The Strange Bunker

a German passanger on board MH 3700 had his initial dream-reverie, because alien spores which transmogrified an iguana egg that had been found in Taman Negara is in his hand-luggage..

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        THE STRANGE BUNKER (2014)

             2,405 words (edited on 16^th September 2014)

 

      He was inside the pressurized suit and astronaut’s helmet: on a routine reconnoitering mission around the base perimeters, a short-walk of half an earth mile when it happened.  He will be on his way back to Eagle Base II next, then, and he could see two fellow astronauts from the New Zealand space mission coming forward to greet him.  His brain buzzed, but somehow more than other times, the others seemed to have been cut adrift from him and their usual warm, human contact: the way their voices came to him: as if he was jittered from the current of his thoughts, and, well,--the others seemed threatening to him.  He was suddenly afraid of his own men.

    ‘Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald, is that you?  Come, get over on the ramp and get inside!’ a voice spoke inside his head.

     Captain H. Fitzgerald was a new comer to the group; but had been promoted over the heads of the others; mercurial and curt; he was very outspoken and would like to do things his own way.  He had graduated from the university with a Ph.D. in ‘bio-engineering and cybernetics,’ and because some senator up north backed him, he had won the ticket for this exploration mission.  He was a plausible Bay of Plenty lad who had made good. The senator from Auckland was a guy named Chinook Issult de Lesseps, on the campaign trail for the New Zealand Presidency.  It was the year 2524.  

     He suddenly veered to the side- because the pressure had changed inside his semi-circular canals - heavily.

     ‘What’s the matter with you, Captain?’ their voices seemed swarmed by heaviness inside his brain, and, he felt a buzzing and pressure in his forehead.

       He panicked as they made an attempt to grab him: to hold him up.

       He suddenly staggered to his feet, pulled out his laser gun and shot off his own left arm.

       Manser shouted harshly to the control center, ‘Get ready the emergency unit to meet us!  Captain Fitzgerald’s been hit!’

       ‘What’s happening out there?  Do you copy, Manser?  Please respond, Fitzgerald!’ the control center crackled inside each of their heads.

        Fitzgerald seemed to have regained his senses because he faltered, ‘Help me!  I think I have just shot off my left arm!’

       ‘Hello, hello!  What’s the status of the left arm?  Any chance of reattaching it immediately?’ mission control tweeted; ‘maintain visual contact.’

        ‘No, it’s incinerated!  Burnt to a cinder at the wrist.’              

         Fitzgerald felt a throbbing on his left upper-shoulder, that pain that seemed to gore deeper and deeper into his flesh; he looked at the charred remainder in the orifice that had been his left fore-arm, as the space-suit had automatically sealed up itself. 

          They were finally up the ramp by now, and remote control sliding door no: 1 of their rocket slid open.

         ‘We’re in,’ said Peters, the other man with him.

          Their suits melted off from their bodies, and the three men, two looking very pale, and a third, Fitzgerald, positively haggard, went through the tight doorway and they were scanned for another five minutes longer before the main door opened.  There a medic team rushed the injured Captain Fitzgerald to the ship’s emergency bay. 

         Captain Fitzgerald was in a state of bedazzlement, and befuddlement: as the opiate entered his veins.  He saw a golfing green �" a soothing color - in his numb brain induced by the anodyne, and there was a bunker some distance away from the hole.  And there was something strange about the bunker, with its naked, brown sand, that made him strangely afraid.  Something seemed to be alive, and living there, like crystals, tiny crystals that were reflected in the morning sunlight; but, soon, disappeared.  He found that he had purchased a mystery, as the same images had came to him before he lost control of himself while he was getting up the ramp earlier.  And earlier, still…

      Doubtless, he dreamt many disconnected dreams while they were fixing his body up; as they tried to reconstruct him a tissue and metal interface arm.

      Dreams after dreams chased each other, like particles suspended in a colloid that had been vigorously stirred, as he opened one eye to stare blindingly at the lights of the operating suite.   He could hear voices conversing, and these voices washed over him like surfs against a distant beachhead.

      ‘Where had I seen the green grass and the bunker-shaped hole before?  In Wellington �" Auckland - Christchurch?’ thought the patient to himself, the question repeating itself anxiously over and over in his mind.  ‘What country club?’

      Then he heard Dr. Malone’s voice alone, ‘Right. I’m done here.  Let him sleep it out now.’

