Apolonia

“I thought you said the inhabitants were extinct,” I said. “How does a parasite exist without a host?”

“By returning to an inactive state. An organic presence along with the right environment reanimates the parasite. Once this happens, planet-wide infestation can happen within seventy-two hours. My planet, Yun, is a little more than twice the size of Earth. Chorion was roughly the same size and population as ours. They were overrun in two and a half days.”

“Yoon?” I asked, trying to form my mouth around the word.

“Yes, Yun. Its meaning is similar to sunshine.”

“Boring. Not even any Kryptonite in this story,” I said, my chin resting on my palm.

Cy began to pace. “The head of what you might consider the science department of our government picked up a signal from a neighboring world, Chorion. As I said, that planet had long been considered derelict. We were very excited to pick up on that signal. However, all scans revealed our previous belief was correct, and the planet was indeed barren. Curious about where the signal was coming from and how it was tapping into our frequencies, our Amun-Gereb, Hamech, sent out an exploratory vessel. It never came back. What Dr. Brahmberger picked up on his equipment was not the signal from Chorion, but the SOS beacon from that vessel.”

“What is a hammock?” I asked.

“Hum-OCK,” he pronounced precisely with a slight accent. “He is our Amun-Gereb. He is a…like your President, but he leads our entire planet. He is king.”

“Amun-Gereb,” Dr. Z said. “As in the supreme Egyptian god.”

“That’s where Egyptians first heard the word, yes, from our exploratory teams, as they did Osiris, my namesake.”

“Oh,” I said, nodding.

“The ancient astronauts were real. The paleocontact hypothesis is correct! Please, Cyrus, go on,” Dr. Z said, engrossed.

“Contained within the beacon’s frequency was an image. Similar to what you call a video here. A crew member, but she was on a different vessel. She was very distraught and injured but was able to report that Chorion was not barren. There was life, but it was not indigenous to the planet or any planet that we had charted within our galaxy. She said the original signal we’d picked up was from an alien spacecraft, the one they had located and boarded. We’d homed in on its beacon. The craft had appeared to be overrun by something else. The crew member said that she’d been infected by the same hostile organism—a parasite—and then she began to convulse. The image stream ended before we could see her full transformation, but by her screams, I assumed it was extremely painful.”

Cy closed his eyes for a moment. I knew he could still hear her screaming. No matter how many years passed or how hard you tried, some things never faded away.

“I’ve been studying humans since Heracleion was discovered.”

“The underwater city discovered in 2000 near the Nile Delta?” asked Dr. Z.

“It was an area of interest for our people around Earth’s three to four BC. Heracleion was a place our people visited often. There were many statues erected in my ancestors’ honor and many scripts detailing our assistance to the Egyptian culture. Part of my function is to make sure our civilization is protected, and the discovery of Heracleion was alarming to our council. Your oceans are vast and largely unexplored, and so for centuries, we weren’t concerned about the relics detailing our visits here, but once Heracleion was discovered, I decided to design a mission to extract any concrete evidence of our existence to prevent any unwanted contact.”

“Such a shame,” Dr. Z said. “Contact and an alliance could lead to so many wonderful things!”

“You have to admit, historically, humans don’t make the best neighbors,” Cy said. “It would become, What do you have? And then, What do you have that I can take? And then, the fighting starts.”

I rolled my eyes. It’d be fascinating maybe, if it weren’t a huge steaming pile of bullshit.

Cy continued, “Once I realized the beacon had been redirected to Earth, it was decided that I would leave immediately. We realized you were being baited, as we had been. You see, we managed to reverse the feed and bring in broken images from the exploration vessel, and we saw that the entire crew was moving in and out of the ship. It was the crew that had redirected the beacon. The parasites were aware that we had been warned and that we wouldn’t be sending more ships to them. They had no way of bringing in more hosts.”

“So, the signal we localized,” Dr. Z said quietly, “was sent to Earth by the crew.”

“Correct. It was our crew who sent the signal to Earth. But it wasn’t really our crew. They were…altered.”

“Altered how?” I asked, realizing I was on the edge of my seat. His story might be bullshit, but it was entertaining.

“They appeared…mutilated. Their faces were mutated, and their eyes…” Cy seemed to be lost in thought. His face screwed into disgust and horror. He shook it away. “We can’t let Tennison keep the specimen, Dr. Zorba. If he manufactures a sustainable alien atmosphere, and the parasites are reanimated, none of us will last long.”

“Tell us what to do,” Dr. Z said.

“Hold on. I have questions.”

“Rory,” Dr. Z warned, “this could lead me to Brahmberger. He is still alive, and they have him. They’re going to use him to reanimate the parasites. He’s the only one who could do this.”

“No, I let him tell his story. I let you listen. Now, I have questions.”

Cy frowned. “I know you don’t believe any of it. I expected that. But we can’t stay here. They’ll be knocking on the front door any minute.”

“Then, we’ll go out the back. Why didn’t you take the rock the first night you were alone in the lab?”

Cy lowered his chin. “I was going to, but then I worried about how much data Dr. Zorba had collected on his own. He was only giving it to us in pieces. A little bit of knowledge is dangerous. What if he eventually learned the origin of the parasites or even the specimen, and NASA sent an exploratory vessel there? What if the parasites, via their new human hosts, directed the vessel back and infected Earth’s populace? And what about the next planet? And the next? When would it stop?”

“We wouldn’t send humans that far into space. We have robots for that,” I deadpanned.

“We do, too, but had conflicting information. Curiosity is a dangerous thing.”