Sweet, Sweet Ignorance

He folded the newspaper up and turned it to the back page where a story about the latest political debate was promised. He reached down to the table and snatched a slice of toast off his plate, taking a large bite while reading. The article was nothing more than slightly interesting, something about a republican saying something that democrats found offensive and wanted an apology for; it was a rerun.
He preferred the presidential elections more than these little debates. While debates still got attention from newspapers and coverage on twenty-four hour news channels, they were still just short productions that were put on for a couple weeks. Elections had more effort put into them because they were on a bigger stage. Nearly everyone from the two major parties took a role and even some from other, lesser-known parties. They were usually pretty entertaining, but in the last election, the lead roles were played by an ex-drunk and man who could put a crackhead to sleep. He thought it was pretty stale and needed to be spiced up. Something interesting needed to happen.
His eyes wandered from the article long before finishing and came across an article about a sweatshop-free shoe company. A good, old American company not exploiting poor, Chinese children for once. It was classic bullshit, kissing the ass of America’s ego. Pampering it to make to feel special and different from the rest of the superpowers. The only thing that was special about Americans was their ignorance.**
“Honey,” she said sweetly. “Do you think I’m getting fat?”
“Yeah a little,” he said while skimming the words of the article.
“You didn’t even look at me,” she stared at him, waiting for him to make eye contact.
“I don’t need to,” he said. “I know what you look like. You’re just starting your second trimester.”
She was silent for a couple seconds as she brushed a gentle hand across her growing stomach. He was able to skim through another paragraph before she said “I’m getting an ultrasound today. Can you drive me?”
“You know I have work,” he grumbled.
“You could take the morning off,” she suggested politely.
“I have the carpool today.”
“You do?”
“Yep. I have to pick up Tom in fifteen minutes.”
“Well,” she started as he tried t begin another paragraph. “Isn’t the hospital on the way? Can I still get a ride from you?”
He let a long deep sigh and let his focus fall off the paper and look down at his arm. “You know,” he snapped. “You didn’t tell me about this.”
“ I know, I forgot,” she said innocently. “I guess it just slipped my mind.”
He cursed below his breath. She always made these last-minute decisions. Now he had to leave earlier, within a few minutes instead of in half an hour like he always did, so he could go by the hospital.
“Let me finish this article first, then we’ll go,” he said and stared at the words. But he couldn’t concentrate anymore and his mind went off to do its own thing. His mind began to wonder what it would be like to have a kid around the house. It wondered how it would affect his life. How would a kid change his daily routine? Would it be more interesting? Or would it be more troublesome? What kind of responsibilities would he obtain? He had a lot of questions that he kept to himself. He was man, so it didn’t bother him to leave them unanswered. His wife had brought up similar questions and preferred to have them answered, since she was a woman and didn’t like insecurity. He had provided little help.
He realized he had read through half the article without paying attention to it., so he le the newspaper fall gently to the table as he finished his coffee with a gulp. He pushed back his chair, stood up, grabbed his keys off the nearby counter, shoved them into his pocket, and pushed his chair back in. The same routine he repeated every day.
Something interesting needed to happen.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Don’t forget to take your vitamin,” she said pointing at a tablet sitting on the table. She took hers and walked out to the garage.
“Oh yeah,” he said before picking it off the table. He had forgotten to take it before breakfast. He held the pill in his fingers as he looked around for something to wash it down with. There was nothing to out of the refrigerator at the moment, so he put it back on the table and headed to the garage. He knew his wife would get mad at him if she knew he hadn’t taken his vitamin, but he wasn’t going to tell her. He didn’t need to take it, it wasn’t something vital like heart medication.
She was already in the car when he walked into the garage, sitting quietly with a bulge of a growing child and her purse in her lap. He opened the door, sat down in the car, closed the door, pulled his keys out, and paused. It was just like his daily routine of leaving for work. But something was different about it. As he sat in the silence of the car, he realized he couldn’t remember the way to the hospital.
“Honey,” he said. “Do you know how to get to the hospital?” He turned to he, but she didn’t return his glance. She kept staring out the windshield, her face didn’t change, her eyes didn’t move.
“Honey?” he said quietly, his voice suppressed by confusion. He slowly reached out his hand and touched her chin softly, feeling the same skin he had felt for years. “You okay?” He stared at her unmoving blue eyes. He kept his own eyes open as long as possible, but he eventually had to close and reopen them to find that her eyes hadn’t blinked and faced the same direction.
The silence in the garage was interrupted by someone talking outside. They sounded close, so he figured it was neighbors. He thought about asking his neighbors for help with his wife, but he couldn’t remember what his neighbors looked like. He couldn’t even remember having neighbors. A slight panic came over him as he realized that he could neither remember what street he lived on nor what city, or even what his house looked like.
