Roswell Fanatics

Telazole really was an excellent anesthetic. Even though he was waking up, the dissociative anaesthetic kept him from really feeling the pain as he was flung in to the wall, even though the impact knocked him unconscious. It was the OTHER effects of Telazole that had kept the FDA from ever approving it for human use, and two of these effects were dissociative amnesia and hypnagogic hallucinations. No one really knew why these things happened…..either forgetting reality…or remembering things that had never really occurred…but happened they did. In Kyle’s case it might even have been his subconscious ego not really wanting to accept the fact that a 112 pound girl had just hit him harder than he’d ever been hit in four years of Peewee football and a year starting on the Freshman team. For whatever reason, what Kyle perceived sure bore little resemblance to what had actually happened.

• 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....

It wasn't like they had never manhandled her before Tess thought, as the cold gloves of the vinyl bioprotection suit lifted her from the floor and laid her back upon her sleeping pad. But this time it was different...this time there was a real threat.....and things were moving way too fast for her to sort them out.

There were three of them in the biocontainment suits and she recognized the voices of the one who had threatened her...one of the same ones that had brought the creature in to her room. One of the others was the one who had removed her eggs and had....she tried not to remember that day.

They injected her with the drug....a fairly massive dose, but she was neutralizing it almost immediately and only a few traces got by. She tracked them down and tried to neutralize them before they could fog her brain...and was only partially successful. She was unable to control the beating of her heart...she could barely control the shaking of her hands...and she knew that if the one called Higby checked her he'd know she wasn't really unconscious...but he didn't check her. Instead he checked the creature.

"I don't think he's seriously hurt," Higby said, shining a light in Kyle's eyes. "I think probably just a simple concussion....made worse by the Telazole not being completely worn off. He should be awake in a few hours...I really have my doubts that this will work, Carlson."

"Probably not...but at this point we really have nothing to lose. Even if she destroys him afterwards...it's very possible she might conceive. And we'll learn something from the interaction. My understanding is that artificial insemination is less effective than actual coitus. We've already gone to the effort to kidnap him, and we can scarcely put him back. You saw how he reacted to her.....he thinks she's human and he is quite attracted to her. He's a teenage boy after all. Barring the chance that we've picked up some sort of an Eagle Scout here, he'll mate with her if she's unable to stop him...and that shot should keep her out for hours."

Tess heard the words but didn't understand them...too unfamiliar...too many years since she'd seen the dictionary...too little context....and worst of all, she was still fighting the effects of the massive dose of drugs she was given.

But drugged as she was..it was all she could do to keep from crying out with terror when they spread her arms and legs and picked up the unconscious creature and laid it on top of her. As she heard them retreat through the door...and the door lock behind them she felt its breath upon her cheek...the weight of its body across her chest and abdomen...and it's legs warm against the inside of her thighs....

'No!' her mind screamed...' No!...No!....No!!!'

But even as her mind recoiled in horror she felt the first movements of its body. The creature was waking up. This was a different sort of chess game now, and there were no good options. She struggled to make her clouded mind find the capsule in her back...to dissolve it before the creature awoke...but she couldn't concentrate.....

The two deputies had traced the route twice...from the municipal athletic center to the Sheriff's home. The Sheriff was busy calling all the hospitals in the area. But, it was only on the second occasion that they actually got out of their car and walked the diagonal path through the small park.


They found the equipment bag almost immediately, the glove in it bearing the marking K. Valenti. But the dart sticking in it was certainly out of place, and they put the bag down until it could be tagged by the criminal scene investigator. It was only minutes later that they found the other dart...the needle of it with what appeared to be blood. They knew better than to touch it. Forensics would check the match of the blood...do DNA testing if there was any question it was the Sheriff's son's...they had a call to make.

Jim Valenti had just hung up the phone after talking to the Emergency Room clerk when it rang. He sprang to answer it, only to be disappointed to hear the deputy's voice.

"Sheriff....this is Appleby. Williams and I are at Brenson park, we've got forensics coming...but you probably will want to have a look for yourself...."

"You've found Kyle...?"

