The Mimei

I was just a boy when the Mimei arrived in their hot, metallic-pink ships. It was autumn, I remember that, when every TV in the world had crackled to life and Lucille Ball had appeared on screen in all her black-and-white splendor and announced to the world that the Mimei had come to Earth to bring us a new era of peace, friendship, and prosperity.

Things went about as one would imagine after that: every nation in the world fired every nuke they had at the approaching armada, to no effect. Every slack-jawed idiot with a gun fired indiscriminately into the sky. Thousands of religious types committed mass suicide thinking that this must be the end of days. Nope, these were not the end times; this was just the beginning.

The Mimei arrived on October 12th—a Sunday as I recall, but things were so chaotic and hectic, and I was young. I can’t quite recall anything other than mom crying in hysterics, and dad in a drunken stupor. I remember that my dad had taken a bunch of pills and loaded his gun. My mom gave me a heart-shaped locket with a picture of some old people who died a long time ago. She said that we could all be together in heaven.

Dad shot mom, and then he pointed the gun at me and it went click and the bullet did not come out. I ran away, and that’s the last thing I remember about that day.

In the dark of night, several days later maybe, I remember a bright light in the sky, and Mary Poppins came out of the clouds riding on her umbrella, like that was a normal everyday thing. She walked the streets calling out to the people to come out and meet her.

Several people outright attacked her, but she dispatched them with cruel efficiency with what looked like a small bright pink gun that she produced from her bag. It made a high pitched barking noise like a Pomeranian puppy, and emitted a lavender flash; they fell limply to the ground without further struggle.

Those less foolish followed placidly along after Mary Poppins. She stopped in a park where she was joined by Lou Costello and Richard Nixon, each of them leading their own procession of glassy-eyed people behind them. I saw one woman take a swing at Lou Costello and she was put down with a gun very similar to Mary Poppins’, and with the same detachment that she had shown.

Mary Poppins spoke in a voice that was like a bull horn, and told the crowd that she and her companions were emissaries of the Mimei and that in order to bring peace and prosperity to our planet, they had no choice but to move us into concentration camps for our own protection.

About a third of the crowd attacked them, which ended about as one would imagine. Not one of them made contact with the Mimei agents and each and every aggressor was killed with efficiency and without malice.

I noted that each of the Mimei guns got twelve shots before a small magazine needed to be reloaded; the Mimei reloaded with a precise motion that was faster than the eye could comprehend. The remaining group was marched to a nearby area and detained for processing.

That was thirteen, maybe fifteen-ish winters ago, though I could swear that the last two or three had barely been considered winters—all the months tend to run together. I’ve been based out of this same camp for the entire time and I have not seen anything of the rest of the world.

Early on, our job was to go out into the city and clear each building of all the dead bodies. It was terrible work, especially as the winter ended and the bodies that had not been cleared yet began to thaw, to bloat, to stink.

The Mimei had us deliver the bodies to the big, awful, gaudy monstrosities that were their space vessels. Each ship had the same precise design with a high-pitched neon pink coloration. The ships looked like Abraham Lincoln's hat, only considerably bigger and much more shiny.

I was not among those who brought the bodies onto the ships, but I was glad of it because from time to time, those people never came back out.

After clearing the bodies, we were put to work breaking down the buildings and demolishing them brick by brick. It’s hard work tearing down a city by hand, but by now you could see entire portions of the city that had been dismantled.

It was on one of these work details that I encountered something strange. In one building there was an abnormal glow coming from beneath a bookcase in the cellar of a bigger house close to the center of town. It had a flicker to it, but I did not think that it was from a candle; it was bluish. I was sure that I should have reported it at once to my Mimei overseer (today it was Jean Luc Picard), but I threw caution to the wind and investigated the strange phenomenon myself.

I slid the bookcase to the side and found a smallish room with a man inside, a strange man. He was so thin to the point that I could see his bones—in fact I could see more bones than skin. His long, yellowing coat hung in a very ill-fitting way and his spectacles were sitting askew on his face. I was less than shocked to find that he had no skin, nor pulse, nor functioning organs.

He was long dead, and he had been recording something on a camera when he had died. The flickering I had seen was coming from a computer monitor nearby; there were lots of wires coming out that led to a small box with lots of intricate moving parts. On the camera, a light was blinking with a triangle on it. I pushed it.

