Doctor Troyd made a point not to watch that video. Now that he had his hearing back, he didn’t want to lock eyes with that man and hear any commands. So Troyd played along. Mastermind made him a promise – a promise that, so far, he seemed to be holding up. When all this was over, Doctor Troyd would get to see his daughter again. And hear her sing. Her beautiful voice. That was what he focused on.
“Come,” said Doctor Troyd.
Luke followed him to the park entrance. The zoo was empty by now.
“Sorry sir,” said the only remaining guard. “We’re closing.”
Doctor Troyd sighed. Again? He pulled out his cell phone, loaded Mastermind’s message, and pressed play.
“You will grant this man access to anywhere and anyone,” said Mastermind’s recording.
The guard looked right at the video.
“Oh, uh, right. Of course. I’m sorry. But you heard about the mutant plague, right? People around the world are turning into monsters. We’re closing early.”
“We’ll be fine,” said Doctor Troyd, walking past him. “Oh, and we’ll need your keys. We may need access inside some of the animal exhibits.”
“No problem,” said the guard, handing him the keys.
That little video sure was coming in handy. It helped them get through security at the United Nations building and gain access to the President of United States. It got them into the local park zoo. Hmm. Maybe Troyd should use it for getting into other places too. Like… Area 51? Fort Knox? Celine Dion concerts – hey, he was a fan. Ooh, or skipping all the long lines at theme parks and grocery stores! Yeah. Anything was possible…
They passed various animal exhibits. The aviary. Sea lion pool. Then the “South American Trail” section, where there were deer and bears. Hmm. A bear might be a good fit. Mastermind would appreciate a mutant bear.
But… no. Something else. So they kept walking. Saw some porcupines. That could be interesting. But… nah.
Finally, they came upon a large cage for a familiar winged creature. Pteropus personatus, read the display. The fruit bat. “Yes,” said Doctor Troyd, smiling as he eyed up Luke. “I think this will do just fine.”
“This…” said Luke, swallowing hard, “is what Mastermind wishes for me?”
Doctor Troyd nodded.
For a moment, he almost felt sorry for Luke. He was sure Luke didn’t actually want to get mutated. When Luke woke up this morning, he probably didn’t imagine his day would end like this. Popping out of some mysterious hovering sphere, falling under Mastermind’s control, and becoming one of his mutant henchmen.
But, that was life. We don’t always get what we want. Or expect. And this was just Luke’s fate, his future.
Still, admittedly, Mastermind was a bit crazy. Claiming to be a god, planning to rule the world. Doctor Troyd knew better than to ever cross or challenge him. Mastermind was a force beyond reason. A threat beyond comprehension. Doctor Troyd willingly obeyed, to avoid the consequences.
Oh well. Luke would become a mutant. So what? So would the rest of the world in a matter of days or weeks. And any who resisted, any who somehow avoided the “cure”, would be hunted down and undoubtedly killed.
This was the new world order. A new world of mutants. Luke wasn’t the first. And he certainly wasn’t going to be the last.
Troyd reached into his pocket and pulled out the vial of green liquid. Then, out of his other coat pocket, he retrieved a small hypodermic needle.
“You better take off your clothes,” he said. “Your mutations will be a bit unpredictable. Don’t want you hurting or choking yourself with your old clothes, depending on how your new form manifests.”
Luke nodded. “I understand.”
He slowly disrobed as Doctor Troyd filled the needle with the glowing green chemical.
“Now hold out your arm,” said the scientist.
Luke stepped out of his pants. Now completely naked. Totally exposed. Completely vulnerable. Luke obeyed and held out his arm.
Doctor Troyd injected him.
“That’s done,” said the scientist.
“I feel funny,” Luke said.
“It hasn’t started yet. Relax.” Doctor Troyd looked at the bats flying around. Hmm. Catching one might be kinda hard. He saw an entrance to the side. “Now go inside,” he said, pointing at the door.
“Oh. Okay,” said Luke.
He climbed over the barrier, walked off the path, and went up to the side entrance. “It’s locked.”
“Here,” said Troyd, tossing him the guard’s keys.
Luke unlocked the door and stepped inside. He left the keys next to the door.
Doctor Troyd glanced down at Luke’s pile of empty clothes on the ground. His glowing pink crystal slid out of a pocket. Hmm. That could be useful later. Doctor Troyd discretely picked it up and tucked it away in his own pocket.
Inside the cage, the bats pretty much ignored Luke. They flew all around him, but none were willing to give him any sample DNA.
“Swat at them,” said Doctor Troyd. “Try to get them angry. Get one to bite you!”
“But—”
“Do it!” shouted Doctor Troyd. “Mastermind wants this for you.” He hesitated to say it. “Obey his will.”
Luke nodded. “Okay. I will obey.”
He started swatting. Tried chasing the bats. Finally, after some considerable effort, one finally bit him.
“Ow!” Luke exclaimed. It got his finger. It drew blood.
Both Luke and the doctor knew it was now too late. Luke would begin transforming any second…
And he did.
First his skin turned dark. His ears grew larger. His nose reshaped. And wings – giant black bat wings – spread out from under his armpits, down along the length of his arms, stretching all the way to his hands, connecting from his arms down to the sides of his body.
