Bill couldn’t tell what was up or down, left or right, forward or behind. He ran a hand through his black hair and pulled it back, revealing a scar little more than half an inch wide. His hand was covered in sweat. This disorientation gave him pause. He shook himself. There was no turning back now. He touched it. The world seemed to him concentrated on the point of his index finger, touching the needle-like protrusion of a cactus-like being its origin seeming to stem from his native United States. But this being was no cactus. It was a highly intelligent lifeform from far beyond the reaches of planet Earth, and he was touching it. The needle was not sharp, rather blunted like a crochet needle. Images flooded into his brain, too fast to comprehend.
“Slow down,” Bill said. The images didn’t slow down. In fact, they sped up. Bill had a thought. He pictured the words “slow down” in his mind in English, trying to send that image back to the creature. It didn’t seem to work. He changed tactic. Instead of sending images of words, he tried to get across the concept by picturing a car slowing down. It seemed to work as the images slowed to a crawl. He could make out some of them. Others were a complete mystery.
The first he recognized was a picture of a planet. At first it reminded Bill of Earth, all greens and blues, but the shapes didn’t make out the landmasses he was used to. There was no America. Bill recognized the planet from pictures in the newspapers on Earth. It was the cacti’s home planet. The denizens of Earth didn’t know much about the mysterious planet or its inhabitants except that it had nearly crashed into them before being sucked into the same orbit around the sun as the Earth just slightly beyond the Earth’s moon. It had been dubbed New Earth due to its relative environmental similarity to Earth, discovered by various probes sent to investigate the planet. Despite being on the first mission to bring back specimens from the alien planet to Earth for study, he knew little more about the alien beings than the humans on Earth did. It was top secret information.
He had been told along with the rest of the lower section of crew, those who dealt with day-to-day mechanics and cleaning, that the specimens were akin to plants hence the nickname cactus. But they had lied. The officers and the captain had to have known the true nature of these beings. Bill fought back a snarl. He would wring the truth from them eventually. He had plans. Another unrecognizable image flashed into his mind.
A few days past as Bill could reckon by the time on the clock, just after leaving the cacti’s home planet, he had been awoken by strange dreams and emotions. Images and feelings of desire fermented in him of violent revolution against his captain and officers. Image after image of a bloody massacre led by none other than Bill himself, gun in hand. There were no guns or weapons of any kind aboard the ship. The imagery of guns repulsed him. At first, he thought the images nothing more than macabre dreams, but he soon reveled in the intensity of the visions as if his actions a few days later had been preordained. Among the bloody images were those of the cactus like beings that Bill had seen brought aboard the ship from the alien planet. He made the connection between the visions and the cacti.
He had tried getting access to a cactus under the old regime, but he had failed. He began sharing his visions with the rest of the lower crew at mess. Many thought him mad as Bill was the only one to receive the visions, but some of the crew listened. Enough listened for them to act, the allure of a possible alien species too much to ignore. The makeshift weapons of pipes and cords they had scavenged from various machines did not match the guns of his visions, but they had worked to convince the captain and his officers that they were now in charge. Bill took up a temporary leadership position.
The images changed. The still pictures moved. Bill began to comprehend concepts like those he tried to impart to the cactus. The two started to have a conversation of sorts. The first thing he learned was that he didn’t need to be touching the cactus for it to impart its images or Bill his in return. All he had to do was picture his chosen cactus to get its attention and then his chosen image. While all the cacti looked similar, they came in different shapes and sizes. Not one looked exactly alike. He looked at a particularly gangly one nearly as tall as himself. He dubbed his chosen cactus Jim, slim Jim.
He sent the image of a cactus to Jim. Jim showed amusement, but it didn’t seem to mind the name for itself and its species. Bill wasn’t very creative to come up with a new name for the aliens, and they didn’t seem to have a name for themselves. Jim showed Bill why they hadn’t acted when the humans abducted some of their species. They wanted to study the humans. They were curious about the possibilities that the humans presented to further the progress of the cacti species, specifically the human tenancy toward individualism such as naming things as well as the possibilities presented by increased movement.
Jim sent Bill images of Einstein, the periodic table, and other scientific equipment then an image of itself. The aliens depicted themselves as rational beings. Bill’s dreams had called out to them. They knew he could and would act for them by delving into the recesses of his mind. They had learned a lot about humanity from Bill. Jim sent an image of a little human girl, no more than six, black ponytail swinging as she ran with a German Shepherd. Bill didn’t know how to take that information. How deeply could they delve into his mind? Very deeply it seemed. How deeply could they control him? They had some influence over his emotions. His privacy, his private mind had been invaded without his consent. They had coerced him into doing the very thing they were supposedly too rational to do, violent revolution.
