Rick then remembered the speed and realized he might be falling for a scheme by this thing to make him less alert. There were perhaps three hours until sunset, but Rick didn’t want to look down at his watch. Eyes on and rifle up. He could feel his arms tiring.
The butchering was done. Mr. Clean carefully took the hide from the ground with its contents of internal organs, and used the four legs of the skin as handles. He tied them together to make a kind of carrying case and hung it in a tree. He stroked the fur with his hand, sweeping the dust from it. Rick was determined not to speak first.
At last the stranger turned to him and spoke. “You are patient.” He lifted his arm to point at him. “That’s good.” A bluish squiggling fog erupted from the blades on the gauntlet and hit Rick’s midsection before he could begin to move his trigger finger. His M4 vibrated violently and crumbled in an instant, falling to the ground as dust. Rick immediately moved for his revolver under his jacket, knowing what he’d feel. As his hand hit the pistol grip, he felt it shudder and crumble, sending the same shock through his hand that took the rifle from him. Dread flooded him as he was becoming disarmed, helpless. “You don’t need those,” the monster said.
Rick felt like a child standing before a god. He would have reached for his knife if not for the feeling he imagined a fawn must have in the jaws of a bear. What’s the use? It was probably gone, too. A second ago, he thought he had some sort of power over the situation. Now, he had nothing except for the knowledge that he was indeed witnessing something very unusual, and if he came to die, at least it would be due to powers beyond his control. His mind raced, and all his knowledge and training, in an instant, became irrelevant.
Just when Rick thought he might be getting control of himself, the god threw something to him. “Take this.” His impulse was to catch it, and he immediately knew this was wrong. Half catching and half squirming to avoid it, he felt like an out of control child again. As the object hit his contorted arm in the midst of its aborted catch, it seemed to crawl to his wrist in an instant. He heard and felt a click, and the object, a sort of bracelet, was now affixed. Again, with the despair he thought must belong to a desperate animal succumbing to a predator, he knew all was lost. He was now trapped beyond recovery. Every caution, every concern, all his weapons and training had led to nothing but this one moment of being an easy victim to this thing that appeared human, that looked real, and that spoke to him but left him helpless. Rick’s vision quickly dimmed to black.
Chapter 12
Rick oNboard
Rick had the sensation of cold stone on his fingertips. He moved them to confirm the slick texture. A bright light above him forced his eyes open, then immediately made them want to close. He blinked and tried to move, but couldn’t. He struggled to get his elbows beneath him to get up, but they wouldn’t go. He tried to lift his head, but the muscles in his neck immediately cramped. He realized his legs were being held down by something. His clothes were gone. The dread that he’d felt before came to him again. He’d rather be dead than feel this way.
Rick was strapped on a table – head, arms, and legs all secured. He was in a large white room lined with glass on the upper wall. There was a robotic arm above him with a large needle. He heard a voice command, “Be still”, and a searing pain, like a red-hot skillet pressed to his neurons was raked across his brain. He could not move and wanted only for the pain to stop. When it did, he wanted only to die. And when he thought about moving again, the pain came back a little, reminding him of its torture and threatening more. He screamed as if to try to disgorge both his physical and mental agony. When he once thought to rip and tear at his bindings with all his might, all at once, the pain consumed his being. He thought this must be the fire of hell. After that, he remained motionless, simply wanting to die.
The needle moved slowly down to his face, entering his nostril and piercing his head somewhere deep in his sinus cavity. This pain almost felt good compared to what he’d just suffered. The needle came out and moved to his abdomen, where it inserted again just below his ribcage. This continued over multiple locations around his body. All the while he prayed for death.
Rick awoke not even knowing he’d become unconscious. He was on a bed and could feel a blanket on his face. My God, what a horrible dream! He thought he’d been poisoned and he …opened his eyes to see the nightmare was not over. It was reality.
Looking down on him was Mr. Clean, the large bald man who’d trapped him. Though Rick felt weak, he also felt remarkably good and otherwise well rested. He was wearing a robe that felt of silk and was extremely comfortable. His hair was slightly damp, and he smelled fresh, as though he’d been bathed.
“Come with me,” the bald one commanded.
Remembering the pain, Rick complied, simply glad to be off the slab. His circumstances had improved. Could there be hope? Sitting up on the edge of the bed, he found simple sandals on the floor. He put them on. He looked at the evil bracelet still on his wrist. Rick stood and followed Clean to another room where they sat with a table between them. Rick thought, correctly, here it comes.
“Rick Thompson, I am Synster the Provenger. A long time ago, we introduced agriculture to your primitive species to encourage population growth so that we could return one day to harvest your kind from a sustainable population. Your species is our cattle, our livestock. I have chosen you to be my operative on Earth. You will consider resisting this proposal. To assist you in this decision, I must inform you of the circumstances.
