Aside from Amie’s differing physical appearance, it was probably her ability to “read their hearts”, not just to hear the replies given in their minds, that was enough of an issue to totally set her apart and make all on the team uncomfortable with her. Every team member realized that this alien talent to be able to read the thought process of another was a “one way street” – a talent the aliens possessed and the humans did not.
Sometimes, after a particularly harrowing meeting, Nick would invite Amie to join him in the break room. He would pour himself some coffee and buy her a bottle of water. She could always see that he was frustrated by the way he would smooth back his gray hair and then hold his head in his hands, after first taking a thoughtful, long, sip or two from his coffee cup. But she could read the frustration in his thoughts, before Nick would formulate his ideas or questions for her. Amie was always ready with a quick response on how Nick should proceed. She knew he was using her in this way. After all, the other team members were not aware how much she really had to offer to the human captors. But she wanted to help Nick, to make him look good to his employers.
The reason Amie helped Nick was that he, out of all the others, would always take the time to ask her, with genuine concern in his thought pattern, how her life was going at Area 51. His respectful questions always displayed a rare sensitivity. Because of this, Amie began to focus on him and provide special advice.
The previous year, Amie had told Nick that, in her opinion, their project would not propel the X-56 much past Mach 14. He sensed this as well and became very trusting of her knowledge. The Air Force personnel were providing a different picture to him and the upper echelon, touting the pulse wave detonation design as far more capable. Amie explained how her own aerospace team had previously tried something similar to this, experienced failures and discarded it. This was information that Amie had never revealed to anyone else. Nick began to rely almost exclusively on Amie, in secret, for her opinions on the project as it progressed. But it was through these meetings, that a plan of her own, to escape, began to evolve.
Amie was glad Nick trusted her. She felt she had succeeded at accomplishing what she considered to be the “first phase” of her escape plan. By offering Nick “secret information” that allowed him to better direct the project outcome, she had created an ally. Nick eventually became indispensable to the project director in the Pentagon, and, in turn, Amie became indispensable to Nick.
Amie’s plea for help had first started on Nick’s 64th birthday. This was her “second phase” as she saw it in her plan for eventual escape. The hangar crew had bought him his favorite, a chocolate cake. The administrative assistant carried it in as everyone sang “Happy Birthday”. They all took a short break to enjoy eating it, after Nick blew out the one giant candle. As they ate, Nick’s colleagues teased him with the usual “ageism” jokes about how lighting 64 candles would surely set the building on fire, and he received birthday cards recommending prune juice, denture cream, and walkers.
When they returned to work, Amie sent Nick a low energy vibration response, after he had jovially asked her if she had enjoyed a slice of his cake.
“I do not care for sweets,” she replied, and Nick barely heard the voice response inside his head.
“You sound down. I can barely hear you,” Nick beamed to her. “Is it because you can’t enjoy dessert like we can?”
“No, of course not. Such nourishment is bad for you, you know. All that poisonous sugar and too high of a caloric count,” and Amie’s mouth did attempt a small upturn, which for her resembled a smile.
“What is it then?”
“Do not misunderstand me. I am happy for you that you have reached such a great age.”
“I’m not that old! Don’t pay attention to their jokes. I’m only 64. I mean, I hope to have many more birthdays.” There was no reply. Nick continued, “How old are you?”
“I am 45 in Earth years. This is considered old in my world.”
“That’s just early middle-age.”
“My race ages differently. Much faster. Most die of old age at around 50 years.”
“Are you starting to feel ill?”
“No, it does not go like that for us. We do not usually start to develop physical sickness. Our bodies do not wear out. Our energy depletes. It happens at about 50 in your Earth years. Our gray coloring starts to fade, to turn lighter and more iridescent. I watched this happen with our pilot. Your people had renamed him Captain. He was our leader. I respected him greatly and it pained me as I watched him fade into death.”
“I’m sorry to learn this, Amie,” Nick stated sincerely.
“Do you know what Captain’s greatest wish had been?”
“No, of course not. I never met him.”
“He wanted to go back home. It is the wish we all have. We want to return before we fade into death.”
There was a long pause. Amie could tell from Nick’s energy vibes that he was feeling uncomfortable discussing this with her. She continued, “After Captain died, they cut his body into pieces. Autopsying. To find out how he differed from humankind. They will do the same to all of us. There is a laboratory room that holds the remains of all captured aliens in formaldehyde jars. I read the thoughts of one of the biologists to learn of this. It is a disgusting thought. Thinking that my head will be in one of their bottles some day for all to stare at. They have used my crew all along. Used us for the knowledge we possess and they will use us in death to learn how we are constructed. That will be my fate.”
Amie’s energy was lowered now, to the point where her voice-speak had melted from Nick’s mind to a barely audible whisper.
