Sextile

Aquarians at Night…

CyberVegas was the IT industry’s annual group grope of code and data addicts. An entire hotel was booked, its rooftop terrace party central when the day’s presentations were over. My buddy Troy and I went up there for cocktail hour. The haze above the vapor patio was so blue I thought I was on Uranus. Maybe we were. The place was crawling with weirdos.

“Get you something?” A waitress slithered up in a sexy lizard body leotard, like the reptilian alien Diane in the TV series V. I wasn’t sure if she was a real waitress or just acting out some cosplay script. But she had a tray in her hand, so I took a chance.

“Dirty vodka martini with a slice of jalapeno,” I told her. “Two shots of vodka, easy on the vermouth.”

“Dry and spicy,” she said.

“Like my wit,” I said.

“Whatever.” She looked at Troy. “You like it dirty too?”

“Uh, yes,” Troy said, but his answer revealed that her appearance had caused a short circuit in his logic.

I knew his drink was a Bloody Mary, two stalks of celery, no salt on the rim. Troy was currently on a health kick, so his drinks had to be nutritious, fruit or vegetable juice, fiber, low sugar/sodium content. And he was going easy on alcohol, no doubles.

Suddenly he’d gone completely off his own program. Distracted perhaps by her spectacular figure, poorly-concealed beneath a micro-thin gauze of lizard-skin. I was a little distracted myself, but at least I’d got my drink order right.

She headed for the bar. We watched her reptilian buns shimmy with luminescence across the terrace.

“Houston, I think we have liftoff,” Troy said.

“Isn’t it a little early to be breaking your resolution?”

He’d sworn this year he wouldn’t make a fool of himself. Last conference, he’d been netted in a tranny bar raid and held overnight in a crowded jail until I could bail him out. Meantime, he’d lost most of his clothes. There’d been pictures on Facebook, LVPD mugshots, enough memories to last a lifetime…

“This is different,” he said.

“Like how?”

“There’s something exotic about her.”

We drifted toward the bar, scanning the crowd for unfamiliar faces. We already knew half the people there, either because we worked in Silicon Valley, or had met at other conferences. Anyone half-serious about their career was here.

Aside from boning up on cloud coupling and deep-data derivatives, it was a fabulous hookup scene for nerds of every perversion. Sorry, persuasion. I was looking for someone I didn’t know. Someone who could take me places I’d never been before. Flesh drive fantasy.

Troy and I nodded to a crew from CalTech, every one of them an inventor with patents up the yahoo. Super-geeks. Guys so far out there you needed radar to track them. The alpha geek was an Iranian they called Dr. Aquarius because no one could pronounce his real name.

As we neared the bar, our waitress materialized with two martinis. I drank mine straight off and pried Troy’s from his hot hand. “He needs a cool nutritious beverage.” I told her the recipe for his Bloody Mary.

“Okay.” She was back in less than a minute, as if a Bloody Mary had been waiting at the bar. Maybe she had a mic in her lizard-collar, bluetoothing her orders to the bartender…

“Thanks.” Troy sucked absently on his drink as he scanned her up and down. Maybe he was still trying to decide if she was real or not. There were some nice bots out there but nothing quite like this.

“Have you guys been to Area 69?” she said.

“What’s that – an alien crash site?” I said. “Or a strip bar?”

She gave me a look.

“Where’s Area 69?” Troy said.

“Out in the desert. I’ll show you later.” She touched him and I saw electricity run like blue fire up his arm.

“Does it have anything to do with aliens?” As rational as he was, Troy was also into UFOs. “Can we go now?”

“It has everything to do with aliens,” she said. “But you can relax. The shuttle doesn’t leave until midnight.”

“Shuttle?” Troy looked around. “Who else is going?”

“Just enough people to make it interesting.”

She winked at him but it was creepy. Her main eyelid stayed open as a gauze-like film partially obscured her pupil, but you could see she could still see you. Maybe it was some sort of bio-patch dreamed up by one of those super-geeks. Or maybe she really was part-reptile. Ever since David Icke had discovered lizards under the Denver Airport, there’d been sightings all over the Southwest.

