Lost in Amber

by Esther Rabbit

  She came to a defeated halt as she saw her kidnapper behind a desk lifting his nose from the papers he was reading and pushing his glasses up. The men following her stopped just outside the doors. She’d been hoping for another hallway that would lead her to the exit, but this was an office. This was her dead end.

  “I heard you put up quite a fight, too bad I couldn’t bring myself to see you. All the roads here lead to me, you know…There’s no point in fighting back,” Speed Date Sam said matter-of-factly, seemingly unruffled.

  “I hope you want my vital organs, Sam, because sure as fuck I ain’t prowling the streets for you!” if looks could kill, Sam’s eyes were a loaded weapon. Her dark hair was coming loose from its messy bun under a face covered in sweat and dirt. Sam held her fists tight at the sight of the two men blocking the door, glaring.

  Speed Date Sam laughed dryly and stood up, casually dropping the papers on his desk and taking his glasses off.

  “Allow me to introduce myself again. I am Professor Trenton Beck. You will forgive me for all the confusion before; I had no time to explain things when you woke up.” He gestured to the papers on the desk. As if she cared. As if that was supposed to dim the ache of her fists, desperate to have a go at his face.

  He looked nothing like a professor in her eyes. Olive-colored skin, green eyes, features that contrasted with the nerdy look he was going for, the white robe not matching his manners. She held her breath, making a mental note of his features.

  “If a career in the prostitution industry had been my goal, I like to think I’d have a better eye for business.” He scanned her filthy, grazed body while pacing towards her, hands locking behind his back. “Your organs alone, although probably within health limits, are not the goal of our not-so-casual encounter. You are here in the name of science, as cliché as that might ring in your ears.” His voice trailed off, so unlike the voice she remembered—the soft, playful tone gone.

  “You want me to be your guinea pig, to experiment on me?” She tilted her head in confusion as heat suddenly rose in her head, spreading all over her chest and knees, making her legs numb.

  “We need your friend Zoey.” He paused to fix her with his gaze. “We’re working on a complex project here, much beyond your understanding. Things have to go smoothly.”

  “What?! You will not hurt Zoey!” Sam screamed and launched herself at his throat. The second she set foot in his direction, she also lost gravity, twitching in slow motion, unable to reach him.

  “There are things far bigger than you or Zoey, but that is a tale you won’t remember.”

  γ

  Zoey remained tense and awkward on the couch, looking at Jasper while trying to connect the dots and process the information she’d been given.

  The end of the world as you know it.

  And he was right. Another brick in the wall, another page in her book of things she couldn’t understand. And how she’d much rather forget because her only thought right now was getting back to wet her pillow over James.

  Old tears and new tears were gathering to celebrate defeat on the curve of her chin. Life versus Zoey. And life won. Every time.

  “But I want to forget! Maybe you’re not doing it right, maybe if I help you figure out what’s wrong, you could help me forget a bit more. Can you stop the floating? I can’t concentrate!” she demanded. In an instant, everything crumpled to the floor making a unanimous torrential rain noise. The floor looked ransacked, and Jasper seemed puzzled.

  “Do you also know how to put everything back?” Zoey pleaded.

  “I am an Interplanetary Alliance ambassador, not Mary Poppins.” His eyebrows raised in disbelief, mouth twitching in amusement.

  He anticipated her next question. “An ambassador must know the assigned planet and all its quirks. That’s how I knew Halloween was a festivity for children…” And he sounded proud too. “I don’t know your name, though.”

  “It’s Zoey.” She couldn’t bring herself to look at him just yet. Instead she touched the back of her head, searching for the wound that wasn’t there.

  “Zoey, I’m gonna need you to trust me. I know this is way more than you bargained for, but I mean every word and it’s the truth. I am here on a mission, and that mission has to do with you and with three others just like you. The reason why you can’t forget is because you’ve been altered. Genetically.”

