The Ivaldan Bride

Earth swirled blue and white with ocean and cloud cover as the Ivaldan armada made its initial approach. The planet was still far enough away to look like a child’s toy, a shooter marble perhaps, out in the vast black. But Kaz knew that human technology was advanced enough that it wouldn’t be long before they were spotted. That is, if they hadn’t been already.

No matter, Kaz thought, allowing his men to tap into the thought stream if they so choose, they will not be prepared for us either way.

Have you made the decision, Sir? Kazimir’s second in command, Nix, asked, his voice rising sharply in the din of thought.

Yes, Kaz replied, though of course he didn’t need to. He could simply open up the plane of his mind for Nix to see. And so he did: it was a vision of beautiful silence. Although the warships were prepped and ready to wage a bloody war, Kaz wanted to spare every life that he could. After all, they weren’t there to conquer humanity. Not exactly, anyway. They were there to co-exist peacefully alongside them.

So not a single laser would fire, not a single warhead would detonate. Instead, they would approach slowly, calmly, Kaz’s star-like ship at the forefront. And before the humans had the chance to panic, before they even knew what was about to happen, the Ivaldans would release their nanites into the world, these infinitesimally small machines, each of which could be uniquely controlled, and they would seek out sentient life. They would seek it out, they would be ingested, through breathing, through the pores, through eating, through any means necessary, and once they were ingested, they would put their host safely to sleep.

They wouldn’t drop all at once—no need for such dramatics. Instead, the nanites would remain dormant in the system, going to work only when breath and heart rate had regulated to the point where it became clear that the host had fallen asleep naturally. Then, they’d simply stay asleep and wait to be collected.

And they would be collected, each one of them. Collected, cleaned, and placed in cryogenic stasis. They would be handled gently, and with great dignity. They would be watched, monitored, cared for. Then they would be awakened one by one, until they had all been roused, slowly and over time and over many years. It was in this way, Kaz thought, that the humans and the Ivaldans could share this planet, this Earth, without waging war on each other.

They had to make it work. They had to. For the Ivaldan home planet no longer existed and Kaz and his people had nowhere else they could go.

“All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.”

― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

The dream was a pair of eyes, the kind of limpid blue I could drown in. And I awoke the way a drowning man emerges from the depths: I was pulled, sputtering and gasping, back into breath. The first thing that I saw was water; the first thing that I felt was cold. I began to tremble violently as the fluid drained out of the confining chamber in which I had been held, and I realized that I was choking around the intrusion of a tube down my throat. I tried to reach my hands up to remove it, but I was secured by two metal cuffs about my wrist, with a matching pair about my ankles.

Try to relax, someone said. No—not said. No one spoke, not a sound had been uttered. Nevertheless, I heard the words reverberating in the echo chamber of my skull, my own voice the way I speak to myself, except someone else’s words. We will remove the tube momentarily.

I tried to force myself to stop shaking, but I couldn’t help it. I blinked the fluid away, thick and viscous like gelatin or a mucous membrane, and saw that I was in a glass pod of sorts, and that there were two faces peering at me from the outside. When I felt the last of the liquid drain out at my feet, the glass pod split down the center, two panels moving outward like sliding glass doors, and a gust of air chilled my already water-cooled skin.

I was situated in an upright position, more or less, my palms up, and I blinked against the glare of the light even as a pair of hands reached forward to secure their grip on the breathing apparatus. On the count of three, the voice said into my brain. One…two…And on three, I felt the tube come up and out of my throat. I thought I might vomit, but it was just a dry heave; my throat was raw, and I when I tried to ask where I was, to demand what was going on, I found that I had no voice at all.

With the flip of a switch, my restraints were retracted, and I felt as though I might topple forward. That same pair of gentle hands reached out for me, steadied me by the shoulders until I found my footing and could venture to take a step down. My knees buckled on the way, but I was caught, cradled, and gently directed to doctor’s chair, whereupon I was directed to sit.

I blinked to clear my eyes, but I could hardly see the faces of the individuals assisting me. Were they my saviors? Had they rescued me from who—or whatever held me prisoner? Or were these, in fact, my captors?

“Who are you?” I asked, feeling lightheaded from the sudden burst of movement after spending God knows how long in that capsule. “What do you want with me?”

Relax. The voice, again. I squeezed my eyes close; I balled up my fist and pressed it to my temple.

“Get out,” I said, as loudly inside my mind as with my mouth. “Get out!”

