The Expanding Universe

by Craig Martelle

  "I am a confident Swimmer but… yes. The Breath could interfere with my navigation.” She sighed, brows knitted. “I will retreat to the water. Make haste."

  I checked the seals on my suit to reassure myself, and then doused the whole thing in peppermint oil. It used up about half the canister, but added another level of security, however flimsy. Some years ago, I’d messed around with my body, improving my response to stress and raising my threshold for fear, but I was freaked the hell out. Any Cellular Scout who survived more than a year on the job knew that the ‘lesser’ in ‘Lesser Morphorde’ didn’t mean that they were any less dangerous than Greater Morphorde. They were microscopic and mindless, but still capable of hijacking a more advanced living host and turning them into a brood factory for all sorts of nasty shit.

  My boots crunched down on the brittle permanganate as I picked my way inside the needle-lined maw of the hallway, knife and canister at the ready. Lights trapped behind a haze of purple flickered and spat, and I had the unpleasant sensation of being watched as I climbed into the hopper-shaped core and turned the corner. A high, agonized scream pierced the air behind me.

  “Uhq'ur!” I turned back and ran, only to screech to a stop. The fake bathroom door was being disassembled by a creeping carpet of black things, each unit so small that the mass of them looked like white and black television snow. The assemblers. Behind them, I sensed a shadow... Uhq'ur's lifeforce, flitting like ball lightning as she fought on the run from something I could not see or hear. "Uhq'ur! Wait!"

  There was a crackle overhead, like the feedback from a speaker, and then a soft sound that echoed off the dark, angular contours of the crystal corridor. The sound grew from a murmur to an angry, distorted amalgam of voices, each talking over the other so completely that they became completely unintelligible. Laughter, babbling, pleading, screaming.

  "Shit!" I moved back uncertainly and tried to connect to Uhq'ur's link, which I should have been able to do even with the relay jammed. It rang once, before the call diverted to an unknown ID. "God Dammit!"

  "Entry Number Twel- twelve." I heard the same woman from before speaking through my hijacked comms link, her voice blurred and distorted on every other word. "Jacinta gave birth to this... thing todurrrr-today. It killed her. That's the fifteenth one to die like this. We hhhhh-ad to put her in the compactor and flush her through the blackwater system…”

  The assemblers could kill me. They could efficiently disassemble my Zero suit, exposing me to whatever pathogens were in the air, and they could probably disassemble my body if they put their collective mind to it. Uhq’ur could survive without her clothes – I could not. There was nothing to do but move forward.

  Shoulders hunched, I slunk down the crystal corridor like a dog. The ambient noise swelled when I reached an area of wall where the crystal structure turned inward, an effect something like a lamprey's mouth. There was a door behind it, sealed over with a crumbling layer of minerals. I turned my knife around to the glassbreaker end and struck at it, chipping the brittle layer off in sheets of angular purple glass. It sloughed off and shattered on the floor, hissing as the chlorine gas oxidized it black. I cleared the barrier quickly, skin creeping with the anticipated sensation of something crawling on it.

  The voices in the hidden speakers swirled into a furious hissing sound as I punched in the override code. The light by the door flickered green, gears grinding as it fought to open, then turned red. The door slammed shut.

  As I wrestled with the door, the log started up again suddenly enough to make me jump. "The assemblers walled off the residential unit and we can't get to the jump pool. The- We rrrreeeeee-treated behind Bulkhead Five and locked ourselves in with the communications ahhh-aarrrrrr-rray. We’ll trrrry GNOSIS. Maybe we can get control of the assemblers again."

  "Would you just shut up for half a second?" I dialed the code in again, and when the door opened, I jammed the knife hilt into the crack that opened. The panel turned red, and the motors in the door ground relentlessly as the speakers crackled with angry, terrified shrieks and cries. The whole goddamn building was possessed.

  "Can anyone hear me?" A different feminine voice crackled over the link through the noise, buzzing against my eardrum. "Is the buoy relay operational? Hello? Zealot? Are you here?"

  I froze, fingers wrapped around the edge of the door. My callsign. I didn't know anyone in this colony other than Uhq'ur. "Roger? Uhq'ur, is that you?"

