The invisible people came and went according to their own set of priorities which he was not privy to know, would reveal nothing more of themselves to him than flashes of light and darkness in his peripheral vision; they would be seen as clear, shimmering outlines distinct against the landscape in the corners of his eyes, but whenever he turned to face them, they would vanish completely away. Only once did one remain when he faced it down, and it was soon captured and taken off by other unseen aggressors before he had any idea of what had happened. They seemed to have a code of their own against interacting with humans, which they reinforced as actively as the humans reinforced and upheld their own.
After the first time he tried to tell his mother about them he'd never brought them up again. The look of horror, the judgment, the naked, raw disapproval she'd shown him at the mention of those things which did not exist left such a deep impression that to avoid ever feeling such a hurt again, he would keep his silence.
But the creatures themselves would not let him put them out of his mind. They continued to appear to him, always remaining an untouchable force just outside his reach.
And then one day one stopped for him, and stared at him with golden eyes. For a while, it became his world.
They were the djinni, the first people, an ancient race of advanced serpentines that had grown and evolved on the earth long, long before any of the hairy ones had spawned. This the being had told him, and much more besides.
Where humankind had established the boundaries of possibility through their belief in what was real and sealed their dominion in bonds of glass and iron, the djinni had known no such limitation. Their sorcerers had imagined a world of truly limitless permutations, and thus given away their own solidity; they had become masters of dreaming who lost themselves into the dream and did not want to find their way back. Without the restraint of a physical shell, the djinni had freed themselves to become anything they could conceive of and had lost to the ability to retain who they once were, and had so given the earth over to those who came behind them. They were in the Earth, but not of the earth.
This the being had told him, speaking directly into William's mind as the boy slowly but surely lost himself into the human collective, shedding forever his past among the Outlanders. It waved its hands around his body and drew away long streamers of a thin plasma that rapidly evaporated, leaving him vertiginous as the remains of his alien heritage went. William had been a being enslaved by the groupthink of its last incarnation and resisted with mixed feelings his assimilation into the unfamiliar body of beliefs and behaviors that his new species shared, but these limitations were to become the basis of his strength, according to what the djinni would have him believe.
They were dinosaurs, as best as William could tell, a sort of lizard man that had grown up millions and millions of years ago and become stronger than even the human men of today, with brighter minds and farther-reaching vision. They'd lived in the world long enough to learn all its laws, and then long enough to recognize the aspects of themselves that weren't bound by those laws.
It was an idea so big the creature fed it to him in the form of pictures:
A fog cleared and William saw a pink and blue fringed lizard walking upright in a tunnel; it dropped to all fours and skittered at breathtaking speeds through the underground network until it came to a brightly-lit chamber housing a large stone wheel that spun with a noise like a waterfall, infusing the air with static and shooting great arcs of electricity from its axle to splash into the walls and away.
The lizard held up a claw and absorbed a passing spark, taking the energy into its body as nutriment, and then left the chamber again to continue its run through the tunnels.
Soon it came to its own chamber, a small cubicle with a nest of papier-mâché in one corner. The lizard had laid its last clutch of eggs many years ago, but it now longed to share the old nest where it slept with another. It kicked backward against the wall of its cubicle, punching a small hole through to the next room over.
The lizard in the other cubicle was not in the mood for company, did not want to share domiciles. It gnashed its jaws and hissed.
The pink-and-blue lizard's dorsal spine drooped and its chest sunk; it let out a deep sigh, allowed its shoulders and fore-claws to droop, and then sunk dead to the ground. Immediately, another form just like the first stepped out of the inanimate shell and the lizard stood back up, coldly regarded William watching it, and then leapt upwards and disappeared through the ceiling.
The second lizard watched the apparition disappear and then set about devouring the body slowly and noisily.
It finished its meal and swallowed the bones, then lay down to sleep, snoring loudly; William watched the second lizard step out of its body and give chase after the first, scenting its unique identity lingering on the shells of quivering atoms. It gave a quick, quizzical look at William's astral form and then chased after its departed mate, with William close behind.
The lizard-person didn't seem to mind the outsider's presence as William followed it through unfamiliar landscapes of towering fauna and jagged, newly-formed hillsides. William was not aware how he managed to keep pace with the creature; it seemed to be no more complicated than to simply keep his attention fixed on it and it would drag him in its wake; he followed it in its pursuit until it caught up and overcame the other. What followed was some kind of dogged interrogation which William was not allowed to witness—the two creatures joined together the strength of their collective will and pushed him back into the blackness of the void by himself.
The being returned him to his body, and then asked him to forget, and William came away changed.
Scott sunk deeper into the couch, putting his arm up around his wife's shoulders and pressing buttons on the remote.
The channel switched over to one of the endless news broadcasts, this one reporting on the latest in a string of deaths around the country of microbiologists; the only connecting factor appeared to be their professions, as most had died by accident, two by suicide. The death in the news was the most recent and noteworthy only because it had been a murder, and had happened locally. As the reporter read out the name and cause of death (coincidentally, the twelfth microbiologist to die in the past year) a picture displayed briefly on the screen and Scott gave a start.
