H.A.L.F.: ORIGINS

by Natalie Wright

  “So long as they keep finding new sources of meat to eat.” Tex’s voice was filled with the bile he felt whenever he thought about one of those nasty creatures ripping into any of the people he cared about. He’d even hate to see Commander Sturgis taken down in such a manner. If anyone was going to end her, it should be him.

  Cynothian’s smile vanished. “We recognized our mistake nearly instantly. The original species had an inherent predatory nature that was quite ingrained. Though we counseled and coached the early M’Uktah away from eating flesh and the hunter society, our lessons never seemed to last long. No matter how advanced their technology became, they persisted in their desire for the hunt.”

  The pyramid walls were filled with images of huge, two-legged beings with long, black hair flowing down their backs ripping into the throat of four-legged gazelle-like creatures. The pictures shifted and the predators now wore biomechanical armor with fearsome helmets complete with razor-sharp teeth. A M’Uktah warrior pounced on a small, two-legged humanoid running through a jungle of green leaves and vines. The humanoid being was not a human. Its face was far wider, its nose shorter and its skin was a greenish color. Its mouth was open in a scream, its eyes wide with terror as the M’Uktah used its mechanical claws to rip into the being’s chest.

  Tex’s stomach roiled in disgust at the images of carnage. “You just left them to their own devices?”

  “You judge us harshly. Perhaps it is no comfort to you that we have judged ourselves for this error as well. The Ulv were not ready to receive the gifts we brought to them. Gifts of advanced evolution and culture and knowledge. They have used it to engender great fear and suffering on the rest of our children.”

  The admission did little to improve Tex’s opinion of these cosmic tinkerers. “You mean to say that these creatures have destroyed your so-called evolved species on other planets?” He shook with anger. “You have to stop them. If you shut down their ability to use the galactic highway, you can prevent them from taking more lives on Earth.”

  Before Tex could speak again, the images blurred and swirled across the walls of the pyramid. As they slowed, he recognized the white and blue planet he called home.

  He was shown images of a species that resembled modern chimpanzees. But the creatures were even smaller with head and body proportions that more closely resembled modern humans.

  “We found them living in tight groups with an even more sophisticated social structure than the Ulv of Uktah. They had begun to think creatively. They made tools, mixed paints and carried on a form of education one generation to the next through painting onto rocks. When we found your planet, what you call Earth, we believed we had at last found the perfect species to receive the gifts we had to bestow.”

  Tex watched as people from Cynothian’s species, the Elosians, worked in what appeared to be a lab. They wore silvery tunics made of whisper thin material that barely skimmed their bodies and fell to nearly the floor. Their heads too were covered in elegant, complexly wrapped head coverings that looked a bit like turbans but without the bulk.

  Mechanized arms injected what looked like baths of gel auger with pink-tinted material. In another area Elosians inspected several rows of half-shell shaped glass containers filled with a viscous liquid. Inside were tiny fetuses, no more than four inches long. The fetuses looked nearly human.

  The sight reminded Tex of the jars filled with preserved specimens of A.H.D.N.A.’s failed attempts at creating a H.A.L.F. The ones before me. It also called to mind the row upon row of Conexus clones that the Regina had shown him. Bile rose in his throat. His head spun.

  He wanted to lean on something. He longed for a cool drink of water.

  If Cynothian noticed Tex’s unease with the knowledge that an alien hand had augmented human evolution, he showed no sign of it. The projected scene continued and showed the results of Elosian genetic tinkering. The creatures they created walked more upright than a Chimpanzee or other apes and lost much of their hair. Their foreheads became narrower but their heads grew larger. Finally they looked like a perfect mix between the chimpanzee cousin and the representative of the Elosians that stood before him now.

  And as on Uktah, Tex was shown the evolution of their society too from small family groups to tribes to villages and finally to great cities of stone. There were even images of Elosians walking among the people of Earth in a city that must have been in Egypt. They talked freely with the humans who bowed down to them in the streets.

