Keep Your Friends Close…

Keep Your Friends Close…

by Richard Helmling (with compliments to Alan Dean Foster)

He thought he was starting to get pretty good at reading the alien’s moods by how its feelers twitched.

The Methcalt—a loose aural analogue of the name another species used for them—had no spoken language. They were capable of creating some sounds, but lacked anything like vocal cords to control their emanations well enough to communicate with auditory species, so they spoke to humans through computer-synthesized voice boxes that read the elaborate movement of their facial appendages and turned it into speech.

Still, David always wondered if there were things that their natural mode of communication revealed that their conscious, computer-aided vocalizations did not. He tried not to wonder too much about this, though, because they would know if he did.

Serving in their administration was an exercise in restraint, he told himself. Not that it was entirely their administration anymore.

“These are excellent,” T’Ghal, the Methcalt administrator before him, said. The computer inflected his voice with a tone of enthusiasm. “Based on these latest training and production reports, we will not only be ready for the launch window, but may be able to exceed our forecast strength estimate.”

It unnerved him that the alien was so elated about the overproduction of weapons of war, but then, it probably unnerved T’Ghal also. He had come to Earth with the initial pacification regime over a hundred years ago. His studies of human cultures had told him that adopting a human name would probably not be received well, so he had introduced himself as “T’Ghal,” a name similar to that which another species in the Federation used for his kind.

“I think in their language it means something similar to ‘boot licker’ here on Earth,” he had told David once, adding a chirp of synthetic laughter afterward.

It took a long time to see the Methcalt sense of humor. They had greeted humanity with grim, serious tones—something like a doctor’s bedside manner when bringing a terminal diagnosis. Homo sapiens had, they’d announced when first arriving on Earth, been assessed using their best psychometric and biological survey tools. And humanity had been found to score very high on three critical indexes that the Federation used to classify sapient species. Those amounted to, essentially, ruthlessness, discordance, and opportunism. A species that checked off these boxes was consigned to a sort of galactic quarantine. They were confined to their home system and their existing governmental and social structures were placed under the administration of an appointed Federation delegation.

T’Ghal had led that delegation. It was his synthetic voice—translated into every language on Earth—that had delivered the news even as Federation ships quietly saturated the planet with nano machines that disabled every country’s nuclear arsenal along with a fair amount of the global supply of gun powder and explosives for good measure.

“Yes, Commander Vasquez has accomplished wonders,” David said about the optimistic forecast. “How do you think that increased capacity might impact the outcome of the war?”

“I am no military mind, as you know,” T’Ghal said, “but my impression is: more is always better.”

He faux-laughed again. David nodded. Though not a “military mind,” T’Ghal had also been the one to orchestrate the purge of the rival alien factions when the Federation’s civil war began and when Earth’s status shifted from “protectorate” to “allied vassal.” The Methcalt may be pacifistic, but they were also practical.

“Vasquez might be able to do even more if any of us better understood the purpose of the campaign,” David told him.

“I know, I know,” T’Ghal said, his feelers cascading from top to bottom and then back again. “But some things are classified at the highest level. Honestly, even I know very little about the larger war.”

“I can understand why you wouldn’t want her to know too much,” David said, baiting the alien.

T’Ghal looked up. “Oh, no, my friend. All is forgiven, don’t worry. Her participation in the resistance is completely understandable and completely consistent with human nature. We do not hold that against her. Her competency in this new role is clearly a product of her expertise from her time as a resistance fighter. It is not a matter of trust in her individually, or in you, or in any human. Honestly, there are few Methcalt or Vissari or Gerpathoids here in your system who know any more than you do about the broader goals of the campaign. It’s just a matter of compartmentalization.”

David nodded, adding a placid smile that any human would find unconvincing. He assumed T’Ghal, after so long among humans and even longer studying them for the occupation, was not fooled by it either. David did not work too hard to hide misgivings; they would only read his thoughts and memories during the next security sweep anyway.

The truth was that he didn’t mind T’Ghal. He thought often that his species wasn’t that different from humans psychologically. Maybe the Methcalt, as one of the founders of the Federation, had never been subjected to the metrics humanity had, and so now that they needed help in their civil war with the other half of Federation species, that was why they were able to overlook the earlier verdict and bring humanity into the fold. Into the war effort.