Chapter 6
After the more revealing birthday discussion with Amie, Nick took it upon himself to make discrete inquiries regarding the plight of the aliens and to gather more information about their arrival at Area 51. The general rule at Area 51 was that everything was on a ”need to know basis”. If you didn’t know, you didn’t ask. It was made very obvious, in the top-secret environment in which Nick worked, that employees should not be openly questioning each other about the aliens. However, over a period of time, by merely listening to random conversations, Nick gathered enough snippets of information to verify much of what Amie had already told him concerning the harsher measures practiced when her crew first arrived.
“At the military hospital they kept me tied down for days at a time, Nick, all the while injecting me with needles, drawing blood, and then taking other fluids from my spine and stomach. It was painful, but my race does not possess the ability to cry and we are stoic regarding the endurance of pain. One day, they used a knife to remove skin samples from my head, arms, and legs. Even other areas I wish not to mention. It was painful and it was frightening.
I was so terrified that I could not quiet myself enough to read their intentions. I convinced myself that they were not going to let me live. I thought they intended to carve me up. No one spoke to me. They just kept doing their experiments, with the masks over their faces. Day after day they poked and prodded.”
“How would you feel if our people did that to you?” Amie had queried Nick.
Nick agreed that these biological probes would be fearful and unpleasant, particularly on a foreign planet where one felt alone and vulnerable; where one was treated as an enemy. Nick admitted to Amie that he had not given much thought to her true status in his world. He was grateful she was there as his daily colleague and consultant, but he had not thought much about her plight.
As Nick talked to other team leaders, those who worked with Amie’s two crewmembers, he learned that they did not have particularly fond feelings towards the alien beings. In conversation, they were dismissively labeled “the grays”. X-ray and Mike had apparently not attempted to ingratiate themselves with their human colleagues. They were more taciturn and seemed to lack any sort of charm. They appeared to their co-workers more like robotic figures, working among them only to spew out helpful facts and figures. They we
re not viewed as true colleagues.
Amie, on the other hand, seemed to become a highly sympathetic figure to Nick. As he continuously worked beside her, she was becoming a valued co-worker and friend. He began to regard her as almost human.
It was all of this information that was beginning to change Nick’s sympathies regarding what he had previously accepted as the ultimate fate of the aliens. In particular, he felt extremely concerned for Amie, and the unkind, inhumane treatment she had received. What he didn’t realize, however, was this was exactly what Amie had counted on when she began her plan for escape several years before, and had decided that Nick would be her hope for success.
Amie had discussed escaping many times with her cohabitants as they lounged about after work in their dormitory pod. In the past few years, it had almost become a daily topic of discussion amongst them and, because of their telepathic communication, none of their ideas were known to the guardians that watched them constantly on the cameras, discreetly placed with listening devices, in their pod domicile.
X-ray was older than Amie, his skin beginning now to turn a lighter shade of gray. He would probably soon deplete his energy and pass away, as their pilot had done several years before. Strangely, he seemed to accept this as his fate and told her that he would support her in her own escape plans but that he did not wish to be included in them.
Mike was Amie’s age and, like her, was beginning to worry about the end of his life. But he was extremely unhappy with his captivity and his energy flow was thus deteriorating more rapidly. She wondered if his depressed outlook on life would take away his life spark, even before X-ray faded due to old age.
Therefore, it became obvious to Amie that, if she were to evolve escape plans, they would be hers and hers alone. Her crewmembers had no desire to join her. It was up to her to convince Nick to help her.
It was actually X-ray who had reminded Amie that their race had evolved mental capabilities far beyond just communicating telepathically. If the human subject was receptive, and many were not, they were quite capable of “planting” a thought into that human’s subconscious. Here it would lie among the brain’s “flotsam” thought processes until it later surfaced, becoming a more conscious and compelling idea requiring action.
Amie had planted several such thoughts with Nick over the past two years. The first had been that Amie could become a valuable asset to him as she possessed intimate knowledge of propulsion systems, the focus for Nick’s particular role in the X-56 development. Once she sensed he seemed anxious to learn more from her, she had brought his “subconscious implant” to a more conscious level by offering “special alien knowledge” only to him, thus creating herself as an indispensable ally. The second phase began on his 64th birthday. It was then she discretely implanted the idea into his subconscious that he should be more proactive in learning about the fate of the dying aliens. She wanted Nick to become sympathetic to her plight. She wanted him to see the aliens as “human equals”, not as sub-human “grays”. Amie believed this step was necessary in order for Nick to bond with her on a more human level.
But even more steps remained to be taken. Amie wanted Nick to believe that his government had been wrong in taking the aliens as captives. She wanted Nick to have a revelation that he had been brainwashed by the premise that the aliens could not return to their planet and, therefore, were glad to be useful by sharing their knowledge and information. She wanted him to realize that he had blindly accepted his government’s position that all aliens must be held under comfortable but captive conditions, as they were all a potential threat to life on Earth. Even the existence of cooperative aliens, such as Amie’s race, could be a frightening prospect for the world’s population to accept, but Amie wanted Nick to realize that this point of view derived from the various incidents over the years involving abductions and mutilated cows, among other things, which were not the deeds of those from her planet. And now, Amie’s mind probe revealed that Nick was open to having his opinion changed.
