The Ithaden’s Slave

by Daniella Wright

  Apparently Sid was a spacetime traveler from a warrior race called Ithaden (yes, all of them had scales), on a quest to basically repair time itself. Kate’s brain hurt from all this information but, somehow, the more he spoke the more she felt…right, somehow. As if she already knew all those things, although she couldn’t quite remember them fully yet.

  Sid spoke about a prophecy among his people, involving the birth of what they called “the Third Sun” (roughly translated in English), a child emperor that would unite the Ithaden and grow up to conquer huge swathes of galaxies, bringing peace and prosperity to the universe. Kate had to roll her eyes a bit at how such a seemingly advanced society when it came to technology (from time travel and jewelry that doubles as ultrasound devices, to floating screens and who knows what else) still had such old-fashioned notions about governance. But then again, her whole perception about life, humanity and how it all fit together in the bigger picture did just recently shatter into a million pieces, so she decided to keep her opinions to herself. She was waiting for Sid to get to the point of how all this affected her. How all this affected her child.

  “Something happened in the future, you see,” he carried on. “Or, well, future depending on how you look at it. Future from where we’re standing now, I suppose. Anyway, according to our records at the Time Agency, when the Third Sun rose in power, he pissed off some other… imperialistic you would call it, race who had plans of their own to take over the cosmos. The Xerrks. Since they couldn’t get rid of him then, with all the vast armies of the Ithaden and our allies protecting him, the Xerrks decided to make sure that the Third Sun would never be born. To do that, they had to eliminate his bloodline.” Sid paused for a second and looked at Kate, as if to make sure she was still with him and could understand the importance of the situation and what was being implied.

  “Ith-rassil, the Third Sun was of Ithaden and human descent. To prevent his birth, the Xerrks went back to the past and wiped the entire human race out of existence. What happened with you, with your disappearance and your pregnancy, it was all an attempt to prevent that. Here, perhaps you need to see for yourself.”

  Before Kate had a chance to react, Sid waved his hand at one of the floating screens on the desk. Like some sort of weird puppy, the screen obediently flew right in his hand. After browsing for a second, he found what he was looking for. Using the wall as a projector again, he pointed the footage on the screen toward the wall, so that Kate could see what he was seeing. And what he was seeing, was, well, Kate.

  Tears started running from her eyes. There she was, walking and talking in that alien language, interacting with Sid and a bunch of other people in what seemed to be…other rooms of this house? (Just how big was this house? Had they expanded to other houses as well, secretly taken over the whole of Yardley, Pennsylvania? At this point a secret alien invasion didn’t even sound so crazy anymore.) She didn’t seem to be held against her will; there was nothing about the way she walked and her body language toward people, that implied she was scared or being coerced somehow. If anything, she seemed comfortable, like she was having a good time. For some reason, that made her cry even more. Clearly worried, Sid stopped the projection and kneeled in front of her, lightly touching her knee with one of his hands.

  “I… I didn’t think this footage would upset you. I promise it wasn’t staged in any way, it’s just raw recording material from one of our trips with the crew. I wanted you to see that you are safe here.”

  Kate realized she needed to compose herself.

  “I’m not… doubting the footage,” she tried to explain between sobs.

  She cried because she finally had answers about what happened to her. Not all the answers though. That realization sent shivers down her spine, making her stop crying. It still wasn’t clear what part her and her child played in all this, in this story about Ithaden and humanity… Wait.

  “What did you mean when you said they had to wipe the human race out of existence? Is someone trying to attack us? Destroy Earth? Is that what we’ve been trying to stop?”

  Sid’s eyes were very kind — and very sorrowful.

  “They are not trying, Ith-rassil. They have succeeded. In this timeline, Earth will be destroyed in a few hundred years, right before humanity’s first attempt to colonize other planets. From my point of view, it has already happened.”

  Kate pushed his hand aside. She suddenly felt the need to get up and do something, anything. Warn people. Warn her parents. It wasn’t until Sid grabbed both her shoulders that she realized she had gotten up from the couch and was pacing frantically around the room.

  “Sid, I can’t believe that something like that can actually happen. My willing suspension of disbelief has been suspended a heck of a lot today, but that’s just one thing too far. I mean… this is the whole of humanity we’re talking about!”

  Actually, it was even bigger than that as she would find out later. But for now, Kate was in denial. After pleading with him for a good ten minutes to let her go back home and warn her parents, Sid finally seemed to realize that more drastic measures were in order.

  “I will have to show you, then,” he said quizzically. He took her to the next room, a room she recognized from the footage. It looked a lot less like an apartment and a lot more like a spaceship, with a console and what seemed like a steering device. “We don’t need to wait on the whole crew for this, they’re stuck on a maintenance run anyway. We can just pop in and out, for you to see. Kate, it’s important that you see this. You’re not going to like it, but you should see it.”

  With that, he helped Kate in a semi-reclining chair and rolled out some kind of protective vest over her. It seemed to be made from solid gold, but Kate knew better by now. The material was taking the shape of her body, like a half-liquid shield. When she tried budging, she realised she couldn’t.

