The Book That THEY Do Not Want You To Read, Part 2

by Andy Ritchie

  I started to find myself drifting off.

  ‘...it must be quite lonely if you are here on your own, might be quite nice to have the opportunity to break the monotony with a friendly chat...after all, I doubt you get much conversation out of the Tofusbutts, that is unless you’ve programmed them to...

  ‘Save your breath. Your SVPT won’t work on me.’

  The man’s voice was shrill and high and had an almost unnatural quality about it. Given his vaguely Mediterranean looks, I had expected a deep, luxurious voice awash with brooding masculinity; to get a voice which sounded like a cross between Alan Carr and Alvin the Chipmunk was something of a shock.

  Tukaal, however, seemed completely unfazed by the bizarre voice that had addressed him.

  ‘Ah, so you are aware of Subliminal Voice Persuasion Technique, are you?’

  The man nodded slowly, his expression bordering on smug contempt and arrogance.

  It was an expression which changed very quickly when, suddenly and without warning, Tukaal used his PWS to simply blow off the man’s left hand.

  The hand had been resting on the plastic arm of the chair when it simply flew apart as if it had exploded from the inside. But it had done so soundlessly, without the crack of a gunshot, without the fizz of some cosmic ray-gun, without the boom of some sonic particle disrupter (not that I’m sure whether sonic particle disruptors do go off with a boom, or whether they even actually exist).

  Part of the chair arm was missing as well.

  There then followed a strange moment of calm as the man stared disbelievingly down at where his left hand used to be, and at his white lab-coat and the white floor beside and behind him which were now littered with bits of blood, tissue, finger, thumb, chair-arm...

  He screamed.

  No...he shrieked.

  Loudly.

  The high-pitched, almost painful sound echoed around the control room as the man stared in wide-eyed disbelief at the injury.

  I found myself staring too, because amidst my own shock at the suddenness of Tukaal’s violent act, my own horror at witnessing a hand just fly apart in the manner that it had, and my own discomfort at the scream that seemed to put every nerve and sinew in my body on edge, I noticed something odd about the stump that had been left behind.

  It wasn’t bleeding like it should. In fact, it wasn't really bleeding at all.

  This was not because it had been cauterised by the searing heat of whatever it was that Tukaal had fired at it; from what I could see, there had been no heat involved.

  No, it wasn’t bleeding like it should (which I envisaged to involve copious amounts of red stuff spurting out of the severed arteries and veins and spraying Jackson Pollock style across the previously pristine white tiles) because...well...there didn’t seem to be any blood.

  Instead, there was something I recognised from cutting open the back of a certain alien’s head. It was that same yucky combination of stretchy white sinews and icky yellow pus (that so-called sub-cutaneous lubricant) that had revealed itself when I had peeled away the skin on Tukaal’s skull.

  There was also some gloopy grey stuff dripping from what looked like a couple of tubes hanging loosely from the stump, as well as what looked like a piece of plastic, its end shattered as if it had been hit by a hammer, which I could only assume was the ‘bone’ of the fore-arm.

  ‘What the fuck...?’ I whispered as the realisation began to sink in about what it was I was looking at.

  Meanwhile, as reality slowly dawned for me, Tukaal’s willingness to tolerate the bone-jarring screams from the injured man eventually reached an end.

  ‘Oh, do be quiet, for heaven’s sake,’ he shouted unsympathetically

  The man took no heed and continued to scream.

  ‘Look,’ Tukaal shouted further, ‘Just disconnect yourself from the shell’s pain receptors, it’s simple enough.’

  ‘Not in this fucking shell,’ the man hissed angrily, ‘that functionality is broken.’

  ‘Oh,’ was all Tukaal managed to say.

  ‘Why the hell did you go and do that anyway?’ the man asked, his teeth still clenched, his breathing still quick, but his expression a little less pained than it had been.

  ‘I needed to get your attention, quickly, and I wanted to make it clear that we weren’t going to be messing around.’

