Survivor

I

Not long after the raid over, did Margot Jackson along with her partner in the Federal Army Stephen Ng, find herself assigned to the Fourth Regiment crew.  Their job was to sweep all the buildings that had been established during the enemy’s control as to scour the establishments that the Narvs left behind.  However, The Narvs destroyed nearly whatever they could.

This planet, Sioghetta, was seized in a violent occupation shared between the humans and the Narvs.  Five years later, the Narvs overpowered all of the human colonies, and for the next fifteen years reined control over them and the original inhabitants.  When a fleet of humans returned to take back the planet, a full-scale war took place between the Federal Army of Earth and the Narvs.  The Narvs made it their business to populate small planets then after a few decades, and when they realized that the planet could not belong to them, they departed.  After that, the humans and the Federal Army worked to restore Sioghetta to its proper order.

It was a year after the Narvs had gone; the human civilization of Sioghetta had been fully reconstructed.  Now the Federal Army was moving to process the remains of the former imposers, intending to go through, analyze, and purge every trace of the Narvs on Sioghetta.  This process would take the Federal Army half a year.

Margot Jackson was doubtful that they could find anything worth saving – remains from a deceased human slave, nuclear weapons, or even Narv-related documents.  She simply performed the routine that was required of her.  Each day she woke; she dressed, met up with the crew, examined the next building and demolished it at the end of the day.

Narv construction was parallel to human construction – there were concrete walls, doors, locks, windows and pipes.  However, the nature of their architecture was more arched, fitting to the Narvs’ conical heads and wide shoulders.  Margot and her partner Agent Ng found themselves being accustomed to the high doorjambs and spacious ceilings.  They also found themselves familiar with the technique of opening the alien doors.

At the hundredth day of the processing, they prepared to examine their first medical building.  Agent Jackson and Agent Ng were unable to force open the ominously barred doorway at the end of the building.  Contrary to all other locks, this one was fitted with no computer device – just a series of metal locks.  There were no windows in this door.  There was sure to be many more doors securing the entrance to the room.  They called up all of the crew.  Director Serrick called in a square canon used to knock down barred doors.  The canon produced a flat-faced battering ram, and knocked down the blocked entrance.

II

When the cloud of dust cleared, Agent Jackson and Agent Ng were the first to venture in.  As always, they put their guns before them into the dark and silent room.  The first thing they saw were tanks of water illuminated by a dark light.  There were no fitted lights in this room – it seemed that these tanks were meant to stay in the dark.  The tanks were about the size of a coffin and twice as tall, resting on waist-height pedestals.  The liquid was in fact, not water, but a smoky-black gelatin liquid, lighted from a light source beneath them.  Looking across the room, the other agents confirmed that there were sixty of the tanks.  There was no hum of electricity to support the light, so they assumed that a long-lasting chemical reaction was supporting eerie illumination.

Partly in realization of the harmlessness of the tanks, and mostly in utter awe, Margot put away her gun.  In a trance of disbelief mixed with horror, she approached the dark tanks, and gently placed her fingers on the clear surface.

She saw a withered hand inside the dark liquid.  A human hand.  She moved across side of the tank.  A shoulder, an ear, but no hair.  She saw toes and toenails.  She saw wires delving into the gloom and surely into the body of the prisoner.  She saw a tube pulsating with electric-blue goo enter the mouth of the head.

“It’s human!” she muttered, feeling revolted.  This was the first sign of life they had seen since processing the dead buildings.  However, Margot was not so sure that it was alive.

“Get it out!” called Director Serrick.  The crew moved the remove the lid on the tank, but there was no lid, or any sort of opening on the surface.  So, with heavy equipment, they cracked open a hole in one end of the tank.

Black slimy liquid poured out onto the floor.  The crew jumped away in fear of touching the vile substance.  The body, white, wrinkled, and trailing of wires, tumbled out like a mummy.  It was dead.  With its shaved head, it was hard to tell if it was male and female, but it looked to be a teenage human. 

It was withered beyond belief.  The clammy skin was pure white, the hands so narrow they looked like a single claw, with papery fingernails.  Blue lips fit around the tube in its mouth, still throbbing gently with the blue goo.  The skeletal structure, roughly sixty to seventy inches in length, was slight and narrow like a child’s.  Bones stretched through the translucent skin, but the joints were so small that they were barely discernible.  All this showing how little this dead child had been able to use its body.