There was something very wrong.
Maybe he had amnesia. Maybe all he had to do was refresh his memory. He could still remember his entire relationship with his wife: meeting her in a quiet diner, their first date on a deserted beach, and their lonely Vegas wedding. He could remember the smallest detail, but he was blank on other parts of his life, like they never happened.
Staring forward in thought, he noticed a little red light in front of him. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see another light, a green one, in front of his wife. When he stared directly at the red light, it moved back and forth between his eyes, then turned green. The garage door began to open.
Unable to make sense of what was going on, he was filled with confusion. He tried to open his car door, but it didn’t open. He checked to make sure it was unlocked and tried again. He tried opening it while it was locked with no success. He was trapped inside the car. His confusion quickly turned to panic.
To get his mind off his situation, he listened intently to the voice outside. It was getting clearer and clearer as the garage door opened. As the words became distinguishable, he thought he could hear Chinese being spoken in toneless recording. Listening to the message was calming him down, until it started speaking English.
“I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but the human exhibit will be closed for about an hour because the humans must have a checkup. In the meantime, why don’t you enjoy some of the other Earth creatures.” A short list of animals followed before the message started over in a different language.
The words swirled in his minds as he tried to make sense of it. In stunned silence, he sat back in his seat and stared forward, imitating his wife exactly. His positions and expression did not change as the car began to roll out of the garage by itself. He didn’t show any emotions, partly because he was in disbelief of what he was experiencing.
His disbelief was forgotten and his emotions returned when the car exited the garage. As if guided, the car cut across a dirt path and into different room. As it crossed, he saw a flash and turned to see a crowd of unearthly creatures. They were tall, skinny humanoids with almost no head; their long neck just seemed to split into two, ending with their eyes. They reminded him of slugs. They wore a type of toga, and their chests were exposed just enough to show they had two slanted holes on them. They watched him cross the path, they had probably watched his entire morning, his entire life.
He was afraid, confused, and Claus phobic all at once. His heart pounded rapidly as he entered another room. Keeping himself perfectly still so as not to draw attention, he saw another reality emerge. The room was a lab, evident by the tools laying around and the operation tables. There were more aliens, dressed in metallic uniforms which covered all but their eyes. They waited for his car to inch towards them. They were waiting to operate on them. He realized he and his wife were test animals in a zoo.
They went for his wife first. It happened quickly; all of a sudden her door was open, her seatbelt came off, and they pulled her out of the car. He didn’t watch, but kept perfectly still until they put her on an operating table. He moved his head to watch them push her out of the room, her head no changing expressions, their child sleeping in her womb.
Anger told him to open the door, get out and chase after her. Anger said to punch one of them aliens. Anger thought chaos would be a good idea. But he resisted. He hated them, but wanted to save that hate for a better time.
An alien approached him, allowing him a moment of opportunity for his anger. He let it build, reminding himself that what they had done to him. They had taken his wife to another room to perform strange experiments on her, they tried to control his thoughts and life, and put him on display like an animal. By the time the alien was about to let him out, and anger was so intense it bled out of him as sweat.
There was little time to think of what would happen if he failed at whatever he tried to do. There was no time to plan, he would have to improvise. Time only allotted for action and reaction. The alien pulled the handle of the door, he slammed his body against it. The alien fell down, he started running. Action, reaction.
He dove for the nearest door while the other aliens in the room were wondering what had happened. Only one or two of them actually tried to run after him. He ran fast. Not knowing what their devices did meant he feared being caught. His stamina wasn’t all that great and they had long legs; they could catch him if he tired. But he couldn’t allow himself to be caught. Adrenaline kicked in and he ran faster.
The first thing he came to was an elevator. It was hard to recognize because the doors swung open, like all the other doors, and it was covered with strange blue markings, which covered the walls as well. But when he entered, it became clear that the small room was meant to go up and down to other floors.
The noises of the aliens coming carried down the hall. Their high-pitched yelping freaked him out and he quickly pushed a button. The elevator didn‘t just rise, it shot up to the next floor.
The doors opened to an empty corridor. As soon as he got off, the elevator went back down. The aliens were coming up to get him and he had to get away. So he gathered his energy and started sprinting again.
But it wasn’t long before he came to another room, filled with computers. The only inches of wall that weren’t covered with some sort of technology was the doors and a large window in the center. Out of the half dozen aliens working, only a couple noticed him. They didn’t react, just stared in shock. All of them eventually noticed him, and none of them did anything. They all looked scared. One near the window kept looking back and forth between him and the window, as if he couldn’t believe either sight he was seeing.
A rare confidence grew in him because he knew they were scared of him. They were only computer nerds that didn’t know what to do with an escaped human. Deciding to take the initiative, he gathered his breath and let out a loud scream. He got out of their way as they raced out the door, letting out terrified yelps that he imagined were screams.
