The Time of The Cat 52

THE ANCIENT ONE

The last cube was almost all the way around the dome near the transporter door through which we’d entered. I walked up and casually pulled the loop handle. As the door swung open, I felt like my body was exposed to a vibrating shock that made me become numb. I could stand but wasn’t able to move voluntarily. A shadow moved in the rear of the dark cube, and a horrific visage appeared out of the darkness. It was a huge Pug-bear.

This one must have been much older than the ones we’d disposed of earlier. Its body was almost twice the size of the largest I’d previously seen, and its carapace gave the impression of being old. It was actually ragged around the edges where it had chipped and been broken by use. The huge creature’s mental projection was far stronger than that of the younger ones I’d previously encountered.

The thing moved closer to the door, and I could see that its brain case was likewise enlarged. As I watched it approach, in my horror, I tried my best to move my gun hand, but nothing happened. I was panicking. I wondered briefly why one of the others didn’t shoot the thing. Then I suddenly felt a combination sensation that was like nothing I’d ever felt before. It was a kind of mental pressure combined with a rapidly increasing headache in my temples.

As I wondered where the others were and why they weren’t shooting, the pressure became unbearable. It mounted in my skull to a crescendo, and then something seemed to rip with an agonizing, tearing feeling. The alien had torn through my mental defenses and ripped its way into my conscious mind.

In spite of the pain, I understood that this was how they communicated, and it was obvious the old alien was far more adept at sending than I was at blocking. I was completely unable to defend myself from the thoughts and emotions it inserted into my mind. It was a helpless, outrageous feeling, almost as if it were raping me. I ached from my loss of control. It was terrifying being at the thing’s mercy, but beneath my terror, I was coldly and utterly angry at the violation of my core being.

I suddenly felt a sense of inquisitiveness coming from it. It wasn’t angry or revengeful. It was simply wondering why we were attempting to resist their invasion.

“How did we expect to stand against them, The Masters?”

The thought seemed to slide into my mind edgewise. The communication came slowly at first as if I had to interpret patterns of emotions into concepts that I could understand. As the thought formed, the creature’s self-identification also came into my consciousness. He referred to himself as “The Ancient One.”

His intrusion became more forceful. Suddenly, I unexpectedly found myself sobbing aloud. Tears welled out of my eyes as the thing manipulated my emotions.

“The Masters were wonderful. They were kind and loved humans. Why had we ever thought we were good enough to kill them? We were guilty of cruelty on a genocidal scale.”

I was completely under the control of the thing. It must have previously experimented with other humans since it had no trouble pushing all of my emotional buttons. I was practically salivating in my urge to help The Masters. The only thing was, I didn’t really want to help them: far from it. There was another wave of emotion, and I suddenly felt totally unworthy of existence.

“How dared our species deign to monopolize that wonderful planet? We absolutely didn’t deserve it. I should kill the other unworthy ones behind me and then help them with their invasion. With my expert help, they would be guaranteed success, and I’d have a cherished and honored place after the take-over. They’d see that I had everything I desired, all of the food, all of the luxury, all of the women...”

That last promise suddenly shocked my mind. I didn’t want All of the women. I only wanted one, and I’d just been instructed to kill her. I was horrified that I’d actually accepted that thought as my own for a moment without any question. The shock split my mind into two parts.

It was a state that was somewhat familiar to me from some of my past experiences. At one point in my long and admittedly spotty career, I had spent a considerable amount of time meditating as part of a series of advanced healing classes I’d taken, and I knew that those surface thoughts weren’t really me.

In each human’s mind, there are divisions of consciousness. The first is exclusively involved with our passing thoughts. That is the one that we normally think of as ourselves.

The thoughts that come and go through our minds aren’t really exclusively ours. We think they are us, but we actually may be receiving them from someone else, or they may be floating around in the quantum plenum, waiting for us to become conscious of them.

There is, however, another aspect of our minds that is not part of the surface thoughts. I call it the ‘Observer’, and it stays separate from them. I’d learned to allow myself to passively watch the thoughts that come through my mind while I meditated. I’d discovered that they have no effect on the ‘Observer’ part of me. It can look at a thought and say, “That’s an interesting one. I wonder where it came from?” and then let the thought go without becoming entangled by it.

