CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Changes
Melissa heard the electromagnetic, or EM, field that had been humming all around her gradually fade away to nothing, then start back up again after a few seconds of silence. She was having trouble seeing now- her eyes mostly swollen shut, and even if they weren’t she realized that the way they worked wasn’t the same as before. As near as she could tell, they were beginning to sense different parts of the EM spectrum! What little she could see was now starting to bear little resemblance to the world she knew and instead looked like someone was running the world through some sort of graphical filter like people played with on their smartphones.
Yes, that’s it, my vision is now courtesy of Instagram!
She had been noticing that EM field noise for a while now, and even though she couldn’t see it or the equipment generating it with her morphing visual capabilities, she knew that’s what it was. She even began to realize, as she listened to it humming away in the background, that it was cycling through a narrow band of frequencies at a rapid pace. It wasn’t something typical of a medical facility, but it was something she had been exposed to many years ago, so she knew what it was.
A friend of his, Jean-Pierre Regaeu, a French scientist she had become friends with over the years, had a setup much like it in his laboratory. Melissa had asked about it, and they had a conversation that lasted well over an hour because the mechanics of generating such a field were highly complex. Even more complex was the way in which the field was shaped to enclose a known area fully, forming what was in effect a spherical forcefield around the point of the machine that generated it. It wasn’t purely spherical though, that was the part that was so fascinating to Melissa. In fact, Jean-Pierre was able, through techniques that even Melissa had difficulty understanding, to extend precise parts of the field to enclose specific areas of a room, for example. The way he could accomplish this was simultaneously the reason for such a shield to be created in the first place.
Nanotechnology.
Jean-Pierre was a leader in the field of microscopic machines, and he and Melissa had long discussions about the "gray goo" theory, the theory that runaway nanotechnology could destroy mankind by assimilating all material, organic and otherwise, to self-replicate, as nanotechnology in most cases is designed to do. The solution Jean-Pierre had come up with was this EM shield technology. The oscillations of the field were precisely tuned to disrupt the CPUs of the nanotech he was creating so they could never escape his lab, or whatever area was demarcated for their operation.
Melissa had asked Jean-Pierre how he solved the problem of the nanotech escaping should the field lose power. Jean-Pierre had always just smiled and refused to answer, which Melissa always took to mean “if that happens, we’re screwed!”
Not a comforting thought to say the least.
No more comforting than the thought she had now, which was, in fact, a question: why would an EM shield oscillate in a way designed to contain nanotechnology be required in the med bay she was in?
Of course, she knew what the answer must be, and she also understood what the consequences were likely to be. She’d had plenty of time to realize it in between waves of excruciating pain…
…another of which she felt coming on now.
“Hey babe, you just go ahead and squeeze the shit out of my hand and fight through it! And don’t worry about breaking my hand either, you still owe me for that time I broke your pinky with that crazy shot I took when I forced you to try playing Tennis!"
Alex could see the expression of pain on Melissa’s face, could hear the groaning beginning, so he did the only thing he knew he could now: he grabbed Melissa’s hand and tried to make her laugh.
This time, there was no real possibility of it working.
“A-Alex…”, Melissa managed to get out before the heavy breathing and crying began. She could only hope this wave of pain would be a short one, as did Alex.
Three minutes later, it finally began to subside, and Melissa could hear Alex speaking again, no longer consumed with the agony wracking her body.
“Jesus Christ, what the hell is that?”
Alex was looking at Melissa’s right side. A few inches below her breast and off to the side was what looked like a new arm. Not a proper, complete arm, but something monstrous, malformed, and altogether inhuman. It had what looked like translucent scales all along it’s six-inch or so length, was a greenish-brown color with purple veins crisscrossing underneath the scales, pulsating in a horrible rhythm. There were buds where fingers would be, but there were seven on the stub, and Alex could see what were beginning to look like claws growing out of them. Claws with a curved and razor-sharp edge. There were also spikes on the top of the fledgling hand extending a few inches from the surface, and the palm was covered in what seemed to be suction cups of some sort. The fingers appeared to be forming two new joints, and one of them was bent backward at an angle that was entirely unnatural.
