The Hyperman Principle

Science fiction - alien contact

 

  

 

 

 

THE HYPERMAN PRINCIPLE

by

GeorgeE

 

(21 pages : 5973 words)

 

 

 

 

‘I want to tell you a little story,’ I said.

I was talking to my ex-fiancée from twenty years ago; now happily married to my ex-best friend and partner.

          She sat facing me in a comfortable armchair, legs crossed and arms spread along the sides. No drumming of fingernails. No nervous mannerisms at all. Her attitude was defiant, but quite calm.

       I was impressed.

        She had changed, of course. But, looking at her now from across that bizarre twenty year gulf that had separated us, I could still see the girl I had once known.

At twenty-four she had been merely beautiful. At nearly twice that age she was stunning. Her figure was more rounded now, but I was quite sure that those piercing green eyes under that shiny mane of wavy auburn hair would turn heads wherever she went.

Then again, I am probably prejudiced. After all, I had had a long time to think about her with no competition around.

She had certainly weathered better than my ex partner whose blond good looks had sagged to amorphous pudginess despite all he had probably tried to do.        

'But, before you ask,’ I went on ‘it’s not about revenge. Whatever you might think; believe me, it’s not about that.’

          I stopped for a moment to gather my thoughts.

  ‘You see,’ I began again. ‘I want to tell you what happened - what really happened - not all those ridiculous stories made up by the media when I refused to talk to them anymore.’

          ‘Well, go on, if you must,’ she said a little less coldly. She hadn’t wanted to talk to me; hadn’t wanted to see me; but she couldn’t help being curious. Natural enough, I suppose, when a person you thought had been dead for over twenty years comes back in real life to haunt you. Especially when you had played a part in arranging his death.

Oh yes, she wanted to know, all right; just as much as I wanted to tell her.

          I thought back then over the last ten weeks since my antiquated ship had finally coasted back into the shallows of the Solar System and docked at KOSMOS BASE - the oldest and largest of the burgeoning new hordes of Earth orbital stations and factories.

          I suppose it was totally naive to have imagined I could just come back unannounced and expect to get away with it. And, needless to say, I didn’t.

Fortunately, the ‘authorities’ stepped in as soon as I was formally identified and whisked me planetside to one of their ‘safe places’ where I could be quietly interrogated to their hearts’ content without anyone knowing about it.

          The eager questioning went on for weeks but I’m afraid I was a sad disappointment to them.

          All they really knew was that twenty years ago I had volunteered to go on the test flight of a small experimental ship powered by a new type of fusion drive based on my own designs. The prototype ship’s drive had malfunctioned, killing everyone on board and causing the ship to spin off under massive uncontrolled thrust towards the depths of outer space. That much information had been radioed back by one of the men before he died.

So, how had I survived?

I told them that I had been injured and unconscious, but not dead. Eventually, I had recovered sufficiently to effect jury-rigged repairs to the drive and, using the ship’s cold-sleep system, had come safely home. End of story.

      It wasn’t true, but, with a little stretching of the imagination, it was almost believable.

I was the one who had invented the damn drive anyway, wasn’t I?

          I, David John Bradley, was the one who had designed and pioneered the world’s first workable fusion burner, wasn’t I?

So, in the end, they had to let me go. They weren’t satisfied, but they let me go.

We’ll secretly keep him under close surveillance, they secretly said to themselves. Sooner or later, we’ll find out what the truth is, they secretly promised themselves.

          But there are no secrets from me. Not anymore.

          Anyway, there I was, ready to go back into what passes for normal circulation in this weird wonderland, when the media circus found out - and pounced.

          I was the original seven day wonder and had absolutely no privacy at all. For a short time I eclipsed just about every other news item on Earth, or off it.

     But, I kept repeating the same dreary old facts and eventually they tired of me. Their rapacious little minds finally turned to other, more titillating matters; like the new South American Pope who had set himself up in opposition to the Vatican; or like the girl - if you could call her that - who had just won The World’s Most Muscular Mammaries competition. Oh well!!

          In a way, I was sorry when the furore died down. Until then, I had just locked myself away in a hotel, waiting for everything to die down before I got on with the job I had come back to do.

