by E. R. Torre
As Sheriff Spradlin walked past the prospector and headed out of the cul de sac, he added:
“Stay the hell out of my way.”
50
The rocky cul de sac faded away.
Nox and General Spradlin stood in an empty white room.
“What was that?” Nox asked.
“A small taste,” General Spradlin said. He released Nox’s hand and reached up, until his fingers pointed at her forehead. “Here is the rest.”
“What are you—”
Spradlin’s fingers gently touched her.
The moment they did, an avalanche of memories roared through the Mechanic’s mind. Volumes and volumes and volumes of life memories, beginning with General Spradlin’s early childhood in the slums of New York through his journey to Europe and experiences in the Great War penetrated her mind. She saw the deserting German soldier he talked of moments before and witnessed Spradlin’s sadness when the impossibly young looking man was executed. When the Great War ended, she stood at his side when he returned to New York on an old freighter. The sight of his home did not lift his spirits as the war left him an emotionally broken man. Though he longed for a better world, he lost almost all faith in humanity.
For several months the still young Paul Spradlin wandered the streets of New York aimlessly, taking on odd jobs while wallowing in a deep depression. Then, one rainy late September day, he found Charlotte. She was a modest, down to earth woman who worked in a textile plant. They courted. They married. A year later they had a child, Jessie. They felt the big city was not the type of place to raise their precious little Jessie and decided to move to Arizona. It was there Paul Spradlin hoped to live the rest of his years in peace.
This was not to be.
Nox experienced the horror the then Sheriff Spradlin felt that day so very long ago when he received the message that his daughter was kidnapped. She relived his furious trip to the Blue Mountains, of awakening before the elderly Prospector, of touching that mysterious statue.
As memories from the statue flooded Paul Spradlin’s mind at that moment, so too did they flood Nox. She experienced the statue’s –the Sentinel’s– activation. She was there when it joined its companions on their long trip to Earth. Because their bodies were composed entirely of nano-probes, they survived the crushing gravitational pulls needed for the abrupt deceleration and orbit of Earth, something their masters’ bodies could not withstand. Nox was there when they landed. She was there when they explored the lush forests and icy mountains of primitive Earth. She witnessed their first contact with humanity, then in its very early infancy. Later, she relived the moment their master’s programming was subjugated and the Sentinels gained independent thought.
Independence proved too much for two of the three artificial beings. One of them could not adapt to its new setting and opted for self-termination. This Sentinel fought mightily to process its new status and eventually abandoned its remaining partner. It wandered the Earth alone for several hundred years before finally stopping in a mountain range of what would eventually become Arizona.
The visual input of the Sentinel became static while the world around it changed. Rock and dust covered the artificial being until its optical equipment could only see darkness. Its internal machinery failed…it went dormant. Then one day a small part of it was reactivated. It again saw the world around it. Sheriff Paul Spradlin stood before the re-activated being and touched it. He received this same information…
The perspective changed and Nox now viewed the world through General Spradlin’s eyes. She watched as he returned to town and, a few months later, reluctantly abandoned his beloved Charlotte and Jessie and devoted himself fully to stopping the alien invaders. Spradlin learned of his wife’s passing two years after the fact, and Nox witnessed his collapse before her dusty grave outside the Blue Mountains. He was filled with regret and a deep sadness. He spoke to the grave. He spoke to his lost love.
“I wish…I wish I could have said goodbye.”
For weeks grief consumed Paul Spradlin. He forced it aside. Saving humanity became his sole purpose in life.
A few years later and just a couple of months after the end of World War II, she watched General Spradlin make his way up a treacherous icy mountain top somewhere in the Alps. Top Secret Nazi documents found in vaults buried deep beneath Berlin pointed to secret expeditions sponsored by sordid Nazi higher ups. A map among those documents indicated the discovery of strange wreckage buried in the snow on that distant mountain top. A German sponsored expedition was organized to retrieve the wreckage but the fall of Nazi Germany ended the operation before it began. On that mountaintop, General Spradlin found and unearthed the wreckage of a strange spacecraft. It would not be the last time he got his hands on alien technology.
Years later, Nox saw General Spradlin standing a distance from a burial. A large group of people –strangers to him– watched with sadness as little Jessie’s coffin was lowered into the ground. She died peacefully at the age of eighty five and surrounded by grown children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. They were direct family to General Spradlin. They were all strangers.
Even more memories flashed before Nox’s eyes before slowing and finally stopping at the moment of General Spradlin’s death.
The memories left Nox exhausted and bewildered. Buried in that enormous memory dump, she caught bits and pieces of his plan to counter the approaching alien invaders.
The information scared the hell out of her.
“I can’t…I don’t understand…” she said. She was back in that white room with General Spradlin and fell to her knees. “There is…too much to absorb…”
“You will,” General Spradlin said.
“What is…what is a Displacer? How will it save us?”