There were plastic tubes and electrical wiring and rubber cords protruding out of its back, growing from the spine like a line of porcupine quills.  There was also a computer chip in the skin of each shoulder blade.  This was surely a test experiment. 

Minutes passed.  Nobody knew what to do.  Even the obtrusive Director Serrick was at loss for words.  They couldn’t help staring at the white mummy, which was plastered with that black smothering gel that lay at their feet.  In the back of their minds, they knew that there were dozens of other tanks, just like this one, which were the crypt for these young humans.  Who knew how long they’d been confined to these tanks.  Their whole lives?  Not being able to stretch a limb, or breathe some air?  Every one of them was surely dead.

III

He awoke.

Life grew and bloomed into consciousness, surging through his body.  He didn’t move.  He didn’t open his eyes.  He didn’t know anything at all.

IV

A specialized quarantine emergency crew had come to extract the bodies.  They found no other way to drain the tanks to remove the bodies, so each tank was cracked open and the body was allowed to tumble out like a crash-test dummy.  The sight was mortifying.  Within minutes, the floor of the room was flooded with black slimy liquid, swirling sluggishly around their knees, leaving them no choice in avoiding its vileness.  The skeletal bodies floated in the darkness like cold white bodies left for dead in the sea.

Margot Jackson helped break the glass on the last and final tank.  Her bitter frustration at the crimes the Narvs committed upon these human children was thrown in along with her weight in the sledgehammer.  The glass was resisting.  She bashed it again, angry at it for imprisoning the dead body.  A hair-thin line broke upon its surface.

Agent Ng came up to help her, dragging his feet like they were through the excess like they were on ball and chain.  He went around to the far side of the tank, and then gasped in surprise.  “What--”

Then, “Its alive!”

“What?” demanded Agent Jackson, making her way around the tank as fast as she could.

Agent Ng squinted at the glass.  Apparently he saw something.  “There’s a faint hologram on here, you see?  It’s showing its vital signs.  Heartbeat, brain activity…”

“Oh my god!” Jackson exclaimed.  “Its alive!”

“Its heart is beating so slow, its impossible.  And look, brain activity is near nothing.  It might as well be dead.”

“Were any of the others alive?  Oh god, what if they were alive?”

Ng said nothing.  He picked up Jackson’s sledgehammer, and forcibly shattered the tank.

He felt something.  His sense of touch had been aroused.  He was moving, falling.  Suddenly he felt something abruptly slam onto one side of the body – he had fallen onto the floor.  An instantaneous moment later, sharp pinpricks were digging into his senses.  Sharp glass had pricked his skin.

“It’s moving.  My god it’s moving.”

Ng and Jackson watched in fascination as this feeble corpse, this body so like all the other dead ones, struggled.  He twitched like a newborn baby, experimenting with new-found limbs but unable to move them in full motion.

They realized that someone in this state must have no muscles.  It looked unable to coordinate its body, this body that was spewing with wires and tubes from its spinal cord and tubes from its guts.  Ng shined his flashlight across its eyes.  They were screwed shut like a newborn baby.  Its mouth was fastened around the tube that lived in his esophagus.  It didn’t seem to be breathing because its chest was still, and it didn’t choke or cry like baby when one takes his first breath of air.

A streak darted across the front of his face.  As of this he found the meaning of light and dark.  He had a slivering hint of what it meant to see.  He fished around for that instinct that connected to his visual centers, and his eyes suddenly snapped open.

Like a creature confined to live beneath the ground, Jackson saw that same blankness in his eyes.  The minute she looked into its mystified eyes, she could tell it was male.  His eyes constricted like any creature when exposed to sudden light.  He didn’t blink though.  There was no stimulation to blink rapidly, or to squint against the flashlight’s blinding lights.  Jackson imagined that he was driving himself blind by staring non-responsively to the lights.  She wanted to pick him up and carry that withered body right out to the nearest paramedic.  But the reason why she was afraid to touch him was because of the wires.  The wires sprouting from his body were attached to the tank base, and she wasn’t sure if they were imperative to sustaining his vitals.

Just then a medic came over.  He ran an experienced eye over the boy, and despite the body’s stillness, seemed to know that it was living.

“Should we pull out the cords?” Jackson asked.

“There’s nothing else that we can do,” the medic replied.  He had never before seen anything like this.

Jackson and Ng approached the boy.  She touched his face, but he didn’t seem to respond to her touch.  They each put a hand on a cord, and pulled.

