The Alien Agenda

The story of Human evolution is a long and convoluted one, yet Humans are aware of little of it that is actual fact.  Their myth is steeped in incomplete science, supposition and religious credo to help account for the absence of hard fact.  To help them deal with the unknown. 

Humankind's scientists, historians, philosophers and others of learning proclaim a body of knowledge as fact.  Mostly they are correct.  Life evolved on Earth in the same manner as it must evolve everywhere.  It started with simple protein combinations and over billions of years through single-celled organisms into complex, through reptiles, into mammals and finally Human's stone tool using predecessors.  That is where the story gets a little fuzzy.  How Humans made the leap from tool using apes to today's Human, in an evolutionary blink of the eye.

The truth is not as humanity sees it.  They cannot see it.  They would be destroyed.  Humans would not be able to face it if it were cried from every street corner.  If they faced the truth of it, the tenuous fabric of their nebulous make-believe reality would unravel around them and they would be left with nothing but the stark unbearable horror of their own futility.  Of humanities doomed place in destiny.  The oblivion Fate had decreed them.

I watched humanities transformation with my own eyes.  Had I not seen it with my own eyes I know that even I would have had a hard time facing the truth of it, so foreign is it to nature and common-sense!  So abrupt and radical has been humanities transformation.  Once very much different than they are now, Humans have been made to evolve into beings that would in the end of the process be much like myself genetically but fully evolved to live on Earth- while I was not.  It was an induced evolution in which the Human race had been elevated from and above the rest of Earth’s native fauna.  Our two species had also once been very much different, Vampires and Humans, from one another though now those differences weren’t quite as noticeable as they had been thirty-four thousand years ago.  Not quite so different now that the Human race had come so far in the process.  I had been at that time the evolutionary advancement, they the half formed beasts only barely cognizant of the differences between them and the other animals within the forests, jungles and savannahs of their primitive world.  The Human race had come a long way but had almost reached the end.

That was then and this is now.  Humans have been changed radically.  They have been induced to evolve.  They have had no more say in what has happened to them than I have had in the life I have lived, except that their change occurred gradually, over long eons, the transformation more controlled, more scientific, while my own was… a mistake.

Yet Humans are still ruled by those basest of animal needs.  They had been induced into an accelerated evolution that changed them too quickly for the hardwired instinctual reactions of the Human animal to form an equitable balance between new and old resulting in a race both civilized and barbaric at the same time.  Like myself and all Vampires, Humans are a mix of contradictions.

All Humans are not ignorant, however.  There are many enlightened souls who see through the fog of misinformation the unequivocal truth that lies in front of all humankind, but that most yet refuse to acknowledge because the truth is too ugly, too vicious.  There is nothing that can be done about it so it is simply best not to believe.  The Other's technological advantages are too far in advance of humankind.  To maintain mass sanity, Humans unconsciously accept the inescapable certainty of the inevitableness of their circumstances.

What other choice have they had?

The sun would soon be up and I would have to retreat indoors.  The old myths of Vampires and sunlight are true.  We cannot tolerate it.  Not Sol, anyway.  Not Earth's life-giving star.  We Vampires suppose there is a star somewhere more tolerable to our divided natures.  To our half which is not Human.  The Others must have evolved under a star somewhere, but a star in some way intrinsically different from Sol.  Or possibly it is that they have traveled so long within the black depths of space, or have not lived on the surface of any world, under any star at all, for so long that they may not be longer able to tolerate any such emissions as Sol or any star gives.  It is my belief that the Others travel across the vast gulfs of interstellar space at will. I presume at many multiples of the speed of light. But yet is not the Universe so vast that even at these velocities it may take generations to make crossings?  Why else would they spend such time and resources stealing what belonged to others?

In either case or if neither is true all that really matters is that the Others have passed on to Vampires their inability to tolerate the sun.  This the entire point of the Other’s interaction with humanity in the first place.  Their genetic manipulations of humanity are to steal humanity itself.  Slowly infuse humanity with their DNA to acquire humanity's tolerance to Sol and when entirely infused slowly remove humankind from the picture, one snip of deoxyribonucleic acid at a time, until the final result is a population one hundred percent the Others, yet tolerant of Sol. 

Vampires are also genetic manipulations.  We are Breeds.  Half Human and half the Others except created without the slow indoctrination which has occurred with humanity.  Mayhap the very first experiment, I am unable to tolerate the sun any more than the Others.  Given too much of their DNA at once, I became the first Vampire.  I was the only one of my kind for many eons until I discovered how to propagate my species.  By then humanity had undergone drastic changes.

