Aliens - The Truth is Coming (Book of Aliens 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The board of directors was there with us, looking out my lab’s one-way window, and they also seemed confused and disappointed. I was beginning to panic when Summer wandered out of her cave. I couldn’t tell what summoned her, but she often seemed to respond to stimuli I couldn’t detect. Something bothered me about that, but I couldn’t understand it.

  She wandered around until she saw the open door, then stopped, her small body tense and unsure. She moved her mouth again and something jumped on one of the sensors. I glanced at it and couldn’t see what it was. Whatever it had recorded was gone already. Then it appeared again, just a little jump. I tried to keep my light low, but I could feel my excitement building. In the enclosure, Silver was moving. He lifted his head and looked around. Then he rolled to his side and almost leapt to his feet. He was awkward, as if he’d forgotten just how to move that quickly. He stumbled into the larger enclosure and I felt my anxiety spike. Maybe she had angered him. I didn’t want to tranq them so soon.

  When he saw her, they both froze and stood facing each other, tense and horribly still. I glanced at the sensors again, but nothing was happening. The board was excited. Kel was glowing with nervous anticipation.

  Slowly, Silver raised his hands and took a small step forward. Summer did the same thing. Then she took two steps excitedly forward and opened her mouth rapidly, leaning toward him. The sensors jumped again. I extracted myself from the excited group and leaned toward the readouts. Vibrations. It was detecting vibrations.

  I looked up again. They were closer now, within reach of reach other. Then, slowly, Summer sat and Silver followed. They opened their mouths swiftly, their hands moving rapidly, pointing at each other and all around them. Lines flew across one of the graphs. The humans were vibrating at each other. They were communicating.

  “I don’t see what you’re so excited about,” a board member said, teasingly. “They’re not doing anything yet.”

  “Nonsense,” Kel said defensively. “This is fantastic progress. We should be proud. Alegh has done a wonderful job.”

  But I hadn’t.

  Nothing happened for a month, or rather a lot of things happened. The two humans continued to communicate and bond, and every moment was fascinating, but the board wanted very specific results, and those weren’t happening.

  I suggested they needed time away from the public and shut down the observation area. That didn’t help either, though they became increasingly close, even sleeping together, curled up in their cave. But that was all. The computer started cataloguing patterns in their vibrations. Curious, I gave them some supplies, mostly poles and fabric, and watched them construct things from them. I moved their food and gave them a puzzle to solve to reach it. They had no trouble solving the puzzle. I felt a terrible realization coming to life in my mind. They could solve problems.

  I gave them a small computer, the type we would give to toddlers to learn mathematical reasoning. They lay on their stomachs together under the big tree and poked at it for days. They hardly slept. They started solving the little problems, rapidly making their way through the program. When I fed them, they took the food back to the computer, completely engrossed. They snacked, lying on their stomachs, solving the puzzles with a speed that terrified me with its implications. Perhaps they were not experimental animals, sent to test the livability of space. Perhaps they were the intelligent species themselves.

  I started to categorize the patterns in their vibrations. I grasped a common one, a high frequency followed immediately by low. They often used it when they first saw each other, and I guessed it was some kind of greeting. When no one could see or hear me, I practiced it. Our hearing is nowhere near our strongest sense, in fact many of us cannot hear at all unless the source of the noise is directly beside us. I could tell my attempts were creating a noise but had no idea if I was correct. Still, I felt proud of what I achieved.

  Finally, I told Kel what I learned.

  He was incredulous, to say the least. In fact, he got rather angry with me, flashing red to ask what I meant to do – destroy all his good work? I told him no, but if I was right, there were larger, moral questions to answer here.

  “The morally correct thing to do is to send them home. But they won’t forgive us for what we’ve done, and they may come back. We may have been safe so far only because the humans on their home planet don’t know what we’ve done.” I said.

  Kel looked at me, concerned, but not in the way I hoped. He looked at me like I might be sick, or insane. He didn’t seem to understand.

  “I know you have reservations,” I said, “but come to the enclosure tomorrow morning. I’ll show you what I mean.”

  And he agreed. Why wouldn’t he? I checked on Silver and Summer before I went home and felt a strange sort of affection wash over me. They were working away on the computer, curled up together. Summer turned to him suddenly and he rubbed her head and pushed her away playfully. They looked happy. I was glad that I had given them something interesting to occupy their time.

  I didn’t want to imagine them being locked up in a cage.

  The thought made me sick to my stomach. We had treated them badly.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I paced around my empty home. I never wondered why it was empty before. It seemed like a simple choice. Either I chose to mate or I didn’t. Now, though, I wondered about the relationships between Summer and Silver or Kel and myself. I had created a bond between two beings who may never have met under different circumstances. I had changed the future of thinking, feeling creatures, and I had no right to do so.

  I wondered what would happen next and thought, ridiculously, that I might be able to move them to my home and see what a different environment might do for them. Finally, when the sun rose, I realized I might as well go in early and see what they’d done overnight.

