Icarus looked up and down the streets trying to find a way through the crowd of aliens. It reminded him a lot of downtown New York on a busy day.
The rows and rows of people were all moving deliberately through the chaos. He really wanted to follow the crowd and find a spot to watch the other aliens’ arrival.
Icarus noted that one good thing about these aliens was their design of public transport. Icarus guessed he was looking at a sea of maybe a million people, all moving like sardines in the same direction. He and Ship were even bumped into a couple of times as people moved past.
Icarus was glad these aliens didn’t use cars. It would have been complete gridlock if they had this many people moving in the same direction on any of his planets, where cars were still one of the primary means of transport.
Icarus thought some more about it and realized he hadn’t seen any children and wondered how they moved through the city. The air canals were potentially dangerous to anyone small. He knew that they didn’t populate like humans. Only chosen ones had the ability to impregnate others. But surely there would still be little ones around.
Icarus began scanning the crowd looking for any signs of young aliens. As if answering his question, Icarus saw an alien riding some sort of scooter-looking thing along the air canal. Belted onto the side of the scooter were two smaller aliens. Icarus wondered whether that was a pram of sorts.
“We need to go watch the arrival of these alien gods.”
Ship looked a little worried. “I was hoping we could regroup with Lex. We can watch it on the TV.”
“We can’t miss this live, Ship. This is the biggest event this country will have this year. It’s our opportunity to see who’s really behind the curtain, see the alien controlling everything on this planet.”
Icarus couldn’t get over the fact there was another intelligent alien on this planet. He wondered how that alien had coevolved with the penguin-looking aliens. How did it all work? His mind started to race through possibilities. Icarus knew that cats and dogs had become smarter and more docile because humans had unknowingly selected animals with specific traits. Humans deliberately bred sausage dogs, dogs that were small and long, so they could fit into badger holes. Humans effectively made them for hunting.
From what he understood, these godlike aliens controlled who on the planet could have children. Through controlling who the chosen ones were, they wielded the real power—they controlled the gene pool of this species.
“Ship, which do you think came first?” Icarus asked. “The aliens with the god complex or the aliens that look like penguins?”
“Is that some kind of chicken-or-the-egg joke?”
Icarus laughed; he honestly wasn’t thinking like that. Although, now that Ship pointed it out, he wished he had come up with a similar joke. “It’s a serious question. Who came first, the penguins or the gods?”
“It has to be the gods, if they really are the ones controlling everything. But then, why would they go inside of the penguins? And the penguins need to exist for them to enter.” Then Ship scratched his head, another human action he needed to stop doing. “Neither of them turn into each other, so I’m not sure.”
“I get the feeling the gods became intelligent first and selected for the most intelligent penguins. But I’m just guessing. It sounds like these two species coevolved,” Icarus mused. “We need to find a way to interact with these other aliens. We need to understand how they think.” He paused, noticing Ship’s discomfort at the idea. “Don’t worry, Ship, we’ll be fully prepared for meeting them when the time comes. And if that means heading back to Lex, then we’ll do that.”
Icarus noticed Ship’s tension noticeably drop with that comment, so he took that as a sign it was time for them to move forward.
Icarus was getting used to his organ for sensing changes in magnetic fields. He noticed that having this many aliens around wasn’t as daunting when he used that organ. With the organ, he gained a better understanding of just how many people there were. But he also saw the gaps in the crowd too. The ways he could move in order to not get stuck.
There was a gap in the air canal coming up. Not only could he tell that there was a space along the tube he and Ship could jump into, he also saw that no other alien was moving to take advantage of it.
He wasn’t used to sensing the magnetic fields of aliens yet but was guessing each person had a unique fingerprint. He was almost certain the auras he and Ship were giving off weren’t quite right. He knew Lex was going to have to do a lot of upgrading to their avatars once they got back with this new treasure trove of information. “Ship, there’s a gap in the flow.”
Icarus guided them toward the alien wind transport, and they jumped in. They were blown down the track faster than before. Icarus could feel himself and Ship were being forced to catch up to the aliens in front of them.
