Time for another little story. Please read it and share with your friends.
Enjoy!
Mutant World
by Kim Randell ©2014
Have you ever wondered about the purpose of a virus? With most parasites
or simbiotes, the life of the host is not intentionally threatened. Poor health
is incidental and not deliberately engineered. The Head louse is a good
example, causing at its worst, a bad case of scalp itch.
Not so with the virus. It multiplies at an alarming rate to overcome its
host and blindly career on to mutual destruction. There's no overt plan for
survival, although infection of other hosts takes place if they come within
range of the original host.
It appears then that the virus is not representative of true life, which
has self-interest controlling its behavior, but is a darker biological agent
directed by some purpose outside of itself.
True life cannot be created in the laboratory. Modified and copied, yes,
but not created. A virus can be created in the laboratory. The biochemical
elements of its makeup are readily stitched together to form a functioning
entity. Humanity can do this but still doesn't have the absolute depth of
knowledge yet to accurately predict its behavior. A man-made designer virus is
currently the result of many failed attempts. This is called empirical
engineering and is time-consuming and expensive.
There is a case for speculation that viruses are being engineered by
beings other than Man. Some scientists have already speculated that viruses
have been hitching rides on meteors headed into Earth's atmosphere, so it is
not too difficult a step to take to surmise extra-terrestrial engineering.
"To what purpose?" I hear you ask.
Consider what happens during the course of a viral infection. The body's
immune system creates antibodies, genetic markers, to assist in recognizing
future viral attacks and defending against them. An actual change in the
genetic makeup of the host has occurred and subtle changes in biological
behavior result.
Enough of these small changes together can be seen as a finite physical
change by an external observer. For instance a change in eye colour, hair
colour and texture of skin. A behavioral change, maybe.
Natural genetic engineering, or is it?
The evolutionary nature of it all would appear normal enough, but we seem
to be targeted with an increasing number and variety of these viral attacks.
Too many for natural occurrence.
So I will surmise a deliberate purpose for it, and allow that all the
high-speed genetic modification of Man is for the benefit of some alien
intelligence and not for the benefit of the Human Race.
--------------------2-------------------
The Commander examined his timepiece.
It was taking far too long for feedback of the latest viral series to
reach the base computers.
Biosensor systems strung all over Planet Earth gave feedback of signals
from all living things, monitoring temperature, oxygen metabolizing rates,
physical activity patterns and myriad other attributes.
Temporary "abductions" of biological entities from the planet
gave further finer data to utilize.
These were all then fed to huge processors programmed to analyze in the
finest detail the data gathered. Reports generated would then show current
changes in the biology of Earth and extrapolate further changes based on this
and historic data from past tests.
The Commander's superiors although some Light-years away, still expected
results "yesterday" so to speak. Their communication systems did not
use conventional electromagnetic theory, so passing information was virtually
instantaneous. There was no excuse for any delay in reporting.
The atmosphere of urgency pervaded the base.
It had arrived from the home world along with the personnel who manned
this research outpost. It flavoured the air, the food and the water they all
consumed. It coloured the view of their work and the time that they had to call
their own.
Back on the home world, in the not too distant past, scientists had
discovered in horror that the biological clock of their race had nearly come to
its end. The race would finish with a whimper in a hundred annual cycles as its
genome collapsed and fragmented. They had discovered too late that aggressive
biodiversity is what kept Life fresh and vibrant, resetting the internal
genetic clock frequently.
Cloning and genetic engineering bypassed that resetting.
The narrow concentration of the scientists and biologists on genetic
engineering and its technical perfection, caused them to overlook the gene
sequences that acted as a racial timer. Only when unexplained rates of physical
degeneration amongst themselves started to increase, did the scientific
community take notice and investigate.
Almost too late they discovered the truth.
Almost too late for their own genome in its current form.
What was there to be done?
Urgency became the way of the world. Urgent meetings, urgent conferences,
urgent plans, urgent schemes, desperate ideas tabled and then scrapped. Time
became a frightening word in everyone's vocabulary.
In the end the scientists and biologists all agreed that finding a race
with a similar genome to their own and whose bioclock still ticked strongly,
was paramount. Then research could commence to find how to blend the two
biologies and reset the race's failing bioclock.
Over several million annual cycles, the
race had changed. Their eyes had become larger and more sensitive to
infrared. Their skin had become darker, less translucent, and their bodies
smaller.
Long ago the sun around which their home planet revolved, was a yellow
star of medium size. It was now aged and evolving slowly but surely into a red
giant. It would engulf their planet and its sisters in due course before
collapsing down to a dying white dwarf. The Robae were destined to die aeons
before the cataclysmic end of their sun, but evolution of their race already
reflected the change in this old star.
