by Paul Tassi
“And what will you do?” she asked.
“I will ensure we do not explode,” he said as he brought up a hologram of the engine room. “Though we have power, this vessel’s engines are still extremely unstable and require constant monitoring and correction.”
Lucas hadn’t flown so much as an RC helicopter before, but something told him that even if he was a master F-18 pilot, that wouldn’t help him much presently. The alien CIC was a puzzle wrapped in an enigma, and he didn’t even know where to start.
“What exactly am I going to be shooting at?” the woman inquired.
“If we manage to secure the core, we will need to . . . outmaneuver the Sentinels. Without manually operated offensive capabilities, we will surely fail. You will man the [garbled], as the [garbled] has been damaged beyond repair.”
“Come again?”
“You will man the light guns, as this ship’s main cannon is no longer operational. Even the smaller, active weapons may only work for a brief time, as all spare power must be diverted to the engines.”
Alpha zoomed in on northern Norway once more, where a bunch of red dots surrounded the big green one.
“Additionally, scans show a number of life-forms near the entrance of the downed vessel we must enter. Whether human or [garbled], I do not know. It is reasonable to assume they will be hostile however, and as such, suppressing fire will undoubtedly be required.”
Lucas thought he saw a glimmer of excitement in the woman’s eyes.
“Take this,” Alpha said, handing the woman a small chip laced with tiny holograms.
“Go through that door and take the [garbled]. Take the lift down three levels. Exit and you will discover the light cannon nest. Release that device from your hand while seated, and your training will begin.”
The woman didn’t waste any time, blowing past Lucas, bumping his once-wounded shoulder as she did. Some water and peaches and a new objective had flooded life back into her. Lucas felt the same way, to an extent. Alpha turned to him and presented a similar chip.
“You will remain here, as your station is the commander’s chair.” He motioned to the large seat full of electronics and holograms.
“And this chip is going to teach me how to fly this ship?”
“Ideally, yes. I’ve translated the programs for each of you into your own language. Some information may be lost, but we require only basic skill for our present flight. This is a program we give to our [garbled]. To our children at a young age.”
“I guess the war starts early, huh?”
“There is not one among us who is not trained in some aspect of combat. It has been our way for millennia.”
“But you’re a scientist.”
“Inventing weapons of destruction for my superiors, rarely able to focus on my own creations.” He tapped his translator with his claw. “And as you saw, even I was made an unwilling soldier. As are many of us . . .”
Alpha’s gaze trailed off before he snapped back into focus.
“But you must begin. Be seated and I will retreat to finalize preparation of our engines so that we may extract ourselves from this crater wall.”
Alpha turned and exited out the main doors, leaving Lucas all alone in the great mess of technology that was the central command. He walked up to the massive chair, unslung his rifle, and laid it against its side. He sat down, leaned back, and released the chip. It hovered in the air for a moment, then shot into a slot near his left arm. All of a sudden, a host of cables with flickering nodes on the end shot out and attached themselves to his arms, legs, torso, and head. The black viewscreen in front of him flickered to life.
5
The training program was an elaborate video game–type exercise that made use of the huge viewscreen, projecting a photorealistic holographic setting where blackness used to be. Lucas’s virtual ship appeared to be on a landing pad amidst a vast and rocky wasteland where unfamiliar moons hung in the sky.
Holograms wrapped themselves around each of his arms, and in broken English, the translated commands in his field of vision showed him how various gestures controlled different parts of the ship.
The cables connected to parts of his body allowed him to experience the simulation in a way that mirrored realism. When he clenched his fist to start the engines, he felt them thunder through his bones as they came to life, though no such thing was happening in Alpha’s engine bay. He felt the sensation of motion in the pit of his stomach the first time he ascended in the virtual craft, and a sharp sting of pain when he promptly crashed it into a nearby mountainside.
Something about the program soon seemed to be crawling its way inside his brain. He felt himself processing information far more quickly than normal, and the longer he stayed plugged in, the more the controls began to feel second nature. He wondered if the cables attached to his scalp were creating this effect, and imagined what else he might learn with such a device. It was a complex series of actions just to make the ship move in three-dimensional space, but his ever increasing knowledge of the intricacies of the controls caused him to crash less and less as time went on and he progressed through various training stages of increasing difficulty. Pain avoidance was certainly a motivator as well, since each failure brought a marked increase in the amount of hurt received. Did Alpha say this was a program for children?
Lucas was jolted out of an eighth-level mission by a complete shutdown of the system. He thought it was a power failure, but turned and saw Alpha standing next to him. He held out his claw and the chip released itself from the console and floated into his hand. He tapped it, and a hologram shot out with a bunch of alien symbols of various colors.
“Hmmm,” Alpha mused. “It seems you have passed [garbled].”
Lucas was pleased.
Alpha clarified. “It seems you have passed the equivalent of fourth grade. And barely at that. But it will suit our purposes.”
Lucas scowled.
“Don’t I need to keep going? I was almost through with the eighth set.”
“It has been fifteen hours.”
