- There was only time for one more play and West Roswell needed a touchdown to win. The star quarterback had called for all the eligible receivers to go downfield for a ‘Hail Mary’ pass lofted in to the end zone, leaving no one in the backfield to pick up anyone that got past the line. The decision had looked good for a moment but when the huge middle linebacker came on the blitz, there was no one to cover him. Kyle faded back, every step he took carrying him farther from the goal line while his receivers downfield tried desperately to free themselves from the coverage. But the linebacker kept coming…and it was only a matter of time. Kyle simply couldn’t keep retreating, he couldn’t throw that far…no one could. What was more, he needed to actually step forward to make the pass, to get enough on the ball to have any chance at all. But to do that meant he had to leave himself wide open to the charging linebacker. 'It can’t be helped,’ he decided, as he stopped backpedaling and took the step forward, the ball barely leaving his hand in a smooth long arc as the linebacker crashed in to him at full force…
In the background the West Roswell crowd cheered as the wide receiver outjumped the defensive back and hauled the foot ball down in the end zone. As he struggled to his feet, Kyle was still seeing stars…and briefly thought he’d died as he saw the angelic face looking at him from twenty feet away….but as the stars cleared, it wasn’t an angel…he seemed to remember the beautiful face framed by the golden curls as she walked toward him. Her cheerleader costume seemed to become translucent as she came closer…then transparent…then it seemed to disappear altogether. Kyle’s mouth dropped open automatically. Unfortunately, other parts of him were operating just as automatically. He watched the beautiful eyes open wide with concern….just before the golden flash came from her hand, and Kyle lost consciousness yet again.
It took Tess several minutes to realize the creature wasn’t moving…that her powerblast had at least immobilized it. It took longer yet for her to gather the courage to step closer. She had never seen another being…not without the protective suits…and for all the terror the memory of that video invoked in her….she couldn’t help but be curious. She was starting to realize just how stupid she’d been taunting the controller. Chess? Chess was nothing. There were probably thousands of these beings in existence…maybe millions of them. And they interacted with each other constantly in a continual interplay. By contrast, she knew chess …32 pieces on a small board…with narrow limits on what each piece could do. Somewhere out there was a world infinitely more complex than that chessboard and these creatures were competent in it….while she was not.
Her learning, Tess realized, had been strictly limited. It was almost like her captors had intentionally denied her any knowledge of what the world outside was really like. In fact, in all her years the only clues she had were from the alphabetical list she’d been given as a test of her abilities…and that was seven years ago.
seven years previously
- ”You used a dictionary as a source document?” said Dr. Higby. “Are you insane? Don’t you know how much information she could get from that?”
“I only used it to test her recall,” protested Dr. Carlson. “And look at these results. Out of 20,000 words she only remembered 600 the next day…and those only because she’d seen them used in some of her learning programs.”
“Well, don’t do it again…nothing goes on the computer screen unless it’s approved by the committee. We need her educated well enough to converse with us, not well enough to outsmart us.”
Tess struggled to make sense of the situation. She still knew thousands of words by rote, but exactly how they fit together and how they applied to this situation? She had no real context to understand them. She had the pieces of the puzzle…but not the experience to put them together. She envied the creature before her its knowledge. Undoubtedly it understood what was going on. But it made no sense to Tess. Sure, she’d angered the observer….but that certainly didn’t seem to justify doing….THAT to her.
But before she could think further she saw the creature stagger back to his feet…and watched in horror as he AGAIN made himself ready to impale her.
“NO….!” Tess wailed, as she powerblasted it again.
As the boy again hit the wall with a solid thud, Higby shook his head and looked helplessly at Carlson. “She’s going to kill him…. It doesn’t seem like there is any doubt about that….”
Carlson shook his head sadly. “Well, maybe we can salvage something out of this….”
When the solenoid clicked and the gas poured forth, Tess didn’t know what to do. If she didn’t respond they’d know she’d figured out how to block the gas and use more of it, for longer periods, or perhaps try something even worse. Right now the creature couldn’t harm her…she needed time to think. She slumped to the floor…too uncertain to do anything else, her only comfort the feel of the capsule in her back and the knowledge she could destroy it quickly if she needed to. She'd prefer death to allowing THAT to happen to her....