Bill ran. Jim sent a final image of peace, coexistence between the two species before retreating from his mind. He slowed to a stride, nearly a march, heading toward the isolation chamber.
The captain sat bound and bloody on a metal chair in the center of the room, the isolation room. His head was bowed. Bill grabbed the captain’s black hair, pulling his face up to meet his. The captain had halted the ships progress toward Earth just before the mutiny as he had suspected an uprising.
“Give me the codes to steer the ship, and this will end,” Bill said.
The captain spat, a hunk of blood and mucus staining the white floor.
“It won’t help you. You have nowhere to go but back to Earth. There you will be executed for treason,” the captain said.
“Liberty of sentient lifeforms isn’t treason. I think the people of Earth will see it my way.”
“That is assuming you can get to a newspaper to publish that information before you are arrested.”
Bill left the room, turning off the lights behind him, leaving the captain in the dark. He could ask the cacti to pry the information from his brain. Would that be more humane than torture? Bill shuddered. He didn’t revel in the thought of contacting Jim at that moment. The three officers came up to him on the bridge led by a woman. Her name was Evaline. She had given him access to the cacti once he had explained his visions and his reasons for the revolution. She was sympathetic to his cause to a degree.
“I said I’d help you, didn’t I? The three of us each know a piece of the code necessary to steer the ship. Together we can reveal it to you,” Evaline said.
“I don’t think we should do this,” the second officer said.
“We don’t have much choice. I’d rather not die here. If it helps us get home, I don’t care what this crazy character does,” the third officer said.
“I would appreciate your cooperation,” Bill said. The three of them gave Bill the codes. He walked down the corridor back to his room and looked out the window. The vast blackness of space surrounded him. He couldn’t see any stars or planets. Time seemed non-existent in this world in-between. Clock time had stopped. The only thing that mattered was the vastness of his imagination and all the possibilities it presented.
Bill tossed and turned in his bed. Images bombarded him, a little girl, Emma, with a German Shepherd, clinging to his pantleg barely able to stand, choking on baby food. She had been only six when the intruder, gun in hand, had shot her at point blank range in the head right in front of him before another bullet came for Bill himself. How had he survived a shot to the head, but she had not? He wished every day it had been him that had died not her. The perpetrator had not liked that Bill and his daughter were Native American and got handouts from the government. Bill couldn’t say if his memories simply haunted him or if Jim had something to do with it, but it had its intended effect. Bill, more than anything, wanted to escape. He wanted a new world. Bill contacted Jim.
Bill learned a lot about this new alien life form in the coming days. The ship sat unmoving, seemingly stuck out of human time. The cacti had separate personalities, but they seemed to share a mind. They couldn’t move without human help, and so conflict beyond bombarding someone with imagery or emotions didn’t exist among them. They were hermaphrodites, all of them, having both male and female sexual organs, so they were not any specific gender. Like plants they relied on insect like beings for pollination and the wind for spreading seeds. Bill thought about continuing to use the pronoun it, but he thought it too impersonal. He settled on they and them as they did share consciousness, so the plural forms didn’t seem as odd to use as with humans.
Going back to Earth and rallying humanity had been his initial plan; however, what if the captain was right? He would be arrested on sight along with all of the mutineers. Perhaps there was another option. The people of Earth had long considered the cacti’s planet ripe for colonization due to its Earth-like environment and seeming emptiness.
The fact that another species existed there put a hitch in that plan. However, if the other species were to accept the humans and coexist, an entirely new system could be created given the nature of the aliens. They could see into the minds of humans and influence their emotions. That came with possibilities, some disturbing some promising. Could the aliens be convinced to invade the minds of the humans on the ship? Should they be encouraged to do so? At first, Bill decided he would ask for each person’s consent first before they essentially mind melded with the aliens. That was his initial idealistic agenda, but it soon proved too costly. Bill had the codes, but the officers thought they were going back to Earth. He could send them back later with the message to humanity after they went to New Earth.
The planet needed a new name. New Earth didn’t suit his purposes. The cacti did not have names among themselves nor any name he could figure out for the planet. Generally, the planets had been named by the humans after Roman gods, so Bill started there. He knew a little about them, Roman gods, from Latin class in high school. Jim had given Bill the image of a pileus or felt cap denoting the freedom of slaves. The goddess or personification of liberty, Libertas, held a pileus in her hand, holding it out to the soon to be freed slave. Libertas would do well enough.
