Manipulate (Alien Cadets)

by Corrie [kids] Garrett

  Their dorm was on high ground, and as Sam got to the door he looked back at the amphitheater for a moment. Far off, on the beach, he noticed a thick plume of smoke rising into the sky. He’d smelled the smoke before his trial, but hadn’t thought about it. It looked like the bathroom next to the parking lot had burned. Sam felt his joy melting into panic. It shouldn’t matter, but something about that smoke…

  He sprinted up the stairs to Nat’s room. From the hall he could hear an alarm clock chiming with nerve-grating insistence. He threw Nat’s door open and it slammed against the wall.

  The room was empty, as he half expected. No Nat. No Jia. He walked over to Jia's desk and slapped the clock silent.

  Sam stood next to Nat’s bed and dug his fingers into his newly bald head. Nat’s window faced the beach, and he could see the smoke still rising and twisting in the wind.

  Then he saw someone walking around the building. The distance made it hard to tell, but it looked like a girl. Could that be Nat?

  Chapter 18

  Nat started shivering while the Rik doctors put an IV in Akemi’s hand. “Just for sedation and hydration,” they told her.

  “We’re ready to start your procedure,” Tishing told her, gesturing at one of the real Rik. “This is Wishi, who will be taking your body."

  “What, here?” Nat asked, appalled. “You’re going to kill me in the same room as my sister?"

  Nat wouldn’t have been so blunt, but Akemi was fast asleep.

  “It is already three a.m. in Los Angeles. We’ve got to get you back before ten tomorrow. We have reason to believe you won’t be missed until then,” he explained.

  Nat felt frozen inside. The shock of their plans left her lethargic and stupid.

  “How do you do it?” she asked.

  “We’ll need to scan your brain and limbic system. Then our insdecrum … um, I don’t have the word for that…” he thought for a moment. “Oh, nanotechnology. Our nanotechs will be injected into your brain tissue. They will recontour your brain according to Wishi’s pattern. Then we’ll use electrical signals to stop your brain function, whatever’s left after the nanotechs, and use a similar set of pulses to start it up, using Wishi’s electrical signals.”

  Nat felt a flicker of life in her frozen brain. “You don’t infect bodies biologically? I assumed you were a parasitic species.”

  “Oh not originally, we think. We just developed the technology to transfer memory and consciousness before anyone else.

  “But don’t you forget things? You can recontour my brain, but his memories won’t be there,” Nat gestured to Wishi.

  “Wishi is a she, actually,” Tishing explained. “We have gender like you. And some of the memories are linked to brain activity. Others she will lose. It is something we all accept.”

  Nat had almost forgotten that Tishing had done this too. They’d stolen this poor black guy and turned him into an alien. She wondered where he came from. Los Angeles? Detroit? South Africa?

  “Do you remember things from him?” Nat asked. “This guy you’re in now?”

  “I am this guy,” Tishing said. “I remember a little. Mainly flesh memories. I remember how to walk, how to talk, how to drive a car. He spoke English, so I speak English. When we get people who speak Chinese or Spanish or something then we have to learn English.”

  “So basically I’ll be dead,” Nat said. She needed him to say it. She needed him to acknowledge the truth.

  If the Spo were going to punish you, they told you exactly where and when and what would happen. If they were going to destroy a village, they made it clear. Maybe that was one of the ways they had changed her. She wanted horror spoken out loud.

  Tishing looked at her. She knew what he would say. He would try to convince her that as her body lived on, she lived on. He would want to comfort her or lull her into compliance.

  He pulled out a syringe. “Please lay on your cot.”

  “No!” Nat jumped off the bed, stung into energy by his ignoring her question. “You have to say something. Are you killing me or not?”

  He gestured to the empty bed, but Nat just glared at him. “Does your flesh remember human expression? This is fury. Do you remember guilt? Answer me.”

  Tishing’s lips twisted slightly, as if he couldn’t help responding to her question and was trying on the expression for fury.

