(Tobias)
Tom raised the Dracon beam for the last time.
Rachel was crying.
I love you, I said.
I waited...
And yet... as he squeezed the trigger... the closer Tom came to firing, the harder it seemed to become for him. His whole body tensed up... beads of sweat rolled down his forehead, as though it was an immense effort to control his fingers...
Maybe it was...
I breathed again. I had thought that war was lost forever.
I knew now that the battle for freedom continued.
Only this time, it was taking place inside a human head...
*****
(Tom)
My name is Tom Berenson.
The slug that controls my every action is the top Security Chief for the late Visser One. That evil creature has made me a prisoner. I am a slave trapped inside my own mind.
I am a Controller.
I have been for more than three years. Three years of a life that was no longer mine to be a part of.
I watched helplessly as my body was passed on to each new Yeerk. I was assimilated into the Yeerk Empire as a host. The Yeerk that infested me passed as a normal human every day. No one suspected me of being a Controller - not my friends, not even my own family. Or so I thought.
At first I didn't believe that these Yeerks had any real chance of taking over the planet. I figured that someone had to find out eventually, and alert the government, or whatever.
But I was wrong. Every day more and more humans became Controllers. Like me. Every day the Yeerk pool had more cages, more helpless host bodies, mere tools of the Yeerks. Like me.
Just a tool. Just a part. Just a machine. Only a pawn in some larger game.
The Yeerks were sweeping the human race like a tsunami, starting innocently as a small swell, then growing larger and more powerful, until by the time we would realize what was happening, it would be too late to escape.
And we, the human-Controllers, were the automatons that were making it happen against our will. We were the front seat observers of the conquering of our own species.
Those few individuals who discovered the Yeerk threat were infested or killed.
I've tried to resist the Yeerk's control. I have all but failed. Here and there, when the Yeerk was either distracted, or very emotional, rarely for a Yeerk, I could slip in and for a split second I was back in control. But then the Yeerk would regain his hold upon me, as always, and put me through mental torture as such that I had never imagined. It would taunt me. It would show me how easily it deceived real humans. It would look into my deepest memories, my hopes and dreams, shattered like glass, all crushed beneath the arrogance of this slug.
Even with the most recent turning of events, when the Animorphs, led by my brother, had come so close to winning the war, they were shown how far they really were from their victory.
Far.
The Yeerk raised the Dracon beam. Pointed it at my cousin and her fellow Animorph.
This was his victory! He was in an ecstasy of pure ruthless Yeerk triumph and arrogance unleashed. And he was both very distracted and very emotional.
Now was the time. Now was the moment.
The Yeerk tried to squeeze the contact. I resisted.
Push!
With all my might, I fought to gain control.
But my effort was in vain. For I was blindly groping at the tendrils of control that the Yeerk clutched so tightly. I couldn't see what I knew was there. Mentally, I reached out, but with a miniscule effort, the Yeerk tugged them from my grasp.
The Yeerk laughed. Foolish human! Trying to take what is rightfully mine again? Have three years taught you nothing? You are mine to command, slave! Well, this time you will pay for such disobedience with your cousin's life!
Again he attempted to fire the weapon, and all would have been lost had not the other Animorph, Tobias, said his last good bye.
I love you, he said to Rachel.
And by some miracle, he thought-spoke just loudly enough for me to hear. The Yeerk, but the real me, too.
The real me.
No!
Something snapped inside me, then. Some kind of barrier broke. This kid, this child Tobias, had been dragged from a terrible home life into an interstellar war, and he wasn't bitter or hateful. Instead, he had become a true warrior, and now, at the end of his life, he had chosen not to strike back with hate, but instead give his final sentiments to the one he loved.
I knew that I had become a mere shell of a person. And I realized that I had lost myself. I had lost my will to survive.
That act of love touched a part of me ... deep inside... a part that I had nearly forgotten in my years of slavery, a part that did not exist in the Yeerk. It touched the child deep inside, that part of everyone that loves without question, that hopes without reason, that believes in miracles. The part that most of us grow out of, and too few of us never do...
And suddenly... the light was turned on... and I could see! I no longer groped in the darkness... I knew where to reach... I stretched out again for the reins of control.
The Yeerk screamed, full of rage, Get out of the way, human!
