Charger the Soldier

by Lea Tassie

  Only an hour ago, Anna's snowmobile had hit a crevasse and flipped, injuring her badly. Beth radioed for help and they were now waiting for the search party to reach them. The cold of the falling snow and the bleakness of the high arctic sent another shiver through Beth as she held her friend close.

  "Tell me more. It keeps me from thinking about the pain," Anna pleaded.

  Beth drew her friend closer, trying to keep her warm. "After high school, we planned to travel to France and then to England. But when the school year ended, Henry's father needed help at the gas station and we put off our travels, though we often talked about when and how we would eventually go. The day never came, though. The invasion put an end to that dream."

  Seeing that Anna was listening, Beth went on. "Henry and Dal, his friend, decided to run off and join the fighting. I tried to persuade him to run away with me, go to the mountains, but he was determined to fight. I had gotten pregnant a few years earlier, but that ended badly. A week before he left for the army base, I got pregnant again, but I never told him."

  Anna looked up at Beth and asked, "So you're pregnant now?"

  "Yes, I am."

  "You can't stay with me!" Anna coughed as blood from her wounds filled her mouth. "I don't want to be responsible for a miscarriage. Go! Leave me!"

  "I'm sure the rescue team will find us soon. We just have to wait a little longer." Beth's eyes welled up with tears again. "I can't lose you too. You're my only friend."

  Nor did she have a family now. An influenza epidemic had hit the northern camps less than a month after they arrived, and both her parents died.

  Anna held tightly to Beth's arm. "Didn't you tell Henry about the baby when he came home on leave?"

  "I wanted to, but I couldn't," Beth said, remembering the pain of that visit. He'd been changed so much that he didn't seem like Henry anymore. It wasn't just his towering strength and his Hyborg armor, but he seemed different mentally, too. She'd been afraid of him. He'd seen the fear in her eyes, and she knew he'd been hurt because of it, but she couldn't help herself.

  The two girls held each other close as the falling snow continued covering them. When they stopped talking, the beeping from their transponder was the only sound in the inhospitable landscape.

  Beth began to panic. Anna was becoming less responsive and was surely moments from death, and the constant fear that a polar bear, smelling blood, would find them before the rescue team could get there haunted Beth's mind. Minutes felt like hours. But, from off in the distance, the sound of the rescue team finally came.

  Two days later, Beth and Anna woke up in the village hospital, alive but weak. When the hospital staff discovered that Beth was pregnant, the decision was made not to let the girls participate again in the perimeter watch program.

  The village had once been a small, simple Inuit settlement in the high north but now, because of the invaders, it had become a sanctuary for survivors from all parts of Canada and America. The population had exploded and buildings to house the survivors dotted the horizon on all sides, as thousands of beleaguered humans arrived.

  Beth gave birth to a baby boy. She and Anna found other tasks to help the village be productive, while the refugees waited for the military to eventually drive off the invaders. When the day came, a little more than two years later, with news that the war was over and the people could return home, the two friends decided to remain in the frozen north as a couple. They wanted to help the Inuit in return for the kindness these good people had shown them.

  Beth never knew what became of Henry; whether he had perished in battle or was still being used by the military as the Hyborg, Charger. He'd told her they couldn't change him back to Henry, and hinted she should find someone else.

  She bore silently the sadness she felt at the loss of her love, but every day she smiled at his reflection in the face of her son.

  And every day, the sun shone down on a prosperous, peaceful Earth. People began to think that it would always be that way.

  Chapter 18 The Bat Cave

  "Okay, so what you're telling me is that the invaders we spent three years fighting were not aliens after all, but humans who existed on earth before the last ice age?" Mark Dixon was thin, and bore a scar on the left side of his face where a piece of shrapnel had plowed a small furrow.

  Andy wondered where Mark had found the suede jacket he was wearing. His friend must have scrounged it from some bombed-out house or store. Only seven years had passed since the war ended and now, in 2040, luxury goods were still scarce.

  Andy pulled a coin out of his worn jeans for the vending machine. "That's correct. The data we've recovered and transcribed tell a story of the protohumans of Earth. They might have been the mythical Atlantians, though they were far more savvy technologically than past story-tellers ever imagined. These people knew another ice age was coming and that they couldn't survive on Earth for long." He shook his dark hair out of his eyes. "Somehow, by a means we still haven't identified, their colony moved from Earth into outer space. They formed a colony on the world we now call Neo Terra, the world that we traced from information on their spacecraft."

  Mark started to ask a question, then stopped. Andy could tell he was having difficulty digesting this information. It seemed contrary to all the archaeological records, which were, however, tainted by government and military staff who wanted the propaganda they had created about vicious aliens to remain firm and unaltered. These people were convinced that fostering hatred of anything alien fueled the population's drive not only to rebuild but also to take revenge.

  Andy pressed on. "They may have moved into underground caverns, converting them to survival bunkers at first, along with their grounded ship, or they somehow mined the planet to get inside. We don't know how they achieved this, but we do know what followed: towns, then cities, and finally countries."

