Zelda took in a breath and let it out slowly.
“Then it means something has happened to these patients that cannot be explained rationally; and if it can, it will change the way we think about our lives on a global scale.”
“Is this your highly improbable idea?” Ivana asked using her fingers as quotation marks. Zelda nodded again.
“Yes, but I don’t want to discuss it until I’m done with the test.” Unable to contain my impatience, I turned squarely to Zelda.
“You know, Zelda, when I stumbled on Doogie the first person I called was Ivana because she’s the only person I can trust in this world. She called you, that means she trusts you; and that means I have no choice but to trust you. We’re now a team and we’re at each other’s mercy no matter how unconventional or ridiculous our theories may be.” I suddenly felt embarrassed about this admonishment, but I couldn’t stop the words from leaving my mouth.
“Now, I don’t care about Nobel Prizes, book deals or international recognition. If you’ve got a few of these lined up and this case is going to deliver them, I’m happy for you. But that’s not my concern right now. We’ve got two patients, maybe more, who are crying out for our help. I’m here to help them. Ivana’s here to help them. If you have any ideas on how we can do this, we need to know; which means, we need to know what you’re thinking despite how it might impact your personal agenda or your personal beliefs.” I stopped when Ivana’s hand softly clutched mine. It was her way of saying “Okay, you’ve made your point.” Zelda took her napkin and touched it on her lips.
“Zelda, I’m sorry,” I began. “I have no business lecturing you.” She raised her palm, and rolled her large eyes up to me. I could see an inner struggle between what she wanted to say and what she shouldn’t.
“No, you’re right. I’ve let a personal prejudice erect a wall around a certain idea that surfaced once I watched the Patricia clips.” She looked at Ivana then back to me. “My improbable theory is this: What if their knowledge was implanted in them?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. She leaned forward slightly.
“What if the knowledge they have was placed in them by an outside source?”
“You mean, like brainwashing or subjective memory theory?” asked Ivana.
“No, I mean, like storage.”
“Storage for whom?” I asked, but Zelda didn’t reply right away; in fact, she looked away. “Zelda, storage for whom?”
“For extraterrestrials.” She looked at both of us, perhaps waiting for us to burst out laughing. We didn’t. She continued. “Alien entities.” The conversation died for a moment as we all decided it was time to think about this. We began eating again, ravaging our food and gulping down our beers in an attempt to give us more time to consider the possibility.
“Another beer?” Both women nodded, so I caught the waiter’s attention with my hand, raised my beer bottle and showed three fingers. When he came back with the beers, Zelda looked up to him.
“Can we have another order of Mongolian beef?”
“And Kung Pao shrimp,” added Ivana. The waiter smiled and left. We obviously entered a new realm of consideration and needed some more time.
“Have either of you heard of Dr. Joseph Terlaje?” Zelda asked. We shook our heads. “He’s the creator of Suppressed Cognitive Implantation Theory. It’s a theory that if aliens planned to visit Earth, they would first implant data into society’s subconscious to prepare us for that coming; and that implantation has been going on for decades for a visitation that he believes will occur very soon.”
We stared at her in our uncomfortable silence, afraid of saying something utterly ridiculous. But she Zelda was used to our expression by now, so she shook it off and continued.
“Okay, anyway; I met him at an astrophysics conference in LA where he was giving a lecture on alien contact scenarios two years ago.” Zelda’s eyes drifted away from us as she talked, taken by the memory of that time.
“. . .We all know from history that if you want to take a castle, or a city, you have to plant spies or moles within it so you can get information from the inside,” Dr. Terlaje said into the mike, looking around at the packed house of USC’s lecture hall. “Defensive positions, castle architecture and layout, tower fortifications, weapons stores, sentry guard changes, for example. Even mundane facts like when the soldiers eat, when they train, where the horses are kept, where the moats drain out-all of this, is golden information to a commander before a siege.”
Zelda remembered Terlaje well. A Pacific Asian-Islander from the tiny island of Guam in the Western Pacific; 64 years old with a full head of graying, slicked back hair. He was handsome; with a sharp Spanish nose, high forehead, tanned skin and a thick beard and mustache that hid a strong chin.
“You send in people, dressed as merchants, farmers or slaves; and let them blend into the population. They spend months, maybe a year amongst the people and all that information. At a certain point in time, those moles are recalled and the information is delivered and a siege is planned out perfectly.”
“So, Dr. Terlaje, you believe there are aliens within the human population now just gathering information for a future invasion?” asked a young man to the chuckling urges of his friends.
“No, I don’t believe that at all. Assimilating our human biology to the point of near cognitive perfection would take millions of years of evolution,” Terlaje answered flatly as he strolled the front of the amphitheater lecture hall.
“And cloning wouldn’t work because once the embryo is fully adult, his or her life will have been shaped, modified and evolved by his environment. The physical carbon body wouldn’t be a problem to replicate given time, but the interaction among the people would be a severe problem for aliens hoping to infiltrate our society because of natural human idiosyncrasies, tendencies, emotional consistencies, and mental interpretations. Visceral reactions, for example, can be naturally seen and studied throughout the world. Happiness, excitement, grief, pain-all, are the same in our human culture. A person crying desperately in New York looks and feels exactly the same as a person crying desperately in the Sudan. A person pleading for his life in Mexico looks and feels exactly the same as a person pleading for his life in the Netherlands. It’s a human thing that can’t be replicated. You can’t clone a human on an alien ship, per se, or a distant planet; transport it back here, and expect it to act, react and live like an Earth-born human. That crap exists only in Hollywood!” This brought out a roar of laughter. Zelda, too, had laughed. Another person raised his hand and stood up from the center row.
“Dr. Terlaje, I’m Professor Vince Malcolm. I teach Economics up at Cal Berkeley.” The auditorium immediately welcomed him with a light-hearted chorus of boos. Terlaje laughed.
“Wow! Dr. Malcolm ! You’ve got more courage than I do. Let’s see, two weeks ago your Cal Bears massacred the Trojans by three touchdowns! Are you sure you want to be asking questions on this campus?” The audience shared the laugh with Malcolm. “Please, sir, go ahead.”
“Dr. Terlaje, first let me say that your appearances on “Ancient Aliens”, “Science Tech Tomorrow”, PBS and other Discovery Channel shows are amazing! I’m such a big fan!” This prompted the auditorium to quake with thunderous applause. “I read your book discussing the actual space travel theories and how aliens have been visiting Earth for thousands of years implanting people, and I agree with all that. But your latest book talks about whether their future visit or visits could be benign in nature.
“Given the fact that they’ve watched us evolve into a very hostile species, and they’ve monitored what our weapons can do, they understand that we know how to destroy. In fact, quite sadly in my opinion, human suppression and destruction are what we seem to be very good at as a race. My question is: What makes you think they, the aliens, wouldn’t just come and clean house, sort of speak, and populate our planet with their own species?”
“Well,