Despite the time of day, walking the woods around Lucille’s house was pleasant. There was enough space between the trees to walk casually through, and there was picaresque nature there; animals and nature existing peacefully.
The moon was full as Sandra followed Fo and Mog into the woods. There was an owl hooting, but Sandra could not see it. The full moon was visible through the trees and it was bright enough that Sandra could see her surroundings easily, and even make out the color of things; the grass was deep green and there were big mounds of brown dirt that she recognized as ant hills.
“When Eakran started working with Smoke,” Fo explained, “he made recreational drugs that Smoke had been selling for decades; cocaine, codeine, and ecstasy. Eakran grew weed strains that existed on Earth, but he used his technology to conceal it from authorities, before it was legalized. Eventually, Eakran tried to reproduce drugs and medicines from Druont using Earthling materials and chemicals, which is what led to the bad batch.”
“That batch had people’s heads exploding,” Sandra recollected. “Figuratively, a few literally. One of they heads probably still exploding and healing itself. Y’all know where that man is?”
“He is a curiosity on Druont, I believe,” Mog said. “Daecoo says that he is well known among the population as a medical anomaly.”
“I just want to understand what happened to those people. Eakran made some crazy new drugs that nobody should have been using, but what happened to them people that lost they mind? There was one boy, he was probably eighteen, nineteen, and we saw him out on the street naked, walking around on his hands. You should’ve seen him, his hands and knees scraped up and bleeding, and his face just blank. He didn’t look like a person. We called an ambulance and they put him in the hospital, then sent him for mental observation. I checked on him, far as I knew they never figured out what was wrong with him. He just lost his mind. If Eakran was making shit from Druont but everything was made on Earth, why did it mess them up like it was some alien shit?”
“The alchemy is powerful,” Mog said. “The ability of a Druont scientist is miles ahead of anything Earthlings know, but you all are learning.”
“So what did the drugs do to that boy?”
“His spirit, his essence, what made him who he was, was ejected from his body,” Fo explained. The trees were becoming more sparse as the moved through the woods and eventually they were on the other side facing rolling hills with houses like Lucille’s scattered among them. “We think it was collected and used on Druont for scientific purposes.”
Sandra nodded, staring out at the serene countryside.
“What’s out here?” she asked.
“Out there,” Mog pointed to a sport in the horizon, “used to be a landfill. Where they dug up all them bodies about thirty years ago. Theres a monument out there now. THe Druintes built it as a sign of good faith to the inhabitants of Ellerson to apologize for the terrible fallout from irresponsible use of their technologies. Its a nice monument too. There statutes and plaques with names, very fancy. But we think it was made for more than just honoring the dead.”
“I know it was made for more than that,” Fo said. “I was out that way with a cellphone and I got hte strangest interference. It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever seen before, which is how I know it must have something to do with the Druintes. I think that memorial is sending data back to Druont. I think they were able to harvest the souls of the people that died out here and they digitized and are sending it back to Druont.”
Sandra shook her head. If reality wasn’t what it was by the point – if aliens hadn’t revealed themselves to the world and moved into projects all over the world to improve them to be beacons of interstellar cooperation – she would have thought Fo and Mog crazy believers in conspiracies. But the world was strange, and stranger things had happened.
“So that’s it, then?” Sandra asked. “The drug knocked their spirit out of that boy’s body and stored somewhere until that monument was built to send it across space for God knows what?”
“That’s what we think anyway,” Mog said.
“How would you go about proving that?” Fo asked sincerely. He seemed eager to get to the bottom of it.
“Ain’t no way,” she shook her head and chuckled. “I’m satisfied with the theory, now I’m going back home. For what yall talking about, we gone need space ships to question Druintes, and I am definitely too old for that. Thank you for indulging my curiosity boys. I’ll see y’all around the house.”
Sandra walked away. She would have to learn to be satisfied as she said, because of course she wasn’t. If only she could get her hands on a spaceship.
PRL Serials 