“So, how do I look?” Melissa asked, trying to sound as calm as she could despite still feeling a twinge of fading pain.
Alex forced his attention away from the new arm.
“Oh, just fantastic babe. You may get a few days off work out of all of this though”.
Melissa tried to laugh, but the fluid building in his lungs made it turn into a disgusting choking-like sound, and chunky bile dripped from the corner of her mouth, which Alex dutifully wiped away with a cloth. A voice came over the intercom that Alex recognized as one of the doctors, Mark, he thought the name was.
“Captain, your test results are back."
Those words triggered immediate worry in Melissa. Was this going to happen to Alex too? She interjected before anyone else could.
“What test results? Are you all right? You’re not infected too, are you? Please say you’re not Alex!”
“Well, I think we’re both about to find out. So, doc, what’s the verdict?”
“You’re infected too, Captain, with the… uh…”
“Nanotech” Melissa said, completing the sentence with agony dripping from the word.
Both Alex and Mark shared the same shocked look on his face, as did Major Alcheck, who was outside the EM shield with the doctor.
Melissa was struggling to speak now. The fluid buildup was getting worse. She forced herself to continue as if she knew they were all wearing puzzled expressions despite not being able to see more than blurry figures now.
“I can hear the EM shield, and I recognize the oscillation pattern. What I don’t know is how we were exposed to nanotech.”
“Melissa, it’s not just nanotech inside us both. It’s fucking alien nanotech!”
Melissa began to cough and hack up blood and bile. The shock of what Alex was saying caused an extreme physical reaction.
Yet, even though she couldn’t understand how, deep down inside, she knew they were alien already before he had said it. In fact, she was starting to realize that wasn’t all she knew.
Alex grabbed the cloth on the table beside Melissa’s head and began to clean off the ejecta from her lungs.
“Well, we can’t have this, now can we?”
“Alex, what’s going on? What’s happening to my body? I can feel… things… growing all over me. I can feel them moving and changing, and my eyes don’t seem to see like normal eyes anymore. My God, if there’s nanotech inside of me, they could be…”
“…hey, Melissa, you know me, I don’t know shit about that stuff. Doc, what’s the deal here?”
“Melissa, the nanotech inside of you seems to be rewriting your DNA and rearranging parts of your body. We’re seeing new appendages growing, changes to the structure of your skin, even your brain is undergoing significant structural changes.”
Melissa was struggling to form the words now of the obvious question, but Alex beat her to it anyway.
“Why isn’t all of this happening to me too then?”
“We don’t know, Captain. While we observed the same nanotech in your blood as is present in Melissa’s, they seem to be completely inactive, completely dormant. We have no idea why, and we have no idea if they’ll just suddenly spring to life and start changing you too.”
“How did…we get… infected?”, Melissa chocked out.
“We’re not sure about that either, but our best guess is that Alex was infected first during his dimensional jump to Jupiter. We don’t really have any evidence to support that conclusion frankly, but given that Alex would have passed through numerous parallel universes on his way to the one he landed it, the working theory from the team is that he crossed paths with this technology in one of them. As for how you would have been infected, Alex told us you were the first one to come into physical contact with him upon his return. We suspect you were infected by that contact.”
“Has anyone… else… been infected?”
“No, that’s the strange thing-”
Alex couldn’t resist.
“You think that’s the strange thing, Mark?”
The doctor ignored him.
“-we’ve checked everyone else on the base, and you and Alex are the only two infected. Alex has told us he’s come into contact with some others since his return, shaking hands and that sort of thing, but the nanotech hasn’t been transferred to anyone else. Frankly, we have no idea why this would be the case. We have you in the EM shield just in case- it should keep the nanotech contained, although even that’s just a guess based on our limited terrestrial nanotech.”
"Maybe they just know how much cooler we are than everyone else around here," Alex quipped, trying to lighten the mood a bit.
This caused Melissa to begin cough/laughing again, and a new round of blood began to seep out of her mouth.
Something was different this time though. It wasn’t just a fit of coughing like last time. Suddenly, Melissa’s entire body began to shiver, as if she was freezing.
