FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Undisclosed Location, American Samoa

“And how many others agreed with the information, Senior Chief Moreau?” the bland suit asked Pattie. After three days of this, it took all her self-control not to punch the smug elfin woman leading her interrogation into next week. Three days without a drink found the incarcerated woman’s nerves badly tested.

“I’ve already told you, four fucking times, everything I experienced and can recall from that island. It's the same answer to every other goddammed question you’ve already asked me today, tonight, or when the fuck ever it is. When can I get a shower?”

The woman, only ever giving her name as Officer Bennett, heaved an ostentatious sigh and flipped the folder before her closed. All part of the same predictable charade Pattie had been subject to since the Naval non-commissioned officer had reappeared out of thin air in the midst of the operations center at her duty station on American Samoa. In all honesty, Pattie couldn’t even be sure of the time that had elapsed since her return. Her cell, this sterile interrogation room, and the hallways were windowless. She had been fed and awakened at what seemed to be random intervals that lost all meaning with the constantly illuminated overheads and confiscation of anything she had capable of telling time.

Classic hallmarks of breaking down her defenses as they attempted to make her slip up and confess what she’d been telling them all along was not really the truth.

“Niceties such as showers are only permitted to those who cooperate, and the cooperation we seek is….”

“Is me telling you that I’ll act as a spy on the aliens while I turn into a fucking sea snake!”

The interviewer’s hands spread in an inviting gesture that accompanied her placid smile. “As someone who has sworn an oath of service to their nation, it is only natural for you to place your country’s interests before anything else.”

“Spare me your patriotic platitudes. I will only agree that I will try to act in my country’s best interests while becoming ambassador sea snake to the stars if I see a memorandum before me with the President’s signature on it that my rights are guaranteed even when I’m not a human anymore.”

“Oh? Is that all?”

“No, and you better be writing this down as you seem to have a terrible problem remembering a single thing I say. I want a Captain’s commission and my future pay to go to my daughter, wherever she is. I also want all my possessions to be secured and my current finances held in an interest generating trust until I, Ambassador Sea Snake, can figure out how to use them again.”

Officer Bennett said nothing and only tapped her pen against the table with a coy half-smile, tempting the larger-framed woman to strangle the girl with her own ponytail. Senior Chief Moreau waited, getting angrier by the second, as there was a distinct lack of writing down the demands for her cooperation in what she knew the government wanted.

The young officer opposite Pattie stood with her expression sliding into the neutrality of what the naval non-commissioned officer had to admit was a rather good poker face. The door opened to reveal a fidgety pair of navy boys who were Pattie's escorts.

“I think we’ve had enough for now. Please see to it that Senior Chief Moreau is afforded the opportunity for a shower and change of clothes. Also…” the stone-faced woman looked down at the Senior Chief’s hands growing shakier by the hour as she detoxed. Annoyed, Pattie clasped them tightly until they stopped betraying her. “…find her something to drink before we have a medical emergency.”

Pattie should have known she was being played well before Officer Bennett appeared in her cell after she’d downed the entire fifth of whiskey brought to her with her meal. Pulling a chair in from outside and settling with a voice recorder that she toyed with as she eyed the older woman groaning in realization.

“You wanted me drunk,” Pattie said, slurring.

“Yep.”

“Letting me get tanked will not change what I tell you.”

“We’re no longer interested in your recounting what transpired on that island. We have corroborated all that we can from the information gained through your cellphone and the data given to you,” her inquisitor answered in a light and tinkling voice that resembled the chiming of bells. Making the enlisted sailor dislike her interrogator even more.

“Then what do you want?” Pattie asked, leaning against the wall with an angry huff.

From her seat, Bennett did not react beyond reaching back to the door to rap twice on it sharply with her tiny fist.

Everything about her is tiny, Pattie thought spitefully as she sat up and focused through the comfortable haze warming her on the slight woman. Tiny hands, tiny voice, tiny body. It’s like she was being tormented by a blonde-haired, baby-skinned fairy.

Bennett activated the recorder with a flick of her graceful fingers as the door opened to admit a rotund man mopping at the sweat glistening across his forehead and soaking into his suit. However, his ruffled and travel-worn appearance did nothing to dull the razor-sharp brown eyes fixed analytically on Pattie while he sat in his own chair.

“This is Captain Titania Bennett, assisted by Doctor Jonathan Huntsman in the psychological assessment of Senior Chief Pattie Moreau.”

“What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” Pattie muttered, drawing a squeal of delight from Titania at the quote from her namesake, the Queen of the faeries. The captain’s carefully constructed blank expression dissolved into a brilliant smile. Making her hazel eyes gleam.

“Oh, how delightful!”

Perhaps it was another ploy, but if it was, it had worked when Pattie’s guard slipped. Her armor loosened by a shared interest in Shakespeare and copious amounts of alcohol into talking at length about how she felt and thought while on the island. She knew she was giving them what they needed to decide if she could be trusted to represent the United States as an ambassador to an alien race. At that point, she didn’t care what they thought of her.

Three days later, Pattie looked at a thick, gloss-black leather folder embossed with the Presidential Seal, handed to her by a grinning Titania as a dozen bystanders nervously awaited her answer.

++++

Christchurch, New Zealand

“Mum and dad, if you won’t listen to me or the rest of your children talk you out of killing yourself for nature, I want you to meet my neighbor. I want you to know what you will do to yourselves and your family.”

It had been a week since the retired couple had reappeared in their home, and their decision to attempt to make a world where their children would embrace their M?ori culture’s connection to nature had not entirely gone as smoothly as they’d hoped. A reality showed well by the weary sigh, and pained look Manaaki and Airini shot each other at their eldest daughter’s baroque and mistaken language.

---

Airini hoped it would help set her daughter’s heart at ease to meet with her neighbor in the cozy row of townhomes she called k?inga. But the value of meeting Blake where he lay curled across the lawn and street before his residence and staring blankly up into the late spring Christchurch sky was lost as their daughter flatly refused to go anywhere near the one-time man.

“I want you to meet it, not me, so you know if you go through with this, I will never be able to see you as my parents again.”

“Tam?hine!” Airini gasped, staggered by the vehemence in her daughter’s words as Manaaki cast a sorrowful look at Pounamu.

How could they respond to the ultimatum that they would lose their daughter when she counted among the reasons they agreed to become taniwha?

But the flat refusal in the shake of their daughter’s head was their only answer, and they left heartbroken to try to show that the dragon-like Child of the Egg her neighbor had become was no more a threat to anyone than they would be.

If they hadn’t been witness to the sheer enormity of the Dreamer upon the island, they might have been daunted by their daughter’s neighbor when he lifted his head. Alerted by a twitch of his ear, the turquois-eyed Child of the Egg sadly watched them approach where he had been resting his chin on the small patch of grass that fronted his k?inga. His body and tail stretched out into the road to show his startling length.

“You’re not afraid of meeeee?” he said, his surprise coming clearly through the deep resonance of his voice. His scales rattled, and his shifting wings produced a slight breeze that brought a curious citric smell to Airini’s nose.

“You should beeeee,” he looked up from them to the woman hiding and watching in the safety of her car, “like your daughter. Iiiii can smell her on you, just like Iiiii can sssssmell her and everyone else’sssss fear. Iiiii’m dangerous.”

“You are dangerous, you animal! My neighbor is dead!”

“Can you please get out of the car, Po? It’sssss making meeeee feel odd.”

“No! You’re not Blake anymore; I don’t trust you not to maul me!”

“You’re neither odd nor dangerous,” Manaaki said gently and stepped forward between his frightened daughter and the saddened Child, spreading his muscular arms wide. “You’re a Child of the Egg, and we've been invited by the Void Children to join you in healing the world.”

Blake snorted heavily, blowing his heated exhalation into the couple’s faces as he reared up onto his haunches away from the large embrace nearing his neck in shock. The former man’s head bobbed and wove with emotion before freezing one argus eye turned to look down at the humans before him. Behind Manaaki and Airini, their daughter screamed with unnecessary alarm.

“How do you know those words?” his tongue flashed out to wet his nose. Bringing his head down, he sniffed closely at them. “Iiiii don’t sssssmell another on you, what do you mean you have been invited? How can thisssss heal anything?”