“Your entire civilization exists because of our intervention approximately 12,893 years ago. If it had not been for our arrival, humans would still be scurrying around in the dust fighting with other animals for food, just as they had for the last half million years. You owe everything in your current, somewhat advanced society, to us. We are here now to complete our project on schedule. We are technologically advanced beyond any of your capabilities, and your resistance to us would result in complete failure.
“We have two possible plans for the future of the human race. The first is called ‘Natural Proliferation’. This management method is similar to the method you use on your fifty acres of land. You set up the conditions for wild game to be successful and then harvest it as you need it.”
Rick sat bewildered, understanding everything he was hearing but not wanting to believe it. He was afraid to speak from the pain he’d previously felt. Synster seemed to sense this.
“You may speak freely.”
Rick had so many things he wanted to say. Curses, threats, questions, more curses and threats. He felt like a wild animal inside, yet knew that all his words were impotent. He couldn’t think of anything. He just shook his head.
Synster continued, “This is how we plan to harvest from your population. You live out your lives mostly unaware of our existence. We harvest per our quotas – quotas, I might add, that we designed your current population to sustain many millennia ago.
“As a reward for helping us where we need, you get the following. You get to assist in assuring the continuance of, for a large number of people on your planet, their current way of life. You will be allowed to exempt from harvest anyone you want, as long as they touch your life in some immediate way, such as family members, your mailman, your senator, your lawyer, everyone in your town…you get the idea.”
Senator and lawyer on a no-kill list? Rick wondered. Synster obviously didn’t have a complete concept of human culture.
“You would also be empowered with the ability to include certain people or groups in the harvest, any who you feel might be a threat to you and your work. You will also be granted any Earth-derived material goods or pleasures that suit you. We believe these incentives are sufficient for you to freely decide to work with us on this endeavor. What I’ve described will be yours. If I haven’t yet been clear enough, we are offering you the power over life and death, along with all the material possessions on Earth that you desire.”
Rick had to agree this Synster had a
lot to offer. He didn’t consider himself a religious man, but this reminded him somewhat of a deal with the devil. Everything seemed too good to be true. Rick looked around the stark room for probes, thinking maybe he was being tested for what might be incentives for humans. Anything could be going on. Rick decided he’d have to ask a lot of good questions to assess this situation.
“And what if I refuse?” Rick realized he sounded like a movie again as he lowered his head in disbelief.
“We’ve put considerable effort into our preparations so far, and your refusal would cause me personal and professional inconveniences. I will promise you that if you refuse, I will personally use all of my authority to keep you alive as long as possible while on the highest pain setting that will allow your sustained existence. I will also abduct all of your family members, your friends, everyone that I can imagine has held any significance to you, including your dogs, Barnes and Nobelle, and see that they all get the same pain treatment. And when they appear to be at the end of their lives, you will watch as they are dissected while they still live, for the edification of our school children.”
Synster was glad there were no recording devices in this room. He’d chosen it for that exact reason. While he was allowed to conduct vivisection on samples taken from Earth and use pain control to recruit his surrogate for the sake of the Project, the punishments he just promised could not be implemented with any kind of official endorsement. It would be the same kind of depravity that is forbidden during the Contact Protocols. But threatening was not doing. The only time the Provenger were allowed to commit such destruction on humans other than testing samples was during their ritualistic banquets. Synster knew he had to convince Rick how committed and serious he was, and how brutal the Provenger could be.
“Observe.” Synster commanded.
On the white wall in front of Rick appeared a room containing six people, three women and three men. They were all mounted on individual racks that seemed to be floating without gravity. The image was so clear that Rick couldn’t tell if it was some kind of projection or if it was an actual room on the other side of the wall.
From what he’d observed so far, Synster had no hair, not on his head or his arms. The people on the racks were obviously human because they had hair on their heads and looked scared. Approximately two dozen male and female Provenger entered the room. They wore only the gauntlets on their arms with shorter blades than what Rick had seen on Synster. They approached the racks and, as if on signal, took turns jumping into them. When near the racks, they would also float. It appeared that in the area of the rack there was no gravity. They used their gauntlet knives to hold and slice at their victims, cutting them repeatedly, gripping onto them with their curved blades. Blood shot directly out, but when it reached a certain distance, it seemed to touch gravity and fall with a gush and a splat to the floor. The Provenger clung to their meals and so became covered with blood. If they let go and drifted to the edge, they also fell to the ground in the puddle of blood.
