Heyer placed his palm onto one of the walls. The surface changed, the entire side of the corridor becoming transparent, forming a window which looked into a massive room on the other side. As Jonathan absorbed what lay within, his eyes grew heavy.
He may as well have been looking at a farm for poultry or cattle, though it was humans being kept as livestock. He only saw women, confined to small squares, each in some stage of pregnancy. There were no walls that he could see blocking one woman’s cell from another. It was as if each small chamber was enclosed by glass. Their faces and clothes were dirty, and they sat on floors made up of a mix of soil and a dried, black plant life that reminded Jonathan of the bedding pet stores use for rodent cages. The inmates all seemed to gravitate to the corners of their stalls where they were closest to one another, despite whatever invisible barrier that kept them from making any physical contact.
With all the technology that the Foedrata had at their disposal, it was as though these women were placed into surroundings where they could never confuse their function.
“Why would they do this?” Jonathan asked. “Keep people here like livestock?”
“This was more efficient than returning to Earth to replenish their stocks. The popularity of the human combatants inside the Arena eventually led to the Foedrata abducting a greater sampling of mankind. They pulled men and women strategically from various locations on each of Earth’s continents, enough to sustain their population and breed for desired traits. The strongest male progeny were kept in smaller numbers, enough that the Arena always had plenty of combatants, but also enough to ensure there would be no decline of quality stock due to inbreeding. The females better suited for producing were kept here.”
He looked at the ground, then.
“My brother and I found only the dust left by their remains when we arrived,” Heyer said. “At the Borealis extinction, these women and their unborn children died, trapped down here in the dark.”
Jonathan turned away from the faces inside. The outrage he felt was so maddeningly irreconcilable and the criminals responsible were so far outside his reach. When his initial disgust passed, he was left with nothing but pity and sadness. “Why are you showing me this? If you wanted me to hate the Foedrata —it’s done. I hate them. But what is the point if I can’t do anything about it?”
“They are painful realities to absorb, and I am sorry you needed to see this,” Heyer said. “I am showing you, so you know exactly what is at stake—what mankind’s enslavement under the Ferox will look like. If my brother feels he has no option but to take earth, he will not be using the Arena for entertainment, but to reverse the Feroxian extinction and maintain his place of dominance over the species. After the Ferox have crushed any resistance from humanity, I suspect he will use the design of the Foedrata’s Arena to place hundreds of these facilities on your planet. Men will be implanted, forced to fight, and slain, allowing the Ferox to breed. Those of humanity allowed to live outside of the Arenas will be the owned subjects of the Ferox.”
Jonathan closed his eyes and nodded.
“Seeing this, I hope you may understand what lengths we should be willing to go to in order to keep it from happening,” Heyer said. “Follow me. There is one last thing you need to see.”
The alien set off down the corridor and the window to the women’s prison shimmered, becoming a wall again. Jonathan fell silently into step behind Heyer. They took several different corridors and turns, so many that Jonathan knew he could easily become lost if the alien hadn’t been there to guide him. He wondered how it was possible that they were still inside Mr. Clean. The computer must have been moving the ground beneath them, as though in reality their journey was taking place on a treadmill he could not perceive while they walked through the Foedrata’s footage.
Finally, they came to a hallway where Heyer placed his palm on the wall once more, and the seamless surface parted into a doorway. When Heyer prompted him inside, Jonathan entered, and the door closed behind them.
At first, Jonathan thought that they may have left the footage. The room they stood in, from what he could tell, seemed nearly identical to what he had seen behind the safe door within Mr. Clean. Now that he was in the chamber, he saw that it contained more than the devices that lined the walls. There were three chest-high pedestals; two placed beside one another near the center of the room, and one further away, almost at the very back wall.
Heyer stopped beside the two pedestals in the center. Jonathan could see that each had a socket much like the spaces lining the walls, and both were empty. Heyer nodded toward the empty spaces, and Jonathan watched. In a few moments, one of the sockets filled, a dormant device materializing. He recognized the metallic symbol on its exterior. It matched the flux capacitor design he’d seen on Rylee’s chest.
“The woman, in the Arena,” Jonathan said. “The Alpha killed her.”
Heyer nodded.
“This is what happens? When we die, our device returns to their place in this chamber? They don’t follow the body through the gate?”
As Heyer nodded, the man’s device, the one that matched his own, materialized in the empty slot beside the woman’s. “Thank you, Mr. Clean,” Heyer said. “You can end this projection now.”
The black void returned.
When reality manifested around them once again, Jonathan found they had in fact been moving inside Mr. Clean. They were now standing on the other side of the vault door, inside the device chamber. Some of the empty slots on the wall that had been filled were now empty and vice versa. Inside the chamber there were two apparent differences that stood out from the version he had seen in the footage: the vault door they had used to enter, and another, similar door on the far back wall beside a third pedestal.
“This armory,” Jonathan wondered aloud. “Did you take it from beneath the Foedrata’s Arena?”
“It is a replication,” Heyer said. “Necessary to achieve the same functionality.”
