Now, six hundred years later, I still cannot answer that question. I can only say that the world we live in is a beautiful and peaceful one, but one that did not become so without its share of bloodshed. A fact that I often find difficult to live with.
We were only four, three with humans bodies and me. I had regretted taking the ones on the boat without their permission, even though they insisted that they were happier for it. So it was with great reluctance that I asked the others to go out and bring us back a few more compatriots. With a handful of our kind in zip-lock baggies full of sea water they headed out into the city. They had assured me that they knew who they could help best with the task they were assigned. Being partly human themselves they knew the plight of the poor and the homeless, of the addicts who slowly poisoned themselves to death. In retrospect it was a big risk. What if the addicted personality had been so deeply ingrained that it tainted one of our own? My friends knew what they were doing though, and I give them credit where it is due. They healed those poor human souls and gave them a renewed life. So there we were, twenty of us in all. Three fishermen, sixteen street dwellers and me inside my little metal beach ball.
At the request of Survivor and the other two, all of whom desperately missed their families, we sailed back to our original port where I allowed them to disembark with more little sea-water baggies with the explicit understanding that once those families were made whole once again there would be no more forced melding. It was an extremely difficult decision for me to make, but I felt that fracturing three human families permanently was likely the worst of two undesirable choices. The men would explain that it had all been an elaborate joke and that they were terribly sorry for having perpetrated it. Then, when their families had gone to sleep they’d release symbionts onto their pillows and in the morning they would make apologies and express their feelings to their loved ones. Then we would lay low.
And we did. The next five years on Earth went by quickly, or so I’m told by the others. When you don't sleep time seems to stretch on for an eternity. At times weeks would pass when not a soul other than Hiro would enter that basement in which I was hidden away from the world, sitting on my precious egg of 3 billion sentient souls. Still, there was progress even if it was slow. At the end of the first year there were nearly one hundred added to our group, all volunteers who’d been approached very carefully. By the end of the second year there was well over five hundred and by the end of my fifth year in hiding the ship's numbers showed that over six thousand of our kind had been sent out into the world.
There were some of our kind who would come to see me and would plead for more symbionts, I knew what they were up to, so I never gave in. They intended to violate my rule and begin to implant our kind into unwilling hosts. Always I would tell Survivor to keep watch over those who made such requests, and he did. He kept watch over me as well and on an August night in that fifth year he found a man trying to sneak into the house. The man explained that he’d been told by someone, one of the over-zealous members of our own species no doubt, that we could help him or more specifically his daughter. She’d been shipped from one hospital to another and suffered from extreme depression, violent outbursts and drug addiction. Hiro told the man that he’d been mistaken and threw him out onto the street, threatening to call the police if he returned.
It was later that evening that my sensors detected movement and I realized that he had broken into the basement. I had no desire to hurt the man but I had to stop him before he saw too much. Some years before then I'd had the machines create tranquilizer darts that could be fired from the ship, just in case anyone got too curious and ventured down to the basement without permission from Hiro. One quick shot and the man stumbled to the floor in the dark. A second shot, this one a neural communication dart, allowed me to speak with him, albeit briefly, before he lost consciousness.
I alerted Survivor who he quickly rushed down to the basement. The man had revealed to me that he was a key member of the cabinet so I had Hiro check his identification. Sure enough he had been telling the truth. Even before he awoke, some hours, later I started regretting having had the machines design the tranquilizer darts to erase short-term memory. Luckily it turned out to be of little consequence, he still remembered setting out to come to our house, just not the part where he'd been thrown into the street or having broken back in.
Tied to a chair he sat and watched as Survivor went for the switch that activated the light in the corner of the room where I was positioned on a large workbench. In five years our ship had never once been revealed to a living, purely human, soul. All of that changed when I activated the ship’s anti-gravity stack and caused it to lift up off of the table. Peering through its mechanical eye, the larger one that worked better in dim lighting, I shone one of the navigation lights in his direction. His face was filled with fear that was quickly replaced by surprise as I began to speak to him through his neural transmitter. Hiro stood in the corner and watched as my softly humming metal beach ball floated over to a position directly in front of the man and I began to ask him questions. I left the transmitter's channel unencrypted, I had no secrets from Survivor.
I agreed to help the awestruck man, but on one condition, that he agree to be melded first. It was not a demand, it was simply that I could not pass up such an opportunity to attain such a high-level ally. Had he refused I would have wiped his memory but still sent Hiro out to help the girl, if she was willing that is. Much to my surprise, however, he sobbed and begged me to make it so. He explained that whatever we were going to do to her that he’d want us to do it to him first. As the tiny hatch in the side of the ship opened the man extended out his left hand and took the symbiont into his embrace. Without being told what to do he held it up to his ear, where it gently wriggled into place.
The man made a peaceful transition, just as had been described to me by most of the others. It seemed to me that those with the most inner torment gladly accepted the joining and even found great peace in the process. We sat for some hours that night and conversed as Katsuro, as I learned his name to be, came to terms with his new self. Hiro brought him some tea and the two of them even laughed together about some of the more pleasant aspects of their human lives. I saw them smile and for the first time since we had been forced to land on Earth I didn’t feel bad about who I was or what I was doing. I was the leader of my people, as reluctant as I was, and now I simply wished to help them create a bright new future, one in which I was no longer needed.
Chapter Five