  “I remember,” he said. For the first time he didn’t sound flippant or indifferent. He blinked slowly, seeing who knew what against eyelids that were not his own. When he opened his eyes, they showed no pity or suffering or guilt. But there was knowledge.

  “I am going to kill you,” he said.

  Nat stared at him for a long moment, trying to decipher the new knowledge in his eyes. He turned away from her gaze. “If you lay down now, you’ll have time to write your sister a letter before the insdecrum set in.”

  Nat lay down on her stomach. He admitted he was going to kill her. This was how executions were supposed to work. She wondered in despair how the Spo had conditioned her to accept even execution if it was down with truth and order.

  Tishing pulled up her shirt and rubbed a strong anesthetic on her lower back. She felt the tingling as it settled into her pores. Slowly her back became numb and warm, followed by her legs, as the anesthetic reached her spinal cord. When the warmth reached her feet, Tishing took an opaque black needle and pushed it into her spinal column. She felt pain, but not severe. When he had the needle in, he attached a tube and connected it to a box held by one of the Rik.

  “You can turn over now,” Tishing said, helping her roll onto her back. She couldn’t feel the needle anymore. The Rik set the box on the pillow next to her head. “The insdecrum will travel through your spinal column to your brain, but it will take at least forty minutes before the restructuring begins.”

  He handed her a notepad and a pen. The notepad was pink and purple, with Hello Kitty on the front.

  “You have that long to write. We have given your sister more sedative. She will not wake up.”

  Nat nodded. Finally they left, and she was alone with the notepad and the box. They hadn’t strapped her arms down; she could reach the needle in her back and pull it out. But what would be the point? They would do it again, this time with straps.

  She opened the Hello Kitty notepad, and started to write. She didn’t ponder what to say, words just poured out of her.

  “Akemi. I love you,” she wrote. “I loved you on Spo and on Earth. I never regretted that they took me instead of you. I was always glad that you were with our parents. I’m glad I got to see you again even if it was only a little while. I’m glad you got your ears pierced. I wish I could take your place now, but I don’t think that’s going to happen again.

  I wish you could have gotten to know Sam. I know you would have liked him. Armen was pretty funny too.

  The Rik are not going to win. I don’t want you to think that. Whatever they do with me or with you, they are not going to win."

  Akemi put her pen down for a minute. The pale pink paper blurred slightly. Her eyes flew to the box on her bed. It had only been ten minutes. Her vision cleared and she started to write again.

  She told Akemi about her friends. The jokes they shared over the years of training. She told her about Greg, really a decent alien, but so confusing when they got back to earth. She told her about Malaysia. She needed to tell someone about that. She told her about the pictures she’d taken at the Walk of Fame.

  Nat brushed a stray ant off the notebook, and wrote about her garden on Spo. “It was beautiful, in a way. The corn stalks turned orange from the soil, but the corn kernels were brilliant yellow. The leaves of the carrots and potatoes would sway in the Spo wind, like the farm in the Wizard of Oz.”

  She used to imagine that a tornado would come and swirl her away from the alien academy, just like Dorothy. Nat jumped when one of the ants bit her little toe. She dropped the notebook on the floor and jerked the blanket off her feet.

  “Oh no!”
she yelled, seeing the bugs swarming over her feet and legs. She tried to sit up and beat them off, but the needle dug into her back, sending a flash of pain up her spine. For a second she remembered what was happening. The nano junk they’d sent to her brain was making her hallucinate. She forced herself to lie back down and close her eyes. There were no bugs.

  Keeping her eyes closed was hard. She kept picturing the bugs on her ankles, on her calves, working their way up.

  "There are no bugs. There are no bugs," she repeated.

  She counted by twelves, in Spo numerals. She tried to remember all sixteen verses of her favorite Spo poem... But then her eyes snapped open. The bugs might get on Akemi! She turned to her sister. Akemi looked horrible. Her flesh was sinking right in front of Nat’s eyes. Her skin was sagging and turning to ash.