“Very promising.” T’Ghal stood up. More rolled up, the bony plates of its back clicking into place like a zipper. “I will return to our residency now and file a transmission to the fleet from there.” It scuttled around the seating before David’s desk and he rose out of deference to see it out of his office. “And you? Surely you should head home for the night?”

“You know me. Midnight oil.”

“You work too hard,” the Methcalt said, shaking its head (well, the uppermost part of its body anyway) in a practiced gesture it used to communicate with humans.

“Type A personality,” David added with a grin. And isn’t that why you wanted us, he thought.

“Get some rest, won’t you.”

“Will do,” he answered as he closed the office door and then walked wearily back to his desk. Once there, he spun idly in his seat and watched the ribbon of orange sunshine peeking between the blocky shapes of the city skyline.

The alien knew as well as anyone that there was nothing especially captivating calling David home. No family. No partner. He usually preferred to stay late at the office. The Methcalt were rigid in their sleep-wake cycles. They’d reprogrammed themselves to the twenty-four hour day on Earth, but they never burned that midnight oil. They always evacuated the embassy building for their residences promptly at sunset. Still, the building seemed alive to David as human custodians and security personal maintained it, so it was less lonely than his empty apartment. So even on a night like tonight when he couldn’t really think of any actual work to occupy himself, he stayed late. In fact, with nothing to do, he seemed completely unable to pull himself away. He whittled away the hours on vapid webpages and reading articles from around the world—most of which in one way or another had to do with the war effort. His name would appear often, sometimes with a tone of disdain.

Some time close to midnight, after freshening up in his office bathroom, he sat back down at his desk when he knew, once again, he should be heading home to bed. It was better to kill the insomnia here at the office, he thought, then track home the inevitable restless feeling. Once again he opened up the web on his desk screen. This time, though, he got an error.

But that only happened when you were being censored, when your search or possibly the content you were searching for had fallen outside the boundaries of what the Methcalt believed was acceptable.

He tried a different search, but again, he was blocked. Something was wrong with the building’s connection. He took out his personal device from his pocket.

It, too, would not connect. “What the hell.”

He got up and walked to the hallway. Peeking out, he heard no signs of anyone left on the floor. His staff had gone hours ago. He knew that in the levels below, everything significant would have stopped when the Methcalt left for bed. Most of the work in the embassy complex was sensitive and required Methcalt supervision, like the labs in the sub levels that even he wasn’t allowed to know about.

“What the hell,” he said again and turned back to his office.

Something, though, prickled along the hairs at the base of his neck and he froze halfway back. Slowly, very slowly, he turned toward the still-open door to the hallway.

At first he was confused by what he saw there. The wall on the other side of the passage seemed distorted and someone had installed a circular lens of some sort there—no, the lens was floating in the air.

His puzzled feeling changed, bubbled over the side of the pan, and with all the vapor burnt off, all that was left was panic.

It froze him, the fear, so that he just stood there and watched as the distortion and the lens walked into the room. Then its arms reached up and peeled back the mask covering its head.

He breathed a sigh of relief and shifted back to mere confusion once he saw the familiar face before him.

“Vasquez? Sabrina? What are you doing here? I thought you were on the moon at the forward training base?”

“Oh, David, why’d you have to be here,” she answered, shaking her head.

He studied her from head to toe. The suit she was wearing bristled, the skin of it twitching in the penumbra between the glow of his desk lamp and the dark hallway behind her.

“Why are you in tactical camo?”

“Do we need to go through this little drama, David? Can’t we jump to the part where you admit that it’s obvious what I’m doing. I don’t have time for your theater of disappointment. I hadn’t planned on coming up here at all, but when I hacked the security system and saw you were still in the building, I knew we’d have to have this little chat. I guess I always knew that someday we would have to anyway.”

Suddenly her face was familiar for a far too different reason. She looked like she had that day in the bunker in Guatemala when they’d tracked her down. She looked less like the politician he’d watched her evolve into over the last several years and was once again the hardened guerrilla fighter, the resistance agent who had stared him down so skeptically when they’d offered the terms of the armistice—when he’d explained that the alien civil war was an opportunity for them all.

He saw that she was fighting again.

“Dammit, Sabrina, you made peace with this. The resistance stood down. You’ve been granted access and power. You’ll ruin everything now.”

“I don’t intend to, no.”

“Dammit. What are you trying to do, declare open war on the Methcalt? Everything we’ve accomplished these last few years will be lost!”

