They’re letting Arthurs take the bar exam.
You wouldn’t think it right, to see one of those oily purple exoskeletons crammed into a beige plastic institutional chair-desk combo, flipping pages and clicking meditatively over a particularly complicated Contracts question.
You might see one outside the building, during the 15-minute recess between Torts and Civil Procedure, puffing on a single-use gas station vape, sucking sticky clouds of mango-scented nicotine into one of their fluttering book lungs, pulsating with lymph. They stare up, past the clouds, dreaming of subject matter jurisdiction and world domination, or maybe just thinking of home.
“They’ve got three brains,” Matt protests to me, sotto voce, on our first day of Advanced Advocacy. “How is that fair?” he questions, angling his complaint a few seats behind us, where one of the school’s Arthurs perches, cleaning his antennae and pulling a legal pad out of his satchel.
“I’ve just got the one and it’s all I can do to remember the rule against perpetuities – and these fuckers got three? They can play mock trial in their heads, judge-state-defense.” Matt laughs like a shovelful of gravel. The Arthur chirps melodically. I don’t know if it’s a laugh, or if the big bugs even have a sense of humor where they come from.
Most of the big firms – Bleicher and Strange, Walker and Walker, Granger LLP – have a few Arthurs on staff now. They pick them out of the big East Coast schools: Georgetown, Yale, Harvard, and put them to work on fat retainers and big contracts. They’re doing workplace law, mediation between tech billionaire babies bitching about copyright infringement, helping settle mineral rights on Europa. Ever since the first one rocketed out of the eclipse and came to rest, perspiring from reentry heat, in a Nebraska cornfield, it’s been a new world for litigation.
Cornfield birth – like Superman, but if Kal-El had compound eyes, shimmering with rainbows, and a six-legged suit of crab armor. They turned that farmer’s field into a protected site now, I was reading. Friendship Falls National Monument, or something. Sounds like a kid’s show, something my little sister would have watched on Nickelodeon or Sprout. The Pentagon cabbageheads got everything they could out of the crash site, and now the police tape and buzzcut National Guard checkpoints are gone.
There’s a big bronze statue there now, where John Deere robo-tractors used to mow down swaths of Monsanto corn to turn into Chili-Lime Cheetos and Fanta Pina Colada. A Norman Rockwell man, broad-shouldered and straight-backed, shaking hands with an Arthur, like one of those Art Deco statues they built under FDR.
Matt and I are day drinking at Miguel’s, this dive near campus. I have a brief for class to finish that evening but Matt’s done, so he’s sucking down well tequila between cans of Rainier, and lamenting the grading of his Property midterm.
“Stupid. Fucker. Idiot.” He beats forehead with one fist, slams shot glass on the bar with the other. “Can’t get it right. I’m switching careers. Going back to the army.” He tears apart a Deschutes coaster, shredding the cardboard into tiny white fragments. The bartender, who looks like a piece of bison jerky in a Misfits t-shirt, polishes a glass and scowls at Matt, but he’s too drunk to notice. “Selling customs on OnlyFans. Hundred bucks an hour.”
“No one wants to see that.”
“Someone might. Sick demented sugar mommy. Girls like dad bods now. I saw that on Twitter.”
“Is that what they call it?”
“Won’t call it X.”
“No, dad-bod.”
“Yeah.”
“I would have called you a fat fuck.”
Matt zings the remains of the coaster at me across the table, giggling with glee. “Cocksucker, you retard-" He’s cut short by the door swinging open, and we both turn around instinctively to see if it’s someone from class who’ll pitch a shit fit if they hear us saying the R-word, but it’s one of the new 1L Arthurs slithering up to the bar.
The bartender keeps polishing, by instinct, but you can still see the residual ripple of shock run through his face as the 1L sits down and adjusts his talkbox, strapped under his mouthparts. “Modelo, please,” the box squelches out in tremulous Autotune, “Draft?”
“No draft,” Jerky Boy says, putting some bass in his voice. “Bottle. Rainier on draft. Or Pacifico.”
“Bottle, then,” comes the laryngectomy mic buzz, and the bartender retrieves a bottle, perspiring with frost, from the lowboy fridge.
The Arthur gingerly places a few dollars on the counter, and scuttles away to a table where the last half of the Penguins-Kraken game is playing on the holo-screen. A song off The Arcs’ first record is playing, gently, over Miguel’s tinny speakers and I hum along, like a child scared of the dark, singing to ward off bad medicine. No one is around to hear me, besides Matt and the bartender and the Arthur. “I’m barely here, I’m barely there, expect me home, any day, now real soon…” The Arthur hunches over his beer like a medieval gargoyle or a Bosch monster, sucking down the Modelo froth with his mosquito mouthparts.
