Colonization

by Scott McElhaney

  “Again, I need to continue with the whole story if you’re to fully understand. I can’t skip ahead,” John began.

  I remotely switched the boat engine on when I saw the behemoth rise from the depths. Unlike an actual whale from Earth, this particular creature didn’t breathe air. Nothing spouted when it broke the surface. Its fluke was fully as big as my boat and it nearly hit my boat when it broke the surface. I immediately went to the pilot’s cabin and grabbed the wheel. I accelerated and turned toward the shore, but I wasn’t quick enough to elude the curious whale. That whale saw my boat as a toy in the water and that toy was now drifting away from it.

  By the way, I called it a whale instead of some other sea predator based on the fact that its actions never appeared to be intentionally threatening to me in any way. Its actions seemed playful. Even as I sped away, it kept rising from the deep and nudging my boat. Finally, it gained the necessary speed to break the surface and come crashing down on the boat, instantly bringing me and the splintered remains underneath the ocean.

  I couldn’t tell you how I escaped from beneath that whale, but somehow I managed to make it to the surface. I can only recall the crushing roof, shattering windows, and me rushing toward the shattered door. After that, everything was simply a flood of rushing water. Anyway, somehow I made it to the surface along with several portions of my splintered boat.

  “The windows!” Darius interrupted, “I remember you coming and taking windows from the USN-SD stash left in the warehouse. You just wouldn’t tell me why.”

  “Windows? I’m confused,” I asked, afraid I’d missed something.

  “John is an engineer. He rebuilt the boat,” Darius stated, “Which would explain Zane going fishing with him on the boat recently.”

  “Would you please let him continue?” Leah insisted.

  “Thank you, Leah. Yes, the windows were for the boat, but that’s the only part I had in repairing the thing,” John explained.

  Anyway, I was now floating in the ocean, holding onto a portion of the bow. The whale broke the surface two more times before realizing he’d accidentally shattered his toy. After that, he left and didn’t come back. I was so far out that I couldn’t even see the shore. I floated out there for several minutes longer, wondering if it was even worth trying to swim to shore. That was the moment that Tau Ceti broke through the sky again and this time shined a beam directly onto me. I could look straight up and see our local star in all its glory.

  I took that as a sign from the gods to continue onward. I took it as a sign that I had hope. Apparently I did have hope, but not in the way that I had envisioned it. Suddenly something else broke the surface right next to me and this was by no means a ‘fish’. This was a human, swimming right there in the middle of the ocean next to me. This was a woman with long black hair, solid black eyes, and a subtle nose. This was a woman with pale blue flesh and long thin arms. This wasn’t a woman at all – this was an alien sea creature.”

  “Dear Lord!” Henley gasped.

  “I’m not done,” John immediately turned to her.

  This woman glided to me and reached out for my hand. I was frightened, first by the realization that this was an alien, and second by the angry features of her face. The solid black eyes looked quite naturally ‘demonic’. Her brow, with the way it sloped downward in the middle made her look not only demonic, but angry as well. Yet at the same time, the hand she offered was clearly a thin human hand and it was presented as one of assistance. I reached out and took it. She drew me to her quickly, causing me to release the wooden plank in the process.

  This woman wrapped me in her arms, which was somewhat uncomfortable considering that her body had all the same features of an ordinary woman. While she wore something shiny that covered her torso, it wasn’t quite enough coverage. I realized just then that I’d sacrificed myself to an alien that might just well kill me. I also realized a more significant mistake a moment later when we sunk together beneath the waves. She could apparently survive underwater and I obviously couldn’t.

  I held my breath as long as I could as we somehow moved like a speedy torpedo through the water. I couldn’t even see in the darkness beneath the water, so I couldn’t gauge how fast we were moving. I did however know that I was about to die. I hadn’t had time to prepare myself for the dive, so my lungs weren’t full to begin with. I drown there in her arms, flailing in my last moments to the sound of her screams. And yes, I somehow heard this lady scream as I drown.

  “So, you lost the boat and now you died beneath the waves in the arms of an alien,” Leah said, “How do we get to a world where you’re currently alive and the boat is perfectly fine?”

  “If you’re finding this hard to believe, then the rest of the story I have to share with you will be utterly useless,” John stated, “You might as well just leave now.”

  “The creature’s nose… was it more like a gill than a human nose?” Rigel asked, “The skulls we discovered were odd where the nasal cavity should have been.”

  “My first thought was that it was a somewhat flattened nose. But internally, I guess it served the purpose of both gills as well as the sort of nose we were accustomed to. They breathed just fine on land and it seemed to me that they preferred being on land actually. It’s best to think of the Keplerians as something more similar to a seal than to a fish in that regard,” John said, “And these creatures lived like the seal right up until the Hawke Jump sent their world into an ice age.”

  “Let’s stop interrupting him,” my father said, “What happened next?”

  John leaned against the mantle and crossed his arms in front of him. He looked over at me and then continued.

