The BEMs really are alien.  We all know that intellectually, but sometimes it doesn’t really sink in.  They came up from a different primordial slime on a different planet with a different atmosphere, different gravity, a different sun, a different set of stars in their sky.

They don’t talk about their home planet.  I’m not sure we know where it is.  I don’t.  Their ships just appear out between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, then glide in to Earth or Mars at a speed no chemical rocket could possibly get them to.  Does every government on earth want to get their hands on one of those ships?  Do bears prevent forest fires?  Does the pope disapprove of Monty Python?  In case you were wondering, that means yes.

They want our minds, but only for their equivalents of stamp collections.  That’s why I have a job, but we’ll get to that later.  Are they interested in our souls?  No sign of that.  Do they want to be worshipped?  No sign of that either.  That doesn’t stop people from trying to worship them, or from trying to keep people from worshipping them. That’s a problem for me.  I don’t just have to deal with gangs of mind harvesters. I also have to deal with people trying to fit the BEMs into their religions as Gods or devils instead of as casually interested technologically advanced extraterrestrials.

So we end up with a murder.  A little girl dies.  Why?

Al Borden came in and sat on the edge of my desk.  "Ever heard of the Church of the Space Saviors?"

I made a motion like I was inducing vomiting.  He grinned.  "I take that as a yes."

"Yeah.  They ran demonstrations in front of my house for a month.  I got a restraining order.  You know all of that."

"Yes I do."

Let's do a flashback here.  I was sound asleep at 7 in the morning on a Saturday.  The chanting didn't penetrate my sleep-fogged brain for a while, and when it did my mind somehow turned it into a dream.  In the dream the BEMs were giant insects clattering their oversized lobster front appendages together in unison and singing "Give Me That Old Time Religion" in shrill sped up chipmunk voices.  Their heads looked like baseballs with vacuum tubes stuck out of the top and the respirator from a gas mask as a mouth.  Yeah.  My dreams get a little strange.  My wife Tara woke up before I did and shook me awake.

As I woke, the dream took one last twist.  The BEMs broke into the "Old Rugged Cross", but in a Reggae theme with heavy drum line almost but not quite overwhelming the chipmunk voices.  Believe me, my subconscious scares me too sometimes.   Then I came back to reality, or what passes for reality since the BEMs showed up.  That reality included chanting.  I couldn't make out what the words to the chant were at first, but after a couple of iterations I got it.  "Let the souls go."  Over and over again.

I looked at Tara.  "What?"

"I don't know."  We got up and walked to the living room.  Annie, our daughter, woke up crying.  Tara looked at the window and then back toward Annie's bedroom door.  "See what's going on and shut them up, now!"

Tara is a wonderful wife and a wonderful mother.  The wonderful mother part says that daughters shouldn't be disturbed by random chanting at an ungodly hour on a Saturday morning.  I walked to the living room window and looked out.  A group of several dozen bearded men and bloodless-looking twenty-something women stood on the sidewalk in front of our house waving signs that for the most part said the same thing they were chanting.  Yeah, an imaginative bunch.

So picture this: I'm standing there in my pajamas, a foul taste in my mouth, my six-month old daughter screaming her lungs out, and this bunch of losers was standing out there waving their stupid signs.  Remember that when I tell you what I did next.  Yeah, with more sleep and less crying in my ear and less weird dream lingering in my mind I could have handle the situation better.  I went out the back door, still in my pajamas, got a garden hose out of the garage, and screwed it into the outside faucet.  It seemed to take forever as I fumbled at the connection.  Finally I got it connected, turned it on, then went around to the front and sprayed a heavy stream of cold water on the demonstrators. Not exactly enlightened political discourse, but it shut them up for long enough for me to say, “Trying to sleep here!  Go away!”

They all stared at me.  I must have been quite a sight; unshaven, in rumpled pajamas, and with my hair standing up on one side, though I didn’t find that out until later.  They didn’t look much better.  It was an early June day, but the breeze made being soaking wet distinctly uncomfortable.    I know that because I felt it myself where I had splashed a little on my leg.

I walked back in without saying a word.  A couple of the women made rude gestures as I closed the door.

Tara came out of Alice's room.  "What was that about?"

"I don't know.  A bunch of people I've never seen before chanting something about letting souls go."

She looked out the window.  "I'm going to kill them.  I swear I'm going to kill them."

"Who are they?"

"Who knows?  Probably some branch of the "Church of the Space Saviors"."

