7
JAX IS REALLY ALIVE
Chapter 2 Recap
Tara tries to prove to Jax that she's Tara by kissing him. He feels like she's Tara, but when she refuses to sleep with him, he wonders if he's in hell.
Tara reveals she's an alien from another planet.
CHAPTER 3 Origin
Earlier Jax had tried shaking his head to clear it. It hadn't worked. Harsher methods were needed. Jax slapped himself in the face a couple of times.
"Wake up, Jax," he ordered himself. "Wake up!"
Tara burst into laughter.
"It's really fun seeing you off your game," she said.
"There's got to be a better explanation. This has to be a dream. Or maybe I was on Death Row and I volunteered for some crazy medical experiment and this is it."
"Or you're in hell with a slightly off version of Tara; one that won't have sex with you."
"I knew it. I am in hell."
"You can take off your disguise. We haven't seen anyone for twenty minutes. Here we go off road. We're almost there."
Tara turned the SUV off the road and continued driving in the rugged mountain area along a narrow dirt trail.
"It's not that complicated once you get past the aliens landing on earth bit. About seventy-five years ago in our time, there was a planet called Rackle with two countries separated by an ocean. They each were roughly the size of Texas. Sliven had a population of a million or so. Paralorn only had a population of half a million, but they were more advanced technically. The two countries had been at war for decades mostly over air pollution. The Slivens did a lot of manufacturing that produced a lot of hazardous chemicals. They dealt with the problem by building a domed city for them all to live in. The Paralorns wanted to use technology to reduce the pollution but that would require cooperation from the Slivens.
"Finally, they signed a peace treaty. Paralorn devoted itself to exploring space and tech advances. Sliven made weapons. They claimed they were worried about Paralorn leading enemies back to the planet with all their space exploration. Some of the Paralorns knew what was going to happen, but the government—apparently the most incompetent president and legislature in the country's history—saw rainbows and peace."
"I think I know this next part. The Slivens used their weapons to take what the Paralorns had," Jax said.
"Close. The Slivens told the Paralorns that if they didn't give up their country, they would detonate this atmosphere destroying weapon and kill them all. The government was overthrown and the former king and queen returned to power. Even before that, the King and Queen were working on a plan. They built underground tunnels with everything they would need to get through a massive atmospheric attack.
"They also had their spaceships, but there wasn't enough room for everyone. They had four ships each capable of holding five thousand people. Some volunteered to stay and then they used a lottery system to determine who got spaceship seats. The King stayed with the underground group. The Queen went with one of the ships. She took with her multiple embryos for everyone who wanted to contribute. They are pretty advanced with their in vitro techniques and they wanted their civilization and genetic line to continue. They also hoped to either find a planet for them all to live on or a planet to stay on until it was safe to go back."
"OK," Jax said, rubbing his temples. "I've got it so far. The space ships are looking for a planet and they find earth."
"Right. Earth was a perfect match. The plan was for the embryos to be implanted in Paralorn surrogates, but the embryos never made it past the three month mark. The Paralorn couples were infertile here. The Queen decided to implant the embryos into earth women. That's kind of creepy," Tara said.
"So those people I saw on talk shows when I was in prison who said they got abducted by aliens were telling the truth?"
"Maybe. The Paralorns heard the alien stories so they fed into them. They used robots that looked like all the alien drawings. They use a memory erase technique, but it isn't perfect. They decided to use in vitro only on pregnant women. They didn't want to impregnate a woman who wouldn't be able to explain the pregnancy."
"So, did the women have twins?"
Tara shook her head.
"That's what they expected, but the woman all had one child. They looked at the child's DNA and it matched back to the birth parents. They thought that it had all been a failure until one of these babies died from a fall. The baby returned to life a few hours later. This was more than sixty years ago, so they called it a miracle.
"When the baby came back it surprised the Paralorns too. The baby's DNA matched the parents when it was born. After the baby came back to life, the DNA didn't come back to the parents anymore. It matched back to the Paralorn embryo's parents. The only difference was the hybrid stops aging after age thirty-two or the age when they died whichever is greater. The hybrid also has an increased lifespan, which matches the Paralorns. They live to between three hundred and fifty to four hundred years old."
"So you died and came back?"
"Yes. My egg donor mother is the Queen and my father is the King. I call the Queen Meg kind of a mash up of mom and egg. She and a couple of others grabbed me as soon as I was shoved into cold storage at the coroner's office. She stopped time, so it was easy. The coroner's office had already lost one body a few weeks ago, so when I turned up missing, they did what all incompetent government agencies do, they lied and covered it up. The coroner's report was completely made up. They figured I was a victim of biker violence and no biker would testify or provide info and they figured you would take care of justice."
"So you are an alien in Tara's body?"
"No. I'm a hybrid. I'm both equally. Instead of having two biological parents, I have four. If I hadn't been killed and died naturally, then the alien half would never have come out. Now, I can come back from a major injury, but if the coroner had sliced me up and removed my organs to weigh them, that would have been fatal. We aren't invincible. The human part rebuilds thanks to the alien part. The best part is that humans see me as not quite Tara. I look a lot like her, but once that alien side comes out they don't recognize me anymore even though I look exactly the same."
"That's why I don't completely recognize you," Jax suggested.
"No, that's not why. I don't know why. There's a lot we don't know about what happens because we—they—I can never figure out which one to use—don't want to destroy any of the embryos with research. There was a massive power failure on the ship and all except seventy-five or so embryos were lost. On Paralorn, the people don't have powers like they have here. Meg and I can stop time. No one else can do that. It's possibly something about earth that causes these powers to manifest and something unique to our genetic structure. We don't have the equipment or specimens to do much research. So it's a lot of guess work."
Jax ran his hand over his stubble again and shook his head.
"I never could have imagined this. It doesn't feel real."
"There's just one more big piece of information . . ."
"Let me guess," Jax interrupted. "I'm also an alien."