“Why do you think this happened to you?” Manaaki asked the Child three times his height to the shoulder.

Blake’s massive nostrils flared again, and a thin mewling whine, out of all proportion to his size, came with palpable longing.

“Please tell meeeee what happened hasssss meaning! Tell meeeee there isssss purpose in myyyyy suffering.”

*******

“Aaaand after everything you learned, and Iiiii told you, your mindsssss haven’t changed? According tooooo the law, Iiiii am dead, isssss that what you want? Tooooo not eeeeeven beeeee allowed intooooo your own home?” Blake’s tail rose to point at an eviction notice taped to his door while asking them to reconsider. His head swung back and forth disapprovingly while their daughter yelled hysterically at them from her car after they had shown the Child of the Egg the recordings of the island and told them of their intentions.

“We are surer than ever having heard your tale, Blake,” Manaaki said firmly, getting a resolute nod from his wife.

“Dad, mum, you can’t do this!”

“Rangi! Pounamu, puta atu koa i te k?, a, haere mai ki konei.”

“I don’t know what that means, mum! You know I don’t.”

“I know, and it pains us both an appreciation for the culture you share with us, and its connection to nature is lost.”

“Blake,” Manaaki said, turning to the Child watching the painful scene. “We cannot change what has happened to you, but together we can work to bring understanding and respect to the world once again through what we hope to achieve alongside you.”

Closing his eyes, the stout man extended his right arm and lifted his left hand. Blake, a life-long Kiwi, recognized the ritualistic hongi being initiated and hesitated.

Possibility after possibility floated through the former human’s mind with a rapidity that would have left who he was a fortnight before dazzled. His strange eyes that could move and focus independently of each other glanced from man to woman while watching the daughter. Her gaping mouth frozen along with the white pallor of her horror as she shook her head in denial where she hid within the small coupe in her driveway. Blake took in the conviction of the two so far below his head and made his decision.

Raising one paw, he placed a claw into Manaaki’s hand and lightly touched the man's opposite shoulder with another. Tilting his head until the tip of his snout was flat against the man’s nose and brow before repeating the gesture with Airini to seal their understanding.

“Iiiii’m trusting you.”

“Pounamu, please, we are doing this for you.” Manaaki tried to reach out to his daughter one last time as he and his wife left the Child of the Egg, looking wistfully into the windows of his house at his possessions.

“Please, tam?hine,” Airini said, placing her hand on the glass of the tiny runabout.

“I don’t care about your culture, nor do I care about nature! I want my parents to stay exactly who they are.”

Sadly, Airini’s unrequited gesture fell from the glass with her daughter’s words. They had done everything they could to convey to their eldest that all they intended was to reconnect those just like Pounamu with something the world seemed in danger of forgetting.

A connection the Golden-Eyed Ones and Dreamers had made clear risked dooming all of humankind alongside countless other sentient species.

“We will be here for one more week, and we’ll be able to talk at any time while on the island. E aroha ana m?tau ki a koe. Even afterwards, we have been told we are free to travel where we like. Please, Pounamu, this doesn’t have to be the end.”

“I don’t know who you are,” Manaaki’s daughter said flatly. Gripping the steering wheel and staring straight ahead with emotions locked behind a cold, lifeless mask that frightened her mother and father. “My parents are dead.”

Blake broke into his own residence with a forceful tap of one talon upon his door for Manaaki to collect sentimental items essential to the former man. Once the couple gathered the few things they brought with them, a laptop and the thumb drive to share their experiences, they left their estranged daughter behind after being hoisted to Blake’s shoulder.

Instead of returning to their home on the same metro route they’d arrived on, severely degraded as it was since Zero Day and the continuing chaos of the aftermath, Blake diffidently offered them a ride on his back.

Like many others he’d encountered that shared his new species, he had not yet learned how to fly, but even a casual trot was a multitude of times faster due to the length of his stride and his enormous endurance. So, it was an honor for Blake Walker to be of some use instead of the listless life his world had simplified to after he was summarily fired from his job as a wireless network technician for...not being human.

Blake rumbled with sympathy as he kept his head extended and swaying vigilantly for hostile strangers. But did not remark further upon the muffled cries and the patter of tears splashing upon the scales between his wing joints. Padding through the once vibrant and bustling city of Christchurch that now lay waiting with bated breath, fearful of what would happen next as the world reeled from the events of Zero Day.

++++

Ecuadorean vessel BAE Orion

It had been ten days since Evelyn and Jackson reappeared into a storm that they could not have known was coming. Bitterly, they resented the opportunity they’d squandered not to inform their fellow researchers that the married couple were unmolested during the two days of their forced sabbatical. Reappearing on the BAE Orion research vessel, they found an armed contingent from the patrol ship LAE Isla Islabela moored alongside. At the panicked crew's request, the coast guard ship had been sent to investigate whether the married couple’s disappearance was related to the thousands of Ecuadorians who had suddenly started becoming dragons in the days prior to first alien contact.

They had, Evelyn dryly observed, some fear that Jackson and herself would reappear suddenly in their midst in entirely different forms that might not be amicable towards the humans in claustrophobic quarters with them.

The husband and wife knew they were damned lucky they hadn’t been shot by the overwrought sailors aboard the floating laboratory.

Nor had that been the end of it. Escorted back to port, those onboard were quarantined until the government could figure out what, if anything, to do with the crew and scientific staff. Their armed guards had spirited a copy of the proceedings on the island away before they'd even docked. Proceedings that had been duplicated. Leaving Jackson and Evelyn’s cohort to salivate over the video and data confirming alien life orders of magnitude more complex than humans. At dock, the sailors of the coast guard vessel had been replaced by others wearing a uniform that Evelyn didn’t recognize, but that remained every bit as disconcertedly dazed and twitchy.

“The problem remains these creatures are uniformly dismissive of the effects their actions will have on humanity.” Carmen, a short but distinguished woman in her sixties, serving as the research team’s seismologist, stressed. Continuing an ongoing debate Evelyn found a mite trivial with its focus on fiscal ramifications when much more critical issues were afoot.

“Fact,” Jackson said, “humanity’s welfare is secondary to their stated goals. The protection of the biosphere. If the existence of these other life forms is ultimately of greater significance than humanity’s, then their logic is sound.”

“Then they should have thought of that biosphere and those lifeforms before they dumped millions of tonnes of pollutant into the atmosphere launching every nuclear missile on Earth.”

“Supposition,” Evelyn rejoindered, “the missiles were an undeniably public message reinforcing the distributed communique. Serving a purpose worth the ecologic price to warn aggressive members of society that a certain level of conflict would not be tolerated.”

“Getting rid of the nuclear weapons those other countries had is not going to prevent the conflict these Void Children aliens created by curtailing the lifeblood of our civilization. There won’t be a corner of the world that won’t be devastated by what happens next!” Carmen exclaimed in exasperation. “Hundreds of millions, if not billions, of lives are at stake. Was there any indication that they cared for the human cost of what they were doing? That they would be open to stopping or reversing what they’ve done?”

“I think at this point,” Carlos, their project leader, spoke for the first time, “we must accept that these beings regard their actions as necessary to preserve a far greater number of lives than are at stake within the human civilization. Based on the data they have provided and the recollections of Jackson and Evelyn, a rapid shift in human affairs may prevent a far more protracted cataclysm if we act in unity. From their point of view, human life is no more or less of value than any other life in our world.”

“And these are the creatures that you are proposing becoming?” Carmen exclaimed. “Amoral aliens who care nothing for those who do not conform to their expectations.”

The crowded laboratory was filled with the murmuring of agreement with Carmen’s last comments. A tense atmosphere made worse by the pair of armed guards watching the conversation suspiciously. What they, or the national government employing all aboard the ship, thought about the choice given Jackson and Evelyn made some more hesitant than others in speaking their minds.

“I think it is wrong to accuse them of amorality when their concerns seem much loftier than the pursuit of money and power choking our home,” Jackson said. Standing to look about the room with a sweep of his gaze.

