12

The Trans-Resurrection Machine

Mary struggled against her restraints.
"It will only hurt worse if you continue. Why don't you lie still?" Said the hissing voice. It chilled her. It wasn't human. She wondered what creature possessed that eerie voice. She was tied down to a hard, cold surface. She'd been here for what seemed hours and she'd been blindfolded before being brought here, wherever here was.
"Where am I? Who are you?"
"Be silent. You will know soon enough." Seconds later she felt a terrible sting and a burning sensation in one of her arms, as if a long, large needle had been carelessly inserted. Then something was being wound around her head. She started to feel panic rise again. What was this. . .person. . . going to do to her? Somewhere in the room she could hear the soft noises of medical equipment being handled. Above all that stood out to her was a regular beeping sound, like a pacemaker, as if it were in tune with her own heart beat.
"How did you find the place?" Demanded the raspy, inhuman voice.
"I told you already! I was wandering around, going for an evening walk, and I was just curious about the buildings in the old rail yard. It looked abandoned."
"Do you always break into abandoned buildings?"
"No, only I was curious about it as all. And bored."
"You lie. Why do you humans always lie? A defect in you." She received a hard slap and she cried out again. Mary's thoughts raced. She tried to think of something calming, anything, to ground her. She tried to think of something that might. . .she felt a slight rumble as if there were an earthquake, and it suddenly stopped as soon as the sensation had started. There was a brief silence and then someone else entered the room.
"What?" Said her captor in annoyance.
"You know what," said second voice in cold anger from what Mary could discern.
"I couldn't get my agent inside from the box. She wouldn't open the box, stupid woman! I'll send your agent in by another way or by another's agent. Someone more compliant this time. I-"
"Never mind! You've failed. But you're not accountable to me. Surely, you would know that by now. How one as inept as you were allowed into the first waves of the Expansion, Seeding or the Settling is baffling. When the High Sentinel arrives, you can explain your failure to her." Mary felt a shock of cold fear, sensed it like an overpowering scent. It smelled like burning ice. She was sure this fear had come from her first tormentor. Footsteps came close to her, stopping.
"I was allowed into the Expansion project-"
"You were allowed in because your progenitor was one of the best and strongest of your family tree for the project and because he had so many connections with the other strongest, smartest progenitors. Nothing more. I suppose genetics really isn't everything."
"You speak as if you are my progenitor or instructor-ward," he hissed angrily. "You are not. Beware how you deal with me." The second one blithely ignored this warning.
"Our little bandit. I see you've been tormenting her. Stop right there, before you overstep your mark, once again. That's why they keep you here, in the dark working like a rat. She has a red mark on her face. You struck her?"
"What of it?"
"You never did learn discipline, did you? And you wonder why you've been relegated to bottom-rung status and grunt work," the second voice said imperiously. "In all of your playing with the subject did you prepare the device like I asked you?"
"The device is ready."
"Prepare the subject." Prepare me for what, exactly?
"The subject is ready," snapped the other one.
"Did you prime her with a numbing agent?"
"I did." hissed the other voice.
"You didn't finish the job. Must I do everything? With fools like you entering the Expansion it's no wonder it's taking so long. Step aside." The sack was yanked off her head and a tubing device was wrapped around her head. Then thin tubes were inserted into her nostrils, far up until she thought she would black out. A thin stream of blood trickled down her right nostril. Her mouth was forced open and another tube inserted down. She began to gag violently and struggle. The second being held her down and tightened the restraints. There was shuffling of footsteps in the room.
'Now," she heard the imperious voice say, "I think we can make you useful to us without the normal tactics of getting humans to behave and cooperate." Rough hands took off her blindfold. She was in a dark room set up as an operating hub. It was dusty, she could feel the grit in her throat. At one end of the room, before her stood  a frightening looking edifice. It had the look of an ancient looking machine. The device seemed to hum, a sensation she could feel in her bones. It filled the room from the floor to the ceiling on that side of the wall.
"A rather old contraption, quaint even, but it remains very useful and valuable."
It was frightening and she couldn't understand why. It looked like a huge outdated, useless computer, like a Rube-Goldberg contraption, but something about it frightened her. The red light energy shifting from it swirled and roared in her vision.

