Concept YUS (Cross-World Murder Cases Book 1)

by Set Wagner

  “Hey you, Yusian!” I shook him. “Get up!”

  Chuks clambered to an upright position with the sticky blue substance still clinging to him and seeping into his body. I waited patiently for the process to end—a procedure just like the one I was exposed to before I entered this spectral dimension. It suddenly occurred to me that, while I was ripping off my Yusian layers, not a drop of Yusian blood had escaped. In other words, I was still charged with it. That was a fact.

  “I was going to kill you,” I informed Chuks, just in case he hadn’t even understood that.

  ‘But contact is still before happening,” he responded.

  Damn! When I resolved to attempt this impossible confrontation, I knew perfectly well I would be risking my life, but I never considered the danger to my sanity!

  “A contact? This is your spiritual union? The two species becoming one? When will you come to your senses, for God’s sake? If you try to apply this “spiritual union” to us, you will actually be digging the first of your own grave. Only the first one, yes, because the rest will be dug by us.”

  I waited for some reply, fully aware that most likely all Yusians were witnessing this crucial exchange, from one side of their polyplanetary system to the other, without the delay of so much as a nanosecond, through the atemporal channels that connected them. But I was still worried that they wouldn’t understand me, so I decided to use simpler language.

  “Listen! For ten years we have searched for your vulnerabilities—for a weapon to use against you. Now I’ve found not one weapon but two. Two! You know the first one: our categorical, final refusal to accept the contact! That unresolved problem is enough by itself to cause your entire civilization to stagnate and wither. Now I know that there’s another, incomparably more dangerous weapon: exactly the contact you are seeking. Such a contact, according to your rules, will result in our conquest of your whole system and your total destruction!”

  Again I waited for some response, but none came. The complacency of these creatures was itself monstrous. Paradoxically, it grew out of that impersonal, complete lack of individuality that shielded them from any troubling thought or disturbing truth. I tried to be even more direct.

  “That’s exactly what will happen! We will erase you once and for all from the infinite face of the universe. What do you plan to contribute to this merging? This human Yusian hybrid you want to create will be filled with our individualism, our egotism, and our sense of self. You have evolved without ever confronting any other life form but your own. What could you possibly know about the struggle for survival, about survival of the fittest? Absolutely nothing! What’s more, you evolved from plants. We are predators.”

  “Ter, Ter.” Chuks repeated my name almost tenderly. “Why stay lost from fact that our contact happens where nobody recognizes self but already knows other? So nobody then has only own origin—”

  “Nonsense!” I interrupted him impatiently. “We are going toward a conflict, not a contact—a conflict that is going to take place here, in this dimension, and will be really crucial. For you! Well, yes, this abomination—I mean your collective mind, your system—will immediately start to reprocess and channel our negative energies, but there is no way it can change our instincts. In contrast to our thoughts and feelings, instincts can’t be reprocessed. Do you understand?”

  No, obviously he didn’t understand me, nor was I sure he was even trying to understand me. So I switched to the socratic method of question and answer, which usually captures the attention of any audience.

  “And what will happen when human instincts start spreading through your system, Chuks? Your collective consciousness will undergo transformation because the system itself will stop reprocessing our negative energies. It will no longer consider them something negative to be guarded against or sublimated. You will naturalize our feelings as if they were your own. Then we must remember that the system itself is not a consciousness, just a universal automaton, a psychoconstruction that governs everything, including all of you, through your own instincts—the instincts you share with everything in your system. Now the instincts that you completely rely upon will be our instincts. That’s what this contact really means!”

  Unfortunately, there was more. The Eyrena colony that had been planned as the first phase of the contact could also prove fatal to us, to humans on Earth. It was a horror to imagine the only “product” that could come from it: insane criminals in Yusian bodies, armed with the colossal power of this advanced civilization, and very angry at the race that had abandoned them in the name of its “redemption.”

