The Grays (12 page)

“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.”

“Mike?
But why?”

“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
billion?
”

“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 currently control the world. He sees any threat to that structure as an act of war, and what the grays are doing is such a threat, big time.”

“But what actually . . . are they doing?”

“That’s the incredible part. The miracle. They know what needs to be done for their survival. They need access to our genes. And they know what needs to be done for our survival. We need to understand how to fix our planet and how to start colonizing other worlds. But what they
don’t
know is how to communicate the information we need to do these things.”

Rob looked from Crew’s mild face to Simpson’s careful, acute eyes. “Who does?”

“They have found a way to give a super-intelligent human being access to their collective mind. This, we believe, is why they were on the ground tonight. They’ve begun this process.”

Rob felt his face flush, felt sweat breaking out under his arms. “And this person is . . .”

“It’s a child. Bred over dozens of generations for extreme brilliance. The smartest person humanity can produce. When they bridge him to their collective, he’ll be even smarter than they are. He will trump their genius and, they hope, figure out how to save us all.”

“A messiah?”

“You could say that, I suppose.”

“But this is all predicated on the collapse of our environment being a real thing. If it isn’t, then they need us but we don’t need them.”

“It’s real.”

“It’s not global warming, is it, because—”

“Global warming is one aspect of a very complex phenomenon. A sixty-two-million-year extinction cycle. The last time it struck, it killed off the dinosaurs.”

“Which was sixty-five million years ago. So what is it, late for the bus?”

“It started right on time, three million years ago, when what is now Central America rose up out of the ocean. This destabilized ocean currents and led to what we have now, a devastatingly lethal oscillation between ice ages and warm periods. The number of species has been declining since before there was a single human being on Earth, and the climax has now been reached. We’re finished, basically—at least, as far as nature is concerned.”

“But why? And why sixty-two million years? I don’t get it, who’s behind it?”

“Ah, the silent presence. Nobody knows. The grays don’t know. But they hope that their brilliant child will understand. They hope he will understand the universe, the work of God, as it were, because, unless he does, we are all going to suffer extinction, both species, for different reasons. Twelve billion vital, living minds, all hungry for life, for love, for children and all right about one thing: every single one of us, whether human or not, is exactly as important as he feels.

“The grays are going to arrive on Earth in force in 2012, around the time the planet comes apart at the seams. They’ve been racing against time for
thousands of years, and now it’s down to a clock that’s ticking fast, and either they get that kid to figure this all out and fix the world, or both species crash and burn.”

“This is beginning to sound—well, to be blunt, horrible. Truly horrible.”

“You can understand the reason for the secrecy. For the grays’ terrible threats.”

“Keeping us from panicking and shooting ourselves in the foot.”

“And them.”

“So what has Mike got against all of this? And how can he stop them?”

“He and his buddies see this as an invasion, pure and simple. The grays are gonna show up in force and cream us and take our planet.”

“Why do they believe that?”

“They don’t know. Can’t know. They fear it.” Crew looked at Rob. “Do you fear it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Good answer. Truthful. Neither are we. But Eamon Glass—you know, he was the first empath—he felt that the grays did indeed need us, and if they need us, they aren’t coming here to take the planet.”

“But how can Mike and friends possibly stop them?”

“First, they kill this child. That throws the grays off their timetable, because there won’t be time to breed another one before mankind goes extinct. They lose the tool they’ve been breeding across a hundred generations, that’s endgame for them.”

“But the other consequence—the environment falls apart and we go extinct. Where’s the win?”

“Mike and his group—they call themselves the Trust—intend to save about a million. Who they regard as the best people.”

“One million? Out of six billion?”

“There’ll be a few survivals on the outside, but the million people the Trust save are going to be the core of a new humanity, as defined by the Trust, of course. Their million survivors represent every race they consider valuable, every DNA group, all chosen to ensure an adequate long-term gene pool. It’s scientifically sound, certain to continue the species, and a nightmare of racism.”

“But why would doing this stop the grays?”

“For the same reason that they’re not coming to my world,” Crew responded. “Too little genetic material to help them. They need to create a
new genetic foundation for billions of their own people. That’ll take a huge number of human donors. A million would be useless to them, so they’d go away and, presumably, die somewhere off in space.”

“The Trust isn’t stupid,” Rob said, “and Mike’s had unlimited access to Bob and Adam for years. He knows the grays as well as anybody.”

“And he would rather see the human species essentially brought to an end than live with the grays on what we believe will be at least equal terms. After all, this person who’s brighter than them, and thus able to control them, is going to be a human. They’re doing that for a reason, to give us a basis for confidence.”