Greenflies Read online

  Butler rubbed his eyes; he’d been up for nearly forty hours straight. While normally trim, the lack of sleep and non-vending machine food had turned his stomach muscles slack and pudgy. He was in need of a good shower, too. He was grateful the alien couldn’t smell him.

  He caught the Greenfly aping his motions as he rubbed his eyes. It was something the alien did frequently. For some reason, though, the creature had difficulty learning gestures to connote desires or symbols. You could hold up a ball and make a shape like a fist a thousand times, but it would never put the gesture together with the object.

  The alien slammed into the glass, scaring the hell out of Butler.

  A session rarely took place when the Greenfly didn’t attack the glass, but it took Butler by surprise every single time. There was just no preamble to it. The creature could be performing very well and peacefully on an intelligence test, then bang! The glass wasn’t actually glass, but acrylic, so it could handle the repeated assault. The Greenfly’s claws had left a couple gouges on the inside, but the cell was in no danger of being breached. After each assault, the alien would just resume its sphinx-like seat, and hours might go by before it tried again. The Army interrogation specialist had insisted they punish such acts with electrical discharge, or freezing cold, or some other adverse condition, but the civilian scientists had united against that decree and overturned it. They were getting used to such confrontations in the weeks since the Greenfly studies began. The first such incident had involved the now-infamous range-of-tolerance experiments the military had wanted to conduct.

  Instead of physical reproach, Butler chose to punish the Greenfly by just leaving, assuming the alien had some need for social interaction. It did always seem more alert when he began the next session, and it was attacking the glass far less than it used to.

  He exited the interrogation cell into a dim concrete hall, a guard on either side of the door he was passing through. Butler was beginning to get used to these folks, men a few degrees burlier than any of the Yale security guards. The guns might take a little longer. Butler was required to carry a sidearm whenever he interviewed the Greenfly. Given the alien’s size and claws, it could never be considered unarmed, and as such, anyone in its presence had to go in packing.

  Butler handed the pistol to the guard on the right and made the long walk down the detention hall. He grabbed the badge on his lapel and held it high so the sensors along the length of the hall would identify him. A failure to do so on his second day had caused bulkheads to cage him in in a small section of the hallway. He’d had a similar experience with the guarded door to leave the detention area. There was a thick sliding steel door with an electronic display and speaker to one side. Exit required a voice and hand print. On his fourth day here, Butler had burned his hand lighting a cigarette. When he later tried to use the hand scanner, it failed to recognize his print. More bulkheads. Security was getting used to prying Dr. Butler out of cages.

  Today, everything was operating smoothly. He exited Detention through an airlock and emerged into meandering concrete hallways. He walked a few more minutes and reached the elevator, built with the same concrete and heavy steel as the rest of the base. Once the door opened, he stepped inside and selected the second floor from the top. The numbers were all preceded with the letters SL, and the numbers themselves increased towards the bottom. In this base, every floor was a sub-level. He was headed to the level just beneath the ground floor, where most of the office space was located.

  The elevator opened to a catwalk overlooking a subterranean hangar. This massive room had once been home to one of the great bombers of the Cold War, but now it was host to dozens of swarming scientists and the soldiers here for their protection. A layer of transparent plastic sealed off the lower level of the hangar from the catwalks. Within it, in an atmosphere of nitrogen, lay the spoils of Battle of Sydney and a few other minor engagements.

  Scientists in plastic suits with independent air supplies crawled through the husks of alien transports. There was even one of the alien aircraft, a red arrowhead the size of a WWII fighter plane, a single jointed leg trailing thirty feet behind it like a tail. Rows of coffin-like workbenches housed dead Greenflies, and not far from them were transparent cases containing the armor bugs, the small silver creatures that could coat Greenflies, transports, and aircraft. Despite seeing this everyday, Butler still took the time to stand in awe at the alien creatures as they were being disassembled for science.

  As he stood there, a confused young man stopped nearby. He had a box of papers in his arms, and was trying to balance it against the rail of catwalk while looking at a pamphlet in one hand. The situation looked precarious to Butler, the box’s center of gravity moving a little too far over the railing. If the box went over the edge, odds were against it puncturing the plastic divider, but it would certainly get the lad into trouble. Butler walked over to him and took the box.

  “Here, let me get that for you,” he said, “Are you new here? Can I help you find something?”

  “Yes” the gangly youth replied, “Franz Lietner. I am looking for Physics, but I keep finding myself back here. It is a nice view, but I am already late.”

  “Jerry Butler. Here, let me take you. Physics is just down the hall from Xenosociology,” Butler said, “Come on.”

  The two began walking parallel to the hangar, heading towards the research offices, exactly where Franz had just been. Butler continued to carry the box and wouldn’t allow Franz to take it back, for courtesy’s sake.

  “Dr. Lietner… you did some of the teleportation research, right?” Butler asked.

  “Tracking them, anyways. We just wrote a quick paper based upon the immediate results with our neutrino detector and theorized a cause. I’m surprised at everyone’s extreme reaction to the research.”

  “How so?”