  Mark looked as though he needed more persuasion. He'd make a fine scientist, Andy thought, but first he'd have to truly understand, right to the core of his brain, that no old theories nor old information were sacred.

  "These people eventually found a way to hollow the world enough that a false sky and a sun were possible. Their adaptation to this dark, hollow world brought a change to their own human forms. But they used their technology to create a world very similar to the original Earth they came from."

  "What you're saying makes sense, I suppose," Mark grumbled. "The so-called aliens apparently had no problems breathing here on Earth. And we had no difficulty in reverse engineering their technology."

  "That's because they were us," Andy said. "We fought humans, not aliens." He tried to sound nonchalant, but he was excited about this incredible new information which solved so many mysteries arising in the past ten years.

  "So what about the Grays? How come we have yet to prove their existence?" asked Mark. He looked irritated.

  A third voice joined the conversation. Mark's long-time friend, Mickey, had just joined them in front of the vending machines. "Mark likes to believe in those theories of an alien race that visited Earth thousands of years ago and performed scientific experiments on captured humans."

  "That's what the military wants us to believe, too," Andy said. "They have the idea that soldiers fight harder when they hate the enemy." He pulled a can of root beer from the soft drink dispenser. "I don't know whether Gray aliens exist or don't exist. So far, we've found no data regarding them on Neo Terra. Surely we would have come across something by now."

  Mark capitulated. "Okay, so that explains why reverse engineering was so easy after the tech geeks cracked the codes. These technologies were human in origin and so followed a basic Earth way of thinking."

  "Most things about the so-called aliens make sense now," Andy replied. "The multi-faceted eyes were goggles. The encounter suits protected them from their environment. The weird envelopes of slime they wore in battle were a defense against us. The weapons they used, the modes of transport, all things once thought alien, arose from the human mind.
"

  Mickey ran a hand through his rat's nest of curly red hair. "It's said that contact with nonhuman aliens would be very different, based of course on how those aliens have evolved."

  "I think that's true," Andy said, and paused to suck heavily from the root beer can. "But I can't help wondering if some parts of religion may have been correct after all."

  "How do you mean?" Mark asked.

  Andy belched. He should quit drinking so much carbonated stuff. "Think about the theory that some type of god created humans, and the fact that we have yet to find nonhuman aliens."

  "That may not prove true in the future," Mickey said. "Now that we have space travel, we could be in for a few surprises."

  Mark nodded. "We might discover that humans left Earth several times in the past, reinvented themselves to survive distant worlds, and forgot about where they originated."

  "That seems entirely possible." Andy regretfully added, "However, with our propensity for aggression, it also seems possible we will end up in yet another battle."

  "Sad but true," Mickey said. "For a start, there's the extinction of Neanderthals, said to have been caused by a different human species either through war or inter-breeding." He tried to grab Andy's root beer.

  "Hey! Back off, short stuff!" Andy batted Mickey's hand away. Mickey might be the smallest of the three friends, but he was often the most aggressive. "We've set foot on one distant planet, so finding a third isn't inconceivable. And, to date, no physical record of human society from before the last ice age has been found."

  Mark got back into the conversation. "That could change, too. I agree that all stone monuments found at today's earth strata are from our own time period, but a friend of mine using ground-penetrating radar has made a few discoveries of deep structures that haven't been uncovered yet."

  "Humanity builds cities next to water sources found on the surface," Mickey said. "We've always done that. Thanks to the invasion destroying cities and towns around the shores of inland water as well as the ocean, it's easy now to find ancient ruins."

  "So these structures your friend found, what are they like?" Andy asked as he eyed the mostly empty shelves in the snack vending machine.

  "He doesn't know. It's hard to get funding these days," Mark replied. "He got some help from staff, but had conflicts with those who still believe the world is flat, which makes it difficult for him to proceed. But what he's found is very deep under destroyed cities."

  "Deep? How deep?" Mickey asked. He might be able to use such information in his thesis on human evolution in societies.

  "In one find," Mark replied, "a core sample, taken by drilling down to the relevant level, showed that the structure was made of a type of concrete and asphalt, therefore constructed by humans. The soil underneath the structure was actually thirty million years old, but it's now thought, from cores done at different locations, that the soil was exposed only during the time the structure was built."

  Mark leaned back against the wall. "The theory is that this structure was created possibly two or three ice ages back, dating it too roughly between forty and fifty thousand years ago. That would be well within the range of Homo sapiens sapiens evolution and the extinction of the Neanderthals. The theory is that the structure must be of a primitive design, since any modern building techniques would never stand the test of that much time. So we might have the equivalent of the pyramids in this ancient structure. Not only that, but it's possible that more recent societies living on this site may have been the founders of the mythical Atlantis structure."

  Mickey snorted. "Well, that topic is still up for debate! The idea of the Atlantis structure is fragmentary at best. We should not be so quick to include myths in today's science."

