Waking, on his back, Saufir discovered he couldn’t move. His senses: sight, sound, taste, smell touch, they were dim, distant, vague; this had happened before. He opened his mouth to draw in deep breaths, made an attempt at stretching. Trying to roll to his right hip, he failed; to his left, failure. He went limp and fell back asleep.
When he woke the second time there was pressure on his eyelids; a rubbing in circular motion. He asked “Who’s there?” and the rubbing stopped. He’d tried earlier to open his eyes and failed. His head was rolled gently, side to side, then back. A deep voice said “Saufir.” Saufir stayed perfectly still, and when he heard nothing more he spoke: “I can’t open my eyes.”
The rubbing started again – little circles – and he said nothing; the pressure increased, moved to the corners of his eyes, to his nose, cheeks, mouth, chin, back to his eyelids and his eyebrows, then stopped abruptly. He waited, managed to open his eyes and raise himself up on an elbow. He looked around and found himself in a small structure, apparently alone, then, in the corner, a smudge – not a shadow – it was coal black. Saufir said “I can’t quite see you.”
In response, a hum of sorts.
He looked away and wondered how he’d got to this place and right at that moment his Assist kicked in – he could feel it instantly – and he immediately felt better, all of him, and he remembered arriving at the shack and what had happened when he arrived. He rose cautiously, stood and inspected himself, looked around the structure, walked to the door and cracked it open. The sun was up; sunlight was dull grey. The topography was flat and the horizon was flat and the ground was as grey as the sky above it.
“You are hybrid.”
Saufir closed the door, stepped back and looked at smudge in the corner. “I am,” he said. He felt clear in the head and his senses were working. Looking at his hands, he saw there was dried blood under his fingernails. His clothes and his shoes were covered in dried blood.
“Scabs covered your eyes.”
Hearing that, Saufir remembered the fight. The fight had started on his arrival. It had been the reason for his arrival, and it had been an ugly, base struggle, nothing more. His opponents had weapons. He rubbed his hands together, rubbed his face and his neck, touched his chest, then stretched. “I won,” he said.
In the corner – the smudge – it flickered into a shape and then the blackness became a haze of sorts and the haze slowly compressed itself into a shape, contracted horizontally, rose vertically and then took a step out of the corner and revealed itself. It had become a biped, human in shape.
“Who are you?”
“Alien,” it said.
Saufir shrugged. Assist began retrieving data on ‘alien.’
Saufir Ayaan’s blood coursed through Assist, his chemo-mechanical implant, and Saufir thought Assist a treasure. Saufir’s breathing fed oxygen to Assist and Assist provided tutelage of all kinds, as well as comfort and perspective. Saufir was Assist’s host; would that make Assist a parasite? Saufir would never consider such a question because a question like that was noncompliance. Assist resisted noncompliance.
A machine installed Assist just under Saufir’s right shoulder; it ran down and across his chest, put there to optimize him, provide surety and guidance and a sense of belonging. Installed, Assist defined Saufir as a contributor, a fellow of value, a champion. Corrected and enhanced by Assist, Saufir was a better man, a powerful man.
Who produced the machines that awarded and implanted Assist? Assist did not know. Saufir did not ask.
The alien? The alien was space and time. The alien assigned to Saufir, assigned to the planet to preserve the planet, was documented knowledge, ritual, epiphany and sustention. The alien arrived after the event, before Saufir became a hybrid … before any human became a hybrid. The alien was planet protective, an assigned protector, regulated by time and space and dedicated (and instructed) to the survival of life all the way down to the cellular level. Everything the alien knew the alien had always known. Anything the alien did not know could not be known.
Nowhere in the universe were there words – in any language – to explain this inexhaustible mystery: the alien’s self-knowledge was identical to Saufir’s and to Saufir’s warden’s: incomplete. Mysteries will always reside openly in the universe.
“You are here why?”
“To assist,” the alien said.
Saufir had felt it an honor to receive Assist. Before Assist, the old Saufir feared. Assist promised – and delivered – bravery and honor. Assist enhanced physical prowess and maintained singularity in thought and Assist made it clear that Saufir’s insufficient language would be replaced after glorious victory and only then could Assist explain why what was required was required. Assist curtailed emotion and prevented dreaming – it had to. Saufir’s native language was insufficient to explain why. Assist promised a win, and after winning would reward and punish accordingly. This had been explained, as best as possible in the insufficient language.
