks," I said. "I think I'm gonna head back home."

His face turned red, and he stammered out, "I didn't mean – "

"I didn't take it like that," I said quickly. "Thanks for the offer, really. I just... I feel like I'm intruding."

He nodded. "I guess, to you, it's sort of like a wake for an acquaintance. Do you have family?"

"In Omaha, Nebraska. I'll be seeing them next month."

"You won't be intruding, then. It's good to have family." Something dark crossed his eyes, but he dismissed it with a blink. I hesitate to say what I would have read if I'd been using telepathy on him then. "Well, good luck with the new world, Cal." He stuck his hand out again, and I shook it. "Remember us."

"I will." I waved, and he turned back to join the press of people that were celebrating their lives and commiserating their loss. I wished that I could have joined them, but felt ashamed that I wasn't able.

Time slowed down for me as I waited for seven o'clock to roll around. I thought about telepathizing again, but the only one I really wanted to do that with was Michelle, and even I knew that was way too needy.

I surfed the Internet for a while. Forum chat was in-sane. Literally. Every crazy person in the world must have acquired access to a computer, because the normally insane places were packed with the crazy, and the usually sane ones had some crazy spillover. Yeesh. I gave up after the fifteenth accusation of being an alien quisling and loaded up an old video to kill the last hour.

Fifteen to seven, there was a knock on my door. I jumped up and opened it for Michelle, who hugged me and gave me a kiss. "I would have been earlier, but it's been a rough few hours." Her eyes were puffy and her voice had a scratch to it, and that told me all I needed to know.

I took her to the couch and we held each other for a few minutes, just to let go of the day and recharge. We lost all track of time, and jumped when the doorbell rang. I gave her a kiss on the cheek and went to the door, opening it up for Lorraine and Jane. "OK, who got telepathy first?" Jane asked.

"I did, but it was only through a cheat," I told her, ushering them in. "My alien friend gave me something that accesses what the Fhh-bop-uh call the neural communication network. I actually want to see if we can kind of do a conference call once Kevin gets here; get our hive-mind on."

"Sounds cool," Jane said, obviously excited. She was so cute; I hoped that Michelle didn't mind that I was still totally turned on by Jane. I didn't know if she'd seen that in me in our earlier connection. I mean, Michelle was still first in my heart at this time, but Jane was a really close second.

Don't judge me.

"It is," both Michelle and Lorraine said.

Jane looked back at me. "How come I didn't get a call?"

I looked at Michelle, who shrugged at me. Vixen. "It's a really intense experience, and after Michelle, I was totally exhausted."

"Really?" Jane looked over at Michelle, who smiled broadly.

"What can I say?" Michelle spread her arms and winked at me, and everybody cracked up. I went and got some snackage and drinks for everybody while the girls bunched up on my couch. Lorraine kept some distance, but Jane and Michelle were close as sisters, which brought up both uncomfortable thoughts and porn scenarios in my mind. I was really going to be embarrassed if that came out during the mind-meld.

"Is this okay for everybody?" I had Coke, Sprite, root beer and water, and assorted chips, dips and veggies that were leftovers from game night. Nerds know how to snack.

"It's great," Michelle said, grabbing some carrots and ranch. "Breakfast was good, but we skipped lunch."

"Oh, yeah, that's right." I wasn't feeling hungry till she said that, but my stomach growled once the suggestion hit it. "Maybe I should run down to the social center and get some pizzas."

"Or you could mind-zap Kevin and get him to pick it up. Late guy gets the food." Michelle picked up my tablet where I'd laid it down earlier. She concentrated on it, and jumped when Kevin's image showed up on the screen. "Whoa."

"Don't play with other people's toys unless you understand 'em," I told her.

"Would you like to access the neural communication network for this human?"

Michelle craned her head around to me. "Would I?"

"Why not?" Lorraine and Jane were eager to see how it looked, and they nodded.

Michelle said to the tablet, "Yes." She swayed as contact was made between her and our tardy companion. The screen switched to Kevin's point of view; he was walking up to my apartment unit. "Kevin," she whispered, and the POV camera stopped. None of us heard his reply, but Michelle said, "We don't really have telepathy yet, but this is Michelle Barrett from this morning. Cal has an alien tablet from his alien friend, and it's letting us get into each other's minds." She paused, and we saw that Kevin was walking up to my door again. "Yeah, get up here. See you in a minute." She looked back at me. "How do I stop it?" I reached across her, brushing her skin with my arm and feeling the electric tingle of her, and tapped the disconnect icon. I had a feeling that the tablet was personalized for me so much that no one else would have guessed that's what that icon meant, but once I touched it, Michelle said, "Oh, of course." Part of her being in my head that afternoon, I suppose.

Kevin knocked on the door just a minute after, and I let him in. I gave him the comfy recliner, and I sat on the arm of the couch next to Michelle. I nudged her. "You forgot to tell him to pick up the pizza."

"It was only my second mind-meld, give me a break." She draped her arm across my thigh and leaned back against me. Noticing the mildly surprised looks from the others, she said, "We, uh..." She looked up at me for help.

"I was her first mind-meld today." Lorraine and Kevin hid smirks, while Jane sighed and looked away. "Hey, that reminds me – do we all do something artistic or creative? Michelle used to be in a band, and I write game modules. How about you guys?"

"I made a good living as a sculptor," Lorraine said. "I retired a couple of years ago because of my arthritis, but I've been thinking of starting up again all day."

Kevin said, "I play drums in a couple of bands around town. Nothin' I can quit my day job for, but it's fun and gets me free beer." We all laughed when he did an air rim shot for us.

We all turned to Jane, who shrugged. "I play five instruments and I sing," she said quietly. "What can I say, I had a tiger mom who wanted an overachiever." She sipped at her Coke and added, "I also composed some before I got my lobbying job."

"That's it," I said. "We are definitely playing Rock Band together." Everybody laughed and I stood up. "I doubt that anybody's delivering tonight, so why don't I pop around to the social center and pick us up some pizza?" That was agreeable to everybody, but I was going to end up getting five different pies when they each gave me their preferences.

"I'll come with," Michelle said, hopping up.

"More drinks in the fridge," I said to the others, "bathroom's on the left in the hall, don't watch the porn. We'll be back in a bit."

Michelle linked arms with me as we walked down the stairs to the driveway. The music from the social center was discordant and loud, and the place was even more packed than it had been earlier. It looked like lots of families were meeting there, and kids were running around having a great time. I squeezed Michelle's hand because the sight of the kids affected me, and she moved closer to me, kissing my arm and squeezing my hand back.

This trip, I wasn't the only Elbie in the center; several had apparently come to visit family members in the neighborhood, so Michelle and I didn't stand out that much, which I was grateful for. We got in line for the matter transmutation device and watched people pull out musical instruments, toys, fun clothes, and, of course, food.

When we were a couple of people from the front, I watched the people using the MTD to make sure I didn't look like an idiot when I was ordering. It was easy – vocal interface with an AI that asked for clarification if you weren't clear enough in your order. It seemed capable of anything. When we were second from the front, the guy at the machine got it to make him a solar-powered motorcycle. There was a pad beside the MTD interface for large-scale items, and the bike appeared there. It was beautiful and shiny, and he hopped on it with a howl and rode it off down the street.

"Lotta bucket lists getting items crossed off tonight," I said in Michelle's ear. The noise level around us was so high it was the only way to be sure she heard me. Not that I minded...

I bent my ear down to her, and she said, "I have a few things to tick off, myself. But, we have time." She nibbled my ear, which made me giggle. This attracted the attention of the woman in front of us, who noticed we were Elbies and wanted a word.

"So why are you here?" She stepped up to the MTD and asked it for several different plates of food. "Can't y'all just make things appear magically now?"

"No," Michelle said. "At least, not yet. Apart from feeling better physically, I can't really tell that we've been changed at all."

"Everybody feels better," the woman said. "I was in a hospital bed this morning. Aliens cured my cancer only to kill me in two months." She picked up the plates. "I want the cancer back." She stalked off, and I pulled Michelle up to the machine with me.

"Don't let it get to you," I told her. "It was a lot worse when I was in here earlier. I had a line of people wanting to know why I deserved to live."

Michelle slumped; she still kept hold of my hand, but the happiness just disappeared from her. We got the pizzas and walked back. I tried to get her to talk, but she wasn't in the mood. Back in my apartment, she was spared from talking by being able to eat. Everybody dug in and there wasn't much talk until we were all full.

"So," Lorraine asked. "What do we do with ourselves, now? I take it that the aliens want some kind of interaction with us, but how are we going to organize ourselves? Democratically?" She smiled, and only half-jokingly, said, "Dictatorially? Would it be easier to deal with the C.O.I.L. if they had to go through a despot?"

"I'm not sure how easy it would be for one person to pull an iron fist over a race of people who'll have the powers that the C.O.I.L. are promising," Jane said. "Of course, other than physical health and some flashes of insight, it's not like we've actually seen the abilities that they've promised. I trust them, but that could be something they've implanted in me, kind of like the non-violence they've seeded the marked with. Does anybody know if we have an out clause in the treaty we've signed with them?"

I thought for a minute. "Yes, individuals who do not subscribe to the values of the C.O.I.L. are not bound by its laws. There's a formal declaration you have to make, a promise of non-hostility towards the C.O.I.L., and then you're free to live as you wish. Now, there's a possibility that you'll have to leave this planet in order to do so, but you can live as you wish in space or on another planet. But why would they go through this elaborate deception in order to wipe us out? Why not just wipe us out? They clearly have the power."

"It could be a cultural thing," Kevin said. "Their god or their society says that outright killing is wrong; you have to make your victim comfortable and give him a chance to say goodbye before you do him in." He shrugged. "I mean, they are aliens, guys. We can't plan on them thinkin' like people."

Everybody nodded. It was a good point, but I had to say, "Bilbette, the alien I know, she seems a lot like people. Maybe it was an act, but she really seemed like my friend."

"Again, you can't subscribe human motives to them." Lorraine said. Jane and Kevin were in agreement with her, and I opened my mouth to defend the Fhh-bop-uh again when Michelle put her hand on my thigh to quiet me.

"I don't think there's any point in going round and round about whether they're deceiving us. If they are, there is nothing we can do about it. If they've been lying, we're already screwed. Let's face that, and move past it." The others had to admit the logic of that, and we all agreed. "So, if we take that off the table, we're left with us seeing a slow transition to supermen. That could be by design; you want to evolve the smart monkeys slowly so that they have a chance to get used to their new abilities. It's only been a day. We all may have wanted to start flying the minute the marking happened, but it's probably better that we just started off with feeling good." She pointed at Lorraine. "Am I right?"

Lorraine nodded. "Just being young again and not experiencing the various ailments I've been through for the last twenty or so years has been a huge change for me. The telepathy was pretty amazing, as well."

"Yeah," Kevin said, looking over at Michelle. I felt a little jealous, I admit, but I choked it down. It wasn't a good idea to enter the new world order riding the big green monster. "Cal, I know your alien friend gave you that, but do you think we could get one from the machines in the social centers?"

"We probably could," I said. "The couple of times I've been there, it hasn't seemed like the Fhh-bop-uh put any restrictions on what people could get out of them. We'd probably need to bring this one with us, for reference. I'm not sure that 'alien tablet' would get us exactly the result we wanted."

"I feel left out," Jane said with the most adorable little pout. "All you guys have gotten to do telepathy and I haven't."

I picked up my tablet and concentrated on her. When her face appeared on the screen, Michelle arched an eyebrow at me, but her little smile let me know it was all right. "Would you like to access the neural communication network for this human?"

"Yes," I said, and I was inside Jane's head. It was odd, because she sometimes thought in Chinese, which I could now understand. "How often do you think in Chinese?"

"Whenever I think of something my parents told me." Neither of us spoke. Each of us felt an odd attraction to everyone in the room; we were both horny nerds, and we each giggled a little at that.

"I'm gonna see if we can all get on this together," I said to the other people in the room. "Anybody have any objections?" None of them did, so I looked at my tablet and concentrated on each of them. The screen split into four sections, each containing one of the faces of my friends.

"Would you like to access the neural communication network for these humans?"

"Yes."

And with that, we were down the freakin' rabbit hole. Embarrassing thoughts, profound thoughts, emotional, restrained, deep, shallow; everything that was in us was open and accessible to all of the others. It was the most profoundly intimate and frighteningly public thing I had ever been a part of. Imagine an orgiastic psychiatric session, where you were not only naked and vulnerable but revealing your innermost self to everyone present. That's just a glimpse of what it was like.

We made the decision to disengage, finally, and I tapped the screen on my tablet to return us all to our own minds. We all sat there in the afterglow for a few minutes before any of us could gather the strength to speak. "You're going to let us know what sex with that is like, right?" We all turned to Lorraine in surprise and she turned red as we laughed.

Michelle went over and hugged her. "Yes, we will," she said quietly in her ear. "Why don't we – "

"Get everybody a tablet." I grabbed mine and headed for the door. "Anybody coming with me?" This time, they all got up to follow me to the social center. We walked closely together; we couldn't recreate the intimacy of the telepathy physically, but we all felt loathe to be apart from each other.

The social center was rockin' when we got there. We'd lost all track of time, and it was pretty late. The families had left and the people remaining were there to party. There were about 3 different bands of different musical genres playing, and dozens of dancers flinging themselves around without a care as to what they were dancing to. It was beautiful, if a little chaotic.

The line at the MTD was much shorter, now. It was mostly people getting alcohol, although I noticed that there weren't any sloppy drunks, or violent drunks, or really obnoxious drunks. Another gift from the Fhh-bop-uh. Where were they during my college days?

As the five of us waited in line, a woman who had clearly had a few sidled up to Kevin. "Hey, baby," she slurred at him. His eyes turned to plead for help to me, and I shrugged. I might love him like a brother now, but this was gonna be fun. "What's it feel like?" She threw an arm clumsily over his shoulder, and he had to take a step back to keep them both from falling over. We could all smell the booze on her.

"It's, uhm... it's great. I never felt better." Now his plea for help was turning into a silent call for my death in flames, and I was trying not to bust a gut laughing. None of the girls jumped in to save him, either; don't judge me.

"I been wonderin' what one o' y'all'd be like in the sack," she said, quite loudly.

I tapped Kevin's arm. "Kevin, you wanna wait till we get the things, or just go on ahead now?"

With a forced smile on his face, Kevin said, "Honey, I'd love to show you, but I can't leave my friends right now. Why don't you give me your number so I can call you later and I'll arrange a demo for you?" He even pulled out his phone to tap down her number.

"Awright, sugar," she said, then clumsily whispered her phone number into his ear, which he dutifully typed into his phone. "Now, don't you wait too long, baby," she said, stumbling off. "We ain't got all the time in the world."

"Okay," Kevin said, waving. He turned back to us and spit out, "I hate every one of you."

The girls all hugged him and I patted him on the back as we laughed at him. He forgave us when we got to the front and I was able to coax out four more tablets like mine. "Hey, what about power cords?" Jane looked all around hers for a place to plug it in.

"As far as I've been able to tell, it either charges through solar power or taps into the cosmic ether," I said holding mine up. "There's no place for a cord to plug in, and it hasn't run out of power on me yet."

We started walking back to my apartment and Lorraine asked, "I wonder if it would work with people who've been marked?"

"The neural communication network's never mentioned anything to me about being Elbie-only, so I guess it would work." I shrugged. "We'll have to experiment."

"I've got someone in mind," Lorraine said, and for a moment, I could see the man she was thinking of; tall, tanned and European. I'm not sure if it was because we had just been linked and my thoughts were synced up with hers, or if it was the beginning of telepathy independent of the tablets.

I leaned over to Michelle and whispered in her ear, "Did she just think of a tall European guy?"

"With a nice body," she nodded, smiling. She looked over at me. "What am I thinking of?"

"The girliest room I have ever seen," I said, as images of pink fluffy bunnyness bombarded my head. "You really grew up in that?"

"I loved that room," Michelle said, leaning in against me and rubbing my chest.

"I liked it," Jane said behind us. We turned to her, surprised. "I've been getting images from you two for the last couple of minutes." Before I could stop myself, a sexual thought of particular inappropriateness flitted across my mind, causing Michelle to pinch me and Jane to blush. "Yeah, like that one." Kevin and Lorraine both laughed at us, and he pounded me on the back.

"I guess we don't need the tablets now," Kevin said.

"They're still fun to have," I said. I put an image into my head of the holographic George Carlin concert that Bilbette had shown my gamers.

Jane nodded. "All right, I still want one." She touched my arm. "And, you're right, it's also possible that this is just a side effect of using the neural communications network before."

"Can you read anybody else?" I looked out at the marked people and tried to touch somebody's mind – anybody's. I got nothin'. I could feel that nobody else had gotten anything, either. "Maybe tomorrow," I said, and we advanced to the front of the line and got our shiny toys.

Once we made plans to meet again the next night and then said goodbye to everybody, Michelle turned to me and started massaging my temples. "My mind to your mind."

"Oh, baby, you know what gets me goin'."

We laughed and kissed for a little while. "We did promise Lorraine we'd let her know how telepathic sex was..." Michelle looked over at my bedroom.

"I don't need an engraved invitation," I said, taking her hand and sprinting.

I'm not gonna give you the details. I'm just going to say that experiencing another person's orgasm and getting excited by everything that got them excited made me feel more than human. It was the most transcendent experience of my life, and I can guarantee you that she felt the same way, because I was feeling it at the same time she was.

We had to sleep eventually, though, and our minds remained connected through the night; we shared dreams. When we woke up, I was looking through her eyes as well as mine. "That could be dangerous," I said. "How can we tell which one of us is about to walk into a wall?"

Michelle concentrated for a minute, and I was cut off from her. We both gasped at the return to our normal state of mind and the loss of the other person. For a second, I wanted to tell her to bring it back, but I held myself in. I could see the longing in her eyes, too. "That's hard to let go of," she whispered, burrowing into my neck. "I know, that's what she said," she laughed, reading my mind without effort.

"Imagine if we go all Borg and are constantly connected to each other." I tried to wrap my head around that. "We'd have to adjust to this constant, low-level input of where other people were, what they were doing. It'd be like having a wall of TV screens with every channel running at all times."

"And only limited control over the remote." She smiled, but it was a nervous one. "It's scary to think of giving up that much individuality."

"But, we'd remain individuals," I said, and I rolled over to face her. "See, we each have control over how much we share with the collective mind. You and I had a deeply shared experience, and I feel like I know you better than anyone I've known in my life, but we wouldn't be having sex with everybody. We wouldn't even be talking to everybody. Most of the Elbies we'd only know at the surface."

"It's so exhausting, though," she said, and yawned to drive the point home. "It'd feel like the world is whispering at your ear all the time."

"At first. I'm sure we'd get used to it, over time. All the other thoughts would be background noise." I rubbed her shoulders and squeezed her close to me. "One of the decisions we have to make; we have an ability, but how are we going to use it? Are we going to use it?"

"If an ability exists, somebody will use it. That's just human nature."

"Ah," I said, raising a finger. "But is it going to be the nature of the humans that are left? Maybe one of the things they've culled is our primate impulsiveness, our desire to poke a stick in someplace we can't see just to find out if there's food inside."

"I don't believe that," Michelle said, thinking. "They want human culture joined into theirs. If they eliminate all the things that make us human, then they eliminate the very thing that they find desirable about us. Some people are going to remain impulsive. Some people are going to use any ability we're given." She nipped me on the lips. "And those are the people that are going to be the Borg."

"I love it that you're making Trek references, now." I kissed her on smiling lips.