  “How long did you visit Earth?”

  “We first came to know your planet well over two-hundred thousand Earth years ago.”

  Tex nearly choked on his own spit. It was a time period impossible for him to truly grasp.

  “We seeded the population with our DNA then left and waited. By around 50,000 years ago, humans had made great strides. We visited more frequently then and guided your species toward the development of advanced mathematics and political structure, architecture and rudimentary medicine.”

  “You were there when the pyramids were built. That’s why I could use it to come here.”

  “Yes. We did not build the structure. Humans did that. But we guided them on how to create such a monumental machine.”

  “Why did they build it?”

  Cynothian turned his eyes to Tex. “So that they could come home.”

  He said it without the least bit of sarcasm. “Young star child, it was our hope that there would be many before you that would visit their ancestors here. We guided the construction of similar structures on all of the planets we seeded. All were to be conduits to align with Elosia allowing anyone to enter the quanta and come home.”

  “But I’m the first?”

  “And only.” Cynothian’s face wore a look of utter despair. “It is a sadness that we have had to bear for millennia. All of our machinations for longevity – for immortality –all for naught when our first child eats the others and our last child is bent on annihilating itself.”

  The pictures vanished. The room was dark and quiet and still. There was only the steady beating of Tex’s heart and the low, insistent thrum of the Elosian machine. Or is the vibration made by their very consciousness?

  Cynothian sighed. “You expect answers from the great architects. You wish for us to smote the M’Uktah and fight your battle for you.” He glided closer to Tex so that they were now only a few feet apart. Up close, Tex saw that Cynothian was less corporal than he appeared from a distance. His image wavered.

  “You came to a throne room but the throne is empty, son. The gods you seek—and the answers too—reside within you, not here on a dying planet.”

  Tex’s patience with the galaxy’s first mad scientists was as dried up and blown to the wind as the sands whipping against the pyramids exterior walls. Rage welled up within him. It started low in his belly and rose to his chest and finally outward in a scream so loud and ear splitting that it may have knocked Cynothian over if he had in fact been corporeal. Tex’s anger-filled shout nearly knocked him to his knees. He shook with fury, his eyes bulged and a trickle of spittle hung at the corner of his mouth. His frustration, fatigue, fear and hunger reduced him to a base animal, eager to strike down the figure that stood before him.

  He lashed out like an animal, his more elegant telepathic weapon all but forgotten in a moment of rage. His hand flew to Cynothian’s neck, intent on squeezing the life out of the man that towered over him like a giant.

  But Tex’s hands grasped only air. The image of Cynothian vanished in an instant and Tex fell to his hands and knees.

  Cynothian had teleported himself several feet away and behind Tex. Cynothian coolly, calmly and silently watched Tex’s rage-filled tantrum.

  Tex’s breath was ragged and his head ached. He finally spoke in halted breaths through gritted teeth. “They spent valuable resources—put all their chips on one number. Me. Their only hope.” He wiped sweat from his forehead and massaged his temples. “And you stand there and tell me that there’s nothing I
can do. That I have to watch them all die?”

  Cynothian crossed his arms over his chest. “We said no such thing. You can put an end to the M’Uktah’s plans for invasion and thus end the slaughter.”

  Tex closed his eyes and continued to rub. “When you say ‘you’, do you mean plural ‘you’ as in the people of Earth or do you mean ‘you’ as in me, Tex?”

  Cynothian moved even closer and he touched his fingertip to Tex’s chest. Tex had not expected to feel anything. Cynothian was not real after all. But he was startled by the sensation of warmth that filled his chest. It tingled pleasantly.

  “You, Bodaway. You are the key.”

  Cynothian’s touch had calmed his racing heart but his mind was still ragged with anger, fear and worry for Erika and the others he cared about back on Earth. “But how?” His voice cracked.