There was silence again, blissful silence, and it was only in that silence that I was able to open my eyes fully, to get them to focus, so that I could properly take in my surroundings. It was dark, subterranean, and there was a glare on the glass in front of me. A glare from an overhead light, glinting off of a pod like the one from which I’d emerged. And inside of it: the sleepy expression of a person, A woman like me, frozen, suspended, their eyes closed, a breathing apparatus secured about their mouth. Her hair was short, and it floated in a blur of blonde around her head, caught in the viscous liquid that kept her living. The wall across from me was lined with such pods; so was the wall behind me.

But between the rows of pods was a table, stainless steel, about the length of a tall man, about the width of a wide one. And two figures on either side of it.

Humanoid, but not human. One was tall and lean, with slender limbs and skin the color of fresh baked bread. He had wide, round eyes of gunmetal grey, and his brow boasted small, but distinctly bulbous protrusions that made it look like he had a string of pearls beneath his skin instead of eyebrows. This, however, was not the strangest thing about him: from his forehead came a series of elegantly sloping horns that swept up and over the crown of his head and ended at a point at the nape of his neck.

The other bore similar characteristics, but he was stocky where his companion was lean; and he was ash grey where his fellow was light brown. This one’s eyes were blue like summer sky, and his horns had been cut short and filed to sharp points, like some sort of gruesome crown worn low on the head.

“We’ll talk to her with our mouths, then,” the thin one was saying to the stocky one. “Perhaps it will make her feel more comfortable. And, after all, we do have mouths and vocal chords, we might as well use them.”

The stocky one grumbled his displeasure but gave a sharp nod of assent all the same. I was glancing between them; I must have looked like a terrified rabbit in the clutches of a bird of prey, because both of them held up their hands as though they wanted to calm me.

“Please, do not be frightened,” the thin one said. “We mean you no harm.”

“What is this place?” I eked out. “What am I doing here?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Slim asked. Stocky crossed his arms in front of the impressive expanse of his chest and leveled me with his eyes.

I wracked my brain, trying to remember anything, anything all before this very moment, but my memory was a fog. I looked away from them, casting my gaze to the floor as I searched through the annals of my brain for anything to grab on to. Big mistake: the floor was metal grating and when I looked through it, I saw that there were countless floors below mine, without countless rows of pods. I looked up: more and more, extending as far as my eyes could make out. There was some movement on sone of the floors, no doubt where other such lost souls were ripped from stasis and shoved back into the waking world. But the entire room was eerily silent.

Except for my floor.

“Jane?” Slim urged gently. “It’s all right. It’s normal for there to be blank spots. But please, don’t worry. It’s only temporary, and you’ll find that you have the full breadth of your memory back within the next twenty-four hours.” He came forward, and he laid a hand gently on my shoulder.

“Not s’posed to touch her, Rax,” Stocky grumbled, but didn't move to stop him. Slim—or, I guess, Rax—gripped my shoulder. It was oddly reassuring.

“Just try to think,” he murmured, “what is the very last thing you remember?”

I allowed my eyes to come to a close, forced my mind to focus. At first, I could only pull snippets, images or moments, to the forefront: the feeling of my cat’s fur against my hand and how her body rumbled when she was purring; The sunlight streaming in through my kitchen window in the morning. The taste of coffee, sitting down at my kitchen table, switching on the news.

And then the scene came alive inside my mind, like a movie projected onto the screen on the back of my eyelids. I was there, in my kitchen. My old orange cat Apostrophe was laying on her back on the kitchen table. I sat down, I sipped my coffee, I rubbed her belly and I switched on the news. “A team of NASA scientists have confirmed that the unidentified celestial body, or UCB, is in fact on a collision course trajectory with earth. But according to their calculations, the object should mostly burn up as it enters our atmosphere and is not large enough to cause an extinction level event. It looks like it will touch down somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and that coastal communities should begin to evacuate in the coming days, in case of tidal waves from water displacement. NASA released an official statement this morning, saying—”

And I switched the television off. I rose to my feet and padded in bare feet across the old linoleum of my kitchen and peered headed for the window. I perched myself on the windowsill and lifted a hand to draw back the white lace curtains my grandmother had made for me, so that I could peer out and look at the sky. Apostrophe hopped into my lap and started to sniff at my chin with her cold, wet little nose; her tongue flicked out and was sandpaper against my skin. But this was my memory: there, in the sky, in broad daylight, a perfectly spherical object that looked like the moon in daytime, except without a single shadow where the moon’s craters were. Just round, a perfect star, a little bigger than it was yesterday, which was a little bigger than the day before that.