"See, you've already infected my mind. I'm being assimilated."

"Resistance is futile."

She jumped out of bed, naked, and ran for the bathroom. She poked her head out and shouted at me, "Hey, why don't we spend tonight at my place? That way I won't have to change into what I'm wearing today."

"Clothes are futile."

"Well?" She was looking at her clothes on the floor around my bed and back at me, and there is no way I was going to be able to say no.

"Okay," I said. "You know, if you'd told me six months ago that a gorgeous, intelligent woman would be asking me to spend the night at her place, I'd have asked you how long you'd been reading my fantasy journal."

"You have a fantasy journal?" She was shouting at me from the bathroom, now. "I want to read it."

"You've already been in my head – you've lived my fantasy journal."

"I want to try some of those things linked up, too," she said, and my love for her grew ever stronger. "I wonder if we'll grow jaded about other people's kinks once we've grown accustomed to seeing each other's weirdest sides."

"I would imagine. I mean, I've seen Japanese tentacle porn, so nothing in your mind was any great shock to me."

"Whereas Japanese tentacle porn..."

We both laughed. She cleaned up in the bathroom and leaped back in bed, snuggling into my arms. "What do you have to do today?"

Michelle sighed. "I have to call everybody I didn't reach yesterday and see if there's any get-togethers arranged. Next week, I'm going to be spending some time with my dad." She looked up at me. "You should come to dinner, at least. I won't make you endure the disapproval of my whole family for more than one night."

"Sounds like an evening in Heaven."

"Just try not to bring up being an atheist."

"I'm from the Midwest, baby," I said, kissing her forehead. "I'm well-practiced in not talking about my anti-American beliefs."

"Good, because that would make the rest of my visit the beginning of the exorcism." She began talking in a gruff, deep voice, "Good thing you're not going to die, Michelle, since you'd only be going to Hell," she thundered, and I laughed. I could picture her father saying that to her, hear his voice, because her life was so clear in my mind.

"I've got some people to say goodbye to, but I've been wondering about doing touristy stuff. Think we should try to see places like Paris while there are still a lot of people there?"

She shrugged. "Plenty of time for us to see those things."

"Will they be the same without people?" I mulled it over. "Clothes make the man, do people make the destination?"

"There'll still be people, just not as many." She looked over at her tablet, sitting beside the bed. "Hey, Tab, how many people are in Paris?"

The tablet glowed with activity and answered her, "Twelve million, five-hundred-eighteen-thousand, eight-hundred-four in the greater metropolitan area."

"Tab?"

"Sue me, it was the first name I thought of for it," she said, elbowing me. "Tab, what's the unmarked or 'elbied' population of Paris?" She smiled back at me, and I hugged her little meme-spreading self.

"Currently estimated to be six-hundred-thirty-one-thousand, five-hundred-seventy-two. 'Elbied' population is only an estimate, because migratory patterns will affect the population post-deletion."

"See?" Michelle pointed at her tablet. "Six hundred thousand people is still a lot."

"It's not twelve million." I got my tablet from my side of the bed. "Show us Paris now."

Suddenly, we were surrounded by the City of Lights, with millions of cars stuffed into tiny streets, people crowding every sidewalk, and everything filled with life. It was a tour on the wings of Mercury, though, because we only stopped in a place long enough to look around before zipping off to another destination. It was a methodical trip around the circular arrondissements that make up Paris, from le premiere to le vingtieme. Even as quickly as we were being shown the city, though, I knew that it would take a long time to get through all twenty of the cantons, so I stopped around the seventh.

"Aww," Michelle said.

"See what I mean? Paris with people is a lot different than Paris barely populated."

Michelle looked down at the tablet. "I think that there are people who need to see that more than we do, though." She looked at me with survivor's guilt covering her face, and I knew what she meant.

"Yeah," I said, putting my tablet back on my night stand. It was amazing how we could go from ecstasy to depression in the course of a few minutes. That's just the end of the world for ya.

The rest of that day was spent making calls from my TV and from her cell hooked into her tablet. She left around five to go change her clothes and shower up, and I did the same. We'd both called people that were lower on the emotional totem pole, so we weren't complete wrecks. Still, we held onto each other longer than we probably would have if we hadn't spent our time talking to people who were looking at the last two months of their lives.

Once I closed the door on Michelle, I felt a presence; the telepathy was starting to become familiar. "Yes?"

"Cal, it's Jane." She was excited and filled with joy. "I'm not using the tablet."

"Sweet," I said. "Have you tried to fly, yet?"

"Couldn't even levitate," she said, but wasn't too disappointed. "But I'm thinking we'll be able to teleport on our own before we can fly. Isn't that how Bilbette got around?"

"That's right. Maybe they don't think flight is that integral to enhancing us."

"Damn their alien perspective," she said, and we both laughed. There was a sensation of awkwardness, and then she said, "So, you and Michelle, huh? Maybe I should've stuck around for breakfast yesterday..."

She was good-humored about it, but there was definitely a little jealousy there. This was how I knew that aliens were making me a god – two women wanted me. "It might have made for an interesting day..." The implied threesome in my head went to hers, and she giggled. "I need to start censoring myself a little more carefully."

"It's fine with me," she said, and my affection for her just blossomed further. "But we'll have to check with Michelle. Should I try to contact her?"

"No, that's okay," I thought, hastily. "I'm not sure I can navigate a new relationship with one woman, let alone two."

She was giggling like mad now, and it made me laugh, too. Maybe it was worth a try; Michelle had been very understanding...

"I'm not gonna get in between you two," Jane said, pulling out my last thought. "She could totally kick my butt." She sighed in her head, and I felt the wistfulness reach across the distance between us. "Maybe Kevin's free..."

"I think so," I said. "From our link last night, it seemed like he was single."

"All right, then. What am I doing talking to you?"

I laughed. "Is this what you're doing with telepathy, trolling for dates?"

"It's what every technological advance in history has been used for. Why should this one be any different?"

"Rule thirty-six."

"You know it, baby." She blew a mental kiss to me. "See you tonight."

"Bye."

My head was my own again, but the feel of her still lingered behind. She was definitely a cutie, but I had spent the last day and night imprinting Michelle on my soul, so I wasn't going to give her up, even for a nerd girl that was so compatible with me. I wasn't.

The thought was going to stay with me, though. I put it in the background and tried to do some more calling, but my heart wasn't in it. One conversation with my ex, Rita, and I was ready for a nap. I brewed some tea and sat down for a relaxing drink. I flipped on the TV and started up an old Star Trek to give my mind a break.

About halfway through Kirk seducing a young blond, someone knocked on my door. I reached out a hand and tried to open it with my mind, but telekinesis was a no-show, so I got up and opened the door. On the other side stood a woman of about thirty, very cute in a nerdy way, with shoulder-length brown hair and big hazel eyes. She was dressed in a knee-length denim dress and was as pale as a ghost. "Hello, Cal," she said, and as soon as I heard her voice, I knew who it was.

"Bilbette?"

She walked around me into the apartment and sat on my couch. "How do you like my outfit?"

I closed the door and sat down beside her, too stunned to say anything for a minute. When my voice returned, I asked, "If you could do this all along, why did you come to us in that other shape?"

"It was a test of human tolerance," she said, looking around. She had, after all, viewed the apartment with very different sensory organs before. Just to be sure she wasn't a hologram, I touched her on the shoulder. "This form is quite real, Cal."

"Sorry," I said, slinking away. She had a small smile playing at the corner of her lips, like there was a great joke she was dying to tell me. "It's good to see you, even if I'm more freaked out by you as a human than as an alien."

She laughed, and I realized that the entirety of her form was pleasing; her voice, her body, the way she moved – she had taken everything she knew about me and made a human woman to my specs. It was flattering, creepy, arousing, scary... I think I went through every emotion I could feel as she stood there looking at me, her head tilted just so, evoking exactly the emotional response she wanted from me. She looked over at the TV and saw the paused image of young William Shatner. "Captain Kirk exhibits many of the behaviors that my people do when they are sexual tourists," she said, and that did exactly nothing to calm my nerves. "I rarely engage in that form of contact, myself, but I have been curious about humans." Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me... She reached out a hand to touch my forehead and brush away a lock of hair, and I felt the shock of it down to my toes. "You are with someone," she said, and I could hear happiness in her voice. "I am pleased."

"She's great," I blurted out. "I think I love her."

She looked into my eyes for a minute. "Yes, you do," she said, and she still sounded pleased. "But you fear that she would be upset were you to indulge my desire to copulate with you."

A little stunned, I said, "Uh-huh." About as coherent as I could manage at the time.

She got serious. Her eyes wrinkled the tiniest bit as she thought, and it was so cute that I just had to look away and think of baseball. "Perhaps we should ask her to join. This is a common human desire, is it not?"

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

"We should contact her together." She reached a hand out and touched my forehead. I felt her mind touch mine and desire flooded me; longing to be close to someone who shared so much in common with me, who wanted to tie her mind in with me and feel everything I was feeling – it was even more powerful than when Michelle and I had connected. We reached out across space and tapped Michelle's mind.

"Hey, baby," she said, feeling me first, and then the wave of emotion hit her from Bilbette, roiling all of her alien desire and loneliness in with my embarrassment and horniness and washing over Michelle's psyche. Words were too slow for Bilbette. She threw her entire self at us, binding us together, letting us see each other in, if you'll pardon the expression, all our naked glory. We were assimilated, but I had no desire for my individuality, and neither did Michelle. "I'll be right there."

"I will teleport you," Bilbette told her, and her thought became reality. Michelle stood there with us, and our minds and bodies were one, and I'm not going to tell you any more about it because I've got to save something for the letter to Penthouse.

Bilbette couldn't stay to meet the other Elbies in our group, but promised to come see us again before I left for Omaha. She kissed each of us tenderly on the forehead and left two glasses of water on our nightstands. "You will need to rehydrate," she said. "Thank you for a most pleasurable day." She waved and disappeared.

Michelle propped herself up on an elbow and looked down at my sweat-drenched self. Bilbette was right, I did need to rehydrate. As I picked up the glass and sipped at it, Michelle asked, "Do you think we could have said no to her?"

"I don't think so," I said. I gave her my glass and she sipped at it. She'd perspired a little, herself. "Once we felt how she felt..." I let out a deep breath.

"That's scary," she said, leaning over me to put the glass back on my nightstand. She smiled down at me and said, "Just so we're clear, I do not do this with all my boyfriends."

"I have no doubts of that." I'd been into her mind so deeply that I doubt we had any secrets left from each other. Bilbette's mind had been more disciplined, so we didn't have as much insight into her, but I think I knew her well enough now. She wouldn't force herself on us, but telepathic contact with us pretty much made us want whatever she wanted. Was it consensual? Was it rape? "How do you feel about this now?"

"Well," Michelle said, running a hand over her head and lying back on a pillow. "She was right. It was a most pleasurable day. But I don't think we ever really consented."

"Just like joining the Coalition," I said. "They wanted us in, minus a few billion people, and that was what happened. The negotiations were to let us have the illusion of free will."

She nodded and took my left hand in her right. "What can we do?"

"Assimilate." I didn't mean to sound so hopeless, but it's entirely possible that I was elbied because I would accept my situation. "Resistance really is futile."

"I love you," she said, and I squeezed her hand tightly.

"I love you, too." I thought about our situation, and something from my teen years came back to me. "It would be a stronger world, a stronger loving world, to die in."

She looked over at me. "John Cale?"

"Watchmen." I grinned at her. "Quoting John Cale."

"You're such a nerd." She raised my hand to her lips and held it there.

"Yep." A thought hit me as I said that. "That's why I'm here. I'm not artistic, my writing is amateurish at best, but I walked up to her in the game store and invited her to play. I'm an outgoing nerd, just like her, and she elbied me because she was attracted to me."

Michelle blinked at me. "Talk about a friend with benefits."

"If I hadn't gone up to her in the store, I would have been marked. The only reason I'm not extraneous is because, unlike all the other nerds in the store that day, I could talk to girls." I was in shock, and Michelle hugged me, not knowing how bad an existential crisis I was having. "If I'd just taken a picture instead of talking to her, you and I wouldn't have gotten together and I'd be going to Omaha next month to die with my family." I grabbed the glass of water and sucked some down to get rid of the huge lump in my throat. "Holy God."

She rubbed my chest and kissed my cheek, trying to caress away the Lovecraftian horror that I was staring into. "Are you okay?"

"Just grappling with the tenuous fragility of reality, that's all. Don't mind me."

"It was a quantum miracle," Michelle said, resting her chin on my stomach and looking up at me. "Like when Lori's life convinces Jon that humanity is worth saving, because each one of us results from an unlikely set of random events, some of which are so improbable that they can only be called miracles that they happened at all."

I gazed upon her with rapture. "Did you pull the plot of Watchmen from my mind?"

She looked away, embarrassed. "I read it when I was in college; I took a course in sci-fi literature." Her mouth pursed to the side. "I still have a copy at home."

"My woman!" I hugged her tight and she laughed and hit me. "Maybe we all got chosen because we're all nerds; Bilbette seemed to have an affinity for us."

"Hey, now, don't lump me in there just because I read a couple of books," she said, offended. "You don't have to be a nerd to like science fiction."

"No, of course not," I said quickly. "But you have to be a nerd to be able to quote science fiction to somebody having a philosophical crisis." She slapped me on the chest. "Nerd."

"I'm never talking to you again."

"You won't be able to help yourself. Our people are notorious chatterboxes."

In spite of herself, she laughed with me. "If only there weren't such a stigma against us."

"I know; it's a cross all we oppressed minorities have to bear." I didn't want to push the joke any further for fear of really offending her, so I let it go. "Watchmen must have made an impression on you."

"It was amazing. I got physically ill after reading it." She relaxed, accepting her nerd status, as she described this icon of the culture passionately to me. "I learned the next day that I had food poisoning, but the effect as I was reading it was so visceral. It felt like the book was punching me in the stomach." I didn't need telepathy to see the story unfolding in her eyes. You could read the whole book in her face. "And when Adrian gave his speech at the end..."

"I did it thirty-five minutes ago."

"I mean you had the expectation that they'd find a way to beat him, that Jon would come back from Mars, that something would happen to save the day, but boom." She lay back, spent. I could only dream of satisfying her that well. "That book depressed me so much. But, I still go back and reread it every couple of years, because it's so good."

"I think it's like Greek tragedy." She raised an eyebrow to encourage me to go on. "Well, a lot of the classics guys say that tragedy is really hopeful; it shows us that the human spirit can't be broken, no matter how much is piled on top of it. Watchmen tells us that even in the darkest of times, someone will step up. Justice will be done; evil will be punished."

She smiled wickedly. "And then someone will find more evil to do."

"And then someone will step up to that. No matter what happens to us, humans will find a way to come back. It's what we do."

"That's what we're doing."

"Yeah. We're going through a devastating alien invasion, and we're coping with it."

"By collaborating with the enemy."

"Well, yeah, but let's face the facts." I ticked off points on my hand. "In the movies, there's always some magic human quality that lets us resist the vastly superior alien technology. We ain't got that. The other thing that gives us the edge is that some humans are immune to alien control. It may not have hit the news, but I think we'd have heard something about that by now. Then, there's the War of the Worlds ending, where Earth itself is able to fight off the invaders with humble diseases. Instead, the Fhh-bop-uh are curing all our diseases. Or, hey, fighter jets are able to defeat spaceships." I made a rude gesture and Michelle smirked. "Come on. Could the best Roman trireme in history defeat a nuclear aircraft carrier? No. They would worship it as a god."

"So, should we be worshipping the Fhh-bop-uh as gods?"

"No, because they don't want that. They want to take human culture and merge it into their own, but they want us to keep being human, because that's what makes us interesting to them." I leaned my head back on the pillow as revelation struck me. "That's why we all have artistic interests. The Elbies have to be able to stay human and keep human culture moving forward. That's the selection criteria."

Michelle considered it. "Okay, so we're the torch-bearers for human civilization because, in the opinion of the Fhh-bop-uh, we're the most capable of doing so."

"I don't think that's all of it." I considered what I was about to say carefully. "We're the most capable of carrying human culture forward without challenging the C.O.I.L. We're willing to assimilate."

"Isn't that interfering with our culture?"

"I don't think they live by the Prime Directive."

Michelle sat up and began finding her clothes. They'd gotten scattered in our rush to the bedroom. "What does that say about us? We have so little loyalty to our own people that we're willing – no, eager – to join in with their killers? We're the capos ushering others into the gas chamber?"

"It's possible that our behavior is being controlled as much as theirs is," I said, examining my own emotions. "We may not be able to be anything but – eager – to join them. I'm starting to think that our responses have been programmed from the minute they entered the solar system."

"But, why fulfill any promises they've made to us, then?" She got out of bed and started putting on her clothes. "I know they're aliens and we can't judge them by human standards, but if they wanted our planet and not the people, why not just make us all vaporize? They have the ability. If they wanted artistic humans, why not just take them? Why kill everybody but a select few? Space is big. Why do they think it can't handle seven billion humans?"

"Aren't you the one who told the rest of us that it didn't do any good to go round and round about the C.O.I.L.'s motives?"

"Doesn't mean I'm not thinking about it." She sat on the edge of the bed and rolled on her socks. "And anyway, this is more about us. Can we be moral beings if we willingly follow these rules?"

"Moral?" She nodded. "I thought you taught business. Where'd all the philosophy come from?"

That made her smile and laugh, which is what I wanted, just to get her mind off of everything. "I guess cognitive dissonance is our hallmark as a species. I know people who wouldn't spank a bad puppy, but think nothing of breaking regulations that result in misery for hundreds or thousands of people. I'm going to be Wonder Woman; who cares that everybody had to die to get me there?" She slipped into her loafers and came around to my side of the bed. "See you at seven, baby." She leaned over and gave me a passionate kiss, then stood up. A flash of realization came over her face. "I can teleport." She closed her eyes, and it was like she was sand blowing away in a soft breeze; her body disassembled one atom at a time and vanished.

"Wow." It was cool, that was undeniable. She was completely right about the immorality of it. But maybe that's just us humans; even in Star Trek, we made them pay for their utopia with the Eugenics Wars. Maybe the Fhh-bop-uh felt that we wouldn't be able to accept membership in the pantheon without some human sacrifice.

I didn't want to think about it anymore.

I showered and got dressed and flopped myself down in front of the TV. I put on a mindless dudebro comedy that wouldn't challenge me or make me wonder if I was worth saving and I just let it take me away.

A few minutes before seven, I felt another mind brush mine. "Cal?"

"Hi, Lorraine. What's up?"

"Watch this."

I felt static run across my body, causing all my hair to stand up. Next to me, her body appearing as if an artist swiped her into existence with broad brush strokes, sat Lorraine. A huge mischievous smile on her face, she hopped up and down and hugged me once she was done materializing. I laughed with her and hugged her back.

"I took one of the public transporters last night," she said, her enthusiasm bubbling over. "I went to see an old friend, and telepathy does work on the marked, by the way." She turned a little red as she added, "And you don't need to tell me what sex is like with it anymore." We both laughed. "Hoo. So, this morning, I thought about what it had been like to go through the transporter, and I concentrated on my living room, and it felt like my entire body was being gently electrocuted. Then I was like a cloud – I don't know how else to say it – and shooting across space to my living room. When I got there, the whole thing happened again in reverse, and I was home." Her smile could have powered a city block. "It was exhilarating. We need to try it together."

"Sounds like fun."

She touched my hand. "You seem less than enthused about it all. Trouble with Michelle?"