  Cynothian removed his hand and Tex was instantly colder and wished for the warmth of his touch to return.

  “By using the same power that brought you here.”

  Tex shook his head. “I still don’t see. I want to understand but I just—”

  Cynothian put a hand to either side of Tex’s head, looked down into his eyes and said simply, “Know this.”

  The tingly warmth that had filled his chest now filled his skull. His eyes relaxed and his brow uncreased. His face no longer tensed and he had the sensation of floating. He thought his eyes were open and he knew he wasn’t dreaming, but he was surrounded by golden light. When he looked down at himself, he was shocked to see that there was no himself to look at. Tex’s body was gone but it did not cause him fear or anxiety. He was simply Bodaway and on some level he knew that he was now in his natural form and the one he would return to someday.

  And in the instant of his acceptance of that truth, he also became aware of the Elosians. He was with them. And not just Cynothian but all of them. They were one collective mind yet many. They spoke to him with one voice and he understood them easily.

  He knew instantly what he must do. He was overwhelmed with the shared anguish this required action caused the Elosians. But in that realm of pure thought they assured him that they accepted the actions he would take.

  As he comprehended the method of preventing the M’Uktah’s success, he also understood a risk to himself. This will not be easy.

  “It is a choice, Bodaway. And your choice alone to make.”

  In that place of comfort and peace, he did not grapple with the decision. Knowledge flowed to him and he allowed it and catalogued it.

  Within the bundle of information fed directly to his mind by a method he did not comprehend, there was a bit that stood out. He was aware of the home planet of the M’Uktah. In his mind’s eye, he hovered over an impressive hall built of stone where an old man with hairy knuckles sat on a large, ornately carved wooden seat. A female M’Uktah in a richly embroidered black robe stood, her bright yellow-orange eyes fixed on the old man as she spoke, her arms gesturing wide.

  Tex did not know all that was said but he knew that the old man in the wooden throne liked it not. Other men seated at the long table rapped small stones on the table and howled their support of whatever the woman had said. He could not decipher their language but one word kept being repeated. U’Vol.

  It was a familiar name. But in that place and time of ethereal dream, he was not sure where he had heard the name before. It seemed important and he wanted to hear more of what the woman with the blazing yellow-orange eyes said and know what happened next.

  But his attention was pulled away from that place. He was again in the pyramid in his Tex body. He should have rejoiced but it somehow felt like a prison, shackled inside a lumbering meat sack.

  His vision was bleary and his head full of cobwebs. He blinked to clear his sight and he searched the room. Cynothian was gone. The pyramid was brighter and grew lighter with each second until he wanted to shelter his eyes from the sun.

  A voice boomed, its bass resonating within him. “Wake and remember.”

  He did not need to be told that he was alone again. The insistent thrum that he had felt was gone. It had comforted him though he hadn’t realized how much that steady, low hum in his chest had tethered him until it was no longer there.

  Within the knowledge imparted to him by the Elosians was a methodology for his return trip. The very machine in which he stood was a vast harmonic resonance chamber. His thought could activate it. He saw it now. On Earth he had needed the waves generated by the radio telescopes but here he had no such need.

  He looked around the kingdom of the gods and found it was nothing more than an empty glass room. He stood in the center of the emptiness and activated the wave resonance machine. The photons collected by the faceted glass focused to the point at the very top of the pyramid and fed down into him and through him. The entire pyramid glowed and he too shimmered with the light as it poured into him. He was hot beyond anything he had experienced before, his skin instantly wet. He wanted to rip the suit off and throw himself in a river of ice water.

  He yelled out from the pain but he didn’t move out of the light. That focused beam of pure energy was his ticket back to Earth. His only way to see Erika again. His eyes burned and even with them closed tightly, the sunlight burned through his lids. It took every ounce of willpower he had not to run back through the maze of corridors out of the pyramid and away from the burning light, but he somehow forced himself to remain planted.

