by J. Blanes
The alien sat on the table, his head between his legs, shaking with fear. He was sure they would kill him now, and he didn’t dare to look up.
“Why? Why would you leave us alone if it was your job to help us?” Keira asked him. She was now as furious as the others and had to try hard to keep herself calm.
The alien raised his head a little. “Because I was afraid,” he mumbled.
“Afraid of what?”
“Afraid of you, afraid of what Humans would do to me,” he repeated a little louder.
“That’s incredible!” Albert exclaimed in desperation. “I cannot understand it. If your masters told you something, aren’t you supposed to obey their orders?”
“Yes, and if I were a normal Blip, I mean, Robot, I would’ve done so without hesitation,” he explained. “But my masters wanted me to be more likable to Humans, so they made me different from the others and programmed me with Human emotions that the others don’t have, fear among them.”
“So, because of your humanity, you left us to our own luck,” Albert said, with a half smile that betrayed his incredulity at what he was hearing. “I can’t believe it. Didn’t they program you with a Human conscience?”
“What’s that?” the alien asked with surprise.
“The ability to do the right thing even when confronted with difficult, painful, or scary situations,” Albert tried to explain.
That was a shocking revelation for the little alien. “Humans have that?”
“I’ve had enough of this!” Dylan snapped loudly with fury in his eyes. “He dares to insult us now? This is a waste of time; let’s finish this now!” He swiftly grabbed the little alien and brought him close to his face. “I’m in no mood for more of your games. So, now you’re going to take us to the small ship and bring us back home; do you understand?” He was pissed off, and Keira feared he would do something they would all regret later.
“I understand you,” the alien could barely mutter, his mouth shaking with each word, “but I cannot do that. I can’t control the small ship.”
“Why not?” Dylan was not willing to give up now.
“This ship,” he replied. “Only this ship can, but even it can only make minor deviations on what is already established, and only in emergency cases.”
“This ship? Are you saying this ship is alive?” Dylan shouted louder.
“No, it’s not, but it’s programmed to act on emergencies and special situations.”
“Well, this is an emergency and a special situation, so tell the ship to take us back home or else,” Dylan insisted even more threateningly.
“There’s no way the ship will obey these orders.” The alien’s words were now almost unintelligible because his mouth was shaking like a snowflake in the wind. “Its main mission is to take us somewhere else, and it would do that no matter what. There’s nothing we can do about it. Please, I’m not lying, let me go.”
Dylan looked fiercely into his eyes and then…“OK,” he said with a smile as he released the alien. Keira gave him a frightening look. “What? It was worth trying,” Dylan said, proudly repeating one of his favorite lines. “Am I good or what?”
The others, especially Keira, were astonished and relieved. They had been totally fooled by his brilliant performance, and thanks to him, they had another important piece of the puzzle, although not an encouraging one.
“Don’t ever, ever do that again,” Keira reprimanded him. “I thought you were going to kill him.”
Dylan was hurt. “I’m not a monster,” he complained.
Albert found Dylan’s little theatrical act very interesting, but the interrogation was far from over, and he had destroyed the only tactical advantage they had over the little alien. Now he knew that not even Dylan would hurt him, and that they had lost the power to scare him in a way believable enough to extract something useful from him. Albert decided to press on, leaving the discrimination of fact from fiction for later.
“Do you know we almost died out there because we couldn’t find a way into this ship?” Albert tried to reverse the situation, putting them into the position victim of victim’s and appealing to whatever little conscience the alien might have. “You were supposed to guide us out there and not let us roam aimlessly to fall into a death trap.”
The alien seemed to understand what Albert was saying but remained silent for a while. Then, he abruptly spoke again. “I know,” he confessed, “and I must concede that my masters’ programming of Human feelings is not flawless. My fear seems to be much stronger than any other Human feelings, offsetting my actions toward the self-persevering ones. It’s not my fault.”
“From what I see, your masters seem to be a very advanced species. How could they make a mistake like this?” Albert didn’t trust him. There must be something else that he didn’t want to reveal.
“They didn’t have a choice,” the alien explained. “Humans are a very primitive and violent species that doesn’t interest anybody, so it’s relatively unknown, even to my masters. For some circumstances unknown to me, they had to study Humans and program me in a hurry. They did the best they could to make me look Human given the time they had for that.”
“Look Human? But you’re too different from us. You’re little, blue, cylindrical, and have no conscience, among other things,” Albert was mystified. How could the alien lie like that in front of such evidence? “And why the hurry?” he added finally.
“About the hurry, I just told you, I don’t know. I only know they had to act fast. About my appearance, it’s simple: they took what they had readily on hand, and that was us, Blips. Making a new biological being from scratch would take too much time, so they took one of us, me, and adapted me the best they could. They left me with two arms and legs, and provided them with hands and feet. They also gave me the ability to hear and speak and, sadly, diminished my ability to see. Then, they programmed me with Human feelings, and if they left out the Human conscience, it’s probably because of their ignorance of your species. On the other hand, who could blame them, given your usual behavior on Earth?”
