8. Isaac Austen, Astral Projector
I stood by Plop ‘ik looking out of the wide window at the end of the antechamber. I gasped to see the scope of what the alien wanted to show me. Spread out before us in a grid pattern was what looked like a city of golden pyramids. Each about ten meters tall with a six square meter base.
There were lanes between each pyramid and I counted them from left to right. Twenty three in all on both axes. The walls of the giant room were covered in the same metallic material as the antechamber but the floor was striped with bands of black, silver, and gold that ran between the pyramids asymmetrically.
The entire pit was probably over 1000 square meters. You could have held three football games at once in the thing, with room for a taco-cart. It was much taller than it needed to be. The chamber could have supported pyramids three times as high, though not as wide. Perhaps it was due to the limited light source; which was a large spherical bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling. The cloudy light that it cast on the gleaming pyramids gave the room the warm ambiance of a Spanish cathedral. Even though I was an atheist, I found it somehow holy.
“What... what is it?” I stammered.
“It is a brain,” Plop ‘ik said, his wispy phalanges flashing resplendently. His eye was open wide, exposing a bright pink pupil, flecked with gold. I wasn’t sure if that was due to the reflection of the pyramids, or was it caused by one of his inscrutable emotions?
“It is a self aware intelligence. It calls itself Myriad. His creators spent eons amassing the palladium and gold for the quantum conductors, and even longer fabricating the fallalium.”
“Fallalium...?
“An alloy of eight different isotopes, with properties proven impossible by human scientific systems. None of these isotopes exist naturally on Earth so I had to fabricate them using samples brought from inside the Magellanic Cloud. My race were the first to begin utilizing its superconductive electron patterns. Superficially it resembles volcanic glass, and has some properties similar to silica, except that it’s macroparticles have negative mass. Fallalium, paired with the superconductivity of gold, creates the most perfect processor. In the right circumstances we can use it to transmit particles at superliminal speeds. I could show you a diagram, if you would like. It’s simple, really. Imagine if Arthur was in possession of particle A and Bobby was in possession of particle B-” He really would just go on and on. I cut him off.
“Right, of course. Special space-metal. Why do you need a quantum computer?”
“The consortium does not need Myriad. They have done all they can to eliminate any trace of his kind from the universe. But that is something that, unfortunately, I cannot risk sharing at this time. I can only apologize if you are unsatisfied by this. Remember that your thoughts are not fully your own.”
“I get that part. You don’t want to tip your hand to this Tulip, but at least you could tell me who he is? Why is he listening to my thoughts? And why are you so afraid of him?”
“Kli Truip. He was once my partner, well, my Commander really. He was the supervisor for our entire project on Earth, or as we would say ‘terra’.”
“Yeah, I used to watch Star Trek.”
“Of course,” Plop ‘ik said, missing or ignoring the reference. Then he walked to one of the two doors that led out of the antechamber.
The glass door slid into the wall and he passed into another brightly lit room. I limped after him and found myself in a long hallway, lined on both sides with coffin-sized glass tubes. The tubes were filled with what looked to be bubbling liquids of green, magenta, violet, and gold. The colors of the Aurora Borealis.
I approached the tube to my left and was surprised to see a naked man floating in electric blue gel. He wasn’t attached to anything, just floating in peaceful sleep. I tapped on the glass like a child in an aquarium trying to startle an octopus.
“Isaac,” Plop’ik scolded me, “Please do not disturb them.”
“Them?”
Down the length of the hallway I could make out at least two dozen similar tubes. Most were empty but a few contained naked humans of varying shapes and genders.
“Who are they?” I asked, not sure if I was looking at a science project or a collection of victims.
“These are Retainers, humans with unique genetic mutations. I have been keeping them in stasis, and recombining their DNA as well as augmenting and sequencing it with my own fabricated polymerases. The solution that you see contains a population of programmed viruses, to maintain tissue integrity, and magnesium ions to improve polymerization of the target sequences. Their genetic destiny represents a new tier in human evolution.”
“What do you mean? Are they like me?”
“Not exactly, some have telepathic abilities, some are more equipped to be soldiers, but each are empowered with natural gifts, surgically enhanced with genetically-tailored brain implants.”
I was awed by the sights and sounds of this strange collection of humans in jars, but I can’t say that I was that impressed with Plop ‘ik’s science project. I mean, he did possess a super-computer. As complex as it is to reverse engineer targeted three dimensional protein shapes it was something that humans had been doing for decades now.
The decoding of the human proteome was basically one big chain reaction of which humans had just begun to scratch the surface, but would ultimately result in knowledge of all biological interactions and complete understanding of how organisms function. The past decade might be called the dawn of a new age for molecular biology, especially for medical applications. Working in medicine had allowed me access to some of the newest technologies informed by our new knowledge of the proteome, all manufactured by an Oregon based conglomerate called the Plopman Group. Even Ketchikan’s backwoods oncology center was using a kind of protein screening method to diagnose cancer before the cells could even metastasize.
