The Big Hunt

They say there’s no rest for the wicked, but perhaps it’s more apt to say there’s no explanation for the rational minded. At least there’s funding, even if it comes from eccentric billionaires.

“We’re cryptoxenologists,” I told him as I slid into the booth, shaking the last of the rain off my trench coat, “trained professionals in the scientific methods. Not ghost hunters.” Despite the expensive felt hat pulled low over his face, which was shadowed in the flashing light show of the Vegas club, I could still see a mad gleam in his eyes, like a kid setting his targets on the Holy Grail. So this was Robert Bigelow, I thought, of Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, and my new patron.

“Don’t worry,” he smiled, the quivering of his fat jowls sending a shiver down my replaced spine, “I’m still talking aliens, UFOs, what have you. I need someone I can trust independent from the Mutual UFO Network to head a special division of my Star Impact Project: we’re after the big one, the biggest alien of them all.”

“Bigger than Roswell? Than the Vogans, than Xenu?”

“Very.”

“Hmm. You’ve got me intrigued, but I don’t come cheap. Is this supposed to be a Category Two or Three, physical traces, physiological effects in the witnesses?”

“Yes.” He smiled again; gesturing at the drink which a peculiarly androgynous waiter had set on the dark table. “Traces and effects of every imaginable kind. I didn’t believe it myself first either. This one’s beyond old Vallee’s categorizations. You want the run down?”

“Don’t you have a spec sheet? I’d like to get started before another bug hunter gets the goods.”

“No, I want you to understand the scope of what we’re dealing with here. Humor me.”

I shrugged back in the booth and took the drink, the first of many he’d be paying for I imagined. Its taste was impossible to pin down. While Bigelow talked I wondered what kind of alien we were hunting here, where it fit in Card’s Hierarchy of Foreignness, as varelse or raman: the other-as-enemy or other-as-self. I hoped the later; friendly aliens are always easier to negotiate with, and cover up after they leave town. But as the fat billionaire talked I began to think he was referring to the last function of foreignness, that ghost in the machine: the other as wholly and in-fucking-effably other.

“Wait, wait,” I stammered, sloshing the last of the weird blue drink on the tabletop, “did you just list as traces certain international monuments, text, rituals, and as physiological effects specific systems of belief and social codification, including the whole of our cultural value system?”

He smiled again, and this time the fear it caused me was almost enough to make me jump up and run screaming from the club, from the whole cursed city of Las Vegas, lit up like a giant welcoming beacon in the deserted night. “I told you I’m after that most alien of aliens…”

I gripped the table; the spilled drink sticky and surreal under my fingers. “You… you’re talking about God aren’t you?”