Mimic and the Journey Home

Over-hyping the Finale

I had a strange combination of emotions as we flew in a beeline right toward the scanner’s destination. A bit of it was a surreal level of accomplishment. After everything that we had been through, some dumb janitor who was born on a backwater colony had managed to not only discover our first definitive proof of alien life, but to reunite her with her people after wrongfully destroying her home.

But at the same time… I was realizing that we were about to drop my best friend on a planet that might not support human life. After all, we weren’t nearly close enough to get an actual reading on its atmosphere. I couldn’t go home either, so was I just going to be stuck in an orbit life, only to occasionally drop down to visit Mimic planet-side with all of her shifter friends? Would she even want to be friends when she was with her people again?

The knot in my stomach only grew as we navigated closer, with more and more worrisome thoughts cropping up. Such as, what was I going to do with my life, would there be room for us on Mimic’s new planet, and what would we do if the scanner turned out to be incorrect and we had to recalibrate?

When it was time to sleep that night, Mimic and I both curled up in my bed, me cocooned in blankets and her just lying there, completely motionless as she always was when she rested. She was looking a little softer these days, less whittled down by the unforgiving clutches of starvation. I found myself staring at her, taking in each and every feature. It was probably a silly thing to do considering her face could change into whatever she wanted at any time, but it didn’t matter. Mimic had changed my life. In no small way either. And now that we could possibly be parting ways, I found myself worrying that I would never see that face again.

But still… I was supposed to be happy for her, right? And I guessed I was, but that happiness was having a hard time keeping up with all the worry and fears. I had spent so much of my life being friendless, and now that I had stalwart companions, I didn’t want to let a single one of them go.

Oh well. It wasn’t like I was going to come to any sort of definitive conclusion before our sleep cycle. We would be arriving at the planet in another four hours, and then the short-range, planetary scanner would find us a landing spot and any preliminary information about the environment that we might need to know.

Once we woke up, it would be the grand finale of our little journey.

…but what if I didn’t want it to end?

“Everyone ready?” Gonzales asked, her fingers hovering over the controls of the landing ship. It was just different enough from the other vessel we had been stranded on for a week for everything to be uncomfortable, like someone had come into my room and moved everything an inch to the left.

“Ready,” Mimic said, practically bouncing in her seat. At least she was happy, and her obvious excitement made me smile as well.

“Alright, shape-shifty-Mcgee, let’s go say hi to your people.”

The engines hummed and then we were gently flying out of the hangar bay. It was certainly much different than our last frantic escape from the ship, but my heart wasn’t beating any less hard. What was waiting for us on this strange new planet?

I supposed I was going to find out very soon.

For the first time since we had met, our flight was neither hurried, tense or fraught with danger. We descended through the atmosphere without trouble and landed right where the nav had set out for us.

Once the ship was settled, Gonzales hit the proper sequence for a landing rest and then we were all suiting up for our exit.

“I am confused,” Mimic said as the rest of us donned our enviro-suits. “I thought the scanner said the atmosphere was quite livable for humans. Why are you putting on such protections?”

“The atmosphere is livable, but the foliage or fauna could be less than pleasant. You remember that nasty creature you fought off during our first visit? Who says there aren’t bigger ones here?”

“I doubt there are. My people deal with predators…remarkably well.”

“Really?” I asked. “I was under the impression that your people were entirely peaceful.”

“We prefer it that way, but when life does not give us a choice, we will defend ourselves. It’s always a last measure, of course. Mostly, we’re happy if we can just eat. Before I met you, eating was ninety percent of my daily function. The other ten percent was thinking about eating.”

“I can identify with that,” Gonzales said. “Last night, I had this amazing dream about tostones made from Earth-grown plantains. That’s pretty much all I’ve been able to think about today. Oh, and uh, getting you back to your people, of course.”

We all laughed at that before Mimic gave a dutiful nod.

“Yes. It is time. Come, my friends, let’s take this final step of our journey together.”

In a bittersweet gesture, we all joined hands. Standing in a line, the five of us waited for the hangar door to slide open then the ramp to descend before walking forward into the light.

The planet was beautiful, that was for sure. Much different from the comet home we had originally pulverized. It reminded me of pictures I had seen of Earth, lush and green and full of all sorts of animal sounds. Far different from the colony I had been raised on.

“Wow,” Mimic murmured. “This is nothing like my last home.”

“I guess your people have gotten a bit of an upgrade.”

“Maybe one day, thousands of years ago, one of our space colonies was knocked out of orbit and landed here. My people do not have any form of inter-celestial object communications, so we would have never known. Never…cared, really.”

