Alien Omega

by Marc Landau

  I shook her. “Kat?”

  “I don’t want to wake up. Just a few more minutes,” she grumbled.

  “Kat. Wake up.”

  She rubbed her eyes. “What?”

  “It’s you.”

  “What?”

  “You’re you.”

  “Yes, I’m me.”

  “You are!” I said and then kissed her.

  She pushed me away in shock. “Are you crazy, Wil?”

  “Probably.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I had a dream.”

  “So now you’re suddenly into aliens?”

  “You’re not an alien. I mean, you are. But you’re also you.”

  “You said I died.”

  “That’s what they told me. But they were wrong.”

  She touched her face as if it was for the first time. “It’s me?”

  “Yes. I swear, you’re really in there.”

  Her eyes watered. “How do you know?”

  “Trust me. I just do.” And then I kissed her again.

  This time she kissed me back. It was a kiss to end all kisses. Like when you haven’t seen the love of your life for months, and you go to meet them at the space port and they get off of the jump-ship and run into your arms, and you kiss. It was that times a thousand.

  It was so intense, I even heard klaxons sounding.

  When we finally broke our embrace, I still heard the klaxons.

  That’s weird.

  Then I realized it wasn’t the kiss, it was the ship’s defensive system alert. If the klaxons were going off, it was bad. Very bad.

  “What’s going on?” Kat asked.

  “Follow me,” I replied, then jumped out of bed and raced out.

  The command room doors whooshed open, and I spotted the walrus already there.

  “Why didn’t you wake me?” I yelled over the blare of the alarms.

  “I assumed the blaring alarms would wake you,” it yelled back.

  “What’s happening? I’ve never heard these alarms. What do they mean?”

  “Extreme danger.”

  “I figured that. I read the protocols.”

  “You read the protocols? Impressive,” it lied.

  “This is no time for snark.”

  “I am not programmed for snark.”

  “Well then, you’re evolving.” I went to the screens and saw tiny dots on the planet’s surface. It looked like the lights of a city, the way you would see it from space. They were actually kind of beautiful. Which of course, at this point meant it was most likely deadly.

  “Is that a city?” I asked.

  “Unable to determine. Insufficient data.”

  “It looks like a city.”

  “Unable to determine. Insufficient data.”

  The blare of the alarm had Kat holding her ears, and Poka was nowhere to be found. She hated loud noises and was probably curled up in a tub somewhere shivering.

  Then the lights started moving closer to the ship. If it was a city, it was a flying city. Or a spaceship as big as a city. After all that I’d seen, either was possible. If so, it would be the largest ship, or city, or ship-city ever created. Even the Haldon Supreme city-ship was puny compared to what I was seeing. This thing was at least the size of the surface of Prime’s two major continents.

  “Why did the alarms go off, if you can’t analyze what it is?”

  “There is a power signature strong enough to trigger the alert.”

  “What kind of power?”

  “Unknown.”

  “That’s it? Unknown?”

  “Correct. But it is enough power to devour ten black holes.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “Do you want me to…explain?” the bot replied in a droll tone.

  “No. How about just shut off the fraking alarm? I can’t think.”

  “Yes. That is why you cannot think,” the bot replied. It slid over to a console and shut off the noise. That was better. At least now I could hear myself think.

  The lights moved off the planet’s surface, growing larger as they got closer to the ship. As they approached, I could see it wasn’t a city. The lights weren’t interconnected; they were individual points. They looked like small…

  Spheres.

  Shat! There must be a thousand of them. Millions, maybe. And they were moving faster than torpedo-laser missiles. In seconds, they’d broken out of the planet's atmosphere on a collision course with the ship.

  “Incoming power signatures,” the bot said.

  “Thanks, we can see that.”

  Millions of laser missiles headed straight towards us. Awesome.

  “Thirty seconds to impact,” it said.

  That, I didn’t know. Thirty seconds left before millions of laser bombs hit the ship. Or not. I sensed the intention wasn’t to destroy us. Whatever they were planning it was worse than blowing up the ship. There was more power coming at us than anything known to exist. If each sphere was an alien like the one on the ship, and our alien could suck up the sun, then millions of them could likely suck up the entire universe.

  “Five seconds to impact,” the bot reported.

  I knew the countdown didn’t matter. These weren’t missiles, they were something else. Still, I reached out and took Kat’s hand, and closed my eyes.

  The bot counted down. “Three, two, one.”

  Nothing happened. Well, something did, but the ship didn’t explode. It was just as I sensed. But it didn’t provide any relief.

  “Unknown objects have stopped,” the bot said.

  I exhaled and opened my eyes. In front of me on the screens were mirrored spheres, just like the one that had almost destroyed the ship. There were thousands of them. They covered almost every inch of every screen. I could no longer see the multicolored planet below.

  Like the planet, they were all colors. Red, purple, blue, green. As well as colors I’d never seen before. If each one was as powerful as alien-Kat, I couldn’t fathom their collective abilities. These could be the creatures that actually created the universe. Or they could be the ones who would destroy it.

