Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  On a typical Thursday, the test subject was instructed to wait in the early morning at a designated place, usually in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant on Route 1, though sometimes in the parking lot of a discount store on Route 27; there was a busy intersection near the campus of Edison Community College on Route 27 that was a convenient place for Maada to await the van, for here he could easily blend in with other young men like himself, drawn to the college with a hope of bettering their lives and being granted US citizenship as a reward. Maada had been warned never to speak of waiting to be picked up by any vehicle. So zealous to obey the commandant, he did not speak to anyone at all, gesturing at his throat and shaking his head bemusedly to indicate that (possibly) he had a sore throat, laryngitis, if anyone tried to initiate a conversation with him. It was a continual surprise to the subject to glance around and discover the (unmarked) van gliding to the curb beside him like a vehicle in a space film, and braking silently to a stop. The driver, only just distinguishable through a tinted windshield, wore dark glasses, and gave no sign to Maada that Maada should make his way with seeming casualness to the rear of the van, where the doors would be opened for him, quickly, and quickly shut behind him.

  It was with a sense of excitement and exhilaration that Maada climbed so trustingly into the van, to be borne however many miles to the institute, in the company of mostly dark-skinned men of about his age, sometimes younger, rarely older; these were individuals dressed like himself, in nondescript dark hoodies provided by the PROJECT and good-quality running shoes; at a glance you saw that their wrists were not cuffed and their ankles not shackled, for they were here voluntarily, as J. S. Maada was here voluntarily. There was little need to warn these men (they were all men) to remain silent, and to keep to themselves, for each believed the others to be spies who would report them to the CIA. Also, each knew that a surveillance camera was trained on the interior of the van, for (they knew) all US citizens were under surveillance at all times. The van was windowless, of course. There was no way to look out. The driver took the silent, slightly apprehensive men who avoided eye contact with one another on an ever-shifting, improvised circuit that might have taken them twenty miles from their pickup site, or five hundred yards. Their destination was the Institute for Independent Neurophysiological Research on Route 1, Princeton, New Jersey—a windowless three-floor rectangle that looked as if it were covered in aluminum foil, blindingly reflecting the sun—but of course none of the men ever saw the exterior of the institute.

  The van passed into an underground garage and came to a halt. The rear doors were unlocked by unseen, deft hands. As Maada and the others disembarked, always very polite with one another, and maintaining their discreet eye evasion, PROJECT assistants were waiting to check their IDs (eyes, fingerprints) and to take them to their assigned laboratories. They had not a moment to glance about, to “get their bearings”—indeed, in the dim-lighted interior of the garage, which smelled of nothing more ominous than motor oil, there were no bearings to get.

  Inevitably, the test subjects had no way of exercising any residue of a natural sense of space and direction, for they had no more information about where they were than blindfolded children forced to turn in circles until they were dizzy and in danger of fainting might have.

  Joseph Saidu Maada was usually eager to cooperate with researchers. He was boyish, even energetic. He laughed often, if nervously. At the institute it was said of him that he resembled the youthful Muhammad Ali—so tall, so handsome, and so good-natured!—but that was at the start of his participation in the PROJECT.

  After disembarking from the van, the test subjects were quickly taken to individual examination rooms in the institute. Their blood was drawn, and lab tests run. Some, like J. S. Maada, often volunteered to give more blood, for which they were rewarded with cash bonuses; but this was not required.

  (Of course, after several months, when our research team began to replace Maada’s blood with an experimental chemical solution mimicking the molecular structure of the blood, it was not “blood” drawn from his arm but a surrogate material designated as *blood [patent pending] in the reports. See also *plasma, *bone marrow, *nerves, *ganglia.)

  From the examination room the subject was brought to Dr. Lehrman’s laboratory, where the staff awaited him. Assiduous lab notes were kept by all, to be subsequently conflated; each session was videotaped, and copies sent at once to PROJECT JRD headquarters.

