current

T-shirts, Tentacles
and the Melting Point of Steel


by Ben Burgis

     If there was one thing that Jessica was sure of, it was that the government was lying about 9/11. The evidence that President Bush, Vice President McCain and their cronies were engaged in a massive cover-up was overwhelming. It infuriated her that most people couldn't see it.

     There were multiple eyewitness reports of explosions at the base of the towers. There were detailed computer simulations demonstrating that the official version simply could not have happened. There was the strength of steel and the temperature of burning jet fuel, and none of it added up.

     Jessica liked nothing better than ticking off all of this evidence to anyone willing to listen, but John's question couldn't have come at a worse time.

     She’d met him at the House of Blues in downtown Cambridge, and gone home with him after last call.

     She kept telling herself that she had to stop doing things like this, that she always ended up getting hurt, but sometimes she just couldn't help herself. He was cute, he was funny, and he was exactly her type. Short, muscular, winning smile. He even drank his martinis the same way she did, stirred, not shaken, and seemed delighted that she knew that shaking it bruised the gin.

     But. Still. She'd known him for ... what? Three hours?

     For all that, there they were, on the edge of John's bed, kissing and groping. Her blue jeans were already somewhere in the piles of clothing that covered much of the microscopic floor of his efficiency apartment.

     He reached under her crimson and white Harvard sweatshirt and the t-shirt beneath, running his hands along her bare skin. She shivered with pleasure. He reached up to peel off the sweatshirt. She lifted up her arms to ease it off ...

     ... and he stopped dead, the sweatshirt hiked up around her wrists, and stared. It took a few seconds for her to focus back in on the external world enough to read his expression.

     “What the hell is that?”

     “Huh?”

     He finished taking her sweatshirt off and crossed his arms over his bare chest. “The t-shirt.”

     Until she looked down at it, Jessica had forgotten what she was wearing. “Oh. Right.”

     It was a plain black t-shirt, with large white letters on the front, spelling out “Investigate 9/11” and the URL of a web-site.

     John uncrossed his arms and flexed his hands. “Are you a conspiracy theorist?”

     Jessica ran a hand through her long, curly red hair and sighed. “Oh, for God's sake.”

     John looked away, but kept talking. “Well, are you?”

     Jessica got up and paced. She wondered in some corner of her mind whether she should put her bluejeans back on, but tabled the question, if only because she had no idea where they were.

     She was in no condition to have this argument, but the familiar lines made their way out of her mouth anyway, as if on conversational autopilot. “I don't know what that means.”

     “It means--”

     Jessica held out her hand. “Look. 'Conspiracy theory' is just something people say about ideas they don't like. It doesn't mean anything.”

     John looked up at that. “No?”

     “No. If more than one person is involved in something, and they're keeping it secret, that is by definition a conspiracy, no?”

     “Right, but I mean--”

     “Well, whatever happened on 9/11, it wasn't just one person who did it, right? And they didn't tell us, right?”

     “No.” John's face was red now. “That's crazy.”

     Jessica fixed him with a defiant glare, her hands on her hips. “Which part is crazy?”

     “You said people. They weren't people.”

     John was, of course, right.

     They weren't people. At least if you believed George W. Bush, the Republicans, the Democrats, the U.N., and, Jessica had to admit, about 90% of the general public. She just didn't.

     Not everyone in the 9/11 truth movement subscribed to the same theory, and Jessica had seen suggestions ranging from the towers being blown up by some radical offshoot of the anti-globalization movement to the suggestion that the government itself had perpetrated the attacks as a pretext for going to war against the Sai'bek, but she herself was among the most outspoken advocates of the “Bin Laden hypothesis.”

     After all, Osama Bin Laden had been a big deal at one time. He was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List for involvement in previous terrorist attacks. Wasn't it strange that everyone had stopped talking about him since 9/11?

     Since the official theory that burning jet fuel could melt steel didn't wash, someone must have blown the towers up, right? Arab terrorists were the obvious choice.

     To John, none of it was obvious.

     He just took it for granted that the government was telling the truth, that 9/11 was the day that the world learned about the existence of a technologically advanced alien race dedicated to our destruction. That the Sai'bek were capable of manipulating Earth's magnetic fields from millions of miles away and using them to slam our own planes into buildings.

     Oh, Jessica wasn't so foolish as to deny the existence of the Sai'bek, like so many people had tried to at first on the message boards she frequented after the attacks.

     In the days and weeks that followed, even the most stubborn skeptics were convinced of that point. The government declassified thousands of files they had accumulated since the first Sai'bek exploratory ship had crash-landed in Roswell in 1947. The military even displayed a living Sai'bek prisoner from a more recent crash to the news cameras. Thrashing and squirming in a glass cage, it looked like a cross between a bear and a squid.

     That “yes, there really are aliens” point blew a lot of people's minds, but Jessica's wasn't one of them. It was about what she’d always assumed.

     It was just that, as far as she was concerned, it was a separate issue. They existed, but they didn't knock down the towers. They couldn't, not with planes.

