While staring into the fluid, she remembers where she is. Dr. Black is alone in the specimen room of the Grey Valley Bunker hidden in the remote dry hill-curved landscape of California, where she just arrived hours ago with Mr. Nix, her commander, to identify Tomas' body.
She looks at her street clothing and wonders why she imagined herself wearing a uniform. And why was she imagining Walter with her, a man she had never met until today? She kn0ws he's a scientist and curator of the Roswell artifacts housed in this bunker and has been that for decades. A dissipating dream, the visions in her mind fade and become jumbled images of muddled meaningless conversations she can't decipher.
Tomas Seventeen, who was in an accident with a Grey craft less than twelve hours ago, got thrown into the past, crashed in Roswell, recovered by the 1940s military, and stored here in this specimen tube until now. Next to him are three other tubes of dissected, sutured up Grey species corpses floating in the same liquid as Tomas. Their large black oval eyes as cold as the rationale of their massive brains. One of the Grey corpses has its arms cut off at the forearms, missing hands and wrists. Dr. Black senses no souls in these creatures, or refuses. A pain pinches in her chest that these beings were the company of Tomas' last moments of life.
Thinking about what Tomas has been through gets the tears welling in Dr. Black's eyes again. Dr. Black accepts his death, but struggles with the idea that while she was healing, training and caring for Tomas over the past year, even conversing with him just days ago, a manifestation of Tomas was here, preserved, deceased, waiting for her to come and acknowledge his fate.
It lingers heavy in Dr. Black's mind that this is the second time she had to identify the body of a man she loved. The first was after her husband's suicide. There are those who believe seeing the deceased can offer closure, but Dr. Black never felt that way. When told someone is dead, she doesn't question the truth of it, has no thoughts that a universal joke is being played, that someone is making a mistake. For her, identifying the deceased is nothing more than a last unforgettable morbid image of those closest to her.
When she thinks of her deceased husband, and now Tomas Seventeen, she will always remember their life-drained faces. She is a doctor. Death neither bothers nor disturbs her, but seeing the bodies of those she cares for does. When she was a teen and her father passed away, she refused to enter the funeral home room for his viewing. Dr. Black understood he died of cancer. Outside that funeral home where she stood, her brain was running rampant with memories of him playing with her, lecturing her, laughing with her, and she did not want those memories pushed aside by one last sight of her dead dad. Her mother kept telling her she was disrespecting her father by not going into the funeral home to see him, but she knew better. And she never regretted it. Dr. Black's thoughts of her father are always of him alive and with her. Unlike her husband and Tomas, immortalized in her mind as tragic freeze-frames of death.
It can't be more than an hour that Mr. Nix, Walter and Burt left her alone with Seventeen, but it seems an eternity. She doesn't want to look at Tomas anymore, but something in her, either respect for him or his soul watching her, compels her to look while he floats in fluid alone and naked.
Dr. Black recalls conversations she and Tomas had regarding spirituality and religion. Tomas wasn't big on organized religion or church-going, but he had ideas on heaven and hell. She couldn't understand why Tomas said he made too many mistakes to get into heaven and didn't do enough evil to go to hell. He believed that his soul was destined to be cast into purgatory, lost in limbo, forgotten by both God and man, floating in empty nothingness, no reward for good deeds done, nor torment from a flawed life. When she first heard this, Dr. Black didn't understand why Tomas felt that way, but now seeing him here preserved underground in a vessel with no one to visit or pray for him, he was right. Tomas saw his fate, his future, connected to his body stored here floating in fluid during his birth, his childhood, his adulthood, until his disappearance less than a day ago. God abandoned him. Purgatory exist, and she is staring at it.