  One of the consequences of the initial brain (microchip) insertions was a flattening of vision, so that to the subject much of the world looked like “walls”—“wallpaper.” A three-dimensional world is a visual habit that can be broken readily in the human brain, if one knows how. Maada was more perplexed by this phenomenon than disturbed, for there was, in line with the simplification of images, a cartoonlike simplification of “depth”—you could feel that “depth” was missing from your visual field but you could not comprehend that it was “depth” that was missing.

  Soon, without understanding what was wrong, and that it was his perception that was amiss and not the actual world, Maada began to puzzle over the S_______ children, who did not seem (to him) to be the “right sizes.” Especially his favorite, Riki, a lively three-year-old, appeared to be “different sizes,” depending upon his physical proximity to Maada. For Maada might sight Riki at a distance, without realizing that it was a distance, and so the child would appear to Maada much smaller than he was, like a doll; without three dimensions to suggest depth, all was flattened, cartoonlike. Such experiences bewildered Maada, who could not have explained them, even before the impairment to his cerebral cortex, in clinical or intellectual terms. The diminution of the children in size was particularly frightening to Maada, who soon became convinced that Riki, the smallest child, was in danger of going out—as a flame is blown out.

  Conversely, adults who seemed, to Maada, of a comfortably small, contained size at a distance, loomed large up close, and could be terrifying. The overall shifting sizes of persons and objects was disorienting to Maada, and eventually exhausting, but he learned to shut one eye so that the expectation of three dimensions (whatever “three dimensions” had come to mean) was not an issue.

  In all, there would be eleven surgeries performed on Maada’s brain, each for a distinct purpose. One of the more successful was the instillation of selected amnesia, through “erasures” of certain clusters of neurons in the brain matter surrounding the hippocampus, with the result that the subject could not remember that he’d had surgery, along with much else. To account for his part-shaved head, the subject was told that he’d had an infestation of head lice—his hair had had to be cut off and his head shaved in the affected area. The surgery left wounds and scars that had to be disguised with a scalp covering, in this case a “wig” that was a patch of hair matching the subject’s own hair, which he could not remove from his head, and would not try to remove, under the impression that it was a “scalp flap” that had been secured with stitches. In addition, Maada was told that the patch contained toxin to repel lice. All this he seemed to accept without question.

  Another of the surgeries concentrated on the agency of will, willfulness. With neurons in these areas “hosed clean,” these were subdued.

  Eventually, the “scalp flap” was enlarged, and a more serious, systematic neurosurgery was performed on the subject. (Of course, the subject was kept in an anesthetized state for such surgeries, which could require as long as nine or ten hours.) Exposed as a clockwork mechanism, the brain was readily examined by a team of experimental neuroscientists involved in the NTM project. Could one communicate with a region of the subject’s brain without involving the subject (“consciousness”) at all? Could one give contrary signals to parts of the brain, and force upon the brain a quasi consciousness, born of desperation? Could “consciousness” be chased into a region of the brain, like a rat into a cage corner? Maada, in his state of suspended animation, barely breathing, bodily functions monitored minutely,
was an ideal subject, for he was in excellent physical condition and, in recent months in particular, inclined to passivity.

  In a sequence of surgeries, parts of the subject’s brain were excised and replaced with artificial devices—chips, stents. Such experimentation is crucial, for one day, and that day not far in the future, neurophysiological enhancements will be necessary to provide longevity to humankind, at least to world leaders and members of the ruling classes. One of the most innovative experiments developed at the institute has been the gradual replacement of a subject’s blood with a chemically identical *blood that was not red but near transparent, a more practical blood composition in which white cells are better equipped to combat bacterial and viral invasions than “natural” blood.

