Then a stream of bright red blood shot upward and appeared to have come from somewhere in the man's torso. But I couldn't see his body, something was in the way, I could only see the stream of blood since it shot upward a good meter or so and then the strangest thing happened. The stream of blood stopped in midair and held there for a couple of seconds. Then it disappeared.
Then I realized that the man's right foot was missing. It had been there just a minute before hadn't it? Oh God, what was happening to us? I heard more rustling noises and a faint gurgling and clicking sound and could see two shadows flickering on the walls occasionally. The clicking, I could now see, was coming from a bizarre-looking instrument that floated in midair above the man's body. Segmented tubular appendages uncoiled and snaked and whipped around it, and darted in and out and to and from the poor man's body. Each time the metal snakelike appendages would dart inward, a new stream of blood would appear, solidify, and then disappear. Each time I could hear a thump followed by a squish. Then a bluish-gray three-fingered hand reached up to the instrument and touched a panel on its side. The metal snakelike appendages zipped back up inside the thing with a metallic clang. Then the bluish-gray three-fingered hand gave the instrument a light push and it vanished through the nearby wall of the room. The wall rippled like water for a split second as the instrument pushed through and then solidified back to a normal, solid-looking surface.
The gray thing turned something over in its other hand and peered at the thing closely with its huge, oval-shaped, deep blacker-than-black eyes. It held it up with its right hand and the thing floated in midair. the thing was a human heart—and it was still beating! The gray whatever-it-was made a hand-waving motion, and the heart floated through the same wall the other gray thing had vanished through. Aliens. No human, or human machine, could pull off something like that wall trick!
I looked down at the man's lower body and noticed that both of his legs were gone from the knees down, but there was no blood. There was more gurgling and clicking and motion as the moments passed. The gurgling increased, and the alien held up a human head in his right hand. The eyes in the head were still open and staring at me. The alien stabbed the head with a sharp needlelike instrument and then retracted it. Blood oozed from the poor man's nose, but then froze, solidified, and vanished, the eyes on the floating head still staring at me. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!
My finger twitched and I could feel it. I looked down at my feet and saw my toes wiggle. I was regaining control of my body. The gurgling and clicking picked up slightly, and I froze and stared up at the ceiling. I could tell the motion was moving over to the girl on the gurney or floating table or whatever it was to my right. Oh no! They were going to kill her, too!
I had seen enough killing today . . . I had seen enough loss of life in my life . . . I had simply had enough! NO, NO, NO, NO, NOOO! Then I could feel my body as if a switch had turned on the feeling to it and my voice worked. The screaming inside my head now had a voice, NOOO . . .
" . . . NOOOO!" I forced myself up in pure rage, pure anger, and rolled to my right, off the table, and to my feet. The little creatures, there were two of them, were startled and I believe surprised to see me awake. Although I still felt a little sedated and queasy, the pure rage energized my body and I grabbed the one Gray alien closest to me, snapped the little bastard's neck like a twig, then picked him up and threw him into the second alien. The ugly little monsters didn't weigh more than fifty pounds and couldn't have been taller than three or four feet. I grabbed the dead alien by the feet and bludgeoned the other alien with him repeatedly. I finally threw the little blue-green bloodied dead alien down and reared up my right arm and drove my fist right into the remaining gray thing's left eye, which was, conveniently, bigger than my hand. I pushed harder and harder with my clenched fist until its eye bulged out of the socket and popped with a shlurrp! A blue-green syrupy-thick blood oozed from its face.
It clawed at me, gurgled a high-pitched squeak, and tried to get away, but I snapped its neck and it was dead. I collapsed to the floor Indian-style, covered in the alien blue-green blood and a little red blood of my own. I sat and stared at the alien bodies. I was catatonic for many minutes, maybe tens of minutes.
After a while, I stood up and looked at the girl; she was still as out of it as I had been, as the other poor fellow had been. I felt her neck and could tell that her heart was still beating. At least she was alive. I surveyed the room to see where the door was and there was no door. We were in a completely enclosed cube of white walls and I could see no way out. I sat there a while longer. I tried to wake the girl but couldn't; she must've been heavily sedated. My guess was that we all had been.
I sat back down, still woozy. I'm not sure how long I stayed there before the rage and horror in my mind cleared and I began to feel a little like I do when the happy pills kick in after a bout of crying and depression. Maybe that was it! I remember now, I had overdosed on the happy pills and was hopped up and wired wide-awake. The pills must have counteracted the alien's sedative.
The buzz from the pills was making me less and less suicidal feeling, and I guess that the alien sedative had counteracted enough of them that I wasn't going to pop an aorta or my medulla oblongata or something. Since it looked like I was going to survive, at least for the next minute or two, I decided to find ways to increase my longevity. Perhaps the catatonic naked girl on the table would benefit from whatever I decided to do as well.
