The large extractors were now up and running. Four huge black-ore towers rose more than fifteen hundred feet above the frozen plains. Professor Gustav Meyer had achieved the impossible within the required time frame. From the broad window of the large control room, he contemplated the hyperadvanced technology of these beings. For him, they were gods. He revered them to the point that he would have sacrificed his life to serve them. Ultimately, that was what he was doing. He had no life beyond his days and nights spent between the laboratories and the testing rooms. His wife and children no longer expected him to come home at night. His family life was limited to a few hours a week over a formal meal, during which he didn’t say anything about what truly interested him. His obsession with his secret work had dissolved his human sensibilities. He no longer wondered about the morality or fairness of a given act. For him, designing extractors couldn’t depend on any ethical judgment. The people who were going to die here were his equals: servants of the most evolved species the Earth had ever known.
For comparison, the four extraction camps in the US had a total daily capacity of six thousand human units. The Siberian camp at Snezhnogorsk could receive convoys of up to half a million people and process them in a single day. In anticipation of the launch of the Siberian extractors, the Hominum primus strategists had already begun deportations to the Siberian plateaus three months earlier. The prisoners sentenced to death were there because they had chosen “rehabilitation in work camps.” They represented between twenty and thirty percent of all deportees. Militia guards at the Snezhnogorsk camp had taken radical measures with these individuals. In recent weeks, several revolts had broken out in the detention areas. Because detainees saw no evidence of the promised work rehabilitation, they had started to ask themselves serious questions. They had answered them by trying to force their way out. The special militias didn’t split hairs. They sprayed the entire population of convicted prisoners with paralytic gas. After neutralizing them, they sent more than eighteen thousand of them to the cold-storage rooms to join the infected humans awaiting extraction.
December 8
Professor Meyer sat down in his chair in front of the quantum-generator control panel and turned several manual controls. Before him, neon lights gradually lit up the four wells that rose in the darkness. He eased back in his seat and took a few minutes to admire the beauty of the machinery made of the smooth, black material he still found fascinating.
A voice spoke in his earpiece. “We’re ready, Professor.”
“Very well,” he replied, “I’ll launch the quantum generators.”
He flipped a switch. A powerful rumble made the floor vibrate and shook the walls of the complex.
“Quantum generators launched. Particle flow activated. On standby,” Meyer reported.
“Copy,” came the reply. “We’re starting the chains for placing the containers in the extraction wells.”
A series of clicks sounded, activating the chains. Under the control room bay, Gustav Meyer watched the rows of containers sliding toward the wells where the chains placed them in elevators. Once they reached the height of their respective positions, mechanical arms distributed them in the intended spaces. For the men and women contained in these boxes, these spaces were their final home. Everything transpired in silence, except for the hum of the transport chains and the creak of metal hinges. There were no screams, no cries, no hysterical wailing. The bodies were all unconscious. Professor Meyer preferred that things proceed without unnecessary suffering, without hearing intolerable distress. The pleading annoyed him. Couldn’t they just resign themselves to their fate? Why did some have to wail like sows? Meyer had soured on the death he caused. He had become uncompromising on some points. The extracted people had to be unconscious. And they had to stay that way. Because sometimes, he’d noticed, the liquefaction of the internal organs, extremely stressful and painful, woke some of them from their artificial sleep. The professor had asked for doubling the anesthetic doses “so that everything would go well.”
It only took the robotic device an hour to distribute the thousands of containers in the wells.
“Placement complete, Professor Meyer,” the voice from his earpiece reported.
The scientist took a deep breath and savored the moment. “Launch the initial phase,” he ordered coldly.
A deafening roar arose upon releasing the clouds through the hoses. They vibrated and shook under the movements of the living flow of black particles. Almost simultaneously, the human bodies entered the liquefaction phase. Although the seals on the containers acted as a shield, pestilential odors still seeped out. Despite the mask he had slipped on, Meyer could smell the stench. This revolted him. He was highly sensitive to these kinds of stimuli, perhaps because he kept his entire person, body and mind, sanitized. He spent hours scrubbing his nails and then trimming them to leave only a few tiny millimeters at the tips of his gnarled, white fingers. He coated himself with gallons of disinfectant during his antibacterial showers to seal his soft, alabaster skin. From beneath this translucent layer, the professor no longer feared contact with reality because he had isolated himself from the world. He had erected a wall of denial between himself and all this horror, to repress his own madness from the outside.
The professor had managed to isolate himself from all those people he was leading to death, except for one thing. Sooner or later, these bodies emptied of their contents would make him pay for his actions, he felt. A final essence would ooze from their bloodless bodies, their withered flesh, which would find its way to him like a blind worm. It would penetrate his flesh, making him face the horrifying reality: the other side of himself. There, millions of broken people met their ends stuffed into boxes and then permanently liquefied in giant hydrochloric acid baths.
Gustav Meyer pressed a single button with his index finger. “Extraction phase launched,” he announced flatly to his team.