          As an interlude, it was nearly pleasant, but it had to end sometime or other, and when it did, the first of the removal attempts started. Some of the more public attempts were even thinly disguised as ‘accidents’ but, as crude and sometimes as funny as they were, there was no doubt about their intent.

          The intent was to kill me.

       I had been expecting it, of course, but it still came as something of a shock to have my expectations so brutally fulfilled.

Not nice. Not nice at all!

          I even knew exactly who was behind it all. None other than my old partner and buddy, Jason McDermott and his beautiful wife, Janice.

          Jason, lucky man, was currently Chairman of the Board of Universal Fusion and Janice was CEO. So they had the whole package neatly tied up between them.

          This discovery didn’t particularly surprise me, but it rapidly became obvious that many things had changed while I had been away, and I had a lot to learn.

          Universal Fusion Industries, it seemed, was the biggest and most powerful corporation on Earth, Moon and Mars at this time. Universal Fusion Burners were now being used in almost every aspect of business, industry, transport and, thanks to steadily reducing prices brought about by modern robotic production techniques, were also slowly filtering into the general domestic market.

          If satellites and personal computers were responsible for the introduction of the hi-tech electronics and communication age, then cheap, clean and easily available fusion power looked like leading the way into the dawning interplanetary age. In fact, commercial exploitation of the nearer planets and asteroids already seemed to be well underway.

I also learned that rapidly spreading strains of mutated retroviruses and other epidemics had slowed the world’s runaway population growth to more manageable levels and much of the pollution and environmental ravages caused by the last millennium’s industrial age were now being dealt with to a markedly greater degree by concerned groups and governments. However, starvation, disease and poverty in more than two thirds of the world’s population were still ominously present.

          In that respect, at any rate, not much seemed to have improved. It was just as explosive a mixture as before - if not worse.

          Greed, stupidity, and political short-sightedness had obviously not changed much in the time I had been away.

          I suppose I didn’t even really have the right to feel betrayed by Jason and Janice. After all, it had mostly been my idea to set up McDermott-Bradley Enterprises to research and develop my horribly unorthodox but surprisingly workable ideas in low energy laser photon collisions. And, like many others before me, I made the mistake of taking on a partner with the usual silly idea that he would look after all the business arrangements; arranging scientific research grants; seeing to patent applications; setting up business deals to exploit any commercial applications that might accrue out of research discoveries, and, thereby, leave me free to get on with the really interesting stuff of scientific research.

          I know, I know - it’s an old, old story.

          I was crazy.

          Worse - I was stupid!

  I can’t even offer any excuse that would make the slightest bit of sense. I only remember that I was so in love with science and Janice, in about equal measures, that I was totally incapable of really seeing anything else.

The thought that either my best friend or my truest love might be capable of selling me out was so far beyond my comprehension as to be completely inconceivable.

          Hah!!

          It was conceivable, all right. They must have spent a lot of time conceiving it, because they certainly did a thorough job.

          But . . . I deserved it.

          Oh, yes! Stupidity always has a price, and it was a price that I had paid in full for the past twenty years.

    The simple fact was that after I had made the most important of my discoveries and developed the first workable fusion generator, they had cold-bloodedly set out to get rid of me and take over the business. And they had succeeded brilliantly.

          Until now.

       To give the devil - or is it devils? - their due, they had built up the business to its present gargantuan level with no help from me.

   McDermott-Bradley Enterprises eventually became Universal Fusion and the greatest business success story of all time.

      They even had a statue of me in the forecourt of the company head office in Switzerland. Very flattering - so I’m told.

        All this, of course, led up to the summons I received from Jason just after I had been released from questioning.

        I was invited up to his office and treated there to an acting performance that deserved an Academy Award, or an Oscar - or whatever-the-hell the present day equivalent is.

          ‘David’ he cried rapturously. ‘It’s so good to see you. It - it - it’s a miracle, old buddy - a blessed miracle.’

He carried on like that for some time, while I smiled and nodded and said all the appropriate things.

          It was as if the prodigal son had returned and nothing was to be too good for him. I was to be offered a place on the board; a munificent salary; my own portfolio of stocks, bonds, pensions, etc, etc, - the list went on, and on.