"No Sheriff...no we haven't. But we found some of his gear. It looks like he was drugged and abducted...."

"I'll be right there..."

It is a strange but true fact that the unexpected seizes your attention more than the expected.

Tess was quaking with fear…almost incapacitated by her terror of what she expected to happen. That’s why it was so disturbing, really, when she felt the reactions of her body.

At first she thought it was just the warmth… She’d lived for eight years in a room that was 25 degrees…certainly not uncomfortable but not like the warmth of the creature against her. While her mind was in terror, her body seemed to thirst for more contact with the creature….she'd lived her life physically alone, without any contact other than the periodic manipulations of her protective gowned captors.... and somehow being close to this creature provided a comfort like she’d never known in her nine years of life.

Tess tried to put it out of her mind, but by thinking of the warmth she raised the awareness of it in her own mind…suddenly it seemed she could think of little else.

‘You’ve got to concentrate…ignore it…’ she told herself. ‘It’s just that it’s warm-blooded…’

Yes, the creature was like her, she told herself. Warm-blooded. The memory of the dictionary entry seemed to flit across her mind….

• warm-blooded (wôrm'blŭd'ĭd)
  Having a relatively warm body temperature that stays about the same regardless of changes in the temperature of the surroundings. Birds and mammals are warm-blooded.

‘It isn’t a bird…they have wings. It is clearly a mammal…..’

She felt it’s chest slide slowly over hers as it moved in its sleep…felt the tumescence grow in her areolae as they moved against the warmth of its chest…

‘I’m a mammal too,’ she realized suddenly as she felt the nerve endings of her areolae almost reach out to welcome the warmth of the creature…, ‘that must be why my chest has grown…’

• mam•mal (mām'əl)
  n. Any of various warm-blooded vertebrate animals of the class Mammalia, including humans, characterized by a covering of hair on the skin and, in the female, milk-producing mammary glands for nourishing the young. The young are born alive except for the small subclass of monotremes and nourished with milk

The pieces of the puzzle somehow seemed to be falling in to place… and the warmth she felt externally was suddenly matched by an internal warmth as she recalled still more dictionary references….

• mammary gland
  –noun
  any of the compound accessory reproductive organs of female mammals that occur in pairs on the chest or ventral surface and contain milk-producing lobes with ducts that empty into an external nipple, becoming functional when young are born and secreting milk for the duration of suckling.

So she was a female mammal…and the creature was a male mammal…and the voice on the computer had mentioned … mate….mentioned coitus…

• co•i•tus (kō'ĭ-təs, kō-ē'-)
  n. Sexual union between a male and a female involving insertion of the penis into the vagina.

• sexual union
  noun
  the act of pairing a male and female for reproductive purposes.

• re·pro·duc·tion Pronunciation[ree-pruh-duhk-shuhn] . Biology. the natural process among organisms by which new individuals are generated and the species perpetuated.

The dictionary entries flashed in to her mind in rapid fashion…and though her mind didn’t want to believe…in the end her body left her no choice.

She could feel herself there as his body rubbed gently against hers…her body reacting without conscious thought…opening itself …. moistening itself to prepare for his entry. Her mind wanted to deny it…wanted to not believe, but millennia of evolution were imposing their own lessons on her. She could sense through her molecular manipulation what was happening…as his pheromones sent signals to her body and her body sent pheromones back to signal his…they were the same species. Tess fought to control her body…fought to deny it what it so obviously wanted….and then she remembered the video…

‘No…it can’t be like that. Please no..’ she thought, remembering the video. She’d been used all her life…no one had ever cared for her….in fact, Tess realized, right now...with the warmth of her body as she lay underneath him was the happiest she’d ever been. Couldn't it stay like that? Was being used...being hurt.. the price for companionship? For the warmth of having a ... a mate? That she had to let him do THAT? Let him hurt her like the one in the video had?

Tess didn’t know if she could accept that or not…and paralyzed with indecision, she did exactly nothing.


Kyle was sure he had taken worse hits than that last one on the football field…he just couldn’t remember when.