"I was with her when the trouble happened, but it's not trouble with her. It's sort of... trouble for all of us." She gripped my hand and she reached out to my mind with hers. I let her see it all, feel what I felt, and she pulled away, startled.

"Wow." She got up and paced around for a minute. "That's a hell of a question, all right." She was interrupted by the appearance of Michelle right next to her. Lorraine gave her a big hug, which surprised Michelle. "Cal was just telling me about your day."

"Oh." Michelle looked like she was going to object for a moment, but then just waved her hand. "It's not like we're going to be able to keep secrets from each other, anyway," she said, sitting down next to me.

"I think we can if we try," Lorraine said, sitting next to Michelle. "We can block off parts of ourselves we don't want to give others access to. I did it last night." She reddened in the cheeks. "And, if we respect each other's boundaries, there's no reason to fear those who are close to us."

"Some of the ones close to us are the ones we're scared of," Michelle said, looking over at me. "It was Bilbette, Cal's alien friend, that sort of took us over today."

"Oh, my." We weren't able to talk any further, because Jane and Kevin knocked on the door. I opened it up and they walked in and took seats.

"Everybody's so serious," Jane said, looking around the room. "What's up?"

"We've run into a moral dilemma," Michelle said. She reached out with her mind. "Let's show you."

A few minutes of telepathy brought our concerns to everyone. We came out of the link to consider what had happened. "I see what you're saying," Jane said, her voice trembling a little. "Can we really trust our perceptions at all?"

"I don't think we're in the Matrix, but we should be aware that telepathy has the ability to take control of us without us realizing it." I pointed my finger at the rest of them. "I'm watching you guys, so don't try anything."

They laughed, and we put it behind us. Fledgling gods that we were, we didn't want to think of our limitations. Lorraine spoke up, next. "On the plus side, teleporting is awesome."

Kevin leaned forward. "Where can we go?"

"Anywhere, as far as I can tell," Lorraine said. "I came back from Budapest after getting there with the public teleportal."

"Where are we going?" I stood up and reached out for Michelle's hand. She grabbed mine and pulled herself up. Lorraine took my other, Jane joined her and Kevin.

"Paris," Michelle said. "I've always wanted to go."

"We should pick someplace at least one of us is familiar with," I said, recalling every single transporter malfunction I'd ever seen or experienced in a game.
Jane nodded in agreement with me. "Yeah, we don't wanna end up in solid rock or something."

"Fair enough," Lorraine said, thinking of a small park to the north of the city. "Everybody concentrate on this place with me."

We held the image of the park in our minds and let go of our bodies. Lorraine was right; it was strangely like being slowly electrocuted. Bits of us disappeared, and even though we didn't have eyes, we had conscious perception of what was around us. For a millisecond, we floated there, disembodied, merging with each other as easily as we touched minds earlier.

And then we were off.

There's a video Madonna made around the turn of the century. She sings about being quicker than a ray of light and the video is all time-lapse video making cars turn into rivers of light on highways, and that's exactly what it felt like to shoot through the earth and come up in Paris in a small park where we suddenly appeared in the dark to the applause of dozens of people around us.

"That was fun," Jane breathed, her eyes wild. "Let's do it again."

Tourists were approaching and taking pictures of us as we stood there, and it felt like being swarmed by paparazzi. I grinned like an idiot, but everybody else managed to look pretty suave as we joined hands again and let Lorraine lead us again, this time to the observation deck at the top of the Eiffel Tower. The place was swarmed with other tourists, so we materialized in a knot of people, who were pretty startled to see us. They cleared some space for us, but we were still approached by the curious, who wanted to know what being an Elbie was like.

Michelle took my hand and led me over to the edge. Paris was lit up all around us, and I tamped down the fear of heights so that I could enjoy the moment with her. Well, her and a few hundred people with the same idea. I'm surprised the observation deck didn't come crashing down to the ground from all the people that were jammed onto it. Now it was Michelle's turn to grin like an idiot, and she kissed me and hugged me like she was a teen getting to meet the latest boy-band. Jane and the others managed to shove their way to our side, and we all put our arms around each other and looked out at that beautiful sight.

"We had our good points, didn't we?" Lorraine was feeling such longing for the city below that I nearly suggested we go down and play the tourists, but she turned away and pulled us with her. "Let's go someplace else," she said, and the pleading tone of her voice made us give in, even though Michelle wanted to stay more than anything.

"We'll come back on our own later," I promised her in a whisper.

We joined hands again and all looked at Lorraine for a destination. She smiled and closed her eyes. We all saw a hilly field, and with a minute's concentration, we were there. It was still dark, and the wind whipping through the tall grass gave the whole place a spooky feel. Lorraine lay down in the grass and relaxed completely.

Jane lay down beside her and looked up at me. Her eyes sparkled with reflected moonlight, and I pictured a barrier around my thoughts to keep from leaking them out to the others. I'm not sure how well I succeeded, because Michelle's grip on my hand tightened and Jane smiled coyly at me.

Kevin looked at the spooky hills and shivered. "So, why here?"

"This is where I lost my virginity," Lorraine said, pure joy in her voice and thoughts. The rest of us were so caught by surprise we snickered, and Lorraine did, too. "I was sixteen and living the hippy life for the summer, and he was so handsome." Warmth spread through my limbs, and the others, too. We all lay down with Lorraine. "I know that not everybody gets to enjoy their first time; some people don't get to choose their first time, so I felt supremely lucky that I did, and that he was so good." She practically moaned the last word, and we were all feeling the same thing she was – horny nostalgia.

I thought we were heading for another Dear Penthouse moment, especially when I felt Michelle's hand sliding up my thigh. Now, I'll be honest with you – even though another dude was involved, I would not have objected to this at all. I was in love with Michelle, in lust with Jane, and Lorraine was a fascinating woman with a wealth of experience. Kevin, well... Kevin was a nice guy. Handsome in a rugged kind of way. Nicely built, you know because of the plumbing and the drumming...

Don't you judge me.

"Is that how easy it is?" Lorraine interrupted us all as we were falling into each other's arms. "A little passion, and our minds are overwhelmed?" Although she was overwhelmed herself, she struggled free from our embrace. "This is the new world - you do what others feel." She ran a hand over her face, trying in vain to cut us off from her. She looked at Michelle and me. "My friend in Budapest; did I rape him?"

"I doubt he had a choice," Michelle answered her. She looked over at me. "We didn't."

A wave of revulsion swept over Lorraine, and the mood in that field did a one-eighty. "Are we just playthings to each other now? Or to them? What are we?"

"We're whatever we want to be, now," Jane said. "We're not used to having that kind of power yet, but once we're accustomed to it, it won't feel that weird." She went over to Lorraine and took her by the hands. "Maybe we're giving up some of what we used to think of as ourselves, but think of everything we're getting. The universe has opened up to us," she said, with passion that burned across us all. "Don't lose sight of our potential."

"I haven't," Lorraine said, fading away as she teleported someplace else, far away from the rest of us, leaving Jane holding nothing but air.

My first tendency in a situation like that is to make some kind of joke, but I couldn't summon any gallows humor. A dark cloud fell over us as we sat in the gloomy field. Kevin stood up and said, "I'll see you," then vanished into the night.

Jane asked, "Could I hang with you guys for a while?"

"Sure," Michelle said, reaching out her hand. Jane sat down with us and we tried to let nature zen us out.

It wasn't working for me, though. I stood up, pulling the ladies with me. "This field is creeping me out, guys. Can we find someplace else?"

Michelle asked, "My place?" Jane and I nodded, and we teleported there.

Michelle's apartment was nice – nicer than mine, I'll tell you that. They must've paid profs decent money at Howard. "Wow," I said, looking around at all her very tasteful and very nice things. "Why weren't we staying here from the beginning?"

Michelle shrugged and walked over to the kitchen. "You took charge." She got a few drinks from the fridge and handed them to us.

"You should have overruled me." I sat down in her very plush couch and sighed. "Oh, yeah. That's the stuff."

Jane giggled a little and sat down with me. "Wow, you're right." She leaned her head back into the pure comfort that was the cushioning and asked Michelle, "Can I live here?"

"Get in line," I told her. I gave Michelle my best puppy-dog eyes and she laughed.

She flopped down next to me and put her legs in my lap. She gave me a mischievous grin and said, "Watch this." She looked over at the TV and it turned on. Once it was up, it then flipped through a few streaming providers and settled on one, then flipped through movie choices in there before settling on Star Wars Episode Nine. She wiggled her eyebrows at me. "Cool, huh?"

I looked at her setup, which was top-notch. "Motion sensor?"

"I've got one, but that's not how I did it." She smiled at me and the lights in the room went off.

Jane said, "You've got everything on a timer."

"Nope." The movie paused without her looking in that direction.

I looked at the screen and concentrated. The movie started again. "You're controlling it with your mind." Michelle nodded and paused the movie again. "That is so sweet."

"Let me try," Jane said, sitting up and concentrating on the screen. It flipped back to the selection list and she clapped. "Awesome."

Michelle certainly knew how to get a couple of geek's minds off their trouble. We spent the next ten minutes just flipping around the TV's options until Michelle told us, "All right, all right. Don't break it." We lighted back on Star Wars and let it play. I leaned back with my arms across the back of the couch and Michelle snuggled up against me. Jane scooted a little bit closer to me and her head leaned back and touched my arm. I couldn't help it. Dear Penthouse popped into my head, along with a specific reason for writing. Michelle slapped me on the belly and said, "You have got to stop thinking things like that."

"I'm a man, I have no control over these things," I pleaded, and she laughed at me. I turned to Jane and gave her an embarrassed, "Sorry."

"I don't mind," she said, scooting a little closer, with the Penthouse scenario running through her mind, now.

Michelle shook her head. "What am I going to do with you two?" As our suggestions popped into her head, she added, "Besides that." We both looked at her with hope, and she rolled her eyes at us. "Just watch the movie."

Dear Penthouse, that's how I got to watch Star Wars with two beautiful women snuggled up to me. Every nerd boy's dream.

We woke up the next morning to a pile of messages from everyone we knew. Even Jane, who tried to play herself off as a major loner, had messages from friends in far-flung places trying to reach her before the end. I guess it took a couple of days for it all to sink in to everybody, and now they were scrambling to make contact with everybody they wanted to be with before the end. Exes had left messages for all three of us.

"OK," I offered, "Ex-sex doesn't count, and nobody gets jealous. Agreed?"

Jane just laughed, but Michelle thought about it a minute. There were a couple of very nice-looking exes in her mind when she said, "Agreed." I gave her a kiss, which she returned with passion. "Be back tonight," she said, caressing my cheek fondly. "Seven."

"I'll be here."

Jane looked at the both of us like Oliver asking for more, please. Michelle beeped her on the nose and said, "You, too."

"Okay," Jane said, hurrying off to the door. "See you guys."

Once she was outside, I told Michelle, "I guess she forgot we can teleport." I gave her a quick peck and then I was gone, shooting back to my place to shower and change.

My list had a lot of college and high school buds, people I'd been close to while we were engaged in those activities, but hadn't heard from since. It was fun to talk to them, but bittersweet. I was the only Elbie in my old high school crowd, and while they all pretended to be happy for me, I could feel the undercurrent of despair they were just keeping in check. We made half-hearted promises to get together once I hit Omaha, but I was pretty sure I'd never see any of them again. It was both sad and a relief. Sometimes, you don't want to go home again.

A couple of my friends from college were elbied, which I was happy to see. One of them worked as a computer animator, and was hugely artistic, so I wasn't surprised by her, but the other Elbie was a guy who'd been a gaming buddy. His name was Ben, and I didn't think he had any cultural contributions to make. I called him up, anyway, because he'd always been a dependable player at my table. When I saw him pop up on my screen, he said, "You, too?"

"Yeah," I said, pulling out my ultimate trump card. "I gamed with one of the Fhh-bop-uh."

"You're kidding me." He concentrated on me for a minute, and I felt him touch my mind. "And you had sex with her, too? I'm dyin' here!"

"Not just with her," I said, giving him the low-down on my last couple of days. "I'm livin' the dream."

"You were totally right about DC," he said, "I wish I'd come with you, now." I was still connected to his mind, and he was thinking about coming to see the city now.

"You should totally come out. I bet we could round up some other elbied gamers."

He looked at me skeptically. "That whole 'elbie' thing is never gonna catch on, man."

"I have telepathy. I can make it catch on."

"If you say so." He got serious for a minute, and his thoughts were guarded from me. When he spoke back up, he was quiet, like he didn't want to be overheard. "Do you wonder why you got chosen?"

"No," I said. "I pretty much know it was because my alien friend wanted me around."

He nodded. "I don't know why. I can't... justify myself, Cal. I know guys – geniuses, you know? They didn't get chosen. Most people are polite and try not to make you feel bad, but I can't help thinking somebody made a mistake with me." His eyes were misting up, and I tried not to let his emotion overwhelm me. "I got three sisters. They're all marked. Their husbands, all marked. Their kids..." He choked up and took a minute to gather himself. "I don't know if I can do 'em proud, Cal."

"You will," I told him. "Cuz if you don't, I'm gonna come kick your butt."

He chuckled and his mood lightened up. He wiped at his nose and set it behind him. "So, what's the deal with all these hot elbie women around you? Man, your friend must've pulled the strings hard behind the scenes to get all that for you."

"Yeah, she must've," I said. That got me thinking along the lines I'd been before; Bilbette saved me for my body. While flattering in most respects, it left me feeling inadequate in the starting-a-new-civilization respect. Especially since I'd already lost forty percent of the group I'd been trying to keep together. I was not Captain Picard. Heck, I wasn't even Captain Reynolds – at least he kept his crew together. I was sharing in my friend's belief that I would do no one proud, and I wanted to know whether I was right.

After promising to get together soon, I hung up on Ben and concentrated on Bilbette. As soon as I thought about her, I heard her voice behind me. "Yes, Cal?" I turned around to look at her in her human form, mousey and adorable and so very attractive to me, but I resisted the urges she brought on. My thoughts were an open book to her, and she walked over to take me by the hand. "We did not just choose humans who are artistic now, Cal. We also chose those who could blossom, as well as those whose company we would enjoy. I enjoy your company, and I know that many others do, as well." She tapped the side of my head. "And I know that in that mind are wonders that will make us all gasp. Have faith in my judgment." She tiptoed up and kissed me on the cheek. "Do not listen to the inner voice that says you are not worthy; listen to mine, that says you are."

And, with that bit of cryptic encouragement, she was gone.

I did call one ex-girlfriend, an old college flame from Nebraska, and teleportation was involved, and I want to stress that we had agreed beforehand that there was going to be no jealousy.

It was difficult seeing Bridgette again. When we were together, I thought she was The One, but she found another guy who was less geeky, and more One than I was. I guess that didn't work out, because she was alone when I popped into her place in San Francisco. "Wow," she said as I appeared in front of her. Not to go all Freud here, but Bridge was a short, adorable, mousey brunette, and I was struck by how much Bilbette's human body resembled her. "So, you guys can really do all the things the aliens can do?"

"Not yet," I said, trying not to sound like a fake-modest douchebag. "We've got telepathy and teleportation, and if I concentrate I think I can access their version of Google, but I haven't tried flying or anything cool like that yet."

The corner of her mouth flickered up for a second, just a little twitch of a smile. "Telepathy and teleportation sound pretty cool."

"Telepathy's got a few... moral problems we've been fighting."

"Like what?"

"Well..." I wasn't sure how to bring up the whole coercion/possible rape situation. I held a hand up to her face but didn't touch her. "Can I show you?"

She looked at my hand nervously, as if she expected it to turn into a tentacle. "It won't hurt, will it?"

"Hopefully, the opposite," I said, smiling.

"Okay," she said, closing her eyes and bracing herself. I touched her on the temple and linked our minds. I took it slow, walking through my last couple of days, looking at her week, and then we shared the longing for each other that we had both been feeling, the nostalgia of our relationship, the anger at its ending. I unlinked us and she opened her eyes to find that she had wrapped me tightly in her arms. "Wow," she said, not letting go. "That's what it's like, huh?"

"That's what it's like."

She kissed me on the lips and buried her face in my neck, tickling me. "Michelle seems nice."

I rested my chin on the top of her head. "Michelle is great."

"Is it weird that I think she's hot, now?"

"See," I said, pulling back a little and looking down at her. "That's one of the moral problems I was talking about."

"You just wanna do every woman all the time, don't you?" She rested her head back on my chest. "You horndog."

"I can control myself, though." I had to add, "Plus, not every woman wants to do me."

"Telepathy changes all that, though, doesn't it?" She was very close to me, and very warm, and I was feeling a lot of guilt. But not enough to stop, you know? "I mean, everybody feels what everybody else does, and it makes you understand why they do what they do..." Her hands reached up around my shoulders and her lips reached up to mine.

I swear I'm not making all these women up. And I swear I'm not telling about it just to brag. I'm just letting you know how it was. It was the end of the world; impossible things were bound to happen.

I kissed Bridge goodbye and she reached out to hold onto me. "Please come see me again," she whispered into my ear. "See me before the end."

"I'll try," I whispered back. "I'll be in Omaha all next month with my family, but I'll try to come see you."

She kissed me again and then she was holding air. I went to my apartment to shower and change and try to regain some sense of good cheer. The depression that was consuming Bridgette hung over me like a psychic blanket that I couldn't throw off. When I was clean, I tried to contact Michelle.

"Yeah, Cal?" She wasn't feeling too well herself.

"Can I come over?"

"Please."

Poof, there I was. Brushing over her thoughts, I could tell she had just gone through something similar to what I had. "Ex-sex wasn't that great, huh?"

She shook her head. "Demoralizing. I feel like I've been manning a suicide hotline; a particularly unsuccessful hotline." She pulled me down onto the couch with her and enveloped me in a tight hug. "I can't believe how much this sucks. I just want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head until it all goes away."

"You'd kick yourself for doing that, though. It's hard to say goodbye, but at least we get to."

"I know, I know. First galaxy problems." She kissed me on the cheek as I smiled at her increasing nerdiness. With exaggerated drama, including throwing a hand to her forehead, she said, "Woe is me; my godhood buzz is being harshed by all these dying mortals." She sighed, dropping the act. "I just wish we could do something."

"Like save people?"

"Yeah," she said. "Why can't we save a few people?"

"Our numbers are balanced for our species," I recited, tapping into the Fhh-bop-uh Google. "With either more or less, we wouldn't be culturally viable." Something else came to me, and I tried to access information about it, but couldn't. "Hey, see if you can get anything on the term 'backed up' that the Fhh-bop-uh used when they said what was going to happen to the marked."

Michelle concentrated for a second. "Huh." She was confused, too. "I'm not getting anything."

"Yeah."

"So we get to add this to psychic coercion on our list of things we don't like about the C.O.I.L.?"

"Yep." I thought about it all for a minute and said, "Maybe they didn't want us to know because they don't want us talking to the marked about it."

"Maybe it's not really happening."

"Yeah, that's crossed my mind a time or two," I said. "But, there was a friend in my gaming group that sounded like he wanted to commit suicide, and Bilbette was adamant that he wait out the full process; like she wanted him backed up."

Michelle considered that. "Maybe the Fhh-bop-uh have a cultural taboo against suicide."

"But not against genocide?"

"They may not see it that way."

"I think they do," I said. "Granted, this is anecdotal evidence going off my experience with the one Fhh-bop-uh, but I'm positive that they consider what they're doing to us genocide and morally wrong."

"But they feel that the benefit they're granting us as a species outweighs the hideous crime they're committing against us?"