  “Hold still,” Sid instructed while going toward the chair near the console, the one that clearly belonged to the captain. “You will be safe, I promise.” And with that, he wore a similar protective vest and dimmed the lights of the room.

  For several seconds, absolutely nothing happened. Less than nothing, actually. The silence, the absence of movement were somehow deeper and heavier than usual. Did something go wrong? Kate had no idea how time travel was supposed to feel like, but all the shows and movies made it seem… more spectacular somehow. This felt like she was in a sensory deprivation tank, one of those her old KWC colleagues used to rave about. It was deeply relaxing, but somehow also very disconcerting. And then, suddenly, it was over. She couldn’t tell exactly what had changed, but something did. It was as if existence became lighter again. Right on time, the lights of the cabin came back.

  “Welcome to the end of the Earth, Ith-rassil,” said Sid with a somber tone, while he got up from his chair and helped Kate remove her protective vest. “Please, this is going to be hard for you, so you need to stick close to me and follow my lead. Do you understand?” Kate nodded. As if in a trance, she allowed Sid to grab her by the hand and lead her back to the room they were sitting before and from there, to the front door. Still holding her tight with one hand, Sid reached out to that green lever that had gotten her attention earlier and pulled it down. The door opened.

  They definitely weren’t in the suburbs anymore.

  “What is this? Where are we?” Kate whispered, unable to comprehend why everything around her was black and barren, no signs of life as far as the eye could see; why the sky was such a sickly yellow.

  “This is still Yardley, Pennsylvania, I’m afraid. What becomes of it. This is the Earth’s future.”

  Kate’s main problem with super-villains, whenever she would come across one in a movie or while leafing through her sister’s old comic books, was that their motives were never believable. If anyone had bothered to give them proper motives to begin with. Destroying a whole planet only to laugh maniacally at the wake of its destruction? Working tirelessly to bring about total annihilation of every living b
eing just because it’s the villainous thing to do? Come on, that’s not how people behave. Even the very villainous ones.

  Kate should know; she had encountered her fair share of them back in Wall Street. But no matter what, no matter how unsavory or unsettling she found them, she could always understand their motives and the logic behind their actions. That used to scare her a bit back then, as if understanding evil also meant she had the potential for it herself. Now that her worldview had expanded immensely, she wished she could go back to these childish concerns.

  She stirred her tea absent-mindedly, trying to digest what had just happened. Or, rather, would happen. Just a few hundred years from the time she woke up that morning. She had traveled to the future… only to find it in ruins. And the worst thing? The worst thing was that a part of her could understand the logic behind it, horrific as that logic may be. At the end of the day, it wasn’t all that different from the theoretical question her moral philosophy teacher at the university loved to ask the class: “If you had the means to travel back in time to April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, would you kill baby Hitler in order to prevent the deaths of millions?”

  From the Xerrks’ point of view, the alien race who destroyed (no, would destroy) her home planet, drastic measures had to be taken to prevent their own annihilation and enslavement from an Earth-ish baby. A baby who would grow up to be their undoing… And since they didn’t know exactly which bloodline would eventually give birth to that dreaded Third Sun of the Ithaden, they decided to wipe out the whole planet just to be on the safe side of things. It was unimaginably cruel, but it wasn’t unimaginable or illogical in a “cartoon villain” way. And that somehow made it even worse; it made it more real.

  Suddenly, Kate couldn’t stomach another sip of that calming tea Sid kept refilling her mug with. It wasn’t the flavor that bothered her, no, it was the color. Its sleek, black surface reminded her too much of the scorched wasteland they had just visited, on the planet formerly known as Earth.

  It was instant, Sid had said. At first, Kate thought he was saying that to make her feel better after her encounter with that nightmarish future. But, as they were settling back into the room with the mismatched furniture (the captain’s quarters, Sid’s quarters, Kate realized), he explained that truly, the destruction of the Earth happened so fast nobody had even time to realize what was happening, let alone suffer.

  The Xerrks, who were the last of the great alien races in some obscure corner of the Universe called ‘Far Reach’, had been planning this for a long time. More than three thousand nuclear bombs, cloaked with perception filters (a technology similar to Sid’s illusion shield), had been strategically planted all around the globe by Xerrks agents. Before the Earth’s defences could spot them, the bombs detonated all at once. It was a suicide mission that cost the Xerrks a substantial chunk of their military power, but it worked. Humanity was wiped out of history, the Third Sun and the rise of the great Ithaden empire along with it.

  “But that’s the thing,” Sid continued, taking that floating screen of his and sitting next to Kate on the couch. (The irony of them being all cosy with each other while discussing planetary extinction wasn’t lost on her. Still, she scooted over to make space for him. It felt oddly nice… and oddly familiar.) “The Xerrks didn’t just wipe out humanity: they wiped out everything humanity would do once humans started embarking on their space travels.”

  According to the Time Agency records on his tablet, humans were actually very influential in the original timeline. This small species of people from that seemingly inconspicuous Solar system, humans would actually turn out to be the bonafide protectors of the galaxy. Who would have thought?

