by Koch, Gini
We hit the dining area just in time. It was a sea of black and white Armani. I saw Martini waving, but I’d have found them without the help—Dad’s yellow polo shirt stood out like a beacon. “Why don’t you do something about his wardrobe?” I asked as we made our way to them.
“He’s married, you’re single.”
“I thought we were avoiding that train of thought.”
“Only for now.”
The dining room was filled with long tables and typical industrial-type chairs. It gave me the feeling of being in a military unit that just happened to wear designer fatigues. Dad and Martini were at the end of one table; Gower, Reader, Christopher, and White were with them. There was an empty chair between Martini and Reader and one between Dad and Christopher. I knew where I was sitting. We reached the table, and Martini pulled out the chair for me. Christopher beat Dad to Mom’s chair. I saw Dad give him a glare similar to the one he’d shown Martini earlier. Good, at least one of them wasn’t ready to adopt Christopher into the family just yet.
There was no menu. Food was served family style, with a wide variety of options. This was a relief—hearing Dad’s complaint about pig products being the only breakfast option was never fun, and I’d learned it by heart before I was five.
Mom and I filled our plates and started eating, while Martini gave the others a very high-level and abbreviated version of last night. He left out any form of innuendo, but I had a good view of Christopher’s expression, and it was clear from the glaring he’d made the same assumptions as my parents. Either that or the room wasn’t soundproof, and the whole compound was aware that Martini had introduced me to the Alpha Centaurion Love Knot.
Gower waited until Martini finished. Then he leaned forward so I could see his face clearly. “I’d like the full details from you. But it’ll be easier if I’m touching your head. Are you all right with that?”
“Sure.” I didn’t have makeup on and my hair was in a ponytail, so no big deal.
Gower got up and moved behind me. He put both palms flat against the sides of my head. “Go on. Tell us about it, but I’d like you to try to see it in your mind as well.”
“No worries.” I couldn’t get the images out of my head any time I thought about them. I went through the whole dream again, and it was just as horrible as reliving it for my parents had been. I ended up closing my eyes because that way I had a better chance of not crying.
I repeated everything, including what Christopher said before I killed him and Mephistopheles’ closing line. Then I stopped and tried to clear my mind so Gower would get the hint.
He took his hands away slowly, massaging my temples as he did so. Some of the horror dissipated. “Rub her neck,” he said quietly to Martini. “Base of the skull in particular.”
Martini’s hand slid up my back to my neck. I managed not to arch into him, but it required effort. His ministrations relaxed me, and I was able to open my eyes safely.
To see Christopher looking at me with a mixture of anger and hurt in his expression. It was different from being glared at, but still unsettling.
“I don’t actually want to kill you,” I told him. Mostly, I added to myself to remain somewhat truthful.
“Paul, what do you think?” White asked.
Gower sat down. “I’d like to hear what Kitty thinks, first.” He sounded guarded.
“I’ve got nothing, other than I’m scared by Mephistopheles. A lot.”
“But it’s Yates you should be afraid of,” Reader said thoughtfully. “He’s the one who tried to replace you with a robot.”
“Maybe she’s not afraid of him because she didn’t interact with him,” Mom suggested.
I felt something tickling inside my brain, but not enough to form an idea yet.
“Or it could be she just figures her mother will handle it,” Dad said with some pride. I noted his arm was around the back of Mom’s chair. Not unusual, but rare for them in a group situation. I got the impression he was jealous of Christopher.
“Maybe it’s just a nightmare,” White suggested. “People do get them.”
Gower shook his head. “Come on, Richard. All dreams mean something, you know that.”
“James, what do you think?” I asked. The tickling in my brain got more intense.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just want to hear what you think about all this. You were the only human besides me who was there. Mom doesn’t count because she was unaware of the aliens or superbeings before the incident at JFK.” My conscious mind wasn’t where this was coming from.
“Okay. I don’t think Yates is real to you because you’ve never met him.”
“But I have, in a sense. He’s as much a part of Mephistopheles as Mephistopheles is of Yates.” Almost there.
“But Yates doesn’t know he’s a part of Mephistopheles,” Christopher said, sounding exasperated. “We told you that last night.”
And there it was, another epiphany. Alien sex was great for my mental processes. “That’s it. I think there are two plans.”
“Well, we know Yates has a plan.” Mom said patiently. “It would make sense that Mephistopheles would be a part of it.”
“No, I mean two different plans, planned by two different beings who don’t know their plans intersect. As Christopher mentioned, you all told me an in-control superbeing’s brain is split, and the human brain doesn’t know it’s part of an alien hybrid. Well, maybe the parasitic brain doesn’t know, either. Yates has his plan, and it’s terrorism-based. That’s why he wants to kill my mother. But Mephistopheles has a different plan.”
“What plan would that be?” White asked carefully.
I closed my eyes and thought about it. “In my dream, Mephistopheles’ parasite moved to me, but he stayed the same. I didn’t change outside, but I could feel the change inside. I wasn’t me any more, I couldn’t stop doing what Mephistopheles wanted.”