This entanglement is what traps the majority of people into responding emotionally before they even think things out. They’re so sure that their surface thoughts are all that there is of them they respond instantly to any emotion that comes through their mind. I was aware of the ‘Observer’ watching the emotionally laden thoughts that the alien created.

It was this part of my mind that was resisting the Ancient One’s control. The alien was pushing its own thoughts into my mind in a masterful way, and those thoughts were so calculated as to activate my emotions powerfully. I didn’t like the forced intrusion, but I couldn’t cause it to cease. I found that I could avoid it by retreating into my ‘Observer’ state.

The old Pug-bear continued to work its controlling influence into my surface mind, and as it did, the ‘Observer’ part of me became aware of a hidden channel. The Ancient One was obviously unaware of that flow. I was somehow receiving information about the Pug-bears and Pugs that I realized should never be released to an enemy.

Below the controlling, emotionally laden thoughts it was deliberately forcing on me was a connection to the Ancient One’s entire knowledge. It may have been accidental, but information flowed out of its mind into mine on some deep level in a continuous stream. I suddenly felt as if I knew things about the aliens that I couldn’t possibly know. Things that gave me a far better understanding of their invasion and strengths and weaknesses.

Retreating into the ‘Observer’ had given me a self-induced respite from the emotional control, and I had been building up more and more resistance to the manipulation. The ‘Observer’ part of my mind was not angry since it didn’t feel emotion, but I, the me on an existential level, was more than ready to do something about the intrusion.

As I prepared myself mentally, the information flow from the old alien increased on its bi-level intrusion. On the surface, the Pug-bear was attempting to gain control of me, but on the lower level, it was unintentionally dumping its entire store of knowledge into my subconscious mind. I didn’t have a firm grip on the flow. It wasn’t as if I was reading the information on a conscious level; instead, it was as if I just had discovered that I had memories of it that I hadn’t known I had.

At that point, something even stranger happened. It must have been due to the ripping open of my individual sense of consciousness paired with the infiltration of the massive amount of extra knowledge. I suddenly was able to reach a mental depth that I’d never experienced before.

I found myself actually standing behind the ‘Observer’ section of my mind. Now, I found myself in an emotionless, colorless, neutral space that had no connection to thoughts as we normally understand them. This part of me was the ‘I,’ the ‘me,’ my ‘core existence.’ It was untouched by the surface thoughts, and the Ancient One’s emotional manipulation was far away and unimportant.

From this vantage point, I was simultaneously conscious of all that was going on around me and also able to sense lines of energy flowing in what I understood was the universe. They were passing around and through my body and connecting me to the moon, the stars, the sun, Liz, my friends, and everything else in existence. The connection was direct and immediate. Distance didn’t seem to make any difference; something could be far or near, and I could still see a direct link of force. There was a skein of these connections between my energy field and that of the Ancient One.

I reached out and tapped into these lines of force in some indescribable way. I could feel the energy flowing through me, arising from my pelvic region and ascending in two rainbows, sparkling columns on each side of my back. There was a momentary pause, and then the columns joined, continued up my neck, and then shot out of the top of my head, connecting me to an incredible feeling of strength. The net effect was a thrilling flow of energy along my spine, paired with the sense that I could accomplish anything.

I’d heard of Kundalini energy before, but I’d never felt anything like this, and I’m not sure that was exactly what I was experiencing. I did realize that the flow of force was irrevocably changing my mental structure. The change wasn’t limited to my thoughts only; my ability to use my senses seemed also to have been impacted. I could somehow mentally enhance my perceptual ability. I guess a better description might be that I was developing some form of psychic ability. I didn’t know how it would affect me or if it would even last, but I knew with dead certainty that it was there and that I was different as a result.

The flow strengthened in seconds. I let the feeling build until it reached the point where I didn’t think I could hold any more power. Then I used my knowledge of the Pug-bear’s mental structure. The understanding suddenly welled up from the new information in my subconscious, and I knew with total certainty what to do.

I carefully formed and then sent a brilliant, white-hot, and high-energy thought at the Pug-bear. It was an imperative, simple, piercing, and highly focused:

“Die!Die!Die!Die!Die!Die!Die!Die!Die!Die!Die!Die!Die!Die!”

The Pug-bear reared back in shock!

“This had never happened before! The worthless human had broken its mental control and had launched an attack directly through its mental defenses. It must fight, it must – ”

It began quivering, and foam appeared around its mandibles, and as it did, I suddenly felt the paralysis that it had imposed on me disappear. At the same time, there was an additional rush of information that flowed from its mind to mine as it struggled to regain control.

