14. Izzy’s Last Thoughts
The big boom from high in the sky was like thunder, six year old Kate thought, but there weren’t even any clouds. It was followed a minute later by a crash like when cars wrecked on TV, but there weren’t any roads in the woods behind her house where the noise came from, so what could crash there? Curious, she walked through the forest towards the sound. It had come from not far away, she was sure. Her brother Johnny who was supposed to be watching her would be angry with her for leaving the yard, but that was just too bad.
Inside his badly damaged space/time transport craft, $%^& regained conciseness and began to assess status. When his life support and transport systems failed to respond to his mental inquiries coherently, and the extent of the damage to his biological body became clear, he marveled at his situation. He was experiencing a one-chance-in-a-billion anomaly, for multiple system failures must have occurred. His ship’s guidance system had failed, that much was obvious, allowing a collision with a flying object within the atmosphere of this planet. Even more improbable, fail-safe systems that should have in turn disintegrated him and his vessel in order to avoid planet contamination had also subsequently failed. Also he was dying.
Inside the house Johnny Warner decided to take a food break from his gaming. He thought that he had heard something earlier, a loud sound that had penetrated his sound deafening head-phones and distracted him just enough to result in his pre-mature death in the game he had been playing. It had been a disturbing experience. He decided that he would chill out, eat some brunch, and return to his gaming refreshed and more ready to take on the bastard space invaders of his video game. Downstairs in the family room he ate his peanut butter sandwich and drank his skim-milk, it crossed his mind that he should probably get together some food for his little sister Kate. But no, Brainiac Kate could take care of herself. She would come inside and feed herself when she was hungry. He had to get back to his games. When Mom got home she would make him do homework.
He turned on the TV to look for the weather forecast and happened upon a breaking local news story. An airplane landing at the local airport a short time ago lost an engine and nearly crashed, but it managed to land safely without any casualties. Not much of a story, Johnny concluded. Nothing important or exciting ever happened around here. Not a damn thing. He went back upstairs to his bedroom, closed himself inside, put on his earphones, and resumed his computer gaming. He was resolved to save the world from the evil space aliens.
As she approached the smoking, nasty smelling pile of twisted metal, Kate could sense the pain and despair of the helpless creature that was trapped inside. It was focused on getting to an object in the wreckage, a small glowing cylinder. How she knew all this she didn’t know. “I’ll help you,” she volunteered. It was the right thing to do.
Inside the smoldering wreckage, $%^& sensed the approach of the Earthling. Despite his own sorry condition, he couldn’t help feeling a sense of awe and wonder. The Earth life-form was essentially a collection of water and complex carbon-based living material, kludged together over billions of Earth years by a relentless process of random variation and natural selection. It had immense potential, more than it realized. Besides the single, unifying entity, billions of co-evolved smaller creatures lived within it symbiotically. There were similar instances of life throughout the universe, but this was one of the more interesting examples and was worthy of intense study. Hence this planet and this timeframe were frequently visited by several advanced life-forms such as his own. Frequent visitation increased the probability of interference and contamination, a possibility which was now coming to disastrous fruition.
Specifically, he was dying, and would soon lose control of his own symbiotes. When released to this world they would undoubtedly do incalculable harm to the local life-forms. There was only one way to save the life of Earth, and it required activation of an emergency communications device. But he couldn’t get to it. He couldn’t move at all, not while mortally injured and in the high gravity of Earth. He was dying. He had the time and ability only for a few last thoughts. He sensed that the human had crude telepathic abilities that could perhaps be exploited. He made some hard decisions that would minimize contamination.
“I’ll call you Izzy,” Kate decided, as she gently lifted the creature into her arms and carried it away from the wreckage. She couldn’t begin to pronounce its real name. The creature was immensely ugly, with six thin legs or arms that each ended in a dozen tiny fingers, six small eyes and a tiny, fish-like mouth, slimy, scaly skin, and a body segmented into three body parts and one disproportionally large head. Kate didn’t mind it being ugly. Johnny had action figures that were just as weird, and Kate liked the equally weird frogs and snakes and spiders that Johnny tried to scare her with. Besides, this creature was small; it was about the size of one of her larger dolls: less than half as tall as herself, if it were to stand upright on its rear set of short legs.