Icarus couldn’t tell if this was a simple matter of air currents naturally flowing to make this happen. The air canal might have a computer or something pulling the strings. Icarus realized how impressive the design of it was. The reason he was able to notice a gap in the flow of aliens was this air canal had created it. And the reason no other alien was moving quickly to take that gap was because they trusted there would be others.
Icarus felt the aliens all around him getting denser and denser. Icarus was struggling to get a read on everyone as they were so tightly packed in.
Interestingly, Icarus knew exactly where he was in relation to the beach everyone was heading toward. He could feel everyone around him and knew he wasn’t going to find any place to view what was happening through the crowd.
The locals kept scrambling toward that one place though. And because these aliens were so small, Icarus was sure no one but the people at the very front would be able to see.
The air canal was about to split up ahead: One way would take him into the denser part of the crowd. The other way would take him up on a hill, where he sensed a lot fewer aliens. From the top of that hill, he would be able to see everything clearly. He wondered why not that many aliens were gathered up there.
Then Icarus thought about it a bit more. Maybe they weren’t expecting to see it all with their eyes. Maybe everyone would be using that organ that was unique to these aliens.
Icarus needed to make a decision quickly; the turning point was coming up. He decided to watch from the top of the hill. Even though the prospect of watching everything from a truly alien perspective was tempting, he and Ship still favored their eyes as a means of taking in information. He doubted they had the knowledge to properly experience it all.
Turning right, he exited the air canal at the top of the ridge, a good few hundred meters away. He sensed Ship pulling up behind him.
With their enhanced eyes, they could zoom in on the excitement and watch as if they were in the front row. There were several people around them. Icarus assumed they didn’t have as good of eyesight as humans. On Earth, this would’ve been the perfect spot.
Icarus grabbed hold of Ship’s hand. He didn’t want to take any chances of someone overhearing their conversation. He was painfully aware that their magnetic resonance, or whatever it was called, was different from everyone else’s. He made it a priority to come up with a name for this sense the aliens had.
“Do you have any ANTs?” Icarus asked. “Any that can sense magnetic fields?”
“A couple. Why?”
“I want to get a recording of everything that happens down there.” Icarus pointed to the sea of aliens all crammed together near the water. “I want to see if there’s anything else we are missing.”
Ship knelt down toward the ground, pretending he was picking up something. Out of the palm of his flipper, a micro-ANT jumped out. It immediately started to go across the ground before flying high up into the sky.
Quickly, it crossed the distance and dropped like a rock, scurrying to hide beneath the sand.
“The ANT will stay there, recording everything. And once the beach is empty, it’ll swim its way back to Lex with everything it recorded,” Ship said.
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Icarus watched as a giant spacecraft appeared along the horizon, a large floating circular ship, similar to the one that had encountered Atlas and the others. It was moving toward the beach quickly. The speed left a noticeable ripple across the water.
Icarus focused on the magnetic lines created by the large ship. It was leaving noticeable patterns in the water. And those ripples were multiplied by the water—creating an interesting effect to Icarus’s ability to sense echolocations.
Icarus was glad he’d made the decision to send a small ANT down there. To humans, it would have made more sense for them to fly in from the sky, so everyone could see what was happening clearly. But Icarus now understood why everyone was crowded down by the beach.
Unlike using human eyes, sensing the world through a magnetic field or echolocation wasn’t impeded by others being in the way. So every single one of those aliens out there in the crowd was probably experiencing the arrival of their gods as if they were in the very front row.
The alien spacecraft was hovering just above the water. Icarus guessed it was one hundred meters away from the beach.
The water around the ship started to shake violently. Then the waves began oscillating and moving back and forth. Icarus saw several standing waves appearing all around. There was a deep message being told in those waves. Icarus made it his mission to translate what was said later.
The water right beneath the alien spacecraft started to move upward, almost like an invisible straw had appeared below the ship. The column of water became thicker and thicker as it continued to rise up slowly toward the alien vessel.
