3zekiel (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

He can see.

  He must be able to see as he’s dodging Sergei’s swinging arms.

  How can he see?

  Petty Officer Garcia has his own means of making hay. Rather than wild, wishful swings, he moves in close, getting inside Sergei’s reach and sending a succession of upper cuts into his jaw. Blood sprays out from Sergei’s nose, coating the alien equipment in thousands of tiny red spots. Immediately, silver spiders set to work cleaning or perhaps sampling the blood.

  The huge Russian falters, falling against one of the tiers, grabbing at the ledge, trying not to collapse on the ground, but that makes him an easy target for Garcia and the Navy SEAL has no hesitation in sending a thundering blow into the side of his head.

  After the brief, one-sided struggle is over, Garcia drags Sergei’s limp body behind him, walking back down the tunnel toward the daylight.

  “Come with me,” Garcia says, but there’s something wrong. Even in the low light, it’s obvious. At first, I thought Garcia was wearing some kind of helmet, but his head is metallic.

  Pretzel takes my hand. He’s shaking, trembling like a leaf in a storm. Rather than providing comfort, he’s holding onto me for the same reason I’m clinging to him—there’s a fleeting sense of relief in that we’re both still alive, but it’s fragile. We’re as helpless as a chrysalis inside a cocoon hidden beneath a broad, green, drooping rainforest leaf, desperate to avoid attention, longing for a chance at life.

  “En—Enrico?” Pretzel asks, still standing inert beside me, not willing to move from the darkness.

  “The one and only.”

  “Petty Officer Enrico Garcia?”

  Garcia just laughs, continuing on and disappearing around the bend. We follow along, unsure who or what we’re following, with footsteps that seem to barely touch the ground. As Garcia approaches the opening, the silhouette cast by his head is unsettling. Machines crawl over his shoulders and neck. The bandages are gone. Whereas there should be the curved outline of his skull, instead there are bumps and bulges as though he was wearing a helmet with clunky night-vision goggles.

  “Garcia? Is that you?” Pretzel asks as the Navy SEAL dumps the barely conscious Sergei on the mud outside.

  “Who else would it be?”

  As my eyes adjust to the light, it’s clear the upper portion of Garcia’s skull has been replaced by an alien machine. Segmented chrome-plated worms wind through a metal crown covering his eyes, starting at the bridge of his nose and extending around to the back of his head. Tiny spider-like machines clamber over his face, working their way on top of his metallic skull.

  “It’s—I—ah,” Pretzel has his hand out, on the verge of touching the machinery wrapped around Garcia’s head but not daring proceed the last inch or so. His fingers twitch in response to the spiders, wanting to touch them, but fearing the worst.

  “I can see you, you know?” Garcia says. He laughs. I’m not sure what’s funny, perhaps the look of disbelief on our faces.

  “Can I?” Pretzel asks.

  “Sure.”

  He reaches up, touching at the slick metallic surface with its grooves and channels forming an ornate, almost decorative pattern where once the soldier’s skull lay. The skin on Garcia’s face presses hard up against the alien skullcap, with just a thin red line showing where one ceases and the other begins.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No.”

  “And you can see?”

  “Yes, but it’s not what you think.”

  I’m not sure what I think as there are no eyes in the polished finish. Were it not for the placement of his nose, cheeks and mouth there would be no way to distinguish front from back, or one side from the other.

  “What can you see?” Pretzel asks, holding his hand up before Garcia, flexing his fingers roughly in front of where Garcia’s eyes should be.

  “Everything. In front and behind. Out to the sides. It’s all visible.”

  “You can see in 360 degrees?” Pretzel asks in disbelief. “All around you?”

  “Yes.” Garcia’s grinning, unable to suppress a smile. “Only there’s no color.”

  “No color?” Pretzel replies. “Okay, that makes sense.”

  “Wait. Why would that make sense?” I ask, confused by what to me seems like a trivial consideration. Petty Officer Garcia has been turned into one of those things within the tunnel and Pretzel thinks seeing in black and white makes sense? How does any of this make any sense, let alone a lack of color?