  ‘You could have just said that,’ the man muttered (I’m still using the word ‘man’ even though it had become pretty obvious that this wasn’t a man at all), ‘you didn’t have to go all Polaxian on me and blow my fucking hand off!’

  The man now sounded more indignant than agonised.

  ‘Okay, sorry about the hand,’ Tukaal said apologetically. ‘Still, I’m sure you’ll be able to get a replacement...’

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ the man replied sulkily, ‘but I’ll still have to pay for it out of my own pocket, and replacements don’t come cheap, assuming I even manage to get hold of one...shells for life-forms which are still going through the First Contact protocol are not particularly easy to get hold of, I’ll have you know.’

  ‘So where did you get this one?’ Tukaal enquired. ‘Stolen from the URG development facility on Regus 6, perhaps? Bought on the black market?’

  I had an urge to suggest he got it on eBay, but I fought it.

  ‘It’s clearly a prototype human shell,’ Tukaal continued, ‘one of the early ones by the looks of it. The skin gives it away, you see, the premature aging caused by the lack of collagen was a problem they only managed to rectify quite recently. I guess that’s why some of the functionality isn’t quite right. Also, it won’t be specifically configured for you, will it, so the interfaces will be a bit...temperamental.’

  The man chose to remain in his sulky silence.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Tukaal asked after a few, long moments.

  Silence.

  Tukaal looked down at the gun in his hand and seemed to adjust one of the settings. This prompted a response from the man.

  ‘I’m earning a living, same as you.’

  Tukaal smiled, but it was a thin, cold smile; chillingly, it was just the sort of smile I could imagine Mendelssohn wearing as he moved the glove thing about my body and readied himself to inflict some further agonies.

  ‘How many of you are there?’

  The man seemed to consider for a moment whether he should answer or not. As he pondered, he used his one remaining hand to wipe away beads of sweat that had erupted across his forehead. In the end, he decided that Tukaal’s bluff was one he should not try to call.

  ‘There’s three of us manning the control room, plus another three working days on Research...’

  ‘All like you?’

  The ‘man’ nodded, then continued:

  ‘No. There are also two Melded Troogs...’

  ‘I thought Troogs were melded into a triad,’ Tukaal interrupted.

  ‘This triad lost one of their number a little while ago, working on one of the moons of Platikus 3...’

  ‘And what are you working on here? There’s something wrong with the set-up of that power station on the surface, that much I can see. It’s got the standard fossil-fuel power generation system, it’s got the three-phase export system, but there are also three large cables coming down here. What’s the purpose of those cables...?

  I was about to also ask what the hell all that black stuff was all over them, but I didn’t get the chance.

  The man chose that moment to become belligerent again, telling Tukaal determinedly:

  ‘I’m not going to tell you anything!’

  Whereupon Tukaal calmly blew apart his right foot, as well as disintegrating one of the five nylon legs of the chair's base and its associated caster, and shattering a couple of the white floor tiles for good measure.

  More shrieking, more anger.

  ‘You fuck!’ the man shouted. ‘You fucking fuck!’

  ‘You’ve clearly mastered some of the more colourful local vernacular,’ Tukaal said calmly, ‘I myse
lf have yet to fully get to grips with the use of such violent expletives.’

  Tukaal took a deep breath as he waited for the screaming to subside a little.

  ‘Now, that’s the last warning I’m going to give you. Either you start telling me what is going on here, or I’ll rip open your shell’s chest cavity, strip out your Wel-Qa substitute and leave you to wither and die.’

  The word ‘Wel-Qa’ dragged from the depths of my mind a memory, one of my memories, something which Tukaal had told me about why he was so enchanted by the ability of humans to experience food and drink and all the tastes and textures and flavours associated with them; it was because he, a Gao’An, had only ever experienced the absorption of energy and nutrients from some kind of giant swamp thing on their homeworld, called the Wel-Qa.

  ‘Are you saying that he’s a...’ I stammered.

  ‘A Gao’An, yes, same as me.’ Tukaal concluded for me.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ was all I could bring myself to say.

