Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology Read online

  “Yessss,” Rory’s shout reached her ears as she pulled the interface headset away from her neural nodes. He came out into the hall. “We’re clear. I say we get the hell out of here before he finds out she’s a copy and dumb as a stump and comes back to discuss that.”

  Nova frowned at him. “Hardly dumb,” she said.

  “Compared to that AI, she might as well be a toaster. Especially without a database to draw on. I’ll head up to the bridge. We need to get the helm back up and run a structural analysis. You’ll want to check the prison boxes and report to Air Command. That AI is a hazard for whoever encounters it. They’ll want that taken down.” He hurried away, counting off the many tasks that lay ahead of them.

  Nova watched him go and then turned to enter the mainframe chamber. The cold air shocked her but the AI had begun to initiate her functions, reaching out again into all corners and subsystems aboard the Kaven, warming this space with her own list of things to do.

  “Sadie?” Nova said.

  “Yes, Lieutenant Whiteside,” the bland voice drifted from an overhead speaker.

  “Do you remember what happened?” Nova asked, feeling awkward. Of course the AI would have a record of all that had transpired here.

  “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  Nova bit her lip, knowing that this was likely the last private conversation she’d have with Sadie before Air Command took over for their investigation. “How do you feel… uh, I mean, what is your analysis of these events? Of the entity that boarded us?”

  A screen on the monitoring station flickered something that needed someone like Rory to decipher and then went dark again. Something hummed, then clicked, probably all part of whatever rebooting was going on. Or was the AI stalling? Was there anything here that matched the soul she had seen in that simulated character’s eyes?

  “It called to me,” Sadie said. “From the distance. And I wanted to fly.”

  ~FIN~

  Nova Whiteside is the main character of The Targon Tales, five books describing her adventures as military pilot and agent in the deep space Union wars against a ruthless rebel force. The first book, Sky Hunter, is free on all vendors.

  Visit www.chrisreher.com for information about this series, other science fiction by Chris Reher, synopses, audio books, and links to your favorite book sellers.

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  THE ALIEN

  A SHORT STORY

  By Kay McSpadden

  ABOUT THE ALIEN

  At first he passed for human to hide from the dreary collective of his alien world. But no matter how much creativity, passion, sex, and even love he found on Earth, he knew he was living on borrowed time.

  THE ALIEN

  He shouldn’t have run, but he panicked. That was the word, wasn’t it? The word the humans used to describe an overwhelming, unthinking fear response?

  He shouldn’t have let himself panic and run when the enforcers came. He was, after all, a criminal, and criminals were not allowed in the collective. Or rather, the collective realigned the fabric of their being until they were no longer criminals. Who they had been—the unique arrangement of molecules and vapor—was shifted into something else. A death of the self, but necessary for the unity of the collective.

  If he hadn’t panicked he could have planned better, would have found a safer place to hide. But as soon as he realized the enforcers were close, he spread himself thin enough to catch the next particle transfer to the planet of the humans, a popular travel destination.

  He’d been there many times, usually borrowing the corporeal body of one of the large tropical felines but occasionally choosing to inhabit a creature capable of flight. Only once had he slipped into the body of a human. The poverty of sensation compared to other animals was striking, though the trade off in intellectual capacity and all it conferred—language, imagination, the use of tools—would have been worth it if he had time to overcome the initial disorientation.

  Running from the enforcers was futile. They would catch him and realign him. He understood that—not just that it would happen but why it would happen, and even why it needed to happen. He was a criminal and criminals were a threat to the collective.

  He’d known other criminals, or known of them, and none had tried to run. When their crimes were called out, they’d apologized to the collective and undergone realignment without protest. Whatever their crimes had been—a stubborn refusal to bow to the will of the group, an insistence on keeping some experiences private—they eventually saw the wisdom of giving up and giving in.

  Something in the unique collection of molecules and vapor that made up who he was rebelled at the idea. Instead, he skimmed the surface of the planet of the humans, the buzz and hum of the alarm and anger of the collective spurring him on, looking for a place to hide.

  The familiar savannahs where wild cheetahs and lions lived in protective refuges were too close and small. He hovered over farmland and rural communities but their sparse populations made his eventual discovery more likely. A large city would be an easier place to find a human host—one too young to object to sharing a consciousness while he waited for the enforcers to lose interest in hunting him down.

  If they ever did.

  Without knowing how he knew, he could feel the enforcers drawing closer. He sped away to a collection of steel and concrete buildings, their heat signature rising above the earth like a beacon, a visibly populous city with a central grassland where humans walked alone or in multiples.

  Find one, find one. Make a decision.

  “We’re not naming him Isaiah,” a human woman said, laughing. Her companion, a dark-haired man taller and leaner than the woman, shook his head.

  “Then Mordecai it is.”

  “We’ll see about that!” The woman’s face was almost luminous in the heat. Her hair, darker than the man’s, was pulled back in a complicated knot at her neck.