Different than I genetically Humans still possess all of their humanity, all of their genetic heritage, the Others DNA added to the entire helix where it could be fitted in and nothing yet removed while my own is the product of a split; I am half Human and half the Others.  A being of both worlds yet of neither!

This is the genetic inheritance I pass to Humans I transform to Vampirism as well as my own offspring.  My blood is parasitic.  It attacks the host's cells, reproducing quickly, feeding on what it destroys.  It infuses every cell within the Human host, rewriting the DNA, destroying everything that is different, leaving only copies of itself in its wake. It was a side effect of the Others' evolutionarily superior regenerative abilities I do not believe they could have foreseen.  They did not foresee.  I am the only mistake the Others have ever made that I am aware of.  I was an attempt to rush a process that cannot be rushed.  Despite all of their technological advantage, there were still limitations to what they were capable of doing.  I was the proof of that.

“Marcel.  You had better come in.”  Sonafi said from the rooftop-entrance doorway.  I had triply felt, heard and sensed her approach.  A Vampire is perceptive in many unusual ways, but my focus was elsewhere.  This was pre-dawn.  If not my favorite time of the day, it was at least that portion around which I had built a certain routine.  If I was not so fond of this particular time of the day, I was at least fond of the ritual which I had constructed around it.

I liked to pretend that I would stand and watch the dawn.  Watch the sunrise.  Of course I could not.  It would cook me.  Burn me to a crisp.

Not that there had never been occasions when a prolonged delay left me exposed, unprotected from the sun's brutal rays.  The memories of those incidents remain fresh in my mind no matter how much time has passed since they occurred.  I could not forget them.  It had been nearly fifty years since the last and I could remember those excruciating moments as if they had happened only yesterday.

Painful but yet alluring the sun held a fascination for me that I could not describe.  I could not describe the fascination having never actually gazed into the sun, but it pulled at me as much as it pushed.  I would give almost anything to be able to walk under its warm rays- those beautiful, deadly rays.  It was a dream which could never be.  It could never more than the twisted fantasy of a delusional night walker.  It could never be real.

I seemed to delay longer every day, edging farther and farther towards that steep precipice.  To have lived an entire life denied of its warmth, the energy, the driving force which had fueled the birth of life on Earth, was to me the most unbearable aspect of my entire existence.  The bane of my long life, but the Eastern horizon was pinking now with the ambient light of sunrise and I retreated before it.  I could not force myself to remain.

“Another day.”  I said as I turned to my wife.  “The last is yet too vivid.”

“I feel it already.”  Sonafi said, near haunted eyes staring Eastward at the deadly beauty of the lightening sky.  There was little of Earthly origin that a Vampire might fear, but a Vampire was deathly afraid of the sun.

Our fear of the sun is a learned fear, not an instinct.  It wasn't instinctual for Humans to fear Sol, certainly, while the Others had not evolved here under Sol, so they would have no cellular memory of our star, but it became near instinctual rapidly when the aversion was this powerful and this painful.  This painful when even its indirect ambient glow burned with a fierceness that could not be denied.

This tableau had become ritual.  Nearly every morning I stood on our roof and awaited the coming of the dawn.  Every morning Sonafi came up to remind me to return indoors.

“How many thousands of times have you come to see me safely indoors?”  I asked as I retreated to the safety of the roof access doorway.

“Millions,” Sonafi said, “and you have been cutting it closer every day, again.”  She shut the door behind us and, standing so close we were nearly touching, stared up at me with her liquid, almond eyes.  Of Egyptian lineage, olive skinned, the straight black hair and muscular figure of her race, plus the flawless beauty, power and symmetry of movement of the Vampire kind, she seemed a Goddess temporarily transformed to Human kind.  She had nearly the powers of One, the beauty and the intelligence, though not necessarily the pure intentions.  Vampires are carnivores with an instinctual drive to kill that went far beyond what their Human halves brought to the union.  Though Humans are carnivores, as well, their addition was by far the tamer of the half.

We still possessed our Human consciences, after all, though if humanity was aware of that fact, it was unclear.  They feared and hated us.  Despised us.  Loathed.  Both wanted us dead.  Both Humans and the Others and for good enough reason.  We were a threat to both.  We preyed on one while our continued existence threatened the other.  The Others.  The Others obviously had a lot riding on Earth.  They could not afford to be exposed.