  Chuks stood in front of me as silent and motionless as a plasma statue. I knew perfectly well, however, that he wasn’t troubling himself over such human truths or even taking them into account. He was simply preparing himself again to complete his mission, to establish our Yusian-human contact.

  “Don’t ignore what I say. Most probably I won’t have the time for you again. Very soon your ‘mind’ will try to destroy me.”

  “Make a major mistake,” he objected calmly. “Destroy incompatible with system.”

  “It was incompatible until minutes ago, but now it has swallowed my impulse to kill you. My aggressive impulse, my survival instinct, is now in its structures. Before its only choice was to assimilate everything that stands in its way; now it has another one: to destroy all that is not pliable enough for absorption.”

  “Your pliability sure, Ter. At end contact, Ter not need aggressive. Have system protection.”

  “We’ll see. Perhaps I’ll be a fire that’s been extinguished, or perhaps it is you who will go up in flames. After all is said and done, however, you still have to ask yourself why I am here? Why did I feel the need to accept this contact you had forced on me, even though I was entirely opposed to it?”

  “For us details chaotic human nature.” The Yusian’s voice again sounded maddeningly tender and solicitous. “Going to insert our help into you.”

  “Enough! Follow your program. I’ll even endure your help.”

  These words seemed to let the genie out of the bottle. It appeared in the form of a cloud hovering above us, shot through with many multicolored striations like a thick rainbow. Chuks quickly moved out of its way, but I stayed where I was. The cloud descended before me and began to change its shape. In the end it looked like a Yusian torso cut at both ends but at least three times larger. Its communication zones pulsed abnormally bright, and it repeatedly activated them, perhaps the cause of the ominous rumbling sounds that began coming from inside the torso. I knew I wasn’t going to be destroyed yet, but just to be safe, I decided to step back—and found that I couldn’t. The space behind me hardened so that I was literally “up against the wall.” Then I realized that, in fact, I was being pressed from the sides as well; panic gripped me, so much so that I was tempted to play my last trump right then and there. But of course I didn’t. Now that I had breached the system, I had to stay there and play my part almost to the end, though I had no idea when the end would come.

  Now the cloud stood silent, which was no less threatening than the thunder before. All I could do was wait, and the longer it delayed its attack or whatever it had in store for me, the more tightly panic gripped me—but in the opposite direction. Against all reason, even against my will, I feared now that the cloud might draw back—abandon me!

  I felt the Yusian blood suddenly bursting through my absurd psychoplasma body. Rushing into my brain, it filled me with incomprehensible—but even more incomprehensibly attractive—images and feelings.

  As fast as butterflies fluttering into the bottom of a damp hollow, a whirlwind of sharp crystal flakes thrusts deeply into me and I take them in. A slippery hump fills me with delight, and I cling to it. I sink into a sea of miniscule black grains, flooding my eyes and turning them black, changing them somehow—usefully. I pull down my forehead membrane so they don’t escape.

  A forehead membrane? Again! I shook my head and stretched my eyes to see if I still at
least looked human. Yes, I did, but the cloud was pulsating in front of me, and my heart was echoing its rhythm, every beat and pulsation becoming faster. My blood started pounding in my chest, boiling and bursting out, covering my body with foam. I scooped it up with my hands and then extended my arms and drew the sharp arcs of—the detention. I couldn’t stop; I didn’t know what this detention was, but I felt it was something important. Then the “interdict” split lengthwise, and I felt that the time had come. But for what?

  The cloud’s glaring communication zones enveloped me, filled my whole field of vision. But no, there would be no communication. They only functioned now as mutual aid organs, I realized the moment before they took me into their cloudy tissues, and when they crushed me in a suddenly stiff embrace, I realized something else too: Yusian aid is also viciously aggressive, in no way “vegetable.” I absorbed its radiation ravenously, desperately, although my still-human consciousness strongly objected. It was so well intentioned, saturated with somebody else’s belief, that it was necessary for my survival. It worked on me like a drug, like painless euthanasia, providing me passage to another, distant world.