“What’s your name?” Troy said.

“Phoebe.”

She went back to work and Troy and I went out onto the patio for a smoke. The sun had set an hour ago. We could see planes coming in from all over to land at McCarran.

We each took out our vaporizers. In private we’d occasionally share one like you would a joint, but in public it looked too gay, which we weren’t. In fact, we were just the opposite of gay. We were distinctly unhappy.

I was congenitally saturnine. Tory was legitimately sad.

His tenth girlfriend had just broken up with him. Not because he was a bad guy. In fact, he was such a good guy I think girls felt bad about keeping him to themselves, and released him back into the wild so other girls could have a taste too. Girls, when they weren’t being bitches with each other, could sometimes be very tribal that way.

Why did women dump him? Beats me. He made a quarter mil a year running cloud ops for a Fortune 500 company. He spoke three languages, ordered wine with confidence and picked up any tab within reason. Maybe he was a dud in the sack. But I couldn’t ask him about it, never mind talk to his exes.

I ignited my vaporizer. It contained a blend of cannabis and gotu kola that made me feel hip and smart at the same time. While my eyes drifted across the patio, looking for that someone special, Troy stared off into the sky.

“Did you see that?” he pointed to the northeast.

“What?” I looked but all I saw was the Las Vegas Freeway lit up like a neon snake with thousands of cars running on a dream.

“A plane just dropped out of the sky.”

“Saturday night, planes are coming in here every five minutes. Plus which, Nellis Air Force Base is out that way…”

“No, I saw a light – vertical as a plumb line. It just dropped out of the sky – way out there.” He pointed toward the black horizon.

“You want to call 911 or TMZ?”

He laughed, but I knew he was ticked that I didn’t take him seriously. He was a bit of a Star Wars trooper, prone to spin out of orbit, but I’d learned not to follow him.

We had another drink and went downstairs to the dance lounge. They had a funk band with singers in miniskirts, and a Latina shaking her castanets. These nerd-fests were notoriously short on women, so Troy and I split up and prowled like hungry men at a buffet. When I spotted a tall brunette in a blue mini, I knew the night would never get better.

Her name was Rhea, the lead developer for a high-tech Montreal firm doing special effects for movies. Cutting edge graphics, lots of mathematics. In minutes we were deep into a conversation about fractals.

I caught the bartender in pause mode and ordered her a drink. Personally, I never liked gin and tonic, or guys who drank it, but the women could be interesting, especially if they drank a lot of it. I got her a double.

We hit the dance floor and ripped it up for fifteen minutes, which is all the cardio I need after three drinks while still trying to keep my armpits dry.

We returned to the bar for another round. I hadn’t seen Troy in a while, but it was early and he couldn’t be in trouble yet. Besides, he had a shuttle to catch at midnight.

I excused myself to visit the washroom. Rhea had to go too. We headed off together for the washrooms. But when I entered the men’s, she followed me.

“Uh, the women’s is over there.”

“I know, but I’m a man,” she said.

I stopped dead in my tracks. “Okay, I didn’t see that coming.”

“Gotcha.” She flashed a wicked grin and went into the women’s. But she had me going there for a minute. She was tall for a woman, lean like a runner.

When I got back to the bar, Troy was there with Phoebe. She was wrapped around him like an anaconda. I really began to wonder what her job was.

“Where’ve you been, man? The shuttle’s leaving in a few minutes.”

“I’ve got to wait for this woman I met.” I didn’t want to lose her now, having had a drink and broken sweat together, almost shared a bathroom…

“Rhea went on ahead,” Phoebe said. “She’ll meet us on the platform.”

“How do you know her name?” I said.

“I know everyone who wants to come.” Phoebe led us to the elevator.

We took a ride down. Phoebe got off at the lobby to pick some people up, she’d meet us on the platform. We continued, me and Troy and a few geniuses from CalTech, another four stories underground until we emerged on a subway platform. A few other familiar Silicon Valley faces were there already, held spellbound by Rhea with her spherical geometry and harmonic coordinates.

“Where’s Phoebe?” Troy said.

“She’ll come on the next car,” Rhea said.

