Title: Elvis
Author: GMonkey
Rating: G, very mild swearing
Category: story, humor
Spoilers: tiny Never Again spoiler, but it’s not what you’d expect
Summary: Elvis is alive…
Premise: I wrote this for my high school AP English class. We all had to write an essay to use for college applications. While telling us about our assignment, our teacher read us the essay prompt for the University of Chicago. Not wanting to stray that far from home, I didn’t apply there, but I thought – since I’d already written my UC Davis essay – that I’d have a little fun with this assignment and use the Chicago topic. Here it is. I’m not kidding, this was part of the application.
“Elvis is alive! Ok, maybe not, but here in the office of College Admissions we are persuaded that current Elvis sightings in highway rest areas, grocery stores, and laundromats are part of a wider conspiracy involving five of the following: the metric system, the Mall of America, the crash of the Hindenburg, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, lint, J. D. Salinger, and wax fruit. Help us get to the bottom of this evil plot by constructing your own theory of how and why five of these items and events are related. Your narrative may take any form you like but try to keep your theory to under two pages”
Well, I didn’t ‘try’ too hard – it’s 5 pages. But I still got an A :)
“Scully! Scully!! You’ll never believe this!”
He was probably right. He usually was about these things. Agent Scully turned reluctantly from her computer to see her partner practically jumping up and down, and waving a piece of paper at her.
She took the paper from Mulder’s hands and glanced over it.
“Oh, Mulder, you’ve got to be kidding”
Looking slightly hurt, Mulder replied
“What? I don’t see anything too incredible about that”
You wouldn’t she thought, but held her tongue.
“Okay, Mulder. Listen to me” she said. She stood up and planted her hands firmly on his shoulders. Mulder was a little taken aback. She looked deep into his eyes. “Elvis....is....dead. And he’s not coming back” Irritably, he shrugged off her hands.
"How do you know?” Now it was Scully’s turn to stare in disbelief.
“What do you mean how do I know? You want me to go dig him up? Christ, Mulder, you’ve seen his grave yourself” She crossed her arms rather defiantly, and said something she knew she shouldn’t but couldn’t resist. “You see a few blurry photos of a metallic frisbee, and you believe wholeheartedly in UFOs. You travel 1200 miles to see a man’s grave and then refuse to believe he’s dead?”
Now Mulder really looked hurt. Hurt and annoyed.
“He’s alive, Scully. I know he’s alive, and now I know why the government is trying to cover it up” Scully sat back down. This could take a while. Mulder pulled up a chair in front of her. “He supposedly died in 1977, right?” Mulder didn’t wait for a reply. “That was 30 years after the Roswell crash. I just received this information about a second crash in ‘77, and about how the aliens send expeditions to Earth every ten years and those two decades they crashed!”
“So what does that have to do with Elvis?”
“Shhh, I’m getting to that. The Lone Gunmen broke into a top-secret database, and they found all these files that describe a massive conspiracy surrounding Elvis’ alleged death,” Mulder shook his head. “It’s almost too big to even comprehend!”
“That’s a split infinitive”
“Huh? Oh shut up. Ok. Elvis knew all about the aliens, and the clones, and the experiments. You know how he knew??”
It was late, and Scully was tired. She didn’t fancy the prospect of getting into an argument with her partner; but maybe if she got him really pissed off, he’d leave. She said, wearily and dripping with sarcasm
“Elvis was an alien?”
Mulder’s jaw dropped.
“How’d you know?!”
Oh God. This time he’s gone too far. I wonder if I could kill him with these pencils...
Mulder continued:
“Well, that’s not quite right; he wasn’t really an alien he was, is, a hybrid”
“Oh, of course, how silly of me”
“It all started long before the Roswell crash. Well, kind of. See, the aliens have time machines. That’s what the UFOs are. And that’s why so many abductees experience unexplained time loss; the aliens can actually manipulate the fabric of space-time, and - “
“Don’t try to BS me, Mulder. I have a degree in physics, and I guarantee you, no matter what those conspiracy geek friends of yours told you, it’s impossible to travel back in time, and it’s almost impossible to travel forward”
Mulder shook his head,
“That’s just what they want us to think. It’s entirely possible and, in fact, probable that a race of beings more advanced than humans would develop a means of traveling through time just like we can travel through space. Elvis, actually, was a test pilot in one of the first UFO-time machines”
“Wait, let me guess, the time machine was what crashed in New Mexico, right?”
