by Nancy Fulda
What should I do? Was it even possible for me to bring them out of stasis safely? Where would they go? The aliens would be furious. What did I care about that? So what if I mess up their demonstrative collection? I was positive they’d have samples of DNA, too.
Then I remembered the medieval torture machines. There was no reason to have those on a space ship. The deliveryman next to Monster had made me see them somehow. I know he changed that memory. Obviously, it was some kind of threat.
They would know my plans. They probably already knew what I’d done and were deciding what to do with me. Still, I had managed to surprise Monster. So their telepathy was limited. Maybe they were too preoccupied to notice. Or maybe they just assumed my small brain was so primitive and uninteresting that it wasn’t worth bothering to look inside. Either way, it made the gamble worthwhile.
Would there be some way for me to do this without them knowing? What if I could pull some people out of stasis and the aliens never found out? The thought was like an infection. It filled my mind and ran over into obsession in mere moments.
The configuration of the capsules and the people in them burned in my memory. There were fifteen of them secured in a triangle like bowling pins. One of the three center pins contained a woman. Her face was round and fleshy. In many ways, she was the physical opposite of Monster and Giselle. She wasn’t a candidate for being a super model, but she had a hint of a smile. Obviously, they were all dreaming. Whatever she dreamed, it made her look fun and whimsical over a kind of deep strength.
I can’t really explain how I came to decide so much about a complete stranger based on an expression her face made in stasis, but she caught my eye. With her capsule being in the middle, I suspected that I might be able to arrange things so the aliens didn’t even know she was gone. As long as she stayed in my apartment, they might never know she was here.
It was a ridiculous long shot. One scan of my brain would tell them everything.
It didn’t matter. I was committed. I didn’t care if they tortured me. I just needed another human to talk with.
Once I decided to act, I went fast. By rushing, I hoped to avoid detection. I pulled out some old jeans, a shirt, and some towels. I used one brown towel to make a head shape and used the rest to stuff the clothes like a scarecrow. It was a pathetic decoy. If, as I suspected, their perceptions were other than sight, this would be a complete waste of time. Still I brought it on the chance it might keep them from looking closer at the tanks. I also grabbed my toolbox.
Grateful the room was close, I hurried down the hall carrying my life-sized fabric doll and toolbox. I pushed through the sandy barrier and into the pink room. Heart racing, I didn’t waste a moment. I climbed up onto the platform that was halfway up the round walls and walked around to the back of the stack of cylinders. My damp stockings failed to protect my feet from the bite of metal corrugated for traction. I could feel tiny snags making Swiss cheese out of my socks. The platform wound past a few more pieces of alien equipment. I was sure one was a centrifuge. Another was a small freezer. I ignored them and moved on.
There was a little space between each cylinder. I slid between the six that were closest to the back wall to the person I had chosen. Her shoulder length hair was floating free in the tank. She was biting one lip now as if deep in thought. They all had on gauzy gray clothes, which seemed to be nothing more than protein strands in the plasma, which adhered to their bodies. It fit tightly with loose threads floating at strange angles in the light blue goo.
I found an access panel in the back. Two round screws made of the same clear acrylic as the case fastened it on. They didn’t match any of the screwdrivers I owned. I grabbed some pliers and began mashing and twisting the hard plastic. The top pulled off the first one. I jammed a flat screwdriver under the second screw before twisting with pliers until it came free. The panel popped open under the pressure of the goo behind it and smacked me in the face.
The stuff inside smelled like a disgusting mixture of broccoli and ether. Most of the fluid oozed out of the hole and ran down to the floor where it pooled around the bases of all the stasis chambers. As soon as the air hit her, the woman inside began to cough and convulse. She doubled over and hit her head on the side of the tube.
I reached in and put my hand between her and the clear wall, guiding her out through the opening as she heaved blue goo out of her lungs. The tube responsible for filling the chamber kicked into overdrive and started showering us with more of the clear sludge. Luckily, it provided enough buoyancy that I could easily slide the woman out of the tube despite the opening being waist high.
I made sure she settled onto the floor safely before I jammed my scarecrow into the tube feet first and slammed the door shut. It took some jiggling to get the one working screw back in place. Then I knelt down in the smelly stuff, next to the woman. She wasn’t choking now, but her lungs sounded raspy. I assumed she had been breathing the blue stuff. Some of it was still in her lungs and sounded like pneumonia. She had one hand touching her mouth and the other shielding her eyes.
I shouldn’t have put her through this trauma. What gave me the right to decide whether she stayed in stasis or not? Too late now, I hoped she would prefer this shock to never ending dreams. Once her eyes could open a little, she grabbed my hand. She wasn’t expressing thanks. She needed support. She was terrified and she didn’t want me to leave.
I curved my hand so she wouldn’t crush it. I wanted to move her out of this place as soon as possible. However, I could tell she was weak and in shock so I waited. The puddle of blue stuff we sat in was sinking slowly. At first, I thought it was spreading out. Then I realized there must be a drain somewhere.
Not wanting to cause any more hurt to possibly sensitive ears, I whispered, “Are you okay?”