      The casing of the special tray closed over him, and the patient knew that inside the unit the ‘biomass-generator’ would induce his arm to ‘grow’ around the plastic and metal and silicone that will form the robotic part of his new arm.

       After they left, Dr. Malone said to the chief surgeon-therapist, Dr. Wanda, ‘Gee, I don’t know about this one, Gray.  Something had contaminated the wound before it was sealed properly inside the suit.  Probably, due to a slight malfunction!’

       ‘Contaminated!  What?’

       ‘Yes, it’s true, but it didn’t show up clearly on the scan.’

        ‘How can that be?  It’s impossible!’

        ‘I am ordering Fitzgerald to be quarantined.  Feed him with the milk sedative the rest of our journey back to moon-base and keep him under tight security--until we know what the hell is this stuff that made his body’s cells and fluid peculiar; all of a sudden.  As of now, the emergency area is off limits to everyone except you and me!  Buzz the word around inside their brain.’ 

        ‘Poor Captain Fitzgerald,’ Dr. Wanda Gray muttered half to herself. ‘I wonder what the devil made him do it.  There’ll be an open investigative enquiry.  But I guess the poor guy is having it painless, now.  We will bring him to Prince Island Base VI, as that is the law’s clear stipulation in cases like this for a full psychiatric examination and evaluation.’

         Somehow during his painless sleep, strange things were happening to Fitzgerald’s body.  His cells were replicating, but in an unusual sort of way.  On the monitor, they could see that his new arm was growing noticeably.  Suddenly, the strangest thing happened.  His left arm began to elongate and the fusion with the electronic parts was better than they could ever have expected.  But the fusion did not stop, it kept on and on, and his new limb was now elongating in a way that took up a lot of the available space inside the glass casing.  Its footage increased to yardage;--but suddenly, when it seemed to built up enough pressure to burst the cover �" as the machine clattered and beeped alarmingly �" the arm retracted itself, and yet,--still suddenly, one of the monitors lost the signal of the man’s insides which it previously displayed.  When, a picture was established again, it as if the inner layers of skin could only be seen, but the bones and the organs in his torso had all disappeared.  The men on board the rocket ship did not realize this until it was too late….

     In other words, Captain Fitzgerald’s insides were like gelatin.  What had filled him up was a certain kind of fluid, that appeared half-crystalline and apt to sudden molecular changes and gave out radio waves; but, he was still alive, and all his vital signs were being registered as normal.

    They did not see blurred lines of bluish veins in his transmogrified body in his still normal head and neck; and, he was now conscious, trying to speak as two doctors that had clearance rushed to his side:

      ‘Dr. Malone, where am I--?’

      ‘Alpha-beta-epsilon,’ said the physician without any inflection in her voice, but looking over him.

      ‘A.B.E. Abe,--Abraham,’ Fitzgerald said, slowly.

      ‘How are you feeling now, Fitzgerald?’

      ‘Cold, cold!’ said the patient, ‘I feel like getting up.’

     ‘No, no! Lie still: don’t move!’

      ‘You have access to the top-secret, classified data on board this ship, Captain, before this thing happened.  You know you are not supposed to move,’ said Dr. Wanda with a grim smile.  ‘Take it easy, Captain.  You are very valuable property, Captain.’

      He was seeing the green fields and the brown bunker again. 

       It flashed like a beacon through the intervening space, telepathically, and he was aware that some kind of ‘life-form’ was coming alive symbiotically inside him.  The first thing this viral thing that had been activated, did was to distort all the mirrors on board, warping the faces and bodies of the men, which was followed by a sonorous hum like an African hummingbird’s fluttering in the air, and then, silence...

     Fitzgerald knew that he had made contact intellectually with whatever that was inside him that was intelligent, and the contact would be finished and irrevocable once it touched his brain.  He was now alone, in the small ward. 

      They were monitoring him on flat paper-thin screens, watching him every second.  One screen displayed his vital signs, such as his heart rate and B.P, and, the top half of his body was being scanned by the blue light of the big machine to his right. At two chirps, when most of the ship’s crew went off to sleep, something half metallic and half flesh slid down unto the floor, something long and undulating, with the elasticity of liquorice and this thing undulated along out from where the captain lay sleeping: it crept towards the door, when it at last got free of the tray’s casing.

