Incredible. In all her time interacting with different Ex-Sol colonies, Carolyn had never encountered one that communicated in this fashion. Neuro-interactive technology was not unknown to the UHT—plenty of people employed wearable devices like the one Sero had used to interface with the shipboard computers. But, a whole colony that communicated this way instead of with language? That was something entirely new and unique. It might explain why the 217s were resistant to direct interactions with human civilization. They no longer communicated the way Earth humans did.
“Okay… Okay. I think I’m getting the hang of it. Yes, they all share each other’s thoughts directly with these devices. They don’t bother with spoken language anymore. They’re… They are upset about something… Something that we did. No wait. Something we intend to do.” Sero’s brow furrowed as he tried to interpret the 217s’ thoughts. “We’re deceiving them… I think that is the message. They want to know where we come from.”
“We’re from the United Human Territories. They should know that, they replied to the probe. You’re the alien arbitrator they requested.” Carolyn’s amazement was turning quickly to frustration.
“I… I don’t think I’m alien enough for their liking. And that we are imposters. They think we’re trying to trick them somehow. They say… They say that all humans are gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean gone? I’m right here. I’m human.”
“They say they did not receive any communications from humanity for centuries. It seems…they became convinced that humanity was extinct on Earth. They say all…standard humans…died out. That’s why no one came looking for them. Earth died and the colonies were left to themselves.”
“I see. They’re not the first to think that—many of the Ex-Sol colonies became convinced that Earth had met with disaster at one point. The colonists often need to think that because it is better than feeling abandoned. The truth is, it just wasn’t practical to send follow-up generation ships. After the first wave, the generation ships of the Stellar Migration fell out of favor as there was no return on investment. The missions were all designed to be self-sufficient anyway, so Earth decided to leave them to their own devices. UHT saw no point in attempting a second wave. So there were no further attempts to colonize extra-solar planets until the development of wormhole travel.”
Sero nodded his understanding. The room was quiet for another moment.
“No. They don’t believe that. They think humanity is dead. They say the fact that we are both…that we are both colonists proves that this is true. They insist that standard humans are extinct and the Solar System must be dead.”
“Can they understand me?” Carolyn had to get involved.
“Um…yes, they can, by reading my thoughts as I hear what you are saying.”
“You have got to believe us. You were not abandoned. Your ancestors were selected for the colonization mission because they were skilled and intelligent and resourceful. Humanity sent them on this mission because they knew that they had what it took to survive. They were capable of going it on their own, of building a new world. But now we have a technology that allows all those disparate parts of humanity to interact again. To pool resources, exchange knowledge. The UHT only wants to give you the opportunity to share what your people have learned with the greater collective and to benefit from its knowledge in return.”
“Uh, Carolyn…” Sero interrupted. “I don’t think they are open to your message of good will. They seem pretty convinced of what they think to be true and they’re not really interested in what we have to say. They seem to think that we represent some kind of…unholy alliance of colonies who want to take control of 217’s resources.”
“Why would they think that?” She knew this was going to be challenging but this was getting ridiculous.
“Apparently…that’s what they would do if they had the wormhole technology.”
Suddenly, Carolyn saw movement from the corner of her eye. The two seemingly dormant colonists had leapt into action. They pulled batons from their belts and rushed at Sero. One struck him in the back of the head while the other landed a hit to his abdomen.
“No!” Carolyn screamed as she leapt from her perch on the bench and made it to Sero in two strides. He collapsed on the ground at her feet just as she reached him. One of the colonists darted around her, moving much more gracefully in his native gravity than she could manage. He struck her sharply in the center of her spine, his baton delivering a crippling shock. Carolyn’s limbs seized and she found herself on the ground next to Sero. Her head swam with searing pain and confusion. Then her vision went black.
Chapter 4
Carolyn awoke in a small, dimly lit cell. Sero was sitting against one wall.
“Good. You’re awake.” He obviously had been waiting for her to recover from the surprise attack.
An agonizing pain stabbed through her head when she tried to stand. She stumbled, then caught herself and eased back to the floor. Too soon.
“Whoa, take it easy. No hurry.” Sero comforted her. “I’ve been up for a few hours and no one has come by to check on us.” He offered her a hand. She put more weight on him than she intended as he helped her up. It did not seem to bother him, though.
“Where are we now?”
“A prison cell as far as I can tell. A very ‘special’ one.” The intensity of his voice was startling.
“What do you mean?”
He pointed across the room. Carolyn realized it was very narrow and seemed to funnel toward a door on the far end.
“Did you try the door yet?”
“Oh no, Carolyn. I hadn’t thought of that. What would we ever do without that brilliant mind of yours?” She glared at him, then looked back to the door. She could at least try the handle. Even if it was locked, there was no harm in… no harm in… Carolyn stopped. What was I doing again? She seemed to have forgotten.
“Alright Carolyn,” she heard a voice say from what seemed a great distance. “Come on back.” The voice was beckoning her. She’d better go back. Why was she even here? Carolyn turned slowly and shuffled toward the voice.