  In another yet more radical experiment, through electrical charges directly into the memory center of the subject’s brain, circumventing conscious channels, the subject was informed in a vividly “mystical” dream that he was not an ordinary, mortal human being but a native of Ganymede, one of four large, beautiful moons of the sixty-seven moons of Jupiter. Given the code name “Joseph,” the subject had been sent on a stealth mission to the Earth, to the United States, in the guise of a youthful, male native of the African nation Nigeria; to throw off suspicion, the subject was outfitted with a very dark, purplish-black skin, hyperalert senses (visual, auditory, olfactory), and “radioactive” eye sensors. In this guise, as “Joseph,” the subject could see through solid objects; he could hear not only what was being said at a distance but he could “hear” thoughts. He knew languages instinctively—without needing to think, he “translated” these languages into thought. In this superior being, the thin scrim between consciousness and unconsciousness had been penetrated.

  Of course, there have been unanticipated side effects of such experimentation: in several test subjects these have included convulsions, psychosis, and death. (So far as we know, none of these have been subjects in Dr. Lehrman’s lab.)

  Here, there. How do we distinguish?

  Despite J. S. Maada’s spatial destabilization, or perhaps because of it, the subject exhibited no difficulty in understanding, or imagining that he understood, how his cramped living quarters in Edison, New Jersey, were at the same time the open, unbounded atmosphere of Ganymede; he was not baffled that he could be here and there simultaneously.

  Partly, this extraordinary mental feat was made possible by the near-total modification of the subject’s basic memory—that is, the neural region in which were stored memories of the subject’s earliest childhood and adolescence, altered to include purposefully vague “memories” of Ganymede. In a bold experiment the subject was shown photographs taken in Nigeria, initially landscapes of surpassing beauty, villages, celebrations, smiling children; suddenly, war-torn villages, hellish ruins, fires, corpses; men, women, and children strewn in the street, some badly mutilated, headless. Such powerful stimuli had a minimal emotional effect upon the subject, for an inhibitory microchip governed the firing of neurons in his brain. Where neurons fail to fire there cannot be conscious “thought”; where there is not conscious thought, there cannot be the retrieval of “memory”; and where no memory, no “emotion.” (See Lehrman, M., “Neurotransmitter Inhibitory Functions in the Subcortical Human Brain,” Neuroscience Quarterly, I:3. [Another paper of which 90 percent was written by Dr. Lehrman’s postdocs, names grudgingly acknowledged in an obscure footnote.])

  Yet more ingeniously, microchip neurotransmitters were activated at a distance in the subject’s brain by (remote) electrical stimulation sending “voices” to the subject, with such auditory acuteness the subject could not but believe that they were in the room with him and were actual; amidst these, secondary “voices” could be sent to confirm, or contradict, or drown out the initial voices, leaving the hapless subject utterly baffled and catatonic. In one phase of the experiment the subject was made to hear voices in his original (Yoruba) language but with unusual inflections as if being uttered by computers, or foreign-born persons, which produced a particularly unnerving effect in the subject; in another phase, the subject was made to hear “Ganymede” speech—a computer-generated language with a scrambled syntax. At all times the voice of the commandant could interrupt and redirect the subject. (This too was a computer-generated voice but its baritone timbre was soothing and “paternal.”)

  More recently developed has been a means of using the subject as a recording device without the subject’s awareness, in Maada’s case exchanges among Maada and some members of the S_______ family, when Maada sat down to meals with them; these in pidgin English or, presumably, Yoruba. No effort was made to translate these desultory conversations as they could have zero scientific interest.

  Other sounds sent to the subject at a distance were thunder, music, dreams, an eerie whispering “breath” of outer space meant to simulate the sound of winds on Ganymede; each drew a specific reaction from the subject, ranging from fear to sorrow to intense, infantile joy, and each was experienced without question.

