Journey Back to Mars: a sci-fi collection Read online

  Copyright © 2016 Hugo Huesca

  All rights reserved.

  Www.hugohuesca.com

  Edited by Ana Ortega

  Cover by www.goonwrite.com

  To Pablo.

  Contents

  The Contrails

  Brother of Considerable Size

  The day the machines rebelled, which, admittedly, took some heavy persuading

  Through the looking visor

  To never forget you

  The Road of Fire

  Quark and the Martian Vampire

  The Contrails

  I met Cooper Kaproc when we were kids. It was the first day of school, after one long summer. The morning started cold, but it warmed quickly under the bright sun and clear sky that was always present when we remember our youth. The little, trimmed gardens of the block smelled like cut grass and dew.

  I walked down the street, passing colorful wooden houses with their white fences. He stood there, a couple of meters in front of me, a slim kid with olive skin and glittering black eyes.

  I hadn’t seen him in school before, so he must’ve moved into the neighborhood recently. I paid him no further attention until I was almost in front of him and realized he had no intention of moving and that he was, in fact, waiting for me.

  “I saw you spying on me,” he said, with the most serious voice a boy our age could muster, “while you walked behind me. Mum says kids are too young to work for the Government, but she could be lying. Are you working for the Government?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, dumbfounded.

  He appeared satisfied with this answer. He nodded and let me pass him without adding anything else. I had just started walking again when he matched my pace.

  “I see. Well, if you are not with them, you are with us.”

  “With—?”

  “With us. You know. Us on one side, them in another. Always us versus them.”

  I never fully knew who he meant by them. Over the years they had had many names, depending on Cooper’s age, or his mood, or the music he was into at that moment, or the underground tribe of the girl he was dating. They have been, in no particular order: The Illuminati, the Men in Black, the lost people of Atlantis, the Magic Society of Hermes Trismegisto, The Church, the Grey Aliens and once, while drunk at a party; the mole people. That’s Cooper for you.

  We were best friends during middle school. He was the mastermind behind our best works, such as “let´s run into the director’s office, grab his tablet and change the name of all his contacts”. And “we should drop red coloring paint into the water cooler at the teacher’s lounge”. Also “if we jump over this fence during playtime we can get out without no one seeing us, go explore and be back before anyone realizes”. That last one got us in real trouble the third time, by the way.

  In high school, we drifted apart. See, our interests diverged at that point. What I mean is that I started liking girls, and started drinking with the other guys so we could impress them. Cooper kept on being Cooper. That’s the gist of it. I played soccer and hung around with seniors until they finally started inviting me to parties. He screamed at a teacher during World History lessons because Finland couldn’t have fought in the Winter War of 1940 because he knew that Finland didn’t exist.

  I worried about where to sit in the cafeteria; he just sat at a faraway table and ate alone. And when the soccer team picked on him, because he was way too ‘Cooper Kaproc’, I kept my distance.

  Don’t be too harsh. I did go to him afterward and told him that they would lay off if he faked interest in beer and cars and sports. This was back when the firsts automated cars were just rolling out of the factory, mind you, so even I knew how clichéd I was sounding. It would have worked, cliché or not. He just looked at me sadly and shook his head.

  I don’t think that he minded my attitude that much. He had this air of, “well, Fred, I know it’s just a phase, I get it, I’ve seen movies about high school.” The only time I saw him angry at me was when I started going to church because I liked this cute, platinum-blond girl in my gym class, who was a devout catholic. Cooper found me after mass one day like he had a freaking radar; all red-faced, hands clenched into fists. He tried to push me around but he was a scrawny kid and I exercised, so when that didn’t work he pointed at me, pressing his finger on my chest and went:

  “What are you doing, Fred? Fraternizing—” yeah, he said fraternizing, “with the enemy? And as for that girl, you know she is just stringing you along, right? I’ve seen her kissing your friend Ted, at the park, when you are not around. They’ve been at it for a while.”

  Ted was the soccer captain, by which I mean, I should have seen that coming. I was sixteen, though. Then he just kept Coopering me:

  “Dude, I have told you like a million times. Church is a big microwave soup. It’s made to be like that, tailored so you get in there and there is singing all along. There is praying and sitting and standing and everyone is thinking the same. All their brain-waves are looking the same and suddenly your own waves start shaping up because they are outnumbered. And before you realize it you start singing along and sitting and upping and next thing I know, you have become them!”

  “That’s ridiculous, man, I am not one of them,” I said, because his insane spiels somehow got to me sometimes, even if only because I knew how much he cared for them. “I will never be one of them. You know it.”

  He just stared at me. I suspected he was trying to read my aura like he had read in an old new age website years ago.

  “Alright, Fred. Just don’t be scaring me like that. It’s us versus them, you know that.”

  “Yeah, Cooper. Like always, us versus them.”

  Next day I told Ted I quit the team. He looked at me like I had punched his mother, even when I explained the reason.

  Time passed faster than we expected. High school ended like a movie that’s over just as it’s getting interesting, as the heroes are getting the hang of it, as the audience is starting to like the characters.