He still felt like he had some cobwebs in his head as he started to shake it…hoping it wouldn’t fall off in the process. But they weren’t cobwebs he found out, as they moved across his face and as he opened up his eyes he found them staring at blond curls.

Kyle immediately shut his eyes. ‘Uh-oh….’ Whatever he was laying on, he decided, was extremely comfortable….warm…and breathing. It wasn’t your usual nightmare. He felt his knees and elbows against something that was reasonably solid, so he pushed himself up on his elbows and knees…then put his hands down and pushed himself up even further before opening his eyes to get a good look.

It had to be a dream….that was the most beautiful face he’d ever seen…and beautiful neck and beautiful…. ‘OMIGAWD…..’

The area of the park was marked off with crime scene tape and while Jim had seen such scenes a thousand times, it had never affected him quite as viscerally before. The CSI looked up from his work and fought to avoid wincing when he saw the look on the Sheriff’s face. The job was never easy, but when it was one of your own…

“What can you tell me, Davis?”

“From the tracks on the ground they waited over in the brush there….two of them I think, we have one good footprint, one partial, but unless it’s a guy who wears a 9 Adidas on the right and an 11 Nike on the left…well, it’s almost certain there were two. Besides, they carried him…not dragged him to the car. Kyle’s what? One thirty-five?”

“One-forty. He’s trying to bulk up with weights for next football season,” said Valenti.

Davis saw the hollow look in the Sheriff’s eyes and he knew, ‘He’s already starting to wonder if there WILL be a next football season.’

“Look Sheriff, whoever did this…well they obviously wanted him alive. I mean the whole point of tranquilizer guns is non-lethal capture…”

“But why? Why would anyone kidnap a fifteen year old boy?” The question was rhetorical but it sat his mind ablaze with a virtual endless series of fears about just why someone might capture a fifteen year old boy, many of them bizarre and terrible but none quite as strange as the reality.


As Kyle awoke he remembered…vaguely…that he’d taken a couple of darts, and that the first one had injected him with something that knocked him out.

As concerned as he was about himself…where he was…how he’d gotten there…and where his clothes were, his first priority was the young girl. She was unconscious and unmoving. The puncture wound on her thigh was clearly visible and if she’d gotten the same injection he’d gotten, with her smaller size and weight…would she even survive? He was, he was sure, looking at a drug overdose.

Kyle actually WAS an eagle scout, and three of his merit badges had been in first aid, lifesaving, and CPR. Although still a little groggy himself, it appeared he was dealing with a drug overdose. He looked around quickly for someone to help…no luck there. Nor was there a phone anywhere. The single door had no obvious way to open it, so he did what he’d been told…felt for a pulse, while screaming for help.

“Anyone…help! There’s a girl here who has been drugged.”

Kyle’s own heart was beating rapidly, and he was unable to discern Tess’s thready pulse with any certainty…but he needed to be sure before doing CPR. He put his head on her chest and listened…detecting a heartrate that must have been over 140 beats per minute. But he still didn’t hear any breathing…

“Help!” Kyle screamed, hoping to hear the sound of running feet coming to help him. He held his hand to her mouth and nose for long seconds, feeling for any indication of breath. Feeling none, he commenced mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Tess had been too shocked to respond when he’d pulled himself away from her, her mind still terrified…but her body somehow already aching with the absence of the closeness it had experienced. Her entire world had been so limited all her life…even the monthly medical manipulations and specimen taking had become nearly routine. Today was chaos…she was experiencing so much…so much terror…so much closeness.

She didn’t want to give away the fact that she was conscious…not unless she had to to avoid…that. She had indeed been drugged, but he obviously didn't realize yet she had neutralized it.

She ordered her body not to move, surprised at the feelings within it…feeling her body’s desire for her to again nestle against the creature…feeling her body’s desire when it simply touched her wrist. But as its head moved to her chest and pressed there, Tess felt the warmth grow…filling her entire body. She held her body still…afraid even to breathe. It seemed like all her life she’d been waiting for this moment.

‘Nothing can be better than this,’ she thought as the warmth flooded through her chest and reached out to her entire body….and then the warmth disappeared as he left her again.