Albert mulled over those words. The alien painted a plausible scenario, and it was very hard to know if he was lying or not. “Are you saying that before your adaptation you couldn’t speak or hear, and you had no arms and legs?”
“Yes, I couldn’t speak or hear. It was not needed. And I had arms and legs, but not like yours. I had a different way of moving and grabbing things, that’s all.”
“If you couldn’t speak or hear, how did you communicate with your masters?” It was Dylan’s turn to question him.
The question really took the alien by surprise. There were so many ways to communicate that he didn’t know where to start. He tried to begin with a simple one, just to see how he reacted. “Have you heard of radio waves?”
“Are you saying you have a radio in your head?” Dylan scoffed.
“What’s peculiar about that?” the alien replied.
“Yeah, Dylan, what’s peculiar with that?” Albert repeated amusingly.
“I…I…” Dylan stammered. “I don’t know; I just found it interesting.”
“That’s the way I communicate with this ship,” the alien blurted out, showing off but regretting it instantly.
“You can, eh?” Albert found this new fact very interesting.
“It doesn’t mean it will answer back.” The alien tried to downplay this matter.
“Why not try?” Albert proposed. “Ask the ship what we are waiting for. Why aren’t we moving?”
“I don’t have to ask that, because I’m pretty sure we are moving,” the alien said plainly.
“We’re moving?” all three asked at the same time.
“Since yesterday.”
“You’re lying.” Dylan would not be caught off base his time. “We surely felt the acceleration on the other ship. Why not on this one?�
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Albert replied before the alien could talk. “Gravity.”
“This Human is right,” the alien agreed. “This ship is far advanced than the small one, and it uses gravity to counteract the effects of acceleration.”
“Could you ask the ship where we are going?” Keira spoke for the first time in a long time. Going away from Earth was making her uneasy, and she wanted to know how far they would go.
The alien closed his eyes and concentrated. After just a few seconds, he opened them again and spoke. “The ship says we’re going to the interstellar portal on this star system,” he announced in a way that denoted familiarity with those terms.
“A what portal?” Dylan was not so familiar with them.
“Interstellar,” the alien explained, “means between stars. Interstellar portals interconnect star systems with each other, so ships like this can travel between them almost instantaneously. In fact, you switched ships because the small one doesn’t have that capability.”
“A portal is some kind of wormhole,” Albert said as if this clarified anything. He seemed not to be worried or surprised by the news.
“So, you’re saying that we’re going to travel to another solar system?” Keira was about to burst out crying. How would they come back from that?
“That’s right,” the alien confirmed. “In fact, the ship informed me that we’ll have to travel through another star system before arriving at our destination.”
“And where’s our destination?” she managed to say.
“The ship wouldn’t tell me.”
Keira and Dylan looked at each other with incredulity in their eyes. They had assumed that the reason they had been abducted was somewhere in the solar system, our solar system. They had hoped to somehow seize the small ship in the future and return home on it, but now, all their plans had come to nothing. They would be traveling through star systems, who knew how many, each one farther away from Earth, and without any chance to use the small ship as a fallback plan. And on top of that, they had not been able to find out the reason for which they were there, nor the alien’s intentions. Their future was already painted black and had just gotten worse.
A tear tried to escape Keira’s eye, but she brushed it aside hastily. If they couldn’t travel back by their own means, the aliens would have to provide for that. It was their fault, so they would have to fix it.
“You better tell this ship and your masters that if they want our cooperation with whatever scheme they’ve concocted, they must promise first to bring us back home when everything is over,” she said icily. “Otherwise, we’ll cause so much trouble that they’ll regret having us on board.”
These words made a deep impression on the alien, more than the threats made by the others. If he’d had a spine, a shiver would have run down it.
“Don’t worry about that,” he reassured her. “This is not what my masters normally do. It’s a universal law not to interfere with less advanced civilizations, and if they did so with you, it must be because they had no other choice. And it’s another universal law between most advanced civilizations not to kill or put others in harm’s way unless strictly necessary for survival reasons; this is why they put me here, to ensure that you reach your destination safely.”
“Yeah, what a good job you’ve done so far,” Dylan said sarcastically.
“You said that most advanced civilizations adhere to the nonkilling law. Are you implying that some do not?” Albert asked out of curiosity.
“Sadly, yes,” the alien put a somber face. “There is a powerful one that grew from hatred and spread destruction and desolation as its way to advance. It’s a natural law that the universe gets rid of civilizations like those in their infancy, normally by self-destruction, but this one was able to survive. One reason the galaxy doesn’t like Humans is because you’re one of those civilizations, and most civilizations are just waiting for you to destroy yourselves and free Earth for another civilization.”
“How is that for Human spirit and hope?” Dylan exclaimed. “We’re doomed, no less,” he added grandiosely.