Dr. Black wishes she could push these thoughts aside and move on, the way Mr. Nix does. Mr. Nix has a different way of dealing with death. She has been under the command of Mr. Nix for years, watched him kill people and bury the bodies of agents he trained. For Nix, accepting death was important to his ability to lead. She could see a switch in his eyes. The moment Nix saw Seventeen's body floating in liquid, he shut off his emotions for Tomas, let go, and moved forward. This gives Mr. Nix great strength in times of tragedy. At those moments, Mr. Nix's clear head focuses on what needs done and not what has happened, his thoughts concerned with helping those still alive.
However, Dr. Black can't help but think something deeper is going on with Nix, a part of it he buries inside. Though Mr. Nix never shows weakness or signs of remorse, she believes someday it will catch him. That the multitude of death and destruction he has witnessed will bear upon him with the weight of the world. But maybe she is projecting her emotions onto him. Since she can't shake those she lost, her projection onto Nix might be her misery longing for company. She realizes it is possible Mr. Nix rises above it all, and her feelings that repressed emotions will someday burden him is jealousy for his ability to get beyond that which she herself cannot escape.
Her thoughts are compounding. Dr. Black blames herself for Tomas' death. Tomas was the seventeenth time she used her surgical skills to transform agents into hybrid mimics for the Committee, and every one of them is dead. Was it a curse of her surgical expertise? Or was her purpose to prepare seventeen agents for a fated demise? She tries to suppress this self-criticism, however, facing Tomas as he floats in embalming fluid, forever the human hybrid mimic she altered him into, does not help. She wants to look away, but knows once she leaves this bunker's lab, she will never see him again. As long as she looks at him, Tomas isn't alone.
Burt, a robust man in his sixties with a white olive wreath hairstyle, walks into the room, slowing as he sees Dr. Black's somber state, "Mr. Nix is briefing Walter on what has transpired in the last forty-eight hours."
"Why?" asks Dr. Black.
"Walter is not only the caretaker of the artifacts in this bunker but also the lead research scientist of the Grey archive bunkers, the Committee's foremost expert on Grey technology, and the Head of Personnel for Committee scientists. He is the one who approves the placement of scientists, including you, Dr. Black."
"He's Professor Tomb?"
"Yes. Why they gave a morbid moniker to a thoughtful man, I'll never understand. That is the Committee's sense of humor. Fortunately, they only use that title on paperwork anymore. Mr. Nix wants to get Walter's thoughts on the anomaly that brought Specimen Four here. I mean, Seventeen...Tomas, right? Mr. Nix told me that is one of your agents, and someone you befriended. My sympathy to you. It doesn't feel good knowing that I regarded him as nothing more than a specimen for decades. Unaware he was a human with friends and family who has made a great sacrifice to help humanity. Something compels me to look at him out of respect, and to look away, ashamed I once viewed him as nothing more than a hybrid specimen."
Burt's response surprises her. Scientists shut away in isolation often have inappropriate responses at emotional moments. She finds it strange his thoughts on Seventeen are compassionate and communal.
Burt continues to speak, "Nix and Walter requested that you stay in the specimen lab and analyze a mutated Grey hand we keep in cryostorage. It is quite a unique anomalous piece. A Roswell specimen where a pair of Grey's hands intermeshed with the Grey craft's metal control panel. Taken from that one right there."
Burt points to the Grey inside one of the liquid chambers that is missing its wrists and hands.
"What do you mean by intermeshed?" asks a curious Dr. Black.
"The theory is that the immense electromagnetic field generated by the craft created a rift, causing the objects within it to phase out and back into our dimension, or spacetime. If two objects touching each other don't phase
simultaneously, a chance exists that when one phases out, the second object shifts into the space the first object once occupied. When the second object phases, both objects inhabit the same space in the rift. As they phase back, the two objects fuse, becoming one in the space they share. In this case, the alien's hands became fused with the space craft's console which the alien was touching."
"That's fascinating. Living and non-living material. Does the organic material just get destroyed by the inorganic matter?"
"No. Which is why they thought you should look at it. The two coexist. While the hand became part of the metal console, the console became part of the hand, the organic molecules still intact and alive. It reminds me of supersonic ice, or ice 18."
