3
Ira plopped down in her chair inside the mainframe room. There were still no lights, save for the aquatic glow from the servers, but the darkness was somewhat comforting; there was a certain amount of freedom in it, like she could imagine that she was somewhere else—someone else. She opened her laptop and started looking for the system that controlled the security cameras. She had no time to daydream if she was going to find Eddy.
She felt the pressure in the room change when the hatch opened, forcing harsh light into her eyes. She shielded her eyes and squinted to see who it was.
"You need to control your anger, sis." It was Nico, who'd come to lecture her on the million reasons she shouldn't resort to hitting people in enclosed spaces.
"She had it coming," she said. "Been nothing but a bitch to me since she joined us, and she doesn't give a damn about finding Eddy."
"You and Eddy are close." He crossed his arms like a disapproving father. "Not everyone is going to feel the same about him."
"Like you?"
"Eddy's got skills I need. Christ knows he's a lot more useful than Hugo or Mathias. But accidents happen, we all know that. It isn't as if we're living in a tropical resort. This new world is dangerous, and just one mistake out there can be fatal."
"So, what are you trying to tell me—" tears welled up in her eyes "—that he deserves to die?"
"He shouldn't have wandered off when he woke up, and it's that same carelessness that got him..." He paused, a distant look in his eyes. "Why he was mauled by a cougar in the first place."
"Get out!"
"Ira..."
"No! I said get out!"
She covered her eyes and heard him open the hatch.
"You need to remember that we're isolated here," he said. "It's easy to go crazy here, to lash out. We're all just a hair-trigger away from tearing each other apart. One mistake. That's all it takes, Ira."
The door closed, and she was left to collapse into her keyboard, sobbing like a child. She couldn't remember the last time her heart had felt like this, maybe when they’d had to leave Papa behind...
Wiping her eyes, she tried desperately to bring herself back to reality, but she couldn't stop imagining that somewhere within the facility, Eddy was lying dead or dying, bleeding out through his bandages or scrambling through bloodstained snow.
A knock came at the hatch.
"Go away, Nicola!" she said.
The knocking persisted.
"I said go away, damn it!"
The knocking persisted.
"Goddamn it." She jumped from her chair to the hatch and slammed it open. "I said go away, Nicola!"
Mathias put his hands up in surrender. "I'm sorry, I'm not Nicola."
She glared at him. "What are you doing here, Mathias?"
"I just wanted to see how you were doing."
"I never figured you to be the compassionate type. In fact, I thought you despised Eddy."
"It's true, I never took a liking to him, given my aversion to the soldier mentality, but that doesn't mean that I wanted anything to happen to him." Mathias paused. "Or you, for that matter."
Her grip tightened on the hatch. "Forgive me if I call bullshit."
"I expected that." He smiled; it looked forced. "I just wanted to see if you were okay, that's all."
"I'm not, so go away."
He nodded and started to back away from the doorway. She watched him slither back down the corridor; even his walk was arrogant.
Ira closed the hatch and sulked back to her chair. She couldn't keep feeling sorry for herself; she needed to throw herself into her work.
She brought up the interface she'd used to gain access to the facility's basic systems. The security system couldn't be turned on the same way that the basic systems were; it required some form of authorization, probably Weber's.
A shudder escaped her shivering lips at the thought of watching more of those insane experiment logs.
A dialog box came up, asking her to enter in a passcode. She placed her head in her hands.
Cracking that passcode could take all night, or all week.
Ira spent the night attempting various passcodes and watching video logs hoping that they might give her a clue to what the answer was. She found herself locked out of the system for hours at a time when she'd maxed out the number of times it would allow her to fuck up. She found herself alone with her thoughts and memories, most of them unpleasant.
The experiment logs were, as usual, more disturbing than helpful, and the security footage of day-to-day activities didn't give her any idea as to who had been in charge of security. She watched the scientists rinse and repeat their daily routine countless times. The time stamp told her that they had been conducting these experiments when the ice sheets hadn't yet reached beyond the Canadian border. A lot of experts had suggested that they'd stop there, that we'd be spared having our cities crushed by sheets of ice six times larger than the tallest building on Earth. But they did advance, because it wasn't an ordinary ice age that humanity was dealing with.
The United States had been lucky that all they’d had to worry about was snow and ice, in some places accumulation in the double digits; they'd be dead if the ice sheets had come to cover all of their resources.
However, the ice sheets would reach them eventually. It was only a matter of time before everything froze.
With each passing day, the sun grew dimmer, as the thickness of the interstellar cloud the Solar System was entering thickened. Eventually, the thickness of it would even out, but, by then, the course would already be set. All land-based life would be stamped out eventually. So, really, Ira felt that their struggle for survival, day in and day out, was, in a way, completely futile.
None of it means a damn thing, she thought. At least when you were here, I had a friend. Someone to distract me from the unavoidable truth.