  I went to college in a city far away and only came back to town for the holidays. Cooper stayed and worked with his dad in his auto-repair shop. We kept in contact via social media, and even tried to get into a game of Dungeons and Dragons one time, but my schedule didn’t work out. We hung around during holidays, and it was a bit like old times, with us drifting around our own town aimlessly, looking for adventure, like we had always done; only the town looked different, and it was not a warm morning in the middle of summer anymore. There were new people, modern tech from the city, some stores had closed down. It felt emptier.

  Mostly, we were starting to think in different waves, as he would say. I was graduating as a lawyer and found work in a prestigious firm in the city. Cooper would inherit the shop someday when his dad finally drank himself to death.

  I had stopped drinking and going out by then because I was serious now, shit was real now, it was the real world and it was do or die. Cooper, meanwhile, started experimenting with drugs, hanging out with these modern hippie-in-a-small-town crowd. Mixing god knows how many pills with weed and peyote. Then getting into these online forums to report minute by minute his symptoms, until he was high as that colony on Mars and couldn’t type a word to save his life.

  I admit I felt sorry for Cooper. This condescending kind of sorry, ‘It’s so sad when our childhood best friends from our small town won’t mature and get real and do or die; to evolve like we had to.’ It was the ugliest kind of sorry, I pitied him. And we would hang out about once a month to ‘catch-up’. I would try to not mention how great I was doing with my internship at my soul-less firm because I knew he had nothing going on except
his latest camping trip with his drug-addicted friends. We would talk about his latest conspiracy theory and I would pretend that I didn’t see the bruises on his chest and arms that he tried to cover up with his black metalhead t-shirts. Yeah, you could tell when Cooper’s dad had been drinking.

  It was too awkward and forced. Cooper reminded me of life in a small town that I was trying to leave behind. I preferred to pretend I was born at my internship with my law friends and my club girls and one-month girlfriends.

  So it was easy to let the days pass and just don’t think about these things. On holidays we would make plans to hang out but I’d rather just rest at my parents’ house and stream some shows. Next time, I’d think, next time we’ll hang out. So time passed and eventually we stopped making those plans.

  It had been three years without any contact with Cooper. My first year out of college had just passed. I had become a partner just the day before, so I was still hung-over as a sailor who’d just gotten ashore, when he called me, desperate, telling me he was in deep trouble, and he needed my help.

  I vaguely remember waking up with my bedroom still spinning, answering the phone and then letting myself drop out of bed so I could crawl to the shower. I was on the highway within the hour, with a confused message to my boss; my best suit and briefcase in the back seat of my battered down car.

  At this point, you may be wondering why I would even answer the call of a guy I hadn’t talked to in years. Whom I had nothing in common anymore, except the memories of an awkward childhood. Well, there is this trait most lawyers share. No matter how deep into the hole of corporate partnership we are, we are always willing to get up in lawyering arms for our friends in need. Even when we don’t really talk anymore. It’s a hobby and also a duty-bound responsibility that comes with the job description. My boss would understand, as long as I returned with some paper trail that proved how I spent the weekend. Not, say, running around with some girl from the club, in a massive drug haze for ten days straight. To pull that off, you had to be a senior partner.

  So yeah, the ‘Frederick Terrance’ plaque I had on my shiny new desk allowed me to try stuff like this once or twice over a year. I just hoped the power wouldn’t get to my head.

  I arrived at my parent’s house, said hello to mom and dad and made a mental note of mom’s graying hairs. Those seemed to double in quantity each time I saw her. I hid that mental note in a faraway drawer on my brain, where I kept those things that are too painful to think about.

  Then I changed into my suit and walked to Cooper’s.

  Cooper lived with his dad, in a small house with two bedrooms. It seemed that old machinery occupied every free space, waiting and hoping to become someone’s summer project and gain new life. Cooper’s room looked like a sanctuary by comparison. Filled with dim light from one of those lava lamps that had been popular long ago. An old, stained carpet which was now a discolored light brown. A carefully made up bed with Captain America sheets. A modern computer sitting on a plastic desktop. Some posters of Jamaican weed paraphernalia on the walls; some more drug-related utensils on his closet, which was as messy as the house I had just trudged over. And several wooden bookshelves that we had stolen together from the local dumpster long ago. Conspiracy books filled them: The Vatican Conspiracy. The GMO Conspiracy. The Roswell Conspiracy. The Finland Conspiracy.

  Those were the normal ones, other ones were ‘Time-Polygon’ and ‘Flat Earth’ material. Not like he believed every single dumb sprout that you found there, mind you, but he had read most of them. It was the Cooper Kaproc idea of light reading to pass the time.

  I found the guy himself hunched in front of his window, black drapes closed over it. He was trying to get a peep outside by pressing his head against the frame without using his hands to move the curtains.

  “Hey Coop,” I said from the door. I had to step over a semi-disassembled lawnmower to reach his room, “I got your message, what’s going on?”

  Without looking at me, he gestured for me so to enter and close the door behind me, which I did. No one wanted his old man snooping around, getting the idea he was being lazy.

