The Argus Deceit

by Chuck Grossart

  “And I know there was someone else there with you. A woman.”

  Brody’s heart began to beat faster. He’s referring to Connie.

  An ugly realization crept into Brody’s mind as he lay in this bed, unable to move and unable to defend himself.

  I was with you during that last day, he’d said. And he knows about Connie.

  That could only mean one thing.

  Brody blinked his eyes, twice. Again and again, two blinks.

  The man sitting beside his bed, impeccably dressed and seemingly so willing to help, was not what he seemed.

  This man—this Commander Demetrius Pitcairn—was the shadow man.

  And he’d killed Connie.

  The noises from the machines, the beeps, sped up as the fear within Brody blossomed into panic.

  The man noticed and placed his hand on Brody’s arm. “I know what you think you saw, Mr. Quail. Brody. But it was an illusion.”

  Brody kept blinking his eyes twice, over and over, until the man spoke again.

  “Constance is alive, Brody. She’s alive, and we’re taking care of her just as we’re taking care of you.”

  And then the shadow man spoke the words that gave Brody the strength to overcome the grueling days and weeks ahead.

  “And when you’re strong enough, I’ll take you to see her. I promise.”

  Chapter 39

  Three Months Later

  On Board the Terran Transport Carrier Oneiroi

  “This is me?” Brody asked. Being able to speak, to really communicate again, was a godsend, but it was going to take some time to get used to hearing his words issue from a voice synthesizer implanted on the front of his throat.

  “It is, Brody,” Commander Pitcairn replied. “We were able to gather photographic records of almost all the people we retrieved. This particular picture,” he said, tapping the projection device with his finger, “was taken after you were . . . after you disappeared.”

  Brody couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “This is a boy from one of the worlds they made for me,” he said.

  “Brody, I assure you, this is you. It’s from an archived missing person report filed by your parents.”

  They’d already filled him in about what had happened, even though Brody knew exactly what had occurred the night he’d disappeared. He’d dreamt about it, relived every terrifying moment. The things had been in his house, immobilized his parents, and taken him away. Him, and countless others. As far as his parents were concerned, they’d woken up the next morning and found him missing from his bed. They didn’t remember any part of the ordeal. They’d lived their lives, and died, without ever knowing the truth.

  And Brody could only remember them via images from his dream, and his mother’s voice.

  But this image was almost too difficult to look at. He wanted to lean closer, and the exoskeleton reacted to his nerve impulses, acting in place of the muscles in his body, which had long since atrophied. The bio-implants in his eyes made it easier to see—he could actually focus on things now—and he stared closely at the holographic display.

  He saw a young boy, maybe four or five years old, standing in a bedroom. The room itself wasn’t familiar to him, but the boy surely was.

  Brody was staring at a 3-D holographic image of Murphy, an exact copy of his little brother from Culver, Ohio. But in reality, Murf was him. There was one other familiar thing in the picture, though, in the boy’s hand. His hand.

  A small, yellow dinosaur. A T. rex.

  The things, the aliens that had taken him, had constructed numerous worlds for their subjects to experience, crafted using some of the subjects’ own memories and the memories of the others they’d taken. A huge data bank thrived, filled with the lives of countless people trapped within oval coffins, which kept their bodies alive and their minds functioning.

  Pitcairn had told him the place—a massive alien lab, full of hundreds of human life signs—was discovered by a scientific probe sent to study the death of the system’s star. More probes were sent to Argus IV, robotic orbiters and landers, and the scope of what they’d found became clear. Plans for a massive rescue mission were set in motion.

  Brody learned he was reported missing on July 21, 1973. He was only five years old.

  He’d been missing for almost three hundred years.

  Brody leaned back from the screen. “I had a younger brother in one of my worlds, Commander. His name was Murphy. Murf. They made him look just like me.” And that was the only part of his four worlds that was anywhere close to being true. All that time, he’d been staring into his own face whenever he looked at Murphy. It explained so much. But Brody also knew that every single detail of his other worlds, all the places and people, had been copied.

