PRL Serials

The PRL Event: CZS 8

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Kevin did really want to see his family. He wondered what his sister, mother and father looked like, and he wanted to know that they were happy and safe. He hoped that his time with the CIA had not had any affect on the simple life they enjoyed so much. His family home is not far from Durham, and he drove the couple hours or so without any music from his radio. He didn’t need anything but the memories of his old life. He wanted to do his best to remember the boy that he was so that he could pretend to be that person when he was with them. 

But the drive was faster than he could recall the intricacies of the boy that he was, and it wasn’t long before he was driving the country roads of his youth. He stopped first at the lake where he enjoyed time alone in a canoe, and he tore himself away after he stood there for nearly an hour just taking it all in. 

There was no car at his family’s house and he climbed the steps to the front porch. He looked through a window, saw no one, then he rang the doorbell. He waited there for a minute before he looked inside the window again. He could see that it was dark, but he could make out the old furniture inside, arranged in the living room as he remembered it. The fabric of the couch reminded him of cheap curtains; the floral pattern was rudimentary and only roughly resembled flowers. There was an old throw rug in front of it that he and his sister would get comfortable on to watch TV when they could find channels with the old rabbit ears that they took turns adjusting.

Kevin made his way to the back of the house, and when he saw the door of his father’s toolshed open, swinging gently with the passing wind, exposing the emptiness inside, he knew that the home had been long abandoned. His tools were his father’s most prized possession. It was how he kept the house from falling apart. 

Kevin looked through the back door and it was easier for him to see the kitchen inside was mostly dusted over. He imagined a screwdriver that he used to take the back door off its hinges, and when he was inside, he figured that his family had not been there in a long time. He wandered both floors and he got flashes of the life that he had lived before he decided to take off in search of a real life. He’d regretted it. Real life was mean and scary. He wished he could go back in time and make a different decision. 

Before leaving the house, Kevin replaced the back door. He imagined his family sitting at the dusty table in the dining room, just to see it outside of his memory one last time, like a photograph, and then he left through the front door. As he locked and closed it, then turned to descend the stairs, he saw his old friend Ivan Santana.

“Alia is never wrong.” Kevin said to himself.

The Alia is on the campus of Duke University. She is on a mission to find the father of Conner, a new acquaintance. The man named Dr. Roy Worthington works at Duke University and Alia is convinced that he can help Conner, who she believes is infected with something that she can only identify as evil. Not like a possession, Conner isn’t in need of an exorcism, she believes that he is infected with something like a disease, that he is unaware of. Conner doesn’t believe her, and she had Kevin drive her to Durham so that she could talk to him in person to see what Dr. Worthington knew.

She is alone because she insisted on it. Kevin would be no help to her in tracking Dr. Worthington, and she was aware of a powerful mind like her own that was searching for answers to similar questions that she wanted answers to. This mind was not close when she was in Wilmington, but in Durham, she can feel that it is a man named Ivan, and he has a mind like her own that is different from the normal person. He is not like the women she had known at the Institute for Brain Function, the Aliarum as her doctors had called them, but he can be helpful, and Kevin had known him in his youth. 

Alia walks to a bench on the college campus and she stares up into the sun. The same possible futures are there, even when the clouds drift in front of the sun on this cloudy afternoon, but still no indication of the current events having occurred in any of them. In each future that she encounters, she can access her memories of the past that created the future, but none of her possible selves have memories of the man named Conner, or his father, or even of this day when she is out in the world alone for the first time in at least a decade. It is such a significant event that she knows her future selves would remember it if they had experienced it. Unless there is some other explanation that Alia cannot fathom. Say for instance that one of her future selves is unknowingly suppressing her memory of this time, or if she suffered a head injury that clouded her memory. Regardless of the reason, it frustrates Alia that she can’t be more helpful. It’s hard to account for the responsibility she feels to the man Conner and the other people that he has unknowingly infected. Alia has always been a very empathetic person and she was comfortable enough with other people to impact their lives in positive ways when she was close enough to them to help. Her time with the CIA had opened her eyes to the full scope of her ability and for the first time, she wondered if she had a duty to humanity outside of her looming responsibility to prevent the takeover of the aliens. Her want to avoid the alien takeover future was largely a selfish desire to see the planet Earth maintain its current status quo of humans as the dominant animal species; that ensured that she could avoid the bad things that result when the aliens come in force. She’d seen their spaceship, before it disappeared in the blink of an eye, and she saw the beleaguered men and women being corralled into what looked like nothing; just disappearing into a black void where the ship had been. It disheartened her most that they were all black men and women, like they were being taken prisoner by the aliens. The Alia is black, and she doesn’t want to be targeted. The current situation is different. She could have ignored the feeling that Conner made her feel and insisted that Kevin deal with someone else to find an audience for their magic show, but her sense of duty had grown at least enough to pique her heroic instincts when she sensed a threat on the scale that was becoming more apparent the longer she sat in Durham.   

She sits on the bench, looking into the sun and making sense of her current situation as students and other members of the community move past. Some don’t notice her, others whisper to their companions and point, one man stops, scratching his head. He is a professor of economics, Dr. Richard Nigard, and he walks over to Alia.

“Excuse me ma’am?” Dr. Nigard looks over his shoulder and up in the direction of the sun to confirm that the woman is staring directly at it. He turns back to Alia, concerned. “Ma’am, that’s not good for your eyes at all. You’re gonna blind yourself.”

The Alia blinks and then stares him in the eyes. “Thank you for your concern, sir, and this will sound rude, and you will think bad of me for it, but my eyes are not your concern. You should be more focused on your classes, they are starting to notice that none of your students are passing higher level courses because you’re not teaching them anything. And, they will be coming to ask questions soon, and they won’t be satisfied with your answers.”