“Hypothesis,” Evelyn stood as well, “humanity will not change their behavior nor learn from their mistakes without a significant level of inflicted pain. Therefore, maximizing human participation is the surest way to minimize future suffering. Even if it means sacrificing one’s humanity.”

“It would be traitorous to help these aliens!” one of the two watching guards exploded. The one Evelyn had warily noticed was growing paler and twitchier as their conversation unfolded.

“This is an invasion. These aliens have come to wipe us all out, and you are going to help them!”

“No,” Evelyn said calmly with peaceable movements of her hands. She did not like how the thickly built man’s hand kept twitching towards the handgun holstered on his hip. Jackson slowly stepped closer to his wife and whispered in her ear.

“Careful, dear.”

A touch of his hand was all that she needed to convey that she heard and understood as she tried to calm the jittery guard. His subordinate partner’s own feverish eyes flashed around the room with her own agitation.

“We cannot force the aliens to undo what’s been done. But we can show them that we are worth letting live by setting an example for others to follow. That is what Jackson and I have agreed to do. We are willing to sacrifice our places in the world to show that we can change and create a future for all.”

“And it is because you are willing to do that,” a new voice said, unannounced as a group of four grim-faced men stepped in wearing black jumpsuits and no identifiers, “that we must do this.” Once she heard a series of metallic clicks, Evelyn realized that the men carried evil-looking rifles with extended magazines jutting from beneath them. They now knew what the response of their government was to be.

Someone screamed; it may have even been Evelyn herself, as the scientists of the room surged to their feet. With two deafening cracks in the enclosed laboratory, bloody sprays erupted across the bulkhead next to their two guards as they were executed just as their hands jerked towards the handguns at their waists. In the middle of their formation, the other two newcomers raised their rifles at each flank of the research center's helpless men and women without another word.

Evelyn found herself pulled into Jackson's arms as he buried his face into her neck and squeezed her eyes shut against what she knew was her last moment alive. She whimpered and tightened her hold on her husband as she heard one round fired, and then silence as the dim light and dead air of the room rank with the smell of cordite was replaced by the warmth of the sun and the distant sound of rolling surf.

Jackson and Evelyn fell shocked to the ground, not knowing what had just happened as all they could see was the patchy grass of a coastal region and the Orion's entire crew and research staff. Prone, just like them, they had all shrunken into protective balls with hands covering their heads. Frozen in fear and still expecting the gunfire that no longer seemed like it was coming. As the pounding rush of their skyrocketing hearts faded along with their adrenaline, they began to hear more noises over the rhythm of the unseen ocean.

Familiar ones like deep raspy breathing, the musical fluting of what she knew was air passing over gills, and the sound of something noisily slurping up a liquid followed by a belch that had what Evelyn feared was saliva spraying upon the back of her neck.

“The Golden-Eyed ones warned So’waa’Ma’wae,” the eponymous creature said from behind the dazed woman. Drawing a gasp from the others. Standing firmly on her four thick legs with her fins undulating in the ocean breeze, her sight was as surreal as Jackson remembered from what already seemed a lifetime ago. Next to her was a large, blank silver panel mounted on a tripod. “The Golden-Eyed ones warned that humans could be foolish enough to shoot messengers of dire currents when they did not like their feel. But I did not want to believe them because So’waa’Mae’wae had some thoughts that humans might see the truth of present briny cucumber they created to make smacking of our tail fins necessary upon rocky skulls. Now So’waa’Ma’wae stands before you very much with stunned sensors to have proven that hu-mans prefer collecting of green paper turtle shells over continuation of life functions and are willing to kill those of their pods to maintain illusion of what must no longer be.”

“What just happened? Where are we?” the Orion’s captain, a short, rather unfortunate looking woman with a nose that Evelyn had always likened to the rudder of the ship she commanded, demanded. Being the first to gather her wits. “What have you done, creature?”

“My identification tag is So’waa’Ma’wae, human. You were not important enough to be included in my information. So you must tell me what moniker you declared for yourself once you had cracked your shell,” Soma said with one of her tactile whiskers reaching again for the dish of the amber liquid that smelled like turpentine beneath her head to empty it sloppily. Closing her eyes, she hummed in a singsong cadence before abruptly sitting back on her haunches and erupting into an enormous hiccup that widened her eyes. Sending rings of color rolling backwards from her snout as if she’d been startled by the sharp blat coming from her mouth. The rude sound in juxtaposition to the melodic lilt that preceded it.

“She’s drunk!” Evelyn whispered, appalled, in Quechua to Jackson.

The humans shrank against each other as an enormous shadow fell over them with a vibration that coursed through the soil to make the grains of sand dance chaotically up and down. All but Evelyn and Jackson looked up, blanched, and screamed as the most enormous creature they could imagine loomed above. A much larger version of the one Jackson had identified to the others. Having a body that stretched out of sight beyond the obscuring tree canopies. A few tried running only to realize that the leviathan’s body blocked their way when they rebounded off its camouflaged flank.

Its mottled sea-green body shimmered into sight to reveal that the titanic animal soared above the treetops even with its legs folded and its belly resting upon the ground. As the amazed humans watched, one of the tendrils growing from its snout extended until it hovered overhead. A tremendous light flashed outwards from the bulb at the end, and all the humans bowed their heads as if they had regressed to being mere children and had just received a blistering scolding from a well-respected parent. An immense disappointment filled them for the actions of their countrymen.

A new yacumama, slightly larger than Soma but similar in appearance and with eyes of an unbroken gold, made its presence known. Emerging from a massive structure with a roof of thatch supported by imposing wooden pillars that revealed an array of furniture surrounding what looked to be a bar.

The latecomer bore two dishes, one grasped by each tendril growing from its snout that it placed before Soma. Along the smaller creature's back were a set of cylindrical containers on a harness that it set before the looming giant. The titan moved the same serpentine whisker that had stunned all the humans to encircle one barrel and hoist it far above to sip daintily despite the size of a muzzle that looked like it could easily fit three of Pablo’s hippos whole within.

“Adulterant beverages,” the newcomer started just as Jackson and Evelyn belatedly identified it as the one Soma had called Trust during their previous stay, “do not affect the Dreamers as they do humans. Do not dismiss her words, for she has spoken accurately of your actions.

“To answer your questions, I am the one who has brought you here. Just as we had said previously, you will remain alive at least until the time that your decision must be made at the end of the two-week period we have given you. Everything else that has transpired has been due to your own nation’s actions.”

It said this looking straight at Jackson and Evelyn as they stood and tried to convince the others that they were in no danger despite the nearly religious awe inspired by the presence of a creature of the titan's size. “For the rest of you, there is a decision to be made on what fates you would desire for yourselves.”

“Get us out of here!” a sailor in the ship’s crew shouted in a panic to anyone who seemed willing to listen. Drawing the unblinking gaze of Trust instead of the help he was seeking while Soma and the titan moved away to have a conversation…by staring at each other and drinking steadily without a single vocalization. The only clue that communication was underway was given by the intertwining of what Evelyn knew were remarkably sensitive appendages.

The Ecuadorean scientist reminded herself that she would have as well if she held true to what she'd decided.

Truth ignored the shouted cascading demands and instead waved one tendril at the metallic panel beside it. “It is unfortunate that we had to wait until you witnessed the deaths of your two guards before you were ready to be saved. But you would have not accepted the reality of the danger you are in from your government otherwise.

“A predicament you have created by placing us in harm’s way,” Carlos said, standing beside the captain as the two leaders, civilian and military, took responsibility for speaking for the group. Privately, Evelyn didn’t think that their display of authority mattered. The only reason why those in this clearing were alive was because of her and her husband. There must have been countless situations identical to theirs playing out worldwide.

“While what you say is true,” Truth said, rearing up on its hind legs in the curled shape that Soma could have told her was the ritualized posture an adult took when teaching the young of her species. “Ultimately, it is humanity’s many ruinous decisions that brought us to your world. Your government alone is the organization that decided your deaths were necessary. Not us. Observe.”

The screen flared to life to show a quadrisected grid. Four subsections that each showed different videos highlighting every step of the way from their return to the Orion to the present.

The report of individuals vanishing from a research vessel.

Their reappearance and the first indication of contact with the aliens.