  He took a step closer to her, stopping at the foot of the wooden coffee table. His training had not been enough for him to operate like a perfect human, but it was enough to read wariness and mistrust in the dance of her eyebrows. “I’m sorry, Zoey. If I had better words or more time to prepare you for what’s to come, I wouldn’t throw all this at you. I promise I wouldn’t. But there’s just no time for me to break it all down in pieces, so allow me to show you.” Easing humans into dealing with the fact that intelligent life existed beyond of their universe had never been part of his job description. But he’d done it with Rufus. Rufus though, had seen a side of life Zoey hadn’t.

  It was like something inside her just snapped. And she knew the theory too well—how different people handled stress and anxiety. Her glass was overflowing with it by now and every living cell of her body was fighting to push it all out. All the madness, all the unwanted change.

  “Listen, you just told me I can’t forget! How could I have been altered and not remember anything? This is just too much crap to deal with in one single day!” She bounced up, concentrating all her anger in her stiff little fingers. “I need to grieve, I need you to get out of my apartment so I can return to my normal, petty, mundane life and find some sense in the fact that the only person who gave meaning to all of this has left me!” she yelled, trying to hold back her tears. “Get out!” she yelled again, this time determined to open the door, shove him out, and lock it twice.

  Jasper took a few steps back, crossed his arms over the chest, and leaned against her door. He felt the wood cold and stiff against his back, watching Zoey making her way towards him. Fluttering his eyes shut, he realized there was no other way to make her listen. So with a slight dance of his index finger, she was still. Again. He had frozen her for the third time tonight.

  “We have no time for you to process things the way you’d like to, and my patience is running thin under the circumstances,” he went off, her frozen eyes pointing directly at him. “All the building is now aware you broke up with your boyfriend—hell, I live downstairs and I have had it with your sappy breakup playlist.” Jasper snapped. “Who jumps from Staind to Colbie Calliat anyway?” He shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “I hear you crying when you go to bed and blowing your nose in the elevator. No one in the universe is worth that kind of drama, Zoey. Your life is at stake here.”

  He moved closer, grabbing her shoulders. “Although, in your defense, I had no idea I’d end up enjoying Staind over and over again because shuffling…that’s just not your thing, is it?” He loosened his grip, carefully choosing his words as he faced her. “I take no joy in having you frozen, so we can either have a conversation or I can very well have the best monologue your ears will ever hear—your choice.” As soon as he finished speaking, Zoey felt the thin ice holding her in place shatter.

  She was back in her own skin, taking full control of herself. She dropped her arms to her sides, her eyes searching the carpet of crayons and stationery on the floor until she finally gathered the strength to speak. She didn’t care for his tone nor manners—coming into her home uninvited, mocking her emotional state, her taste in music, as if he had a say in it.

  She lost her temper like a time bomb winding down to zero. “Why are you here? Why show me all this? Why can’t you just kidnap me like regular aliens, put me to sleep, wipe my memory and wake me up when all this shit is done with?!”

  “Kidnap you like regular aliens?” A bemused smirk hung at the corner of his lips. He shook his head remembering how Lilou had forced him to watch The X-Files and countless Discovery Channel documentaries as part of
his training. That’s what humans imagined: little green men in round silver spaceships.

  Here we go again. He brushed his fingers over his mouth, anticipating the difficulty of dialogue. “I take it back, all you have to do is listen.”

  He threw his head back, exhaling deeply before freezing her yet again. “My job is to make sure evolution on your Earth goes smoothly and without interference, if we do our job right. We’re not barbarians, Zoey. Someday Earth could be a righteous member of the Interplanetary Alliance if its progress is natural and there is no hitch in its natural course. The universe is huge and we’re discovering more and more planets with intelligent life with each passing day—humans don’t have the tech to preserve the life of your planet by yourselves yet.”

  He took a step back, watching the water still dripping from her wet curls. Every time he’d frozen Zoey, her face stilled with a grimace that was almost comical.