With a click the cord withdrew, trailing on the end a root of hair-thin wires dripping with bodily fluids.  They threw the cords away, and proceeded to remove the rest.  A metal rim encased each opening for the cord, and there was just a little hole in the metal case where the smaller wires were inserted into the flesh.  They would put a cap on the holes to prevent infection.

The medic decided to leave the tubes on the front of the body so a surgeon could properly remove them.  They cut it off at the source.  The medic went to retrieve a stretcher for the only living survivor.

V

 

Truly, a burst of life was blessed upon him.  He could feel through his skin.  He could feel hot and cold, dry and wet, all over his skin.  His nerves were all a sudden tingling, announcing the dawn of his newfound body.

He learned that there were two arms, two legs, and extra appendages on the end of his arms.  He felt the liquid in which he had lived in all his life between his fingers.  It was smooth.  He reached out and his hand came in contact with a piece of broken glass.  This was hard, and had dimension and sharpness. 

As his arm brushed the tube hanging from his mouth, he felt something wiggle in his throat.  He put both hands on this tube, feeling his smooth texture and thin hardness.  There was nothing else to do.  He moved the tube.  There was another wiggle in his throat, his stomach too.  He pulled it.

Jackson didn’t know what to do.  The boy was pulling out the tube in little awkward jerks.   It was like watching an animal trying to pull out the arrow that wounded its own body.  If someone helped that animal, it could be more easily done, but at the same time causing more harm.  She could help the boy, but would it do him harm or good?  Only he could know.

Finally, the end of the tube exited his mouth, like a snake had just climbed out of his stomach. 

As predicted, he began to breathe.

An empty vortex in his chest made him want to suck in air.  But he thought.  He didn’t know if he was ready to suck in the dryness that was the air around him.  The air that stung his skin so unlike the smooth comforting water that he was kneeling in.

And in one moment before he made his decision, he felt something else too.  There was something beating, pumping, and beating some form of life in his chest.  It was beating faster and faster, more shallow and agitated.  His heart.

His heartbeat called for his chest to draw in air.  So he breathed.

Slow and steady he allowed some of that air through his mouth and it guided itself into his lungs.  Slow and very cautiously he continued to fill the emptiness near his lungs.  Once the oxygen had been utilized, he had the sense to rid the old air, and exhaled.  On his second breath, he continued the same process.  Slowly and carefully.

VI

Drooling with black slime the body was lifted out of the dark water and put on a stretcher.  They carried it outside.  This was the boy’s first breath of fresh air.  He was loaded into the ambulance.

5 weeks later

“Now Ricky, sit in this chair please.”

Nurse Ann directed him into the chair, putting her hands on his shoulders motioning for him to sit.  They were in a room not unlike an observation room for chimps and apes.  There were plastic toys on the ground, a table in the corner, and windows all around.

“Good.”  Ann put a mark on her clipboard, and proceeded to begin the tests.

She held up one finger and moved it back and forth.  Ricky, the only survivor from what was known as ‘Project Tank’, seemed to disregard the movement, steadily staring past her shoulder.

“Ricky, eyes,” said Ann.  She moved her finger again, this time demonstrating how her eyes were moving back and forth with it.  This time Ricky responded by imitating her and he followed her finger.

“Next.” 

This time an inch away from his nose she clapped her hands.  Contrary to the expected, he did not blink.  She did it again, making twice the sound.  He did not blink.

“Okay.  Now I’m going to hit your knee with this little hammer, okay?” Ann tapped the hammer on her own knee to show him what she was about to do.  Then she knocked on the boy’s right knee.  It did not move.  Left knee.  No response.

Ann performed a few more reflex tests on the boy, but all proved the same thing.  His reflexes were either turned off, or permanently damaged.  Whatever the Narvs did to him, their crimes were apparent.  Their purpose, however, was not.

VII

Over the next few weeks, doctors at the Federal Army base puzzled over the boy called Ricky.  He hadn’t learned to communicate, through oral or body language, and had made no attempt to do so.  When people in the cafeteria surrounded him, Ricky simply ignored them, instead of observing their behavior or trying bond with them.  He had no interest whatsoever in people of the opposite gender. 

Such behavior that Ricky displayed was not typical of any known primate, even of the ‘loner’ kind.  However, he did not try to avoid people, yet refused to acknowledge others, thus making him utterly anti-social.  He was rather like a machine that ate and slept, learned nothing and did nothing.  He was a human being, admittedly an artificial human being, without basic instincts.