Mulder grinned. She was quite a good agent, really, when she’d open her mind a little.
“Yeah. The aliens in the craft were taken prisoner, but Elvis escaped”
“So that’s why the government wants to cover it up? Because they don’t want to admit that he got away? That still doesn’t prove that he’s alive”
“Oh, that’s just the beginning, Scully. It was planned all along that the craft would land in 1947 and Elvis would assume the identity of a human. He was created by a rebel group of aliens who didn’t want the humans to be exploited. He was trying to warn us about the colonization”
“They didn’t want humans to be exploited, and yet they use one to make a hybrid clone?”
“…… c’mon, Scully, you expect me to know everything? Anyway, they had been testing these time machines on Earth and...hey, you ever wondered what really caused the Hindenburg to crash?”
Scully had a pretty good idea what he was going to say, but she decided not to spoil his fun.
“No, what?”
“A UFO!” Mulder cried triumphantly. Scully couldn’t help smiling.
“Do you have any reason for suspecting this?“ (Aside from the fact that you’re a credulous dolt) but she left that part out.
“Think about it Scully. What year did the Hindenburg crash? 1937. Ten years before the Roswell crash. It wasn’t an accident. The Hindenburg was shot down because there was a diplomat on board carrying blueprints for a UFO. The blueprints had been sold to the German government -”
“In exchange for what?”
“I don’t know. But the rebel group saw what was going to happen to Earth if Germany had time machines and alien weaponry in Word War II, and so they went back in time and prevented it from happening”
“Could you explain exactly how they managed to do that?”
“Ok. I assume you’re familiar with quantum mechanics?” Scully just glared at him. He continued “Have you ever read that book? They make high school English classes read it a lot. Ooh, I forgot what it’s called, the one about time travel. And there were aliens....”
Scully thought for a moment.
“Slaughterhouse 5?” she said. Mulder gave her a blank look. “You know, by Vonnegut?” Another blank look.
“No....no, it was by J. D. Salinger. The Catcher In The Rye! That’s it!” Mulder was smiling. As if all this suddenly made sense. As if anything he said made sense...
“Uh, Mulder, have you ever read Catcher In The Rye?” She remembered reading it as a girl, out in the woods by her house. She loved that book. “It’s not about time travel”
Mulder couldn’t believe it. She didn’t know?
“It’s in code. So, to the casual observer, it appears to be a story about some kid,” (She rather resented him calling Holden ‘some kid’, but she let him go on) “while in actuality it explains how the aliens invented the UFOs!”
“You still haven’t explained how the aliens can defy the laws of physics and travel through time”
“Laws of physics” Mulder scoffed ”The so-called Laws are only observations we’ve made about the natural world as we perceive it. Did it ever occur to you that we might be looking at everything the wrong way?” Yes, it had, and she’d had countless debates with her friends in college on that very topic.
“Yes, but even if we knew that the universe worked differently, what could we do about it?”
“We couldn’t do anything. We don’t have the technology yet. But the aliens are so much more advanced than we are, and...”
“Oh, you can use that argument to explain away anything.”
“But it’s true! By traveling at exactly the speed of light, they can...”
“Nothing with any mass can travel at the speed of light! Hypothetically, if they had a very efficient propulsion system and unlimited fuel, a craft could travel near the speed of light, but...” Mulder obviously believed otherwise, and she wasn’t going to change his mind. Anyway, there was another thing bothering her: “What does this have to do with The Catcher In The Rye?”
“I told you, it’s in code” Mulder couldn’t believe he had to explain this to her. “You count how of times they say ‘goddam’ on each page, and you get a simple numerical cipher. And you know how Holden likes The Great Gatsby so much? Fitzgerald was an alien too. ‘Gatsby ‘ describes how to make fuel for the UFOs”
“Fitzgerald was an alien too? You mean Salinger is an alien??”
“Scully! Of course he’s an alien! I thought you said you read the book” She ignored that one.
“So how do the UFOs work?”