Izzy was better than a doll though, because he was smart and he talked with her. It was a funny way of talking; thoughts just entered her mind without her hearing them. But Izzy talked to her and she was soon talking back. She was glad to have someone to talk; Johnny was useless, and Mom and Dad were mostly gone. This wasn’t ‘stranger danger’ she decided, this was different and special. Besides, Izzy was colored like a rainbow, and she liked rainbows. His thoughts were sort of like rainbows too. They were fuzzy at first, but they rapidly got clearer and brighter. He was teaching her how they could think together, he told her; teaching her things about herself that she didn’t know.
Izzy gradually talked less and not as loud, and didn’t look good at all. His vibrant skin colors were slowly fading, and his fingers moved less. He was feeling cold, he told Kate. She wrapped Izzy in her little pink baby blanket and sat beside him as he lay on the grass of her back-yard. Inside her head, Izzy now repeated the same simple message to over and over: “return to the wreckage, find the small cylinder, push the red button.” Kate wanted to talk more about first grade, and Johnny, and that new TV show about cute puppies, but Izzy was stubborn and kept repeating the same thing.
Izzy was being annoying, like Johnny. He was very sick though, so she decided not to make an issue of it. The rainbow colors of his scaly skin seemed to be fading to a dull grey-brown, and the thoughts were becoming ever slower and weaker. Concerned, she tried to feed Izzy water and a chocolate candy bar, but Izzy rejected them. He only wanted her to find his precious cylinder. He wanted her to do it now.
Leaving Izzy wrapped in the blanket under her favorite tree, with the birds and squirrels to keep him company, Kate finally relented and returned to the woods and the nasty smelling wreckage. She used a stick to poke around and finally found the faintly glowing metallic cylinder that Izzy had pictured in her mind. It was about the size and shape of a small flashlight, and felt warm and heavy in her hand. She put the cylinder securely into her jeans pocket and ran through the woods to where she had left Izzy. Izzy would be pleased with her, she reasoned. So pleased that he would brighten up his colors and play with her like she wanted, and teach her more things about herself that she didn’t know.
When she saw him again she knew immediately that Izzy was dead. Mom and Dad had talked to her about being dead and she saw it happen to animals on the road and to both of her pet goldfish. Izzy’s rainbow colors were all gone, and he was still and silent, just like the goldfish. It wasn’t fair, she thought, as tears came to her eyes. She had at last found a friend and now he was gone already! Poor little Izzy. She would do right by him though. She covered his six sad little unmoving eyes with the blanket. Then she got her little plastic beach shovel from the garage and carried him deep into the forest, close to where the wreckage of his crushed space craft still smoldered. The soil was soft there in the forest, and full of bugs. There with difficulty she buried him in a shallow grave, still wrapped in her favorite blanket.
As she said some prayers over his gravesite, the soil over the shallow grave seemed to
shift a little. She would have stayed to watch but instead she ran away when she heard the helicopter coming. She didn’t think she had done anything wrong but you could never be sure what grownups would think about anything. Besides, this was definitely stranger-danger. She ran towards the house.
“Probably another false alarm,” Major Frank Adams predicted to his team, as the Marine helicopter approached the predicted position of the object that had allegedly collided with the airliner. “The pilot was making up that UFO business. It was birds again, I bet. We’ll find a big dead goose. A cooked goose, if we’re lucky.” His voice faded when he saw the smoke rising from the forest. They did a low pass, and infrared and visual cameras easily distinguished smoking wreckage the size of an automobile plus a few bits and pieces nearby, located hundreds of yards from any road or trail. “OK, not birds then. Too big to be engine parts from the airliner though. I bet it’s a human-built UAV. There’s kits for sale for them now that any idiot can buy.”
They landed in a nearby field and quickly hiked to the crash site. Besides himself there were four well-armed marines and the five-person tech team: three aeronautical engineers with special training in crash-site examination, and two biochemical-hazard science types dressed in hazard protection suits.
“Holy shits!” the Major exclaimed, when they got within sight of the wreckage. It was in banged-up pieces, but it didn’t look like any UAV he had ever seen or heard of. Following protocol, the tech folks began snapping photos and taking readings.
“There are increased radiation levels originating from the wreckage, but they aren’t high enough to worry about,” said a tech. “No chemical or biological contamination measured yet either.”
“That’s just peachy keen,” Adams responded. “But what the hell is that thing?”