No, I said. Not this time. This time you lose, Yeerk. This time, you die.
The Yeerk, enraged, pulled them out of my reach. I struggled for them again, but the Yeerk's evolved process of controlling domination was infinitely stronger, built into their very beings.
Foolish slave. No human has -ever- resisted the absolute control of a Yeerk. And I assure you, you won't be the first. Wave good-bye to your species, he gloated.
My body had tensed up, muscles contracted, from the strain of two intelligent beings trying to control it in very different manners. Now, against my will, the Dracon beam rose once more. I knew finally, that I was truly nothing more than a slave.
And I gave in to the Yeerk's cerebral propaganda that had haunted me for so long... I accepted the supreme truth... I was not a person... I was not a human... I was not a sentient creature... I did not care or feel... I did not hope... I did not love... my only and sole purpose was to be an instrument for my Yeerk.
The child shifted towards the background, became a foolish image of an unreal fantasy world which no longer existed...
I gave in...
As the last of my resolve faded and the Yeerk coldness rose to power, as the final conflict of Yeerk and host dwindled to nothing, as the confused mental cacophony of sound ultimately gave way to silence...
There arose a single voice.
My brother's.
I had heard it many times through a sort of filter since I had become a Controller, as the Yeerk's presence fogged it and all other input from reaching me fully. I only dimly registered the sound in the back of my mind...
"Tom."
He called my name. I mechanically noted that he was sobbing, crying, pleading. But they were influences of emotion... meaningless inflections of tone...
Emotion was nothing. Servitude was all.
"Tom."
Again and again, I listened to his voice, artificially reproduced by the Blade ship, traveling over the vast intercom gap of space between the two spacecraft. But suddenly he was much closer.
Much, much closer.
I must have imagined it. It couldn't have been real. But I swear his arms extended. He reached out for me, and I to him, and suddenly it didn't matter how far away we were anymore...
I felt it as though I was under water. I could see his hand up in the clear air, so close, but distorted, shifting. All I had to do was reach for it... but I couldn't pass through the shimmering barrier...
And then his face came into my limited view. Jake. My brother.
The last of the child had left him. He had become a general. The other extreme from Tobias. A cold, calculating, ruthless fighter.
War had destroyed what was left of the child inside him. The part of Tobias that had so touched me did not exist anymore in my brother. He had sacrificed himself for his people...
Through it all, after all his battles, all his life-and-death decisions, he could still feel sadness. The special sadness that comes from sacrificing so much, fighting so hard, and yet still watching three loved ones die.
He looked into my eyes, and I knew, I knew he had fought, lost, cried, and destroy his innocence for me. Part of Jake had still had faith in the goodness of the universe; he thought that if he fought I would be freed... and I realized that there was a child in us all. You just had to know where to look.
And now I would never be able to tell him that I understood. His last vision of me would be as a hated enemy, a destroyer, a Yeerk.
My last vision of him...
It wouldn't be as Jake the General, cold-hearted and destroyed by war. It wouldn't be like he saw me, battered and beaten, but instead it would be Jake, the believer... my brother...
I looked at his tears... they hid so much hurt, so much pain... his eyes were just an illusion, a barrier of cold steel protecting the vulnerable youth inside. If someone looked at him superficially, they would never realize the complexity of this one person, this one hero that carried the burden of war for his planet because he must. They would just see the hardened teenager, and never look into the wonderful person that he was... but just because they didn't believe there was a deeper part of Jake didn't mean that it didn't exist. They just let the illusion trick them into thinking there was nothing more to him than what was on the outside... but the real Jake inside was always there for you when you chose to believe in him. I knew. Everything else was just an illusion...
Just an illusion...
I had fought the Yeerk and lost... Jake had reached for me, but I did not have the strength to reach out for him... because... I couldn't pass through... the barrier...
Jake... the child...
No. Not a barrier...
An illusion...
The Yeerk...
Just an illusion...
I saw the child...
I reached out...
I knew what the Animorphs had gone through. All the battles fought. All the morals lost. To save Earth. To save me. And knowing that they had fought together for so long, so hard, and had lost...
I cried inside my head, closed off from the outside world, closed off from the Yeerk... and I cried. For them. For me. For the victims of war.
