The Filter Trap

by Lorentz, A. L.

  The Japanese astronaut moved away, heading to the oxygen recycler controls, rejoining them after increasing the nitrogen content of the air in the station. They all naturally headed to the cupola, to spend their remaining moments looking out at the universe which had created them.

  “Here’s to dying doing what you love,” the German emoted.

  “I still wish we had some vodka,” the cosmonaut joked while choking back tears.

  The American laughed quietly and took his hand.

  The crew of the International Space Station took softer and softer breaths, the Sun’s warmth touching them through the glass one last time.

  Chapter 1

  “Lay down your rifles,” Amanda commanded the troops.

  “What!” the few terrified soldiers remaining in her care asked, never letting their eyes—or their guns—deviate from the squat, four-limbed things surrounding them.

  Amanda motioned with her head and eyes, following the curved confines of the alien room inside the ship, then landing last on the multiple alien soldiers, lasers pointed at her and her soldiers.

  “Their weapons are lasers, remember? They only need to wave their arms up and down and they can slice the entire squad to pieces, scientists too. No valor there, just a 100% failure rate on our mission.”

  “And the alternative, to be prisoners of war?”

  “Your small rounds are just going to piss them off: I fought these things twice in LA-trust me, you’ll barely make a dent.”

  “Better than getting stuck in a cell like the lieutenant. Food for the rest of their zoo.”

  “We don’t know that,” Amanda whispered. “They kept Lee alive.”

  “But for what, Major?”

  “Head count, who has their pill?” Amanda looked each soldier in the eye as the aliens slowly crept forward.

  Even though suicide pills hadn’t been a reality for pilots since the cold war, they had resurrected the existing stock for missions after the Event. Each soldier confirmed that if he needed to take his own life later he still had the option.

  “Do it, then,” she said. The soldiers softly set their rifles on the floor.

  “Sit!” Jill whispered. “They don’t know what hands up will mean. But getting below their eye level will convey something. They clearly are no strangers to war, so surely they understand taking prisoners.”

  “Taking to where? This is suicide,” a few soldiers mumbled as the group sat cross-legged on the cold hard floor. “Major, don’t you remember, they’re leaving!”

  “I’m aware, Private. I’m following my orders and I expect you to follow mine.”

  “Oh Jesus,” a private whimpered, “I’m gonna die on an alien ship on the way to an alien planet. Major, we can blast our way out of here just—”

  Amanda picked up her rifle and held it to the soldier’s head, bucking his gas mask with the tip. The aliens stopped and focused their laser appendages on her.

  “This is your job. You pledged your life to the Corps. Remember? That pledge didn’t have an ‘Earth soil only’ clause.”

  His mask wobbled as he shook his head in agreement. She gingerly put her gun back on the ground.

  The aliens cautiously approached. When they perceived the humans did not pose a threat they put lasers to the soldiers’ gas masks and pushed down. Every human lay flat on the floor.

  “Looks like we won’t need those pills, Major,” a soldier whispered.

  “Still got your boot-piece?” she asked. “I have orders to comply if we’re taken peacefully but the first bolt from one of those lasers and you do what you have to do. All of you.”

  Lying on the floor, their pistols, for those who had them, were not far from reach. They wouldn’t do much against the alien fur suits that repelled kinetic energy, but at this range the eyes, the only vulnerable spots, were easy targets. Especially when the ugly things stepped over the soldiers on all fours and hunched down for a closer look.

  “They’re not mouths,” Jill whispered.

  “What?” a few soldiers asked in surprise.

  A few of the aliens squeaked their own conversation in staccato bursts. These soldiers looked different than the only human they’d had to study up close so far, the captive fighter pilot who came too close to their base out in the Mojave. She’d been outside when they took her, flight suit abandoned in a futile attempt to run.

  The humans here still wore their gas masks, confusing their enemies. A new Earth animal species?

