The Expanding Universe

by Craig Martelle

  The Tulaq craned her elegant neck, breath rattling through her respirator. She was lean and leggy, her black feathers sleek with protective wax. Like me, she wore HEGA gear: filters capable of handling viruses, poisons, and gas. I had a Zero suit on, close fitting bio-armor with a sealed full-face helmet, but her filter only covered her muzzle and eyes. A Tulaq’s Phitonic wax was strong enough to protect her during our interdimensional jaunts through the Drink. She could handle some microbes.

  “That Swim was easier than I expected,” she said, mind to mind. “Can we take off the machine lungs?”

  "Wait." I was busy pulling off our saddlebags. "Let me do a bio-scan and the initial report first. Something’s off."

  “Yes. I hear the air move... but no HuMans.”

  “The air might be moving, but that doesn’t mean it’s breathable." I removed our weapons and assembled them, then laid out Uhq'ur's humanoid bodysuit and filter mask. We'd brought an assortment of aerosols and bladed weapons, no guns. There were some seriously bad critters in the universe, and contrary to the wet dreams of many a wannabe space marine, a lot of those critters ate bullets like candy.

  Once Uhq’ur’s gear was ready, I rose and crossed to the bulkhead at the end of the room, lay a gloved hand on the surface, and concentrated. I'm a Phitometrist: What some would call a mage. You know that thing about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic? Phitometry is sufficiently advanced evolution indistinguishable from magic, the innate manipulation of Phi - the blood plasma of the multiverse - in any given local area. Specializations vary. I'm a Biomancer, which is why we’d been picked for this job. My specialization is Life in all its forms.

  The interstitial liquid wobbled around and through my skin, the Phi that cradled and separated the atoms of Reality, and let my senses expand through it. Eyes closed, I could 'see' anything alive within thirty feet or so. The expanding matrix of sensory awareness splashed off the Tulaq behind me, glowing green with vitality, and expanded through the hard walls ahead and... that was it. No bacteria, no animals. No plants. No people. Nothing.

  "Shibal no ma." I clicked my tongue, drew a deep breath, and refocused in a different, less specialized direction. I bent the Phitonic scan and switched my focus to the telltale chemicals of decay. "No detectable cadaverine, putrescine, skatole... so no decaying bodies. I am picking up a holy shitton of potassium permanganate somewhere nearby, though."

  Potassium permanganate is violet. Bad smell. Uhq’ur did not sound comforted, and neither was I. Where there was Morphorde, there was violet.

  "Yeah, I know, but it looks clean from here. We should be good to go. You can change… I’ll call in to base."

  I kept my back to her and squatted down on my heels to make the call. From behind me, I heard flesh slither and bones pop, wet sounds that continued to be audible once the ANSWER Comms relay connected. "C.S Zealot to FW02, logging Jump time at zero seven one five local. Jump was smooth, atmospheric NO-presence nil. Arrival point on Fafnir-1 is intact and atmospherically integral. No reception. No signs of life, over."

  There was a twenty-second delay between my message and the reply: ten seconds through the relay of buoys to ANSWER’s nearest command center, and ten seconds back. “FW02 to Zealot. Understood. Command requests special attention be paid to the retrieval of a GNOSIS BCI module given to Fafnir-1 for testing. A Med-Vac escort is on proximal standby in The Drink. Report in fifteen, over.”

  Fifteen minutes. We could do fifteen minutes in an underwater tomb and not die, hopefully. "Zealot to FW02, duly noted. Report in fifteen. Text following. Roger, out."

  I logged the text report. After a moment of consideration, I added '#2Spooky' to the end and sent it off. I doubted Comms would get the joke. Most ANSWER personnel were from times long before or long after the development of 4chan.

  "Hey Uhq'ur, have you ever heard Spooky Scary Skeletons?" I bounced up to my feet and turned to see a lithe humanoid woman standing in place of the winged quadruped that had been there just before. She was taller than me, her facial features proud and aquiline. In their native form, Tulaq were greyhound-like in appearance and build, and the refined, lithe look persisted when they shapeshifted. Her hair was black and iridescent, like a fall of long feathers.

  "Alliteration, with a double descriptor." She wrinkled her nose as she zipped up the thin bodysuit she'd brought to wear. "I smell a HuMan joke coming."