  ‘So, what’s it going to be?’ Tukaal asked, turning back to the Gao’An man.

  The Gao’An man hissed and wheezed with pain and discomfort, but all the time he was staring at Tukaal, almost as if he was trying to gauge the Ambassador’s mood, the depth of his intent.

  ‘All right,’ the Gao’An man said eventually, ‘I’ll tell you what you want to know. But before I do, you have to promise that you’ll do what you can to get me out of here and to get me off-world. Once they know that it was me who told you...’

  His voice tailed off limply.

  ‘I’m only going to promise you one thing,’ Tukaal responded with icy coldness, ‘if you don’t start talking, I’m going to take your shell apart one piece at a time.’

  Another baleful look from the Gao’An man, then a wave of resignation swept across his haggard, sweating features.

  ‘We are harnessing emotional energy.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Tukaal growled nastily, instantly raising his weapon and, without a moment’s hesitation, blowing away first the Gao’An man’s right knee, then his left knee, which resulted in his severed left foot falling somewhat comically to the ground.

  The cold brutality of Tukaal’s actions was shocking.

  ‘Please, I swear it,’ the Gao’An man screamed wildly, his voice so high-pitched it was almost inaudible, ‘that’s what we’re doing here...’

  ‘No-one can harness emotional energy,’ Tukaal shouted back, ‘it’s a fantasy, a dream. It simply cannot be done!’

  The Gao’An man waved his good hand at the consoles and at the giant display screen.

  ‘It’s all up there...on the screen...’ he babbled almost incoherently. ‘We use the electricity grid...to gather it...feed it back to the sub-station, channel it...’

  ‘What medium do you use to channel the energy?’

  ‘We use Tark Particles...flood the grid with them...there are twenty TP generators across the UK, hundreds world-wide...it’s all inter-connected...globally...wires, optical cables, it all comes here...’

  The Gao’An man was talking breathlessly fast, not only, I suspect, because of the pain he was not able to switch off from a shell that now had three limbs missing, but also because I think he/it had suddenly realised that he was actually talking for his very life, that Tukaal, gently spoken and smartly dressed though he was, had demonstrated a propensity for violence that left no doubt of his ability to kill...not that, for a moment, he actually intended to do so, this was all about intimidation and fear and creating in the mind of the Gao’An man the conviction that his very life was at stake.

  In a way, this was classic negotiation.

  At least, I hoped it was.

  ‘So you’re telling me that you have a world-wide collection system, based on an electricity grid flooded with Tark Particles, for gathering emotional energy.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the Gao’An man babbled eagerly.

  Tukaal walked over to me and passed me the weapon.

  ‘If he moves, Jeth, shoot him in the chest. I need to study this display.’

  The weapon felt awkward in my hand.

  I trained it on the Gao’An man who looked at me with a mixture of expressions — anger, hatred, desperation...hope.

  I simply stared back at him, keeping my own expression blank and cold...and I felt a mild satisfaction as I watched the wisps of hope that had drifted into the Gao’An man’s features evaporate into nothingness.

  Tukaal spent several minutes studying the huge display screen and looking at the console where the Gao’An man had been sat when we had entered. He had his back to me for most of the time, so I was unable to gauge what he was thinking, though his movements and his mutterings seemed to grow more agitated.

  The Gao’An man had lapsed into a pained silence, broken only by an occasional whimper of self-pity. The chair on which he sat, having had various parts of itself blown apart, now looked a little precarious, and I could see that it was swaying back and forth in unison with the Gao’An man who was doing the same, like a man in shock.

  I guess if I was sat on a chair with bits of me splattered all around the place, I’d be in shock as well!

  And still we waited for Tukaal.

  He was hunched over the Gao’An man’s control console now and was working feverishly the touch-sensitive desktop, highlighting icons and images on the giant display and then enlarging them or moving them or minimising them.

