The 12 Faces of Mr. E
His greatest adventure yet
I know I talk a lot. My ex-wife could never let me forget it, and I can’t really blame her. She knows me better than anyone.
“That’s why I can’t — and won’t! — live with you anymore, Alphonse. You never know when to shut up!”
She’s right. That’s where this job has gotten me. I’m Alphonse Aloisus Edgerton-Jones, Private Investigator for Aliens: “Just call me Mr. E.” (It really is easier to say.)
Would you believe I used to be normal? Probably not. Too many years of this shit, and when I go to sleep at night… Well, even “night,” where my office is on the Far Side of the the Moon, is something you may not understand: Two weeks day, two weeks night. No air (well, outside, anyway,) so the stars don’t even twinkle. They just stare at you, hard. If it’s daytime, the Sun illuminates the ground, but the stars still haunt you. Implacable. Suspended in black nothingness.
With Alien voices all around.
It’s those voices that have changed me forever. The stars I can take. You see them on Earth, too. Well, you hear the Aliens, too, now. It’s been 22 years since we’ve had them, shopping at Costco, interviewed on streaming news sites, hosting travelogues about Planet XYZ where they’re from, selling stuff, alienating your kids, mesmerizing your own dreams of what could happen…
And it could! That’s why it’s different now. The Land of Oz used to just be a story. Now you can buy a ticket there.
But, hell, I should complain. I’m a Private Investigator for Aliens! I’m tough as titanium. And, maybe, just as cold.
************
I was on Mars for a holiday when I got a call.
“Mr. E here. What can I do for you?”
“My ex-wives recommended you. My name is La’Counter Estaravian. I’m the Plōtānian Ambassador to Earth.”
Shit almighty, and I have been fuck-a-reen-oed.
No one in their right mind — and he must have known I had lost mine — ever wants to be contacted by a high official from Plōtānia.
I have to explain. Our Solar System has become a refueling stop on the Galactic Silk Road. All kinds of ships and all kinds of creatures come through to top off their warp tanks from the cloud tops of Jupiter and Saturn. They all have embassies and shipping offices on ‘ol Planet Earth, and every intrigue you could imagine, too.
The Plōtānians are the bad ass cops that keep ride on them all. One ring… And I do not envy their job.
“Mr. Ambassador, how pleasant to hear from you. How can I be of service?” (And his ex-wives recommended me? Oh boy.)
“Mr. E, yes, all 12 of my ex-wives recommended you. Your assistance in locating their stolen cargo of MBO was spectacular.”
In case you don’t know … well, maybe somebody doesn’t know … but, just in case — MBO means Martian Brine Ooze. And it has made our little out of the way refueling stop a hot commodity. It turns out that there is life on Mars. It’s all underground, where all the hidden lakes and rivers of liquid water are. MBO is made up of little single cell organisms that we at first thought were no more complex than little pond creatures here on Earth. But were we wrong.
Life has been evolving for over 3 billion years on Mars, just like on Earth, but it all had to move underground when the atmosphere got too thin for liquid water on the surface. 3 billion years is a lot of time for evolution. They look no more complex than Euglena in a salt water sea, but evolution on Mars took off in a different direction.
They learned to network their DNA. It’s all fucking entangled. Fucking entangled. You talk to one little MBO cell, and you’re talking to them all. And, oh boy from hell — They are all in a constant orgiastic love fest that no one on Earth ever conceived was possible. Or even Aliens, too.
You can take just one sip of MBO. And you go go go.
The Ambassador’s 12 wives had made a major investment, and someone had hijacked the whole shipment.
I solved it. I charge a lot, but you get what you pay for. At least, with me.
“Yes, sir. That was quite a case. How did their business venture go, then?”
“That’s why those 12 decided to be Ex.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”
“It’s not your fault, E. They’re richer than I’ll ever be, but that’s OK.”
Isn’t it weird? People can choose public service over fame and glory, even if they were never human to begin with. But, public service for a Plōtānian means you can get your nose (or their version of a nose) into the slimiest corners of interstellar criminality you can’t ever imagine.