  Silence. The door continued to whine, but it wasn't strong enough to break the hilt of my knife.

  "Uhq'ur, do you copy?"

  The link disconnected with a click and went dead, and it was only then that I realized. The voice had been weirdly modulated, like a series of individual words strung together by a computer. Something was listening, but it wasn’t Uhq’ur. I’d just made a terrible mistake.

  The lights stopped flickering and turned red as a claxon pierced the building from end to end, whooping as a series of thumps, felt but not heard, rumbled the floor under my feet. The chattering black noise cut off as a smooth artificial voice came in over the PA system. “Preparing full atmospheric purge. All escape modules released. Life scan negative–”

  "Hey, what?" I left off the door as the recitation continued, looking up and back. "Hey!"

  "All personnel evacuated. No biometrics detected. Relay system notifications disabled. Purge initiated."

  My gut thrilled with fear - real, genuine fear – as all sound disappeared from the hallway. The door stopped trying to slam closed and went still. I wrenched it open, switching to nightvision as a low hiss filled the air. There, I took a moment to steady myself, feeling out along the Phitonic threads to get a grip on what was happening around me. The oxygen-nitrogen level was dropping, displaced by... argon. The base was purging its GOD-damned life support system.

  My suit could do a lot of things and take a lot of damage, but it wasn't a space suit designed to keep me alive in an airless environment. Zero suits had a single emergency cap of breathable air that could be drawn on in the event of a badly placed jump in or out of the Drink – about five minutes’ worth, which was plenty of time for a disorientated Tulaq to get her bearings, re-enter the Drink, and swim for safety, but not enough for this.

  "Hello? Zealot? Are you there?" The woman spoke again. This time, I heard the synthesized falseness of the voice, the borrowed soundbytes of Uhq’ur’s voice. Something was in the arcology's network, a virus circulating and replicating in its 'blood'. It was capable of thinking, learning and plotting... and it was not my friend. “Please tell us where you are.”

  In a few short minutes, the atmospheric integrity of the base had dropped to 96%, seeming to decrease a percentage point with every other breath. The instinctive urge was to breathe faster and run somewhere, anywhere, where I wasn’t going to slowly choke to death. Instead, I brought up the map and tried to orientate. Eventually, I worked out where I was: the medical bay. Fafnir-1's medical laboratory was just up ahead. The Command Center and the servers were in the next quarter, if I could just get to it.

  I ran with my eyes glued to the map, and careened around a corner where I nearly ran headlong into a bizarre spiderweb of carbon, metal and mutated flesh that blocked the corridor. For several lightheaded seconds, my mind didn’t want to put the pieces of what I was seeing together, to make sense of it… until she moved. It was a woman. Her torso hung limp and broken from her shoulders, her lower body meshed into the net from the hips down. Her abdomen was grotesquely swollen, the skin drum-tight. I could see the veins under the surface of her belly. The blood that flowed through them was black.

  I recoiled, stomach churning. The growths on the wall and her limbs looked like uterine tumors, white and fibrous. The sight and smell of this place – necrotizing flesh, disinfectant, metal, the weird, skin-ruffling smell of advanced cancer – took me back to memories I really didn’t want to relive, memories that made the artificial bones in my legs ache with remembered pain.

  “Hhhhhhhhh…
.” Her breath, frosting in the air, was green-yellow. She was not alive, but her lips were moving... and as I stared, I realized she was mouthing the same word over and over. Please.

  “Oh GOD.” I had awful hunch about what was brooding inside of her, too, and it was nothing I wanted to tangle with. “Are you… I mean… can you..?”

  The woman’s rotten eyes rolled up to look at me, staring without recognition. Her lips were cracked and blue, face hollow... but there was something still in there. Something HuMan was still trapped inside the corpse.

  "Cellular Scout Seung Min-Joon.” I edged forward, voice cracking. I still had half a can of peppermint oil, and kept my finger on the nozzle as she swayed. Something was moving under the skin of her belly. “Can you hear me?”

  "Hear… everything," she whispered. Now that the life support was off and the air cycle had stopped, I could hear her broken voice in the unnaturally still air. “Please. Can…cer. Please.”