          I thanked him kindly - and then dropped my bombshell.

          ‘Sorry, Jason,’ I said, ‘but, I want it all.’

  'Oh no, David, you can’t be serious,’ he chuckled, trying hard to keep his smile from slipping.

          ‘Oh, but I am,’ I said grimly, and then went on to detail how serious I really was.

          ‘But, why?’ he demanded, all feigned surprise and deeply wounded feelings.

          ‘Because,’ I said, ‘I know that the malfunction on the ship’s drive was no accident. It was sabotage. And, it was either done by you directly, or arranged by you - it doesn’t really matter which. The point is, you did your best to murder me and you succeeded in murdering six of the men who were with me on the ship when the drive blew up. And for that, I’m going to take it all.’

          That was when the real Jason came out.

          He went very quiet and just sat looking at me for a few long moments.

         ‘I don’t think you have any way of substantiating that ridiculous allegation,’ he said carefully. ‘But, even if you have, I think it would be most unwise to mention it to anyone else. Most unwise.’

          That was when I walked out.

Not long after that, the removal attempts began.

         The first came only hours after I had left Jason’s office when I accidentally ‘fell’ into the path of an oncoming mag-lev train.

          It was no accident, of course. The shove I had been given so discreetly would have resulted in my being pulverised into fine mince if it had succeeded. Fortunately, the implant took care of it all without any trouble. My reflexes are now so inhumanly fast I can’t even recall exactly what I did, but I was safely out of harm’s way in something less than a hundredth of a second - much to the amazement of several stunned looking bystanders.

          I didn’t make any fuss about it, though. No point, really. I knew what was happening and I had already decided how to deal with it. So, I just went calmly about my affairs while the attempts continued and grew steadily bolder and more desperate as they all failed.

          Oh, they tried all sorts of stuff, but every new attempt was just as unsuccessful as the previous ones.

          I think the most farcical incident happened at one of the innumerable press conferences inflicted on me by the voracious gangs of media reporters who had decided to take me to their cold collective little hearts.

          I had been doing my best to satisfy their insatiable curiosity by giving my usual selection of bland answers when one of them - a nondescript little man wearing a curiously heavy glove - handed me a live mike to record my next answer.

          I tapped the mike to make sure it was live.

It was - almost a hundred thousand volts live to be exact. So I gave my answer and casually handed it back to him.

          I guess he was so surprised that he clean forgot and took the mike back in his unprotected hand.

          Or, perhaps he just found my answer shocking, I don’t know.

          Anyway, things went on like that for a while until I completed my preparations and decided to go and visit my darling Janice.

          Please don’t misunderstand me, I really didn’t want to see her just to gloat.

          It was a justice thing.

          I had given Jason fair warning, and I intended to do the same for his murderous accomplice,

          ‘Now,’ I said ‘I know why you did it to me, but was it really necessary to have involved others? - I mean to the extent of murdering six other innocent people at the same time?’

          She shrugged this off with a sullen, ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Try me,’ I suggested.

           ‘You really have no idea, do you, David?’ she snapped suddenly.

           I kept silent and waited her out.

           ‘Oh, very well then,’ she sighed. ‘We didn’t intend to kill anyone, you know. That part went badly wrong. That stupid drive of yours couldn’t have been very stable to start with. But, if you must know, the idea was just to get you out of the way long enough for Jason to quietly set up a few deals on the side which would have made us some real money.

‘You were always such a do-gooder, David,’ she went on sneeringly. ‘Always thinking of the marvellous benefits your discoveries would bring to all of suffering humanity.’

           ‘Was that so bad?’ I asked.

           ‘Maybe not, but when you started talking about setting up charitable trusts so that everything we made from fusion energy could feed the poor and all the rest of that crap - Oh boy! - I could see the writing on the wall.

          ‘You were so generous and selfless, it made me want to puke. You never once spared a thought for me, did you? You may be a brainy little nerd, David, but that’s all you are. Jason’s twice the man you ever were, or ever will be.’

          There was silence for a few minutes while I digested this.

           ‘All right,’ I said equably, ‘that tells me some of it, now I’m going to tell you the rest.’