I looked shakily down and realized that I’d dropped the eraser gun, which I’d been holding in my right hand. Fortunately, my left hand instinctively moved in the muscle pattern engraved through years of practice. I yanked the splinter-gun from my belt holster and shot a single splinter down the creature’s opened gullet.

The Ancient One let out an incredible, moaning shriek, and the telltale green fluid ran from its spiracles. The splinter mortally injured it. The creature’s body was beginning to succumb to the poison. It fell over on one side, and its legs moved slowly.

The mental control it had been exerting on me was destroyed. I could sense that it was dead or dying as I made an effort to return to my normal reality. As I came out of my mental depths, the information I’d received from it seemed to recede into mist. I still had the sensation that I knew a lot about them, but it wasn’t so easily accessible, now

I was trying to regain my equilibrium when Liz suddenly grabbed my arm and shook me. “What happened? I was frozen! I was paralyzed, and I couldn’t move, and then you did something, and I could move again, and – and then you killed the thing!” She was screaming directly into my face. She moved to grab both of my arms, still trying to shake me.

I was so stunned at the outcome that I couldn’t immediately answer. All I could do was put a hand on her shoulder and weakly nod. The sense of energy flow receded rapidly back down my spine, with part of it moving out around my ribs. My head felt like it was about three times its normal size, and the sense of knowledge about the aliens had now simply faded out.

The others were recovering as if from some huge emotional binge. They were rubbing their eyes and staggering around as if they were inebriated. They moved towards me, and Stormbreaker pointed at the dying Pug-bear as it slowly moved one leg in a reflexive action.

“It’s a good thing you’re a powerful Shaman, paleface,” he said.

I’d noticed that he used ‘paleface’ in moments of approbation. He was giving me a compliment. I took it in the spirit in which it was offered.

I had recovered enough to joke back with him, “That’s OK, Redskin! I’m here to help any time you need me.”

He laughed and said, “You better not use that term around any politically correct devotees. I don’t care, ‘cause it describes me perfectly, but some busybody might think it’s meant as an insult.”

It was apparent that they had somehow sensed the mental exchange on some sub-conscious level but not been able to follow it. The Ancient One had been holding us all in its control but had been communicating only with me.

Now recovered to the point where I could think more or less rationally, I turned to the others and said, “Let’s set those bombs and get out of here. I could feel the old Pug-bear mentally summoning help while he had me captive.”

We dashed to the cube where the bombs were stored, and I carefully adjusted the ones with timers to go off in what I judged would be about fifteen minutes. They were at the back of the room and hidden from easy view by the non-timed bombs, so I thought that the Pugs probably wouldn’t find that they were set until too late.

It took me a couple of minutes to set them all, so I tried to stagger the settings in order to get the timing correct. I was hoping that they’d all go off at the same time. If not, the first explosion might simply destroy the other bombs before they fired. I didn’t have a great deal of confidence in my timing expertise, but I hoped that it would work.

The only problem was that the cubical door was dissolved, so I decided to remove that indicator by camouflage. As I stepped out of the cube, I turned with the eraser gun and dissolved all of the other cube doors that were in sight. That made them all look similar and kept the bomb storage room from standing out.

We cut and ran for the transporter cube. As we reached the point where I could see the other two cubes around the central jungle, I burned out their doors. We then dashed into the transporter as soon as it opened, jumping over the stacked Pug bodies as we entered. With a button push, we left Titan and returned to Earth.

As we came out of the transporter door into the small room, I mentally sent a message to my compatriots to “Run!” I had intended to yell it out loud, but somehow it came out mentally instead.

No one seemed to notice that it was not audible. They’d been looking around at the room, but now they scampered to the other end rapidly, bypassing the stinking carcass of the Master we’d previously killed. I started after them but then stopped and turned back to drag one of the stacked-up Pug bodies partly out of the transporter to block the door from closing.

The others were yelling at me to hurry as I turned back to them.

“That might keep them from getting through so quickly,” I panted as I arrived at their end of the room.

Liz hit the call button, and the door swung open. We bailed in, and just before she hit the button, I set the timer and threw one of my last two eraser-grenades into the room. It was adjusted to go off rapidly, so I slammed my hand down on the transporter activation button, brushing hers aside, and we were out of there!