The flow of black particles entered the liquefied bodies to perform the reaction for drawing the precious vital fluid. After this long, silent phase of internal work came the extraction itself, emptying the people of their contents. Then came the hideous gurgling of suction, and when the bodies had given everything they could, the mechanical arms immediately grabbed the boxes. They replaced them with boxes containing bodies still “full.” The movement continued this way, flawlessly synchronized, as fatal as it was precise. Hundreds of people. Thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands. Professor Meyer stayed busy in the control room, pushing the controls feverishly, his eyes clouded with madness. His pact with the Elders, their promise of omniscience, came back to enlighten him. The thought inspired in him a crazy hope of becoming one of them. Would he be strong enough to handle the knowledge they would soon infuse him with, using their telepathic powers? Obscurum scientiam, “the dark light,” the ageless knowledge would warp his system to the point of mutating, to becoming almost like them. At that moment, the devotion he felt for these creatures would never be great enough. A deep, authentic joy engulfed his being with euphoria as the containers continued their distribution into the extraction shafts. Rhythmic clattering punctuated the infernal ballet, which he heard as the sweetest of symphonies.
43
December 12
Eliott estimated the number of days he had spent in that icy cell by the number of buckets of bloody guts and offal. Human? Animal? It was impossible to tell. The guards shoved it in with their feet through a rusty steel trap door that slid open. Since these meals arrived once a day with mechanical regularity, he had started to scratch a mark in the jail’s rock wall with his claws each time he received a bucket of grisly food.
One hundred fifty-eight white scratches lined the granite wall. He wasn’t sure whether they were really days. But there had been 158 intervals during which time had passed only in terms of nightmares of varying length and levels of horror. Buried in this chitinous shell, his human nature had nevertheless continued to energize him from the depths of the smoldering resentment hi
s monstrous body inspired in him. The flame of his human spirit hadn’t completely gone out. But it was waning with each passing day, drifting away from him on the river of oblivion. All that remained of the man he had been was an ethereal memory, a distant dream—Eliott Cooper: twelve letters that had lost all meaning. Nobody would call him by those two words anymore.
The familiar squealing of the metal hatch sliding open made him shudder.
“Hey, Monster, here’s your lunch!”
The militia soldier thrust the iron-smelling bucket into the cell. It sloshed over and spilled reddish drops on the ground. Eliott remained in his corner, motionless, tired of having to eat cold blood. He wasn’t hungry. He raised a clawed hand toward the stone wall to scratch the 159th thin line into the rock.
Later, Lauren’s face appeared in his mind. Her green eyes were like two jades that steadfastly read his heart. Her smile was so full of love, so full of life, it made her glow, in good times and in bad. A natural grace characterized her every move. And her body with its perfect shape invited the act of love in the purest form.
He knew now he’d never see her again. He didn’t even try to hope anymore because hope had become synonymous with pain. The more time passed, the more natural his resignation grew. He should stop rekindling hope. He should just yield to forgetfulness, calmly give up on himself. The cold gripped him with such force that he was sure it would have killed him if he had kept his human form. The cold had become a presence, his only company, an entity that pushed him to survive. Sometimes, his helplessness in the face of his confinement caused a destructive fury to erupt inside him. At those moments, he beat the frozen walls with his fists until his black blood spilled on the stone. But it didn’t last long. Soon, he was out of breath, and he dropped to the ground, howling like a wolf caught in a trap.
That night, like all the others, sleep finally carried him away. He rested his head, as heavy as lead, on the ice-covered, rocky ground, his muscles taut from the fear of having to face another one of those terrible dreams. He never really slept. It seemed like his sharp Sentinel mind had the power to perceive all the evil the Elders had accumulated in their memories. Every night, he faced demons not his own. He saw himself swinging a bloody sword with his powerful arms, furiously beheading and gutting armored men on medieval battlefields. Or he rode through putrid swamps to hunt down convicted heretics. In the depths of unknown dungeons, he used glowing irons and pincers to extract confessions of witchcraft from young women who begged for mercy. Or legions of assassins crowned him king deep inside temples the demons they worshiped had desecrated. He had spent nights wandering the darkest ages to strike the Earth with the seal of death and destruction. He now understood that the Sentinel’s lineage had only one memory, one consciousness for all its descendants. Above all, he realized he was the only one in this lineage to refuse to serve the evil these creatures spread. He was the last of the lineage. After him, it would become extinct because Hominum primus would no longer need the Sentinel.
They would come for him soon to open the final crypt, the most gigantic of them all. And by this simple event, this insignificant ritual, he would perform the most destructive act humanity had ever known.
Deep sleep eventually overtook him, and he let himself go. But the night began with a great emptiness. No horrible dreams seemed to take shape. Only space—dark and unlimited, scattered with sparkling stars—appeared to him. He felt a deep calm as a light wind caressed his cheeks with spring fragrances. He couldn’t tell where he was. There were trees. He could see them in the darkness, their branches waving in the breeze; it was comforting. A voice suddenly emerged, more like a whisper. He recognized its deep, coppery tone.
It was the voice of Isha, the shaman.
“Iyayenagi, I come to you through the ways of the spirit. And I’m happy to see that the evil hasn’t reached your heart.”