“I’m wondering about you now, David. Wondering about you in ways I don’t know that I ever have before.” She came closer and the suit calmed down, settled into a color like the wood grain of the office floor. “Do you really believe it? When their machines read your mind, do they see a true believer or just someone defeated enough to go along with their plans?”

“You all got what you wanted, Sabrina. We’re free. Humankind is free.” “They’re just using us, David. You have to know that.”

“Yes, of course they are. But in exchange for being used we get what we want—what you all wanted all along. Freedom.”

“At the end of a stick, shoved through cage bars. If we win this war of theirs for them then they are just going to try to slam the door shut again.”

“So what are you trying to do?” His exasperation sounded desperate, empty. “Take the god damned thing off the hinges, so they can never close it again.”

“Your resistance fought that war for a hundred years and got nowhere. You never made a dent in their control. What’s different now?”

“Everything. They’ve given us a chance—“ “A chance you’re destroying now!”

“Not if we play our cards right, David.”

She raised her hand. For a moment, he thought she was about to shoot him, but he saw instead a vial, a small canister. It was clearly Methcalt in design.

“Do you know what this is?” “No,” he answered.

“I came here tonight to get this. It was in the biolab on sub level 3. Just sitting down there in the basement.” She looked at it. He wasn’t sure if her expression was awe or spite, but he could see the tension, the raw emotion in her for whatever the object represented. “They’ve had this all along, David. They made it when they first arrived and these samples were just used as part of a testing program. All along.”

“What is it, Sabrina?”

“Do you think that T’Ghal’s lifespan is natural, David? He’s been administrator here for over a hundred years. Do you think his species just naturally lives that long?”

“Well, no. Their natural lifespan was actually shorter than ours, but they modified their own genome ages ago. That’s not a secret. He’s—”

“They’ve developed a genetic cure for our aging, too, David. That’s what this is. This is the fountain fo youth. The Methcalt have had it all along. The Federation prohibited them from giving it to us when they first locked Earth down. And now, even when we’re supposedly partners in this fight, they still aren’t sharing it with us.”

He started to reach for it, but then pulled his hand back, as if afraid it would burn him. “How could you know that?”

“We’ve known about this for a while.”

“Why not publicize it? If you’d gone public before the armistice, back when you were fighting them, you could’ve—“

“They can lock down our web whenever they want. They could’ve made sure no one heard us. You would’ve helped them do that, David. You and yours. Or worse, if we had gotten word out to the public, who knows what kind of draconian control measures they would’ve put in place then. Besides, to let the world know would be to let the aliens know that we knew—and they could infer a lot about our capabilities that way.”

“What capabilities?”

“That we’ve reverse-engineered their mind-reading devices, for one thing, and that we can use the technology against them.”

“You can…read Methcalt?”

“All those Methcalt hostages who were assassinated in the decade before the armistice,” she said with a nod. “We didn’t kill them out of spite. We couldn’t let them report that we’d downloaded their brains and knew everything they knew.”

“No…it can’t be.”

“Why not, David? Because you trusted them?”

“No, I…I didn’t,” he said softly. “I just…can’t believe they’re so vulnerable.”

“It has not been easy. Very few of us know what I’m telling you now. We had to keep this information safe.” She raised the vial again so he could see it. “But now we have this.”

“And what do you want to do with it? They won’t let us use it. You’ll just break the armistice, cause chaos. Those draconian measures you worried about—”

“No, David. We’ll start distributing this in secret. By the time they even know it’s happening, the bulk of humankind will be immortal just like them.”

“And then what?”

“It’s one more advantage for us. We need every edge we can get. We’re still going to cooperate. We’re still going to fight their war. But when we win it, we need to be in position to dictate terms.”

“You’ve been planning this for years?” “All along.”

“But they’ve read you. They’ve scanned your mind. You’ve been through countless security sweeps.”

“They’re our minds, David. We know them better than they ever will,” she said, shaking her head as if she pitied him for even asking. “Why did they bottle us up in the first place?”

“We’re ‘discordant,’” he said softly.

“Exactly. We can’t be controlled from the outside. A little discipline. A lot of training. Good old fashioned will power. We can influence the flow of data they get when they scan us. Again, not many of us know this. We can’t allow it to ever slip out.”

He was quiet a long time.

“Then you have to kill me,” he said suddenly, stepping toward her eagerly with the tone of a child asking for a present. “I won’t be able to resist. When they scan me for debriefing, they’ll know everything you just told me.”