When Rax pulled his hand away, the memory vanished, and I wondered if he had been feeding it to me somehow, wondered if it were truly my own. I furrowed my brow and looked at him; he gave a barely perceptible nod of his head. “The star,” I said. “That was you.”

“That was us,” he confirmed.

“How…” I looked around me: countless floors above me and countless floors below. “How long have I been asleep?”

Rax cast a glance back at his stocky compatriot and was met with a simple shrug. Rax cleared his throat, a small pink tongue darting out over lips the same pale brown as his skin. “Nine years,” he replied. “Nine years.”

I went dizzy; everything went sort of fuzzy around the edges, and I teetered where I stood. Rax caught me by the elbow and led me to the stainless-steel table, which lowered itself with a mechanical groan so that I might sit upon it. I did sit, for lack of a better option, and tried to focus on my breathing so as not to hyperventilate. Nine years.

“Where am I?” I demanded, trembling either from the cold or from a surge of adrenaline: my fight or flight response had kicked in. “And what are you?” I hugged my arms tight around me, noticing for the first time that I was clad in something like a bathing suit, that was high around the neck, but left my limbs uncovered. It was forest green in color, and whatever material it was made out of was already dry, though my hair was not. I felt it, cold and damp against my forehead.

“You are in one of the hundreds of thousands of life sustaining chambers across the globe,” Rax said.

“Slumber cells, we call’s ‘em,” said the stocky one, and I peered past Rax to furrow my brow at him. Rax shot a glare his way before turning his attention to me.

“All will reveal itself in due course,” Rax murmured, patting my hand. “For now, we would like to make sure that you’re healthy, and ready for relocation.”

“Relocation?” I echoed. “Where am I going?”

“That isn’t for me to say,” Rax replied, manipulating some sort of small device in his hand. Where it had come from, I had no earthly idea. I knew only that one minute there was nothing there, and the next…“But there isn’t anywhere for you to comfortably sleep here.”

“Not outside the cryo pods, at any rate,” the Stocky one chimed in.

“So we want to get you on your way as quickly as possible.”

“But I—”

“Jane,” Rax said, looking pointedly down into my face, “I know you have a million questions. But I don’t have all the answers you want. So, please, let me do my job, and then, I promise you, I will make sure that you are brought to someone who can make everything clear to you. All right?”

I swallowed hard and could do nothing but nod my head.

“Thank you,” Rax said, and proffered a smile. “Now, would you please lay back?”

I wasn’t afraid of Rax—nor of the other one, though I hadn’t exactly warmed to him either—and I felt oddly at ease as I did as he bid me. I laid myself down on the table, clutching my hands oddly together at my sternum, my eyes darting furtively around me as Rax towered overhead, beginning his ministrations.

It began with my jumpsuit dissolving on my skin. No, that isn’t the right word—it broke down into pieces, no larger than the head of a pencil, and moved down and away from my body my body. But not entirely, just in certain places. I lifted my head up and peered down the length of my body, seeing that the fabric had fallen away around where I’d busted my knee open falling off of my bike, and around the scar I had from when I got my appendix out. And in smaller places, too: around where I sliced my arm open on a tin can, around the cat-scratch scar on my shoulder. And other, smaller places: around moles, and scars and imperfections that I could not identify. I pressed my fingertips to the fabric, to see if I could determine what it was made of, but it felt like polyester to me. But polyester couldn’t do what this fabric was doing. The holes created by the movement of the tiny bits and pieces were not smooth-edged, but jagged, opening just enough to look at whatever imperfection they were revealing.

“What is this stuff?” I asked, and Rax smiled a little even as the other one grumbled in disapproval.

“None’a the other ones talk so bloody much,” he gruffly intoned.

“These are nanites,” Rax said by way of explanation, even as he bent over me to look intently at the openings in my jumpsuit. “They are highly complex individual robotic machines that work in unison with one another.”

“Extraordinary,” I said, reaching tentatively out to poke at the pile of nanites that had collected at my side. They felt like fish roe on my fingertips, gave slightly when I applied pressure to them, then resumed their initial shape when I pulled away. “We had been exploring technology like this but were decades away from anything even half so sophisticated. What else can they do?”

Rax paused in his examination to look me in the eye and smiled. “You are not afraid of us.” It wasn’t a question; it was an observation. And I shook my head.

“No, I’m not.”

“Good. That is good.” He patted me on the arm and took in a deep breath of air. “We do not come with vocal chords, our people,” he said by way of answering my last question. “But it tends to frighten your kind when we speak to you telepathically, so we have designed voice boxes for ourselves comprised of these very same nanites. They allow us to speak to you the way you speak to each other.” I blinked, owlish, my awe written plainly on my face. “Furthermore,” Rax continued, “they can identify an anomaly or imperfection, which is why they have moved away so that I can examine you.”

