Humans and other Aliens: Book 1

by Winzer, Alexander

  The glow of Delta’s body slowly diminished. Eva’s voice trembled as she said, “What’s happening? It looks like he’s weakening. Maybe he can’t stop it…” She held on to Jon’s arm, watching the spectacle in fear and amazement. “His body is being covered with something… a glasslike substance.”

  A massive flash, intense like lightning, struck the portal and sent Delta’s body flying back onto the floor. He lay there, covered in a shiny substance, smoke coming off his body in thick swaths.

  “The hole, the portal, it’s gone.” Eva gazed at the red marks she had left in Jon’s arm. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

  Jon smiled. He hadn’t even noticed her nails burrowing into his flesh. “That’s OK. I think it should be safe now.”

  Jon opened the door to the lab and briskly walked over to where Delta was lying on the ground, steaming like he had been bathed in liquid nitrogen.

  “What is this stuff? Looks like…” Ivan touched the dark, nearly black, shiny material. “Ouch… that’s hot.”

  Eva looked at him. “Didn’t your mum tell you that steam means hot?”

  Delta started to move, breaking the glasslike substance that covered him like a glossy armor into shards that fell off his body which still glowed like frosted glass lit up by a slowly fading light source hidden under the surface.

  He sat up and looked at the group of people staring at him.

  “I thought I would bring back some moon rock, or should I say obsidian. Sorry, it melted on the journey.”

  Delta got up, looking at Peter and Ivan. “Next time you better consider that a portal like this will only be stable for about two minutes. After that it connects with its new environment and starts fusing with it. You know what happens when a wormhole fuses with something?”

  Peter was still shaking. “No… well… yes, maybe. I guess we’ve just seen what happens… it tries to swallow the new environment bit by bit until…”

  Delta nodded “Yes… bit by bit until nothing is left. Well… it’s not that nothing is left, but that everything will not be here anymore, but there.”

  Delta pointed up into the sky. “Your moon would have a massive weight problem very soon, but it wouldn’t matter, as there would be no one down here to judge its appearance.”

  Peter’s face was as red as a tomato. “We can adjust the lifetime of the portal to under two minutes, just to be safe.”

  Ivan nodded. “Sounds like a good idea… Let’s call it a partial success.”

  Jon was amazed at how lightly Ivan took this extremely dangerous situation that could easily have annihilated the whole planet.

  Peter looked at Jon as if to say sorry before he continued, “Why don’t we do that… Before ever opening a wormhole again we adapt the stability matrix used for the portal. That way we should be able to limit its lifetime accordingly.”

  Ivan looked confident. “I’ll go and order more parts from ARC. We have to build a few more of these guns.”

  Peter shook his head. “Has he always been like this?”

  Eva laughed out loud. “Well… yes… in a way, but it seems the exposure to the alien DNA that is now present in his bloodstream has made him more reckless. I think once you’ve lost all certainty that you’ll still be alive and healthy the next time you wake up, it changes your personality. At least that’s what seems to have happened to Ivan.”

  Jon was not sure if he had correctly understood. “Are you saying that Ivan is infected with alien DNA? Why didn’t you tell us that before?”

  Eva’s face went bright red. “Ah… well… I thought that you knew. I believe most people on the planet are infected by now.”

  Jon was astonished that he had never heard about this before. “Most people on the planet?”

  Eva nodded. “We found that the alien DNA attaches itself to the iron molecules in our red blood cells. It has been spreading from the Green Egg using water vapor as a transport mechanism. I guess by now it should have infected more than ninety-nine percent of the world’s population.”

  Everyone was looking at Eva in trepidation. Was she serious?

  “Once I was told I was infected I basically stopped sleeping and decided to work instead…” Ivan was the only one who seemed to take this lightly. “Mov… Professor Abramov decided it was the wrong kind of news to be let loose on the people of a planet that’s already under alien attack. He decided to keep it to himself.”

