The Pill

The strap across my chest chafes as do those attaching my wrists to the gurney. There is something about being held naked and helpless that intensifies one's sense of vulnerability. Even worse is the way my captors have wedged open my noses. The leads they have attached to my frontal cortex via my multiple nostrils are no doubt leaching my memory. Still I struggle to resist.

This is not simply a case of a man trying to overcome pain. This is a clash of civilizations. I have children of my own. How could I bear it should they come under the control of the Lomb? That's why I chose to enter the agency. Unfortunately, I have no explanation how a culture as debased as theirs could ever have developed. Our biologists claim the Lomb have evolved through an alternative type of DNA involving only fourteen chromosomes. My speculation is they are a spontaneous upsurge of pure evil, comparable to a fungus.

Whatever it is when I think of their slimy skin touching my own and the repulsive, heavily-lidded third eye buried deep in their forehead, I shudder.

Longo is the worst of their kind.

"Tell us what you were doing with the photographic equipment in your room?" His voice is like electricity hissing from a frayed wire as the third-eye stares at my nostrils.

"It's like I told you before I'm a journalist."

Two of his cronies place sharpened sticks under my fingernails.

"You're a bad liar, Alux. Can't they train their agents better than that before they send them across our border? Well, let me assure you, you're in for a bad time of it now."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Of course I do; this is not the first time I've been captured. Torture is as universal as eating.

"That's a very amusing, my friend," Longo says, gazing at me with disdain. "Once we've finished leaching your brain, you'll no longer have the capacity to understand what I am talking about. But as for now, I want to know who made the decision at Oletra Flats"

Oletra Flats? Something I didn't want to think about much less discuss with Longo. At the time of the incident there were at least a hundred of the Lomb accused of terrorism holed up in the shrine to the gods. We had them surrounded, but they refused to come out. I remember my exact words.

"Look, you people don't have any choice. You either come out like good little boys with your hands up and your weapons thrown down or we use gas."

"Go to hell," they called back.

We waited a few more days. Still nothing. That's when we sent the crawlbot up to drill. We pumped the gas in on the 24th, and the next day went forward. How were we supposed to know they were holding all those children hostage in there? Of course, it was a terrible massacre, but we didn't know. What you do in these situations is only as good as the intelligence you've got in hand.

"You think I'm going to tell you what I know, so your gorillas can target our best people?" I said

"You can be stubborn, Alux. It's fine with us if you wish to suffer the pain. But in the end your brain waves will tell us all we need to know whether you cooperate or not. In the meantime we have documents for you to sign."

Whether Longo was bluffing or not, I couldn't be sure. I knew the Marchon had advanced techno capabilities, but whether they had brain wave reading capacity, I wasn't certain. If they did, it was something our intelligence hadn't picked up yet. All I wish was that they hadn't trapped me while I was sleeping. I never got a chance to eat the poison pill.

The pill was never something any of us ever relished thinking about or informing our underlings that swallowing was the required procedure. I certainly never wanted to be the one who signed off on those instructions, but ironically some of my best agents had had to swallow. 31-13 was a tough son of a bitch, living behind Lomb lines for months at a time. He'd even worked his way into the lower hierarchy of their controllers. His communiqué were rich with information that enabled us to abort strike after strike, but finely they got wise to him when their detectors picked up the magnetism embedded in his tooth radio.

He elected to take the pill rather than endure their torture and spill what he knew. He saved God knows how many lives by doing so. Had they not blown up his mother in a supermarket, I doubt that he would have ever had the drive to take the risks that he did, but his hatred for the murderous bastards ran deep.

"What kind of documents?" I ask, playing stupid.

"Confessions regarding the plot for your people to wipe the Marchon off the face of the planet."

"What kind of propaganda is that? Nobody is naïve enough to believe such nonsense. We want peace. Anybody who can think and knows his history knows who the real perpetrators of genocide are."

"You are very naïve, Alux. There are an infinite number of planets beyond our galaxy willing to come to our assistance if our case is made persuasively. Remember it is your kind who are the minority in distant realms."

"Pity that."

"The pity should be for you, my friend, for we have ways to make you willing to sign whatever we want you to."

Pity was a useless commodity. What I wanted was to go back and resume normal life beyond the war zone. The twins were going to be ten years old this coming spring. With their long legs and powerful shoulders, they were sure to be swimming champions just like me. They had the work ethic that it took too. You could already see what strong adults they were going to become in their blossoming bodies even though you knew on the inside they were still just children. The last time I was home they came to me complaining about having to learn trigonometry in the fourth level.