He gestured to the appendectomy scar. “Would you like me to remove this scar for you?” he asked. “I am able to smooth it out, as though you’d never had it.”

I furrowed my brow, considering. But I’d been sixteen when I had my appendix out—that scar felt like a part of the landscape of my body. “No,” I said at last, “just leave it.”

“As you like,” Rax said, and the nanites gathered a neat line, no thicker than a piece of thread, and knit themselves up into the fabric over my scar until it disappeared. “This mole, however,” he said, indicating a dark spot of melanin on my ribcage, “will turn cancerous some forty years from now, so why don’t we just save you the trouble, hm?”

I blinked, and nodded, and the nanites marched forward, covered the mole, and marched back again. And when they did, it was gone. I hadn’t felt a thing—not a pinch, no stinging, nothing.

“Well, Jane,” he said, patting me gently on the shoulder, “you appear to be in excellent health—you may sit up now.” And I did, even as the tiny armies of nanites knit up the rest of my jumpsuit. “Permit me to ask you a personal question, if you will.”

“Go on.”

“Do you plan on procreating?”

“Jeez, Rax, maybe a little dinner, a little wine, maybe we get to know each other first…” I teased, mostly because I was feeling uncomfortable. But he just smiled his sweet, complacent smile and I saw that my lame attempt at a joke had been lost on him. “Um, yeah. I guess. One day? With the right guy, or whatever.”

“Excellent,” he said.

“Why?”

“We factor in your desires when we place you. Your health, your desires, your history and temperament. We want you to be happy.”

“Not all of us care so much,” grumbled the other one, and Rax shot him a dirty look. I wondered if perhaps they weren’t speaking silently in one another’s heads the entire time.

“Well, I care, at any rate,” Rax went on. “I care very much.”

“Why?” I asked. “If we’re…your prisoners. Your slaves, even—”

“You most certainly are not our slaves,” Rax said, offended. “We want nothing more than to peacefully co-exist with your species.”

“And inter-breed,” the other interjected. This garnered another dirty look from Rax. “No point in keeping it from her,” he added with a shrug.

“Please, Jane, trust me when I tell you that you will not be made to do anything you do not want to do,” Rax said, holding out his hand to help me down off the table.

“Except you can never go home again,” the other one said, almost grinning, “can never return to your own life. Probably won’t see your people no more. But, hey, welcome to the invasion.”

I turned to peer at the stocky one, my head canted gently to the side. “What is your name?” I asked. “I want to know who I’m complaining about when I fill in the customer satisfaction survey.”

The stocky one grumbled and turned away, and Rax took me gently by the elbow and led me down the corridor, my bare feet pressing uncomfortably against the grated metal flooring. “Please do not let him frighten you,” Rax said. “He’s just…a brute. He’s here as muscle, which I told them I did not need, but they insisted.” Rax walked with me to the far end of the corridor, past twenty or so cryo pods with sleeping human faces that I tried not to look at, and pushed the button for an elevator. When it arrived, we stepped on together, leaving the Muscle where he was, alone amongst the countless faces.

“Where are we going?” I asked, as we plunged down, down at a speed high enough to make my stomach come up into my throat.

“We are relocating you, as promised,” Rax said. “I’ve suggested, given your history and interests, that you be placed in a great house, where you will be responsible for the education of a band of Ivaldan children—some of the last.”

“What happened to the rest of the children?” I asked, crossing my arms tightly under my breasts.

Rax smiled. “They grew up,” he said. “And there were few females to have any more of them.” The elevator slowed, stopped, and dinged its arrival, and Rax stepped off, gesturing down another hallway. I moved slowly, with great caution, wondering if I might at any moment wake from this strange dream.

“You know I was a teacher, then?” I asked, glancing around me: metal walls, a metal floor, a maze of metal.

“Yes. Earth sciences—is that correct?” I gave a sharp nod of my head. “It will be good to orient our young ones to the special conditions of this planet, as it is to be their home as well.”

We reached a door and stopped. But before he could open it, I turned around to face him. “Were we all asleep? All of us?”

“Yes,” Rax confirmed.

“Why?” I searched his face for any glint of remorse on behalf of his people and found none.