Bill gathered all the crew, lower, researchers, and officers, into the mess. He shared much about the cacti’s abilities with the men and women aboard the U.S.S. Liberty. He also shared something of his own history. He couldn’t bear to share everything, but he told them why he wanted to leave Earth.
“I mean to give you a choice come to the new planet once called New Earth, now called Libertas by me, with me or go home and tell the people of Earth the crimes against these sentient beings perpetrated by the U.S. government. Those who go back could say they wrested the controls away from the mutineers to avoid punishment,” Bill said.
“You want to start up a new culture with the help of aliens on a new planet. What are you going to do when Earth invades?” Evaline asked.
“I’m hoping the cacti’s mental persuasion techniques will ward off war. As I said, they can control mental imagery and emotions.”
“You’re going to help those creatures attack humans? Despite what they did to you? They invaded your brain without your consent.”
“It seems to be the only way. They got the idea from my outer mental images, my dreams, that I would help them, and they were right.”
“Still, they used you. How can you trust them?” Bill thought she seemed to be deciding for herself if she could trust them. He didn’t rush her.
“They were desperate. The humans came and did whatever they wanted with them. They didn’t want to attack without gathering information first, but they saw me as a potential ally.”
“What will this new society of yours be like? You’re doing this for a reason after all. Is there something you want to create that cannot be found on Earth?”
“Of course it cannot be found on Earth. I want humanity to merge with the cacti as much as possible. We help them become better, and they help us by allowing humans access to each other’s minds. They aren’t individualized enough, and we are too individualized. In the end, I think we will balance each other out.”
“How will you decide what jobs everyone does? What about those who don’t want to work, but still want to live?”
“Everyone will do what they want within reason. Everyone will be taken care of even if they won’t work. For those jobs that need doing, but no one wants to do, we will show people the need for it. If that doesn’t work then they can be coerced by the cacti into doing it emotionally for the good of the society.”
“Coerced by the cacti? At what point do people stop being human in your society?”
Bill was nothing but a lower crew member, but he thought it could work. It was his vision for a non-hierarchical society in which race and class didn’t matter. He thought the cultural baggage from Earth could be lessened by merging minds. If everyone could see from another’s perspective, conflict would lessen. The cacti could also control human emotions to keep everyone who wouldn’t cooperate in check.
“If being human means living in an inefficient and immoral system then perhaps I don’t want to be human anymore.”
“It’s not for you to decide alone.”
“No, it isn’t which is why I’m sharing.”
“You said these beings have no hierarchy of class, race, or gender. How will you enforce such things among the humans?”
“I think I’ve already touched on that, but as far as families are concerned, we will have the children live in commune, raised and taught by all. There won’t be a blood family dynamic to reassert a hierarchical power dynamic into the mix.”
The researchers, the experts, started to come up to Bill now. It started with the anthropologist.
“I demand to communicate with these aliens without you present. You are not someone of specialized skill. You are no authority figure in any scientific area of study. As such it would be better for one of us, the scientists, to communicate with these beings and decide our future. You just fear going back to Earth due to your actions. I know a little something about dealing with informants of native cultures,” the anthropologist said.
“Perhaps that is why they contacted me first. Because I didn’t have any specialized skill. They and I don’t want a world with authority figures. Jim is my informant, and I am theirs,” Bill said. He pondered things. If one were to take away government and police, one would still have to contend with authority figures in education. Unless we merge minds with the cacti no one can know everything at their whim, and as such, they cannot be free of authority. With the cacti we could share our intelligence with one another being free of differences in intellect as well as lack of information. Anyone could be a doctor or a professor. There would be no hierarchy of teacher and student.
“If you are willing, I would have you open up your mind to Jim and I, so that I as well as any of the lower crew who wants can have your knowledge about anthropology. This goes for any of the scientists aboard. I would have you work with us not against us. There is much we can learn from each other.”
“What will do you if I decline? Will you have this Jim take the information by force as you have done with the ship?”
“I’ll have to think on it, but I might. If it leads to a better, more fair society for all. I’ve already acted in force once for the good of our future. I will do it again. Jim and the other cacti won’t act against you unless I allow it for now. But if they see you as a threat to their people back home, they might pick another to help them.”
“I’ve spent years studying, unlike you. You want the information without putting in the work.”
“Does it matter? As long as we have the information, I think we should share it freely among each other. Is your only reason that you don’t want to give up your position of authority?”
The anthropologist spluttered.
