They Came to Us

It was a dark night. It was a stormy night. Far down wolves howled and wailed at the black, moonless sky like clerics of some primeval sodality. Aqueous orbs tumbled and twirled from their cumulonimbeous birth to the lonely earth below, shattering into millions of featureless specks—bursting and breaking their bodies on the windows of the house where, inside, it was warm and dry.
Of course, warm and dry were relative words in this case as the night cap cart had tipped over and spilled the what Jeremy had thought of as quite a fine collection of spirits. And even after cleaning away the precious liqueurs, his spirits remained dampened. Nor did this help Gail’s mood. She was visiting from Oregon where she had moved years before in hopes of tracking down Big Foot. In ten years she had yet to have a sighting although certain evidences suggested some kind of presence. She and Jeremy had been school friends who had crushes enough to keep in touch and who kept in touch enough to get together when she was in town, but not enough to have much to talk about when they did. They sat at a table near a window watching the rain after Jeremy’s attempt at talking about Ruskin hadn’t got going.
Had they been able to follow those specks, tracing them to where they coalesced in the clouds, they would have seen a similarly shaped but utterly alien speck also tumbling and twirling, with infinitely greater grace and purpose, down towards the house, its windows, and its spirit-dampened occupants. This orb, utterly un-cumulonimban in origin grew larger and larger as it approached until finally, even with the scant light and their coarse eyes, they saw what looked like a huge rain drop descend out of the sky, stop near the ground, then shift into a fairly human, though unisex, form.
Jeremy let out a swear. What was this/that? He blinked. Gail blinked. The thing blinked and began walking towards them.
Jeremy scrambled. Think eggs. He grabbed all around him looking for something, hyperventilating, and crouching low to the ground. Gail didn’t move. It wasn’t so much that she was brave, but that she seemed caught in some wizard spell. This was weird. The humanoid approached the house, his feet barely echoing on the wooden porch before the door opened, and it walked inside. Gail had turned her head, and Jeremy now froze, arms out, half crouching near the couch as if he was in the middle of the escalator gag he’d been fond of for about a semester in College.
The humanoid looked first at Gail and then, for a slightly longer time, at Jeremy while he emitted a soft humming sound for a few moments. There was a pause in which the impossibility of breaking the silence in the room settled down on Gail and Jeremy with a force they had never known. Jeremy thought it would drive him mad. Then it spoke.
“You are male and female of the species?”
It spoke perfectly, but there was something unfamiliar about the way it came out. Neither could tell if it was the flattish tone, the feeling that it was spoken with at once none and all of the dialects of English, or the way he paused one moment before each time he spoke and then rushed through everything. Something in the way the voice formed words perhaps. Had things turned out differently, they may have discussed this at great length on similarly rainy nights when she was back in town. As it was, Jeremy had no one to really talk to about it.
It was Gail who said, yes.
“I have been searching for something like you for a very long time.”
Jeremy’s first reaction was sarcastic. Really? You didn’t see the tons of other males and females down the street or… his thoughts were engulfed in tangents of how this being sensed until it was brought back to the pain in his leg muscles from standing so long and its next request.
“Will you come and meet my people?”
Again it was Gail who said, yes. It was then that he gained a hitherto unknown appreciation for the vagaries of the feminine mind. The being seemed unsurprised, if it felt such things. It did however, nod.
“You’ve been watching us?” Jeremy finally spoke. A longer pause than usual before it nodded and said, “that is how you would understand. We will go now.” It expanded into an amorphous bubble that was half open with lighted footprints walking up into its middle. One set was pink, one was blue. Gail smiled in spite of the strangeness, Jeremy was blank faced. They looked at each other for a moment before Gail, still smiling, walked towards the visitor, followed the pink footsteps inside, turned, and looked at Jeremy. What could he do? He followed.
With so many things vying for the title of the strangest thing, it was the in flight TV that seemed to be offered. Even Jeremy had to laugh at that in spite of kind of wishing they could just look out a window or something. They could tell they were rising and moving in different directions, but little else. After some silence, the voice of their visitor/conveyance spoke again.
“Are you communicating right now? Or do you have nothing to say? You have questions for me perhaps? I am from far away from a similar but advanced planet. Remarkably similar.”
“You’re like us?” Gail asked, incredulous.
“We were. We have since discarded much frippery you hang on to. Again, it was in the small things that this experience most approached unreality.
Soon Jeremy also became capable of small talk with the visitor. Most small talk ended however when they found out the visitor had been searching for other life for more than 20 million years. After asking many many times, confirming there was no miscommunication, another silence fell on the occupants until they felt themselves slowing down.
Moments later the skin, or whatever it was, slid open, and they saw a small group of more unisex humanoids with similarly clear, sleek, and luminescent skin staring at them. Gail fainted. Jeremy looked at her, dumb. Suddenly they were both outside their visitor who told him not to worry, they would restore her to optimal working order and to please come with him. She was taken by another of the aliens while he was ushered to a sitting room. He would curse this weakness later.
While waiting, Jeremy came out of his numbness. Well, if anyone could fix her it would probably be these things, he thought. His host told him she had sprained one of her ankles and gotten a bruise. How it knew, he didn’t know.
“So, you going to take me to your leader or something? Didn’t want to see mine?”
A short pause and then, “we are our leaders. We work together.” That didn’t seem to be an answer to Jeremy, so he asked less questions.
Curiosity and discomfort finally forced a “Are you a man or a woman?” It seemed his host was avoiding the question with talk of malleability and progress when two more aliens entered the room. One said, “the female of the species has been restored to working condition and upgraded to near optimal performance.” Jeremy didn’t immediately know that “near optimal” meant that everything except her 23-year-old brain had been replaced by their kind hosts. In a voice both alien and familiar Jeremy heard his name. It was then that he stopped taking a passive role in the events occurring.