She was struggling to decide what to think…what to do…when her head was softly bent back and he closed his lips over hers.

Tess had never had any sort of religious training, but even so….her thoughts could sort of be translated as, ‘Omigawd…’

Even if he hadn’t had his lips clamped upon hers…Tess would have been speechless. In fact, she was rapidly losing the capacity for coherent thought as she fought desperately to control a body that suddenly seemed to have a will of its own....

In the control room the six people looked at the screens with surprise.

“Could you have made a mistake on the dosage of the Telazole?” asked Carlson.

“I…I don’t know. I gave her quite a lot but she’s been on it for quite awhile. I figured there would be at least some tolerance…,” replied Higby.

“But she only gets it monthly…she may have little if any tolerance…”

Higby pushed the button to get a pulse from the chip buried in Tess’s back. The computer screen said 148…..almost three times her normal pulse. “Shit…it looks like Tess is in shock.”

“Should we go back and try to help resuscitate it?”

“No…it’s over a mile. If what the boy is doing doesn’t work…it may be done for. At least he seems to know what he’s doing.”


Tess’s mind was in chaos. She didn’t understand. Twice she’d powerblasted the creature but her mindwarping powers confirmed what her brain had already told her…it believed she was in distress and was trying to help her. But pleasant as that was …. and the pleasure of its lips against hers was undeniable…she was becoming even more frightened.

Tess felt like she was going insane…..losing control of her body. She was trying desperately to control her tongue….which seemed to want to flick out and curl up with his… her areolae seemed to be desperate to get back into contact with his chest…and farther down… well, at least his appendage seemed to have gone flaccid as he’d become concerned about her, that might slow things down a little. Her body was threatening to betray her with its efforts to get close to his, and it was taking every mental effort she had to avoid the movements that would tell the observers that the drug no longer affected her.

But even beyond that Tess was terrified. She remembered the horror of that video…..and intellectually she could never allow that to happen. But she was starting to think that the prospect of that didn’t bother her body in the least…in fact…she struggled to get those images from her mind. They were making her body even less controllable.

Giving mouth to mouth resuscitation isn’t easy. You tend to hyperventilate…blow off carbon dioxide, making yourself weak and dizzy. You also tend to make your own heart race. It took a while, but to the men in the control room, the efforts of the boy appeared to be having an effect. The heart rate started to slow….first to 140…then 130…it finally stabilized near 88.

Kyle wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep this up but whoever his fellow captive was….whatever reason someone had locked them up together….well, he couldn’t let her die. But as he was nearing exhaustion, the voice came from the small speaker by the computer screen.

“Her heart rate appears to have stabilized…I think you can let her breathe on her own now.”

Kyle quickly checked her pulse at the carotid artery…it felt strong. He held up on the mouth-to-mouth, watching as her breasts rose and fell with her breathing…only then remembering just how bizarre the situation truly was. He turned to the speaker angrily…

“Who are you….and why have you done this to us?” he asked.

“I assure you the overdose on the specimen was unintentional. We routinely sedate it when we do biopsies and bone marrow aspirations and other things that it might find…uncomfortable. It isn’t used to being around people and of course has never had sex before. We thought sedating it the first time would make things more comfortable for it.” said Carlson, neglecting to mention the fact that it would undoubtedly improve the odds of Kyle’s survival as well…at least until Tess woke up.

“Sex?! You put us together like that…expecting me to have sex with her? Are you crazy? You actually expected me to rape her?”

Carlson quickly shuffled through the boy’s personal effects, finding a student activity card from West Roswell High School and a library card with the name Kyle Valenti.

“Mr. Valenti….Kyle…it isn’t like that. Tess isn’t a human….not really….she’s a genetically engineered organism. She was created, you understand. The supreme court has ruled that lifeforms can be patented,” he lied. That’s how come people can sell genetically engineered seeds. What we have done with Tess is very similar. Tess is a genetic modification. She has DNA that is not of terrestrial origin….DNA that give her enormous recuperative powers. Tess may well be the secret to unlocking cures for cancer…for degenerative diseases. She has been a multi-billion dollar research project that may allow the human race to leapfrog thousands of years of evolution to better itself….and you can play your part in this great advance. We need additional specimens for study and all we are asking is that you do what…well it was very apparent when you awoke that you wanted to do.”

