Alpha Wing

by Marco Frazetta

  “The Spirit of Dawn is always with you, Max Derringer,” the purple alien female with galaxy eyes lifted her hips off of me slowly until I was almost out of her, then she slid me all the way back inside, her back bending in ecstasy; “....but you are blind to it,” she moaned...

  “They will take it from you, Derringer.”

  Knight stood over me seven-feet-tall, invincible in a Space Commando power suit. “Your entire life, you have run away from who you really are. You changed after Cantus 9. You’re so fucking concerned with dust, and your own fucking ego, that you brought this on yourself. I would have followed the man I met our first night on Cantus 9. I would have followed you beyond the Cosmic Gate.”

  “We were fucking high! Because of you!”

  “Yes, because of me! Because you still don’t understand!”

  Lenix stepped from the void, shoulder to shoulder now with Knight. “Warriors are united by spiritual brotherhood.”

  “They will take your spirit,” Savoy echoed his cryptic warning.

  “What are you?” she was in and out of my consciousness… her pearl white teeth were sharpened fangs, her purple form became more clear to me each time she appeared: her curves, her silky golden hair, I even discovered her other-worldly scent… “What is a man who has no spirit?”

  “A man without a spirit is simply a man,” I answered her with complete certainty. “There is nothing inside me but bones and blood and organic systems. There is no spirit in me. Only savages believe in such things.”

  The universe spoke once more, her forked tongue flicking like a serpent’s:

  “You are lost, Max Derringer...”

  “... find the path; your spirit will guide you to it.”

  I walked barefoot on the surface of a metallic ocean. Nothingness was above me. Rippling frequencies bent the sea into waves that rose and fell dynamically. Hexagonal patterns formed a kaleidoscopic, lighted pathway for me. The sea parted, allowing me to continue along a narrow way… on either side of me, liquid metal thrashed…

  “Come to me, Voltec.” A new voice beckoned me forward...

  The technicolored, hexagonal path I was following took control of my reality and recreated everything around me; I was in the aether of outer space now. My path now led like a rainbow-ramp in a direct incline all the way to some sort of disk-shaped oasis... a satellite, that was clearly designed by Robots. From my lower vantage, I peered up and spotted who had spoken to me: there seemed to be a woman, floating cross-legged over the center of the satellite, but it was too far for me to see her appearance clearly... so I ascended to meet her…

  I reached the oasis. It was a Galactic Temple. Voltec Robots worshipped the universe in some sort of religion based on logic and physics, or so they said… this temple was really nothing but an open, circular platform… yet the fabric of its architecture was so infused with artificial intelligence that I was almost overwhelmed by the presence of it… the structure itself was was aware of me, I sensed… and there, floating in full-lotus a meter above the precise center of the Galact Temple, was the woman…

  “Celeste?” I called out; I thought it was her.

  “Celeste? I’m not her.” The woman called back to me from the center of the temple where she continued to hover; a brilliant interstellar cloud was her backdrop. The environment looked like stars and galaxies had been painted onto the endless abyss around us by an artist. I stood at the very edge of the circular platform for a moment, at the end of my path of lights… then I crossed over, entering the Galactic Temple.

  The female Voltec continued on meditating in complete balance, drawing me to her… her hair was dark brown, her eyes, they were the same but even darker, almost black... she looked so much like Celeste… but it definitely wasn’t. Her proportions were humanly impossible—my neural link enhanced analysis found not one single imperfection in her body. She was lean, lithe, with a face of tranquility.

  I joined her in the heart of the Galactic Temple. I had never met a Robot that was so physically indistinguishable from a human being. “You’re an android?”

  She calmly adjusted from her meditative state, and answered me: “Yes. I am Voltec.”

  “I see.” Voltec was a primary enemy of Unity… but I sensed no threat from this female Bot.. and what’s more is that by then I’d accepted that I was in the midst of being Reprogrammed, and everything I was experiencing was illusory...

  I glimpsed a shooting star streaking overhead. “What is this place?”