  Nat watched in horror as Akemi turned into a skeleton. But blurry, so blurry. Three different Akemi's hovered over the bed, only one of them a skeleton.

  Nat slapped a hand over her eyes. “It’s not real, it’s not real.".

  They hadn’t told her it would be like this. She was going to die on a horror trip, like a drug addict on an overdose. Nat chewed on her tongue, focusing on the pain, to keep her mind from wandering to horrible places. Oh, oh, oh…. For a long time Nat rocked slowly, side to side, trying not to think. Whenever she opened her eyes, the room spun or worse, seemed to dance with flame or shake in an earthquake. She gripped the bed to keep from falling off, feeling vertigo and claustrophobia at the same time.

  When a sharp pain hit her left eye, she cringed. Then another struck, somewhere near her right ear. With this began a new barrage of sensation. The hallucinations faded, but every few seconds a stabbing pain burst through her skull. It was a migraine headache on meth.

  If only it would end…

  When Nat started screaming, she hoped Akemi couldn’t hear her.

  ***

  Sam pounded down the stairs of the dorm, the thud of his steps reverberating up the stairwell. Outside he saw Armen and the crowd of cadets coming up the hill toward the dorm.

  “Call Greg!” Sam shouted. “Nat's missing. I’m going to the beach.”

  Armen shouted something, but Sam didn’t hear. He was already running toward the road that separated the Pepperdine grounds from the public beach.

  He felt, perhaps unreasonably, that he had to get to the beach right away. Maybe he was crazy, but he wouldn’t ignore this kind of intuition.

  He lost sight of the beach as he ran down the hill, but when he got across the highway and could see the burned bathroom. However, he no longer saw the person he’d seen from the window. Sam scanned the beach, and saw a small Toyota parked on the far side of the parking lot. A short, blond woman was just getting in.

  Sam ran toward her, waving his arms.

  She turned on the car and peeled out of the spot, tires squealing.

  “Hey wait! Just a sec!"

  Sam ran as fast as he could, and she hit the gas. The car fishtailed slightly on the sandy asphalt as she turned out onto the road. When it straightened out she really hit the gas and the car sped away from him.

  Sam jogged to a halt, and leaned over, hands on his knees. Breathing hard, he cursed silently.

  ***

  Nat writhed on the bed with no sense of time. She had no idea how long the torment had gone on, but surely it was longer than ninety minutes. Akemi swam into view over her, looking scared. Her lips were moving, but Nat couldn’t hear what she said. Someone was screaming and it drowned Akemi out. Then Akemi’s face was joined by a dark one, and two alien snout faces.

  The snouts elongated and shot flame at her. They were dragons, like in the fantasy books of her childhood. The dragons stood over her bed, trying to roast her alive. She felt hands push her over, rolling her onto her face against the wall. A pain in her back joined the pains in her head.

  This position jogged an old memory. Lying in another bed, face to the wall. Pain in her back, pain in her head. And next to her, in another bed, Melanie was screaming. And Sam was somewhere near, crying in a little boy voice. The fear. Greg patting her head.

  When was that? Nat thought. The pain was receding from her head now. Her thoughts began to trickle slowly back in.

  She could hear Tishing talking and Akemi crying. Then someone took Akemi away, and Nat could hear her shouting breathlessly, “No! I want to be with her! Take me back!”

  The door shut, and Nat breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t want Akemi in here when she died.

  “We have to administer the stopping agent,” Tishing was saying. “The insdecrum are breaking down.”

  Nat was repositioned onto her back. The dragons were still there, looking puzzled.

  “Don’t pat my head,” Nat said. If dragons capture you, you don’t want them patting your head as if they like you.

  “It’s not working,” Tishing said. “We’ll have to find out why. Perhaps some kind of chemical defense…”

  He wheeled Nat out of the room on her cot. She lay flat on her back, watching the ceiling pass by. It was light grey, with inset dark grey triangles. The edge of the triangles glowed, giving the hallways a low luminosity.