“Don't you ever miss it?”  I asked as I linked my arm in hers and we walked down the stair to the second story.  Her fingers were like mobile bands of iron on my arm.  Her grip like that of a vice.  Those hands had the strength to rip a Human limb from limb, had done so, yet they could also be very comforting.  They were comforting to me now.  Sonafi was the one being whom I knew with absolute certainty that I could trust with my life.

Sonafi knew what the sun looked like whereas I have never gazed upon it.  She had grown up Human.  Normal.  At least she’d had that.

“I do miss it, but not the same way as you.”  She replied and I could only smile.  We had repeated this conversation many tens of thousands of times, yet Sonafi answered me each and every time as good-naturedly as every time before.  Instead of continuing the ritual as usual however, I paused to look deeply into her eyes.

“What is it?”  I asked.  This was not telepathy.  I had not read her mind.  This was simply body language.  She had something on her mind.  I led her onward to the sofa.

“We have been here a long time.”  Sonafi said as we sat, in the parlor in front of the television.  Though I was a creature of long habit, enjoying the old pursuits, Sonafi was quite modernized.  She and all the members of our latest brood, now all departed the nest.  The television, computer, phones, the electronic gadgets of every sort which were all just meaningless noise and static to me were her greatest comfort.  It had brought amusement to our latest brood as well, which had been a relief in itself.

“We have been here a very long time.”  I agreed.  “It has been a good time.”

“We've been here too long.”  Sonafi said.

“Have you felt something?”  I asked quietly, knowing she would not have been so calm if she had, yet my hand strayed to the hilt of the weapon resting on its stand behind the sofa, anyway.  It was a Japanese katana of such antiquity that were the Japanese to become aware it existed, they would assuredly insist on its return as a National Treasure.  It had been the gift of a Human with whom I had spent long years of intellectual discourse.  One of only few Humans I had ever entrusted with my secret and a man whose memory I would carry with me always.  He had been a Human whose honor and integrity had been above reproach and he had been a good friend to me- a man I had learned much from- and a very enlightened man for his era.

The Others are both telepathic and technologically superior to humankind, but Vampires are not Humans.  We cannot be taken against our wills through the telepathic suborning of our conscious minds.  We Vampires are too sufficiently similar to the Others to be manipulated in the same ways they manipulate Humans.  The very same way Vampires manipulate Humans- through a direct interference with the Humans' cerebral cortex.  Both we and the Others could interact with Humans without leaving a memory of interaction through subconscious telepathic suggestion.  The way a hypnotist can if the subject is suggestible enough.  Except that Vampires and the Others do not need a suggestible subject.

“No.  I have felt nothing.”  Sonafi said reassuringly, reaching out a hand and placing it on my own.  “It is just a feeling.”

“Your feelings have often been more than just feelings.”  I said.  “Are you sure that is all there is to it?  Just a feeling?  No more?”  The reason I made such a point of my question was that Sonafi had proven, through the long years, to be especially attenuated to the Others.  She was our early warning detection sentinel in a very real way.  She could almost always be counted on for an advance warning, sometimes earlier than other times, however.  

“I just fear that we grow complacent.”  Sonafi said.  “It has not been so very long, after all.”  She meant since the Others had found us last.

I looked around the house we had called home for fourteen years and felt its loss like a physical blow.  Sonafi was correct.  We had remained stationary for far too long.

I was the oldest Vampire.  In a very real sense I was the cement which bound our loose society and perpetually hunted.  Fourteen years without discovery is a long period, one of the longest, but it has also been becoming easier to hide within the human population as that population swelled, we few more easily missed in the crush of overwhelming Human numbers.  More easily missed but I was sure not forgotten.  If we remained stationary too long we would eventually be found.  We always were.

“Where will we go?”  I asked.  “I have dreaded this day.  I hate to leave.”  Now would it be as easy as it once was, merely to pick up and go?  We would require the aid of other of our kin to make that possible, I am not technologically inclined.  I have not well made the transition to the modern world.  A creature of long habit, I read, I write, I ponder philosophically, delving into the deeper mysteries of the world, the Universe, Time, Physics and Mathematics, subjects which hold endless fascination for me and probably why I find little time for modernization.