"I would assume."

Michelle gave me a skeptical smirk. "That's some serious compartmentalization."

"Well, the thing that I think is easing their guilt is that the marked are being 'backed up'. I thought that was just some BS they were feeding us for crowd control purposes, but now, I'm not so sure." Bilbette had been maddeningly vague about the whole thing. "I wish I'd thought to try to probe Bilbette's mind about it while we were having sex."

Michelle raised her eyebrows at me. "You were a little busy probing other things..."

"I know, I know," I said quickly. "She was distracted, though, and it would have been easier to get into her mind." I thought about her conversation with Will. "She was adamant that one of our friends not kill himself. She wanted him to wait out the full time that the marked have." I stood up and paced around. "You know when you do your data backups – "

"I don't do backups." In response to my withering gaze, she said, "That's what you guys are for."

I shook my head. "I can't believe I ever loved you. Anyway, when people of good morals and character do their backups," I went on. I got pain for it, but it needed to be said. "It takes time. The data has to be scanned, analyzed, and copied to a new location. What if that's what's happening now? Ostensibly, the marked are being given two months to set their affairs in order. I'm sure that's part of it; but the main reason is so that the Fhh-bop-uh have time to scan, analyze, and copy the physical data of six and a half billion people." I narrowed my eyes. "The only question is, is it being stored off-site or on?"

"I know we've shared minds and everything," Michelle said, "but the nerd-speak is getting a little thick for me."

"A backup is something you make for emergencies, so you don't necessarily want it to be in the same place as the emergency might happen." I illustrated this with my hands together, then moving one away from the other. "A backup is best kept someplace other than where the original data is. A backup of us..."

"Would be best kept off of Earth," Michelle said, getting it.

"But, you want to keep a copy of it on hand, too. You don't want to have to schlep out to get your offsite storage for something that's minor. That's probably something we can find here; at least in our own solar system."

Michelle was trying to process why I cared about this. "Other than the way it makes the Fhh-bop-uh look like huge computer nerds, what's the point of going on about this, Cal? Why is it important that the marked are being backed up?"

Of course she didn't understand – she didn't do backups. "Because, my sweet, beautiful muggle, the purpose of backing up your data is so that you can restore it."

The light bulb went off behind her eyes. "Oh!"

Jane got the point about the backups immediately. Oh, Michelle, why couldn't you have been a computer science teacher? Anyway, they wanted to know what we could do with this. "There's got to be local storage of the data."

"Maybe it's on the moon, though, instead of Earth." Once she'd wrapped her mind around the idea, Michelle was able to follow my thoughts on this. She wasn't a nerd, but she didn't have a problem understanding us. "Have either of you tried teleporting someplace like that yet?"

"I tried to go to Mars," Jane said. "It wasn't pleasant. I made it back, but my hands and face are still tingling."

"Okay, so no going into space just yet," I said, rubbing Jane's hands in mine. They did feel cold, poor thing. "I think it'll be as local as possible. The backup you want to use for non-site-destroying emergencies is always either on the drive with the data or right next to it, so that you can get to it quickly and not waste any more time."

"You're assuming that they think like a computer tech would," Michelle said. "They may have other considerations besides ease of access in times of emergency."

"Well, of course, you have to consider security, too." I started going over my own requirements. "You don't want it to be where users can paw all over it, because they will, but you do want it to be someplace that isn't a pain to get to for the quick stuff. You have your off-site for anything really extensive. This is the backup copy that you can lose and not worry."

"Would it be big?" Jane flexed her hands after I warmed them up and stood, trying to kick some blood back into her feet. "How much information is contained in a human body?"

"A lot; something like exabytes of data, especially if you consider how much information is stored in a person's brain. Multiply that by six and a half billion, and you get an insanely large number. They've gotta have some kind of hugely powerful compression technology, but that's still a lot of data that's got to be stored somewhere."

Jane said, "Could they just be keeping it on their ships?"

"For now, that's viable, but they're gonna want to leave it here, long-term."

"Now," Michelle said, holding up a hand, "I'm still fuzzy on what you want to do with the backup. If we restore everybody, won't the C.O.I.L. notice?"

"If we do it here," I said. "So, we can't do that. But, we can find another planet, rebuild everything there, and restore them to that planet."

"So, we'll just create another Earth." Michelle didn't sound like she was buying into my bold plan. "Just like that."

Jane looked a little skeptical, too, so I tried to explain. "Look, the powers that we're going to have are miraculous. I've read what they were negotiating with giving us. Recreating Earth on another planet is gonna be a piece of cake."

"With the powers that we don't have yet."

I tried to keep my impatience in check. "Yes, honey, with the powers that we don't have – yet." I ticked off in my hand what had already been done. "They removed disease and old age, they gave us telepathy and teleportation, access to their version of the Internet – why would they stop there? Why tease us with what we have if we're not getting it all?" I reached out to her with my mind to try to still her doubts, and she didn't resist. My entire life as a nerd had been preparation for building worlds, and I gave her detail after detail of what we would build, how we would build it, and why. "We just need a planet to do it on," I said, disengaging from her mind.

"And the backup," Michelle reminded me.

"Well, that goes without saying." Jane leaned over me and rested her chin on my shoulder. "You got any ideas on it?"

"I'm thinking," she said. "If they're following the pattern that you're thinking they are, the backup probably doesn't exist yet, at least not completely. It'll only be fully formed at the end of the backup period, when the marked, uh..."

"When they die," I finished for her.

"Which makes me think that restoring them is just something selfish we want to do for us." Michelle nodded, and I turned to face Jane. "Everybody still dies. Recreating Earth just makes new people that we're familiar and comfortable with. It doesn't save them."

The girls each kissed me on the cheek. I had been so sure... "No, the backup's got to be better than that. Bilbette was insistent that Will not kill himself, that the backup was worth it, that it was going to be like a cross between the Matrix and Tron."

"How?" Michelle turned my head to her. "If they die, then that's the end of their existence. Even an exact duplicate is still just a duplicate. And, I know you don't believe in the soul, but let's say it does exist. Then that's gone at the end of November, and the things we reincarnate are nothing but the shells of the people they resemble. That sounds more Monkey's Paw than rapture to me."

I ran my fingers through my hair and gave up. "Damn it. You're both right." They hugged me tight, and I have to confess that even my god-like self felt much better for it. I couldn't let it go completely, though. "What's the backup for, then?"

Jane shrugged. "Crowd control. Just like religion, they're offering people something to hope for even after they die in order to keep them under control before they do." She spread her hands. "Hey, I know it's cynical, but it's the only thing that kept people from rioting before the marking, and it's the only thing preventing mass suicides now."

"They've got mind control now. They don't need false promises."

"Maybe they don't have mind control." The girls lay their heads on my shoulders and I was starting to think about things other than saving humanity. "Maybe that was another disinformation campaign." Jane was way too good at debunking my theories. "I mean, if we could keep people from believing in climate change until cities were underwater, it's not much of a leap for us to believe god-like aliens when they tell us we're incapable of violence."

"Your evil genius is too powerful for me," I told her. "I give."

"Sorry," Jane said, kissing my shoulder. "I don't mean to destroy all your dreams; it's just a gift."

"Never be ashamed of your evil power."

"I'm not," she said quietly. "Just sorry I used it on you."

I kissed Jane on the forehead and I felt the warmth of her mind slip over mine. Michelle joined in, and my despair at not being the hero of this scenario was leavened by their acceptance of it. We rolled together into one blob of a mind, experiencing the disappointment of ex-sex while feeling a voyeuristic thrill at it. Michelle's ex was definitely more manly than I could ever hope to be, but Jane's was a wisp of a guy; he was inventive, though.

If it sounds odd to hear about how attractive I found these men, and how I rated them as lovers, please believe that it was far odder to experience the attraction and lovemaking. Maybe this was the real alien plot – confuse us all with intergender sexual fantasies and move in while we're trying to sort it all out.

I disengaged from them as they fell asleep and I wandered into Michelle's kitchen to see what she had for grub. Very little, as it turned out, so I put on some clothes and tipped out to the neighborhood community center.

There was still a party going on in there. I don't know if it was all the same people, but there was still the cacophonous mix of musical forms blasting away, and still people drunkenly hooking up, and still a line for the MTD. I was an anomaly again; there were no other elbies in the center. Several people noticed and a couple of them came over to me.

One of them was a very attractive blond woman whom I had lusted after from afar ever since I'd moved into that neighborhood. "Hi," she said, sidling up to me. "I'm Laureen."

"Cal," I said, extending my hand and shaking hers gently. "I've seen you around the neighborhood."

"Yeah, you moved in, what, two years ago?" She eyed me up and down, and I reached into her mind to confirm that she was, indeed, checking me out. "So," she asked, looking back up to my eyes, "what's it like?"

There was no longer any need for me to be stumped by that question. I let my thoughts flow over into hers. "It's like this." I hit her with a barrage of thoughts, emotions, memories, and lust, and then I disconnected from her.

"Wow," she breathed. She was flushed, and fanned herself to cool off. She was stunning – blonde, full hair, clear skin that she was showing just enough of to be enticing, yet not so much that she looked cheap, and a smile that could have been carved from marble. "Too bad you never talked to me."

"I know," I said, bringing her hand up to my lips. "It's one of many things I regret, Laureen."

"I saw the two girls in your mind," she said, tilting her head and flashing her baby blues at me. "Think they'd mind?"

I so wanted to say no. But a god needs to know how to restrain himself. "Sorry, Laureen. But I really appreciate the thought."

"Okay, then," she said, waving goodbye. "I'll be around the neighborhood if you change your mind." Laureen walked away, and I regretted every step she took.

"I can't believe you let that walk away, dude." The skinny guy next to me gave me a nudge. "If I was an elbie, I'd totally have hit that."

He was kind of a troll, but I loved him for the one word. Innocently, I asked, "Elbie?"

"It's this name for y'all that's goin' around the Internet. L-B, you know, Left Behind, cuz y'all are bein' left behind."

"Oh," I said in exaggerated comprehension. "That's pretty clever."

He shrugged. "Yeah, I thought it was pretty cool." He leaned in close. "So, two chicks, huh? Man, it must be so awesome. I mean, I haven't had a hard time gettin' the ladies since the marking, but you guys must be swimmin' in it." He slapped me on the arm. "Must be like livin' in porn, dude."

"Yeah, it's a dream come true," I said, trying to give him a few non-verbal cues to back away slowly.

He didn't get them. "Dude, can y'all control women's minds? Make 'em do... anything?"

"Yep," I said, draping an arm around his shoulder. "Men, too."

As I expected, that made him back off. Homophobia – never underestimate its power over the dudebro.

I got to the MTD and ordered up a basket full of food, then decided to show off a bit. I teleported back to Michelle's place and filled up her fridge and cabinets with the food, then sat on her couch and popped open a soda. Her place was so plush; all the good taste in furniture in the rest of the apartment made up for the uber-girliness of the bedroom. I looked around for a remote for the TV, then I remembered her trick from earlier. I concentrated, and the TV turned on, blaring some cop show at me. I hastily reduced the volume, then flipped through a few streams until I found an old Doctor Who and settled down to it.

Jane found me on my third Who episode and sat down beside me, draping her legs over mine. She noticed my soda can on the coffee table and said, "Is there more?"

"In the fridge."

She looked over at the kitchen and then gave me an Oliver Twist face. I laughed and almost got up, but then I realized something. "Watch this." I held my hand clenched in the shape of a can, and totally spoiled the effect by dropping the can when it appeared between my fingers.

"Awesome," Jane said, picking the can up from the couch. "But I still have to go to the kitchen to open it cuz you shook it up so much." She hopped up and took the can over to the sink. Sure enough, when she opened it, it spewed all over her hand and into the sink. "Stop thinking like that," she threw over her shoulder at me.

"I told you before, I can't help being a guy."

"Why are those always your strongest thoughts?" She shook her head and turned on the water to wash off.

"Again, I can't help – "

A pillow flew at my head and I stopped talking. I turned around, expecting to see Michelle, but no one was there. Jane turned around and looked very smug. "I did that." Her eyes widened in mischief, and the cushion holding me lifted up, carrying me into the air about two feet above the couch. "I'm not entirely sure I won't drop you," she said, because I was wobbling pretty bad.

"Just as long as you keep the cushion under me." I gripped the fabric tightly to help her.

"Okay, let's see if I can stick the landing." Slowly, she lowered me down towards the couch, and I think she would have gotten me there safely if somebody hadn't knocked on the door right then. I got to stick that landing; I rolled onto the floor and hit my head on the coffee table. "Sorry," Jane said, running over to me and kissing my head.

"I wonder who that is." I stood up and walked over to the door.

Jane looked at the clock on the microwave. "Booty call," she said confidently.

"Would it be wrong if I answered it?"

"I'll answer it, you go get Michelle," Jane said. I reluctantly left her and walked into the bedroom. Michelle was sleeping the sleep of the dead, and I hated to wake her. I reached out with my mind and gently nudged her out of her dreams. She opened her eyes and smiled up at me.

"Hey, baby," I said, leaning over her and kissing her. "Jane can levitate things, and there's a booty call at your door."

She blinked and tried to come up with a response better than, "Uhh," which is all she came up with.

I helped her up and she walked to the closet to find something to throw on. She came up with a simple black dress that I thought looked way too sexy, but I had already agreed not to be jealous. I kissed her again and followed her into the living room.

Jane was sitting on the couch with a young black man who was an elbie, much to my surprise. Michelle's, too. He turned when he saw her and said, "Professor Barrett?"

"Dex, what are you doing here?"

He stood up and looked nervously around. "Ever since I was elbied," I looked over proudly at Michelle, "I've just been wandering around town. School was everything to me, and now there probably won't be any school anymore." He held a hand out towards her. "You know that I wanted to be a teacher, because of you and your classes. I wanted to help other people find themselves, and I wanted to give knowledge to young people, and now that world is gone." He nervously rubbed his arm, as if that could coax out something profound. "I don't know what I'm going to do once everybody's gone."

Michelle walked over and hugged him. Even though he was a good foot taller than she was, he looked small in her arms. "Dex, you are just the kind of person that needs to be here." She held him at arm's length and looked up into his sweet young face. "You have passion and compassion, and you want to help others, and best of all, you want to improve the world around you. That's your ticket to the new world, honey." She pointed back at me and Jane. "All we've been able to think that we can contribute is music and games." She placed a hand on his chest and spoke quietly, but with fire. "You are going to show these aliens the heart that humanity possesses, the spirit that uplifts us, the soul that drives us forward. I have nothing but faith in you."

Dex burst into tears and gave her a huge hug, lifting her off of the floor. Jane and I looked away from them, giving them the moment. After a few minutes, he regained control of himself and stammered out, "Thanks, Professor Barrett. You don't know how much that means to me."

"I've got some idea," Michelle said, smiling. She looked back at us and I could feel her question without trying. Jane and I both nodded, and she turned back to Dex. "Do you want to stay with us for a while? We've been exploring the things that we can do and trying to figure out what we want society to be like once it's just us."

He beamed down at her, then looked over at Jane and me. The change in his expression was subtle, but he hadn't really learned how to guard his thoughts yet, so we could see in his mind that he wasn't that keen on sharing Michelle with us. He hadn't had the hippie commune experience that we'd been living through. "Do you all... stay here?"

"We've been playing it by ear," Michelle said, leading him over to us. "Cal, here, sort of took charge the first day and we met at his place, then last night we decided to stay over here."

"Since her place is better than Cal's," Jane chimed in.

"Thank you," I said, slapping her on the butt.

Michelle laughed with us, but Dex just looked awkward. She reached up and touched his cheek again. "Have you been around any other elbies?"

"No," he said, still nervous at how comfortable we all were with each other.

"Maybe we should start off with telepathy?" Dex looked like she just asked him to let her give him an enema. "It'll help. Trust me, Dex."

He nodded reluctantly, and she shuffled him over to where we could all join hands. Jane asked him, "Have you tried out telepathy, yet?"

"Not really," he said. He was nervously looking at each of us as if we were going to explode his head at any second.

"Well," Jane said with a big smile, "it's gonna be a little weird."

We didn't explode his head, but we definitely blew his mind. We opened ourselves up to him, and merging with him was as easy as opening a book. I could see why Michelle liked him; he had kept his hope in spite of so much misery in his life. Jane and I liked him right away, too. He also wrote poetry, a cultural contribution we didn't have yet.

When we came down from linking together, he couldn't stop grinning. "Y'all – sorry, Professor – you've been doin' this since the marking?"

"You can call me Michelle," Michelle said to him. "I'm not your professor anymore. The telepathy was, what, the second day?"

"Yeah," I said. "The tablet let us do it, at first." I looked over at Jane. "We've been able to use most of our powers once we've seen somebody else do them. Watch." I levitated Jane off of the floor where she was sitting. She wiggled a little too much, almost causing me to bonk her into the coffee table, but I steadied her and got her up to the ceiling.

"You all look so tiny," she said. "Now get me down."

"Okay, okay," I said, lowering her slowly down. As soon as she could get her feet under her, she flopped herself down onto the floor. I looked over at Dex. "Wanna give it a shot?"

Dex looked around at us nervously. He raised his hand and pointed it at me. He concentrated for a minute, but nothing happened. Michelle touched his hand. "Just let it go." He dropped his hand and let out his breath, and I felt my feet leave the ground. I tried to keep myself steady, but I flipped over before I was a foot off the ground. Dex sucked in some air and moved me higher, plastering me against the ceiling, a little more roughly than I'd done with Jane. We all applauded, and he completely dropped me.

Fortunately, I remembered that I was able to levitate, and I caught myself before I hit the floor. "I'm okay," I said, my face inches from the carpet. I put my feet under me and stood up. "Ta-dah!"

Nobody applauded me, but Dex was clearly astonished at what he could do now. "We can all do that?"

"We can do that, we can teleport, we've got the Fhh-bop-uh version of Google in our heads," Michelle said. "And we're healthy. They cured us just like they cured all the marked." She looked at me. "Did I miss anything?"

"We can control the television with our minds," I said. "No need for remotes."

"Yeah, that was pretty neat," Jane said. "But not exactly the most Earth-shattering thing we can do."

"Not every superpower is invulnerability," I said.

"Anyway," Michelle said, trying to get back on track, "we're finding out new things we can do every day."

Jane, Michelle, and I sat down on the couch, and Dex sat down on the recliner to the side of the coffee table. He was still trying to take it all in, and he clearly wanted to take it in with Michelle's help. I didn't need telepathy to tell that. He leaned forward in the recliner to touch his knee to hers and said, "Have y'all talked to... your family yet?"

This brought down the mood in the room immediately. We all nodded. I was surprised at Jane and asked, "I thought you and your sister hated each other."

"The end of the world has a way of making your old differences look kinda small and pathetic," she said. "She called me and I teleported over there yesterday. She was crying to me because she'd never get to be a mom." Jane's voice caught; I was amazed that she'd managed to hide that part of her mind from us. "She was so jealous that I was elbied and she wasn't that she forgot about the whole mom thing. I think the thing that upset her most, though, was how much this all shook up her plans. She had everything planned, her career, her relationships, how often she flossed... and now we live in chaos. It's made her totally crazy." She smiled. "It's kinda nice, actually. She was more real than I've ever seen her before. We talked for hours. I'm going to go see her at the... the end of next month."

Michelle and I squeezed her hands. "Next month is going to be rough," Michelle said. "Cal's going to Omaha; he's got a brother with a little boy."

