“It’s moving! I mean, he’s moving! Look!”
Joanne drops the phone, not noticing when it misses the cradle, dangles like a hanged man by the stretched cord. She doesn’t hear the distant voice from the other end saying: Go ahead Foxtrot. Foxtrot? This is Delta … do you copy? Hey, you guys okay?
Because they’re all yelling now.
From inside the bright, red-jellied texture of the Specimen, a dark human-shaped shadow moves slowly toward the edge of the great mass, as if it is being squeezed out. Pushed away.
“Maybe he got the Suit to freeze?” someone says, but no one responds because they’re all watching, rapt, the obscene delivery of their leader.
Like the birth of a metal baby, the head of the Suit breaks free from the gelatinous body, a gooey pink film covering it like embryonic fluid. The shoulders come next and then, more quickly, the rest of Bob’s suit emerges, dropping awkwardly to the floor with a heavy clunk, but seemingly intact.
“All readouts are coming back online!” Jim shouts as the monitors filling the control room spring to life, showing the full array of the Suit’s sensors, along with an audible crackle of the comms.
Joanne depresses the button for her microphone, doing her best not to scream into the mouthpiece. “Bob, can you hear me? Do you copy?”
“Get the medical team in there,” Marisha barks, and another phone is picked up, a hurried voice asking for help. Robbie is already out the door, bolting down the metal steps. Daniel, slumped in his chair, muttering to himself like a madman, stares at a swarm of data filling his screen. “Holy shit … holy shit …. ” he mumbles, eyes tracking the insane amounts of data flooding through his monitor. “It’s been talking” he says, then sits bolt upright. He spins to face the room, his exhaustion erased by a look of terror. “It’s been …. Guys! Damn it, listen to me!”
Daniel stands fast enough to knock his chair over. It clatters hard to the floor, and the general chaos of the room quiets as all eyes turn to face him.
“It’s been talking! It’s been talking to him this entire time!”
TWO DAYS LATER, BOB LIES on a cot in the medical tent. They have removed the IV drip since he is once again eating solid foods, drinking all the fluids they give him. He begins today’s tedious regiment of exercises, prescribed by the army doctor, to stretch and energize the muscles, revitalize the strained organs of his body.
Members of his team have come and gone, intermittently and without pattern. Joanne has visited the most, stayed the longest. In a way, the team needed some time to recoup as well, given their around-the-clock efforts to free him.
Daniel, oddly, has visited only once, and as part of a group. Bob noticed the communications expert looking at him warily, as if cautious. Or suspicious.
Or afraid.
Alone now, wearing white medical scrubs, he runs through his series of light stretching and strength exercises. As he huffs and sweats, he continues to replay—over and over—the things the alien had told him.
The philosophy of perspective; how humans can only see what their minds are capable of seeing. Their senses hampered by the limits of what a body of flesh-and-blood can acknowledge. Can understand.
If you could see sound, or music, as I can, your perceptions of your world would change forever. To you, my shape is amorphous, an auditory rendering of a foghorn instead of a sonata. If my shape were human, would my ability to consume energy be any less repugnant? My way of devouring nutrients and absorbing thoughts, memories, genetic code less horrifying? Would I be less of a threat if I had teeth or tentacles?
I think not.
Bob counts his knee-bends. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen ….
Your people wonder about my existence here, in the universe. Why I came to this world to feed. The secret, Bob, is that I only come to worlds that are dying. Or, in your case, worlds that are already dead but don’t yet realize it. Like the light from a distant, long-extinguished star, the fate is written, waiting for perception to catch up.
Bob, sweating freely, begins to do push-ups, his palms flat against the cool concrete floor as he counts. One, two, three ….
When I devour this world, crossing the floor of oceans, feasting on the largest cities, toppling the deepest forests, consuming all the life which exists, I will grow to such size that the planet itself will feel my weight upon its surface. And then I will burrow, Bob, crushing the core of this world, and the continents will collapse, and the seas turn to ash. The atmosphere you breathe will wither and the planet will erupt into dust and rock, flung out into space as meteoric detritus.
The same as I’ve done countless times, to countless other worlds such as yours.
And then I will split into countless pieces, and each part of me will nestle within these galactic travelers, these meteors of your world, and through them I will expand further across endless space, absorbing new species, new planets. I’ll go on and on, until I am spread across the breadth of the cosmos, and all of it is ME, and all of those species will be part of what I AM.
It’s all so glorious, Bob … it’s all so glorious.
Can’t you see?
Bob finishes his push-ups. He stands, plucks a towel off the back of a nearby chair and wipes his face.
A nurse enters his room holding a tray of food. He watches as she sets it down but makes no move toward it.
Instead, he steps, silently, behind her. She turns, surprised, but does not cry out. Does not scream.
His raises his hands slowly, rests his open palms on the sides of her face, almost tenderly.
“Dr. Cronus?” she says, her gaze steady. “What is it?”
He looks deep into her eyes, and she smiles awkwardly. Prettily.
For the nurse, this is not the first time something like this has happened, and by men less handsome than this one. She knows what he wants, of course, but is happy to play the game. “Aren’t you hungry, Doctor?” she says, reaching behind her to rest a hand on the edge of his dinner tray.
Then her cheeks begin to burn, as if his palms have transformed into blistering-hot irons. She wants to scream now, but it’s too late, and her breath catches in her throat as the searing heat eats through her cheeks.
The dinner tray clatters to the floor.
As she stares at him—her mouth hung open and filling quickly with wet, hot flesh—his bright blue eyes appear to bleed. But it is not blood that trickles out from the corners of his eyes, that runs down his cheeks in thin tendrils.
And when he grins, a fat, pink tongue pushes outward from between his gleaming white teeth, and divides.
And when he speaks, it is the voice of multitudes.
