by Jeff Long
She was awed by the grandeur of it. Such imperial vision: it was virtually psychotic. And she and these scientists were to be the agents in gaining it.
Her neighbors were lodged in their own thoughts. Most were probably weighing the risks, adjusting their search goals, adapting to the vastness of the challenge, reckoning the odds.
“Shoat!” a man bellowed.
Shoat’s face obligingly appeared at the podium light.
“No one said anything about this,” the man said.
“You did sign on for a year,” Shoat pointed out.
“You expect us to traverse the Pacific Ocean? A mile to three miles beneath the ocean floor? Through unexplored territory? Hadal territory?”
“I’ll be with you every step of the way,” Shoat said.
“But no one’s ever gone west of the Nazca Plate.”
“That’s true. We’ll be the first.”
“You’re talking about being on the move for an entire year.”
“Precisely our reason for sending you a workout schedule over the last six months. All those climbing walls and StairMasters and heavy squats weren’t for your cosmetic enhancement.”
Ali could sense the group calculating.
“You have no idea what’s out there,” someone said.
“That’s not exactly true,” Shoat said. “We have some idea. Two years ago, a military reconnaisance probed some of the path. Basically they found the remains of a prehistoric passageway, a network of tunnels and chambers that are well marked and have been improved and maintained over a period of several thousand years. We think it may have been a kind of Silk Road for the Pacific abyss.”
“How far did the soldiers get?”
“Twenty-three miles,” Shoat answered. “Then they turned around and came back.”
“Armed soldiers.”
Shoat was unflappable. “They weren’t prepared. We are.”
“What about hadals?”
“There hasn’t been a sighting in over two years,” Shoat said. “But just to be safe, Helios has hired a security force. They will accompany us every step of the way.”
A gentleman stood. He had Isaac Asimov muttonchops and black horn-rims, and had X’ed out the word “Hi” on his name tag. Ali knew his face from the dust jackets of his numerous books: Donald Spurrier, a renowned primatologist. “What about human limitations? Your projected route must be five thousand miles long.”
The cartographer turned to the glowing map. His finger traced a set of lines that ambled back and forth across the equatorial rhumb. “In fact, with all the bends and turns and vertical loss and gain, a better estimate is eight thousand miles, plus or minus a thousand.”
“Eight thousand miles?” said Spurrier. “In a single year? On foot?”
“For what it’s worth, our train ride just gave us an easy thirteen hundred miles without a step.”
“Leaving a mere 6,700 miles. Are we supposed to run nonstop for a year?”
“Mother Nature is lending a hand,” the cartographer said.
“We’ve detected significant motion along the route,” Shoat said. “We believe it’s a river.”
“A river?”
“Moving from east to west. Thousands of miles long.”
“A theoretical river. You haven’t seen it.”
“We’ll be the first.”
Spurrier was no longer resisting. “We won’t go thirsty, then.”
“Don’t you see?” Shoat said. “It means we can float.” They were dazzled.
“What about supplies? How can we hope to carry enough for a year?”
“We start with porters. Every four to six weeks thereafter, we will be supplied by drill hole. Helios has already begun drilling supply holes for us at selected points. They will drill straight through the ocean floor to intersect our route, and lower food and gear. At those points, by the way, we’ll have brief contact with the World. You’ll be able to communicate with your families. We’ll even be able to evacuate the sick or injured.”
It all sounded reasonable.
“It’s radical. It’s daring,” Shoat said. “It’s one year out of your lives. We could have spent it sitting on our butts in a hole like this. Instead, one year from now, we’ll go down in history. You’ll be writing papers and publishing books about this for the rest of your lives. It will cement your tenure, gain you chairs of departments, win you prizes and acclaim. Your children and grandchildren will beg you for the tale of what you’re about to do.”
“This is a huge decision,” a man said. “I need to consult my wife.” A general murmur agreed.
“I’m afraid the communications line is down.” It was a blatant lie, Ali could see it. But that was part of the price. He was drawing a line for them to step across. “You may, of course, post mail. The next train back to Nazca City leaves two months from now.” Helios was playing hardball, a total embargo on information.
Shoat surveyed them with reptilian coolness. “I don’t expect everyone here tonight to be with us in the morning. You’re free to return home, of course.” In two months’ time, on the train. The expedition would have a tremendous head start on any leaks to the media. He looked at his watch.
“It’s late,” he said. “The expedition departs at 0600. That leaves only a few hours for you to sleep on your choices. That’s enough, though. I’m a firm believer that each of us comes into this world with our decisions already made.”
The lights came up. Ali blinked. Everywhere, people were leaning forward onto seatbacks, rubbing their hands, making calculations. Faces were lit with excitement. Thinking fast, she looked for Ike’s reaction to judge the proposition. But he had left while the lights were still off.
He who fights with monsters
might take care lest he
thereby become a monster.
And if you gaze for long into
an abyss, the abyss gazes
also into you.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE,
Beyond Good and Evil
10
DIGITAL SATAN
HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER,
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, DENVER
“She was caught in a nursing home near Bartlesville, Oklahoma,” Dr. Yamamoto explained to them. Thomas and Vera Wallach and Foley, the industrialist, followed the physician from her office. Branch came last, eyes protected by dark ski goggles, sleeves buttoned at each wrist to hide his burn scars.
