Humans Must Kneel (Possessive Aliens)

  HUMANS MUST KNEEL

  A POSSESSIVE ALIENS ROMANCE

  LOKI RENARD

  Copyright © 2019 by Loki Renard

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  1. THIS ISN’T REAL

  2. INTERSTELLAR LAUNDRY BASKET

  3. CARNAL CONUNDRUM

  4. REDUX

  5. HUMAN DELICACY

  6. ALIEN ATONEMENT

  7. THE TRAGIC MATRIARCH

  8. FREEDOM SUCKS

  9. BROKEN SPACE, HEALED HEARTS

  Epilogue

  CAVE ALIEN | ANCIENT EARTH ALIENS

  MORE! LOKI, MORE!

  THIS ISN’T REAL

  Seven

  I’m staring at a creature who is Absolutely. Not. Human.

  He is massive. He has horns emerging from a skull fashioned from pure insanity. His eyes burn with an orange glow, his skin is silvery and sharp in places, glinting like he’s wearing a thousand Ginsu knives. Except he’s not wearing them, he is them. He’s effectively naked, I realize; his, er, appendage sitting hard between his thighs, pressed against his lower belly. Wait, is that his manhood? Or is it another ridge? It’s hard to tell. He is configured broadly in the human sense, but everything about him is brutally alien. There are ridges and channels, hard plates and sharp edges. When he sits forward, I see there is a carved slot in the back of the throne for the massive scimitar of a ridge which rises between his shoulder blades.

  “What the… are you?”

  “I am Krave,” he says. “Scythkin judiciar.”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  He leans further forward, his lips splitting into a befanged smile.

  “It means you fucked up.”

  I have messed up a lot of things in my time. I have made many bad choices. I always told myself to never regret any of them because every bad decision always took me closer to a good one. Suddenly, I’m re-evaluating that stance. This vicious monster is right. I have fucked up. And right now, I would give absolutely anything to be able to do this day over. But that’s not possible.

  Right?

  Earlier that morning…

  THIS ISN’T REAL

  These three words are ruining my life. I found them by chance and now that I’ve read them, I can’t get them out of my mind. I’m uncomfortable in my own skin, unable to settle down and just chill, because every breath is another reminder how wrong everything is.

  I sit in my hot pink sweatpants, playing with a strand of curly permed hair, and wonder why I feel as if the whole world has shifted several degrees in some unknown direction and I have stayed in the same place.

  I’m missing someone. I can’t quite remember her. I can’t picture her face. I can’t think what her name would be. But I miss her. When I look at this note, I feel her.

  I turn it over in my fingers. It’s not written on paper. It’s been scrawled on canvas of some kind. The backside of it is painted with nothing but an enigmatic smile, torn at the edges as if the original painting had been ripped from its frame and shredded. Instinct tells me that it is original and real. There’s a feeling I get when I hold it, a sense of authenticity which is absent from every other object in my apartment.

  THIS ISN’T REAL

  I flip the note over and read the words again. What do they mean? What’s not real? Anything? Everything?

  When I look out the window, I could swear that the sign on the billboard across the street used to advertise a soft drink or a snack or something. Now it boldly and blankly declares three words:

  HUMANS MUST KNEEL

  As I look, it starts to flash, yellow text on black background, and the words themselves are intoned from on high in a deep, all encompassing voice which resonates to my core. I get up, along with everyone else in the building and go down to the street below. We do not speak to one another. We walk single file and find our assigned place.

  I could have sworn it wasn’t always customary for us all to line the sidewalks and go to our knees once per day. Some people say it’s religious, but none of us know what we’re supposed to be worshipping, and at this point, we’re too afraid to ask.

  With my knees on asphalt, a thought worms its way into my head. What if I stand up?

  The idea is as subversive as screaming out loud in the middle of a grocery store for no reason, contrary to the public expectation which I feel pressing at me from all sides. Humans must kneel. That is what we do. It is what we were made for, at least, for several minutes every morning.

  But what if I refuse?

  What if I stand?

  What if my knees are already rising from the ground, my legs straightening, my head rising. What if my hand is in my pocket, clutching the scrap of canvas which feels to me as though it comes from a place of great power. What if this isn’t real?

  It doesn’t feel real.

  It feels like a dream we are all trapped in.

  What if we wake up?

  I am standing now, the only person standing for many miles around. My feet feel powerful, pressed against the ground, my back straight, my head held high. This is an act of rebellion against the unknown.

  A drone flits through the sky to center above me, and a voice which is as loud as it is aggressive rains down on me in ways voices don’t. Little droplets of sound dribble over my hair and shoulders, seeking their way over my body and into my skin.

  HUMANS MUST KNEEL

  It commands me.

  KNEEL, HUMAN

  OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES

  A few other heads lift and look at me. There’s curiosity in their gazes. I feel pressure to kneel back down. It’s a weight on my shoulders, unseen, but still powerful.

