David Larson - The Myth of the Anal Probe

“Are you an Alien?” Mike asked weakly.

“Alien to what?”

“Oh my God!” Mike said jumping out of his chair. He didn’t see a door anyplace to bolt for, and apparently the room was round so he couldn’t find a corner to hide in.

“Please,” Mike had dropped to his knees, “please don’t give me the Anal Probe.”

“Geez, what the hell is up with you people and the anal fixation? As soon as you figure out where you are, you want to start talking about sticking things up your ass. Is that the way you act when you go to a friend’s house? ‘Hey great new TV there buddy. Mind if I stick the remote up my ass?’

“Let me explain something to you clowns. One time, ONE TIME, we have this guy up here and he hasn’t had a bowel movement for like three days. So, we give him an enema, got it, an enema, that’s all! Nothing more sinister than that! Now we constantly have to go through this ‘Anal Probe’ crap. Man oh man, you people can hold a grudge. Get back in your chair”

“Sorry” Mike said.

“Look,” Bob said easing back into his chair. “If we can get past all the ‘rectal phobia’ thing, I’ll start by laying out some information to you and we can go from there. You can ask anything you want and I’ll be more than happy to tell you. Nothing is a secret here. Well, nothing except who has been using the skipper’s head, but that’s not important now.”

“The skippers head?” Mike asked weakly “what is someone doing with the skipper’s head? Did they cut it off?”

Mike swallowed hard

Bob was laughing uncontrollably.

“No,” Bob finally said as he wiped a tear off his cheek “Not that kind of head. His bathroom. Someone keeps pooping in his bathroom and doesn’t flush.”

“Where was I?” Bob snorted one last chuckle. “Cut it out,” he said to himself, “oh yeah.”

“First, this is a ‘space ship’.” Bob made the finger quotation marks in the air. “And we are from, well, let’s just say from someplace other than your solar system. Next, we snatched you from your car.” Bob held up his hand. “And before you spit out the obligatory ‘why me’ the fact is you just happened to be in the right, or wrong, place in the right, or wrong, time.

“As for what are we going to do with you, well, that’s kind of complicated.”

The blood instantly drained from Mikes face, as it went looking for someplace safe deep in his chest cavity, and farther from the vicinity of the mad man sitting comfortably in front of him.

Bob rested a reassuring hand on Mike’s knee. “Not complicated like that old buddy. We’re going to talk is all, and I don’t mean that in the whole Hitler and ‘it’s just a shower’ thing. Really, we’re going to have a conversation. Then when we’re done we’ll drop you off wherever you want to go. OK?”

Mike nodded apprehensively.

“Just one thing though,” Bob went on. “You can never eat ice cream, use the word ‘Bolero’ in sentence, or wear the colors green and yellow in the same week ever again. Got it?”

Mike nodded.

“Lighten up Melvin.” Bob said “I’m just jerking around. Well except for the Bolero thing.” Bob winked.

“OK then” Bob said slapping his knees. “Let’s get started.” Behind him a giant picture of space materialized on the wall.”

“Is that a window?” Mike asked.

“No, dickhead, it’s a television. I use it for my slide presentation. Christ, you people need to get out more.” Bob got out of his chair and walked around to the screen.

“This is a picture of our solar system. Hundreds of millions of years ago we developed ‘near planet’ space travel, and man was that cool. Unfortunately, after a while this got to be boring.” The picture next to Bob turned into one of what looked like an astronaut sitting on a crate, picking his nose. “So, long story short, we developed deep space exploration.” The next picture was one of the same astronaut jumping up in the air with a look of total joy on his face. “Once we perfected the whole magnetic drive thing we were zooming around space like wild men, exploring this frozen shithole and that desert wasteland. And do you know what we found?” The screen went blank. “Not a damned thing.”

“Now, I know you are going to find this hard to believe, but we are pretty stress free at home.” The screen was back on with a picture of a bunch of people hugging each other. “We have always been vegetarians. Killing for food never made a lot of sense. We don’t fight or argue, and we have never had a war. The concept of your politics and religion make no sense to us. We don’t need laws and rules telling us how to treat each other, telling us not to screw each other over. We all work together for the common good and betterment of each other.”

The picture was now one of a lab with a lot of scientists in lab coats, working. “Consequently, with all that time on our hands, we have been able to make great advances in our civilization. Then one day, somebody got a bright idea” the screen now had a picture of a man from the nose up with a light bulb above his head. “Why don’t we start looking for places that can sustain our type of life forms and start to populate other planets?”

“Nice graphics,” Mike said.

“Hey butt-wad, just remember which one of us has the interstellar space ship here.” He pointed back at the screen. “May I?”

“Sorry.” Mike said.

“As I was saying,” The picture changed to a man and woman holding hands and smiling in a beautiful garden filled with animals and birds that all seemed to be in perfect harmony with each other. “We actually found several planets that were much like our own. We made a few alterations. Long story short, we dropped off our colonizing crew and the rest is blissful, and I might add, very successful history.”

“Then you found us?” Mike asked.

“Not exactly ace, then we found your planet. For all practical proposes it was the most perfect place for colonization we had ever seen. It was exactly like our home planet. We just had one problem.”

“We were already there.”

“Man, you guys certainly have evolved into a bunch of myopic shits haven’t you? Do you know why you freaked out so bad when you came to in here? Because you clowns think you have all the answers, that’s why.

“You actually think that if it’s in a history book it must be fact, or if you were taught it in school, or church, that’s just the way it is. You look back into your own past and laugh when you read that some of the greatest thinkers of their time were persecuted, chastised, imprisoned, and even tortured by the church for saying such wild things as the Earth is round, or it revolves around the sun. And now you actually have the audacity to think you have all the answers.

“Let me tell you something. There actually is a library on my home planet that is FILLED with shit Earth people don’t know. And right next to it is an annex filled with shit Earth people think they know but actually don’t.”

“Jesus!” Mike groused, “I’m sorry. I’m trying to cooperate here, wherever here is, so how about cutting me a little slack.”

“Yeah, I know.” Bob said gently. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.

“At any rate, what we found were a whole bunch of carnivores with real crappy attitudes.” The next slide was what appeared to be an actual photograph of a bunch of dinosaurs tearing the hell out of some other, smaller dinosaurs. “This caused us some real heart burn. We aren’t a very aggressive people and we don’t kill for the sake of killing. We debated this problem for nearly 200 years.”

“Oh my God” Mike gasped, wide-eyed, “how old are you?”

“I’m 42, Mike. Our life span, not surprisingly, is the same as yours. We don’t think in the moment. We think out problems as critical as this for as long as it takes until we come up with an answer that will work for the very long term. I think you people are involved in a war right now that could have been circumvented with a little more talking and cooperation.