When the alien said “to assist,” Saufir was confused. Was the alien trying to trick him? Assist began running additional data. A hint of anything less than compliance and Assist would run data.
“Tomorrow,” the alien said, and that smudge-turned-biped approached Saufir and surrounded him, as if to console him, and then, using its two legs, it stepped back to where it had been a smudge. The alien, guardian-designate, had not witnessed the event that delivered the machines, but had known it would happen and knew of it as it happened. The alien could not help but know. It would intervene because that was its role.
The alien knew the grey planet could heal itself, could heal the grey sky and the grey landscape and could restore itself with no assistance; significant time would be required. Only the planet and that-of-the-planet could be present in that significant time. The machines, multiple variations with wide-ranging objectives … they had to go. The assigned alien’s only job then – its darwinian edict – was to circumvent Assist. The alien did not know duty so much as it _was_duty. Physiologically.
Assist was the interloper, brought by planet killers.
Assist made Saufir stand silently and think not about the alien, but about tomorrow. Now that Assist knew that tomorrow was understood by Saufir _and_ the alien, Assist saw the alien as a glitch. Saufir thought that, too, because Assist alerted him, dispatched that information. Assist knew it could not make Saufir completely unaware of the alien or the glitch, which is what it wanted to do. That was one of many things it wanted to do.
The biped stood, stepped toward Saufir and looked right into his eyes and said “Assist curtails emotions. You … receiving Assist … was that voluntary?”
#
How long did Saufir sleep? He’d talked to the alien, then woke up, and when he woke he wondered about his decision to sleep. Was it his decision? Involuntary? A defensive move? Those thoughts … questioning thoughts … Assist halted them. Those thoughts were not facilitative.
It was night. Saufir rose, touched himself: head, shoulders, arms, hands, hips, calves and knees. He stretched and the biped stepped out of its corner and looked at him as if seeing him for the first time.
Assist knew biometrics and innateness and chemistry and, more importantly, experience – not _its_ experience, _Saufir’_s. It also knew the alien was not facilitative; the alien was noncompliance.
The biped went shapeless, then transparent, then became a smudge in a corner of the shack. Saufir sighed, looked down at his boots, his pants, his hands and arms.
“Tomorrow,” the smudge said.
Saufir rubbed his eyes. “I know,” he said, then returned to sleep.
While Saufir slept, Assist ran data.
#
Saufir had been having dreams. Assist worked to cancel dreaming; dreams meant malfunction. During Saufir’s dreams – dreams that came despite Assist – Saufir had been wondering – the wondering separate from the dreaming – he wondered if Assist was causing the dreams. Could that be? Saufir knew little about noncompliance, only that it meant resist. But … Could Assist be in noncompliance? Could Assist malfunction? Before Assist, when he had been only Saufir, he could dream, and did. But as the new Saufir – the hybrid Saufir – honor meant no dreams. No dreams meant bravery. The brave Saufir was targeted at something and Assist monitored. The old Saufir thought about things, which was acceptable for the old Saufir but not for the new Saufir. When the new Saufir thought about the old Saufir, the new Saufir considered the old Saufir’s thinking as little more than hiccups.
#
Two days earlier, when Saufir had arrived at the structure, the structure had been occupied by two humans. The old Saufir was human; hybrid Saufir was better than human. The humans were in the way. Saufir didn’t know why they were in the way, or what would happen when they were no longer in the way, but he was to remove the humans. That’s all. Assist made that clear. On arrival, Saufir had never been more confident in his life; Assist made him confident.
Saufir had been emotionless and barbaric. Two humans fought one hybrid and the hybrid won. Saufir killed them and dragged them out in the grey landscape and left their dead bodies there without a second thought and returned to their structure and laid down and didn’t wake up until he felt rubbing on his eyes.
#
In the grey daylight Saufir stood in the open door and looked right where he was supposed to look … across a flat, grey landscape. In the distance he saw a structure – he’d not noticed it before and he wondered if it had been there when he killed the humans, or if it had appeared after, like a reward. Assist made him think that … giving him something to think about to keep him thinking about targeting. Behind him he heard the alien speak. “Humans,” the alien said. Assist began running data. According to data, Saufir was still accurate.
