Mimic and the Journey Home

Memories in Gridlock

“So…this is what you looked like?” Gonzales said. “When Higgens first found you?”

“Actually, it was more of her finding me.”

Mimic paid no attention to either of us, staring intently at the mini-mimic she had brought onto the ship. Bahn had it contained in a small field not unlike the containment unit Giomatti had tried to keep her in. I was a bit worried about bringing it onto the ship, but I knew that I needed to trust her. Mimic had put her stock in me for so long, this was the least I could do.

“I need you to put on the ship’s shields,” Mimic said finally.

“Wait, what now?” Ciangi asked. “We’re on the ground. And there’s no one attacking us. And an energy spike like that will definitely alert that alien, goopy thing we saw that we’re here.”

“I need the shields on now,” she repeated, her tone much more tense than before. “I need to talk to it and I can’t since it’s already receiving a signal.”

“Wait, signal? What signal?”

“It’s something I’ve been hearing since I was in that cave. At first, I thought it was the children using a language I didn’t understand. But now I know exactly what it is.”

But Gonzales wasn’t having any of it. “Wait, children? And you know what what is? When did you lose your ability to speak normally?”

“Shields. Now.”

It wasn’t a request and I didn’t think I had ever heard her use that tone of voice before. “Hey, let’s just do what Mimic asks. She’ll explain when she’s ready.”

Gonzales shrugged but thankfully didn’t seem to be in an argumentative mood. “Fine. I just like to know why I’m doing something as I do it. That’s why I’m an engineer.” She crossed over to the console and pulled up what I recognized as the security command board. A few seconds later, I could feel the hum of the engines change and the pitch shifted ever so perceptibly. “The shields are up.”

I opened my mouth to give Mimic the go-ahead, but she was already nearly doubled over, her face almost pressed against the containment field. She was murmuring something, but her voice was so low and her words were so fast that I didn’t have a hope of understanding it.

“I know that we’ve seen quite a bit in our short time together,” Bahn said, carefully grabbing his data pad from a console and typing something in. “But this strikes me as decidedly odd.”

“Yeah, I’m creeped out a little,” Ciangi admitted.

Then, as if Mimic had been studying comedic timing, her human face melted away, leaving only the black, shiny surface that comprised her true form. Little tendrils spiked out of the darkness, almost like a cross between audio waves and tentacles.

“Okay, change that to creeped out a lot. Is that necessary?”

“I’m sure whatever Mimic is doing needs to be done.”

“What about a tentacle face is necessary in this situation?” Gonzales asked, although she looked more amused than horrified.

“I don’t know, I’m not the shapeshifter. We’ll have to ask her when she’s done… doing whatever it is she’s doing.”

“I’m talking to it.” That was distinctly Mimic’s voice, but there were no lips on her onyx face. No tongue. No eyes. Only the polygonal obsidian and angular tendrils.

“Um, how are you talking to us?”

“Through my mouth, as is customary to your species.”

“Um…where is your mouth?”

“I’m a shapeshifter. It’s wherever I want it to be. I need you all to be quiet, you’re scaring the baby.”

“The bab-- Oh. Right. Shhh.”

We fell into a very tense silence for several moments before Mimic finally began to speak to us again, although I still had no idea where her voice was coming from and I tried not to think about it.

“That creature, the alien we saw, he is part of the reason my people were in space to begin with.”

“Come again?”

“He crashed here, millennia ago, knocking several mountains greater than the one we were on into the atmosphere. A few of my people were on those chunks and I suppose you could say the rest is history.”

“So what, you guys just drifted through space until you were caught in the gravitation pull of that asteroid belt?”

“Yes, it would seem so.”

“And what, that little baby shifter told you all that?”

“Of course not. It has no idea what gravitational pull is. I was merely pulling context from its mind.” She stood, but she kept her fingers splayed out to either side of the containment field, as if still connected to the mini-mimic. “My people have a sort of…communal memory. Some things must be learned, but some things are engrained into our DNA. I can tap into these memories, while this youngling is too premature to do so.”

“But if you have communal memory, why didn’t your people know this?”

“Perhaps they did once, but through the centuries, it proved to be irrelevant to our evolution and was phased out.”

“Wish I could phase out some of my memories,” Gonzales muttered. I sent her a look begging her to lay off the quips for now. She rolled her eyes, but then nodded.

“So, these mimics kept the memories because they were still relevant to them. Which makes sense considering that the alien is still here.”

“And using them,” Mimic continued. “It is…grossly uncomfortable how similar the creature’s story is to our own. After it crash landed on this planet, the crew tried desperately to get themselves back home. But between the predators and weather and entirely incompatible atmosphere, they all died out. Except for one.

“They knew that they would never survive as it was, so they began to make…alterations to their body.”