  "Spooky, scary skeletons send shivers down your spine, shrieking skulls will shock your soul and seal your doom tonight?" I did a little dance with jazzhands and everything, but Uhq'ur just pulled her head back on her neck and stared at me like I'd crawled out of the mud. "Uhh... don't worry. We're at Threat Level 'Not Spooky' anyway.”

  “What are you prattling on about now?”

  “4chan Skeleton Advisory System. This is serious stuff,” I said. “It's safe here for now, but always be alert for skeletons."

  She made a little huffy sound through her nose. At least I thought it was funny.

  I went back to the bulkhead and fed an override code into the lock. The heavy door pushed forward, breaking the seal, and opened into a sterile wasteland. It was as dark as a movie theatre just before the previews, just enough to see by, and creeped with a sense of still wrongness. Once upon a time, there had been plants in the pots studding the hallway. They were gone, and so was the soil.

  "All the organic matter is missing." I drew a knife with one hand, and armed a can of pressurized peppermint oil in the other. Morphorde – the same critters that ate bullets and gestated in guns – really didn’t like peppermint oil. "Can you hear anything? Because I can't."

  "A faint hum. But it might be the ocean."

  No sooner than she'd spoken, a loud creak echoed through the walls of the corridor. We both froze for a moment. The ocean. Water pressure. Right.

  "If something happened but there's no bodies, the settlers might be holed up somewhere," I said. "We have a map for Fafnir-1, but it’s out of date. We need to update it and see if we can find a panic room or records or something. Command wants us to try and return with their GNOSIS setup."

  "A Morphorde experiment?"

  “No. BCI. Brain to Computer interface,” I replied. “Basically lets a HuMan link a computer to their mind. You can create teaching modules that feed information straight to your brain, and you can upload and download memories from it and shit. Last I heard, it was still experimental. I wonder why they had it down here?”

  “The Ocean above insulates fragile minds from interference. I think I understand, but the concept of mind-injection hurts my Heart.”

  That was a literal statement. A Tulaq's heart is literally her soul, a big chunk of exquisitely sensitive crystallized Phi. “Yeah, I agree. Too much can go wrong with BCI.”

  We transversed silent, clean metal and polycarbon corridors, and arched walkways with transparent aquarium ceilings. The ANSWER override codes worked on the doors we came across, revealing abandoned quarters and spotless common areas. The mess hall was still laid out for the last meal, tables lined with gleaming metal trays and empty dishes. All organic matter had been scoured from the base, and everything smelled of bleach. Like a hospital... or a morgue.

  The first useful-looking computer terminal we found was in an office, a deck waiting on standby. Without a word, Uhq'ur went to watch the door, her sword in hand. I took the computer, licking my lip as I shuffled into the chair. I booted up my suit HUD and dug into the network. Ding-a-ling, and yay, ANSWER Relay Systems connected.

  The holo loaded a double-screen array. The computer belonged to Sandra Hakaal, according to her ID widget, and she had just under a million unopened emails. The last one had been opened only three days ago, when contact with ANSWER Command had lapsed. I closed the mail client and focused on scavenging through her documents, and was halfway through dumping the folders to a memory chip when a flash caught the corner of my eye.

  The ID widget was back up, but the portrait photo pane was blank. The n
ame was a string of screwed-up fuzzy letters that flickered to a different name between blinks. Linda Summers. The blank portrait stand-in fizzed as well, but no picture appeared.

  "What the...?" I closed the widget down again, and navigated through to the map of the arcology. Fafnir-1 was a newish floating biostructure, and I expected the map to fit on one screen. Instead, the terminal flipped out four more screens as the image loaded, one horizontal and three vertical. I pushed back from the desk on reflex. “Holy shit.”

  "What?" Uhq'ur glanced back over her shoulder.

  "Look at this. This place is huge. They built the arcology and then just... kept bolting shit on in a great big sprawl. While floating underwater. Somehow." I stared at it, trying to make sense of the crazy rat-warren that expanded out from Fafnir’s core buildings.

  Aghast, Uhq’ur came over to examine the map herself. “That’s… that base is nearly fifty acres.”