And gradually I became aware of a sound, soft at first, then louder, then earsplitting. It was a raging scream of denial, of disbelief. It was the Yeerk. The Yeerk who saw himself as he truly was.
A slug.
Inside... and out.
And in his fatal scream of fury, past reason, past rationality, past sanity, all he wondered was how he had lost...
You want to know how, Yeerk? You want to know why? You destroyed your once-peaceful species by sacrificing peace for power. You, and other fanatics like you, turned your race into an army. You are ruthless. You are determined. But you are a coward. When victory is impossible, you stop trying. If it looks like you can't win, you give up. We never do. We find solutions. We adapt. We die, maybe. But we never surrender the hope in our hearts and the free will of our minds, and nothing - no weapon, no torture, no Yeerk - can take that away from us.
His last unearthly howl continued, and I knew my words rang true.
You betrayed the Andalites, you betrayed the Yeerks, and now you have betrayed yourself. For your entire life has been bent on war, on victory, and now you have lost, and there is nothing more for you to live for. You enslaved me and controlled my body. But -you- are addicted to the power, the destruction, the killing. And in reality, the only one that is a slave is you, I said. You chose the wrong race to pick on, Yeerk. Humans value loyalty, freedom, and love, virtues that you have never understood and you never will. And that is why you lost.
I looked at Tobias and Rachel, together, in love, and I knew that nothing could ever take that away from them, either.
I looked at Jake, and I saw who he really was. A leader. A friend. My brother.
I looked at the Yeerk, writhing, dying... the manifest result of war's evil.
I looked at myself... my years as a host... fighting against the Animorphs physically as a Controller, but fighting for them in a way that was somehow much stronger.
Throughout the battles, the destruction, the aliens, the enemies, the betrayals, the sacrifices, the fears, the death, the sadness, the loss...
I saw darkened clouds of hatred, the thunderous march of war, acid rain of betrayal, shadowy fog of denial, a blurry horizon that gave no hint as to what might follow.
Just an illusion...
And even though there was no light to be seen yet...
I knew there was hope.
I opened my eyes.
And through the tears, I smiled.
Tom raised the Dracon beam for the last time.
Rachel was crying.
I love you, I said.
I waited...
And yet... as he squeezed the trigger... the closer Tom came to firing, the harder it seemed to become for him. His whole body tensed up... beads of sweat rolled down his forehead, as though it was an immense effort to control his fingers...
Maybe it was...
I breathed again. I had thought that war was lost forever.
I knew now that the battle for freedom continued.
Only this time, it was taking place inside a human head...
*****
(Tom)
My name is Tom Berenson.
The slug that controls my every action is the top Security Chief for the late Visser One. That evil creature has made me a prisoner. I am a slave trapped inside my own mind.
I am a Controller.
I have been for more than three years. Three years of a life that was no longer mine to be a part of.
I watched helplessly as my body was passed on to each new Yeerk. I was assimilated into the Yeerk Empire as a host. The Yeerk that infested me passed as a normal human every day. No one suspected me of being a Controller - not my friends, not even my own family. Or so I thought.
At first I didn't believe that these Yeerks had any real chance of taking over the planet. I figured that someone had to find out eventually, and alert the government, or whatever.
But I was wrong. Every day more and more humans became Controllers. Like me. Every day the Yeerk pool had more cages, more helpless host bodies, mere tools of the Yeerks. Like me.
Just a tool. Just a part. Just a machine. Only a pawn in some larger game.
The Yeerks were sweeping the human race like a tsunami, starting innocently as a small swell, then growing larger and more powerful, until by the time we would realize what was happening, it would be too late to escape.
And we, the human-Controllers, were the automatons that were making it happen against our will. We were the front seat observers of the conquering of our own species.
Those few individuals who discovered the Yeerk threat were infested or killed.
I've tried to resist the Yeerk's control. I have all but failed. Here and there, when the Yeerk was either distracted, or very emotional, rarely for a Yeerk, I could slip in and for a split second I was back in control. But then the Yeerk would regain his hold upon me, as always, and put me through mental torture as such that I had never imagined. It would taunt me. It would show me how easily it deceived real humans. It would look into my deepest memories, my hopes and dreams, shattered like glass, all crushed beneath the arrogance of this slug.