A governmental panel, including the Ecuadorian President, reviewing the data they’d been given as men and women in uniform explained what they were being shown. The President receiving a briefing on the toll on her country over the next few days before slamming her hand down on her desk and railing vehemently at her advisors. Declaring that they could not allow what Jackson and Evelyn had told the others to become public knowledge, or it would send Ecuador into chaos.

Lastly, a view of the squad intended to execute them gathering on the dock beside the Orion and grimly confirming their orders at the foot of the gangway. The ship crew watched this footage rapaciously as they disappeared from the fatal confrontation and death squads stalked madly from room to room of the research vessel in an increasingly harried search for those who were no longer there.

“This—this is a trick. It must be!" one sailor shouted in Spanish. Denying what he was shown after the videos had been extinguished. "You’re trying to trick us into betraying our country!"

“What is more likely, human?” Soma said, disentangling herself from her elder with a thump of her intimidating tail that elicited an ignored reproof from her far more massive elder. Her fluting voice was even, but her agitation showed through the jaggedness of the colors flashing around her gills.

“That the Golden-Eyed ones have overcome the distance of eternal voids to roil foamy water and obscure your vision using wasted tera-whips of energy? Or that what has been shown here is true swim of your own pod that you find irritating to gills?”

Evelyn wasn’t sure if Soma was speaking on her own in Spanish or if she was using a translation device akin to what they’d worn earlier. But when the alien mentioned the humans having a biological feature that they distinctly lacked, Evelyn was vexed to see the panic that descended upon the crew of the Orion with the fixation on only one part of the nearly meaningless speech of the aquatic creature. It figures, she thought, that the only piece of all the information they’d been given that would circulate to the crew was the part about being transformed. Not something more critical like facing humanity’s extinction.

“I can feel them! I have gills! The creatures are turning us into them already!”

Their panic was enough to confuse Soma herself as she froze with her fins spread to their utmost and her tendrils bobbing and weaving. Feeling the neck of one frenzied human screaming past her and looking at Truth with an expression neither Jackson nor Evelyn had seen before.

The giant hovering over this chaotic scene emitted a thick croaking gurgle that rose and fell in time with a tremor that disturbed the ground. Bands of light oscillated across his dancing sensors overhead, and an alien sense of mirth that was not her own touched Evelyn’s mind. Drawing an involuntary laugh that startled her when it flew from her mouth. Realization set in among the others rapidly once the error of their misconceptions was corrected. A knowledge sternly forced into them by their captain and first officer.

“None of you have gills, you idiots!” the towering bull-necked first officer shouted at them. Lifting the worst of the panicked clean off the ground to shake them as he methodically worked through the crew. “The creature said that you’re denying what you saw because you don’t want to believe it.”

“Then what do we do? We’re dead if we go back!”

“Of course, we’re going back! We can’t stay here with these things that whip us back and forth all over the world without asking us.” Another shouted, standing up to the first officer and poking him in his chest.

“And any right-thinking Ecuadorean would agree with me that we’re being lied to.”

“You saw with your own eyes and heard with your own ears the execution of your guards for knowing only a fraction of what you know. We can assure you that your return to your birth nation will mean your death,” Truth said, not having moved from his position despite all the erratic movement around him.

“Then we will face our deaths bravely as humans, knowing that what we’re doing is right! Not becoming your slaves to remake the world in your image,” Carmen declared, striding forward to stand with the others already shaking their heads in denial of what they were being told. Appalled, Evelyn reached out for the woman as she passed but was shook off without a backwards glance.

“What you’re doing isn’t right! It will destroy the world.”

“No, it will not. Only the one that humans have made for themselves at the expense of all others. Each of you must decide what it is you desire. To be a part of something greater in creating the conditions needed for intelligent life to develop in the nurseries of Earth’s waters.”

The screen came to life again. Showing images that only could be from the future or another world of creatures like Soma and the giant swimming through the ocean alongside mixed-species pods of whales and dolphins. Some towing elaborate sensor arrays, while others trailed huge nets extending hundreds of meters.

Another scene with a yacumama rising from the water among a flotilla of fishing vessels with Asian characters drawn on their hulls. Snapping off outriggers and throwing wadded balls of net across their decks while in the background, Jackson recognized the unmistakable outlines of the Galapagos Islands just behind them.

A third video showed another Dreamer, half-buried in the surf surrounding an atoll Evelyn did not recognize and conversing with the local inhabitants on the beach. A representative of the indigenous people stepped forward and raised his hand to touch the sensor orb of the alien’s whisker to signal an agreement. At this signal, the people upon the beach stared in shock as a dozen more serpentine heads burst from the ocean outside the bay with sprays of water glittering in the air. Coming on to land, each Dreamer bore enormous troughs of rock and dirt dredged from the ocean floor across their backs.

The last display showed a whaling factory ship steaming across open ocean with an ice-covered landscape low on the horizon. A klaxon suddenly sounded as the crew ran to peer over the side rail down the ship's hull. Below them, there was activity amidships as a fountain of bubbles appeared in the water before an enormous head surged to the surface when a creature nearly the length of the vessel clawed its way up. The whole ship leaned precariously with the addition of the sea dragon's weight until righting itself when the invader had scrambled to the top of the centerline.

Moving forward, the yacumama showed on the screen casually pulled down a gantry and jammed its crossbeam into the main winch to rip the drive motor apart with a horrible screech. “The ghosts of all the whales you’ve killed have sent me,” it said in clear, fluting English that whistled through its gills once it reached the command structure. Looking into the bridge with one window filling eye that flashed yellow before settling on blue, “I am your captain now, and you had better listen very closely to what I say if you wish to live.”

“Or would you like to be a part of this?” Trust said simply as the screen changed to a single video fixed on one gruesome scene. The two executed guards, the blood and brain matter still oozing down the walls next to where their heads had been above the now slouched bodies. Off-screen automatic gunfire started and stopped with terrifying abruptness. The fate that had nearly become their own.

“Jackson, Evelyn, you have four days until your decision needs to be made. I will give the others the same opportunity unless they wish to return to a location of their choosing.” Truth’s head swiveled to look each of the people arrayed before him in the eye. “Any human that remains on this island after that time will not remain one for long as we make your choice for you.”

++++

Ulithian Atoll, Micronesia

It had been twelve days since Eiken and Rieko had returned as inexplicably as they’d disappeared. Popping back into their home village in the community center and into the welcoming arms of their eldest daughter, Sihna.

It was good that the spirits who had blessed them with this opportunity had given them many days to come to terms with a decision already settled in their minds. It had given the village time to bring their children, chasing after the sea life that had once been so abundant in their own waters, back to honor the spirits of nature and what their appearance meant for the village’s future.

Many hard decisions that weren’t Eiken and Rieko’s alone had to be settled as the preparations for an occurrence that would never come again played out.

“Which of you would join us,” Rieko asked of the Ulithian council of elders in which he sat. His wife beside him, Eiken, seated with her own authority among the oldest and wisest of the village leadership. A conjoined bridge spanning the divide between the men’s and women’s councils. “Haser, as the keeper of our history, the value of your ascension would be greatest. Even if the changing world proves too powerful to be tamed, our culture will live on in you. Protected, as it must be.” The younger man, only just beginning to enter the twilight of his years, held the village’s memories and beliefs resting firmly in his mind. Haser nodded his head in understanding with his amber eyes steeled for the fate he'd just pledged himself for.

A muttering of agreement passed around the room, but for one voice, Sihna, their daughter and the one they always felt could be relied upon to consider all sides of a problem. It was why they hadn’t hesitated to name her in their place on the elder’s council.

“We must not let this weaken us. The elders are our voice with the outside world. We need as many of us to remain untouched by the gods to speak in our affairs. Neither can we allow the young, the future of our culture, to ascend without children of their own,” Sihna cautioned.

“Many of our children have already grown weak. Taken by the bottle and without faith in the unity of family and village, they have turned away to escape from our traditions that they see as failing. Who can lay blame upon them when we have lost so much and have been promised to lose more yet? Many days I listen to the plaints of the mothers as they watch the earthly spirits of their children wither,” a matronly figure said. Speaking from the woman’s side of the extraordinary mixed-gender council meeting. “We have been truly blessed by the ancestors for this miracle to come now with so many dangers unresolved.”