The youngest Vampire generations, like their Human counterparts, brought up with these mediums, the computer, cell phones, the internet and all of the other technological wizardry of this the modern world, had become as technically literate as some of humankind's finest scientists, programmers, engineers, biologists, geneticists, and the whole plethora of Human endeavor.  We had been endowed with the technical inclinations of the Others and with our forced daily hibernation, the time to pursue those studies.  We need varying amounts of sleep, like Humans, but generally far less than the entirety of the daylight hours.  For those of us so inclined, and that is a great percentage of us, we are afforded ample opportunity to pursue these endeavors.  Documents and new identities would not be a problem.

We were already getting too old for the identities we were using anyway.  Our apparent longevity set us at odds far more than our aversion to the sun. Many Humans were night-lifers, third shifters, but none did not age!  They all aged.  All but us!

“I thought we might return to the Old Country.”  Sonafi suggested.  “It has been a very long time.  I yearn for its old familiarity.  The comfort of its superstitions and fears.  The hysteria and undercurrent of constant suspicion.”  At this she smiled, her long eye teeth overly white and prominent.

“That's not one of the things I have particularly missed.”  I said.  The superstitious people of the Old Country had often been as dangerous as the Others themselves.  But that was something I had brought upon myself and not really a natural state for Humans.  I was Vampire born, not transformed, and I had rampaged unchecked for centuries.  I had done horrible things.  I had killed indiscriminately, like a rabid animal.  The enmity Humans felt for me was well earned.

In those earliest years of my existence Humans and I were very much different.  I did not see them as anything more than a food source.  No different than any of the other animals I preyed upon, even though I could recall my birth of them.  It had been no more than one more of the many things I did not understand.  Like a reptile, I came to this world fully prepared to fend for myself.  From the very first moment!  I can only thank providence that it was the custom of my mother's people that the woman went into the woods alone to give birth and also that I was in the shade of the canopy of branches above when I came out and not within the sun's direct glare.

The shock I had seen on her face, the confusion I felt at that moment, when I realized I was rejected, had haunted me for more years than I cared to count.  It was the reason I had predated the early pre-Humans, when the forests were full of easy prey.  I had hated them and I had made them pay.

Those earliest Humans knew true terror when they thought of me.  I was relentless.  I hounded every Human settlement within thousands of miles.  I had nothing but time, after all, and it became much like a game.  I would kill randomly.  One here.  One there.  Keeping them always on edge.

It was while persecuting those earliest Humans that I realized, suddenly, that I could understand them.  Having listened to their seemingly meaningless noises from the outskirts of their caves, their villages and their camps when they traveled, one day I simply made the mental leap that they were communicating, and I began to study them.  After that it was only a matter of time.  Then it was that I quit persecuting Humans.  Suddenly I was more intrigued than angry.

They had begun to change as well by then.  They had begun to look more like me, but I had not noticed.  I had been living like an animal.  I knew only the thoughts of the predator.  Yet suddenly my mind had been awakened.  Vast potentials opened before me.  I began to study them and to learn.  It was during this intense study of Humans that I first saw the Others.  I heard them in my head before I actually saw them.  I heard dozens of voices in my head all at once, wordless yet completely understandable.  They heard me, as well.  They were suddenly aware of me as I was aware of them.  This was before I learned how to control myself.  Learned how to control my thoughts.

“This is the modern era.  Humans have put their superstitions behind them.”  Sonafi said, but she wasn't really pushing the issue.  The New World had been good to us.  We have thrived here.  I could think of nothing which would convince me to return to the land of my birth.  I had ceased to hunt them, but the Humans of the Old World would never forget me.  I had hunted them too long.  Verbal histories had been passed down.  The fear those earliest Humans had felt for me was still strong in the peoples of the Old World.  We may have been forgotten here in the United States, but we were still remembered there.

My eyes shifted to and lingered momentarily on the detail and craftsmanship of the exquisite weapon under my hand.  It was the finest blade I had ever seen and made by my friend.  He had been the finest blade-smith who had ever lived.  I had offered the gift of eternal life, but he was only one of the few who having been made the offer had declined.  Hamaterara Cumosachi had been his name and a Human who had nothing to fear from the afterlife.

I well knew that Hamaterara would have nothing to fear in the afterlife, and he had assured me of my own goodness, even knowing how I fed, but I have always wondered how God will greet me when my day does arrive.  Could those things I had done before the dawning of reason ever be forgiven?  I returned my hand to my side, my attention to my wife.

“They will never put us behind them.  We have done too much.”  I said.  Nor was it only what I had done personally.  To add to my crimes I had unleashed a wave of Vampires I confusedly had thought would become my new family.  I had been wrong.

