by J. Benjamin
They kissed as if it would be their last.
“Kiara,” Matt said. “This is one constant that will continue to be by your side, whether we survive this or not.”
Kiara and Matt walked to the edge of the wormhole, hand in hand. In the blink of an eye, they were swept into the vortex and vanished to the other side.
30
Location Unknown
Kiara did not feel, did not see, and did not hear. She did not think. She couldn’t even tell if she was alive. There was nothing. However, there was the awareness that she was aware. That was a start.
Beyond that, silence. That’s what bothered Kiara the most. Imagine being buried alive and trapped.
Kiara felt a piece of her mind flicker. Like a lightbulb, it just turned on. Then she felt it again but in another area of her mind. One by one, little pieces of her brain opened up to greater awareness.
Then, as quickly as they turned on, parts of her mind closed back up. Something was wrong. Kiara was not in control of her thoughts or her consciousness. She couldn’t determine what was happening nor why, except that she didn’t have any choice in the matter. If her brain was a grand piano, someone else was pounding away at the keys.
With what little brainpower she could muster, she attempted to track the perpetrator as they invaded the various spaces of her cognitive landscape. However, Kiara would come to realize that it wasn’t so simple. Every time Kiara made progress, the invader wisened up and managed to stay one step ahead of her.
Kiara felt it peering ever deeper, Like a parasite. It could read her deepest fears and greatest joys. It quickly learned about her doubts, her anxieties, and what made her insecure.
She was in a room. The walls were decked with posters of her favorite pop stars and a tourism banner for New Tokyo. It was Kiara’s room from her childhood. It was as well-preserved as she remembered it. Not surprisingly, her desk was a mess. The books on her shelf were exactly as she recalled: Dickens, Plato, Steinem, and Zel.
Kiara walked up to the window next to her bed and pulled back the curtain. It was an endless blizzard outside, atypical weather for California. The sky was completely white as snow and hail barreled down with no pause. Then Kiara noticed something. There was no ground. In fact, Kiara realized the snow wasn’t actually snow but just white noise and static.
She remembered that something was out of place about her environment, but she wasn’t sure exactly what.
Something fell. Kiara turned from the window, knocking over her perfectly detailed globe of the world. It rolled to her feet. She looked up, and there it was, the usurper.
It stood there in a trenchcoat. It looked like a 1960s movie spy that often hides in the shadows. At least that is how Kiara’s mind manifested it. Kiara couldn’t see its face but could feel it looking back at her. She could feel its creeping and unwanted presence.
“Hey!” she shouted at it, but it became aware, and ran. She chased after it, but it easily outran her. Funny, Kiara did not remember her room being so vast. Then she realized it wasn’t her room anymore. It was now an endless hallway.
The uninvited guest stopped running. Kiara got closer and closer.
“Stop!” Kiara shouted. It ignored her. There was a red door behind it. The usurper opened the door and escaped. Moments later, Kiara ran up to the door and opened it. She crossed to the other side.
The hallway was gone, as well as the door it came with. This new space was vast and wide. It was nothing but a grassy field that stretched as far as the eye could see. Kiara looked around. The usurper was nowhere to be seen.
A voice cried out. Actually, it was more like sobbing. Kiara turned to identify the direction of the noise. As she approached, she couldn’t shake off that something sounded very familiar about it.
There it was, a baby lying in the middle of the grass. She watched as it sobbed and wailed uncontrollably. It made her slightly uncomfortable.
Kiara walked up to the baby and gently picked it up. What she saw next almost made her drop the child.
“Oh, my God,” Kiara said as she saw the baby with no face. Well, almost no face. It had a slit where its mouth was. While it had no eyes, Kiara felt it ‘looking’ at her, even if it couldn’t see her. It no longer cried.
“What are you?”
Little Kiara opened her mouth, but no words came out. Instead, the ground shook slightly.
“Are you… that thing from the trenchcoat? Are you the one whose been following me through my thoughts?”
The little one stared at her, and once again, opened its mouth. This time the tremors were so intense they knocked Kiara to her knees. The baby vanished from her arms.
Then she heard another sound. A whisper? No. It was several whispers. Kiara felt it in her head. Something was getting in there, and she didn’t like it. The whispers grew loud until they rushed into her head like a wave.
She screamed. The sky flickered on and off like a broken light switch. Kiara looked out, and the strangest phenomena occurred before her. Random structures and establishments flashed in and out of her field of view.
One second it was a skyscraper. The next, it was a village of small single-family homes. Suddenly, an entire city appeared and then disappeared. What was that familiar jellyfish in the sky? Was it the Sagan? she wondered. No, it was an actual jellyfish. What was that?
Random parts of Kiara’s mind toggled on and off as if a kid on a sugar high found a bunch of light switches. Kiara had a feeling she knew which kid was responsible. Finally, it stopped. The field was as it was when she arrived.
Suddenly, the baby disappeared. Kiara was all alone. She looked around. She determined this experience had been a side-effect of the usurper opening pockets of her mind. It made no sense that the most-random memories would be brought back to the surface.
Another door appeared, similar to the one in the hallway. Kiara was so happy to get far away from this part of her memory. She walked inside.
