Easy Does It

“So, you’re an astronomer or something?” The man asked me, a spark of interest shining through the cloud of liquor in his eyes.

“Did I say I was an astronomer?”

“No, but when I said scientists didn’t have any proof of life from another planet, you said you were a scientist and you’d seen proof. So if you’re not an astronomer, what are you? An astrophys-sis or something? Or one of those cryptic zoologists?”

“I’m a geologist.” The man laughed.

“Izzat why you’re drinking your whisky on the rocks?”

“A little ice helps open up the flavor of a single malt and a single malt whisky is filtered through peat moss which, when fossilized, produces petrochemicals which many geologists devote their time to. Not me, however. My expertise runs deeper.”

“I appregiate that. My granddad used to drink scotch. But whatzat got to do with what we were talking about? You do geology from other planets, too?”

“Kind of. Do you know how the Earth’s moon was formed?”

“It’s like stuff that got knocked off the Earth when something big hit it back in the day or somethin’ like that.”

“Pretty much. A planet-sized object named Theia hit the Earth and part of Theia mixed with Earth debris to form the moon, but the rest of it  drove deep into the Earth’s mantle and it rests there still. Its core merged with Earth’s.” The man swallowed his drink along with this information.

“That’s cool and all, but what’s any of that got to do with life from other planets?”

“I was hired as part of a team to explore the remnants of Theia in the mantle. It split into two chunks, one under West Africa and one under the Pacific. They’re sitting above the core like a pair of headphones. At first, all we could use was Seismic imaging techniques and we could see that the waves would slow down when they went through those layers, meaning they were denser and chemically different. But then my team was given a different tool. Everybody on the project had to have detailed background checks done and we lost several excellent scientists in the process.”

“What kind of tool?”

“The kind of tool that doesn’t melt in the Earth’s core. I don’t know where it came from, but I know it didn’t come from the Periodic Table as we know it.”

“So, the tool was built by aliens?”

“I don’t know one way or the other. What I do know is that we sent the tool down to the chunk that’s way under the Samoan islands. The object was made up of tube-like structures that we were able to traverse with the tool, almost like traveling through a beehive. Then we saw the builders,” the man’s eyes lit up and he started nodding his head.

“What did they look like?”

“Easy does it.” I pulled the man’s consciousness into the six-dimensional space that I occupy and showed him. He was forever changed.