Xenophiles

by David R. Eland

Dear Dad,

The way the postal service is jammed up, I expect it will be a few weeks before you get this letter. By then I’ll be long gone so don’t write back. I’m not sure where I’m going but I’ll write again when I’m settled.

Do you remember when I told you about SETI? Boy, were they wasting their time listening to radio telescopes. They should have been scanning Internet traffic. And the UFO nuts were just as clueless with their conspiracy theories — it wasn’t the government that kept bringing down their web sites.

The ET’s have been on the web since its inception. In fact, the whole idea was probably theirs — the sick bastards. That’s why the government shut down the Internet. A lot of phone calls went over the Internet as well; so you’re more likely to win the lottery than get an interstate phone call to go through these days.

We should have suspected it and looked for something like their wormhole uplinks. Everyone knew what accounted for the majority of web traffic — remember when that Paris Hilton video clogged the Internet for weeks — but in the name of privacy and free speech, we turned a blind eye. Instead, we chased after red herrings like hackers, viruses and spam. But now, the truth is out. When the Internet response times tanked, it was because the aliens were sucking up all the bandwidth downloading porn.

Those damn perverts have been ogling our women (and men) for years.

I shudder to think of what kind of monster I was talking to in that chat room. I should have known. Some of the things it promised to do — well, they struck me as physically impossible.

At least not all the aliens are sickos. Personally, I was relieved when the Galactic Decency League demanded that Earth shut down the Internet. I just pray that my last email didn’t go through — and not because it had a nudie picture of me — I included my home address. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

You should be safe on the ranch, but if any of the sheep go missing, I want you to get the hell out of there.

Your loving son,

Eugene