  They made me look through the prism of their senses, maybe even their feelings. The world grew ever more distant and expansive, filled to overflowing with radiantly bright spirits, ethereal figures of various live and “nonlive” creatures. Yet they weren’t really crowded together, not in the least. Somehow there was plenty of room for all of them; the space was unlimited—infinite. In spite of that, I could still discern each and every one in sharp detail. Distance was no obstacle; here everything was immediate and accessible, simply by meditation. All I needed to do was direct my attention toward something, and I was right next to it. There was no trace of the spectral psychic construct that held me earlier, and no trace of Chuks either.

  The figures were not static, but neither were they moving. The movement was in them. I felt it as life spiritual to the point of—perfection. In my meditation floated the oval ghosts of whole planets, an astonishing number! I also saw the wavy silhouettes of oceans and seas, long chains of ancient mountains, mouths of volcanoes, ephemeral winding rivers, and narrow creeks. I even recognized that strange Yusian river despite the fact that its “spirit” wasn’t black and grainy. Here it wasn’t flowing; instead, suffused with light, it looked almost white.

  Where are the spirits from our Earth? I asked myself, and they immediately appeared, very few thus far in this radiant space. Here were the mushrooms, as big as oak trees, silver reflections of those at the Yusian base. I found also the seashells, seaweeds, and moss, each species larger and flourishing here. Even the colossal eyes of insects—all part of this great harmony. A harmony without any human spirit—mine was the first!

  But without any Yusian spirit either. Their place, obviously, was higher, I sensed, which gave me a weary feeling of humiliation. After all, I found it repulsive to be placed at the same level as mosses and seashells, even with oceans, mountains, or even planets. It offended my human nature. Besides, I no longer found all this inner life captured statically in frames attractive at all. It seemed to me that the “spirits” of rivers must also flow as oceans need to swell, volcanoes to erupt. Yes, I was ready now to return, leave this perpetuum immobile. Only in the spectral dimension of the collective Yusian “mind” would I be able to defend everything that’s human, alive, and struggling to the end.

  I realized my error a minute later as if someone had shouted at me, Though now invisible, this mind is still here! Of course! The system itself was the exact outside force that had paralyzed everything here—even me. Unfortunately, metaphorically “to capture the spirit of things” had taken on literal meanings here. I had finally reached the real Yusian control center, and it turned out to be an entire, but immaterial, cosmic world! A perfect reflection of the visible polyplanet system so that those living worlds could be watched and controlled from here and, if necessary, restrained when disaster threatened: quakes, restraining hurricanes, floods, volcanic eruptions—maybe even people.

  The agonizing tension I had felt abruptly subsided and disappeared. Why struggle, since there was no escape? Without the slightest hope of success, why waste my energy? There was no need, no point. So I began to relax. Or perhaps I was extinguished? It didn’t matter. I had been given incredible, imperishable senses. The need to grow and develop, the categorical imperative to evolve in some material way, no longer applied to me. I felt that I had become a part of something eternal, harmonious, stable, and whole. Deep inside, I knew I never wanted to leave. How could I, just like that, force myself to go back somewhere and stand up for—what?

  Those insane, fatal passions? The destroying, even ravenous, aggression? The cruelty, killings, terrorism, wars, mass graves, mass suicides, and in general, the dreadful, eternal insecurity of human life—is that what I was defending! Is this what my consciousness was telling me? Isn’t our place really here? Aren’t we potential disasters that need to be constantly checked and controlled? Yes. That was exactly the kind of help we needed, to be fiercely protected—against our will, our instincts, our being—until in the end, all the demons in us have been crushed forever. So that we can survive—although it wouldn’t be “us” anymore. Along with those demons, other things will also be crushed forever: our spontaneity, courage, faith, self-sacrifice—our human compassion. Our capacity for love.

