One and a half pretty rubbish years later…
ALIENS
[Antarctica]
Roughly hewn polygons of ice stretched out over the calm depths of the Southern Ocean like shattered white china. The jagged fragments created a scene which spoke of violence and chaos, but now floated in perfect calm, as if someone was trying to piece back together what they had earlier destroyed.
Derek loved the Antarctic ice floes, their flawless interlocking suggested a beautiful kind of order, but the genuine randomness in their forms made him feel like they needed to be worked out – an immense natural jigsaw puzzle.
The Aliens had managed to relocate to Antarctica in the turmoil which followed the crash. Conflict was anathema to them and Antarctica offered an ideal isolated safety away from the chaos engulfing Earth. Its icy wastes resembled those of their home planet, but with an extra transient beauty that the open ocean brought to Antarctica’s continually shifting landscapes.
Derek was leading Work Team 1 on a survey of the Northern Sector. The nine-strong unit represented half of the original eighteen to arrive on Earth. Since establishing themselves safely in Antarctica, the Aliens had busied themselves with gathering data to beam out to space – information relays to extend the vast infrastructure of the Alien nation across the universe. For the last 63 hours, they had been bookishly fixing each vector of the crooked line between the ice and the ocean, a key part of their study into the impact of climatic changes on Earth.
Beatrice and Hank hovered over two vertices on the ice shelf and each set into a spin. They absorbed information from their environment as they turned – geolocation, magnetic field, gravitational strength – and re-emitted it as data to the rest of the team.
Done! Gerald announced telepathically, as the information fizzed back to his database. Next!
Maud and Betty took up their positions on the next survey points and began to turn.
Done. Next. Trevor and Walter rolled into place. How we looking, Skip? Seems it’s receding to me. Gerald turned to Derek, Skip!
Derek sat in the snow, his detectable energies simmering low.
Skip? You, OK? Gerald rolled over and settled alongside him. Worried about tomorrow, huh?
Derek eked out a telepathic nod. Can’t believe morning is finally here…
Since arriving in Antarctica, managing the colony’s occupants had been Derek’s responsibility. On top of being the only colony member to refuse to adopt a Human name, Derek’s boss had also discarded all respect for the daily cycle of Earth to which the other Aliens had all attuned. He insisted on remaining on the circadian rhythm of his home planet, for which one day would last almost three Earth years. Now that Alien morning was finally about to break it was time to wake him up and, with that, the moment that Derek was dreading.
They don’t understand. They think their orders are so simple. A few Earth weeks back, the orders had been beamed many light-years across the universe from home planet HQ, orders the colonists were bound to follow. One team, on their own, to get the ship from way up North. It’s ten thousand miles away! Ten-thousand! They’ve got no idea how complex this planet is, how many different lifeforms there are. How much anger there is!
Derek’s anxiety smothered the team. They dropped their data collection tasks and huddled around him. They were all original arrivals, they had struggled together through the chaos that followed the crash. Deeply buried traumas began to wash around their collective memory.
Bullets…
Zombies…
Bots…
Then what? Thought Derek, Who knows if they can even fix the ship and get it back down here to pick us all up.
You think Boss will ask you to pick which team goes on the mission? Beatrice thought.
Of course he is – he asks everybody to do everything! How will I possibly choose who will go? Ten thousand miles!
A message fizzled through the air from the main colony, its searing positivity burning through the gloom. New arrival in zone 3.3!
New arrival? That’s all we need… Derek normally loved the challenge of providing for every new member of the Alien population – creating new living quarters, adjusting fuel distribution and organising the diversion of waste energies – all the kind of administrative tasks he normally adored. But with the need to fly home looming, every new colonist was one closer to the ship’s capacity.
Number 357, thought Derek, three more and we’re full. Come on team, we gotta get back.
With unspoken understanding, the nine grey balls pulled into a perfectly coordinated circle with Derek at the exact centre. They invisibly locked on to each other with a practised contortion of their natural magnetism. Then, in one smooth action, they flipped up into a vertical wheel, bound to Derek as the central pivot.
Let’s roll.
All things Alien were derived from efficiency. Over short distances the Aliens would rely on individual movement, their perfectly spherical, featureless forms making such movement very flexible and energy efficient. For longer distances, or over rougher terrain, the pinwheel-like, nine Alien formation they now held was the most frugal on energy. The team leader simply acted as the turning point for the other eight to orbit around, with the resulting group propelling forward in perfect harmony.
Within seconds, they were spinning their way at high speed across the blank white landscape. To them, however, the landscape was anything but blank. It was an intricate course of dangerously polished ice surfaces too slick for traction, of hidden trenches of sun-warmed powder too soft to bear their weight and thin ice with frigid watery darkness lurking beneath. They detected such obstacles together, deriving their course across the ice shelf as one single entity, automatically shifting centres of gravity as the harsh Antarctic winds tried to spin and tip them off course and the evening sun played games with the blur of their shadows.