As she walked back to the wall, Sero’s form solidified again in her mind: Sero, the Dextronin who was assigned to be her arbitrator. How had she forgotten him?
“Neat trick, huh?” Sero had obviously tried to walk down the funnel too. “I tried for the door three times before I realized what was happening.”
“What did just happen?”
“They’re projecting some kind of psychoactive field between our ‘cell’ and the door. It seems to cause cognitive blunting. Makes for a fun prison, huh? Try to escape, and you end up shuffling around the field trying to remember what you were just doing till you stumble back into the cell.”
“What do they want from us?” She was having a hard time keeping the anxiety from her voice.
“Information, I assume. They seem convinced that we’re the first wave of an invasion by another colony. From what I gleaned when I was in communication with them before, their existence has always been one of hardship. They struggled getting to this system on the generation ship. Then they landed on this rocky, unforgiving world and found it lacking in the mineral and chemical resources that they needed.”
“The whole system was less than ideal for colonization. I believe that most humans would call it ‘drawing the short straw’? I think that’s how they ended up using these neural patches to communicate. The extreme conditions they found themselves in meant they needed to operate as a unit. There wasn’t room for dissent. They needed to act with one mind.”
Carolyn had a moment of wonder at the information he was privy to, then realized he was still wearing the neural patch. “They seem to assume that all other colonies must have experienced the same hardship that they have. Therefore, all other Ex-Sol colonies would covet the resources that the 217s have managed to scrounge together.”
“How are we going to convince them that we’re not trying to invade?”
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p; “I don’t know, but we better do it soon. They seemed like they were ready to take drastic action to get information from us. They are convinced we are spies at the very least.”
“Can’t they just read your mind and know that’s not true?”
“The patches allow for the sharing of knowledge, but it would seem that they cannot compel action with them or read if the wearer is trying to hide something. I fear they could sense I was trying to withhold information in the initial meeting and they assume that there is a nefarious reason for that. Of course I’m withholding information—I’m here on business negotiations after all. And I would automatically be protective of my personal matters. But I get the sense that they don’t have personal lives like you or I would. They share every thought or feeling that enters their minds. Thus they cannot conceive of a reason to hide.”
Carolyn didn’t have a solution to this dilemma. She was not used to not having solutions and she felt vulnerable in that realization. How would they ever be able to convince people who share everything that they were not trying to hide anything of import from them?
“What if we did disclose everything with them? Tell them even our darkest personal secrets? Wouldn’t that clear the supposed ‘block’? Would they believe that we weren’t invaders then?” The desperate idea made Carolyn’s skin crawl. The thought of strangers poking through her thoughts, peeking into every well-guarded corner made her shiver. But she couldn’t think of any better way to get the 217s to trust them.
“It might,” Sero agreed. “But…” His eyes lingered on her for a moment.
“What?”
“Well,” he said, sheepishly, “in the interest of full disclosure… I was wondering if you would explain why they seem convinced that you are a colonist and not a ‘standard’ human.”
Carolyn sighed. It was bound to come up eventually. Any time she worked with someone for an extended period of time they always became curious about her physical appearance, about her size. In the quest for a perfect society, technology had been developed to allow people to change themselves to a certain ideal and in a world of perfect bodies, Carolyn stood out. Of course, no one ever directly asked, “Hey, why are you fat in an age of medical nanotechnology?” Still, they always found a way to ask.
“Because I’m not a standard human.” Might as well be blunt. “And, yes that is the cause of my appearance. Until about a century ago, my family lived on a dense, cold world. Stout bodies that stored fat were advantageous for us. Because of our different physical appearance, integration into the UHT was difficult. Humans these days use nanotechnology to make themselves into what they see as beautiful, the perfect human form. Even many of my colony’s people eventually gave in and used the technology to alter their appearance.”
“I just can’t bring myself to do it. It would be a vain act and it would spit in the face of all my ancestors who fought for survival on that colony so that I could be alive today. So, no, I’m not an ideal beauty and I never will be. I’ve dealt with it, now everyone else has to.” She couldn’t keep the passion from her voice. Sero could tell this was a well-worn speech.
Sero smiled kindly and with a smirk surprised her with a suggestive “Don’t sell yourself short.”
“What do you mean?” She wasn’t used to not being argued with on this subject, not being told the benefits of “perfecting” what you were given.
He quickly wiped the smile off his face. She thought she saw a bit of discomfort as his face reddened ever so slightly. “Uh, nothing. Anyway, I’m an alien living on Earth. I think I have a decent idea of what you mean. I’ve had plenty of nanotech peddlers try to sell me a treatment to reduce my trap muscles, make me more human in appearance, but I’ve turned them all down. I’m a Dextronin and damn it, I’m going to look like one.”
They both shared a much needed laugh, the tension of the last few hours breaking if only for that moment.
Taking advantage of the new found comfort level, Carolyn took a chance. “Alright, Mr. Full-Disclosure. It’s your turn. Why are you living on Earth?”