  “Fifty acres of badly-planned bullshit,” I said. “Look. None of it goes anywhere. The core of it is the original base, but look. All of this junk is just labeled ‘access corridor’. No wonder I couldn’t sense anything.”

  "That can't be right." The Tulaq's nostrils flared. "There's no way the colonists could support that much infrastructure undersea."

  “No, but the assembler nanites that built the base could, if they kept drawing carbon and metals out of the sea bed. Frowning, I downloaded a copy of the map to a new chip and chewed my lip in the moments before my ear vibrated and beeped. I flinched on pure reflex.

  "FW02 to Zealot. Status Report. Over."

  Ten second delay. "Zealot. No signs of life. Something’s wrong with the computer network, and it looks like Fafnir-1 was illegally expanding modules out into the surrounding ocean. Base site has been expanded to… approximately two hundred thousand square meters. Over."

  The lower right screen flashed, just before the ID widget popped up again of its own accord. A chill went through my back as it displayed another faceless image. Terry Weber. Then another one opened, overlapping the first. Juana Vega. A third, fourth, and then a clamor of them, hundreds of ID popups crowding the enlarged screens. Dara Rhodes. So Han. Ayana Shade. The portrait photos were either blank or twisted, pictures stretched into agonized mockeries of smiles. The eyes were fuzzed out by lines of distortion across the screen. Sanora Arndt. Olani Sisk. All women.

  "Woah." I stood up from the chair, alarmed. "There's some kind of crazy network virus in this system. I think we-"

  The ambient lights in the room died, plunging us into darkness. Uhq'ur made a strangled sound, her glowing eyes widening as the air-conditioning vents opened and began to pump freezing cold air into the room and the hall beyond.

  In that moment, my gratitude for the sealed Zero suit magnified. "Wow. I can already tell this is going to suck. Do you want to abort?"

  Uhq'ur was jumpy but grim-jawed, weaving her head like a bird of prey as we exited into the hallway. "No. We continue. I am not afraid of a virtual virus."

  "It could get pretty un-virtual in here pretty quickly." I tapped my peppermint oil bear spray can as we continued on.

  Uhq'ur pulled up sharply, and I screeched to a stop behind her as she held up a hand and cocked her head. Then she broke into a lope, running on the balls of her feet. I didn't bother to ask why, because as we rounded a corner and slowed, I heard it too. Soft, feminine sobbing echoing off the metallic walls from a closed room down the hall. It was the entrance to a women’s bathroom.

  "Hello!" I called out, but held the knife up ready. "We are Cellular Scouts Seung Angkor and Uhq'ur of Fort William Base, here on welfare check! Can you hear us?"

  The crying continued.

  "So, Korea has a lot of stories that we call 'urban legends'," I said quietly. "Basically myths about how weird stuff happens and precludes some serious horror. Murder, mutilation, etcetera. Just so you know, lots of them start with hearing a girl crying in an empty bathroom."

  "I see. And the conclusion of these stories?"

  "In the one I’m thinking of, she asks you what color toilet paper you want, blue or red. If you choose either option, she either kills you or makes you commit suicide.

  “How charming.”

  "Yeah." I looked back at her. "Just so you know, you’re supposed to refuse the toilet paper and run. You want to hold the door again?"

  Uhq'ur nodded tersely. She dropped her chin, and the prismatic nictating membranes of her eyes slid into place as she stepped forward towards the door. The temperature was dropping rapidly, and the fog billowing from the aircon vents had a yellowish tinge. Chlorine gas. P&D had been activated – Purge and Decontamination.

  I waved in front of the sensor, but the door was locked. I entered the code and stepped back. Uhq'ur gasped, and held her hands up to her face.

  The bathroom door opened into a tunnel straight out of a Cubist nightmare. The passageway beyond began ordinarily enough, with smooth floors that merged seamlessly into contoured walls that curved gently out at the sides. Beyond that, everything was carpeted with a sparkling druse of needle-like, black-violet crystal points. They started small and turned savage further down, where the architecture itself began to warp. The walls, ceiling and floor twisted into an eerie, orderly progression of repeated, angled layers, the walls and ceiling rotating clockwise in a square-edge spiral. About thirty feet in, it cut a hard, sharp angle to the right. The crying had stopped.