  Franz stammered a little, “Well, my university gave me my PhD, and I was sent here. I had no thesis and still a year left in my program. The director of the neutrino lab I was at is organizing a collaboration with most of the other detectors in the world to coordinate their efforts. All in just a few weeks.”

  “Don’t worry, son. I’m sure you earned it,” Butler replied, perhaps coming off a little patronizing, but he was half dead for lack of sleep, so it was forgivable. “I skimmed over your paper. Very solid work, very fast. They probably wanted to put every author on it to work as soon as possible. Hopefully you can pull that off again a few more times.”

  “Hopefully,” he replied.

  They had entered the office section, once again a maze of concrete and metal doors, though at least these had knobs. Not all of the doors were labeled yet, and in some cases the numbers had been removed to make way for a department label in the near future. Physics was one such door.

  “Well, that explains it,” said Butler, handing over the box. “Welcome home. It’s not Wurzburg, but hopefully it will do. If you can settle in quickly, it might be a good idea to attend the multidisciplinary briefing in an hour. Xenobiology is presenting today. Rumor is they’ve gotten the genetic code of some of the alien sequenced.”

  “Everything is xeno, here,” Franz said.

  “Well, now that we have a practical use for the prefix, we might as well use it, don’t you think,” Butler said. “Good to have you on the team.”

  “Umm, how did you know I was from Wurzburg?” Franz asked as Butler began to walk away.

  “Linguists never reveal their secrets,” he replied, tapping his ear. He then disappeared into the Xenosociology door.

  The office was an interesting combination of the archaic and the ultramodern. It had once belonged to some of the finest code-breakers in the country, and most of them were still here. As such, there were terminals in every office with access to a dedicated supercomputer occupying its own glass-walled office at the end of the row. Most of the new recruits were responsible for dumbing down the appearance of the code-breaking lab. White boards were everywhere, with little pieces of tap
e holding pictures of the captured Greenfly in infrared. Butler himself had a chalkboard, with a continually changing list of potential experiments and linguistic tests scrawled upon it. The code-breakers’ craft was based upon the premise that the code would eventually break down into a known human language. To actually decipher a new language, they’d needed an older breed of scientist and the older methodologies they brought with them.

  Butler found a picture of the captured Greenfly taped to his office door. It displayed the one-eyed creature in his typical sphinx-like pose, but with a cartoon parrot on its ‘shoulder’ and a patch over his bad eye. The words ‘Aaargh, Greenbeard the Pirate’ were written at the bottom of the picture. He left the picture hanging on the door, chuckling and thinking that perhaps the name would stick. He sat for perhaps thirty seconds before someone came through the door.

  Dr. Sandra Weaver was the civilian liaison with the quartermaster’s office. All equipment and personnel requests for research purposes passed through her hands. As such, she was extremely popular and equally busy. Fortunately, she was one of those sorts with boundless energy. In her forties with a head of pure white hair, she still bounded around in a spritely manner that brought joy to every office she visited. That was also, in large part, because she brought multiple millions of dollars worth of research equipment.

  “Jerry, you’re getting an intern,” she said, closing the door behind her.

  “I need an intern?” he replied, reaching for his coffee mug habitually, even though it was empty.

  “You need coffee. Therefore, you need an intern,” she said, taking a seat.

  “Seriously, Sandy. What is this, work-study? The government’s given us a blank check to save the world, and you’re hiring an intern? We can afford to hire a PhD to fetch me coffee. Hell, we could legally conscript a PhD to fetch me coffee.”

  “Not my call, this time. There’s a civilian, an American girl who shows up on the Greenfly’s detectors. The folks in biotech are dying to get a hold of her to test their theories on the detectors, the military are talking about using her as bait, and pretty much everyone agrees that she should be kept here underground where any Greenflies in orbit wouldn’t be able to see her. But, the girl has some very important friends, somehow, who are refusing to allow her to be treated as a prisoner. So… you’re getting an intern.”

  “Why me, exactly?”

  Weaver just gestured at the piles of computer printouts and texts on his desk.

  “I have a system,” Butler said.

  “Tell it to the chaos theoreticians next door,” she replied, “I picked you because she’ll probably be less lost among you than the hard sciences…”

  “Hey!” he replied, “We can be as incomprehensible as the next discipline.”

  “…and I thought you might be able to use her. She’s witnessed a Greenfly attack in person. In Manassas, Kentucky.”

  “Greenbeard…” Butler muttered to himself.

  “Pardon?”

  “The Greenfly caught in Kentucky,” he replied. “Alright, I’ll take her, but in trade. Where do things stand on my high resolution IR camera?”

  “NASA says they’re having one built for you,” she replied. “It should be ready by next week.”

  “Now, that’s just nonsense,” said Butler. “They have exactly what I need on those Mars probes they sent up. If they have them in space, then they have those fully functional mock-ups sitting in a NASA lab somewhere, like from that movie… Apollo 13. They could strip the cameras off them and send them to me. As far as I’m concerned, they could just set up the whole darn probe in the observation booth. The camera’s not that complex a piece of equipment, and without it, we’ll never be able to fully understand Greenbeard. For all we know, he may be trying to relay the complete history of his race on his skin, and we just can’t see it.”