General Spradlin gently helped Nox back to her feet.
“When I left the Blue Mountains in 1925, I was just as confused and scared as you are now,” General Spradlin said. “It was as hard for me to assimilate the information thrust into my head as it surely will be for you. It took me a while before I could fully focus on the coming invasion. There was so much to process on these invaders –the Locus Plague as I called them– as well as an enormous amount of information on the many, many races they destroyed. I sorted through it all, seeing where those races failed in their fight against the Locust Plague, and what lessons I could learn from those failures.”
General Spradlin paused.
“In doing so, I made the exact same mistake they did.”
“What?”
“Like the other races, I was intent on finding a way to fight the Locust Plague,” General Spradlin said. “It was from that mindset that Oscuro arose. But first, and as you saw, I abandoned my family and journeyed to Washington D.C. I met skeptical politicians and quickly turned them into allies. Given the advanced technologies at my disposal, it didn’t take all that much to convince them the Locust Plague was a real threat. In a short amount of time I attained the highest ranking in the U.S. military as well as my own department and budget. All top secret, of course.”
“My Department estimated the Locust Plague’s power and based on those estimates, we theorized how strong our forces needed to be if we had any hope of fighting, and defeating, them.” General Spradlin shook his head. “The results were…maddening. Not only were we technologically many, many millennia behind them, but we simply didn’t have enough time or resources to create any sort of meaningful counter to their forces.”
“Nonetheless, by the end of the twentieth century Oscuro was in operation. It didn’t take very long for me to realize it simply would not work. Estimating future global population growth and conversion of that entire population into weaponized soldiers, we could hold off the Locust Plague for only a decade. Twelve years if we were lucky. Afterwards, we would fall as surely as all those other civilizations and races before us.”
General Spradlin faced Nox.
“Then, at the start of the twenty first century an
d only a few years after initiating Oscuro, I gained access to a Sentinel’s handheld computer. Within its memory banks, I discovered new technologies the Locust Plague took from civilizations I was unfamiliar with. Deep in those memory banks I discovered the existence of the Displacer.”
The white room they were in darkened until it was night. General Spradlin and Nox hovered over a lush Caribbean island. Immediately below them was a military helicopter. It made its way to that island. Suddenly, something exploded on the helicopter’s tail.
Just like that, the two were inside the vehicle. The passengers within, including a younger General Spradlin and Becky Waters, grasped at their harnesses as the helicopter dropped from the sky, an apparent victim of an attack.
“It was here I met Becky Waters, as well,” the elder General Spradlin said.
They watched as the helicopter crashed on that island and Nox witnessed the survivors’ trek through the forest and to a military base on the island. She re-lived the horrors the group encountered on their way to the base and the equally terrifying discoveries made within it. Through the General’s memories Nox came to know the other passengers, including Captain Samantha Aaron, the co-pilot of the craft. Nox sensed the General’s very sad memories about her fate, but was unable to recall anything specific.
Finally, Nox witnessed the defeat of the very last of the Sentinels –at that time classified as Automated Chameleon Units– among them, and how General Spradlin gained access to that Sentinel’s personal computer storage device. Months later the device was fully unlocked. The amount of information gleaned from it was nothing short of incredible.
“Now we had the schematics for creating Displacers,” General Spradlin said. “Many years later, you witnessed our first use of it outside the confines of our laboratories.”
The island scene faded and the two stood in the Arabian village. Nox was next to her younger self. She watched as the villagers in the back of the transport vehicles shimmered in the glow of strange lights. She heard the distant sound of thunder and, just like that, every one of them was gone.
“Put simply, the Displacer is a device that transports objects from one location to another,” General Spradlin said. “The race that discovered this device used it like a sophisticated railway, connecting planets and systems within their Galactic Empire. It allowed them to strengthen their ties to their outer territories and facilitated trade. When they were targeted by the Locust Plague, they tried to use the Displacer to flee.”
“To…flee?”
“Yes,” General Spradlin said.
He stepped away from Nox’s side and looked up at the Arabian sky. Around him, the Child Brigade soldiers went about their work, creating phony graves and destroying the village.
“I’ve never thought of myself as a coward,” General Spradlin said. “Yet after going through all our options and all the means by which we could deal with the Locus Plague, the facts proved brutally clear. We could stand our ground and fight until we were just as dead as all those other civilizations that came before us…or we could give up on this planet and run. The Displacer allowed us to do that. It was the only viable option for humanity’s survival. The question was: how many people could I save before the invaders arrived?”
The Arabian village faded away and was replaced with a dark laboratory. In it was a young General Spradlin. He consulted several technicians.
