Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  “How’s that?” Divinity asked. “How do you feel?”

  Liza blinked. She was in an all-white room with a brown-haired woman and two Titans, same as before. But it all struck her as if she’d just walked in, though she knew she’d been here for a while.

  “How do you feel?” Divinity repeated.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Do you remember meeting me before?”

  Liza didn’t. Not entirely. She searched her mind and came up only with the same vague feeling of familiarity. There was something else, like a faded snapshot: a ghost of a memory involving her rectory’s cafeteria, this woman, and a sense of foreboding.

  “No.”

  “It might return. It might not. I don’t have time to wait. Do you remember … anything else?”

  Liza blinked again. She almost gasped as — in the split second of darkness with her eyelids shut — she seemed to see something staring back at her. A black mass: a giant worm with no mouth or face — only a pair of giant yellow eyes. The sight made her start. She bucked backward and almost fell, one of the Titans grabbing Liza’s arm to steady her.

  “What the fuck?”

  Divinity turned to one of the Titans. “She sees it.”

  And an echo, repeated inside Liza’s head: She sees it. She sees it. She sees it. As if Divinity’s voice were plucked and repeated, a call sent out and perpetuated by other sources.

  “Listen to me,” Divinity said, now taking Liza’s shoulders and staring into her eyes. “I don’t have time to be anything other than blunt. You, as Liza Knight of Cape Town, are host to an observer. It might frighten you as the top part of your mind adjusts to what it believes is news, but this is something you’ve always known deep down, because the observer has always been with you. Breathe.”

  Liza felt the peak of an adrenaline spike. She shook beneath Divinity’s hands, her heart rate climbing. She wanted to run, but the woman’s grip was strong. Her breaths were short and fast, her eyes darting everywhere. Every time she blinked, she saw that thing, looking back at her, coiled inside.

  “Breathe. The feeling will pass.”

  “What the fuck is that thing?” Liza demanded.

  “It’s part of you. It always has been. But it’s also part of us. I need you to focus, Liza. It’s like remembering how to inhale. Your body knows it even if panic wants you to forget. You must accept this — and do it fast. Just like you need to inhale for your body to keep living, so you need to integrate this knowledge of what you’ve always known. Can you do that?”

  Fuck no, she couldn’t do that. There was a worm inside her mind, with giant yellow eyes. Liza’s hammering pulse was in her neck. In her clenching hands. In her tiny, shallow breaths.

  “Liza.” Divinity shook her. “Liza!”

  Liza’s head snapped to center.

  “Watch my eyes.”

  Liza held them, willing herself to Divinity’s requested calm. Slowly, grudgingly, it came. Then, still keyed up, Liza watched those brown irises and said, “You’re not human.”

  “This body is a surrogate.”

  “Am I a surrogate?”

  “You are a hybrid. I can feel the observer touching our collective. You’re intertwined with the observer. I know you can access all the answers you need if you’ll allow it to happen. Do you see?”

  Liza didn’t. But then, as she watched the woman’s eyes, answers came. Fog departed. Clarity returned.

  “It was you in my head. You sent me to that canyon. To that cache of stuff.”

  “Circumstances made a trip necessary, and I could not go myself.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  Liza dipped her toe into the new mental water. Her memories were more or less crisp, save that one blank spot between the rectory and the moment she’d awakened near the freighter to find Peers Basara and Stranger. And she had new memories, too. New senses that must be her mind — or the observer’s — reaching into the Astral collective. She could feel its concerns. Its rough spots. Two places, in particular, where things weren’t as harmonious as a collective was supposed to be.

  “Who is Eternity?” Liza asked, feeling one of the rough spots.

  “An Astral who’s been compromised. Which is why I need your help.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She is on this ship. Being held captive.”

  “By who?”

  Divinity’s mouth worked again, probably deciding if she could trust Liza enough to tell her a closely held truth.

  “A hostile.”

  Liza reached into the collective. It was there. Like Eternity. But there was a block — something twisted enough that she couldn’t see.

  “I know you can’t see far,” Divinity said, as if reading Liza’s facial expression. “Eternity’s … abduction … has caused more knots than our collective is equipped to deal with. Communication has broken down. In many cases we’re having to transmit mouth to ear like humans.”

  “Shout for more Titans. Let’s break in there and get her back,” said Liza.

  For a third time, Divinity seemed to consider. “Many Titans have been compromised, as well. These two will help us.” She nodded at the pair. “But you should not leave this room without me because others might be … less helpful.”

  “But you’re a group. Like a hive mind. All thinking as one?”

  “That’s the way it’s supposed to be, but right now it is not. There is too much to explain. I just need to know if you’re with me.”

  “With you?” It was a bizarre question from an Astral. Humans thought this way. Not aliens. Not Liza, if she was to believe the big yellow eyes she was slowly getting used to seeing.

  “Look inside, Liza. Consult your observer. I know you can feel it. I can feel you feeling it. Haven’t you ever felt our pull? A desire to understand what Astrals are doing and perhaps even join us?”