          So I told her my story. The real story this time.

          What I had told the media and the authorities was true up to a point. I hadn’t died when the drive malfunctioned - I died later.

          I had managed to get my sick and injured self into one of the cold-sleep chambers - which I had objected to strenuously at the time they were put in, but had been overridden. So, two chambers had been installed by the manufacturers during the initial fit-out with the idea that we could test their space flight suitability under real conditions.

          As I recall Jason had had some say in persuading me to accept them in the end. Probably another one of his little money making deals that I knew nothing about at the time. Irony of ironies!

Anyway, I had gotten in and set the thing up as best I could from hastily read instructions supplied with the chambers and settled back in the hope that I might still be rescued in some miraculous way.

           It’s a funny thing about knowing you are going to die. The unfairness of it all really hits you. There was so much that I still wanted to do - so many ideas that I wanted to try out - so many other things.

          The sense of frustration I endured at that point was nearly unbearable. But, like it or not, it had to be endured. So I slowly sank into that long, cold, last sleep, never really expecting to wake up again and eventually I died.

          The chambers had been set up to be powered by the drive and, if it failed for any reason, there was a back-up battery system which was designed, theoretically, to last until repairs could be made. Unfortunately, it had never been intended to last for nine years.

          Which is roughly how long it took the ship to get flung out by that last unbelievable flare of thrust into the outer reaches of the Earth’s Oort cloud.

          Where, strange as it may seem, I finally got rescued.

          Oh, not rescued in any conventional sense - I was long since dead - but, at any rate, prevented from carrying on ever deeper into space in the rough direction of the Boötes constellation.

          What happened was that the ship was picked up by aliens who happened to be in the vicinity at the time.

          There, I’ve said it.

Yes, I know how incredible it sounds, but I can’t help that. It’s the simple truth.

          They examined the ship, or what was left of it, probably wondering what the hell it was, then gave that up in favour of examining the bodies.

           And that, of course, was when the trouble started.

          The reason lay in the cold-sleep chamber that had preserved me long enough till the absolute zero of space could complete the job and freeze me totally.

          There I was, the best preserved body in the Universe - apart from the remains of the others who were probably too shredded and decomposed to be recognisable as anything much.

          So, the aliens gave me the implant - which gradually brought me back to life.

          Looking back on it now, about the kindest thing I can say is that it was an experience I would never want to repeat.

          The aliens, unfortunately, seemed to have no concept of physical pain. After a while, though, the implant started restimulating my body’s own natural endorphin flows. It helped, but not much.

          Most of that time, with a few blessed intervals, and for a long time later, I lived with a background of endless throbbing agony, barely muted by the constant rush of endorphins flooding through me.

          I lived, I healed, and I stayed sane - the implant wouldn’t let me do anything else - but I certainly didn’t enjoy it.

          Enough about that.

          As for the aliens - well, that’s a tricky one. I’m not sure to this day if I ever really saw them.

I saw things, sure, but whether they were the aliens or not, I just don’t know.

          Mostly what I recollect seeing was a lot of space and stars through a fine translucent mist. From that far out, the sun was little more than a slightly brighter star in a glittering myriad of others.

Astronomers, physicists and a few other scientists in related fields would, no doubt, have sold their souls to have experienced what I could see from that incredible viewpoint, but I was too involved with my own pain to care.

          Now and again these infinite perspectives would be interrupted by glimpses of slowly tumbling, ice-shrouded rocks - some of them tiny, some of them the size of planetoids.

          I had glimpses of other things too - crystalline shapes that shimmered into being and formed and reformed in different sizes and colours like beautiful glowing kaleidoscopes before they faded into nothingness again. There were also occasional surges of scents and sounds and other sensations, which seemed to come and go like unpredictable tides.

          If any of these were the aliens, I honestly can’t say.

          We did communicate, though.

          There were moments when I would simply become aware that some knowledge had been imparted to me. There were also times when I knew I had imparted some knowledge in return.

          How this took place, again, I don’t know. All I know is that it did, and it wasn’t like any definition of telepathy I have ever come across. There were no voices in my head, or anything like that. It was just a knowing, and a return of knowing.

