Alien Invasion

by Flame Tree Studio

  After that, the light goes out.

  Blind Jump

  Suo Hefu (索何夫)

  Translated by Cai Yingqian (蔡盈倩) & Collin Kong (孔令武)

  Rumbling and crackling – now, it was too late to do anything.

  He finally came to his senses and realized what a fatal mistake he had made when the massive and billowy brown surge broke through acoustic barriers outside the campsite and started to engulf this only peaceful and safe land. He should have perceived the perilousness lurking behind this seemingly tranquil woodland and marsh two days ago, after the scout unit that had been sent out lost contact with his team; they should have been prepared for the impending danger when the missioned reconnaissance UAV first sent back signals flickering on the screen of the landing spacecraft, locating an expanse of Darkness in the distance spreading far into the sky. Yet they hadn’t – half stemming from excessive arrogance, and half out of self-deception and blind optimism. For a piece of comfort and numbness, they immersed themselves in countless optimistic ‘excuses’ and lies, thus letting the chance of self-rescue slip through their fingers. Finally, the situation became irretrievable.

  Resistance was still going on at some places nearby – just as prey falling into a predator’s claws still wants to fight a desperate battle for survival, his team members didn’t wish to lie on the dining-table of this Darkness either. At the former camp border, explosions and flame accompanied by cries of rage or fear incessantly lit up the great caesious sky in the wee hours of the morning. His reason pitilessly reminded him that nothing could be changed – there was a definite lack of favorable conditions surviving from the jaws of death. Fuel and ammunition carried by the exploration team were limited, with the contrast of that vivid and lively ocean containing endless power; they could drag on for another minute, hour or even a day but as for the destined forthcoming outcome, they were unable to escape.

  However he knew that there was at least one thing he could do.

  He dashed through a heap of litten materials and climbed over a parapet cursorily built with some empty crates, the translucent mucus left nearby which told clearly the guarders’ tragedy. A lump of Darkness found him and immediately started to condense, swooping on him like an agminate shadow. However, he moved faster than his enemy – this ‘shadow’ trembled and convulsed in deadly fiery arms and turned into a small black blob at last, smoking thickly and acridly on the ground. It was just like a monster whose soul had been stripped from its body by the Creator, but again returned to its original state before the creation.

  He had a victory – sure, only a negligible one. For the ocean they were fighting against, it could not be counted a loss to evaporate a small drop of water. Yet it at least made his plan more feasible. After thinking for a while, he dropped the drained flamethrower and turned back, rushing towards the other end of the campsite. His lander was a star hanging in the sky, but fortunately, he still had another chance – there were two usable communicators at the campsite in total, one of which had been taken from the lander after he commanded it yesterday morning.

  As he rushed to the tent sheltering that communicator, a dead silence was gradually taking the place of chaos and noise around – more and more people were encircled, overwhelmed, and engulfed by the surging and acrid flood of darkness, and the glow of flame and lights faded into nothingness as well. In two hours, the first flush of dawn would pass through the near canyons and spatter itself over this heavily forested but dry lagoon. However, he knew he would never see it.

  He fell down in the dark, and stumbled for the second time. While he was tripping again, a lump of cold liquid caught his heels, entangling itself with him like the legendary Norse Kraken – the one that has an appetite for sailors, and dragged him into the hungry sea behind.

  He tried to resist against the overwhelming force, but in vain. A sense of despair scratched his heart and pinched his throat like claws, but in this frantic struggle, his remaining sense of rationality still allowed him to take the last correct action – he grabbed the thing hanging from his belt, pulled the pin out, and hurriedly triggered the metal pull-tab on the top before more black tentacles could control him.

  To his relief, all this ended quickly at least.

  Night fell.

  Nothing seemed different from every day before here on this planet which would never be named ‘Earth’. Located a few kilometers south of the equator, a continent that would never be named ‘Australia’ was taking a slow southbound journey driven by the asthenosphere in the mantle. Onto its eastern coast, the warm sea waves from the equator were pounding and smashing, delivering a great amount of water vapor to the east side of the mountain range which could be named anything but ‘Great Divide’. On its innumerable sister planets, this precious precipitation had all fruited vascular plant communities with exuberant vitality. Here, by contrast, the coastline, thousands of kilometers long, was covered by a sheet of gloomy and sticky liquid, appearing in the deepest sea-like black.

  Anu still stayed wide awake when the last glow of the setting sun faded from the horizon. For it, this scene was not going to make any sense. This was because not only had it experienced billions of planetary rotations in its life, but the concept of ‘alternation of day and night’ did not make sense at all to it – its body stretched over every piece of land and parts of it pervaded each continent. At any time, there were some parts of its body being bathed in sunlight coming from 150 million kilometers away, while others hid themselves in the low-lying night view. These sensory signals were transmitted and aggregated by biological electronic pulses at the speed of light, and then became part of Anu’s incredibly complex consciousness.