Kiara found herself in a completely different environment. It wasn’t her childhood bedroom, nor a grassy field. Instead, it was a giant bank vault. It had a tiled floor and several never-ending rows of gold lockers. The lockers seemed to tower far above Kiara and terminate at an arched, glass ceiling with nothing but white static beyond.
Kiara walked past the various rows, which seemed to go on forever. She took a closer look at the label on one of the rows. It read ‘The Periodic Table of Elements.’
Kiara ran through the rows. She saw a section titled ‘Daddy Issues.’ The one after was ‘Favorite Foods.’ Kiara moved past several more random areas with names like ‘Enceladus,’ ‘Extremophiles,’ and ‘Familiar Faces.’
There was not a single label with which Kiara wasn’t familiar. That’s when she realized that the vault was a collection of everything in her mind. It was a Library of Kiara Lacroix. She was thankful that it took up so much space because she would have been offended if it hadn’t.
In the sea of golden rows, Kiara saw one that had red lights going into it. She ran over to that row and turned into it. This time, the labels on the indexes seemed far more personal in nature. Kiara read them to herself.
“XXX? People I almost killed on Space Station Sagan? Guys I slept with? They really didn’t hold back, did they?” Suddenly, her fascination with her own indexes was disrupted by a noise at the end of the red-lit row. It sounded like someone attempting to guess a combination and open a vault.
Kiara turned, and there it was again. The usurper. This time it was trapped with nowhere to go. She saw the locker that it was trying to break into. It had a massive label above that simply read ‘MATT ASHFORD.’
“Hey! Get away from there!” Kiara shouted. The usurper continued trying to pry into the locker, but Kiara had enough, and decided to fight back. She ran down the long row of golden lockers, grabbing the intruder by the shoulders. “You’ve fucked with my mind for the last time.” She turned it by the shoulders and looked directly in its eyes. She then stumbled back in horror whe
n she finally saw its face.
“Get the fuck out of here.” Kiara stared into her own face. The usurper—her mirror—was silent. It just stared at Kiara with a creepy, deathly stare. Kiara thought she might die right in that moment. She felt like Jennifer in Back to the Future 2 when she ran into her other self.
Then Kiara felt her entire mind rip open. All the clouded areas became unclouded. Every suppressed thought, every emotion, and every closed-off part of her life forced itself back into her consciousness like a hyper-nova or great flood tearing apart every wall and mega-structure that held it back. She no longer saw the usurper as “it,” but them. They were watching her every move and had cracked the furthest reaches of her being.
It wasn’t just her mind coming awake, it was the cells in her body. She felt each of them on a deep and connected level which she had never before felt. It was as if her mind and physical body were one and the same.
31
They hovered over her, eight in total. Their fiber-thin appendages latched into her like roots in a tree. They weren’t just hacking her mind, they were building it anew. Kiara wasn’t sure when she gained her sight back, but she could see clearly.
In fact, she could see everything. She could see the eight Aquarians surrounding her. She could see the dark, cavernous space they had her in. She could see the bright red siphon that emerged—similar to a miniature volcano—from the bio-engineered walls which resembled living tissue. She saw the pink pod beneath her had already been cracked open like an eggshell.
Something was happening with the red siphon. It was producing massive quantities of organic material that they fed into Kiara. Each time they extracted it and gave it to her, she felt more cells in her body coming to life and gaining consciousness. Kiara wanted more of it. She had already become addicted to it.
Kiara saw further. She saw thousands of other spaces, just like the one she was in. Like an incubator, each fed life to tens of thousands of eggs, such as the broken one beneath her. The spaces and halls connecting them breathed with unbelievable life and energy. All of it connected to a grand central node where the ingredients for life were produced in near-endless abundance.
Slowly, Kiara was coming to a realization she was unprepared for. That was that her mind was no longer functioning the way a human brain was supposed to. That much was obvious. So was the fact this was definitely not the landing zone on the opposite side of the spacetime sequence.
Kiara could feel another presence through the ventricle of the alien megastructure that her pocket of space was connected to. Kiara saw and felt another pocket. In there, eight of their brethren were conducting a similar procedure to what was happening in her space. They were breathing life into a newborn Aquarian.
Kiara had become one of them. It finally hit her. They had now become “we.” This was where Kiara was born. No, not the human Kiara from California. Instead, the Kiara that they wanted her to be. This Kiara was every bit as alien and otherworldly as the slimy balls of flagella coalescing around her.
As for that newborn Aquarian in the other ‘room,’ Kiara knew why it mattered. Its birth was at the same millisecond as hers. Kiara wasn’t sure why she knew this, but she did. There was a cosmic connection to it.
Then there were the Aquarians before her. She could hear them. Though they lacked mouths and vocal cords, she could listen to their whispers. She did not understand a word of it, but she could feel it. They were conversing with each other. It was about her, or perhaps it was to her.
Hello, Kiara said. Except like them, it wasn’t out loud. Like them, she spoke from her consciousness. The moment the word left her, the whispers increased ten-fold. Yes, they were definitely talking to her.
Kiara continued to listen. Certain words started to break through the noise.