“You remember I mentioned quantum mechanics? Well, that’s really all there is to it. Time exists in a plane, just like space. Except whereas space only has three dimensions, time has infinitely many. Once you understand that, traveling through time is a simple matter of being able to change one’s position on the plane”
“Huh. Easier said than done”
“Not really. See, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle dictates that a system exists in all possible states until it’s measured; in order to measure it, one must enter the system and in so doing, changes it. The changes made can radically affect the outcome, as described by chaos theory. The aliens have discovered how to make sure that their ‘measuring’ gives the system the right input to take them where they want to go in space-time”
“But Mulder, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle describes the behavior of subatomic particles, not spaceships!”
“If it can apply to the fundamental particles of matter, then it can also be applied on a larger scale” Mulder said. That sounded logical. But was it true? Scully tried to think of an argument against that, but it was almost 11:30pm and she was tired. Mulder said “Didn’t they teach you this stuff in physics?”
She didn’t bother to answer that. As far as she was concerned, Newton’s laws still held true. Specifically Newton’s first law: if she left Mulder alone, he’d keep talking. And, with any luck, tell her how all this proved that Elvis was alive.
They sat there in silence for a moment. Finally, Scully spoke.
“OK. So the aliens, and Elvis, can travel at the speed of light, and travel through time. The UFOs come to Earth to help us...”
“No, not all of them. The alien government sends UFOs to do tests on humans. It’s just this rebel group that wants to help us. You haven’t heard the best part yet. The humans are helping the aliens, only nobody knows it”
“How?”
Mulder was grinning like a child. A child who was about to tell his friends a big secret.
“Two words: wax fruit”
Scully just stared at him. Was this it? Had Mulder finally gone off the deep end? She had a brief fantasy of him being dragged off in a straight jacket. If he were gone, she’d get her own desk...
She shook her head. Back to reality.
“Ok Mulder, I’m almost afraid to ask...”
That silly grin of his got wider.
“Wax fruit is the fuel for UFOs”
Millions of questions sprung to Scully’s mind, and she picked one.
“Why can’t the aliens make their own wax fruit?”
“Why do American companies set up factories in developing nations? Cheap labor. Plus the resources are right here, I don’t think the aliens can easily manufacture it on their own planet”
"And what does this have to do with Elvis again?” Hadn’t she been paying attention? Mulder gave an exasperated sigh.
“Elvis is a hybrid. The aliens sent him here to warn us about the colonization project”
“So why didn’t he?”
“He tried to, but he couldn’t”
“Why not?”
“Because of lint”
“LINT?!” This had gone far enough. Wax fruit used as fuel for a matter conversion engine was one thing, but Scully was reaching the end of her tether. She didn’t even care what lint had to do with this. If she weren’t so tired, she might’ve strangled him and been able to go home and get some sleep, but as it was she sat there waiting for him to elaborate.
“Yeah. You see, in the 1950’s the widespread use of labor saving devices in the home became common. Devices such as clothes dryers. Elvis, as you’ll recall, came to Earth in 1947, but it took him several years to establish himself, and take on the identity of a human. By the time he was ready to send out the warning, it was too late”
“What, the colonization had already started?”
“No, there was already too much lint around. Elvis was supposed to receive transmissions from his home planet, telling him what to do. But the lint from all the dryers caused so much interference that he couldn’t receive them. So he lived as a human for the next 30 years, until another UFO landed to take him home”
“I thought you said it crashed”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t as bad as the one in ‘47. They managed to fix it” Scully sat there for a minute trying to absorb all that. “The government found out the truth about Elvis shortly before he left, and obviously they didn’t want the people to know that one of the most beloved entertainers of the 20th century was an alien, so they told everybody he’d died”
Murder yawned and stretched. He hadn’t realized how late it had gotten.
“Well, that’s about it. I’m pretty tired, I think I’ll go home”
Mulder got up and opened the door.
“Wait, Mulder, you still haven’t explained how you know Elvis is alive” said Scully “You say he was involved in all this UFO stuff, and if he were alive the government would want to cover it up, but how can you be so sure he is actually alive?”
Mulder looked back over his shoulder.
“Hmm? Oh. I saw him at 7-11. He was eating a Twinkie. G’night Scully”.
The End