2084-H

Chris sat in the police station.
"Where is Michael Smith?" asked the police woman.
"I'm not going to tell you."
"Doctor," said the policeman to a middle aged man who was wearing a suit, "he's on PCL. It's supposed to make them fully compliant so they do exactly as they're told."
"Not quite. Some people can resist the injection. Chris was one of the very first patients to be given pre-frontal chemical lobotomy treatment by injection. He's had 30 years to get used to it. I could give him something stronger." The doctor loaded a syringe with a clear liquid. "I must warn you very strongly that xylozine must only ever be used in an institutional setting. If you have a patient on xylozine they must not be allowed to walk down the street on their own. The drug induces a low anxiety state. A patient on xylozine might walk out in front of a bus convinced that it would not harm them." 

He injected Chris in his left arm. After a few seconds, Chris started laughing, grinning like a Cheshire cat while the doctor was still adjusting his shirt sleeve and putting a blue elastoplast over the little cut.
"A police station is a happy place. It has a warm family atmosphere. We are all here today because we want to help people. Isn't that good?"
"Yes," said the police woman, smiling at Chris. "We don't want to punish Michael, we only want to help him. Help him see the error of his ways."
"Indeed. The error of his ways. The aliens came to save the world and what thanks do they get from people like him? He's on that radio every day, blasting them. If you see an alien spaceship, don't get into it. If you see an alien at the foot of the bed, sing a hymn or recite your favourite psalm. It will go away. Michael is against the flying saucer cults but they heal people. When was the last time you saw a Christian like Michael open the eyes of the blind? The flying saucer cults are like the film, The Tomorrow People, they are evolving humanity to the next stage, the stage of evolution where we all become telepaths, psychic beings with miraculous powers. The whole universe will evolve into a living organism and we will all find Christ consciousness. We will all be one."

"Why do you help him?" asked the policeman. Chris burst out laughing.
"One of us has been deceived. I suppose, the answer may be, I've never really been sure which one of us has been deceived. Michael Smith of the Sacred Name Radio Broadcast, perhaps he has been deceived. You all think he's been deceived, right? Or the flying saucer cults, they have been deceived. My dilemma is that it would be lovely to believe that all the religions of the world were basically the same but, inevitably, that is impossible. Either Michael Smith is right or the flying saucer cults are right. Either the aliens are The Tomorrow People or flying saucers are an evil supernatural deception. Uncertain, at the time, of what I really believed about aliens and having some reservations about the way they seem to take control of people's lives with their almost daily close encounters, I decided to offer Michael my assistance as an electronics engineer."
"What did you do?" asked the policeman.
"I bought a set of radio equipment. Walkie talkies, our grandparents called them. One for me, one for him. He lived in a tent in a field, I lived in a van in a village a few miles away, and he would preach his sermon over the radio every day. I would record it and, when I recorded it, the GPRS signature on the sound recording would show exactly where I had been when I recorded it. But I could drive 50 miles, I could play the sound recording back through a loudspeaker, and I could record it again and upload it to the internet. I could do this in a different place every time. It was the ultimate plan. The authorities would not know where the broadcast was coming from. They would not know where Michael Smith was living. He was living in a tent in a field. He never spent any money, I just brought him things. No electronic trail. For 5 years we got away with this. Then a policeman came into the village. There were not many policeman in the village. I was suspicious. This guy was hanging around the village for days. He came to the van. He asked me what the radio was for. I said I was a radio amateur. Actually, I have passed the amateur radio exam and I do have a licence. He asked me what a radio amateur was. I said that I could talk to people all over the world on that little radio. That explanation seemed to satisfy the policeman. That afternoon I radioed Michael and told him. He said, they're onto us. Michael would have to disappear. I should buy him a train ticket to London. He would go to London and just blend in with a million homeless people who live in greater London, within the limits of the M25 orbital motorway. The police would never be able to find him among a million homeless people."
"We'll soon see about that," said the policeman. "Notify all the social service centres, homeless day centres and night shelters in the Greater London area. Use all the CCTV cameras on the AI network. See if they can find that face." 

Unknown to Chris, Michael Smith had never arrived in London. The train from the village went to Liverpool and you had to change for London at either Doncaster or Sheffield. Michael had asked Chris for a ticket that was valid via any route. He had got off the train at Sheffield and never boarded the train to London. He would stay in Sheffield. Sheffield was a perfectly good city to be homeless in. The police would be looking for him in the wrong place. Michael Smith wore a cloth cap and sunglasses. Although his last few hundred broadcasts had been podcasts there were plenty of video recordings of him from several years ago still in circulation. He was a famous man of God all over the world and easily recognised. He tried to avoid going to free food centres that might be frequented by large numbers of homeless people and volunteers. Michael would sit beside a shop doorway and wait for someone to buy him something to eat. It was surprising how many people did. Michael could easily eat 2 or 3 times a day if he sat for 15 hours in a busy shop doorway. The vast majority of people would politely ignore him but a few were really friendly, especially as Michael didn't put them off by demanding money if someone simply said hello. There was this woman called Anna. Every day she would ask Michael what he wanted from inside the shop.
"A sandwich," he would say. "Any kind. Beggars can't be choosers." One day Anna gave him a leaflet.
"Would you like to come to our church?"
"Do you think they'd let me in?"
"I should think they would. The pastor's wife used to work in a centre for the homeless. We have lunch together on a Sunday. It's Sunday today. Come with me. You're very welcome."

