Alien Powers

      This morning's dream started with a murder. Not mine, thankfully, but one I witnessed.
      I was in the front yard of my home, not the one I have now, but a wonderful two story thing, working on taking out a few mustard plants and some large thistles. Even though I liked them, I knew that my neighbors wouldn't. The first because it was a "weed" native plant in a no longer native habitat, and the second because when it went to seed the whole neighborhood would be thistles if I didn't take the flowers off in time. My wife, not N in this dream, would enjoy the cut thistles, and the little yellow mustard flowers would make a nice contrasting filler both for the complementary color and size difference. A very Yin-Yang sort of arrangement was forming in my head.
      My visualization was interrupted by a large Asian man who floated down out of the sky and landed on the hydrangea bush. I though for a second that he's somehow jumped from the old playroom balcony, but a quick glance showed the balcony doors closed. The man looked angry, and his anger like himself, was larger than average. I dropped my trowel, a small part of me thinking I had just disarmed myself, a larger part registering that it wouldn't matter.
      He had an unusual tube in his arms, the tube had a very dark interior, darker than would be expected for what looked like a piece of translucent plexiglass tubing. Along the outside of the tube were several breadboards, attached with screws and standoffs, all wired together with carnival colored wires. The whole construction was about ten inches around and slightly over a yard long. As the open end of the tube swung by me, I was hit by a swirling double helix of prismatic light. I felt the pull of the beam, the oddness and alieness of it. The fact that it was way out of place, and now something had been triggered in my head that made me feel out of place. Something in the core of the tube pulsed, and I knew the next blast would be different, dangerous, though not deadly.
      I also knew I didn't have to worry about it, mostly because it wasn't going to hit me at all. The big Asian man turned the tube opening onto himself. He seemed to inhale the beam as well as soaked it into his face. I sensed that he knew I'd been struck with the more benevolent outpouring. For some reason this angered him.
      Paving stones from my front walk ripped out of the ground and hovered for a second at waist level. I knew what was coming next so dove behind a hedge just as the stones ripped through the brush seeking to crush my head. The Hibiscus bushes thickened and stopped the paving stones.
      Before the giant could launch a second attack, he'd dropped the tube and was ripping a post out from the covered walkway, another man appeared. He was tall and thin, with curly short brown hair and sharp hazel eyes that spoke of madness and pain. He spoke a single word to the giant in a language I didn't know, but somehow understood.
      "Time."
      There suddenly seemed to be tons of it. I wasn't sure, but I think everything outside the three of us slowed. I looked at the neighbor's yard, no one was looking at us, a car was about to turn down the street towards us, but the occupant was looking the other way for oncoming traffic. I drew further back towards the corner of the house. There was almost no sound from the cracking branches as I pushed past the brush. Everything was quiet, save for the thin crackle of the tube on the ground, and the voices of men in conflict.
      In a straight hand to hand conflict, I would not have given the thin man odds, but he was carrying a cane, which when he swung it, seemed to connect like a tire iron. The giant Asian's head crumpled on contact. The thin man guided the body down to the ground behind a pile of brush I'd already removed.
      While he was kneeling he retrieved the tube, then before I could think to move he was beside me, with an iron grip on my upper arm. His hands were warm, warmer than being in the sun could account for, warmer than his activity or any level of fever would account for. He dragged me into the house. Although I could easily have made an argument for me killing the man in the front yard as self defense, witness the thrown paving stones and the ripped out support post, what this man had done looked more like hunting. Somehow, even though everything had slowed, I knew that there were witnesses, and I knew that they saw me hitting the man on the head, not this killer. Up close I could see his eyes contained the same double helix coils of prismatic color swirling in the tube, which he managed to somehow close with his free hand.
      In my head I could feel that he was trying to alter my thoughts, erase his part of this, make it seem that I merely defended myself. I could tell he's already altered the neighbor's perceptions, that's how I knew what they though they were seeing, and how I had immediately thought of the self defense argument. Or at least had started to think that.
      The fact that he couldn't change my perceptions struck home. His demeanor, up to now a sort of gruff determination and urgent but calm action turned cold and hard, almost as though a switch had been thrown.
      "Did you see the pulse."
      "No, there was something wrong about it, I turned away." I knew that my response to his question was somehow going to determine whether there were going to be two murders today. Or perhaps three. My wife had just entered the room. My heart raced, she was in danger, I could feel it, but I could also feel, somehow, a way around it. My heart also raced because I could sense the immediate attraction between her and this man.
      My wife was still very attractive even after raising two daughters to adulthood (or nearly, our youngest was 17 and visiting with friends, the oldest 20 and away in college.) She had managed to maintain a full but real waistline and had a classic hourglass figure.
      "Who is this?"
      "An engineer, he came to ask about something in one of my articles."
      "I'm Carl, pleasure to meet you." He did something with his prismatic double helix that made her sit with a thump in a nearby chair.
      "I'd love to go back to your shop to see more, perhaps there is some sort of test."
      He looked at me, thought for a moment, then stood. "I would be grateful if you would come and witness a test. That would answer my question satisfactorily."