“Oh, my God,” Gower said. “That explains it.” He looked at me. “Your dream didn’t feel right. It was subtle, but not normal.”
“You think the parasite’s already in me?” I could hear my voice, and it had moved to squeak-of-terror level. Martini increased the massage pressure on my neck. It helped. A bit.
“No,” Gower said reassuringly. “We know you’re still you. Believe me.”
“We couldn’t touch you if you were infected,” Martini added.
I thought about his and Christopher’s reactions to touching Yates’ image last night. “Why not?”
“Just something in our physical makeup,” White answered. “We haven’t been able to pin it down, though we do have a team working on it.”
“Have them focus on what’s different, really different, genetically between A-Cs and humans. Because when Mephistopheles picked me up, I didn’t have any kind of reaction like the one you all did to just touching the image.”
“What did you feel?” Mom asked quietly.
I tried to think back. “I wasn’t scared,” I said finally. “I was mad. Him picking me up made me madder. And I never got scared, even when I thought he was going to eat me.”
“It’s rage,” Reader said immediately. “Humans have a greater capacity for rage than A-Cs do. Not that they can’t get mad,” he grinned at Paul, who laughed, “but they don’t do it to our level.”
“Yeah, but is rage really controlled at the genetic level?”
“It is in us,” Martini said quietly. “Somewhat in you, too.”
“I thought it was lame, too, what he said to me,” I added. There was silence. I waited for the sound of crickets. “What?” I asked finally.
“You could understand what he was saying?” Christopher asked.
“Well, only two short sentences. I mean, it was obvious he was talking to you all in some alien language, and I couldn’t understand a word of that. But he talked to me, when he had me near his head.”
“How?” Gower asked flatly.
I shrugged. “His eyes changed. They went from that re
d, glowing, superbeing creep-out look to almost human. He said I was trouble,” I added.
“He got that right,” Christopher muttered.
I chose to ignore Christopher’s little comment. “Then when he was about to stick me in his mouth, he said I wouldn’t be trouble much longer.”
“They can’t do that,” White protested. “Human or superbeing. No in-between.”
“He did with me. Then I hit him with my hairspray, and he dropped me.” I looked around. All the A-Cs looked, to a man, nervous. “Again, what?”
Gower broke their silence. “It wasn’t a dream, Kitty. It’s an implanted memory.”
“It hasn’t happened.” I could hear the “yet” no one spoke aloud but I was pretty sure everyone was thinking. “I mean, what, do these parasite things work backward in time or something?”
“Not that we know of,” White answered. “But you could be overlaying your own experiences onto the implanted memory.”
“Maybe he’s figured out how to make more superbeings.” This wasn’t a great thing to be suggesting, especially since I had a feeling I was supposed to be Test Subject Number 1.
“Maybe it’s more that he’s just remembering how,” Christopher said quietly.
“From,” Gower added, “touching you.”
CHAPTER 25
“WE ONLY KNOW ABOUT THE PARASITES from our translations of the Ancients’ texts,” White explained as we all headed to the Research level. This was at my mother’s insistence on knowing, fully, what the hell was going on.
Martini had his arm around my waist. He wasn’t being possessive, he was keeping me up and moving. Hearing I was not only parasitic-alien bait but was also likely triggering some sort of alien Armageddon wasn’t doing a lot for my ability to remain calm.
We arrived in what looked like the biggest library on Earth. I figured it probably was. The room was vast, bigger than the science level we’d been on last night. The stacks of books seemed to go on forever, like a huge maze of literature.
It was all computerized, though. A-C efficiency in action. Gower punched in what we needed on one of their free-moving light board screens, and then we went into a reading room to wait for our selection to arrive.
This room was big enough to hold fifty people comfortably, but it actually had walls. It also had a large screen in addition to another huge conference table and plenty of chairs. The translations of the Ancients’ books were available in hard copy, but the originals were computer-created documents.
Everyone was arguing about what portion of the text to look at first when Claudia and Lorraine came in. They grabbed me away from Martini and took me over to a corner of the room.
“We heard,” Claudia whispered. “Are you okay?”
“I’m totally freaked out.” I hoped they were talking about my dream and not my sexual escapades with Martini.
“Who wouldn’t be?” Lorraine asked. “Mephistopheles has been in existence for twenty years, and we’ve never been able to kill him.”
Twenty years? This was a little tidbit no one had shared with me yet. “How have you allowed him to do all he has as Ronald Yates?”
“We didn’t make the Yates connection until a couple of years ago,” Claudia admitted. “It’s hard for a dead agent to tell us much.”
This hit me in my stomach. I knew several agents personally now, one very personally. The reality of what they did for a living washed over me. Any one of them could be killed by these superbeings, just as a human could. For all I knew, one of their number had died at the courthouse—I hadn’t asked, after all.
Martini came over. “Stop freaking her out; she’s upset enough. None of us died yesterday.” He put his hand on my neck and started massaging again. “No one can agree on what to look at first,” he added with a sigh.
“I know what I want to look at.” I did? “I want to read what the Ancients said about the parasites, how they came into being.” Why did I want to read this?