She reached out her arm and rested it against the side of his shoulder. “David, I am so proud of you for saying that.” He nodded to her, resigned. The enthusiasm, the revelation passed quickly and he found himself considering the implication, the last moments. “Come with me.”

She led him to the roof. From a pouch on her hip, she produced a spool of fine, shimmering material. She snapped it out with a flick of her wrist and it took shape. The material formed a glider, wings a meter across. She gently hooked the vial into a wire frame undercarriage and then, deftly, hurled it off the roof.

They watched it vanish into the night and then he stood beside her, waiting for his end.

Something pulsed in the distance. A tiny blink of green light several buildings over.

“They got it. It’s safe,” she said. “It’s already on a cargo drone being sent out of the city. It’s done.”

“How have you done this?” he asked. “How have you evaded them all these years? Their surveillance, their scanners—how can you defeat them? I mean, don’t they know you left the moon base? Won’t they know you came here?”

“I’m still on the moon base, David. Right now, I’m in a meeting with several engineers planning modifications to the forward weapons array on the new battlecruiser. It’s the perfect alibi.”

“How?”

“I’m not the only me.” “Clone?”

“Nature’s clone. Well, not all natural, but it’s easy enough to split an ovum early in gestation.”

“A twin?”

“You knew my father was a resistance leader, too. This is the kind of commitment to the cause he showed.”

“My God…so you and I have never actually met, it was your twin all along?”

“No, you and I have more than just met. I’ve been in many of those boring meetings with you, consulted on press releases, shook hands at public briefings. It was me who you talked to in Guatemala all those years ago.”

“So the other you?”

“We swap back and forth, depending on the situation.” “So are you ‘Sabrina’ or—”

“We’re all Sabrina, David. It takes absolute commitment. We learned to do it in grade school. From one day to the next, adapting to every situation, learning to stay hidden inside our own singular identity.”

“Amazing. I wish I’d known. I wish…I wish I could’ve helped.”

“I wish I could tell them all that you were never really a collaborator at heart. Deep down, you believe in your species more than these aliens’ verdict of who we were.”

“Doesn’t this prove they were right, though? Doesn’t this prove that we are too cunning, too dangerous. You—your whole resistance and this grand plan—it shows they were right to be afraid.”

She studied him for a moment, but then he huffed a little and smiled. She returned the gesture.

“Yes, David, I guess it does. They should be afraid of us. Because we’re going to win this.”

“Wait—” he said suddenly, realizing what she had just said. “What do you mean you wish you could tell them?”

“You were right that I can’t let you live, David. They would read your mind. But we also can’t have them know that we stole that vial.”

“So…what…what are you…”

From another pouch, she produced a radio trigger.

“Tomorrow the news will report a strike on the embassy by a rogue cell from the old resistance. From the moon base, I will publicly and loudly denounce the ruthless terrorist bombing of the facility, saying that it endangers the peace. I will fully cooperate with the investigation, which will turn up a few patsies who have volunteered to go to their graves for the cause.”

“You’re going to blow yourself up, too?”

“It’s the only way. Once the bomb goes off, they’ll lock this city down. They would find me…if I still existed. But the charge is going to completely immolate me. They won’t even find a shred of DNA.”

“But you won’t be as useful to the resistance now,” he said somberly, trying harder not to think about his imminent death. Instead he tried to imagine the grand arc of her plan, tried to visualize their success—tried to see a future of human independence. “Now that there will only be one of you.”

“An ovum can be split more than once, David. There will still be two of me out there.” “Your father really was committed to the cause.”

“And now you are, too,” she added with an approving nod. “Is there anything else you want to know, anything else I can tell you before…well, before I push this.”

“No, I guess not,” he said. He drew in a long breath and looked out over the cityscape. “I’m still thinking about them, about the Methcalt and the Federation and why they locked us up, why they quarantined Earth in the first place.”

“You really do think they were right about us?” “No,” he said. “They clearly underestimated us.”

“Like I said, David, I did too. But I’m proud of you now.”

He nodded again and looked down at the trigger. He laid his hand over hers. She flicked off the safety and pressed the button.

---

Richard Helmling is a teacher and writer living and working in El Paso, Texas. His work has been featured in Corner Club Press, Black Heart Magazine, Arsenic Lobster, the Rio Grande Review, The Drabble, and Fiction Brigade. Visit him at www.helmling.com.

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