by P A Vasey
Adam looked back at me, arched an eyebrow, and nodded. “You are correct, of course. I think this is called ‘getting off on the wrong foot’.”
Hubert took a step toward the chair. “Am I speaking with the alien?”
“Negative.”
“May we speak with it?
“You can stop calling it, ‘it’ or ‘the alien’, Director Hubert. They are called Vu-Hak.”
“Vu-Hak. Okay then,” said Hubert, dryly. “Can I speak with the Vu-Hak in your head, please?”
Adam shook his head. “If I let it speak with you at this time, I will possibly lose the dominion I currently possess. However, I may be able to speak ‘for them’ if you wish? I do have certain insights.”
I watched him talking and tried to read him. His mind was closed off and this worried me. Before, I was sure that he was trying to make me see that he was being coerced, that he was an unwilling participant in the destruction he had brought about. Now, I had nothing to go on and he was giving nothing back.
“Is there just one alien – sorry, one Vu-Hak - in there with you?” Hubert said, his face tight.
Adam nodded. “It is an individual, yes.”
Hubert gestured to the guards to bring chairs and we formed a semi-circle facing him. Stevens remained off to one side perched on a stool which put him level with Adam’s chair and next to a couple of monitors which had cables and wires snaking into the straightjacket. Up close I could see that dozens of thin wires had actually been embedded into the skin covering Adam’s head, presumably attempting to record any brainwave activity. Adam looked impassively at Hubert, before letting his gaze drift around the room taking everything in.
“Where’d you go?” I said quietly, finding my voice, “It’s been days. We’ve been worried.”
His head swivelled to me and his lip twitched. “Worried for me, or worried about what the Vu-Hak might have been doing?”
I looked down. “About you,” I said softly.
Hubert harrumphed, and interrupted. “Adam, we need you to tell us about these Vu-Hak. Who they are, what they want. Everything you know.”
Adam shifted his gaze from me to Hubert. “The Vu-Hak are millions of years old, possibly the oldest species in the universe. They were once organic like us, and carbon-based. They spread throughout their solar system, converting rocky planets and asteroids to industrial use. They were rapacious users of energy and eventually enclosed their star in a Dyson Sphere to capture all stellar emissions. When they developed interstellar propulsion they uploaded their minds into machine bodies, similar in structure to the one you see here, and spread out at an exponential rate throughout the rest of their galaxy. They are what you would call a ‘super-civilisation’. An alpha species. A species that colonises on a galactic-scale.”
I fidgeted with my fingers, watching him. He seemed calm and collected, with no signs of belligerence or of being possessed by the alien. His eyes remained deep blue. I still wished he would let me into his mind, so that I could feel what was going on. I sensed I was missing something important.
Hubert said, “Did they encounter other intelligent species, or civilisations?”
“They encountered many other civilisations.”
“And…?”
“They all died.”
I heard Stillman take a sudden intake of air. “The Vu-Hak killed them all?”
“Not all of them,” said Adam. “Almost every civilisation they encountered had already self-destructed. Wiped themselves out. Most before achieving intersystem spaceflight, but all after the discovery of nuclear technology.”
So there was the ‘bottleneck’ theory. Holland was a smart guy.
Until, he wasn’t.
“So, pretty much where humanity is right now,” I said.
“Yes, just like humanity at this moment in the early 21st century. Most species that the Vu-Hak encountered which had not yet destroyed themselves were in the process of doing so. Escalating intra-species conflict and world wars led to their demise.”
“Did the Vu-Hak come in peace though? I mean, if there were species that hadn’t yet self-destructed.”
“Initially, yes,” said Adam, in a response that surprised me. “But first contact with a more advanced alien civilisation is almost always to the detriment of the less advanced culture.”
“So they were all destroyed, I presume,” said Hubert.
Adam shrugged under the straightjacket. “The Vu-Hak crushed any belligerent species and continued their expansion. They criss-crossed their galaxy, disassembling planets and smothering suns, until they could go no further.”