“The footage is over, then. That is what you wanted me to see?”
Heyer took in a long breath before answering. “A Ferox is not difficult to motivate, Jonathan. Their role in the Arena is a fabricated lie, but that lie is in alignment with their nature and beliefs. Humans raised in enslavement are another matter. Did you notice…” Heyer paused. “How quickly the male combatant’s device followed the female’s?”
The male in the Arena had been injured, according to Heyer—unable to run. Still, he saw what the alien was getting at; the man had put up little resistance once his mate had perished. Jonathan remembered how the pair had looked at one another back on the beach. He wondered if the man had anything left to fight for once the female was gone.
“You’ve noticed that emotion plays a role in your strength when activated. This is a symptom of how the implant functions. As it enhances your body based on mass, your muscles also react to your adrenaline and the various hormonal components of aggression. Such things make you stronger, but also compromise your reasoning and self-restraint. This is true whether you are activated or not, but when you are activated, the effect is intensified.
“The Foedrata were quite skilled at manipulating human behaviors that had application in combat. Over the course of the Arena’s history, they found powerful methods to motivate men and women to fight. The bonded pair was, perhaps, their most disturbing achievement. Your device is quite powerful alone. This isn’t simply a result of your compatibility, but because the device itself is one of the strongest ever re-purposed for the Arena.”
Heyer raised his hands, drawing Jonathan’s attention to the walls where other implants laid dormant.
“These devices are earlier models; they have no pair. Their strength in any given combatant is fixed by compatibility and body mass alone. Your device is not bound by the same limits, especially when the bond is in play.”
“So the angrier I get, the stronger the device becomes?” Jonathan asked.
“Not precisely. The reaction was designed to
create an entertaining spectacle in the Arena,” Heyer said. “It is catalyzed by a very particular emotional experience … anger is more a byproduct than the source. The reaction is synergistic, exothermic, like that of an explosion. That is to say, once it begins, the energy output is greater than the input, and provides you with far more resources to draw on.”
Heyer paused, gathering his thoughts, and then continued.
“The Borealis’s similarity to humanity gave the Foedrata insight into how to manipulate your species, but also made mankind a more relatable combatant to watch inside the Arena. Influencing the intensity of human emotion within the engagements added a layer of theater.”
“Influencing emotion?” Jonathan asked.
Heyer nodded. “Of all the species I have studied in our archives, only one has anywhere near the number of faith-based belief systems as the Borealis had throughout their history.”
“Mankind,” Jonathan said. “What does it have to do with the bonded pair?”
“As mankind matures, they follow a similar pattern as the Borealis, with different religious beliefs drawing from one another, their themes coalescing and evolving. Faiths tend to be rooted in addressing what the population at a given point in history fears, and Earth’s modern religions embrace a continued existence after death—usually a spiritual continuity assumed beside a creator. Some see this as becoming reconnected to the creator itself, others as a spiritual ‘self’ that joins their god on a celestial plane after the body dies. This speaks to a deep-seated fear in Mankind: that of ceasing to exist.
“Mankind, like the Borealis, is a species that tends to think themselves a superior life form—more than an animal, by their own standards. They believe in the soul, a spiritual component that makes them of greater value than other life,” Heyer said. “The Foedrata’s beliefs had a similar notion of the soul, but Foedras eventually took it one step further. They began to interpret this spiritual addition as the means by which the universe’s creator divided itself and inserted its consciousness throughout the species.”
“Heyer…” Jonathan paused. “I am really not seeing where you are going with this.”
The alien raised his hand, requesting Jonathan hold off his questions a moment longer. “Mankind was prone to believing that they had more value than other life because of their subjective experience of reality,” he said. “The Foedrata, of course, found this offensive to their own beliefs, but recognized it as a weakness that Mankind had perceived as a strength. A subtraction masquerading as an addition. And yet, every Foedrata experienced the very same weakness in themselves. It was, therefore, easy for them to exploit, but all the more unforgivable.”
“What subtraction, what weakness?” Jonathan asked. “What are you getting at?”
“Humans, like the Borealis, feel incomplete,” Heyer said. “They have a void and desperately look to fill it. This incompleteness comes from gaps in what they can understand or explain, gaps in purpose, or a need to find meaning in existence. Yet, their greatest gap comes from the internal isolation.”
Jonathan raised an eyebrow.
“Humans and Borealis both share a profound cosmic loneliness. They live and die with the knowledge that no one will ever truly know or understand the mind within them. It is a gap they desire filled so desperately, they’ve created one god after another trying to fill it,” Heyer said. “The Foedrata manipulated the bonded pair by finding the means to artificially fill that gap. They created a bond that grows stronger every time the two are activated together. Until tonight, Mr. Clean and I did not fully understand how they had accomplished this. Now that we have heard your experience, we have a better idea of the mechanics.”
“What, that hallucination?” Jonathan said. “How could that manipulate me to do anything?”
“Tell me, Jonathan,” Heyer said. “If you could never see or talk to Rylee again, how would you feel?”
