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  FreeForm:

  Reborn

  Orrin Jason Bradford

  A new physique. An old façade...

  In light of what she’s seen, former ufologist Pat Vogt is reluctant to conceal the nature of Allan Pritchard’s seeming nephew. TJ isn’t as he appears, and the boy’s history could mean a bleak future for mankind. Are Pat and Allan instilling humanity or nurturing a malevolent force? Would the true monster be borne by betrayal? As TJ learns to harness his powers, the stakes mount ever higher.

  Meanwhile, hidden away in a backcountry cave, another lifeform is growing...exponentially. With the help of a shadowy benefactor known only as ‘Aeo’, Doctor Homlin’s plans have received new breath. Soon to emerge is Val, a hungry incarnate that won’t rest until its progenitor’s vision becomes reality.

  Ex-operative James Stepp may hold the key to salvation, but how much responsibility can be entrusted to a mercenary...?

  Building upon its own powerful predecessor, Book II of O.J. Bradford’s FreeForm Series thickens the plot, dials up the tension and doubles-down on a rallying cry for excellence in modern SF. Readers that hope to be whisked away, prepare for a brisk abduction.

  Are You My Daddy?

  1

  "Daddy," the young boy said, a look of confusion mixed with fear etched on his face as he stood at the mouth of the cave from which he’d just exited. Allan stared at him for a moment frozen in place.

  "TJ?"

  What in the world is he doing here? Allan wondered as he glanced around at the barren mountain landscape and the black abyss of the cave entrance.

  Not your son. He heard Pat’s voice reverberate through his mind and another part argue with her.

  Yes, yes, it is my son. He looks just like Todd.

  But you told me Todd was killed in the same house fire that took your wife years ago.

  I know, but…but…but. Allan had no answer to that statement, for it was true. Allan shook himself back to the present and studied the boy in front of him.

  Even though it had only been a day since he’d last seen the boy, he would have sworn TJ had grown at least another inch. Probably my imagination, Allan thought. I know he’s growing fast, but not that fast…right? TJ looked to be between five and six years of age in appearance even though Allan knew his actual chronological age to be less than a year; more like six months. The FreeForm larva from which the boy had developed had amazing properties that Allan was still learning about.

  “Daddy," TJ repeated, his voice wavering, a perplexed look on his young face. “She killed him. Why were they fighting?"

  Allan glanced from TJ to the bloody half-man, half-catlike creature lying on the ground; all that remained of Homlin, the alien being that had started this whole mess; the alien being that had been instrumental in bringing FreeForm to the world and therefore indirectly TJ.

  “He was a bad…man," Allan said, not quite knowing how to finish the sentence. “He hurt her and would have hurt a lot of other people as well."

  "Does that make me bad as well?" TJ asked.

  "No, of course not," Allan replied. “Why would you even think such a thing?"

  "Well, I'm part him, aren’t I? That’s what he said."

  Allan noticed the boy shiver then tilt his head to one side. Allan wasn't sure if TJ’s shivering was from the frigid temperature that was continuing to drop as night approached, or from the question he had just asked.

  Allan glanced at the large black wound on the side of the mountain once more and wondered for a moment what lay inside. This was a stark, isolated part of the North Carolina mountains; inhospitable, to say the least, and made even more so by the plunging temperatures and the slate gray sky that promised snow. Allan put down the tire iron Pat had asked him to retrieve and took off his jacket, offering it to the boy.

  "Here, put this on. You’re freezing.”

  TJ took the navy blue jacket and wrapped it around his shoulders. Clutching it in front of him, the windbreaker reached down to his ankles.

  Allan reached out to him and started to pick him up, but TJ pulled away.

  “Easy there. I'm not going to hurt you. We just need to get out of here before the snow comes."

  "Home? Can we go home? See Kendra? Have Cheerios?"

  “That's right,” Allan said with a chuckle. “We’re going home.” Allan bent down to retrieve the tire iron before picking up his son. He strolled towards the helicopter where an injured Pat and an anxious Oliver waited.

  2

  In the deep recesses of the cave twenty or thirty yards from where Allan held the boy, a small ellipsoid-shaped globe the size of a large, slightly flattened grapefruit pulsated with a bluish purple glow. The anguished screams and the waves of the pain of the Primary had awakened the AI contained within it moments before. A high pitch whine reverberated from it throughout the cave and beyond, pricking the ears of several wild animals in the vicinity.

  On the home planet, the Primary was known as Sluneg. The violent attack on Sluneg had caused the beta version of the Fail Safe Protocol to be initiated. The AI who referred to itself as Aeo struggled to manage the emergency and recover the consciousness of the Primary now known on this greenish-blue orb as Homlin. Unfortunately, the subject was in the final stages of dying, and nothing could be done to reverse the process. In use for the first time, the fail-safe mode had been designed for less intrusive, less violent, and less rapid cessation of the body that housed the Primary. In short, Homlin's consciousness was strung out all over the place and dissipating rapidly. Aeo struggled to pull all the pieces together and back into the cocoon for safe keeping.