  Eva nodded. “We thought that sooner or later someone would notice… but it’s a very specific test that has to be performed, so… it seems I was wrong.”

  Jon’s mind was racing. “This is important information. Maybe we can use it to our advantage. We’ll have to do more tests.”

  Eva looked at Jon, her eyes displaying restlessness. “We’ve been trying to remove the DNA, but to no avail. There was also no way of changing it. I don’t know… it’s just sitting there in your blood, but it’s not doing anything…”

  Jon felt that this was not the complete truth. “Why do I have the feeling that you’re holding something back?”

  Eva blushed. “Because I am, but this is personal. I might tell you over dinner… If you’re good…”

  Jon smiled. He enjoyed Eva’s kind of humor. “I’ll be very good.”

  Thirty-Six

  Zoe

  Zoe put away her phone and sat down on the bed in her hotel room in central London, tears running down her face. The agency had just informed her of Ezrah’s death. She felt vulnerable and lost. She had liked the big black man who had a soft heart covered by a rather rugged shell. He was gone, fallen victim to the alien war that it seemed they couldn’t win. She sat there, burying her face in her hands, after another long day of meeting a bunch of rather strange people. She had managed to convince two people to join their cause yesterday, but only two out of the five people she had spoken to today.

  One of them was a tall, dark-haired Scottish man, who looked like he had stepped out of one of those old-fashioned movies that her mum still liked to watch. He’s nearly as tall as Ezrah, thought Zoe as she read up on the details of Ezrah’s death. She closed Ezrah’s file.

  This Scot… he seemed to have something that she couldn’t see in any of the others. When she looked into his eyes it felt like looking at a wild animal, a wolf or a bear… whatever it was that once roamed the Highlands of his home country. His name was Ciaran Muir; he was born in Inverness, the largest city in the Scottish Highlands, located on the north-east coast, where the River Ness meets the Moray Firth. His parents moved to London for work when Ciaran was sixteen years old. He hated leaving his friends and his proud heritage. The busy city of London became the home that he loathed for the next seven years until he left the UK to travel the world. Seeing all the overpopulated cities in Asia rekindled some love for the city he initially rejected. He moved back to Camden Town, London three years later and had lived there since. Looks like the experiences you had during your travels made you see things differently, thought Zoe.

  It started when Ciaran left London for Bangkok, Thailand. He was not fond of the steaming, bustling city and soon traveled to Chiang Mai, the largest city in the mountainous area of northern Thailand, home to hundreds of Buddhist temples, with Doi Suthep, some fifteen kilometers outside of town, considered the most elaborate one.

  Ciaran felt overwhelmed by the busy city life. He was looking for a place to reflect, to find solace from the urban nightmare. He climbed the three hundred steps to the temple fairly late, when most tourists had already left. He felt drawn to a statue of a Buddha made of green glass decorated in gold. He sat down in front of it. He just sat there for a while until a Thai woman tapped him on the shoulder. She didn’t speak any English. She just smiled and handed him a little flyer. It was a bid for volunteers helping out at a hospital in Pai, a small town near the Myanmar border, about a hundred forty kilometers northwest of Chiang Mai where a massive flooding of the Pai river had killed a few hundred people.

  The next day Ciaran traveled to
Pai. He met Dr. Jo Baker, a British woman in her forties who was spending the year with Doctors Without Borders. Ciaran didn’t have any medical training so she assigned him to the hospital’s morgue where Ciaran learned to wash and prepare corpses for the traditional Thai funeral ceremony.

  On the third night Ciaran was the last one left in the morgue putting away bodies into the refrigeration units. It was dark. Only a few dim lights illuminated the damp room that was lined with rows of shiny, square metal doors, each holding a corpse, while there were still another three dead bodies laid out on the preparation tables, set up in the middle of the room.

  Clouds in your eyes, thought Ciaran as he stuffed small strips of cotton under the eyelids of the dead woman he was preparing.