“Oh, no!” the alien said, concerned about being misinterpreted. “There are lots of civilizations that changed their ways and survived. Humans can do the same, and knowing you, I guess there’s still hope. There’s much we have to learn from each other, it seems.”
“Well, there must be a reason that your masters, the Tolok, selected us, some lowly Humans, for whatever they have in mind,” Albert said. “That must be something.”
“Now that you say it,” the alien agreed. “It is really strange, though.” He had a hard time trying to accept that his masters would have selected Humans for a mission.
Albert had only one question left, one thing that had intrigued him from the start. “Why would you suddenly come out of hiding? I mean, you could have stayed hidden from us, and we’d never have bothered you.”
The alien’s reply seemed to have no relation to the question. “I knew that you would survive on the ship; you’re not smart by galaxy standards, but I believed you were smart enough to find your way around, as it happened. I didn’t know what to do when you landed on this ship, but I finally found a way to help you by opening the door that you used when entered this ship.”
“That was you?” Keira interrupted.
“Yes, that was me,” he confirmed proudly.
“You were worried about us?” Dylan found it difficult to believe.
“No, I was not,” the alien answered sincerely. “But if something happens to you, my masters would surely decommission me.”
“That’s more like you,” Dylan assented, satisfied.
“Once inside,” the alien went on, “I also knew you’d find the basic things that you need for survival, so I wasn’t in a hurry either. But there’s one thing you couldn’t possibly find out about, and it’d kill you without my help, so I tried to help you secretly until you caught me.”
The alien stopped talking, as if what he said was enough to answer the question, but their eager faces impelled him to continue talking.
“The portals aren’t safe to cross without proper protection. There’s a chamber where you must go and prepare yourselves before entering a portal. That chamber contains harmful materials that must be dealt with in a knowledgeable manner, so its access is forbidden unless I am there with you. When you caught me, I was in the process of finding a way for you to enter that chamber without me.”
“The chamber is behind the wall with the columns,” Albert said confidently, sure about it.
“There’s nothing useful behind that wall,” the alien contradicted him.
“But, what about those symbols?” Albert asked, dumbfounded.
“Just decorations,” the alien said plainly.
“Just decorations?” Albert couldn’t believe it. He had never been so embarrassed.
“Yes, just decorations,” the alien repeated. “I saw you playing a whole day with them. I must say, I was perplexed at your sudden interest in some useless decorations. Why you would waste so much time looking at some unintelligible gibberish was beyond my comprehension.”
“Do you mean those symbols mean nothing?” Albert sank lower and lower, his confidence level by the floor.
“Just random, meaningless figures. But they’re pretty, aren’t they?”
Keira and Dylan were having the time of their lives, laughing like crazy.
“I have no more questions.” Albert got up, now with a smile himself. He deserved it, he thought, and he would need to be more careful in the future. He went to serve himself some water.
“What next?” Dylan asked when he could finally stop laughing.
“I don’t know,” Keira said, “but before we continue, we can’t continue calling him ‘robot’ or ‘alien.’ We must find a name for him.”
“OK,” Dylan agreed, “any suggestions?”<
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Keira had already thought about it. “I do,” she said and extended her arm to give the alien a handshake. “Little friend, do you want to know your new name?”
“Yes,” he said excitedly.
“Hi, Blip.”
“But you just said I’m a Robot…”
TWELVE
They all took a break from the interrogation and sat in silence around the table, Blip on top of it. He’d turned out to be a good source of information, but not as useful as they had expected. Albert was interested in getting more details about the ship and the Tolok, but since he had already known about the existence of a portal, he could not stop thinking about it. That was a fascinating world in itself, a technology that humans could only dream about, and he would do anything to put his hands on it.
Dylan and Keira’s thoughts wandered in other directions. They were worried about being taking away farther from Earth by the minute, even with Blip’s assurances that the Tolok would bring them back home safely. Their hatred for the portal was as intense as Albert’s love for it, and if they had been given the chance to destroy it, they would have done so without hesitation. But the only thing they could do now was to wait for this nightmare to end, the faster the better.
“When will we reach the portal?” Keira’s voice broke the silence and brought everybody back to the present.
Blip’s answer was brief. “Soon.”
“How soon?”
“I don’t know, but this ship is extremely fast, more than the small ship, so probably in less than a day.”
“Is this ship faster than the small one?” Dylan had been mystified once by the small ship’s speed. Hearing that this one was faster bothered him to the core.
“It is faster,” Blip reaffirmed.
“Really? How much?”
“In units used by Humans and using your sun as a reference, I’d say we’re traveling away from it at about fifty million miles per hour, more or less,” Blip estimated without a blink.
Dylan smiled. He had believed Blip for an instant, but now he knew that he had been joking after all. Fifty million miles per hour, what an absurd thing to say! He waited for Albert to unmask this obvious lie, but Albert remained silent and just said, “Hmm.” Keira also seemed not to care, so he decided that he had to be the one to unmask Blip.