  "This is... uhh... this definitely isn't within the permissible architecture protocols." I drew up beside her, thumbing the pressure nozzle on my can of oil. I had the sudden urge to spray everything in sight.

  "Potassium permanganate crystals," Uhq'ur said, her voice trembling. Her eyes tracked something I couldn't see, as if watching ghosts pass by her and into the hall with us. “There was no purge here. It has been taken by the Breath of Those Under the End."

  Shit always got real when Tulaq started talking like this. Uhq'ur was a young Tulaq, but her people were ancient: one of the first living things in all the universe, in fact. They could get… abstract. “The Breath of the Who in the What?”

  “A Morphorde. They are some of the first Morphorde to crawl from an invasive necromass; they breathe the starving wind that desiccates and mutates.” She stepped backwards, shaking her head. “I will not go further. Explore if you wish… I cannot.”

  I was fairly good at translating Tulaq-speak after years as a Cellular Scout. I could conclude that the frigid chlorine gas was the Breathers’ main byproduct, the one that they got their name from, though the permanganate crystals were a mystery. “Mutations? Like pirohulves?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Pirohulves infest, like flies. The Breath of Those Under the End assume control.”

  Hands on hips, I brought up the map I’d downloaded from the malfunctioning computer. “Duly noted. This tunnel must be the work of the assemblers… only nanites could pull off something like this. Could these Morphorde, say, infect a bunch of nanobots?”

  "I don’t know." Uhq’ur brought a forearm up to her nose and mouth, but did not touch them together.

  “I'm going to call back to base. You should get back to the jump pool and stand by while I find the server room. We can get into the engineering logs and take a record, then get out of here. This is way above our paygrade. We need a RUBICON team."

  "As you say." Uhq'ur idled by nervously while I took a picture, logged into the relay and set up my messages. I copied it to FW02 – Cellular Scout Comms – and FW01 as well. Fort William 1 managed ANSWER’s rapid response teams, the RUBICONs. They could come in with flamethrowers and armor better suited to fighting Morphorde.

  “FW02, Fafnir-1 has been compromised by aggressive NO-infection," I said. "It appears to be lesser Morphorde, CAT-1 or CAT-2. No reception, no signs of life, extensive repatterning of the arcology. We are requesting reinforcements and will wait on standby before we continue the mission. FW01 copy?”

  We waited for the relay in silence, watching the crystal corrid
or for movement or change. Eventually, the hum of the return message tickled my ear.

  "Entry Number Twenty-Six." A female voice, dulcet and tremulous, broke into my helmet against a background of twisted, discordant static noise. “Everything grows constantly. We go deeper, deeper in and twist. It hurts. I wish we could just… reach someone. Anyone. ANSWER, Longriders, Li’Chee… GOD, I don’t even care any more.”

  "What?" I tried to disconnect, but the transmission continued to override the relay link. "Uhq'ur, can you hear this?"

  Uhq'ur was shaking, her jaw clenched, hand fisted around the hilt of her weapon.

  "I don’t even know how we’re still afloat." The woman on the radio sounded tired, defeated. "We're all… twisted up back here. Sandra led a team to the Comms room, security’s trying get past the blockade, but anything they manage to clear just grows back. If anyone finds this, you need to get out of here. Send for RUBICON, or… just… leave."

  The transmission cut, and then my HUD pinged amber. Transmission rejected. Attempting resend.

  "Shit. We’re cut off from the relay." I brought up the log, scanning it. "My radio’s pinging. We're jammed."

  "Something is here. We need to Riverjump and get out," Uhq'ur said, shaking her head. "Do not worry about our orders. We are not welcome here."

  I hated to admit it… but I was freaked. Many years ago, I’d altered my body chemistry to better manage stress, but the message chilled me all the same. Cancer was the one thing that Biomancy couldn't touch. I knew that all too well.

  “Go back to the jump pool and stand by. I'm in Cat-4 grade gear here. There's nothing in this building that can get through my suit, but there are things here that might want to get to your Soulstone." I shook my head. "Go hole up, head off the Medic team if you can. For all we know, the virus is going to screw up our jump coordinates, and they’ll end up torn to pieces across three different dimensions. We have to reestablish a link, at least."