First Contact

Chapter 950: The Setting Sun

How does this work, Doctor?

Simple. RNA has been discovered to facilitate learning, neural plasticity, and memory. Additionally, it is passed between neurons to communicate meaningful changes in the experience of the subject. Properly controlled, it allows the direct transfer of memories from one subject to another.

Isn't that dangerous?

My dear, all science is dangerous. - Man Amplification Project Congressional Hearing, Age of Paranoia, TerraSol

Subject is male, 45 years old, in excellent physical condition with no deformities detectable on even the most advanced medical scan.

Subject was part of Team Lightning Sight, which was tasked with examining Forerunner artifact sites. Subject's team came under attack by reanimated robotic enemies, killing all but the subject, who survived through unknown means.

Addendum: Subject possesses a single anomaly. Their eyes consistently glow amber in color, the glow increasing in strength and eventually moving to red as the subject's anger and aggression grows.

Addendum Two: Subject is easily angered and often responds with shocking, immediate physical violence.

Addendum Three: Physiological changes previously undetected include an adjustment to the flight/submit response to cause intense outbursts of violence and combative nature.

View Interview? Y/N

Y

The being was short and furry, with wide sensitive ears on the upper part of the skull, at a 45 degree angle from the nose to the ear-tip. The eyes were wide, set wide apart, with large pupils and a ring of purple color that was hidden from sight by a steady amber glow. It had two arms, two legs, the arms and legs the length of the torso. It had a mouth full of flat plant chewing teeth and a flat nose at the end of a short muzzle.

The being was dressed in white paper clothing, pants and shirt, with paper slippers. A thick leather belt was around the being's waist.

It was also manacled. Heavy thick cuffs that completely covered the wrists. Another set on the ankles. The manacles were connected to one another by a thick heavy chain of battlesteel. The connecting chains had a chain running from the ankle chain, through a thick battlesteel ring on the front of the belt, and to the wrist chain.

The being was also masked. An open mask of thick wire that was affixed to the being's head by a set of leather straps.

Two guards, dressed in high threat security armor and carrying only shock prods, moved the being to one chair that was opposite of the two chairs on the other side of the table. They affixed the chain between the wrists to a half-ring set in the heavy metal table, then stepped back.

The door opened and two beings of the same species moved in. These were dressed officially, the colors bright to denote authority and menace. Both moved over and sat down. One opened a holorecorder, the other fussed with hardcopy files for a moment.

The amber glow in the chained being's eyes brightened for a moment then dulled until it was barely visible.

[ADDENDUM NOTE: AT THIS TIME SUBJECT IS HEAVILY SEDATED TO LETHAL LEVELS]

"Good afternoon," the female said. "I am Agent Tilk'yanp," she motioned at the male. "This is Agent Urtr'ekip."

The chained male just made a grunting noise.

"We have some questions regarding your previous statements," the male agent said.

"Yeah," the chained on said.

The female pressed the button on the holorecorder, introducing herself, the male agent, and calling the chained male by the name of Oftr'kaj. She stated they worked for the Department of Exploration and Scientific Discovery and this was an officially sanctioned interview.

The chained male, Oftr'kaj, just grunted.

Finally it was done and the female sipped at a glass of water before adjusting the plas sheets in front of her.

"We, of the Office of Scientific Inquiry, wish to understand where the robotic entities that attacked you came from," the female, Tilk'yanp, asked, her voice calm and assured.

"They were already there," Oftr'kaj said, looking up for a moment. "Our investigative team had been attempting to get power to the memory core of one," he snorted. "We had already, but we didn't know it. It tricked us."

"It was a machine. How did it trick you? Machines don't 'trick' people. You just didn't understand what you saw," the male, Urtr'ekip, snorted.

"These trick you," Oftr'kaj said. "They're self aware."

"In nearly five thousand years of scientific research and advancement, the idea of self-aware machines has been nothing more than a flight of fancy," Urtr'ekip said.

"We did not know it was stealthily repairing other machines when we left the dig site each night to return to our shelters. The atmosphere was dangerous, high in oxygen and carbon monoxide as well as carbon dioxide," Oftr'kaj said, the glow in his eyes brigthening slightly. "It would even use tools left behind to repair its fellows."

"To what motive?" Tilk'yanp asked, trying and failing to keep the disbelief out of her voice.

The chained male sat there for a long moment, breathing slow and steady with his eyes closed. After a moment he opened them.

The bright amber had been replaced by a dull crimson.

"To kill all of us," he said.josei

"For what purpose? It logically makes no sense. If we are capable of providing it what it needs to repair itself and its fellows, why attack and kill the scientific team?" Tilk'yanp asked.

"It told us why. I've told you what it told us. I've told you why," Oftr'kaj said.