  “Jill, you’re right,” Kam agreed. “We studied the one you captured in L.A. They’re breathing through those holes, but those aren’t teeth.”

  They looked to the center of the rings of black bulging eyes, focusing on the tiny hole at the center, usually closed in battle. They were all open on the ship, exposed to their normal atmosphere. What seemed like nightmarish teeth before shivered as each creature breathed in.

  “Gills!” Amanda whispered in surprise.

  This close, the dense frills on each central spiny tooth were obvious.

  “We think their world must have a much denser atmosphere, much higher atmospheric pressure, otherwise gills would be an evolutionary mistake for something out of water,” Kam said.

  “Or it’s a vestigial adaptation. They don’t have hands either and their anatomy is more like a starfish than a mammal,” Jill reminded him.

  “So how do they eat?” a terrified soldier asked. “And what?”

  The chatter among the aliens got louder and quicker, and they began to prod the gas masks with their appendages, probably wondering similar things about their captives.

  “Don’t take them off,” Amanda commanded. “Even if we could breathe in here, there may be deadly microbes floating around.”

  “But Major, you already took yours off back in the hallway-tube-whatever when we found Lieutenant Lee,” a soldier started.

  “I know!” she said. “My job is to protect you, not me. Just because I could be infected right now doesn’t mean you all have to be.”

  “Oh shit!” a soldier behind them said, shaking. The bearantula had brought in a kind of cascading soft plasticine and was rapidly wrapping the man in it.

  “Fuck, they said they nicknamed these things bearantulas, well they’re gonna eat us like spiders,” another soldier said. “Don’t need no teeth to eat!”

  “Quiet!” Amanda commanded. “Hands near your pistols.”

  With great speed, the aliens wrapped and dragged the human captives along the slick floor of their vessel, dumping them in new cells, two by two. Their haste must have been invigorated by the increasing piqued warnings of an imminent launch. After dragging the humans out, the room of the confrontation collapsed in on itself, then the hallway they were dragged through. Their holding cells collapsed last, until their wrapped noses brushed the ceilings.

  “They’re safeguarding us for the launch,” Kam said, hoping the radios still worked through cell walls.

  “Precious cargo, I hope,” Jill said back.

  Gurgled moans came in from other cells in their headsets as the gravity of launch tore at their bodies. They felt the slingshot up into space, multiple Gs pushing against flesh that had nowhere to go. The feeling only lasted a minute, and then the opposite arrived, as they floated in their newly-pressurized habitats as their cells expanded around them.

  “Roll call!” the major barked.

  “We’re cut off,” the other soldier in her cell replied.

  “If the ship is moving at the same speed it arrived, we’ll be at the next planet in only a few days,” Kam assured his cellmate, Jill.

  Kam and Jill shared a bedroom again, but romance was at the very back of a long line of human needs not being met. Still, some prisoners received worse treatment back on Earth at the hands of their own species. When their cells repressurized, the plasticine wrapping brittled and snapped off. Each human tandem, cut off from the others, faced a moment of truth when their oxygen canisters depleted.

  Microbes lined the ceiling of th
e human cages, eating carbon dioxide and farting oxygen and nitrogen. Barely palatable meals made of some kind of protein and nutrient-rich algae appeared with regularity and their captors even provided a strange vacuum device for the daily unpleasantries associated with human digestion.

  Days of floating left Kam listless. Though trapped together, neither he nor Jill wanted to broach the topic really on their minds. Maybe he wasn’t alone. After a few days, Kam began to think he sensed Jill’s emotions, a longing for something.

  Then came sensations, even images, of a strange world.

  “Something is trying to communicate with us,” Jill stated.

  “Another captive?” Kam said, between slow hazy glimpses of green ferns and ancient stone. He still kept his previous visions to himself, afraid of what she’d say if she knew he’d been seeing these things since the day when Amanda had rescued him from drowning back in Boston after the tsunami hit. Better to let Jill be open about it: there was no need to disclose his knowledge if they piped the same things into her head.