  Strange how things change, thought Ciaran. In ancient Greece they used to place silver coins onto the eyes of the dead to pay Charon, the ferryman who would take them across the river Styx. Ciaran wondered if this ritual also came from the perceived need to keep the eyes of the dead firmly shut. When he stuffed the second cotton pad under the woman’s eyelid her face muscles started twitching. Suddenly her whole upper body moved and she sat up on the table, eyes closed and mouth dropping open. Ciaran had heard about postmortem spasms before, but this was the first time he was witness to such a rare event. He jumped back from the table only to be caught by a monk. He had entered the morgue without Ciaran noticing his silent approach. The monk placed a finger on his mouth, indicating Ciaran to be silent. He walked over to the woman’s body, which was still sitting up straight. He whispered something into her ear. Her face softened and her upper body muscles relaxed as the monk gently eased her down onto her metal bed. He started reciting a mantra while standing next to her for nearly twenty minutes. Ciaran observed the ritual, slowly falling into a trance while following the monk’s rhythmic humming.

  Suddenly the monk stopped. He turned around and touched Ciaran’s forehead. Ciaran looked up. He was lying on one of the preparation tables himself while the monk stood over him, humming his rhythmic song. Ciaran tried to get up, but his body didn’t move no matter how hard he tried. Suddenly he understood. He was dead.

  Again his perspective changed. He stood next to the monk but his dead body was still lying on the table. When looking down at his hands he saw the hands of a woman, holding two strips of cotton in slim fingers.

  The monk stopped his chanting and smiled at Ciaran, pointing to the door leading out of the morgue. Ciaran slowly followed the monk’s lead, walking out the door, down a dark corridor, and out of the hospital.

  They walked another ten minutes in the dark until they reached a small temple next to the forest. The monk pointed to a little sitting area next to the building where he sat down on the floor. Ciaran again looked at his body; it looked familiar. It again was the well-known male body that he had considered his own for more than twenty-five years.

  The monk smiled. “Who are you?”

  Ciaran hadn’t expected the small man, dressed in a saffron robe, to speak English. “I… I’m Ciaran. I am…”

  The monk held up his hand “No! Who are you?” Ciaran was bewildered. What kind of answer did the little monk expect? “Well… I’m… It seems I am not this body…”

  The monk laughed. “Yes… What are you?” Ciaran sat on the damp ground, in front of the temple that bordered the forest in nearly complete darkness, thinking about what he truly was. All that he could think of were objective descriptions, interpretations of experiences that he believed to be his own, memories of the past, and ideas of the future, but the more he looked, the less he was able to find an answer. “I… I’m not sure… My mind?”

  The monk smiled. “Show me your mind.”

  Ciaran laughed. “How can I do that? I can’t show you my mind. It’s in there…” Ciaran was pointing to his head, referring to his brain, when the monk suddenly gave him a knock on the back of his head.

  “Ouch… What are you doing?”

  Ciaran’s mind suddenly went blank. All thoughts were gone. Time stood still. His surroundings merged into his own being while he himself flowed into the environment until there were no more lines of demarcation left. It felt like dropping off the edge of a map that until then had been describing the reality he had been living in. He was cast into this very landscape, erasing all artificial concepts of separation.

  Ciaran finally understood what the monk was asking him. “I am… that…” is all that came out of his mouth.

  Ciaran didn’t know how long he had been sitting on that very spot when he saw the first light of day twinkling through the forest’s canopy. He looked over to where the monk had been sitting. He was gone. In his place was a little boy, smiling at Ciaran as he stated in broken English, “Now you know… now you live your knowing.”

  Ciaran sat motionless, watching how the boy got up and walked towards the forest, slowly vanishing amongst the trees like morning mist touched by the warm rays of the sun.

  Zoe again glanced at Ciaran’s photo on her holographic display. “Live your knowing… what an interesting piece of advice… Sounds like something that Delta could have said.”