“Should we keep the knowledge of this to ourselves? We must consider that we alone have the sight to see what needs to be done,” another council member interjected. Already Eiken was shaking her head.

“We must answer whatever troubles disturb their thoughts. We cannot be like the foreigners. The Americans, the Chinese, the Australians. The great, distant nations telling us we must abandon our lands or sign over our rights as we sink from the world beneath the waves. We must do better than those who fight to exploit far from their own lands and waters with their tainted influence.”

“What of Palikir? Is our capital not working for us?”

“Working to be comfortable with American money,” someone muttered. Rieko could not see who, but the restless grumbling let him know he was not the only to think so poorly of those who represented them.

“Palikir rules over us; what we decide here might be against their wishes,” Sihna pointed out.

“We are Ulithians. It was not decided by us that we would be bound to their rule. We…” Reiko raised his trembling hand to silence Iakop before his voice could rise higher. Settling in for what was a lengthy speech for the geriatric elder, Reiko drew in a raspy breath.

“Yes, we are Ulithians, but we must not forget that the ocean binds us more tightly than any government. Those who accept this gift must not think of only our coasts and way of life. We must unite with the spirits of other villages and islands from far beyond the horizon to find a future where we’re not forgotten as so many others have been. Our legacy must now become greater than being one tiny spot in the vast ocean that thinks foolishly its fate can be decided within its own borders. We must join with as many as would have us in protecting the waters that had once allowed us to flourish. So that we may flourish again…” Reiko’s raspy voice failed him, but he had said all that needed to be. Men and women around the meetinghouse signaled their agreement.

So it was as all the people of the tiny atoll, Ma Ulithi, gathered the next day. On the largest of the archipelago islands, three hundred Ulithians gathered in brightly colored ceremonial dress to celebrate the death and birth of forty-seven. The forty-seven volunteers were ritually bathed as if they had already died while having their lives extolled through song. As the day grew long, the celebrations of lives led turned to one of feting the birth of new life. Fermented drinks and rich food, a month’s worth of each, made the hope of the revelers swell that this was a new beginning for them all. One that brought them to a world that would remember their names and deeds as they thrived in their ancestral homes.

The forty-seven sat in simple cloth wraps among the celebrants reminiscent of traditional burial shrouds and prayed. Some prayed to the new God, the Christian God, while others prayed to an older pantheon hoping that the birth water of their culture would thrive when imbued with the strength of their resolve. That their people might live to see untold years yet.

At the stroke of midnight, Reiko, Eiken, and forty-five others vanished without a sound as a tremendous passionate cry encompassing the beliefs and hopes of hundreds filled a moment that would become legend. Lit only by torches and a brilliant splash of stars crossing the equatorial sky.

++++

Perth, Australia

It had been a week since Cathy had last seen or heard from her friend Elizabeth and a fortnight since the two of them had reappeared in their insurance office. Sunburned, bug-bitten, and with dirt covering them from head to toe. The moment their office mates had stopped screaming, the two women demanded that the authorities be called while they madly waved the thumb drives they’d been given in the air.

When they’d popped back up into the civilized world, there had been a bewildered copper right there in their office who had come back to follow up on statements from their coworkers. They had been taken seriously quickly enough after that and evacuated straight away to the authority’s custody. Spirited away into days’ worth of interrogation separately and with each other about what they’d seen and been told. Grilled relentlessly on the information on the data sticks that had been swiftly confiscated from them.

They’d been detained for four days, and then…nothing. Not another word from any government authority had ever been exchanged. Instead, they’d been forced to sign documents to never speak again about what had happened to them, had tracking anklets clamped on their legs like ordinary hooligans, and then thrown out into the world with an admonishment not to leave Perth.

“She hasn’t responded to my messages for a week, Jonathan. I’m afraid of what she’ll do next.”

“We can’t help Elizabeth, love, I can barely understand her at the best of times, and she’s been spinning like a three-legged washer ever since you’ve been let go,” the gangly and sandy-haired accountant tried to reassure her. Her husband, Jonathan, a natural jester, always had a quip for nearly any occasion. But it was a comedic mien that fell flat as they paced nervously around their Perth flat. “She’s afraid of the aliens and what they could do to her.”

“She wasn’t home!” Cathy exclaimed, pressing the issue.

“I know. I was there with you when we went to her apartment. But that pistol she kept in her lockbox was gone, and I don’t particularly feel like being perforated.”

“You’ve known her since you were kids. You must know somewhere she’d go.”

“We grew up in the bush, Cath. If she's removed that tracker, she could be anywhere. After what you told me about her going off, that’s exactly where I think she’d kip off to. And with all her camping gear gone, I’m sure of it. She’s gone walkabout.”

As much as it pained her, there was little Cathy could do. Jonathan might have been able to find her if he knew where to start, but the Outback was a vast region where one could disappear for as long as they had food and, far more importantly, water.

“Today is the day,” Jonathan said unexpectedly. Not looking at his wife while he fiddled with a knotted bit of survival rope around his wrist. She knew what he meant but didn’t want to consider what he’d been suggesting ever since she’d given him the whole truth of her disappearance despite the draconian proscriptions forced upon her. At first, she’d never wanted to talk about the terrible things she’d seen or been offered. But when her filthy, reeking clothes had been washed by Jonathan, he’d found another thumb drive that Cathy knew shouldn’t have existed.

She found him hunched over their computer when she awoke from a fitful night’s sleep stalked by nightmares. Having watched seven hours of footage, he had a curious gleam in his hazel eyes that Cathy didn’t like. The probing questions he’d asked ever since unsettled her even more. He admired the aliens and their intentions.

“Yes, it is, and tomorrow will be the same as today. I will wake up a human and enjoy not being another one of those creatures rampaging through the countryside or the oceans.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that our government is doing exactly what the dragons said not to? That people are acting even worse than they were before? I don’t think the animals are the ones you’re thinking of. If you ask me,” he said with a small smile, “we could take a few cues from animals.”

“Hmph!” Cathy snorted, not taking the bait, “humans are only acting like animals because they’re being treated like them.”

In response, Jonathan fished a remote from between their sofa cushions to turn the tellie on. When he switched to the BBC, she tried but failed to turn away from the footage that showed a line of pickup trucks ramming the legs of a vast pitch-black dragon until it fled into the bush as it screamed haunting but animalistic anguish in its escape. The whistling screech it was making turned into a howling cry that pierced Cathy’s heart despite her resolute attempt not to feel any sympathy as the tinder-dry brush was ignited behind its tail with Jerrycans of petrol and road flares. Sending up a wall of smoke and flame that grew out of control in seconds. Backing away hurriedly, the arsonists celebrated while ducking away behind sheltering buildings to hide from the intense heat of their own conflagration.

Changing the programming to a network covering the workings of parliament in Canberra revealed the MPs engaged in a physical scrum. Three opposing factions surged back and forth with the fists of the immaculately dressed pols flinging wildly along with their inarticulate cries. The chyron below the melee showed that they debated removing all restrictions throttling the excavation of coal and other minerals. The legislative proposal even went as far as to dismiss all claims that the aboriginals had to any land where confirmed deposits lay beneath.

A commentator popped up in a smaller picture to remark that this legislative act was an act of defiance aimed squarely at the alien invaders' decision to strip humanity’s resources from them. The announcement that the invaders had dictated the neutralization of ground sourced petrol, whether society could make themselves ready or not, had been a shock to Cathy’s already troubled mental state. Offering no allowances for the trillions and trillions of dollars this would cost the global economy and the untold number of lives it would end. The aliens had shown callous indifference to the effect their command was already inflicting.

In the eye of the swirling typhoon of the legislative mob, a tiny dragon with solid gold eyes scarcely as tall as a human adult’s waist seemed more interested in scratching a pattern that meant nothing to Cathy into the wooden table it lay upon in lieu of watching the debate raging around it. The tiny creature was a false image that did nothing to hint at the unspeakable evils it was capable of. A man wearing federal police regalia, fighting against the ebb and flow of civil democratic debate, hovered over the minute alien to take pictures of every mark made with an expensive-looking camera festooned with antennae.

