Jeremy Finley - The Dark Above

It chose a great barren canyon, its craft obliterating a once-towering mesa and landing in its sudden absence, altering itself it take its form, down to the very grains of clay and stone. Once completed, the scientist sent forth a telepathic message to the others: Bring them to me.

Hiding behind the storms that were necessary to blanket their arrival, the testing began almost immediately, conducted on the very first of mankind to be taken. More people, then; samplings, dissection. At last, a single, successful manipulation, with extraordinary results: The very building blocks that gave them existence, the strands of molecules and chromosomes, if adjusted and twisted, affected the makeup of the very air around them.

The experimentation continued. Few survived. But those who did, who had been changed themselves, each commanded a power: fire, storms, death, and disease.

The testing began, small, slow. The specimens released into varying locations. From within the canyon, it watched their environments, seeing how each was affected by their return. Diseases spiked. Storms leveled homes. Murders increased. Even the food, for many, became deadly to eat.

And the scientist was pleased.

No longer would it be necessary to send their kind into battle, to eviscerate valuable natural resources in order to wage war. Once perfected, the very populations they wished to remove would be taken, altered, returned, and activated.

In the end, all their enemies would ultimately kill their own kind.

But almost immediately, the scientist discovered the fatal flaw. The abducted, when their weapons were activated, could not withstand it. Their fragile brains faltered, leaving them incapacitated. And when the time came to see how far the specimens had traveled, the scientist made an astounding and enraging discovery: Even their pathetic governments had realized the danger they posed and corralled them, limiting the scope of the sampling.

Furious now, the scientist ordered all of them removed, even the one—the boy—who it intended to thrust them into the next phase of testing. None of its kind knew what it had done, how far it had gone, to complete the task.

Take them away , the scientist had ordered. They may still be of use.

It was much later when the scouts—the scurrying, smaller of its kind that quaked in his presence—alerted the scientist that a few of the abducted were not in their ships. Including the boy named William.

Enraged, the scientist retreated into its work, knowing full well that the boy was alive. Only it, and it alone, could know this.

Longer experiments, more extensive manipulations, taking year after year, examining the strands of DNA that they had taken from the boy himself. The conduit was too valuable to abandon.

Then the scientist unraveled its mistake, the fatal miscalculation born of pride and arrogance. It ordered the scouts to begin the reaping once again.

The boy would be grown now.

This time, nothing would be left to chance. No great swaths of people. Only four of each population, on each border of the population. All of them with the correct alterations, tied to the boy.

It pained the scientist to realize what must be done, as distasteful as it was. It was now time to see if its theory would, in fact, prove to be the missing link.

The scientist itself would have to be altered. Manipulating its own genetics, it intertwined the boy’s DNA into its own.

It would be shunned amongst its own kind if any were to learn. But when the work was done, the connection was complete. Even the boy’s dreams belonged to it now.

Each of the newly taken was brought to him. Their manipulations had been improved as well, a sliver of the boy’s genes added to each.

When the four were in place, on the corners of the populations, it reached out for him in the darkness of his mind. And in turn, the boy had found the others.

When the scientist willed the activation, the boy, in turn, willed it. The newly abducted not only survived but thrived.

It was careful with the boy’s mind, as pushing him too far, too fast, threatened to ruin him. Already, he could feel how he was struggling, at times, with the inability to breathe. In time, it learned how to push him to the others around the world. And when all the others were linked, the time had come to bring the boy in.

There was just one glaring problem: Despite their genetic and telepathic links, the scientist could not control him while he was awake. Influence, yes. Move him to a central location amongst the four to enrich their connection. But the boy would always wake from the dreams untouchable, as of late, for days on end.

It was why the girl had to be released. To see if, in fact, she could lead him back. If the emotional attachment to her sibling would serve as a beacon.

Unexpectedly, the boy began to usurp the scientist’s control. Reach out to others on his own accord. And most troubling of all: The boy’s physical touch of anyone that shared his DNA enabled him to disarm their weapons as well.

A defiance that could no longer be allowed.

“They’re in range, General!”

“Do not hesitate!” General Wolve shouted. “Fire at that mesa with everything you’ve got—”

“General, please!” Kate grabbed his arm. “William could be our only chance—”

“Realize this,” he said, pulling her in closely. “We’re all dead. Do you understand that? If we don’t do that, your mother, the others, will kill us all. All those people taken all over the world into those ships fifteen years ago, they’re returned . And they’ve been placed all over the world, in all the gaps between. This is what they intended. Unless we take him out.”

Kate looked helplessly at the screen where a feed of the mesa was coming in from a satellite. From its vantage point, she could even see the F-15 fighter jets emerging from every direction.

“Fire!” the general bellowed.

They watched the jets approach, knowing they carried Tomahawks.

Oh, William.

She gasped as the planes suddenly exploded, all at the same moment.

“What the hell is that?” the general screamed. “What just happened? What fired on them?”

“Sir, it doesn’t look like anything did,” the soldier at a computer stammered. “It looks like they just smashed into something.”

“There’s nothing to hit, only fucking air!”

“Unless when those drones went down, when William’s phone died, something went up that we can’t see,” Kate said. “Something those pilots couldn’t see either.”

The image on the screen just showed the undisturbed mesa, with the burning remains of the wreckage lying on the edge of an imperceptible barrier.

The boy felt the intrusions into his body. There was a dullness, a numbness. When a sudden infusion ripped into his body, there was at last pain, his eyes burning in the light.

He didn’t remember his name. Only that it considered him a boy. And it was both angry and pleased with him.

He saw them. All of them, all of their faces at once. Four in every large population, in smoke, in storms, in death and disease. But now there were hundreds more, in clusters, standing together. Who were they? Why were their eyes that milky white? Who was the beautiful woman with brunette hair? The girl with black skin? The old woman with curls of white?

He knew that, just like him, they had no thoughts, no memories, no concerns. Blissful, unmoving. Waiting.

For him.

It guided him. Beyond their minds. Into the fabric of their bodies, their veins, their cells. Deeper still, to the foundation of their existence.

It was there that the irregularities of the molecules were apparent, as if each of the strands of curving phosphates had been infected. While the purity, the original designs of the DNA strands, were still intact, they had been corrupted, twisted. The irregularities were visible, like a plague that was still not yet complete.