Finally, after what seemed a small eternity of despair, I found myself back in the ship again - a clean and fully repaired ship, much to my amazement, with a perfectly functional drive - and heading back towards the sun.

          I won’t bother going into details about the long dreary hell I suffered in those first few years of the return voyage. Suffice it to say that it passed.

          All I remember is that I lived but I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep - the implant wouldn’t let me. The best I could achieve was occasionally drifting into a kind of dreamy trance state that seemed to pass the time with dimmer awareness of the pain than at other times.

          I couldn’t even use the cold-sleep chambers. Again, for some unknown reason, the implant wouldn’t let me.

          Towards the end of that period, however, things began to change.

          I began to notice that the pain was definitely lessening, that I was experiencing longer and longer periods when I scarcely noticed it at all.

          Then one day I woke up - I mean I really woke up. It was as though the whole long process of coming back to life was at last complete. Quite suddenly I was fully alive again.

          I used the rope rails and netting that were so necessary in the weightless environment of the ship to pull myself round to the airlock ante-chamber where the space suits were stored. There was a large mirror there which was supposed to help you check that all your connections were connected and functioning.

I stripped off the white ship’s cover-all I had taken to wearing recently and drifted down to the floor so I could stare at myself.

          It was the same old me. Five foot ten inches of slim, wiry build. Dark brown hair. Brown eyes. A rather thin face with a nose that had always seemed too long above a small stubborn mouth and deeply cleft chin.

          There were some differences, however. I no longer had the small scar above my left eyebrow left over from a childhood accident. I no longer had an appendectomy scar either.

I got a little scared then and began to check myself over more carefully. But, there was nothing else. I appeared to be my old self in every way except for the lack of scars or any other form of physical damage. I hadn’t really changed. I was, more or less, exactly the same as I had always been.

          Most astonishing still was the fact that in some way all my natural muscle tone had been regenerated despite all the years in zero gravity. That should have been impossible, but quite clearly wasn’t. I felt fine. I felt better than fine - I felt great.

           It was only when I noticed the distorted reflection of my back in the gold mirrored visor of the space suit helmet behind me that I saw the implant.

          There were no lumps or extrusions of any kind. In fact it was hardly noticeable, apart from two slight discolorations on either side of the nape of my neck just below the hairline.

          Don’t ask me how I knew it was the implant. I just knew.

          I looked back at myself in the mirror and took a deep and satisfying breath.

Well, well, well, I thought. If only . . . then I nearly strangled in terror.

          My face had turned silver. Within a split second my whole body had turned silver.

          I stared at myself aghast. What was happening?

          I didn’t feel any pain. On the contrary, I felt almost bursting with energy and a kind of weird excitement and exhilaration.

          The silvery colouring hadn’t seemed to affect my eyesight, either. In fact, I realised I could see even better than before, and by some strange trick I could even see all around me. Perfect three hundred and sixty degree vision in every direction without even turning my head.

          I also realised my wonderful new sense of vision could zoom in and out like a lens on a tele-camera, I could extend or contract it at will. I could see as far as a telescope or as small as a microscope, I could even see into the deep infra-red or far ultra-violet.

           My hearing had extended too. I could filter out everything except the minutest blips or magnify everything to a roaring cacophony. I could even pick up radio waves.

          My skin was tingling with new sensations as well. I could feel the slightest displacements of the air around me as I kept up the constant small shifts of balancing on two feet in zero gravity. I could almost feel the vibrations of individual air molecules. I could tell the exact temperature of heat and cold around me, but not feel it if I didn’t want to.

          My sense of smell had gone crazy. Did everything really stink that much? Then the smells began to sort themselves out, and I began to tell them apart. I could tell where each smell was coming from - and where it was going. I was better than the best tracker dog alive.

          I could sense energy. I could sense all the enormous energy of the ship around me. I could pick up that energy. I could even use it.

          I lifted my hand and pointed an accusing finger at a bulkhead a few feet away to my side. There was an ear-splitting crack and a searing bolt of mega-voltage plasma burned a ragged hole right through the titanium steel it was aimed at.

          I stared at it in horror for a moment. There was no sensation of effort involved. I had just decided to do it, and it had happened.

