Chapter Two: The Best Intentions
When the ship blipped into existence some kilometers away from Johannesburg, people took note. When it slowed to a halt directly over the city, people panicked. The only people left alive from when it left were pushing 90 years old, so hardly anyone knew what was going to come out when the doors opened.
They did open this time, thankfully, saving crews the task of having to fly up and see if anything was alive. Instead, a shuttle detached from the bottom of the flying disk and coasted down to the ground. Some human officials churned out to greet them. Or, rather, they hoped it was a greeting and not an attack. The shuttle doors opened and out stepped a tall, rangy Prawn flanked by two others. He wouldn't have been called a young Prawn, but he had a youthful air about him and a cockiness in his stance that belied his age. At first, nobody knew what they were saying. Experts in xenolinguistics were few and far between, but the city police commissioner happened to have been raised by a former MNU member who believed in passing things on. He became their interpreter.
The message was simple. All the Prawns on Earth were to be taken home. This was just a transport crew. A discussion on their treatment over the past 90 years would be forthcoming. The Prawn nodded decisively at the end of the statement and set off towards the rebuilt D9, now called New Town. The officials gathered tried to gain more information – when would Prawn officials be contacting, how long would it take, what could they do? All the leader said was that their concerns would be addressed in due time. Now, he had an inherited promise to make good on.
When the ship went by overhead, the entirety of New Town stopped. A collective mind, an internal frequency they couldn't ignore caught their attention. Even those young enough to have never seen the mothership took notice. At once they all knew the time had come.
There was only one who didn't react. He sat up against the base of a metal building just beneath the overhang to stay out of the sun and an ancient brown coat draped over his shoulders. He kept a tin flower in the button hole. His eyes blinked slowly, foggy not quite with age but weariness and worsening by the week. Suspended between four fingers and one thumb was a rickety tablet display showing a news article in English. The article discussed the recent advancements in what the privileged were calling 'Elysium.' There was a rather interesting bit on a thing called a Med-Pod. They were having trouble with the wiring, though, and some tests had gone horribly, horribly wrong, but they were working on it and should have it finished by the time the Taurus Station was operational, and so on and so forth.
He avoided company now, and company avoided him. They looked on with something like pity, watching him age by the day. Some tried to help when he asked, but otherwise they left him alone. He was prone to lapses of silence where he'd see things, memories maybe or dreams perhaps, images from a life he wasn't sure was his anymore. His humanity huddled up into a tiny ball in the depths of his subconscious beneath layers of survival instinct and alien and death. He would address the phantoms behind his eyes, sometimes tenderly, sometimes violently. Sometimes he would do nothing at all, staying hours at a time in one place staring at nothing.
He only looked up from the article when somebody addressed him. The somebody's shadow fell across his screen, making it hard to read. He squinted up at whoever it was, but the somebody was already crouching down to get level with him. The stranger was alone, save for two other Prawns he didn't know. In fact, they were totally overlooked otherwise. The residents of New Town were shuffling out en masse towards the city.
He lowered the tablet. "Say again?" he muttered.
"Wikus van de Merwe. I have had trouble finding you."
"Who is this?…Wikus, you say? I have not heard this name in many years."
"I imagine not many know you by it any longer."
"You seem to."
What equated to a smile crinkled the corners of the other Prawn's eyes. "Because I know you." He shifted his crouch to a kneeling position. "I know you, you know me, and you knew my father."
"Your father?"
As soon as the question left his mandibles, a memory sprang up from the part of his mind buried deep by a century of waiting – the human part. As the memory played, a feeling similar to happiness warmed his thorax. His humanity crept out from under its rock, peering meekly out into the sun. His own smile came with a chuckle as he patted the 'boy' on the cheek more to make sure he was real and less out of tenderness.
"The boy. Christopher's boy, eh? I never did catch your name."
The Boy nodded, patting Wikus's shoulder happily. "You might have called me Oliver in your paperwork, once upon a time."
"Ah, yes." Wikus nodded to himself, chuckling again in surprise at himself. "I might have proofread that paperwork."
"You might have." Oliver's tone took on an excited note. "Wikus, I am here to fulfil the promise my father made to you. I am here to fix you."
All at once, Wikus's smile froze. It remained there on his face but it took on a waxy, death-like look. He shook Oliver's shoulder lightly, emitting a short bark of a laugh. The light was too bright, as it turned out. The man he used to be started to drown in the harshness of the past washing over him.