“Alterations? Alterations like what?”

“I… The little one doesn’t know how to describe it, nor can I decipher it from their fragmented memories.” She tilted her head as if listening harder, and it was uncanny considering she was still completely faceless. “But I do know the alien was a…engineer, of sorts. It fused parts of itself into the ship, changing, improving, re-forging, until it was able to eke out some sort of existence. But there was still the matter of the great beasts that wandered this planet, and how to fix its ship since it no longer was a mobile creature as it had been before.”

“What predators? All I could find on the scanners were lifeforms smaller than your standard human hand.”

“Exactly. From what I could tell, the alien captured one of this guy’s little ancestors and experimented on it. It was able to figure out the sub-harmonic frequency at which we communicate and exploit that. It developed a system where it could issue commands, commands that normally adults would issue and juveniles would follow until they were able to understand their own genetic memory and mimic ability.”

“And what did the adults do?”

A dark expression crossed her face. “They died. The first order the alien gave was for the juveniles to kill all of the adults. The adults didn’t try to resist, and were wiped out within a few weeks.”

“Oh my gosh, Mimi. I’m…I’m so sorry.”

She shook her head. “It…it’s fine. These are just memories; they cannot hurt me. They can’t…” She trailed off, her voice growing weaker until her words weren’t audible at all. Her human face slid into place and when it did, I could see fresh tear tracks down her cheeks. “I can see their pain. They could have easily beaten their children, but they couldn’t bring themselves to do it. They knew they would be murdered but they wouldn’t raise a hand against those they loved.”

I didn’t even have to think about it, I automatically stepped forward and gently pulled her into a hug. She clung to me, burying her head into my shoulder with very quiet sobs.

“The alien enslaved them. All of them. He murdered their parents so he would be the only voice for all their lives.”

“I really, really am taking this emotional moment seriously,” Ciangi said, sounding sheepish but curious. “But if they were juveniles centuries ago, wouldn’t they eventually grow up and stage some sort of rebellion?”

“Much like feral human children who have been denied the proper contact to become functioning adults, these children have all been suppressed. Both mentally and physically. They’re all starving, and their command of our language is…rudimentary at best. The alien uses them to collect the materials it needs to repair the ship and feed it. It is hard to say where one task ends and the other begins, but it’s an endless march.”

“So how do we free them?” I asked.

Mimic pulled away, looking at me with watery eyes. “You want to free them?”

“Of course. These are your people. We’re not just going to take off and try to find somewhere nicer to live when your entire race is being used as some sort of brainwashed slave labor.”

“But you could die.”

“Yeah, I suppose. But by this point, I feel like we could’ve died on about half of our endeavors.”

“You’re not wrong there,” Gonzales added. “Besides, I think if there’s one thing I’ve learned from ol’ Higgens here, it’s that he never passes up the chance to be a hero.”

“What?” I objected. “That’s not true.”

This time, it was everyone in the group except Mimic who gave me a look.

“Higgens, you are possibly the only person I’ve ever met who would find alien life that looks more like a spikey pincushion than an actual living thing and immediately care for it instead of informing the rest of the world that you just found proof of new life.”

“What? Come on, you guys wouldn’t have done the same?”

“I definitely would not have,” Bahn answered quickly. “My first instinct would have been to contain it, study it, and present it to the scientific community.”

“You know that ‘it’ you’re talking about is Mimi, right? Your friend?”

“But she wasn’t any of our friends then. And while I definitely would have tested for sentience, to me, science would have come first.” Bahn’s face was serious but not unkind as he continued. “You’re the only person on the ship that she could have met and had her story come out as it did. You’re one in a million, just like her.”

“I think we’re getting a little sidetracked here,” Gonzales said, coming up from behind us and clapping me on the back. I was grateful for the reprieve. I didn’t like thinking of myself as some reckless hero. I was just a janitor, after all.

…a janitor that made friends with aliens, hopped to the opposite side of the universe, planned mutinies, and now wanted to start a full-on rebellion. Oh, and was developing a knack for engineering grunt work.

“The point is,” the weapons engineer continued, “Higgens won’t let us leave with your people enslaved, so instead of hemming and hawing about what we’re going to do and how great our friend is, why don’t we jump to the part where we start planning what we’re going to do.”

The coin twins exchanged looks with each other for a long moment before their gazes finally moved to me. Mimic wasn’t paying attention to any of us. She removed herself from my arms and was staring at the mini-mimic again.

“Alright,” Ciangi said finally. “We’re in.”

“I knew it,” Gonzales said, holding up her hand in a high five. However, neither of the twins returned it. “Okay, we’ll just save that for later.”

I crossed my own arms and steeled myself for what might come. “So,” I said after a deep breath. “Who has the first idea to kick off this rebellion?”