First Contact

I was there on the day they landed. I was at ground zero. I was the DJ for the event, in charge of whole mixing deck and an array of five whole, shiny buttons.

I already knew of their impending arrival. For the last few weeks I'd been experiencing lucid hallucinations while in bed.  Some experts call these kind of experience "dreams", and they're probably correct about that. Within these dreams I had seen multicoloured lights streaking across the sky, heard garbled communications, and seen shadows all around the neighbourhood. Most of all, an image of a distinctive location had been branded onto my mind.

I couldn't shake this place from my conciousness. It popped into my thoughts constantly, and I bore witness to it so vividly it was as if seeing it with the naked eye. I felt compelled to build a monument to it out of mashed potato, but the car park beind Kwik Fit is a difficult situation to render using nothing but pliant mash. It seemed that the aliens had planted this in my brain as some sort of invitation, but little did they know that I had already been hired to attend the event as the sound engineer anyway.  They tampered with my mind for no reason at all.

Why couldn;t they pick a more out of the way location?

Back to the event itself, and the government had sealed the area for several blocks around to prevent the general public from witnessing first contact with an alien race. There I was dropping some phat bass on the hundreds of scientists that had piled into the car park, watching them wave their glowsticks in time to the music. Several of them were off their tits on poppers and getting off with each other behind the bins, as is ordinary behaviour at festivals. Just as I was getting the crowd whipped into a frenzy with some sweet acid drops, I was rudely interrupted by a low-flying craft that appeared overhead.

I cut the music as we all stared up at the object. It was a pulsating vessel of somesort, glowing a multitude of colours that had never before been seen by human eyes. I couldn't describe those colours to you as you have no adequate frame of reference (you had to be there). As we gawped in awe, a military commander jabbed me in the ribs, snapping me back to reality and reminding me of my job. To try and make first contact that little easier, since it was unlikely that they would speak fluent English, the scientists had concluded that tonal sounds might stimulate conversation and show our desire to communicate. I pressed a few buttons, releasing tones across the car park like some creepy numbers station that only broadcasts to hobos. There was a short pause while we waited for a reply.

That reply came in the form of Cars by Gary Numan. As the aliens blasted an 80's classic at us and caused spontaneous dancing to occur once more amongst the scientists, I realised that I had a bit of The Human League that they might enjoy. I popped on the vinyl and let them have it.

We barely got as far as working as a waitress in a cocktail bar before the craft started to descend. The landing gear extended (covered in Blondie stickers) and touched down gently, right on top of my car.

"Shit!" I screamed as I leaped out of the booth and ran towards the alien ship. As I approached, a metallic ramp protruded from the object, and a clear doorway slid open, releasing clouds of dense smoke to add to the tension.

"I hope you've got insurance!" I shouted, pointing at my flattened Ford Ka. But the aliens didn't respond. They simply stood in the doorway looking mysterious, staying hidden amongst the fog so that we could only see their slender silhouettes.

These guys seem legit

At that point, other, more human shadows began to emerge from the craft. They walked down the ramp towards us, and it soon became clear that these were people who had been taken, some of them had been missing and presumes dead for decades. There was Bruce Lee, Elvis Presley, and Mr Gregory my old chemistry teacher.

"Stop!" I shouted, waving my arms at the descending group. "We don't want these people, go away! Finders keepers."

There wasn't a chance that I'd allow Mr Gregory back onto Earth's good green soil, not after he gave me extra homework.  It was probably him who has been teaching the aliens about all this 80's music.

And so the boarding party turned around and headed back where they came. The aliens closed their door and promptly left on an impossibly vertical trajectory. That's the story of how I saved Earth from the tyranny of a chemistry teacher, and how I managed to successfully fit The Human League into one of my DJ sets. It was a good day all round.