"If you were home, Daddy, you could at least help us with it. Mommy's no good in math."

"You know the situation, children. There's a war going on. I've got to do my part."

Then out of the blue they began to cry. That blindsided me. "What if you die, Daddy?"

"I won't die, kids. We've got the ability to restart the heart and brain now. There's nothing to worry about." I didn't mention the poison pill, and the possibility I'd be trapped behind Marchon lines. There was no revivifying a body that had been dead for over 24 hours.

Longo read me the propaganda piece they wanted me to sign.

"You needn't bother to tell us you refuse to sign, Alux. That would be redundant. Instead we have something for you to breathe first."

He signaled for one of his henchmen to bring a mask, which they forced down over my face. I felt light headed; then I was drifting.

Soon I was alone, naked and cold, on a slab of endless stone. In the distance I could hear the roar of huge beasts. I trembled, thinking of the various species of dinos the Marchon had chosen to revivify. Hungry, I began to wander in search of food.

I hadn't gone far when I saw a blinking red light embedded in stone. Stumbling forward, I felt myself magnetically drawn towards the light. As my entire body began to warm, I saw a fissure open in the earth.

A strange voice speaking a foreign tongue emerged from the crack. Using the decodex embedded in my wrist, I translated.

"You are invited in."

Hesitantly I stumbled through the crevice in the rock and with a sickening feeling in my stomach heard the rocks surge closed behind me. Now there was no choice but to go forward into what appeared to be a cave, lighted by dim red lights at ankle level. Up ahead of me, hundreds of dwarf-like figures with faces of dead men trudged this way and that carrying what looked like small stones.

Mystified I stumbled towards them and was just about to speak to one of them when I found myself lying on a gurney, staring into a brilliant white light.

Two shadowy, dark surgeons leaned over my face; and ,though I was under anesthetic, I could hear them talking.

"Average size," the taller one said.

"But nice tucks and pleats."

Somehow I gathered they were talking about my brain.

"I think," said the tall one, "if we remove some of this tissue adjacent to the pituitary, we can eliminate the decadent memories; and then we'll insert the chip with the desirable information."

"Yes, shouldn't be any problem." Tucks and Pleats smiled. "The subject's tissue is quite spongy, and he's definitely not a bleeder."

The next thing I knew I awakened in a hospital bed. Longo was staring at me with an amused look on his face. His third-eye was completely shut.

"And how are we feeling this morning?" he said.

"Dreadful, master," I said, for the first time really registering his inner beauty.

"Those are sweet words, Alux," he said. "You are going to make a wonderful double agent. Do you feel proud?"

"Yes, proud. Anything I can do to assist the Marchon will make me feel better."

"That's excellent." Longo took my hand in his gelatinous one that I vaguely remembered I once had thought of as slimy. "We're going to treat you well, Alux. Exceedingly well."

The biological agents capable of neutralizing Aspersian revivification potions strapped to my chest in tiny canisters, I re-entered Aspersia via secret tunnels dug by Marchon intelligence. Once I'd entered it was a simple matter of penetrating one of the major shopping forums and getting the germs into the ventilating system.

Knowing Aspersian security measures made my job so much simpler. That I might die in performing my mission hardly bothered me. As Longo had pointed out the Aspersians were a genetically-warped species, analogous to mosquitoes. What did it matter which of them died? Even my children. The important thing was that the Marchon should prevail. Fine questions of who was a legitimate victim were the kind of issues that feminized the Aspersians and made them unfit to dominate the planet.

Thinking along these lines, I made my way through a swirl of lighter than air into the parking lot outside of Forum East. Thousands of my former kind were coming and going, arms filled with packages, servants of the sickening gods of consumption.

The filtered air inside the forum was a perfect 72 degrees, scented with a hint of ambrosia. These Aspersians were a tall, handsome species despite dual noses, their moral degradation, and profane values. I passed one of their brown-skinned kind walking behind a motorized baby stroller with triplets aboard. It gave me some satisfaction to think of them, breathing the germs with which I would infect this monstrosity of consumption.

Feeling invulnerable, for after all I looked like one of them, I found a door marked MAINTENANCE. The keys that Longo had fitted me with easily opened the forbidden chamber. The maintenance pavilion was alive with the roar of great fans and air conditioning units. There was no one in sight.

