Voodoo Space Lizard

Tuning the TV sky to a different channel. Looking for a sad day soundtrack feel. He pops a couple of rewire pills so that he can have nanobots go in and perform corrective surgery on his gut, which was flagged up as problematic on his last closet scan.

There’s a man at the door who is packing, but who says he has the weeks supply of food builds. What to do? He tranqs him, rolls him off the welcome mat with his foot, and instructs the Floor Monitor Lizard to carry him out of the building.

It’s a long day, designated by the local crime statistics bureau — any day labelled as being historically crime-ridden gets the sunlight quota dialled up, and they bring in the artificial buffer lights.

Someone told him last week that they had landed on a populated planet. The people who had carried the flag with them had to roll it up quickly so as not to offend the people who lived there that had obviously discovered it before they did.

They were lizards that could talk. They narrowly avoided a bullet between the eyes by shouting angrily at their invaders in a way that the interpreter in the group recognised as indicative of a language rather than random lizard noises. Something the lizards later were discovered to be secreting calmed the humans down — it wasn’t so they could eat them, as one panicked diary from a soldier on a momentary comedown wrote, but so they didn’t find the presence of talking lizards alarming. The talking lizards had made first contact more often than the humans so they had real worked out protocols in place. Some of the humans were still thinking with the ass-backwards philosophy of shoot first and ask questions later.

There’s something off about the food build. The pack seems bigger than usual. He puts it into the builder and … hey presto … there is a lizard in his front room.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello. We were pulling the wool over people’s eyes. We are pushing for a soft invasion. No need to worry. Just breathe deep. You’ll enjoy it.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘Your friend, Gaines, he had your contact data in his wallet. No one else had anything like that on them.’

‘So, I’m the ingress point?’

‘Sure, we’ve been messing with your for a while. See, this here’s a voodoo doll.’

‘A voodoo space lizard?’

‘You got it. How are you feeling?’

‘Pretty good actually.’

‘Good.’

And he stepped outside into the artificial day light with a lizard that had bad things on its mind.