  “Colors don’t exist,” Pretzel says, gesturing with his hand and waving as though he wants to be rid of this point as quickly as possible. “They’re artificial, just constructs of our minds. Reality is shades of grey. Colors are evolution’s way of helping us distinguish things of importance, but they’re not real. Different animals see different colors.”

  Okay, I’m not sure what freaks me out more, seeing Garcia with some alien implant set over his brain, acting as his eyes, or the realization that the blue of the sky, the green of the weeds growing up between the cracks in the dirt and the red blood seeping down Pretzel’s leg are all actually grey. What the hell? If I can’t trust my own eyes, what can I trust? Surely, colors are real. They’re real to me. Is that all that matters? Science has a way of shattering illusions. Sometimes, I wish Pretzel would just let me be—I’m content with colors.

  Garcia isn’t finished. “I see other things.”

  Pretzel is fascinated, ignoring the small alien machines and running his fingers gently over the device crowning the soldier’s skull.

  “What else can you see?”

  “If I concentrate, if I focus, I can see through things… see through you. One moment, you’re standing there in shades of grey, the next, I can see your heart beating, your lungs expanding, the blood pulsating around your body. Squint and I can see your bones. Then there’s the little things.”

  “Little things?” Pretzel asks.

  “At times, everything seems to be alive with energy. It’s like it flows through stuff. Like rain falling, only coming up from the ground and passing through the trees, through people and stones, following their shapes, flowing around them like water running over rocks in a stream.”

  I’m freaked out. I’m still a few steps behind the conversation.

  “You can see bones?” I ask, still trying to process that.

  “I can see the bones in your arm and shoulder,” Garcia replies. “I can see what they’ve done.”

  “Done?” I ask, stunned by the past tense. “To me?”

  My eyes cast down at the filthy bandages padding my shoulder and the dirty sling holding my arm against my chest. My heart races. There’s something under there.

  “Get it off me,” I yell, jumping to one side as a small spider alien machine moves beneath the fabric. Its thin legs reflect the sunlight.

  “Easy,” Garcia says.

  I start to panic, but Pretzel takes me by both shoulders, saying, “Just relax.”

  He pulls back the bloody bandages, peering beneath them. A shiny chrome plate curves over my shoulder, but there’s no pain. Surprisingly, it’s the absence of pain that feels most unsettling. For the past two days, there’s been a persistent ache, like a background noise. Now that it’s gone, I feel strange, as though I’m not myself. I’m hyperventilating.

  “It’s okay,” Pretzel says. “Breathe. That’s it. Slow things down.”

  I touch at the metal. No pain. No feeling at all. My arm, though, is fine.

  “Is it? Is it?”

  “It’s okay,” Garcia says.

  “I don’t understand,” I say, loosening the sling, looking into the tunnel, thinking about my father and the monster he’s become. “But—what they did to him?”

  “Not them,” Garcia replies, pointing at Sergei. “Him.”

  I’m confused. Pretzel, though, seems to realize what actually happened. “It wasn’t them,” he says. “It was Sergei.” He gestures to the Russian, who’s lying against a burnt tree trunk, rocking slightly as he cra
dles a broken arm. Blood streams from his nose, soaking his shirt. He’s lost several teeth.

  Garcia says, “He killed your father. Not them.”

  Pretzel adds, “They must have found your dad in the ruins after they set down.” He pauses. “They did what they could. They tried to save him, tried to revive him, but it was too late.”

  “The aliens didn’t kill your father,” Garcia says, kicking one of Sergei’s boots. “The Russians did.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sergei says through gritted teeth. “All of this will be over soon. This blight on the planet will be erased.”

  “What have you done?” Pretzel asks, towering over Sergei.

  “I videoed the whole thing. It’s being uploaded via satellite. Once they see the freaks in this circus, they’ll bomb the place.”

  Pretzel reaches around Sergei’s waist, frisking him and pulling out a satellite phone.

