Extraterrestrial nervous systems never had been my cup of tea (in fact, I never thought I could be privy to such a phenomenon) until I managed to get my mitts on a real live corpse. Yeah, you heard me right. One night as I was driving home from an average day of pushing papers around, I received a call from an unknown number. I’m not sure what possessed me to answer it. I rarely answer the phone while driving, let alone from strange numbers. I just recall having an inkling that the intention behind that attempted connection was more or less benevolent. Funny thing to hear myself say, but that’s definitely what it felt like. Anyway, I answered the call and put it on speaker, only to hear a sequence of hisses and beeps in an unpredictable pattern of multiple tones. As I attempted to speak with whomever had just contacted me, the call abruptly ended. Weird, I thought, but I didn’t think anything of it. As I was pulling into my garage (I always back in for the sake of convenience when I’m leaving in the morning) I looked over my shoulder and saw a limp body in my backseat, gray and slender. Not from here, you could say. Well, as a man of science, I was immediately overcome with more curiosity than anything. I immediately schlepped it to my house–it was much lighter than I thought it ought to have been–to get my bearings. While clearly not hosting a living being, it would seem that even after an extraplanetary individual has ditched their meat vessel from the previous life, there remains a kind of intact life force within the remains, as though awaiting a new passenger. I had that corpse under around-the-clock surveillance and never once saw a breath enter or leave. Nevertheless, I didn’t detect any of the decay one would find on Earth, and there were still trace electromagnetic signals that confirmed beyond a doubt that these… physical manifestations, for lack of a better term, are perpetuated by a force yet unknown by our primitive race. That anomaly was the catalyst for my lifelong study of the biology of such foreign bodies, to the chagrin of every person in my life who, up until that discovery, had held me in high esteem. Ah well, screw ’em. They’re just afraid of the things they can’t explain.
WHARVED 