Dex nodded. "I got three brothers and a sister, and they all have kids." He hung his head. "I can't face 'em. I called 'em and they're all marked."

"It's like in the Christopher Reeve Superman," I said, and Jane nodded. "We have all these powers, but we can't save them."

Michelle kissed me on the cheek and told Dex, "They're nerds, but you'll get to love them after a while." That gave us a little chuckle to liven us up a bit. "I think one of the things I love about these two is that no matter how depressed I've gotten, they've been able to bring me back up."

Dex was looking a little uncomfortable at the physical side of the relationship we had. "So, are you guys..."

Michelle nodded vigorously. "Yeah. The whole sex thing has been..."

I offered, "Confusing?"

"Yeah." She waved a thumb between us. "Cal and I hooked up first, then there was an alien friend of his, and then Jane is just cute, and there've been exes..." She sighed. "You know, it's the end of the world. I don't think anyone should be judging us."

Jane and I giggled, and after a minute, Michelle joined us. Dex was still a little stiff, if you'll pardon the expression, but he smiled at us. "Studies have shown that the birth rate nine months after a major disaster goes up," Jane said. "Animals that survive something cataclysmic are driven to repopulate. It's what's inside us."

Dex leaned forward and asked Michelle, "Can I talk to you outside?"

"Sure," Michelle said, standing up. She shrugged at me and Jane, then left the apartment with Dex.

"He doesn't want to share her," Jane said to me. "Course, the only reason you wanted to share her was so you could have a threesome."

"What man wouldn't?"

Jane punched me. "What if she and I decided we liked women more, and you became our friend that we indulged every now and then?" She raised an eyebrow at me. "You like the threesome because we're both hetero women who aren't going to replace you, because we love you. But, what if we decided to broaden our horizons? Would the weird relationship we've built up over the last few days be able to survive that?"

I shrugged. "Who knows? Lorraine couldn't handle the possibility that we're all rapists, but the three of us seem to be able to handle anything the end of the world can throw at us."

"You and I can, because we're nerds, and our entire life in that culture has prepared us for this. I don't know how Michelle is coping with it. Maybe business school makes you more open-minded than I thought." She looked over at the door. "Our new arrival is a fragile guy who had a huge crush on the teacher he modeled his life after. He doesn't seem like a nerd. I think he wants to wander the Earth, and then the universe, and I think he wants a certain gal by his side."

I couldn't disagree with her. "So, you don't think we're gonna have a sweaty night – sorry, morning – ahead of us?"

"Maybe one," she said, nudging me with her shoulder. "I mean, he is a guy, after all." Her eyes were pointed at me, but she was staring someplace else. "He'll tell her he can't live our hedonistic lifestyle, that he has to see what the world has left to offer; and then he'll ask her to join him." Her focus returned to me. "She cares a lot about him."

I nodded. "I could feel that." I took Jane's hand and brought it up to my lips. "And they have history together; all we have is... what would you call what we have?"

"A long, deep swim in each other's souls," Jane said, then grinned at me.

I drew back from her, impressed. "See, that's why you got elbied."

"I've been having a lot of thoughts like that. I need to start writing them down. We have to keep our culture going, after all." She played with my hair and I leaned my head over to brush her hand. It was nice and comfortable, and I wanted Jane as deeply as I wanted Michelle. "Maybe the next letter you need to think about is to Dan Savage."

"Think he's still answering mail?"

"Maybe he got elbied."

"We could always use telepathy." Jane's face lit up. "What?"

"What if..." She had to stop to giggle. "What if we contacted people we've always wanted to talk to? There's no filtering system on the neural communication network." She gathered her feet under her and bounced on the couch in excitement. "How many elbies do you think are trying to reach Nathan Fillion now?"

"Or Chloe Moretz." I was running down a list of stars and starlets in my mind. "Yeah, we could get into some serious trouble."

"I'm not saying we teleport over and have sex with them," Jane said dismissively. "I mean, unless they want to."

"We really need to reign in our sexual impulses."

"Why?" She was smiling, but the question was serious. "Sure, we need to devote some time to cultural pursuits in order to please the C.O.I.L., but why should we adhere to the mores that we've been living by? We don't have to worry about disease or pregnancy now. Why not have sex as often and with whoever we want?"

"As much as I want to agree with you – "

"I know you do."

"Yes. We still have the specter of coercion hanging over our heads. So to speak." She smirked at me as I continued on. "And it's not just the sex. I'm starting to think that whoever's the most passionate about something can win any argument, now. Your passion is gonna bleed over into the minds of everybody around you."

"Yeah," Jane said. She kept the smirk. "Not that it wasn't that way already."

"Well," I said, shrugging. "Facts had a little role to play."

"Sometimes. But not as often as you'd like to think."

I sighed. "This is not curing my depression."

"It's the end of the world, baby." She kissed me on the cheek and nuzzled my neck. "We've got to take our happiness where we can."

I put my arm around her and squeezed her tight. "Nathan Fillion, huh?"

It turned out that Mr. Fillion was not, in fact, elbied, nor was he overwhelmed by the attention of our kind. Jane and I made a date to see him. Talk about the nerd ascension...

Michelle walked back into the apartment, but Dex didn't follow her. We held out our arms and she collapsed into them and we tried to give her comfort and privacy at the same time by not reading her mind or asking questions. When she was ready, she settled in between us and we all held hands. "I always did like him," she started. "He's got drive and he's handsome," she said, smiling lopsidedly at me, "and his soul is right there for all the world to see. I've found him utterly adorable, and I gossiped about him with other teachers, but I couldn't do anything while I was his professor. The Fhh-bop-uh took care of that." She closed her eyes and let us see the surface of her thoughts. Dex was adorable, all right; but there was something of the old world in him, the ambition to take on a world that had shunned him and dominate it. "He wants to see the world and take charge of it. And he wants his lady by his side."

"It's romantic," Jane said, stroking Michelle's hair.

"Kind of," Michelle said. "And, you know, there's part of me that wants to live in the patriarchal fairy tale. We probably have the power to make it real now, with wings and crowns and fairies and everything." She looked over at me. "But, I wasn't raised to be somebody who hangs on a man's arm while he goes out and has adventures. I've lived my life without looking for a Prince Charming."

"And Dex already had the crown on?"

"He was at least trying it on for size. And you know, he is a prince." She turned to the TV. "I'm just not his princess."

"Awww." Jane put her arms around Michelle and squeezed. "You still have us."

Michelle kissed her on the forehead and smiled at me. "Yeah, I still have you. And that's good. But sometimes you want a little more than you can have."

"That's how I feel when I look at the two of you," I said, feeling supremely dorky as I said it. "I feel like I already beat the odds by getting elbied, so how lucky am I that I also found two super-cool people to build the new world with?"

"It was four others to begin with," Michelle said.

"Yeah, but I'm tryin' to gloss over the negatives right now," I said, jostling her. "We're just thinking of the positives, okay?"

"Okay," the ladies said, both grinning at me.

"Good. I'm glad we're all on the same page." I was starting to think I'd been elbied to keep the others from sinking into depression. I looked out Michelle's window and saw that the sun was coming up. "Jesus, is it that late?" I reached out to the C.O.I.L. data stream and confirmed that it was almost seven in the morning. "Did we get any sleep?"

"I got an hour or two," Jane said. "But I feel like I slept all night."

"Me, too," Michelle said. "No more need for sleep?"

"Maybe it'll be like food – something we can do, but don't need to." I stood up and walked over to the kitchen. "Speaking of which, would either of you like some breakfast?"

"I could eat," Michelle said, sprawling out on the couch and laying her legs across Jane.

"Just something light for me, thanks," Jane said.

I pulled out a melon and sliced it up, then threw some toast into the oven and popped open a box of cereal. Her dishes were almost in the same shape as her pantry had been, but I cobbled together enough bowls and plates to get the food out to the ladies. Michelle scooped up the cereal and Jane gobbled up the cantaloupe. I sat down and drank a little coffee and nibbled at my toast. I didn't feel a need to eat, but I wanted to taste the coffee and toast; I liked them, enjoyed their familiarity. My nourishment was coming from the universe around me; I could feel the sun's power beaming down on us all, I could taste the various cosmic rays that were pulsing through the system on their way to eternity. I set my coffee, a weak substitute for that kind of stimulation, down on the table. I looked at my two ladies and I breathed slowly and deeply. "I'm ready," I said to their puzzled faces.

And then I was on Mars.

Olympus Mons, the second-tallest mountain in the solar system, is even more impressive when you are looking at it in person, as opposed to a video screen on another planet. I can't even begin to tell you how small I felt next to that behemoth. But, at the same time, I felt like I was more than its equal; like I could encompass worlds.

A few minutes of contemplation, and I was ready to return to Earth. I breathed in the shallow air of Mars and concentrated – and I was back in Michelle's apartment. Neither of the ladies were there, and when I checked the time, I saw that I had been gone for an hour. I reached out and found Michelle in the bed room, while Jane had gone to my place. As soon as they felt my mind touch them, Jane teleported back and Michelle hurried out of the bedroom.

"What was that all about?" Michelle slapped me on the shoulder and jumped back in surprise. "You're freezing," she said, rubbing my sides and walking me to the couch. The ladies draped me in a blanket and hugged me tight.

"I went to Mars," I said, expelling the last wisps of the Martian air from my lungs. "That's why I was gone so long. I was only there for a few minutes, but it's a twenty minute trip each way."

Jane nodded. "We teleport at the speed of light?"

"Apparently."

"Why did you say you were ready?" Michelle and Jane were both puzzled by that.

"Well, I saw that we didn't need sleep anymore, and I didn't feel like I needed the food, so I figured the next thing was that we wouldn't need air. Or warmth, as it turns out." I wrapped the blanket more tightly around me. "Intellectually, I knew how cold it was, but feeling it... man, it was like having colors described to you while your eyes were closed your whole life, and then opening them up one day to see the world. It was like I could feel the atoms in my body slowing down, but my brain just moved faster to compensate."

"I wanna go," Jane said, gripping my frosty hand. She looked over at Michelle.

"You kids and your new toys," Michelle sighed. She reached a hand out to each of us, and then we were gone again.

On Mars, we linked minds so that we could communicate, since the atmosphere was so thin. I started thinking of ways to change that; Mars would be a nice summer home for us all one day.

This time, instead of the great volcano, we stood at the edge of the Rift Valley, the scar that stretches across a quarter of the planet's surface. Looking down, I got the urge to jump, but the ladies prevented me; none of us trusted our levitation that much yet. The view was astonishing, and we held each other close, sharing the physical moment as much as we shared the psychic.

We watched the strange flash of the Martian sunset, and then we hopped back to Earth, three popsicles dropping the temperature in Michelle's apartment so heavily that her heater kicked on. The message notification on Michelle's TV was flashing at us, and a quick side trip showed us that Jane and I had people waiting to hear from us, as well. We gathered back in Michelle's living room and struggled to put words to what we had just experienced. "It's getting harder for me to leave either of you," Jane finally said. Michelle and I hugged and kissed her.

"I know what you mean." Michelle's eyes burrowed into mine, and I kissed her over Jane's head. "We have obligations now to the ones who are leaving us, but then we have eternity." She smiled her beautiful, beautiful smile at us, melting our hearts. "We'll see other worlds soon enough."

We hugged and kissed goodbye, then Jane and I teleported back to our own places. My place felt so empty that it depressed me immediately. Which was pretty much the mood that followed me the rest of the day as I went through friends who were going to miss me and acquaintances who wished that we'd become friends so that they could miss me. Each gloomy conversation left me wanting to check in with Michelle and see if I'd done enough penance in the land of the mortals.

After the sun went down, I wiped my eyes with the last of my tissues and gave in to the exhaustion. I sprawled out on the couch and tried to recover mentally from seeing so many of the people I grew up with marked for death. As I lay there with my eyes closed, I felt the pressure of a smaller body on top of mine. A gentle hand caressed my forehead and I opened my eyes and looked down into Bilbette's. My eyes must have widened, because she asked, "Are you surprised?"

"Yeah. I didn't think I'd be seeing you again so soon."

"I wished to see how you are doing."

"Both well and poorly," I said. She reached into my mind and I frowned.

She paused. "You object to the blending of minds?"

"I wonder about my free will."

"You always have agency, even when you are joined with others. But yes, it is difficult to know whether one does things freely or from the coercion of a stronger mind. We accept the consequences of telepathy in much the same way that you accept the consequences of being intoxicated."

"That's a little frightening."

"Even our lives are not perfect," Bilbette said. She sat up, straddling me. "We strive for a utopic existence, but we are not gods. We need comfort, and reassurance, and the thrill of companionship with those we find interesting. We make mistakes. But we have time to repair them."

"Time heals all wounds."

"Or dulls them, at least." She touched me lightly on the stomach, tickling me, and my movement nearly knocked her off me. She laughed, not the creepy laugh that had come from her translator when she was in her own form, but a human chuckle that made me smile. "The joining of ourselves to others, even if it is not permanent, is another joy that makes eternity worthwhile." She leaned down close to me, and I could smell the cinnamon and ginger of her natural shape; it was oddly arousing coming from the mousy brunette on top of me. "You are with Michelle, still; and now another woman?" She raised an eyebrow at me. "And you think I have arranged all this because I like you?"

I blushed. "Earth nerds tend to lack self-confidence in personal relationships."

"Yes. I have seen The Big Bang Theory." She lowered her face to mine, and all the world was cinnamon and ginger, and she kissed me with passion. I melted; well, at least in some areas. "I find you interesting, Cal," she whispered into my ear and in my mind. "And joining with you has made this piece of eternity worthwhile. But I have not stacked the deck in your favor. Any luck you have had has been your own. Cherish the relationships you have made, Cal. They are the only lights in a universe of darkness." My conversational skills deteriorated after that as she made love to me with both her mind and body.

It was while we were twined together that she opened up more to me than she had before; she dropped the defenses that she had been keeping up, and I got a tiny glimpse of what it was to be a Fhh-bop-uh, to watch your people be annihilated, and to join with the ones who made you an orphan. I learned Bilbette's real name, the one I'd never be able to pronounce, but which described so much of her being. And it was in that deep dive into her soul that I caught a glimmering of what it was to join with the people who had destroyed yours, to be a collaborator, to betray all that you were so that you could be more than you had ever dreamed of being.

She pulled away from me as night fell, and I reached out for her, wanting to pull her back and never let her go again. "I will find you again." She kissed me on the forehead and stroked the back of my head. "I will always find you."

She poofed away, and I got up to shower. I was going to be late joining back up with Michelle and Jane, but I stank and wanted to cleanse myself. I was in the shower when Michelle popped into my mind, and then into my bathroom. "Room for two in there?" She pulled aside the curtain and I stepped out of her way. She touched my cheek and could see the trouble in my eyes. "Do you want to share it with me?" I nodded, and she connected with me, letting me spill Bilbette's life into her brain. She staggered, and I held her up while she tried to assimilate it all. She rested her head on my chest as water splashed over us and finally said, "So that's our lot in life."

"It's not a lot, but it's our life."

"Ba-dum-bum-bum." She scrubbed her face and I scrubbed her back, and we felt cleaner after the water washed it all away. "Jane's already over at my place, by the way."

"Why is it just the two of us in here, then?" I tutted in mock outrage. I stepped out of the shower and concentrated for a minute, and I was completely dry.

Michelle smiled at the trick. "How'd you do that?"

"That's not all." I concentrated again, and clothes appeared on my body. "Ta-da." I sent a thought over to Jane. "I'm letting Jane know we're here."

Jane appeared in my bathroom as soon as my mind touched hers, and she looked at Michelle standing in the tub and pouted. "No fair."

"More like no room," Michelle said, stepping out and reaching for the towel on the door.

"Don't bother," I told her, and whisked the water away from her skin.

"That's cool," Jane said with a grin.

"Watch this," I said, and in rapid succession, I shifted my clothes to her, her clothes to Michelle, then Michelle's clothes to me and mine to Michelle, and then popped Michelle in a dress and ended with Jane and I dressed in our own outfits. "Abra-cadabra!"

The ladies applauded and I took a bow. "Not exactly a family-friendly show," Michelle said, adjusting the dress. "And you need a little more practice on how to hang these things." After a couple of tugs, she felt comfortable in the dress and underwear I'd supplied her with. She looked down at what she was wearing and asked, "Where did these come from, by the way?"

"I'm... I'm not sure." I tried to remember what my thought process had been. "I just pictured you in a dress, and there it was."

We were all struck silent by the implication of that. Jane held out her hand, took a deep breath, and made a ring appear in her palm. "We don't need the MTDs anymore." She placed the ring on her middle finger, which was appropriate because it was a Green Lantern power ring.

I took her hand and admired the ring. Looking up into her eyes, I asked, "Is it real?"

"I was thinking about that." She pointed the ring at the towel on the door and an emerald light slowly unfurled from her hand. The light shaped itself into a hook and she maneuvered it under the towel and lifted, gripping her ring hand with the other. She was sweating from the exertion. Slowly, she lifted the towel from the rod it hung on and drifted it to me. From the effort she was putting into it, you'd have thought the towel weighed a ton. She got it near my hand and grunted, "Take it." I grabbed it quickly and the light from her ring faded. She slumped into me, exhausted. "All I need is a uniform and a lantern," she said sleepily.

"Can we fly?" Michelle lifted up off of the floor a few inches. "I know we can levitate, but can we fly?" She turned horizontal and assumed a pretty good Superman stance, aiming herself at the bathroom door, which I hastily opened for her. She slowly sailed out of it and crept into the living room.

"You're not exactly a speeding bullet," I told her, walking behind.

"I don't want to break anything," she said, a little whine in her voice. She raised herself higher, floating up to the ceiling. "I'm trying not to break me, either. What if I lose the power and drop?"

"We'll catch you," Jane said, looking over at me and shrugging.

"Sure, we can probably do that." I positioned myself under her and tried to keep an eye on her without bumping into everything in my way. I didn't succeed, and Jane scooted in front of me to move things out of harm's way.

Michelle floated over to my door and took a deep breath. "Should I try it?"

Jane and I looked at each other. "She can always teleport back," she said, "right?"

"Sure," I said confidently. "That's the failsafe. That's why we got teleportation before flight." I looked up to Michelle's thrilled but terrified face. "If you get worried, just teleport back here. Piece o' cake."

"Okay," she said shakily as I opened the door. She bumped the wall and the frame as she inexpertly floated herself out. Once she was on my landing, she paused with her feet on the railing. It was the first time I noticed how many trees there were around my fourplex. "Okay," she shouted, rocking forward. "Here I go!"

She still didn't take off like a speeding bullet, but she took off at a pretty good clip; thirty or forty miles an hour, at least. She narrowly missed the taller trees surrounding us and I heard her peal of joy as she rose higher and higher into the sky. Jane held onto me and said, "Ready to give it a try?" I nodded, and we both rose into the air.

There's an old series, The Greatest American Hero, about a guy who's given a suit that makes him super-powered while he wears it, but he loses the manual to it, so everything he does is kind of clumsy, especially flying. I bring this up because that's exactly how I felt gliding along with Jane, holding her hand and trying desperately to conquer my fear of crashing to the ground at thirty-two feet per second squared. She was squealing like a fangirl, but I was trying to keep from crying like a baby.

Michelle looped around us and said, "This is the best thing ever!" She then twirled around in the air like the world's most angelic ballerina, and I lost my fear just watching her. We had the teleportation failsafe, after all. I did a couple of maneuvers around the ladies, and they glided and twirled and soared like they were dolphins of the sky. I looked down once to see how high we were, and tried not to think about it again. We were pretty high.