  His mind was fixed on what he had to do, despite the physical pain of entering the stream of particles on which he would be carried home. In an instant he felt cool air on his skin and shivered, his face cold from the evaporation of the tears from his cheeks.

  39

  ErikA

  As Erika suspected, General Hays didn’t allow her peace for long after she was attacked by the M’Uktah creature. She was still in the makeshift infirmary on the ground floor of the western-most building of the VLA getting the deepest gash in her back stitched up when he stormed in. She lay on her side and winced as the med tech thrust a needle into her skin and worked surgical thread through.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t have any topical anesthesia. We aren’t really prepared for this here.”

  General Hays didn’t seem to notice that she lay there in only a bra. He pulled a stool on wheels over to the table where she lay. “What the hell happened out there?”

  His voice was still gruff but Erika figured that was just how the guy sounded. He didn’t seem mad.

  Erika had planned to withhold her story until she got assurances that the General would leave the array aligned for Tex. But the details of the attack spilled out of her. It was like she had need to tell it. She shivered with cold and her lip trembled as she spoke.

  The general listened with rapt attention. His eyes never left hers. When she got to the part about tasing the alien, he asked her to repeat what she’d seen twice.

  When her story was finished, Erika asked, “Will it live?”

  The general’s eyes narrowed and he regarded her for a minute. “Probably. The suckers are damned near invincible. Three gunshot wounds—and good, clean shots mind you—and the only reason the thing went down was because your last bullet penetrated into the heart.”

  The med tech tied off the stitches and cut the thread. “You need to leave those in for seven to ten days.” He put a gauze bandage over the wound then handed her shirt back. “The back of this is ripped to shreds but at least it will keep you warm until you get back to your room.”

  Neither man looked the other way while she dressed. They didn’t gawk at her but it was still awkward. It gave her a small hint at how Tex had been treated all those years living in A.H.D.N.A.

  The general rose from the stool. “You should get some sleep. But don’t go anywhere. I may have more questions for you tomorrow.” He turned to leave.

  “General Hays—” Erika’s voice came out high and shrill. “You need to keep those telescopes aligned just as they are. We need Tex.”

&n
bsp; He stopped to listen but kept his face averted from her. “I never authorized the dishes to be aligned in that configuration in the first place.”

  Erika held up her sweatshirt. The back was a tatter. She pulled it on over her head anyway. “What’s done is done. But you know as well as I do, if that gate remains open and more of those things some through—Well, just imagine thousands of those beasts. We don’t have enough Tasers, sir.”

  He looked back at her and she though there was the smallest hint of a smile playing at his eyes. “You were brave out there. You’d make a fine soldier.”

  Erika had never wanted to be a soldier. Heck, she didn’t even kill spiders or scorpions that got into the house. She had a catch and release policy. Her experience with guns, blood and death made her want it even less.

  She shoved her hands in the fleecy front pocket of her sweatshirt and moved toward the general. He was probably close to six-foot-three and stood high above her. “I don’t think you’d want me in your ranks, general. I’ve got authority issues.”

  He gave her a wry smile. “The best of us always do.” He was through the door in two strides. As he marched down the hallway he called over his shoulder, “You’ve bought yourself twenty-four hours to get him back, Miss Holt.”

  ____________________

  Aunt Dana and Ian fussed over her for nearly an hour before Erika literally shoved them out of her room claiming she was exhausted and needed sleep. It was partly true, but mainly her head ached and she wanted peace.

  She dug her last clean T-shirt out of her duffle and scrounged for a sweatshirt that hadn’t been shredded by the monster’s metal claws. The one she found didn’t pass the sniff test but she didn’t care. It was too cold to go without one.

  She slept for a few hours in her bed but woke drenched in sweat. She’d dreamed that Tex was calling to her from a swirling vortex but the general had shifted the position of the telescope array and Tex was stuck, unable to return home. In her dream, he called to her. “Erika!” She reached out to him but he got sucked away from her.