  Liza thought back. Oh yes, she’d felt shifted loyalties before. In a way, realizing what she’d apparently always known (something that, right now, felt more like integration than realization) was a relief. She’d wondered, long ago, if she was just a dirty traitor. Now Lila realized she was being true to herself, though she hadn’t seen what her true self was before now.

  “Our Founders seeded observers in your population. They’ve always been among you, moving from host to host upon their passing. The Founders also seeded each test population with chaos. Before now the element gave the experiment variation. This time it triggered a fault. Another of our hybrids manifested an anomaly. We tried to purge it, and the anomaly spread systemwide. There’s only a small unaffected cluster.” Divinity sighed, frustrated. “I would rather not tell you this, but there is no other way.”

  “You and me and them,” Liza said, nodding toward the Titans. “This is the ‘unaffected cluster’?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you said my ‘erasure’ didn’t take. And I’m not stupid enough to believe that any of the three of you are acting normally, for Astrals.”

  “It’s a matter of degrees.”

  Liza considered, then said, “Why are you telling me this? It’s not just so that you can have a fourth.”

  Liza’s intuition — surely from her human half — was prickling. Since when did Astral command beg humans for help? Maybe Liza had Astral in her, but the collective hadn’t grabbed and compelled her — though arguably, that might have been what had happened when she’d been on the surface, before she’d stepped into that shuttle and come up here. No. This one was asking for help, even if she was doing it sideways. It didn’t fit. Something was terribly wrong … and right now Liza, as the newcomer, had a surprising amount of power.

  “When we accessed you earlier, before your erasure, there was something in your record about a sabotage plot. A reason you were, from the start, more allied to Astrals than humanity. It struck us as a counterpoint to the imbalance in the other direction — toward humanity — that we’ve seen in the other hybrid.”

 
Liza was seeing more and more. She could peek into the Astral collective, sure, but the old viceroy also had her human cunning. And right now, that superpower duo of abilities was pointing her toward one inescapable conclusion: This particular woman, whatever she was to the Astrals, was in a hell of a bind. And she thought Liza, for some reason, held her key to salvation.

  “It’s spreading, isn’t it? Whatever’s gotten into your system and is causing trouble … It’s getting worse.”

  “The human collective is new to us. Their minds have changed in a way we don’t understand. We were unable to complete the Forgetting because their minds work like a hologram: as long as one node remained, others could be rebuilt.”

  A smile crept across Liza’s lips. Combining human memory and Astral insight, she thought she could see the problem in a way this woman couldn’t. Liza didn’t know how to solve their problem or even begin to crack its shell, but she did get it in a way that they couldn’t. She had a different frame of reference, and to Liza, a metaphor for the problem — still with no solution — was clear as glass.

  Divinity was saying that the Astrals couldn’t blank humanity’s memory banks (minds) because they couldn’t erase all the servers (people) at once — because each mind in the collective held all the data (memories) and could repopulate the rest at any time.

  Humanity’s minds were like the cloud, back in the days of the Internet.

  “What’s that smile for?”

  “You really can’t tell?” Liza asked. “You can’t read my mind?”

  “Eternity’s abduction has put knots throughout the system. And the hybrid’s pollution, working on her, has made it … difficult … to see.”

  “You’ll have to kill us all. As long as one human mind keeps popping up …” Liza shrugged, suddenly feeling very much herself, suspecting there was still an ace far down in this hole — one that, when revealed, would trump all the rest. “You’re fucked,” she finished.

  “We can’t kill you off. We’re too intertwined. We can bluff, but eradicating this planet’s experiment, at this point, also eliminates us.”

  Liza watched Divinity, sensing what was coming, enjoying the unfolding.

  “You had a way out,” Divinity said, now almost pleading. “I could see it in your observer’s record. It’s why I sent for you. It’s why I sent you to that canyon! You needed something. I can’t see what it is, what you once knew, but I know it’s there, buried in your mind! What is it? Think!”

  Liza had already figured it out. Just as she had so long ago.

  Divinity knew Liza had once known a way to disrupt humanity’s virus, but Liza’s mind must have been hidden enough to stay mostly invisible. She was half-Astral but living undercover. Now Divinity was guiding Liza’s no-longer-foggy brain toward what it once thought of as salvation.

  “You don’t know why you need me,” Liza said.

  “It’s something you once had. Something you once planned! I can sense the potential, but with the collective compromised—”

  “Where is my backpack?”

  One of the Titans reached behind himself and procured the thing, holding it out to Liza.

  “It’s full of junk,” said Divinity. “But your mind seemed to once feel—”

  “Not junk,” said Liza, cutting her off.

  Her hand effortlessly found what she was looking for. Her fingers went right to it, as if guided.

  She pulled it out. Held it up. Watched Divinity puzzle the item, savoring the obvious shift in power.

  “Take me with you to the next colony,” Liza said, slowly revolving the thing in her hand. “Make me a queen there, and I’ll show you how to end your ‘experiment’ on Earth for good.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Melanie watched Meyer until she was sure he was in a trance. He was trying to reach out to Clara and the others, believing Melanie (rightfully) about the Ark but trying to find a way to assist their doomed mission anyway. And that was human hope: tell one of them that their situation is futile, and they’ll go back and start hammering the same nail.