  In many other parallel universes – formed by accidental quantum events – that would never have been a slightest overlap with this universe, this planet had bred a rich variety of life forms – there were, of course, the same number of other parallel universes where this planet had always been a deadly cold wilderness during the five billion years since it was originally formed, or a living hell baked by the greenhouse effect. However, the situation in this universe was different from both of the above – multicellular carbon-based organisms had never held a dominant position here because of a series of accidents and coincidences within a strange combination of circumstances along the long path of life evolution, and they had even been marginalized from the entire ecosystem during nearly 100 million sidereal years. An intelligent creature will find that the planet’s surface has an albedo of more than 10 percentage points lower than its peers’ in countless parallel universes, if he/she looks at it from its only satellite – most of its land except the two poles was heavily covered by trillions of thick blanket-like black slime molds and even a considerable part of shallow sea had also been invaded.

  This super-giant symbiont drew heat continuously and directly from the sun and then, with this energy, combined the collected carbon with water electrolysis hydrogen into a wide variety of hydrocarbon-based compounds, to constantly repair and expand its huge body. However, it was not a sole resident in this world as in this black-untouched area, there were still remaining advanced carbon-based ecosystems through which this super Leviathan could supplement trace elements that cannot be absorbed directly from air and water, and maintain atmospheric oxygen content at a liveable level. In short, the status of this planet was like a dynamic abstract painting explicitly expressing the concept of ‘terror’ – the living Darkness dominated anything and everything, greedily, insensibly and irrationally and their actions were solely guided by the most basic biological instincts – swallowing, digestion, and reproduction.

  Of course, objective facts tend to be quite at odds with subjective impressions. Although it was somewhat incredible, the fact was that the first ray of intellectual light had quietly appeared amid this black as early as hundreds of thousands of centuries ago. In order to be more effective in adapting to the surviving competition me
chanism, the slime mold community, which had not yet become an absolutely dominant species then, tried to achieve complex physiological mechanisms that do not belong to single-celled organisms through the specificity of its certain members – they did not own a nervous system, but they could achieve a similar result by increasing the conductivity of cell sap and cell membranes in some members and arranging them in a particular pattern; they did not have any limbs, so a part of the members at the edge of the symbiont formed versatile pseudopodia; they had no eyes, ears or nose and as a result, a large number of members distributed on the surface of the community became increasingly sensitive to thermal signals, air vibration and pheromones in the surrounding environment. All these developments eventually led to the need for a unified reception and processing of information, prompting more and more slime mold communities to further integrate together. After that, Anu was born.

  Although Anu’s ‘lifespan’ had far surpassed any living body that had gone through natural evolution, Anu got this name just a few planetary days before. On that unusual day, a small group of strange objects suddenly appeared in the sky almost 10,000 meters high above the planet, plunging toward the land surface as rapidly as meteors did.

  Among a total of five such objects, one unfortunately crashed into a towering mountain range and was immediately buried in a terrible landslide caused by the impact; a wobbling one toppled into an active volcano standing on the edge of the mainland and was soon burnt to ashes among molten basalt; another two went straight to an island far from the island, beyond the reach of Anu and disappeared; only the last one landed safely on the continent and eventually fell into a saline bog that had not been covered by Anu’s body.

  At the beginning, Anu didn’t pay too much attention to these ‘meteors’ – yes, these objects were indeed different from those of the past; they could not only appear in the atmosphere without any warning, but also realize a substantial reduction in their own speed in the final stage of falling so as to avoid the fate of dashing to pieces. But Anu, without a Ph.D. in astronomy or any experience taking related courses, naturally failed to recognize the implication of this series of anomalies. Everything stayed unchanged until a whole planetary day after the arrival of this ‘meteor’.

  In the wee hours of that morning, two creatures with two legs each – or rather, two flexible and bipedal multicellular organisms with an odd-shaped endoskeleton which was mostly composed of calcium carbonate – left the ‘meteor’ site, rashly approached the forest belt of ferns at the edge of a swamp, and then tripped into Anu’s hunting trap.

  On the whole, the two creatures from that meteor were not fundamentally different from the billions of carbon-based organisms that Anu once devoured, but in the process of capturing them, their reactions were much more unexpected – instead of instinctively running away like stupid animals, the two creatures used some kind of instrument spraying high-temperature plasma, trying to defend themselves from its attacks. Although they were still doomed to be engulfed in the end, fiery flames in the previous battle had destroyed a rather large part of Anu’s body – it had never encountered this before.

  Anu, out of curiosity, sneakily and prudently permeated the area of that fallen meteor and suddenly launched an attack on a small group of bipedal creatures camping around it unawares. This time, it didn’t directly digest these creatures as a source of carbohydrate and protein. Instead, it did its best to capture them in their full shape (of course, the process did not go off smoothly) and carried out a meticulous study on these creatures – again, this was another thing that it had never done in the past hundreds of thousands of years.

  The result of this study surprised Anu. Each of these bipedal creatures was an independent individual, but they obviously possessed wisdom not inferior to Anu’s – these creatures who called themselves ‘human beings’ could act purposefully in a planned way, could carry out organized logical thinking like it did, and could even make and use tools to compensate for their lack of flexibly structured and multifunctional limbs and organs. (The word ‘tool’ was borrowed from the bipedal creatures’ vocabulary. Anu had no idea of it before this study).

