1
- Averie -
“Maybe they’re not so bad. Maybe we just misunderstand them.”
Gabrielle stretches her long legs out on the grass. The lawn is newly cut and smells like late summer. A few other students are milling around, but campus is pleasantly empty still – the freshmen won’t be here for a couple weeks yet.
But Gabrielle and I are media majors, and we have to get the important Welcome! edition of the student paper done. Some of our classes start early, too.
It could be quite an idyllic day at the college. But these days, a dark shadow hangs heavily over everything.
I get a small tub of yogurt out of my backpack and pull the plastic top off, enough to expose the purpleness while keeping the flimsy lid still attached. “I’m not sure how that could be. An alien invasion is pretty easy to understand, turns out. The Bululg came here from space, totally destroyed our desperately fighting military, and are now picking out young women to harvest and sell to the highest bidder. Pretty simple.”
Gabrielle closes her eyes and angles her face towards the sun, leaning back on straight arms. “No, but I mean in the long run. They might be taking all of mankind to a higher realm of consciousness. It looks pretty bad now, sure. But it might be happening for a reason.”
Gabby is the coolest girl I know, but she has this unreasonably bright outlook on everything. Even Earth invaded by aliens and harvesting thousands of young women to sell at auctions in space has a silver lining to her.
“The worthy reason of making the Bululg richer from their slave trade,” I state flatly.
I have no illusions. The Bululg are evil and cowardly, and now they’re treating Earth as some kind of farm where they can go in at will, pick out any girl they want, and then sell her to other aliens so they can breed her. At least they’re being totally honest about that – they don’t pretend that the girls they harvest will be anything but slaves and entertainments and breeding stock for rich aliens.
“Well, sure,” Gabrielle says. “There has to be something in it for them, too. But it’s not like they’re oppressing us that much. They’re leaving us pretty much to govern ourselves.”
I stir the yogurt with the thin, white spoon. Ten minutes until my next class. “I wonder if that’s not the worst thing they do. Leaving us just enough fake power over our lives to make us accept their rule without much protest. Making sure we have enough food and enough entertainment to not rebel. Making it all seem almost normal, keeping us just satisfied enough.”
“It was just a thought,” Gabby defends herself. “Everyone is so down these days. I am, too. But everything has a bright side. You just have to look for it. Like, violent crime is trending down.”
“Only if you don’t count abducting young women as a violent crime,” I counter. “If you do, the trend is rising off the charts.”
“I’m not so sure. They don’t take that many, do they? A few thousand a year from the whole planet. We can handle that.”
I groan. That mindset is spreading fast. After a couple years of being invaded by the Bululg and their mercenaries from other species, lots of people are trying to ignore the problem. And they do have a point. Minoring in history, I know that invasions of countries by other countries or barbarian hordes right here on Earth were usually much worse than this.
I feel it, too. I just want to keep my head down and live my life without any trouble. The thing is, that is possible for most. A lot of the world has lost its luster, sure. But it is still possible to get by.
As long as you’re not abducted. As long as you can look the other way. As long as you obey.
But I don’t want to become complacent. We are important. We are not slaves, and we must not start to accept that we are.
“Would you say that if you were taken up, Gabby? To be sold, raped by aliens, and maybe get pregnant, then ripped open while giving birth to a hybrid baby the size of a basketball? With spikes like a sea urchin?”
“Probably not,” Gabrielle concedes, throwing back her mane of silky hair. “But the odds are in my favor.”
I glance over at her. If the alien abductors were humans, she would be in the first batch they abducted. She’s