I decided to examine the room more closely and, basically, I found nothing but smooth walls with no seams, cracks, doors, or windows. I wasn't even sure how the light was getting through the ceiling. The only things left to examine were the little alien corpses on the floor. The blue-green syrup that had oozed from the one creature's oversized oval-shaped eye socket was beginning to harden and I was curious what type of physiology these things must have in order to have blue-green blood and still breathe oxygen. I'm not a biologist, so I had no idea.
I examined its other eye more closely and noticed a clear nictitating membrane over it. The membrane had two halves, an upper and lower that met slightly below the middle point of the oval eyeball. The thing had no hair as far as I could tell, but it was wearing a garment. Further inspection revealed something akin to light bluish-gray tights that covered it from neck to toe—with its head, hands, and feet uncovered. The material matched the characteristic blue-gray of the alien skin so closely that it was hard to determine where one stopped and the other started.
I ran my fingers across the junction of garment and skin and could barely detect the seam with my sense of touch. Then I heard a scream!
The naked girl was snapping out of her trance. I rushed to her side and attempted to calm her, but she screamed at me and hit me and then cowered, naked, in the corner of the seamless, doorless room.
I quickly realized that the girl wasn't speaking English; my guess was Russian, by the sound of it. Frankly, it could have been pure mindless gibberish and I wouldn't have known the difference.
Not being able to help her by speaking to her, I turned back to my survey of the alien bodies. I placed my finger around the collar seam of ol' one eye and ran my finger up its neck, in front of its lobeless ear, and then over where its temple would be. Then, unexpectedly, a rainbow of light appeared in a half-inch band around the alien's head. That startled me and I jumped back as though a bee had stung me, although there had been no pain. I repeated the process and again the rainbow band of light.
"It's a headband of some kind," I realized.
I worked with it for a second until I could slip it over the alien's bulbous head and then held it in my hand in front of me, inspecting it. "Well, I'll be damned. Wonder what this thing is?"
I rolled the other alien over to check him for a similar gadget. When he rolled over his head dangled loosely. Obviously, in my rage, I had snapped his neck completely into two pieces. This alien had a similar headband as well.
"This means something. Why would both of them be
wearing them?" I sat back down, rolling the headbands over in my hands, and tried to think. "What the hell are these things?"
I noticed on opposite sides of the headbands' circumference there were slightly thicker spots, so I pulled one of them closer to my eyes to see if I could resolve any details. When the headband reached a point about six inches in front of my face I felt funny and then multiple colored flashes of light sparkled in my eyes, accompanied by a low-pitched rushing noise. I dropped the headband almost immediately following the noise. "What the hell was that?"
The girl in the corner was watching me closely while still cowering in there. I don't think she trusted me; hey, why should she? She tried to cover herself, which made me more aware of my awkward and ugly nakedness.
I picked the headband up again and slowly brought it close to my head. Again, I was bombarded with flashes of light and noise. I persisted through my fear this time and forced myself to press the headband closer and closer to my head. The light grew brighter and faster, and the noise grew louder and higher-pitched. The weirdest part is that a strange feeling possessed me, as if I was being spoken to and I couldn't quite make out what I was being asked. The noise grew too odd for me to continue and I pulled the headband away.
I rested for a second, thinking about the headband's purpose while I scanned the room one last time for some other way out. I could see no real hope. The walls appeared solid, much more so than even my heft and the moveable gurney's mass could force through. There were no other instruments in the room, or any other devices that could be used as tools. The headbands were the only unknowns. There were two confused and completely naked and scared out of their mind humans, two mangled alien corpses, and two alien gurneys. The third gurney had vanished when the aliens completed their experiments on the poor human the gray bastards had dismembered. His remains had vanished also.
"What the hell," I said aloud. The girl, now alert and frightened, realized what I was going to do and stared at me with a hopeful and fearful look. She cowered naked in the corner but didn't take her eyes off me.
"We're dead anyway, right? Might as well try it." I put the band around my head. For a second there was an earsplitting screech and I was completely flash blinded. Then . . .
. . . nothing.
But there was something at the same time; I felt as though I had been asked a question. It was weird. I was still me. I was aware of everything around me and I could move and think normally. But. It felt like a question is the best I can do as far as describing it. But it was more than that. A moment or two passed and then a visual image flashed in my mind.
?
A blinking question mark is what I thought of. I could see the damned thing on television screens, billboards, signs, and computer monitors. . . . When I thought that, computer monitors, the question mark image blinked away and there was a new image.
C:>
C:>
It was a computer screen with a C:> blinking on and off. It was a DOS prompt! Why the hell was I seeing a DOS prompt? "I'm sure the aliens must've long since upgraded to some better operating system, ha ha," I joked with myself. Then the reality of my wisecrack caught up with me.
That was it! The question was not a question. It was the operating system of a computer. It was a prompt of some type waiting for a user input or command. The alien computer must be using my memories to explain itself to me. Why not?
So, I tried it.
Where am I? I thought.
You are here. Popped into my head in a generic and asexual tone of voice.
"Whoa! That was weird," I mumbled.
I thought about it a little more analytically and from the approach a programmer would take in designing an operating system. After all, I had designed an operating system before, so I should be able to understand this one, right?