  We were surrounded by ancient bubble wrap. Multicolored bubble wrap. With super powers.

  They hadn’t destroyed us, which only meant one thing. They’d come for something else. Or, I should say, someone else.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The spheres flickered and shifted colors. First it was a slow pattern of change. Blue for a moment, then green for a moment, then orange. The color changes slowly picked up speed, moving faster and faster. Blue-red-green-orange-purple. Were they communicating with one another? Was this alien-colored Morse code?

  I looked to Kat, and her eyes were blinking a cavalcade of colors. Blue, orange, yellow, green, then some color I’d never seen before, then pink. Over and over again, her eyes shifted in unison with the spheres outside the ship. Faster. Then slower. An infinite color rainbow flickering at light speed, then suddenly in slow motion.

  A coded message? A musical symphony? A familial argument? Who could possibly know what they were saying, or if they were speaking at all? It was hard not to get caught up in the color show. Her eyes were verging on hypnotic.

  There’s a relic vid called Close Encounters of the Third Kind I’d watched when I was a teenager, where UFOs communicated with sound. Dun, dun, dun, dun duuuun. Or was it wah, wah, wah, wah, waaaah? Whatever. It reminded of that, but with color. I was expecting to hear the thunderous horns from the vid, but there was no sound to go along with the coordinated lights. Only the horns in my mind.

  I turned to the bot and asked if it could analyze the color patterns and figure anything out.

  “Unable to process. The objects are changing frequency too quickly. My processors cannot keep up.”

  Wow. The bot’s processors were too slow to track the spheres and figure out what they were doing. It must be bumming. It hated being unable to do something. I was sure it was impressed by these aliens. I bet it wish
ed they programmed it, and not us feeble-brained humans.

  The command room glowed, reflecting the hues from the spheres. The bot’s metal shimmered with another light show.

  Poka was still nowhere to be found. I was relieved, because if she saw the lights she’d be going after them like a cat chasing a laser pointer. This wasn’t the right time for her to be snapping at the color blue and slamming into consoles as she chased glimmers around the command room. Not that there was ever a time for it, but now was definitely not the time.

  I watched, speechless as the colors ping-ponged back and forth between Kat and the spheres. She would glow a series of colors, and then they would react.

  “Kat. Are you talking to them?”

  She nodded.

  “What are they saying?”

  “They’re here for me.”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “With words?”

  “I don’t know what words to use. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Then how do you know they’re here for you?”

  “It’s a feeling.”

  That made sense. These aliens were big on feelings.

  Suddenly, all the floating marbles outside the ship turned beet red. “They’re pissed right?”

  She nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I think because I don’t want to do what they want me to do.”

  “What do they want you to do?”

  “Go with them.”

  That made sense. If this was her home planet, of course they’d want her back. The real question was, why didn’t she want to go? Was I wrong about this being her home? Had she started an act of war by protecting us and destroying the sphere that attacked us?

  If this wasn’t her home, why would she teleport us here? And why would her powers seem so similar to the spheres? None of it made sense.

  Unless, of course, she was truly an all-powerful being that could turn into anything in the universe and communicate with anything in the galaxy. The alien cocoon had figured out a way to talk to them, just like it had turned into my ex and figured out how to talk to me. Sort of.

  A chill went through me. The bot said that the combined power of these balls of light was more than ten black holes. Kat had turned into one and basically ate it. If she wasn’t one of them, was she powerful enough to eat them all?

  If so, she was even more powerful then ten black holes! She wasn’t an alien-succubus-vampire ex-girlfriend; she was literally a potential world destroyer. For all I knew, she had enough power to devour the entire universe.

  Holy frak. Hold on a second. Is Kat God?

  Could that even be possible? Technically, anything’s possible. But she couldn’t be more powerful than God, because God is all-powerful, so anything else would have to be at least a notch below all-powerful.

  Why am I going off on this thread?

  I have no clue about religions and gods and alien priests and galactic spirits, and ghosts of the black hole. That’s for philosophers and teachers and radicals to figure out.

  Stop ranting. The aliens are messing with your brain again, the little voice said. I was glad it spoke up and got me back on track.

  “Thanks,” I muttered.

  You’re welcome.

  I was back to watching the colored lights having a conversation with each other. I think the alien spheres were messing with me to keep me distracted, but for what reason, I didn’t know. They could vaporize me with a flick of color, so why bother screwing with my mind?

  I guess it could’ve also just been the static coming off their convo with Kat. My puny human brain, a feeble antenna, getting scrambled by higher life forms chit-chatting with one another.

  I had that sense again. Something inside telling me even if they wanted to, they couldn’t hurt me. Kat wouldn’t let them. She wouldn’t let them hurt any of us. Not even the walrus.

  “Why would they want to hurt us?” I said out loud, not meaning to.

  The bot beeped. “They may not view the ship or any of its contents as meaningful enough to even register as things that can be hurt.”

