Science Fiction Month

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...