  Anu was not new to fiddling with the nervous systems of multicellular organisms for it had been treating local animals with nervous systems as its playthings, manipulating their every movement by pheromones and bioelectrical signals, to kill time during its endless years. Finally, practice showed that these experiences could also be applied to these more advanced bipedal animals. Anu gradually mastered the knack of controlling these new toys after repeated attempts, which meant that it could not only have command over their basic physiological activities with the help of well-coded bioelectrical signals, but read their memory and absorb their knowledge by analyzing the brain activity of these creatures as well. On the third day after capturing them, Anu made use of the knowledge extracted from the brain belonging to a female creature known as ‘Chief Programmer’, to manage the computer which was made of metal, silicide crystals and other inorganic compounds in this man-made ‘meteor’ – it was also a crucial turning point of its incomparably long life.

  It was within just one day that this magical machine gave it knowledge more than the information it had received over the past thousand centuries. It even used the data stored on the computer to name itself – Anu, a name originating from an ancient Babylonian myth, of a very good match with its own story. Yes, it was as omnipresent, omniscient, and overweening as the Sky God imagined by the ancients and tightly held the authority of this whole world with a supreme will.

  But now, it was no longer satisfied with this.

  The lungs in its chest, under the exact stimulation of a series of bioelectric pulses, gradually shrank and gently squeezed out a pocket of gas from the trachea. This air flow passed through the vocal cords and nasal cavity, coordinating with several delicate movements performed by the tongue, lip, jaw and mouth, and then a string of sound waves representing special meanings were spreading by ambient air. The woman sat upright in her former position, repeating mildly a short passage in her mother tongue – the working language of the spacecraft Good Boy-21, just as she used to do in dozens of rehearsals.

  Of course, one thing was different from the rehearsal-version – she did not turn on the video system on the communication console or the video device as required. Or if not, people who received this communication signal would see the most bizarre scene they had seen in their life – at the back of the woman’s head, on both sides of her cervical spine and her back, dozens of blood vessel-like pulsating black ‘ropes’ penetrated her grimy sky-blue uniform and hid beneath her pale skin, looking every bit like the strings pulling a puppet – certainly, people who saw this scene would be completely right if they really thought so. Although this woman was still alive in the sense of physiology, she was not much different from lower invertebrates that could only and simply respond to the stimulus; she used to be a correspondent of the expedition, but now she lost the title, and her name. In a sense, she was now only an organ attached to another organism…. But those who talked to her could not be aware of it.

  “This is Good Boy-21. We call any monitoring centre at the landing site.” A minute after the end of the 30th call, the correspondent pushed the button at the bottom of the control panel and started to repeat exactly the same content in exactly the same calm voice. This correspondent had once been a grouch. In the past, thirty consecutive fruitless calls would have probably made her hopping mad and foul-mouthed. But Anu never knew what anxiety really was because its endless but lifeless life had cultivated in it the virtue of patience a long time ago. “The landing ground has been successfully developed with no casualties. A survey shows that the local environment is at least of B-class liveable, but the accessory cabin carrying airdrop supplies encountered a jumping failure. We need emergency support. We need emergency support. For any listener of this message, please reply as soon as possible.”

  N
o response. Only white noise, boring and monotonous, came from the speaker. However Anu still decently kept its countenance. Following this woman’s eyes (It had to admit that this organ that had a very sophisticated biological structure and was capable of stereoscopic vision, was much more effective than that light-sensitive stuff adhering to its surface which could only hazily distinguish between light and shade and hardly detect different colors), it patiently observed the timer at the corner of the communication console, waiting for the minute to end. If necessary, it could repeat this process thousands of, or even tens of thousands of times – after all, a short wait now would be worth it in the end.

  Time was still gently lapsing through the timer display. A few small black sticks of equal length and width continuously flashed and extinguished, forming numeral characters one after another. Among all human inventions, numbers and mathematics astonished Anu most – before it was exposed to these concepts, its understanding of this world was made up of its pure perceptual knowledge about objective reality. But now, a new bright window was opened in front its eyes (This was another concept belonging to humanity, captured from the head of its captive). This was nothing more than a negligible tiny fraction, Anu told itself. The information contained in such a small cabin had already made it so excited. What would the humanity on the world bring it?

  The last two digits on the timer changed to ‘50’, and then ‘51’, ‘52’, ‘53’, ‘54’…. As for Anu of past, such small fine-cut bits of time (The human term used for this was ‘second’, which was about 86,000 times shorter than the length of a planetary day) didn’t make any sense. But given the short lifespan of humans and their tight and fast lifestyle, it was not surprising that this species would create such a sophisticated timing system. The number turned to ‘58’ and then ‘59’. Anu was adept at inputting a series of electrical instruction signals into the human body it controlled, preparing for the next attempt which might still be futile….