  “So we’re like ants to them?”

  “More like plankton, amoeba, or other microscopic bacteria,” the bot replied.

  Great, we were plankton. At least if we were ants, they might not want to step on us. But who even knows when they step on plankton?

  I didn’t have to worry about it at the moment. Kat was protecting us. Right now, I needed to know why she didn’t want to go with them.

  Why IT doesn’t want to go, the little voice said.

  “Shhh. Not now.”

  If these weren’t her people, they could be like the aliens who attacked the Earth fleet before we transported here. They knew about the cocoon and wanted it badly enough to start a war with Earth. But why the hellvian would Kat jump us right into enemy territory? Unless she did it to destroy them first.

  Shat. Were we being dragged along as witnesses to an alien war? Was she going to eat them all? Frak. Please. Not another war.

  “Kat, do you know them?”

  She nodded.

  Okay, that was something. It still didn’t tell me if they were friends or foe. Regardless, it was clear, we were plankton. All they cared about was her.

  It.

  “Shut up.”

  “Are they friendly?” I asked her.

  She didn’t respond. Not a good sign. But at least she wasn’t glowing red anymore. The spheres and Kat’s eyeballs had turned into purple mirrors. That was a clue. It confirmed they were all related to the original purple-mirrored sphere. This was a species, and it wasn’t in our database. So, no need to ask the bot about it and have it tell me that it didn’t have data in a snide tone.

  If we survived this, the bot would have more data than any bot ever created. After all it was absorbing, it would become the world’s most important data drive. I couldn’t imagine what new things the smart people on Prime would be able to figure out from the info it gleaned.

  Too bad they’d have to deal with the bot. I felt bad for them. But better a bunch of egghead military scientists than me. I’d done my time.

  Maybe she was a diplomat and they were discussing a peace treaty. Ugh. Those thing stake forever to hammer out. It sort of made sense. She was powerful, and they were powerful. Maybe the two weren’t going to war; they were discussing an alliance.

  Why was I thinking of things in terms of war? It’s such a human thing to do. They were most likely discussing something that plankton-human minds couldn’t comprehend. Creatures like these could easily have evolved past the concept of war.

  I felt stupid for even thinking they were fighting. For all I knew, they were figuring out how to create multiple dimensions. Or combine black holes with supernovas, or discover new galaxies.

  Alien-Kat could be an astronaut explorer that had returned home to tell them what she’d discovered. Or maybe she was a teenager who’d snuck out and was being reprimanded for breaking curfew.

  Whatever it was, it was something I couldn’t compute. The bot couldn’t even figure out what was going on, and the walrus was the smartest thing I’d ever met (though I’ll never admit it).

  I needed to just stop even trying to figure it out and worry more about getting me and Poka back to Prime. Okay, the bot too.

  Finally, the light show in Kat’s eyes stopped and they returned to normal. She snapped out of the trance. Kat was back.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “So?” I asked.

  “So what?” she replied.

  “You were just talking to those things. What did they say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  This was too frustrating. What good was having the alien take a human form if she couldn’t even explain what the hellvian was going on?

  “You said they’re here for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t know why?”

  “No.”


  “You have no idea what they want?”

  “Me.”

  This wasn’t getting us anywhere. My jaw clenched in frustration. “They want you. They’re here. You’re here. What’s next?”

  “They’re going to try to take me again.”

  “Again? What do you mean, again?”

  “They tried taking me just now.”

  “That’s what was going on?”

  “Wil, I don’t know! It’s a feeling! I don’t understand it either.”

  Ugh. Stupid feelings. If these aliens are so damned advanced, why can’t they figure out a way to convert emotions into language and explain what was going on?

  “Because they don’t use language,” Kat said.

  “Did I just say that out loud?”

  Kat just shrugged.

  “You heard me talk? Or did you hear my thoughts?”

  She shrugged again.

  Enough with the one-word answers and the shrugging, I thought.

  “Now you know how I felt when I tried talking to you,” she replied.

  She’s bringing up relationship issues now? Now?

  “There’s never a good time to bring up relationship issues according to you.”

  “I know I didn’t say that out loud. You’re totally reading my mind.”

  She shrugged again.

  My face went hot. I was moving beyond frustration, into pissed-off territory. “Why are you barely talking and shrugging? You never act like this.”

  “How do you know how aliens act?”

  Good point. Even if this was Kat, it was also an alien. And I had no clue how an alien-Kat hybrid was supposed to act. Live and learn.

  “I just want to figure out what the frak is going on,” I said.

  “And you think I don’t? How do you think I feel, being an alien receptacle? And I can’t even explain anything! These aliens suck!”

  “Praise universes to that,” I replied.

  The orbs began color-shifting again, this time turning a soft green hue. It looked like they were responding to us. Our arguing.

  “I don’t care if you turn green! I don’t understand what you’re saying!” I yelled.

  That made them shift into an even deeper green. It reminded me of a rainforest.