“I gathered a group of my most trusted scientists and began work on our own Displacer. From the beginning, we realized there were two issues we had to deal with: First, the device required a great deal of energy to function and each time it was used it left behind enormous amounts of radioactive waste. That’s why the race that created it did so for use in outer space and far away from habitable planets while using heavily insulated starships. Second, and most importantly, we needed a Displacer unit at both the point of departure and arrival. One couldn’t step into a Displacer and reappear at any point of one’s choosing. We needed to find a destination to send humanity. A place far enough away from the Locust Plague that also had its own Displacer unit.”
General Spradlin waved his hand and the scene around them shifted.
“On the face of it, it appeared we hit a complete dead end,” General Spradlin said. “If we created a target Displacer and sent it to the stars, it would take many thousands of years before it arrived at the closest habitable solar system to us. By then, the Locust Plague would have fed off our world and destroyed humanity a long, long time before. I feared my work was a failure and humanity was doomed. But I didn’t give up. We had to find some kind of alternative. We simply had to.”
Before General Spradlin and Nox appeared a youthful General Spradlin. He stood among several very excited scientists and looked over several reams of paper. A look of wonder filled his face.
“One day, we had an incredible breakthrough.”
General Spradlin stood before his younger self.
“We theorized the Displacer’s creators must have a network of such devices in and around their home world and beyond. Even if the Locust Plague devoured their entire civilization, we hoped at least one of those Displacers units survived the attack and might still be active.”
The figures before Nox and the elder General Spradlin froze.
“We were right,” the General said. “We found and established contact with a single Displacer in a system far, far away from us. It was operational.”
The scene before Nox and General Spradlin shifted again. They were standing in the middle of outer space. Nox was startled by this unexpected view. General Spradlin pointed to the right.
“Look over there.”
Several hundred miles from them was a small asteroid field. Before the asteroids floated a large rectangular object. Its structure was dark metallic gray and its center was completely empty. To its side hovered three enormous silver spacecraft.
The black emptiness at the center of the rectangular object was suddenly filled with an intense halo of pulsating energy. The alien Displacer device was alive with multicolored lights. Abruptly, those lights winked out. All looked the same as before, but it wasn’t.
At the center of the Displacer floated an almost microscopically small object.
It was a man in a spacesuit.
The man examined his surroundings in quiet wonder. His eyes settled on the trio of ships parked to the side of the alien Displacer. He activated the thrusters in his suit and began the flight toward the closest of the three ships. Though he thought the ships were very near to him, the astronaut soon realized they were incredibly far away. The only reason they appeared so close was because of their enormous size.
The man continued his journey. He burned almost half his propellant and spent five hours before reaching the nearest of the distant ships. Once there, the astronaut gazed at the massive wall of alien technology before him. The starship was easily fifty times the size of the Big City.
“These three ships, we found later, were designed for massive evacuation,” General Spradlin told Nox.
“How massive?”
“Massive enough to fit every single person on Earth,” General Spradlin said. “Not only did we have the means to escape our doomed world, we now had a place to fit everyone in.”
“Why hadn’t the ships been used?”
General Spradlin shrugged.
“Maybe the civilization that created these ships perished before they could be used. Or perhaps they built more ships than they needed and these three were left behind.”
“You don’t believe that,” Nox said.
“I had another theory,” General Spradlin admitted.
The astronaut maneuvered his body toward a large window on the side of the ship and wiped away a thick layer of dust. He peered inside. Despite the darkness within, he saw enormous corridors and rooms. He gathered as much data as he could before re-activating his thruster and journeying back to the Displacer. When he reached it, his supply of oxygen and propellant were almost exhausted
. The astronaut reactivated the Displacer and made the instantaneous journey back to Earth.
The scene shifted again. Nox and General Spradlin were in a brilliant white laboratory. They stood behind several scientists who, in turn, stood behind a heavily plated glass wall. In the room beyond theirs a much smaller version of the Displacer unit, one no larger than a door, activated. Energy pulses lit up the room and the astronaut emerged from inside that Displacer’s center. He staggered forward and fell to his knees. Clouds of steam rose from his suit and for a moment it appeared he might catch fire.
None of the scientists came to his aid.
Gauges within the outer room indicated the Displacer room was filled with toxic levels of radiation. Cleansers were activated, but the astronaut was already poisoned. He remained on his knees until the steam rising from his suit abated. Once it did, he removed his helmet and revealed himself to be a young General Spradlin.
The scene froze.
“I performed the first tests of the Displacer because I was the only one that could,” General Spradlin said. “It took two full weeks for my nano-probes to cure me of the radiation poisoning from each trip.”
The scene shifted yet again.
General Spradlin and Nox were in a larger room. They stood behind a larger, heavier protective glass. Beyond that glass was another Displacer unit. This one was as large as a house.
“Time passed,” General Spradlin said. “We expanded and refined our work.”
The large Displacer faded away and was replaced by one even larger, then one larger still.
“Soon, we were ready for the next phase.”
Small experimental spacecraft appeared before the Earth’s now massive Displacer.