  The surgery to remove the cancer from the bones of my legs was a distant childhood trauma, a half-remembered violation. There were still days where I felt that there wasn't a part of me that someone's hands hadn't touched. My marrow. My heart. My lungs. Gorge rose in my throat. The Morphorde had bought cancer to HuMankind, among other things… viral parasites who’d burrowed into our genome and screwed with the code to further their own replication. Our very own Pandora’s Box.

  "What's your name?" I asked. It was important.

  "C... Ckttt..." Her word faltered for a moment. "Cait...lin."

  Names were a powerful thing in the hands of a Phitometrist. My stomach stopped fluttering quite as hard. "Caitlin. Can you tell me what happened to you?"

  She looked down at herself, and squeezed her eyes closed, fighting madness at the ruin the Morphorde had made of her body.

  “Caitlin. Stay with me, okay? I'm sorry. I won’t leave you like this, I promise.” The old sense of social guilt rose in me. I was causing her pain with my imposition.

  "Base assemblers... they dug down. We didn’t have enough oil to com-complete… base. They found a fossil deposit. Sea bed." She couldn't lift her voice above a whisper. "It wasn’t oil. The a-assemblers turned black. Went crazy. Spread through vents. Infected everyone."

  The Breathers of Those Under the End could infect nanobots. Great.

  "Air turned bad. Men died. Women... women..." she continued, trailing off. Her skin was beading with bleach instead of sweat. "Cancer. Rapid, catastr-strr-ophic. Hours… only hours."

  The backs of my arms prickled with gooseflesh. The assemblers were everywhere, watching my passage like millions of little spiders. If they broke into my suit… GOD. I already had cancer written into my genes. I was screwed. “Okay. Then what happened?”

  "Buoy failed. No radio. No signal." Caitlin lifted her eyes, gaze wandering over the black mirror of my visor. "Survivors... started security protocol. Went to C-C-Command.”

  I frowned. "Uploaded?"

  "Please. It’s cold." She shuddered again. A trickle of black fluid leaking from her mouth, and I took a step away from her as her belly roiled. Something was pressing from behind the skin, dark and angular.

  “What did they upload, Caitlin?” I kept an eye on the motion, squeezing the knife until my knuckles creaked.

  "Memories. Copies. Mind... copies. Uploaded."

  They’d used GNOSIS? A nervous thrill passed through me. "They... actually tried to upload their memories to the system? Why?"

  "Warning. To warn." Tears leaked down the woman's grimy cheeks. "Memories... not separate in the network. They thought… they could make records. Control assem…blers. But there was no space."

  My imagination put the pieces together with horrifying certainty. "GNOSIS can’t be advanced enough to handle multiple ghosts, it was never designed for that... Oh my GOD. They merged together. They went mad in there."

  "Mad," she wheezed. “Too… close together.”

  My pulse was thundering in my ears now, heart racing. I consciously slowed it down, leveraging the Phitonic control writ into my body. "So now they’re haunting the base. Where are the bodies?"

  "Command," Caitlin said. "Don't... don't go... "

  The last word garbled as she coughed. A gout of fluid flooded down her chin. Her torso suddenly went rigid. The dark shape inside her shifted, and then began to struggle, forcing its way up against her diaphragm. Her eyes widened, pupils shrunk to pinpoints. There was nothing in the known universe that could help the soul still trapped inside her, except death.

  "I'm sorry." It seemed like the only right thing to say. I used the can to spray my knife blade, and then went in for the kill.

  The symbiont inside of the woman's body punched up through her throat, a long, dripping black jointed spine that filled her mouth and split her lips at the corners. It swiped blindly as I drove the blade in under her sternum. It felt like ramming a knife in through a hard-shelled crab, crunching and slipping across hard armored skin before it plunged into soft tissue. The thing inside her convulsed around it, nearly tearing the weapon from my hand. I hung on grimly as it struggled. Caitlin went before the DOG did, but soon both parasite and host hung limply from the bizarre fleshy wall. My ears were ringing, lips numb and mind distant as I pulled the knife free and stepped back. Combat training had kicked in, and there was nothing but a roaring wall of white noise where grief should have been.

