© 1987-2007 By Ralph Rewes

After weeks of secret meetings with his friends on Earth, Mr. Edkor Armluz finally granted me this interview.

I had puzzling doubts when I first heard about the questionable existence of Mr. Edkor Armluz. He was supposed to be an alien visitor from a far-away planetary system. "You've got to be kidding!" I thought. But my friend, John, insisted. He was either an alien believer or a nuts. At first, I thought John was just another UFO weirdo. I had always been adamantly agnostic about alien life. In fact, I took pride in calling myself a hard-core disbeliever. However, but in this case, curiosity got the best of me.

I began to listen carefully to John's intriguing stories because, after he introduced me to some of his friends, I must confess, I began thinking about some kind of conspiracy.

The five guys that comprised John's clique were charming, handsome, young and, above all, intelligent. Somehow, I imagined their kind as being ugly, wacko-looking. I don't want to go into unnecessary details on how I finally got here, in front of Mr. Edkor Armluz, with a list of questions. What really count are his answers, which I want to share with you.

• Ralph Rewes: Mr. Armluz, how long have you been in our planet?

Mr. Armluz: Over five years. I plan to stay until 2060. I want to find out what answers are you going to give to your present, puzzling, chaotic problems.

• Ralph Rewes: What's your profession?

Mr. Armluz: We have no professions in our planet. Although, if you consider my hobby one, you may say I am an anthropologist.
 

• Ralph Rewes: What puzzles you most about us Earthlings?

Mr. Armluz: Your behavior toward plants.
 

• Ralph Rewes: I would have guessed sex.

Mr. Armluz: No. Not at all. I could tell you things about sex on other planets that you wouldn't even dare to imagine.

I meant plants. Your conduct toward plants is appalling. Plants are a life form so benign to you. And you are so cruel to them. You eat them. You burn them. You mutilate them. You destroy them massively. You even have the kinky pleasure of clipping off their sex organs for ornament or to offer them to your gods, loved ones and dead bodies.

Imagine a plant civilization doing that to you? How would you like to have your sexual organs inside a vase for the esthetic pleasure of some thinking fern? You are knocking down rain forests all over the world a such a rate that if you don't stop, soon you all will be gasping for air.
 

• Ralph Rewes: You got me curious there — about sex. How is sex in your planet? You look like a regular male Earthling to me.

Mr. Armluz: Not really. You see: We don't have males and females. We have Uppers and Lowers instead. Although our appearance is closer in looks to your males, we all have both male and female organs, but not in the fashion depicted by that Sci-fi genius, Asimov.

• Ralph Rewes: I don't follow you…

Mr. Armluz: Well. Uppers and Lowers have male pecs and muscles. In our civilization strength is not considered aggressive, but highly esthetic. From the waist up, we all look like men.
The sexual difference lies in the position and number of our sexual organs. We , Uppers and Lowers, have hanging testicles, a penis and vulva. Uppers have them from top to bottom in the following order: penis, testicles and vulva. Lowers have them in a different order, from top to bottom: vulva, penis and testicles. When Uppers have sex with Lowers, they reach perfect mating with double penetration.
 

• Ralph Rewes: That is a great. Does that mean that among your people, you are lacking the concept of homosexuality.

Mr. Armluz: Not at all. Our equivalent of what you call homosexuality is when an Upper has sex with another Upper or a Lower with another Lower. There is also anal sex and other variations.
 

• Ralph Rewes: For what you told me and for other things I heard from your friends, your world is much more advanced than ours. Can you tell us how close we get when our science fiction writers describe a more advanced civilization?

Mr. Armluz: I should say pretty close. Of course, there some things that... Let me explain. I am a trekkie myself and, for instance, I get a kick every time I see the transporter room. You see. We have something similar, although less dramatic: we use doors. We just walk through and zaas! we are in far away places.

Curiously, though, intelligent beings everywhere are nonconformists. In our world, where the doors make any other kind of transportation useless, everyone likes to own an antique vehicle, from flying saucers to carts pulled by a couple of frznske. A frznsku is a horse-like animal, but smaller.

• Ralph Rewes: Have you found anything awkward or funny when our writers try to describe an advanced civilization, like in Star Trek?

Mr. Armluz: Fashion, definitely fashion. You seldom dare to go away from conventional fashion in any science-fiction film or TV program. You always go deep into your past to copy from it and seldom really create something. You go back to Greece or Rome, in the best of cases, or to Attila or the Vikings, in the worst.

You are also tied up by current morality. Godforbid if you show some kind of sexual experimentation that has not been accepted in the present. And, boy, you are in for a surprise in your own future when advance surgery and neurosurgery can provide you with new sexual organs or erogenous zones in the most unexpected parts of your body!

• Ralph Rewes: I find some of our TV and movie props quite realistic for an advanced culture. Your opinion?

Mr. Armluz: The problem with props and clothes has to do a lot with the material you used to build them. Back in the 50's you showed computers that today look rudimentary. It was because nobody then imagined the materials that you are using now to make these modern nice-looking computers.

