Day 132 - Babel - Chapter 28 (1581 words)

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BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 28

The ground receded at a lightning fast pace, the throbbing sound of the engines and blades did nothing to lessen the feeling of alienation from reality as Nick was airlifted from his home to a futile mission on what he could only conceive of as a Hollywood fever dream. There were soldiers, in boots and camouflage gear, armed to the teeth and completely incapable of any language communication with anyone. They operated on hand signals and years of obeying orders without questioning or trying to comprehend.

He could not leave, could not resist and ye was unable and unwilling to explain their folly in taking him along on this misguided quest for revenge on behalf of humanity. They were there to get him, they saw him as this movie style Macguffin, a plot device or a convenient piece in a puzzle to be solved by the hero or by the 'good guys' in the film. In the film you'd see him played by some wild haired science type with thick glasses and a personality disorder, brilliant and yet unsociably inept when it came to lead or interacting with ordinary people.

This was how they saw him, this was the narrative they thought they were acting out, a ragtag commando group, self styled heroes of humanity ready to repel the alien invasion with whatever tools they had to hand. They attacked the ships, they tried to cure the Babel, tried to wrest control from the alien overlords as they seemed to take a total brainwashing relationship with the Babel humans. There was bickering, there was personality clashes and there were setbacks and there was despair. Then there came the hope, the thing that could turn the tide and win the war that they were fighting, there was a way out. A name came up in the data they had salvaged from the military records when they got access to some sensitive files, his name came up. Dr Nick Bianni had identified the Babel virus, had isolated it and had been working on the vaccine, the cure the last piece of the puzzle.

Find him, cure humanity, stand up and push the alien invaders off of their beach head and claim America back, show and example to the world. This was their plan, they plotted, researched and extrapolated where Nick had gone to, had worked out what they could and they searched high and low through the air, in the places where he could have gone to ground and now they had him and the key to winning the war in their hands.

Except.

There was no war.

Nick shut up at first because he was scared, men with guns and an army of pliant, silent grunts ready to do the rough business they needed them to carry out. That had unsettled him, being found and dragged from his hole to be sat in front of all this power and death waiting to be unleashed. He said nothing more as they laid out what they wanted, what they wanted from him and he listened to it all. He said nothing to that because he thought they were mad, driven so by the collapse of society brought about by the Babel, constructing a paranoid fantasy to explain the chaos, add meaning to the meaninglessness of how the Babel actually arrived on the planet, caused from within, inflicted on ourselves by something as stupid as human error. Much better to believe in the Science Fiction explanation of Alien Invaders, a beach head on an invasion of humanity softened by the blow of a world wide epidemic of Babel. Aliens that were somehow weakened by water, of any kind in a blatant borrowing from the Day of the Triffids, their weaknesses were as transparent as the plot device they wanted him to fulfil. This was their madness made manifest, but with trained weapons of death at their silent and unyielding commands.

Then they showed him the footage.

He said nothing again, this time because he feared for his own sanity not theirs. How could this be possible at all? Giant spaceships, Babel being controlled and manipulated en masse unless they were isolated, surrounded and contained by water. Each of these soldiers, helmets permanently attached to their heads, lined with a fluid layer to prevent them being controlled by the alien hordes. This was madness, it was an insanity that this could be happening and now he suspected that instead of being prey to their delusions, they must be a symptom of his own. They felt real, he pinched himself and slapped himself a few times to see how much it hurt, and the figments if that was what they truly were, let him do so.

There was a number of explanations in his mind and none of them presented good alternatives to his deeply disturbed psyche. They were mad, he was mad or no one was and the greatest of coincidences lay before him and Earth had made first contact with an alien race.

He could have confessed, but that would have sealed his fate in any of the three options, and rendered his participation useless, making him expendable and unnecessary. If they were mad and he confessed to being the cause of the Babel and that there was no cure, he would not live to see the day end. If it were his delusion, what good would confessing do when he was behind and underneath it all, he could not see, touch or affect the course of his madness if it were manifesting itself. It could end as badly or spiral out of control completely if he confronted his own demons. With every passing minute he thought that the first two options were less and less likely to be the truth.

Which left the impossible truth, the ludicrous condition that there was an alien invasion, one blamed, but responsible for, the Babel.

He could not breathe, it was too claustrophobic a set of facts and theories that assaulted him on all sides. He took in what they wanted from him, the vaccine or the cure to the Babel. He could not tell them that there was no cure, and there was no vaccine really. He could prevent future generations from getting the Babel, but they would grow up like that anyway. The Babel was never going to last very long, it was designed to burn itself out by the time the second phase was entered, it was already too late for humanity who had been affected.

He could not know this though, not for sure if the Babel was externally presented, an alien tool of invasion. To Nick it was not an unknown, but to reveal his extent of knowledge would reveal himself as the author of the disease. Now he was the man that was in the records as the person who had the cure at his fingertips, before the tipping point came and forced him into hiding. They never questioned why he fled, before Phase 2 manifested itself, before it all went to hell. That was how he had left a trail, because the infrastructure was still there for anyone that could still read the clues. They did not ask why he had abandoned humanity, they assumed there was a reason, but like the maverick scientists of blockbuster films, there would have been a reason that was largely irrelevant.

When heroes were called to stand and fight for humanity they just needed the opportunity to do so, to be given the leadership of a hero, to give a path to walk, and a cause to fight. They came and gave those things to him and now here he was, delivering his Macguffin to the human resistance. They were fired up and full of the vigour of righteousness, they had found the “one ring” and were ready to fulfil prophecy, achieve the quest, attain their goals and meet their destiny, to win the war.

There was no war, that was the cold hard truth of the matter. Babel was self inflicted and it's architect was being drafted without much reasonable thought to fight an enemy that probably had no idea what it was being blamed for. There were no communications from these 'invaders' the skirmishes had been decidedly one-sided from what Nick could tell, and the fight for Freedom seemed to be for it's own sake, as their was no yoke to over throw.

The mass control of the Babel though, that was interesting to Dr Bianni and he saw that it was a possible way out. If they could communicate to the Babel, there was an open line and maybe, just maybe it could go both ways. Perhaps it was time to go and see for himself. He needed to see with his own eyes, put lie to the madness in his head, or dispel it, accept it, deny it or anything really.

He could not do nothing, these men would not allow that.

So he got on the chopper and it lifted off in a time that made his head spin, he had barely clipped his seatbelt when the sensations of reaching away from the hold of earth began and the ground he could see outside the open bay doors the helicopter flew away so fast and so far out of reach.