Duped, Part 2

Be sure to read Part 1 first for the full story!

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“I hear you think I’m a pod person.” Benny’s grin stretched wide across his face, lavender eyes locked into Penny’s. Eve glared a hole through her husband’s back from across the kitchen. She’d warned him to be sensitive but he just couldn’t resist poking a giant stick at the elephant in the room.

“Benny, knock it off and top up our guest’s wine.” Eve flashed her husband a stern look as she delivered everyone a helping of sticky toffee pudding. She risked a side glance at Penny, expecting to see embarrassment or confusion.

The other woman, contrarily, remained poised. Stiff-backed, napkin laid precisely across her checked skirt, Penny calmly spooned dessert into her mouth whilst monitoring Benny. 

“So, your theory is that I’m an intergalactic being that’s crawled inside the body of a retired schoolteacher? Am I intent on world domination or have I come to warn civilisation of a greater evil?”

The smile was starting to descend into smugness. Eve kicked a fluffy-slippered foot at her husband under the table and tried to change the subject, whilst directing an apologetic glance at their guest.  

Penny was unruffled, eased by day-drinking her third large glass of wine. She expected it to challenge her, do its best Benny impersonation. It couldn’t reveal its true form, not yet. There would be a mission, an end goal. “It’s okay Eve, he’s only teasing me, I know that.” Penny smiled at her hosts politely. 

Benny’s face faltered. His lips flickered rapidly between upturned smiles and neutral straight-line expressions, like he was practising the movement or someone was operating a switch. Blinking, she snapped her head toward Eve, seeing if she too had seen the same thing. Nothing. And Benny’s smile was pasted back on.  

“What do you think of the selection for next month’s book club, Penny? We had a stinker this month, Benny. It was terrible, we all agreed.” Eve’s voice jittered awkwardly.

“We certainly did, well apart from Jeremy but he’s a vegan and a farmer; his entire existence is dissonant. I can’t say I’m familiar with it, Eve, but if the cover is anything to go by it’s not going to be to my liking. I prefer my murder mysteries cosy, something you can read with a nice cup of tea and slice of marble cake.

“This is all drug-lords and people-trafficking. We get enough doom and gloom on the news without self-inflicting more,” Penny noted. 

“Oh, quite so, yes. Although, you’ve always been partial to a crime thriller haven’t you, Benny? What was the name of that writer you like, you know, that one with the double-barrelled surname?” Eve stared intently at her husband, the name clinging to the tip of her tongue. Penny waited eagerly for the imposter to fail the test.

“You’re thinking of Clive von Hey-” Mid-word Benny’s head tipped back, his throat gurgling like a blocked sink. “Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey”. Head pivoting back to its original position, his eyes targeted his wife’s with inhuman precision.

“Clive von Heydan, dear, I believe you are searching for. He writes these private detective novels and although on the gritty side Penny, the plots are clever and punctuated with a devilish humour.”

The two women looked at each other. Benny, far from acknowledging his ‘blip’, carried on as if nothing peculiar had occurred. His eye-contact moved between them, questioning Penny and Eve’s respective quizzical and concerned expressions.

“Are you feeling okay sweetheart?” Eve’s voice was low, tentative, afraid to ask the question without knowing the response. Not that she entertained Penny’s delusion; there was a rational explanation. 

“Tip-top darling. I may even treat myself to another glass. You must be a bad influence, Penny.” The familiar chuckle emitted from his lips. Benny left the table to retrieve another bottle from the chiller-cabinet.

“He must be tired. I’ll get him to have a lie down after lunch.” Eve tried to reassure herself as much as her neighbour.

“Has he done that before?” Penny whispered, unsure if being inhabited by an alien magnified hearing capabilities. 

“No, absolutely, not. He’s been perfectly fine. Maybe I should call the doctor? What if he’s still teasing, pulling our legs?” Eve realised she’d transitioned from treating Penny as a woman with an illness, to a confidant for advice. The two couldn’t exist in parallel.  

“You two ladies are missing out. This is the finest New Zealand offers supermarkets in a mid-price bracket,” Benny proclaimed loudly as he placed the bottle on the table.

Part way through opening it, his left arm froze mid-air just millimetres away from holding the bottle steady. His right hand continued regardless, unscrewing the cap, the bottle spinning and sliding on the table. 

“Benny?” Eve stared at her husband, watching as the right-side of his face kept hitting his shoulder. 

Penny stood up and waved her hand in front of Benny’s glassy eyes. No reaction, no blinking, nothing. It was like Benny had been scooped out of his body. Eve pulled the bottle away from his right-hand without resistance but the hand kept repeating the motion. 

Benny suddenly dropped into a sitting position on his chair. Both arms stiffened, straight down at his sides, hands in fists. The manoeuvre had been rapid and synchronous like a choreographed dance move. Eve and Penny gasped, backing away from the table. Eve’s eyes watered, hands covering her mouth.

Penny inquisitively approached Benny’s hijacked body, convinced now more than ever whatever lay inside, if it remained, was not Benny. Not human. Frantically waving her hand in front of his face again, she still received nothing in return.

“Kitty litter, kitty litter, kitty litter, kitty litter, kitty litter,” Benny’s mouth heckled. “Farm to table, farm to table, farm to table, algebra, goat, sausage, polar bear, hattrick, xeroderma pigmentosum, crumpet, crumpet, trumpet…” His mouth the only part of his body moving, Benny’s emotionless voice called out nonsense strings. 