“I won’t rape her! You are insane…she’s as human as I am…and even if she weren’t…she has the right to have a choice as to who she wants….who she loves…”

said Higby. “Son…that’s totally ridiculous,” “Love has nothing to do with it. The creature is artificial…it is not human…has no rights.”

Kyle wasn’t too sure who this guy was, but he was as insane as the first guy. “What’s wrong with you…we fought a war over this in the 1860s, and you bastards LOST. People are people…not property. I don’t care what you guys say, hell, I don’t care what the Supreme Court says….I’m not going to rape her…”

“Son, it isn’t a her…just a lab specimen,” growled Higby into the microphone. He turned to Durning and Brosby.

“Where did you find this boy scout?”

Just then the intercom sounded from the guard shack. “Sir, you need to check channel 7 news on your monitor.”

They quickly pulled the TV signal up on a monitor to hear the news anchor reporting

• “…and that’s Kate Edwards, coming to you from the city park where apparently Kyle Valenti, son of the county Sheriff, was last seen. The Sheriff’s office have recovered some physical evidence…exactly what they won’t say, but an inside source tells KROS news that there is little doubt the boy was drugged and abducted. Kyle, an Eagle Scout and quarterback of this year’s league championship freshman football team, will be sixteen in four weeks. Anyone having any information is asked to contact the Chaves county Sheriff’s Office or the FBI immediately.”

“You brought us the county Sheriff’s SON?” screamed Higby to Durning and Brosby. “Of all the teenagers in the county…the Sheriff’s son?”

“Hey Doc,” said Durning, “..you wanted a teenage male, and you wanted him in three hours. We brought you what you asked for. Don’t go laying this at our feet.”

The world outside the 420 square foot cell where she’d spent the last eight years was a big one, and it would have been unrealistic to expect Tess to understand it. Her captors plan had been to keep her ignorant…and it had largely succeeded. Ignorant is different than unintelligent…even though Tess had sort of sandbagged her captors on her IQ testing, she’d still scored near genius. But by keeping her ignorant, they hoped to limit her capabilities to outsmart them, and with the exception of access to the dictionary that one time, it had largely worked. But she had a near eidetic memory, and every word spoken between Kyle and their captors was triggering flashes of those definitions…

• rape1 noun, verb, raped, rap•ing.
  –noun
  1. the unlawful compelling of a woman through physical force or duress to have sexual intercourse.
  2. any act of sexual intercourse that is forced upon a person.

That was what the video she had seen had portrayed. But the definition said unlawful…

• un•law•ful (ŭn-lô'fəl)
  adj.
  1. Not lawful; illegal.
  2. Contrary to accepted morality or convention; illicit.

Tess had theorized that most of the world was inhabited by people much like her captors. It had seemed logical at the time. The resources necessary to confine her like this were substantial, and she had assumed that represented a capital investment by the dominant group in the society…but she now saw that wasn’t so.

The creature….Kyle … represented the dominant faction of the society. To use a chess game analogy, those holding her were the weaker side…even though they had a local dominance of power. The resources they used…the dictionary in this case…was borrowed from the dominant faction…of which Kyle was a part. The world outside wasn’t her captor’s world…it was Kyle’s world. Kyle…who had tried his best to help her…even after she had twice powerblasted him…Kyle who was even now arguing with the observers on her behalf….calling them things she’d wanted to call them for years, if she’d only had the fluency to do so.

Kyle who was soft and warm and whose lips had made her soul come alive.... Kyle whose touch had made her heart throb and her body ache for his closeness....You know, THAT Kyle.

Tess was now starting to put things together…just a few. Although physiologically approaching sixteen, she had only been alive for nine years, and largely unconscious for the first of those. What knowledge she had…mainly from the dictionary, failed to cover huge amounts of knowledge that the average sixteen year old girl would have acquired in growing up…of course the average sixteen year old girl wouldn’t have been incarcerated her whole life.

