Dream CXLIX

I was staying in a hotel in a large resort town, doing some work for a bank.  Halle Barry was my roommate, and I had agreed to take her to dinner later that evening, provided, she said, that I could really afford it--she knew my finances were iffy and didn't want to be a burden.

I arrived at the bank and began generating the codes they would need to close the day.  Since I had some time left, I decided to go ahead and go on and do some further work, which I then brought over to the folks who were due to close the day.  They were very pleased that I'd gone on and done more work for them.

I later met with several folks to go over the next day's work.  My boss, after a while said, "It's a good time for breakfast."  I saw that it was getting close to six PM and said, "It's a good time for dinner," and remembering my date, I made my excuses and left. 

When I got back to the hotel, I sheepishly checked out the prices in the hotel's restaurant.  They were expensive but not unaffordable, so I asked a friendly concierge about dinner reservations.  It turned out he knew about my bank work and was impressed, and said that although they were full he would be sure to find something.

In the room, Halle wasn't in, so I decided to go up to the observation floor at the top of the building to take some photos.  There was a lot of cloud cover, but some good views of the city and the surrounding mountains.  I put my camera down and walked to the opposite wall.

Just then I saw something moving in the sky.  It looked like a silver gumdrop, with a nearly invisible disk rotating at its bottom, and it whizzed through the sky back and forth as no natural object--or even aircraft--should be able to do.

I ran across the room and grabbed my camera, and tried to aim and take shots, but the camera suddenly went crazy, cycling through menus and submenus and speaking about the settings.  I quickly shut it off before it could format itself  and thought, well, the spaceship out there is affecting electronics somehow.   I crossed back over to the window from which I had originally spotted the ship, wondering if it would pass over again.

The friendly concierge was there.  "There's the enemy," he said, pointing to the sky.  Below on the hillside were several heavy tanks, poised to fire.  When the silver object came by, the tanks lit up the sky with artillery fire.  It was too fast for them to make a direct hit, but several shells came close.

I thought, Wow, I sure hope we've established that these folks are unfriendly.  That we at least tried to communicate.

Suddenly bursts of fire opened up from the silver object and nearby buildings burst into flames.  From below, we could hear the sound of crowds screaming.

I called Halle on my cellphone.  When she answered, I didn't give her a chance to speak.  "Pack up only what you need to survive and get out as quickly as you can.  Don't wait for me or you'll be dead."

I went to take the elevator down.  When it opened, there were three old men wearing tuxedos waiting to get off.  When other people started to get on, nearby hotel staff--who were actually clearly disguised aliens--fired on them with small black guns hooked up to power supplies about the size of a hardback book.  Green bursts shot out, and the people trapped in the elevator screamed as they dissolved.

I ducked back and took the stairs down to the next level, which was an infrastructure area full of plumbing and wires.  I started to walk toward the next stairwell when I saw a group of men coming toward me.  They were all dressed in black suits and ties, like most of the staff at the hotel.

Something made me hesitate to get too close to them, and when I thought they noticed me I ducked back into the stairwell.  I thought that if I went the opposite way I could reach the other stairwell and continue down.

But the other door only went down one flight of stairs before stopping at a dead end.  I was trapped, and the men suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs.  They fired something at me which was painful--a regular gun, I thought--and I told them, "I would have greeted you as a friend."

One of them raised the black ray gun and aimed it at me.  He smiled, but before he could fire, the friendly concierge leapt through the doorway and managed to pin all three of them to the wall.  He held the ray gun so that it pointed away.  Seizing the chance, I dashed up the steps and wrestled the ray guy out of the leader's hand.  "Show me how this works, or I'll learn how by using it on you."

He just smiled smugly, and as I pressed glowing buttons on the powerpack, he kept on smiling.  His companions had begun making odd noises, and the concierge was struggling to contain them, so I knew they were reverting to their true forms and I had to act fast.

"Well," I said, turning the barrel of the gun toward his eye, "if I can't learn how to fire it, I can at least use it to poke out your eyes."  I moved the barrel closer and closer and his eye darted, just for an instant, toward a green button I had not tried yet.

I quickly turned away, pointed the gun at his two companions, pressed the green button and fired two shots directly into them.  They were flung against the far wall where they painfully expanded and burst.

In their true forms, they had looked like worms--one of them, small, delicate and dark, the other large, fat, with multi-colored banding.  Both now quite dead.

I turned the weapon back on the leader, and he dissolved into a green glow, as the aliens' human victims had.  Perhaps he was a human; perhaps the aliens had allies among us who had been preparing for this day and hoped to gain some reward.  Or perhaps he was simply a different alien, and the ray's effects were the same whether human or humanoid.

The concierge and I untangled the various power cords; we now had a working weapon.  I noted that another component seemed to be an earth-made graphic-equalizer; I was tempted to leave it, but decided to take it, thinking about my digital camera's behavior and wondering if they needed something like this so that their weapons could work on our world.

I thanked the concierge and we parted.  I continued down and reached my room without incident, and started packing up useful items--tools and things.  I also carefully packed the weapon, but packed so that I could reach it instantly if need be.  I noticed that Halle's suitcase was still there, and tried calling her.  She was safe, and told me that she hadn't bothered to pack but simply left town as I'd asked.

I told her I was leaving the room now, and asked if there was anything she'd like me to pack for her.  She said, "No, nothing important.  Thank God you're safe!  Just get out of there."

I used her suitcase to pack more tools, took a last look around the room, and left.

On the way down to street level, I heard bits and pieces of various reports on the attack.  So far as I could tell, this city was the only one attacked, so perhaps by striking first we had prepared ourselves to meet a much larger invasion later on.  Reports on how the battle was going--if it could be called that--were more muddled.  Panic seemed to be less, which I took as a good sign, though with aliens able to masquerade as humans it was hard to know who was who and, therefor, who to trust.

Once as I passed a floor near the ground, I saw someone's computer screen through a door.  On that screen, someone had written a message rather harshly critiquing a tutorial I had recently posted online.

Well, I thought, smiling, that's not all that important now, is it.