  Felix, Reba, his friends at the elementary school, his teachers, Joan, and the bartender in Garland Trail . . . all culled from other people’s minds, mixed together to form a suitable world in which the aliens would study the one thing they didn’t understand and couldn’t comprehend about the strange species they’d discovered on the third planet in a distant star system.

  That one thing had been simple human emotion.

  Fear, longing, happiness, despair, loss, heartache, love, hate, sacrifice, revenge, lust, even physical addiction. None of it made sense to them. So they studied it. Brody, and all those like him who were taken from Earth, were nothing more than subjects to them, lab rats to torture, to shock, to please, and caress, all to see how humans reacted.

  But they were abandoned when the system’s star entered its rapid death throes, left with only a single caretaker. The controller began to fail, the subjects began to die, and the caretaker could do nothing to stop it. For it had been abandoned, too.

  Worlds—environments, as Pitcairn called them—collapsed in on themselves, leaving the subjects in a mental limbo of sorts, still alive, but with no sensory input. They were trapped within their own minds, floating in the darkness, until the life-support systems failed. One by one.

  Alone in the darkness, they starved to death. Just as he and Connie had almost done.

  The shadow man, or men, had tried to communicate with him, pointing, attempting to get him to go where he’d never been before in his artificial worlds so he could see a boundary for himself. So he could break the bond. By the time he’d seen a boundary, however, his bond with Connie was too strong.

  In the end, the last shadow man—Pitcairn—had saved them both, by appearing to shoot Connie in the head, severing the last chains holding them inside the aliens’ illusory world. Unlike the divers, who weren’t protected from injury by the alien controller, the people trapped in the pods could suffer catastrophic injuries without any harm to their physical being. For the divers, though, because of the sheer invasive power of the alien simulation, a bullet to the head or a shard of glass in the shoulder would cause bodily harm. If they died in the simulation, they died for real.

  “I can only imagine how difficult this is for you, Brody,” Commander Pitcairn said, “but you’ll get through it.”

  Brody wasn’t too sure he wanted to get through it.

  He was nearly three hundred years old. The world he’d experienced as a little boy was long gone, blasted apart by war, and then rebuilt.

  Connie’s story about the Arks and living underground was true, but not for her, as the war, fight for survival, and rebuilding had occurred long after she’d disappeared; the world she’d believed was her real life was nothing more than someone else’s memory, used as another experimental vignette. Brody had seen the post-war world, too, he remembered. His single, momentary glimpse into that ruined world, when he’d awoken in the middle of the ash-covered landscape, was accurate, even though that particular scene had been inserted into his mind by the controller, furiously attempting to manage the millions of environments in its databanks as its subjects failed and died. Like the firefight in Vietnam he’d found himself in, a memory taken from someone named J O H N S O N.

  Physically, Br
ody didn’t resemble a human being anymore. The machines had kept him alive, nourished him, and kept the aging process from progressing at anywhere near a normal rate, but lying prone in a coffin for nearly three centuries had resulted in a myriad of physical abnormalities that were difficult for Brody to view.

  When he’d seen himself for the first time, he didn’t see a person. He saw a monster. His legs and arms were impossibly thin, his torso short and wide, and his head oddly elongated. Of the other victims, some were older and in much worse shape, but the crew of Oneiroi was helping them in the same way, replacing muscles with mechanical exoskeletons, replacing eyes with implants, and, just as Brody would be forced to undergo for the rest of his days, giving nourishment from a tube in much the same manner as the alien pods.

  Brody was no longer a human being. He was the detritus from a failed experiment. Everything he’d ever learned, seen, or experienced from the time he was five years old was crafted inside someone else’s head, changed to fit the aliens’ experiments, and forced into his mind through a series of cables inserted through a port in the back of his skull, branching out into tiny nanofilaments, woven throughout his brain, spreading and growing as time went on. The techs were able to sever the physical connection with the controller, but the alien technology would always be inside him.