A third channel showed great burning heaps of trash in Sydney spewing plumes of multi-colored smoke into the sky from an overhead vantage point. Crowds of chanting people held signs, one reading ‘Burn Before Surrender” as more and more objects of every description were thrown into the conflagration. Creating a toxic miasma showed in the protestors' red, inflamed eyes and wheezing coughs but doing nothing to temper their manifest ardor. While Cathy watched, a flock of birds flew through the rising plume and fell from the sky to flop upon the ground until the twitching movements of their black and white wings ceased.

A professionally designed banner off to one side of the demonstration invited those present to join a group called ‘The Pure Legion.’ Beneath the sign, a squad of bald Caucasian men wearing featureless black uniforms handed paper flyers out to eagerly reaching hands. In response to an unintelligible shout, they pointed at a dragon watching from high above the chaotic scene on the roof of a skyscraper and then at an aboriginal man fleeing down an alley. When the direction of the crowd’s anger fell upon them, the dragon’s wings mantled as it stood with the frills lining its head splayed while the man escaping down the alley doubled his speed and veered out of sight of a small group chasing after him.

“Perfectly reasonable reactions! Why worry about aliens destroying us all when we can do it for them?” Jonathan drolly asked.

Cathy knew just what Jonathan was getting at, and she wasn’t having any of it. There was nothing wrong with humans. Neither in action nor body. When she looked at those scenes on the news, she didn’t see misconduct from those demonstrating. She saw the malfeasance of the aliens she’d made the mistake of telling her husband all about.

“I know what you want, Jonathan,” she said with her arms crossed and head turned. A defensive wall warding off his suggestions and ideas. After the internal turmoil she’d felt and the decision she’s come to, her husband should be supporting her. Not agreeing with the aliens that the damage being done to the world would not cease unless it was made to by a force far beyond anything humanity could hope to match.

“You want to shoot off to that island with those scaly freaks and join them. I have news for you, hubby,” Cathy declared, stabbing a finger authoritatively into her husband’s chest. “You can go if you want, but I am not going with you. I will not be a snake, and if that’s what you want to be, you can go get stuffed! Becoming an alien is not solving anything. If they cannot accept humans as we are, right now, then I will gladly die before I ever accept that what I am,” she flapped one hand at herself, “is not a rational species that meets their bollocks criteria for existence!

“I am human, and I will not ever be anything else….”

“Can I please say something?” Jonathan tried to interject. Not sure where this utter conviction that she knew what he was thinking had come from and quite at sixes and sevens.

“Only if it is to say that you agree with me that there is nothing wrong with humans and that whatever the aliens want is nothing good.”

Jonathan froze with one arm raised in an aborted placating gesture as Cathy glared righteous fury at him. All his jokes, all his jovial attitude, flensed away by her heat.

“I’ll admit that their methods seem to be cruel and arcane. But from what I’ve seen of the data, there is a reason for every action they are taking. Cathy, they must care about our wellbeing to some extent, or they wouldn’t even bother to engage in dialog with us. If beings with this power were truly malevolent, they could have erased us from existence without a second thought.”

“Then why don’t they just fix this world if they are so magical? Why do we have to suffer for their amusement?”

“Because we made the world like this, Cathy! Every weekend you go with me and clean up the same rubbish washing up on the beach that I do. Once a month, we find dead porpoises and turtles with bellies full of plastic. And what have we done? Nothing. We do nothing. But now we are being offered a chance to stop all that, with the small sacrifice….”

“Get out! Get out! Get out! I don’t ever want to see your face again, Jonathan!” Cathy tearfully screamed, not believing what she was hearing. Not believing that someone could possibly think this was a viable solution to what should have been a human problem. Cathy reasoned that if we mucked this up, we should be allowed to fix it. She could not, she would not, accept that the aliens were telling her and all of humanity that the window to temporize was at an end. She did not want anything to do with her husband any longer. He knew what he had to do to agree to the Devil’s bargain. All he had to do was volunteer. A fact that she’d told no one else and now hated that she’d even told him.

It was more of the same things they’d been saying ever since he’d opened that God damned data stick before she could destroy it. She didn’t want to think about this anymore. She couldn’t fathom how someone could sympathize with their intentions.

“Leave before I call the police to report you for allying with the aliens,” Cathy said threateningly. Already reaching for her phone and the business card she’d been given if any new development involving contact with the aliens arose. She didn’t want to hear the hitch in his voice, a voice that generally would have been so full of laughter and jest, nor his broken sobs that left him nearly unintelligible.

“Cathy, I love you. I love you, and I will never forget you.”

Then a silence that was only broken by inhuman, bestial roaring and sirens from outside filled the flat. Facing away down the short hallway to their bedroom, Cathy waited for him to leave. To hear his footsteps and the sound of their closing behind him. Cathy waited before turning towards where she sensed he stood after wondering why she couldn’t hear his breathing anymore.

Realization sank into the woman, and loneliness took her. Her best friend gone. Her husband gone. She was alone. Her parents and brother missing, or at least not responding to all her attempts to contact them. She was prevented from going to find them by the anklet clamped about her leg. Still fearful of the law, despite their utter lack of interest in her.

“Oh god, Johnathan, I’m sorry!”

Indecision and fear tore at her, as did a devastating depression brought about by her isolation. Leaving Cathy whimpering and huddled in the corner of her room as one of the beasts in her city roared outside the complex where she dwelled. Trying to calm herself, the return of her stress-induced stutter left her in tears instead. Tearing at her scalp, Cathy screamed and yanked handfuls of her long tresses painfully from her head.

“Y--you dro—ve y—your husband away,” she shrieked at herself. “You are nothing! You are useless! You are weak, and now you have nothing!”

“Please answer,” she begged, cradling the phone in her hands and looking for some comfort, some confirmation that she’d done the right thing. The isolated woman tried to call her family again. Receiving the message of a disconnected number instead of her mum’s or her dad’s voice. She couldn’t deal with this uncertainty that left her feeling untethered from reality. Cathy didn’t even know if she now existed only in a dream. Or if the island awaited her upon awakening from it. Everything since her return seemed out-of-focus and surreal as the surety of her previous life slipped further and further away.

Listless, she rose to her feet and stumbled down the hallway to her empty bed, shedding her clothes along with her last waning convictions. She collapsed into the cold, unkempt sheets and sobbed despondently. Her hand reached out to her husband’s side, where she could smell him even then.

“I don’t want to be alone,” she cried, closing her eyes. When she opened them again, Jonathan was there, a look of regret and sorrow straining the lines of his face as he reached out to draw her into his comfort from where she lay within a rocking hammock. The last shreds of her fragile senses splintered and left her unsure of who, or what, she wanted to be.

Saying nothing, Jonathan only stroked his wife’s head as she shook against him. All the while, the hypnotic pounding of the distant surf continued without end.

---

++++

Apia, Samoa

“If you’re trying to shirk out of catching your lot, then when will you do something useful? Like giving me grandchildren that have some of your strength.”

“Please, tin?. I know that with this information we can track where the fish schools are, and even…we could even farm them! By knowing where the algae blooms….”

“Listen to you talking about algae as if that means something! My daughter, the fish catcher, telling the ship captains their business. What do you know of such things?”

“But...” Chloe tried to interrupt her mother but was talked over. Like usual, she thought with a sigh and a downcast glance at the memory stick in her large hand.

“Whatever you did to get bruises like that on your face when you ran off from the docks, I’m sure I don’t want to know with all the trouble your disappearance has caused! Oh, if only you were a boy like you should have been and not a willful girl always making up excuses for why we must change the way things are! Now, tell me, do you think these dragons are man-eaters? Because I heard on the news that….”

Of all the possible outcomes she’d expected upon her return two weeks ago, still woozy from the concussion she’d suffered at the hands of those confused people on the dragon’s island, Chloe had not expected the apathy shown in what she had experienced. She knew well that her mother and her family expected so little of her as the latest example of the condescension shown to the large woman attested. But even with the data stick, two weeks of trying to get anyone to listen to her warning about what was next to come and what needed to be done had still born no fruit.