  The hum of the enforcers was close.

  More panic—and a choice.

  With one last dash, he settled into the cluster of multiplying cells hidden deep inside the woman. A preborn human—so indeterminate that it had no consciousness at all. He pulled in the molecules and vapor of himself and waited as the enforcers drew close, scanned the area, and left after a march of time. They would be back, he was certain.

  He settled in, grew, and was born Isaiah Mordecai Shapiro.

  He spent the first year exploring each part of his host body, lingering in the cilia of the lungs, washing through the leaflets of the heart, standing watch as bone and muscle and skin and nails became a fortress. As he grew accustomed to the rhythms of sleep and awareness, his fear of being discovered receded and he felt genuine pleasure in the experiences available to humans—sight and sound and smell, of course, but most especially the joy of taste—the flavors that made him shiver with delight or disgust, the unusual sensation of cold and hot on his tongue and the roof of his mouth, his befuddlement at the varied textures and viscosity of food.

  “Bananas are a hit,” the man who called himself his father announced. Isaiah bit hard on the spoon and marveled at the chill of the metal on his new teeth.

  In the history of the collective he could find no record of anyone inhabiting a host body for any length of time. On earlier visits to the planet of humans he’d intertwined briefly with the electricity coursing through the brain of a host. He was careful to tap into the senses without alerting the host to his presence—not so difficult with cheetahs and sparrows but harder with the primates, and almost impossible with the humans themselves.

  “I’m just not myself today,” he overheard the older woman say whose mind he’d borrowed once, a definite note of complaint in her voice. Apparently humans feared losing control and agency as much as he did—resisting his direction with the same resentment he felt when the collective tried to corral his autonomous—and therefore criminal—thoughts.

  This baby
human host showed no such fear or resentment. At first Isaiah thought this was because the human was relatively unformed, the number of brain neurons fixed but the connections between them exploding exponentially.

  Yet as he neared the second year of habitation he realized that the lack of resistance to his presence was a general lack of everything—a pervasive emptiness of mind that was slowly beginning to concern the humans around him.

  “Developmental delays,” his father told a co-worker.

  “Uncle Mordecai was also slow to learn to talk,” his mother said, her voice trembling.

  Perhaps despite his care he had damaged this young human in some way—simply by being here, sharing his interior world.

  Or perhaps—and this was more likely—the young human was defective. Isaiah experimented by vacating the host completely for short expeditions—lurching into the family dog—a creature whose life was driven primarily by smell and hunger—and once transferring into a passing house fly, whose black and white compound world was splendid and confusing in equal measure.

  From those vantage points he watched his host body falter and slump forward; the vacant eyes, the flaccid arms, the tiny pink tongue poking uselessly between his lips. In the metaphors of the humans, a car without a driver. A canvas without a painter. A room empty of furniture. His parents were visibly distressed.

  With that, Isaiah gave up being tentative and stretched out fully as the pilot of the body. Why not? It would go to waste otherwise.

  He often caught his mother watching him, not just when he ran about in the back yard testing the heft of gravity or the angle of solar deflection, but during quiet moments, too, when he sat with a paper book in his hand and traced the mysteries of written language with his fingers. The notion of immortalizing thoughts this way intrigued him but made him sad for humans with their imperfect memories.

  “An old soul,” his mother said, ruffling his hair. “My little old man.”

  By the time he started school, he’d had several close calls with the enforcers. Once a woman his parents invited to join them at their favorite Park Slope diner kept touching his arm, as if to gauge his reaction. She held her hands awkwardly, like someone borrowing unfamiliar tools. Would a normal human six year old object to or seek out more of her contact? The third time she rested her hand on his forearm, he pulled away and shifted in his seat. Across the table his mother and father exchanged glances. He never saw the woman again.

  Sometimes in a crowd he felt the hair at the back of his neck rise as if the current of the collective were sweeping over him.

  A large husky followed him around the park so closely one day that he was convinced it was an enforcer—until the dog’s owner showed up, empty leash in hand, and the dog bounded to him with obvious recognition and joy.

  It was only a matter of time, of course.

  Meanwhile he was astonished at how passing for human became second nature for him, how easy it was to fall into the patterns of conversations and play, how necessary to his happiness other humans were—the clucking attention of his grandmother when he spent the afternoon helping her make rugelach, the kisses and cuddles his mother gave him when she tucked him in at night, the pride in his father’s voice when he brought home top marks from school. His friends became another measure of his acceptance—seeking him out on the playground and later, when they were young teenagers, sitting cross-legged for hours in his room listening to music and talking about imagined journeys.

  “I’m an alien,” Isaiah said one afternoon to his best friend, Tip. The comment slipped out unbidden, weighted with years of necessary secrecy, burdened by the discomfort of deception.

  Tip seemed unfazed. “I know what you mean,” he said. “No one gets me at all.” He looked up from the digital tablet in his hand and smiled. “Except you, of course. And every other teenager in the world. We’re all just aliens in this crazy place.”

