Just Add Salt

by Al Simmons

Do you remember the classic sci-fi film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? I’ll bet you didn’t know the film was based on a true story that took place in Northern California, in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live. They say the film is getting another remake, only this time they plan on telling the true story.

The first two film versions followed the same script. Seed pods traveling through outer space dropped to Earth and somehow took human lives for their own while they slept to become a new human-alien hybrid species in both body and soul, a non-sentimental and emotionless kind, but happy in their bland, dominating, conformist way.

In real life, they didn’t take over human lives. They simulated humans. They were more copycat than hybrid, and arrived much earlier, over a century, in fact, in a modest showering and not nearly as dramatic.

Basically, the pod people grew into themselves, but resembled us. They called themselves Alterians because they adopted the form of indigenous populations in order to blend in wherever they venture.

The first crop mixed well and shared technology. Industrial revolution, anyone? They were peaceful, practiced non-violence, followed the law, stayed out of trouble, and the news, and life went on.

The Alterians were basically intelligent seeds, a thinking man’s seed pod. They were easy to get along with, though most would consider them bland. They were shape shifting seeds that grew up to be people.

The pod people, or Alterians, came out in the mid-1950s with the advent and popularity of sci-fi movies. Aliens love sci-fi. Who would have thought? Though fiercely competitive by nature, they claimed to have nothing to compete for on Earth. Other planets, perhaps, but not on ours. But Earth is where they landed so here they were.

It really came down to genetics. Our personas, individual traits, characteristics and physical designs are manifest and embedded into our DNA. Alterians don’t have DNA. They have their own three letters. The Alterians may resemble humans in most ways, but lacked the genetic markers to reproduce with humans, and vice versa. A human would have more luck mating with a tree. The other thing, and maybe more importantly, neither species had the means to digest the other. Carbon-based life forms were about as nourishing to an Alterian as sand was to a human.

The pod people grew their own food supplies. Alterians were self-sufficient within their communities, and kept ample food stores to sustain themselves. They carried within them a seed library should they reach a land rich in cadmium required for their unique bio-signatures to take root, grow and thrive. Alterian cell structure required cadmium to grow like plants on Earth required nitrogen to flourish. The Alterians wandered the galaxy on a limited resource platform, living a strict disciplined scientific existence, and only procreating when necessary to maintain their numbers. Their lives were therefore pretty hit or miss, and why they probably evolved to be so emotionless.

Interspecies crosspollination didn’t work with humans and Alterians, despite the physical likenesses and familiar mammalian pleasure feedback reward mechanisms inviting both groups to try, and try they did. Alterians were easy to find attractive considering they made every effort to resemble you. But try as many did, the match had yet to bear fruit.

I’ve met a few Alterian women. To me, Alterians were like hybrid corn, all starch and no story. Up close they even smelled like high-fructose corn syrup. I admit, I invited one home more than a couple of times, actually. She was addictive. She even tasted like high-fructose corn syrup.

But in the end, I had to cut her off like a bad habit.

The whole idea of dating an alien was insane. Nobody liked the idea. She was rather dry. But the inability to procreate was the underlining factor.

“You need an alien? An Earth girl isn’t good enough for you?” my mother argued, accusing me of near bestiality.

But once Alterians stepped out of the shadows, as it were, and thus drew a spotlight to themselves and their life on Earth, their fortunes radically changed for the entire alien group as a whole. In retrospect, they should have kept to themselves. The federal government got involved and dedicated a piece of land in Utah, rich in cadmium and not much else, to the Alterians to establish a reservation there, and to get them out of the general population, who had grown uneasy with the idea of aliens among us, and giving new meaning to unalienable rights.

The official government grant made it clear the land had the cadmium requirements the Alterians needed, though not sufficient to support an alien population explosion. There was enough cadmium to sustain their numbers, and maybe a little more.

So, that’s where they went, the whole lot of them, off to the first Alterian Reservation on Earth, located on a bare piece of land in central Utah, about 100 miles west of the Great Salt Flats.

The relocation of the Alterians turned out to be their doom and a total disaster for both the alien population and the human race who prospered by them. But who knew salt would affect them that way?

On their second night on the reservation, the Alterian elders announced a meeting outdoors beneath the stars. Everyone was expected to attend. They gathered beneath a spectacular clear high desert sky begging for stargazers when a sand storm originating downwind from the Great Salt Flats caught them by surprise and lit them up like sparklers on the 4^th of July. And within seconds, the sequestered Alterians in mass turned a deep emerald glow and burned to a crisp.

Leave it to the dogs to discover salted aliens cooked right were digestible.

But here’s the thing, according to chefs in the Salt Lake City Gazette, Food Section, once prepared, salted, and cooked, the Alterians tasted just like BBQ pork, juicy, and kind of sweet.

Bad news for the few remaining Alterians, because once the news got out, they never stood a chance. Even today, the ritual of tossing salt over your shoulder pre-entry at some big-city high-end conservative venues is still required.

Bio:

Al Simmons was Poet-in-Residence, City of Chicago, 1979-80. He has been quoted on the front page of the New York Times, Living Arts Section. He was nominated for a 2021 Rhysling Award. His work has recently appeared in 44 magazines and anthologies since 2017, including Abyss & Apex, Kanstellation, Urban Arts, Illumen, The Novelette-Dark Fantasy, The Reckoning, Path of Absolute Power, Dyskami Press, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Knight Publishing, What Really Happened, and Cutleaf. He lives in Alameda, California.