Fifteen hours? It had seemed like barely one, if that. Now he understood why his son had been able to play his video games for massive stretches of time without so much as a blink. His son. He had avoided such thoughts for more than a day now, but again, there was no time to grieve as Alpha barked an order.
“Fetch the female and return here. Both of you must rest or you will be useless during the upcoming campaign. Your biological readings indicate neither of you have slept in almost thirty hours.
Lucas wondered what device was able to take such readings, but as he got out of the chair his legs buckled and he knew those statistics were accurate.
Alpha motioned to the doors the woman had walked through. He picked up Natalie and, with the gun once again secure on his back, walked through them and down a long corridor with a lift at the end.
Bracing for another long ride, Lucas noticed that the symbols on the elevator marking the levels of the ship were now in English. Alpha must have programmed elements of the ship for translation now that two thirds of his crew needed access to its decks. The five levels read COMMAND, BARRACKS, LABORATORY, ARMORY, and, finally, ENGINE. He swiped his hand across ARMORY, the ship’s controls now registering his presence, and the slow descent began.
The doors opened and he could see flashes of light almost immediately from a hallway down and to the right. As he made his way to the divide, he first looked left, and with a swipe through the door controls, peered into a vast room full of racks and storage cubes, all apparently bare. He imagined the original crew had cleared out whatever weapons remained when they evacuated the ship, but the area would warrant further exploration when time was not of the essence.
Heading right, the hallway wound around and he found himself entering a spherical room with a chair similar to his own but smaller in the center. The woman was seated, strapped in with the same sort of cables that had bound him, shooting at virtual spacecraft on a great cur
ved screen. Her eyes darted back and forth, not noticing his presence as he stood next to the chair. He could hardly make out what type of ships were being shot at before they began exploding. It seemed her training might be going a bit better than his.
He encroached further into her gaze, but still, no recognition. Finally, he waved his hand over the console and the chip shot out and the screen went black. The cables retracted and she looked around, suddenly confused as he had been.
“What the . . . ?” She finally saw him. “Why did you stop me?”
“Alpha say it’s time to go.”
“Alpha? Is that his name?”
Lucas was taken aback, but quickly realized that he had only shared that identifier with him.
“Sort of. Call it a nickname.”
She tried to wave her hands over the console, but it remained black.
“I just started this.”
“It’s been fifteen hours.”
She looked incredulous.
“Yeah, I know. These things mess with your mind a bit.”
She swiveled around the chair with a gesture.
“You know this is insane right?”
“What is?”
“This entire thing.”
Lucas leaned back against the black viewscreen, rubbing his eyes with his palms.
“Of course I know that, but what about the last few years hasn’t been?”
He slunk down to sit on the curved floor of the spherical room and continued.
“But I’m tired of walking. I’m tired of starving. I’m tired of this dusty, ashen, barren world. If he can take us somewhere away from here, don’t you at least think we should stick around to see where that is?”
“I don’t like leaving my fate in the hands of a . . . thing whose friends destroyed my life and the planet I lived on. At least out there I was in control of my own destiny.”
Lucas scoffed.
“You really believe you were in control?”
“Of course, you don’t?”
“What about that unstable freeway overpass that could have crumbled when you stepped on it? What about that one burning rainstorm that could have caught you when you were just far enough away from cover? What about that lone wanderer whose shot you couldn’t have heard until it was inside your brain? You weren’t in control out there; that was just a delusion. You think that being alive right now makes you some kind of superhuman, but really all it makes you is lucky.”
She looked past him, brow furrowed. “I earned the right to be alive. You should know that better than anyone,” she said, pointing to his shoulder.
Lucas threw his hand up dismissively.
“And what if I knew better by then? What if when I came along I just blew your head off without a second glance?”
“And what if tomorrow was a bright sunshiny day with a high of seventy-one?” the woman said fiercely. “There’s no point in that kind of thinking. I’m alive for a reason, and now this, this could be my reason. I know what I’ve done to be where I am today. Don’t tell me it’s luck that I can butcher five grown men waiting in ambush without suffering so much as a scratch. Don’t tell me it’s luck that I can charm two psychopaths to do my bidding like a pair of loyal dogs for months. Don’t tell me that I’m one of the last people alive on this planet because of pure chance. Maybe you stumbled into this ship after months in the desert on a whim and prayer, but I doubt it. You crawled your way here over the bodies of millions like I did, which means you’re made of some of the same stuff.”
She turned and shot him a piercing glare.
“Why are you doing this if you just think we’re mere flies that are simply fortunate enough not to have been swatted yet?”
Lucas tilted his head upward, keeping her gaze. After a lengthy pause, he spoke.
“There’s something to be said about discovering the unknown. To have a task greater than just surviving the next day or hour. I thought Portland was the end, but maybe it wasn’t. Clearly he has a plan, and I don’t think it involves going back to his homeworld and being executed for treason. There’s something he wants to show us.”
Suddenly, a familiar metal voice rang out.
“All crew report to command immediately.”
Alpha was growing anxious.
The woman got up from her chair to leave and Lucas rose from the floor.
“I think it’s about time you told me your name,” Lucas said.
The woman paused on her way out of the room, her back to him.
“Asha.”
“Lucas.”
“Let’s go.”