She didn’t acknowledge me. I spoke louder. “Can you stand up?”
She turned toward me then, her eyes focused off in the distance. Then she turned the other way and closed her eyes again. Slowly she pulled her knees up to her chest. A raspy whisper escaped her throat. She wasn’t trying to answer. The sound was just an instinctive act. She flailed the arm that was holding my hand and then let go so she could curl all the way up into a fetal position. Whining softly, almost a purr, she fell into a shivering sleep.
At that moment, I would not let myself believe what I suspected. Instead, I roused her and tried to help her up. She couldn’t stand. Her legs were too weak. Whenever she opened her eyes, she winced. All she wanted to do was sleep right there between the stasis chambers. I knew that couldn’t happen. I had to get her back to my apartment.
With a great effort, I slid my hands under her arms and dragged her between the cylinders and out the door. At first, the blue liquid acted as a lubricant and left a trail. Once we hit the black corridor, there wasn’t enough and her ankles squeaked across the cold floor. I stopped to open the outside door of the hall in front of my apartment. Suddenly my heart stopped. Monster might have been in there checking the mail and waiting to ask me for dinner. I looked in. It was clear.
I dragged the squirming woman across the cheap industrial carpet. Her gray body suit kept snagging on the carpet and tearing like wet tissue. So I had to lift her higher, straining my back, to get her into my living room. I didn’t want her on the couch. That seemed wrong. So I took her straight to the bed. It took a lot of work to get her arms and legs under the covers. She couldn’t help at all. Each time her foot or other limb would be stuck in the covers, she would try to cry out in pain and instead release a tiny whimper. It was a cute sound. Then she would shut her eyes tight and curl up into a ball.
I changed my clothes and took a shower. When I came back, she was still fast asleep. I stood in the door of the dark room, watching her halted breath. I thought about what condition I had seen before that this woman reminded me of.
She couldn’t focus her eyes the few times they opened. She couldn’t control her limbs. She couldn’t speak. The gravity of the situation slowly s
ettled on me. Whatever I had imagined was shattered with the sure realization of one important fact I had never imagined possible.
This full-grown adult woman was mentally a baby.
I told you I was a moron, right? I realized too late that these people might not have been abductees. The aliens probably had not kidnapped anybody. The people in the chambers were probably cloned, or grown in test tubes. As the result of gene splicing, the aliens most likely selected them for demonstrative variety. The equipment in the room was for combining DNA into zygotes. Those giant tubes served as artificial wombs. The people in them had never lived. They were just fetuses that had been growing up into adulthood. And I, in my usual self-centered manner, had just barged in and birthed an infant in her late twenties.
What would the aliens do when they found out now? Would they just kill her and start growing a new one like some aborted experiment? Would I be destroyed, too? It was pointless to try guessing their ethics and motives. I had made a choice and now I had to live with it.
It was now my responsibility to care for and teach this innocent person. In a way I could never have fathomed, my life had changed forever. At the very least, for as long as it lasted, I wouldn’t be alone.
“That could have gone much worse.” Monster zigged her light manifestation into a smile. “I told you he just needed another human. They are pack animals. They can’t exist in isolation.”
“And you think he will be happy now?” Her boss arched his spark to emphasize the question.
“I do. His mind needed to feel responsible for the choice. They have some vague need to believe in freedom.” Monster morphed to display the equivalent of arched eyebrows.
“That’s absurd. What you are saying is paradoxical. You say he feels free, but he is making choices that bind him through the distant future?” The same arch of question flashed.
“I know. Nevertheless, their thoughts often oscillate between two irreconcilable opposites. I have observed it many times in our dinner conversations. We had to wait until he was ready to make a big change. Then it had to be his idea. Now he will be happy with the choice he made. That’s how they all live on their home planet. They make choices, which bind them, and then they are happy about being free.”
“It’s funny to think about, but I’m glad we aren’t stuck with such incongruent thoughts and behaviors.” Her boss zagged to show the conversation was almost over. “You really have an interesting hobby. Too time consuming for my liking, though.”
“It’s something to do on the long trip. Anyway, I suspect he won’t need me around as much now.” Monster smiled again and zipped off to tend to her work.
Knowing Me
Eric G. Swedin
A screen above me constantly replays a permanent reminder of what is now gone. My wife places the drill on the dirty snow, checks the orientation readout, then flash-freezes the clamps to secure it against the comet’s surface. A blizzard of ice sublimates off the comet around her, visible only as a hint of haze tickling the edge of my vision. I can hear her humming to herself. Her suit is painted in bold rainbow colors, the full glory of which is only visible when the cone of light from her head lamp illuminates an arm or leg.
She does not know how many times that she has drilled holes for guidance rockets, but I kept track. It is in my nature to be thorough. In the last seven years, she drilled nine hundred and thirty-seven holes. The laser turns the ice and dust into vapor that sprays around her legs. She is my angel, a goddess of love and perfection.
Strange to think of gods at a time like this, since the universe is truly a godless void that creates aberrations like me and angels like her. That same universe conspires to bring two events together on the screen. The laser stutters, a wobbling of light, and she pulls herself closer to check her tool. The laser pierces a gas pocket.