  The same way the whale didn’t expect to destroy my boat, that alien woman didn’t know that I couldn’t breathe underwater. And how they brought me back to life, I didn’t know. All I knew was that I awoke with her lying right in front of my face hollering something. I started coughing and retching, causing her to retreat from me a little. I leaned over and continued coughing, suddenly puking out a small flood of water onto the cold stone floor. Even so, it wasn’t enough to free me from the urge to cough.

  All the while, I felt hands on my legs. It took me several minutes until I could breathe normally. By then, I had time to discover that I was inside an enormous cave with miniature dots of lighting installed all around the roof and the walls. I sat up, discovering that I was surrounded by a dozen male and female creatures all kneeling and dressed in unusual shiny skirts. I also discovered that three of them were touching my wet pants and feeling the legs they covered.

  I turned to the woman who rescued me and thanked her. I still had no idea how they had revived me. I recalled no evidence of CPR. To my immediate pleasure, she replied to me. I couldn’t understand her, but it made me glad to see that verbal communication was an option. I had already worried that they’d be a water species that communicated through chirps or sonar. Instead, she spoke like we do with words from her lips, albeit undecipherable words.

  “What about her teeth? Were they sharp?” Henley interrupted.

  “Her canines were long and sharp, again giving the appearance of something demonic,” he replied, “Beyond that, they had teeth quite similar to our own.”

  “So they revived you and brought you to a cave on the surface,” Kennedy said, “Then what?”

  “It wasn’t a cave on the surface. Ever since the impact event, they fled for their old caves beneath the sea where they usually only stayed during inclement weather. When they realized that Tau Ceti would never rise again and that the world was getting colder, they sought to improve their undersea world,” John stated.

  “So you’re telling us that you could communicate with these creatures?” I asked, suddenly amazed at this man that I had known so little about, “You were able to learn all this from them?”

  “Thatcher… I have lived among these Keplerians for more than fifteen years now. They are my friends, and they are my family.”

 
; Chapter Eight

  “You can speak their language and they can speak yours?” my mother rose from the sofa and faced him with her hands on her hips, “This is an entire separate life that you happened to keep hidden from us for more than a decade?”

  “Seriously, John, you’ve known of an indigenous alien species for most of the time we’ve lived here and you never thought to tell anyone?” Rigel added.

  “What would you have done, Rigel? What will New Sumter anthropologists and biologists do when they learn of this species? What will paleontologists do when they learn of a new species here as well as the existence of their fossil history? Those friends of mine would become nothing more than animals to experiment on,” John argued, “Which is why I needed you to know that they’re not animals. You won’t like to hear this, but I believe them to be a more advanced civilization than we are. Their math… their sciences… philosophy… technologies… they are amazing.”

  “What about space travel?” my father asked.

  “That’s how we define an advanced civilization, Zane. We define advancement based on something that we use to define us and our own current stage in history. Space travel is the most important to us and the thought of seeing other galaxies which is beyond our reach is the sign of someone more ‘advanced’. What if I told you that we have here in our presence a civilization that mapped, charted, and categorized every star in the Milky Way and all the galaxies in the known universe? And they did it all from right down here. And they can reverse the current stellar expansion all the way back to the very beginning in such a way that would turn us on our heads. What if I told you they could pinpoint the exact moment the universe began, and I’m not talking about narrowing it down to a date to within a billion years? They can show how the flow of time has changed and how it exponentially changed the further you moved toward what we call the Big Bang, and doing so led them to their most valuable discovery. They can define an actual universal time, based not on the time here in the Tau Ceti system or based on the flow of time in this particular arm of the galaxy. No, they have clocks that move at the flow of time experienced in what they like to call the ‘perfect void’, far from the reaches of gravity or galactic movement. And their work on defining time in a universal manner has allowed them to determine how to pinpoint specific moments in history for their chrononauts. They can-”

  “Chrononauts? We’re talking about a race that specializes in time travel?” Rigel burst.

  “And yet I’m still not done poking at your curiosity. And curiosity would only lead you to my people,” John said, “Something that I can’t allow to happen.”

  “You’re people?” Renata asked.

  “What intrigues you most? The fact that a humanoid can breathe both above and beneath the ocean? The fact that a humanoid can thrive on this moon for apparently millions of years? The fact that a humanoid can define the whole universe around them, including the elusive ‘dark matter’ that we still spend so much time on? The fact that they can manipulate time and visit epochs in their history?” John argued, “Because whatever intrigues you is the very thing that would cause you to befriend them for one purpose. To exploit them. To exploit them for science or for biology. Do you know why I love them? Because of who they are as people and as a society. I love them for their love and compassion. I love them because like us, they hope to protect their peaceful way of life and to do it without war or weapons. And yes, I consider them my people.”

  “Can we please get the rest of the story?” Henley asked.

  “I agree,” I offered.

  Henley Knight

  Chapter Nine

  I saw one of those creatures that John was telling us about once, but I passed it off as my mind playing tricks on me. After all, I knew of no members of our colony with long black hair and this was during a period of time that I thought we were the only people on KMA. And of all the places that I saw her, I saw it on his boat.