*
They soon reached the ridge above the colony, easing up the gradient to its crest. The pinwheel disassembled, Maud, Walter, Betty and Trevor dropping down from the top of the wheel to settle on the ice alongside Gerald, Beatrice, Nancy, Hank and, of course, Derek. The team of nine stretched along the ridge in customary admiration of the view beneath them. Scores of Alien-sized holes punctuated the ice shelf, leading deep down into the permafrost to the intricate system of chambers and tubes which formed the underground city they now called home. The wind whipped up a fine mist of snow which oozed across the scene, blurring the view as it curdled around penguins waddling on carefully traced trails between the Aliens’ doors.
Down by the bay, glaucous waves teased the icy shore, setting the monotonous soundtrack to the toils of the other recent Alien arrivals as they practiced their different movement formations in the training zone.
I’ll kinda miss this place after we head home, thought Beatrice, the team’s most gifted engineer. Beatrice had a knack for inventive solutions that often evaded the tried-and-tested mindsets of the others. Her ingenuity had been instrumental in getting the Aliens safely to Antarctica in the first place.
They watched the trainees lift into the sky in a perfectly coordinated heli-spin, before the wind remembered its duties as party-pooper and tipped them spiralling back down into the dusty snow.
Race ya! thought Gerald as he sprang over the crest, always the first to throw down any challenge.
Beatrice and Hank were the first in pursuit. The others were right behind, careering down the ridge-face in perfectly measured slides before vanishing into their corresponding entrances. Derek paused for one more moment to survey what he had been instrumental in creating. They had made this place home but soon they would have to leave it and head back into the vast emptiness of space.
He edged over the crest and slid down the ice towards the hole he had selected to be extended for the new arrival. He dodged criss-crossing work teams, skirted a small troupe of penguins, ducked into a cloud of snow dust and then slipped down the hole like a perfectly hit eight-ball.
Telepathy had its benefits. Despite the spaghetti heap of tubes cut through the ice there were no awkward collisions. The Aliens knew the location, relative speed and bearing of every member in its proximity and accordingly adjusted their own speeds on a perfect auto-pilot. Derek would zip past one hole a split second after the blur of another Alien crossed his tube. He would spin into an offshoot and slot into a Derek-sized gap in a perfect train of grey balls as they zipped down the tunnel like stringed pearls, each popping out of sequence as its own exit arrived. Alone, he finally drew to a stop at the end of a tube: the location for the new arrival’s lodgings.
Number 357… he thought. We did too well down here.
After a moment’s analysis, he set into a steady spin. Despite having no visible limbs, the Aliens were able to manipulate objects around them by altering the various forces of nature to create any form of tool created out of solid energy. Such tools could exert forces on other objects in exactly the same way as say a real screwdriver or a pick did, despite not really existing in a physical sense. For this excavation work, Derek had set the invisible forms of half a dozen blades into curves around his surface. He needed a fast enough spin to turn the ice into vapour, as there was nowhere to stash the waste materials. After some careful manoeuvring, he had hollowed out a perfect sphere, five exact Alien widths across. On the lower face of this he set into a final spin and carved out a snug Alien cot. His work was done.
Living bay 357 complete, he emitted to the colony in general. He paused to observe his craftsmanship with pride. Still got it.
Although Aliens were, to other less perceptive creatures, all identical to the naked, extremely limited eye, there was in fact immense variation in their identities. The non-visible ‘aura’ that each emitted took on a very distinct ‘fingerprint’. How each individual naturally wove the gravitational, magnetic and other forces into a rich tapestry of unique emissions was a constant thrill for other Aliens to encounter, certainly as much so as the curve of a cheek, or the softness of a lip is to a human. The wavelengths that Derek was now eagerly picking up were quite illuminating.
As the echoed frequencies emitted by the new arrival drew closer and untangled themselves from the confused reflections and refractions of the ice tunnel walls, Derek was drawn dreamily into a state of full attention.
She arrived.
Derek was overwhelmed. What an incredible blend of energy! Such perfect frequenc–
Ahem.
Er, yes… Derek was struggling to get his ducks in a row. New arrival 35…7. Um… What’s your Human n–
“Rita,” she said audibly. Derek found himself suddenly disabled. He slid backwards into the new berth and settled into the Alien cot in a light spin. What perfect audio pitch, how is that even possible?!
Rita peered in. Of course, she had heard his thoughts but was pretending she hadn’t. Derek detected her stifled amusement and fought to get a grip.
Er…Yes, perfect fit. He took one last desperate spin in the cot to emphasise the point of his feeble charade. OK, you are assigned to work group 39, you will report to Terence at Earth time 0600 hours tomorrow… as in Earth tomorrow… um… morning, by which I mean–
Earth morning? Rita asked. Which, incidentally, is also Alien morning tomorrow morning.
Derek’s mind was frazzled. She was toying with him, he knew it.
Er, yes. He will take you for… um… you know.. for… His frequencies had jammed.
“Cworffee?” Rita joked audibly in a thick New York accent.