Irrespective of Amie’s subconscious meddling, time and lessons learned along the way had transformed Nick, and created some disillusionment about the way his country was being run. He felt the country had changed since the days of his youth. He thought about the brave pioneers like Glenn and Armstrong, and the other hero astronauts, and how President Kennedy had paved the way for man to go to the moon. Now NASA’s budget was continuing to shrink. When the shuttle program ended, it was outrageously rumored that NASA’s mission would change to include Islamic outreach. “What the hell did that have to do with space exploration?” Nick wondered.
Nothing seemed as it should be. Money was wasted or spent foolishly, with an outrage seeming to pop up on his Internet websites or on cable news almost daily. The list was endless and so was his disgust with politicians and their corruption. Fraud, and power games seemed rampant in government, with no concern for taxpayer’s well being.
Beyond that, he reasoned, “why shouldn’t the public know that there is extraterrestrial life and that we have made contact?” He and his NASA colleagues had debated this question many times, and almost all came down on the side of full disclosure, although there was much concern about sharing propulsion and aircraft developments with the world community. However, disclosure of alien life forms was another matter altogether. In fact, Nick found it odd that the United Nations, another community he had no fondness for, would not make some proposal along those lines.
To pass the time, one of the things Mike and Amie did was have sex. They had no deep feelings for each other. In fact, Amie actually enjoyed the company of X-ray more than Mike, as X-ray did not complain nearly as much. However, theirs was a far less emotional race, and Mike had asked Amie if she might offer the pleasure of the sexual act to him to relieve their boredom in captivity. She had complied. Their bonding offered each a brief, enjoyable sensation and served to pass time, much in the way that a video game offered some respite from their empty hours.
In the alien world, sex was an act performed mainly for the purpose of procreation, not pleasure. Thus it was engaged in infrequently. The small sexual organs of the population were seldom put to use. One of the intriguing aspects about Earth life was the discovery of the strong sex drive in animals, especially humans. It had become a whole facet of study among the biologists of their world.
Amie and her comrades were hybrids of their race. They had been bred to become space voyagers. Her type of hybrid had been born of a cross mixture of human genetics and those of their own race. The experimenting in this field had been going on for centuries, with the first Earth-bound hybrids visiting the ancient Egyptians and aiding in the building of pyramids as energy transmission sources. Experimenting and perfecting of Earth voyager humans had been going on ever since, in their “Voyager” laboratories and breeding compounds. This crossbreeding was what enabled the aliens to be able to breathe and exist comfortably under the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere, which differed from their own. It also enabled them to digest and thrive on the fruits and vegetables of the Earth diet, although they had never developed a taste for meat and animal products nor sweets and salty snack foods.
There were other hybrid colonies on their planet, as well. These were composed of space voyagers being prepared for some of the other planets inhabited by intelligent life. But it had been discovered that Earthling hybrid breeding was the most successful, the most compatible DNA swap, in their Cosmic Voyager program.
As hybrids, the crewmembers had actually developed larger sex organs than their home race. Females possessed a small vagina and clitoris in the same area as the female human anatomy. Males possessed a short, thin, pencil-like penis, which only extended from a cavity in their bodies when they were able to transmit enough energy to that organ. This penis was not used by the males for elimination of bodily waste, but was purely a reproductive tool. Also, the hybrid penis differed from the human male in that it would not generate reproductive sperm unless both couples initiated an extended
foreplay session, which served to greatly enhance their energy levels. Without this extended foreplay, the male’s penis was essentially “shooting blanks”.
It was Mike who had suggested to Amie that she might try experimenting with Nick’s sexual responsiveness toward her. She had vetoed Mike’s suggestion at first, mentioning that her strange alien facial features, flat chest with tiny nipples, and lack of human-like female pubic hair or any hair at all, for that matter, would always be a barrier to voluntary sexual contact with a human male. Mike reminded her that what she lacked in Earthly physical appeal was more than compensated for by her hidden abilities of mind control.
“If mind control is so powerful, why have we not been able to influence them to release us from this prison?” Amie inquired.
Mike and X-ray reminded Amie that the humans were distancing themselves emotionally from them and were thus impossible to influence. Only when a human opened their reception to a hybrid, when their energy field was made vulnerable through their emotional feelings, could they then be influenced in their thought processes.
“If you can meld your energy field with Nick’s in a close enough bond, you may be able to overcome whatever physical revulsion he might normally feel toward you. You may actually be able to make him manifest feelings of sexual desire for you, as being a sexually exotic experiment. Many human males are open to unusual sexual experiences and practices, and you must play on this curiosity with your human subject,” X-ray advised.
SKY WOMAN OF GROOM LAKE Page 3