Even with the most recent turning of events, when the Animorphs, led by my brother, had come so close to winning the war, they were shown how far they really were from their victory.
Far.
The Yeerk raised the Dracon beam. Pointed it at my cousin and her fellow Animorph.
This was his victory! He was in an ecstasy of pure ruthless Yeerk triumph and arrogance unleashed. And he was both very distracted and very emotional.
Now was the time. Now was the moment.
The Yeerk tried to squeeze the contact. I resisted.
Push!
With all my might, I fought to gain control.
But my effort was in vain. For I was blindly groping at the tendrils of control that the Yeerk clutched so tightly. I couldn't see what I knew was there. Mentally, I reached out, but with a miniscule effort, the Yeerk tugged them from my grasp.
The Yeerk laughed. Foolish human! Trying to take what is rightfully mine again? Have three years taught you nothing? You are mine to command, slave! Well, this time you will pay for such disobedience with your cousin's life!
Again he attempted to fire the weapon, and all would have been lost had not the other Animorph, Tobias, said his last good bye.
I love you, he said to Rachel.
And by some miracle, he thought-spoke just loudly enough for me to hear. The Yeerk, but the real me, too.
The real me.
No!
Something snapped inside me, then. Some kind of barrier broke. This kid, this child Tobias, had been dragged from a terrible home life into an interstellar war, and he wasn't bitter or hateful. Instead, he had become a true warrior, and now, at the end of his life, he had chosen not to strike back with hate, but instead give his final sentiments to the one he loved.
I knew that I had become a mere shell of a person. And I realized that I had lost myself. I had lost my will to survive.
That act of love touched a part of me ... deep inside... a part that I had nearly forgotten in my years of slavery, a part that did not exist in the Yeerk. It touched the child deep inside, that part of everyone that loves without question, that hopes without reason, that believes in miracles. The part that most of us grow out of, and too few of us never do...
And suddenly... the light was turned on... and I could see! I no longer groped in the darkness... I knew where to reach... I stretched out again for the reins of control.
The Yeerk screamed, full of rage, Get out of the way, human!
No, I said. Not this time. This time you lose, Yeerk. This time, you die.
The Yeerk, enraged, pulled them out of my reach. I struggled for them again, but the Yeerk's evolved process of controlling domination was infinitely stronger, built into their very beings.
Foolish slave. No human has -ever- resisted the absolute control of a Yeerk. And I assure you, you won't be the first. Wave good-bye to your species, he gloated.
My body had tensed up, muscles contracted, from the strain of two intelligent beings trying to control it in very different manners. Now, against my will, the Dracon beam rose once more. I knew finally, that I was truly nothing more than a slave.
And I gave in to the Yeerk's cerebral propaganda that had haunted me for so long... I accepted the supreme truth... I was not a person... I was not a human... I was not a sentient creature... I did not care or feel... I did not hope... I did not love... my only and sole purpose was to be an instrument for my Yeerk.
The child shifted towards the background, became a foolish image of an unreal fantasy world which no longer existed...
I gave in...
As the last of my resolve faded and the Yeerk coldness rose to power, as the final conflict of Yeerk and host dwindled to nothing, as the confused mental cacophony of sound ultimately gave way to silence...
There arose a single voice.
My brother's.
I had heard it many times through a sort of filter since I had become a Controller, as the Yeerk's presence fogged it and all other input from reaching me fully. I only dimly registered the sound in the back of my mind...
"Tom."
He called my name. I mechanically noted that he was sobbing, crying, pleading. But they were influences of emotion... meaningless inflections of tone...
Emotion was nothing. Servitude was all.
"Tom."
Again and again, I listened to his voice, artificially reproduced by the Blade ship, traveling over the vast intercom gap of space between the two spacecraft. But suddenly he was much closer.
Much, much closer.
I must have imagined it. It couldn't have been real. But I swear his arms extended. He reached out for me, and I to him, and suddenly it didn't matter how far away we were anymore...
I felt it as though I was under water. I could see his hand up in the clear air, so close, but distorted, shifting. All I had to do was reach for it... but I couldn't pass through the shimmering barrier...
And then his face came into my limited view. Jake. My brother.