I wondered how much more advanced Plop ‘ik’s Consortium was than modern human science. There would always be part of me that wanted to say ‘meh, we could do that. Given enough time and resources, humans could accomplish anything.
“You are in pain, Isaac. Come.” Plop ‘ik pointed to a circular platform at the end of a row of tubes.
“Oh, hell no!” I said backing away from the platform. “You want to put me in a jar? You think I’m that stupid?”
“Isaac, if I wanted to, I could lift you with my mind and set you on the platform with the smallest effort,” said Plop ‘ik and I knew he was right. “You are damaged and you need to heal. This chamber is not meant to trap you. It is meant to prolong your life. When you look at the humans around you now, you think that they are my prisoners, yes? This could not be further from the truth.”
“Then what are they? What the hell are you doing with these people?”
“They are my retainers. These men and women come from every epoch of human history. What they have in common is their loyalty to our cause. Right now their minds are joined as one, a common dream.”
“Why?”
“I will show you,” Plop ‘ik said.
I stepped onto the platform cautiously, aware that there was a distinct possibility of becoming part of his museum of hominids, but what choice did I have? I turned to ask him what he was doing but before I could say a word, a glass tube shot down from the ceiling, trapping me like an insect in a collector’s jar. Asshole, I thought as I tried to kill him with my best death-stare, to no avail.
“Plop ‘ik! God damn you, you bastard asshole!” I shouted, but my critique of the alien went unnoticed.
Then a bright red fluid, somewhat viscous, began to fill the tank and within seconds I was fully submerged. I writhed in the cool red slime and pounded on the glass. I felt slow and weak as if I was in a dream, where every movement was tortuously ineffective. Then my fingers and toes filled with a pleasant warming sensation, electrical and tingling, that spread up through my extremities through my body and into my head. The pain was gone. The bruises disappeared. I could literally feel my broken bones resetting themselves and healing impossibly fast. The liquid filled my nostrils and my mouth but I wasn’t drowning. In fact I hadn’t felt so good in quite a while.
“You see? Much better,” came Plop ‘ik’s voice, gentle yet resonating in my head. His mouth wasn’t moving. He just watched me healing as I floated in the strange goo.
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“You’re in my head?” I asked him without vocalizing. Speaking telepathically like this felt surprisingly natural somehow. I was calm, all of the rage of the invasion of my mind was subdued, put into the background of my thoughts.
“I need you to locate someone for me. I need you to leave your body once more. This machine will keep a part of your consciousness anchored here, so you won’t become lost.”
“Who?” I wondered, the liquid swirled around my eyes and everything felt like a dream.
“Ana Martinson. I can help propel you toward her but only you can see where she is,” Plop ‘ik said and then set his massive three-fingered hand against the glass of my tube. “Are you ready?”
He didn’t wait for my reply.
Then I was alone. I couldn’t sense Plop ‘ik at all. The ocean and then the earth rocketed out from underneath my disembodied consciousness. I felt like a kite blowing in a hurricane until finally I settled, somehow gaining control enough to come to a halt. I could see. I was high up above the Earth, like I was looking at an incredibly detailed map except this map was covered in mutlicolored auras, hues radiating like weather systems. Each continent was visible under giant swirling clouds of what I somehow knew was psychic energy. A dark black storm front stuck out, calling my attention and making me feel ill despite being so far away from my body.
It was Alaska.
“I need to find Ana!”
The thought exploded in my mind. It was like I couldn’t resist the pull of her gravity. Soon Alaska blew up before me until all I could see was the greens and browns of the forests, the white mountain-tops, and the dark blue sea. I found myself drifting, falling, being pulled toward Ketchikan and then I was in a hospital bedroom.
Ana was lying on a gurney. There was no one else around. No doctors. No nurses. No cops.
I couldn’t help myself. I dove right into her brain like it was a swimming pool. I felt a sudden rush of energy and sensation and then I was in her head. I had stowed away in my first human mind. It was incredible. I hid myself in what seemed to be a quiet section of her subconscious. I was going on pure intuition, and tried my best to be a passive observer.
Then she woke up.
“Gets easier every time,” she groaned to herself before she stretched and looked around her room. If she was counting, which she was, she had died approximately 18 times.
Looking around her room, she saw that the place had been bio-tented. Quarantined by the CDC, as told by the red biohazard warnings and logos on the plastic sheets that made up her isolation bubble. Ana gracefully dismounted from the bed and began to remove the hydration IV and monitor lines that were stuck to her arm.
Despite feeling fine, she took it easy and tested her weight on each leg before standing. Ana grunted just a bit as she felt the slight sting of atrophy in her calf. She would need to go for a run later, or maybe get into a fight. Nothing like a few high roundhouse kicks to get the juices flowing in proper fashion.