They metabolize alcohol similarly to us. Good drinking buddies, so I’ve heard. None of Matt’s cross-eyed belligerence after a few G&Ts, and none of my weepy bullshit about some ex or another. Just a nice, even buzz. I saw a schizo on some /x/ thread theorizing that they’re actually hyperevolved prehistoric humans, taken far away by some long-forgotten ancient aliens, and subjected to evolutionary forces beyond our comprehension, giving them shells of chitin and legs of hyper-extended prehensility. “Then something called them home,” hypothesized the /x/ anon. Replies were uncharitable.
“>mfw im retarded”
“>trips of truth”
“>formerly chuck’s”
And so on.
People wonder where they’re from. They think, based on their biology, it’s a world similar to Earth, with a slightly higher gravity. They breathe the same kind of air – oxygen, nitrogen, some argon. They’re carbon-based, like us.
But one night, I saw where they came from. They showed me. I walked up to one sucking the brainstem out of a stray dog and he showed me where he came from, far beyond the stars. It’s different there – but it’s close enough.
I’m in the alley, late at night, stumbling home from a sloppy end-of-midterms bash at Matt’s. You can cut through to my apartment building using the alley behind this Mexican restaurant that always gives me the runs, if you can resist the urge to take off running through the blackness when a milk crate or a bag of beer cans clatters to the ground behind you. Whistle past the graveyard, I tell myself, and don’t start picking up speed, else you’ll never stop until you run – smack – into a telephone pole or the side of a dumpster.
I’m hum-whistling the song from Jaws that Brody and Quint and Hooper all sing, drunkenly, aboard the Orca before the shark hits the side of the boat – “Show me the way to go home,” harmonizing with myself on the “bum bum bum”s and forcing my feet into a measured pace.
He’s there – wiry proboscis inserted into the scruff of a twitching Doberman’s neck. I’ve seen that dog around the last few weeks, digging through trash or chasing screaming co-eds home from Greek Row. The dog, dubbed “The Beast,” after the St. Bernard from the Sandlot movies, made a stir on campus, and emails had been sent out from admin advising undergrads to “maintain a reasonable distance, and contact Campus Security in the event of an encounter.” Matt had drunkenly discussed taking it down with a suppressed AR and turning it into a rug for his apartment.
But now here it is, twitching in the claws of an Invader from Mars, getting sucked dry for a midnight snack. I didn’t know they did that.
For a moment, the Arthur and I just stand there, looking at each other. He looks like a kid with his hand stuck in the cookie jar, and I half expect him to shrug his shoulders and say something like "Did I do that?” But he’s silent.
He slowly puts down the dog, cradling it in his arms, gingerly setting the carcass on the pavement. Far away, an owl hoots, and the distant crash of bottles, drunken shouting, and the latest Playboi Carti single signals midnight revelry. I don’t want to be here. I’ve disturbed a private ritual. I’ve seen too much.
The Arthur puts his claw on my shoulder. The weight of it burns, stooping me to one side. He runs his antennae along my forehead, and they feel like falling leaves or fire ash drifting down, down to the center of the earth. He snaps his talkbox off with a squelch of static, but I can still hear him somehow, in lightly accented English inside my skull. “Look. Home.”
Images flash with a burning intensity into my head – a barren, rocky landscape, peppered with craters and veiled by fog. Underneath – tunnels, lit with glowing fungus, dug out of the rock and clay of an alien world. The Arthurs are there, hundreds of thousands of them, hammering away and welding on ships that look eerily similar to the ones that slammed into that cornfield years ago.
An Arthur crawls into one of the ships – the doors are riveted shut behind him, and it rockets into the abyss, followed by one, ten, hundreds, thousands more. A fleet of craft, like a swarm of bees, all aimed in the same direction. It’s never shown, but I know it’s towards a little blue planet that’s developed common law and automatic firearms and Coors Banquet tallboys.
The images stop, and I stumble backwards into the side of the alley, my head splitting, nose bleeding. The Arthur picks up the dog, and walks away into the inky gloom. I call after him, throat hoarse. “Why did you show this to me?”
He doesn’t answer.
“What does it mean?”
His talkbox still off, I can hear the Arthur’s voice echoing through my brain through whatever residual psychic link remains between us, man and spaceman.
“More are coming.”
-- Jacob Hersh is a junior partner at Fear & Loathing, LLP. You can retain his legal services on Twitter at @youngjakeinc.