  Cooper finally turned around. He had long ago grown out of his ‘all-black, combat boots, heavy make-up’ phase. He had settled for a comfortable, small-townish combo of a work polo shirt bleached by the sun, thick denim trousers that were almost white, and work boots stained with oil of diverse machinery. He had his long black hair tucked in a ponytail and his glittering black eyes regarded me suspiciously as if deciding if it was really me, or merely my evil doppelganger. He said:

  “Did someone follow you here, dude?” He snuck some glances over the window.

  I started to have a nasty, nagging suspicion to which I tried to pay no heed. I sat on a corner of his bed.

  “I don’t know,” I told him, “if they were professionals I don’t think they’d let themselves be seen. And man you are in the phone book anyways.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said dismissively, “you are right of course. The Man can become invisible after all. Mostly invisible. They’ve been perfecting the technology since the ‘10s. I just don’t want to make it easy for them.”

  The nagging feeling worsened. The Man was his slang for the government, he had borrowed the word from dated websites that had somehow survived a couple decades online without someone mercifully pulling their server out of its misery.

  “You said you were in trouble,” I told him, sternly. I hoped with all my being his talk about the Man would lead to an explanation of how he had managed to get a traffic violation in his battered up car. Or maybe a friend of his got caught with weed in his shorts.

  “Oh yes, deep trouble. I’ve been hiding here for two daysdude. The house, I mean. I tried to hide in my room but I got hungry, and dad would have eaten all my groceries… Listen, I messed up. I think they are after me.”

  Nothing in all of that did anything to make me feel more at ease.

  “Who is after you, Coop?” C’mon man, I like working out traffic citations. Give me one of those, please.

  “The Man, dude. The Man! I screwed up, I messed around in its business, I thought I was being smart but of course they saw me, I had to come hide here and black vans have been driving all over the neighborhood. I’ve seen them pass,” he gestured around, in a familiar mixture of sheer panic and excitation that something was happening to him that didn’t involve auto repair. “I didn’t know who to call because the police are on the payroll, of course, and my friends don’t have the backbone to stand against The Man. Then I thought ‘you gotta call Fred, Cooper. You know Fred; it’s always been Fred and you against everyone. Can’t trust anyone else.’ I can’t trust no-one else, Fred; you have to help me out.”

  “I know, Coop. But you have to tell me what happened, so I can help out,” I explained, calmly, letting my training take over. The rest of me was a mixture of disappointment, sadness and a ‘you-should-have-seen-this-coming’ feeling.

  He finally left his place by the window and sat at the other corner of the bed, like we did when we were kids and talked about important business. Like the neighbor’s cat being possessed, or how to smuggle soda into the cinema.

  “Of course, that’s where I was going,” he raised his hands in front of him as if inviting me to see his, I guess, his flashback, "I had been reading about these airplanes, you know, from 1996. I like to dig into the past now and then, check out if it’s still the same old past. I find this trove of information, some big names backing all up, saying The Man used to make experiments on the population by spraying them with chemicals from the back of the planes. Keep them cozy and submissive, you know, the usual.

  “They used to leave these contrails behind them, these planes, but laced with hallucinogens. The people back then called those ‘chemtrails’, by the way.

  “I think, ‘well, if they did, they must’ve stopped by now because modern planes don’t leave behind no residue,’ but I keep reading, because there is just so much information. Must’v
e been a huge scandal back in the day; perhaps a president resigned over it. Everything covered up by now, of course, that’s the way it goes.

  “So I’m reading, and I’m like, boy, sure we are lucky that planes don’t leave residue today or they would still be pulling that shit on us. Then I freeze. See where I’m going with this? Yep, that’s right. It’s the perfect cover-up! They probably worked on cleaning the planes themselves, so they could create some… some transparent chemical to douse on us, keep us compliant! We would never know!”

  By then all hopes this was about a citation had evaporated from my mind, but there was no stopping Cooper Kaproc when he was on a roll. This felt like being at the bottom of an avalanche; all tied up, only able to look grimly at him and hear him out.

  “So I do my research. All the chemicals invented recently that mess with the mind and are transparent. Big Pharma is just a front for the military, as you know, so I had a lot to check. The answer hidden in plain sight. So I get into the deep web and stock up in everything I need to undo any cocktail they could be throwing at us."

  Oh, Cooper, I thought. I tried to not let my disappointment show. How high was he right now? He would probably not even remember me when I left the room.

  “So, finally my stuff arrives and I set to work. I have to find out what works and what doesn’t because to be honest most of that stuff only gets you high. So when I was sure I found the right chems, I went over to the campaign party this candidate has been doing next town over and took a look around.

  “Then I turned right on my heels and hightailed back home, and I’ve been hiding here since.”

  I just stared at him blankly, until he added, a bit contrite that I had ruined his dramatic reveal.

  “She is not human, dude. She is just wearing this skin-like suit, a disguise. Probably not a single politician is human; they are all green and scaly underneath. It’s really obvious once you are not jacked up to the nose in military-grade hallucinogens. Then, I’m sure she saw me, because she turned to me when she was giving her speech and smiled at me. I could see this sharp row of fangs behind her normal teeth, and I knew she knew I knew. I ran then.”