The alien stood up. The alien was primitive intent. Not so much evolved as _evolve_, ageless, past/present/future spectator … the alien was colossal, forever-lasting, unchangeable primitive intent. Primitive intent was the awkward birth, the urgent duplication of the cell, the cell that could (and did) survive and flourish in the water – brine, actually – that could (and did) patiently wash away mountains. Unerring, primitive intent could stop the hybrid – Saufir – who did not actually belong to his wardens, the machines, the planet killers. Saufir was not owned and the alien knew that and Assist, which could not actually think but could produce thought, did not. The designated alien recognized that as a weakness.
#
The alien stood behind Saufir in the open doorway, looking over Saufir’s shoulder at the structure far across the grey landscape. Two humans were in the structure. Most of their lives had happened already. Neither could remember a time before occupation. They were both illiterate. History was, for them, sung in the dark. The machines they fought were from somewhere else, that’s all they knew. The songs said the machines came, made some obey, made many dea d, and those who managed to escape those alternatives became mongrels who ran in packs and sang songs in the dark.
They’d no idea that a protective alien even existed.
#
Saufir stepped through the doorway and began crossing the grey landscape toward the structure where he would fight. The biped fell in behind. Saufir was unaware, Assist was not. Saufir did not think about the actual blood in his actual veins. He did think about his breathing or the oxygen utilized and enhanced by Assist. He did not think about anything … the crusade he was serving, the structure he was leaving, the structure he was approaching and the humans inside. Saufir was targeted.
Had the walk been hours? Yes. How many? Saufir did not think about hours. Thinking about hours was noncompliance. The alien was time and space and knew that time was only time and rarely thought of time as anything other than now.
Saufir approached the structure calmly and Assist monitored his approach and approved his approach and when the door opened and two human beings stepped out of the grey structure and raised weapons, the alien touched Saufir, touched his neck, front and back, touched his jaw and his chin, his face, and Saufir stopped. Stopping was noncompliance; Assist ran data. In that instant Saufir remembered touch and in that same instant Saufir recalled days he lacked touch, days he lacked senses, and he didn’t know why that was or how that could be and he didn’t really understand that thinking like that was noncompliance. Noncompliance was not brave and not honorable. And in the same instant Saufir Ayaan remembered touch, the humans fired their weapons and the alien – planet protector – guided the bullets … those sad, primitive things … guided them to Saufir where the first bullet hit Assist and Assist ceased functioning instantly, and right then – right in that same instant – the old Saufir, the Saufir who had not been hybrid, that Saufir looked into the eyes of the biped and worried, had he trudged across the grey landscape for days and days to have this happen? Why?
And in the next instant the second bullet hit and Saufir Ayaan – the wholly human Saufir – died without realizing the honor and bravery he’d been promised was no more. Saufir, who had been a human but became a hybrid, was now only a casualty, forever. His carcass would rot in the grey landscape.
#
The designated alien knew there were other hybrids, knew how many hybrids had been fabricated and how many humans the hybrids had killed and how many hybrids had been killed by humans alone and how many hybrids had been killed with the assistance of itself, the alien-designate. The machines were incapable of knowing of the alien. The alien recognized that as a weakness.
The alien, time and space and sustention, would look to find yet another hybrid. The alien, planet protector, knew that first it was kill hybrids, then destroy machines.
#
The two humans – the humans who had killed the hybrid Saufir Ayaan – they ran for hours, until exhaustion set in, and then they slept. The female would wake first, wake the male, and they would set off again.
They would speak little and it would be a full day before they connected with a small group of like-minded. No bravery, no honor was discussed. Several days later two young women joined that same group – they’d seen abandoned cities, dry rivers – and they said they’d heard that agriculture was resurfacing again – far away – and that other groups were reporting hybrids behaving in strange ways … stumbling, refusing to attack, offering themselves as targets. Some groups were claiming the war was waning.
The two humans who shot and killed Saufir Ayaan went on yet another mission. The male was killed. The female escaped and, finding herself lost in the flat grey plains, survived on roots and rodents for some time before dying of starvation. She’d been trying to get to somewhere, anywhere, where civilization could regenerate.
Victor Kreuiter lives, reads, and writes in the Midwest.
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