“Not an aircraft like we know it, Frank.” answered Dr. Benson, the lead aeronautical engineer. “We see no wings or control surfaces, or anything that looks like jet or rocket propulsion structures. In other words, the design does not reflect use of an atmosphere for lift or control, and the means of propulsion are totally unknown.”
“Look at this,” said his tech aid. In her gloved hand she held up a foot-long metal part for Benson and Adams to see. On it writing was engraved, but it was unlike any writing they had ever seen. There were vague similarities to Russian and Tibetan perhaps, but that’s about all that Adams could say about it. Though an expert linguist, Adams couldn’t translate any of it.
“Code 4 then, I’m thinking,” announced Adams loudly. “What say the rest of you?”
“Aye,” each of the team called out in turn. “Hell yeah, sir,” Staff Sergeant Connors agreed, as he handed his radio to Major Adams and the Major made it official to headquarters. Within hours these woods would be crawling with containment forces and science personnel. Until then, his little team would need to cope with the situation as best they could.
He called local law enforcement and had them cordon off the immediate area. Possible bio-hazard from an aircraft accident; that was the story he gave, and that was the truth, as far as it went.
Nearby in a shallow gravesite, what had once been Izzy was in a state of reorganizing chaos. Bio and mechanical symbiotes were no longer working harmoniously to support a centralizing host. Instead, they refocused on their own survival. They began to assimilate each other and form new alliances and multi-unit structures. They quickly ingested Izzy’s remains, but needed more. They tasted the surrounding Earth soil and gained sustenance from it. The soil was swarming with carbon-based life and laced with mineral content that provided the energy and material needed for survival and growth, but they needed more to survive and grow. Roots formed. Nearby soil was quickly depleted of useful content. Locomotion was needed to seek further sustenance. Roots were quickly transformed into stronger appendages.
“I’ve got a bogie,” said Marine Corporal Davis into his radio. Davis had been exploring his assigned portion of the perimeter when he happened upon the strange sight. What looked a bit like several octopus tentacles were emerging from the ground nearby. He raised his automatic rifle to his shoulder and aimed it at the thing as he cautiously backed away from it. Foot after foot of several tentacles continued to emerge from the soil. They were glistening like metal and rainbow colored, unlike anything he had ever seen before. A career Marine that feared no man, Davis was spooked, big time.
“Describe it,” Adams ordered.
“Metallic looking tentacles or roots coming up from under the damn ground, sir, several of them. Multi-colored metal and thick as my arm and maybe ten feet long each. One of them just wrapped around a big tree.”
“We’ll be with you in a minute. Stay away from it. Observe and report what it does but take no action against it unless attacked.”
“It’s using the tree to pull itself out of the ground,” Davis continued. “The body is man-sized and glowing different colors, like the tentacles.” The body flattened itself around the tree trunk and seemed to be eating away at it, weakening it. “Oh shit!”
“Davis! Report what’s happening!” Adams insisted, between breaths.
“Had to dodge the falling tree, sir!” resumed Davis. “The tree is down and the tentacle thing is eating it and getting bigger. Oh no!”
Adams and Benson heard Davis discharge his automatic rifle at the thing. Davis turned to run but a tentacle caught up with his fleeing body. Death was nearly instantaneous; in moments the thing tore Davis to bits and absorbed his body, clothes, and equipment.
Adams and Benson arrived in time to see the last bits of Davis being consumed. The Major carried only an automatic pistol. He emptied it into the thing with no apparent effect except to alert the thing to his presence. A tentacle lifted away from where Johnson had been and pointed towards Adams. Adams turned to Benson to tell the man to retreat but Benson was already nearly out of sight and running away towards the helicopter.
Meanwhile Staff Sergeant Connors arrived with the flame thrower and attempted to incinerate the creature. The creature absorbed the burning napalm into itself and on flowing tentacle-legs rapidly followed the flame back to the napalm canister, which fortunately had been abandoned moments earlier by Connors.
“Retreat, retreat,” Adams ordered unnecessarily, as he and Connors fled towards a nearby house. The tentacle thing finished absorbing the napalm canister and broke into several man-sized segments that began to spread throughout the forest, consuming trees and soil as they grew larger and split again into yet more units. The sound was like a swarm of locusts plus a raging tornado that tore the forest to bits as it consumed it. One segment ran/slithered towards Adams and Connors, pausing only momentarily to absorb trees and the exploding hand-grenades thrown at it by Connors. It was clearly in pursuit of the fleeing marines, and it was growing larger again, into an elephant sized central mass with writhing metallic tentacles thirty feet in length, simmering with rainbow colors.