  "I think we have more than sufficient evidence from Dr. Opinhimmer's work at Gobekli Tepe," Mark replied, with a challenging look. "The three stone rings he and his team uncovered clearly show the location and the time at which Atlantis existed. The first ring showed the location of the three-ringed cities around the globe in relation to the continents and shore lines of that time period. The second ring does suggest a time frame in which these cities and their peoples lived here on Earth, and the third ring shows that the only mistake to date was the naming of that society as Atlantis."

  Andy smiled and waited for the rebuttals. The three graduate students had developed a fast friendship at New Denver University, and they all liked arguing.

  After a short pause, Mark added, "There was also the work done by that British fellow, I forget his name. The guy who thought that the works of Stonehenge had something to do with the Atlantis myth."

  "I remember him," Andy said. "Still, without the keystone he insists has to be real, the true combination of elements and their order will never be known. So far, we've determined only that mercury, manganese, gold, rhenium and bismuth are the base elements listed in the old writings. The keystone element meant to activate the entire stone acropolis may never be found."

  "But we do know that the thirteen stone circles buried 10,000 years ago at Gobekli Tepe had nothing to do with religious beliefs," Mark added firmly, as if no one could possibly doubt his words. "Instead, they seemed to be an attempt to communicate with departed humans. What scientists are now suggesting is that by digging up these ancient sites found by ground-penetrating radar, we might at last find the keystone."

  Andy decided he'd had enough of standing around, and led the other two down the University hall to a small room called the Bat Cave. The walls were adorned with posters depicting ancient societies and science fiction battles in space. The men flopped into their usual seats with more soda and the last bag of potato chips from the vending machine. After a few minutes of munching, Mickey offered a suggestion.

  "Maybe they evolved a culture that didn't believe in a god. Without any religious influence, they might have invented things that allowed them to attain space flight quickly. If the church hadn't forbidden knowledge discovered by the scientists of long ago, our society would certainly be further along in its evolution. Discoveries by Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and many others, were suppressed. Otherwise humanity might have landed on the moon in the 1600s." Mickey took a breath. "Remember, it took barely a hundred years to go from horse and buggy to space flight, and that happened only because mankind threw off religious dogma."

  Mark shifted in his seat but Mickey beat him to the imaginary podium again. "These people may have created a thriving society 15,000 years back and developed the technology for space travel in order to escape the oncoming ice age. Those not deemed worthy to leave, or who were too stubborn or stupid to go, remained behind to fall into the first dark age. Consider removing the heavy fur covering of Neanderthals, or Homo heidelbergensis, and replacing it with modern clothing."

  Mickey grabbed the nearly empty potato chip bag out of Andy's lap. "Maybe they were more intelligent than we tend to think, with our superior sense of self-worth. It's only because we find fossils scattered around in areas of sparse vegetation that we perceive them as less intelligent. They may just have been the fools left behind, fighting to survive with the tools they could make by hand. Small brain size does not always mean lesser intelligence. We are still not sure of all the areas mapped out in our own brains, and the relevance of the unused areas."

  Mark's expression became intense. "If humans were created that long ago, it only stands to reason that some great unseen force must have been responsible for our existence. In our travel to space, we've so far only found one world populated with different humans. I put it to you that we will never find aliens, for man has been the only creation of God."

  Mickey spoke up, his tone respectful but firm. He was an anthropology student, grounded deeply in the roots of hard-core science. He often found it difficult to converse with people who wandered from the facts, but because of his long-time friendship with Mark, he always went the extra mile in tolerance.

  "There were old cultures addicted to a type of LSD made
from wheat that creates paranoia but does not diminish intelligence," Mickey said. "The group that left Earth were maybe elitists, like the old Heaven's Gate cult, who believed they were actually extra-terrestrials chosen for eternal survival. The planet this group found was a rogue planet, drifting into the path of their spaceship, a carbon-rich planet with frozen ice reserves found in caves. Bacteria-ridden ice created mutations in the human genome, creating the so-called aliens that invaded Earth. Hardly seems like the work of a guiding hand."

  Mark licked potato chip salt off his fingers. "Well, think about this. The universe is too immense for the average mind to truly understand its size. The distance from one side to the other of the visible universe is estimated to be about one hundred billion light years. A light year is equal to 186,000 miles per second of speed, and a spaceship would need to travel at the speed of light for one year to cross the universe. The universe is still expanding, too, so for every second of our human life, the visible edge of the known universe is moving away from us at an incredible speed."

  Andy decided not to interrupt.

  "Imagine someone pulls the pin of a hand grenade and the explosion sends metal fragments outward in all directions," Mark said, warming to his argument. "Imagine we live on one of those fragments going south, and another life form is on another fragment going west. We will never meet. That's the basic principle of the Big Bang theory, but it is more incredible then just that."

  He took a deep breath. "As those fragments travel away from the starting point of the explosion, the starting point is left empty and that's a problem. Nothing in our universe is ever empty, God has seen to that. Hence the terms 'dark matter' and 'missing mass.' The universe may be filled with rogue black planets, which would mean that our spaceships need strong headlights to prevent us from crashing into things we can't see."