The monitor came to life with a gaunt man in a white lab coat that looked very much like the one that was in the room with me still, but this man was alive and he spoke. He talked about his investigations into the Mimei; it turned out that the Mimei that we knew were some kind of robotic servants of the actual Mimei.

The Mimei had been receiving broadcasts of our television programs for about a hundred years before they arrived on Earth, so the robots had taken the forms of the popular celebrities and characters they saw on TV. I suppose that made sense.

He went on to describe that he had gained access to one of the ships and had done some snooping. He found that the actual Mimei are nine-meter-tall, monstrous lizard creatures who were all in some kind of suspended animation on the ships. He had deciphered some communications about the Mimei needing our planet to be a lot warmer to survive comfortably; they came to Earth and accelerated our global warming to Mimei-form the planet.

It was his life's work but he had created a microchip which, if introduced to the computer core of any one of the ships, might cause all of the Mimei Servitors to shut down or self-destruct. He was never able to get back onto the nearest ship to test it and he was certain that they were onto him.

The recording explained the basic layout of the ships and described what the computer might look like and that the chip would just be inserted into a slot on the thing. There was a lot of other mumbo jumbo that I did not really understand. I took the chip from the complicated machine and turned it over in my hand; it was such a simple thing. I put it in my mom's heart-shaped locket that I still wore around my neck.

Seconds after I had closed the clasp Jean Luc Picard burst into the room, weapon in hand. He was flanked by Mr. Rogers and Judge Judy, each with their weapons drawn. They interrogated me but I feigned incompetence, surrendering myself to their scrutiny as all these years had taught me that any level of resistance would be met with an immediate and guaranteed death.

I told them about the strange light, how I found the body, and how I had found the strange relics in the room fascinating. They wanted to know if I had touched anything in the room, and I told them that I had not. They told me to turn out my pockets, which I did.

They seemed satisfied and told me to take the remains to the nearest ship for disposal. I really did not like the way that Judge Judy said the word disposal; it had a finality to it. She stowed her weapon inside her flowing black judge robes and did not hassle me further.

I took the remains of what had been the man and carried them to the nearest ship. The awful color and shape—the pinkness burned my eyes so that I could still see it every time I blinked my eyes. As I approached the ship, Dolph Lungren in his He-Man costume stopped me and said that I was to take the remains onto the ship.

I complied, ascending the long and very wide ramp onto the ship. The inside was dimly lit, very warm and very dry—like they were baking cookies inside the ship somewhere. Just inside I was intercepted by a two foot tall red-furred figure who demanded, in a nightmarishly shrill voice, that I follow them; I complied.

The small red figure led me to a large bubbling vat of pink goop. The figure told me to place the body into it and I did so. I was very surprised when out of the goop came Tom Selleck and John Wayne, both naked, genderless and dripping with goop. They stepped into a cubicle that emitted a slurping noise and when they stepped out they were dry and stood before me as Magnum PI and Rooster Cogburn. They left without a word.

The squat, red, terror-of-fur instructed me to follow it. I did so, of course, and it led me to a huge room in the very center of the ship, which appeared to fit the description of the mainframe.

I feigned tripping, retrieved the microchip from the heart-shaped locket and palmed it. I got up, made a show of dusting myself off and stood where the red-furred monster told me to.

The mainframe came to life and spoke in a chorus of voices that I did not understand, but the gist was that I was going to be executed because I had seen the inside of the ship and I could not be allowed to leave.

I could see a slot on the mainframe that looked like it was the size and shape of the microchip in my hand; it was just three steps away.

The scarlet-furred creature produced a gun from who knows where and in its shrieking voice speaking in third person, his voice like a fork slipping on a ceramic plate, he ordered me to my knees. I lunged forward and to the left hoping to dodge the shots, ducked and rose up.

I jammed the microchip into the slot. I screamed out in pain as the shots pierced my body. The chip slid neatly into the slot on the console and an alarm sounded somewhere deep in the ship.

Time seemed to slow down as flashes of lavender light erupted out of my chest. There was very little blood. It did not hurt as bad as one might imagine. I fell to the ground. Rolled over and faced the furry red figure standing over me with the gun. His long snake-like arms appeared to have neither bones nor muscles. His bulbous eyes did not have even a flicker of a soul in them as he pulled the trigger.

Elmo emptied the rest of his magazine into my torso, laughing in his shrill screaming voice. Honestly, I never imagined this would be the way that I would die.