Once it reached the ship, it stopped moving. Icarus used his enhanced vision to take a closer look. The water was crystal clear, however they were using the hapticgraphic engine; it was suspending water perfectly still above the ground. Icarus knew Atlas would be interested in this application of similar tech to what he’d invented.
Icarus saw dark-black fish swimming up the column of water.
“I think that’s the aliens coming out of the water,” Ship said. “Enhance your vision and you can see they look almost like eels or squid.”
Icarus looked closer; he saw those animals looked very similar to the cephalopod-like animals Lex had first seen swimming around the base it had constructed.
Icarus wasn’t religious, but he found himself praying that it was a different species. He hoped those squid-looking mollusks were distant relatives of these animals and not them.
This was his first time ever seeing the aliens, so differentiating between them and evolutionary cousins was impossible.
He wondered whether they would have a similar struggle trying to tell humans apart from monkeys. In his mind, a gorilla and a human were obviously different. But maybe an alien that evolved to distinguish between different tentacle shapes couldn’t tell which was which.
Icarus turned to see Ship and noticed his face. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. It was a clear human look of worry. He obviously realized they might be the same aliens that Lex had scared away when they’d first arrived.
Icarus shook Ship’s hand. “Don’t worry. They look different from the animals hanging around our base underwater,” Icarus lied because he wasn’t sure himself. But he knew there wasn’t much point in worrying too much, as they couldn’t do anything about it. Icarus assumed they wouldn’t be there right now if their cover was blown. So he assumed there was a low likelihood of it being the same animal as before.
Before Icarus had a chance to think about it all a little longer, things around the alien spacecraft began to change. The outside of the ship began to move and deform like water. It looked like a bunch of material was being spewed out of the spacecraft. It was forming like a small wave.
The penguin aliens near the waterfront started moving side to side as if a wave was moving through them all. Icarus was almost confident they were reacting to a change in magnetic fields.
They began taking off their clothes and throwing them to the side. Icarus noticed a lot of them already had no tops on.
Out the front of the alien spacecraft a platform appeared. It was massive. It shimmered in the light, clearly designed to carry something. The platform dipped into the water.
The penguin-looking aliens began clambering over one another, every one of them moving as quickly as they could to clamber onto the platform.
Icarus watched as thousands of these now-naked aliens shuffled their way onto the submerged stand.
This went on for a good long while.
“These must be the chosen ones,” Icarus said.
“This actually looks like a penguin colony.”
Icarus agreed with Ship’s assessment; it did look like a colony of the birds. It was amazing how the evolutionary paths were so similar.
The platform began to rise, and the aliens began floating up.
Icarus watched as several unlucky ones fell off the edge and back into the water.
There were a few thousand aliens all piled up waiting for something to happen.
What happened next would stay with Icarus for the rest of his life. It was the most disturbing ritual he’d ever seen.
Several pipelike objects on top of the spacecraft opened up right above the platform all the penguins were standing on.
Then it began raining the squid aliens. Hundreds of the little slimy aliens began falling from the tubes that now appeared. They landed on the faces of the penguins and slid down into their chest cavities.
It was an open space in their chests that developed specifically for these other aliens. Icarus felt like he could hear a slurping sound as the cephalopods crawled inside. He couldn’t actually hear that because he was too far away, but his mind had no problems making up the disgusting sounds.
“This is like a nightmare of a horror movie,” Ship said.
“I’ve had to turn off my gag reflex. This is worse than that scene from The Suicide Squad.”
“Imagine all these things attacking humans on our planet. Squirming inside everyone’s brain. Entering through the nose to control their minds.”
Icarus shuddered at the thought. That was the worst kind of alien invasion. “New subject. I can’t get that image out of my mind.”
“Do you think they’ve visited Earth? Do you think they’ve done that already? They freely admit that they pushed humanity toward the simulation.”
Icarus thought about it. That was a great question. These aliens had evolved to enter the minds of another alien species, to take over their bodies and control them but also make them smarter.