  Oh, no, no, Yusians! The price is too high, so exorbitant that no matter where I am and how you paralyze me and try to extinguish this fire in my soul, I’ll always answer you with a single syllable: No!

  “No!” the man repeated, who in spite of everything had stayed there too, in the dimension of Eyrenean reality. “No, no, no” was his every breath, even as the invisible psychoconstruct began to absorb and grind away his negation.

  But the hand holding the detonator had already moved. The fingers found the little buttons under the tape, pressed them with slow, mechanical consistency. When each level of protection had been removed, this very hand squeezed the detonator hard—and its thumb activated the program.

  The man there started to get up: I, with my weak, vulnerable, real body, was rising out of the “bed” gurgling greasily like slime in a swamp, its substances again radiating the lullaby impulses programmed into them. To no avail, of course. Now Elia’s life depended on me. And I knew what I had to do. My human spirit and masculine instincts were becoming inaccessible to them. All future attempts to extinguish or absorb me would be unsuccessful. I stood upright, raised the hand holding the detonator, holding hidden death, and prepared myself for a formal declaration.

  “I have activated the detonator sequence for an eight-kiloton Adler explosive device, located in the underground clinic and research facility on the Eyrena base, where a young member of the Yusian race is now being held hostage. The neutrino remote detonator and the device operate on a closed circuit that you cannot interrupt or override. Program number nine, Autocontrol, is running: an automatic control sequence keyed exclusively to the registered operator who has activated it. That means that it will detonate automatically the instant the device is no longer in direct contact with my hand, and it will detonate at any abnormality in my brain activity and my neurological reactions due to death, loss of consciousness, hypnotic or medication dependence, or other similar conditions.

  It is under these circumstances that I offer you the following ultimatum. I will release the young Yusian hostage only if it is fully and irrevocably accepted and fulfilled.

  You must for all time accept a final refusal of contact through convergence of human and Yusian civilizations. That acceptance must be evidenced immediately by fulfilling the following concrete measures:

  First, you will deactivate the four settlements for the colonists, including pseudo-Earth substances, hybrid plants, and Earth organisms under Yusian management.

  Second, you will destroy all essiko robots on Earth, as well as all subsidiary holdings of essiko located there.

  Third, you
will establish a direct hypercommunication link between Eyrena base and Earth, by means of which we can and will confirm that all terms have been obeyed, before the Yusian hostage will be released.

  Warning: the explosive devices can only be neutralized by me and only after personal bodily identification has been confirmed. Moreover, any attempt to breach the underground facility will automatically detonate the explosives.

  This is the end of the ultimatum.”

  I dropped my arm and, smiling maliciously, couldn’t help adding a few more words beyond my official demands, “For all the Chuks that might be listening, you can be sure that this little machine of ours functions faultlessly. There is nothing you can do to stop it. So obey the ultimatum. And hurry!”

  Chapter 42

  The Eyrenean “night” gave way to the yellow glare of Ridon pouring through the windows. The whole house heaved spasmodically, but the windows didn’t even rattle. The pseudo-Earth materials still preserved the illusion of daily human life with all its seeming solidity. The empty bed gaped at me like some underfed animal and then finally gave something like a sigh and settled primly under a light-blue sheet without a hint of a wrinkle.

  Obviously my ultimatum hadn’t been accepted. I wasn’t surprised. I knew the outcome was going to be difficult and also very uncertain—not only for me. I slowly lowered my eyes to the detonator in my hand. I had hoped that I would be able to end all this without resorting to the explosives, to reach my goals by only bluffing. But that hadn’t happened. So Elia really had supported me in her possibly fatal decision. The thought of her trapped there had given me the strength to return here unchanged, although the contact was already established and I was losing touch with my human self. Now the radical actions we had both taken proved worth the risk, for another reason we hadn’t considered. Instead of being put under control there, I had in fact ensured myself free access to the Yusian control center.