     John wouldn't see that. He was going on about some half-remembered nonsense from a CNN special he'd seen about how burning jet fuel could weaken the support structure of the towers enough without melting it.

     He was, in fact, seriously considering dropping out of Harvard to join the newly formed U.S. Space Forces. He said he'd been inspired by that speech President Bush had made at Ground Zero, the one where he was wearing the hardhat and speaking through the bullhorn. Bush had announced plans to build a fleet of intergalactic spaceships based on reverse-engineered Sai'bek technology so the human race could “take the fight to the enemy.”

     That sounded good to John. He wanted to go kill some of the creatures that had killed all those people. As far as he was concerned, denying what the Sai'bek had done was disrespectful to everyone who'd died, not to mention crazy. “It's like Holocaust deniers ...”

     “Oh, fuck that,” Jessica finally said, exhaustion, sexual frustration and the beginnings of what would blossom into a full-blown hangover the next morning driving her past the point of rational thought. She finished pulling on her blue jeans and stormed out of John's apartment before she had time to so much as zip up her fly.

     She didn't see him again for another year.

     During that interval, she got together with a Norwegian graduate student named Frederich, co-wrote three papers on the paradoxes of transfinite set theory with one of her professors, flew to D.C. to be the keynote speaker at a conference of the 9/11 truth movement, broke up with Frederich, took up smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, had a one-night stand with the same professor and decided she preferred her martinis shaken after all.

     It was a busy year for the rest of the planet too. Reverse engineering turned out not to be quite as easy as Bush had made it sound. For all the grand rhetoric about building a “fleet” of intergalactic spaceships, so far they'd managed to churn out a total of five.

     Seven, if you counted the two that fell apart in the test flights.

     Still, Operation Infinite Justice went forward as planned. There were only two Sai'bek ships close enough to Earth to engage with anyway. Five ships built with Sai'bek technology, suitably combined with a little human ingenuity in the form of nuclear missiles, were more than enough to take them out. Nearby satellites captured the exploding alien ships in a series of spectacular images replicated in glossy pictures in every newspaper in the world.

     Just before the five ships of the “U.S. Space Forces” returned to Earth orbit, George W. Bush became the first U.S. President to go into space. Wearing a badly-fitting, lime green Space Forces uniform, he gave a speech on the deck of the ship that had lobbed the winning missile. The red, white and blue banner laid out behind him, carried in every photo of the event, read “Mission Accomplished.”

     Two weeks later, a fleet of 500 Sai'bek ships arrived to start the bombing campaign.

     Her head full of equations, Jessica didn't even hear the high-octave beeping of the newly installed air raid warning system until some fat Russian woman grabbed her arm. The Russian pulled her to the stairs leading down to the subway platform “shelter.”

     It was just a fenced off area on the platform of the Central Square subway station, but there were big signs everywhere officially designating it as an air raid shelter.

     When she did hear the siren, Jessica didn't know how she could have missed it. It made a sound like all the car alarms in Boston going off at the same time. People were running in all directions.

     As Jessica joined the herd going down the steps, she caught a glimpse of gigantic black ships passing through the gray afternoon sky.

     The minutes crawled by into hours. There must have been at least three hundred people crammed onto the subway platform. Jessica had nothing to read. She didn't know anyone there.

     The Sai'bek detonation capsules made repetitive thump-thump-thump noises above them. Every time one of them went off, it drowned out all the conversation below. Smells of sweat, coffee and tobacco filled the air.

     Jessica wanted to scream.

     Granted, she was contributing to the tobacco smell. Some older guy whose name she didn't bother to commit to memory kept on giving her cigarettes. He was far too tall and willowy for her tastes, but the cigarettes passed the time.

     They just barely made it worth it to her to tolerate cigarette-guy's persistent efforts to hit on her every time the thump-thump-thump died down enough that she could hear him talk.

     He said what he clearly thought were witty things about his life. He asked her about hers. She gave him functional answers, composed of as few syllables as possible, and thought about other things.

     The air raids did nothing to shake Jessica's beliefs about 9/11, Bush or the rest of it. Why would they? She blamed Bush for starting the damn war with his lies in the first place, indulging in an unwinnable crusade against tentacled aliens instead of going after the real culprits in Afghanistan. But. Still.

     As the thump-thump-thump continued, she decided that killing aliens was a really good idea.

     When the all clear beep finally sounded, Jessica made her excuses and split off from cigarette guy. When she joined the throng heading up the stairs, she was walking so fast that she almost slammed into John.

     He put out a hand to steady her as they stood facing each other on the steps leading up and out onto the street. His blond hair was crew-cut beneath his Red Sox cap and the collar of a lime green Space Forces uniform peeked out from the top of his leather jacket.

     Jessica finally realized how long she'd let the silence linger. “I'm ... ah ... hey, sorry about that.”

     John looked into her eyes, the beginnings of a smile curving around his lips.

     “I'm sorry too.” From the way he said it, she was guessing that he wasn't just talking about almost slamming into her. “Can I buy you a drink?”

     Five hours later, Jessica lay next to him on her bed. Sheets entangled with their limbs, the smells of gin, sweat and tobacco mingling in the air, she was reasonably happy. Wasn't she?