  “Every planet is vulnerable to adversities—radiation, alien interference, and so on. You can think of us as galactic nannies, here to fend for you until you can fend for yourselves. Every planet goes through a series of evolutionary stages that are necessary in a planet’s development. It’s a universal cosmic law. Until then, you’re under the Alliance’s wing. Civilizations have to reach a natural stage of development through time and practice, much like your students do at school. And before you think I’m a stalker, allow me to tell you I knew when I saw you carrying your Halloween nonsense, and that drawing on your fridge confirms it.” He stepped closer to it, propping his elbows on the counter and staring back at her zany expression.

  Zoey’s home was an extension of her classroom. Drawings from her students often came home with her, including that perfect smiling flower held in place by a fridge magnet. It read “teacher” in bold, colorful letters, and Jasper’s eyes were now on it.

  “We messed up.” He continued, still inspecting her kitchen. Our previous ambassador sent to your Earth brought…um, equipment from Opt, my planet, to continue carrying out his research here. He was a scientist. He should have never become an ambassador in the first place because his scientific development gift was higher in percentage than his other enhancements. Nevertheless, our superiors thought an ambassador with scientific skills could prove worthy, and there were more new planets to attend to than there were people with the optimal combination of skills to become ambassadors. So the Council named him Etienne and arranged for him to be sent to Geneva and start training, immersing himself in the integration process thanks to our operating team over there. At first, he reported his enthusiasm to experience a live particle collision in its rudimentary stages, thanks to CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, to explore the basic science and tech of your world while keeping an eye on possible disturbances or interferences in your atmosphere. It soon became quite boring for a scientist, and we think he felt his ambassador duties were keeping him from further developing his experiments involving genome editing and cell morphology. As he knew there was no way out of Earth, he started mounting a lab of his own in Geneva and another one here, in your hometown.”

  Lemme out! Dammit! Zoey’s thoughts screamed from the stiffness of her body. This had to be one of the worst things one could experience. Entrapment. Her brain was uselessly sending messages to the limbs, and she was swimming in panic once more.

  “I don’t have specifics on how you’ve been altered, we need to have you tested.” Jasper went ahead with his monologue.

  Tested. The word rang in her head like a side effect. Tested for what?

  “Earth does not have enough resources for this kind of complex scientific experimentation, so Etienne sneaked in key elements to continue his research with every visit to Opt. No member of the Alliance is allowed to bring foreign elements, items, or substances into your atmosphere. That alone disrupts the very reason we’re here and things can easily escalate.” As they did with you, he thought, but kept it to himself. “Pretty soon he made some striking discoveries, some elements that reacted differently to your atmosphere. Etienne employed young and eager physicians and engineers to carry out his work. Initially, he made them forget what they did, just like I was trying to do with you, because this is one of the perks that comes with our job: while we’re here, we can cover our tracks if we make mistakes or humans accidentally stumble upon something of our doing.”

  Despite her general numbness, her eyes caught a glimpse of his face. Apart from his slightly unusual eye color, there was nothing alien-like. Not the blond surfer hair now caught in a bun, not in the way he carried himself.

  “We believe Etienne got greedy as he was advancing in his work on genome editing. Upon interrogation, he confirmed his initial aim was to develop new enhancements for future generations of Opt and the skills we receive. Telekinesis is one of my gifts, one that my parents chose for me before I was born. On my planet, both parents are taken to something similar to a hospital here and mothers begin the enhancement treatment, which lasts from three weeks to one month and a half, depending on the amount of enhancements or their complexity. As I mentioned before, on Opt we are given skills that will help us perform in our future jobs, like enhanced visibility, language skills, negotiating skills, and perception, among others, and physical skills ranging from beauty to agility and strength. At some point in time, Etienne met human professor Trenton Beck and together they simulated the process we have on Opt for altering human subjects. Infants didn’t survive, so he moved on to different age groups. When you commit a crime this big, there is no way back. Etienne was captured and terminated before I was sent to Earth.”