A subway car pulled up, bullet-nosed like a giant dildo. Rhea waved us all aboard. I threw myself into a seat as the car accelerated, my back thrust hard again the seat. Then we decelerated, and I came half out of my seat in almost gravity-free space. We braked to a halt and the doors opened.

We took an elevator to the surface and emerged from inside a rock formation at the edge of a sprawling desert – an ancient lake reduced to a salt flat. Phoebe was there to greet us.

“How’d you get here first?” Troy said.

“We overtook you in the passing lane,” she laughed. I thought she was joking but there she was with half a dozen nerds whom I’d seen in the lobby when she got off the elevator.

Troy and I joined the others under the infinite night sky. We couldn’t see the lights of Vegas. I looked up and tried to find the Big Dipper to orient myself. The other geeks milled in circles, waiting for something to justify having left the conference after-hours party.

A pillar of light dropped from heaven. In a blink it was replaced by a giant chrome thermos bottle settling onto the sand. A portal opened on our side. Red tentacles rippled out in a sticky net and pulled us inside.

~~~

I woke up curled naked in a shower. The bath towel on the shower rod read, Hotel Nevada Blue. I didn’t remember checking in but at least I wasn’t waking up in jail. Now if I could just find some aspirin for this massive headache…

I wandered out into a huge suite overlooking the Strip. A dozen geeks were sleeping in various states of nakedness. The TV was on, it was Friday morning and the AM show hosts were talking about this weekend’s weather.

Huh? Troy and I had only attended day one of a week-long conference, and gone to Area 69 on Monday night. I was missing three days.

I looked around for Phoebe and Rhea but there was no sign of them. Just Troy and six guys from CalTech and a handful of other code-runners from the Valley.

“What’s going on?” Troy awoke with a start, shocked to see he was lying on the sofa with some other nerd in only his underwear. He leaped to his feet. “Christ, not again!” He turned on me. “You were supposed to keep an eye on me. What the hell happened?”

“This was different,” I reassured him. “No trannies. And no police.”

“That’s a relief.” He got a bottle of water from the fridge and headed for the shower. “But why do I feel like someone took my brain out of my head and used it like a sponge to get a stain out of a carpet?”

I phoned room service for food and lots of coffee. One by one the Valley wunderkind woke up with blank looks on their faces, headshakes sounding like a pair of dice in a tin cup. Snake-eyes, sucker. Did somebody say, mindfuck?

Gradually we pieced it together, although it was like one of those paradoxes from quantum physics. Dual state realities, entanglement, spooky action at a distance, Schrodinger’s pussy.

The Monday night consensus was, we’d all met two women named Phoebe and Rhea. They were both very attractive in a weird way, but details of their clothing were contradictory. According to some, Phoebe wore the electric blue mini-dress. Rhea, the tall one, wore the snakeskin jumpsuit. Both shimmered with an alien light, but served great drinks.

And then it got fuzzy. Some remembered taking the shuttle with Phoebe or Rhea to Area 69. Others said the thermos bottle came right to the hotel, hovered above the rooftop terrace and sucked guys off the vapor patio like dust bunnies in a hand vacuum.

My most vivid memory was of the tentacles. They looked wet but they were actually made of fire. They took hold of me with a reassuring grip and pulled me into their body-temperature hull. I should have been terrified but it was all very pleasant. It was like being massaged by God.

I remember lying there as a blue doughnut of light collared my ankles and raised my feet above my head. It squeezed me like a tube of toothpaste – up my legs and across my waist, up my chest and onto my face. It rotated my head until something popped. Then it went back to milking me.

As plasma began draining from my head, Rhea placed beneath me an urn of glow-in-the dark metal. I felt everything start to whirl, like I was in a centrifugal drum. It felt nice, like giving blood for a good cause.

But what cause? That, I’ve forgotten.

~~~

Alan Annand is a writer and astrologer with the moon in Scorpio.

Find his New Age Noir series and other mystery novels at Amazon, Apple, Barnes&Noble, Kobo and Smashwords.

Tags: aliens, aquarius, las vegas, saturn, uranus