“Potential Code 5,” Adams screamed several times into his radio, as Connors stumbled and fell, spraining an ankle. The brass probably wouldn’t take his word for it though; they would want conformation before they launched tactical nuclear weapons. He and Connors limped into the backyard of the nearby house as the tentacle thing paused to consume a particularly large backyard tree. The pause might give him and Connors time to reach the house, not that it would do them any good. The thing chasing them would tear through the house like it was tissue paper, and probably eat it and everybody in the house like it was now eating the tree.
Suddenly an angry little girl came running towards them from the back door of the house. “That’s Izzy’s tree,” she shouted angrily, as she pulled a flashlight from her pocket and pointed it at the monster.
As Major Adams moved quickly towards the girl, intending to pick her up and run with her into the house, he was aware of the sudden silence. He looked back. The tentacle monster had stopped its relentless pursuit. Poised in the air only a few feet above the marines and the girl was a
huge tentacle that extended back to the creature. The tentacle and the rest of the creature were frozen like statues, as were the other segments of the creature that had been consuming the forest. They were no longer glistening with rainbow colors; instead they were all a dull, grey, metallic color.
“I remembered about pushing the red button, like Izzy said,” the girl told him. What she held was a flash-light sized cylinder, but it was obviously not a flashlight. She handed it to him and he examined it. It was a plain metal cylinder without any switches or buttons. Writing was etched onto one end of it; alien writing like the team had found at the wreckage.
“Tell me about Izzy,” the Major requested.
“Izzy was my friend from the wreck in the woods, but he died,” the girl replied. “That thing doesn’t work anymore,” the girl told him, as Adams again examined the cylinder. “Izzy said that it turns things off and calls for help. Then it turns itself off.”
“Help? Help from whom?”
The bright day suddenly darkened. A huge saucer-shaped spacecraft hovered silently above them. “Bloody hell!” Adams exclaimed. His burly sergeant dropped to his knees on the ground, too paralyzed with fear to even cry out. This is what the unit had trained for, but no training could begin to match the real thing.
“Don’t be scared,” the girl told them calmly. “It’s just Izzy’s friends, come to make things right. Then they’ll go away.”
A brilliant beam of light flashed and pulsed over them, and the tentacle thing faded away, along with the cylinder that Adams still held. More time passed; how much the Major couldn’t tell, but later timeline analysis put it at ten minutes. When he woke up he was lying in soft green grass beside a peacefully sleeping Staff Sergeant Connors. The girl kneeled next to him. Her name was Kate, he remembered, though he didn’t remember how he knew that.
“They’re gone for now,” she told him calmly, “but they said they might come back again someday. They like our planet but they aren’t allowed to live here.”
Frank Adams looked around, trying to make sense of what he saw. The trees, including the big one in the yard, looked healthy and untouched, as though the tentacle things had never happened. Tentacle things? What tentacle things? Had he daydreamed them? The tree was alright, but why wouldn’t it be? He couldn’t remember.
“They said that they’re terribly sorry about a man named Davis, but they couldn’t put him back. Does that make sense, Major Adams?” The girl was looking at him with her clear blue eyes. He couldn’t remember telling her his name or rank, or saying anything about Davis, but he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t really sure now about anything, including what he and Connors were doing napping in the backyard of a civilian residence populated by a civilian named Kate.
“Sure, Kate, I guess it does.” He looked at Conners. He seemed to be smiling in his sleep. “Wake up, Connors,” he said, as he poked the big man’s shoulder.
“What the hell?” Connors asked, as he sat up, winking and blinking. “Sir!” he added, when he saw Adams.
“Report mission status, Connors,” Adams commended, as he stood up.
The big sergeant stood up to stand at attention before the Major. “Status unknown, Sir. Mission? Sir, I don’t even know what day this is.”
Adams stared into the Staff Sergeant’s eyes sternly for a moment, then looked around the yard and studied the house and little girl. “Me either, Staff Sergeant.”