"Uh.  Do you think they know what I do?"  Yeah.  Dumb question.  I reunite harvested minds with the bodies they were harvested from, at least part of the time.  When the police get lucky and then I manage to figure out which body the mind came from.  I do that by going into the harvested minds and spotting clues as to which body they go with.  As you can imagine, some of the BEM worshippers don't like what I do.  I don’t know how they tracked me down, but there they were.

By the way, in case anyone is wondering, the images of the BEMs in my dream come purely from my messed up mind as far as I know.  Then again that could be what they look like.  Nobody has ever seen them, or if they have it’s classified far beyond my ability to get at it.

I peeked out the window, the ‘Space Savior’ people were still standing there, looking cold and with the cardboard of their signs drooping and smearing from the water.  After a while they drifted away.  We went back to sleep.  And woke up to the chanting again about an hour later.  This time my dream included the ‘Space Savior’ people, but they had light sabers and dark cloaks instead of signs and Tara was out there barehanded kicking their butts.  Finally she slipped and they converged on her.  I watched helplessly as she yelled, “Wake up and help me.”  Alice was crying in the background.  And that’s when I woke up.  Tara was sitting up shaking me and saying, not surprisingly, “Wake up and help me!”  And Alice was crying in the next room.

“They came back?”

Tara nodded.  “Apparently.”

I went to the living room.  Yep.  They were back.  And they were wearing raincoats.  After the dream I kind of jumped and wouldn’t have been surprised to see light sabers.  Nope.  Just signs, but they had laminated them this time.  The chant hadn’t changed.  The writing on the signs looked a little rushed, and one woman spelled Soul ‘S.O.L.E.’.  Yeah, these weren’t intellectual prize catches.  Well, what would you expect from people who worship extraterrestrials who collect human minds like some people collect stamps.  I’ve heard that the BEMs even pay extra for the weird ones.  “Ooh, a high school cheerleader who became a leading physicist.“

So they chanted.  My daughter cried.  I saw red.  I went out to the garage, put on goggles and earplugs, revved up my chainsaw and walked around front carrying it.  I didn't do anything more threatening than just walk into my front yard, but they ran like I was something out of a horror movie.  I can't imagine why.

Unfortunately they came back about an hour later with a couple of police cars escorting them.  I chatted with the cops and agreed not to cut the demonstrators up for firewood.  The demonstrators agreed to go home for the day and not to come back before 9 am in the future.  I tried to get them to expand the range of their slogans, but I don't think they had the intellectual capacity to remember more than one.  I kind of suspect that the ones in the back were reading the signs in front of them.

Anyway, we put up with the chanting for a few months, going to bed early and wearing earplugs.  Finally the demonstrators got annoyed with our ignoring them and stepped over a couple of legal fine lines.  That's when we got the restraining order.

Okay.  End of flashback.  Point is.  I'm not a great fan of the Church of the Space Saviors.  Keep that in mind when I tell you the rest of what happened.

I mentioned a little girl dying earlier.  That's always tough, especially when I was inside her mind earlier that day, trying to reunite it with the appropriate body.

The Church of the Space Saviors doesn't officially condone mind harvesting and they don't officially have anything to do with any harvesting gangs.  If they did step over either of those lines they would get shut down in a hurry.  Harvesting is a criminal enterprise.  We don't have the power to make the BEMs stop doing what they do at their end, but anybody involved in harvesting at our end is going to end up on death row when we catch them.  We take the harvesting seriously because the process strips away most memories and abilities, leaving the harvested person functioning at maybe a two year old level, if that.  Unfortunately, the physical mind never recovers much of that lost stuff.  Harvested bodies stay mentally at two or three years old until they die. 

Fun, huh?  But the lure of BEM technology means there is always someone willing to harvest minds.  It's a lucrative trade for us poor benighted humans, more lucrative than crack or meth or heroin and more damaging.

The “Space Saviors” people fit BEMs and harvesting into their belief system.  The way they look at it, the BEMs are either God or working for him.  For some unknown reason they are just pretending not to care overly much about the minds they get.

Obviously we keep a close on people like Church of the Space Saviors (we call them COSS), but so far they had looked like a bunch of the usual idiots, cult fodder looking a cult to be fodder for.

"So I know they're idiots," I said. "Lips move when they read. IQs smaller than their pant sizes."

"That's the general opinion," Al said. "But now we're seeing evidence that might not be true."

I had been standing up in my cubbyhole near the BEM mind reader. I sat down at my desk, partly to get the massive non-human thing out of my line of sight. "What kind of evidence?"

"We traced BEM tech back to one of their members. Substantial sales but the money trail disappears. No sign of where it went."

"BEM tech equals somebody's mind went into a BEM collection," I said. "No other way to get it. Any sign of missing or harvested people associated with the church?"