"Melissa, talk to me, what's going on? Mark, get your ass in here and help her!"
The EM field came down as the doctor rushed in. As he arrived at the bedside and the EM shield was brought up again, Melissa's body began to convulse violently. The new arm on her side began to flail about violently, and it took all of Alex’ considerable strength to hold it down. The sacks of flesh that were hanging off her body were undulating like giant bowls of jelly. The skin all over her body began to change colors in waves, first to a bluish tint, then to green, then the red, like a chameleon in front of different backgrounds. The skin of her face began to move as if there were insects underneath, moving to and fro, but never breaking through. Melissa began to scream, although the sound was mostly muted by the fluid in her lungs, which was now spewing out of her mouth in a seemingly impossible volume. Blood, puss, and stomach acid flew all over the place, covering both Alex and Mark.
Suddenly, less than a minute later, Melissa went silent. Her skin settled into a slightly green-tinted skin tone, the convulsions stopped, and the swelling around her eyes subsided somewhat, enough that the doctor could see her eyes again. They no longer looked like human eyes at all but were now something closer to a cat’s eye.
“What the hell?”, Mark said.
Alex was looking at Melissa's eyes just as the doctor was. Mark grabbed the penlight from out of his shirt pocket and began shining it in Melissa’s eyes.
“Melissa, can you hear me? Answer me if you can, please. Melissa? No response to light stimulus and no response to pain stimulus either”. He was pinching the skin of Melissa’s cheek as he said that, almost as hard as he could. Any harder and he might draw blood, but he didn’t think he would get a reaction even if he did.
Melissa was staring out into the center of the room, transfixed, but unable or unwilling to move or even respond to either Mark’s please for a response or his pinches.
Although they didn’t know it, Melissa was very much aware of what was happening, but she locked inside her own mind, unable to respond
——————————
She noticed that the space she was staring at was shimmering and distorting and rapidly began to fade out of existence as if the light in a roughly spherical area of the room was being sucked out. The area was slowly being replaced with what looked like a nebula out in deep space. Before she could comprehend what was seeing, Alex, Mark and the rest of the room vanished entirely from her sight, and Melissa realized she was, impossibly, floating out in space!
She also realized that she could move again and that her vision seemed to be normal as well, so she began to look around. In front of her was a brilliantly-colored pinkish-purple nebula, the brightness of a thousand stars causing it to glow diffused through it was almost overwhelming.
This must be a stellar nursery, where stars are born.
The words echoed through her mind as she looked at the nebula and realized it was an amazingly beautiful sight.
Before long, she began to become aware of a small black splotch up and to the left. It was slowly growing, blocking out progressively more of the nebula behind it. Melissa watched, fascinated, for what seemed like hours. After a time, she began to realize that this wasn't a single, solid object but was actually a group of smaller objects. But, there were so many of them that it seemed to form a single massive object for a long time before they were close enough that she could make out the multiple objects.
Over time, the darkness grew larger and larger, and she began to be able to resolve details on the objects, and once she could, it didn’t take long for her to realize that she was witnessing a fleet of spaceships coming towards her. The ships were irregularly shaped, seemingly shaped in random patterns. There was no rhyme or reason to the shapes that she could discern. They were not any sort of craft design she had ever seen. Of course, that made sense: in space, there was no need to consider aerodynamics in any way. In fact, a simple cube was considered by aerospace engineers to be the most efficient spaceship design imaginable: easy to build, maximizes internal space and just as efficient as something with wings and a sleek outer hull.
As she watched them approach though, she realized that the shapes weren’t just irregular, shaped, they weren’t even a constant shape: these ships were morphing into all sorts of different forms! She tried to imagine the kind of technology that would be required for such a thing, and it came to her quickly what the logical answer was: nanotechnology. If you could build a ship out of nanotech, you could rearrange the ship in any way you wanted at will. Her scientist mind immediately began racing, trying to formulate the sort of algorithms that would be required to dynamically morph a ship, presumably with beings inside, without killing them. It was overwhelming!
The ships were now close enough that they were blotting out most of the nebula, obscuring its light almost entirely, and reducing the light around her to almost nothing. It was then that she noticed a faint glow coming from behind her. She began to torque her arms, trying mightily to rotate to see what it was behind her. It took some doing, but she finally managed it.