“He’s having a stroke. Oh my god, he’s having a stroke!” Eve ran to grab her phone and called the emergency services. 

Penny knew she was deluding herself but it didn’t hurt to have some professional intervention. Plus, medical tests could document the invasion. The police would have to take that seriously. 

The ambulance drove away carrying Benny strapped to a gurney and a fretting Eve. The coldness of the outside air punched Penny’s face, as if her brain hadn’t had enough free capacity to notice it previously. Shivering, she wrapped her long woollen cardigan around her torso, closed their gate and turned toward her own home.

Crossing the road, Penny clocked movement in her peripheral vision. Shocked and disbelieving at first glance, she did a double-take before emitting a small yelp and running to her front door. Locked safely inside, she headed to her front window. Gasping, she’d seen exactly what she thought she had.

The mid-thirties carer of a woman from down the street had come around the corner into the cul-de-sac. Walking in the middle of the road. Backwards. Totally and utterly naked.

Now parallel with her window, Penny saw his long straggling black hair matted to his head and down his back, like he’d just stepped out of the shower. He continued walking. Aghast at the view she then got, Penny haphazardly seized one of her curtains dragging it to block the window. 

Panicking that he may come to her door, Penny called her local police station to an engaged tone. She tried 999. The same.

Peering from behind the curtain, she steeled herself to look. The carer had reached the end of the cul-de-sac, seemingly unbeknownst to him as his walking motion continued. The back of his head and shoulders, ankles, and limbs all persistently scraping against the rough, immovable stone.

Penny scrambled around her coffee table for the TV remote, flicking until she saw news.

Benny. The carer from down the street. There had to be more victims.

She forced herself to sit, teetering on the edge of her armchair as her legs jigged up and down. Penny tried to focus on the newsreader’s words. There were similar stories emerging from across the whole country. Clips of live TV presenters, suddenly and simultaneously, losing themselves.

Mid-weather forecast, a presenter started doing jumping jacks and wouldn’t stop. A daytime TV host copied everything her co-host said and did. Thousands of people, instantaneously static, like human statues. Hundreds reported people being injured without exhibiting pain.

A rambler in Wales walked straight off a cliff-edge, breaking bones in his arms, legs and back, while singing the word “corsage” throughout.

A vegetable-picker from Yorkshire even walked straight into a combine harvester without a single whimper, discounting those who witnessed it.

She bounced across channels accumulating information, trying to draw together pieces of a bigger picture. Dozens of experts proclaimed victims as catatonic. Ascribing it to mass hysteria, a country-wide psychological meltdown. A chemical attack from foreign enemies. Others espoused conspiracy theories related to mobile phone use.

The more reputable newscasts settled on an epidemic, with a pathogen doing wide scale neurological damage.

Penny kept flicking for reports of reversals or recoveries, finding none: everyone inflicted stayed inflicted. The realisation made her empathy pang for Eve but also led to a worrying afterthought. 

If the aliens had evacuated their initial hosts, had they clambered into other vessels?

A potential second wave.

***

L18Z faced all their vision receptacles downward, grateful to be only adjacent to the firing line. C52T admonished the senior-ranking neurobiological officer regarding an accidental occurrence that L18Z had yet to discover the nature of. 

“A simple error. Simple. Yet this error, you say, has impacted the entire batch?” C52T’s questioning wasn’t designed to fact find or clarify but to humiliate.  

“Affirmative. All the xenos have been lost.” The officer’s confidence was gradually being shaved down.

“And by lost, you mean what exactly?” 

The response came hesitantly. “As in irretrievable C52T.”

“L18Z.” The superior’s switch in focus caused an attentional shock like a nail to the cerebellum. 

“This officer carried out simulation 61910 with the xenos you painstakingly guested. Then programmed a memory reset to automatically initiate after the results finished downloading and went to eat. To eat, rather than supervising the action. And rather than initiating 10955Mauve for memory reset, this officer made the simple error of programming 10955MauveB2.” 

“You vaporised them? All the humans, every single one?” L187 could not control the shock that flooded their emotional cortex.

“Shock is appropriate, L187. What are our options with regards the duplicates?” C52T had turned the hotspot onto a dumbfounded L187.

“There are no options, the options have been vaporised. We swapped them with temporary duplicates. They were only ever short-term placeholders. They’re not designed to extend beyond twenty-four to twenty-six hours maximum. The CarbonFlash protocol sacrifices precision for speed.

“Their bodies are perfect replicas but made with materials that decay like fresh produce. With their brains, it’s worse. We downloaded easily accessible and well-trodden neural structures and networks. They’ll be decaying as we communicate.” L187 couldn’t stop all their upper limbs twisting with anxiety. 

“Can we retrieve the evidence?” C52T felt quietly cheered by their decision to propel the neurobiological officer into space before the end of shift. It would be a fitting celebration once damage limitation was complete.

“No. There is no protocol designed for this; it had not been foreseen. The dupes are dead withering shells.” L187 had never witnessed an operation going this awry. 

C52T focused on the positive.

“Right then, half the mission was successful. Our simulation data suggests humans can easily be brainwashed to sacrifice themselves as food. And it could have been worse. Vaporisation means no goo-scooping. Compare that to the popping incident of 2008. Let’s go to another galaxy for a few months, return when their feeble minds have forgotten all about it.”

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