“A quantum communications device,” Dr. Simpson said. “It passed signals between entangled particles, and thus was capable of instantaneous transmission across the entire universe. But no longer.”
“Things have been at crisis for some time now,” Crew said. “And we’ve reached a very serious point. A flash point, we believe.”
Given the threat they were under and the absolute inability of the Air Force to offer any defense against the grays, those words made Rob feel a little sick. “What sort of a flash point?”
“We need to take you to another level, Colonel,” Simpson said. “I’ve revised your job description and your need-to-know.”
“You can do this?”
He laughed a little. “Colonel, you’re talking to your boss—for the first time in your whole damned career. Isn’t it the damnedest thing?”
Rob shook his head. “Maybe we’re a little too bound up in need-to-know.”
“I’m a Defense Intelligence Agency specialist and chairman of the Special Studies Sciences Committee.” Special Studies was the umbrella euphemism for all the scientific groups that worked on the problem of the grays.
The Sciences Committee, Rob knew, oversaw the whole operation, including his own Air Force mission. The poetry man was indeed his boss.
“How has my mission changed, sir?”
“We’ll get there. First things first. I brought you here for the specific purpose of showing you this device, because you need to understand exactly what it did, why it’s been destroyed, and by whom. Because you are about to be tested, Colonel, more rigorously than you have ever been tested before. I cannot stress this enough. In a few moments, I am going to ask you a question. Your answer will be crucial.”
“If I answer wrong?”
Simpson gazed at him. The man’s eyes were rat-careful. “This machine gave us communications access to Mr. Crew’s species,” he said. “Which we very much needed, because they were generating questions for Bob and Adam that were, frankly, a lot more subtle and a lot more effective than anything Michael Wilkes has ever come up with himself.”
Rob realized that he’d just been told that his old friend Crew was an alien. He looked at him, pale in the dim light that filled the room. He appeared human enough. But then again, Rob had read enough UFO folklore to know the stories of a tall, blond race from a planet somewhere in the direction of the Pleiades. “You’re what the UFOnauts call a Nordic.”
“Ours is a very stable agricultural world with as much land mass as Earth, but barely a million people.”
“But you look so much like us. What are the odds of that?”
“We’ve done DNA studies,” Dr. Simpson said. “We and Crew’s line split from one another about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago.”
“But we—we’re the same species? On two different planets?”
“So it would seem,” Simpson said. “The most bizarre part is that the DNA trail is quite clear. We are not their colony, Crew’s people are our colony.”
“But in the past, uh, weren’t we pretty damn primitive? How could we possibly have colonized another planet? We couldn’t do that now, couldn’t begin to.”
“The past is a greater mystery than we allow ourselves to believe,” Crew said.
Rob’s mind raced. “All of those ruins that nobody can understand, things like the pyramids and the fortress at Sacsayhuaman in the Andes and that impossibly huge stone platform at Baalbek in Lebanon—all of those ancient engineering impossibilities… does this explain them?”
“The remains of our lost civilization, or so we believe.”
“The legends of the fall… Atlantis, that sort of thing, the war in space narrated in the Vedas—”
“Distorted memories of a world that was lost in a ferocious war that plunged Earth back into savagery and caused you to lose contact with us altogether. The Book of Ezekiel in the bible is a confused account of a failed mission on our part to rescue you, when we built the Great Pyramid at Giza. We had to come physically, and that is extremely slow. The journey took thousands of years on a multigenerational starship.”
“The Great Pyramid is dated. We know who built it.”
“You know that Khefu put his mark on it. We returned in force about thirty-five hundred years ago. For a time, we ruled Egypt. The Pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti were from our world. We attempted to reestablish essential lost technology, which is the technology that enables the movement of souls across space. A journey that takes eons in the physical can be accomplished in a few moments by a being in a state of energy. The Great Pyramid is a device that enables this. The Egyptian religion of the journey of the soul to the Milky Way is not imagination, but mythology based on lost science.”
“And did it… work?”
He nodded. “It still does. At present, I can use it to return home, but nobody else can come here.” He gestured toward the blackened console. “That new device had a lot of capability. Among the things it could do was transmit the entire record of somebody’s DNA at faster than light speed. A clone could then be grown using stem cells and DNA matching. Using pyramids on both planets, the soul could cross from one body to the other. But that’s all impossible now, because of what Michael Wilkes did.”
“Before we can answer that question,” Simpson said, “you need to understand a little more about why the grays are here.”
“They’re exploiting us somehow, I’ve always assumed. Feeding, perhaps, in some way that doesn’t seem to hurt people but that they regard as absolutely essential to themselves.”
“They’re here because they’re in terrible trouble,” Crew said.
Simpson joined in. “They have one hell of a problem. Genetic. Only in the past few years were we even able to understand it. But when you do a really good genetic study on them, you find all kinds of breaks, inserted genes, genes that must be from other species, artificial genes—they’re a genetic garbage can, is what the grays are. They’re not actually alive anymore. The grays have replaced so much of themselves that they’ve become, in effect, biological machines. If you can believe this, the few original genes we have detected are at least a billion years old.”
“A
“Or more. Maybe much more. What we’re looking at with the grays is a species so ancient that it has used up its gene pool. As a species, in their entirety, the grays are dying of old age.”
Crew continued, “Every gray we have ever recovered from crashes, a total of fifty-eight bodies over the last sixty years, has been suffering from this degenerative genetic disease, where the membranous nucleous of their cells hardens, until the genetic material that’s stored there can no longer be used by the cell. Then the grays replace the affected organ with an artificial substitute. Over time, the individual becomes a sort of machine. They have even created a prosthesis for their brain.”
“So, why are they dying? If they’ve become artificial versions of themselves, they’re immortal.”
“The more artificial they are, the less alive they are. Knowledge and intellect transfer to the artificial brain, but not feelings. They’ve gained a sort of immortality, but at the price of losing their heart. And every gray is like this, and they all remember their lost hearts, and all they care about is getting them back. What they have now is not life, but the memory of life.”
Rob had seen the Bob autopsy. He had been a living entity, but with things like a manufactured skin and metal bones, and a mind that was housed not in a brain as such, but in silicon filaments that filled his head in intricate patterns that looked something like Mandelbrot Sets. You could see, though, in the structures of the skull, that it had once contained a natural brain.
“So how does coming here help them?”
“The grays are trying to save mankind.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, it’s not altruism. They’re getting access to our rich young gene pool. In return, they’re going to save us from the environmental catastrophe that’s going to ruin us. Together, both species survive. Apart, both die.”
“Then why—I’ve always had the impression from Wilkes that they’re evil.”
“He and his friends are at the center of the linkage of corporations, governments, and individuals who