That last part seemed to bother her, but I wasn’t about to let her put a damper on what should be one of the happiest moments of her life in recent memory. “Hey, none of that now. You’ve found your people. This is a happy day.”

“Right. Supposing I actually find them.”

We looked around, unsure of which direction to go. “Well, east or west then?”

Mimic craned her neck, her eyes flashing several different colors. I guessed that maybe she was changing their structure to view the world in different ways, but she didn’t explain one way or the other before taking off to the east.

We followed her without question, our eyes all busy surveying the area while our hand-held scanners were set to find deposits of minerals that Mimic could eat. We figured that if her people were anywhere, it would be near food.

We trudged on for hours, saying nothing, seeing everything. The plants were truly beautiful, and my scanner beeped occasionally about edible ones. At least if we were stranded here in permanent exile, we would have plenty of different options for building our own sustainable farm.

I could see it now. The four of us settling into everyday life as we invented different things to make our own mini-colony, visiting Mimic and her shapeshifting relatives at least once a week while we ate totally non-compatible dinners. It was a nice vision, and I couldn’t help but find myself wishing that was exactly how all of this would pan out.

“There!” Mimic cried suddenly, tearing me from my reverie.

I blinked and turned my head to see that she was suddenly dashing off, disappearing between thick, flowered vines. The four of us exchanged looks before tearing after her.

I had no idea where we were going, or what she had seen, but I trusted her, so I sprinted along blindly, enviro-suit squeaking as I did.

But then, as suddenly as our chase had started, it ground to a halt and I barely had time to kill my speed to avoid crashing into a suddenly very still Mimic.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

But her eyes were affixed on something ahead of her. Squinting, I looked into the distance to see some sort of black cliff, shimmering in the light. It was only after several steps that I realized it wasn’t the rock itself that was ebony, but rather the light glinting off of hundreds of thousands of little mimic bodies.

“My gods,” Bahn breathed. “It’s them.”

Mimic let out a screech that sounded like it might have been something in her own language, and ran forward again, arms outstretched. She shifted as she went, until she was once more the large dog-sized version of her dark, miasmic, spikey self.

She reached the base of the mountain in just a few short seconds, us following behind her with massive grins. I could hear her excited chirping even from where I was, while she danced in a small circle. Her joy was obvious, even in such an alien form, and it was entirely infectious.

Except…none of the mini-mimics reacted.

As the four of us humans drew closer, I realized just how small they were. Even smaller than Mimic when I had first met her. They just continued on, marching in a very dedicated line toward something that we couldn’t see.

Joy quickly turned to worry, then to heartbreak as Mimic’s cheerful cries slowly lowered in tone until they were nothing but a shaking warble. I wanted to intervene, but I also knew it wasn’t my place until I was invited.

After several tortuous moments, Mimic slowly shifted back into her human form. “They…they won’t answer me,” she murmured, eyes red with withheld tears. Since when had she learned to cry? What a horrible lesson to have to learn.

“It’s okay,” Ciangi soothed, coming up alongside the alien woman and gently rubbing her arm. “Maybe you guys speak a different language? You said they could have crashed thousands of years ago, right?”

“Yes, but it is like they don’t even see me. They should have some sort of reaction. Even when I couldn’t understand a word of what Higgens was saying, I still knew that he was some sort of strange and terrifying living creature!”

“You thought I was terrifying?”

“Of course. You were a massive giant inside of an even bigger giant that destroyed my home.”

“Fair enough.”

“Maybe it’s not intentional?” Ciangi offered, still trying to be supportive.

“Why don’t we do a cognitive test then?” Gonzales said, picking up a stone before aiming carefully. With a flick of her wrist, she sent it sailing toward a chunk of the mini-mimics a few feet up the mountain.

The rock crashed into them, sending a few scattering, but mostly they just went around it or over it, never questioning what had sent the missile in the first place.

“Yeah, either they’re not capable of recognizing stimulus or they are actively deciding to ignore everything. I’m not sure which is worse.”

“I don’t understand,” Mimic whispered, her voice cracking. “Why are they doing this?”

We didn’t have an answer, but seeing her like this was awful. I walked forward and pulled her into a sturdy hug, wishing her all the happiness that she’d had just moments earlier. “I don’t know, sweetie. But I’m sure this is just a temporary thing. We’ll get you both on the same page, I promise.”

“Perhaps the best solution to see what they’re all so mindlessly progressing toward,” Bahn said, looking in the direction the little shapeshifters were dutifully marching. “Perhaps they have evolved some sort of hive mentality and our answers will lie at the epicenter of all of this.”