“Mr. E,” the Ambassador continued, “We’ve discovered that the Double D Triad is operating here.”
“Sol System, Earth?”
“Unfortunately.”
The DDT are your worst nightmare. They’re warpship pirates. They appear without warning, and, if you’re lucky, some obscure bunch of people on some out of the way moon in your whole solar system might not be noticed, as the DDT really do their plundering best.
“I was hoping it would take them a few more years to get here,” I forlornly dreamed. “What tipped you off?”
“We caught an encrypted subspace transmission from the Kuiper Belt, aimed back out, to their main pirate fleet: ‘We’ve arrived.’ It was anonymous, but there was a tonal inflection to the data stream that our office now knows. Double DT.”
“But why do you need me? I’m honored, but I run down cheating spouses and crooked business partners. I don’t protect whole solar systems. That’s your job. No offense and all…”
“That’s the point, E. No one will think to think twice that you’re anything important. And we need to plant a Time Dilation Device in the center of their fleet.”
*********
OK. If I was a normal guy, I would have found some excuse to end this conversation, and gotten back to whatever I’m not telling you about on my vacation to Mars. But I’m Mr. E! I’m stupid!! And endlessly overestimating my own abilities. Someone has to be dumb enough to try the impossible! Why not you? Or me.
“Mr. Estaravian, what’s your plan?”
*************
So that’s how I found myself in my cute little ZIP ship (See Mr. E & the Cave Inside Mars,) pretending to be on a mundane trip to deliver a run away teenager back to his parents at Tombaugh Station on Pluto. (We had to catch them out in the Kuiper Belt. A Time Dilation Device has a field radius of a quarter AU. You don’t want too many living beings to get effed, if you set one off.)
And, yes, they were coming for blood. It was probably the MBO that drew them. I don’t know what else we’ve got here. Well, anything else that you can’t get in a thousand other places. I don’t care. Take all the fucking MBO you want. Mars will just grow more. But the DDT kill whole solar systems just for kicks. And, besides, they might even be able to take Mars with them! Not that I wouldn’t get a laugh out of seeing those stuck up pricks in Elonville find themselves farther from Earth than they were bragging about. But that’s just me. (Maybe you, too.)
I couldn’t just go flying out, though, cover story or not. You can’t just carry a Time Dilation Device in the cargo bay. It has a pulsating field, even when turned off, that can be felt, in this case, halfway to Proxima Centauri. They’d catch me, for sure.
Our plan was to get La’Counter’s 12 Exes to run cover for us. (They were Exes, but there’s not a Plōtānian alive who doesn’t want to destroy a DDT bunch of plunderers, if they get a chance.)
So, here I was, trailing in back of the 12 Exes and their MBO convoy, just looking minor and coincidental, but with a bonafide TDD headed for the DDT. (Did I make that up, or was the Universe playing with me here?)
I have to tell you this other thing, too. The Plōtānians have taken sexual dimorphism to a whole new level. It makes so much sense that his 12 Exes had decided to go into the MBO business…
La’Counter is a vaguely humanoid looking guy. There is that bulge at the back of his head that no H. sapiens could ever have, and his skin is more akin to alligator hide than primate stuff, but the women are something else.
“Mr. E! We’re so glad you could come!” they greeted me.
“Yes, Ma’ams, it’s really great to see you again, too.”
OK, I have to explain this one, also. Why did La’Counter have 12 wives, either past or present? Plōtānian women don’t operate alone. 12, 24,… You get it. They come in bunches, and I’m not just being poetic. They trap space-time for parsecs with the intensity of their sex permutation field. Their presence floats ecstasy — and power — on top of its own self. That’s why they saw the MBO business as just the most natural thing since sliced avocado. With lemon.
When 12 of them are in the room, or even across empty star-lit space, their hypnotic mind perfume causes a man from any planet to forget just wtf he was supposed to be up to, and, if we were lucky, to mask the goddamned monster Time Dilation Device I had to sneak through. To say that the future of the human race depended on those 12 awesome ladies — and little me — well, it sort of did.