They observed him as much as possible, and trained hidden cameras to watch his every move.  Normally under such surveillance, one’s sixth sense would warn of them of them being watched, but Ricky did not.  The doctors noted that the lack of this sixth sense was another sign of the boy’s inhumanness.

Hunger was another peculiar thing.  Ricky did not have a particular response to hunger.  In the first few conscious days, as his body starved from the lack of nutrition, Ricky was clueless as to what to do with the food that lay before it.  He saw the nurse consume a piece of bread, and mimicked her.  He learned the chew that day, and also to swallow.  This food satiated the dry aching in his stomach, not unlike the emptiness in his chest when he desisted to breathe.  He found that hunger was an aggravating thing that had to be fed everyday, just like how he needed to contract and expand his lungs to breathe.

Eventually, it was shown that Ricky was a quick learner when he put his mind to it.  The first weeks showed that he was a stubborn spirit, but eager when it came to do what he wanted to do.  When it came to free will, he was free to do anything he wished, or free to disobey any obligations.

In two weeks Ricky had mastered the English language.  He proved it by marching up to a grumpy old soldier to read a page of Homer’s Odyssey, moving him to tears.  Maybe that was luck; Ricky had walked quickly away in alarm at the man’s strange behavior.  Another day he chose to pick a fight with the cafeteria lady, and they argued for an hour on how much the food was worth.

Along with speech, his personality was developing and becoming prominent in the boy known as Ricky.  He was humorous, and also serious.  He amused himself by playing mind tricks on people, seeming to have a liking towards humor.  He was also serious, but it was all blended into the single side of his personality.  People would be reminded of a certain wise man in their lives, content to pass the time by staring into space.  He would be observing something through the window with a calculating expression on his face, and the next moment training his eye on the victim of his next prank.

He cared for not a single thing in the world.

He lived simply because he was alive, but he lacked the human fire, the spirit that people thrive on to make their lives worth something.  It seemed that he existed in this universe, purely because he was there.

TraitorI

He was employed as the “gatekeeper” for the Undarra, a Nova ship.  He collected weapons from the hands of soldiers and put them away in their appropriate holding places.  He gathered and organized the soldiers’ daily equipment, from knives to boots to binoculars.  He maintained the main entrance security systems, even though there wasn’t much to survey when the entrance would open up to the middle of the galaxy.  He was known as “Fox” for his pointed looks, or “Gatekeeper” for his inspection job on the mega-ship, and even “Hermes” because he was the top messenger who strolled the halls.  Soldiers were friendly with him, being appeased by the efficiency in which he presided over his job.  He was also a “handyman”, for he often fixed misaligned weapons or mended a torn piece of clothing for the soldiers.  He was a friendly face to be seen around the Undarra.

The mission that the Undarra was sent on was very discreet, especially to the public on Earth, even though it was massively armed and manned.  They would travel in lost space for three years until they found a Narv settlement on some lonely planet or asteroid.  From there, they would gather information of the Narv’s intentions, and try to halt the some of the expansion of their empire.  Even after twenty years of the initial attack, the humans still considered them a threat.  If the Undarra had enough power and if the settlement was not overlarge, then it would be eliminated.  Then everyone could go home.

A planet showing signs of habitable life for an intelligent species appeared on the map, and the ship steered its course.  The Undarra docked in the depths of a chain of mountains, nested safely under very large blanket of snow dropped by an avalanche evoked purely for the concealment. 

Every soldier, officer, captain, and lieutenant had become a notch tenser.  They were suddenly spending more time fiddling with their weapons, or watching the silent mountain landscape.  They did not joke care-freely anymore.  Conversation was limited. A smile, albeit a nervous smile, was more and more rare.  A potential war was coming.  A few of them had seen it before.

Reconnoiters departed.  They would return in two weeks. 

Rick found all this very amusing, as always.  Perhaps this was because he was not a soldier, and not obliged to fight.  He would be left behind while the troops were flushed out onto land, and he would spend a good month or two on a very empty Nova ship.  Then when they came back, battered, bloody, and bitter, he would put his hands on some of those guns and store them away.  Then they would move on.  Like always.

Legally, he was not allowed to take part in enemy combat.  Simply, physically he was not strong enough.  Then again, wasn’t exactly human either.  This was due to his condition, his condition of being an artificial human.