"Nope. And that's the mystery."

I thought about that and couldn't think of any place to start, so I said, "I've thought about this and can't think of any place to start. You need an action statement. What do you want me to do?"

"For now, keep your eyes open. I don't figure you'd mind too much if you could put the lot of them in jail."

That's another bears and popes type question. In other words, yeah. The months of being stalked by idiots did leave a considerable desire to see the idiots in question have 'slip on a banana peel and land on a cow pie' moment. But where to start?

“I notice you haven’t mentioned the name of the BEM tech guy,” said I.

“That’s an angle we’re working on.  There have been three influxes of BEMtech, each about the same size.  There were two months between the first and second influx, then two weeks between the other two.”

One of the little hypocrisies in the way we handle the BEMs: having or selling BEMtech is not a crime in and of itself.  It’ll get you investigated, but unless we can catch you harvesting that’s all that happens, at least officially.  The thing is, BEMtech can be extremely useful, and any government that banned it completely or put the screws on trading it too tightly would end up on the short end of the economy stick.  So, we fry harvester gangs, but let people profit from using and trading the tech.  All of which makes my job a lot harder.

I have one of those jobs that swings from cushy/boring to scary/mind numbing with little warning. I have a lot of freedom to go my own way in investigations, partly because nobody in my chain of command really understands what I do and nobody really wants to. Investigating BEM activities has a faint aura of woo-woo about it, quite toxic to the career advancement potential, which has always struck me as being weird. BEM-related crime is a growth industry.

In any case, I left word on where I was going with my partner, Linda Stevens, and headed out to visit a sort of guru, Jeff Elkins. Jeff is currently serving serious time for various crimes, some of which I committed or participated in. Long story. Save the world. Go to jail.

Actually, I guess it's not that long of a story after all. Jeff is a phenomenon. Extremely right-brained. Extremely intuitive. He can look at complex, seemingly unrelated patterns and get something important out of them. That's helped me on a couple of occasions, and put him in prison for a goodly chunk of his adult life. I went through the usual prison procedures, and sat down in front of the glass partition, just as the tall, bulky figure of Jeff Elkins sat at the desk across the glass from me. He said, "It's been two months and seven days. Not friendship. You need something.”

Did I mention the lack of social skills? In this case, he was justified in thinking that, and right about my motives, but that’s not something you like to start of a discussion with.  I summed up what I knew about the Church of the Space Saviors.  Jeff tried to pin me down on the timing of the BEMtech influxes.  I told him what I knew, which didn’t narrow things down as well as we would have liked to, but was better than nothing.

Finally he said, “There is a pattern.  An initial influx of BEMtech.  A gap.  More regular influxes.  What do the BEMtech influxes correlate with?”  He stared off into space.  “Crimes a day or two before the initial influx: the usual gang and drugs stuff.  Homeless person torched.  Stolen cars.  Domestic disturbance.”

“No mystery disappearances?  No harvested bodies found?”

“Some of both, but there always is.  Finding a signal in all the usual noise, that’s a problem.”  Jeff stood up.  “That ought to give you a start.  Good luck.”

“Wait! You didn’t give me anything.”

“Sure I did.  I’ll think about the other influxes and let you know.”

He hung up and walked away.  I sat there thinking for a few seconds, then shrugged and walked out.  I thought about the bum-excuse me, homeless person-torching.  It’s possible that the person in question was harvested and then killed/set on fire to cover it up, but that’s not all that likely.  BEMs are picky about the minds they collect, and unless there is an unusual story behind the homeless person involved the BEMs wouldn’t take the harvested mind.  Homeless people are vulnerable to harvester gangs and their minds are a glut on the market.  Also, the BEMs won’t take minds that are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, which leaves out a lot of homeless people most of the time.

I did follow up on the torching case, but it didn’t seem to lead anywhere.  A guy by the name of Denny Swan grew up in a middle class family, got into drugs and alcohol in late high school.  Never came down, and eventually ran out of relatives to rip off for drug money when they were nice enough to let him couch-surf.  That’s your stereotype homeless person, and there are a lot of people in the homeless category who don’t fit into it, but he did.  No significant accomplishments.  No evidence of adventures.  No evidence of exceptional talent or creativity.  Nothing to make his mind sellable.  Sad case, but no evidence of a link.

I thought back to the conversation with Jeff Elkins. Nothing there-unless... I looked up domestic disturbances around the date the first BEMtech showed up. Unlike people-torchings, domestic disturbances are common enough that I had to sift through a lot of them.

 I muttered, "It would help if I knew what I was looking for."

Al Borden showed up as I said that. "Using a cell phone or talking to yourself?"