Oh, and one more thing. No one can actually see a Plōtānian woman. I forgot to mention that. You can smell them, and their perfume is hard to describe. Our biologists back on Earth finally figured out that they send out a molecule that really is a pheromone+LSD in its effect. How they do the invisibility thing, though, we do not understand — at all.
You hear the voice. You fall down an endless hole of love. You don’t see a thing. And then they touch you. In twelves, too.
Hey! So I live on the Far Side of the Moon.
But I travel.
**********
We could hear their chatter. The Double D Triad had disguised their fleet to look like completely randomly positioned (and tiny) Kuiper Belt Objects, just random noise hidden in other random noise. But La’Counter knew their game. Little random blips of subspace fuzz shit were bouncing around, but the Ambassador had equipment to catch that ever so slight tonal inflection that identified those scheming heartless fucks. DDT. Written in letters covered in blood. But we were determined this blood would be their own.
“E, are you ready?” That was the 12.
“As much as I can be.”
“Look, there’s something we didn’t want to mention too early.”
Oh boy…
“E, there’s a bit more to the 12 thing than we wanted any of you Earth guys to know about. Can you keep a secret? It’s sort of like we’ll kill you if you don’t.”
I figured as much. “Go ahead. I got that hijacked load of MBO back for you, and I didn’t take a gram. You know you can trust me.”
Well, actually, I had taken about 50 grams. But, for a human, I’m pretty damned slick. (Or so I hoped.)
“Well, E, no human knows how we manage to be invisible, and why we Plōtānian women always come in twelves.”
“That’s true.”
“It’s because we’re not really Plōtānian, at all. We’re DDT pirates, too.”
Shit.
“The Double D Triad are our sisters. They just don’t — This is hard to say — have a sound moral character.”
“Can they see us coming, then?”
“They see us, but they can’t see you. They really do (we hope) think we’re 12 sisters hauling a load of MBO. They know we’ve chosen to love all those Plōtānian men, rather than live a wanton life of planetary rape and pillage. DDT society, our sense of love and honor, is something we’ll educate you on later.”
“If we survive.”
“Of course!”
*********
“Oh, and E, there’s one more thing. You’re going to be a bit … transformed … out of this encounter. We look, or rather, smell and sound, like 12 individuals to you bipedal guys with those kisses and hard poles that we really do love. But we’re really just one individual being. It all has something to do with what you humans call dimensions. It’s just String Theory stuff, though. La’Counter knows. He says it’s fun in bed. And we know it really helps predict markets, and other business stuff, too.”
And I thought La’Counter was just an Alien Joe Friday.
“You’re going to be 12, too.”
“From now on?”
“You won’t mind. Really. It is sort of fun. And no one will suspect, unless you want them to know, of course. And we really do trust that you won’t, at least for now, anyway. We’re thinking about it. You have to be patient with us.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“Of course not!”
************
************
I’m glad my wife left me when she did. I’d feel responsible if she was still around. She did marry an insurance salesman. That’s cool. Really. Some people need to believe that insurance is possible in this mad life. Or even that you can buy it with money.
But, honestly, if you’re a PI for Aliens, you learn that that’s just bullshit. Why is this galaxy so big? To hide all the surprises! That’s my thought, anyway.
You probably guessed: I’m telling you this because the plan worked. I planted the Time Dilation Device right in the center of their goddamned pirate fleet, and when it went off, they were really randomly scattered: In time, that is, rather than “only” space.
Find your way home, DDT Sisters. Damn, it is sad, though. I feel for them. But they meant us harm, like apocalyptic harm. What are you supposed to do?
And now I’m one of them, too, in a way. There are 12 of me. I won’t tell clients. They don’t need to know. But my girlfriend is already saying, I just seem to have a little extra jazz.
And I guess I do!
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© “John” Lesly Levin 2021