Upon their return to the command center, Alpha quickly checked Asha’s marks on her chip, which he deemed satisfactory. Lucas couldn’t tell what they were, but he definitely saw far more green and less red than when his program had displayed a similar screen.
Alpha then escorted them to the barracks level, which was a room full of rows and rows of translucent pods. Many were cracked or remained dark when Alpha powered up the room, but there were a few dozen still functioning. Lucas remembered Alpha saying this was a transport, and at one time there were over two hundred soldiers plus the crew who manned the ship. Presumably at one point, they all slept here. Well, they were about to sleep, right?
“In a sense,” Alpha explained. “Your higher brain functioning will be shut down for a period in which your body will recharge. Normally it would be fed supplementary nutrients during this time, but this ship’s supply has long been depleted.”
“So how is this not sleep?” asked Lucas.
“It is inefficient to wait for the individual to fall asleep on their own schedule. Rather, unconsciousness is induced with the aid of the [garbled]. It produces a state you might refer to as ‘sleep,’ but in truth it is far deeper than that.”
He flipped a holoswitch and a metal halo-like device descended from the roof of one of the open pods.
“I don’t like this.” Asha said flatly.
Alpha had no time for what she liked.
“You will be unable to perform the complex functions required for the upcoming task without the aid of the [garbled].”
“I’ve been blowing up alien ships for the last fifteen hours just fine.”
“You have undoubtedly noticed an increase of information flow to your cortex, and a distortion of time. These processes take a toll on the body, and readings indicate this is especially the case for you as humans are unaccustomed to such levels of stimulation.”
It was hard to disagree with this point, as Lucas had felt dizzy and borderline nauseous ever since his simulation had ended. His muscles ached and a wave of fatigue had come over him that went deep into his core. Asha had to be feeling the same way, and the dark circles under her eyes gave her away.
“There’s nothing to lose at this point, right?” Lucas said as he stepped into the machine.
“Your cooperation is appreciated,” Alpha said as he closed the pod’s door.
Lucas felt the gelatinous backing of the pod conform to the shape of his body; it was surprisingly comfortable. He looked up and saw the halo descending toward him. Alpha and Asha peered through the glass, and they were the last thing he saw before blackness.
But blackness was not what remained.
He awoke in the same hotel bed he had been in that morning. The same call from his wife jarred him awake, and once again he rubbed his eyes and squinted out the window into the bright Miami sunshine. It was the same moment, and one that was burned into his mind for all eternity.
He answered groggily.
“Hey . . . what’s up?”
“Oh thank god. Are you watching this?” his wife said hurriedly on the other line.
He winced his eyes shut, and found that he had the hangover he expected. It was a familiar side-effect of his cross-country trips for work. The light was too much too bear, and the volume on his receiver seemed deafening. He pulled it away from his ear.
“Watching what?”
“It’s three hour
s later there. Are you just waking up?”
“No,” he lied, and they both knew that. But her voice was frantic, not angry.
“I’ve been calling for hours, but this is the first time I’ve been able to get through. All the lines are jammed. Turn on the news.”
He fumbled around for the remote, which was buried deep in the bedcovers. He flipped on the TV, wondering what channel the news would be on in this unfamiliar city. But it didn’t matter, it was on all of them.
It took him ten seconds to fully process what he was seeing. A giant object loomed in the sky above New York City, the caption UFO APPEARS OVER MANHATTAN beneath it as five correspondents all tried to talk over each other at once. It took Lucas a solid minute to even speak a word.
“Honey? Honey, are you there?”
Lucas found his voice at last.
“I’m coming home, right now. Stay there.”
“Okay, talk to Nathan, he’s been—”
The phone cut out, a dropped signal as the entire cellular network was assuredly in a state of meltdown. Redials were met with an endless busy signal.
Lucas let the phone slide from his grasp as he watched the TV with a fixed gaze. He didn’t even notice when the door to the bathroom opened and she strolled out onto the carpet in her underwear. He jumped when she spoke.
“What is that?” she asked, as she saw the newscast on the flatscreen.
He turned to her.
“I need to go, now.”
Suddenly the woman decayed into ash as the walls of the room expanded outward and drifted away into a starry sky that now enveloped his view. He flew toward it.
6
He woke with the halo slowly rising off his head. His vision was blurred, but within a moment he recalled that he was in the pod. A dream? No, a memory. A crystal clear, perfectly rendered memory. He could even still smell the beach for a few lingering seconds, taste the vodka on his breath, and then it was gone. Why had he just relived the most astonishing, terrifying, and ultimately tragic moment in his former life? He’d thought about it often, but never actually had to fully experience it again. His drinking had finally caused him to make a mistake he never thought was possible, a line he vowed he’d never cross. And on that night, on that day, of all days. Since that moment, there hadn’t been an ounce of alcohol in his veins, and he spent the years since trying to fulfill his promise to come home. On the way, he often viewed his hellish march as penance for his sins. True, the journey had made him a mass murderer in an effort to stay alive and find them, but he preferred the content of his character now to the wreck of self-loathing, deceit, and addiction he once was. The apocalypse made many men worse, but few better.