  Electrical stimulations in the subject’s brain stirred appetite and nausea, sexual desire and sexual repugnance, simultaneously. Shown photographs of (presumably) sexually stimulating images, like naked, nubile women and girls, the subject did not react as he might have reacted normally, when neurotransmitters blocked his reflexive reactions; conversely, shown photographs of (presumably) asexual images, the subject was stimulated to react sexually. (Of experiments performed upon him without his awareness this was perhaps the most distressing to the subject as Maada could not comprehend why he was beginning to have “sex desire” for such bizarre and inappropriate objects as clouds, towels, doorknobs, infants, and toddlers. Even in his diminished state, the subject retained a residue of human shame and conscience, and came to feel agitated about losing control of his “soul.”)

  As “Joseph,” the test subject was required to carry a (“virtual”) explosive device strapped to his body to be detonated by remote control at the direction of the commandant. This act of martyrdom was a test of Maada’s/“Joseph’s” loyalty to his Ganymede mission. Though perceived to be “anxious” and “distracted” at the prospect of a suicide mission, or what he believed to be a suicide mission, Maada did not question its necessity; a crucial incision in his brain had reduced the impulse to “question.”

  Such detonations might take place, for instance, when Maada and the S_______ family were sitting together at a mealtime; when Maada was shopping in a 7-Eleven store, walking along a crowded street in Edison, or traveling with his fellow lawn-crew workers in the rear of his employer Adolpho’s truck. Detonation would be accomplished at a vastly long distance: electrical forces would be released on Ganymede, to travel to Earth at the speed of light. Why? was not a question to be asked, nor even How?—for Maada need do nothing but submit, and he would be blameless.

  Each time Maada was directed by the commandant to prepare for the explosion, he became highly agitated, but only inwardly; his heartbeat accelerated, and his sweat glands oozed sweat. (Eventually, in a later phase of the experiment, the subject’s heart was adjoined to a fine-meshed mechanism that was immune to “accelerating.”) That Maada cooperated unresistingly in what would be (theoretically) his own demise confirmed the success of the NTM inserts; he’d been programmed to elevate the commandant over any (merely) human beings. Obedience was linked to the subject’s “Ganymede destiny” and “Ganymede pride” though J. S. Maada’s notion of his mythical homeland was almost entirely abstract: a rugged rock terrain resembling the badlands of Montana, of pitiless sunshine and shadows so sharp they registered to the eye as crevices.

  In another experimental mission the subject was directed to make his way into the Martin Luther King Building & US Courthouse at 50 Walnut Street, Newark, New Jersey. Here, in this clamorous foyer, he was to pass through security undetected—of course, the explosives he was carrying were “virtual” and not “actual”—and without calling attention to himself in any way; he was then to enter a special
ly designated courtroom on the first floor, and take a seat inconspicuously at the rear. A PROJECT observer stationed at the site noted that Maada did not behave suspiciously in this public setting but exuded the slightly nervous yet eager-to-please air of a foreign visitor to the United States who is hoping one day to become a citizen. Here too the subject was convinced that he was “Joseph”—a “stealth missile” and potential “martyr” to be detonated by a remote control from one of the moons of Jupiter.

  In Judge D_________’s courtroom, which was beginning to fill with participants and spectators, the test subject waited.

  Even at such a time of intense concentration and preparedness Maada retained some residue of awareness from his former life. He could not, he reasoned, be blamed for anything that “happened”—it would “happen” through him but not by his hand. He was as innocent as a young child of knowledge of who the enemy was, and why the enemy, and himself with them, was to be annihilated in a cataclysm of flames and rubble in this austere old government building. US Federal Justice D_________ was to be “executed”—but why? An enemy of—whom? Was the US government involved in a stealth program to assassinate certain of its citizens, like Judge D_________? So long as Maada was innocent of such knowledge and merely following the directives of the commandant, he was innocent of the acts he precipitated, and this was a solace to him.

  Saidu, what are you doing? Why?

  But he was innocent of such knowledge, merely following the directives of the commandant. He did not need to lift a finger—to employ a finger—to “detonate”—for that would be done for him, like magic.