  Zoey heard every word, felt every concern displayed on Jasper’s face. This had to be bigger than she imagined.

  She felt the heat rise from her chest to her ears. She felt her heart knocking, her pulse accelerating. She felt it all, and even as her trapped body wanted all this to be over, she was curious to find out what happened next.

  “Etienne was not smart enough to cover his tracks, some altered subjects were left to chance, some died, some developed enhancements we’re yet to understand. And you, Zoey, are one of these people.” Her heart almost stopped and she felt a void in her stomach, as if her insides had fallen into a blender. Jasper was still pacing left and right.

  “My guess is that he wanted to make himself immune to us so no one could ever erase his memories. He took you and left you to chance, observing you from the distance to see if subject Zoey might survive and serve a purpose. He also enhanced Professor Beck with powers our radar is not sensitive to. I have all the crew on alert because if he is anything like Etienne, he will not stop whatever they had going on. I found Rufus two weeks ago, he’d been kidnapped and is their only mind-manipulation survivor. He’s still shaken and unable to fully control his powers, hence the cat incident you witnessed earlier. Beck will probably be coming for you in order to complete whatever project they were working on.” He leaned closer to her, his expression a mix of anguish and compassion.

  “We brought all of this upon your Earth and I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am. This…this has gone so terribly wrong in every way you can imagine. I cannot leave you to your grieving, Zoey, we can’t lose another one.”

  She was back in her own skin, but the joy of movement was eclipsed by worry. “How many victims are there?”

  “Forty-two dead, four still living—five, if you count Beck.” Jasper gave out a resigned sigh.

  “Who are the remaining two?”

  “A girl about your age and a boy who’s still in a coma, according to Rufus. Professor Beck made himself and the people they experimented on immune to our radars, thanks to Etienne. We think that Beck plans to later use all remaining subjects to further enhance himself and what is left of his team. Your DNA is now gold, so as much as I would love to leave you to your sulking, I’m afraid that’s not in the books just yet!”

  She had too many questions, but for a brief moment she stopped to look at him, the neighbor who took over the remains of her semi-nor
mal life, frozen her, spread her stationery all over the floor, and made a mess out of everything he touched. She watched him stiffen, arching his back as if aligning his bones, strands of wavy sand-colored hair tucked behind his ears, brushing his shoulders. Jasper looked like he needed sleep, as if the weight of the world rested upon his shoulders and nothing could ever make him phase out of this state. For someone as evolved as he was, he sure looked like he didn’t hold the answers to everything.

  But Zoey believed him.

  She believed every word coming out of this stranger’s mouth. Not because he could make things float, but because she felt genuine anguish and fear and worry behind every word.

  “And this Etienne, where is he now?”

  “He’s been terminated. Capital punishment.”

  “Are they going to terminate you as well if you don’t complete your mission?” She steadied herself and gave him a piercing look. Termination was a practice of barbarians.

  “All new planets are supposed to have foreign interferences, it’s unavoidable when so many others actually know you exist and you have no clue what’s out there, so it is quite normal to be vulnerable and exposed. Sometimes there will be casualties, but we have always acted quickly and allowed the natural course of evolution to continue. This is different. This was an attack by one of our own, an ambassador, and it is our own fault because new planets are discovered every day and there aren’t enough with the required enhancements to actually be ambassadors. The Intergalactic Planetary Alliance is formed by one hundred and fifty-six planets, and our tech is advancing rapidly enough to discover one or two new planets inhabited by intelligent lifeforms every cycle. And every planet needs an ambassador, but not every I.P.A member has the necessary skillset to be one.” He sighed. “They settled for second-best when they chose Etienne, and that alone sets a precedent. There are over one hundred new planets whose ambassadors do not possess the proper percentage of necessary traits for the job. And it had to be us; it had to be Opt making the first catastrophically sized mess. That endangers our position in the Chamber of the Alliance and our further involvement in the universe.” He stared blankly at the floor.