Brown and black fur spread across his body. His fingers and toes lengthened, becoming more bat-like. Suddenly he could hear more, smell more, sense more.
Despite the myth that all bats were blind, Luke could still see quite well. But now he could also “see” with his hearing. The subtle differences of how the sound echoed around him. He could tell how hard or soft an object was, and how far away it was, just by how the ambient sound around him seemed to bounce off it.
Cool.
“How do you feel?” asked Doctor Troyd.
“I feel… like Mastermind’s newest mutant. Ready to worship and obey my god who created me this way.”
Troyd nodded slowly. Had they gone too far? Too late for second guessing now. “We need to give you an appropriate name,” said the doctor.
“Echo,” said Luke. “Call me Echo.”
Chapter Five
Where No Nerd Has Gone Before
Luke placed the palm of his hand flat against the wall.
The interactive menu displayed.
“Directions to the bridge,” said Luke. Nothing happened. “Um, command center? Control room? Pilot deck? Navigation?”
A map suddenly appeared, identifying their current location and the navigation center, with a dotted red line providing directions from here to there.
“Google would’ve figured out what I meant sooner,” he said.
“That is so cool,” said Ray, staring at the interface.
Uncle Charlie looked at the interactive map glowing on the wall. “Hmm,” said the old man, “looks like quite a walk from here.”
“Then we better get moving,” said Luke.
“Or,” said Charlie, “we go here,” he pointed, “to their teleporter pads. We’ll get there a lot faster.”
“Teleporter pads?” asked Ray.
Dawn smiled. “Like on Star Trek!”
“Right!” said Luke, remembering them from before. “The ‘recall’ button thingy. How we got away from that alien snake den underground lair cavern.”
“Um, right,” said Charlie. “Anyway, it’s much closer. We’ll go there. These pyramids are huge on the insid
e. We could get lost for days if we’re not careful.”
“Days?” Dawn remarked skeptically.
“If we’re not careful,” Charlie repeated. “This way.”
He led them to the familiar hexagonal room, where three circular platforms laid side by side along the floor.
Luke stepped up onto one of the pads. “So how do we tell it where to send us? Where’s Miles O’Brien when you need him?”
“Who?” asked Dawn.
“Star Trek character,” explained Ray.
“Oh,” she said. “I guess I should’ve known that. Is he related to Mr. Spock?”
“What?” remarked Luke. “No. They’re not even on the same series. Spock was on the original series, and Chief O’Brien was—”
“It’s voice activated,” interrupted Uncle Charlie.
“Thank you,” said Ray.
Charlie stepped onto one of the open pads. Dawn and Ray stepped onto the remaining third. She held his hand tightly.
“Is this going to hurt?” she asked.
“Won’t feel a thing,” said Luke.
“Send us to the navigation room,” Charlie called out loud.
“Energize!” said Luke.
A circle of white light instantly appeared around each pad, rose up into the air above them, and they all disappeared.
Elsewhere, the same circle of white light appeared on the floor, lifted up, and they reappeared there.
They were on the bridge of this starship. The command center. The navigation room. The place where the pilot – oh my God, there was a pilot.
The room was shaped like a giant dome. With a perfect view of all the stars around them. They appeared to be somewhere near the top of the pyramid. Various computers – at least, they assumed these machines were computers – lined the edges of the dome walls. And in the middle, at the center of it all, was a single chair, a large seat, comfortably positioned in front of several display panels and control pads.
Someone was there.
In the seat. Controlling the pyramid space ship.
They could only see it from behind. But what they saw – a long, thin gray-skinned hand... Could it be? Were they actually in the presence of … an intelligent alien creature?
They were all silent.
Luke looked to his uncle. The old man shrugged, saying nothing. Ray tried to keep his cool, but inside, he was freaking out. Dawn, well, she didn’t feel like waiting any longer, so she just started walking right up toward it.
“Dawn!” whispered Ray.
She got closer. “Um… hello?”
The alien turned around.
Mastermind launched out of the sphere inside the pyramid on Sekhmet.
He laid on the floor, curled up in the fetal position, shivering. His eyes stared blankly forward, lost in the psychological trauma of the memory he just relived over and over. But then a faint smile slowly emerged on his face. And his smile got bigger.
Mastermind started to relax. His breathing and heart rate slowed down. He sat up, looked at the palm of his hand, and began laughing.
Perfect.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, the president’s message played over and over, in multiple languages, across multiple borders. As did Mastermind’s video.
Echo – the bat mutant formerly known as Luke from a slightly different timeline – flapped his new giant bat wings. It took some practice, but with a little effort, he started to lift himself off the ground. “I’m doing it! I’m doing it!” he shouted. “I can fly!”
“I’m thrilled for you,” said Doctor Troyd. “I’m not sure where Mastermind wants to send you. I’d guess New York’s a good place to start, but I’m not going to take any chances of messing up his ‘master plan’.”
Echo landed back down on his feet. “What is Mastermind’s plan? He made us into mutants. But surely he wants more than our obedience and worship. What’s his ultimate goal?”