  When I walked into Kel’s office, there were already three vet techs there, wearing the scratch-proof silver suits they use to handle animals. Kel looked shocked to see me, then rapidly blinked red. The techs turned to me and pulsed a light pink. I realized immediately what was happening.

  “Kel, no.” I said.

  “I had to do it. I contacted the board last night. They agreed: you’re too close to it.”

  “Kel, what have you done?”

  He burned scarlet and said, “Nothing, yet! But this breeding program has to – where are you going?”

  I’d already turned away from him and hurried down the hall. I knew I was too late.

  Once the board made a decision, there was very little I could do to change their minds. My thoughts were in turmoil and I wanted to see Summer and Silver – just for a few moments. I could hear Kel and the vet techs hurriedly following me, and knew that they would try to stop me; they were unsure of what I was going to do next.

  I crashed through the lab door and flung myself toward the windows. I looked out into the big enclosure; I looked for the happy faces of my two humans, picking away at their computer.

  The enclose was trashed.

  The small computer had been deconstructed, its insides strewn across the ground. The food- and water-dispensers had likewise been dismantled. Even part of the ceiling was hanging loose above the tree.

  Had the techs removed the humans already? Where did they take them? Perhaps Summer and Silver had put up a fight. They were smart enough to realize what was happening and they wouldn’t want to be separated. My lab was the only one set up to care for them. Every other lab was too small, and didn’t have the right equipment. But the door was open to the utilities corridor, painted like a tree beside their cave.

  The ceiling panels, revealing a ragged rectangle of blue sky, had been pulled loose and the wiring inside pulled down, connected with the computer. They’d figured out a way to connect the little computer I gave them to the lab’s system and just opened the door. They’d figured out our computer system.

  Kel was suddenly by my side, breathing heavily. I felt vindicated. He
hadn’t listened and now he would see that he had made a mistake. No sooner did the emotion surface than it soured. Superiority was what led us here – what had caused this situation. The techs came in next, stumbling against each other and then huddling around Kel, flashing a confusing array of colors.

  Kel watched me leave the room. He seemed so lost I almost felt sorry for him.

  I found them in the parking lot, trying to take apart a transport. They didn’t hear me coming. We can be quiet when we need to be.

  Silver raised a bar above his head, probably something he pulled from the ceiling. I flinched away and gestured the way he had to Summer; gently, a sign that I hoped meant I don’t want to harm you. He paused and I knew I had a moment, just a moment, to make a connection. It was almost impossible that I could convey everything I needed with the tiny amount I had learned.

  I tried to make the vibrations they did, or at least the one they used as a greeting – the quick, high vibration followed by the low one. He paused. I tried again.

  I didn’t know what word it was, but I knew that he understood that I was trying to communicate. I gestured to my transport and then opened the door. They looked at each other and then at me, and I wondered if I was doing the right thing. There might be some kind of revenge for all this, from their planet.

  I let them crawl into the back seat of my small, luxury transport and drove them to the back lot, where the ship was sitting. There was no security. I opened the door of my transport and they ran right up to the ship. Summer glanced back before she went inside. I like to think it was for me, a small thank you, but maybe not. Maybe she was only afraid I would follow.

  They didn’t take off right away. In fact, it took two days. I took a vacation while animal control was called and they searched the woods, the nearby canyon, and the other enclosures. It wouldn’t occur to them to search the ship. They never believed the humans could fly it, and I didn’t say anything. Eventually they gave up, and when the ship rose into the sky, it was blamed on electrical issues, though there was some speculation on the news that the far-away geniuses had called their ship back.

  I hope that they made it home.

  I’ve recorded my experience in this database as accurately as I can, so that it might benefit future generations. I’m afraid that a reckoning is coming for us, from the great lights in the sky. I’m waiting for it. Or perhaps we will be forgiven for keeping their friends in cages, experimenting on them.

  I find that hard to believe. We deserve their retribution.

  I’d come to understand them, but no one believed me. No one would listen to my warnings. Until the humans come for their friends, we’ll keep them in cages, while they try to communicate with a world that can’t hear them.

  Here

  by Tim James

  My dad said a lot of things. Quite a lot of those turned out to be true, no matter how wild they might have sounded. Don’t get me wrong, he never raved or came across as being crazy or anything like that. He just told it how he saw it, no matter how it sounded.

  He once said it was easy to say there was no such thing as aliens, but it did not mean there weren’t any. It was just that we had not seen them. It was one of his biggest things that, aliens. He would tell me about his childhood, how things were so different, how it was he would look up into a clear night sky and see all the stars. “It was beautiful!” he would say. “Still is if you see ‘em on a clear night.”

  I suppose he was right; I’ve done it myself and I’d like to think that there are not many who haven’t. You know, just looked up, seen that vista, pitch black with all those silver pinpricks sparkling away. I guess to me, to many of us, it’s just something pretty; to my dad, though, it was so much more.

  He would tell me, back when I was a kid, that they were more than just lights; the stars were suns, about which worlds orbited, and that some of those lights were actually planets. I never knew how he could tell the difference, you know? But he could. I don’t know why he’d done it, but over the years he’d memorised so much about our heavens. He could tell you the names of the constellations, even many of the individual stars. With a single jab of one of his well-worn, stubby fingers he would be able to point out a single light and tell you it was a star, not a planet, and then name it.