“Then what, they just sat around in space playing scrabble or something?” I said, sarcastically.
Adam considered this more thoughtfully than it deserved. “The Vu-Hak had no equal, no competition. They looked around and asked ‘is there nothing more’? And when they realised that there was not, they took the final step and divested themselves of physical structure, becoming one with the interstellar void. Entities of pure thought. A once-organic consciousness, now drifting between the stars. Limitless, and immortal.”
There was an uneasy silence in the room. The machines burbled electronically in the background, and the gentle hum of an air conditioner could be heard. Stevens fiddled absently with a couple of switches on the recording equipment.
“And you brought one of them here,” said Stillman, her voice unsteady.
Adam looked up sharply. “I did not create the wormhole. That was humanity’s folly.”
Hubert stood up from his chair and started pacing, keeping his eyes on Adam. “What will happen when more Vu-Hak come through the wormhole?”
Adam looked at him, almost pityingly. “The Vu-Hak have been isolated to their own galaxy, millions of light years distant from any other. They have become bored. This galaxy provides them with new … opportunities.”
Hubert was shaking his head. “We can’t let that happen.”
“Do not worry,” said Adam, “I will not transmit the Lindstrom data back to them. No more will arrive. The transient opening of the wormhole remains impossible to localize in their galaxy.”
I looked up at Hubert, and he gave an imperceptible shake of his head. Adam still didn’t know about Holland’s passage through the wormhole into the Vu-Hak galaxy. Nor did he know that I’d seen the preparations being made there.
“What about the Vu-Hak that’s sharing your head?” said Hubert.
“I believe I have achieved a measure of control.”
“Well that’s reassuring. For how long?”
“I do not know. When the wormhole opens on earth, controlling the Vu-Hak becomes more difficult. I am not sure why.”
“But you know how to destroy the portal at this end? To close it permanently?”
“Yes, I believe I can do that.”
“Then we don’t have a minute to lose,” I snapped. “The portal will open soon. Holland said…”
“Wait a minute,” interrupted Hubert, shutting me down with a wave of his hand and glaring at Adam. “How can we trust you?”
“Because I am still Adam Benedict. I am human - despite what those monitors and your scans suggest. The passage of my organic body through the wormhole resulted in its death, which is true. But the Vu-Hak long ago discovered how to separate the living mind - the consciousness - from the body. What makes me - Adam Benedict, a human being - is still here.” He glanced at me. “Dr Morgan knows this.”
I gave a damp smile and my gaze shifted away, uncomfortably. I’d seen into his mind and encountered a tortured soul, akin to my own. Let down by the life he had taken for granted, broken by the lives he had lost. He’d experienced – and still was experiencing – unimaginable things. Things we couldn’t start to understand let alone appreciate. And yet unbelievably he was fighting tooth and claw to retain his humanity, and wanted to help me, and protect us, despite no longer being fully human.
“Adam, why were you allowed to come back?” I said. “Why didn’t th
e Vu-Hak just upload themselves into these machines?”
“Yes, and why is the machine needed at all?” Stillman interjected. “I mean, why couldn’t they just come through the wormhole directly?”
“Fair questions,” he replied. “Firstly, travelling through the wormhole requires a reinforced, non-organic repository. This is to prevent organic tissue or neural networks being ripped apart and dissociated by the massive forces within the wormhole.”
“So they can’t travel through without them,” Stillman said, throwing a glance my way. “That explains all the other ones you saw, Kate.”
Hubert scowled back at her and she reddened, realising what she had said. He stopped his pacing and put his hands on his waist. Adam was looking at Stillman, a curious look on his face.
“The ‘other ones’, Ms Stillman?” he asked, calmly.
Hubert stepped between them. “I’m still asking the questions Mr Benedict. Why did they send you back with one of their own? Do you have any thoughts on this?”
