Not Me, Only Us.

The room was small. Too small. Grey walls pressed close, a low hum from fluorescent tubes overhead. Alex sat alone at a metal table, hands flat on cold steel. Sweat beaded on her furrowed brow.

A door opened. Two men entered, darkness dressed, head-to-toe. Each man’s face obscured by a mask. Wordless, they moved as one to stand at Alex’s shoulders.

“Welcome,” a sound crackled through unseen speakers. “You have been chosen.”

Alex’s throat grew taut and dry. “Chosen for what?”

“To become part of greatness. To shed your self and embrace new purpose. To become one of The Us”

Alex’s heart thumped. She grasped the table edge to keep centred as he fought a suddenly urgent fear. Shallow, staccato breaths paralysed her thought and left all words of substance dead on a dry tongue. “Who are you? Where am…”

“We are The Us,” the speaker crackled. “You’ll understand soon enough. These men have been told to escort you to our hub resource to start the process.”

Alex’s arms were pulled up as the men dragged her from her seat. As they hauled her from the room, the personal world of Alex Farne, government contractor, mother, daughter and former spouse of the Company Controller, began to collapse. The so-far freeform fates of career, clan and all the collected, connected consequences, outcomes, upshots and sequelae would soon be reduced to a quantum dot of only one outcome; the death of her complete personal core.

She thought. The death of thought. The death of me. “But what am… ”

Eye to eye, Alex Farne faced the masked men.

They had pulled her through hallways, across blacktop tarmac to the back of a large concrete hangar, where she was manacled to a steel pole, masked and sedated by gas that threatened to make nausea the last personal sensory event she would feel. That and the darkness and cold.

A sharp gasp. The needle of cold breath woke her up. She faced the masked guards once more, only now she could see that the masks had changed form from a black woven cloth to some sort of dull metal. Each guard had a long, steel baton slung from a belt. Each looked unshakeable and adamant and prepared for any and every development. How long had she been asleep and what had they done to her?

She checked herself for harm and knew, so far at least, the only cruelty The Us had exacted upon her had been her capture and rough treatment. All at the hands of a mystery group she had never heard of.

She scrabbled through her memory for a clue. Her recall now seemed hazy at best; a fog-bound landscape of half-remembered glances of who, what and where she had been these last few days and hours. That was new, she was almost sure of that. All she had now was half-hunches and frameworks of what was real, but there was a memory there - she felt the grasp of cold metal, her hands wrapped around a heavy object. A gun? Why was she armed. Was that who she was? A cop? A Fed? A spy? The memory scuttled away out of reach, but she focussed on the reason why she had apparently held a gun long after she forgot the gun altogether.

She knew she worked - or had worked - for government, as an agent or contractor of some flavour. An alphabet agency for sure. She clung to the concept because - for some reason - her chance to get out of whatever trouble she was part of depended on that memory.

She had been an agent and sent here for a reason.

There was a wrangle.

She had been sent here as an agent?

There were bullets. The bullets passed through the craft.

They had sent an agent here. Her.

She had shot several rounds at the craft, but the craft had not appeared to be there at all.

Craft? What craft?

Her orders were to shoot the craft down. Out of the sky. That was her job.

They sent her, an agent.

An agent was sent. Who was she?

Who was she?

An…

Her confused thoughts began to fog. What was once her, the Alex that she knew, was broken down and shared much the same way a bowl of tapas would be. Others of The Us took parts away and separated them to pass to yet more Others. Alex’s laugh, her love, her despondency, decency and even her death were watered down, adulterated; eventually owned by one that was the many. Not her. The Us. There was no ‘her’ anymore.

The absence of such a personal reference, some form of locus she could gather her separated self to, made her start to look around the hangar, absorb the area, get to know what she was to become a part of.

As her personal despondency grew, the dark hangar grew by contrast full of hope. The space around her started to lose the tenebrous, leaden corners where the unknown lay camouflaged by the gloom.

“Not yet, not yet, let me see.”

The stars came out, her eyes were overcome by darkness. And then, she was dazzled by a sun that grew from the last corner of her eye. She managed, before she was defeated by the creep of darkness to see what would be her last spectacle.

Parked at one end of the hangar, was a 15 metre-long craft that seemed to just float there. She understood.

“What’s that all about?” she breathed, sotto voce, almost to herself, but then couldn’t hear the words she had spoken. Her speech became marcescent, a useless, dead protuberance from her body and soul. A peace fell onto her and dampened all sound. She could only hear her mental process.

And then, she lost even the sound of her thoughts.

One after the other, her senses drew away from her.

Her ears could not hear. Her eyes were already dark. Her sense of scent and smell decayed; the last dusk of fragrance set on her soul. The very last sense to go was touch, but touch held the secret of loss of self; the sense of closeness to an Other.

And so, Alex became aware of an Other. An Other that merged to her. She felt a warmth, a soft touch, a contact that barely entered as goose bumps washed over her and tremors and low waves brushed her nerves to an ecstasy she had never known before. She was shaken and shuddered by love. They were here and she was a part of them.