by Lea Tassie
"Command unclear," replied the computer voice. "Please restate request."
"Stupid piece of human crap; no wonder humans all got killed," grumbled Charger as he lowered his huge old frame down onto a large chair.
"Command unclear, please restate request," repeated the computer voice.
"All right, don't get your panties in a bunch. Give me the readout on the human populations." Charger wanted to get this done as fast as possible.
"Human populations stable and thriving in all zones except for the one labeled Mexca. Mexca population is accelerating beyond controllable parameters. Resources will be exhausted in three to four years of planet rotation. Expected outcome: strife and conflict."
Age leads many to wisdom, but excessive age, like Charger's more than three hundred years, was not his friend. This simple condition of population growth was destabilizing the delicate balance of Neo Terra, and Charger's response to this was unintentionally devastating to those he held dear. "What, so you're telling me that the Mexca peoples are humping like bunnies?" Charger said jokingly.
"Command unclear, please restate request," responded the voice with its usual aggravating response.
Speaking slowly and deliberately, Charger asked, "Are the people of Mexca over-populating?"
"Yes," responded the voice.
"Well, stupid, reduce the population quickly," snapped Charger impatiently.
With that simple command, the computer set about creating the conditions needed to reduce the population quickly. Charger thought a slow reduction would take place, for the computer mentioned three to four years.
What happened instead was the rise of the "mad ones," a program of cannibalism meant to rapidly reduce the population and maintain planet stability. The consequences were dire for the Valley of Shadows inhabitants for, when the people of Mexca cast out the vile human cannibals, they wandered starving only until discovering Mestas' people.
Charger eventually came to discover the mistake he had made. In his attempt to do the right thing, he had again created chaos and destruction. Weeks later, after leaving the city and making his way back to the Valley of Shadows, he stood in the center of the small town, able to feel only anger, not sorrow, surrounded by the dead and dying.
Is it the destiny of humanity to create chaos everywhere they try to create order? When faced with order, when things are at their best, do they instinctively feel the need to create disorder? Charger had once been Henry, who worked at his father's gas station, and was always willing to help others, always ready to give of himself. Then he was drawn into war with an enemy he did not know or understand, but who turned out to be human. Now he stood surrounded by the skeletons of people who had taken him into their homes and given him a moment's peace from all the torment his long life had thrust upon him.
He was completely broken now. He walked away from the town, never turning to look back. He no longer even had the power to turn on his blinding field. He was a shadow of what remained of the old world, a wraith of humanity's greatest triumph and its greatest disaster.
Charger had come to understand from the survivors that these good people faced a group of ravenous cannibals that he had helped to create. He walked for months, never stopping, never eating, never sleeping, until one day, exhausted and with his feet bleeding, he sat down beneath a great oak tree between a forest hill and a green field of grain below.
There he sat, looking at all the wonders of this inside-out world, with a small dog keeping him company. The dog was out of place, and seemed sometimes not so much a dog as something else. Whatever it might be, the dog was the companion Charger needed. He had completed his mission: protect humanity and give the peoples of Earth a fighting chance. Humanity had created him because they needed him, needed a monster. He did what they could not, and they had feared and despised him for it.
Now he intended to leave it all behind.
Chapter 11 Dart speaks to Reader
Yes, Reader, the cannibals were horrible. No, Charger didn't stop them; he was too afraid that if he tried to fix the problem, he'd end up doing something that would cause even worse damage.
But don't worry about the cannibals. As Charger had designed them to do, the humans exercised logic and took care of the problem themselves. The peoples of Mexca, Canda, and Hamerca got together and organized groups of hunters and a few fast young runners who were willing to act as the bait.
More deaths? Yes, a few more of the little people who lived in the Valley of Shadows were lost, but finally "the mad ones" were all killed.
Humanity learned a valuable lesson from this tragedy. These humans created by Charger had no understanding of their true heritage; they were as fresh to life as newborn children. They had been truly innocent, exploring and interacting in harmony with the environment, so much so that they hadn't even considered the ramifications of over-populating. The horror of the cannibals taught them to be careful how much they took from a giving planet.
Yes, of course, that's why Charger gave them free will. Once they understood the logic of environmental supply and demand, they easily made the decision to limit the number of children born.
Oh, and Charger did something else interesting when he created the new humans on Neo Terra. He made their physical characteristics a combination of all the various types which had lived on Earth. Neo Terrans are generally slim, like most Asians, and rarely tall. They have light brown skin and usually brown or black hair, and brown eyes.
You'd rather have green eyes and blonde hair? Well, sometimes the DNA combinations will throw out a redhead, or somebody with blue eyes, say. Charger didn't do a perfect job of meddling. And that was a good thing, in my opinion. It would be too boring to have everybody exactly the same.
Now I want to tell you about the small Gray alien which followed Charger's ship partway to Neo Terra, then changed direction and followed the Grays' battle fleet to Earth when they destroyed what was left of humanity.
No, this lone Gray didn't go home again when the last battle was over. It actually found its way to Neo Terra.
