BIRTHRIGHT Book One: The First Key

Chapter 11

Darkness.

Suddenly, a red light flashes on, illuminating the spread-eagle shape of Alex's twisting body laying on the floor of the cylindrical operating room.

Just as quickly, the light blinks off, leaving him in complete darkness again.

A few moments later, the red light blinks back on. Alex is involuntarily writhing within the limited range of motion provided by the clumsy Zek'Hasa inhibitors on his hands and feet, and by the hefty Human clamps around his wrists and ankles.

The red light blinks off again.

As trapped as his body is by these various restraints, his mind is even more trapped within his body. He has virtually no awareness of what's happening outside of his body, and even less control over it. Could he even speak if he wanted to? This kind of mind-body separation is well beyond human science. This must be the Zek'Hasa's doing.

Alex has been laying here in this intermittent red light for what feels like hours, but with the way he's been slipping in and out of consciousness, it could just as well have been days since he was captured. He's felt his body endure the most excruciating tortures he can imagine, and yet it still continues to repair itself. But for how much longer?

He recalls the story of Prometheus. A great champion of mankind who, after bringing the gift of fire down from mount Olympus to the mortals on earth, was punished by Zeus severely. Bound to a rock, he was forced to have his insides ravaged by a great eagle each day, only to have them heal at night and be ravaged again the next day. If that's the way humans remember it, so be it. It's not so far from the truth that he'd bother correcting them.

And besides, if his ancestor Prometheus was the martyr at the dawn of mankind, then it's only fitting that Alex be punished thus at what may be its dusk.

'All my story needs now is a Heracles.' Alex thinks as the red light blinks out yet again.

With a woosh, the door opens and the room illuminates to a blinding white. With the lurch of hydraulics, the round table that Alex is bound to begins to rise up out of the smooth white floor.

Alex can tell someone or something is approaching. Has that Zek'Hasa returned?

Professor Kalkazopf sheepishly lopes toward the table, carrying a small silver case in one hand and a palm-sized device in the other. The table continues its impressive journey up from the floor as tables, monitors and intravenous drip hooks swing out from beneath it.

"Hello?" the Professor whispers cautiously as he looks around the room, quite breath-taken by the amenities and technology of this military operating room.

But there is no response from the alien.

As a hydraulic piston releases pressure from beneath the alien, the table finally rises to the proper height of an operating table. 'Or an autopsy table' the Professor notes morosely. The Professor takes a few hesitant, but anxious steps closer.

"Hello..." this time, he raises his voice to speaking volume.

Still nothing. How frustrating. He takes a few more steps, this time more confidently.

"Hello!" he yells only a foot from Alex's ear. The alien shoots up in place like a rocket. But his well-bound wrists wrench him back down with a painful crunch from his left hand. The wrist is broken.

"You bastard!" The agony in his wrist has returned some awareness of body, but Alex is raving now with no focus of what's around him. Just a confused memory of a man with a metal glove. No, not a man. Not really. The Professor instinctively recoils from the painful crunching sound as Alex continues his surprise outburst. "I'll never tell you..."

The Professor frantically darts to Alex's left hand to take a reading of his healing process with his beeping handheld device.

"I'm Professor Kalkazopf, and I'm here to answer a few questions my people have about your people." the Professor's bedside manner is the closest thing to humane manners Alex has been privy to in some time. It actually does soothe him slightly.

"The key..." he whispers, just loud enough for the Professor to make out the words. Alex's eyes are barely open at all. "The war..."

His moment of calm is a brief one, as the bones in his wrist pop back into alignment without any apparent cause or warning. Alex winces in pain, writhing on the table.

"War? No, no, no. We don't want war." Frantic concern has made it into the Professor's voice; the last thing he expected his first contact with alien life to result in was war. He scurries to the opposite side of the table to take a reading of Alex's good wrist.

Looking up to the other side of the table in surprise, Alex does a double-take back to where the Professor came in from. "Who? Where?" he asks, still in a daze and not absorbing a word the Professor is saying.

"Good lord... what was that green junk they pumped into you?" The Professor zips open one of his cases and reaches for a syringe. Measuring out a dose of a deep purple liquid and mixing it with a blue powder, the Professor draws his chemical cocktail into the hypodermic needle.

"Zek'Hasa" Alex whispers, staring off into the distance.

The Professor dismisses the unfamiliar word as an incomprehensible noise. "Whatever it was, it's still playing hell with your medulla--" the moment he injects Alex with the syringe his eyes immediately dart wide open and the Professor's scanning device begins to beep rapidly.

"Noo! Tia's in danger!" Alex's focus has returned. Whatever the Professor did, it seems to have worked.

"Tia? Tia Forest? That's the General's daughter." An extra twinkle of curiosity comes to the Professor's knowing eyes. Now might be the perfect time to pry into the information that the General seemed intent on hiding. After all, having a little leverage over a high ranking military man could come in handy if he keeps working places like this one. "Why do you care about her? The General is the man who put you here."

"She's not safe here." Alex says as he shifts his weight, leaning up to look the Professor right in the eye, locking his gaze. His focus has indeed returned.

Alex's eyes pulsate with a rhythm just like the sparks that come to life in his bloodstream. The Professor cannot look away. He feels something strangely familiar about the situation. Has he seen Alex before? No. But still, for some reason Alex's eyes are so very familiar.

"I lose her, I lose everything." Alex says solemnly. And he believes it. The Professor can see it in his eyes. In his soul.

"Love looks the same in any man's eye, doesn't it?" the Professor says as he involuntarily leans on the table, unable to break his gaze into Alex's pulsating eyes. "You are incredibly human."

Exhausted, Alex finally collapses back onto the table with a pained grunt, breaking his gaze with the Professor and the brief hypnotic trance all at once. The Professor reels back a step, blinking to regain his hold over his faculties.

"Me... human..." Alex cracks a smile as he stares up into the bright lights on the round ceiling above him. "That's a funny way of looking at it."

"It's all a matter of perspective." says the Professor as he looks at his rapidly beeping handheld scanner, his eyes taking in the information hungrily. "Tell you what... I've got some numbers to crunch here, but before I do, I'll check on Tia for you."

Alex mulls this kindness over with suspicious eyes. Why would this human help me? He thinks.

"Because, this human isn't like the others." The Professor replies aloud pointing to himself with a smile, not realizing Alex had't said his last question, he had only thought it.

Still too dazed to fully notice it himself either, Alex passes it off to his own confusion.

"You just relax, no one is going to be hurting you anymore." the Professor says in a kind demeanor that is disarming, but seemingly genuine. "I'm a friend, Alexander. Just here to learn."

Alex's firm demeanor cracks and his eyes go glassy with tears. The Professor zips up his case with a smile and touches Alex on the shoulder reassuringly before heading back the way he came. There's no obvious harm in treating this man's intentions as genuine, Alex supposes.

After all, perhaps this human really is different.