“Okay.” Martini gave me a funny look, but he relayed my request to Gower.
Claudia and Lorraine sat down with me while the text rolled up onto the screen. Gower handed me what looked like a superduper computer mouse. “You control the speed with this button,” he pointed to a round knob on the top.
The text was choppy—you could tell it had been translated by people who had no idea of what the original language sounded like. Dad stood behind me, reading along. Mostly it sounded as though the Ancients were trying to explain who they were, so their warnings would carry weight.
“Can we see the original text?” Dad asked, his tone thoughtful.
“Why? It’s in an alien language,” White replied.
“It translated, didn’t it?” Dad didn’t sound huffy. He sounded as though he was getting excited. “I just want to see it.”
A thought occurred. “Um, Dad? What is it that you do for a living? I mean really, not what you’ve told me all my life.”
Mom was in front of me and to the left. I saw her give a small nod, and I assumed Dad had just asked permission to share the truth.
“I’m a cryptologist,” he admitted. This was a far cry from college history professor, which was what I’d been told all my life. “But,” he added hastily, “I do teach at the university.”
“As your cover. Which agency do you work for?” Long silence. “Dad? I mean it, I want to know.” I didn’t turn to look at him. I had a feeling he wouldn’t tell me if he had to look me in the eyes.
“NASA,” he said finally.
“NASA. In their extraterrestrial division, right?” I’d never heard of this division, but after a day with the boys from A-C, I had a good idea it existed.
“Right.” He sighed. “I don’t see the kind of action your mother does. I don’t see action at all, really. Cryptology isn’t a field job. I didn’t know we had ETs on the planet, though—that’s on a need-to-know basis—”
“And you didn’t need to know. Got it.” Nice to see other people besides my mother were withholding information from my father. Of course, I’d spent my entire life believing he was a tenured history professor at Arizona State University, so clearly Dad was also into the need-to-know lifestyle. Chuckie and I had even taken his classes. Of course, most of his classes were taught by grad students. As I considered this, history professor seemed like a great cover.
“Right. My group works more with the transmissions we pick up from the other inhabited planets.”
“Not just the Alpha Centauri planets, right?” I was taking this remarkably well. I wondered how long my calm would last.
“Right. This is the only alien text we’ve got. The rest are all audio only. It’s why I want to see it.” He was lying, I could tell—I’d lived with him the majority of my life, after all. The big lies, sure, both parents had done those well, but they’d had them in place before I showed up. But the little lies, not so much. Dad, in particular, had a lot of clues when he wasn’t telling the truth. I knew there was more to why he wanted to see the text than curiosity. But I wanted to see it, too.
White shrugged and Gower left the room, presumably to go order up the actual volume. While we waited, I kept on scrolling through. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I just had a feeling there was something no one was picking up.
I reached the part about a sun dying, and I slowed down. The description was sad, really. A well-inhabited planetary system had circled a star that went supernova with almost no warning. One day, everything was normal. The next, the star exploded. In a big bang.
I backed up. It literally said it—“big bang.” There was text in parentheses after this saying “supernova.”
“How do I mark something I want to come back to?” I asked Lorraine.
She reached over to the mouse and pushed something. The paragraph I was reading was now backlit in yellow.
“Nice, thanks. The words in parens, what are they?”
“Areas where the translation team wasn’t sure of the accuracy,” Claudia replied. “Th
e information in the parentheses is the most likely guess.”
“Okay.” I kept on reading. The Ancients were describing what happened to the people on the planets.
“They were stripped apart, and the portion that could live without the body (aka: parasite) was freed. These sailed through space, searching for their new home. But because of their innate being (best guess) they could not find it and so began to search for new hosts.”
“Highlight this, please,” I asked Lorraine. “Dad, I want you to find the passage that corresponds to this in the original.”
“You got it, kitten.” He sounded as if he knew where I was headed. I hoped so, because I wasn’t sure of my direction yet.
I kept scrolling. Many references to the big bang, to the portions that could live without the body—now only called parasites for ease of reading—searching for a place they couldn’t find. Descriptions of horrors to come when the parasites found their new hosts. Details of why to avoid the parasites—death, destruction, horror—no details on how to live with them. Several references to the pain the parasites caused when they joined with a new host.
The book shifted, and now it was talking about the Ancients, how they had avoided the parasites, and how they wanted to ensure all the other planets would as well. They gave detailed instructions on how to keep the parasites away. Planetary protections were listed side by side with what sounded like the standard clean-living plan—be a good person, don’t do bad things, don’t get angry. Lots and lots of don’t get angry and similar advice. Keep your cool, that was the Ancients’ watchword for this section.
“Who did the translations? I know you said it took a supercomputer. Did any humans have involvement?”
“Some,” White replied. “Most were our people, though humans created the computer program.”
Gower and several women came in, including Beverly, the one with the boring speaking voice. The women were there, it was clear, to protect the original text, because they weren’t allowing Gower to touch it. The situation and my request were explained.
Beverly appeared to be in charge, at least of the book. She moved it in front of me and Dad and reverently opened the pages. She turned carefully to the part I’d asked for. It was very near the start of the book.