  “It was the beginning,” Nat said. She was remembering the other bed, the other pain, when the Spo had first taken them. She didn’t remember much from the first year of their exchange program. Sometime in there, they had done something like this to her. Only she had still been herself at the end. They hadn’t put anybody else in her brain.

  After a few turns Tishing pushed her into a bright white room. It was filled with medical equipment, and it all looked familiar. She could have been back at the Los Angeles Children’s’ Hospital. The decal on one of the big machines said, “Epsilon Inc."

  Tishing rolled her over, finally removing the needle from her back and rolling up the tubing and box. Then he shifted her onto a hard table and unceremoniously slid the whole thing into a machine. She was in a coffin-shaped box, domed over her head, completely in the dark. A loud rumbling started but the pain was almost completely gone from her head now.

  Her body ached, like she’d just run for miles down the beach behind Greg. As the rumbling continued, she couldn’t stop herself from dozing off. Apparently a mind meld was completely exhausting.

  Tishing was talking again when Nat woke up.

  “She’s been protected,” he said. “It must be the Spo. The humans don’t have anything like this technology. Oh, she’s awake."

  Tishing and the two dragons… no, the two Rik, turned to her.

  Tishing waited for her eyes to focus on him. She didn’t think she could lift her head if she wanted to. Her whole body felt limp. Not drugged, but unwilling to move without serious provocation.

  “What did they do?” Tishing asked. “When did the Spo inject you?”

  Nat blinked.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you right now. I can’t. I’m just trying to figure out how they stopped us.”

  “Maybe… maybe when they first took us,” Nat whispered from a dry throat. “They did all of us.”

  “Did you lose memories?” Tishing asked.

  Nat thought. “Not from before, but the next year or so…it’s blurry.”

  Tishing sighed. “Probably a slow-growth protein reactant. It would change the chemical structure of the brain slowly, as new connections were made. That would account for a lost year. After eighteen months or so, the entire brain would be consistent, and new memories would be encoded normally.”

  “They protected you,” he said to Nat. “They protected all of you. We can’t recontour your brain.”

  “I sure wish you’d known that before you tried,” Nat whispered. “Can I have some water?”

  Tishing handed her a cup. She propped herself up on her elbow, sipping slowly. They weren’t going to kill her. She should feel happy about that. Mostly she was filled with dread. It couldn’t be over that quickly.

  “So, that’s it?” she asked. “I don’t supp
ose you could drop us off back at school.”

  Tishing shook his head. “You are protected, Akemi is not. We’ll proceed to our Mars station, for her phase of the experiment.”

  Nat slumped back onto the cot. “You have a Rik station on Mars?'

  Tishing nodded. "I know, it's so cliché, but it's also very handy."

  Chapter 19

  Downy felt like killing something when Sam climbed, unharmed, from the trouncer cage. Downy had worked it out so carefully. Leaking the information to Sam at the carnival, suggesting he spread it around (though the live TV interview had been Sam’s idea), and waiting for the inevitable trial. Even though the trial had gone slightly awry, the main point, Sam’s execution, had gone as planned.

  And then! To watch that abomination of a trouncer protect Sam, when he should have been slashed to pieces and consumed before his body could even void itself… Downy had been cheated.

  Downy got some satisfaction watching Sam and the others frantically search for Nat and Jia. They found Jia’s body in the ashes on the beach, and identified her from a healed break in her right ankle. That was unfortunate too, he’d hoped Sam would think it was Nat for a while.

  The worst part wasn’t even Sam’s survival. The worst part was his new authority. Suddenly Greg and General Gustav were offering Sam choices, listening to his advice… following his orders! Of course, Sam didn’t phrase them as orders, but it was clear to Downy that he was taking over. He’d even demanded they give him the trouncer that saved his life.

  Greg hadn’t liked that, but Sam wasn’t playing the humble student anymore.

  “You think it’s dangerous?” Sam said. “Jia was murdered last night. Possibly Nat too. Jonathan is never coming back. I could use a dangerous bodyguard."