They searched their galaxy for younger yellow suns around which orbited
planets with free water and oxygen atmospheres. They found very few.
There was one on the outer fringes of one of the arms of their spiral
galaxy. It contained hydrocarbon life forms similar to their own. It was their
last chance for survival.
Mark Dobbs to all appearances was dull and ordinary like
ninety-eight-point-five percent of his peers. He worked an eight hour grind at
a local garage as a service-pit mechanic, was married to Mary with whom he had
two daughters, and was mortgaged to the eyeballs over a forty-five year old
weatherboard house. There was one difference that set him apart from everyone
else.
He claimed to be an alien abductee.
It had started in his early teens.
His bed would shake late at night when everyone else was asleep. A
blinding light appeared at his window,
rendering the curtains invisible. The walls of his bedroom dissolving in this
light as he was strapped down against a struggle.
All was white and asceptic.
He could remember screaming in terror as strange instruments guided by
strange black-eyed beings penetrated his body. He would then lose consciousness
as the pain engulfed him.
Far too real to be a nightmare.
He would wake up cold and sweating in his bed, nerves jangling, pins and
needles in every limb. No sign of any intrusion in his bedroom. No disturbance
anywhere except in his mind and heaving body.
He didn't say too much to anyone these days about the abductions. He had
discovered over the years what damage to one's life such a story could cause.
Who would want to believe such a crazy tale anyway, except for a few
nutters.
Kro was excited.
He had been informed that he would be one of the first of his people to
be melded with one of the many human subjects that had been monitored and
genetically fine tuned over the years of the Grand Experiment.
The human would be once again brought to the base and Kro would, for all
intents and purposes, take over the subject's body. It was a complex process of
DNA blending and consciousness transfer. There was no going back, as only one
viable entity would result.
His name would become Mark Dobbs, a strange set of sounds which he
practiced over and over in his mind, trying to make them feel familiar. He
would know all of his Human host's thoughts and memories. He would gain all the
traits and habits of Humanity but would retain his own ego and all of his own
knowledge. The essence of Kro in the container of Mark Dobbs.
The day arrived and the melding started.
Bright light, humming machines and the faint smell of ozone everywhere.
Kro lay down on a couch adjacent to another containing the human Mark
Dobbs. Bright silver instruments moved over and down onto their bodies and a
kaleidoscope of pastel colour and sound enveloped them both in a seemingly
interminable dance as transfer and melding took place.
Humans compartmentalize their lives. They construct myriad vessels of
Space and Time, then confine their various activities and emotions to these
containers. Work life and home life are usually well separated and interference
between the two is actively discouraged. There are many other compartments as
well, such as sport, gambling, love affairs, et cetera. Great traumas in a
human life, be they emotional or physical, are almost always compartmentalized.
The door is slammed shut, so to speak, and the container shoved well back in
the darkest recess of the mind.
Kro's race didn't do this. Robae minds multi-threaded. That is, they had
many trains of thought running simultaneously in their consciousness and
continuously reprioritized every time they shifted focus. It was something like
a muti-tasking personal computer with many application windows open at once.
Tasks would start and then run to their conclusions at different times,
but all were concurrent with each other. It was quite dynamic and efficient,
with information being able to flow across these mental streams from task to
task. As a result, their minds were well suited to research but not so suited
to coping with stress.
The arrogance of superiority gave birth to a fatal flaw in Robae
thinking.
They were so engrossed with the biological aspects of the Grand
Experiment that they failed utterly to recognize that Human mentality was
different to their own. The physiology was almost identical, so why not the
psychology?
Robae had been dominant on their home world for several million years,
whereas Humans were still competing with themselves and other life-forms on
Earth.
Although Robae intellect appeared far greater than that of Humans, it
could not match the robustness of the younger race.
Mark Dobbs was not dead.
When the black-eyed demons started once again to torture him with their
strange silver instruments in that blinding white place, he retreated. He
locked himself in a small dark space at the back of his mind, away from their
view, away from the pain. He had made that place of refuge many years ago to
escape their awful probing and was thankful for it now.
He closed his mind and slept.
It was over.
The melding and blending was done. Kro, alias Mark Dobbs, sat up and
looked across at the Robae remains lying on the other couch. He felt no remorse
and no sense of ownership of the collapsed and dry-looking shape of his old
body.
He tentatively lowered his legs to the floor and attempted to stand up.
Attendant Robae moved to his side to support him. It wasn't all that
hard. The body he was in already knew what to do, of course, and Kro was soon
confidently striding around the base, closely followed by his attendants from
the melding room.