Michelle grabbed my hands and pulled me into a tight embrace, then barreled into Jane and held her close. We floated in the sky and we felt like gods and everything inside me was joy. And yes, of course we made love in the sky, because who wouldn't? It was just the icing on the cake of being able to fly like a freakin' superhero.

"Do you think we can breach the atmosphere?" Jane looked up at the night sky and I could feel the tremendous longing for it in her heart. "Do you think we could just fly into space?"

"I don't think what we're doing is anti-gravity," I said. "If we just cancelled the gravitational field around us, we would have been thrown into the walls at, what, seven-hundred miles an hour? Isn't that how fast the Earth rotates?" They both nodded absently. "So, we probably still have to speed up to escape velocity."

Michelle kissed Jane's cheek and my lips. "How fast is that?"

"Seven miles per second."

She grinned wickedly. "If I get into trouble, I'll see you back at my place." She flipped away from us and pointed her fist at the stars. Faster than I could move my head, she shot straight up, and I felt the wave of her sonic boom a moment later. Jane and I contacted her telepathically, and she was flying in her own private hurricane until the atmosphere thinned out so much that there was nothing to slam back together as she tore through it. But, the pull of the planet below was too great, and she fell like Icarus back to Earth. She was still conscious, and teleported to safety, followed by Jane and me.

Michelle was lying naked on her couch; her clothes had been ripped off by her velocity. Jane knelt at her side and asked, "So, do you just need more practice?"

Michelle, who was taking shallow breaths to calm herself down, said, "I think so. I just need to start further down, maybe from the ground. I needed more distance to build up speed. Not for a while, though; I'm exhausted." She sucked in a deep gulp of air and let it out slowly.

"We'll need to come up with something more durable to wear for the next try," I said, rubbing her bare belly. "Unless we're ready to let go of our silly former notions of modesty. I personally think that naked African and Asian goddesses flying through the sky would be inspiring."

"I'm not so sure about pasty naked European gods, though," Jane said, and Michelle high-fived her.

"There's a proud and long tradition of that."

"Don't go braggin' about how long your things are..."

I went into the kitchen while they chuckled at me. While I was standing there thinking about my pasty European-ness, it hit me. My clothes vanished and I turned back to the ladies. Slowly, I reformed my body, working like a sculptor on his masterpiece, changing my form from a slightly out of shape nerd into someone the ladies wouldn't be ashamed to be seen with. I gave myself a six-pack, a few inches in height, a couple of inches elsewhere, tanned myself and added definition to all my muscles. Jane looked over at me and her jaw dropped. Michelle sat up and looked over the back of the couch and gave me a wolf-whistle. "Sup, ladies," I said, strutting over to them.

"Now, that's something I wouldn't mind seeing fly overhead," Michelle said, reaching out to stroke my new muscles. "Turn around, baby, let's see the whole package."

I went through my best Mister Universe poses to their applause and laughter, and I could feel their hunger for this new body of mine. "We can be anything now," I said. "Just like Bilbette could be a human." I closed my eyes and I reshaped my body again; somehow, from some wellspring of knowledge that the C.O.I.L. was providing us, I knew the intricacies of human anatomy. When I opened my eyes, I was a woman, and the ladies were already getting the idea. I just spurred it into reality by saying, "Wanna see how the other half lives?"

Telepathy prepared us for that night a little bit, but it was still a hell of a revelation. The morning saw us all back in the gender we had started with, but we all had a new-found appreciation for the other. Even though we didn't need it, and I could have created it whole, I made us breakfast from scratch. I created the ingredients, of course; no need to make a trip down to the MTD for that. It was nothing fancy, just some fruit, eggs, bacon, and juice, but I brought it all forth from the ether.

Flying, spontaneous creation of matter, teleportation, telepathy; that all paled next to the ability to change my body into anything I wanted. That was the point where I truly felt like a god. Even as I cooked the food, I was wearing a more muscular body than I had been elbied in. I was taller, I was more handsome, and there were other attributes I'd increased, as well, as virtually any man would.

It wasn't just me. The ladies filed in from the bedroom once they smelled the cooking food, and they were each much more shapely and fit than they'd been the night before. Our faces were roughly the same, though. I guess that was our identity, and we didn't want to screw with it too much.

They came to either side of me and kissed me on the cheeks. Jane asked, "How are you feeling?"

"Different," I answered. "The whole god thing is real for me, now. I feel like Zeus, or Loki."

Michelle tittered; what I'd said struck her as funny, and we looked at her for an explanation. "After last night, are you going to give birth to Athena or Sleipner?"

"Neither, I hope. I don't fancy the idea of someone springing from my broken brow full-grown."

"And hooves would definitely hurt coming out," Jane said, nodding. "Teleportation makes cesareans a cinch, though."

"Still not something I want to do," I said, but my brain was running down the ways that I could keep both an outward male shape and still carry an infant to term in my abdomen. Maybe I'll try it someday, if eternity bores me enough. "Have a seat, sweeties. Food'll be ready in a minute."

"Smells good," Michelle said, taking a seat at the small dining table.

Jane hung by my side, her head on my now-muscular bicep. "It's funny," she said, rubbing her cheek against my arm. "I knew why guys liked sex before, and telepathy gave me every sensation coming from you, but I only really get it now. Like, last night, I kept thinking, 'Yeah, I totally understand why guys like to do that, now.' Especially the oral sex."

Michelle nodded emphatically. "Tell me about it. I didn't want to stop getting that."

"I'm glad you approve," I said, blushing. I have no idea why it embarrassed me; maybe I just hadn't embraced my feminine side enough. "I'm not sure which aspect was best for me, although the two of you were wonderful at it all, once you got used to the bodies."

"I'm forgiving every guy I've ever been with who was too quick," Michelle said, hiding her face.

"You just need a little more practice," I told her, ladling food onto plates for them. I handed Jane hers and a juice, then teleported Michelle's plate in front of her. I carried the juice with my plate, because I wasn't that confident in my aim with a liquid. Once we were all into our food, I said, "What do you guys want to do with eternity?"

Michelle put her fork down and considered. "It's all real to you now, huh? One night as a woman transforms your whole world view?"

"Well, Bilbette's real form is a huge kind of Cthulhoid horror, and she's become so jaded by eternity that she wanted to see what physical fun is like with the hairless monkeys. How long will it be before we're there?"

"You mean you're not thinking about it now?" Jane snickered into her juice, but her eyes were on mine as I answered.

"I kind of am," I said. "She said that they had sexual tourists in her delegation, and it's obviously something pretty common for them. We went cross-gender in a week. Are we gonna need alien lovin' to spice up our lives by the end of the month?"

"It's just the euphoria of suddenly acquiring all these powers," Jane said. "Once the initial excitement wears off, we'll probably behave more like the people we were raised to be."

"Will we?" Michelle gulped the last of her juice and made the glass disappear. "In mythology, who keeps the gods in check?"

"More powerful gods, usually," I said.

"That would be the C.O.I.L. in our case. But as long as we supply culture for them to consume, they probably don't care what else we're up to. Hell, they might even like our troubles; soap operas always have an audience." Michelle stood up and went over to the window to look out on the day. The social center was rocking, as always, and she watched it for a minute. "Are we changing enough with all the powers? Can we handle it, or are we going to be like musicians who suddenly hit it big and flame out?"

"Apollo or Dionysus." Jane made her own plate disappear and turned to Michelle. She stuck out her left hand. "Disciplined, creative, and wise artists who enjoy themselves, or," she held out her right hand, "chaotic partyers only looking for the next perverse thrill. Judging by reality shows, there's definitely an audience for these guys," she said, waving her right hand.

I pointed at her left hand. "But those are the sustainable ones. And the odds are greater that they'll create better art than the other guys."

"There's room for both, though." Jane put her hands together. "Our society has both opera and people setting themselves on fire on YouTube; ballet and cockfighting; Mona Lisa and Piss Christ."

"Maybe that's why we're interesting," Michelle said from the window, her eyes still on the social center. "We're buffoons who can recite Shakespeare. All the universe wants to see the hairless monkeys dance."

"What a piece of work is man," I said under my breath. "In action, how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god." I pointed to Jane. "Don't make the joke about the buffoon reciting Shakespeare."

"I wasn't gonna say anything."

"So, should we be pulling back? Are you thinking we need to count to ten before we teleport or have sex with somebody?"

"Maybe." Michelle kept looking out the window. "Maybe what I'm saying is that I'd rather be Elvis than Johnny Knoxville."

"That might not be who we are." Jane's head swiveled as she spoke to either side of the room. "We might be the low-brow romcom instead of the Oscar winner."

"I think it's up to us," Michelle said, turning back to us finally. "We get to choose. And it's time to start exercising that choice."

The next couple of days are kind of a blur. The three of us brainstormed cultural ideas; Michelle and Jane composed music, and I wrote out plots and characters. It was kind of a rock opera, and I was totally overwhelmed by how talented my girlfriends were, and how little I was. But, they told me that I was doing OK, so I kept plugging at it.

We all agreed that, while Jane was pretty good at dialogue and lyrics, we needed somebody to fill that niche in our group. It was time to make contacts in the greater Elbie community. While it was easy enough to find other Elbies, we were looking for somebody who had adopted the philosophy we were living by now.

Apparently, we were the first Elbies to embrace the idea of restraint, because everybody else was having orgies and off-world fun. I'm just sayin'. After a few rejections in the DC area, I thought about my buddy Ben, and he teleported over to meet us. Although he'd seen Michelle and Jane in my mind, he was properly impressed by them in person. "Pleased to meet you," he said, kissing Jane's hand like a total dork. She loved it.

Michelle kissed his hand, and everybody laughed. "Pleased to meet you," she said. "Cal's told us that you might be able to give us a hand."

"Dialogue and lyrics, huh?" He looked over at me. "Is this where my English degree saves the world?"

"No, your degree is still as useless as ever."

"Damn it!"

"But we do want your help making a rock opera."

His face went completely blank. He blinked at me twice.

I added, "And we'll maybe get famous?"

"Okay, I'm in."

So, he listened to what we'd come up with and he changed around some of Jane's lyrics, rewrote her dialogue, added in scenes, and before too long, we had something I wasn't unhappy with showing people. It was a science fiction rock opera, with effects provided courtesy of our super-special Elbie powers. We created a box that played all the music Jane and Michelle fed into it, we had animated holographic characters singing the songs and speaking all our dialogue, and we beamed the sets into existence. That was how I learned that Bilbette wasn't using her tablet to do any of the projections she showed us during gaming; she didn't need to.

We premiered our little show for the folks at the corner social center, and it was a big hit with them. I even invited Bilbette to come see it, and she showed up in her adorable human form and loved the show. She came up to us after the show and gave us all a hug, even Ben. She took him aside to talk gaming and Jane tiptoed up to whisper in my ear. "Is it wrong that I find her attractive, now?"

"No, it's right in so many ways, Jane."

"Damn you, Cal." She hit me on the shoulder and then kissed it.

"Hey, I'm looking at Ben's ass all the time now, thank you very much."

"No, that'd be me," Michelle said, joining us. We both turned to her. "What? It's cute." We both nodded in agreement. Michelle gazed out at the social center crowd and waved at someone who waved at her. "No idea who that was," she said. She was smiling brightly; the long-forgotten high of performance had come back to her. "We need a lot of work," she muttered to us. "This was okay for our neighborhood, but the C.O.I.L. are going to want something with polish."

"I wouldn't be too sure about that," I said. "Rough edges are what make us unique. Polish us too much, and we become homogenized. They don't want more of the same – they want unique human, the kind that only we can deliver."

"We can deliver something better," Michelle said.

"All right, but I'm hoping you don't lose your soul in all that polish."

"I think my soul can stand up to a little rubbing." She kissed me. "And stop thinking like that."

"I make no apologies for being a man."

"Oh, that reminds me, dinner at my dad's tomorrow night," Michelle said. "Dress nice."

"I'll miss you," Jane said, her face pointed down like a little girl who'd been denied ice cream.

"You can keep a telepathic link on us the whole time and see how big a heart attack I give her whole family," I said.

"It is not going to be anything like that," Michelle said, rolling her eyes at me. "And I'd take you, too, honey, but it is going to be a little bad with just the one white boy. I don't need to explain the Asian girl and other white boy, too."

Jane and I snickered. Ben and Bilbette were nowhere in sight, and I suspected that my Fhh-bop-uh friend had decided to play the tourist with him; a brief brush of his mind told me that I was right. "We can leave," I told the ladies. "Ben's gonna be otherwise occupied tonight."

They looked around for him, and then Jane caught on. "Ohh," she said. "That fickle alien. Here I thought her heart belonged to you."

"She loves her some gamers," I said. We teleported back to Michelle's place and flopped on the couch. Jane and I were emotionally exhausted, but Michelle was charged up from the performance.

"That was so much fun," she said, going into the kitchen and raiding her refrigerator for snacks. "Once we tighten it up, where do you think we can perform next?"

"Carnegie Hall?"

Jane hit me with a pillow. "We can probably get the Warner or Dominion, provided there aren't some die-hards doing productions there. But if we want audiences, we might need to stick to the social centers until... after next month."

"Do we want audiences?"

Michelle was flabbergasted that I was even able to ask the question. "Audiences are what music and performance are about, Cal. If you don't have an audience, it's just... it's just..."

Jane offered, "Masturbation?"

Michelle gave her that one on the nose. "Exactly. The audience is what makes it art."

"Okay. I'm just a nerd who's never done this kind of stuff before."

"You've performed in front of your friends when you play RPGs."

"Yeah, it's not really the same."

"It's different in degree, maybe, but not in kind." Michelle vaulted over the back of the couch and landed on us. "I've seen enough in your head to know that the performance is pretty informal, but you still perform, you still put on characters and make up dialogue and plots. You've only had audiences of four or five people, but you still gave them a show, just like we gave a show to everybody tonight. This is what makes us interesting as a species; this is why we are being changed and made into beings capable of producing all of this. This is what makes us valuable."

I took in what she'd said, then replied, "So, we have to dance for our supper?"

"And everybody else's, baby."

"Shoulda told me that before I dropped out of the dance class at the rec center..."

Jane looked up at the ceiling and a small image of the stars appeared above her. I touched her hand and she smiled at me. "We always thought they'd come for our resources; our water, our minerals, our food, our women. Nobody thought they'd come for the theater." She traded the image of the stars for a bank of speakers. "Either of you have a chance to listen to Fhh-bop-uh music yet?" Michelle and I shook our heads. "It's, uh... it's different." She pointed at the speakers and a strange low hum filled the room, like the quietest bagpipe in the world. It was then accompanied by a rhythmic wet slapping, and then a cacophony of noises piled onto that base, tumbling out and then disappearing, each sound taking the mike for a moment before fading off into nothing. It went on for a few minutes, then ended as if Jane had simply cut the power to her holographic stereo.

"You're right," Michelle said, pursing her lips. "It's different."

"I wouldn't say it's something you couldn't get used to," I said, "but it would take some effort."

"We have eternity," Jane said. "And they say that they're the most like us of anybody else in the C.O.I.L."

"I wonder how long it'll take us to get sick of Earth culture." I raised my hand. "Dibs on being the first Elbie hipster."

"There's this great Fhh-bop-uh band," Michelle said in a faux-English accent, "you've probably never heard of them."

"Sorry, dude," Jane said to me, "she's got the hipster down already."

"Damn it!"

"I wonder if we could incorporate some of that into the show." Michelle took out her tablet. We didn't really need them anymore, but jotting things down on it helped her think. "Never hurts to throw local color at the crowd."

"She's already turning into an impresario," I whispered to Jane. "How long before broken hotel rooms and drug addiction are in our future?"

"Rehab and Jesus are just months away."

"At least we'll be able to have a comeback tour afterwards."

"That's always fun."

"That's two people who don't want to have sex tonight," Michelle muttered. "I wonder if Ben and Bilbette would like a third."

Jane and I said in unison, "We'll be good."

"You know, that threat loses some of its sting since Cal and I could go right ahead and have all the sex without you." Jane waggled her eyebrows at me. "I'm just sayin'."

"She's got you there."

"I'll get you there," Michelle said, jumping on top of us and teleporting us into the bedroom. We didn't get any more work done on the show that night.

The next day saw Ben return to us with a satisfied expression and a spring in his step. "Some good alien lovin', huh?" I gave him a fist-bump that he clumsily returned. "I hope you did us proud."

"She said she had a good time," Ben said, blushing. "She's really nice."

"I think pretty highly of her." I offered him some breakfast. The ladies were already sitting down and eating. "Fortify yourself. Michelle has notes on the show. Lots of notes."

A napkin sailed into my head and Michelle pulled out a chair for Ben. "Just a little polish, Ben, nothing drastic. I just want to make sure we're giving Earth the best face we can give it before we perform for anybody from the C.O.I.L."

"That's a good idea," Ben said. He sat down and tucked a napkin into his shirt.

I sat down with a plate and started scooping food into my face. "Maybe we should be improvising more. I mean, what good is doing a live animated show – a phrase I didn't think I've ever hear uttered – if it's just the same every time? It might as well be recorded."

Michelle and Jane both looked sour on that idea. "I get improvisation," Michelle said, "but I don't like it. I'd rather know what we were doing."

"Plus, you can drop the ball," Jane said. "And then everybody's just listening to dead air."

"I improvise all the time," I said. "Ben, too. We can pick it up if you guys can't think of anything."

"Don't be too proud of my skills," Ben said. "It's not like I've improvised in front of a real audience."

"And who's to say it won't be one of you that chokes?" Michelle poked me. "Then we have to pick up your slack."

"Like I would leave any slack."

"I'll slack you." She slapped my hand and we got into an embarrassing slap fight, stopped only by the gales of laughter coming from Jane and Ben. "I just didn't want to hurt the boy," Michelle said, hitting me on the arm one more time. "I could have."

"Sure," I drawled out. "I hope you're not gonna hit me too much in front of your family."

"Nah, I'll leave that to my dad."

"And that makes me feel so confident."

"You can always teleport out before his fist hits you," Jane said.

"Unless he takes you by surprise," Ben added.

"Oh yeah, that could be a problem."

"Have I mentioned how much I love every one of you?" I picked up my plate and took it into the kitchen.

Jane followed me and hugged me from behind. "Aww, sorry baby." She kissed my back and rubbed my belly. "At least you get to meet her family." She pointed at Ben and herself. "We're the dirty secret Michelle's leaving behind."

Michelle shook her head. "There are arguments I don't mind having now, and there are arguments I do, okay?"

Jane turned back to her. "Hey, if my mom was alive, I'd be feeling the same thing, believe me. She'd be all like, 'Why can't you find a nice Chinese boy? And why haven't I got grandchildren already?'" She took her seat back at the table. "Yeah, it's made this transition a lot easier."

"Grandchildren." Michelle put on her faraway eyes. "I guess we won't be having kids."

"I don't see why not," Ben said. "Unless they mean for our numbers to be stagnant forever."

"I think that's exactly what they mean," Michelle said. "We'll be pruned to the optimal number. The Coalition's population increases by assimilation, not reproduction."

"What happens if one of us dies?" Ben gestured around. "Or if a large number of us die?"

"We're not exactly easy to kill off right now," I said. I resumed my seat at the table. "Once we come into our powers completely, I imagine it'll be even harder."

"But not impossible," Jane said. "I saw in your head something that Bilbette told you. They have contingencies in place in case some of us go rogue." She raised her eyebrows at us. "We're not invincible."