  He would never be fully human. No one wants to live as a monster.

  But there was one thing that gave him a purpose, a reason to at least try to live a life in the new world they were taking him to.

  Connie.

  She’d been taken in 1994, more than two decades after Brody’s abduction. For reasons Pitcairn’s people couldn’t explain, her body was, compared to Brody’s and those of some of the others who had spent roughly the same amount of time in the coffins, in much better shape. Brody hadn’t seen her yet, but from Commander Pitcairn’s description of her condition, Brody figured the doctors on Earth would be able to reconstruct her features much more easily than his own.

  If, that is, she could be saved.

  Connie’s worlds had collapsed in on themselves, but Commander Pitcairn’s people discovered that her mind had somehow reached out, making a connection with Brody’s worlds. This feat was, they said, the only thing that kept her alive.

  But now, they were struggling to keep her body functioning. She had woken, just as Brody had done, had been told what had happened, and had seen her own physical appearance. Pitcairn wasn’t sure how much of it Connie truly understood, because her periods of consciousness were brief and getting more and more infrequent.

  She was dying, and the medical teams weren’t sure how to stop it.

  Commander Pitcairn had promised Brody he could see her once he was strong enough, and that time was now. His appearance might make things worse for her, but he had to try to reach her, let her know there was something worth living for.

  “I would like to see Connie now, Commander,” Brody said.

  “Are you sure?”

  The exoskeleton whirred slightly as Brody nodded. “We need to bring this with us,” Brody said, pointing at the projection device.

  He explained what he wanted to do, and Commander Pitcairn agreed, but not before he placed his hand on Brody’s arm and said, “You need to know one other thing, Brody. We’re not sure how much she remembers.”

  “About the worlds?” Brody asked.

  “Yes,” Pitcairn replied. He paused then added, “And you.”

  Brody had asked about Connie as soon as he was able to communicate. He assumed Connie had done the same; she’d been fitted with her voice synthesizer a few days ago. “She hasn’t mentioned me, has she.”

  “No, she hasn’t. Not yet, anyway,” Pitcairn added quickly. “Maybe seeing you, or this, will make a difference,” he said, motioning to the projection device.

  Brody’s heart sank. Connie was his one reason for living, and if she didn’t—or couldn’t—remember him, then what purpose was there for him to continue?

  “Maybe she needs a reason to live, Brody. We’ll give your idea a try, see what happens.”

  Pitcairn was right. He had to try. She might view him as a deformed monster instead of the Brody Quail with whom she’d shared so much, and there wouldn’t be anything he could do to change that, and all the effort Commander Pitcairn had made to rescue him would have been in vain, for Brody didn’t see any place for a man like him. Anywhere. Pitcairn had said that Earth was a wondrous place now, where war, starvation, and illness had become, almost, a distant memory. Oneiroi didn’t have the extensive medical facilities that Brody would experience on Earth; she and her sister ships, three of which had already arrived back home, held facilities only capable of handling the initial care and rehabilitation the abductees required. On Earth, however, technology had advanced to such a state that in time, Brody would be able to walk among his fellow citizens with barely any sign of how he appeared now. He would at least look human.

  But still, without Connie, would it matter?

  If she did remember him, though, that changed things.

  He would have a reason to live. And hopefully, Connie would, too.

  It was hard enough to look upon his own body, but seeing Connie nearly broke Brody’s heart.

  The general shape of her face and the strands of red hair that still clung to her scalp told Brody that the body lying before him was, in fact, the Connie he’d seen in his different worlds. Still, as Pitcairn had told him, her body’s deformations weren’t quite as extreme as his.