“That’s definitely a theory,” Gonzales said, nodding hopefully. “I like it.”

Mimic nodded, wiping her face before pulling herself from my arms. “Thank you. That sounds like the best idea considering the situation. Let’s go.”

And so, we were marching again.

It was slightly disturbing to walk straight through the mini-mimics, but they paid us absolutely no heed. We could nudge them aside with our shoes, even give them a little air with a gentle scoop with the toe of our boots, and they would pay us absolutely no mind. As soon as they were back on their feet, they would continue their persistent trek upward.

None of us said anything, but perhaps that was because none of us knew what to say. What was there that we could say? After so much work, all the danger we had survived and impossible odds that we had beaten, we had finally found Mimic’s people, only to have it be the most disappointing turn of events since I had learned that Colony Claus wasn’t a real person and didn’t deliver presents to all the good little girls and boys at the solar eclipse.

The sun had sunk far into the sky by the time we reached a large, craggy opening of a cave that all the mimics were pouring into.

“Is it just me or does this seem straight out of a horror sim?” Gonzales asked, dubiously eyeing the dark entrance.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this exact scene,” I answered, raising my arm to press in the code for my head-light to illuminate.

The roughly hewn stone seemed to go down quite a far way, but there, just at the edge of my vision, I saw the walls smooth out and fade into something that looked almost jade in nature.

“Come on, guys,” I said, stepping forward cautiously. “This way.”

“Are you sure?” Ciangi asked, her face pale and her cheeks quite flushed.

But Mimic was already striding forward, her lips tight in a grim line. We didn’t need much other discussion beyond that and went right along after her.

Sure enough, while the cave was completely primitive for the first stretch, less than five minutes later, we passed into something that was anything but.

“What is this?” Gonzales asked, running her hand along the metal-like surface.

“If I didn’t know better,” Bahn mused, “I would say it looked like the interior hull of a ship.”

“But this isn’t a ship, Bahn. It’s a mountain.”

“Yes,” he answered with a cool shrug. “But was it always?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like. While I agree the idea is improbable, it’s nowhere near impossible. And, as science dictates, once the obvious has been eliminated, the improbable is what to explore next.”

“You know, he has a point,” I said sheepishly, unsure if I should be cutting into all this scientific thought. “Mimi said that what might have happened is one of their comets was knocked into this planet’s gravitational pull and that’s how there are mimics here. What if something knocked into that comet and that’s what caused the sudden change? And, what if that something was a ship?”

“It’s all possible,” Mimic said. “But we won’t know until we go farther.”

“So let’s go farther,” I said with a resolute nod.

The mood grew even more tense as we crept forward. We didn’t want to make too much noise, so that led to another eerie silence as our footsteps echoed through the long, high-tech corridor.

I couldn’t say how long we marched, but time seemed to stretch on forever. We didn’t halt, however, until we suddenly reached a large chamber that was illuminated with a bright, blue light.

We all dropped and crouched instinctively. For being a bunch of eggheads with no military experience, we had some pretty good instincts. Or maybe that was from surviving so many near-misses when we were hopping through the far-side of the galaxy we had accidentally wormholed ourselves to.

The mimics all continued their march past us, continuing up a ramp and finally to what looked like a massive vat not unlike our own mineral containers back on the mining ship. We watched, a bit mesmerized, as one by one they climbed to the top, walked onto a gangway over the vat, and then regurgitated some sort of liquid paste into the container.

“Ew! What the heck!” Gonzales hissed.

“It’s the half-digested form of the minerals we eat,” Mimic explained. “I can smell it from here.”

“And why are we doing that?”

“Normally it is either to offer nourishment to another who is too weak to take in their own food, or to feed younglings. I am guessing it’s neither in this situation.”

Bahn held out his scanner, aiming the reader at the vat. “I think—now, I could be wrong--but this all seems like they’re fueling something.”

“That’s good, right?” Ciangi asked. “Some sort of group effort toward a goal implies sentience.”

“I don’t know…” Mimic admitted, her voice tense. “This is so unlike anything my people would do. I’m afraid I don’t understand. I know evolution is often dictated by environment, but this…this does not seem right.”

Then, as if in response to her comment, a blaring sound ripped through the corridor. All of the aliens froze, including Mimic, shuddering in their spots for the duration of the noise.

I myself had to clap my hands over my ears, the deep, boneshaking siren making my teeth chatter and my head throb. When it finally stopped, I had double vision and had to shake my head vigorously to clear it.