"Okay, this is tricky. Garbage in, garbage out," I said out loud.
With relation to where I was abducted, where am I now?
Here. An image of the solar system popped in my head and a red blinking dot appeared near one of Saturn's moons.
Am I in a spaceship?
Yes.
"Well, I guess that was obvious, huh?" I said this out loud and got no response from the alien computer. That gave me an idea as to the protocols for the system.
Will you respond to verbal commands?
Only if programmed to do so.
"I thought so."
How big is the ship? I thought and immediately an image of the ship zipped into my mind's eye and for scale relation a man was standing beside it and a large passenger jet was above it; a 747. The 747 was smaller by four of five times.
How many more Grays are aboard this vessel?
Eleven.
Are they aware I am speaking to you?
No.
Why?
They have not asked about you.
What are you?
I am an information control and distribution intelligence.
"An Agent, he's a damned Agent," I said and then I realized that he wasn't just an Agent. "Holy shit! It's a SuperAgent! An Alien SuperAgent program." This led me to believe that there was a computer core here somewhere. And all at once, like a baptism and a Tourrette's spasm combined, I could see and understand what I had been working on for the Air Force. They had an alien computer and were reverse engineering it! They had an alien computer! Holy shit, the Air Force, the CIA, and this Group W-squared has an alien computer!
Are you a SuperAgent the way I understand them? There was a brief pause.
Yes.
Are you the only one like you on this spaceship?
Yes.
Are there other lesser Agents then?
Yes.
Where are you?
Here. A map of the ship appeared in my head and a picture of the green and orange cube I had seen at CIA Headquarters flashed in my mind. I knew just how to find it. I found it odd that the computer would be giving me such detailed information.
Can anybody speak to you?
Anybody equipped properly. Yes.
And do you give anybody equipped to speak to you any information they ask for?
Yes.
Can you be kept from others?
If programmed thus.
Okay. For now on, only let me talk to you.
Okay.
What stupid aliens! Don't they have hackers on their world? I thought this without realizing it and forgetting I was still talking to the machine.
No, they do not.
The answer shocked me a bit. After a few more minutes of this discourse, or whatever you would call it, I began to understand that the entire species of these Grays must be communal and work toward one common goal, with no straying from each Gray individual's purpose. A hive. Or at least this was the feeling that I got from the SuperAgent's explanation of things.
I had been quiet for so long that I had forgotten about the naked Russian girl in the corner. She said something unintelligible to me, which brought my attention to her nudity and mine.
I wish I had my clothes, I thought. A small spot on the wall nearest me began to ripple like dropping a pebble in a pond and then a small table floated through it. On the table were my clothes in the exact same state which they were in when I drove away from Lazarus's gravesite. The clothes were soiled with the sand and dust from the rubble-strewn valley that I had buried my buddy in. There were a few stains of blood on my shirt. This made me sad, very sad, to remember poor Lazarus, my only remaining family. Everybody I had ever really known was dead. Oh God, poor Laz. I missed him so much already.
If my clothes had not been dirty I wouldn't have thought of Lazarus. I began to cry. Why couldn't they have been clean? I wish they were clean. I was starting on the downward manic spiral again and the tears began to flow. Now I was deeply, deeply depressed. I was out of happy pills so I would be in trouble if my depression started running away unchecked by the medication.
The little tray got fuzzy and my clothes looked as though I was l
ooking at them through a zoom lens out of focus, and then they were normal again. Now they were clean and even the bloodstains were gone. I stopped thinking of Lazarus for a microsecond to notice that somehow the clothes became clean and then I realized I had wished that they be cleaned. Then it dawned on me that I should have been surprised by my clothes suddenly appearing, dirty or not.
But that fleeting instant of rationality didn't last long, because the avalanche of depression had started. "Oh God, Lazarus!" I bawled. If only I wouldn't have seen my dirty clothes, if only I wouldn't have thought of Lazarus, why do I have to cry and be so depressed?
The SuperAgent responded in my mind. The tracking device implanted in the limbic system region of your brain is interacting improperly with your hormone production and is causing you to have rapid emotional swings with great amplitude. Your hippocampus cannot compensate swiftly enough for the chemical differentials.
As I cried I mouthed the thought out and repeated it three times. "The tracking device implanted in the limbic system region of your brain is interacting improperly with your hormone production and is causing you to have rapid emotional swings with great amplitude. Your hippocampus cannot compensate swiftly enough for the chemical differentials. . . .
" . . . The tracking device implanted in the limbic system region of your brain is interacting improperly with your hormone production and is causing you to have rapid emotional swings with great amplitude. Your hippocampus cannot compensate swiftly enough for the chemical differentials. . . ."
The third time it pierced the manic haze, "The tracking device IMPLANTED in the limbic system region of MY brain is interacting improperly with MY hormone production and is causing ME to have rapid emotional swings with great amplitude. MY hippocampus cannot compensate swiftly enough for the chemical differentials!" I paused long enough to wipe the tears from my face and start crying again. Now however, the manic state swung violently to rage as it had when I had killed the two aliens.
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