     He was still cute and he was still funny. He had apologized gloriously for what had happened a year ago, and he was a pretty good lay. She should be happy.

     So why the hell wasn't she?

     She rolled away from him and propped herself up on her knees. She took the box out of her bedside cabinet and rolled two cigarettes. John gratefully accepted one with sweaty fingers, and they smoked in silence for a while, a black plastic ashtray between them on the bed.

     As he finished, John rolled over and touched Jessica on the arm. It looked like he was about to say something. Jessica reached over to the remote control and turned on the TV. She got up, covering herself with the sheet, and walked over to the kitchen. She sloshed some ingredients into her martini shaker.

     “You want one?”

     His voice was hoarse. “Please.”

     She'd already started making his, but she asked anyway. “Care if the gin's bruised?”

     He snorted, and then all Jessica could hear was the sounds of the TV, murmuring indistinctly in the background as she searched for her nice martini glasses. As real exhaustion set in, she decided not to let whatever was bothering her get her down. She didn't hear what the TV newscaster was saying until she came back in, and then only meaningless particles of speech, “President” and “war” and “major address.”

     She slipped off the sheet, put her glass on the bedside table and crawled naked onto the bed to hand John his chilled martini glass. He took it without looking at her.

     She grunted, plopped down several inches away from him and took a sip of her martini. It wasn't until she'd had three or four sips and started prying off one of the olives that she consciously processed what she was hearing.

     “My fellow Americans ...”

     They were replaying the clip, with commentary. Several clips, actually, in a montage, starting with “My fellow Americans ...” and going up to the final bit about how President Bush “would not seek and would not accept” his party's nomination in 2004.

     “... the systems that defended our planet's magnetic field against Sai'bek manipulation went down two hours ago ...”

     Jessica choked on the olive. John slapped her back. She spit it out. Neither of them spoke.

     “Sai'bek representatives accepted our surrender 45 minutes ago on the following terms ...”

     The United States and its coalition partners could maintain their sovereignty if they agreed to total disarmament under Sai'bek supervision. And paid annual reparations in the form of iron and mineral resources for the next seventy-five years.

     And admitted that they had lied about 9/11.

     “Well,” John said the next morning, “I guess I should thank you for not saying 'I told you so.'”

     “Mm?” Jessica didn't look up from her laptop computer. “How do you mean?”

     Actually, she knew exactly what John meant. She'd never believed it was a Sai'bek attack. The President had confirmed that much last night, explaining that the Sai'bek interference in Earth's magnetic fields on September 11th was a mistake and that they had immediately apologized for the damages they it had caused to the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. At first, the military had been unable to decode the messages containing the apology. Later, they had kept it secret for fear of the inevitable wave of public outrage.

     Jessica cut him off as he started to say all of that. “But if Bush was telling the truth this time,” she told him as she went up to refill her mug of black coffee, “then I was wrong. There was no bomb, just crashing planes.”

     John made gurgling noises as he held out his own cup—it was Jessica's white-on-black “Investigate 9/11” mug—for a refill. “You don't believe this either?”

     Jessica poured, took a sip of her own cup and frowned. It was the Organic Sumatra blend, and it was excellent, but she thought she might have left the beans in the freezer for too long before grinding them.

     “No,” she finally explained, in her most patient voice. “I don't. Burning jet fuel from the plane crash wouldn't have been enough to melt steel.”

     John put down his coffee cup and started giggling. The giggles turned into torrents of laughter. Jessica crossed her arms over her Harvard sweatshirt and watched him. She wasn't insulted. It was actually kind of cute. “Done?” she asked, taking another sip of her coffee.

     “Yeah.” He wiped a tear from his eye. “But seriously. If he was lying before and he was lying now, what do you think really happened?”

     Jessica shrugged. “I have no idea.”

     It was true. For the last hour, while John was still asleep, she'd been browsing the message boards of the 9/11 truth movement. They were hopping with activity, furious arguments and novel explanations as theories piled on about what could have motivated the Sai'bek to “admit” that it was them, and why the Bush administration would hold on so hard to the “planes hit the towers” story even in their disgrace. It was still far too early to tell, and Jessica didn't know what to think.

     It didn't matter. The melting point of steel was still the same, the computer simulations and eyewitness reports still damning. It would probably be a long time until she had any clear idea of what was going on, but that ambiguity didn't change her essential posture.

     If there was one thing that Jessica was sure of, it was that the Sai'bek were lying about 9/11.

Ben Burgis is doctoral candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Miami and a low-residency MFA student in the Creative Writing program at the University of Southern Maine (Stonecoast). His story Three Perspectives on the Role of the Anarchists in the Zombie Apocalypse, originally published at Afterburn SF, was reprinted at Tales of the Zombie War, where it won 2nd Place in their first 2008 contest. Oh, and just for the record, Ben stirs his martinis, prefers brown-haired girls to redheads and thinks that the set-theoretic paradoxes are best solved by re-interpreting set theory in mereological terms. He blogs at Horselover Fat.