Dispirited, she sat down on the veranda of her family’s cramped and sweating concrete home on the outskirts of Apia with a huff to bury her face in her hands. Wincing at the still tender bruise that had turned into a sickly rainbow of blues and yellows beneath the deep bronze of her skin. Even that physical evidence of the panicked reaction to alien life did nothing but convince others that she had talked back, in her quietly rebellious way, to the wrong man and gotten what she had coming to her. Chloe could only shake her head at the unlikelihood of the violent scenarios imagined in explaining the bruising on her face. No single man alive could go unbroken, taking what she was not willing to give. Of that, she could be certain.

Despite some scant attention garnered by her tales of giants and their dire warnings that they would not allow the world to continue as it had, the focus of the government and those who would be most affected remained elsewhere. Turned to the hundreds of humans who had transformed into dragons across the main islands of Samoa. The few who did believe that she’d met with the aliens behind this only wanted to know if she somehow knew how to tame the dragons. Never once asking to see the data she had so often tried to pass along to an elder or some other authority.

Chloe had gone to one of those Soma had called a Child of the Egg with the thought she could sympathize with them after her own experience. But, after convincing the guards around the restaurant courtyard where the dragon lay curled up, more by intimidation with her size than her logic, she was sad to realize the experiment had been a failure as the former human had never once revealed their head from beneath the wing. Covering it as their body shook with high keening sobs. Trying to lay a reassuring hand on the dragon’s leg had gotten her, and everyone around the transformed person swept backwards by a swing of the creature’s tail. Leaving some even more fearful of the aliens that were now in their midst after revealing their raw strength.

Others, Chloe was horrified to hear, were already formulating plans on how they could exploit that strength by capturing the dragons before they recovered from what happened to them. They callously brushed aside Chloe’s quiet but firm reminder that these were still people who had no choice in what had happened to them.

Unlike her. Which was something that the woman had never been able to bring herself to tell anyone about. On that day, two weeks after appearing back in the marina, she had the opportunity to return to that island full of aliens and the impossible to become a creature far more enormous and terrifying than even the winged serpents scattered across her country. To be given a task that could bring ruin to her own people in the pursuit of making the world healthier for non-human life.

“Goodbye, tin?.”

Her mother’s response to all the farewell Chloe could muster came from within their simple home. “Goodbye? Goodbye! Are you going to earn the money we lost from you running off? Make sure you tell them to work you twice as hard for missing the last outing!”

Chloe had always struggled to find a sense of family with her mother in the city. Cut off from the community and history that Samoans typically enjoyed in an attempt to advance towards the dream she once had of earning a captaincy on a commercial fishing ship to feed her fellow islanders. Only to see that dream slowly turn to dust by the unrelenting criticisms and callous disregard she’d faced because of her sex and soft-spoken demeanor.

The last shred of her ambition was taken by what she’d learned on that island. What could she do when her dream to feed her people was more likely to be abused to provide for the foreigners who had grown impatient and muscled aside her people’s territorial rights for their own? Now, in the face of all that, she was left adrift like a boat that’d lost its rudder. She could only think of one last place to try for guidance.

****

“Father, what should I do?” Chloe said, beseechingly from a pew at the All-Saints Church with her priest, Reverend Berthram, next to her. After telling him all she had gone through in the past sixteen days and what advice she was asking of him, he looked particularly discomfited as he mopped at his head with a cloth. At first, he had tried to placate her by telling her she must have been imagining what had happened. But, once the large woman had convinced him to view the recorded video on the data stick, the profundity of her situation had been made clear.

“My child, Chloe, I—I—Do not know exactly what to tell you. Our bodies are created in the Lord’s image, and I cannot think that these beings would understand how important—I mean—they would have to understand because—God created all life, and these creatures must be one born of his majesty. No matter their power or their alien origin.”

“Father?” Chloe pressed.

“I—do not feel I can advise you here, Chloe,” Berthram said, tugging at his clerical collar. “If these creatures are of God, then they must know his love, and we must hope that they have the wisdom not to wish us to suffer as we will without cause. You said they spoke of this being a test? It—it must be a test. To see if we are worthy of God’s love.”

“So, they are God?”

“No—I mean—no. These aliens are not—Him. With their power, they might be agents of his to perform his will. I—The only thing I feel sure of guiding you towards, Chloe, is to act in the manner that causes the greatest benefit and the least suffering to all—humans. You have been a member of this church for a long time, Chloe. Since you came to the city, you have been unsure of yourself and your place in a world that was changing around us all, but you have always had an inner strength that you would only show in your own way. A light that never dimmed despite all the sins of false witness you were victimized by. That I stood by and did nothing about.”

The large woman turned her head away, shielding her face and not wanting to hear about what should have been. Not now when the evil temptation to misuse the enormous power she had seen in the forms of the Dreamers was within her ability. A force she could use to avenge the wrongs done to her when all she’d ever wanted to do was support her people. Now, she could do that and so much more.

“I do not know how to better counsel you, Chloe, with the tremendous thing being asked of you. If you reached out to accept what has been offered, you might be entering a pact with an agent of God, the Devil, or a—a—group of beings that simply exist outside of God's plan. These creatures hold too much power, a power beyond imagining, to be anything else.”

“Father!” Chloe exclaimed with her head whipping to face him. Not believing her ears that Father Berthram would say such things. Looking at him, really looking at him, she noted how badly their conversation and the footage she’d shown him of the aliens speaking on the island were distressing him. How his hands shook and the manner the sweat poured off his brow in a torrent that was abnormal even for the sultry atmosphere of Samoa declared loudly how badly overset he was.

“Pono,” Chloe said, using the clergy’s first name to get his attention. To drag him back to her and the present from the pit he’d fallen into. No longer trying to converse like a congregant with her priest, but as two uncertain souls who needed the comfort of each other after the steadiness of all they’d known had failed.

Chloe knew then what her choice was.

“Pray with me, Father,” she said. Deploying the kneeler with one hand, she easily brought the man down beside her with the might of one burly arm.

When they were done pleading for strength, she hugged Pono to herself as he wept tears of fear and uncertainty. As his faith broke, resolve crystalized into an adamantine force within her frame. Replacing the doubt that’d brought her to the house of worship.

“It is going to be okay, Father. I promise,” she said. Her soft gaze lifted away from the man that seemed small and fragile within her powerful arms. Now that she knew, she hoped she was strong enough to fulfill what her calling had been all along. Looking away in a direction that pulled at her awareness, an impulse of thought projected outwards from her mind to those awaiting her choice.

When the man of faith’s tears had ceased, Chloe’s arms fell away to allow him to regain some semblance of peace.

“Thank you, Chloe,” Pono said, opening his tightly squeezed eyes. “I…” his last word broke off as he shot up in alarm before looking, but not finding, the woman he’d never felt leave. The only evidence she’d ever been there was the fading warmth of her body and the black data stick that remained lying atop his closed laptop.

---

++++

Pago Pago, American Samoa

It had taken her two weeks since she’d been back from her abduction, but Simone had settled upon a plan to fulfill her self-appointed mission. It had come from one crucial realization. No one had believed the reason behind her disappearance. Not even her employer believed her; the aquarium only threatened to fire her for not being around to feed Sammy, Roxy, Josephine, and Carol. She did feel terrible about being forced to abandon them. After all, the sea lions were her only real friends. But all those of little belief would accept what she said and showed next time she came to them with proof, she knew it. They would all believe her when she was one hundred feet tall and had a tail a mile long!

For this was the last day Simone was going to be human. Starting it with the unpleasant sight, as she rolled away from the window, of a slumbering man, boy really, who fancied her his latest conquest when in reality he had been hers. An unimpressive one at that, Simone thought, scowling unhappily while lying next to the boy that the beautiful woman didn’t even bother remembering the name of. The two of them were in a hotel room she had fled to after determining that there were almost definitely listening devices in her seedy apartment. Planted by American spies probably, who never would accept that anyone outside their own shadowy outfits could know the truth of what was out there.