"Maybe we'll be like the gods." We all looked at Michelle. "We'll have children with the primitives we visit, and either leave them behind to be heroes, or take them with us to be raised on Olympus." She reached over and took my hand. "I wonder if we can be both father and mother to the same child."

"I haven't tried becoming my own doppelganger yet." I relaxed and tried to recreate myself. A faint outline of me appeared next to the table, but nothing substantial. I dismissed the image. "Not yet."

"That's something else we'd use only for sex," Jane said, smirking into her toast.

"This is why I can't take you anywhere," Michelle said.

"I'd be good."

"We have a difference of opinion about that."

Jane stuck her tongue out and Michelle and finished her breakfast. "Spoilsport."

Ben's concentration was on his plate as he said, "Are we going to work on the show next month?" He stirred an egg around as we answered him in silence. "Cal can teleport back from Nebraska, and I can come back from Wisconsin for a few hours every night."

"I don't think next month is going to be very productive for anybody, Ben." I put my arm over his shoulder and squeezed.

"I wanted something to take my mind off it, you know?" He pushed his plate away. "I was there with Bilbette, and we're into it, and our minds are locked together, and... she thought about it." A tear slipped down his face. "So I thought about it. And I totally lost the mood." The ladies came around the table and wrapped him in their arms, and he accepted the comfort they gave him. "Why are we all such basket-cases?"

"End of the world," Jane said in a flat voice. "What else could we be?"

I put on a suit and thought about darkening my skin, but Michelle had already prepped the family that she'd be bringing home a white boy, so there was nothing for it but to go ahead and face Daddy. She wore a conservative dress that covered her legs to the calf and showed no cleavage whatsoever. I asked, "Should I bring a bottle of wine?"

"White boy likes to get drunk? No thanks."

"Bible?" She rolled her eyes at me. "Nothing?"

"I think that's safest." She put on a pair of earrings and then snatched them off. "What do gifts matter now, anyway?" She put the earrings back on and changed them to small studs. "What does anything matter?" She leaned against me and I hugged her.

"We'll get through it."

"Tonight, or the rest of our lives?"

"Both."

She kissed me, then wiped the lipstick off my lips and reapplied more to hers. "I love you, Cal."

"I love you too, Michelle."

"Maybe we should think some more about your plan to find the backup site." She examined her face and hair in the mirror of the bathroom we were standing in and made a face at herself.

"I thought you didn't see the value in it."

"I'm starting to change my mind." She made a couple of starts at changing her appearance, then gave it up and turned to me. "I'm starting to doubt that it's enough for us to just go along with the destruction of everyone we know and love. I..." I took her in my arms and she whispered into my chest. "I don't know if I can let go of them."

"We'll talk some more about it tonight, after the dinner, okay?"

"Okay." She gave up trying to make herself look more beautiful and we left the bathroom. Jane and Ben whistled at us.

"Nice," Jane said, fingering the lapel of my suit. "Don't get it messed up."

"I'll do my best."

She noticed the absence of anything in my hands for a gift. "You're not takin' them anything?"

I cast an I-told-you-so glance over at Michelle, and she said, "There's not much point, is there?"

"Okay," Jane said, backing away and exchanging a look with Ben. "Just let me say that I warned you."

"I know, I know. Trust me, all right?"

The time on the TV gave us about two minutes to get going. "Do we want to be right on time or early?"

"Early's good," Michelle said, taking my hand. Her palm was sweaty, and I squeezed gently. She smiled at me, melting my heart yet again, and we were standing in the street outside her father's home.

Mr. Barrett's place was the sort of townhome that looked like it should have a Huxtable or two walking out of it. As we went up the steps, a woman's voice called out from behind us. "Hey, girl." A younger version of Michelle walked up and hugged her. She pointed at me. "This the white boy?"

"This is him," she said, pushing me forward.

"Hi, I'm Cal," I said, holding out my hand.

She regarded my hand with curiosity. "Cal, huh? Where are you from, Cal?"

"Omaha."

She made a dissatisfied noise. "You all into mayonnaise, too, Cal?"

"Not really."

"Mm-hhm." She shook her head slowly at my burning red face before busting out in laughter. "I'm just playin' with you, Cal." She took my hand in both of hers. "I'm Valerie."

I knew who she was – I was pretty knowledgeable about Michelle's family, thanks to telepathy – but I pretended not to for the sake of politeness. "It's good to meet you."

"You, too." She felt my arm and said to Michelle, "I thought you said he was some kinda nerd." She gave me an approving grunt, then let go. "Nice guns."

I'd kept my improved physique partly out a desire to not be intimidated by Michelle's brothers, all of whom were far more physically imposing than my normal pasty self. But, true confession, it was mostly because I liked being hot for once in my life. I think that was a little too much for Michelle, because she pulled me away from her little sister. She asked in an irritated voice, "You didn't bring a date?"

"Nobody I really wanted to be with right now." The brightness in her eyes dimmed as she said, "That may change next month." Michelle reached out to touch her cheek, and Valerie held the hand to her face. "Hey," she said, dropping a mask over her sorrow, "we're supposed to be grillin' you over your poor choice in men, not makin' me feel bad. Let's get inside."

"Okay," Michelle said. She threw her arm around her sister and knocked on the door. I tried not to look awkward behind her.

They say that if you want to know how your wife is going to look in twenty years, take a look at her mother. Well, if Michelle had actually been able to age after this, her mother was evidence that I would have had to work out a lot to keep her happy; Mrs. Barrett was a knockout. Valerie and Michelle hugged her tight as soon she opened the door and she told them, "Let me breathe, girls." She touched Michelle on the cheek as she pulled away. "You really can see it. I just thought it was something they were doing on the TV." That caused her to notice me and to my great relief, she smiled broadly. "Hello, Cal," she said, taking my hand and drawing me to her. I squeezed past her daughters into the small entrance hall of their townhome. "The men are all already here, but don't pay them any mind. I've talked to Michelle and as long as you make her happy, you make me happy."

"I really appreciate that, ma'am."

"Evelyn." Like Valerie, she squeezed my arm and gave an approving nod to Michelle.

"Man's not a piece of meat," Michelle said, smirking as she pushed forward and led me into the living room. Everything was tasteful and moderately expensive; I was definitely with somebody above my station in life.

Seated on the couch were Michelle's brothers, all of whom looked far less physically imposing in person than I had seen in Michelle's mind. Even more imposing, though, was her father. He was at least six-five and seemed to be made of muscle. He stood and offered his hand as soon as he saw me come in, and his grip could have easily crushed my fingers. "Good to meet you, Cal," he said, looking me straight in the eye. He had a tightly trimmed goatee and a neat crown of gray hair around a shiny bald cap, and his eyes peered over a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. "I'm Jamal."

"Very nice to meet you, sir," I said, trying to keep from wincing at the pain in my fingers and my eyes fixed on his.

He mercifully let go of me and waved at his sons. "These fellas here are Eric, Roger, and Jamal, Jr." Each of them waved at me as his name was called. Eric, the youngest, was the only one that smiled back at me. "Junior's wife Charise is in the kitchen, and their boys are upstairs. You boys get up and let Cal and the girls have that couch." The men grumbled but gave up their seats. Michelle and Valerie immediately sat down, but I offered my place to Mrs. Barrett.

"Thank you, Cal, but I've got to get back into the kitchen," she said, patting me on the arm. "You go on ahead and sit down."

I sat next to Michelle and felt the pressure of ten eyes focused on me as Mrs. Barrett left the room. I feebly asked, "How's everybody holding up?"

"Well as can be expected," Mr. Barrett said. "Only regret I really have is for the kids." His voice broke a little at the end of that sentence, and Junior walked over to rest his hands on his father's shoulders.

"My brother," I said, and then I choked up, too. "He and his wife just had a kid after fertility treatments for years."

"Okay, that's too much depression too early in the evening," Valerie said, standing up and going over to grab the TV remote. She flipped on some late eighties hip-hop and reached her hands back to me. "C'mon Cal, dance with me."

Michelle nudged me up and I awkwardly danced with her little sister, to the laughter and applause of the rest of the family. Junior's sons ran downstairs when they heard the music, and they joined us, dancing even more awkwardly than I did. Charise and Mrs. Barrett were drawn by the sound of laughter and Junior spun his wife out to the crowded floor and I felt an acceptance I hadn't expected. Even Mr. Barrett was laughing and clapping.

A timer went off in the kitchen and Mrs. Barrett jumped. "Charise, let's get the food on out," she hollered over the music, then dove through the door followed by her daughter-in-law. Mr. Barrett stood up from his chair and motioned towards another room.

"Let's get the dining room ready, kids," he said, moving over to a cupboard that held expensive-looking china and silverware. Everybody grabbed a handful and took them to the beautiful mahogany table in the dining room. I'd grabbed forks, and I placed them around as well as I could remember from seeing the etiquette lesson in Pretty Woman ten years before. Michelle followed behind me and corrected my placing.

Mrs. Barrett and Charise burst in from the kitchen with piles and piles of food, and before I could take a seat, the table was crowded with homemade deliciousness. I sat down with Michelle on my left and her brother Eric on my right. The kid's table with Junior's sons was right behind me, and they were whispering about me as they sat down. Michelle, who knew I could hear them, squeezed my hand and smirked.

After a lot of bustle, everybody was settled at a table and we all joined hands. Mrs. Barrett looked expectantly at me and asked, "Cal, would you like to lead us in grace?"

Michelle's grip on my hand was painful. "Of course, ma'am," I said. I bowed my head respectfully and started on my standard hypocritical grace. "Dear lord, thank you for the bounty of this house and for the family within it. Please extend your grace over all these people and give them peace and strength in the days to come. Amen."

Everyone murmured their amens and Michelle's mind opened up to me. "Nice."

"I've been planning it for days," I thought back to her. She nearly laughed and covered it up with a cough.

Charise and Mrs. Barrett started passing around the food and we all dumped way too much on our plates. Michelle and I could probably have eaten the entire table and not felt full, but we both took modest amounts. It was good, too, and I was very appreciative.

"Thank you," Mrs. Barrett and her daughter-in-law said to me. They laughed and returned to their own meals.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to one of Junior's sons. "Cal, what can you do?"

"What do you mean?" I looked through Michelle's memories and drew up his name; Martin.

"Elbie stuff." I beamed at the boy and winked at Michelle. She rolled her eyes at me. "What can you do?"

I turned to his parents, and they shrugged at me. I took one of the forks that was shoveling food into my mouth and held it in front of his face. "Hold this." He took it, and now everyone was watching me. I blew at the fork and it disappeared. Martin's eyes widened, and he jumped back. I then held out my hand and the fork reappeared there, standing on end. "Take it again." He cautiously took it and disappeared. Everyone gasped, and I called out, "Come back down." He ran down the stairs at top speed and jumped up and down in front of his parents.

"That was so cool!" He ran over to me, shouting, "Do it again!" His brothers joined him, clamoring to be the next to teleport.

I looked at his parents, and Junior said to his boys, "Sit down and behave yourselves." Chastised, the kids returned to their table. "I get to be next." He stood up and bounced around to me as eager as his sons, and everybody laughed heartily.

People around the table started calling dibs on who was next, and I started popping them around the house willy-nilly until Mrs. Barrett, returning from a trip to her bedroom, said, "All right, all right, there's food to be eaten, folks." Everyone reluctantly returned to their seats and Michelle gave me a quick peck on the cheek while they were distracted.

"Nice one, Mr. Elbie," she whispered in my ear.

After we returned to our food, the conversation turned to family matters, and I kept quiet while they shared stories and news about each other. I cleaned my plate and emptied my glass of tea, then just sat there and listened, holding Michelle's hand under the table. I didn't need telepathy to feel the love, but I did brush their minds and hold onto that feeling. It was so sweet and strong that I nearly started weeping, but I held it back. I knew that if I started, Michelle would be next and then we'd be in a sea of crying Barretts.

When people started slowing down with the food, Mrs. Barrett and Charise corralled the kids into picking up dirty plates and carting them into the kitchen. The fine china was threatened with destruction a few times, but I didn't hear any crashes. Mrs. Barrett brought out the dessert, a couple of delicious pecan pies that she put in the center of the table and carved thick slices out of. I got a nice big piece and it was heaven. "You don't want to wait for ice cream?" Charise brought in a large tub of home-made ice cream, and I eagerly held out my plate for the large scoop she plopped down on me.

"Thanks," I said, my mouth completely full. It was the best dessert I'd had in years, and I was in heaven. Michelle and the other women of the family were laughing openly at my enjoyment, as were the kids, but the men were trying to be stoic. I could tell that they wanted to moan about their pie, though.

I scarfed down my pie in seconds and made little lunges at Michelle's as she took her time eating it. She was pretty good – I only got two bites off her plate. She bopped my hand away expertly, which was more impressive considering she was defending her food from Valerie on the other side, too.

After everybody's plates were clean, the kids grabbed them and dashed them into the sink, and I leaned back and patted my belly. "That was great, Mrs. Barretts," I said to Michelle's mom and sister-in-law. "You two are awesome."

"Thank you, Cal." Mrs. Barrett – the elder one, not the sister-in-law – leaned forward with a thoughtful look and asked, "So, Cal; are you going to make an honest woman of my daughter, here?"

Michelle's head hit the table with a thunk as everyone else swiveled to see what I was going to say. "I think she's already pretty honest, Mrs. Barrett."

Mrs. Barrett smacked her lips at me. "You know what I mean."

"We..." I cleared my throat and tried to organize my thoughts through the pressure of those twenty eyeballs searing into my head. "We don't really know what the world's gonna be like after next month. We don't know how we're going to relate to other people, what kind of relationships the aliens are going to encourage, what we want the new world to be. But I want you to know..." I looked into every one of those eyes and said, "I want you all to know; I love Michelle more than I've ever loved anyone. And I hope she feels the same."

She took my hand and whispered, "I do."

"I think I'm gonna cry," Eric said, wiping an invisible tear from his cheek. Michelle leaned over me to hit him on the head, and the two of them got in a slap-fight around me as I tried to duck out of their way. I didn't succeed, and they slapped me more than each other, much to the amusement of everyone else in the room. I finally teleported out from between them and let them hit each other.

Mr. Barrett stood and announced, "Time to go back to the living room. Too much for y'all to break in here." We all poured out of the dining room, the kids leading the way. They went straight to the TV and turned on the music channel again. Junior and Charise danced around their sons, Michelle grabbed me, and Valerie and her remaining brothers filled up the rest of the rug. Mr. and Mrs. Barrett sat down and watched their descendants enjoy themselves, and I started crying uncontrollably. Michelle held me tight, but she couldn't stop me; she could only join. In a minute, first the young boys and then their parents, grandparents, aunt and uncles were gathered in a huge Barrett group hug of weeping family.

Mrs. Barrett disentangled herself from the group by kissing each of us on the cheek. She ended with a big, passionate lip-lock with her husband, and the kids all cheered and applauded. Junior and Charise did the same, and Michelle picked up all three of her nephews and covered them in kisses, prompting squeals from the boys as they tried to escape. I dried my eyes and tried to regain control of myself.

I felt stupid as much as I felt sad. I was the one staying; why was I dissolving into tears so easily? I lowered my head to Michelle's shoulder and whispered, "I'm sorry."

She patted my head and kissed my cheek. "Oh, baby, don't worry about it." She sighed. "It's the end of the world."

The family began trickling out; Junior needed to put the boys to bed, Roger and Eric were off to meet women, and Valerie was meeting someone in London. "I worked with him for a couple of weeks during my internship, and he called me up out of the blue last week. We've talked every day since then." Her eyes were already in London, and there was no need for telepathy to see how much she brightened at the thought of him. My heart ached for her, and I hid my face in my hands to get a minute to pull myself together.

"Not another white boy, is it?" Mr. Barrett poked me in the ribs, and I laughed along with him.

"No, Daddy," Valerie said. "I'm not bad, like Michelle." They stuck their tongues out at each other, then she slipped her jacket on and waved her way out the door.

Michelle embraced her father tightly. He looked at me, then said to her, "He makes you happy?"

"Pretty much."

"You tell him that if he screws it up, I'm comin' back from the grave to make him pay."

"I will, Daddy." She kissed him on the cheek and then hugged her mother.

Mr. Barrett put his hand out for me to shake again. "You heard that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Don't make me have to live up to it."

"I won't."

"Good." He looked me deep in the eye and quietly said, "Make us proud."

"I'll try my best."

He pulled me into a big bear hug and then let me stagger back. "All right then. Y'all better get home before it's too late."

I hugged Mrs. Barrett and Michelle kissed her father one more time. "Love you guys," she said to the two of them.

"Love you," they said. We joined hands and walked out the door.

"How do you feel?"

She opened her mind and I squeezed her hand tightly. "Let's go home. I need to take my mind off this."

"You got it." We teleported back to her place, where Jane and Ben were watching a movie naked.

"Well, that takes my mind off dinner," Michelle said, laughing.

Jane bounced up and hugged us both. She massaged Michelle's temples and kissed her gently. "Rough, huh?"

"He cried like a baby," Michelle said, inclining her head at me.

"Excuse me, I cried like a man."

"Sure you did," Ben said, clapping my shoulder as he got off the couch and joined us.

"Hey, it's the end of the world." They all nodded. We all understood the go-to response these days. The end of the world was a weird time, and there wasn't anything anybody did that couldn't be explained or excused by appealing to this overpowering concept. It may sound like a cop-out now that it's all over, but hey – it was the end of the world.

We all linked together so that Jane and Ben could get a replay of the dinner, and Jane was totally disappointed that the family had accepted me so easily. "I mean, none of her brothers threatened to beat you up if you didn't leave or anything."

"Her father threatened to haunt me."

"Ghosts never have any real power in the physical world," Ben said, rolling his eyes. "This isn't D&D. All ghosts can do in the prime material plane is make you feel guilty."

"Sometimes that's enough," Michelle said, heading off to the shower.

"Sometimes."

Jane watched Michelle leave. Our mood had taken a nosedive. "Next month's going to be worse, isn't it?"

"Like we won't be able to believe." I raided the last of the liquor in Michelle's cabinet, even though it no longer had any major effect on me. I took out glasses for everybody else. "Join me?" They nodded, and I poured three full drinks. I sent a mental query to the bathroom, then poured another one for Michelle. Jane and Ben came and sat on the other side of the kitchen island, and we waited a few minutes for our host to finish and come join us. After handing her a glass, I raised mine. "To the ones we're leaving." They all toasted with me and I sucked down the booze. "Does anybody else feel schizo all the time? We're happy, we're sad, we're happy, we're sad."

"More like manic-depression," Jane said. "Schizoid behavior isn't delineated so sharply." We all stared at her. "Excuse me for being literal," she said, sticking her tongue out at me.

"It's why we love you," Ben said, kissing her on the forehead. It was about then that their nudity registered in my consciousness again, because I found myself thinking about his cute butt when he bent over. I caught Michelle's eye and she smirked at me.

"Manic-depressive, then."

"I think everybody's just trying to make the best of this," Michelle said. "It's why my family didn't rag on you."

"You know, I'm not so sure about that," Ben said. He looked through the wall off into the distance. "Before I hooked up you with guys, I was hanging out with the marked, for the most part. Everybody was nice. Not, you know, inhumanly so, but even jerky people were less jerky." He held up a hand. "Before you go it's the end of the world, there are people I know who would not care. They'd be jerks regardless."

"But they were cool?"

"Completely. It was like they'd been neutered."

"My sister." Jane also had the faraway look. "She made up with me, after we hadn't spoken in years."