  I was probably twelve or thirteen years old. The beach where Thatcher and I loved to swim was located about a mile south of the cove where John’s boat was regularly docked. I had been strolling along the beach one day while Thatcher helped his mother clean their house. Before I even realized it, I had made it to the cove. It was early afternoon and I was surprised to see John’s boat already parked at the dock. He often didn’t come back from fishing until shortly before dinner. Everyone knew that he loved fishing more than anything else, so for him to cut his day short was a bit of a surprise.

  I decided to go pay him a visit and to see if he might be willing to take me out on the boat like he’d done in the past. Once I got to the dock, I heard John talking to someone. I also heard a woman responding to him. When I got closer to the boat, John quickly shot out of the cabin and rushed over to me where I stood near the gangway.

  “Hey there, Henley!” he said, a little too excited to see me, “What brings you down here today?”

  “I was just wandering the beach. Thatcher’s stuck at home today cleaning the house,” I replied, noticing someone inside the cabin.

  He suddenly moved to block my view, “Sounds like fun. I’ve got lots of things I have to do here today.”

  “Darn, I was hoping you might take me out on the boat,” I replied.

  “Not today. How about tomorrow?” he asked.

  I agreed and decided to head back home. He seemed too anxious to get rid of me which since he obviously had company, I sort of understood. But when I reached the end of the dock, I noticed a figure with thick black hair moving around in the pilot’s cabin. At the time, I blamed it on the lighting. Looking back, I was fairly certain that no one had so much hair in our village. Looking back, I definitely didn’t recognize her voice. Looking back, I was fairly certain that I saw this same alien and he was sharing his boat with her. And most curious of all then was the fact that he was able to converse with her.

  Chapter Ten

  I discovered that I was on a stone shelf next to a body of water. This was an overhanging underwater entrance into their cavern. And it wasn’t just simply a single natural cave. From where I sat, I could see corridors that led off in two different directions. And I’m not talking about tunnels that had been chiseled into the cave. I referred to them as corridors because unlike the cave that we were currently in, these looked like ordinary finished hallways with what appeared to be floors made of shimmering glass.

  My savior, the unnamed woman with the shiny scarf draped across her chest spoke something to me. I noticed just then as she kneeled beside me that she was wearing a form-fitting skirt made from silvery fish scales. It was then that I noticed something else even odder. Her stomach changed from muscular abs of pale blue flesh gradually into scales of reflective silver right around the area where humans would have a belly button. She hadn’t been wearing a skirt and neither had the other people I’d noticed earlier.

  I looked toward the others and discovered that this ‘kneeling’ didn’t involve knees at all. And besides, the bend that I initially took to be kneeling was occurring somewhere around the area where a human would have shins. I could then see fish-like tails bending backward and curling upward behind them. I saw one of the men move just then, and this was accomplished by laying the full rear half of the tail flat behind them and then slithering on that tail like a snake. It literally moved like an ‘S’ along the ground behind the man. This was the moment that I’d finally realized that I’d been rescued by a group of mermaids and mermen.

  Two of the mermen spoke to my rescuer. While I wasn’t familiar with their emotions or gestures, it appeared to me an angry exchange between them. She seemed to be arguing with the men. I found it quite curious that the differing traits of the males and females were similar to those of humans. The females had higher and sweeter voices while the men’s voices were deeper and more commanding. The men had the same musculature in their upper bodies as the human male, including the pectoral and abdominal definition seen in the stronger of men. As I examined them closer during this e
xchange, I noticed just then that their fingers weren’t actually identical to ours. They had no fingernails of any sort and I could see webbing that extended only about an inch up along the base of each digit. My curious mind then wondered for a moment if their hands would have been fully webbed in ancient times and then as they took more and more to living on land if evolution started progressively taking the webbing away.

  The women, like the men, showed good muscular definition in their arms. But in the cases of the women, their arms still remained thinner and more elegant, the same as seen in athletic human women. The fishlike portions of their bodies as well as the lack of navels caused me to wonder if these were mammals or not. The water had been cold, so I couldn’t recall if she felt warm when she had rescued me earlier.

  Their argument ended with the two males turning and moving rapidly to the corridor on the right. I was still amazed at how their tails moved so rapidly behind them. Rather than imagining these creatures as half fish/half humanoid, I wondered if half eel would have been more appropriate. After all, the half fish concept came from my mind drawing back to the mythical mermaids of Earth history. Their muscle and bone structure inside those tails however would have to have been more similar to that of an eel or a snake.

  A light blue hand was suddenly presented to me as I still sat on the floor of the cave. My mind, still pondering the scientific, focused on the extremely human-like digits. Why would they resemble us in so many ways when they were clearly a sea species first and foremost? I reached out and took hold of the hand, noticing just then that it was cool to the touch. Perhaps they weren’t mammals after all.

  ‘Dee coin pah,’ she said, which meant nothing to me at all.

  I thanked her for helping me and explained that I needed to get back to my people. None of my words obviously meant anything to her. She could probably understand as much from me as I could from her. She merely tugged me toward her, forcing me to rise up from the ground and walk. This brought several gasps and various words of presumable shock from the others in the cavern. She then said something else in my direction and then guided me toward the corridor where I’d seen the others head to a moment before.