The French-American dual national sent the boy packing soon after since he hadn’t had the sense to leave on his own. Simone had told him flat out the night before when they’d stumbled into her room with bodies pressed close and hands tearing at each other’s clothes that she’d only wanted one thing from him.

Rinsing off the stench of the little boy in the shower, the blonde-haired young woman brought herself to climax after being disappointed by what she’d hoped would be a memorable last as a human. Finding self-release instead with her head and back pushed against the shower wall and her legs shaking. Her shuddering moans rose above the sound of the shower. Echoing within the bathroom alongside the low buzzing of the toy pulsing within her until she felt the wave rising upwards from her toes crash down with blissful force. Her hips thrust with a jerk as one hand flew to her breasts; a breathless squeak of ecstasy escaped from her parted mouth. Simone’s cheeks flushed in the steamy atmosphere while her hands ran through her hair and flitted across her sensitive chest as another wave radiated outwards from her core to ignite her nerves once more.

A final sensual thrill in a form she would not have much longer. She thought glumly, one she might never have again, as she didn’t care to think about what becoming an alien monster would do to her sex drive. Or whether she would ever be able to see herself or any of the other creatures like her as objects of desire.

For she would go back to that island to shed her human body like a second skin. Becoming a sea snake that would expose the rotten core of the alien’s plans to rule the world. Because Simone had a plan of her own.

The French-American woman would broadcast every fact, every parcel of information given to her to a society that deserved to know the truth. She would become a double-agent operating clandestinely within the extraterrestrial operations. Every viewer of her blog that she’d lose because she no longer looked like a Hollywood bombshell would be replaced by thousands more as she showed everyone how to fight back against these invaders and where’d they constantly be located.

She planned on doing this by bringing a radio tracker and clandestine video recorder that she knew, after watching her favorite conspiracy channel investigating the insidious applications of latent surveillance, would follow every moment she made and interaction she had. Even if her cell phone was no good, these items would remain able to transmit to the satellite that she knew tracked such things.

Including just where that utterly barren island was that definitely could be an up-and-coming vacation destination if only she could find an investor for her idea to develop the beauty of the island with an all-encompassing resort. A grand escape that catered to the vacationer’s needs was exactly what such a pristine location deserved. After all, there was nothing quite like enjoying the sights and sounds of nature from a carefully managed, clean, concrete pool.

Flashes of her previous failures distracted Simone from her idle musings as she stared blankly at the web of string spanning across the conspiracy board that she had pinned to the wall to help her make meaning of what the aliens really wanted. Wearing a bathrobe provided by the hotel she was in and with her hair bound up in another towel, she chewed absently on a nail as her thoughts turned back to the dismal reception she’d been given after trying to convey what she’d been through since the aliens had shown their faces.

“What madness brings you in this time?” Pago Pago’s police chief had said when Simone had cornered him as he entered his own police compound, far more distracted by dragons than granting her the attention her information deserved. As if the dragons needed managing at all once the six inhabiting the island had fled into the wilderness. Where they belonged.

Instead, he’d ordered her cast out upon the street without a second thought after hearing no more than her opening salvo. Negligently ignoring what Simone knew was the truth and not giving a single gram of credence to her shouts. The police Chief only gave a vague wave of his hand that had shooed the truth-spouting woman away with the coercion of three of his lackeys.

Calling the governor’s office had been met with results even more dispiriting for Simone. The secretary taking her call had burst into laughter the minute she’d reported being abducted.

“What is this, the fourth time now, Simone?” the frumpy bitch, Jacklyn, had said with exasperation. “Did the aliens tell you why they transformed people into dragons this time, or did they just leave another mystery lump on your neck that turned out to be an ingrown hair?”

That lump had been a total accident, and it didn’t change the fact that every six months, she suffered from twelve hours of missing time at night and woke up feeling paralyzed by something moving about her bedroom. Anyway, she had proof this time!

“Of course, you do, dear.” Jacklyn had said soothingly. “I will set up an appointment with Mulder and Scully as soon as….”

Simone had not heard the rest as she hung up on that mockingly sweet voice. No one would believe her.

But they would, and Simone was willing to embrace a transformation of her own to prove to everyone that it was not only the skies filled with winged dragons that everyone needed to fear. A new menace was soon to come crawling right out of the depths of the oceans themselves. No doubt led by that giant Hawaiian woman who never did tell her where the best hidden local beach was.

Even if these sea-snakes had the best intentions, which she doubted, the Earth did not need their intervention to fix itself. Simone was sure that as long as her favorite animals in all the world, sea lions, were okay, everything else would be too. No matter how mean and nasty people were to Gaia.

Her last day as a human. Simone took a huge breath and turned away from the wall she was staring pensively at. Now was not the time to be lost in the tangled web of red string implicating the Rockefellers, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Elvis to the French foreign ministry and a Wall Street banking firm in causing this alien crisis. She had to set her affairs in order. The marine biologist needed to find someone she could trust to take care of her adorable sea friends at the aquarium until her return.

****

Stuffing the fourteenth can of bug spray into her overpacked go-bag, Simone felt physically ready for what she was volunteering to do. But not mentally.

Closing the blinds of her rented room, she stripped down to her birthday suit and stood before the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. She sighed as she admired herself for the last time, saying goodbye with a thorough inspection of her body. Trying to imprint what Mother Earth had intended her to be firmly in her mind, one feature at a time. From the fastidiously maintained sandy locks flowing from her head to the heart shape of her face. Simone gazed hungrily at her reflection as she felt over the fullness of her breasts and the flaring of her hips from a waist made toned through countless hours of Tae-Bo with gentle, scintillating caresses. Her shapely legs, strengthened by the immense amount of swimming Simone did each day, bracketed a thin well-shaped patch of hair that matched her head before continuing all their long, coltish way to end with her well-pampered feet.

Standing naked before the mirror, Simone bent at the waist with her pleasing derriere thrust into the air until she stood on her hands and feet. Tucking her long hair behind her perfectly shaped ears, she looked up to see herself. Forced herself, really, to look at the beast the thirty-one-year-old woman in the prime of her life would become. An animal that would be standing on her hands like the dumbest…donkey…she could imagine.

“Well…Simone,” she said to herself, blowing an errant strand of hair out of her face as she looked at the parts of her dangling pendulously in a pose made awkward by the mismatch between her arm and leg lengths. “At least you’ll have a body fit to be on its hands and feet instead of looking like you’re waiting to be screwed from behind like a dog.”

Simone redressed with casual efficiency after rising from her crouch by flexing limber, athletic muscles. Donning a tight-fitting sports bra, she attached the audio recorder beneath the screening swell of her right breast before pulling on a loose-fitting shirt featuring a carebear with his arms flung open wide for a hug. The GPS tracker strapped around her thigh was hidden by baggy gym pants.

Taking up a picture of herself wearing a wetsuit and mugging for the camera with her aquatic friends, she sighed longingly at her sacrifice for the greater good as the image was slipped into a pants pocket. Hoping the replacement she had found to tend to her dearest friends would be as trustworthy as his biography on tweeter had claimed.

Her phone went into another pocket as the determined woman turned to the mini-bar humming away beneath a shelf. Twisting open two vodka shooters, she quickly downed them both and exhaled heavily as the burning liquor made its way through her. Before the feeling could fade, she shouldered her heavy bag with a grunt and turned her eyes to the ceiling.

“Okay, I’m….”

Before she could even finish the sentence, she returned to the island to meet the fate she’d chosen for herself. Staring into two immense golden eyes as ribbons of light played over the muzzle that extended nearly into contact with Simone's own nose.

“You’re stupid,” the one Simone had heard called Wily said with galling blitheness. Leaving the shocked woman stumbling uselessly over her words and feet as indignation swelled within her heaving chest. The alien pointed downwards to the ground between them, and Simone felt the blood drain from her face at the sight of her carefully hidden electronic devices on the stiff grass.

“Really stupid,” Wily repeated and patronizingly flicked Simone’s nose with one of her snoot tentacles. The woman thought that she just might be that stupid for a fleeting second. But luckily, she knew that she wasn’t. It was the aliens that were stupid for daring to question her resolve to break up their operation. She would have to find another way to make D.B. Cooper and the global movement he directed from the shadows proud!