“Because,” he said, “we wanted to avoid a bloody war that would have resulted in countless casualties on both sides. We put you to sleep, and we continue to wake you slowly. We began with maintenance workers—sanitation workers, men in power plants, anyone who took care of your basic infrastructure. Then, we awakened some of your leaders—and a few of them, we put back to sleep. Now, more and more of you, every day. We show you that we do not wish you harm. We show you what technological advances we bring, what diseases we’ve eradicated, how we’ve reversed the trends that would have destroyed your planet. And we hope that you will agree to live peacefully with us—or, as peacefully as ever you lived with one another.” He reached around me then and opened the door: it was a little screening room, and there was a smattering of other people in there, just like me, wearing jumpsuits and glassy expressions.

“Have a seat, Jane,” Rax said. “And good luck to you.”

“Wait—” I began to protest, but Rax had disappeared out the door. And I watched as the door handle from the inside dissolved into its component nanite parts, and filed in a line, like neat marching ants, beneath the crack in the door.

Sighing, I turned and found a seat in an empty row, trying to give myself the space to determine for myself what I thought of all this. Obviously, there was the low-grade panic, that my life as I knew it was over, that I might never see friends or loved ones again, and also where was my cat? But they had not hurt me. They’d imprisoned me, yes, but I didn’t know it, and then they’d let me go.

But were they influencing me, intracranially, at this very moment? Could I even trust my own mind? I felt a cold sweat break out at my hairline, and closed my eyes, trying to get myself to focus on my breath. When I opened my eyes again, there was a blond girl in the row in front of me, and she turned to look back at me, the same fear and panic written on her face as I’m sure was written on mine.

“Are you all right?” She asked in a whisper.

“Yes,” I confirmed, conspiratorial. “Are you?”

She nodded, her ponytail bouncing, just as the lights in the screening room dimmed and a video projection came to life in front of us. It was the face of the President of the United States, Helen Burns, whose kind blue eyes looked as calm as ever, her grey hair pulled into a neat bun at the nape of her neck. But wait—I’d been asleep for nine years. Shouldn’t someone else be President by now?

“Good morning,” she said, “and welcome back. I am here today to put you at ease.” It wasn’t a video at all—it was a live feed. “I am connected with fifty-seven different screening rooms across the country today, and I am here to answer any questions you might have about our current situation. But before I field your questions, let me begin by saying that the United States Government is working cooperatively with Ivaldan administration, and we have come to a peaceful accord. There has been no bloodshed between us, and we all prefer to keep it that way.”

The President went on to explain that hers was now a diplomatic post: she had stepped down after her two terms, per usual, and the people had elected a much more conservative successor in her place, one William Thackeray. She explained that we had not lost nine years of our lives, we had been put into a stasis, paused as it were, and that there was much to learn about the intervening years. Life had gone on very much as usual, except for the whole alien invasion thing. But the Ivaldans had integrated themselves into society, living largely in warmer climates all over the planet. They paid taxes, worked jobs, raised families, attended schools, and in exchange, they shared with us the secrets of the technology. “The world,” President Burns said, “is a very different place. But you will find that many things have much improved, and those that have not, we will work together to make better.” She even looked as though she genuinely believed all of it. “Now,” she breathed, “I will take one or two questions.”

“Why didn’t we fight them?” The girl with the blond ponytail demanded. “Why did we just let them come in and take what was ours?”

“Because,” the President replied, “their technology vastly outperforms our own. They could have annihilated us utterly. And what’s more, they didn’t want to fight, and neither did we. We came to a peaceful solution instead.”

There were more questions from other people in various screening rooms across the country, and we could hear their voices boom over the overhead speakers in the room, but I was feeling overwhelmed by the immensity of it all. I had gone to sleep nine years ago, and I had awakened to a new universe, one wherein aliens were not only real, but here. Among us. Alongside us or ruling us.

When the image of the President went off, and the lights came up again, doors at the opposite end of the room from which I’d entered opened up and all dozen or so us filed out, our movements slow and sonorous. Well, I thought, we have all just gotten up from what amounts to a very long nap, and no one has yet had the good grace to offer us coffee.

We moved down a hallway like rats in a maze: there was no way to go but forward. And so, on we went, more metal halls, more metal floors, until we reached more metal doors. I sort of stayed instinctively by the blond with the ponytail, perhaps because she’d spoken to me, but once we were out the doors, we were shuttled into different vehicles, and I was alone again. Welcome, Jane, a robotic voice said, and off we shot like a bullet from a gun before I’d even had the chance to get myself strapped in.

“Is this a self-driving car?” I wondered aloud. Yes, came it’s soothing, fake female voice.

“Ok,” I said, sitting back and watching the scenery zoom by. “Where are you taking me?”

Jane Lockewood, it said. Destination: Thornfield Hall.