Icarus was starting to gain an understanding of why the Atua did what it did. It did to humans what felt natural. They didn’t see anything wrong with taking over the minds of another sentient species. Humans were like these penguin aliens. “They did come to Earth and enter our minds—metaphorically. I don’t think they burrowed into our brains physically. It wouldn’t work. They didn’t evolve to interact with our brain chemistry.
“But they did find another way to get inside our heads,” Icarus continued. “They pushed everyone into the simulation, where they could take control of everything we thought about. Manipulate us in ways we didn’t know.”
Icarus was starting to see the world from these Atua’s perspective. He knew now that the alien Atlas and the others had met was this squid-like alien. This was the Atua. The penguins were a different alien altogether.
Icarus tried to shift his perspective, change his way of thinking, look at this situation from the aliens’ perspective. Was there an alien version of anthropomorphizing? he wondered to himself. “Do you think the Atua believe they are helping the penguins?” Icarus didn’t have another name for the penguin-looking aliens so decided to just call them the penguins for now.
“They are giving them the ability to breed. They’re changing their sex. The penguins wouldn’t survive to reproduce without them. So yes, I do.”
Icarus tried to think about these aliens coming to Earth to brainwash humanity. “Do you believe they thought they were helping humanity when they went to Earth and attempted to manipulate everyone?”
Ship opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. There was a long pause as his mind worked through the question. “I’m not sure. I don’t know enough about them. If I were to guess, I don’t think they cared whether they were helping us or not. If you think about it, we brought a bunch of embryos, animals, and plant life from Mars to a completely different star system. We didn’t stop once to ask whether any of those things would mind. If you think about it, we moved hundreds of unfertilized human eggs and sperm across two sections of the Milky Way. In some ways, that’s like moving a human to another planet without asking them. You wouldn’t do that to a human against their will—but we did with the ingredients for humans.”
Icarus understood the point Ship was trying to make. It went back to the philosophical argument of when life begins. Was sperm life? Was an egg life? What made it different when the two ingredients came together?
In Icarus’s mind, what he’d done was completely ethical. There wasn’t some grey area; none of it was human life until the embryo started to grow. None of his people regretted what he did for them; none of them wanted to go back to Sol.
The Atua probably had a similar understanding of the facts. They saw nothing wrong with controlling humans in the way they did. In all honesty, most of the humans still back on Earth were probably grateful for it.
Trying to look at the world from the perspective of the Atua was beginning to hurt Icarus’s head.
He started to look again at the platform full of penguin aliens. He watched as some of the Atua slid out of the chests of one penguin and into the chest of another one.
Icarus got the feeling that the Atua were trying out different bodies. Maybe they were reading the minds of the penguins to get an understanding of which body they wanted to inhabit.
Icarus knew the Atua would normally stay inside of the penguins for about seven months, give or take.
Icarus watched as another platform manifested and floated down toward the water.
A similar scene unfolded as more and more of the penguin aliens scrambled to get on the structure.
Icarus didn’t know how long this would go for, but there wasn’t a shortage of penguins wanting to jump on a platform. And from the body language of everyone below, everyone who wanted an opportunity to become a chosen one would get a chance.
Icarus and Ship watched from the vantage point on the hill for the rest of the day as wave after wave of penguins were picked up and delivered to the Atua.
Penguins that were not chosen were eventually forced off the platform. Penguins that were chosen by an Atua got to ride the platform into the spaceship. It became clear when one of them was chosen because the Atua embedded itself in the chest of the penguin. It looked almost like the penguin had a single breast in the middle of the chest.
This went on for a long, long while. Until it just stopped. The alien ship floated back into the sky.
Icarus expected some sort of speech—but there was nothing. Icarus thought that was odd, until he realized that he was on an alien world—human norms didn’t matter.
“What now?” Ship asked as the crowds below began to dissipate. “If my memory is correct, the tour will be back in five days to introduce the new chosen ones.”
Icarus was grateful that Ship remembered everything from those movies. He’d forgotten that part. That would give them both enough time to do some more research. To find out new answers. To understand this world a lot better. “Do you remember the name of that commune?”
“Nuknuknoe,” Ship responded.
“We’re going there next.”