  KNEEL. KNEEL. KNEEL.

  The drone repeats the order, more loudly this time. The people beside me are getting restless and uncomfortable. The kneeling time usually only lasts a few minutes, but I am prolonging it. The drone continues to repeat the order. Again and again. But I stand. Nothing is happening, aside from the order itself being repeated, and that’s just sound being made at me.

  A revelation is forming inside my mind.

  We don’t have to kneel, do we? Nothing is actually making us except our own childish desire to follow the rules, be good boys and girls.

  Now that I am standing, the kneeling people look silly to me. I feel a rush of rebellious energy which animates me from the inside out.

  Looking down the row of kneeling people, I see that there are more drones at work. They’re skimming over the rows of bent necks, and a beam is scanning a patch of skin on the very back of them. When the beam passes over the skin, it glows with something that looks like a barcode, and there’s a soft beep. Each of us is marked. We are inventory being taken.

  “Get down,” someone near me hisses. I feel as though I should know these people’s names, but I don’t. I only know their faces. When I look at them, I have intimate feelings, as if we have all known one another for a very long time, but when I open my mouth to speak I find I know nothing about them at all. The man gesturing at me to take my place has brown eyes and curly dark hair. He is wearing a bright yellow t-shirt with a smiling face on the front of it, but his actual face is far from smiling. His eyes are narrowed at me with what is starting to look like hatred.

  “Humans must kneel!” This time the words come from his lips, not from the drone, which has skated off down the street. He takes the order from above, internalizes it, and spits it at me as if it came from his own mind.

  “Why?”

  He stares at me with a does-not-compute expression, then lifts his hands from the ground in a shrug. For a brief moment, he is not kneeling.

  “What if we all stood up?”

  “Must… kneel,” he grumbles, returning to his position.

  My rebellion has caught attention further down the line. Heads are starting to pop up all the way down the street, curious eyes gazing at me, the girl who won’t kneel.

  I feel it happening. A shift in the crowd. Here we go. We’re all going to stand up. We’re going to look one another in the face and talk about what’s going on, and we’re going to really understand…

  “HUMANS MUST KNEEL!”

  They start chanting at me, just one person at first, then two, then dozens more. They are on their knees, slapping their palms on the ground to make a collective clapping sound which keeps measure of the chant.

  This cannot be real, and yet it is. This is happening. The flow of everyday life has been broken by a moment of angry subservience to a higher power we have never seen, and now the people around me, people who are just as ignorant of the truth as I am are trying to make me obey with the sheer force of their will - or whatever will is being channelled through them.

  Usually as soon as the bell rings signaling our release, these people transform into individuals going about their daily lives. All kinds of chaos ensues, but behind it all is this moment of order. We remember that no matter who we are, we all kneel. From the richest CEO to the beggar on the corner, humans must kneel.

  Except me.

  Because I have something they don’t. I have been given the gift of doubt. The more they clamor for me to kneel, the more I know I have to resist. Down
the line, I see more heads lifting. Shoulders too. They’re still on their knees, but they’re getting more erect, like meerkats. The drones can’t scan them properly and are malfunctioning, emitting annoyed beeps.

  And finally, my rebellion begins to spark something other than resistance. It starts to inspire new disobedience.

  There’s someone else on the other side of the road standing up, about a block away. And another person, on the same side but further down. I watch with a sense of growing glee. Are we all going to stand? Is this the day we throw off the shackles of whatever unseen tyranny demands our capitulation? Yes… yes…

  No.

  The world starts to vibrate with the sound of something far bigger than any of us coming. A tidal wave. An earthquake. A tornado. A firestorm. All of those things and none of them - a field of pure terror washes over the city. The cries of the people caught in it can be heard, growing louder as they multiply in number.

  So this is the consequence. The punishment for failing to bend the knee. We are punished as a group for the failures of the individual.

  The wailing grows nearer, more frantic, more pained. It is as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror - and then kept screaming.

  The people near me try to pull me down, but it is too late. The punishment is upon us, the vengeful wrath of a deity who can reach into our souls and pull forth the essence of our worst fears, a potent dose of pure anxiety which cannot be escaped.

  It hits the people in front of me and their screeches rend my eardrums. Then it is upon me, and it is all I can do to stop myself from falling to the ground. I put my hands to my ears to try to stop the screaming, but it keeps coming from the inside. Every cell in my being shrieks in agony, pain which makes me feel as though I am being torn apart from my soul out. Something sacred is being violated.

  “Get down! Get down!” They’re clawing at my legs, begging me to submit. If I do what they want, what I’ve been told to do, the pain might stop. But it also might not. I’m clinging to hope that this pain isn’t coming from a place of annihilation. My body is intact. None of us are being physically harmed. We’re just scared. I don’t want to bow to fear. Or confusion. I want to know what is behind it, why my world feels so small.