  She switched off her display and sank back into her comfortable hotel bed. Enough about this guy. I’m sure there’ll be more strange stories tomorrow.

  Zoe woke up early. Horrible dreams about Ezrah’s death had woken her multiple times during the night, making her room a confinement that she had to escape. She walked out onto the balcony and sat down on a reclining chair to watch the sun’s glowing approach from the direction of Ezrah’s death.

  Zoe climbed into the CATI pod that hovered at the hotel’s entrance. “Hi, Jordan, let’s get this over and done with. Who’s first?” Jordan was Zoe’s driver and assistant on this trip. He had been assigned to her by CATI’s central London office. Zoe liked him. He wasn’t much of a talker; maybe she particularly liked him because of that fact, but it really didn’t matter. This was her last day and then she would go back to San Francisco where the real work would start.

  “Ms. Amber Hunt, she lives in Kensington, not far from Hyde Park.” Zoe brought up Amber’s file while Jordan navigated their travel pod onto London’s Web in the sky.

  Another one of these lunatics, thought Zoe as she scanned the condensed history of Amber’s life. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, US; moved to the UK with her parents when she was only a child. Studied at London University where she graduated from law school five years ago, was run over by a car a year later, and spent two years in a coma. She reports having been conscious the whole time, even developing the capacity to leave her comatose body and perform some kind of astral travel. She had been able to give accurate accounts of the most important events, public as well as private, that occurred while her body was still strapped to an intensive care bed in Royal London Hospital; something that should not have been possible otherwise. Sounds like an elaborate trick to me, thought Zoe.

  Amber had not taken up the career as a lawyer that she had envisioned for herself before her accident. She now owned a little flower shop on High Street, specializing in Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. She had won prizes for the best original arrangement at a flower show in Kensington Palace a few months ago. Her second passion was pottery, which she cleverly combined with her flower business, selling artistic arrangements in delicate but stunningly simple homemade pots and vases.

  Jordan parked the pod in front of Amber’s shop, letting Zoe get out while he looked for the closest public parking opportunity. “I’ll be with you in ten.”

  Zoe nodded. “I’ll be in there.” Zoe pointed to a beautifully decorated shop down the road.

  “Hello, can I help you? This is a very special arrangement. I’ve based it on the concepts of uniting opposites, the male and the female, yin and yang.”

  Zoe was impressed. She didn’t know much about the ancient art of arranging flowers. At first glance it looked very basic, even simplistic, but when she took the time to really look at the lines, the delicate balance,
and the thought that had gone into their making, she was able to see the raw beauty that was inherent in the natural way Amber’s arrangements were put together.

  “They’re very beautiful, but I’m not here to buy flowers… My colleague, Agent Jordan Wilson has arranged a meeting regarding…”

  “Oh, yes, sorry, I completely forgot. 9 a.m. Would you like some tea?”

  Zoe had been offered tea at least ten times each day since she had arrived in London, making her think that this national habit must be even more pronounced than the American addiction to watered-down coffee.

  “Yes, thank you. Just black.”

  Amber laughed. “No milk? Are you sure? Tea without milk is like a day without rain… it simply doesn’t happen in England.”

  Zoe laughed. She was starting to like this quirky woman. “OK, milk it is.”

  “Did you hear about the alien attack at Wembley Stadium last night? More than five hundred people were killed. It’s truly horrible.”

  Zoe nodded. She had read about it in the morning paper. “Yes… terribly sad. You know why I’m here. We’re looking for ways to stop these attacks from happening.”

  Amber carried a floral tray set with matching teapot, two cups, and a little jug of milk out of her kitchenette at the back of her shop. “I know, but I have no idea how I can be of any help.”

  Zoe took a sip of her tea and went into some detail expounding on their plan of establishing a global team that should be able to protect people from the attacks.

  “Wait a minute… you think that I can do that as well? Why?”