Dr. Benson and his assistants arrived. “We found nothing, Frank,” he announced. “Not a blasted thing, not even a dead goose. It looks like another false alarm after all.”
“OK,” Adams responded. Memories were trickling into his thoughts. “Airplane mishap, right? The pilot reported seeing something strange, but we found nothing unusual. Just your normal forest.” He turned his attention to Connors. “That sound about right, Staff Sergeant.”
“Yes sir,” agreed Connors. “Sounds about right, Sir. And it’s Tuesday.”
“Of course it is, Staff Sergeant. It’s been Tuesday all damn day!”
“Yes sir!”
“Are you guys alright?” Benson asked.
“Never felt better,” Adams responded. “Oh, and what about Davis?” There was something about Davis that he couldn’t quite remember, though his mind was racing to creatively fill in the details of what must have happened today.
“Davis?” Connors responded. He hadn’t seen Davis all day. “He didn’t make it to this mission.” Why was Adams asking about Davis?
“True enough, gentlemen,” agreed Benson. “Davis didn’t show up for duty.”
“We were short-handed then, but we still managed,” Adams concluded. That must be why he had thought to ask about Davis. Had the girl said something about Davis? No, that wouldn’t make any sense. “Connors, radio Code X to headquarters, and let’s get back to the chopper and back to base. I’m starving.”
“Yes sir,” Connors replied, as he walked out of the yard and made the radio call. Later the entire team would have difficulty reconstructing the mission and explaining inconsistencies with their earlier alarmist reports to headquarters, but the results remained conclusive. Nothing unusual happened or had been found. Davis remained missing, presumably AWOL.
Adams turned and saw that the little girl was still watching them leave. “Everything is alright, Kate,” he assured the her. “We found nothing to worry about. Thanks for talking with us.”
“I like talking with people,” she responded, as the Major turned to go. Especially since Izzy had shown her how to do it better. She was sad to see all of her visitors leave, especially Izzy’s friends in the big space ship. Izzy’s friends had talked with her briefly, before they left.
When the team reached the helicopter the military members found their weapons on-board and unused. They shrugged it off as another odd factor of an odd day, and didn’t worry about it. Major Adams had an especially difficult time explaining to his superiors why he had called for a Code 4 and a potential Code 5, when he didn’t even remember doing it. On the other hand, recordings of the incident were defective, such that there was no supporting physical evidence that the calls ever happened.
“Anything happen while I was gone?” Mom asked Johnny and Kate. As usual they were both waiting quietly in the kitchen for her when she got home. “I heard on the radio that there was some sort of airplane accident investigation going on or something.”
“Nope,” said Johnny. “Nothing ever happens around here.”
“I made some friends but they went away,” added Kate. “They showed me how to do things, though.” She stared at a spoon that had been laying on the table and it lifted a few inches off the table, floating in mid-air.
Johnny and Mom didn’t notice. Johnny was already on his way back to his room and his video games, and Mom was busy putting food from the grocery store into the refrigerator. They weren’t thinking of her, Kate noticed. Mom was thinking about what to make for dinner and Johnny was thinking about girls at school. Kate let the spoon float down to again rest on the table, then went to play outside in the yard again.
The yard and forest looked just the same to Kate, though over the next few days the other members of the family would remark that it had changed slightly. Trees or bushes or flowers seemed a little different to them. Kate smiled when they said that, because Izzy’s friends had explained to her that her memories were used to reconstruct the backyard. So the yard looked normal to her. To Kate everything was different in a different way. She could sense clearly the life around her, and feel the thoughts of squirrels, and birds, and her Mom and brother. She could sense that she was a part of it all. She could do this because Izzy had shown her how.
She could still even sense the complex but friendly thoughts of Izzy’s friends in the distance, as they sped away in their space-ship. They were saddened to have lost Izzy, but glad that he had made a friend. And they were especially grateful to her for pushing the red button for Izzy. Izzy was gone forever but he had given his last friend a great gif
t. He had shown her how to do things. There were other humans that could do things too, Izzy’s friends had explained. Humans were changing. Humans were becoming even more interesting, and they would return soon to watch it happen, and share more thoughts with humans like Kate.
At the edge of her new perceptions Kate could sense other humans that could do special things like she could. “Hello,” she thought loudly, and some of them said hello back. Kate smiled. She had a lot of new friends now, and would never be alone.
****
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