“More than becoming a god?” Troyd laughed. “I don’t know any more than you do. He just hired me to help develop the solution for rapid genetic mutation. Frankly, I’m surprised he’s still keeping me around.”
“Why hasn’t he mutated you yet?”
“Because I’ve got the only real antidote,” said the scientist. “I may be a little eccentric, but I’m not crazy!”
“You have the cure? I mean, the real cure?” asked Echo.
Doctor Troyd nodded.
“Interesting.”
“Um, hello?” Dawn asked, approaching the alien.
It turned around.
“Oh my God,” said Ray, seeing it’s face.
Luke gasped.
Charlie stood in silence.
Dawn’s eyes went wide with disbelief.
“It’s one of the Roswell aliens!” Ray exclaimed.
“They’re not from Roswell,” Luke explained. “They just crashed there, allegedly, back in 1947.”
It started speaking. In a language they didn’t understand. The sounds were hushed and muffled, rapid and unintelligible. Ray couldn’t stop staring at its big bulging gray head, those large solid black eyes, and that tiny mouth and nose where its sounds kept coming from.
“I don’t suppose you speak English,” said Dawn.
It kept uttering in that strange language.
“No, of course not, that’d be too easy,” she said.
“We need a universal language,” said Luke. “Like math or science or something. Prime numbers. Something we can—”
The tall skinny gray alien lifted its long narrow finger towards Luke, pointing. Then it said a word they all recognized. “Astaria.”
Luke looked down at his pocket. The pink crystal partially stuck out of his pocket, still glowing. He pulled it out completely and held it up. “Yes. Astaria.” Then he pointed at himself. “Luke.” He gestured toward his uncle. “Charlie.” And then to his friend. “Ray.”
“And Dawn,” she said, pointing at herself, standing in front of the tall skinny gray alien.
It shook its head, either not understanding or not caring. It turned back around, focusing on the controls.
“Well that was rude,” said Luke.
“Luke,” said Charlie, “I’ve never seen one of… that, before.”
Dawn tapped the alien on its narrow shoulder. “Um, excuse me.” The alien turned its massive head to look at her. “Hi, sorry. We really need to pilot this ship to the nearest planet, so we can get new powers and stuff, and stop a really bad man from taking over our planet. Earth. Do you know where that is? Have you been to Earth?”
The alien shook its head. Did it understand her? The gray creature seemed to sigh, then turned back around to its controls. It made some adjustments, or something, and then looked back at Dawn, waiting for something.
Dawn looked awkwardly back at it. Were they going to a planet now?
The alien started muttering again.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.”
The alien suddenly got a little more excited. It kept talking.
“What? What are you saying?”
Suddenly Dawn heard her own voice, repeated through the machine in front of the alien, but in the alien’s language. Then the alien spoke again, in its own language, and a second later, the same machine repeated the alien’s words, in Dawn’s language.
“Where do you come from?” it said, apparently.
“Hey guys,” Dawn said back to them. “I think he’s got some kind of translator.”
Her words repeated a second later, in the alien’s native words.
Luke and then Charlie approached closer. Not wanting to be left behind or alone, Ray quickly caught up with them.
“Really?” asked Luke. “How cool!”
His words, too, were repeated to the alien in translation.
The alien spoke again, to all of them. “Where do you all come from?”
“Earth,” said Luke.
The alien didn’t seem to know where that was.
“Um, third planet in the Sol system.
Here, do you have star charts somewhere? I can point it out.”
“Do you have more Astaria crystals there?” asked the alien.
Luke looked at his crystal. “No, just this one. And, well, I guess the one Mastermind found too.”
“And the one your timeline-copy had, before, you know… that squid monster got him,” said Ray.
“Oh right. He would’ve had one too,” realized Luke. “Hmm. That makes me wonder. There’s got to be another one of me out there somewhere too. From inside the sphere, after the first time I time traveled to save you guys. He’d have a crystal too.”
Charlie shook his head. “Time travel makes my head hurt. How can there be three crystals from just the one?”
“It’s called temporal stacking,” said Luke, referring back to some theory he read somewhere once. “Newton’s laws preserve matter and energy, even when the space-time continuum gets rearranged. Changing history won’t force something in the present to cease to exist. That only happens in the movies. You see, the crystal existed on the original timeline, and then future me went back in time, carrying it with me. Now there are two. Unless I return to the future with that crystal, without altering my own timeline somehow, both will continue to exist.”
“You’re not helping any,” said the old man.
“It’s the same reason why there’s been multiple me’s running around too. Every time I change my own past, I run the risk of leaving an extra me on the new timeline.” He lowered his head and voice. “But they don’t seem to last too long, though. Maybe they don’t pop out of existence or fade away… but apparently the universe has some kind of timeline-correcting law the prevents extra copies…” He shook his head. “Time travel is too dangerous. They’re dead – I’m dead – because of me.”
“Luke,” said Ray, putting his arm over his friend’s shoulders, “I still don’t follow what you’re saying. But as for the other you’s – it’s not like you tried to kill them. You were trying to save them! You gotta stop blaming yourself. You did your best, man.”
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