“This is too much for me. I’ve made up my mind. I’ll lead the expedition back to Earth if you will allow it,” Evaline said.
Bill saw the anthropologist and the second officer conversing quietly in a corner of the mess. He predicted they would be trouble. Bill decided it was time to use his alien friends to attack first. The cacti could dampen the emotions of all aboard the ship. He would allow them to do so.
The first fight broke out in the corridors of the ship. Some of the men had noticed the dampening of their emotions. They tried to fight back led by the anthropologist and second officer, but Bill acted quickly. The cacti took away all of their emotional responses as well as mental imagery, leaving them in a near zombie like state. Even Bill couldn’t stomach the look of them, so he had them locked in the isolation chamber with the captain and told the cacti to stop.
The next meeting of all the crew in the mess went less smoothly.
“You want to live on this alien planet in order to create a new society, but we know very little about the planet,” the botanist said.
“We would know more if you shared your knowledge with us,” Bill said.
“I for one am willing to do that, but will it be enough? We have enough food and water supplies to last awhile, but eventually we will have to rely upon the planet. The planet has water, but the safety of the plants as a source of food…”
“The cacti can help us with that. If we cooperate, they will come to understand our physiology better, so that we can know what is good to eat and what isn’t.”
Bill began gathering all those planning to live on Libertas separately from those going back to Earth with Evaline. They spent a lot of time with the cacti both in person and in their minds from anywhere on the ship. The hive mind of Bill’s group and the cacti formed a sort of internet of the mind through which all participants could access any information they needed at any time. Many of the scientists participated. Those who wouldn’t, including the captain, the cacti entered by force at Bill’s command. Bill wished he had access to the real internet back on Earth for more information to give the cacti in order to help them progress, but the cacti could dredge up things from the deepest recesses of Bill’s memories that he himself couldn’t even access consciously. They had perfect memories.
The first citizens of Libertas were all former citizens of the United States with its multicultural policies. The citizens were comprised of every gender and sexuality along with many races of the Earth, though not all. Bill suggested that instead of speaking English they spoke in the concept images that the cacti were used to, so that no one language took precedence over another. Thanks to the cacti they could all know and fluently speak all the languages they knew.
Anything that did not do harm to another would be permitted on Libertas. To avoid that harm, first people would share their experiences, senses, and emotions with the other person. Bill started that process on the ship, having everyone share with everyone else their life experiences in excruciating detail with the help of the cacti.
A second fight broke out among the citizens of Libertas about the loss of human individuality and culture. It ended quickly once the interconnected citizens realized that every blow to another meant a blow to themselves.
Bill was insistent that relieving themselves of human cultural norms such as individualism would be necessary in forming a completely new society in which there was no hierarchy. From mind to body nothing would be kept separate anymore. However, some traits of individualism such as naming things would be kept and taken on by the cacti.
Nearly half of the crew was willing to merge with the cacti. But, even though they were willing to try the experiment of sharing minds, they had a hard time coping with the vast and varying perspectives of all the humans aboard this ship. These were experienced adults, researchers, and technicians. How would children fare in this new society? Bill hoped that conflict could be avoided by merging with children slowly. Disconnection from the network couldn’t be allowed as constant policing was necessary to keep conflict in check. A citizen wouldn’t hit another citizen if they could feel the blow themselves.
If the message about the cacti got out on earth through Evaline, Bill hoped new citizens would come to Libertas in time. Those humans outside the network kept themselves separate from the Libertas citizenry. The cacti could keep away those that were a danger.
Bill inputted the codes into the ship’s computer. The U.S.S. Liberty moved back toward the cacti’s home planet.
Could a non-violent world be built on the back of violent revolution? Would the specter of violence always haunt the new world? These were questions Bill couldn’t answer. That first step the cacti had taken, that of forcing him to act in mutiny, was that of violence just as the humans had done. Bill wanted to create a utopia, a world of varying perspectives and perfect morality. Could it be done?
The new generation would be key. In time, the humans would mix to the point where race wouldn’t be an issue. There would be fewer differences between humans leading to more cooperation. Were they, the cacti, any better morally than the humans? Even the very name of the planet was a very human concept, a white European one at that. Would this human nostalgia threaten the new society? However, would leaving behind such things threaten what it meant to be human? Did Bill care what it meant to be human? Humans got into so many messes. He was willing to give the cacti a chance to course correct a part of humanity as an experiment. The old Earth would keep the old ways of humanity alive for the cacti to study and refine their ability to correct humanity’s mistakes.
The planet came into view. Its unfamiliar land masses both unsettling and exciting.
Leave a Reply