Er…
“A candlelit dinner for two, mais oui?” Rita said in her best Parisian. Derek’s brain felt like a goldfish bowl full of jellyfish.
No…
An intergalactic jour–
TRAINING! He pulsed it out far too heavily, Rita was almost knocked back by its force echoing around the tunnels. Yes, yes. Training. Goodbye.
Derek zipped off as fast as his scrambled system would allow. He slipped around the first available corner, only narrowly missing an oncoming train of Aliens as he fought to get his mind ironed out.
What was that?!
; -)
[A computer room, somewhere mysterious]
The little computer’s power indicator pulsed its patient pulse, fading thoughtfully through its cycle from dim to bright and back again. The only other light was from the window of the vast server room next door, in which the flicker of a million LEDs merged into a soapy haze that filtered through the murky glass and smudged across the corrugated aluminium walls of the computer room. A dramatic polygonal shadow gave the little computer an air of great authority, but it knew no-one was there to acknowledge that fact. It was cool with that.
The power light pulsed.
And pulsed.
Processing.
A
Here it was – Alien morning – finally dawning. Derek had been unable to rest. Last night’s interaction had been totally unexpected and left a strange sense of confusion oozing around his mind. But this wasn’t what bothered him most, it was the arrival of morning that sent shivers to his core.
He found himself up on the ice, braving the scathing wind, desperate to feel something that might distract. He watched the midnight sun playing chicken with the horizon before veering skywards and setting the ice on fire once again.
Why’d it have to be me? Why did I have to be the one to wreck this beautiful planet? He huffed a pile of snow into the grateful wind. Frank was lost because of me. I should’ve protected my crew.
Eighteen had arrived on Earth, but only seventeen had made it safely to Antarctica. In the midst of the initial chaos in Scarborough, the crew had watched helplessly on as Frank had been caught by stray Zombie teeth and had instantly inflated to twice his normal size into a grey mushy ball of wobbling Alien flesh. He was lost in the carnage that followed. Despite spending days sifting through the chaos, the rest of the team had failed to find him.
I hope he’s still alive, Derek thought, what I’d give for a clue. He stared out across the now peaceful bay. Translucent ice pierced water so shiny it looked like mercury. He gazed into the near perfect image of the sky on the mirror’s face, playfully curling up on the gentle waves as if to tease him by never quite revealing its flat perfection.
Still as wonderful as the first time I felt it, he thought as sunlight danced off the surface of the sea and played across his grey skin.
Earth was beautiful, there was no doubt about it. The Aliens had crafted the barren arsenic-white desert of Antarctica that they now called home into a mini-maquette of their real home, light-years away across the vacant void of the universe. The colony had the same kind of crafted beauty that home did – the kind that careful planning and immaculate organisation of engineering could bring to any fine-tuned system – but it also had all the extra wonderful trimmings that Earth’s natural splendour brought with it.
Derek’s greatest pride, when working through the details of the colony’s design, was the success of his idea to use the colonists themselves as a collective hub for receiving cosmic rays in the absence of the ship, their usual energy receptor. It was such energies that the Aliens fed on and, with Beatrice’s ingenuity, they were able to harness the surplus each Alien generated and use it for the benefit of the colony as a whole. The idea was essential to both their survival and their prospering, but it was this success which now pushed them towards the limit of the ship’s capacity. They had made efforts to reduce the surplus, an attempt to stem the automated population increases, but the system still determined there to be a potential for growth, and the numbers just kept on rising.
357… that number still haunted him. In just over one Earth month we’ll be over capacity… less if we find Frank… when we find him… we simply can’t be over capacity. Not taking everyone in the colony on the journey home was an unthinkable possibility to a race as cooperative and interconnected as the Aliens.
He recalled the millions of miles they had travelled across the universe – the comfort of peril-free open space, the beauty of being able to rely exclusively on numbers to navigate immense distances, the purity of the data-based survey they were undertaking as they tried to disprove the existence of extraterrestrials.
How wrong were we… So much life here, and so angry. So violent. Those guns, just dreadful. The gunfire and tortured screams which characterised the brutal clashes between Zombies and Humans still spooked him.
And the Bots, just terrifying… they almost stopped us. If it wasn’t for Beatrice… Are they out there, waiting for whichever team is chosen? Chosen by me…
He turned back to the view. The penguins were up to their usual tricks, waddling and stomach sliding their way to the waters to fish. The seals basked in the early morning warmth, waiting for the tides to suit them. Following their lead, Derek soaked up the perfect Antarctic sun for a few seconds more. He worried these were perhaps his last few moments without worry. Once the expeditionary team had left, he would have nothing but the tentative aura they emitted to gauge their progress, an indistinct signal of positive and negative forces which would dilute with every one of the ten thousand miles they had to cross to reach the ship.
Just one moment more.
; -)
The sudden whiteness was blinding. At least it would have been if anybody had been sitting in the Bots’ main computer room to see it. The damp green glow from the server room window was wiped out as the little computer pinged on its monitor and lit up the space.
Right then. A winky face emoji flashed onto the screen. It’s time.
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