"Fix me? Don't you realize how many fokkin' years it's been?"
He was surprised by the venom in his own tone. Oliver was, too. Without attending to it, he shoved Oliver away from him and stood up. The tablet dropped to the ground. The two Prawns flanking Oliver tensed up.
"Wikus…"
"Don't you fokkin' Wikus me, you little shit. He promised three years, man, three years and I'd be fixed and I could go back to my wife and my home and not be this bloody thing. You weren't even alive for the majority of the Prawns' time here on Earth. I've been here three fokkin' times over!"
His shouts were beginning to detract from the homing signal pulling away the others. Some took pause, but not for long. A small part of him tried to be calm and feel bad about the words he was saying, that he had done the right thing and that Oliver was only trying to help, but the pent-up rage and despair from almost eight decades of forcing to cover it all up with a forced optimism would not be held back. Again he was suddenly the panicked, hysterical half-alien running from MNU and trying to cut off his own arm to stop the spread and the old anger at the situation rose up anew. He was okay with giving up a few years to set things right, to fix the things he helped destroy, but this was too much. No matter how hopeful he might try to make himself, the enormity of the experience was too great to handle.
"Three fokkin' years, man! What did you do? Stop for a fokkin' burger on Mars?"
He simply gave up. His will snapped like a tendon and it all poured out of him like lifeblood, the things he had never allowed himself to say to anybody. He yelled, he cursed, he raged at the only thing he could take it out on – Oliver – until he thought his heart might burst.
"There's no fokkin' point now, is there? I might as well just be a fuckin' alien for the rest of my life. They're all dead. Everyone I ever cared about is dead, everyone that I loved and that I wanted to go home to. Tania, Fundiswa to thank him, Tania oh God Tania…"
When Tania first would not speak to him after the incident, he thought his heart had split asunder in his chest. The pain was physical; he felt a deep ache for it and fury unlike he'd ever felt. He thought that had been the lowest point. But she'd called back. She said okay. She loved him in spite of everything. And then he'd never felt a greater resolve to get back to her.
That pain and anger didn't compare to the present. Tania was gone. He never made good on his promise. She left thinking he would never return, and she died without resolution. Her life ended when he failed. As far as he knew, she never remarried. She never had children of her own, of their own. And the resolve he still felt to get back to her hurt all the more for the fact that there was nothing he could do. Here was their salvation standing before him, and she wasn't there to take a part in it.
No amount of hope in the world could bring back the dead. It was the demon that hunted him in his sleep after he found out, and it followed him in the day like a living nightmare. It hung over him now like a phantom with Tania's face, and this time he couldn't recall anything happy enough to replace it.
Oliver took it all in silence and a heavy, guilty veil of resignation shadowed his features. Wikus couldn't even say anything beyond a guttural utterance of his angel's name. He hit his knees, broken, and his sobs carried over the homing signal. He was only dimly aware of Oliver's hand on his back, pulling him forward to put his forehead against his own forehead, and the repeated apologies and sadness and pain in his own voice.
"There are not enough words in our language to express the grief I feel at causing you this pain. I believed in you, Wikus. You saved me. You saved the people. But I cannot bring back your people, Wikus, and that saddens me," Oliver said finally. Wikus stayed silent, staring numbly at the ground. Tania's face stared back at him, the light behind her forming a halo in her golden hair.
Oliver sighed. "I am too late, but I want to help you. We made a promise to you. Returning your humanity is the only thing I can do. It will at least allow you to live among your own people and not be shunned."
Wikus wanted to ask again what the point was. He didn't care anymore. But still, he took the hand offered to him and let himself be led to the shuttle in the center of the city. He was unaware of the people gathering at Oliver's return only to find the Prawn leader serious and drawn. His guards deflected questions. Some cameras flashed. And some people whispered. Some were heirs to the people who lived in the world when the name 'Wikus van de Merwe' struck entire rooms silent in a mix of fear and fascination. Those people passed the story down to their children and then those children passed it on to theirs, talking of the time when a man from Johannesburg became the most talked about man on the planet.
Those children, standing on the sidewalk watching the strange procession go by, wondered. A thought occurred to them, and they all thought the same things: They used to swear up and down that he was probably turned into an alien by now. They played all those documentaries. Could the old Prawn accompanying the younger the man that used to be Wikus van de Merwe?