The subject was obviously uncomfortable for Sero. He hesitated, lowering his head then raising it to look straight into her eyes. It was disarming. “Education…originally. DexTech Corporation funded a scholarship for me to study on Mercury. My degree was to be in mechanical engineering with a specialty in wormhole transit vessels. I was only supposed to spend a couple years in the Solar System, then I’d be hired on at DexTech.”
“Fate had other plans. I ended up falling in love with a girl in my program. She and I were…well, we were good together. In a vacuum anyway. But other people have a way of ruining a good thing, don’t they? A group of students took offence at the idea of one of their ‘own’, a human, dating an alien. The fact that we’re genetically compatible apparently counts for nothing with too many people even after all these years.” Anger and sadness mingled in his tone.
“One day, a group of them jumped me, stripped me and threw me out an airlock. That’s how lynching is done these days, I’m sure you’ve heard. I lay naked on Mercury’s surface for a full two minutes before they did me the courtesy, as they called it, of sending a service drone to fetch me.”
“I spent the next week in a medical ward supposedly recovering, but I got more than I bargained for. A nurse injected me with nanotech… Apparently he believed he was doing me a favor. Hardest decision I ever had to make was telling the doctor to reverse it. Part of me knew if I hadn’t looked the way I did, I wouldn’t have ended humiliated and half-dead. And, I’m sure you’ve guessed, the girl left me. Someone had apparently written the word ‘bestiality lovers’ on her family’s front door. It was the last straw.”
“That’s awful.” It was all Carolyn could think to say. “After all that, why did you stay in the Solar System?”
“I wanted to leave. I dropped out of the program. DexTech cut me off. They wanted to maintain good relations with human businesses, so they cast me as a troublemaker who was asking for it. Without their funding, I couldn’t afford to return to my system. But I couldn’t stay on Mercury either.”
“So you went to Earth? Why would you move to your attackers’ home world of all places?”
“It may be humanity’s home world, but it has the least dense population in the system now. And on Earth, people aren’t confined to stations or colonies. They can spread out, avoid each other if they want to. I was able to seclude myself a bit.”
“I see… Sorry if I am prying.”
“No problem. Like you said, full-disclosure.” She hoped he meant that. Somehow it really mattered to her that he thought well of her.
Chapter 5
The next few days passed in something of a blur. They weren’t aware of the passage of time, having no way to mark the days. Their captors had taken all of their personal tech. Sero had ripped the neural patch from his temple finally, in an attempt to prevent them from delving into his thoughts. But the guards would enter the room at random intervals, force one back on his temple and attempt to extract information of the “invasion”. He defiantly tore it off each time the colonists left the room, but they would reapply it when they returned.
The colonists concluded each interrogation by flooding the whole room with the psychoactive field. It effectively kept Sero and Carolyn disoriented. Carolyn began tearing small slits into the edge of her uniform top in an attempt to track the time, counting the number of times the colonists paid them a visit. At least it was something.
The colonists always wore the same uniforms and helmets and they always entered the room in groups of three. On one occasion, Carolyn tried to address the colonists while they were reading Sero’s thoughts. They struck her with a baton and left her unconscious on the floor. She woke to Sero cradling her head with one hand and cleaning her burned arm with his other, using fabric torn from his own shirt.
The marks on her uniform began to add up. Carolyn roughly calculated 15 days had already passed. Of course, the 217 colonists were wrong. Humani
ty was not dead, but instead had thrived, built a vast interstellar civilization.
UHT would come looking for them when they failed to report back at the scheduled time. Unless… It occurred to Carolyn that the 217s might have collapsed the wormhole. It wouldn’t take much to destabilize their end. A large blast right inside the event horizon would do the trick. No, don’t get ahead of yourself. There was no point worrying about that until they were out of this cell. Carolyn started thinking of better days, of what she would do first when she was free…
Carolyn’s eyes snapped open as she thought she heard someone cry out. Realizing it was her own voice, she realized she had drifted off. With the colonists returning every few hours it had been difficult to get any meaningful sleep, but she suddenly felt replenished. She must have gotten at least a few hours. She realized with a start that she had her arms wrapped around someone.
Sero? Of course it is Sero. Who else? He was lying next to her, his head just below hers, his short hair tickling her chin. Another sensation crept into her consciousness—she could feel their naked skin pressed together. She tried to move ever so slowly, to separate herself from Sero, but she her arm was pinned underneath him and she could not do so without moving him.
Carolyn braced herself and lifted up on his body slightly as she pulled her arm back and out. Sero began to stir. She froze, but it was too late. He stretched languidly and let out a yawn. Then their situation dawned on him too.
“Whoa.” He scooted back, pushing himself up into a seated position. “Um… Good morning?”
Carolyn could feel her cheeks blush. “Yeah…um, good morning.”
“So…” Sero was desperately searching for something to say. What was appropriate in this situation? What do you say when you aren’t sure what happened? “I don’t really know… I’m not sure what…”
Romance: Alien Romance: Simply Aliens: A Ten Book Alien Romance Collection (Paranormal Scifi Interracial Romance) (Fantasy New Adult Alpha Short Stories) Page 25