Kro was requested to attend a briefing room meeting that same day. There
were other Robae-Human meldlings present and the base commander addressed them
all in English. He reminded them again of the objectives of the Grand
Experiment, the importance of communication and the truly great honour it was
to pioneer the saving of the Robae.
When all was said and done, they were escorted to the waiting ships that
would ferry them from the moonbase to their new lives on planet Earth.
When Kro walked through the door of the house of Mark Dobbs, his wife
Mary looked up in surprise, "You're home early, is there anything
wrong?"
He recalled where Mark worked and responded, "Boss let me off early
for finishing a Chrysler on time. Where are the girls?"
His response to Mary was an automatic reflex from the memory of Mark
Dobbs. Kro was pleased with the way the interface between his mind and this
body was working. Everything was going
smoothly so far.
Days passed, reports were made back to the base on the Moon, data was
duly gathered and processed, life continued boringly on.
The success of the Grand Experiment appeared assured.
To avoid any suspicion and ensure successful integration into Earth
society, none of the Robae meldlings knew each other's location and could only
report back to base for support. They were unable to compare notes, and thus
any Earth-oriented experiences that were shared were third-hand and lacked the
fresh and human perspective of a peer to
peer discussion.
Support for any local problem of a psychological nature would be delayed
and conservative, so help with what started to happen next was neither timely
nor effective.
Dreams. Robae didn't have them.
Not until the Grand Experiment.
Since the melding, Kro was starting to have them.
At night after retiring to bed, exhausted from a hard day's work in the
service pit, he would fall asleep and it would start.
Strange visions of stranger places. Faces leering and jibing at him.
"We know who you really are. We'll tell your wife and family. You
won't survive. You'll be destroyed."
He would wake up in a cold sweat, find absolutely nothing amiss, and then
not be able to get back to sleep. He was getting more and more exhausted as
time went on and he reported this to base along with a request for more
information on human dreaming. The meldling controllers took some few days to
reply and then it was just to inform him that others were experiencing similar
problems and that they were still working on a solution.
The dreams did not stop, and his continued lack of sleep was catching up
on him.
Kro started hearing voices even while he was awake and kept noticing
sudden movements just at the edge of his vision, like someone playing
hide-and-seek and peeking just to tease him. Whenever he turned in
confrontation, there would be no-one there.
The situation worsened day by day until Kro was adamant that he was not
alone.
He could feel another presence in this new body of his.
It could not be possible as all mental activities were terminated in this
Human shell prior to melding.
Well, that was what he was assured when all was discussed at the start of
the process.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY HEAD?"
The voice that shouted this appeared between Kro's ears with such force
and volume that he fell to the floor clutching his head with both hands.
He was not ready for anything quite like what was happening and appeared
to be losing control of his new body.
"Who are you?" Kro whispered.
"I am Mark Dobbs and this is MY head. Get out of it and stay out!
Evil bloody demons! GET OUT! GO!"
It was all too much.
Kro could feel a loss of control. His thoughts became fuzzy and lacked
focus. It was like a searing white flame purging him from this body, turning
his mind to dusty ash, scattering in grey-white billows on a foul hot wind.
The Grand Experiment was falling apart. Meldlings everywhere were
collapsing, their minds on fire as their Human hosts took back their bodies.
There could be no resistance to the younger, aggressive and angry minds
of Humanity.
The Robae had failed.
There was nothing else left to do.
All their resources were focused on this plan; there was no backup.
Nowhere to go.
The Commander looked around in horror at what was happening to the crew
of the base.
Their time was up.
The biological clock of his race had finally run down and the result was
swift and unimaginable.
The dissolution of the genome not only caused death but also appeared to
effect a breakdown of the cellular structure of their bodies.
One by one they dropped where they stood, folding and dissolving into
greyish mounds of quivering plasm.
He found his vision failing as his legs also slowly buckled beneath him.
It had all been so pointless.
The secret outpost on a foreign world.
The magnificent scale and depth of their scientific research.
The culmination of it all with the transfer of the lives of a good number
of his race to the target race of Man.
It was as if it were all never meant to be, as if the hand of God had
waved aside the mistake of their existence.
His last thought was that he would find peace and truth the other side of
death.
Hospitals on planet Earth were slowly but surely emptying. Doctors
noticed
that waiting rooms were less crowded
than in previous months.
People in general were becoming healthier. Drug companies were seeing a
downturn in their profits that totally puzzled their marketing machines.
In due course it would be discovered that there was a steady reduction in
viral epidemics in the world. A phenomenon that would keep Earth's scientific
community occupied for decades.
So it goes...