One of the things that she didn’t understand was that sometimes in the heat of an argument people say things that are incomplete….that is, they are true, but not the whole truth, because the other party intuitively understands the rest of the story. But Tess’s captors had been quite good at keeping her ignorant of the culture outside her prison, so when Kyle said that a woman had the right to have the choice of who she wanted to mate, Tess took the statement at face value in the most concrete possible terms.

Of all the people she’d ever met…..which admittedly weren’t many…, Kyle was the only one who’d ever stood up for her…the only one who had ever treated her kindly. And since he was a member of the dominant faction….well…she took it at face value.

Tess was ignorant of the population in the world. She had theorized that there were on the order of 10 to the second power people working at the facility…which actually was close to the sixty-three who actually worked there. Since they were a minority faction, the actual number was certainly more than double that…although the actual confidence interval was huge, ranging from about ten to the third to as high as ten to the eleventh. But of all the people available, Kyle was the only one that had ever been nice to her…the only one who had ever taken her side.... the only one she really trusted. Oh sure, there may be more like him out there...but to someone who had never had anyone...he was more than she'd ever believed possible...and why would she possibly need more?

If she’d actually been a part of the outside world, she’d probably have been told that Kyle was her first puppy-love. ...that she'd get over him. And maybe that's what would have happened, too.

But it wasn't the outside world and she didn't understand that Kyle himself might need a vote in this proposition. But since her body was telling her that Kyle might make a very pleasant mate…and since he didn’t seem to be taken…and since she had been told that the choice was hers....well, her choice was Kyle, and that sort of settled it as far as Tess was concerned. She now had a mate.

Strangely enough, that decision by itself seemed to reassure her body. Oh, it still wanted the closeness…wanted it very badly. But it was now simply a matter of process....like a chess game…just a matter of figuring out the right moves to make the decision into a reality.

And Tess had NEVER lost a chess match.

The small window on the computer screen in the Specimen holding facility said Hour 18 Day 3646. Almost 30 miles away in his office, Jim Valenti was having the worst day of his life. In fact, he shouldn’t have been there at all…he should have been home with Kyle. Except, Kyle wasn’t AT home, and there was no real reason for him to go back there…not when he could still try to do something to find him.

Jim held up the evidence bag with the tranquilizer dart…the one that had hit Kyle’s equipment bag. The other was still down in the lab, blood and tissue samples from the needle at the tip being swabbed for DNA testing. Jim was rather surprised to find how many of these darts had been produced by their manufacturer, a company called pneu-dart in Pennsylvania. It seemed like every big game farm in the world used them. But like many such items, the lot number was stamped on the side. Both of the darts that had been found at the scene were of the same lot number and the distribution of that lot number had been far less wide than the distribution of the darts as a whole.

He had called the manufacturer and gotten a representative out of bed. Seven orders had been filled from this lot for various zoos and game farms, mostly in Europe and Africa. But the vast majority of that lot had been sold under a General Accounting Office contract, a vehicle that the government used to make mass purchases of items that were used by a number of government agencies to get the best price. It was probably a dead end…the darts more likely than not stolen from some fish and wildlife guy, but Jim intended to get in touch with the FBI the first thing in the morning and get them to track down the distribution of every last dart. Once he had that, he’d call or visit every place that they’d been sent to. It would be long and time consuming…but it wasn’t like he had a home to go to.

Jim shook his head as he looked at the clock…wondering where Kyle was…and what terrible things were happening to him. Jim Valenti was having a real bad day....

Thirty miles away, Dr. Higby was having a real bad day as well. He was on the phone to Bartelson…and Bartelson wasn’t particularly happy.

“What do you mean they snatched the Sheriff’s son? What kind of idiots work for you?” Higby had been wondering that himself for most of the last hour actually….but that wasn’t the worst of it. “That’s not all…. They lost two of the darts….darts that we got off a standard GAO contract. We’re afraid that if they find those darts…,” ‘Hell, I’m 99% sure they have ALREADY found those darts,’ he told himself, “…that they may be able to trace them back to our mail drop box up in Corona.”

“So what are you asking..?”

