Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

“Is there really a difference between one super smart alien frog brain or a thousand of them, if they’re always watching?”

“Is that like, if a tree falls in the forest?”

Aaron doesn’t answer. The contrail overhead is starting to dissipate. The clouds around it have turned pink at the edges.

Christian rolls onto his side, propping his head up on one elbow. “Well, I’ve got something to tell you,” he says.

“Yeah?”

Christian brushes hair out of Aaron’s face, and then tucks his own long, dark brown hair behind his left ear. It falls forward over his shoulder and across his neck. There’s a mole near where his clavicle peeks out from the collar of his yellow-and-green shirt. Aaron watches his lips as he says, “I got into Dartmouth.”

He says something else, but Aaron doesn’t hear it. And then Christian is looking at him expectantly. And Aaron knows that what he’s supposed to say is, “Congratulations,” or “Oh wow,” or “I knew you’d get in.”

But what comes out is, “I thought we were going to U of O!”

Christian puts his head down on his arm and sighs. “You’re going to U of O. I told you I was applying to better schools.”

Aaron only vaguely remembers those conversations, whispered to him in the back of the band room while waiting for the conductor to drill the flute section on a difficult part of the song. He does remember hiding in Christian’s attic room, with stolen bottles of hard lemonade, talking about how they could be roommates. Was that all bullshit then?

“I didn’t think you’d actually apply to them,” Aaron says. “We had plans.”

Aaron thinks he can sense Christian rolling his eyes. “ You had plans.”

“But you can’t just… I mean, what about…”

Christian picks his head up to look at Aaron, and then all he says is, “Well, I guess either we’ll spend a lot of time on Skype or you’ll get over it.”

“Fine,” Aaron says, and he gets up. Once he’s standing, his head is above the shadow of the slough’s bank, and he has to shade his eyes to look down at Christian. But he doesn’t. His huffy attempt to stomp off is made less dramatic and more comical by his need to tuck his underwhelmed penis back into his pants and zip his fly. So he’s already less angry and more embarrassed, cheeks burning, as he hunts around the grass for his sneakers. But it would be worse to back down and face Christian now, so he musters what anger he can and storms off.

“Whatever,” Christian shouts after him, as he struggles through the tall grass at the edge of the field, glitter frogs hopping up and away from his stomping feet, their bulging eyes watching him. “Text me when you feel like talking about this like an adult!”

Aaron rides home, stuffs his bike in the garage, heads for his room. There are frogs all up and down the stairs. Even though he likes the stupid aliens, he wants to kick them out of spite. He wonders if he drop-kicked one down the hall if it’d bounce off the back wall or splat horribly. The frogs hop away from him, as if they can tell what he’s thinking, and he feels awful. “Sorry,” he whispers, a roiling sickness in his guts. He can’t get the image of a splatted glitter frog dripping off the wall out of his head.

There are about a hundred of them in his bedroom when he gets the door open. Unlike the glitter frogs in the hall, these ones don’t scatter when they see him. He wonders how they get through closed doors and what they’ve been doing in here alone all day.

He swipes his tablet on and tries to distract himself with Facebook, which mostly works. Well, until Christian’s status changes to single.

Aaron stares at the notification. The thick feeling in his throat is the same one he gets right before he cries. “I didn’t mean that ,” he says to nobody in particular, though of course the frogs are listening.

One of the glitter frogs jumps up onto Aaron’s shoulder. Its back is such a dark and stormy blue, speckled with metallic flecks, that it looks like the night sky. Aaron picks it up and holds it in his hands, feeling the cold fluttering of its heart and breath. It smells odd, like a spice barely remembered from childhood. He wonders if the frogs are alive, or if they’re robots, or if it’s just a grand, mass hallucination. “Well, you were there, some of you.” Aaron says, “Tell me why he did it.”

The frog doesn’t say anything, even after Aaron lifts its face to the screen, showing it his Twitter feed. The feed is full of tweets by Christian that are definitely about him, though they don’t mention him by name. The glitter frogs never say anything.

Aaron puts the frog down on his desk. He lowers his face so their eyes are on the same level. Another frog, this one striped red and black, jumps onto his computer tower without displacing the rejection letters piled on top. From underneath, looking up, Aaron can see the Harvard crest. That response? No. Princeton: no. Yale: no, not even. Don’t even think about it. And Dartmouth? Ha.

The night sky frog ribbits. It sounds disgruntled. Aaron sighs; the puff of his breath makes the frog blink. Here is the pain of his future collapsing on itself and the realization that no, he’s not that great. He’s not great at all. He’s completely, devastatingly average. Seventeen years of denial couldn’t change that.

“I wish for once I could be the one leaving, not the one being left behind,” he says.

The frog stares at him; its wet eyes reflect the cloud-studded sky out the window.

Tumblr gif set, eight images: Rescue Dog “Saves” Frog. Taken from a YouTube video of the same name, filmed on a smartphone in portrait mode.

One: A mottled green and purple glitter frog swimming in someone’s backyard pool.

Two: A golden retriever paces left on the pool deck. Barking.

Three: Glitter frog is still swimming, minding its own business.

Four: Retriever leaps into the pool, and the splash repeats incessantly in the browser window until you tap over to the next gif.

Five: Retriever paddling toward the pool stairs, glitter frog held in its soft jaws.

Six: Retriever puts down frog and backs two steps away. The frog blinks and its throat expands with a mighty, pissed-off croak.

Seven: Retriever lying next to the frog on the pool deck, wagging its wet tail.

Eight: Retriever licks frog. Frog retracts its eyes to escape the overeager tongue.

The last time he ever sees Aaron is when he watches the other boy walk away from their fight. He’ll come to think of it as the stupidest fight that he’s ever had. He’ll spend years wondering if Aaron would have still run away if they hadn’t broken up with each other on Facebook.

Aaron’s parents come to Christian’s house two days later, looking as though they’ve been crying, or not sleeping, or both.

“Have you seen him?” “Did he say anything about where he was going?” “If you hear anything, will you tell us?” “Does he have any other accounts online that we don’t know about?” “Did he say he was meeting anyone you don’t know?”

And Christian has no answers for them, sitting in the dining room with his own parents nearby, their faces also drawn and worried, as though running away might be contagious.

He’s still no help later, when it’s the cops come to ask almost the exact same questions, or when the school counselor asks him how he feels about it, or when mutual friends, voices low and quavering with awe, ask what exactly he said to Aaron?

“Nothing. I told him I got into Dartmouth, that’s all. I didn’t think it was a big deal. I don’t know where he went, he didn’t say anything about leaving. I don’t know why he left. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”