The Gray had no idea where Charger in his lone ship had gone, but it decided to remain behind after the final destruction of humanity and try to find the missing ship. As far as its superiors were concerned, even a single human left alive was one too many. The ship was primitive and slow and the Gray thought it should be easy to find again. But space is vast and such a small target traveling in a random fashion made this task all but impossible.
The Gray spent thirty years traveling the stars before the instruments carried by its ship sensed a faint power source emanating from a rogue black world drifting through space. Curious, it decided to investigate. It discovered the entrance into Neo Terra.
It found the strange, primitive little Earth ship disassembled and devoid of life, and a deserted city. The technology of the city was also primitive, and completely unaware of the small Gray's presence as it wandered the streets and alleys of this dark and forgotten city. Using advanced technologies, it found its way to the doors that opened out into the agricultural area.
The Gray was shocked. Humanity had not been destroyed. In fact, it was thriving.
You think this was a very bad thing to happen? You may be right, Reader.
Chapter 12 Charger in flames
Charger sat under the massive oak tree, his armor cracked and bleeding from small wounds. The left ear had been snagged by a bullet long ago, losing its tip. Long gray hair, growing in patches from the misshapen skull, straggled in thin whips across his battered, scarred, and flattened face. One milky white eye was half-closed. Little flames flared up on his armor as the sun reached it through the leaves. He rocked back and forth, mumbling, a little insane now. But sane enough that he wanted to die.
And why should he not? It was now 2365 and he was well over three hundred years old. Yet when he glanced up, he saw in the distance a young, handsome, powerful man who seemed to be himself. Himself in memory, no doubt.
He sat next to
a little rag of a dog, with three little rags of pups asleep nearby, on a hill overlooking fields of corn and potatoes below, while the damp morning dew seeped through cracks in his armor. "It wasn't always like this," he said to the dog. He waved a hand to encompass the whole area, lush and green. Then he pulled his knees up to his chest and rocked forward, taking a breath of the fresh air, smelling it, tasting it.
Charger looked down into the attentive brown eyes of the heavily matted, long-haired mutt and wondered when it had last eaten. Where had it come from? Its ribs were showing and its legs wobbled, but the tail wagged whenever he spoke to it. Reaching into his pack, he pulled out some dried meat and shared a meal with his new friend. The dog eagerly wolfed down the scraps.
The sky was reddish-gray, typical for a planet that had undergone several years of heavy nuclear bombardment. After a moment, he knew that thought wasn't right. He blinked to clear his vision. No, that was Earth he was remembering, long ago during the Mahoud-Earth War. He was on Neo Terra now, with the new humans.
He reached down and scratched the dog's ears. It was lying next to him, patiently listening as they chatted away the morning. "That was a long time ago," he said. "When I was young."
He was different now, aged and heavily scarred. He hated the milky white eyes that reflected back the image of anything he stared at. Then there were those four damn fangs in the corners of his mouth, always scraping at his tongue and making speech difficult. He'd never got used to being called a vampire by the civilians, but what had been done to him was what his species had needed to do to survive.
Something wrong with that statement, too. Charger shook his head. No, not his species. He wasn't human anymore. Didn't want to be, either.
Many soldiers had been converted to look like those blood-sucking ghouls of mythology. They were able to fight in the dark and they were stronger, faster and less likely to be killed by the poison mist of the invaders. Their hideous biological metallic body armor was designed to keep them safe, to heal them when hurt.
"I remember how we wrenched the limbs from alien bodies during those battles I enjoyed," he mumbled. It had been in the third and last year of the war and most of Earth's resources were gone. Very little food and water remained and, with the loss of five billion humans over two years, most soldiers believed the fight was lost. They could kill aliens but it seemed impossible to defeat them. Most civilians were forced to relocate to the frozen wastes of the north and south polar regions.
It was a scientist named Darwin, Charger guessed, who first hit on the idea of converting soldiers to Hyborgs, or vampires, as they became known soon after the conversion. "It was funny, from human evolution to the undead seemed so wrong." Reaching into his pack he pulled out a vial. He still had to drink a red plasma because he couldn't produce his own blood cells. Humans had willingly donated their precious fluids to keep the new soldiers strong, so the fight could continue.
But that was long ago. The others were all dead. Ten thousand, four hundred and sixty-one. Or had it been sixty-two? He wasn't sure; he'd lost his edge. But there was only him now.
He pressed his back against the gnarled trunk of the old tree. The war was over and nothing good had come of it. "We never knew why the invaders chose to kill all plant life and human life on Earth. Some speculated that it was necessary for their survival, but that doesn't seem right either. We must have killed millions of them."
The dog had closed its eyes and seemed to sleep, relaxed by the story and maybe tired of hiding and scrounging to keep alive. Dogs could sense aliens, but the military only realized that when it was too late.
Many from Charger's division became vampires during the war, but they always feared sunlight, for ultraviolet rays were deadly to them. If they had only known that dogs could find the tunneling masses of alien life, moving beneath their feet, aliens that killed so many children, women, and men, they might never have had to change, to become so different, to become vampires.
Looking up, Charger was grateful for the light gray color of the distant sky. Except for the sun, he didn't mind daytime; it made him feel almost human. He shook his head, dispelling that thought. He didn't want to be human.