Away…
Come…
Truth…
She had no idea what they meant and was further stunned by their ability to transcribe human language. It demonstrated the capabilities of their mental subversion.
They drew closer to her. Their appendages darted in her direction. One by one, they attached more of their extensions onto her, and each time she felt more under their control. They were hacking into her mind again.
Kiara wanted to scream. She aspired to free herself of this cage she felt unable to break free from. Would they even listen? she wondered. Could they understand the emotions of trapping another living organism against its will?
Kiara felt everything fade to black. In a flash, it all disappeared. There was silence. There was darkness.
A tiny droplet of water broke that silence. Then there was another droplet. Then Kiara realized that they weren’t droplets at all, at least not anymore. She kept listening and realized it was a stream flowing. Kiara also noticed that she was her human self, at least for now.
The darkness was the sky above her. She was on a high plane. She looked down, and before her were waterfalls in every direction. However, the water was red as blood. Kiara wondered if it was concentrated bromine in liquid form.
Between the waterfalls sat a massive settlement. It looked unlike anything Kiara had ever seen. It was like an underground ant colony except in reverse, as it was protruding above the surface. These massive, yellow orbs of gas fed into a sprawling dirt structure that lifted several stories into the air.
The structure was nothing as fascinating as the hideous, vile creatures that gathered outside the settlement. They resembled earthworms that grew to the size of anacondas. They slithered from the dirt and crawled from the colony between the waterfalls. Their disgusting bodies were lined with what looked like an exoskeleton. They didn’t have faces. Instead, their undersides had several openings with teeth that looked like they could tear through metal.
Before this gathering of worm-piranha abominations was a far more familiar sight: an Aquarian flagship similar to the ones that Kiara saw in the Kennedy reports, landed next to the colony.
Outside the flagship, more than two hundred Aquarians awaited the worm creatures. Kiara couldn’t believe that the Aquarians were actually outside in the open air and not in water. She was even more impressed with how they were able to stand upright on their own appendages.
A deafening noise filled the air. Kiara turned around and couldn’t believe the scene that was unfolding above.
Many miles away, a fleet of Aquarian flagships hung over the planet. Near the Aquarians sat an entirely different fleet. These ships were red, bulky, made of metal, and resembled death themselves. They did not seem to like the Aquarians.
The red ships launched massive, slow-moving balls of plasma at the Aquarian fleet. The plasma slammed into the blue rose bulbs that were the Aquarian ships. One Aquarian vessel turned pale white and looked like it was starting to fall from the sky. The other Aquarian ships did nothing as this unfolded.
On the ground, another indescribable scene was unfolding. The abominable worm creatures were attacking the Aquarians. The Aquarians did nothing! They stood in place while the hostile army ripped into them with their razor-blade teeth. Just like the dying starship above, several of the Aquarians turned white after being attacked.
Kiara knew what it meant when the Aquarians turned white. Their energy extinguished, and they were now dead. What Kiara did not understand, however, was why the Aquarians were sitting there and just taking it from this other species.
The whispers returned. Kiara heard them loud and clear, even from her human body. However, they weren’t aimed at her this time. They were aimed at the worms attacking the Aquarians. The whispers drastically increased in intensity until they no longer sounded like whispers, but high-frequency screeches.
Suddenly, a tectonic shift occurred before Kiara’s eyes. The worm creatures paused. They no longer attacked the Aquarians. Instead, they came to a complete standstill.
The Aquarian flagship on the ground changed from its royal blue to a hot fuchsia. The same metachrosis happened to the Aquarian ships in orbit. Each one transformed in
to the color that most people confused with pink or purple.
Then she saw the attitude change in the creatures. Though they didn’t have eyes, ears, and noses as humans understood it, the movement of their bodies showed their expressions. The worms closest to the Aquarians backed away. Their gaze now turned to their comrades, who they proceeded to lunge at. The slithering beasts by the colony returned the favor.
The body cavities that appeared to be their versions of mouths gnashed away at the crunchy flesh of their fellow species. Their torn bits littered the area around their strange colony. Some of the worms broke away from the action and attacked the colony itself. The giant orbs of gas ignited, and violent explosions tore apart the hull of their home.
In space, the ships that attacked the Aquarians, presumably belonging to the worms, did an about-face. Their beam weapons seared through the hulls of their own bulky, red ships. Within a minute, they had laid waste to their own fleet, and the debris of their ships rained down on the atmosphere like a terrifying meteor shower.
Kiara had just witnessed the terrifying and lethal destruction that the Aquarians were capable of unleashing. Throughout human civilization, people killed one another with crossbows, guns, missiles, bombs, and conventional weapons. The worms were no different from humans in that regard. That was not the case for the Aquarians.
The Aquarians showed that they were masters of manipulation. They could quickly read a new species, find out how it thinks, and seep into their souls. When the worms attacked, the Aquarians successfully turned them against themselves.
Once again, everything faded. The worms and their dead carcasses dissolved. The colony dissolved, the Aquarians, the alien planet, and stars disintegrated with them. Everything vanished like sand disappearing into the wind. Kiara found herself once again in silence and darkness, at least for a brief period.