In spite of the possibility of being recognised by someone, Michael might have aroused even more suspicion if he had said no. He also had a feeling of peace that this was what God wanted him to do. He had the cloth cap and the dark glasses and now quite a few weeks of facial hair growth. If anyone recognised him now, they would recognise him by his voice. The woman led him a mile across Sheffield city centre to a rented community hall.
"I used to be in a flying saucer cult," she said. "Monday night is Miracle Night. Come and be healed. I healed people with this strange heat that used to come from my hands, which was exciting at first, but it did absolutely nothing to change me. We meditated. It didn't work. It was supposed to transcend you to a higher plane. I couldn't transcend the skin off a rice pudding. I was supposed to be one with God. I never felt further away from him. I found I was becoming a very selfish person. Just me and my alien companions in our little spaceship flying around. As long as we were all right it didn't matter what we did to other people. We did cruel things. People who get into a flying saucer expect a little pleasure flight. They don't expect a surgical operation. They don't expect to be experimented on. Then, once they are involved in the medical research programme, we never let them go. Some of these people have been abducted every night for years. They're physically exhausted. They have children to us. We are creating a hybrid race that will look a lot more like ordinary people. A form of hybrid exists already. The alien politicians that you see and the aliens that live on Mars are hybrids - they're half alien, half human. That's why they have a stable physical form. A pure alien doesn't. They can materialise for a few hours but then they must return to their own dimension. That's what they will say that humanity is evolving into, but it's a homo sapien alien hybrid. They will say that that is the next step along the evolutionary ladder. The children have supernatural powers. They can heal people. They can teleport themselves a short distance. They can read people's minds. But it's a lie. They're not us evolving into a new thing. They're an alien hybrid. Then I came across a preacher called Michael Smith. Have you ever heard of him?"
"No, I can't say I have."
"He answered all my questions. He seemed to know all about it. He knew what they were all up to. He explained how I could find peace with God. I was a sinner and needed to have faith in Jesus. My sins had seperated me from God. I would never find Christ consciousness by wanting to be one with the universe. Are you sure you haven't heard of him? Do you live near him? Your accent is the same. Where are you from?"
"Sheffield for the last 30 years but I grew up in Jarrow."
"He does have a very unusual accent. He said that the aliens would want me back. Once I'd been on the support team, they'd never leave me alone. He said that whenever they turned up I should stand there with a great big Bible and read the psalms. Then they would disappear. A few years of that and the flying saucers and aliens didn't return anymore."

Michael arrived at the church. The pastor began preaching.
"How do I know that Jesus will come in my lifetime? Come on Pastor, people have been saying that for hundreds of years. What makes you so sure? Well, no other generation has seen the signs that we see. 'Men will faint with fear because of what is coming on the world for the heavenly bodies will be shaken.' The powers of Heaven will come down. The flying saucers came down, all right. The aliens are terrorising people. They won't leave them alone. Some people have been abducted every night for weeks and subject to cruel experiments. So these alien hybrids are born. As it was in the days of Noah. God won't stand for that. It's the end, all right." A child of about 12 jumped up from his seat and interrupted the pastor's sermon.
"I am an alien hybrid. What's wrong with it?"
"You may be tempted to abuse your powers."
"Oh, I have abused my powers. I have jumped the queue in the supermarket and teleported myself right in front of the cash tills. You say that I can read people's thoughts. Have you any idea how much effort it takes to read somebody's mind?"
"Can you only communicate with another telepath?"
"No, I could communicate with you if you would open up a bit but your mind is like a clenched fist. I can't read your thoughts without your permission and without some co-operation on your part." The pastor continued his sermon.
"And this flying saucer religion, it's a deception. It denies Christ. They say the universe is Christ and that I can be Christ and you can be Christ. Every false religion denies Christ. It's just too inconvenient to have a crucuified saviour. How can you possibly unite humanity if they're all dirty rotten sinners and they're on their way to Hell? You can't. So you need deception. Oh, we can be reformed. Oh, we can evolve into something else that isn't sinful anymore. But we can't. Our sins have separated us from God. We are totally lost without Christ."

They had lunch together. A simple meal of DIY sandwiches from bread rolls, cheese and meat laid out on the table. There were baked potatoes and baked beans and a choice of spreadable butter or vegetable margarine in case anyone might happen to be vegan. Michael relaxed for a few moments and enjoyed the food. He hadn't been discovered. There was a chance that if he kept coming to this church he might be recognised eventually. Anna had recognised his accent although not his voice. The alien hybrid child could read people's minds, although they said it was very difficult. Michael wondered how easy it would be for Anna to recognise him, realise the danger he was in and try to keep it secret but reveal it to the hybrid child by telepathy. Didn't Anna know something about opening up her mind? She had been in a flying saucer cult. Neither of these things had happened yet but if they could happen eventually they would. Michael went for a long walk that afternoon. Far away from Anna. Far away from this church. He walked for an hour and a half until he came to another shopping centre. There to begin the same process again of sitting next to a shop doorway befriending shoppers and occasionally picking up food, blending in with the thousands of homeless people who wandered around a city the size of Sheffield. Michael sat down next to a shop entrance contemplating what it would be like to spend the rest of his life hiding among the homeless, a secret identity hidden from the police. He decided it was better than turning himself in and being put back on those injections.