The clock read 3:45 am before she finally decided to give it a rest and go hunt down some coffee. She found herself down the corridor, in a space that she'd been setting up before she heard the news about Eddy. It had been a kind of lounge intended for just the two of them. A surprise she’d wanted to spring on him. There was a coffee pot, which she had found packed away in a box one of the scientists had left behind, and enough coffee to last her till the end of the modern ice age—or the end of the human race. There were even some snacks tucked away that hadn't spoiled. She set a pot to brew and basked in the aroma as it percolated.
It was late enough that she was almost certain that the others would be asleep. Her hands cradled a hot cup of coffee. She leaned back into a soft chair, closed her eyes, tried to relax.
She couldn't keep her mind off her task, though. Where was he?
Unless Weber had been really careless and let the password slip in his personal logs, she'd have to use a code breaker program to do it. It would be risky, because it could cause the whole system to lock up. After blowing on her coffee, she took a sip. It was French Vanilla flavored. She usually preferred to have some kind of sweetener, maybe a bit of creamer, but under the circumstances, she could hardly complain. She hadn't had freshly brewed coffee since all this bullshit had started.
"I haven't smelled fresh coffee in a long time." Nico's voice came from behind her.
She watched him come in and examine the pot, grab a cup and pour himself some without asking. Typical Nico. He sat down on a chair adjacent to her. He took a sip without blowing on it and relaxed his shoulders a bit. He always took his coffee black; Ira had never understood how someone could drink it like that.
"Nice place," he said.
"I intended it to be a refuge for myself," she said.
"And Ramirez?"
She nodded.
"He'll turn up, we haven't explored the whole facility yet and—"
"Just, please, let's not talk about Eddy right now?"
Nico set his coffee on the table. "Okay, we'll talk about something else then."
They sat in silence for the better part
of an hour, just sipping their coffee. Most of the conversations they had revolved around business, survival; they hadn't had a real conversation in months. And now, when they finally had a chance to connect, there was a wall between them, something that both of them knew, but couldn't bring themselves to just say.
After a while, Ira finished her coffee.
Ira returned to her task, leaving Nico behind. Ira sat down in front of her laptop and set up her code breaker program, then set it to work on cracking the passcode.
With any luck, it wouldn't fuck everything else up in the process.
4
Mathias woke violently, gasping air for a scream that was choked out of him. It was the masked creature again. Every night the dreams got worse. Every night, the masked creature came for him, guiding him through alien vistas, ancient structures, and impossible realms where the laws of physics held no bearing on reality.
He struggled to remember his nightmare. The last thing he remembered before passing out was retreating from the mainframe room after his failed attempt to befriend Ira. He’d retreated to his room, and...
The clouds strangling his mind's eye seemed to part, his vision focused—there was green, mucous spittle dripping from his mouth to the black and white checkered linoleum floor, and in that spittle, three gnarled, wormlike...things, which he must have vomited up. Glancing up, he realized that he was not in his room anymore, but Weber’s personal chamber.
There was something in his hands too. A tattered, leather-bound book. The lettering on the cover spelled out Messages from the Abyss. He knew the title from Weber's journal.
He remembered now.
How he’d gotten here.
It was the masked creature. A creature which preyed on those possessing forbidden knowledge, unique knowledge...
They had met beneath the pyramids of an alien world, one long since dead. Great clouds came to cover the sky, pulsing green beneath the light of some unknown creature whose tentacles pierced the clouds in odd places.
When the green light flashed in the distance, Mathias could see the texture of the masked creature's cloak more clearly than he had been able to previously. It looked as if it had been hemmed together with rotted human flesh and covered in cobwebs.
That incessant grin persisted. It leaned in close to him. He didn't want to look into its eyeholes for fear of what he might find in their depths. Its arm unraveled into three long, segmented appendages, pointing to the pyramids.
March. It seemed to speak into his mind directly. Its voice was like spiders crawling over his skin, airy and full of the threat of death.
He did not dare disagree with this thing. His feet carried him one step at a time toward the pyramids in the distance. The masked man hung always behind him, looming like some ancient specter of death.
There were strange symbols carved in great obelisks leading to the pyramid's entrance, collapsed statues of winged creatures with too many mouths, too many eyes. The symbols on the obelisks seemed to tell some kind of story. Imagining a species of tall, thin creatures which were facing the end of their world, the coming of a great comet, a creature they’d named "the great devourer of stars."
How was it that he could understand this strange pictographic language? It was as if something had come to infest his mind, a kind of growing madness that yearned for more, more knowledge, to see more of these strange places where logic and reason were forgotten, to go deeper into the abyss.
When they reached the tallest pyramid's base, he was greeted by a wall of solid metal the likes of which was not found on Earth. Still, there were great cracks in the wall.
Enter. The masked man pointed its long, snakelike appendage to the triangular door at the pyramid's base.
"How?"
The doorway was worth three of him in height at the very least.
The masked creature's appendages pulsed with an eerie green light; the slab of metal shook violently, and vibrations traveled up Mathias’s legs, shaking his very bones. Then the door receded into the dark.
"Move."
Mathias nodded and padded into the dark.