          I stared again at my silvery reflection. There was no feeling of being covered by anything. It was as though I was still stark naked.

          Ah, not quite though. A more thorough inspection with my new senses showed me that my mirror-bright silver skin didn’t quite follow the exact contours of my body. My groin, for instance, was now covered by a shallow protective mound.

          My face wasn’t quite perfect either. The eyes were little more than elliptical disks and my nose, mouth and ears were barely sketched in.

          In fact without my new super senses I would have had difficulty seeing myself at all. One perfect mirror surface reflecting another.

          I then had another thought and obligingly disappeared altogether.

          The silver covering had now distorted the light waves around me to such an extent that I was totally invisible.

          I came back to visibility again and deliberately dulled the perfect sheen of my second skin to a degree where I could see myself easily.

          That was when I sensed another small change. It was the digital wall clock changing its display from one second to the next.

          I hadn’t sensed that second by second change for some time. It was obvious that my thought processes had speeded up to such an extent that I was now thinking in nanoseconds or perhaps even picoseconds. I was thinking as fast and accurately as a computer. No, much faster than that.

          I quickly did some mental calculations which would have taken me hours before even with the aid of a computer. The answers were there almost as fast as I posed the questions. It appeared that if I needed to know something, I just knew it - instantly.

          The second display on the clock still hadn’t changed. I stared wonderingly at it for a moment then decided to move.

          That was nearly a mistake because I immediately bumped into the bulkhead I had previously burnt.

          I had moved so fast I had bumped into it before I could stop myself. The titanium steel now had a very considerable dent as well as a gaping hole, but I had scarcely felt a thing.

          I steadied myself with one hand and reached out the other hand very slowly this time - and gently pushed it back into shape. Well, it wasn’t quite as flat as it had been before, but it was near enough.

          The next surprise came when I impelled myself - very slowly and carefully - back to the mirror to inspect myself for any signs of damage. There weren’t any, of course. The strange silvery sheen I now wore was as unblemished as ever.

          I decided I’d have to watch how I moved in this form from then on. It could be dangerous - but to whom, I wasn’t quite sure.

           I was now strong, almost invulnerable and - very, very fast.

          I probably couldn’t fly, but I would lay bets I could leap over a tall building on Earth if I chose to do so.

So, who was I now? Superman?

          No, not quite. But - Hyperman maybe?

          The implant had certainly given me some hyper abilities.

          But why?

          Then the answer to that became obvious too.

          Thinking about it, I deliberately returned myself to my own ‘natural’ state and slowly made my way back to the ship’s bridge.

          I spent a lot of time thinking, then. In fact, I spent the next few years till I got back just thinking and exploring some of my new abilities.

          Naturally, one of the first things my new hyper awareness brought with it was the answer to why my prototype ship’s drive had malfunctioned.

          Looking back and examining a lot of minor clues and a lot more major ones, which I had been too blinkered and stupid to have seen before, very soon revealed what had happened and who had been behind it.

          I went through a lot of painful emotions at that point. But, it was a good thing in a way. It made me reappraise my life and my attitudes and prejudices in a new and searching light.

          That wasn’t pleasant, either, but I came to terms with it in the end, mostly by reassuring myself constantly with the hope that I was different now and maybe this time I could do better.

          Which brought me to the end of my story and back to Janice.

          I finished and sat back to watch her reaction.

It wasn’t slow in coming.

          Disbelief, disgust and rapidly gathering fury. Oh boy, this was going to be interesting!

           ‘That’s it?’ she almost spat.

          ‘Yes, that’s it,’ I replied calmly.

          ‘David… you… you…’ Nearly incoherent with rage, she stammered on. ‘You… really expect me to believe all that incredible rubbish? You… idiot! For a while there, when I knew you had come back safely, I was nearly glad. But, I’m not now. I wish you had died, you disgusting little worm.

          ‘What did you expect from me with these pathetic lies?’ she screamed suddenly. ‘Pity? Sympathy? Open arms and a loving welcome?’

          She abruptly got to her feet, folding her arms around her and started sobbing painfully.

          ‘No, Janice,’ I said gently. ‘I came to warn you that I’m going to take back my Company from you and Jason.