"It felt good to kill aliens. I was protecting my home and I felt strong and invincible. We all did. After a time, we ditched our guns, because the sword was king again. Holding the straight steel in your hand, swinging it back and forth, hacking the invaders. Well, it saved a lot on lead; we didn't need bullets."
Once they knew that dogs could sense the invaders, the experiments creating hybrids ramped up again. Monstrous beasts of dogs began to emerge from surviving science labs all over the world. Then the inevitable happened: The Lycanthrope, half human, half dog, and all bad. The aliens feared these and so did the remaining humans, with good cause.
Heat radiated from his sleeping companion, its breathing regular and its heart beating steadily as it slept. Charger felt cold and dead. Time to finish it.
An old familiar thought again surfaced. Did she survive? He'd had no way to know. Did it matter? He guessed not but, if she were alive, what would she think of him?
No, she couldn't be alive. Not now. Not all these years later.
Their bodies were massive, twice the size of ordinary men. People in the small towns that escaped destruction called them devils. The humans gave food and blood so willingly, the cowards! He hated them, always asking the Hyborgs to hunt down and kill the remaining Lycans.
"I really liked dogs. It was always hard to kill the Lycans; they were good fighters." He laughed, though it wasn't really a laugh anymore, but kind of a grunt and a hiss mixed. His life seemed funny to him now, a mechanic who was a vampire, with werewolf allies, fighting aliens from a distant solar system. It was such B-movie material.
They thought going digital would make Earth quieter, harder to find. But was there some human who knew the aliens were out there? Was that why Earth went quiet? He hadn't thought about that for a long time.
He'd always believed life in the universe would be rare, and even if there were other beings, how would they ever meet? Like an exploding hand grenade, planets were flying apart, and the idea of other life in the universe traveling great distances to find Earth seemed impossible. That's what was shown on televisions every night way back, but wow…were they wrong!
No shrink could hope to understand the joy he'd felt at being the perfect weapon for vengeance, or the high he felt as he snuffed the life from an enemy combatant. Many people over the years told him how disturbed he was, how dangerous he was.
But he'd been a hero back then. He'd saved so many lives of so many pointless humans. What had they ever done that required such a sacrifice?
"You would have hated becoming a Lycan, and if you did, I would have had to kill you, too." The thought made him sad as he shifted closer to his new furry friend.
The dog seemed so small, hard to believe it was a German shepherd. To Charger, in his huge Hyborg form it hardly seemed the size of a Yorkie. "Did I tell you about Dal?" he asked the dog. It yawned, stretched, and curled back into a ball but it looked up, waiting to hear more of the story.
Dal said, "Remember, no matter what we become, no matter where we're sent to fight, we have a responsibility. We can't let these squishy bastards have our home."
"Damn straight," Charger had answered. "We're takin' these super powers to the max and I ain't stopping till all the squishies have been squashed." The liquor that night was coursing through his veins in high amounts as he and Dal stared into the dark sky. "Then we get rockets and we go a-squishing on their home planet," he slurred. The drink was hitting hard now, his eyelids growing heavy.
"Don't let me fall," Dal said. "I want to get to the rockets part too, and fight on their world. Promise you won't let me fall," Dal pleaded. "We can never die if we stick together."
Charger turned to Dal and the words stumbled from his mouth. "I promise, we'll go squishing squishy-town together, Dal, you and me. I won't let you fall."
"We know how that turned out," Charger said to the dog. "Dal died. And I'm a wreck of a thing now, confused and old, with no one to talk to anymore."
He didn't think he could do it; he couldn't kill this dog. Charger's head sagged low toward his chest, and the dog placed its matted, scruffy head on his bent legs and whined quietly. The sound seemed to echo something that was happening in his own mind.
The day was getting brighter and the dew seeping through his armor was drying now. Stretching back against the tree, Charger gently ran his hand down the dog's body, feeling its warmth and its ribs through the mats and burrs.
The aliens wore envelopes of some kind of liquid stuff. It was weird; the envelope covered their entire bodies. He hadn't been able to tell what was real and what wasn't. And they had the most incredible machines for digging and for grabbing people. It was surprising to everybody that the military could actually destroy any of them.
"Television made me believe they were so advanced we'd all be crushed. But I don't think the aliens really understood who they pissed off."
Behind the front lines, far to the rear, the aliens consumed, in the most horrific manner, all the plant life. No one knew whether this was because plants were food or fuel for them, or a method of starving the planet of air.
"Rin Tin Tin," he said to the dog, "that's what I'll call you, like in the book." That prompted another yawn and stretch. "Wow, what an exciting dog you are!" He could feel a blink of sunlight poke through the gray sky and pierce the foliage of the tree he sat under. For a brief second, sunlight touched him. And it hurt.
"You could have been a Lycan too, Rin Tin Tin," he said softly, not wanting to wake his sleeping dog. More and more now, the morning sun warmed the gray sky. More and more light filtered between the leaves to find its way to his blackened skin, more and more small fires erupted on his body and then burnt out as the shade passed back over him.