Heyer’s question, when pondered for a few moments, began to hurt. The idea of her absence brought a pull of panic, inducing a nauseated lump in Jonathan’s stomach. He felt guilt, as though he had done something unforgivable to the most important person in his life. The discomfort quickly became something he couldn’t force himself to endure imagining.
The disturbance… it was so familiar, so parallel to what he had felt as a child when his father had died. He had to force the thought away to stop the sickening sense of loss. He found he was breathing faster; he was afraid. His intuition screamed in confusion at the conflict within him. These emotions—they were impossible, they lacked substance, as though they had manifested from nothing.
Jonathan closed his eyes and swallowed. “I’ve only spent a few hours with her, Heyer. Why is that question terrifying me?”
Heyer’s face grew pained for him. He stepped away from the wall, coming closer to Jonathan, the two pedestals between them. “It is quite difficult to fabricate a thought or a memory within a conscious mind—emotions are not so complicated. However, it is the nature of all three that they do not exist in isolation. All three are linked, and quite difficult to separate, as they often come into being in concert. Before tonight, we knew the bonded pair suffered emotional manipulations, but not how the Foedrata had bridged those emotions to thoughts and memories.”
“Bridged?”
After a pause in his thought, Heyer responded to Jonathan’s question with one of his own. “While at the university, did you study the evolutionary theories for altruism?”
It took Jonathan a moment to pull the word from memory. “I recall it, vaguely.”
“In Man, self-sacrifice is both an act of conscious calculation and unconscious emotion. The decision to put the life of another above your own is greatest for those with whom you share a stronger connection. A parent is more willing to give their life for their child than a friend; a sister more likely to shield a brother than a stranger; a man, for a woman who carries his child. The feeling experienced, the emotional bond that pushes one to make the sacrifice… it grows over time.
“These emotional attachments to another being are not unlike addictions. Losing the individual can be like suffering withdrawals. Hormones and neurotransmitters associate the feelings shared in the experience to memories of time spent together. When such a connection is lost to you, the source of those emotions is also lost.
“With the bonded pair, the Foedrata did not care to wait for this connection to manifest on its natural schedule. So, you find that you have an attachment to Rylee, that you feel things for her that should take months or years to present so powerfully on their own. It is confusing, because the memories that would act as a foundation for these emotions are absent, and yet the feeling is there,” Heyer said.
“Are you saying that this device is, what…” Jonathan began. “Producing hormones to make me care for her?”
“Yes, but that alone wouldn’t have been enough. Your emotional experience required a core of memories to associate. The device could not create a false history between the two of you. So, the Foedrata allowed a bridge between your minds. A bonding experience where the human void was filled by one another. Now that this has happened, the device continues to cement that bond when you interact with one another, creating a profound but artificial intimacy… the desired result being that you would be driven to protect one another.
“But I must warn you. Do not let my use of the word ‘artificial’ fool you, Jonathan. You won’t be able to feel the difference. You’ll only be aware of a contradiction between the strength of your emotional attachment and your lack of a shared history. However, that contradiction is fleeting. If you indulge, keep her close to you, then true shared memories will begin rapidly shrinking any sense of a contradiction,” Heyer said.
Jonathan shook his head. “What exactly… is the implant trying to make me believe her to be?”
Heyer looked at him curiously, almost as though he suspected Jonathan’s question had been insincere. After a moment, seeing he seemed genuine, the alien grimaced u
ncomfortably. “The devices are built for a male and a female. She is not your parent, sibling, or child. Perhaps that you are confused is for the best. It is not without irony that Rylee’s lesser compatibility may, in this instance, fall in our favor. Had she been as compatible as the woman you saw in the Arena, the bond would make you both stronger, but the phrase ‘love at first sight’ would hardly encompass the pull of the emotional suggestion. There would be little chance that reason would hold any sway on either of you, at least in regards to protecting one another.”
Jonathan closed his eyes. “You know, you’re a real bastard sometimes…” he said, resting his forehead against his palms. “You should have warned us.”
“I deserve that,” Heyer said. “I am truly sorry, Jonathan. You were never meant to be in close enough proximity to activate the bond. When and if the time came, I wanted the decision to be yours.”
“Why did you implant both of us? Why didn’t you wait? Implant Rylee when we needed her?”
“Gates need combatants, Jonathan,” Heyer said. “But, more importantly, we need experienced, battle-tested soldiers. I must train an army spread out over the entire Earth. We must have every weapon at our ready disposal. If this war came upon us tomorrow, I would be forced to implant every device in this room as quickly as possible and you would be leading people who had never so much as laid eyes on a Ferox, let alone knew a thing about how to fight them.”
Jonathan shook his head. “I shouldn’t be leading anyone. Being the strongest in an army doesn’t mean you’re capable of leading it. I don’t understand what the hell you think is so damn special about me that I would be remotely qualified.”
The Never Paradox (Chronicles Of Jonathan Tibbs Book 2) Page 28