  “It’s all about empathy, you see. Say what you will about your fellow humans — and as I recall you had a lot to say about them,” he went on with an almost mischievous grin, his elbow teasingly bumping Kate’s left arm, “but humans were actually the most empathetic race in all of the Universe. Without their involvement and, sometimes, their meddling in alien affairs… Without the tech they would grow up to develop but more importantly without the firm stances they have reportedly taken against military tyrants like the Xerrks, many weaker alien races didn’t stand a chance.”

  “See, Ith-rassil,” Sid went on, “it wasn’t just the Earth that was wiped out by those bombs. The bastards took out almost 3/4 of all recorded civilization in their crusade (I believe that would be the word you’d use, no?) to avert the prophecy of the Third Sun… But where are my manners? Here you are, clearly starving, and I’m rambling on and on. Would you like to have dinner with me? After all,” he added with a chuckle that was not entirely unkind, “the police officers you mentioned won’t be here for a while. We are still docked a few hundred years in their future...”

  Kate blinked, taken aback. She had almost forgotten about that morning, the note to her parents, urging them to call the cops. It seemed light years ago… and in a way, it was. Hearing all about humanity’s great future, a future that would now never come to be, had put her in a kind of trance; like a child mesmerized by a fairytale. And then, there was the proximity of Sid’s body, exuding some kind of weird alien heat… For all intents and purposes, Kate felt as if she was curled up next to a fireplace listening to a particularly enthralling story.

  Through it all though, the pang of her hunger was unmistakable — and at this point she shouldn’t be surprised he'd noticed. It’s like his body was equipped with some kind of organic thermal scanner, sensitive to temperature and energy fluctuations in other bodies in his vicinity. That’s probably how he knew she was cold before, and how he could tell she was, indeed, starving now.

  “Well, the ‘eating for two’ cliche seems to be valid for, uhm, unconventional pregnancies as well,” Kate conceded, only somewhat dryly. What with the traveling hundreds of years in the future and all, this day had literally been the longest one in her whole life. At that point, having dinner with an alien didn’t sound that crazy at all.

  Kate looked at the contents of her plate in disbelief. When Sid suggested they have an actual sit-down dinner “like humans do” (apparently Ithaden preferred eating small bites throughout the day, while they went about their business), she didn’t know what to expect. What do people in spaceships even eat? They were, after all, still technically semi-parked at the end of the Earth since Sid wanted to wait and hear from his crew before going on another trip — so it wasn’t like there were many great restaurant options close by. And yet, that ginormous steak on her plate sitting on a bed of greens, looked suspiciously like beef.

  “Don’t worry, I know you have an aversion to eating sentient life forms,” Sid said from across the table. “I do too, unless I have hunted them on my own… But this is just 3D printed protein, manipulated to mimic the flavor profile of kobe beef — you took a liking to it since you got pregnant. Oh, and the green stuff is algae. That, you used to hate. But time travel can do a number to your electrolytes, so this will balance your sodium intake.”

  He flashed her a smile that was part charm, part ‘I won’t take no for an answer, eat your food young lady’. Not that she felt like objecting. She wasn’t sure if it was all the craziness of the day or the presumably alien baby growing inside her, but it was all she could do not to devour the whole thing in one go. Kate seriously doubted she would even remember, let alone like the taste of beef (despite the weird cravings ever since she got back, she still remained a vegetarian). But 3D-printed or not, this thing on her plate was delicious.

  Even as she was munching happily, part of her couldn’t help acknowledging how “date-like” this whole situation was. For one, Sid was back to wearing his human illusion shield. And although now she knew how he really looked underneath it, scales and all, still she found this visage particularly pleasing to the eye. The diner setting wasn’t bad either. They were still at his quarters, at a corner of the room that was empty before, save for an elevated platform of about two feet height. The whole thing was a 3D printer conne
cted to Sid’s tablet: he could choose any kind of object or, in this case, furniture, and have it brought to life in mere minutes.

  “It has been useful when visiting planets or historical periods that require specific clothing or equipment,” Sid observed while taking a generous bite out of his own steak. “Or when I have human guests, who seem to need much more furniture than me,” he continued, winking at her.

  He was being playful. Flirty even, Kate realized. His blue eyes, still tired, now had a spark that somehow made her feel warm and fuzzy inside. Of course, everything about this was created to make her feel warm and fuzzy inside: the red leather benches, the American diner-style table, the hearty food, the conversation… She really wanted to just go along with it, just enjoy her evening and forget all the terrible things she had seen and heard not too long ago. But the rational part of her brain was not so easily won over. At least not before she was done asking all the difficult questions.

  “My baby is… Ithaden… like you,” she said.

  Okay, it wasn’t technically a question. But the concern was there, lingering in her eyes; she knew he could tell. Just as she knew he understood perfectly what it was she really wanted to know. Sid put down his cutlery in a polite manner, the flirty spark now all gone from his eyes.

  “I was hoping we could have a pleasant dinner first, like we used to. I understand now however that it would be unfair to you. I remember how that brain of yours can get when you’re not getting all the answers…”