  ‘Hammering the same nail’? Melanie thought. You’re just as bad as they are.

  The new human mental network had proved difficult to crack, but in the end it came down to the Archetypes. Their external collective had somehow married right back to the more sensible, internal, organic collective, giving them redundancy just like their old Internet had. Unless the Forgetting was applied to every mind at once — which was more or less impossible — the ones they didn’t hit in any cycle kept spreading their knowledge back to the others once pressure abated. They’d make one sector Forget, then that sector would be reminded of everything below the surface once attention turned to the following sector. Any time the Forgetting was relaxed, people began to remember for real. It had been a twenty-year game of Whack-a-Mole, never slowing or stopping.

  “Whack-a-Mole”? That’s even worse than hammering nails. Or individuality or conceit or arrogance or “pride” or “self-confidence.” In another five years, we’ll all be processing human magazine articles, wondering if we’re too fat, splitting into genders, trying to figure out why He’s Just Not That Into You.

  The fact that she even knew the human culture references necessary to make the internal joke was bothersome. The pollution was pervasive. Intrusive. It pressed her every sense, fooling Melanie into believing she needed to have senses, to have her body, to consider herself “herself.”

  Well, not for long.

  The collective was so twisted and fogged that it could barely see its directives, and Melanie could no more issue imperatives than hear the dissent that shouldn’t be there. Getting Meyer off the ship would help; he was twisting the Nexus like an enemy’s neck. But even after he was gone, they’d have trouble piloting the ships or issuing orders until they were finally out of orbit. Until the Archetypes were gone, the ship’s proximity would worsen the sickness. That was human hope in its worst form: aggressive, unwilling to settle until it had ruined everything.

  But now, even as Meyer tried in vain to help the group heading toward the beached freighter, those problematic Archetypes were all in the same place — lined up like the ducks in a shooting gallery that she shouldn’t see as an apt metaphor.

  They’d eliminated the Warrior and the Innocent.

  Now the King, Fool, Magician, and Sage were together, waiting for slaughter as Melanie reached around Meyer’s trance and tapped the Reptars on their big black shoulders, warning them that enemies were approaching.

  That only left the Villain, but Melanie could sense that one, too. Nearby, maybe even on the ship. Reptars up here could kill that one while the Reptars on the planet handled the other five.

  That would shock Meyer right out of this little game, then the release of his hold on the collective — and the Nexus — would relax enough for them to kill him as well.

  It would be enough. Then Melanie could stop thinking of Whack-a-Mole and hammers on nails and ducks in galleries. She could stop considering her reflection and this strange attachment to her surrogate. She could stop taking pride in what she thought and who she was and how she looked. She could stop believing that it was better for her surrogate to keep on breathing than that Meyer be prevented from taking the damned ship captive.

  She opened her eyes. Meyer was sitting quietly in his chair, weapon in hand. She wouldn’t try to get it because that would wake him. But the collective’s pollution could work for Melanie even as it was working against her. She couldn’t see most of the others, let alone issue imperatives, but maybe that meant he wouldn’t see her — as focused as he was on poking Kindred and Stranger and Clara, trying to show them the nature of their ship’s power — and how many Reptars were truly waiting.

  Surprise was everything.

  Melanie pushed through the fog, through her limited point of view, and found her body. Her core. She saw Meyer’s trance to the side, as dominant in the collective as it had been in the human collective unconsciousness when he’d taken
his drugs.

  He could speak to them and try to show them the truth, yes.

  But Melanie could reach out to the Reptars on the ship first, doubling their Doubling, using an inch of the Nexus’s power through the archive to make the illusion that much more convincing.

  Let Meyer show his people exactly how to come.

  The Reptars would be prepared, and waiting.

  Chapter Forty

  Kindred went left when Stranger went right.

  Kindred knew nothing about battle tactics; Meyer hadn’t been a veteran, and he, along with everyone else, had spent the last two decades having forgotten pretty much everything but his name. Even so, splitting up to attack a target seemed logical. Not that it would make a difference. The monolith was in a low V, the sea miles distant, highlands of the side even farther from the water. They’d approach from above, marching down what was essentially a long dune. There wasn’t any cover. It was laughable to think they could take anyone by surprise.

  But even from up here, looking across the V at the tiny black specks that were all he could see of the other group, Kindred knew this was their best shot. You attacked from two directions. It made sense, even if it was a fool’s errand.

  He could feel the Ark’s power, even from here. They’d just been here yesterday, and his daughter (in a matter of speaking) had been slaughtered aboard this same ship, with the same power thrumming in the background. Just yesterday he’d looked at the Reptars and heard a voice from the sky inside his mind and realized they didn’t have to stay. Then they’d been somewhere else, and in the moment — just for the moment — the idea of teleporting made total sense, before it vanished like fog in a breeze. He’d dreamed the whole thing. He and Stranger both, according to what the others said.

  But right now, feeling the Ark’s power, Kindred could believe it.