“Nurse!” She called out. “I’m awake.” All she could hear was the beeps and whirs of a few nearby machines. Otherwise the place was silent. “Okay, I’m going to leave. So if anyone wants to talk to me about the bill, well, you know my number.” She walked slowly over to the closet and found a pair of scrubs, cotton-candy pink. Her favorite color.
She crossed the hall to the large circular arrangement of desks that made up the central hub of the department. No one there either. Now that was very strange. KGH was a small hospital but there was always someone in the ICU. But today there was not a soul in any of the eight rooms. No nurses, no patients, and none of the CDC agents who had pretty much tented the entire floor in emergency quarantine plastic. Ana’s room had gotten the red-alert biohazard treatment.
The whole hospital was the same, a ghost-town. Ana knew this for a mortal truth, because Ana possessed an ability that few other humans possessed. Ana could access a special part of her brain that, through her own will, could extend and contract her own magnetic field. She could reach out with invisible electric sensors and touch any other magnetic field that any life form might generate. She could even act upon said life form through said field and change it, down to its very cells. You might call it psychic electro-gnosis, or subtle body manipulation. Ana called it ‘the trick’. It was not easy for Ana to do, but the trick came in handy sometimes.
This time when she reached out she felt nothing, nothing familiar anyway. Only a strange magnetic aura that seemed to dim as though it knew she was sensing it.
At the hub she found the local-line and dialed out to her Omniphone. She was planning on listening to her messages or trying to figure out what the fuck was going on until she heard her ringtone. An eight-bit take on last year’s pop-anthem about a teenage girl who falls in love with a transexual karaoke singer. Beeeep, boop, boop, Beeeep-eep-eep-eep! Ana found her phone in a nurse’s locker in the break-room. There was one voicemail from a blocked number. She tapped play.
“Hello, Ana. I am grateful for your difficult work today. I am glad you are well. Please meet me at McDonald’s at our usual hour.” The voice was elegant and cordial. It was the voice of an individual endowed with compassion and optimism. It was the voice of her boss.
Ana noted the time. 2:36 pm. 12 hours since she started bleeding out of her eyes.
She logged off of her voicemail and flipped over to local news. The page loaded slowly, which was not unusual with the cell reception in Alaska, but when it came up there was only an error message saying that the site was temporarily down for maintenance. She flipped to her web-browser’s newsfeed, tapped the link for Alaska.
The headlines read thusly:
“Ebola Strain Wipes Out Alaska Town in Hours”
“Ketchikan, AK: 20,000 Dead in Virus Outbreak Disaster.”
“CDC Shuts Down All Travel to and from Alaska.”
Ana’s reaction was to say this: “Oh my motherfucking God. They started the end of the world.”
Leaving the hospital, she saw where all the people had gone. They had died in bloody coughing fits. They had died with their liquefied intestines leaking out of their anuses. They had died in pain, and in terror.
Ana had seen too much war and death for the grisly scene to put her into shock but when she left through the front exit she saw something that made her shudder, something she hadn’t seen since World War II. Piles of bodies, all alike in charred blackness. Pyres made by survivors to sanitize the disease. There had to be hundreds all piled up in the parking lot. They were still smoking.
She kept to the sloping road that ran from the hospital to Tongass Avenue. She saw houses with open doors and more bodies wrapped in blood-soaked sheets. There were CDC isolation tents, torn up and covered in thick red fluid. There were buildings on fire, and smoke choking everything with a gray haze. But there were no people. If anyone had survived the outbreak they were long gone. She broke into a jog as she approached Jefferson Street.
Smoke from the town and fog from the sea limited her visibility to the point where she could only see a few yards ahead. She saw the sign for Ketchikan’s pathetic mini-mall and made a right into the parking lot. The place had a sporting goods shop, a book and music store, a Quequeg’s Coffee, and a McDonald’s. Everything a body could need in this crazy old world. Also the meeting place for her contact.
During the long winters of her seven year stint in Ketchikan, she would come down here every payday and grab a #1 from McDonald’s, a new book, and a new vinyl record. She could just as easily have downloaded either onto her Omniphone without leaving the house, but she preferred the paper versions. The things that didn’t disappear when your phone ran out of juice.
She had lived the vast majority of her life without technology and simply didn’t trust it. There would always be a part of her that longed for the pastoral life of her childhood. A life that she could never have again. As for the burger and fries the thought was making her hungry for that tasty combination of fat with more fat. Nice choice on the rendezvous point, boss.
Before she pushed open the mall’s glass double-doors she peeked inside. It was dark, like the place was closed. That was not surprising considering what she had read on her newsfeed. What surprised her was the eight-foot figure standing in the center of the mall. Through the darkness she could only see a silhouette, but it was one scary silhouette.