"What is supersonic ice?"
"It's a high temperature and extreme pressure version of H2O. The ice is both solid and liquid; the oxygen creates a lattice structure while hydrogen flows within. In the Grey sample, the metal is solid, but the hand's organic material maintains its malleability. The phasing sample and supersonic ice bear nothing in common other than they both contain the capacity to be a solid and fluid at the same time. Not a supersolid, but definitely another state of matter. I'm a master of theoretical physics not biology. Since you are our premier biophysicist, Walter and Nix thought while you're here waiting for them to finish, maybe you can shed new light on this sample."
"Thanks Burt, I'd be glad to look at it."
"Good. The sample wrist is Grey flesh, but the hand is both flesh and metal. The fingers that extend out the other side of the console are flesh."
"What in the ship caused the phasing?"
"The Greys used a cloaking device that bends light by creating an electromagnetic field. Sunlight is electromagnetic radiation, and the cloak prevents light from penetrating it, preventing the ship inside the cloak from being seen. Mr. Nix says you saw this cloak in action. We found it on the Roswell craft. When generated in a consistent power and frequency, it does nothing but bend light. But if the field has too much power, and the frequency changes, it forms a gravitational wave, and generates a gravitational field of its own, the ship becoming the center."
"I follow you so far."
"Walter speculated there was a brief unification of electromagnetism and gravity within the malfunctioning cloaking device, creating a pocket of interdimensional space. He researched ways to recreate the electromagnetic cloak malfunction and cause a rift to occur. However, the only two known cases of rifts being created was aided by environmental influences. The Roswell incident occurred in the ionosphere, and the Philadelphia Experiment was surrounded by salt water. Both environments are highly conductive and played a part in generating the extreme energy necessary to create a rift."
"That is interesting. Why didn't every specimen fuse or intermesh with parts of the ship?"
"The other specimens, including Seventeen, didn't phase into a part of the craft because they shifted into empty space within the ship, so when they phased back, they weren't sharing space with another matter. I can't say if it was motion, momentum or chance that the other Grey aliens didn't phase into part of the ship. A group of human hybrid skin spawns aboard the craft phased into each other, forming a blob of flesh, heads, arms and legs. They must have been touching and became one mutated creature incapable of functioning or sustaining its life.
"The one thing we were unable to figure out with the hand-in-metal is that instead of killing the flesh or displacing the metal, the two coexist as one. The flesh continued to be alive despite being part metal. I'll show you Walter's notes from when he inspected the specimen so you can refer to them. In the notes, Walter uses his moniker Professor Tomb I mentioned earlier, and mine is Professor Stone."
"Thanks, I'll...I'll examine it. Wait...Tomb and Stone? Tombstone?"
"The Committee put us in charge of this stone tomb of dead creatures. I said the Committee has a strange sense of humor."
"When did you two just become Walter and Burt?"
"For over twenty years we researched every specimen and artifact from the Roswell crash here. We distributed our reports and findings to the scientists in the other Committee facilities and to confidential government researchers."
"I read those reports. Well, the ones pertaining to biology."
"If anyone has a question regarding our work, we are here to look into it. Since we have the most intimate understanding of this material, they left us here to caretake it. The Committee has three other bunkers with Grey artifacts in them. This one was the first and has the most intact specimens. Now and then, we pull out old research and give it a second look to see if we can come up with new ideas. But to keep Walter busy, they made him an administrator dealing with the recruitment, placement, and monitoring of Committee scientists like yourself."
"Still haven't told me why go by Walter and Burt and not Professor Tomb and Professor Stone."
"Your personnel file contains recommendations, comments and criticism by Tomb and Stone. To keep scientist who come here from associating us as caretakers with the names that recruit, promote or terminate them, they gave us these first names to use."
"Then why tell me?"