  I glanced at the Phitometric overlay on my HUD as I broke into the MedLab. Atmosphere was at 85... 84%. I had fifteen minutes, tops, before argon gas displaced all the breathable air.

  Fucking think. Everything has a solution, Min-Joon. I paced, glancing around the room, the metal tables and cabinets full of chemicals. I had no idea what had happened to Uhq'ur, but knowing what Morphorde usually did to primordial Phitonic creatures like Tulaq, I couldn't count on her being alive. ANSWER protocol was to keep trying to contact for an hour before they sent in a rescue team, who would likely find nothing except my frozen, desiccated corpse. I had to make contact and get back to the Jump Pool. If I could break through the crazy pseudo-AI, I could message the off-planet relay system.

  I went to the chemical cabinet and opened it, staring at the array of plain labeled jars, tubs, and bottles. I’d worked in labs for most of my adult life before Scout training, and in theory, everything I needed to escape with was here. All I had to do was find a way to sneak through the Morphorde that were defending the server room.

  All personnel evacuated. No biometrics detected.

  I looked back to Caitlin's body, and the web of assembled necrotic tissue that had been woven from her. The system hadn't recognized her as being a threat. Only me, and Uhq'ur.

  A plan began to form. A good plan, but not a nice plan. Then again, there was little about biology – and biomancy – that could ever be considered 'nice'. Life is dirty, and so is survival.

  * * *

  Getting the cancerous tissue that had consumed Caitlin to grow was not difficult – getting it to stop was harder. I coaxed it into spreading over my exosuit like a slime mold, a flexible, thin sheet of muscle that sizzled on the peppermint oil coating. By the time I was done, the atmosphere of the arcology was at sixty percent, but I could move freely through the increasingly disturbing core of Fafnir-1, unmolested by the seething swarms of infected assemblers. With a section of map up, I hurried towards the Command Center with a jerrycan sized jug of glycerin in one hand, a sealed dark brown bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid in the other.

  There was a pattern to the madness of the assemblers and the possessed network. The seemingly haphazard proliferation of structures surrounded and shielded the IT facilities, the server room and communications center. The closer I got to the heart of the arcology, the weirder it became. The corrupted minerals pulled from the sea floor had been turned into spike traps and used to seal doorways and twist tunnels. All the organic material in the base had been recycled into Morphorde brooding chambers: creeping purple and white slime that cocooned black, tumorous buboes ch
urning with anti-life. Here and there, the mutated forms of animals and people could be made out in the walls. They were all dead - their necromass expelled nothing but chlorine, a cloud of gas that was compressing under the argon and now swirled at knee height.

  The Command Center door was sealed around the edges with a bulging plug of mangled violet tissue. Laboring for breath, I found a good patch of potassium permanganate crystals and stomped them to powder, grinding them under the hard sole of my boot. Once I had a good amount of pulverized violet-black sand, I crouched down and chopped it up into piles. Sweat poured down my face while I worked, splashing the inside of the visor before the suit could wick it away. I was dizzy with hypoxia, but had to hold off activating my emergency air for just a few more minutes. I was going to need it to run.

  I scooped up the violet powder and laid a thick trail of it along the edge of the bulkhead, pressing the rest to the meat sealing the door. It only started twitching when I began to carefully splash sulfuric acid onto it. Wherever the acid touched the potassium permanganate, it turned to bubbling, tar-like black sludge.

  Stage one accomplished. I gathered up the rest of the permanganate in a baggie and sealed it shut. The next step was to slop glycerin over the line of crushed purple stone, and then back away - quickly. I withdrew most of the way down the hallway, and braced inside the open bulkhead as the glycerin soaked into the powder. The assemblers swarmed it in a fine rippling sheet, drawn to the developing chemical reaction. I would have held my breath, but I was already seeing white spots. It felt like altitude sickness. The atmospheric monitor on my HUD had turned red. 58%. 57%. Oxygen was at 18% now. Not good, for me or for the power of the fire.

  There was a hissing, rasping sound... and then the line of potassium spewed a plume of smoke, gushing like a flare, followed by a dull, crumpling roar as it ignited in a ball of flame that rushed up the sides of the door to the newly created brown Manganese Heptoxide... which exploded with enough force to rattle the corridor.