     The appendage resembled a spatula-like hand, but it was long like a snake, and it slid and weaved to the door, making scarcely any sound on the metal floor.  Two doors down it was still on the prowl, sort of feeling its way along, probing and groping.  The hand went down the stairs, and headed straight for the weapons’ room.  It crept up the laser gun box, and held a laser gun.  The gun melded into the fingers that had gripped it in the diffusely-lit room.  Then, the hand began to retract itself, wending across the floor once again, prowling again, with a steady inner ‘peristaltic’ movement….

      Meanwhile, the committee had been busily investigating the incident, and had reported the status of their captain to Prince Island Base, thirty million miles away.  They had finally traced the inter-stellar communications message from Captain Fitzgerald before the man went out on his last mission.  There were incriminating evidences against him.  It seemed clear that he had been ordered by some entity to shoot himself deliberately so that the surgery would be performed on him after he had been exposed to XF alien spores.  He was now evidently mutating in the bio-regeneration process, and therefore, highly dangerous for everybody….

     The missing laser gun was discovered ten minutes later by the patrol, and suspicion fell eventually on Fitzgerald, although how he managed it was not immediately known.  The bio-monitor zoomed off, and focussed on everything in the sick ward, and all the pictorial and chart records of the last fifteen hours were analyzed and looked over within minutes.  Suddenly, Roberts, the medical and cybernetics technician caught sight of a hose-like arm moving along the floor.

    ‘There, there!’ he screamed excitedly, ‘it’s Fitzgerald’s hand!  He’s got the gun!’

    ‘Damn him! Cut all power from going into the emergency area because I think he might turn out nasty.  Something had infected the implanted part of him, and I think it’s hostile to us.  It might want to take control of the rocket.’

     ‘Computer,--shut down sectors five and six!’ shouted Vice-captain Saul Martin, the Second-in-Command.

      Suddenly there was an explosion down that area and this was followed by a salvo of zithering shots.  By the time they realized what was happening, his shuttlepod was already completing the separation sequence from the mother rocket.

     ‘It’s Fitzgerald, sir!’ said Peters.  ‘He’s wounded three of our men, and now he is trying to get away.’

     ‘How could that be?’ Manser shouted.  ‘The monitors show us he is still lying there inside the casing.  It must be some kind of his double.’

      ‘But the main computer, Mother Cleverly, positively identified that the person trying to flee as Captain Fitzgerald…’

      ‘Can there be two Captain Fitzgeralds?’ Dr. Wanda Gray said, turning to Dr. Malone, who said urgently, ‘I think that one has entered one of our mini-TPK.’

       ‘Shall I fire a missile at him before he gets away?’ said Peters, ‘he is still within range, but we are losing him fast! Our rocket is too big to swivel on a new course after him easily.’

       ‘Let us see what’s up with this patient’s data in our computers!’ said Dr. Malone, and he suddenly saw that there was no vital sign showing in regard to the convalescing Fitzgerald.  The scanners swept across him from head to foot, and they saw that his chest and stomach had ‘collapsed’ like he was sinking into his own center of gravity.  The dead shell of a man had not been the living, thinking Captain Fitzgerald!

       ‘Go right ahead.  Shoot down the s.o.b!  He’s got all our research and technology built into him, and he is running away to our rival inter-planetary company for mining and exploration industry.  Alien matter that took over Fitzgerald had made him very dangerous, and, now, ready, take aim!  I want the s.o.b. killed!’ cried Saul Martin, the pilot said, stoutly.

      ‘Will you launch the offensive missiles in ten seconds, sir?

       ‘Will you do the honors?’ the acting commander replied calmly, who had been taught to be deferential to others above himself, but he harbored Fitzgerald no ill feeling. 

         Phut! Phut! Thud! Thud!’ Went their missile launcher…and the smersh missiles were launched…

         Fifty hundred miles away, a composite Captain Fitzgerald was nursing his craft with all possible speed for a get away.  Part of his transmogrified mind was thinking if he was ever going to make it back to Earth, to a city called Tawa, in the suburbs of Wellington, where he had an idiot brother who was also a chronic MS case, he was going to see him for one final time…but the missiles fired at him were rapidly closing in on his butter-boat as he made a deft hard right…

                  

Author's Note

I wrote this about ten-years ago; but i have refurbished it and bring it up to date, today.

Reviews

[John Tan]

I like to write the Ray Bradbury way, and the good influence, therefore, is quite clear.

[John Tan]

i like to write the Ray Bradbury way, and the influence is obvious.