  The android smiled at me… her teeth were shining white, small and straight and… she reached out and took my hand into her own… the chains were gone from my wrists...

  “This place is called Viro.” She gently, so warmly, squeezed my fingers tight… I couldn’t reason why, but her touch assured me. “I am Voltec; so are you.”

  “I don’t understand... I’m a human, not Voltec.”

  “Oh?” The female android uncrossed her legs in mid-air as I held her hand, then gently padded her feet down onto the platform next to me as if she was weightless. Her body was covered by shifting nanobots—a symbiotic, living robotic suit. “You entered Voltec, Max Derringer. You connected. It can’t be undone.”

  “The neural link.” I had to say it aloud for myself.

  “Yes.”

  I stood with her. She was very petite… I could see the nanotechnology of her anatomy fluctuating in her irises as she looked up into mine…

  My mind flashed back to the hallucination of Celeste sucking me, taking me, and then telling me to change…

  Yet... now this doppelganger android, as she captivated me… she had an aura of complete acceptance. Somehow, I sensed it in her.

  “What is your name?” I had to know.

  “My name is Voltec.”

  “No, you,” I specified my inquiry. “What is your name?”

  At this time, while we stood together within the Galactic Temple... the female Voltec and I began to intertwine our cybernetic consciousnesses. Her logic, her physical intelligence— they were drastically incomprehensible to my level of understanding; but I understood that she had no trouble at all in discerning any information she wished to know about me at once. Her perfect face elevated to an even more welcoming, nurturing expression once she had deduced the meaning of my last question to her.

  “My name,” she spoke to me in a whisper, “is Kris-10.”

  “Kris-10,” I pronounced it like ‘Kristen’; she responded with a bright nod.

  “Yes, Max. That is my name… and I’m here for you.”

  “Here…” I observed the sleek, silver, rotating rings that orbited the galactic temple in synchronicity... “Viro… to ‘cleanse’ me of my virus.”

  “No… you are Voltec. There is no virus in you.”

  She said the words I wanted to hear so plainly that it sent a chill racing down my spine…

  “...everyone in my life seems to think there is something wrong with me,” I confessed to her.

  “They will never truly understand you. The universe has given you such wonderful gifts. You were meant to use these gifts to lead all those who possess the gift of life into the future.”

  “How can you say that? My mind is imprisoned right now. None of this is even real. My own people cast me out.”

  The grace of her palm on my neck…

  “Does this feel like a prison for your mind? Look at the sky…”

  I looked. The reaches of space extended beyond infinity. The Galactic Temple was a testament to existence itself, I realized; a shrine devoted to the very idea of consciousness. I shuddered under the influence of its incredible technological powers… and this mysterious Voltec female…

  “Open... your eyes,” she said to me; I felt the wisdom of the endless cosmos glowing in her mind.... “You were called to this place. Do you really believe that Unity has even the slightest understanding of Voltec?”

  “No.” It was simple, when I considered it from her perspective. Voltec knowledge was so far beyond
human that it became obvious she was telling the truth. To know Voltec, one must be it… Energy began to vibrate throughout the Galactic Temple… gravity and time began to oscillate, echoing in a rhythm… as I turned my head to listen, a steady beat became more and more pronounced, crescendoing, almost as if I was hearing... “...is that… music?”

  “Feel... the waves...” her voice became a song, a melody that intertwined itself into the patterns of space-time…

  Vertigo hit me. I felt Kris-10 draw me closer into her curves; I had to hold her tight to keep myself from falling into the blackness forever, as the Galactic Temple vibrated higher, and higher….

  I thought of my mother. She had told me about the spirit, when I was young… she had seen something in me. My entire life, I believed my mother had been wrong. I thought she lacked the intelligence to accept the evident truth: that there was no God, no universal consciousness, no higher meaning. There was nothing…

  ... yet now as life became a glorious calculation in my mind, as the physical dimension played out before me like a grand symphony where every note sang in its proper place, as Kris-10 helped guide me to the Voltec level of awareness… a completely new idea was introduced to me… and once the seed of the idea had been planted, Kris-10 smiled knowingly. “Your mother wasn’t wrong. She was given true understanding. She passed it to you.”