  More disturbingly, maybe this meant he wasn’t the “chosen one,” after all. He’d decided long ago that if these visions that came to him in dreams after the Event were actually the communique of an alien intelligence, then perhaps he had some special quality. After all, if the source of the imagery was the same thing that had moved the Earth to a new solar system, it was literally a God speaking to him.

  But now God was talking to her, too. Jill Tarmor, the woman he’d asked God to curse when she’d spurned him for good on that rainy night at the Arecibo visiting research station. He eventually regretted those feelings. Finding new ones for Natalie Cho had helped, but he couldn’t drop his hurt.

  He’d remained jealous, too, of the other SETI man in her life. Dr. Allan Sands, a decade senior to both of them, left her before Kam came down to Puerto Rico to listen to the universe. Sands died on the battlefield on the way into this alien spaceship, so Kam could finally forgive him, and hopefully Jill could as well. Besides, if she was going to be receiving the affections of God, Kam had that to be jealous about with her now anyway.

  “That soldier, before we found the lieutenant, he said something about the tall thing in the cell speaking to him,” Jill remembered.

  This was different than Kam’s dreams, though. This was happening while wide awake.

  “It must be,” Kam said, visions of the being appearing.

  “Amazingly useful skill to have for a prisoner.”

  “Doesn’t seem to have stopped it from being captured.”

  The images stopped.

  Kam assumed he’d lost the connection and the being was concentrating on Jill. It probably heard his thoughts about her earlier.

  “What happened?” Jill asked.

  “Maybe it realized we’re not the ones it’s looking for,” Kam said, trying to hide his relief.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you were a telepathic captive wanting to escape, would you talk to scientists, or soldiers with guns?”

  Only a day after launch, the aliens took Amanda to another cell and trapped her in a stasis field, immobilizing her via a localized magnetic field and micro shocks. The bearantulas taunted and shocked her into agony. Dehumanizing a captive turned out not to be an exclusively human invention.

  The tall being that briefly reached out to Jill and Kam, familiar with the feeling of this torture, worked to subvert the bearantulas’ efforts. In her darkest moments, Amanda experienced calm waters and summer storms so strongly that she felt she was there. She assumed her mind traced old memories, creating hallucinations to distance her body from the pain.

  When the visions started to include immaculately-robed versions of the tall alien she’d seen days ago in the other cell, Amanda knew the thoughts were not wholly her own. The being’s deep blue eyes stared, longing for something; the look of a deer in the headlights at the last moment before impact, helpless to escape.

  “I will help you!” Amanda screamed aloud, though she believed that the tall one could only perceive her emotions, not the vibrations of her throat. She did it more for her own strength, a kindling of the will to survive, showing the tall ones their path to salvation. She could tell eventually that there were more of them, many more. They long suffered the indignities the humans experienced, and long left behind their will to fight for themselves.

  They wanted Amanda to help them, but Amanda only feared she and her soldiers were destined for the same horrible fates as the tall ones; not captured, but born into captivity to the other aliens, as they were just starting to reveal. As their journey to the mystery planet continued, Amanda became more convinced that she may need that suicide pill after all, and wept that they had not thought to bring extras.

  When the visions returned, Kam and Jill realized more than one being projected images of a lush green planet into their minds. Possibly many of the tall ones resided on the ship, as their differing personalities leached into what they shared.

  Over time, the images shifted from flashes of a tropical world to images of the cells in the same ship.

  “They’re alive!” Kam said, experiencing a flood of emotions-human emotions not his own.

  “All of them,” Jill agreed, ecstatic that the rest of the human captives—the soldiers—were alive. Turning somber, she whispered, “Oh, it’s not your fault.”

  The tall ones captured and projected Lee’s guilt too. She openly admitted fault in not taking her suicide pill out there on the sand, before the aliens took her alive.