          ‘You don’t really need it now,’ I continued. ‘You both have more money salted away than you’ll ever need. Universal Fusion is mine and I intend to have it.’

          That was when the old fighting spirit which I had once admired in her so much came back.

          She sniffed back her tears with an angry toss of her head and said threateningly, ‘You miserable little sod. If you think that spreading rumours about what happened twenty years ago is going to get us arrested and you restored to your rightful throne, your majesty, then dream on. Go ahead. Go on dreaming, David. No one will ever believe you.

‘We’re too powerful to stop now, anyway. You damned little fool, don’t you see that we’re rich enough to buy our own law?’

          She turned away then and sighed wearily. ‘Why don’t you just get out and leave me alone. I never wanted to see you anyway, and now I’m sick of the sight of you.’

          ‘All right, Janice,’ I said, getting up and making my way over to the door. ‘But before I go, let me tell you how I intend to do it.’

          I paused, but there was no reply.

          ‘Tomorrow,’ I resumed steadily, ‘all your mainframe computers with all your records, all your data, everything that Universal Fusion Industries deals with, will have a major convulsion. All your data will be lost. Well, not quite lost. All the data will be transferred to me,’ and I tapped my head meaningfully.

          ‘The only way that universal Fusion will be able to carry on working is with me in charge. That collection of greedy b******s that makes up your board of directors will see the sense of that as soon as I show them the proof. But, don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll let you both go with a golden handshake and an adequate pension. So, with all the money you and Jason already have, you won’t be badly off.’

          She didn’t even look round.

           ‘Just, go,’ she whispered sadly.

          So I went.  

          Jason’s goons were waiting for me as soon as I stepped out, of course. This time they obviously intended to make sure the job was done, and this time I intended to deal with it - properly.

          I shifted to silver and within a few short seconds the area was littered with broken bodies. I had had enough.

There was no particular feeling of satisfaction when I finished, but the work I had come back to do was too vital to let these petty distractions go on bothering me. I didn’t want revenge. I just needed the resources of Universal Fusion to help me get things moving more quickly.

          That was why I had been given the implant by the aliens in the first place. It wasn’t from any altruistic motives they might have had about saving my life, or any other nonsense like that.

          Their reasons were a lot more important.

          You see, I had been appointed as a kind of Warden to planet Earth, and I had to get the place tidied up and ready for visitors.

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright © GeorgeE  2020

(Above shows display name only. Copyright filed under full name.)

 

email: [email protected]

 

 

Author's Note

Sorry about the strange paragraph indents. Couldn't seem to transfer the story from the original doc file to this without continuing problems. In the end I gave up, but I hope these minor glitches won't spoil the story for you.

Reviews

[barleygirl]

Don't worry about indents, barely noticeable. This is a top-notch story. I don't even go for science fiction becuz I'm too critical, looking for incongruencies, etc. This story had a couple weirdnesses (I'll explain in a minute) but overall, this is excellent storytelling delivered upon flawless writing. I very much enjoyed reading this. Your story may have had some of the usual unbelievable moments where life goes too conveniently in order to fit the fantasy scheme, but your manner of writing is so fun & intense & well-substantiated, even if your explanations aren't always totally convincing to a doubter like me, the flourish with which you explain is so delightful, I'm going to believe you just so I can enjoy this story. I would say 80% of your explanations are well-done, not getting too tangled up in technical, never to the point of eyes glazing over, & most of it sounds reasonably valid, not ridiculously out-there & convenient to the ends of your fantasy. Now here's the weird thing that distracted me a little bit. You have three distinct flavors of writing . . . most of this is conversational, which I love & which works well when delivering a fair amount of complex ideas & details . . . then occasionally you wax poetic, which is also well-done & fits in fine . . . but the part that wasn't my favorite was when you got into using a high-falutin' techno-weenie voice for some explanations, using more stilted language in complex sentences that started to make my eyes glaze over a teensy bit. These passages were never longer than a paragraph or two, so it wasn't a huge problem. It was just a dull thudding contrast to your otherwise lively & inventive conversational tone. Thanks for sharing a well-constructed & entertaining story! (((HUGS))) Fondly, Margie