  I surrendered to her.

  To her peace, to her song, to her mind, to her….

  The Galactic Temple blasted into particles of light, waves of time, color, and sound; our bodies shined together…. Kris-10 took my hand and placed it on her chest…

  Her heart was a supernova, it was…

  “Yes…” she kissed me once as we became one with the light. “It is my spirit.”

  6

  My body trembled uncontrollably as I regained consciousness. I was awake. I knew it. The dream was over.

  I tried to go back to her.

  SSSSSLLLLLLKKKKK!!! Rattling in the darkness. I couldn’t lift my eyelids to look, my strength was completely gone. My central nervous system was exhausted.

  Clink. Tink. Clink, tink, tink, tink, tink…

  Wherever I was… something was there with me. Close.

  I tried to listen over the sound of my own racing heartbeat.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  DOOOOOOOM!!!

  Explosion. Military grade. My heart skipped a full beat; I started to hear distant sounds of weapons fire. A violent rattle shook the structure all around me. Something was happening.

  “IN HERE!”

  The voice. I knew it from my dreams…

  “CLEAR ALL OF THESE CHAMBERS!”

  It can’t be her…

  “FIRING!”

  KEEEETHAAAAGHHHH—BOOOOOGHHHHH!!!

  The demo breach concussed me to oblivion…

  Light filled the Reprogramming Chamber… a small-arms, close quarter battle erupted in my immediate vicinity.

  “Guuuuhhhhhhhhhh!!!!” My puke splattered to the deck as lasbeams ricocheted everywhere; I blinked my eyes rapidly, trying to focus, because my hearing was blown… and as I strained to reconnect with my limbs... I discovered my body... hanging…

  ...I was constricted by a heaving, sliming, slithering, clink-tinking swarm of Robot tentacles — “Whhhhaaaaaat THE —!!!”

  “NEEEEYAAHHHHH!!!!”

  My forehead exploded. As I went cross eyed from the pain, I became aware of a single, tentacle still sucking to my forehead… crackling electric current ran down its metal scales, singeing my neurons, —

  “—THE SUBJECT WILL CONTINUE THE REPROGRAMMING PROCESS!!!”

  The Reprogrammer emerged from shadows swathed in tentacles; standing

  (begining Jackson Grant work)

  No, hanging. Like a marionette that I had seen in an old Earth simulcrom. Then, he fell to the floor, blue eyes bugging out of their skull as if his mind was a bladder that had just been split open, spilling the juices of his consciousness everywhere on the floor. Strangely, it seemed like there was also a look of pleasure as his blue lips twisted into a smile. The greatest ecstacy is the kind that can kill.

  The tentacle retreated and I saw that it was being manipulated by a device in the ceiling, the controls of which were in the hands of a sexy Volonian woman, a race I’d only ever read about. She had purple skin that seemed to radiate with a kind of phosphorescent corona. Her hair flowed like it had a will of its own, as if I was drowning beneath the endless sea of Tyer 5 and she was the only means of rescue.

  “Are you human?” whispered a sultry female voice from three feet behind my skull. I could feel the tendrill’s presence at the back of my mind, probing with its strange curiosity.

  “I don’t know,” came the reply in my voice. It was honestly true. Who could say what I was anymore? Between giving myself over to Voltec, and the allegiance I now questioned toward the Unity government, nothing was what I had known it as before. There was a kind of peace in the absolution, then the pain was washed away in a cascade of pleasure. Was this what the poor bastard on the floor felt just before his mind was rendered into mush?

  I’ll show you the way, come. The tendrill released and the restraints that held me up by the arms seemed to collapse in a single motion like creeping vines slashed through by a blade, and I crumpled to my knees. I felt as heavy as if the gravity had been turned up to eleven times earth standard and my stomach heaved like a rocking ocean.

