They chose me, of all people. I ought to feel honored. They perform rigorous background checks, using a specific criteria, for selecting candidates. The first requirement is a subject's openness to experience. They don't want to risk their candidates disassociating themselves from the experience thereafter, given how follow-up appointments depend on their remembering everything. (This is my first appointment. I can only imagine what else they will need from me.) The second requirement is a candidate's well-discredited reputation. The administrators here monitor thousands of people, looking for those in particular who have intentionally or unintentionally convinced society of their own unreliability. (I must admit, my years of psychotic rambling and attention-seeking have turned the majority of my relatives against me.) The third requirement is circumstantial: time and place; likely nighttime, in a remote area. They want to avoid witnesses. First-hand accounts must be unique and unbelievable. There may be others like it, but there can be no corroboration for any one event. (I was alone that night.) When they came for me, there was this light—bright, nearly blue, and all-encompassing—and the hum, as if I were lying atop a loudspeaker in a vacuum chamber, absorbing its soundwaves through my skin. They welcomed me inside. It was ethereal. They can speak without mouths; voices sounding like they’re underwater. They are neither short nor grey, as we enthusiasts had presumed, but instead are tall—seven feet tall, and bipedal—with pink fleshy bodies, somewhat translucent, and sheen. Shallow beady eyes, offset, and two large nostrils: short elephant trunks, bowing apart like palm trees. Eerily symmetrical. They examine me without touching. I lay horizontal on a slab of light. I cannot move. Something climbs into of me; inside my mind. It's like a bug, crawling, and I feel it reading me; reading my memories, and telling me things. It tells me things about the future; about other worlds; about other beings; about the slick men to whom we entrust our laws, states, and industries; how they cannot be trusted; how there are others in control. The bug tells me I am free to return to my life on the condition I perform surveillance and additional research; there is much that the tall ones need to learn about their enemies, who wage a proxy war for resources on our little blue marble, using our bodies as ‘influence devices’ in the neverending proliferation of carbon-dioxide, harvesting of coal and diamonds and fuel, and ensuring for us our destruction through in-fighting — a guilt-free genocide, played out like a serial drama. The tall ones say the others are the enemies—the ones who control the kings and scions—but it is hard to imagine the tall ones as any better. I want to tell everyone about this—they need to know the truth—but the bug in my head tells me nobody will believe me. I will try anyway, but nobody will believe me. I will challenge authority, I will rant on forums, and I will stand on street corners, screaming at passers-by—but nobody will believe me. (Such was the second requirement, which I fulfilled.) And I will live in this new reality: aware of the truth yet wholly ignored—much a Grecian myth realised. (Such was the first requirement, which I fulfilled.) And that must be why I was chosen, of all people… I ought to feel honored. They have a very specific criteria for selecting candidates.