Adam paused for a few seconds, and I wondered if he was going to press Stillman on her faux pas, but then he closed his eyes and continued. “The Vu-Hak informed me that although they had learned about humanity by sifting through my memories, they wanted a human mind to interpret what they were seeing. I was to be a guide, a chaperone of sorts, assisting them as they evaluated our world and our capabilities. They did not believe that I could - or would - try and stop them.”
Stillman sat back in her chair and blew out her cheeks. Hubert looked at me and sat down. I realised that the medics had stopped fiddling with the monitors and were hanging on to every word of the conversation now. The soldiers at the back of the room looked on impassively.
I shifted gears. “Adam, how does it feel to be you? To be no longer - physically human.”
He gave what looked like a sad smile. “I derive no pleasure in what I have become. I am unique, an anomaly, a future research project to be discussed and analysed. I can never be who I was again, and that saddens me.”
“But you look human from the outside,” I said. “You can blend in, people would accept you.”
He shook his head. “Acceptance. I think not. Once people found out what I was, I would be shunned.”
I leaned forward toward him, holding his gaze. “No, it wouldn’t necessarily work like that. We all look different, but inside, we have the same internal organs, blood groups, skeletal structure…”
“…And yet vast swathes of your world remain divided on the simple basis of skin colour,” he interrupted. “Was that the point you were going to make?”
I was about to reply, when Stillman piped up again. “I’ve been wanting to ask. How is the machine body powered? We couldn’t figure it out looking at the scans.”
“At its core is a gravitational singularity - a black hole - measuring a few millimetres in diameter and constrained by localised curvatures in space-time.”
Hubert’s eyebrows hit the ceiling. “A black hole?! That’s preposterous. Impossible.”
Adam’s mouth twitched. “Director Hubert, the Vu-Hak have capabilities you cannot even imagine. Recall that picture of me that you saw on the scans. My ‘skin’ is a thin carapace which only looks fragile, but it has a structural integrity analogous to that of the hardest diamond, and is in turn reinforced by focussed gravitational waves.”
“Can you die?” Stillman asked. I looked at her sharply, but she ignored me. Adam let the inference pass.
“I do not truly know. I will certainly outlive friends, family, loved ones. In fact, everyone on this planet. This machine body is, by any definition that matters, immortal.”
Family. Immortality. At the funeral of my beloved daughter, the minister said something that stuck with me, despite the hollowed out emotionless black hole that I’d become. She’d told me that ‘one lifetime filled with great love was worth more than an eternity of nothing’. The triteness and bitter-sweetness had grated on me for a long time, until I had re-immersed myself in the memories of my daughter, my creation, and realised that the love I had for her would never diminish over the years.
My mouth was dry, but I said. “Adam, what about your daughter?”
“We were not close,” he said softly. “We lost touch many years ago.”
Stillman looked at me and then back to Adam, puzzled. “We’d understood that you’d reconnected recently? Gotten back in touch, and that things were going well?”
“No, that is not correct.”
Stillman glanced over at Hubert who nodded for her to continue. “We’ve been talking with Amy,” she said, “and in fact, we’ve brought her here to meet you.”
She indicated for the guards to open the door. There was a clunk as the locks were disengaged and the door swung open silently to reveal Amy, flanked by Gabriel Connor and a female police officer. She shuffled slowly and hesitatingly into the room, eyes flicking side-to-side. She was clasping her bag tightly in front of her and Connor needed to guide her with a hand on her arm. Hubert and I stood up and moved our chairs out of the way so that she could approach Adam, who was looking at her with half closed eyes. She stopped a few feet away from the dentist chair and glanced sideways as if asking for instructions for what to do next. She looked at Hubert with knitted brows.
“What’s he doing all tied up?”
Hubert ignored her. Connor took a few stops towards Adam, who slowly swivelled his head to look at him.
“Welcome back, buddy.” said Connor. “How you feeling?”
Adam looked at him and smiled, although his eyes didn’t follow suit. “Hello Gabe. Have you missed me?”
Connor returned the smile. “Well, I sure never expected to see you again. What happened to you?”