No matter how advanced you are today you still can't show a 3D TV set working. I laughed out loud when a writer thought television out of the future in one of the New Generation episodes (when they rescued two men and a woman frozen in the past). He must have been influenced by a dull atmosphere reflected on episode by the stiff, militarized people who compose the Enterprise crew.

Television in our planets is alive and kicking. It is a means for art and communication. Of course it is transformed by interaction and multimedia, but if it disappears, 80% of our culture would go with it.

VCR also exists, however, in our case, we play half-inch cubes, instead of the little tubes used in Star Trek (although, this is an imaginative alternative. Television is actually now a mini-holographic room, with no substance at all. Star Trek solidifying holographic room is quite valid. In fact, it was the first step toward the physical reconstruction by atomic regrouping.

• Ralph Rewes: What's atomic regrouping?

Mr. Armluz: You will soon discover a cosmic law that does not allow anything in the Universe to be frozen or to keep its shape permanently. It does not allow any shape to remain the same for more than a certain period of time.

The problem starts because all advanced life forms like to keep museums and save certain objects for which they have some kind of visual or sonic attachment. We did it, and you will, too, try to freeze forever a lot of works of art by copying them using almost indestructible materials. The result was unexpectedly chaotic.

• Ralph Rewes: What happened?

Mr. Armluz: Weird things happened. Microscopic black holes popped out everywhere, unbalancing the surrounding, rippling the atmosphere, you name it! To reestablish order and equilibrium we did extensive research and discovered that we had to stop freezing things until we found a way out for keeping what we wanted or what we considered worth preserving forever was to regroup their atoms. This is how it works. We made an atomic copy of the object in questions. Then, after a period of time, according to the material utilized, we let those atoms go loose, picked up new atoms and regrouped them into another copy. That way, we kept on doing copies without freezing the atoms, thus avoiding chaotic molecular situations.

• Ralph Rewes: Do you apply that procedure to dwellings, vehicles, consumer products and the like?

Mr. Armluz: Especially those items you just mentioned. By logic, regrouping accelerates progress. Consequently, people [atomic-regroup their houses, and everything they like to keep every five Earth years ? a reasonable period.

• Ralph Rewes: How did you solve ecological problems? Can you regroup things alive?

Mr. Armluz: Trying to regroup living things is not wise. Life forms follow certain cosmic patterns that we don't like to mess around with. We can't go that far. But we had to rearrange the living areas of our planets (three in our system). Allow me a comment, our civilization is composed by hundreds of different countries with different languages and cultures. Most planet in the Universe are like that, not at all as the planets depicted in Star Trek where people are ruled by some global dictatorship (maybe two) controlling the whole planet.

Unity is not possible with advanced intelligence. There are also different forms of intelligent life. There are humanoids like me. They are also grizke (bird-like sensitive creatures, my best friend ? not lover ? is a grizku) and uskle (fish-like telepathic creatures that, for sure, remind me of your dolphins).

Going back to ecology. To protect each of our planets, which in reality, is a living entity, we decided to set apart huge patches of land and fenced them out from all intelligent life forms, who were kept away from them. Intelligent beings live in huge cities built in artificial bubbles or, in the case of uskle in similar oceanic reservations. Finally, the planets got crisscrossed by glass-roofed passages. This glass called krumu, almost indestructible, has to be regroup every ten years.

• Ralph Rewes: Are you here in some kind of official mission?

Mr. Armluz: Not at all. There is no government as you know it in our worlds. We only follow laws, no leaders. There is no ruling group. I am here on my own. All I needed was a scientific authorization to open a door on Earth — and here I am!

• Ralph Rewes: You mean, you can be now here on Earth and next second on your planet?

Mr. Armluz: Yes. I wouldn't be here without a door to my planet. Earth is a dangerous place, more dangerous than the wild animal reserves in Kerahl. I never get out of my house without my body shield. Nobody can get in or out of this place unless he goes with me and I program the shield computer to allow it.

• Ralph Rewes: Oh, that was why I had to wait outside for you to come in and go out ? ahh. Another question, I had a terrible cold, but it disappeared the moment I came in.

Mr. Armluz: Of course. You see, the door of this apartment acts as a decontaminating device, when you get in, the door kills all germs not belonging to your body system or to your symbiotic system. You are clean as a whistle now.

• Ralph Rewes: What's the name of your planet?

Mr. Armluz: Planets. There are three: Novahr, Molbehn and Silwahn. They are collectively called Kerahl. Please pronounce the "h" distinctly. I am from Novahr.
 

• Ralph Rewes: One final question, Mr. Armluz. Since you can go back and forth from your planet. Do you live here or there?

Mr. Armluz: I live on Earth most of the time, but not here. I live underwater in the Atlantic Ocean. Very peaceful down there. I have wave equipment that works much better on the bottom of the ocean to pick up radio and TV receptions from all over the world. Let me accompany you out. By the way, this apartment will be vacant tomorrow, so you can print this interview, of course, but it will be only science fiction. Have a good night, Mr. Rewes!
 

• Ralph Rewes: Good night. One more thing, Mr. Armluz. Can you give me an incontestable proof that you really are an Extraterrestrial?

He dropped his pants. He was a Lower.