The Predator of the Meadow

The sudden onset of spangled starlight forced back the deep violet and burgundy of cryogenic sleep. Vincent Wagner woke and found himself in the cramped confines of a dimly lit cockpit with bluish ice-vapor lingering just outside his faceplate. Four thick, serrated needles pierced his arm, drugging him with medication to flush sub-zero preservatives from his blood. The dull ache of ice flooded his veins and clouded his mind. Forcing his eyes open, he found himself in near darkness.

  Vincent felt confident of his own identity and therefore deduced that his mind had not been overly damaged by cryogenic sleep. His confinement was the cramped cockpit of a Panthera deep-space fighter. Memories were hard won and his brain felt slippery to logic, though he remembered every detail of the cockpit. The displays were not lit and little was visible with the opaque sun shield protracted over the canopy. Dank quarters barricaded him inside with only murky blue shadows.

  The only audible sounds chimed from his movements and he basked in the silence before disrupting the calm environment of the cockpit.

  He lifted his hand to initialize the cockpit display and narrow swaths of small, white frost-forests were cut out from his gloves and forearms. When power coursed through the screens, soft, incandescent swarms of amber, yellow, and green light bathed the cockpit. The familiar surroundings warmed the chill in his blood. In the faint light, he could see that his flight suit was filthy, and he smelled of antiseptics and regrown flesh.

  The frost quickly melted and coalesced into beads of water as the ship computer increased the cabin temperature. Vincent poked his finger through a hole in his suit just above his instrument belt. Both his trousers and blouse were punctured, but he only the felt warm, healthy flesh of his hip on the tip of his finger. He wondered if he had experienced a battle, and was then curious to know how long the military campaign had been going on. No dates or specific locations were provided, so Vincent could only muse.

  A war raged somewhere beyond the sun shield. An enemy without a face or a name awaited the cataclysmic weapons of Hell riding in biologically sealed canisters strapped to the girth of his ship. And he was a willing participant, ready to die in glorious battle and claim the right to the destiny of any true human. So he had been conditioned to rationalize.

  The needles retracted from his arm, leaving a clotting agent as they withdrew to close the wounds.

  Minutes after having awoken from the deep sleep, Vincent felt invigorated and refreshed. Several neural cables were coiled in a container fastened to his flight suit. He unwound them and connected the triangular leads into the appropriate sockets set in his chair. His muscles felt extremely tired, and the motions triggered spasms of pain in his joints, especially his hips. The feelings were dismissed as after effects of sleeping for an extended amount of time. He didn’t want to entertain the idea that he had already fought and bled in the War, whether he could remember his actions or not.

  The instructions for preparing his fighter were simple and had been reviewed thoroughly before departure. After arriving in a pause, he would be awake and uninhibited by any sort of behavior modification for a short amount of time. Doctors on distant command ships would monitor his condition, and then send the commitment orders that would modify his brain activity and prevent him from remembering any event, including his arrival. He watched the sparse information on the primary display until the command ship sent its reply.

  Seconds after connecting his brain to the ship, a psychological penumbra swept him through several stages of extreme vertigo, claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Random thoughts and concerns gave way to bio-organic instructions that were puzzled together with encrypted fragments of mission data supplied by the ship computer. Complex, heuristic equations in black and gray flooded every screen as top secret instructions and informative data were decoded.

  Star charts were imprinted into his long term memory and he understood his location and the tactical advantages of his current position as though he had studied them for years. Without any memory of having flown the deep space fighter, his body was conditioned to respond and manipulate its every control. He believed he could fly the ship with greater agility than he could walk.

  And then came the rage.

  At first, it existed as nothing more than statistical information about his opponents. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew his opponents might not possess a single weapon, yet his memory was honed with such vile atrocities as any theologian might surmise would be found only in Hell. His opponents were villains culpable for swilling the birth fat from newborns, filching nourishing breast milk from babies’ mouths. The lives of these damned scoundrels were constructed in his mind as being birthed into a netherworld of villainy and wickedness.

  A retched odor filled the cabin and Vincent bit down on his lip to hold back a wave of nausea.

  Vincent was well aware his mind was being conditioned. He knew why he submitted. The human race could not afford to place robots in a situation that demanded inspiration as well as instinct. They did not need killers who would mindlessly or methodically slaughter. His race needed people like himself who would submit themselves to temporary behavioral reprogramming and emerge as mighty beasts of war.

  And the hunger arose.

  He was ravenous for domination, blood, possession and land. Every conceivable lust erotically charged his body. There was naught concern for what he wanted, or why he wanted something he could no longer describe. His mind simmered and roiled in greasy hunger. Hormones and synthetic drugs burned his veins and hardened his muscles.

  The instructions continued decryption.

  Left alone in the silent agony of dimensional quadratic encryption, he could only gaze at the intricate patterns created from the million-symbol code streaking across the primary display screen. He knew that the computer was not some machine buried in the optic circuitry of the ship, but his own brain. The seconds stirred by, and Vincent found himself alone in unknown space peering at the Panthera Defense Corporation emblem. He couldn’t remember whether the information had been stored in his head, and when a voice spoke, he wasn’t sure if he was speaking. But he knew that it was changing the way he thought and remembered. Words scrolled across the primary display in time with the voice.

  Vincent Wagner, you have agreed to participate in this military engagement, funded by the Panthera Corporation. Since the Panthera Corporation does not believe that citizens of Earth and our employees should have to live with the anguish and guilt of war, you are undergoing behavioral adjustments that will block many, if not all, memories of these events. With any luck, your tour of duty from the time of your first encounter will be over within one Earth year. Your patriotism to your planet and company are appreciated and will be rewarded upon your return.

  When the voice fell silent, the sun shield retracted and Vincent found himself in a luxurious nebula without a single star piercing the rich concentration of gases. Time suddenly became a distorted web of events that were forgotten before he realized they could have been remembered. It was not agony. It was glorious. He savored every moment without knowing how many moments had been enjoyed or when it would be over.

  An entire armada of deep space fighters, bombers and carriers swarmed like locusts in the nebula. He imagined that he was within a great hive of metal insects, preparing to feast upon the fresh blooms of spring. The positions of the ships appeared chaotic, but his remaining faculties for logic and a closer inspection dictated that each fleet was prepared to erupt from the nebula and proceed directly to their targets. And though he so desperately wanted to be afraid, those frail remnants of his humanity were being buried and he was left only with hunger, rage, and the endless boundaries of a conditioned human mind to carry out his orders.

  His sense of time waned and each second began to blur into the next.

  The rich luster of the nebula and the vastness of space began to thicken and transform into a richly detailed landscape. Vincent envisioned himself as a lion whose
pride charged the fathomless depths of a lush meadow. A plethora of fauna - gazelle and antelope - flourished in the foreign land. Together with the other lions, they descended upon the meadow. His pride struck mercilessly and fed upon the healthy, without appeasing their ravenous appetites. And then the young fell to the mighty grip of their powerful jaws.

  He watched the remaining young and old realize the speed and accuracy with which the predators struck would soon send every species in their precious meadow into extinction. They fought back with unexpected ferocity, driving the predators back. The meadow was enormous and every foot was covered with blood, dead, and the wounded. For a short while, it looked as though the enemy would win. But too much damage had been inflicted.

  The thrill of the hunt had overtaken him, and he was without memory. But something was amiss. Vincent was familiar with the scents that rolled in the soft breeze and clung to the blades of waist-high grass. The odors were a melange of blood, sex, and hunger. When he was hungry, he ate. When he was thirsty, he drank. He didn’t remember the War. But the primal levels of his mind never forgot the meadow.