And this time, they were here to assimilate Earth and humanity.
The bitter taste of adrenaline and fear flooded Jace’s mouth as he dropped his hands to the controls.
“Gehenna,” he said, “alert the others. The Swarm is here.”
And just as he was about to turn the ship’s thrusters on there was the blare of an alarm. Shrill. Piercing. Deafening.
“Gehenna! What the Hell is that noise?!” he demanded. “Shut it off! I can’t concentrate!”
In fact, the whole spaceship was becoming opaque, hazy, and strangely unreal. He put his hands up to his ears, trying to drown out the squawk, but it did nothing.
“I’m afraid I cannot, Jace. It is not coming from my systems, but yours,” Gehenna said, almost sadly.
“Mine? What do you mean?”
But then Jace jolted awake in his bedroom.
His phone’s alarm was going off. An annoying blare of raw sound. He flew upright in bed and sat there, unsure where he was for long moments. His heart beat wildly in his chest. He blinked his eyes rapidly as he tried to square this ordinary bedroom--desk chair covered in this week’s clothes that weren’t dirty enough for the hamper, desk piled high with his notebooks where he sketched and wrote, windows covered with shades that showed morning light around the edges, half-closed closet doors with shoes spilling out--and the clean, almost antiseptic yet cozy space of the Storm Spike.
We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto, he thought mirthlessly.
He managed to hit the STOP button on his phone and the alarm went silent. It was 7 a.m. on a Monday morning in Sunrise, Arizona, population 300, but if one added the military personnel onto that it rose to 3000.
Allegedly 3000.
Unlike on many bases where military personnel lived both on and off base and used the local city’s services, at Area 67 some unknown amount of people arrived on base, but never left it. They were working on such secret projects that they had to work, sleep and eat on base. Jace didn’t bother asking his parents if the rumor was true or what kind of projects would require such dedication. They would never answer him and betray the country they both served and loved so much. But still, Jace wondered.
He rubbed his face with both hands, still feeling slightly foggy. Whenever he had these dreams, when he woke up he felt like he’d left part of himself behind. He’d been having these dreams for years, but only in the past six months had he decided to turn them into a novel or maybe even a series of novels. His unconscious mind must have liked that idea, because the dreams were coming to him more often and with greater detail.
He blindly reached for the notebook and pen on his nightstand. He had to write down everything he remembered before wakefulness washed it away. He certainly didn’t want to forget that the ship’s AI was named “Hell” for all intents and purposes. It amused him no end. He wondered why his unconscious mind had decided on that.
Was it because the AI would later be shown to be a villain? Maybe the true assimilation would come not from the Khul but from the Precursor technology that would mind meld with every human it could and turn them into pilots and not people. But he didn’t like that idea. It felt wrong to him. He was sure that in the story he was writing that the AI was trustworthy and his ally. He had learned to trust his gut instincts about what the story needed.
As he scribbled down the details in the notebook, he thought he would have to maybe change the AI’s name so people didn’t get the wrong idea, not even as a red herring. But that, oddly, felt wrong too as if the name “Gehenna” was right and had to stay.
Jace frowned at his unconscious mind’s stubbornness about this. Just because he dreamed something, it didn’t mean the story had to be the exact copy of the dream. Yet his fingers slowed as he tried to write down alternative names for the AI. None appeared. His forehead furrowed and he felt the beginning throb of a migraine behind his eyes. He quickly smoothed out his forehead and the pain retreated a little, but not much.
No, no, no, not today, he pleaded. I promised Walter I would man the store all day today so he could go to his granddaughter’s birthday party. I’m not taking that away from him.
Jace set the notebook back on his cluttered nightstand, knocking over a few books including a pile of The Expanse series. He grimaced as they fell to the floor and wedged between the wall and the nightstand. Getting down on the ground and fishing them out would likely just increase the pressure in his head that was already growing. He had to do everything he could to keep the migraine at bay so the books would remain there.
He carefully got up and padded over to his desk. His medicine was in the right pants pocket of the jeans he wore yesterday. He fished out the orange bottle and unscrewed the white top before popping a large gray pill in his mouth and dry-swallowing it. The medication didn’t have a name. It also didn’t come from a pharmacy, but was formulated by a group of doctors on base for him. The reason why was that nothing else worked and the reason for that was…
“They think it was something I was exposed to on base when I was pregnant with you,” his mother had told him several years ago, her head downcast, her eyes not meeting his.
He had been almost glad she couldn’t see his eyes. He hated the guilt in them. It was unwarranted. She loved him and would die for him. There was no way she had done something that would knowingly harm him.
He jammed the bottle back into his jeans pocket. He’d been wearing these today anyways in case he needed another pill later. The pants were his favorites. They were soft and worn in all the right places with a bunch of patches he’d sewn on when the tears had gone from “cool” to a little too revealing.
He grabbed them and a faded lime green t-shirt off the back of the chair. He sniffed the t-shirt. It didn’t smell of sweat or laundry detergent. His migraines could be triggered by anything really, but strong smells were thought to be a factor though he honestly couldn’t say that was true. Or rather, there were only certain scents that would trigger him, but they weren’t the faint floral or ocean breeze smells that were found in laundry detergent. It was often the smell of ozone that did it.
One whiff of that electric, bitter scent and his vision would flash black as if the Matrix were failing and he was seeing the “real” world, for a moment. But instead, his vision would come back and his head would merely throb. Auras would swirl around objects and the high-pitched ringing of tinnitus would be in his ears. He’d avoid that scent like the plague today.
A pair of clean boxer briefs and white socks completed what he needed to get dressed. He would get ready in the bathroom after a shower. He went to his closed bedroom door and paused. His gaze swung to the black Ray Ban sunglasses sitting on the edge of his desk.
Wearing them inside would be a dead giveaway to his parents that he was already suffering from a migraine and they would insist he stay home. He might be twenty-four-years-old, but they still worried about his fragile health. He gritted his teeth just thinking about it. Though he didn’t blame his mother for his conditions, he hated that he was so brittle.
Daily living was a stretch for him most times. He wasn’t sure how he was ever going to get a job that could support him. Forget about his dreams of being a pilot like his father--let alone a spaceship pilot like in my real dreams--he was lucky that Walter was willing to give him some shifts at his combo book-movie-convenience store.
