Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

Clearly he should have screamed, or been overwhelmed by anxiety, and in some compartment of his mind he was. But the trauma was muted, the terror inaccessible.

The plant waved a cluster of long filaments in Tom’s direction, emitting a high-pitched, scraping sound. Now feeling the beginnings of concern, he attempted to escape. But he appeared to be paralyzed, his limbs oblivious to urgent commands. He wasn’t strong enough to even cover his ears.

The scraping ceased. “I apologize,” said a voice inside his head. “I had not activated your implant.”

Tom managed to twist his neck slightly in order to find the source of the voice, whether a presence or some visible speaker grille. He found nothing, but noticed that the handles on the tools, the vessels on the tables, were distorted, as if melted. He was hallucinating, then. Maybe he’d eaten something toxic.

The plant moved with unbelievable rapidity, as an octopus had moved across the ocean floor in a nature documentary he’d seen recently, and now leaned over him. “I will help you into a sitting position,” it—the voice inside his head—said.

The leaves were cool and firm against his skin. One curled its tip around his shoulder and pulled, while another supported his back, and yet another pressed against his forehead as if to prevent his skull from flopping forward, which seemed unnecessary until he was actually upright and felt the heaviness. He noticed among the fleshy leaves numerous strands of wire or cable of varying thickness, some lit with flickering arrays, some ribbed, some featureless. Whatever they were, these additional appendages were not organic.

Now Tom was unsettled. But something was obviously working in his system to suppress the panic.

“Please maintain a state of calm. I will ask you questions. There are no right or wrong answers. I will help you make a safe transition into your next phase. You are feeling some anxiety. For your safety we treated your systems to decrease your level of anxiety. These treatments did not affect your cognitive abilities in any way.”

Tom was now very clear about one thing—the voice was coming from inside this gigantic plant. “I will begin. What is the last thing you remember before you…” There was a pause, and a little bit of that scraping noise bled through. “Before you entered your sleep phase.”

Tom used to exercise to help him sleep. Sometimes he tried heated milk, medications. But not the last time. The last time he’d been lying on a bed before surgery. “I was hooked up to an IV. They were going to do something with my inner ear. The right, no, the left side. I had been losing my balance for a very long time. That last month it had gotten much, much worse—just sitting up made me ill. The surgery was supposed to be… um.” He swallowed. His mouth was like a cloth pocket containing a dried-out, forgotten tongue. The plant inserted a long straw into his mouth. He searched apprehensively for the other end of the straw, but could not find it. His mouth filled with cool liquid. “The surgery was supposed to be a simple procedure. Later, I woke up, but I didn’t really wake up. Everything was so hazy, and the room seemed to be full of people—at least I could hear their… distorted echoes—but I couldn’t see anyone.” He could feel that distant fear approaching. It would arrive very soon now.

“We have repaired… your condition,” it said. “I will answer those questions I have answers for. But please answer these first.”

Tom took a deep breath and looked around. The room appeared sterile, and there were recognizable tubes, containers, liquids, instruments—with handles and other attachments distorted and unlike anything he’d ever seen before. But they made a kind of sense, given the nature of the creature before him, who gave an impression of floating on a mop of fine roots. He understood now that this plant-thing was in constant, subtle movement—its leaves, stems—gently flowing, changing shape in a way that emphasized this impression of floating. He also saw that a thin layer of greenish liquid coated the floor, streaked and shiny like some sort of lubricant.

There were objects on tables around the room. Tom thought he recognized the shell of an old toaster, some random auto parts, maybe a radio, what might have been a fragment of toilet bowl—all so stained and rusty, so worn that they might have been dredged out of the ocean mud.

“You were suspended .”

“What? What do you mean?”

“You were placed in a state… cannot translate… cannot translate. You were placed in a condition of suspended animation. The technology was primitive then, but there have been… cannot translate. There have been survivors. Cannot translate. Did they make promises to you concerning the eventual outcome?”

“What? No… I told you. It was just supposed to be a simple procedure. No one said anything about suspended animation or anything like that. I didn’t agree to anything but my ear operation!”

There was a very long pause. Tom felt increasingly uncomfortable, but periodic waves of cold moving through his body calmed him. Finally the plant spoke again. “Many of the records from this facility… cannot translate. Incomplete. Your record is incomplete. But they indicate that a mishap occurred. An anomalous event. An error was made during surgery. You could not be revived. Subsequently an agreement was reached.”

“An agreement with whom? I told you I didn’t agree to anything.”

Another long, uncomfortable silence. “The agreement was signed by a Richard Johnston.”

“My dad. He was my next of kin.”

“He was told, according to the fragment remaining, that your life might not end. Your body would be suspended, until your condition could be rectified.”

“He always believed in that sort of thing. They probably offered him all kinds of money, but he asked for this instead. He couldn’t fix me, so he had them send me into the future. That’s the way he thought about things.”

“Are you stating that you would not have chosen this for yourself?”

“No, never. I am, was, a fatalist. There were so many diseases then. If it hadn’t been a botched surgery, it would have probably been some terrible plague. Dying in your sleep would be so much better. Those last forty years, epidemics killed so many. And maybe that was actually a blessing.”

“A blessing?”

“I know that sounds harsh, but sometimes you have to step back, view history with a bit of perspective. That’s what I used to do—I taught high school history. There were too many people, and with the droughts, the infestations, many crops were lost. People came up from Latin America looking for food—Mexico was just a rest stop. Refugees were pouring out of Asia into Europe, away from flooded coastal cities everywhere. No way could all those people be fed. The fields were empty, and then the fields were filled with bodies. They deserved better. My father would have agreed with that much. People deserve better.”

“Your father thought you deserved better. So he sent you forward—”

“To where?” Anxiety was beginning to fill him. “To when? When is this?”

“Cannot translate. Cannot translate,” the plant’s heavy leaves rose and fell, rhythmic and graceful as some deep jungle ballerina. “To here. To now.”

It was easier just to imagine yourself a new person than to attempt to adjust, carrying around the old self’s vague memories, as if you’d read them in a book. “Therapy has been performed,” according to the implanted translator, but details were untranslatable, answered instead by a series of random sounds. It bothered him, certainly, to have been tampered with, and to wake up owing someone for his revival. But it was all the life he had.