  “It’s too late, father. They’re on their way.”

  “Garcia?” Pretzel says, handing the phone to him.

  Garcia examines the phone, turning it over in his hand. “Russian military issue... it’s still uploading.” He slams it against the opening of the tunnel, cracking the casing and breaking it apart. Garcia crushes the exposed electronics under his boots. Bits of plastic splinter and break as the speaker crackles.

  “It’s too late,” Sergei yells. “If I’m going to hell, you’re coming with me, father.”

  Escape

  “Yeah, well, I hope you enjoy fireworks,” Garcia says, rifling through Sergei’s pockets and pulling out a set of industrial zip-ties. He straps Sergei’s one good arm to a thick branch, flattening his wrist against the wood as he cinches it tight. “Because you, my friend—you’ve got a front row seat.”

  Pretzel leads us away from Sergei, who’s rocking back and forth, mumbling to himself. To my surprise, Pretzel says, “I’ve been thinking. I could be wrong about this, but what if Brother Mordecai had a point. What if the answers we’re looking for lie in the past?”

  As he speaks, tiny robots clamber from Garcia’s shoulder onto Pretzel’s open hand. He transfers them to his leg, loosening the wire holding his torn trousers over the bullet wound. The spiders set to work. They’re fascinating to watch, consuming the wire and part of his trouser leg, using that material to somehow fashion a repair to the muscle. It’s as though they’re car mechanics improvising with a blown gasket. I’m astonished, but Garcia is preoccupied by Pretzel’s statement.

  “Seriously?” Garcia asks. “You really think they’ve been here before?”

  “It was inconceivable up until the point they arrived in orbit. But now, anything’s possible. Why not? We conduct multiple missions to various planets in our own solar system, why wouldn’t they do something similar between stars?”

  On the platform, another pod shoots off up the elevator ribbon, racing into the sky, only it’s surrounded by what looks like thin, concentric rings spinning around the mirrored pod, rotating on all three axes. To my mind, it’s like the old models of an atom with electrons spinning around the outside of the nucleus.

  “Look at that,” Pretzel says. He pulls out the tatty, burnt Bible, bending the spine and searching for something on the page. “…and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.”

  I know he said, ‘Look at that,’ but I’m more interested in looking at the smooth silver patch covering the wound on his leg, blending in with his skin, but neither man is interested in these astonishing machines. Once their work is finished, the tiny machines drop to the ground, disappearing beneath the branches and making their way back to the opening of the tunnel.

  “You sound like Brother Mordecai,” Garcia says.

  “Listen to this—I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live.”

  “What the hell does that even mean?” Garcia asks.

  “What if it means more to us now than to them back then? What if laying sinews is precisely what just happened to us? It’s describing a physical change, right? Repairing the body. Isn’t that what happened to your injuries? Isn’t that what happened to mine?”

  “I wasn’t dead, Doc.”

  “You weren’t far from it. You were blind. Infection was setting in.”

  “You really think this explains what’s happening?”

  Pretzel hold up his finger, reading something else from Ezekiel. “How about this section: Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves… and I shall place you in your own land.”

  “I don’t get it,” I say, wanting to be part of the discussion.

  “Two elements,” Pretzel says. “To revive. To bring back to life and then to place somewhere else—in your own land.” He points at the space elevator with the Bible in his hand, saying, “I think I finally know what this is.”

  “What?” Garcia asks.

  “It’s a sample-return mission.”

  “Sample-return?”

  “Yes, yes. We’ve got this all wrong. Don’t you see?” He holds up the tattered Bible with its muddy, torn, burnt pages, saying, “It’s not an invasion. It’s not even a visit as such. We look at this alien civilization like it’s all knowing—all powerful. We treat them like they’re gods, but they’re not. They’re just like us. They sent out probes to look for life, to find evidence of biology elsewhere in this desolate universe—and they found us. So just like us they sent out a follow-up mission, only this time the goal wasn’t exploration, it was to retrieve samples.”