“The FBI is going to be called in…if they haven’t been already. We need to get some help at the top….someone who will stonewall when the GAO gets asked about this. We need your help on that.”

Even over the phone, Higby heard the tone of disgust. “I’ll see what I can do….but be careful. Don’t let anything else happen that will draw any attention to the facility. I don’t have unlimited influence with the FBI….I’ll owe Price for this big-time.”

As he hung up the phone, Higby shook his own head in disgust. This had already been a bad day, and it would likely get worse. It didn’t look like Carlson was doing anything more than pissing the kid off trying to get him to impregnate the specimen, and Tess would likely be waking up sometime in the next hour or less. At that point he was pretty sure what would happen…the kid would be dead….and they’d have a massive cleanup to do in the holding cell. He’d already decided to have Brosby and Durning assist with that….the dumb shits deserved it. It had been a long day, and by the time the kid’s body was incinerated it would be a lot longer. Hopefully Bartelson could give them cover. ‘What a totally screwed up day…’ Higby thought. Dr. Higby was having a real bad day....

Dr. Carlson was having a very bad day. He wasn’t really sure why Tess had become so aggressive with the boy. True, she had killed those guys nine years ago…and driven the others insane.
But on that occasion, she had at least been provoked. Carlson would have been willing to bet that she’d have accepted the boy better….not that it would have mattered anyway as it turned out. ‘Where the hell did they get this boy scout?’ He continued to argue long after his experience as a psychologist had convinced him it was no use. The kid wasn’t going to do anything…not even get near her. ‘Unless…..??’ he thought suddenly. It was a wild plan…unlikely to be successful….but what did he have to lose, really? In another hour the kid was going to be dead…crushed like those first victims of Tess. Boy Scout or not, the kid was a teenager. Maybe proximity would work. Carlson left the microphone and walked over to the environmental section of the control room. He dialed the thermostat down from 25 degrees Celsius to it’s lowest setting, 5 degrees Celsius. ‘The damn kid can either snuggle up to her, or freeze his ass off,’ thought Carlson, ‘..I’m tired of arguing with him…’ Yes indeed, Dr. Carlson was having a real bad day.....

A mile away in the holding facility, Kyle Valenti was having a very bad day as well. It had been the last week of school…a championship tournament….four weeks before he got his license and his Mustang….it should have been a wonderful day. But no, he takes a simple short-cut home because some jerk upperclassman doesn’t like freshmen, and the next thing he knows he’s locked up by a couple of mad scientists…if that’s even what they really were. Kyle’s own belief was that someone was trying to make a cheap porn movie and he and the girl were probably both kidnapped for the purpose. She had been drugged even more than she had…the bastards had damn near killed her. He looked over on the bed and winced…wishing he’d sort of composed her there a little bit, rather than just hopping off of her. The bastards could probably see her spead-eagled like that from the camera on the TV…and the poor girl deserved some privacy. He looked again for a blanket…or anything else to cover her with…but didn’t find one. ‘God she’s beautiful,’ he thought…feeling guilt even though he hadn’t done anything to her just because of how close they were when he’d awakened….then even more guilt as he felt his body react to the sight of her. He tried to look away…but her beauty was hypnotic…he finally forced himself to look away, realizing his attraction to her was becoming all too physically apparent.

Kyle felt bad for the girl…she seemed so young…so helpless. He needed to protect her…get her out of here, but he wasn’t just sure how he could do that. Worse yet, he anticipated even more troubles when she awoke. She had undoubtedly been shot with a dart just like he had. She was going to awake a captive…naked…and in the presence of someone who she undoubtedly would think was attempting to rape her. ‘How do you explain to a young girl who wakes up after an abduction naked with a naked guy standing over her that you didn’t have anything to do with it..that you are an innocent victim yourself and that a couple of weird guys on a television screen are the real culprits? After she’s been through an assault and battery an abduction, has all her clothes stripped off her, and then apparently catches you in flagrante delicto that you are just an innocent bystander?’ No...THAT, Kyle was convinced, was not going to be a pleasant experience. He anticipated instant hysterics on the part of the girl….even if he COULD keep his eyes off her and even if he COULD keep his body from showing its unquestionable interest in her. ‘What else could possibly go wrong?’ he wondered to himself. Yes, Kyle Valenti was having a very bad day...

