Member-only story
Bennie: The Alien Among Us
And his mission on Earth
Bennie was a popular guy in the neighborhood. What no one knew is that he was an alien from outer space. No one knew because he was using a perfectly normal human body and he had downloaded all the appropriate language and colloquialisms of the area as well as all the collective human knowledge and customs. He also went to the local library and read every single book they had in about twenty minutes without ever cracking open a book.
Of course he also retained all the knowledge that he came into the planet with. He was considerably more intelligent than all the humans in the neighborhood. The hardest thing for him in regard to interacting with those humans was learning how to lie.
When people asked Bennie where he was from he said Chattanooga, mostly because he liked the sound of that word. It was delightful to say. Plus, Chattanooga was far enough away from the neighborhood that surely no one would go there to research his non-existent history there.
When people asked him about his family he told them that they had all died in a fiery plane crash. He noticed that this seemed to immediately illicit sympathy and kept everyone from further inquiry. He had a feeling, though, that some day someone would ask him which plane crash.