Then Amy spoke up. “Hi, dad.”
Adam looked over at her and tilted his head slightly to the left. He looked back at Connor and raised an eyebrow. “Where did you find her?”
He said it in such a detached way that Connor put his hands in his pockets and looked anxious and perplexed. I glanced at Amy, who was continuing to fidget and had started biting her nails.
“Amy lives in Vegas, don’t you remember?” Connor said. “We thought it would be good for you to see her. Given everything that’s happened, you know…”
I looked at Amy, and again a feeling of unease came over me. She’d pulled a piece of gum out of her bag, and was chewing away, mouth open, looking bored. Adam was now intently regarding his daughter, and I caught a flash of green fluorescence behind his eyes, and at the same time felt a pressure in my skull. I put a hand to my forehead and leaned on the chair back to support myself, and then became aware of another presence in my mind as Adam’s voice floated up.
Kate, I have finally overcome the countermeasures in this room. It has coincided with the opening of the wormhole.
Amy also had her hands on her head and was rubbing her temples furiously. Hubert and Stillman were looking bewildered, while Connor and the soldiers were also appearing slightly discombobulated. Then I felt a wave of anger emanating from Adam. I felt him trying to suppress it, but then I sensed it wash over him. His eyes became solid blocks of green light, and he stood up, breaking the chains that had kept his arms and feet locked to the chair. The straightjacket shredded like the skin of a snake losing its winter coat, molecules separating and dispersing in a cloud of dust. He stepped out of the chair and reached over to grasp Amy by the throat. She cried out in pain as he lifted her up into the air, feet cycling away and struggling to break his grip.
“Adam, what are you doing?!” I shouted.
Stillman and I rushed forward and grabbed his wrists, trying to loosen the grip on his daughter’s neck. It was like trying to separate welded iron bars. He looked down at me and his thoughts exploded into my consciousness and I realised the mistake we had made.
During Adam’s last fateful trip overseas, Cora had answered a knock on the door and found Amy looking the worse for wear accompanied by two men. Tripping on a variety of drugs, Amy w
atched the men rape and beat Cora until she gave away the house’s security code. After ransacking the contents of the safe, Amy watched passively as Cora fought for her life, and was left bleeding to death.
I saw all this through Amy’s eyes, as Adam accessed her memories. I knew that he’d not been aware of any of this and hadn’t had time to grieve for his wife, before he too was killed.
“Please,” I said, “She’s still your daughter. She needs you. Let her go.”
But I saw Amy’s life play fast forward through Adam’s eyes. Amy had pleaded for help, had told Adam about her mother’s death from cancer, her subsequent heroin addiction and her life in Vegas as a prostitute. Adam had offered to move her to San Francisco, and live with him and Cora, but everything fell through. He and Cora became wrapped up in their own lives, and Amy became a sideshow. Adam had stopped calling, and Amy had become an ex-person, an unnecessary complication. Regret washed over Adam like flat cold waves rolling up a shallow beach. I could sense he longed to turn back the clock, and take a different path, but now that was impossible. There was no way back. No way to make it right. Cora was dead, he was no longer human, and the remorse would eat him away for eternity. Finding out that Amy was involved in Cora’s death was almost unbearable. I saw his fractured, fragile emotional state and the precipice he was heading toward. The emotional tightrope that he was walking threatened to unbalance him once and for all.
And in the background – hidden like a shark in shallow waters watching unsuspecting bathers - was the Vu-Hak.
At that moment he spread his fingers, and Amy dropped lifeless to the floor, her head bouncing heavily on the linoleum. I saw that her lips had gone blue and she was not breathing so I grabbed her nose between my finger and thumb and took a breath before closing my mouth over Amy’s and blowing. I leaned back and crossed my hands on her chest, and started CPR. I had delivered one compression when I was pulled away sharply by a steel grip on my arm and found myself being thrown into the now vacant dentist chair. Adam stood over me, his features flicking between anger and distress.
“What is done is done,” he said.