From there, he wasn't sure what he was seeing. Twisting cylindrical corridors and bending hallways, experiment chambers hidden behind triangular doors, and markings that made his mind feel as though it was going to crawl from the safety of his cranium into the ever-looming madness of the abyss. Like the one he’d dreamed of, this place seemed familiar too. What were these pyramids? What was this place? And why was the masked creature showing them to him? Perhaps among these pyramids there was one just like the facility he and his unfortunate companions now inhabited?
Yes, he did understand that beneath the ice of the San Bernardino mountains there was a pyramid, cleverly concealed as a place of military science so as not to be interrupted by the sane and the overzealous.
Were these his own thoughts? Or were these the thoughts of the masked creature? He could not be sure anymore. It seemed as though his head had filled, fit to burst.
He couldn't stand it any longer. It was hard to breathe. He felt something strangling him, twisting and slithering.
That was when he realized he was dangling in the middle of a raised platform at the center of the facility: the masked creature was holding him up, its appendages twisting, writhing around his body. There was something else, too, something above him. A gateway, or a doorway in time and space.
An eclipsed moon on the other side of the doorway, its edges blazing like the exposed corona of a star, its light bleeding onto great, twisting tendrils that threaten to strangle the sky of a once-thriving world, where strange, jagged obelisks stab up through the dusty surface like the claws of some ancient beast, trapped forever by a wall it cannot traverse.
The eclipsed moon is not a moon or a star at all. His mind expands, the doorway approaches the glowing ring in the dark, revealing it to be a black hole. The tentacles coming from the black hole are like gnarled roots of some ageless tree—one finds its way to the doorway, the sheer size of it tearing the pyramid to pieces. The gateway widens to fill the sky, clearing the clouds and scaring off the beast that once dwelled there.
Then it's staring him in the face. The tip of it is segmenting into smaller, gnarled tentacles, an infinite segmenting kaleidoscope mitosis. The smaller tentacles enter his mouth, slithering down into his core, to his essence.
After that it's only brief flashes of memory. Scrambling barefoot through the halls of the facility in the dead of night to the core chamber, where he finds the tattered book. Then he's reading it for what seems like days. The thing that controls his body won't let him blink, won't let him look away, like a mental patient forced to stare at the same clip over and over while strapped to some primitive chair.
Then, when the masked man is satisfied, it carries him through the doorway, into an impossible chamber containing that black hole and a small solar system which is being eaten alive.
You are ready.
It's going to feed him to the abyss! His body will become a lifeless husk!
He screams and yells, but he cannot help but think about how much he'll learn on the other side of that event horizon, to see all of the dead worlds and lost knowledge that await him before he finally ceases to be once the thing in the abyss devours him.
Still, what good will that knowledge do him if he’s devoured by that thing? He wants to live, damn it!
Then, the thought strikes, lightning in a bottle. The thing in the abyss cares not where it gets its information from. It can be bargained with.
"I can give you another!"
The mask has twisted into a grinning thing with deep, bright pinpoint lights for eyes.
We know the one.
"I'll give him to you! Just let me go!"
The masked creature referred to in the grimoire as the harvester of the abyss nods.
That's when he’d awoken in Weber’s chamber.
Mathias couldn't stop himself from laughing. How narrowly he had escaped!
He clutched the tattered book close to his chest.
There was only one thing left to do now.
Honor the bargain.
CHAPTER TWELVE
"Experiment 5D," Doctor Weber said, sporting a smile full of yellow teeth. "Today, we'll be testing out the new experiment chamber. I'm sure you're all as excited as I am."
Weber stood inside the new chamber holding a clipboard. His hair was long and messy, and the gray had erased every trace of his natural color—the same could be said of his skin. Ira couldn't think of any skin condition that could do that.
He pointed to the large, upright tank resting inside the particle collider. Ira had seen sensory deprivation tanks before in movies and on TV—hell, she'd remembered hearing about a few places in Los Angeles that actually marketed them to herbalists and yoga enthusiasts who believed in the power of meditation, crystals, and other kinds of hocus-pocus bullshit. Those had been cute pink and blue bathtubs, with rubber tops and scented candles, compared to the cold metal coffin that she saw on the screen.
It was said that if someone stayed inside one for too long, they could go mad.
"This is the newest addition to the design, a vertical sensory deprivation tank." The doctor picked up a pair of thin goggles. "The subject will be allowed to wear these while submerged inside; there's also a breathing apparatus within to supply air. The goggles and the breathing apparatus are specially made so that they adhere to the temperature of the body and the saline solution, so the wearer doesn't notice that they're there at all.
"Originally, we intended to use a horizontal tank in this room, but I thought that would break the circle. The body must be upright within the eye of the abyss."
Shivers snaked down her spine.
She'd heard Weber talking about the abyss before, about how a creature whom the mad author of Messages from the Abyss called The Eye in the Dark devoured lost worlds unfortunate enough to have drifted into the Astral Lands. There it lived, at the center of all realities, feeding on the memories of worlds and stars unlucky enough to be swallowed by black holes, or...
She held herself.
Or the star eater.
She'd never seen an experiment log where Weber referenced the grimoire directly till now. The other researchers, scientists, and experiment volunteers all looked at him like he was mad. Why didn't any of them try to stop him?
Mind's Horizon Page 15