There was a quick decision to make; go to the computer and try and figure it out or go to the window and see what they were looking at. The window drew him near with curiosity.
He saw nothing he’d never seen before; he was looking down on his own house. But it was different from this perspective. He noticed all the luxuries: the kitchen that made cooking easy, the TV that brought endless entertainment, his warm bed, a shower to make sure he was clean. All these pleasures that the aliens provided for him. All they wanted was for him to stay ignorant, to stay blissful to all the things they could be doing so he would not interfere. But now he was running around, causing mayhem in hope that something would change. He was a protester, protesting against corporations controlling their lives without thinking about what life would be like without them.

He stepped away from the window and took his mind off those thoughts. There were dozens of computers in the room, tall as the ceiling, powerful processors, and yet confusing as hell. One of the stood out; while most used a hologram touch screen, one used a traditional keyboard, which made it stick out like a sore thumb.
The keyboard itself was old and worn down, but it was connected to a top of line computer. The screen showed several options in the alien tongue with an English translation following it. It was strange, he thought, to find a computer that serves humans.

With the idea of disabling the power or any system, he began looking through files. It was impossible to know what was going on, though, as the screen only showed the scribbles of the Alien language. After looking through a few files and learning nothing, he was about to give up.
But, just as he was give up on the computer, a recognizable word caught his eye. “War” was tagged onto a computer file, much like a human computer. In fact, the computers had so many familiar features he wondered if the aliens had stolen technology in its design.
Opening the file brought him to another time. The first sight, a man shooting wild at a horde of aliens, gave him a break in his heart and a chill in his spine that came from a repressed memory. The image of the aliens hovering in a pod-like flying machine and using a type of ray as their weapon.
As he studied the options before a timeline of the war emerged. Detailing a chess match of weapon technology, the timeline was a wealth of information regarding a war that took place between the aliens and the humans. A world-wide battle of wits that turned into a massacre, it was the human’s last stand against the aliens. It told of how the humans used gas, nukes, bullets, even fireworks to fight with, yet they did not prevail.
Near the end of the war, there was one last group of humans in the rural south that fought after the rest of the world was taken over. A mechanic named Chuck led a small group of NRA members as they held the aliens off long enough to negotiate their safety.
That’s when the computer said the aliens captured the humans. That’s when they separated the humans and put them into zoo exhibits to study them. That’s when it mentioned mind control. That’s when the screen showed a picture of Chuck, defiantly being led away by a couple of aliens, to be placed in his cage and brainwashed.
That’s when he saw himself, with a full beard, being led away by the aliens.
He was Chuck, the mechanic. It couldn’t be, he was against cars because of pollutions. He drove a hybrid and carpooled, he was no mechanic. And a member of the NRA, how could that be? He hated the NRA; it was full of gun-nuts who were against any type of gun control. He couldn’t be Chuck, because Chuck was one of those ignorant Americans sucking down every word of the politicians. He wasn’t Chuck, because he wasn’t ignorant.
Suddenly his situation seemed hopeless. He could hear the aliens getting closer, but he didn’t feel like running anymore. There could be no more than fifty people alive, and all were most likely brainwashed like him, in zoo exhibits like his home. Stuck in a world of bliss, too ignorant to save.
The only person he could realistically save was his wife, which was the reason he escaped in the first place. But as the aliens rushed to find him, he wondered if bringing her into this chase was wise. Even though the aliens had kidnapped her, he didn’t want to endanger his unborn child.
So when the aliens burst into the room, he didn’t budge. It didn’t matter to him that they shot a tranquilizer at him. He felt the sting as it poured into his neck, but he didn’t care. Ignorance was welcome to him now; he’d rather not know how his comforts came to be. It was like knowing how beef was made and how he was contributing to such a vile process. All he wanted to do was enjoy his hamburger.
The tranquilizer was taking effect. Feeling sleepy, his legs stumbled, tripped and hit the floor. He tried to push himself up with his remaining strength, but one of his arms gave out on him. Left with only one arm, still pushing and trying, he though of Chuck and the final group, the final resistance, trying to hold up the lifeless body of humanity.
The aliens rushed in around him, waiting for him to go asleep. There were too many of them, it was hopeless. His arm kept pushing.
Sleep was overcoming him. He wanted to sleep for days. His arm finally gave out, and he laid still on the floor. He tried not to be ignorant, he tried not close his eyes and forget what he saw. But it was too tiring, he’d eventually run out of strength and give up like Chuck did. As he closed his eyes on the truth, one of the aliens whispered into his ear in broken English “Don’t worry, it will all be alright.” He smiled, because he believed them.