“I was wondering when I would get to meet the alien that saved my life. Missionary commander Kli Truip, I presume?” She said loudly as she sauntered into the mall like an overconfident cowgirl.
The bear stood on its hind legs, fore-legs dangling in front, and mouth open wide. Its eyes had a familiar necrotic look, as if the thing had died hours ago. It raised its gigantic head at Ana.
“Correct, Ana Martinson,” It said without moving its mouth. Really it wasn’t speaking at all. The bear was projecting a psychic message like a living telephone. Ana knew this was how the alien mastermind known as Kli Truip liked to deal with humans, even hyper-developed retainers like herself. She also knew that Kli Truip was in complete control of this creature, and psychically keeping its body in a state between life and death. She knew that he might be able to do the same to her if she wasn’t extremely careful. If she had to fight, she could, but she needed to keep her mind still and calm, or else he could tear it apart.
“You are welcome for your life. I am quite pleased to offer it to you. However, I did not save you so you could rejoin your master, the traitor Plop ‘ik. We know that he has betrayed us. We know that he intends to disrupt us and prevent the success of our mission. You are suited to help us, Ana Martinson. You have received gifts and are in debt to us. Is this not true? Do you wish to die with Plop ‘ik for nothing?
Once Earth is consumed by Elotiel, all life will become one. All human conscience will merge with God. You cannot stop this. The final step has come and soon Elotiel will be fed. Kill Plop ‘ik and you may join us and live. What is your choice?”
Ana’s skin crawled. She felt the heavy electromagnetism of the alien-possessed bear. She could barely breathe from the miasma of psychic radiation that permeated her every membrane.
“Hmm,” she said, trying to hide the pressure that she was under. “That is a lovely offer. You know, I do want to become one with God. I think that sounds nice,” Ana said and smiled. “But you remind me of a story I read a long time ago, when I was waiting patiently for you aliens to give me an order, before Plop ‘ik told me what the real plan was.
It was about a rich man who gets his feelings hurt by another man over some nasty words. The other guy is a lush and loves wine. The rich guy is a wine collector or something. The other guy, he doesn’t even realize that the rich one wants to kill him, doesn’t even know that he pissed him off. So the rich man tricks the guy into following him down into his basement in for a bottle of wine. Then he ties the guy up and builds a wall around him so he can never get out. Boom, revenge.”
“You have spent too much time with Plop ‘ik. You are starting to blather, like him, and that is not a compliment,” Truip snapped.
“I think you don’t forgive trespassers, and I have trespassed all over you and those clowns who serve you. You need better help than Spaniards and bears to deal with me.” Ana was practically growling as she spoke.
“Your answer is no, then?” The bear asked.
“No,” said Ana. “My answer is fuck you!” She ran and as she ran she prepared her mind to shout, to do the trick as hard she could. At her full power she could shout with her mind with such force that it could break down a brick wall. She could cut a man in half or start his cells on fire. Kli Truip could read her mind, but she may have time for one good burst of pure psychic rebellion.
The bear was ready for her answer and immediately went into a wrestler’s squat. Ana sped toward the thing, she was a blur in pink scrubs, a smear of blond hair making a trail behind her like lightning. The bear exploded from its stance, its long claws, ten horrible knives, reaching for her flesh. Just before it cut into her abdomen she released the psychic explosion from the center of her augmented cerebral cortex. The bear staggered in a staccato of jerky spasms. Blood erupted in a plume from its gaping mouth. A critical hit.
She was just close enough to intuit the bear’s unique magnetic field, a resonant wave that barely registered as alive but still oddly intense. She sensed a purple aura laden with static and psychic interference. She felt the hate pouring from the animal’s brain. The anger. It had been a beautiful female black bear, now it was a slave to a devious mind.
She felt the bear’s field, grabbed on to it, and inserted a tiny part of her own field into every single one of its cells. She overrode the biological directives of the cells and told them to slow down, to stop working, and finally to die. The bear’s cells obeyed her and the great black thing fell to the tile floor like so much meat. Its metabolism slowed down by psychically-induced entropy.
She collapsed on top of the thing and sprawled out like she was resting on a fur rug. Her heart was beating fast, too fast, but she didn’t have the energy to slow her own metabolic processes so she had to endure the exhaustion just like any ordinary sucker when they were out of gas. She gasped for breath. She thought she might cry.
I beat him, she thought. I faced Kli Truip and I beat him.
Her Omniphone rang. Beeeep, boop, boop, Beeeep-eep-eep-eep! She picked herself up off of the floor and dragged herself over to the west wing of the mini-mall. It felt like a really long trip and there probably wouldn’t be any burgers.
She answered the phone, “Odin’s balls Choi, where the hell are you?”
Then something dragged me away from her. I felt myself, bodiless and adrift in a tornado of dark auras. A miasma of negative energy and disease. Something was terribly wrong.