  I didn’t see much of what he was studying; I made sure that I kept my eyes firmly fixed on the Gao’An man; but I did deduce that the huge screen was actually four separate displays which, from left to right, seemed to show the following:

  1. A schematic of some sort, very detailed, of which some elements could be expanded to show more information. The schematic was alive with small, flashing icons, ever changing numbers and pulsing arrows which I assume showed the flow of something, possibly this emotional energy which the Gao’An claimed was being harnessed here.

  2. A series of live video streams from what I assumed were other parts of the underground complex. Every now and again, one of the Tofusbutts would drift through one of the images as it performed its programmed duty.

  3. An area where schematics and live video seemed to be combined. I have no idea where these places were.

  4. A final area which was relatively inactive in comparison to the others. In fact, there was only what appeared to be a video link to a deserted office with a large laboratory beyond it. Above it on the display were the letters ‘EEP’.

  ‘What’s this room?’

  It seemed ages since Tukaal had last spoken, and such was the harsh abruptness of his barking voice, it made both the Gao’An man and myself jump. Fortunately, I didn’t shoot the Gao’An in a reflex action (like Ruby Rhod did to one of the Mangalors in The Fifth Element).

  On the big screen was an enlarged video showing one of the rooms in the complex. I wasn’t quite sure what I was seeing as I studied it...it looked like a hospital ward, a series of beds...I think they were beds...and on the beds...?

  What were they?

  Tukaal had walked back to us and had taken the gun from me. He now pointed it directly at the Gao’An man’s head.

  ‘I shall ask you again. What’s this room?’

  Tukaal pointed at the display and the Gao’An man shifted uncomfortably in what remained of his chair.

  He remained defiantly silent, which really amazed me considering how little provocation Tukaal had previously needed to blow off parts of his anatomy.

  I waited with morbid excitement to see whether it would be the head which went next.

  ‘It’s where you physicalise it, isn’t it?’

  The change in the Gao’An man’s expression betrayed him.

  ‘Look, Tukaal continued, ‘I studied Tark as part of my Red Banner thesis on Altimus, so I have a pretty good idea about the fundamental theories of harnessing emotional energy. Clearly you’ve got a system for collecting the energy...’

  He waved in the vague
direction of the main schematic on the left of the display screen. ‘...but that’s not really the difficult bit, is it? The difficult bit has always been to find a way to ‘physicalise’ the energy... is that what’s happening here, in this room, with these whatever-they-ares...?’

  The Gao’An man’s resolve seemed to suddenly evaporate and he slumped into the chair with a resigned nodding of his head.

  ‘I think we need to go and take a look. Jeth. Grab the duffel bag, please.’

  And with that, Tukaal grabbed hold of the back of the Gao’An man’s chair and began wheeling him towards the opposite door to the one through which we had entered, the Gao'An man holding on desperately to the seat with his remaining hand.

  The chair didn’t roll so well now that it only had four casters, and one of those four casters wasn’t turning because there appeared to be part of the Gao’An man’s left thumb caught in it, making it squeak annoyingly like a damaged supermarket trolley.

  I didn’t make any attempt to remove it as we exited the control room and made our way first along one corridor, then left onto another. As we turned, we encountered a Tofusbutt pushing an empty trolley. It did not even seem to recognise our presence as it trotted past us, all its eyes staring blankly ahead, as if it was in a trance.

  About halfway down the second corridor, we stopped at a large set of double doors which, like the control room, had a keypad.

  ‘Same code?’ Tukaal asked, looking at the Gao’An man.

  He nodded, and Tukaal punched in the code.

  The doors swung open to reveal yet another huge room, this one possibly a hundred yards long and thirty yards wide and fifteen feet high. The room was full of beds, dozens of them, four rows stretching away from where we stood, and on each of the beds, wired up to countless machines and monitors and what looked like a kidney dialysis machine, were...

  ‘What the fuck...?’ I heard myself whisper.

  It is almost impossible to describe the hideous creatures which lay on the beds, just as it is almost impossible to describe the horrific stench which seemed to hit me like a sledgehammer as I walked into the room, a vile and potent mixture of vinegar, strong stilton cheese, stale sweat and shit.