  Okay, I can do this, Aeo thought as it began the download process. It’s all out there. I just need to pull it together. But the brain was dying rapidly, and the electrical signals that contained the information grew weaker by the second. Aeo finally had to admit that it would be unable to retrieve every part of the primary subject. It would have to make do with what it could recover and fill in the gaps later.

  In the meantime, it scanned the cave and took inventory of the FreeForm available and was satisfied to find Homlin had stocked several in the pupal stage in the cave. At least I’ll be able to reconstruct another body for the Primary. The Primary’s mission could still be fulfilled. Aeo set to work to pick up the pieces of a mission that had gone bad.

  Recovery

  Allan pushed the door to Pat's hospital room open and stuck his head in. Glancing around, he was surprised to find her room looked more like a guest room you'd see in your favorite aunt's home. He then remembered reading in the Waynesboro's Chronicle that someone had willed a sizable amount of money to the institution expressly to rehab the rooms to be less sterile and more hospitable. That had been money well spent, Allan thought, as he noted the small flowered wallpaper that matched well with the bouquets of flowers that set on the chest of drawer and window seal.

  Pat lay in bed with her head turned towards a window that looked out on the snow-covered courtyard. The snow had been falling for over eight hours. All details of the courtyard were entirely obscured, resembling mounds of cotton. Already the weather forecast stated it might be the worst storm to hit the southeast in over twenty years, with accumulations up to two feet. Even in Pat's four-wheel drive Cherokee, it had taken Allan close to a half hour to drive the ten miles from his home to the hospital, a drive that usually took no more than fifteen minutes. Travel was hampered in large part because of the Southern drivers without four-wheel drive who didn't have a clue how to maneuver in such conditions.

  He noticed Pat had turned her head away from the window and was smiling weakly at him. He stood there smiling back as relief washed over him. Only then did he realize how afraid he had been of losing her.

  “Are you just going to stand there
gawking, or are you going to come over here and give me a kiss?” As she raised one hand to beckon him over, he noticed the attached I.V. drip. Her neck was bandaged from where the choker collar had cut into it. While she was still pale and weak, she looked better than when he’d last seen her in the helicopter the previous night. By the time he’d arrived at the helicopter, Pat had been securely strapped in by James, the pilot, and Oliver. Allan hadn’t been able to tell if Pat had fallen asleep or had passed out, and he’d been too scared to ask. James and Oliver had stared at TJ with equally perplexed looks.

  “What the hell happened?” Oliver asked. “Who’s that?”

  “I’ll explain later,” Allan promised, though he didn’t have a clue what he’d tell them. “We’ve got to get her to a hospital.”

  Allan walked over to Pat’s bed. His small bouquet of flowers looked puny next to the larger arrangements, but it had been the best he could do, considering the conditions outside where things continued deteriorating by the minute.

  “Oh, they’re lovely,” Pat said as Allan bent over and kissed her. Her color is better than last night, he noted to himself, but her face was still missing its normally vibrant color. He could only imagine the hell she'd been through over the past twenty-four hours. Thankfully, it was finally over. Now they'd be able to get on with creating a life together without the concerns of an alien invasion.

  Then again, there was TJ. How was he going to break the news to her about him? As far as he could tell, she'd been out of it last night and unaware of TJ's presence in the chopper. Maybe it would be better to wait until she was stronger, but even as he had the thought, he knew it was his way to put off an awkward conversation. So after a few minutes of pleasantries, he decided to broach the subject.

  He started to sit in the straight back chair next to her bed, but Pat insisted he sit on the edge of the bed so she could see him better as well as hold his hand.

  “What do you remember about the flight back to Waynesboro last night?” Allan finally asked.

  “Not much, I’m afraid. Really nothing about the flight. The first thing I remember was waking up sometime in the middle of the night with one of the nurses checking my vitals. I could just make out the snow falling, and then I fell back into La-La land.”

  “I see,” Allan said. “Well, I have some…some good news.” At least, he considered it good news, and he hoped she would as well.

  “Oh, good. I could use some good news right about now. What is it?”

  “We found TJ last night. Actually, he found me. Isn’t that great?” Allan held his breath as he studied Pat’s face for a reaction.

  Pat sat there. Her hand that had been gently rubbing his suddenly stopped. She stared at him, a startled look growing on her face.

  “What?” she finally asked. “What did you say?”

  “TJ. You know. He ran away a few days ago, and now he's back." He decided, given Pat's reaction, it might not help his case to let her know TJ had walked out of the cave where Pat and Homlin had fought to the death.

  “And this is good news how?” Pat asked.

  “He’s alive,” Allan answered, feeling the hackles on his neck rise. “My son is alive and well.”

  Pat slowly removed her hand from his and placed both of hers on her lap as she turned and stared out the window for close to a minute. Finally, she turned back to him.

  "You've got to be kidding, Allan. He’s not your son. He's not even human. He's as much an alien as the one I killed on that mountainside last night. We’ve got to let someone know about him."