What she saw was an amazing sight: it was a planet.
Not just a planet, but one that looked a lot like Earth! It wasn’t Earth though, she quickly realized: the land masses were all wrong, there was a lot more land too, and the colors of the atmosphere were skewed towards the red end of the spectrum. It looked to her like what she imagined a cross between Earth and Mars might look like if Mars had some oceans scattered about.
As she examined the planet, the ships began passing over her head. As they did, she noticed that they were no longer changing shape. They seemed to have settled into solid forms now. Their hulls still pulsated and shimmered as they had before, but their overall shapes were now well-defined and steady.
It was these final shapes, and looking at the planet, that finally gave her the answer to it all: they were being rigged for atmospheric insertion! They were effectively converting from spacecraft to aircraft!
She also noticed something else about these ships: they were armed to the teeth! She instinctively knew that the towers jutting out from all over the surface of all the ships were weapons systems of some sort. How she came to that conclusion, she wasn’t sure. It was less a conclusion in fact as just something she knew instinctively.
The ships began to slow now, save for one. That one, larger than any other she saw, continued towards the planet, which Melissa now realized was far closer than she realized. In fact, she guessed she wasn’t too much more than a few thousand miles from it.
The one ship approached the planet, and Melissa began seeing explosions across the face of the world below her. She also noticed a slight glow around the ship, almost like an electrical plasma field. A forcefield of some sort, she realized.
The explosions were satellites, or maybe spacecraft, impacting that field and being destroyed. Yes, she could now begin to make out that the glow of the field was more intense around each of the explosions. There was no doubt in her mind now that they were definitely physical objects being destroyed. This thing was just ramming its way through whatever was in orbit around this planet, not missing even a beat from each collision!
Without warning, beams of brilliant, bluish-white light streamed from hundreds of the towers all along the surface of the ship facing the planet. The beams shot down through the planet’s atmosphere, and in doing so quickly superheated the atmosphere forming columns of intense plasma as the energy pierced through. The beams reached the surface of the planet and Melissa was horrified by the destruction they caused. It was as if entire layers of the planet’s crust itself were instantaneously vaporized. The beams moved across the face of the planet, erasing everything that had been there before, like an eraser eating pencil marks on paper.
And Melissa knew, without hesitation, that millions of lives were being ended with every second that passed. She had no idea what kind of life inhabited this planet, what kind of creatures were meeting their doom this day. All she knew for sure was that life was being exterminated almost without effort by this one single, massive ship.
After a few minutes, the beams went silent as suddenly as they had begun. It seemed to Melissa that nearly an entire hemisphere of this planet was now nothing but glowing, melted rock, flowing like lava from a volcano on Earth, and the atmosphere seemed to be evaporating away. The planet’s rotation began bringing the other side into view, and it was then that she realized the large ship was moving away from the planet while the rest of the fleet began ascending down to the planet. Thousands of ships, smaller than the one that had wrought so much destruction in so short a time, but each still massive beyond words, began moving through the atmosphere, glowing from the friction of entry, and dispersing across the huge land mass now coming into view.
This was an invasion force. A ground assault force. And Melissa inexplicably knew that they would be just as destructive in their own way as the massive ship that had seemingly wiped half a planet out of existence in no time.
As suddenly as it had all begun, the planet, nebula, and space around her began to shimmer and wobble and fade to nothingness, and Melissa realized she was back in the med bay, the sound of Mark’s voice being another clue.
“Wait, I think she’s coming ‘round!”
Melissa gasped, her lungs relatively clear now. It was Alex’s turn to speak now.
“Just stay calm Melissa. You were in a trance or something for a few minutes there, but you’re coming out of it now.”
She struggled to speak. She felt as if she hadn’t slept for a decade.
“Alex-”
“Melissa, seriously, just relax. You can talk later.”
Melissa struggled to move her one remaining mostly normal arm, which felt heavy and excruciatingly sore, but at least controllable. She grabbed Alex’s hand.
“Alex… I know what’s happening to me!”