The female shuffled the papers.

"Ah, yes," she said. She looked down at the papers and then back up. "The statement you claim all of the machines were shouting or whispering but was not picked up by any of the surviving security recording devices."

The male nodded.

"So the phrase told you why they were attacking?" Tilk'yanp asked.

The male nodded, the chains rattling.

"Because we belong to it?" Urtr'ekip asked.

The male nodded again. "We heard it in our brains. It caused seizures, stunned people, made them unable to do anything but scream."

"The supposed 'You Belong to Us' the machines whispered?" Urtr'ekip said, unable to keep disbelief out his voice.

Oftr'kaj nodded, the dark red glow in his eyes brightening.

"Again, how did you survive?" Tilk'yanp asked. "The rest of the scientific team, even the security forces, were slaughtered enmasse. How did you survive?"

Oftr'kaj sighed, looking up at the ceiling.

"I was examining what we had determined to be some kind of elaborate first aid kit or emergency medical kit. It had just determined, the night before, where the power lead was and had plugged it in, recharging the device as it used a simple direct current low amperage low voltage input to recharge the internal battery," Oftr'kaj said. He looked back at the two agents. "I was holding it when the attack came."

"Why did you inject yourself with the substance from the kit?" Tilk'yanp asked. "This... utopiate serum, as you called it. Why inject yourself with an alien substance?"

"Because those things were breaking down the door of the bathroom I was hiding in after they had finished slaughtering everyone else," Oftr'kaj said. "The medical kit recommended it, telling me it was the only chance I had to survive."

The female agent frowned. "How did you get it to activate, much less activate in a helpful mode?"

Oftr'kaj sighed, the red glow in his eyes dimming slightly. "I asked for someone to help me after another scream of 'you belong to us' and the medikit asked me 'do you need assistance'. I, of course, said I did."

"What happened after you injected yourself," Tilk'yanp asked. "Why did you survive when trained military did not?"

Oftr'kaj laughed, a sharp bitter thing that made the guards charge their shock batons.

"Because it wasn't just me doing the fighting," he laughed. He leaned down so he could lift one hand and tap the side of his head. "He helped me. He did most of the fighting, I did the screaming."

"Who? You keep saying that, but you don't tell us who," Urtr'ekip said, flicking his ears in anger. "Why won't you tell us who 'he' is?"

Oftr'kaj just smiled. "You tend to get protective of someone who saves your life and who shares your skull with you." He tapped his head again.

Tilk'yanp sighed. "Then, what, exactly is 'he' you're 'sharing' your skull with?"

Oftr'kaj smiled. "I told you before and you won't believe me."

"State it again, please, for official record."

"A Terran."

[END INTERVIEW]

[THIS INFORMATION IS CLASSIFIED AND NOT FOR DISSEMINATION]

[SESSION CLOSING]

[HAVE A NICE DAY]

[END FILE] - Archive Record TL120348XL, Xeno-Archeological Administration, recorded 1,873 Current Era

He was breathing heavily, making low keening noises in his throat from the pain, anxiety, and outright terror. He was backed up against the back of the stall, in the female bathroom.

The bathrooms were among the most heavily protected, designed to operate independently in case of a facility breach, as beings would be the most vulnerable within the bathroom. It had its own air supply and was armored in case of a meteor strike or one of the Forerunner artifacts becoming hostile.

Like they had.

YOU BELONG TO UShe heard whispered in his brain. It had a triumphant feel to it and he knew that the robots had killed another member of the team.

The medikit beeped and the tiny hologram of a Terror appeared on the top of it.

"Done with the scans," it said. It looked around. "I don't have much battery charge left. The battery is flat and won't hold a charge, so I don't have long to assist you."

"Anything. Please, anything. Just save me," he whimpered.

"All right. You're an 83.58% match and use the right DNA and RNA protiens, so this should all work," the tiny glittering Terror said. There was a beep and six slots opened to reveal rotating cylinders set into the kit. The cylinders held auto-injector tubes and rotated quickly, stopping after a few clicks. "You're kind of skinny, so you'll want to use the injectors where I point out with the laser, in the order I tell you. All right?"

"Anything, please, anything, just save me," he said, his mind numb of anything but fear. Between his terror and his injury, he could feel the tickle of chemicals that would carry him off in a cloud of bliss.

He followed the instructions, the first injection straight into his injury. By the fourth one, the wound was scabbed over and no longer hurt, just a light painful throbbing.

He could hear the robots tearing at the door of the bathroom, trying to get in.

They were coming to kill him.

He whimpered as he tossed aside the second to last autoinjector.

The last one he stared at.

The laser dot was in the middle of his chest.