  “That really is a dumb name,” she said.

  “Would you prefer Long John Greenfly? It’s tough to get away from the pirate motif now that we’re there,” said Butler, “So, what about my camera?”

  “I’ll light a fire under NASA. So, you’ll be okay with your intern?”

  “Sure. She’ll fit right in. But, y’know, Sandy, since she’s not here yet, I’m doing you a favor, and you couldn’t quite give me a firm answer on my camera…”

  Butler held the empty coffee mug up towards her with a sly grin.

  Butler popped a No-Doz as he sat waiting for the seminar to begin. It was one of the most popular items at the base PX, and several others in the audience looked like they’d been partaking as well.

  The auditorium was half of another converted subterranean bomber-hangar. The seating in here were essentially bleachers, wooden platforms constructed in the chamber in a matter of a day, with seats and folding desktops ripped from a Utah high school nearby awaiting demolition. The one modern contribution was a plasma video system at the front.

  The auditorium had been a demand of the science staff when they first arrived. The base itself, a former Cold War bomber installation, had countless small conference and briefing rooms for the pilots who had worked here for so many years. However, there was no single conference facility large enough on-base to seat the entire academic staff recruited since the alien incursions began. The scientists insisted that, given the multidisciplinary nature of the work and the rate at which the world demanded results, that individual team findings be reported to the entire scientific staff as frequently as possible. The daily briefing had been born. As the briefings were given by specialists, the majority of the audience was lost during most presentations but rarely did anyone shirk attendance. You never knew when something would be revealed that would radically change your own work.

  Today was Xenobiology. A number of images were displayed on the screen even before the presentation began, pictures of some of the different alien creatures recovered already. For some reason, the brownish insect that emerged from the alien bee gun was foremost on the screen. It looked much like an earth insect: six legs, a pair of wings, the three body segments, and the barbed bee-like stinger that was reported to dislodge once the insect stung. It was a very striking example of convergent evolution, or so went the prevailing theory.

  The other specimens had no terrestrial analogs. The transports appeared to be limbless things solely dependent upon their hovering for locomotion. The alien aircraft appeared to be descended from some kind of plant equivalent, the arrowhead originally some form of leaf, and the trailing tail the residue of an uprooted stem. The armor bugs and the turret bugs appeared to be related, their primary features being radial symmetry and a carpet of hundreds of tiny legs on their underside. Then there were the Greenflies with their combination of exoskeletal and endoskeletal design, their simplistic anatomy, and their vacuum oriented physiology.

  While the speakers were being introduced, Butler took the opportunity to survey the audience. There was the new boy he’d met earlier, seated amongst the physicists. The physicists and the biologists tended to dominate these discussions, made all the more interesting for their complete lack of comprehension of each other’s disciplines. The aliens’ tendency to split the difference between the subjects had sparked many lively debates. The other disciplines were more evenly mixed across the room. The only other real clique was the military, set up in the first two rows.

  “Ladies and gentleman, we’ve completed rough genotypes on the alien species displayed here,” the speaker began, “and we feel we have sufficient information to make the following conclusions: All of these species and all of the species on earth share a common ancestry, and the Greenflies have been to our planet before within the past seventy million years.”

  The crowd murmured, but it was subdued. Such bombshells came regularly at these briefings. At the very first one, it was stated that the Greenflies generated wormholes in lieu of internal organs, and the physicists nearly keeled over. Everyone had grown desensitized since.

  “Using shotgun gene sequencing techniques, we have
sequenced regions of all of these species’ genomes. We have found that, like us, they share the same four nucleotides, adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, as terrestrial life with a fifth nucleotide taking the place of thymine in the alien transport and the many-legged insect species. This is not unusual, as terrestrial life frequently replaces thymine as well with the nucleotide uracil.

  “This alone need not necessitate panspermia as an explanation… perhaps these are the nucleotides which react most easily in the creation of life. However, there would be no reason for the coding of genes to proteins to be identical between our species. They are. In every species we analyzed, the genetic codons for specific amino acids matched those we see on Earth. There are discrepancies in each species, indicating that each, with the exception of the multiple many-legged insect species, evolved in isolated environments over a period of billions of years. While it is impossible to reliably guess the mutation rates of species on other worlds, by assuming that it is the same as here on Earth, we have extrapolated a date of convergence at approximately two billion years ago, in the vicinity of the origin of life on Earth.”

  The screen now displayed sections of genetic code, showing matches, albeit small, in the exact sequence from the human genome to that of one of the many-legged insects, specifically the armor bug.

  “In addition, we have concluded that, as cladistically observed, the silver, armor-forming insectoid is closely related to the turret insectoid. They are, in fact, more closely related than you might surmise. They have essentially the same genome, with signs of genetic manipulation in both species. They each have simple ‘stop’ codons distributed through different regions of their genome, essentially one of the simplest techniques in altering a creature’s appearance and function. From the early sequencing data, we surmise that the armor-forming insectoids and the turret insectoids were originally a single species, perhaps chosen for their hard shell and adhesion ability, bred and genetically altered to fulfill their current applications.