Released after untold millennia, the explosive expansion of gas shreds her suit with shards of ice. She jerks backwards, arms flapping as if she wants to take flight, her legs twitching. There is no sound. Her body drifts slowly away, the tail of her severed tether undulating gently. I have reviewed the telemetry many times and am grateful that she lived only seconds.
My analysis shows that her new vector will lead to an unstable orbit around the sun, gradually decaying into incineration in about twenty thousand years. The same end would happen to this comet, much sooner, if we did not have other plans.
And so ended the only person, other than my mother, into whose eyes I was willing to look.
I met my wife on my twenty-first birthday. My mother always insisted on a party, an excruciating parade of blank faces and noisy words. Already my talent at world modeling was unequaled. The government provided all the equipment and CPU cycles that I desired. In return, I occasionally worked on their projects instead of my own. Even then I was deep into my life’s work, modeling the two greatest of all the wars in human history.
My mother thrust a woman up to me at the party. She had broad shoulders and wide hips, with stout legs and hair cut short. Her smile was different. I have learned when people smile at me, they are trying to establish something called social rapport. It doesn’t work with me.
Then she touched me. I don’t like to be touched, but her touch was comfortable and soothing, like my mother’s.
She stayed at our house that night and strangely enough, I was not upset. I am a man of routine, a slave to order. Having a book or a chair out of place irritates me. Not to have my meals on time makes me angry.
She stayed and after a while I learned to live for her touch. My mother said that the new woman was now my wife. My mother even tried to move away to an apartment of her own, but I didn’t like that. I stayed in bed and cried until my mother came home, and the three of us became a family.
The propulsion engineer and the life systems engineer are husband and wife, the other couple that formed our crew. They live in another pod, built to be redundant, separated from my pod by the wispy mist of the comet’s surface. Only communications lines and a life support feed connect us. My pod is a nest of steel, a warren of six rooms and stale air. I don’t much use the other rooms anymore, other than the toilet, and occasionally the shower. Every week or so I get a sack of emergency food packets from the storeroom and secure it to the bulkhead within easy reach. My wife used to cook, using the staples in the galley, but I just hydrate the emergency packets and microwave them.
The propulsion engineer sends me a message: It’s about time to get over your grief and move on. It’s been four weeks. I know it’s hard to get on, but we are coming up on our next burn phase and we need those settings. Remember the mission. Everything is about the mission.
I send back a short reply--Message received--because if I don’t, they will keep resending the message.
Another screen displays my lists. My mother taught me that if I made lists, I would remember what I needed to do and thus bring order to my life. Order is the sweet taste of sanity. The burn settings are completed and on a ready list, but I want to keep them to myself for the moment. Last night the two engineers tried to force their way into my computer systems. Their feeble efforts amused me.
I began my Second World War model when I was fifteen years old. Surrounded by the comfort of my bedroom, geometric shapes on the wallpaper, all the furniture painted blue, I worked on my computer sixteen hours a day. Some call it obsession, but I call it focus. The only reason I picked that conflict was that my birthday occurred exactly one hundred years to the day after Hitler sent his army into Poland. At first, each system of equations represented a country; then I modeled the leaders and major generals. Each iteration added a new layer, a new level to the fractals of history.
After I posted my model on the Net, people all over the world started running the model. By good fortune I had picked an even-sided war. Germany won sometimes; other times the Soviet Union stood on the eastern shores of the Atlantic, master of Europe; even Japan occasionally found glory in a stable empire covering half the Pacific Ocean
and half of Asia. For most users, my model provided amusement, though serious historians began to appreciate what I had wrought.
When I was seventeen, a man in a general’s uniform knocked on the door of our small apartment in New Memphis. A pudgy man with eyes that darted around the room, taking in everything but only glancing across us, he informed my mother that he represented the military government and wanted to give me more computing power. That was an exciting day; now I could seriously drill down on my model. The number of agents in the model grew at a geometric rate. My fame grew and soon I was recognized as one of the best systems modeler in the world.
When I was twenty, I received an e-mail from a respected historian. Text only. Everyone knew that I preferred to keep it simple, no video, no audio, and no olfacts. Anything beyond plain text defocused me. He asked why I was expending my talents on a long-ago war? Why not concentrate on the most recent wars? His query revealed his self-interest, since his speciality was the Ice Wars.
I thought about the question while cutting my hair. I always cut my own hair, a snip for each individual hair. It took about six hours and gave me time for my thoughts to wander down new paths of creativity.
The Second World War model had grown to bore me, and the Ice Wars provided a new challenge. So I shifted course. Some of my users objected, but their concerns no longer held my attention. Occasionally I did a little something on the older model, tweaking an algorithm or adding an agent, but my mind wanted to only concentrate on the Ice Wars.
The new model began with the winter of 2035, when the winter snowfall did not melt until July. The next year the snow only turned to slush during the summer. And the following year, the snowfall did not melt at all. The snow turned into hills of ice and then into mountains. I was born on the plains of Texas, where my parents helped build New Memphis. What had once been dry prairie had turned into lush farmland.