"I'm fading. Use it and you'll survive," the tiny Terror said, now barely visible. It flickered twice. "Use it! USE IT!"

The tiny Terror vanished.

He stared for a second, closed his eyes, and jammed the end against his chest. He felt the sharp pain of the needle slamming out of the cylinder and three inches into his chest. He felt the cold fire of something injecting into his chest.

He cried out in pain as burning fire moved through his veins, carried by his arteries up his chest, into his neck.

Fire filled his brain.

Everything went cold. His thoughts suddenly clarified.

The robots were sawing through the door.

He'd been here before. He could remember it. He tightened his arm muscles as he stood up and lifted himself up on his tiptoes. He was out of shape, but still limber enough.

He reached out with one hand and grabbed the pull bar beside the toilet.

One yank, and it came free in his hand.

He smiled. A cruel, vicious, hungry thing, as he hefted the chrome bar.

Now he was armed.

He kicked open the stall door and stepped out into the bathroom. He'd need to fight his way to the snack room, break open the vending machine, and pull out snacks wrapped in aluminum foil so he could make a hat to protect his brain.

But he knew how to protect his mind long enough to reach it.

He felt the anger, the rage, pour out of his memories and into his mind. All the times he'd been passed over for promotion, all the time his pair bonds had cheated on him sexually, all the times he'd been denied what he wanted, all the times he had things taken from him.

The rage burned in his chest as he walked toward the door. It flooded out, filling his limbs with such power the muscles trembled.

The door smashed down, revealing a small robot on six legs, with a dome on top that was full of blue light and had what was unmistakably a brain inside. The robot was waving circular saws, impact hammers, and danced for a second, the clicking of its spindly legs menacing.

He'd been here before with less. He tightened his one handed grip on the chrome bar.

No doubt. No fear.

YOU BELONG TO US!it screeched.

Oftr'kaj smiled.

"Then come and take it." - video archive evidence, Incident 917167HG812, Xeno-Archeology Division, 1,872 Current Era

The It Tastes Sweet moved through red.

That was all there was. Red. In some ways it was matter. Solid, gas, plasma, liquid, all at once and none of it at all. Red light came from nowhere and everywhere. Not photons or other energy wavelengths, but just existing.

The rules were different here.

Where it was only red.

There was no mass, no vacuum, no distance. There were no points to travel between so there was no distance. There was no place to go, no place to be, no place to have left, so there was no time. Without time or distance, there was no movement.

The Sweet's engines, four redspace drives, burned with a sullen dark crimson light as the Sweet moved yet stood still in red. Its sensors reached out, looking for something, anything, but red.

And found only red.

Inside the Sweet the crew was alive. The ship's environmental was as it had been since the ship made the translation. There was air, there was water, there was food.

The ship was an anomaly. There was distance inside, time that moved on since there was a being to observe the passage of time, there was life inside. There were particles that moved.

The redspace shielding held, keeping the ship from dissolving into red.

The crew moved through the ship, doing tasks, interacting, even as the red creeped in. Not the color, the red. The red was more than color, less than color.

It was red.

Inside the Sweet, Nakteti had learned, there was no sense of time.

No hunger.

No thirst.

No fatigue.

No slowly building urge for bodily functions.

There was something strangely missing. Like the previous second and the next second didn't exist, that there was only the single second that Nakteti was eternally dwelling within. Nothing seemed to matter that took place in the past or might take place in the future.

Yesterday is a memory, tomorrow is a fantasy, today is a dream, there is only now, Nakteti thought to herself.

Her feet were carrying her down one of the Sweet's main corridors. There was no click of the soles of her boots on the tile. No whisper of cloth from her clothing. No sound of her breathing. No sensation of moving forward even though she was still moving down the corridor.

She could not remember the last time she had heard her own heartbeat whispering in her ears. Heard her own respiration.

She simply dwelt within a frozen grain of time.

At first, she had worried she would see other images of herself as she moved through the corridors of The It Tastes Sweet. Then she realized that she would not, because the only one of her that existed was the one she was at that moment.

Sometimes it was difficult to remember what she was doing. If it was her routine of walking the corridors, returning to the bridge and checking the computer's progress, then walking the corridors, that was no problem.

She did that on automatic.

But if it involved something different. Like checking Cargo Hold 4E, like she was doing today, she had to struggle to remember that was what she was doing.

Otherwise she drifted off and returned to her routine.

Her footsteps took her to the cargo bay and she moved through it, her mind asleep, her body going through motions that felt as if they had no real significance. She checked the lightning system, checked the phasic shielding, checked the shade protocols.

Her steps were automatic back to the bridge.