This represented certain doom.

As she looked upon it with her own eyes,. it was bathed in faint red light shimmering around its edges, like something poisonous cut out of time and space and pasted into this world. Something that did not belong here.

There was a person standing next to her. He looked like a normal man. He was slight in build with unremarkable, nondescript features. In fact, he looked very much like the kind of person to blend into the background, someone no one would notice at all. And in his ordinariness, he was had an eerie and powerful presence.
"So you can see us? I'd thought we'd rid the world of such ones," he hissed.
"I'd thought so too, but remember that this ability is a genetic anomaly that can appear spontaneously in human beings. We are working on a way to completely eradicate it. Until then, we'll find this one useful," said the other. He too was a man of average features difficult to describe as there was nothing striking or interesting about him either. He was shorter and rounder than the other man.
"Do you know what this is? Mmmm?" He asked.
"What is that?" She asked. .
"We have quite a few of these. It is one of the ways we can control human adepts that are needed for our plans. You're going to be altered anyway, so I'll tell you before we put you under. It's a trans-resurrection device, or machine. It's one of our rmost important inventions, worked on and mproved over the centuries. We could not build it on our original home in such a way that it would work here, but we found that we could build it here. We use it to allow our kind to cross over from where we exist in our natural state, in time and place, to Earth. We can exist quite comfortably within the framework of the human body in this dimension, out of subspace. In fact, most of us find it desirable for it is in the human being's body and brain that we are better able to study the universe and its secrets. But it is a sort of death before life for us. This machine renders the human being pliable mentally, like a person of retarded mental capacity, and eventually into a vegetative state. However, by then, the body is fully conformed to our own physiological and mental needs and the human merely becomes a reanimated puppet or suit as we take it over and become acclimated to the new environment."
"Home?" She gurgled with great difficulty.
"Human body, existing on Earth. That is home. By taking over the brain in the body through this machine the human's mind is severely stunted as well as their personality and they eventually die but by then we have taken over the body. It isn't painful, don't worry. You will still be human on the outside but you will have entered into an altered, higher state of existence." He gifted her with a grim smile.

The room began to tremble again and they stopped.
"What was that?" Asked the taller one. The other studied Mary with murky, gray-brown eyes that seemed to shine.
"I think it's her. Hurry! Let's get her into the device. She's a powerful one. We can use her and through her, find all others like her who are hiding from us!"
"No!" She tried to shout but the tubes prevented her from getting the words out. But she felt as if her concentration on the room inside and her fright and anger were causing some type of effect within the machine too.
"The machine! It's not as stable as it needs to be. Something's happening!" They lifted her up and opened the door of device and laid it flat, laid her on it and strapped her down even as she struggled. She managed to kick the taller one in the head. He hissed at her.

Outside there was an explosion. They stopped for a few seconds, studying the entrance door. Then they proceeded to lift the device door up and close her inside. She could see electrical currents flowing through in patterns in a tub of opaque fluid that filled the machine. The device began to slowly lower her down into this tub. The energy through seeming red felt, cold, cold as snow and she felt her face becoming numb along with the rest of her body as the numbing agent kicked in. She couldn't move the way she wanted anymore. She felt helpless. She hated feeling helpless and afraid all of the time. She'd learned so much from her short interaction with these two aliens, yet now she would never be able to tell the team. She would never be able to warn them or Trillion about what she'd seen. She could feel the power of the device enveloping her. She examined the inside even though it would be of no use. When she came out, she would not be herself, she would be a reanimated husk for one of the redshifters.

There was another explosion. Then another one. The third was so powerful that the entire room and the device shook. It sounded as if the building was breaking apart.