The last of the child had left him. He had become a general. The other extreme from Tobias. A cold, calculating, ruthless fighter.
War had destroyed what was left of the child inside him. The part of Tobias that had so touched me did not exist anymore in my brother. He had sacrificed himself for his people...
Through it all, after all his battles, all his life-and-death decisions, he could still feel sadness. The special sadness that comes from sacrificing so much, fighting so hard, and yet still watching three loved ones die.
He looked into my eyes, and I knew, I knew he had fought, lost, cried, and destroy his innocence for me. Part of Jake had still had faith in the goodness of the universe; he thought that if he fought I would be freed... and I realized that there was a child in us all. You just had to know where to look.
And now I would never be able to tell him that I understood. His last vision of me would be as a hated enemy, a destroyer, a Yeerk.
My last vision of him...
It wouldn't be as Jake the General, cold-hearted and destroyed by war. It wouldn't be like he saw me, battered and beaten, but instead it would be Jake, the believer... my brother...
I looked at his tears... they hid so much hurt, so much pain... his eyes were just an illusion, a barrier of cold steel protecting the vulnerable youth inside. If someone looked at him superficially, they would never realize the complexity of this one person, this one hero that carried the burden of war for his planet because he must. They would just see the hardened teenager, and never look into the wonderful person that he was... but just because they didn't believe there was a deeper part of Jake didn't mean that it didn't exist. They just let the illusion trick them into thinking there was nothing more to him than what was on the outside... but the real Jake inside was always there for you when you chose to believe in him. I knew. Everything else was just an illusion...
Just an illusion...
I had fought the Yeerk and lost... Jake had reached for me, but I did not have the strength to reach out for him... because... I couldn't pass through... the barrier...
Jake... the child...
No. Not a barrier...
An illusion...
The Yeerk...
Just an illusion...
I saw the child...
I reached out...
I knew what the Animorphs had gone through. All the battles fought. All the morals lost. To save Earth. To save me. And knowing that they had fought together for so long, so hard, and had lost...
I cried inside my head, closed off from the outside world, closed off from the Yeerk... and I cried. For them. For me. For the victims of war.
And gradually I became aware of a sound, soft at first, then louder, then earsplitting. It was a raging scream of denial, of disbelief. It was the Yeerk. The Yeerk who saw himself as he truly was.
A slug.
Inside... and out.
And in his fatal scream of fury, past reason, past rationality, past sanity, all he wondered was how he had lost...
You want to know how, Yeerk? You want to know why? You destroyed your once-peaceful species by sacrificing peace for power. You, and other fanatics like you, turned your race into an army. You are ruthless. You are determined. But you are a coward. When victory is impossible, you stop trying. If it looks like you can't win, you give up. We never do. We find solutions. We adapt. We die, maybe. But we never surrender the hope in our hearts and the free will of our minds, and nothing - no weapon, no torture, no Yeerk - can take that away from us.
His last unearthly howl continued, and I knew my words rang true.
You betrayed the Andalites, you betrayed the Yeerks, and now you have betrayed yourself. For your entire life has been bent on war, on victory, and now you have lost, and there is nothing more for you to live for. You enslaved me and controlled my body. But -you- are addicted to the power, the destruction, the killing. And in reality, the only one that is a slave is you, I said. You chose the wrong race to pick on, Yeerk. Humans value loyalty, freedom, and love, virtues that you have never understood and you never will. And that is why you lost.
I looked at Tobias and Rachel, together, in love, and I knew that nothing could ever take that away from them, either.
I looked at Jake, and I saw who he really was. A leader. A friend. My brother.
I looked at the Yeerk, writhing, dying... the manifest result of war's evil.
I looked at myself... my years as a host... fighting against the Animorphs physically as a Controller, but fighting for them in a way that was somehow much stronger.
Throughout the battles, the destruction, the aliens, the enemies, the betrayals, the sacrifices, the fears, the death, the sadness, the loss...
I saw darkened clouds of hatred, the thunderous march of war, acid rain of betrayal, shadowy fog of denial, a blurry horizon that gave no hint as to what might follow.
Just an illusion...
And even though there was no light to be seen yet...
I knew there was hope.
I opened my eyes.
And through the tears, I smiled.
