Authors: Miranda Powers
She ducked into a closet and found a white laboratory coat, the trousers of a sterile emergency garment that she or a technician would have used to enter the isolation room in the event of an accident, and the plastic booties of the garment, and instructed the being to put them on. They would not look completely inconspicuous getting from the lab to her car parked just outside, but perhaps they would look just inconspicuous enough. And she hoped that no one would recognize "Levi Adams" along the way.
Chapter 5
They were quiet on the ride back to her apartment, but Olivia noticed the creature in Levi Adams's body looking at and watching everyone and everything that they passed. She guesses that he...
it...he
was cataloguing and storing things in its memory. That's what it did, she guessed. It looked at everything, watched everything, and built up a repertoire of substances and shapes and functions. Its senses could probably "see" and "feel" things on the level of molecules and atoms, a thought that positively boggled her mind. Where had this traveling, living encyclopedia of the universe been? How many planets had it visited? How many millions, even billions, of things could it imitate with perfect fidelity? And what would she do with it? To let it do what it proposed to do to her with Levi Adams's breathtakingly beautiful body and his erect boy-to-manhood was unthinkable...wasn't it? Of course it was. Olivia Monroe was a PhD astronomer, noted in her field. She was not going to let herself be the study subject of a would-be Masters and Johnson from the stars, especially in the simulated body of one of her students. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the Levi entity watching her and smiling. Startled and nervous, remembering that it was telepathic, she fixed her eyes sharply on the road. Though he said nothing, she had the distinct feeling that the creature was even now scrutinizing her thoughts.
_______________
At Olivia's apartment, the being sat on the sofa in her living room, where she had discreetly drawn the drapes, and watched her pace the floor, thinking. He--and she found herself now beginning to think of it as a "he"--asked innocently, "May I remove these garments now?"
She stopped pacing and looked at him sitting there with the front of the lab coat open and Levi's pecs and abs showing through, and was sorely tempted in spite of herself. She replied, "I'll be able to think more clearly if you stay dressed." Folding her arms and stroking her chin with a knuckle, she summarized aloud: "So...you live in space, and in your natural state you're not matter; you're electromagnetic energy. Your energy matrix stores information from everything that it's exposed to, and you can alter your energy form to anything you've stored. You can also assimilate information from other organisms, which is how you're sitting here looking like one of my students. You can simulate any physical or mechanical function of anything in your memory. When you go dormant, you rest inside an inert space body. The energy from my MRI scan...woke you up." She stopped pacing and looked into his constantly curious eyes. "Can you tell me how old you are?"
The replica of Levi replied, "In your time scale, my age would be measured in billions of years."
Olivia, overcome and struck with total awe, sank into a chair facing him. "Billions!" she said breathlessly. "I can't even begin to wrap my mind around the idea of any living thing being that old. To live that long and never die..."
The entity said, "What you think of as death is a change from one state to another, from living matter to its component chemical compounds, and information. Nothing is lost. The only difference between you and us is that our change of state is a conscious, voluntary process."
Olivia said, "Most of us would disagree with you about that. We've spent thousand of years being afraid, terrified of that process, making up all sorts of mythologies and fables and superstitions around it. Not being able to control things the way you do...frightens us."
The being asked, "Is that why you hesitate to let me perform the unclothed act on you with our organs, even though your memories say it is so pleasurable and you desire it so much?"
For the first time Olivia wanted to laugh, but stopped herself. "We're going to have to find a different way to communicate that idea," she said. "That's another thing we like to try to control. Sometimes I think we want to control it too much."
And for the first time, the being used her name. "Olivia...?"
She felt something react and stir inside her at the sound of the stranger in Levi's body speaking her name in Levi's voice. Even Levi himself never called her by her first name; he always called her "Professor Monroe." She was unsure of herself, uncertain about her reaction, as she said, "Yes...?"
The being said, "I see in your memory that you have a very great, very deep love of where I come from. You love space, the stars, as much as you love the feeling of what this form and others like it can do to you. This feeling is something you have had all your life: wanting to watch the stars and other planets, wanting to know what is outside your Sun's family of worlds, wanting to know everything about the universe. This desire occupied a great deal of your life, except for times when there was one certain...man. Yes, sometimes there was a man who was as important as the stars. The last one was called..."
She finished for him. "Clive. You know about Clive."
"Yes...Clive," said the being. "The feelings that are strongest in your recent memory are about Clive. They were eclipsed behind your thoughts of this form, which is the way I chose to appear to you first because you put it in front of your memories of Clive to block them. But you made Clive as important to you as the stars."
The entity stood up from the sofa. Nervously, Olivia asked, "What are you doing?"
Levi's face smiled, and as Olivia watched, his form dissolved back into a coil of sparkling light that twisted up and out of the lab clothing that he wore. The clothing fell to a heap on the carpet, and the coil of light resolved itself, taking on form and detail once again until it appeared not as Levi Adams but as a vibrantly beautiful and naked Clive Shea, with Clive's thick and ample member suspended between its legs and Clive's round and succulent sac behind it. In Clive's voice the being said, "This was the form that you most enjoyed and desired to join with your body. If you like, I will use this form to join with you instead of the one you call Levi."
The entity studied Olivia's reaction to his offer. He watched the strange mixture of emotions playing and clashing across her face. She looked shocked, excited, aroused, pained, sad, angry. She opened her mouth to speak, but could not. She closed her eyes and turned her head away. She appeared ready to cry. She covered her mouth and hugged herself, and whispered, "Oh my God..."
"Why do you respond in this manner?" the entity asked. "My offer of intercourse in this form should please you. At this moment you should be aroused."