  RETRIEVE THE SPECIMEN

  More drones are on their way, but these are not small scanning drones. These are larger craft with great spinning propellers and arms which reach out of the sky and take hold of me. I feel metal clamping around my biceps and I am lifted aloft, pulled above the wave of fear.

  Under any other circumstances, being yanked from the ground by a flying robot would be the most terrifying thing that could happen, but in this case the altitude pulls me over whatever is affecting everybody on the ground and I feel an instant relief from the pressure which was wringing my soul into nonexistence.

  I have never seen the city from this angle before. I have lived here my entire life, and never had any reason to go near the edges. I figured the roads went far away, took people to places like the airport, or maybe France, but everything just sort of trails off into a sort of nondescript grayness, as if that part of creation hasn’t been rendered yet, a thick space which ends with cosmic darkness on all sides.

  So that is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a border.

  INTERSTELLAR LAUNDRY BASKET

  Krave

  I am bored.

  Boredom is perhaps the worst thing a scythkin can face. Worse than being mangled in a vortex of knives, worse than being flailed for forty days and forty nights, worse than what I used to think was the worst I could face: defeat.

  There is paper in front of me. Paper I am meant to put my seal on and then push to the other side of this arduous torture device called a desk.

  I curse under my breath as my serrated ridges slice through the document I am trying to handle. I grasp to hold it together, which makes me knock over the ever growing tower of other papers. As they tumble and I try to reach for them, my various sharp appendages rend the flimsy desk behind which I sat into a dozen broken pieces.

  This world was not made for a creature like me. This was designed for the soft-skinned paper pushers who used to rule this realm with regulations and rules and files and the most depressing thing of all lying amid the debris of the desk: a little square box which has spilled sand and a couple of small rocks. They called it a desktop Zen garden. In all my conquests and travels, I’ve never seen anything so miserable as that.

  “Judiciar…” one of the little murketeers we suffered to survive in order to run the administration behind our latest conquest creeps into my presence. He’s smiling. It’s not his fault. They always smile. Even when they’re sad, or in, say, horrendous agony. You can chop little pieces off them until only the smile is left.

  “Judiciar…” he repeats in that nasal little voice which is meant to let me know he fears me. Of course he fears me. I am Krave. First hatched among a hundred. I wish he would call me that, not judiciar. I hate that title. It is not a title I wanted. It is not a title I respect. It’s not even a title that makes sense, and yet here I am, wearing it, just like I am more or less wearing my desk.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s been a problem in the human colony. It has been removed.”

  “And I care because…”

  “Because the problem is a human female.”

  “What did a human female do that I should be disturbed from my important task of…” I make a vague gesturing motion to the shredded document confetti and desk shards.

  “She refused to kneel.”

  “So unleash the soul-whip.”

  “We did. She still refused.”

  “Humans must kneel,” I say. Humans have no notion of how fortunate they are to be allowed to kneel. If they were literally any other animal in the universe they would have been wiped out by now several times over. But my kind reveres their soft little species. Humans are living artifacts of the time before universal sentience. They were the first to develop an awareness of separation between themselves and the world around them. The first to use fire. Not the first to discover the wheel, but they take credit for that too. The spawning of humanity sent consciousness flailing forward and backward through time, whirling across dimensions. It had a profound impact on everything all at once. In worlds across space and across time, sentience flowed like a wave. Alien civilizations grew in the wake of it and accomplished many remarkable feats of technology and beauty. Humans used it to dry noodles you could put in a plastic cup and then make wet again later. And that was good too.

  We were under the impression that humanity had died out, but a valuable pocket remains, a breeding colony of over a hundred and forty thousand members living in a simulated world in what is now the middle of scythkin space. I have been given the honor, and the punishment, of overseeing the colony, ensuring it runs in an orderly fashion, protecting it from harm. We ask very little of the humans, but I have dictated that they must obey when instructed. And they must kneel.

  “Bring her to me,” I say, intrigued. Since we took over the colony and I installed several control measures, we have not had a single incident of human rebellion. We have been very careful to ensure that the humans who live in the false world had their memories reset to the last stable point in their lives. They very quickly took to the daily kneeling routine once they realized they were rewarded afterward with a small number of coupons they call money.

  Today, the humans do not get their allowance.

  Today, I deal with a naughty human female.

  “Bring me her file.”

  Seven

  Caught in the grasp of flying drones, I am carried out away from the city, past the gray border and over what I can only describe as an ocean. Because it is an ocean. Why are they keeping an ocean out here? Why isn’t there a beach we can go to? Why does the world look nothing like it is supposed to? I am full of questions, which are only partly drowned out by the screaming I keep doing. God. I want to stop screaming. But I just can’t. Something about the way there’s so much air between me and the water below. If I fell from here, it would be like hitting solid concrete. The drone doesn’t care about my screaming. It doesn’t care about me at all. Something else is controlling it. Something is bringing me to it…