Seconds later, I was already reaching inside my shirt for the canisters as I stood before the great fans when I heard a voice behind me. I hesitated.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you, Alux!"

I turned. For God's sakes it was 31-14, the son of my dead best friend, pointing a fire-master at my genitals.

"Do what?" I knew it was a lame response. I was caught cold though.

"We've been tracking you, Alux. We know about what they did to your mind."

"My mind is fine," I said. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't bluff, Alux. If you hand yourself over quietly and yield up what you've got in those canisters, our surgeons can restore you to who you really are. You've just got to play ball with us."

"I'm sorry, my friend," I said. "I've already removed the lid from the first canister. I'm infected. You and your friends are infected. And when I hurl the canister into the fans, the entire forum will be infected."

"Don't be a fool, Alux." Sweat beaded on Fourteen's handsome forehead.

"No, you people are the fools. You don't understand that real progress lies in the hands of those willing to use terror to achieve their ends. Your soft civilization is totally vulnerable and deserves to die."

Fourteen waggled his fingers. Suddenly I was enveloped in a cloud of black gas.

"You did very well for a convert," Longo offered me a hit on the nargile he was smoking.

"How did I get back here?" I said. Something was wrong with my head. It felt as though my face had been turned inside out and ripped away from my brain.

"Our technology is not standing still, Alux." Amusement wrinkling his brow, Longo stared at me with his third eye. It was like having a drill bore into my forehead.

Fixing me with his unblinking third eye, Longo continued. "We have many just like you stealing Asperian secrets. Fourteen, for example, is among us now and will make an excellent double agent. We used the tracking device inserted in your pineal gland to capture him at the Forum. Now if you'll be so kind." Longo slid the papers across the smooth desk in my direction.

I felt a vague urge to refuse to sign, but the resultant pain shooting from one of my eyes to the other as he intensified his gaze told me not to be so foolish.

With some difficulty I read the document, written in strange Marchon script.

I, Alux-309, an Asperian intelligence and demolitions officer who served at the Battle of Olestra Flats, do hereby sign this document and acknowledge my role in the massacre of innocent Marchon civilians as decreed by orders issued by my government at Solstice, 4061. A complete accounting of all crimes against humanity is appended for the examination of he who will.

I watched as my scripton lurched clumsily across the page. It seemed as though my signature had become foreign to me, and the scripton moved with a mind of its own.

Once the document was signed, Longo beamed at me, allowing the lid of his third eye to slide shut. It was a moment of great warmth, and he clasped me to his bosom. As I felt the soft, spongy, gelatinous texture of his hands touching my flesh, I wondered how it was that I had ever found the Marchon repulsive. However, that I had once felt this way was now only the dimmest memory.

"Very good, Alux," Longo said, patting my head. "It's almost as if you're one of us now. You've been such a good boy I have something for you."

"And what's that, master," I said.

"Why news of how many were infected by the philobacterium that you placed in the blower system of the Forum. The death toll has already reached the hundreds, and many more are expected to be infected as well."

I felt my teeth register a smile though a certain part of my painful brain felt reluctant.

"And is there anything else I should know, master?"

Longo took my hand in his. Lying there in his palm was a tiny, red pill. At first I was uncertain what it was. Then from the dig fog of memory I knew its function. The same poison pill 31-13 had swallowed before the Marchon could capture him.

"I don't think I want this pill," I said to Longo. "I'm one of you now."

"Oh, don't make it difficult, my boy. You realize you're a genetic disaster. You're kind of ugliness could never be tolerated among our people."

"Yes, but I have children. Don't you remember my children back in Aspersia?"

"They're of no use to you now, Alux. Besides one of them died of the bacterium dispersed at the Forum."

I felt a vague thud somewhere in my chest. Losing a child must be a bad thing, I thought, though I was uncertain. My life won't be the same.

"No, it won't," Longo said, reading my thoughts.

A foolish grin spread across my face as Longo handed me a cup of red wine.

"Drink now, my boy. Take your medicine like a good boy. Don't make us have to re-engineer your brain again."

I sighed. Longo was right. It was really the right thing to do.

"That's it. Take a big swallow of the wine," he said, re-opening his watery third eye, fixing me with a command that send electricity shivering down my spine.

"Will it take long?" I whimpered.

"Of course not, old boy," he said, "Such a good boy. Take a big drink, hold your breath. I assure you--you'll never taste a thing."

end