There had been other ‘artificialoids’, beings bred in the laboratory, but they were and grown as naturally as possible.  They were grown at the request of their parents, were fed through their umbilical cord like normal babies, and spent the regular term in their ‘tank’.  After having nine months in a lab, they were to be ‘born’.  Ricky had fifteen years in an alien tank.  The term ‘alien’ didn’t really apply – it was just alien to his DNA.  After all, the aliens did give life to him.

So because of this, he knew that his very existence on the Undarra would be uncanny.  His presence would be an unconscious threat.  It wasn’t like he could do anything bad, even though he was given full access to all the nooks and crannies.  In the land of the enemy, they would have to keep on eye on their spawn.

He knew they were thinking of this.  They had sent a spy to watch over him.

II

This was someone that Ricky knew almost all his life, at least for the five years that he was living.  Her name was Sister Cameron.  She was a young missionary, twenty-three years of age, and born on the Fifteenth Voyage from Earth.  Her occupation was not particularly successful because there weren’t many a great number of people to convert barren planets.  She was more of a priestess or confessor, and encouraged others to commit their sins so they would be free of criminal purges.

He had met her right in the beginning – she was the same age as he.  Later in ‘school’ they were in the same class for two years.  Now, she had also been assigned to this long voyage.

It was like she had been sent as a bug to crawl on his back.  From day one, she was constantly by his side.  She ate with him, followed his footsteps, and stayed by his elbow for all of his duties.  He didn’t know whether to find this annoying or pleasant.  It was supposed to be nice to have human company, but sometimes it was also supposed to excessive.  Personally, he didn’t like it.

That’s how he found her dead in his hands.

It was in a broom closet.  He had lured her, as he had seen some of the soldiers do to the nurses, and she followed.  The nurses always fell for this, and the soldiers always did it this way – he imitated them as best as he could from his memory.  Once they were both locked inside, Sister Cameron giggled.  They were in close proximity, and the girl was shaking with laughter.  He was thinking furiously. Was this the right thing to do?  Why was he doing this?

He had moment of panic.  How was he going to do this?

Then he remembered.  He pulled out the knife from a pocket on the side of his leg.  He moved the blade close to Sister Cameron’s throat, and she suddenly fell silent.

Quiet, tense moments slipped by.

Finally, Sister Cameron uttered, “Ricky… What are you doing?”

What was he doing?  Ricky pressed the blade closer to her skin.  “Why are you here?”

“What?  Ricky, I don’t understand…”

“Why have been sent here?  Are you here to spy on me?”

“No.”

“You lie!” he said, straining his voice to make it sound threatening.

“Alright!  Alright, alright,” she whimpered.  “The reason I’m here… I’m watching over you.”

“Don’t tell me none of your ‘God-is-heavenly’ crap.”

“They think the Narvs have control over you.  They wanted me to make sure that you weren’t going to turn against us.  Obviously you aren’t, I mean look at you,” she blabbered.

He was right, he thought.  They thought that he was going to betray them. 

“And you?  Who do you serve?”

“God.  Ricky, it’s nothing--”

III

I screamed.  Then the most amazing thing happened.  I was cut off.  Not because somebody had put their hand over my mouth. 

No, my voice box was broken, exposed.  He had slit my throat.  I fell silent.  Desperately, I put my hand up to my neck.  Hot blood dribbled all over my fingers as I reached to feel the cut.  I could feel the edge of my throat, the skin, and the muscles.

Next thing I knew he plunged the knife into my stomach, and drew it back out.  I wheezed in pain.  Pain, oh God, the pain!  I didn’t really feel anything until the knife was out – my body was writhing and screaming in agony.  Blood rolled out in spurts from my open wound as I turned aimlessly on the ground.  My hands unconsciously sought to close the wound, the stem the flow of blood.  All I knew was that they were making it worse and I could do nothing to stop it.  It felt like my hands, my fingernails, were tearing apart the seams of my wound.

He was back to my throat.  He sawed, sawed, until I could hear the grating vibrations of steel against bone.  I knew my neck would resemble a broken tube, sliced clean.  Blood would be pouring out from both sides like it would from a bathroom faucet.  There would be a pool of blood beneath me – my blood – to warm my dying body.  The blood would be engulfing my hair, chilling my scalp.  The blood in my head was draining out.  I could hear it – hear or feel I can’t tell you for sure – swooshing out of my skull.  My body was motionless.  I was disconnected from all means of life.  My vision blurred.  I didn’t see the form of my attacker until the pain came to throw my mind into anguish.

Like before, I didn’t feel the pain until five seconds later. 

Five seconds later, I was dead.