  Worse pain and suffering came next, from that of the tall ones. Forests in flames and tall beings herded into black bearantula ships. Long journeys ending on a dark and smoky world, the bearantula home planet.

  “Beijing’s smog times a thousand,” said Kam, wading through flashes of dark red sky choked with industrial fog.

  Dungeons awaited the tall ones on the polluted planet. Forced to do horrible things to each other, generations of pain blasted into the fragile human minds. The tall ones fought as gladiators for upturned stadia full of the squeaking bears, hanging from chairs that cupped them to the ceiling instead of cementing them to the floor. Such were the curious eccentricities of bearantula homeworld architecture.

  Even less fortunate tall ones broadcast final messages to fellow captives before bearantula organs were grown inside and harvested from their immobilized bodies riddled with open sores only seen on Earth in industrial farming pens.

  The bearantulas worked other tall ones to exhaustion to build muscle for harvesting, a strange delicacy on the rotting planet. Still more tall ones, forced to breed, screamed out at their reverse castration and rape. The bearantulas used the tall ones in the way humans might use cattle or plants; any economic benefit, no matter how deleterious to the host, no matter how miniscule the result, was explored and exploited.

  Jill and Kam screamed for the images to stop. Their cries went ignored or unheard by the tall ones nearby.

  ‘Will this be our fate as well?’ they wondered when the barrage of horror finally ended.

  More images brought a new revelation: the tall ones could read the bearantula language. They showed the humans images of the ship’s controls, the weapons storage, everything they knew about the ship in pictures, gleaned from generations of captivity and memory sharing.

  “They want to revolt,” Kam guessed.

  “Something’s missing,” Jill noted.

  The information they shared seemed censored, as if another being had intercepted and muted important details.

  “They’re taught to be pacifists,” Jill realized.

  “They want us to do the fighting for them,” Kam added. “They see us as barbarians, the enemy of their enemy.”

  “Tools for their escape,” Jill agreed.

  Kam’s guess proved prophetic when coordinated visual maps arrived in the human skulls. Pictograms showed details about how many guards would escort them through and off the ship, and their capabilities and weaknesses. A prepla
nned route to escape repeated once per day until the ship arrived on the home planet of the tall ones.

  Captivity gave the humans ample time to rehearse, trusting the tall ones implicitly, without other recourse. The tall ones instilled hope in the humans for a fate better than the slave dungeons of Tua’Goagh, the rough translation in the mind-tongue of the bearantula home world.

  The mind-tongue had no speakable name for the tall ones’ home world, just the feeling of warmth or comfort. After weeks in transit, the tall ones communicated this feeling to the humans as they drew near to the home world. For many tall ones born in captivity the feeling was not of a longing for home, but excitement of a new life. That life hinged on the actions of the soldiers who waited for their chance to implement the plan their lives also depended on.

  When the humans asked about their own home, the request fell on deaf minds. The tall ones neither knew of the Earth, more than they gleaned from exploring their fellow captives, nor cared. The need for freedom was an overwhelming desire. For their part, the human captives didn’t force the issue. Slavery, a scar on human development not so far in the rearview mirror, forced their longing for Earth to the back seat.

  They had other reasons too, the most plainly obvious being their total reliance on the escape plans of the tall ones. Even if it worked, the humans would be on an alien world-the tall ones’ world. They would need their help, maybe even to breathe. The thoughts of getting back to Earth became a distant wish that could only be explored after more immediate dangers were extinguished.

  The tall ones were right: not more than a day after they projected the feeling of home, the bearantulas strapped the humans down and shrunk the holding cells. Within hours, gravity pushed organs to the ceiling as the ship fell. Gradually, the descent slowed and discomfort decreased to a level of barely perceptible movement.

  Just as before, their restrictions snapped off as the cells came back to life. An hour after the cells were fully formed and depressurized, the walls opened and the humans, Lee included, were reunited.