Mr. E & the Pueblo Freedom Time Machine
A sci-fi story about pirates & history
You know me already, and you know that the business I’m in is tough. It doesn’t matter that Aliens come to see me in my office on the far side of the Moon. It doesn’t matter that they hire me to find their aunts, uncles, cheating wives and husbands, business partners who made off with an asteroid made out of solid gold….
Who cares anyway what Aliens want? God, we humans used to be so blissfully ignorant of the rest of this weird, weird galaxy, just involved in our own wars, hatreds, and obsessions with each other; dogs sniffing other curious parochial tail wagging dogs.
But now we’re a refueling stop on the Galactic Silk Road, and they mess with us constantly: “They” being every manner of strange, strange being you could ever imagine, and most that you can’t.
I’m Alphonse Aloisus Edgerton-Jones, Private Investigator for Aliens: “Just call me Mr. E.” It really is easier to say. I have an office in the highlands on the far side of the Moon. I thought it would be quieter there. But, of course, it’s not.
“Come on in, the door’s open.” I had heard a knock.
And the most beautiful, intelligent powerful woman I had ever imagined walked in.
“You are from around here,” I must have said.
“What’s your problem, E? Homegrown money ain’t good enough for you?”
“It’s just that, well, Ms. …”
“Kalondra O’Kelly will do.”
“OK, Ms. O’Kelly…”
“Why am I here?”
That was my question. I had built my office on the side of the Moon that never faces the Earth, not because I was sick of humans, although I was a bit, but because all the Aliens with all their dealings in our solar system, now that they’ve integrated us into their Galactic trade … well, if you want to be a PI for Aliens, it’s the best place in Near Earth Space to be discreet.
It was odd, though, for a human to spend a ton of loot boosting all the way to the Moon’s back side when there are (literally) millions of PI’s back on Planet Earth, who were, if not particularly competent, at least convenient.
“I need to keep this quiet, Mr. E. My husband has run off with a mystery woman who can turn herself into an owl, and they’ve gone to … I should say, they’ve gone when … She grabbed him and stuffed him into a time machine. I think they’re in the 1600s.”
Now I was interested. But, “Time travel is a fiction, you know.”
“That’s what I thought,” she volunteered with a half-hearted shrug of her shoulders, “Fiction a few years ago, big business now.”
So she told me about it: Her husband ran an AI factory in St. Louis, making warp valves for interstellar spaceships owned and piloted (sort of) by the Hummeranians.
That gave me pause. “I don’t know if I should get involved, no offense.” The Hummers are ruthless sons of bitches, mercenaries for galactic hire. “Give me a reason why I should risk my ass,” I challenged her.
She looked at me with her sky blue eyes and locked me in a gaze of understanding that froze me to the spot. I felt my balls sweating.
“I belong to them, and that’s why I came all the way out here. They can’t know I’m looking for him.”
“Why is that? What do you mean, ‘you belong to them?’”
“Look, Mr. E, you and I both know they could vaporize the both of us right here in this office just for saying their names.”
“Thanks a lot,” I thought to myself. “I was just getting ready to have lunch…”
“When you showed up.”
“Hey, I was thinking that thought! You’re not supposed to know it!”
“They trained me. That’s why I belong to them now.”
“Oh.”
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Alright, you’re probably wondering: I haven’t even gotten to the part about her husband getting snatched by a time traveling witch and taken back to the 1600s. It seemed that her main problem was hiding his disappearance from the Hummeranians. He did run a factory that made warp valves for them. What do warp valves do? That’s heavy shit. They’re secret technology the Hum Hums have that underlie their usefulness as mercenaries. Usually, when a ship comes out of hyperspace, there’s a flash you can see when it’s a full week away from where you are, but they’ve got these fucking time displaced warp valves that squeeze that flash into your future, so you don’t see them coming until after they’ve killed you.
“But Ms. O’Kelly, you also said they had trained you. What’s your part in this?”
“E,” she said, as she twined the fingers of her two hands together, and, with her elbows on my desk, her chin resting on both thumbs, her bright voice went deep and deadly serious. “They won’t let me live with what I know unless you can bring him back, and they never find out what the fuck he’s done.”
I started to hallucinate on her two breasts then. I don’t mean it in a simple sexual way, although it was that, too. They started to talk to me, like thought waves coming out of her nipples. Stereo. I saw images of where she had been, heard conversations, saw her in bed…
With Hummer crazy Aliens.