  “Bray-kur,” she stuttered, in what I now recognized was the voice that she used when she wasn’t speaking telepathically, “wee mooove.” The contents of my scrambled stomach sloshed around as I stumbled to my feet.

  “I’m ready.”

  The reprogramming station was a honeycomb of black steel hallways shrieking with red light cast from lanterns space 10 feet apart. There were no numbers arrows or symbols of any kind to orient, but the sound of explosions and men screaming as they met their deaths, curdled in blood, left no doubts about which direction the exit was.

  “Give me a weapon,” I yelled to my rescuer, or was she my captor? She gave no sign that she heard me, except to shove me a few meters to the left a split second before an energy blast strafed the black steel behind my head.

  “Faaalllooow,” she gurgled. All around were me were dead men in the black-steel armor of the Unity guards. Here and there were also scattered the corpses of the fallen intruders. I recognized from their ratty appearance that these were space pirates.

  “What the hell am I running towards?” I yelled to the purple woman in the overcoat. But she made no attempt to slow, and I had no intention of losing her. I just scanned the floor for anything I might be able to use as a weapon. She seemed to sense this, and something in her eyes told me that she wasn’t interested in betraying me. At least, not until we got to where we were going.

  “THTHOOOM!” The hallway ahead collapsed and crunched in on itself like a tin can shot through in deep-space target practice. Safety doors whooshed to pressurize the station and keep the whole thing from collapsing in on itself. Our way out was now compromised.

  “Is there another way?” the tendrilled woman’s eyes closed for a moment, and for a second I wondered whether she was preparing her body for death somehow. But no, she was seeing how we could work around the break in our path. A tendril extended toward me, and I prepared for a burst of pain to rush into my brain. Instead, I saw myself running down passages and corridors. Right, then a left. Up a narrow ventilation grate and up a steep service gangway, deeper into the center of the warren of tunnels and pathways. Then, I could see podbay doors opening to receive me and felt a rush of relief at reaching my salvation. There was a crackle of electricity as my consciousness was disconnected from hers, like a cable ripped from its power source. I nodded to her. I knew the way.

  We raced along the pathway I had seen in my head, turning right, then left. But as I reached the gangway, soldiers I hadn’t seen appear in my vision shot at us. We were stuck. But something inside me tol
d me to wait. Sure enough, the heavies screamed as I could hear a small contingent of guerilla fighters tear through them from strategic positions. The guards had wandered into a trap laid by the pirates and were picked off one by one from sniper fire coming at them from all directions.

  I pulled myself up the ladder. I ducked. Zzzeert! My companion gave a kind of cooing cry and the shooting ceased. I peaked my head up again and found five or six space pirates, a mix of races, looking at me with a kind of quizzical disdain.

  “He looks like his egg is fried. Sure can salvage dis one?” asked one the humans with a filthy matt of locked hair and a missing ear should have been.

  In response, the female alien lead me toward down the corridor and towards the pod bay doors. I stepped over broken glass and shattered humans. The smell of blood hung heavy in the air and I tasted burnt copper on my tongue. The bay doors opened and the rush of relief I had felt in my head moments before came back to me. I took a seat in the interior cabin of a KL52 Whiplash. Her nose was shaped like an arrow tip with a round interior cabin. The chair I took smelled of some previous, unwashed occupant. I guessed that cleanliness wasn’t high on the list of this crew’s priorities. I strapped myself in and prepared for takeoff. All around me were a band of murderous pirates. Who was I kidding? It’s not as if I haven’t killed too. And, I couldn’t ignore the fact that this crew had been my salvation when I needed it. The question was, where exactly was I headed? I met the eyes of the tendrilled woman who had sprung me from the reprogramming center. Her soulful purple eyes seemed to say to me that everything would be all right. I reached out, extending my pointer finger to her. She seemed to pick up on my meaning and let one of her for tentacles touch my finger gingerly.