Title: Specimen
Author: Greywolf
Banner by Frenchdreamer
Disclaimer: I don’t own Roswell or any of the characters. I’m just using them for fiction purposes. Please don't sue.
Rating: ADULT
Category: AU with aliens T/K
Authors Note: This starts about 1998
Summary: Well...this is kind of experimental. My first fic with Tess and Kyle as the main characters. Wish me luck.
Hour 21 Day 3645 The Facility, 120 feet underground, 28.2 nautical miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico
The computer that monitored the chamber gave the specimen’s weight as 51.7 kilos, its height as 160.2 centimeters, and its temperature at 37.2 degrees Celsius. It didn’t list an age…which would have been difficult to define in any event. Technically speaking, the specimen had never been born at all, rather it had been artificially created some years ago…how many exactly no one knew. Certainly no earlier than 1947, though. What the computer did track was the time since the ‘activation’ of the specimen although a fairer description might be the time of its captivity. That particular clock would turn to three thousand six hundred and forty-six days just before noon.
But if you were in the chamber looking at the specimen, …or even one of the two people in the teams that continuously monitored it from the control room, you might think that the specimen was a perfectly normal fifteen or sixteen year old blonde haired blue-eyed girl sitting at a desk talking to a computer screen…normal that is except for being stark naked. Of course the people on the teams didn’t think that,…they knew better.
The screen showed a chess board…the white pieces nearest the specimen.
“White Queen’s knight to Queen’s Bishop three…,” said the specimen.
The computer screen showed the move and the small speaker quickly responded, “Black pawn to King’s Bishop four…”
‘Mate in 27 moves,’ thought the specimen. ‘Too bad…no ice cream tonight.’ The opponent, the specimen knew, was a computer…that’s how it was possible to predict the 27 moves. Years ago they’d actually played against her…whoever was monitoring her. They’d never won, but it was impossible to predict just how quickly they might lose because their performance was so variable. Sometimes they made incredibly stupid plays, and they would lose much sooner than the specimen would have believed. The ice cream was the reward for winning in 25 moves or less, the reward given to the specimen for showing its captors the extent of its mental capabilities...the treat for cooperating.
Of course, she knew she could beat the computer in 21 moves if she had wanted to…even now. It was a side of her that they didn’t know…despite all the testing they’d done on her …despite the blood and tissue samples they would take and the examinations they would do when they rendered her unconscious every month or so. She was determined to not let them know everything.
There really wasn’t much she could do about her captivity, if there had been she’d have done it long ago. But she could at least do that much to mess with their little intelligence and mental tests.
Sometimes a captive must content themselves with even the littlest of victories. So she’d go without the ice cream tonight, just to keep them a little bit in the dark about how capable she was at thinking ahead.
“White pawn to white queen’s four,” said Tess. ‘You screw with me…I screw with you,’ she thought.
1400 Day 3646 The Facility conference room, 30 feet underground, 28.2 nautical miles northwest of Roswell ,New Mexico
He was the new guy….the fourth and most recent of a series of Congressional oversight representatives. The Facility was funded with ‘black world’ dollars, dollars that never appeared as a line item of the federal budget. But even so, Congressional Committees needed to approve these funds, and even politicians wanted SOME assurance that the money wasn’t just lining the pockets of the contractor that ran the facility. James Bartelson gave them this, but he gave them something far more important…plausible deniability.
Bartelson had been selected precisely because he had a certain…shall we say…pragmatism. Black world money had flowed to contractors by the billions over the years, and it had flowed to them for results…not for good intentions. It was understood that such contractors would play a little fast and loose with the rules, the actual extent of the lawbreaking limited only by the value of the prize that was being sought. Black world projects were so secret that no mention was ever made of them other than in secure conference rooms such as this one, buried deep under the ground and secure from the prying eyes and ears of foreign agencies…and even domestic law enforcement. Bartelson’s predecessor was now retired, but he’d made a comment a week ago as they’d been sitting together having coffee in a small coffeehouse in Reston Virginia. He’d known Bartelson had been going west for the quarterly assessment…to Area 51 first,…and then the Facility. He remembered the comment the man had made….that New Mexico reminded him of the Brazilian proverb…that Brazil was the land of the future…and always would be. And indeed, this was one of the oldest of the black world projects…dating back almost to the time of the Manhattan Project. But this far….despite a black world investment that stood in the billions of dollars, the project hadn’t produced a damn thing. He’d come from Area 51….they’d gotten all sorts of things from the reverse engineering of the remnants of the crashed spacecraft over the years…stealth technology…integrated circuits…other advanced electronics…the wealth of information in that treasure trove was only beginning to be exploited. But this project was almost as old, and had cost nearly as much, and thus far had delivered….nothing. And yet Bartelson knew that ALL of his predecessors had given the project their highest marks….despite the lack of results. He was awaiting the briefing eagerly, wondering what could possibly justify all of that expenditure…all of that hope. As the screen lit up in the conference room, he became quickly skeptical.
“A naked teenage girl…talking to a computer? For that we are paying a quarter billion a year? Hell, for $500 a night I can go to Juarez and get a naked teenage girl that will do a hell of a lot more for than play with a computer,” Bartelson said skeptically. In fact that wasn’t just rhetoric. He had plans to take a day off and spend it in Juarez… before boarding the plane in El Paso to fly back to Washington DC. His trips too were funded with ‘black world’ money. His predecessor had told him that visiting the fleshpots along the border was just one of the perks of his new job.
“Except this specimen isn’t human…or at least not entirely human. Mr. Bartelson,” said Doctor Higby, “….you’ve just come from Area-51. Most of the aliens died on impact. But one was caught…..pilfering items from the wreckage. But he wasn’t like the others….wasn’t even a carbon-based life form. He was completely synthetic…a designed artificial entity….and silicon based. He had amazing powers…some of which he managed to hide from us. We…interrogated him for two years before he escaped…hid out on some Indian Reservation. Fortunately one of our agents got a tip from one of the villagers….traded him a case of whiskey for helping us set the creature up. We recovered him and continued our interrogations. It took a long time…the creature was quite….resilient. We worked on it for thirty-eight years before it…broke. But eventually we wore it down…it did break… and led us to a chamber he had created. The creature you see before you is an alien-human hybrid. We believe the silicon based creature…the Indians called him Nasedo…we believe this Nasedo created this creature….that he was trying to adapt alien DNA to be viable on this planet. We found four incubation pods, but we believe this was the only experiment he had time to do before he was recaptured. The other three pods were empty. At first we believed that he had captured some Earth child and infected her but after we got a look at her cells….well it appears that she is artificial as well…only carbon based. She’s something like a chimera…she has a complete coding of human DNA…but in a part of the DNA called the ‘nonsense strand DNA,’ she also has a rather large amount of DNA that is clearly of alien origin…related to that in the bodies of the crewmen who were killed. She is a Terrestrial-Extraterrestrial Synthesis Specimen….”
“Tess?”
“We don’t let people call her that. It anthropomorphises her. We don’t want her keepers to ever believe…even for a moment…that she is human…or tame…or even docile.”
Doctor Higby knew that wasn’t exactly the truth. In fact he slipped up himself. But still…familiarity bred contempt, and it was easier to keep people vigilant if they didn’t start to think about Tess as a human being. Because Tess was dangerous…incredibly dangerous…exactly how dangerous they were not really sure.
“She seems docile enough.”
“Yes…yes she does. I’m sure she seemed that way to the first four people that had contact with her after she was awakened nine years ago. The ones she brutally slaughtered. She appeared about six years old then.”