“Isha. I’m also happy to hear your voice.”
The shaman’s face appeared above Eliott. It floated in a mist with the stars shining through.
“I see now that your body is much weakened. And your resistance will soon give way. You won’t be able to prevent them from forcing you to open their crypt.”
“They’re too strong. I can’t fight anymore. More than anything, I’ve lost hope,” Eliott replied.
“Iyayenagi, the strength you possess is very great as well. You have no idea how great it is.”
“The monster I’ve become is entirely under their control. I don’t know what strength you’re referring to.”
Isha’s face smiled in space. “Do you think they were the first to generate life?”
“I don’t understand,” Eliott replied.
“Before reaching their evolutionary stage, these beings depended on causes and conditions over which they had no control. It was a long time ago, but they too were once created.”
“You mean you know about their past?”
“He who can understand the present knows how things came to be. Thus, he also knows the past,” Isha replied enigmatically.
“How is that going to help me?”
“You have a strength in you that doesn’t depend on them—one over which they have no control.”
Eliott suddenly felt something opening up in his body. It felt like a heat source. It was brilliant.
“Be more specific, Isha.”
“The universe is vast, Iyayenagi. The work of these beings is only a tiny part of it. When they fell dormant, they had to call upon external forces to create their Sentinel. These ancient forces had been at their origin.”
Eliott was growing impatient. He needed answers he could use, not metaphysical discussions. “What should I do now, Isha, to escape them?”
Isha’s face looked at him impassively for a few seconds. “You must find the answer to that question within yourself. Don’t you feel anything inside you?”
Eliott focused his attention inside his body. Yes, he did feel something. The tiny source of warmth took shape as a wave of light. It slowly developed into a sphere with other colored gleams curling out of it. He could clearly visualize the feeling. Little by little, the thing came alive with vibrations, then movements . . . expansions . . . retractions . . . It was like the beating of a frail newborn’s heart—maybe a child, Eliott thought. He could feel that it was alive within the abandoned, black space of his body of darkness, and it was taking shape, developing, second by second.
“Isha, what is it?” asked Eliott, flabbergasted.
“You’re no longer alone, Eliott.”
“I . . . I don’t understand.”
“Lauren has given you a son.”
Eliott couldn’t tear his attention from the source of light growing inside him. He no longer felt the freezing cold in the cell. He no longer felt the sadness that had trapped him in despair. Now he felt only this force rising inside him, and it wasn’t made of shadow and evil. This force shone with such an aura of life that it was overwhelming him with light.
“Do you feel your hope growing now, Eliott?”
Black tears trickled down his jaw and splattered onto the whiteness of the ice. His body started to tremble. He was no longer able to define what kind of emotion was going through him. It was so powerful, so enormous.
“That strength is within you, Eliott Cooper. And it’s now in your son, Matthew. The two of you are united. You are now one being . . . because there can be only one Sentinel.”
The force continued to grow. Increasingly violent spasms shook him. His temperature rose, so much that the ice underneath him melted.
At the same time, at the Meadow Creek resistance base
Aiyana dashed into the common kitchen where Lauren was preparing the evening meal. She was in a panic and had to catch her breath before she could speak.
“Lauren! Come quick!”
Lauren dropped the knife in her hand and ran out behind the young woman, without knowing where or why. The sky was low, almost black; it was so cloudy. It was about to storm. They arr
ived at the shack where Wyatt lived. He was a young friend of Matthew’s, one of the few children on the base who wasn’t afraid to play with him.
When they entered the shelter made of sheet metal and boards, young Wyatt was kneeling beside Matthew’s inanimate body, which was shining strangely. Lauren thought she saw blue lines running through his limbs. Luminous fluids were flowing through the veins under his skin. From time to time, his body shook; his eyes were shut, and his head sometimes moved imperceptibly.
“He talked before,” said Wyatt, with tears in his eyes.
Lauren sat down next to her son and took his limp hand in hers.
“What did he say?” Lauren asked the child, still out of breath from her run.
“He kept saying a name. Eliott . . . Yeah, that’s what it was. That’s the name he kept saying. Eliott.”
Lauren struggled to stifle a sob.
“Has he ever told you what that name means to him, Wyatt?” she asked the boy.
Wyatt shook his head with a sheepish look.
Lauren called her son gently to try to wake him up. “Matthew.”
She stroked his bumpy forehead, lingering on his massive cheekbones. They jutted out to form the upper base of his mouth, which was half open, giving a glimpse of already-long teeth. He was breathing hard. His clenched hands twitched nervously.
Matthew was far away . . . very far.
It was no more of a dream than a nightmare.
Matthew was with his father. He was inside his father.
They were merging.
At that moment, somewhere in central Siberia
Eliott felt the wave of light invading his body. He no longer resisted; he let it completely engulf him. He closed his eyes. His child’s body appeared to him. He was inside him. He could feel his heart beating, right against his own. Soon, amazement gave way to a deep joy, a generous love. They were communing in silence. Words had become unnecessary. Their feelings intermingled. They floated in a state of peace.
The Essence of Darkness Page 33