"Maybe we're influencing them subconsciously. We know how hard it is to resist telepathy, and we're Elbies. The marked don't have the kind of defense we can put up." I connected to the C.O.I.L. network and tried to access any information on subliminal influence we were having on the marked. I got nothing. "Welp, either the C.O.I.L. don't want us to know we're having undue influence on the marked, or else they don't think it's anything we need to know about."

Michelle tutted at me. "Another point against our alien friends?"

"I would say so."

"It's probably just a side-effect of the suppression of their violent impulses," Jane said. "They can't initiate violence, they can't abuse other people; maybe the Fhh-bop-uh went a little too far."

"I'm still gonna count it against them," I said. "What if our conscience is being affected, too? Suppose our desire to show a little restraint is all part of the big C.O.I.L. plan?"

"Lots of Elbies aren't showing restraint," Michelle said.

"We didn't either, at first," Jane said. "It might be something that kicks in at different times for different individuals. Or, it could take a certain group dynamic to initiate it. We hit the right grouping, and we unlocked the desire for restraint." She smirked at my eyes sliding down her naked body. "For certain values of restraint."

"It just makes me nervous about how much control we really have. In spite of how much Bilbette's shared with me, she's still an alien agent with an agenda that we know nothing about."

"Still not anything we can do about it," Michelle said.

"I'm not so sure," Ben said. "We can question whether or not we're under their control. Surely that means that we're not."

"If you can question whether or not you're insane, you're still sane?" Jane shrugged. "Maybe they just don't mind us questioning them as long as we're powerless to stop them."

"You are way too good at being the Devil's Advocate," I said, shoving Jane's shoulder.

"It's who I am." She put on a perky smile. "Ten years of debate team warped me forever."

Michelle held her hand up for a high-five. "Twelve." They slapped hands and I raised my eyebrows at Ben.

"Hey, I did four in high school."

Jane kissed him on the cheek. "Amateur."

"Just trying to stay part of the cool crowd."

I snorted. "When I was in high school, the debaters were the only people less cool than I was." Six evil eyes after saying that, I added, "But hey, I'm sure you guys were all super-cool."

I got piled on and don't remember a lot after that...

We spent the next couple of weeks working on our show and less and less time keeping in touch with the marked from our pasts. We all still made the occasional call or visit to family, but our friends got ignored if they weren't in the theatrical or musical industries. We booked a theater to perform in and started rehearsing harder. It was fun and distracting and we could shut out the world while we were there. Time passed away and Halloween, the last one for most of the children in the world, was coming.

I wanted to be home and give candy out, so we scheduled our last performance before the end for the thirtieth of the month. We got a lot of good word of mouth, and people were crowding the aisles. Sure, it was a free show, but money didn't exactly have a lot of meaning at this point.

Everybody loved the show, and the four of us were mobbed afterwards. I know it sounds like bragging, but there were enough offers of sex to where we could have recreated Caligula. Jane and I found it really difficult to adhere to our philosophy of restraint. One of the abilities we were enjoying at this time was eidetic memory, so more than one person was entered into permanent memory during the cast party that night.

Michelle kept a tight rein on us, though, and it turned out that Ben's conscience was strong enough to cause crippling guilt if we did anything wrong, so as wild as the party got, we didn't take advantage of anyone. Too much.

Halloween morning saw me tiptoeing over a few guests in Michelle's living room while turning the apartment into a house of horrors. It scared a couple of the sleepers when they woke up, which made me laugh evilly and continue on. Once they were all up, I made sure that any of them who knew children would be bringing them over for candy. I created a couple of barrels of candy by the door. "Anybody have a sweet tooth?" I tossed some of the candy bars around the room. Candy for breakfast is fine when you have a month to live.

Michelle took a step into the living room and froze. Her eyes moved around the room, but the rest of her was stock still. I threw on a Death cloak and stretched out a sepulchral hand towards her. "You're cleaning all this up tomorrow," she said in a monotone.

"Death is no one's servant," I croaked out in my best baritone. She narrowed her eyes at me. "OK, OK."

"You are such a big kid," she said, kissing me and then picking her way around the room to look at the decorations. She pointed at the candy barrels. "Seriously?"

"The kids in our neighborhood are gonna get all the candy they want." I raised my right hand. "This I vow."

"Oh, cool!" Jane and Ben came in, and she hopped around the scary stuff like a kid on Christmas morning. "This is so neat."

Ben pointed at me. "Your doing?"

"Naturally."

Cy, one of the guys from the audience the night before, walked up to me eating a huge bar of chocolate. "This thing is big enough to cure a dementor attack," he said around a mouthful.

I pointed him out to Jane and Ben. "One of our people." I gave him a bigger bar of chocolate. "Load up, dude. I want the neighborhood in a sugar coma tonight." I gave my decorations an approving nod. "I want this to be the best Halloween ever." I went outside to mold the entrance to her apartment into a huge mouth. The neighbor came out to stare at me in disgusted fascination and I gave him a few deathly cackles as I created my huge monster. "It's gonna be animated, too." I made it chomp down on me and he jumped back, then doubled over in laughter. "If you've got or know any kids, send 'em over tonight. I've got piles of candy."

"You got it," he said, going back into his place with a shake of his head.

"What did you do to my front door?" Michelle walked outside and took it all in, then wheeled back. "Ooookay."

"Awesome, huh?"

"I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to respond to that, honey."

Jane looked out at the giant mouth and then whispered in Michelle's ear. "Just say it's awesome."

Michelle put on her brightest smile and said, "Awesome, Cal."

"Yes, it is." I put a few holograms around the room and some ghosts flitting in and out to add flavor.

Ben took up Michelle's other ear. "This is the moment he was born for, Michelle. Let him have it."

She looked at me like an exasperated but loving mother looking at a dim but beloved child. "How many kids do you think are going to be by for this candy?"

"All of them."

"Really." She sighed the deep sigh of the much-too-forgiving. "Do you want to put a sign up or anything?"

"I do now."

"We could broadcast a general feeling that there's candy in this apartment," Jane said. "That'd bring in some kids."

"I just don't want to bring in some mobs," Michelle said.

"We're all being mind-controlled," Ben said, "so they'll be well-behaved mobs."

"That's reassuring." Michelle gave up. "OK, put up the sign, broadcast the feeling, let's make some kids barf."

"That's all I'm asking for." I took Jane's hand and we transmitted the location of mounds of never-ending candy to the neighborhood. I also created a sign that announced a haunted house at this apartment and stuck it on the roof.

It was a pretty big sign.

After our guests from last night scarfed down as much candy as they could shovel out of my barrels, I turned to my lovers and said, "You need costumes."

"Dibs on Death's granddaughter," Jane said, transforming herself into a vaguely Victorian-garbed woman with a streak of black in her beehive of white hair.

"Fetching," I said, kissing her on the cheek.

"Thank you," she said with a curtsy.

Ben kitted himself out with a wizard's robe, hat and staff. "Rincewind at your service."

We all looked at Michelle, whose last nerve was having trouble holding all our shenanigans. "Discworld, huh?" We nodded eagerly. I was hoping for Conina the barbarian, but she decked herself out in a witches outfit. "I'll be a Wyrd sister."

Ben started chanting, "One of us, one of us," but stopped after Michelle turned a gimlet eye on him. "Sorry."

"Did you want to wear these all day?" Michelle pulled at the collar of her dress in discomfort.

"Sure."

"Nerds." Michelle shook her head. "Y'all are crazy."

"But fun. Ya gotta admit it."

"I admit nothing." Her voice was stern, but there was a twinkle in her eye, and we all felt the mirth in her mind.

"I wonder if I can walk through a wall." Jane slowly approached the wall between the living room and bedroom and concentrated. She stepped forward and bumped her nose into the sheetrock. "Okay, not like that," she said over our laughter. She took a deep breath and tried again, and this time she slid straight through. We applauded like lunatics when she poked her head back into the room. "Ta da!"

"Perfect," I shouted, jumping over and kissing her partially-corporeal form. "You are gonna scare the crap outta the kids!"

She stepped out of the wall and took me by the hand. "Do we really want to do that?"

"That's the fun of Halloween, baby. That's why they get the candy after."

"I never liked the scary houses," Michelle said, picking at her pointy hat.

"We'll be a nice scary house, I promise." I said to the people who were left, "If you're gonna stay, you gotta be in costume." I motioned at the four of us. "We're going with a Diskworld theme, so try to keep that in mind." There were some smiles, a little grumbling, but for the most part people got in the spirit. The ones that were staying either made a trip out to the MTD or got one of the Elbies to make them a custom outfit. I made a couple, but Jane was the real whiz, coming up with ideas and fitting people's forms with flair.

Michelle contributed what she could, but even with telepathy, she wasn't as familiar with Diskworld as the rest of us. She still laughed when I sent the turtle with four elephants on its back flying around the room. "Are we going to have music?" She ducked the turtle and threw me an evil glance.

"Of course," I said, starting a long playlist that included some Wizard Rock along with songs from various Diskworld soundtracks. Her musical snobbery made her turn up her nose at me, but I said, "Theme, baby, theme."

"Okay," she said slowly. That last nerve was getting twanged pretty hard.

I took her in my arms and danced as awkwardly as possible, and her face broke into an exasperated smile. "Ain't no party like a nerd party," I shouted out to the room. There was a cheer, and that finally made Michelle laugh. The doorbell rang, and I ran to get it.

Outside the door was a small girl in a cow outfit, who held up a bag and asked quietly, "Trick or treat?"

I cheered loudly and poured candy into her sack, giving her the widest grin I'd ever seen. "Eat yourself sick, kid."

"Thanks," she said, running off. I saw her show the nearly full bag to her mom, jumping up and down in excitement. Her mom clapped and hugged her tight, and she caught my eye, and I had to look away.

I was glad for the mask, because every kid who came to that door made me cry. Jane took over for me after the first few, and then Ben had to take over from her. Finally, Michelle put on her best stony face and started shoveling the candy just before nightfall, when the flow of children increased and they were accompanied by their parents. Their often weeping parents. I was cried out, so I spelled Michelle and let her recharge herself by dancing with everybody in the living room.

Every single one of those kids was a punch in my gut, but I'm still glad that we did it. I'm glad that we gave them that one last moment of fun, that last night that they could be kids on the day when it's the most fun to be a kid. Even later at night, when the little kids started giving way to teens, I still filled their bags and tried to put smiles on their faces. It was harder with the older kids; they knew what was coming. But the magic of the costumes and my decorations made it okay for them to forget it for a little while.

The party was a blast, too. In addition to the kids who were popping by, everybody in the neighborhood wanted to see our decorations, and we made sure that they all danced to a song and had a drink and some candy. A few stayed, straining the capacity of Michelle's apartment to the breaking point and sucking in every bit of the oxygen. Good thing the four of us didn't need it anymore.

Best. Halloween. Evar.

We got teens coming up for candy till well past midnight, and if they said they were eighteen, I let them stay for the party. As long as they were close, what did it matter? We all needed this last bit of fun going into November; everybody in the neighborhood needed someplace other than the freaking community center to hang out and be with other people. Someplace we could all feel human.

As exhausted as most of the people were, we finally started shoveling them out by lunchtime on the first. I took down the decorations and the sign and replaced my costume with street clothes. The other three were happy, but I was pretty blue. It was time for me to go to Omaha.

They all hugged and kissed me, and Ben even offered to come back with me. "I met your folks back in college, remember?" He patted me on the shoulder. "Maybe nobody'll break down if your old college buddy's there."

"Nah. Thanks, but I think the whole point of me going home is to break down."

Michelle kissed me and rubbed my cheeks. "Do you want to come home at night, or just stay there?"

"I don't know. Let's just play it by ear." I kissed her forehead and hugged and kissed Jane. "Don't have too much fun while I'm gone, okay?"

"No promises," she said, kissing my hand. "Try to hold it together."

"I'll try." I smiled. "But no promises." I raised my hand to wave goodbye, and then I was standing at my father's front door. I reached inside with my mind and could tell that Dad was alone; my brother and his family hadn't made it in yet. We could be sloppily sentimental and nobody would see but us. Perfect.

I knocked and heard him shuffling to the door. There was a sharp pain in my heart and I held my breath until the door opened. "Cal," he said, smiling and pulling me into his arms. It was just like being five again, being held by my father to ward off the monsters under my bed. I gratefully accepted his comfort and just let myself be the small boy again, letting him have this moment of strength. After a long time, he pushed me back to arm's length and looked me up and down. "Have you been working out?"

"One of the advantages of being an Elbie," I said. I flexed for him, and he laughed, a sound that recharged my heart. "Wait'll I show you some of the other stuff I can do."

"Just don't disintegrate the house, and you can do anything you want, buddy." He clapped me on the back and stepped back through the door. I followed him and breathed in the scent of wood that was always in the air in the old place. After Mom died, Dad had moved all his woodworking tools out of the garage and into the living room. He was in the middle of making a toy for Bobby, and sat back down to work on it.

"When's David gonna be here?"

"He called and said they had just a couple of things to wrap up in Chicago, and they'd be here by dinner time." He sanded off a microscopic rough spot. "Traveling a thousand miles is like walking down the block now."

I looked around the room. The toy he was working on had several companions. I'd almost forgotten how good he was; a couple hundred years ago, he would've been a master toy maker. I set down the perfect train engine he'd made and my eyes fell on a puzzle box, its separate parts stained expertly in different shades. I picked it up and caught his eye. "For me?"

"Something to remember me by."

I turned away to keep from crying in front of him and started working on the box. It was devilishly difficult, just like his puzzles always were, and I was tempted to read his mind in order to figure it out, but I restrained myself. I finally succeeded in pulling it completely apart – the easy part – and then I began the slow task of reassembling it. As each move stymied me, I said to him, "You're an evil, evil man."

"A legacy to be proud of." He pulled out some paint and started drawing a face on the figure he had finished working on.

I left my puzzle to watch him. This was art that should have been carried on; if he'd had an accidental meeting with a Fhh-bop-uh, maybe he would have been elbied, too. How much of my own continued existence was simply luck? It was frustrating to contemplate, so I stopped.

There was a knock at the door, and we both jumped up and raced to the front hall. I let him win; it was his house, after all. He opened the door and threw his arms open wide to capture all of David and his family, and I let them have a minute before I joined in the group hug.

Finally, we all let go of each other and bundled into the house, because it was cold out there. David pulled me behind and smiled at me. "You can feel it even more in person," he whispered to me. "It's like there's waves of power coming off you." He leaned in so nobody else could hear. "What can you do?"

"Comic book stuff," I said, leaning in close. "Like, real super hero things."

"You can fly?" I nodded, and he jerked around in a nerdgasm. "Can you take me for a ride?"

"You ready?"

He almost said yes immediately, but restrained himself. "Let me just go tell Melissa." He ran to the craft room where Bobby was running around all of Dad's toys and told his wife, "Cal and I are just gonna go outside for a minute. We'll be right back." He gave her a kiss and ran back to me. I could feel her bemusement as she wondered what we were off to do, but didn't read her any deeper than that. David was eagerly heading for the front door.

Once we were outside, I said, "Fireman's carry?" He shrugged and grabbed me around the neck and shoulders. "I'll go slow – my girlfriend can almost hit escape velocity." His gripped tightened as he giggled nervously, then his breath was taken away by our feet leaving the ground. A hundred feet up, he let out a loud whoop and almost swung his arms around, but thought better of letting go just yet. I pointed a fist to the clouds and accelerated.

His cries of joy rang in my ears as the wind whistled passed us and we were soon enveloped in the misty fog of a low-hanging cloud. "Holy crap," he shouted. His voice was muffled a bit by the mist, but I could feel his words better than I could hear them, anyway.

I hung in the air there and projected my thoughts into his mind. "You want to dive?"

His brain was a jangle of fear and nerves, but he let go and dropped. I paced him down and he shouted in triumph as the wind whipped past him, turning his face into rubber. Before he picked up too much speed, I maneuvered myself in front of him and teleported us above the clouds. It was cold, so I held onto him and increased the amount of air around us so that he could breathe more easily. "Let's get back to the ground," he said. His teeth were chattering and he was shaking, so I didn't waste time. I teleported us both back to Dad's porch. He sat down on the rail and tried to still himself. His smile was huge, though. "Can you go into space?"

"I've been on Mars," I said quietly.

He shook his head and unsteadily combed his hair with his hands. "I don't have to tell you I'm jealous, right? I mean, that goes completely without saying."

"Of course."

"And you have a girlfriend, too?"

"Two, actually." I didn't know whether to bring it up, but I thought, what the hell, he's my brother. "And a boyfriend."

He raised his eyebrows at me. "A couple of superpowers and you go all decadent on us." He shook his head. "And I always thought it'd be college that made you come out."

"Hey, Ben's a real cutie."

"I don't need to hear it," he said quickly. We both laughed and he shoved me. "Perverted foursomes, flight, teleportation – what else you got?"

"I can read minds, don't need to sleep or eat, cold and vacuum don't bother me; I need to see if I can go under the ocean." I put my hand to his forehead. "Wanna try a mind-meld?" His nerdy giddiness told me that the answer was yes. I connected with him and gave him everything about the last month. I tried not to overwhelm him, but he staggered back under the onslaught of my mind crashing into his.

"Wow." He blinked at me as he tried to make sense of everything that I'd dumped into his head. "That's weird."

"Tell me about it."

"You did a musical?"

"I know, it's not like I have talent, right?" He slapped me on the back and we both laughed.

"So, you think Bilbette'll give you a ride, alien-style?"

"You are a sick, sick man."

"You can't pretend you haven't been thinking about it," David said, tapping his temple. "I got it all in here, buddy."

"Yeah, no secrets. One of the worst parts of telepathy." I was thankful that our link wasn't as thorough as the one I shared with Michelle and the others, because there was a lot of embarrassing stuff from our childhood that I didn't want David to know.

BE SURE TO CATCH THE WEEKLY INSTALLMENTS OF ELBIES AT ROBBIETAYLOR.NET, OR BUY THE FINAL COLLECTION IN AUGUST, 2014

**The** **250** **Word** **What?**

 The 250 Word Project is an ongoing commitment to create 250 words of a story every day for an entire year. Exactly 250 words. No more, no less. And every week, you will get to read the exactly 1750 words created during that week right here. But, you'd better read them that week, because the next week, they're going to be replaced by the next 1750 words, and the previous will be lost to time and the Wayback Machine until 2 months has passed.

Every two months, the 14750, 15000, 15250, or 15500 word output of this project will be gathered together into a small ebooklet and sold for a buck - except for the first one. Like any good drug-dealer, I have to give away the first one for free. At the end of the year, the 91250 or 91500 word story will be completed and compiled together for sale as an entire ebook for $3.99, and the smaller installments will be taken off-sale, lost to the winds of time and piracy.

I use the 250 word project to warm me up for writing on my main projects but it is taking on a life of its own, and I want to share that life with you. I have about a 4-week head start on what you will be seeing appear here and for sale, but otherwise you're seeing the story as it is being created - not exactly Harlan Ellison-level writing as performance art, but as close as I want to come to it. Who knows, come next July, I might cut my lead time out entirely. It all depends on how this goes.

So, enjoy the 250 Word Project however you want to read it - weekly, bi-monthly, or yearly. No matter what, it'll keep coming to you, 250 words at a time.

CURRENT 250 WORD PROJECT

The current 250 Word Project is **Elbies** , a story of first contact between humans and aliens. The aliens want to bring us into their society, and will help us fulfill all of our hopes and aspirations... but there's a catch.

Read along weekly at The 250 Word Project on Robbie Taylor(.net).

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