Tess had always endured all the painful procedures with her eyes closed and her breathing under control, in perfect imitation of unconsciousness. But she found the presence of her mate a more difficult thing to pretend to ignore. But now she found herself unable to keep from peeking out between nearly closed eyelids at him…and she could feel in her body how the sight of him stimulated it. She fought back a smile when she saw him become stimulated looking at her.

To tell the truth, she was feeling a little guilty about this. She was willing to take Kyle at his word for the cultural mores of his world, but it had almost seemed unfair that the female got to make the choice alone. She was happy therefore that she was pleasing in his sight since she had no real idea if she was as attractive to him as other females might be. She was pretty sure that the actions of his body were as involuntary as the actions of hers, but it at least gave her hope that he found her pleasing as a mate.

She stole another quick glance at him....he was beautiful....no...handsome was the word she saw as she rememberred the dictionary entries....males were handsome...

Her mind swam with thoughts about the two of them together and she went through every dictionary entry in her mind having to do with a mate and mating…which only served to excite her more fully. The only troubling thing was a reference to mating rituals….a practice or pattern of behavior done prior to engaging in mating. She wasn’t sure exactly what that might mean…but had little doubt her chosen mate knew and would be able to tell her, after all...he was going to be her companion...her lover...her best friend...her teacher about the outside world. With his help there was at least a chance they could escape together.

On her 3646th day of life, Tess was finally having a good day.

Tess was the first to notice it. The room had been kept at a constant 25 degrees Celsius for the last eight years. The change in the temperature of the air coming from the ventilators was readily apparent to her…even laying spread-eagled on the sleeping pad. She wasn’t particularly concerned about it at first….she could still manipulate matter and use that ability to keep herself warm…. But in seconds the realization hit her. She had a mate to care for too.

Tess knew her captors had been impressed by her ability to manipulate matter, but Tess wasn’t altogether sure why. In her first year in the room she’d spent thousands of hours trying to convert the grey metal of the desk into something with a lighter atomic weight so she could manipulate it…with very little success. Manipulation of the atomic weight of dense atoms was hard…the hardest of any manipulation of matter. And in the end, she’d decreased the weight of some of the material only by increasing the weight of even more of it with no net improvement. Manipulation of molecules was easier but her captors had left her with little raw material. The large sleeping pad and the much smaller pad on the desk chair had been all she’d had, and they watched her closely with those…immediately confiscating the sleeping mat the twice she’d manipulated it. But even if they hadn’t, there really hadn’t been enough mass to manipulate.
In theory at least, she could manipulate the matter that Kyle was made of..…but practically…..well, he was her mate…and she sure didn’t want to convert him to anything else. Most of his parts seemed fairly essential….and some of them interesting in the extreme.
Manipulating gases was really the easiest….by definition they were light and therefore rather easy to control…like she did when she’d capture air to breathe when they tried to gas her.

So it was relatively easy for Tess to trap a layer of air next to her skin…insulating it from the cold…and even easier to randomly add to the kinetic energy of that trapped layer to produce increased motion in the molecules…which was really all that heat was…motion of molecules. So despite the chilled air coming from the ventilators, Tess was quite comfortable herself…but she started to worry about her mate. She was almost sure he couldn’t manipulate matter.

For awhile Tess thought about that….well she wondered if the ability to manipulate matter were a dominant or recessive trait. It somehow made her very happy to think of one day bearing a miniature version of Kyle within her….that was a feature of mammals….bearing live young….and of suckling their offspring at her breast….which mammals also did.

She eventually decided she didn’t care whether or not their eventual offspring could manipulate matter but she did want them to at least stay warm.

Kyle was starting to look chilly. Tess wished he’d join her on the sleeping pad…at least close enough that she could extend her layer of trapped air over him….he was starting to look cold. But she figured she’d have to pretend to be unconscious for at least another half hour. She was starting to worry about him though because...after all...he was her mate now.