      "What about the yard."
      "If you give your husband up for a bit, I'll make sure there is help with the yard."
      "Oh, thank you! I look forward to seeing you this afternoon then."
      I could tell she was looking way to forward to seeing him this afternoon, but I couldn't tell if it was really her feeling that, or if he'd pushed somehow.
      I did feel him push her towards the pol in the back of the house with suggestions for making lemonade and tuna salad. Those activities would keep her out of the front room for quite some time. I wanted to warn him that we were scheduled to have a housefull of guests this afternoon, friends of my wife, writers and artists, mostly. he was working very hard to make me come along with him, which was odd, because I was willing to go, just because, again, for no particular reason, I knew that getting to his shop and testing would solve this part of the problem. I couldn't figure out how to deal with the body in my front yard, though. My leaving and not calling the police was going to be trouble. I could also feel that that was a natural worry, not a "Knowing" worry. I began to wonder what had happened to me.
      With a hand on my arm and one on my back the Thin Man walked me out to my car. It appeared that he didn't' have a vehicle, in fact, neither of them did.
      There was a whoosh and I found myself queasy stomached and floating in a tightly packed low G environment. Through some scratched and thin quartz windows, I could see the earth floating in space, wheeling freely outside the station. Even though the pace was cramped, it was not as cramped as the international space station photos. It was also obviously not entirely human construction. It looked a bit like something from a Sci-Fi channel special, only it smelled musty and spicy at the same time. I looked around. There were some other technicians around. They looked at me, all of them with prismatic double helix spirals in their irises.
      "Exposed?"
      "Yes, but I can't tell where in the cycle."
      "Ronny"
      "I had to kill him." The Thin Man sounded remorseful for the first time.
      "Did you see a pulse?" directed at me.
      I decided to tell them the whole incident as I recalled it. Pulse and all. Including the bit about knowing that the burst after the pulse would be bad, but that their colleague had turned the tube to take that full in the face.
      "But you saw the pulse?"
      "I saw a pulse, just before a burst."
      "Quick, review Ronny's tapes." the lead researcher ordered two white jump-suited fellows, then to me "come with me, I want you to take some tests."
      I started after her, difficult in the low gravity, but I managed far better than I had any right. I noticed the Thin Man had taken a syringe from one of the other staffers and was following not far behind us.
      What followed was a series of tests and attempts to exhibit just about every classical parapsychology talent ever tested.
      "Are you sure you saw the pulse?"
      "Yes, I'm sure. Maybe the circuit boards were faulty, or some connections were missing?"
      The doctor looked at me like I was an idiot. "That was just our monitoring equipment, it was all broken and ripped apart. Look here. She led me to another part of the station, very alien here, obviously not made for the passage of large human beings, now I know why most of the staff were slender. I wondered how Ronny had gotten in to take the thing. He was larger than Me by at least half again.
      There was a series of holes along the curved reddish brown walls of the narrow tunnel, all of them but one had plexiglass tubes connected to detectors and bundles of wires running out of the area into a nearby chamber, one large enough for several technicians to monitor even more screens of data.
      "Three of us were exposed when we first investigated this place. Ronny, Eric and myself. Eric and I noticed something right away and I ordered the tubes covered until we could learn more. I didn't see a pulse and the effects were temporary." I could hear the regret in her voice.
      "Eric saw a pulse, and was out for three days. When he came back to us, he was, changed." I could hear real regret in that comment. There was something else there as well, pride, fear, I couldn't quite make it out at first, then it hit me all at once, sex. I had to take a drift back from her to avoid being overwhelmed. I don't think the effects on her were temporary, but didn't want to spoil her lecture by mentioning it.
      "Eric can do, with some effort, every single psychic effect we've ever heard of and I suspect some we haven't."
      "Like teleporting us up to orbit?"
      "He just called the locator beam to you, that's a bit of alien tech, it is sort of a wormhole elevator, not really a transporter. Eric is limited to what energy his biology can supply, that's why he's so thin."
      "Ronny was different." She anticipated my question. "He claimed there were no effects, but Eric was suspicious. We watched him. Watched him grow fat over the last six months. He spent a lot of time at the windows, watching the earth. Finally we managed to get it out of him that he'd been able to see remotely since the incident. What he didn't tell us was that there was something wrong. We were about to confront him when he took the transport beam and dropped into your front yard. We found tapes, tapes of your family, uh, sunning around your pool. He seems to have become fixated...."
      "You can see into our back yard?"
      "Not with technology, camera tech is good, but not good enough to see through trees and roofs. No, somehow Ronny figured out how to put his remote viewing images on disk."
      Eric handed her a disk, "I don't know how he did it, it's one of the things I can't do."
      The disk played. It was a combination of internet websites, my youngest daughter posing provocatively in photos on her web site, mixed with remote viewing of my home, the girls sunbathing out by the pool, playing in the pool, nude by the pool, my wife and I in our bedroom. "Enough, I'd like to remind you that my daughter is still minor."