“What was that?” Ciangi asked.

“It was a call,” Mimic answered, eyes locked on something we couldn’t see. “This way.”

Before any of us could object, she was striding forward into the open chamber.

“Mimi! What are you doing?”

“Finding out what’s going on and putting a stop to it.”

Oh. Well, I guessed that answered that.

Unsure of quite what to do, the four of us followed after Mimi, our footsteps much less sure than hers. She strode forward like she knew exactly where she was going, which was as worrying as it was disconcerting.

She didn’t slow even as we exited the chamber, or as we went through another room with another vat that mimics were dumping small, green stones into. And then through more halls and rooms until, finally, she crouched down once more.

“Quiet,” she ordered, finger to her lips.

I didn’t need to be told twice and neither did anybody else on the team. For the second time in a short while, we were creeping forward into the unknown.

My thighs began to ache in earnest, but I couldn’t stand, afraid of giving away our position. All of us sensed that something significant was about to happen, but we weren’t sure if it was good or bad. Any whispered questions to Mimic were only responded to with short shushes. I didn’t know where Mimic had learned that habit either but I wasn’t super thrilled with it.

The hall widened abruptly and we all dodged behind ornate pillars at either side of the opening. Peering past the edge, we saw what basically looked like the shiniest, most holographic bridge I had ever seen.

It was arranged in a circle, what looked like array after array that had once been filled with useful data but were now dark with disuse. A fine layer of dust covered everything, except for a loan figure in the center.

There were no words for what I saw there, and Ciangi let out a short gasp before Bahn covered her mouth.

In the center of the bridge, sitting in a chair that was easily twice my height, was a massive living creature. Somewhat gelatinous in nature, it had rolls and rolls of flesh that dribbled over each other. Its skin was a rotten, sulfurous yellow and the stench rolling from it was just as thick.

I wanted to gag, but I dared not make a noise. Was this the creature who was responsible for the strange antics of the mimics?

It raised a long, claw-tipped hand that glistened with some sort of viscous slime and called up what looked like a holo-display, but it was the wrong color. Slowly, laboriously, it pressed in several sequences. When it finished, it let out a wheezing grunt and there was a moment of silence.

Then the horn sounded again.

My hands went over my ears once more and we all struggled not to make noise. Well, expect for Mimic of course. She turned to look to us, a rage-filled expression on her face.

“We need to get out of here,” she hissed through the cacophonous alarm. “Now.”

“Why?” Ciangi whispered. “What’s going on?”

“Feeding time,” Mimic answered.

“Alright, I don’t need a tutorial on why I don’t want to be around for that,” I murmured. “Let’s go.”

We edged backward, keeping to the sides of the halls. As we went, the horde of mini-mimics we had left behind came skittering along, carrying a huge canister of I-don’t-know-what on top of them as if they were a rolling platform. We didn’t whisper a single word until we were out of the cave.

“Whoa,” Gonzales said, looking down at the mountain.

I followed her gaze to see that what once had been a surging mass of black skittering creatures was now just plain rock. It was quite jarring and it just made the scale of the number of mini-mimics sink in in a way that it probably wouldn’t have otherwise.

“Wait here,” Mimic said, her face grim.

“What do you mean, wait here?!” I objected. I didn’t like the tone in her voice oe the expression on her face.

“Give me five minutes. I need to get something. Oh, and I need your helmet.”

If this were any other circumstance, I might have argued with her on it. Demanded an explanation to make sure she wasn’t doing something ludicrous. But even I knew that now wasn’t the time. There was something in her eyes that said there was no questioning her.

So, I didn’t. I handed her my helmet and she walked back into the cave without another word.

“Well…now what?” Gonzales asked.

“If we’re going to stand here, I’m going to take some readings.”

“Good idea,” Bahn offered. “Maybe even deploy some mobile units if you’ve got them.”

The blond let out an un-adorable smirk. “As if I’d ever go planet-side without them.”’

“I dunno,” Gonzales countered, hands on her hips. “I seem to remember an entire story arc where Bahn had to build some handhelds for you.”

“That doesn’t count. I wasn’t probably equipped for all that.”

“You don’t get to just decide what counts and what doesn’t.”

“Says who?”

“Says--”

The engineer was cut off as Mimic stepped back onto the landing. “I have returned.”

“Indeed you have.” Bahn said, eying her carefully. “And you are not alone.”

“No,” she said, eyes hardening. I looked to my helmet in her hands that had been bent entirely out of shape until it was almost like a sphere and something was moving frantically inside of it. “Not anymore.”