  I don’t think I could - even with a map.

  He could tell the most wonderful of stories too. About all the stars and planets. Not just locally but from all over the world. How the constellations were different in other countries, how they were called different names in different times. How the stories applied to them were not always the same. He seemed to know them all.

  For all I know he might have made some of them up, but it didn’t matter. They sounded good and it was something he shared with me. Even when I wasn’t with him he would sit there looking at the sky above, mesmerised. Never used a telescope or even binoculars; he just loved looking at the night sky and did so until the day he died.

  I can remember one winter I sat out there with him. Mum wasn`t there, I don`t recall why, so it was just me and him. It was probably way past my bedtime, but that’s what made it all the more special. Me and my dad, a blanket around my shoulders, a cup of hot chocolate in my hands. The night was cold enough that we could see our exhalations and that made it mystical. He told me some of the old tales. I`d heard a few before, but others were new to me. Afterwards he dropped the myths and legends, the facts and figures, put an arm around my shoulders and pointed up, up into the night.

  "Y’know," he told me, "things can be deceptive. You look up there into space and it looks so... so simple I guess. There`s the blackness that is space and the starts that are light and that is that. But it ain`t like that y`know. I think we see it like that `cause it`s easier. If we take the time to think, t`see it as it really is, then the pure enormity of it all might just start t`blow our minds.

  "Each of those stars look the same, yeah? But they`re not, y`know. Some of them are as big as our sun, others so much bigger, perhaps big enough to fit fifty suns in. Some burn hotter, some burn colder, different colours an` different names.

  "Look at `em up there, lookin` so close together, yet they ain`t, not really. They could be so far away from each other that it`d take years, nah, hundreds of years t`travel between `em, an` that’s at the speed of light.

  “But that’s just the ones you can see. For each of them there’s ten at least that you can’t. Can you imagine that? All these stars, so many, hundreds, thousands, millions of ‘em, scattered across space as far an’ further than we can see.

  “An’ that’s just in our galaxy. As many stars as we can see, then there’s galaxies t’match ‘em, fillin’ up the universe in all directions, all made up of stars, just like the Milky Way.

  “Each of them endless stars could have planets around ‘em, maybe one or two, perhaps twenty or thirty or more. There could even be huge gas giants out there like Saturn or Jupiter, bigger even, with moons like planets.

  “Who knows what’s out there eh?”

  He could and would speak for hours on the subject and there was something in the way he told it that would bewitch me. I mean, it wasn’t the actual words, and not really the way he spoke either. To be honest, he wasn’t the most eloquent of orators. But it was as though some of his enthusiasm crept into the words he said, and although he never raised his voice, somehow I was caught up in his verbal spell.

  Just listening was enough to drag me away from the mundane world and suddenly I was out there in the great wide universe; the sun a brilliant globe of fire around which the planets orbited; stupendous balls of reflected light. Earth might have been the jewel in the solar systems crown, a beautiful, perfect living planet; it did not stop the magnificence of the others challenging it. From Mars’ red-orange shade to the beauty of the Morning Star; to that true giant of worlds with an unending storm it’s red eye, to the hypnotic rings of ice and rock that encircled Saturn; and then there was the often overlooked g
lory - the cerulean blue of distant Neptune.

  Beyond our system, though, there was so much more that his words brought to life. From the stars of Proxima, to those so far away that Man had yet to name them. All gathered together in a stellar splendour, twisting, turning, around a bright core: so many stars around which the spiral arms rotated, the arms like trails of celestial light … a galaxy, our galaxy, just one of many that made up a small portion of the ever-growing and more confoundingly brilliant universe.

  All these whimsical meandering thoughts, that pseudo philosophising, that was my dad and I loved him for it. Of course there was a lot more to it. He would not go on about the same old things, not like some, one-trick pony. Like most people he had many interests, but I guess the stars were one of those he was most passionate about.

  He would talk about the past, too. Not history, but about him growing up and the way the world was then. It was one of those other things he was passionate about, although to be fair the two things did intersect; at least, he made them.

  “I was born in 1969,” he would begin, “in July, no less, an’ that was when a man walked on the moon for the first time. If ever there was a month an’ year t’be born in, then that was it. Was a good time t’be born. The age of free love was comin’ to an end, and a brave new world was beginning. But not t’me - it never really felt like that.

  “T’me, in retrospect, it looked like something died in the seventies. The world changed, accelerated toward a grave it did not know was waiting. For years now people have been talkin’ ‘bout environmental collapse, y’know? All the damage we were doin’, with our industries, the mining, the hunting and polluting. No one ever really listens, though. I guess there are loads of reasons for it, but it’s all crap from where I stand. I think it’s all to do with money, or mebbe power. As a whole, though, we ignore the warnings, happy with our luxuries, and as the whole world slowly goes t’pot we blame it on other things and just keep on going.”