      "You don't think the top will come off on her website in a few months?"
      I sighed. I knew all about my daughter's web site, that she was an exhibitionist, and yes, I was sure she would be populating a "Members Only" section with more intimate photos. She didn't know I knew, and that was enough for now. I made a note to talk to her about keeping as much of her personal and private information personal and private, just to keep the stalkers to a minimum.
      "That's still a few months away. So, he took one of the prismatic things and took off to make good on stalking my family. I should be glad you stopped him."
      "Yes, well, the problem is, we couldn't find anything in his tests either."
      "So you think the prismatic thing makes people evil?"
      "Not really, but it may give huge powers beyond our ability to control or handle. We just don't know. The fact that you were exposed to the same energy as Ronny does have us worried."
      "So you want to kill me, too?"
      Eric chimed in, "No, I'm quite convinced that although you were exposed, your power level is either the highest we've seen yet and you are keeping us from detecting it, or your level is the lowest we've seen yet. I can get absolutely no malice, save in defense of yourfamily, and that is a good thing, I think. You do seem to have an uncanny ability to say or do just the right thing to smooth things along in your favor, but that seemed to start in your front yard, even before you were exposed. I'm quite sure Ronny intended to land on you and kill you outright."
      "Are you sure these prismatic Helixes aren't alive? Maybe they're controlling the effects."
      They looked at one another. Finally the director smoothed her jumpsuit and spoke, "I think they're alive but in some sort of stasis. But I'm the minority view on that one. I thought my exposure was more of a conversation... Just a hallucination most likely."
      "I think we should bring back the one Ronny stole, then."
      Everyone became silent. Then there was a burst of activity.
      "Oh, Lord! How could you have forgotten to bring the container back with you?"
      Eric had no answer, but I did. I knew the prismatic being was, in fact, a being. I knew it was in my house surrounded by many highly intellectual guests, and I knew that it was not in stasis any more, it was dying, it was looking for hosts for its eggs or children. I explained that as we rushed to the elevator. I also knew that it wasn't Ronny that was infatuated with my family, it was the prismatic Helix.
      We arrived in my driveway next to the car. There was a cement truck in the front, pouring concrete in the place of my front yard garden. I took a moment to be angry at Eric for ruining my home. He indicated that it wasn't him.
      Inside the house, our party had turned into an orgy. My wife was waiting for me with the tube, she stared into it for a moment, then declared that we could not stop her. I could see the tendrils of the Helix as it encouraged our guests to mate, it combining its energy DNA Helixes with those of our guests. I knew that nearly every couple here would conceive a child that would be more than a normal human child. There was something faulty in the containment of the prismatic Helix. Its energy was occasionally altered such that the controlled and balanced energy that Eric and the director displayed was corrupted and altered, enabling a problem like Ronny to occur. I could feel the twist coming on, my wife was waiting for it, having already had a dose.
      I started after her, she leapt up to the second floor balcony, skimming over an embracing couple on the stairs. "I will be able to do anything, you will all have to do as I say."
      I could feel the Helix warning about the upcoming blast of energy, not promoting it, but warning about it. It couldn't control it, but it was warning us about it. That is how I'd avoided it before. Ronny had found it a siren song, just as my wife did. She aimed the tube at me. I stepped up into the air climbing as though on invisible steps.
      "No, you can't, you haven't had...."
      I reached my wife and aimed the tube into the floor, feeling the burst, the corrupt pulse pour into the floor and through it into the earth below. Fortunately there was no one beneath us.
      The tube was quiet. I turned to look into my wife's Prismatic Helix filled eyes, she'd taken a full lump of Off center energy. She grabbed the tube and stared into its depths. The Helix responded, giving its last energy to balance the energies flowing through my wife. Not enough, though, and it faded into nothingness. Eric and my wife were drawn to one another like magnets. Eric had Helix energy from a different Helix, I could see that now, so did the director. I found her suddenly very attractive. I stepped over my oldest daughter and her boyfriend to get to her. We then levitated up to the master bedroom to join Eric and my wife.
      Photos were somehow taken, and made their way on to my daughter's web site a few months later. We had a long talk about that. The photos were removed, but she got to keep her site (She was 18 by then, so i couldn't really have made her quit.)
      Every woman at the party had a very unusual gestation, 9 new Helixes were born/produced, after only a few months. The babies seemed to be solar powered, and very lightweight. I knew they would stay with us for a decade or so , then metamorphosize into the same form as their elders whom they would go and recover from stasis. Interestingly, we all seemed to have no trouble keeping the secret from the government, even though the government was funding the research on the alien satellite. These Helixes were our children, and they loved us as children love parents, but part of them was alien to us and always would be.
      Aside from the one time walking on air, I never did exhibit any other showy "psychic" abilities. I did seem to know what to say or do, or where to go to make things go my way. Where to be to make sure our kids stayed out of trouble. My wife needed some fairly long sessions with other Helix exposed to recover and maintain her equilibrium.
      My younger daughter made enough with her website to put herself through college; though often invited, her older sister wouldn't have anything to do with it.