“It was one of those homes that give adult children nightmares,” Dr. Yamamoto went on. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven. Her lab coat was unbuttoned. Underneath it, a T-shirt read THE LAKE CITY 50-MILE ENDURANCE RUN. She exuded vitality and happiness, Branch thought. The wedding ring on her finger looked only a few weeks old.
They took an elevator up. A sign, supplemented with Braille, listed the floors by specialty. Primates occupied the basement. The upper floors were Psychiatry and Neurophysiology. They got off on the top floor, which bore no title, and started down another hallway.
“It turns out the administrator at this Bartlesville scam had served time for a variety of frauds and forgeries,” Dr. Yamamoto said. “He’s back in, I guess. I hope. A real prince. His so-called facility advertised itself as specializing in Alzheimer’s patients. Behind the scenes, he kept the patients just barely alive in order to keep the Medicare/Medicaid checks coming in. Bed restraints, horrific conditions. No medical personnel whatsoever. Apparently our little intruder was able to hide there for over a month before a janitor finally noticed.”
The young doctor halted at a door with a keypad. “Here we are,” she said, and gently entered the code. Long fingers. A soft, sure touch.
“You play violin,” Thomas guessed.
She was delighted. “Guitar,” she confessed. “Electric. Bass. I have a band, Girl Talk. All guys, and me.”
She held the door for them. Immediately, Branch sensed the change in light and sound. No windows in here. No spill of sunbeams. The slight whistle of wind against brick
quit. These walls were thick.
To the right and left, doorways opened onto rooms orbiting computer screens. A plaque read DIGITAL ADAM PROJECT, NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE. Branch didn’t see a single book.
Yamamoto’s voice adjusted to the new quiet. “Lucky for us it was the janitor who noticed,” she continued. “The administrator and his gang of thieves would never have called the police. To make a long story short, the cops came. They were suitably horrified. At first they were sure it was animals. One of the cops used to trap coyotes and bobcats. He set out some old rusty leg traps.”
They reached a set of double doors. Another keypad. Different numbers, Branch noticed. They entered in stages: first a guard, then a scrub room, where Yamamoto helped them put on disposable green gowns and surgical masks and double pairs of latex gloves, then a main room with biotechs at work over test tubes and keyboards. She led them around gleaming banks of equipment and picked up her narrative.
“That night she came back for more. One of the traps caught her leg. The cops came roaring in. She was a complete surprise. They were not at all prepared. Barely four feet high and, even with her tibia and fibula broken in half, she still almost beat five grown men. She came very close to escaping, but they got her. We would have preferred a live specimen, of course.”
They came to a door labeled NIPPLES ALERT on a handwritten sheet.
“Nipples?” asked Vera.
Yamamoto noticed the sign and snatched it down. “A joke,” she said. “It’s cold in there. The room is refrigerated. We call it the pit and the pendulums.”
Branch was gratified by her blush. She was a professional. What’s more, she wanted to look professional to them. She led them through the door.
Inside, it was not as cold as Branch had expected. A wall thermometer read thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit. Very bearable for an hour or two of work. Not that anyone was in here. The work was all being done automatically.
Machinery susurrated, a steady rhythm. Shh. Shh. Shh. As though to quiet an infant. A number of lights pulsed with each hush.
“They killed her?” Vera asked.
“No, it wasn’t that,” Yamamoto said. “She was alive after they got the nets and rope on. But the trap was rusty. Sepsis set in. Tetanus. She died before we arrived. I brought her here in a footlocker packed with dry ice.”
There were four stainless-steel autopsy tables. Each held a block of blue gelatin. Each block was positioned against a machine. Each machine flashed a light every five seconds.
“We named her Dawn,” said Yamamoto.
They looked into the blue gelatin and there she was, her cadaver frozen and suspended in gel and cut crosswise into four sections.
“We were halfway through computerizing our digital Eve when the hadal came our way.” Yamamoto indicated a dozen freezer drawers along one wall. “We put Eve back into storage and immediately went to work on Dawn. As you can see, we’ve quartered her body and bedded the four sections in gelatin. These machines are called cryomacrotomes. Glorified meat shavers. Every few seconds they cut a half-millimeter off the bottom of each gelatin block, and a synchronized camera photographs the new layer.”
“How long has it been here?” Foley asked.
It, not she, Branch noticed. Foley was keeping things impersonal. For his own part, Branch felt a connection. How could you not? The small hand had four fingers and a thumb.
“Two weeks. It’s just a function of the blades and cameras. In another few months we’ll have a computer bank with over twelve thousand images. She’ll end up as forty billion bytes of information stored on seventy CD-ROM disks. Using a mouse, you will be able to travel through a 3-D image of Dawn’s interior.”
“And your purpose?”
“Hadal physiology,” Dr. Yamamoto said. “We want to know how it differs from human.”
“Is there any way to accelerate your inquiry?” asked Thomas.
