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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.
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