Touched by an Alien

stayed the same. I didn’t change outside, but I could feel the change inside. I wasn’t me any more, I couldn’t stop doing what Mephistopheles wanted.”
    “Oh, my God,” Gower said. “That explains it.” He looked at me. “Your dream didn’t feel right. It was subtle, but not normal.”
    “You think the parasite’s already in me?” I could hear my voice, and it had moved to squeak-of-terror level. Martini increased the massage pressure on my neck. It helped. A bit.
    “No,” Gower said reassuringly. “We know you’re still you. Believe me.”
    “We couldn’t touch you if you were infected,” Martini added.
    I thought about his and Christopher’s reactions to touching Yates’ image last night. “Why not?”
    “Just something in our physical makeup,” White answered. “We haven’t been able to pin it down, though we do have a team working on it.”
    “Have them focus on what’s different, really different, genetically between A-Cs and humans. Because when Mephistopheles picked me up, I didn’t have any kind of reaction like the one you all did to just touching the image.”
    “What did you feel?” Mom asked quietly.
    I tried to think back. “I wasn’t scared,” I said finally. “I was mad. Him picking me up made me madder. And I never got scared, even when I thought he was going to eat me.”
    “It’s rage,” Reader said immediately. “Humans have a greater capacity for rage than A-Cs do. Not that they can’t get mad,” he grinned at Paul, who laughed, “but they don’t do it to our level.”
    “Yeah, but is rage really controlled at the genetic level?”
    “It is in us,” Martini said quietly. “Somewhat in you, too.”
    “I thought it was lame, too, what he said to me,” I added. There was silence. I waited for the sound of crickets. “What?” I asked finally.
    “You could understand what he was saying?” Christopher asked.
    “Well, only two short sentences. I mean, it was obvious he was talking to you all in some alien language, and I couldn’t understand a word of that. But he talked to me, when he had me near his head.”
    “How?” Gower asked flatly.
    I shrugged. “His eyes changed. They went from that red, glowing, superbeing creep-out look to almost human. He said I was trouble,” I added.
    “He got that right,” Christopher muttered.
    I chose to ignore Christopher’s little comment. “Then when he was about to stick me in his mouth, he said I wouldn’t be trouble much longer.”
    “They can’t do that,” White protested. “Human or superbeing. No in-between.”
    “He did with me. Then I hit him with my hairspray, and he dropped me.” I looked around. All the A-Cs looked, to a man, nervous. “Again, what?”
    Gower broke their silence. “It wasn’t a dream, Kitty. It’s an implanted memory.”
    “It hasn’t happened.” I could hear the “yet” no one spoke aloud but I was pretty sure everyone was thinking. “I mean, what, do these parasite things work backward in time or something?”
    “Not that we know of,” White answered. “But you could be overlaying your own experiences onto the implanted memory.”
    “Maybe he’s figured out how to make more superbeings.” This wasn’t a great thing to be suggesting, especially since I had a feeling I was supposed to be Test Subject Number 1.
    “Maybe it’s more that he’s just remembering how,” Christopher said quietly.
    “From,” Gower added, “touching you.”

CHAPTER 25
    “WE ONLY KNOW ABOUT THE PARASITES from our translations of the Ancients’ texts,” White explained as we all headed to the Research level. This was at my mother’s insistence on knowing, fully, what the hell was going on.
    Martini had his arm around my waist. He wasn’t being possessive, he was keeping me up and moving. Hearing I was not only parasitic-alien bait but was also likely triggering some sort of alien Armageddon wasn’t doing a lot for my ability to remain calm.
    We arrived in what looked like the biggest library on Earth. I figured it probably was. The room was vast, bigger than the science level we’d been on last night. The stacks of books seemed to go on forever, like a huge maze of literature.
    It was all computerized, though. A-C efficiency in action. Gower punched in what we needed on one of their free-moving light board screens, and then we went into a reading room to wait for our selection to arrive.
    This room was big enough to hold fifty people comfortably, but it actually