“We don’t know what we’re looking for, or even what questions to ask. As it is, we don’t dare miss anything. There’s no telling what might lie in the smallest detail.”
They separated and went to different tables. Through the translucent gel, Branch saw a pair of lower legs and feet. There was the place the trap had snapped her bones. The skin was fish white.
He found the head-and-shoulders section. It was like a bust in alabaster. The lids were half shut, exposing bleached blue irises. The mouth was slightly open. Working from the neck upward, the machine’s pendulum was still at throat level.
“You’ve probably seen a lot like her,” Dr. Yamamoto spoke at his shoulder. Her voice was severe.
Branch cocked his head and looked closer, almost affectionately. “They’re all different,” he said. “Kind of like us.”
He could tell she’d expected something coarse or stormy from him. Most people took one look at him and assumed he couldn’t get enough of Haddie’s blood.
The physician’s voice softened. “Judging by her teeth and the immaturity of her pelvic girdle,” she said, “Dawn was probably twelve or thirteen years old. We could be way off on that, of course. We have nothing to compare her with, so we’re simply guessing. Specimens have been very hard to get. You’d think after so much contact, so many killings, we’d be swimming in bodies.”
“That is odd,” said Vera. “Do they decompose faster than normal mammal remains?”
“Depending on the exposure to direct sunlight. But the scarcity of good specimens has more to do with desecration.” Branch noticed that she did not look at him.
“You mean mutilation?”
“It’s more than that.”
“Desecration, then,” said Thomas. “That’s a strong term.”
Yamamoto went over to the storage drawers and pulled out a long tray on rollers. “I don’t know, what do you call it?” A hideous animal lay on the metal, scorched black, teeth bared, dismembered, mutilated. It could have been eight thousand years old.
“Caught and burned one week ago,” she said.
“Soldiers?” asked Vera.
“Actually, no. This came from Orlando, Florida. A regular neighborhood. People are scared. Maybe it’s a form of racial catharsis. There’s this revulsion or anger or terror. People seem to feel they have to lay waste to these things, even after they’ve killed them. Maybe they think they’re destroying evil.”
“Do you?” asked Thomas.
Her almond eyes were sad. Then disciplined. Either way, compassion or science, she did not.
“We offer rewards for undamaged specimens,” she told them. “But this is about the best that comes in. This guy, for instance. He was captured alive by a group of middle-aged accountants and software engineers playing touch football at a suburban soccer field. By the time they got finished with him, he was a piece of charcoal.”
Branch had seen far worse.
“All around the country. All around the world,” she said. “We know they’re coming up into our midst. There are sightings and killings every hour, somewhere in metro and rural America. Try to get a whole, undamaged cadaver in the lab, though. It’s a real problem. It makes research very slow.”
“Why do you think they’re coming up, Doctor? Seems like everyone has a theory.”
“None of us here has a clue,” Yamamoto said. “Frankly, I’m not convinced the hadals are coming up in any greater numbers than they have historically. But it’s safe to say that humans are more sensitized to the hadals’ presence these days, and so we’re seeing them more clearly. The majority of sightings are false, as with UFOs. A great number have been sightings of transients and freight riders and animals, even tree branches scratching at the window, not hadals.”
“Ah,” said Vera, “it’s all in our imagination?”
“Not at all. They’re definitely here, hiding in our landfills, our suburban basements, our zoos, warehouses, national parks. In our underbelly. But nowhere near the numbers the politicians and journalists want us to believe. As far as invading us, come on. Who’s invading who her
e? We’re the ones sinking shafts and colonizing caves.”
“Dangerous talk,” said Foley.
“At a certain point, our hate and fear change us,” the young woman said. “I mean, what kind of world do we want to raise our children in? That’s important, too.”
“But if they’re not appearing in any greater numbers than before,” argued Thomas, “doesn’t that throw out all the catastrophe theories we keep hearing, that a great famine or plague or environmental disaster is to blame for their coming among us?”
“That’s one more thing our research may help answer. A people’s history speaks through their bones and tissue,” said Yamamoto. “But until we collect more specimens and expand our database, I can’t tell you anything more than what the bodies of Dawn and a few of her brothers and sisters have told us.”
“Then we know almost nothing about their motivation?”
“Scientifically speaking, no. Not yet. But sometimes we—the staff and I—sit around and invent life stories for them.” The young doctor indicated her stainless-steel mausoleum. “We give them names and a past. We try to understand how it must have been to be them.”
She touched the side of the cutting table with the hadal female’s head. “Dawn is easily our group’s favorite.”
“This?” said Vera. But clearly she was charmed by the staff’s humanity.
“Her youth, I guess. And the hard life she led.”
“Tell us her story, if you don’t mind,” said Thomas. Branch looked at the Jesuit. Like Branch, he had a raw exterior that people misjudged. But Thomas felt an affinity for the creatures that was unfashionable at the moment. Branch thought it perfectly in character. Weren’t all Jesuits liberation theologists?
The young woman looked uncomfortable. “It’s not really my place,” she said. “The specialists haven’t gone over the data yet, and anything we’ve made up is pure conjecture.”
“Just the same,” Vera said, “we want to hear.”