“You are probably correct.  I do not know that I would ever wish to return to those turbulent times.”  Sonafi said.  “We were never safe in those days.  Always running and always looking over our shoulders.”

“It may not be good that we grow complacent, but it has been restful.”  I soliloquized.

“I don't think you will ever really grow complacent.”  Sonafi told me.  “I do not believe you are capable of complacency.”  Her eyes flickered to the Katana on its stand behind the sofa and then back to my own eyes.  Amused, I could not help the smile which rose to my lips, or help noticing the fascination with which she beheld it, and the teeth my smile revealed.  Even a Vampire could not resist her fascination with another Vampire's teeth; so white and milky, flawless and symmetrical, ideal and perfect, like everything else about a Vampire.  If it weren't for our aversion to the sun, we would be the most perfectly crafted creatures on the face of this world.

“We don't need the superstitious peoples of the Old World to keep us vigilant.”  I said.  “We have the Others for that.  I can remember every visitation as if they had only occurred yesterday.  I would never be able to forget the Others.  Not ever.”

“Nor I.”  Sonafi said softly, vehemently, the memories flooding her mind.  A mother does not soon forget the children she watched murdered right in front of her own eyes, no matter how long ago it had occurred.

Even if I were somehow ever able to become complacent, I would have Sonafi to remind me, to keep me vigilant.  I had sometimes even to walk on eggshells around my own children.  Sonafi became almost mindlessly ferocious directly after child-birth.  I was sure to keep my distance during these times.  Though I love her dearly, I cannot fail to notice the look of insanity, the pure primal madness, which comes into her eyes when she is guarding her newly -born.

Were it up to me entire, I would engender no more offspring, the entire Vampire race already sprung from my blood, my loins, to begin, but Vampires are not plagued with the same genetic deficiencies as Humans, the genetic influence we received from the Others much more complex, older, more evolved, there can be no problems with inbreeding, nor do I have control over Sonafi's reproductive cycle.  Unlike Humans, a Vampire woman consciously controls her fertility.  I wouldn't have a say in the matter even had I wanted.  I did not attempt to dictate to Sonafi.  It would do no good if I did and our relationship is one of mutual respect, so I don't.  She makes these decisions and I abide them, for good or bad.

My part in the process is a brief one, relatively.  Then I tend to steer a wide berth around her, especially right after she has birthed.  She will look at me in a way, sometimes, that makes me think that it is a struggle to recognize me, her instincts rising and trying to take complete control of her.  It was losing children to the Others that changed her.  Something of her had been intrinsically altered.

“I see that you are determined that we should relocate somewhere else.”  I said to steer the conversation away from the old hurts.  Our offspring are born ready to fend for themselves.  They are born ready and willing to fight.  Ferocious.  Independent.  But no match, when they are young, for the Others.  The only reason the Others had not eradicated us entirely was our too similar likeness to themselves.  They can no more tolerate the sun than we.  When they come, they must come in the night, and the night is the Vampire's friend.  We are the night walkers.  The night is our home as much as it belongs to the Others.  The old legends are absolutely correct about that, at least.

“Will we never return?”  Sonafi asked.

“Never is a long time.”  I said.  “I admit I miss the Old Country.  The New World does not fulfill me the way the Old Country did, but here there is only one enemy.”

I was descended of the race of Humans who would later become the fierce nomadic Kurds.  Black hair.  Light brown skin.  Dark blue eyes.  Nowhere could I go in this new land without generating curious looks.  I would never be fully at home here, but neither would I be persecuted or hunted by its Humans.  Not unless I stirred them, and then like a swarm would they attempt to rise and engulf me.

“There are hundreds of us now in the U.S.  How long can we remain unnoticed?”  Sonafi asked.  “And then what?  Where will we go then?  Imagine a television show 'Most Hunted' with us as the guests of honor; 'Root out the Night Walkers in your neighborhood!'  We wouldn't stand a chance.”

“They have television in Europe and the East.”  I pointed out.  “Plus they remember us.”

“I guess you have a point.”  Sonafi agreed reluctantly, a smile that revealed her own milky, predominant teeth warming her mobile face.  I had successfully changed the subject.  Diverted it from those old anguishes.  It would never matter how many children had come before or after.  My Sonafi would never forget those which had been lost to the Others.  Once they left the nest, they were on their own and Sonafi divorced herself from them, but while within the nest, while still young and defenseless, they were Sonafi’s to guard, and she did so jealously.

The Alien Agenda