“That’s why they own me, E. And I can’t escape.”
Stick with me. This is hard to believe. You’ve heard of every kind of sexual enhancement we’ve developed, but the Hummers are so beyond us. Why? How? It’s because of this: Everything that we’ve ever invented is just for show, things that look bigger, smoother, harder, but the person who’s “enhanced” is still just the same.
The Hummers, though, use “Cognizant Training.” What that means is they connect your DNA to higher dimensions to plump up who the fuck you really are! Then your body does the rest … And with women, that means your brain, your intelligence, your insight, your strength, as well as the intelligence of every sexual muscle you never even knew you had is enhanced. Really. It’s not just for show with the Hummers.
She used her breast beams to invade my brain, and I saw it all: Strange places she had been with them, languages I understood but couldn’t speak.
“Can I call you Kalondra now?”
“Sure, why pretend to be formal? … And you know, too: I pilot warpships for them, and I’m not half bad.”
“They just use your husband for running a factory. They gave you the gold keys.”
“Close enough.”
“Why’d he run off?”
“He couldn’t take the pressure. Oh, yeah, and the time machine thing… He started to cheat on them. You see, those warp valves, they developed them for surprise attacks, but because they shift the warp flash into the future, well, Lonnie…”
“Lonnie’s a dumb name. I’m just being honest.” She had shown him working night after night, hunched on a computer screen while she was spinning her DNA out to higher dimensions, and was hungry for love and connection to match.
“He’s a guy, E. I cut him some slack, hoping maybe they’d put him in pilot school, too.”
I knew I’d volunteer to enroll, but if I asked, they’d find out I was talking to Kalondra, and that would not end well.
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So, while Kalondra was piloting Hummer attack ships out of warp space, ol’ Lonnie was spending his nights buying more AI time than he could afford, so he could convert production line warp valves into bonafide time machines. He succeeded and immediately went back to the Taos Pueblo in Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico, in the year 1680. He met a curandera there who knew he was coming.
You don’t always need Aliens for magic.
She cast a spell on him for real, and they both returned to 21st century St. Louis, so he could show her around. It was OK for awhile, but she got bored with virtual reality video games because she knew how to really fly through the night like an owl.
She was actually a revolutionary herself, and all the Pueblos had been busy planning a revolt against the Spanish.
That’s why she had called him.
You won’t find any mention of augmented reality smartphones in accounts of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 or of the warp valves they used to route the signals through cell phone towers and Starlink satellites that wouldn’t exist for 360 years. (You figure out what year the Aliens will be showing up on Earth.)
You won’t necessarily see the curandera’s fingerprints, but they’re there. The Pueblo Revolt did succeed, and even though the Spanish returned 12 years later, the Pueblos were able to keep many of the rights they had fought for, which the Spanish grudgingly were forced to accept.
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Damn! I’m always taking on jobs that tend to become bigger than the person they walked in with. I tried to get some peace and quiet by hiding out on the far side of the Moon, but you can see how successful I’ve been with that. They find me, whether it’s some Alien wanting me to snoop on their spouse’s love affair with some other Alien who’s even stranger than the first one … or human psychic goddesses who have become warpship pilots for interstellar mercenaries, and just also have time traveling husbands helping the Pueblos get their freedom from the Spanish 360 years ago.
OK. Einstein said, if he came back, he’d prefer to be a plumber. But he was joking.
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So how did it work out?
I found Lonnie at a bar in Santa Fe. His curandera mistress had left him. He was back in the present and had a really bad case of crying in his tequila. I helped him pull it all back together, and, fortunately, she had made sure all the warp valves went back with him. I made certain all the inventory at the factory in St. Louis was kosher. I did keep some AI schematics for myself, though. Maybe someday I’ll need to make an escape to some other time and lay low for a few hundred years. I’m not dumb.
And I haven’t gotten over Kalondra, yet. I don’t want to, actually. She’s out there right now, dropping out of her hyperspace, flying a warpship with higher dimensional DNA, shooting beams out her nipples. Hell, if a warpship follows her commands, what chance do you think I have?
She and I fooled the Hummers, but I do have those schematics just in case.
They’re mercenaries and pirates, and she’s one of them. They own her, I guess.
At least, that’s what she told me.
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© “John” Lesly Levin 2021
