I Married An Alien Read Free

Well, this gives a whole new meaning to the phrase looking at the world through rose colored glasses,” I couldn’t help imparting.
    “ They all say that when they first put them on,” Jackson declared. “I just thought that color would be calming, since some of the things people have seen have been pretty horrific.”
    “ Don’t worry,” I replied. “There isn’t much that can faze me. I’ve seen just about every doomsday movie that’s ever been made.” Why those End of the World movies so fascinated me I’ll never know, but I’d watched my favorites many times over during those long, lonely months I’d sat at home waiting for my mother to die. I know that sounds awful, but in the end that was exactly how it had felt, as she lay there day in and day out with no change in her condition. Until one night she must have decided enough was enough, and she simply stopped breathing. Finding her dead the next morning had still made me feel sick to my stomach, even though I'd been expecting it. I guess no one knows how they will react until it actually happens to them.
    “ One of the reasons we chose you, Ruth Clarke,” the professor replied with a snort, nearly gassing me with the aromatic aroma of last night’s garlic feast. I gagged, almost adding another stain to his grubby lab coat. “But watching it and living through it are two entirely different things,” he reminded me.
    “ Have you actually used this contraption yourself?” I felt compelled to ask.
    “ Of course, but for some reason I always see exactly the same thing.” He sounded disappointed.
    “ Which is?” I prompted.
    He waggled a long bony digit in front of my face. “Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it? Now I just need to attach a couple of small probes to your temples so that we can read your brainwaves and record what you see.”
    That might make ripping the whole thing off a tad more difficult, but not impossible.
    Once he had glued two pads to my head, he finally backed himself and his aromatic body odors out of the cubicle. I took a deep breath, glad I could at last breathe through my nose again. All that shallow breathing had been making me feel rather light-headed.
    “ I’m going to take you further than anyone else has ever gone before,” the prof called through the speakers above my head. I watched him position himself in front of the keyboard. It looked a bit like a TARDIS console, with all those levers, switches and cables hanging above it. I hoped that dangerous-looking lash-up would hold together. Jackson gave me a yellow-toothed grin of anticipation and I shuddered. With a bit of luck, I’d soon be looking at my own interpretation of the future.
    With ample time to ponder over the two days it had taken for his team to get back to me after the briefing, I decided this aging geek had to be a charlatan, or at the very best, someone so obsessed with his project he’d make up everything to get the results he longed for. After all, if he truly was a crackpot, he wouldn’t be working for the University of New South Wales. He’d be skulking in a basement somewhere with his giant super-computer and Tesla coils. I wondered how he’d managed to get the university to fund this experiment in the first place.
    I didn’t know much about how these things worked, but perhaps he was a good lecturer, and had simply been given free rein of this dingy basement to tinker in his spare time.
    “ How about three-hundred years?” He winked, looking smugly pleased with himself. “I’ve been doing some tinkering and upped the power, so there shouldn’t be a problem pushing you that far.”
    “ Sure, go right ahead.” I started to drum my fingers against the underside of the chair’s armrest. I encountered hardened chewing gum. Ugh, weren’t uni students supposed to be more mature than school kids?
    The goggles started to buzz as the mad scientist upped the power or whatever he was doing to align his machine with the future. His