  Her arms and legs were long and thin, but her torso still appeared remarkably human. Her eyes, hidden under a light-therapy device, fluttered beneath drooping eyelids. She was sleeping, but from what Commander Pitcairn had told him on the way to her room, she wasn’t going to last much longer. Her vitals were failing for no apparent reason, as if she didn’t seem to have a reason to live. The doctors weren’t sure what else they could do.

  The Connie whom Brody had come to know in his four worlds had been a fighter. Inside that ruined body was someone who should be fighting to stay alive, not giving up.

  Brody stepped closer, the exoskeleton whirring and jerking with each step. “Connie?” He wished his artificial voice was soft, comforting, but the synthesizer wasn’t designed to mimic the sympathy and caring he wished to convey. He sounded like a damned machine.

  He gently placed his hand on hers, feeling the warmth of her actual body for the very first time. Slowly, her eyes opened, and Pitcairn slid the therapy device out of the way, stepping back out of view.

  This was the moment Brody feared most of all. She would see him, the real Brody Quail, for the first time, and his appearance might be too much for her to bear.

  He watched as she turned her eyes toward him, the green sadly lacking the fire he’d come to know. They were cloudy. Tired. Sad.

  “Can you see me, Connie?”

  She blinked once, then remembering the voice implant, she spoke. “Yes.”

  Brody was glad he didn’t see the terror he expected to see in her eyes, but in a way, he would’ve liked to see some sort of reaction. Instead, she only stared. Her eyes held no emotion. They were just . . . vacant.

  “It’s me. Brody.”

  There it was. She would either remember him, or not. After Brody gave her time enough to answer, it was obvious she didn’t.

  “Brody Quail,” he said. “I was with you, back in that . . . place. Do you remember me, Connie?” Please say you remember me, please.

  “Quail,” Connie said, the name screeching from the still-new voice synthesizer. She was silent for a moment, then blinked.

  Twice.

  Brody straightened and glanced at Pitcairn, who was close by, watching silently. “She doesn’t remember me.”

  Pitcairn pointed at the projection device.

  Brody placed it next to Connie’s bedside and touched the controls. A 3-D holographic picture floated above Connie’s bed. Brody had never seen the image before, but he recognized the person at the center.


  “Connie,” he said. “There’s something I want you to see.”

  She shifted her eyes to the picture. The seconds ticked by, and it seemed as if she couldn’t recall ever seeing what was projected above her. Then her eyes widened with recognition.

  “Who?” she asked.

  Brody leaned closer. “You once told me of your dreams. You were a little girl, with a mom and dad, and you were taken from them.” He watched as she looked into his face, then back at the picture. “This is that little girl, Connie. Her name is Constance Drake, taken from Watseka, Illinois, on July 23, 1994.”

  Brody watched as a tear slowly spilled from her eye, and he gently wiped it away.

  “I was so scared,” she said.

  “You don’t need to be scared anymore, Connie. You’re here with me, and you’re safe. Those things aren’t ever going to hurt you again.”

  She stared at the picture for the longest time, remembering. She finally looked at Brody again, squinting slightly. “Who are you?” she asked.

  Brody touched another control, and the picture of a four-year-old boy appeared next to her picture. He watched her face and again saw some recognition.

  “That’s Murphy,” she said.

  Brody hadn’t expected her to recognize his little brother—the real reason he wanted her to see the picture was in his hand—but figured she must’ve seen him as they ran from his room in Culver. She at least remembered part of the worlds. “No, Connie, that’s me. As a little boy, about a year before I was taken on July 21, 1973. My name is Brody Quail.” Please, remember.

  Again, Connie paused, considering. Then she said, “No, his name is Murphy. I don’t know you.”

  “Try to remember, Connie. I was in a place called Culver, Ohio, and you were there with me, in an elementary school. We hid in a closet, and I hugged you before—”

  Connie shifted her eyes away from the images, focusing instead on the ceiling. “Please leave.”

  One of the med techs at the back of the room stepped forward. “Commander, I think it would be better if we stopped for now.”