With tears streaking her cheeks, Olivia whipped her head back around to face him. "It should? It doesn't work that way. You're made up of memories that you can transform into. My species is made up of memories that we carry around inside us. Sometimes they feel wonderful and sometimes they hurt. Right now I'm looking at you and seeing what I loved most in the world. When Clive was the way you are now, and we went to bed, and he made love to me and was inside me, it was the most beautiful thing in the world to me. It was my joy. It was my happiness. And then he was gone, and he gave the love that he gave to me to someone else, and I had nothing left but remembering how wonderful he was and how he'd never make me feel that way again, and knowing there was someone else and he was making her feel the way he made me feel. And it hurt me. It was the most terrible hurt I've ever felt, and I still feel it whenever I think about him. And now here you are. Here
you
are, using his body, telling me you want to do those things to me with his body when you're not him. And if I let you, it would feel... I don't even know how it would feel, because it would look like him and feel like him, but it wouldn't be him! You can make yourself look like any human I've ever met, but you don't even know what humanity is! You don't know what human love is!"
Once Olivia's outburst spent itself and she sat there, panting and tearful, grasping the arms of the chair as if to tear them off, she fell silent and the entity studied her once again. A look came over him, a look that Olivia read as a sad kind of contemplation. How could he stand there that way, in Clive's form, naked and erect, offering her the most wonderful thing on Earth and not knowing what it was he was offering, as if Clive's body were only a uniform to wear, as if his tool were exactly that, just a tool and not an extension of the heart?
At length, the being said, "I believe I understand. Love is not only physical, of the body. It is a form of energy. And like all energy it cannot be destroyed, only changed to the energy of other emotions--or redirected to another partner. The love that you felt for Clive, and the desire that you felt for his body and his organ, no longer exist in their original form. They have changed and must be redirected."
Breathlessly, Olivia nodded. "It's something like that, yes."
"Then you could feel love and desire for me, and provide me with a physical experience of what I find in your memories, if I were to manifest another form?"
"I don't know. You have me confused now. You're standing there that way, and I don't know what to feel."
"Your feelings were not as conflicted when I expressed myself as Levi," said the entity. And in a flash and a twinkling that made Olivia jump and blink, he stood naked in front of her as Levi Adams once again. "I will have intercourse with you in this body, then. Shall we go to your bed and begin?"
Olivia sighed. She would want to laugh if it were not all so bizarre. "You're still not understanding completely. Remember what you said before about needing intimacy? If I let you make love to me as Levi, it still wouldn't be right, because then we'd become intimate, but it would be... It would be like an illusion, not something real. I'd feel as if it were an illusion making love to me, because there already is a Levi Adams. You're not him, even if you use his shape. I don't want to be made love to by an illusion."
The being frowned, pondering. "Intercourse with a preexisting form would have the feeling of something false, something untrue."
"Yes!" said Olivia.
"I understand," said the entity.
Olivia watched the alien in Levi's shape, wondering what he would do next as he fell silent, shut his eyes, and let his head roll back as if offering up a prayer to the unseen infinite. He was so intent on offering himself to her, on experiencing human sex. If she continued to resist him, what would he do? Would he take all of her memories of men she had seen and known, and disappear to seek out some other woman and sleep with her? She felt a sudden sting of fear at the precariousness of the situation. If this was what he meant to do, she had no way to stop him. She might have just released an alien being into the world to seek experience with another woman, possibly any number of other women. Her only hope of controlling this creature who could be any beautiful man she had ever seen or lain with, was to give the creature what he wanted--and let him try to give her what she wanted.
She now felt as frightened as she had when the coil of light first unfurled in her lab. She was about to rise from the chair and try to talk the form of Levi Adams into not doing anything else--when it suddenly turned back to the phallic shape of glittering light. But this time it was different. This time, within the tube of glowing energy there were pulses and ripples of brilliance that coursed up and down its length. rolling and flowing and reflecting back on themselves.
Oh no,
she thought.
What is he doing now?
It now occurred to her to wonder how this life form reproduced. Perhaps he could divide his energy into multiple forms at once. Perhaps he was preparing to split off into other entities, and at any moment she might be faced with not one but several beautiful naked men, each one seeking her favor.
Oh my Lord, what have I done?
she wondered, fearfully.
What have I just let loose on the world?
All at once, the rippling of energy within the phallic form subsided, and the energy form resolved itself back to flesh and blood and stood before Olivia as a naked man again. This time, however, there was a very startling difference. She gasped and raised a hand to her mouth to stifle another yelp like the sound she had made when the alien first appeared out of the MRI.
Olivia found herself now faced with a being who was Levi Adams--but not Levi Adams. And Clive Shea--but not Clive Shea. And Bruce Foster--but not Bruce Foster. He was all of them, and yet none of them. The body was unmistakably Clive's, fully developed as a man in his mid-to-late thirties. The hair was Levi's blond hair turned a shade darker. The eyes were absolutely Levi's, and she saw both Levi and Clive in the excruciatingly handsome face. The hair dusting the forearms, legs, and chest was Bruce's body hair. She remembered seeing him at the swimming pool at a faculty party; Bruce's body was haired exactly that way. And the long, thick member suspended under the dark bush of pubic hair at his crotch was what Clive had thrust deep inside Olivia three times a night for so many nights. What now faced Olivia looked as if some cosmic chef had thrown the DNA of Clive, Levi, and Bruce into a blender and whipped them together. It was all that Olivia could do to breathe a dazzled and inarticulate, "Oooh..."
"Is this form now acceptable for intercourse?" the being asked in a voice that mixed the voices of Levi and Bruce.
"You're beautiful," said Olivia. "You're... You're... I don't even know what to call you. Do you have a name?"
The being contemplated her question. "Name: a word that identifies a thing. Proper name: A name that identifies an individual human. I have no name. Do you wish to select one for me?"