Eden Seed

Evolution's Game

Oh god, the realization strikes me, I'm being eaten alive. The alien tingle in my toes renders my feet useless. My knees hit the serrated floor and pain rips up my legs. My knees are still my own. For now. I fight the urge to look back at what these...creatures...these...things are doing to me. Tears well up in my eyes and blur my vision. I can't die. Not like this. Instinctively, my hands raise to wipe the tears away, but gloved fingers halt against my Carbonplex face shield. I can't even wipe tears away. How am I to save the entire human race? Waves of self-doubt and despair wash over me and show me a thousand horrible ways where I die screaming noiselessly into the abyss of space. I don't fight it. What's the point? I wasn't even supposed to be out here, let alone on the Indiana Civilization-Carrier.

A thirty-second-in-line English teacher, I'd never have made the ship's list in normal times. If the Polaris Star energy project hadn't gone horribly wrong, I'd still be sucking down filtered, irradiated air on Earth.

The pain in my knees stops abruptly. The infection is spreading fast...or is 'harvest' a more appropriate word. A laugh escapes my lips as I roll over and sit against the bridge wall. I remember the futility of my former English lessons to dim-eyed boys in the boarding school who were dreaming about booze and girls...can't blame them for that. 'Word selection is critical' I can hear my own voice like I'm back in the classroom again. 'Words are power. Choose the appropriate one, or the consequences can be catastrophic.' Perspective is everything.

'Catastrophic?' a student in the class, Timothy Baylor, interrupts me in the memory. 'Like forgetting to wear a bra while teaching?' The class erupted with laughter. I miss that little asshole. He's dead now. Probably incinerated by the initial explosion of the Polaris project if he was lucky. If not, he suffocated as Earth's atmosphere evaporated. Maybe he even survived long enough to watch the larger section of the Earth drift away from his half before he froze to death in the uncaring void.

I jab my only Meloxicut syringe into my upper right thigh and feel no pain at the injection point. The bastards have me to the hip now. Won't be long. Spirits soared when a beacon was found in deep space. Even though nothing was inside, we finally had proof of intelligent life. And renewed hope. We weren't close enough to determine where the intelligent life lived, but now we know: Inside us. Millions of microscopic holes were bored through the hull before the crew took notice. I'm not sure how any of us would have prepared for this eventuality had we known.

I'm staring at the blood-soaked chair of Carson, the navigator, or what's left of him and his bloody entrails as I glance across the bridge of the ship. He must have tried some emergency maneuver to get clear before emptying all the ordinance on board into the darkness. God knows what's become of him. Or any of the hundred thousand aboard.

My right hand grasps my sidearm as the drugs pump euphoria through my veins. As the cold barrel presses an 'o' against my temple, I hear knocking on the other side of the locked door. Voices. They're calm and cajoling at first, urging me to let them in. They say they can help. There's a cure for the sickness. I'm tempted. I want to believe. I need to believe. But when I don't answer, they grow hostile.

"Ava," I call for the onboard A.I.

"Yes, Dr. Prenette?"

"Play the initial contact log-my headset, please."

I witness all the carnage. The captain and crew clawing their own flesh off, severing their own limbs to get the creatures out. The officers had first contact, and it was before the aliens figured out how to eliminate human pain. On evolution's great battlefield, humanity is found wanting.

A Hyperion rage rises within me and, with it, an idea. I have one last defiance, humanity's final roar, to deliver. We will not go so quietly into the night after all.

"Ava, what transports are still active?"

 She lists them. "Stop." I say when Ava confirms my hope. I tell her the plan.

I crawl to the Medstation and thrust my arm into a hole in the wall. A needle pierces me, draining my blood. "Take it all, and pack nukes in the science transport. Copy yourself to it's systems." I order. "Do you have the male's?"

"The transport is already armed. Adam was careful to back up his DNA several times over." Ava responds.

The locked door in front of me bursts open, and I fire round after round at the creatures who wear my friends' faces.

"Defend yourself at all costs!" I scream to Ava over the explosive percussion of the bullets. "At all costs! Just leave me one active nuke. Give me full control and post your visuals to my visor." 

Ava complies. "Goodbye, Eve." She says.

I see Ava and the ship depart though video in my helm as I fire my last round. An ocean of bodies rushes my position. I feel nothing. A planet appears in the corner of my visor. Ava approaches with two sets of the last Human DNA in a science transport. We're going to survive. I say to myself just as Ava's systems flash a red-alert: inbound objects lock onto her position. She responds with 47 nuclear warheads. Most of the planet ignites in plumbs of radioactive fire-all except for a small circular area near the equator-where Ava lands.

Digital renditions of Ava's nuke strikes flicker on my viewscreen as the aliens surround me.

I stare at the mangled bodies of my former friends, standing in front of me.

"You murderers!" I hurl.

No time left, I have one word to utter as the aliens overtake me.

"Execute." And a flash of light...