  “But why not just come here themselves?” I ask.

  “Because they can’t. Just like us, their machines can reach far further and travel far faster than they can themselves. In the same way we struggle to reach the Moon while our robots can fly beyond the outer edge of the solar system, they’re on the verge of what they can accomplish with their technology. We’ve sent robots tens of thousands of times further than any humans, and perhaps so have they.

  “Think about it. We’ve sent orbiters to Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn looking for life. Then we followed up with landers on Mars and Titan, but that wasn’t enough, so we sent out rovers. At each point, we’ve stretched the bounds of exploration, pushing what we can accomplish with our technology. We can send astronauts to the Moon but not somewhere like Saturn or Pluto, regardless of how astonishingly interesting they are from a scientific perspective, so the next best thing is to send a collection device to bring samples back, all in a quest to better understand the nature of the universe and our own origins. Don’t you see? They’re doing the same thing, but on a grander scale.”

  “So, Ezekiel?” I ask.

  “Whatever happened back then, that mission paved the way for this one.”

  “So, there are no aliens?”

  “Alien machines,” Pretzel says, “But not aliens. Not here. But out there.” He points. “Somewhere roughly a thousand light years away, someone is watching for signals coming back from this mission, waiting patiently for the return-samples to arrive. This mission is so important to them they’re content to wait for millennia. But the prize. The prize is worth the wait—it’s a sample of life on another planet—Earth.”

  Garcia says, “Well, I’m not sure how many samples they’re going to get. How long have we got until the Russians wipe this place off the map?”

  “That is a problem,” Pretzel concedes. “If that imagery got through, they’ll destroy this station.”

  Garcia nods, which takes a little getting used to as there seems to be an ecosystem of tiny alien insects clinging to his metallic skull, somehow interacting with it and him.

  “Yeah, nothing like fear to stoke a fire.”

  I’m still getting used to his head. “Are they really going to nuke us? Won’t the aliens shoot the missile down?”

  “Hard to say,” Pretzel says. “The Russians could detonate just outside the perimeter with
an air burst. They have bombs that can clear five hundred square miles. Imagine a hurricane raining down fire. It’s pretty damn hard to survive against a wall of superheated gas moving at hundreds of miles an hour.”

  “But could they survive?” I ask.

  “Maybe,” Pretzel replies. “But we couldn’t.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be around here to find out what happens next,” Garcia says.

  “We’re not going to get out of here, are we?” I say. “I mean, there’s no way we can escape in time.”

  “Not if we move horizontally,” Pretzel says. “But vertically, we’re less than sixty miles from space.”

  His eyes cast up at the elevator.

  “You’re serious?” Garcia asks.

  Pretzel laughs. “You’re the one with an alien machine hard-wired into your brain. Why not?”

  I crane my neck, looking up at the ribbon on the space elevator disappearing into the light blue sky. Pods shoot up the ribbon, rapidly shrinking as they climb ever higher.

  “If you want to find Jana and Lady?” Pretzel points. “That’s where they are.”

  I can’t argue with that, and yet it is daunting to stare into the unknown. Somewhere above us an asteroid is swinging in orbit around Earth, harboring an alien spacecraft and whatever factory produced these machines. I’ve never been good with heights and even though we’re still standing on Earth it feels as though I’m on the roof of a skyscraper peering over the edge, looking at the fall.

  Garcia doesn’t seem convinced, although reading the body language of someone with only the lower half of their head visible is less than easy. If anyone should be ready to launch themselves into space, I’d think it would be the guy with Superman’s x-ray vision, but he’s unusually subdued.

  “Unless you want to wait here for the Russians?” Pretzel says. “Look at what these machines did to your injuries. What we’re seeing here is intent. They aren’t the bad guys.”

  “We could call off the attack,” Garcia says. “Go back to the helicopter and radio our findings to US forces.”

  “If we could pick up a signal,” Pretzel says. “Big if. Not to mention, if they can convince the Russians to hold fire.” He steps off the mud and onto the sloping side of the platform. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”