Dr. Nigard blinks and backs away. He was hoping to have at least one more semester of shirking his responsibilities as a professor, having a teaching assistant fill in for him and giving bogus grades to avoid failing whole classes that he had given no effort to. 

The Alia sits for hours and she eventually closes her eyes to search with her mind for Ivan. The way that she felt the mind of others, was similar to the experience of feeling her own mind in all the possible futures that she accessed in the sun. It was like sitting in a movie theater with a huge screen that projected the point of view experience of the mind she inhabited. Sometimes the picture was crystal clear, other times it skipped, or was blurry, depending on her proximity to the mind. She could not view every mind; some people could, whether knowingly or not, close their minds off to outside viewing. 

Encountering Ivan’s mind was different. His point of view perspective wasn’t being screened in the movie theater that Alia could traverse as an astral projection of her own consciousness. Alia had spotted Ivan as a spectator like herself in the theater of the mind of Dr. Roy Worthington, only he was not sure exactly why or how he had found himself there. And both could not discern much at all from the screening of Dr. Worthington’s point of view. 

Alia had tried to make contact with Ivan the first time she spotted him, but he left before she could figure out how to make a sound that he could hear. She had never talked to anyone while she inhabited that mental space, she hadn’t ever actually encountered anyone; even the Aliarum were never there as she had witnessed Ivan.

As the activity on the campus dies down, Alia’s consciousness manifests on a mental plane that is accessible to any mind that is willing to find it, though most are unaware of its existence, and even Alia does not fully comprehend it though it has become a familiar place to her since she first sensed Ivan. On this mental plane, the setting appears to be a quiet park, and the Alia practices her shout. She makes the size of her physical representation grow and when she is a giant, she yells Ivan’s name. She thinks she does, but when she opens her mouth, the letters I, V, A, and N slide out of her gaping mouth and tumble to the ground like giant stones. She scratches the representation of her chin, eyeing the letters. Then she grabs the bunch of them, and tosses them one by one at the mental plane sky where they stick as if attached by glue. One by one, I, V, A, N, and they start to blur at the edges until it becomes a smoke signal.

“Who is that?”

The Alia hears a voice and without overthinking it, she responds, “Alia! Is this Ivan?” She looks around herself, and there is the physical representation of a man flying at her like a moving ball of green light. Alia comes back to her regular size as the ball of light lands in front of her and dissipates. She opens her physical eyes.

“Alia,” Ivan says smiling down at her.

“That was pretty cool.” Alia smiles up at him. 

“Can you tell me what I am? Kevin said he didn’t even know what you were. He said you don’t have alien stuff in your brain like he does. He said I might. Do I?” Ivan’s smile is gone by the time he finishes. He looks petrified. “Does Clay?”

Alia stands. “I don’t think so. But I don’t have any answers for you Ivan, I would have to look to find them, and we don’t have time for that right now. I think you may know better than me how little time we have.”

“We’re out of time.” Ivan says. “Thank god Kevin is with them now.”

“Let me see.” Alia says.

“I don’t know how. You can’t do what you normally do to see inside people’s minds?”

“No, your mind is different. Tell me what happened.”

“They found a doctor experimenting on people. It was terrible. They were…there’s no other word for it, they’re monsters.”

As Ivan talks, Alia reviews the events that Kevin had witnessed, and it was a scene that she was happy to have avoided. 

“Dr. Worthington did this. He had help, but it’s him.” Alia says. “Do you know why the picture of his mind is so blurry?” 

“No, I don’t even understand exactly what that is. But we can figure it out, right?” Ivan’s eyes suddenly glow green. The Alia looks at him the way she imagines others looked at her.

“That is beautiful.” 

Ivan blinks it away. “Clay is working very hard and I can feel him. It’s hard to keep it down. Do you have a plan? Because I’m thinking that when we find this doctor, we beat him senseless, then turn him over to police.”

“That’s a plan,” Alia says, “we can definitely beat him, but I need him. I need your help to get him back to Wilmington.”

“Why? Kevin told me about his son, but why not just let the police deal with it.”

“Think about it,” Alia says, trying to hide her frustration that no one seems to be putting the pieces together like she is, not even this man with access to information that she accesses. “Worthington is crazy enough to do all this, to make monsters in apartment complexes and maybe even infect his own son with something that might be making him a monster. That’s what he wants to happen. Why would he cooperate with police to stop that from happening? That’s his entire goal.”

“Maybe jail time will scare him.” Ivan says naively and he understands how Clay had felt before they left TN. Alia is making him feel stupid.

“And why do you expect for the police to arrest him when you had to help some renegade cops who are convinced of a coverup? Ivan, look at me. You and I are gonna have to force this man to neutralize whatever it is that is in his son. We have to end this. If the police were capable, they wouldn’t have let what’s happening in those apartments happen. This is on us now. Are you up for it?”

“What am I supposed to do exactly? I don’t know how to force anyone to do anything.”

Alia and Ivan find a quiet place on the campus and she says, “Focus on my eyes.” 

They stare at one another until they are on that mental plane, in that park. Ivan is a green form of himself and the Alia is taller than him, looking down.

She shrinks to his size and embraces him, soon she too is glowing and then she is in the theater screening his consciousness, accessing his memories, the manifestation of his green glow that was never his alone, but shared with his partner Clay. Alia feels and understands that the source of Ivan’s abilities are the same as hers, and because she was never really curious about the source of her abilities, she settled on the explanation that she and Ivan are different manifestations of the same natural phenomenon. They leave the mental plane, and when they both open their eyes, Ivan understands that he can help Alia by allowing her to direct the abilities that he is not fully aware of.