"Our professor names are in the specimen files, and Mr. Nix wanted you to know we are the professors, so you can ask us questions. If you'll excuse me for a moment, I'll collect the specimen and files, and be right back."
Burt gives a kind half-smile before turning and leaving. She felt when she first met Walter and Burt, they were special. Their relaxed and confident demeanor suggests an air of omnipotence. And though presented as caretakers, Mr. Nix treats them both as old friends with great respect and never asserts authority.
With Burt out of the room, Tomas' presence rushes over Dr. Black again. The science she was just discussing has less weight than the spirit of the dead in the room. She is having trouble processing what Tomas meant to her. When Dr. Black's husband sustained traumatic injuries in a fire and months later took his own life, grief and sadness overwhelmed her, but something deep inside kept her moving toward tomorrow. Maybe it was watching her husband struggle with depression for months post-accident that helped her accept his mental state when he died. Her marriage put perspective on what she had become, a widow. Through the pain, she could still think of the future and she should go on, that she had to go on. Life was continuing, and she had to continue with it.
But Tomas is different. Every moment drags to a stop. It is excruciating. Her relationship with Seventeen was undefined, boundaries were untested. She never discovered whether they would become intimate friends, lovers, or drift apart at mission's end. Though she never considered suicide, she now has a sense of what could drive one to end living. Each hour lasts an eternity, every minute a lifetime, every second a year of loss and what no longer is, leading to another second of the same. She and Tomas weren't lovers, had no group social interactions or experiences, just moments alone bonding, sharing the same emotions, inherently understanding each other, and going through it together.
The Committee gave her the name Dr. Black. She always believed the Committee put zero effort into the name, and yet it represents everything taken from her. A declaration of darkness that she had discovered as her destiny. When she first started with the Committee, she told herself saving the world, protecting humanity, was a noble and just cause, a reason and purpose for her work. But over the years, she started to lose faith, to see purpose as mere words. She was the surgeon to take agents and rip the skin from their flesh, painfully reshape their skulls, and turn them into something unrecognizable, a disguise of a hybrid human. An appearance that removes them from social and societal interactions and makes them freaks among men. Into slaves of the Grey species. A species that has as little respect for these hybrids as they do for the human DNA within them.
The agents Dr. Black transformed were unable to cope with what they became and were euthanized. Until Tomas Seventeen. He was the first to survive the transition, accept the creature she made him into, finish the
training, and succeed with his mission. But even Seventeen ended up displaced decades in the past, sealed in a preservative solution by the Committee who later sent him on the mission to die. She was the mortician that prepared Tomas for his tomb. And she was his friend.
Tomas was a man who found purpose as a spy and a slave, gave Dr. Black hope, gave humanity a chance. Dr. Black believed in him, and through him, in herself again. That small reawakening in her caused by Tomas was greater and more powerful than anything in her life. A lifetime of emotions shared with a man that was her friend for mere months. Now, sentenced to this destiny because of what she did to him. This specimen tube is not an acceptable trade-off for him saving humanity from a coming doom. Whatever Tomas awakened in her is trapped in there.
All Dr. Black has left is science. The undiscovered mysteries and unsolved problems give her purpose in the emptiness, though the science in her has changed after Tomas' death. Before, she tried to maintain a standard, an ethical line, and not get caught up in exploring science for science's sake regardless of ramifications. She used to wonder how unethical scientists strove to create what is possible despite the danger or disturbing outcome, wonder how they could cast off morality and ethics in exchange for discovery, let go of the rational for the chance to uncover the impossible.
Tomas' exposed corpse makes sense of this controversial view. That even a moral and ethical scientist as herself can inadvertently torture and destroy, so why limit herself with ideology. To deny discovery on righteous grounds is as irresponsible as the questionable experiments needed to uncover those discoveries. She now realizes the emotional tortures and scars of life and reality are so gross, so disgusting, that ethical innocence is an illusion. Limiting science in the name of morality is for the weak with love and hope and dreams, none of which she has anymore.
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