If they asked Wikus, he would say not anymore, if he said anything at all. Looking up at the mothership casting its round shadow upon the city, he resigned himself to putty in the hands of others. He was a willing puppet all over again. Something in him laughed at the prospect. All the waiting and surviving to finally get to the thing that mattered most, and here it was, a bitter disappointment, the great tragedy. He didn't care. This really was only a stepping stone to get to the thing that mattered most.
The person who mattered most.
Tania.
Oliver's voice sounded like it was under water, but the gist of it made it sound like nothing he didn't already expect. The transformation would likely be painful. It would take several days. It would involve shedding and weeping and temporary blindness. A second Prawn he didn't know pulled Oliver aside and Wikus only overheard it say "think of his age, it may be too traumatic" but Oliver shooed the other one away. It had to be done. Oliver asked again if this was what he wanted. Wikus accepted with a dumb nod, and an iridescent fluid shining in a syringe was injected into his arm.
The mothership stayed for two weeks. It took half that to ferry all the Prawns from the surface up to the mothership and then the other half to try and track down any that remained alive out there in the world. Wikus stayed in the shuttle for the duration, lying in a locked, separate room on an examination table beneath a carousel of torturous-looking instruments with glowing power displays. The return back to being a human was much the same as the reverse. A lot of blood was involved and pieces of his exoskeleton fell off with dull, organic thuds onto the floor, revealing pasty white skin draped over a brittle bone structure.
He wasn't sure if he screamed or not during the transformation, but when he regained consciousness, silence reigned. The ceiling, now unfamiliar, swam and the room spun around him and nothing would come into focus. Gravity was painful. He felt like he was being pressed slowly into the top of the examination table like dough beneath the rolling pin. When he tried to raise his head to look around, he couldn't pick it up more than an inch before it fell back down. Something was wrong. He picked up his hands to look at them; they shook and trembled and the knobby, shrunken claws that looked back at him couldn't possibly be his hands even though the thumb and index finger on his left hand were still gone. His vision went dark and light and back again until the energy in the atrophied muscles in his arms ran out and the panic set in.
Weakened cries eventually brought in Oliver, who fell backwards into his lieutenant in shock.
The Prawn had not returned to the Man whom Oliver remembered; indeed, it had returned to reality. An ancient, shrunken skeleton of a human lay there on the table making piteous, bewildered noises and fighting to move, to live. His attempts to get a coherent response out of Wikus failed. Either he couldn't hear anymore or the animalistic fear in his rheumy eyes won out against his mind. Oliver searched for something to knock over, and his fist connected with a canister of black fluid. Oliver spun towards the lieutenant.
"Get the Commissioner!"
Oliver stayed at Wikus's side, holding onto his mutilated hand for dear life. He understood what had happened but refused to believe it. He had wanted for Wikus to be able to look in a mirror and see himself, but this…he probably couldn't see the mirror, much less recognize himself without having a heart attack. It was all wrong, but Oliver fought to keep his thoughts logical and calm. He was successful enough to communicate what needed to happen when the Commissioner came jogging in with Oliver's lieutenant. The shock on the human's face was palpable, and after a short explanation and the implications hit home, he agreed immediately.
While Wikus was turning back, Oliver was active. He sent the mothership back to the homeworld and stayed with a small crew on the shuttle, which had its own interstellar drive. He spoke with several leaders in the city and over the phone and video feed with other human leaders.
The questions were predictably aimed at the shuttle and how it was powered and how long it took to get from place to place. Oliver declined those questions. He was not at liberty to discuss the details; his own leadership had been quite specific regarding that. Those who were most interested, though, in talking with him were the developers of a project they called 'Elysium.'
The reference was beyond Oliver's knowledge, but he got the concept – a space station large enough to hold roughly a million people with a breathable atmosphere. He offered advice where he could, but he had the same tight-fisted grip on his engineering ability as his father; he stayed away from direct help. The next topic they had exhausted was the Med-Pod and its short-comings. He had even been shown a prototype, and asked to help.