In a very short time, every inch of their bodies was covered in the blood of their bound, screaming victims. As the Provenger clung to them and cut, they bit into them, drinking their blood as ravenously as they could. To Rick they appeared as hideous blood-soaked vampires. He waited with dread for the smell of blood to reach him, but it did not. He couldn’t take any more. He closed his eyes and turned away.
“If this is happening now, please make it stop.”
“This has happened.” Synster turned it off. “It was some years ago, a banquet. We are a reasonable race. But we take what we want, what we need. When we first arrived on Earth, we were treated as gods. We can’t have that now. But we still need the product from the resources we’ve invested in your species.” Synster stood and continued. “It’s simple, Rick. Your gods have returned, and we’re hungry.” He opened a door on a wall where Rick saw none, and gestured that they proceed. “Tour of the ship?”
Synster’s plan was simple: extend unlimited benefits to the human, while promising unlimited horror if he did not comply. Show him they were capable of the horror in the form of terrible bloodshed, and follow that with a tour demonstrating their awesome capabilities. This human really had no choice. If Provenger had any compassion, Synster would have felt sorry for him.
Chapter 13
Friday eveninG on the ship
“So, what do you think?” asked Synster.
Rick didn’t quite know what to think. He sat across the desk from Synster in a sparsely furnished office. There was no light fixture in the room, and yet there was light everywhere. Okay, technology, he thought. There are probably a dozen other things going on in this office that I don’t understand. There was a white desk in the middle of the white room, the white chairs on either side that they sat in, and a strange bench built into the wall on the left and right sides of the room. Much of it was designed for sitting, but probably half was designed with curves and ledges, various protrusions to support various body parts in different positions from reclining through standing. They seemed to invite any visitor to assume the position that suited them.
The image of Saturn lay beyond the large picture window behind Synster, and Rick wondered if it was real. He didn’t doubt it. He’d been given a half hour tour of the ship and was satisfied it couldn’t be faked. Yet he still had a hard time imagining he was the first human to make it to Saturn. He doubted he was.
While in the Grand Corridor, a vast open tube that ran the circumference of the ship and provided the Provenger with access to most areas, he’d followed the flight of a shuttle as it cruised silently by. His eyes then fixed on a surprising token. He saw a long-haired person from a distance. He was at first surprised he’d spotted her from so far away and then realized how much she stuck out among the hundreds of bald heads around her. Rick had always been amazed at how people could identify gender from a distance, assuming it must be some kind of a survival mechanism, enabling them to identify a potential threat or opportunity as early as possible. When he saw her for that brief moment, he could not possibly have predicted the nature or the extent of the opportunity he had just afforded himself. That one chance glimpse would change the course of his life and the future of humanity.
Rick had already come to grips with the idea that he was a dead man. Any way he looked at this situation, he was a goner. No cooperation, dead. Try for revenge, dead. Run and hide, dead. The only thing he hadn’t yet considered was cooperating, and when he tried, he still instinctively figured, dead. Strangely, the only thing that gave him comfort was that he knew he wasn’t alone. The whole human race was in a similar fix. But, so far as he was aware, he was the only one who knew. This either put him in an enviable position or simply an informed one. Either way, he’d rather be in the know. Either way, he had the company of all mankind as the comfort to his misery.
He’d had some time to calm down and get a grip on himself. It’s not every day a man learns that his entire civilization has been engineered by an alien race for the purposes of a food resource development project.
And now he was learning that even the original wheat wasn’t natural and that it was possibly the first GMO, an alien creation designed to manipulate man. I’ll have to completely reassess my crusade against Monsanto, Rick quipped to himself.
Rick sat in the office of a being whose natural diet apparently included him. This very Provenger was the being who created the food that screwed with his health for about five years of his life. Rick thought, actually my whole life; I just didn’t feel it until that last five.
“Why me?” Rick asked Synster, much more in control of himself now, though with full awareness of the instrument of pain still on his wrist.
“We are required, as part of our contact protocol, to have a surrogate on Earth. It reduces the danger of Provenger being injured, killed, or discovered. It also serves a number of other purposes. We choose people with contacts and skills we can use. Your previous employment with the military and NSA, and your brothe
r being the Deputy Director of the Department of Health and Human Services was a factor. Those associations put you in a position we can use. On a personal level, you have shown great tenacity throughout your life. As a former Marine and hunter, you understand the natural order of the food chain. We have examined your medical records. As someone who has healed yourself from the effect of our engineered grain, you have discovered something of your natural history. This reveals the ability to reconfigure paradigms to new realities. It demonstrates your adaptability to new ideas, your ability to innovate. We are certainly something new to which any collaborator must adapt. Even the large jar of broken pottery on the mantle in your house indicates a healthy disregard for your government’s laws when you personally feel they’ve been misapplied.”
Primal Estate: The Candidate Species Page 13