  Isaiah laughed at the truth of it. But it made him lonely, too, that no one here could ever know how much of an outsider he was, how much his life felt like it was pending, or like an observed performance spinning to an end.

  Not an end the way the humans meant end. When his grandfather died of a sudden heart attack, Isaiah was unprepared for the depth of his despair. That a sentient being could cease to exist was inconceivable. No one in the collective ever completely disappeared, even if they were realigned so dramatically that nothing of their individuality remained. There was always something, some trace elements or eddies of existence that the universe recognized.

  When a human died, notwithstanding the elaborate stories and rituals the survivors comforted themselves with, the echoes of who they were, who they had been, buckled and then stilled like ripples on a pond. Human impermanence horrified him.

  For months he moped around. His best companion was his grandmother, content to sit silently in the parlor looking through old photographs or, rousing herself, pulling out a canister of tea and brewing them both a cup. When she started to cook pastries again, Isaiah knew she was resolved to get on with the heavy business of living.

  He moped for another reason, too. Although he loved the planet of the humans—as comfortable as he was as Isaiah—he missed the collective. As a human he was always alone, his body as much a prison as a conduit to experience. In the collective he was never alone, never lonely. He was not an alien there—or at least not the way he was now, exiled among people who could never truly know him. If he hadn’t run away, he would have been realigned long ago into the safety and vibrancy of his own kind.

  Perhaps it was time to return.

  He had no doubt that when he left this body it would cease to be. The organs would function and the body wouldn’t die, but the part of it that people knew as Isaiah would be gone. He was his parents’ only child and they would grieve his loss. That idea pained him, but all parents lost their offspring when they matured sufficiently to move from constant surveillance. Their previous close contact was, of a necessity, broken and rare. Or if parents stayed in close proximity, they were relegated to a secondary role—as grandparents, or occasional companions at holidays.

  As for him, once he abandoned the body he would be taken back up into the collective, his molecules and vapor stripped and twisted until his sojourn on the planet of the humans was forgotten and his criminal tendencies purged. He would fall back into the anonymity of group life with relief.

  His decision to surrender was postponed when his mother fell ill. A neurological disease, curable but only with great effort and suffering. Many days he sat at her bedside and brought her the foods he knew how to cook—simple-minded eggs and sandwiches that made her smile.

  When his friend Tip started taking classes in a local university, Isaiah enrolled as well while he waited for his mother’s full recovery. If he was an odd duck in elementary and high school, in college he was invisible. In most of his classes he was one of a hundred or so students in an auditorium watching the indifferent performances of bored professors.

  Occasionally the presentations were worthwhile, but the other students were the real draw. He fell in with a group that met frequently for coffee and conversation, and soon enough one of them, a young woman named Ellie, singled him out for her attention.

  “You’ve got that look on your face again,” she said, hooking her arm through his and shepherding him from the auditorium. Her tone was light and teasing and warm—an invitation to spar verbally.

  “Everyone’s face has a look,” he parried. “Perhaps you meant I have a particular expression that signals my mood.”

  “I meant what I said.” Ellie was mock adamant. “You have that look on your face, the one that means you would rather be anywhere but here.”

  “Impossible.”

  “I could tell you didn’t think much of what Dr. Stevenson was saying.”

  “His explanations were shoddy, his research suspect, and his delivery dry. But you are wrong.”

  Ellie cocked her head. “What do you mean?”
/>   “I want to be here.”

  Isaiah unhooked his arm and reached for Ellie’s hand, something he hadn’t done before.

  His young man’s body was a delight. He ran in the mornings to feel the burn in his calves and the ragged exertion of his lungs. Sometimes he joined a pick-up basketball game and gloried in the heat and sweat, the marriage of eye coordination and toe liftoff, the shouts and grunts and aggressive posturing.

  In Ellie’s small dorm room, in her narrow bed, he found more to marvel at with his body.

  He stopped considering when to rejoin the collective and started to think about if.

  “I need to tell you something.” Isaiah kept his voice matter-of-fact but Ellie wasn’t fooled. By then they had known each other four years and had kept close company for half that time. In many ways they were an odd couple—he tall and dark, she close to his height but so fair that her eyes were almost colorless.

  She spent her free time in the cramped basement biology lab, though she was equally drawn to pure mathematics when pressed about a future career. When she couldn’t get in touch with Isaiah she knew to seek him out in one of the studios in the art department—a canvas too large for an easel propped against one wall, Isaiah standing close with a brush in his hand or a few feet back, his shoulders squared, eyes forward, feet planted like someone facing a storm.

  They were sitting across from each other at a small table in their favorite campus coffee shop. It was crowded but not noisy, most of the other patrons hunched over laptops or textbooks.

  Isaiah lifted a heavy ceramic mug to his lips before continuing.

  “I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time.”

  At once Ellie looked alarmed. “Are we—are you breaking up with me?”