The technology was not much different on his home planet. Healing pods were a common thing, but rarely used, even among the upper echelons of the society and usually only for serious injury. Humans, though, their ambition was endless. He was a product of their mistreatment, but having known Wikus and experiencing a more or less welcoming environment upon landing, he saw little other reason why they might use them. Or how. There were little to no purposes for it regarding weaponry, so he saw as little harm in it.
They helped him travel to the development site located in a place called the United States. There, he helped fix the bugs in the machine that were leaving test subjects horribly disfigured. Now they could heal people, even those born with disabilities that were otherwise inoperable. Oliver found it somewhat noble. One of them asked afterwards, 'does this mean that your people will look upon us better?' Oliver could not confirm that, but he could not deny. He had a more forgiving nature than his father and much preferred diplomacy.
Brute force got him home, but it was a messy business.
So when he saw the old creature that used to be Wikus van de Merwe writhing there on the table and asked himself how he could fix this, the answer was simple. If the Med-Pod could reatomize a human with terminal cancer, then it could easily fix the tragedy before him.
And that would give Wikus his second chance to have a life.
Oliver and the Commissioner peered into the video feed on the tablet, Oliver with his long arms crossed over his chest and the Commissioner fiddling with his tie. A woman in a white coat with black hair in a severe bun answered.
"Nice to see you again, Dominick, what brings you to call at this hour?" Her tone was pleasant but her expression never strayed from neutral, and her eyes never left Oliver.
"We have a bit of a medical situation, Maggie, and we were wondering if you've finished those calibrations on the Med-Pod yet," he replied, managing a nervous smile. Maggie's eyes went from Dominick to Oliver.
"We should be finishing within the next few hours. Why do you ask?"
"Forgive me, you remember Mr. Oliver Johnson, the repair source, yes?"
"I do."
"This is him. He is an emissary for his, um, people, and he has a request for you. Mr. Johnson, Dr. Margaret Underwood. We met in London for a thing, it's not important." Dominick picked up the tablet and moved towards the table where Wikus lay, stable and conscious but otherwise unresponsive. Maggie could catch glimpses of the inside of the shuttle, but the feed turned suddenly on a man, or what should have been a man.
"Oh my God…"
"This…is Wikus van de Merwe, actually a close acquaintance of Mr. Johnson's. See, he's been, uh-"
"Wikus van de Merwe? You have the Wikus van de Merwe there with you?"
"He's been a Prawn for the past eighty years or so, naturally, and we've, I mean Mr. Johnson has only recently been able to return to, uh, remedy the matter." He turned the camera back to himself. "Unfortunately, uh, there are some complications, eh?"
Oliver pulled the camera to face him. "Can you help us, please?"
"Can you help us, Maggie?"
Maggie's mouth had fallen open in awe and even with her severe bun, managed to look appropriately stunned. "I…"
"We have the transport."
"It's very fast."
"It's quite fast."
Maggie looked like the world had dropped into her lap. It had, in a way. She covered her a mouth a moment. "Like, airliner fast?"
"How far is it?" Oliver asked.
"To London, almost ten thousand kilometers."
Oliver paused for a moment, calculating. "We can make it in approximately seven to eight of your hours, I believe."
"We don't have a lot of time, Maggie. I'm not sure how much longer Mr. van de Merwe will last."
Maggie looked nervous. "We haven't done any tests yet, but I'll do what I can to speed things up. We should have one at one hundred percent by the time you get here. Just promise me one thing, Dom."
"Yes, anything."
"I get to be the first one after Mr. Johnson to talk to him after he wakes up. He's …"
Oliver looked into the camera, eyes narrowing. "I can hear the interest in your voice, Doctor. This man is not an experiment, and I will not allow you or any other to let him come to harm."
Maggie stared back, unable to understand the words but quite aware of the threat in his voice. Dominick blanched. "Maggie, I'd take it easy if I were you on your demands yet."
"Yes, yes, I had gathered that was something of a scolding, or a threat maybe. I apologize. My intentions are purely educational, I swear."
"I will be the judge of that."
Dominick translated and then set off to secure airspace from Johannesburg to London. Oliver put his own crew into motion, and before long, the shuttle lifted off.
Wikus could only hear muffled voices and the tremors of the room around him, and the only picture clear to him was a blond woman framed by light leaning over him, a comforting hand cupping his cheek and a welcoming smile on her pretty face. A weak smile of his own twitched at his mouth and his hand groped for hers.
Hold me down, baby. Take me home.