Nakteti knew she would not encounter another of herself. The past, where that other would be, was a memory, not reality. That past version of her was someone else, dwelling somewhere else. She would not meet a future self, the future was a fantasy and she did not dwell within fantasy. She even knew that she would not encounter that mythical third version of her, for that third version, existing today, moved through the dream. Today is a dream and she was not a dream walker.

She moved through now.

Which was all that mattered.

And as she was in now, she would not meet a memory, a fantasy, or a dream. She would only move through now.

The bridge doors slid open silently, smoothly, just as they had always done in the eternal now.

She moved to the Captain's chair and sat down, looking around the empty bridge.

There had been a reason she had embarked upon this journey with three Terrans, one digital, the other two flesh and blood twins. That she had left behind the other Tnvaru, but she could not remember the reason.

Because it was a decision made by past her, and past her was a different her that was nothing more than a memory any more.

The male human, the Terran, Magnus, stood up and slowly stretched. It was an animalistic movement, all predatory and languorous. He yawned, not out of tiredness, but more gulping oxygen and cooling off his brainstem.

That shook Nakteti out of staring at the red screen.

She moved, getting up, feeling tired and like her muscles were fatigued even though she did not feel tired and her muscles were neither fatigued nor well rested. She glanced down at the navigator's console, seeing that they had been moving at an unknown speed for an unknown amount of time.

There were no reference points that would enable her or the ship's systems to estimate speed and distance. The sense of time was dulled and filed away.

There was no time or distance within the red sky.

Engineering showed that everything was operational at optimum levels.

Just like it had for as long as Nakteti could comprehend.

The sensor technician's console was operational.

ANOMALY DETECTED was all it said. The letters, red with silver outline, flashed steadily on the screen in big bold block letters.

She stood there, staring at it.

She could remember her past self had seen it.

Was it a problem, a situation for 'past self' only?

Part of her knew it wasn't the only anomaly that had been found.

She frowned, slowly, reaching up and brushing at her fur as she stared at the words.

Her handpads had a slight reddish glimmer to them, like a thin coating blood.

After a moment she sat down, staring at the monitor.

She tapped at the mechanical keyboard.

Holograms had a tendency to turn red and slowly dissipate, like early morning fog in the sun.

The anomaly was at a distance but getting closer. The system could not determine a distance for a long time but eventually just put up a slowly ticking down number.

The red around the ship shivered like jello for a moment, then went back to normal, as the ship altered its heading and began moving toward something that was nothing.

Nakteti stared at the numbers going down.

Magnus and Surscee both stared at a piece of fruit on one of the consoles, frowning, trying to remember what it was and why it would be there. Surscee lost interest first, moving over to sit at the Damage Control Command station.

Magnus got down on one knee, staring at the cherry-plum, frowning. He lifted up the razor sharp knife he kept in his boot, staring at the blade then at the fruit, then back again.

Nakteti watched the numbers go down.

"Look," Surscee said. Her words shimmered and then faded in the air.

Nakteti looked up at the forward viewscreen.

The red wasn't in a spot.

There was a spot that wasn't red.

It wasn't a different color. It's coloration was red.

But it wasn't red.

"There," Nakteti said. "Magnus, pilot us in. Automatic is... um... automatic is..." her words trailed away.

Magnus shook his head, like he was shrugging off a punch to the face, and stood up. He lifted his leg, sheathing his blade, then moved over to the pilot's station.

Surscee, her face slightly confused, moved over to the navigation console and she sat down.

Nakteti shifted her grip on the chair, pushing the button.

The harnesses pinched slightly as they went into place, but the pain was gone instantly, a problem for past her, who was different than her, who was not her any more than she was future her.

The ship moved through the red. It wasn't approaching the not-red spot, the not-red spot wasn't drawing closer, it merely was closer, the past and present not effecting the eternal now that was always red.

There were a few beeps from the sensor console and Nakteti stared at it, rubbing the upraised scar on the back of her hand with her other gripping hand while she held tight to her Captain's Stick with her catching hands, twisting her hands as anxiety washed away to her past self. Her future self was worried enough that it passed to her present self, which meant her now self felt it and passed it to her past self.

The not-red was closer as Nakteti stared at the 2.5D/Exists monitor on the sensor station.

The sensors were the best she could find, with a redspace calibration, but the sensors could only classify it as an anomaly.

It just wasn't red. It was colored red but it wasn't red.

The prow of the It Tastes Sweet nudged the not-red. The not-red was pushed into itself by the Sweet, as the red between the leading edge of the prow and the not-red were shoved together.

The red began to ooze from the edges of the Sweet's prow, swirling off.

Finally, the red made its escape and the hull plating of the Sweet's prow touched the not-red directly.

The not-red pulled the Sweet through it.

There was no fanfare, no flash, no release of particles.

The Sweet, which was not red, slid into the not-red spot, and was gone.

The red remained.