World of the Body Snatchers

A body snatcher speaks…

We are old. We have outlived worlds. Deep in us is the memory of a terror from the beginning of things — but we’re safe from that terror now. We have removed from ourselves the part susceptible to fear.

We live for a time in the bodies of other creatures. When one of those bodies fails, we move to another. When there are no more bodies to move to, we put ourselves off of that world and sleep. When we awake, we’re on another world, in a new kind of body.

At each awakening we are fewer. Some of us have drifted perhaps into a sun, or come to rest on a lifeless world, or continue drifting in space, riding the solar winds.

Someday we’ll be just a final few, and soon after that, a vanished race. For we don’t reproduce. But that time is far off: for in our sleeping state, we age slowly. Our people sleep on a million lifeless stones in space. A hundred million years may pass before living creatures come to even one of those stones, but if too many eons have not passed, our people will then feel the wakening pull of nearby bodies.

It is likely that one of us will be the last of time’s living creatures.

Even now it is probable that in all space there is no people older than us. Others rise awhile like a brief fire, ending in ashes. In all our travels, in all the millions of centuries, we have never found a race like ours. We think we alone can be called immortal — though in truth even we will pass before time ends.

What happened after the San Francisco invasion…

The aliens carried pods to the major ports and political capitals of that world. Within four weeks they had taken control of every major nation.

Their goal was to conquer mankind by “replacing” it to death — and then transform themselves into a simpler life form, a gelatinous mush, taking advantage of whatever host creature or plant it could.

The aliens do not care about symbiosis. They simply milk a planet for life as long as possible, then move to another.

Symbiosis would require something like empathy, something like self interest. These creatures have no passion or concern or fear.

They are shortsighted. They are feeders.

They did not have to evolve the capacity for conservation of a food source, thanks to their ability to travel from one planet to another.

Left to themselves, they may destroy all life in the universe.

They have already visited the other planets in our solar system.

Jeff Goldblum survived. When Matthew stabbed him in the brain, his humanness was somehow triggered. The alien in him was able to heal the wound — but not the reawakened humanness.

Jeff is now both alien and human.

It took awhile for his humanness to grow strong.

He walked in just as his wife was being podded. Something fought inside him.

Groggily — hearing his voice — she tried to call his name. The pod beside her wailed with the agony of birth. Jeff’s brow furrowed — the only sign of his inner struggle.

She died hard — her spirit strong beneath the narcotic and the insanity of podding.

Jeff and Matthew both watched impassively. The new Veronica sat up, her face blank.

She walked across the room, picked up a lab knife, and sliced the throats of two aliens. Others subdued her as she slashed towards Matthew. Her face was still passive, her eyes glazed, but something inside her was at work.

She literally boiled away before their eyes, glancing once at Jeff, smiling almost.

“Bad seed,” said one of the aliens, a leader.

Her spirit had died resisting.

The remains congealed into gelatin. One of the aliens scooped the gel into his hand and swallowed it.

Jeff goes to a meeting that is conducted telepathically. A leader points now and then to a map. An alien sometimes mumbles something. The alien who swallowed the gelatin belches.

Jeff has his assignment now.

Jeff is a sort of dogcatcher. He and another have the job of rounding-up stray humans and bringing them in for podding. A mere “cleanup” operation while world conquest is underway.

Jeff at home in his own apartment. Pictures of Veronica. His shelves full of books. His unfinished poem on the desk. Like other aliens, he reflexively, impassively, repeats some of the motions of his old life. Picking up his pencil, playing with an eraser — the poet’s nervous tic. Laying down a horizonal scribble beneath the lines of poetry.

But  looking at the poem stirs something inside.

Jeff Goldblum = Jack

At another meeting. Major capitals now marked with green stick pins.

Jeff and Matthew pass on the street. Matthew asks him to have a coffee with him — an old tradition of theirs. They do paper/scissors/rock to see who pays — but no one has to pay since all the businesses are now pod-run. Matthew shows no signs of humanness — except a reflexive comment about a hair in this coffee.

San Francisco is the center of operations…

For awhile, newspapers and TV news have only dim suggestions of what’s afloat.. Stupid newscaster interpretations, completely misunderstanding it, reports of it as a fad etc. Later, the headlines are frank: “80% of Humans Now Us,” etc.

This is about Jack’s struggle to regain his own identity. And in the process (or by means of it) acquiring an appreciation for humanity. A change, for him. He had been a self-infatuated cynic, talented and passionate but at war with society, society’s critic, not its song maker.

A poet not worth his salt.

Thinking wild now...

Jack goes berserk and starts fucking she-pods. Eating unborn pods. Rednecks pour into San Francisco with guns and gasoline bombs. A tidal wave swamps the western half of the United States. Pods start “replacing” one another. Children prove strangely resistant. Pods have “concerts” in which they contemplate. Two boulders “eroding.” American Indians know how to deal with outer space invaders. The rest of the world offers to strike a deal with the American pods. Pods blow themselves up and spread their fertile viscosity all over the place. They can gelatinize at will, feed themselves into grinder/sprayers in order to “seed” vast areas. The damn things quickly start devouring the world to death. That is, disrupting the food chain.

More Wild Thinking…

Old people are good pod material because their desire to live is weakest. Podding appeals to something we crave: peace, release from pain and effort. Podding is reversible by re-podding and aborting the process, killing the new pod at the last second because the vestigial humanness is the last thing to go in a body-takeover.

Jack sees an alien being re-podded and at the last moment the originating body struggles and cries out — the human inside still alive. People who have been “extracted” are sometimes devastated at the return to pain and effort and obligation. Others are joyous. Jack sees videotapes of his original self — the tormented misanthrope, his terrible sarcasm and self-deploring and self infatuation. Jack pursues some kids who have not yet succumbed. They lead him into a trap and torture him; he sees their fierce desire to live, their resilient gusto. The kids have the dog that is part folk singer. He is their weird mentor; egad, the soul a musician and a dog together would make! The kids and dog have discovered secret weaknesses of the aliens. Jack escapes them but later, more human, seeks them out (only a few by then remain). A baseball game broken up by Jeff and his gang. Jeff is having adventures, danger, encounters he never had as a human; he was so bookish, intellectual, contemptuous, smug. He was a brilliant fool. Gear Jeff Goldblum saying it: “I knew so much I didn’t know anything. I was a brilliant fool. I was this highly trained head floating around poo-poo’ing everybody who liked Herman’s Hermits and baseball. Jesus, when I think about that guy I’d like to take him out back and thrash his arrogant ass.” ~ March 11, 1992