"New miniature cell phone that fits in your ear. Nearly invisible. I don't have one though, so I guess I'm talking to myself."

"About what?”

"Domestic disturbances around the time of the first BEMtech influx. And no, I don't know what I'm looking for or why I'm looking for it." I flipped through the records, then grinned. "But I just found it. Does the name Bill Davis sound familiar?"

"Doesn't sound unfamiliar. It's common enough that I wouldn't know for sure."

"Deacon in the Church of the Space Saviors. I recognize him from my time in court with them. And apparently he got seriously wasted, came home and beat up his wife about the time of the first BEMtech influx.  Is he the guy with the BEMtech?"

"Nope.  Any priors?"

I flipped through the records. "Loud argument about a month before. Police called. Another one three months earlier. No sign of anybody taking it physical."

"So, maybe he celebrates selling the mind or minds and isn't use to the alcohol content, so he comes home and the alcohol releases enough inhibitions that he takes it physical." Al shrugged. "What we have here is a brick. Not useless, but it'll take a lot more of them to make a wall."

"Maybe I should rattle the Bill Davis cage and see what shakes loose."

"That sounds more like my line of work," Al said. "No offense, but cages don't rattle much when you shake them."

We ended up going to see Bill Davis together. Finding him turned out to be an issue. The house at the address we had for him was for sale and empty. Place of employment was also a bust. He got fired about a week after the domestic disturbance. The secretary at the local COSS either couldn't or wouldn't tell us where he was.

We finally tracked down Mrs Davis in a cheap apartment complex. She had the look of an aging ex-cheerleader; blonde, with the color probably coming out of a bottle now based on the grey roots, complexion showing what too much time in the sun does to light skin, dressed to show off a figure that had visibly shifted and sagged over the years, with cleavage declining toward jelly-on-a-platter, and a big smile that showed white, even teeth. The smile was friendly and the dark brown eyes contrasted with the rest of her, with a surprising depth and warmth to them.

Tossing Bill Davis into the conversation made the smile go away, and almost got the door slammed in our faces. She stopped in mid-slam and said, "Police? I hope you lock the guy up and question him with a cattle prod. I'll even do the cattle prod part of it."

"Any reason we should lock him up?"

"Yeah. He drained our bank account, took out a second mortgage on the house, maxed out our credit cards and then came home drunk and tried to force me to sleep with him. Hit me. Tried to drag me into bed. When I called the police he wandered off and never came back. The bank will end up with the house or all the money from the sale, and I'll spend the rest of my life paying off the credit card bills he racked up. If none of that is a crime it should be, all of it."

"The domestic battery, yeah if you decide to press it," Al said. "The rest of it? The price you pay for trusting the wrong guy. Never put both of your names on financial stuff. Any idea where he is?"

"A friend of mine said she saw him at a bar downtown a couple of days ago, drunk on his butt. He made a pass at her." She wrote down the name of the bar.

"You've been together quite a few years," Al said. "Any reason you can think of why he went off the tracks that way? Any previous disappearances? Any alcohol abuse?"

"He used to have a beer or two. No alcohol abuse. This is your typical mid-life crisis except he's a bigger than normal jerk." She gestured for us to come inside.

The apartment was neat but obviously cheap, with worn carpeting and walls that let the noises from the next apartment through--somebody watching professional wrestling and saying, "Oh, that's so fake" every thirty seconds or so, as though they were revealing a new insight. She picked up a picture of herself from probably twenty years ago, along with a tall, handsome boy in a basketball jersey. She pointed to her picture "He married that body. Now he wants another one just like it. Only the years tore him up too. Not too many girls who look like I did want to go out with a forty-five year old with a big gut and not much hair."

I noticed another picture, one with broken glass in the frame.  It was actually a framed newspaper clipping that showed Bill Davis as part of a high school all-state team from twenty-five years ago.

"So he didn’t age well," Al said. "And money would help on that if he was cruising for something young and blonde.  Did he get enough to make a middle-aged guy look sexy for a while?"

"Not really. Enough that I'll be paying it off the rest of my life, but the kind of girls he could get will go through it in less than a year."

"Any kids?"

"No. I wanted them. He didn't.  The smarmy bitch."

I left my number and ask her to call if she saw him or thought of everything else.  She insisted on giving me her number too, and managed to brush her breast against my arm as she was writing it.  I fiddled with my wedding ring ostentatiously and she backed off, but insisted that we both call her June instead of Mrs. Davis and tried to get us to stay for drinks

Posted on Jan 4, 2012.

More Stuff For POD Members Only

What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA.  POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.