  Allan didn't know what to say in rebuttal, so he didn't say anything at first. He continued to stare at the woman he loved. How could he talk to her about how he felt about TJ when he wasn't sure himself? Part of him knew the boy wasn't his son, Todd, even though TJ was the spitting image of his son at that age. But Todd had come from his wife's womb in a normal pregnancy like everyone else on Earth…everyone but TJ. He had come from a late night C-section Allan had performed at his veterinary clinic back in March. At the time, he'd removed several larval looking fetuses from a stray dog that had taken up at the Parkers. Not knowing what to do with the strange creatures, he'd taken them to his home to observe. All the larvae had died in just a few days; all except the one that had slowly changed from looking like a premature puppy to his son. It had all happened by accident at first, and Allan had kept the larvae in the den. After all the other larvae had died, Allan had relocated the lone survivor to his son's old bedroom, surrounded by baby pictures of Todd. Over a few days, the larva went from resembling a puppy to looking like a small human baby. Allan had planned to contact someone in the government about what he had found, but he just couldn't bring himself to do it. He had to see what the larva was turning into.

  And in the process, Allan had grown to love the boy he now called TJ. However, he also loved the woman lying in the hospital bed in front of him. Pat had almost been killed for a second time by an alien that had secretly been trying to take over the world and who had been the source of those larvae that Allan had removed from the Parker’s stray dog.

  Allan rose from the side of the bed and walked over to the window where he stared out at the falling snow. He’d always found snowstorms peaceful and calming, even severe ones like this that would wreak havoc on the area for several days. It seemed like a blanket of snow made everything less noisy, as though it absorbed much of the extraneous noises of life.

  He’d probably been standing at the window for a good five minutes or more when he heard someone behind him clear their throat and a nurse say, “Visiting hours are over in five minutes, Dr. Allan.”

  He turned around and tried to smile back at her. “Thank you.”

  After the nurse left, Allan walked back to Pat's bed. He reached out with one hand and took hers. Finally, he said, "Can we agree not to do anything about this for at least a couple days? Let's get you back on your feet and home. Then we'll sit down and decide the best course of action. Okay?"

  He could hear the pleading tone in that last word and hated himself for it but was relieved when he felt Pat squeeze his hand and nod before replying, “Where is he now?”

  “Oh, he’s at my house. Kendra came over last night before the storm became too bad. She’s looking after him.”

  “I see,” Pat said. “And what are you going to tell her? Are you going to keep lying to her as well?”

  Once again Allan didn’t know how to answer the question, so he just shrugged. “We’ll have to sort that out as well.”

  Snowstorm

  1

  Twenty-four hours had passed since the Fail Safe Protocol had been initiated and its initial recovery task completed. Overall, Aeo assessed that the Protocol had performed well, considering the less than ideal circumstances and the fact that it had never been used before. Still, significant portions of Homlin's long-term memory had been lost. While it would be possible to re-install the Primary's mission into the subject's consciousness, most of the details of the last ten years that Homlin had been on the planet were either a jumbled mess or lost forever.

  On the positive side of things, a significant early-in-the-season snowstorm had blanketed the area with close to two feet of snow, efficiently keeping anyone from investigating the area anytime soon. Also, during its efforts at gathering up the scattered pieces of Homlin's consciousness, Aeo had discovered the planet's inhabitants had invented a world wide web of information they referred to as the internet. Evidently, this species of Homo sapien wasn't as primitive as Aeo had initially thought. It felt certain this discovery would prove useful in recovering from this unexpected breakdown.

  Unfortunately, that was about all the good news Aeo could come up with. It also had discovered that during the night while it had been concentrating on other matters, a pack of wolves had dragged Homlin’s dead body away, leaving it up to Aeo to orchestrate the formation of a new body from scratch.

  2

  The snowstorm had dumped over two feet of snow through
much of the North Carolina mountains, leaving thousands without power and even more stranded in their homes. Fortunately for Allan, he had prepared for such contingencies since he knew he’d have to be able to get to his veterinary clinic no matter what the weather. He had also spent years after veterinary school in New England where he also learned to drive in winter weather conditions. He even had two generators, one in his veterinary hospital and the other at home, just in case. Fortunately, neither area was affected by the power outage.

  Upon arriving home with Pat around 3 PM, he found Kendra had put TJ down for his afternoon nap and had already called her mother to come pick her up from the main road near Allan's home. Allan had hoped to persuade her to stay as a way to avoid further conversations with Pat about TJ.

  "I'm sorry, Dr. Allan, but I have homework to finish before tomorrow in case they call school back into session," Kendra said as she finished putting on her boots. "Besides, I'm sure you two need some time alone."

  After Kendra left, Allan fidgeted around the house, fixing a fresh pot of coffee. He walked into the living room to stoke the fire in the woodstove while Pat made a nest of blankets and pillows in front of the stove. Allan fixed a tray with piping hot mugs of coffee and a pint of Kahlúa and placed it on the coffee table next to Pat. The two of them sat there for several minutes sipping on the spiked coffee and warming themselves. Finally, Allan placed his coffee mug back on the tray and turned to Pat.

  “It's so good to have you back home," Allan said as he reached over and took Pat's hand." I don't know what I would have done if something had happened to you. I can only imagine what these last few days have been like for you, but I want you to know I love you very much."

  Pat smiled and placed her other hand over top of his. “I love you too, Allan, and you're right. It was a harrowing experience, but it’s over now.”