They said he fell off a train, but Scott knew better.
The twelfth such death in less than a year, but no one thought it was odd…
Scott turn to Ella, "Hey, does that seem weird to you? What does a microbiologists do, anyway?" His wife didn't answer him, and Scott pressed the button on the remote, changing the channel away again.
It was a show about ants, but Scott wasn't entirely interested. These ants were sick, they were infected with a fungus that made the ants do things they wouldn't normally do, a coarse, stringy mushroom that grew through the ant and took over its brain… A zombie ant.
The ants were boring to him, but Scott found himself unable to change the channel. Something in him was making him watch the TV, was making him available to the information exposing itself for him; Scott was mesmerized by the images of the struggling ants, hairy with the fibers of the parasitic fungus, but aggressively bored with it at the same time, repulsed from within by something in its presentation. It horrified him, and he looked away on his inside and un-saw it again.
Now he could change the channel. It wasn't on the screen anymore, and he didn't have to think about it anymore, either. He was done with it. Ella didn't have anything to say. Suddenly, he became very tired and lay down on the couch, stretched out upon it next to her; she sat there with him very still, and Scott relaxed quickly and fell asleep.
He dreamed of the ants, of taking the hairy little insects off the ground and holding them up to his eye. He saw the fibrous growths stretching out from the ants' bodies and burrowing under his own skin, felt the fibers crawl under his flesh and multiply. He was sure he was going crazy, that the creepy-crawling in his organs and the dark s
treaks in his veins would drive him insane. The strings worked their way through his entire body and then began to flex, causing Scott to shudder against his will. The fungus was making him dance, jumping like a puppet on the end of a black metal cord.
It was too much; he shuddered and snuffled himself awake, batted sleepily at the side of his head, and then fell back into fitful sleep.
This time he was the ant.
He couldn't know what it actually felt like to be an insect, but he was sure this wasn't it. The nausea, the pain in his head and raging throughout his entire body, the vertigo and the urge to vomit but with nothing on his stomach—something was terribly wrong with him.
It was all he could do to keep putting one foot in front of the other, in front of the other, in front of the other, and yet it was indeed all he could do. His entire purpose was locked up in the idea of finding the leaf, and climbing until he could go no higher, and there to wait. He would die before he let anything interrupt his singular purpose (the leaf, the climb, the wait) but he might also die in all reality before he got to fulfill that purpose and still he was sure that death itself would not interfere.
His eyesight was failing, was growing dim and fuzzy more and more with each step, and still he kept his six feet going, marching toward the soft green light somewhere lying ahead. He knew that he would find in that green glow the leaf, just as he knew that he wouldn't make it, that the thick gray fibers and their black roots running through him had drained the last of the life out of him and sucked out his fluids and he would die, he would die, he would—
He died, and his foot took a step, and his other foot took a step, and his other foot took a step, and his other…
And then he was out of his ant-body, the poor lifeless thing gone over to fungus and plodding along mindlessly forward to its appointment with the sheep. He watched the body that had been himself, trudging along in zombification and knew with a great horror that something similar was going to happen to him.
He drew a deep breath and coughed, bringing up a black lump of something foul that he immediately spat out. It hit the ground and crawled away. Scott didn't have the energy to chase it.
The Queen had been losing mobiles one after the other, in ever-increasing numbers. Infinitely greater was the loss of the drones inhabiting the unrecoverable mobiles lost on planetside missions.
This was one of the darker thought-chains, usually restricted even from the highest-ranked member of a Hive, the Queen: it was the knowledge of Herself. The clones were never to think of themselves as individuals—no drone was to distinguish itself as different in any way from any other drone that had come before. The Queen was one of many, who were one. She could never be distinct from the Hive, nor any of its nestlings, and neither She nor the Hive could ever be rent asunder.
Redundant multiple memory-chains were encoded into each mobile, from Queen to drone and all forms in-between, with perfect replication of the information-laden protein-chains from body to body, effecting immortality. In this way the Hive had maintained perfection for millennia. A review of species with greater internal variation found that they often achieved interstellar congress much quicker than the group-minds, if they survived self-annihilation; the Hive had achieved its slow but total mastery of the elements through sheer persistence, repetition and memory. Its strength was in its consistency.
After Her meeting with the spirit entity representing the intelligence of the Terran planet, She had begun to worry that She might be losing more than just gene-stock from the clone vats, that entire sectors of memory-storage may have been compromised by Her arch enemy. The Queen could only guess the uses to which Her adversary would pit the stolen soul against its former master.
It was one loss after the next; it was unacceptable.
William had seen colors that didn't exist, or at least he was to find out that they weren't supposed to exist, and then they would exist no more.
They were colors like the distorting rainbows made of oil-slick sheen seen in the afterimages of things, flashing and brilliant and occluded and occulted all at the same time. The time he'd barely avoided being eaten by the giant dog when he was four years old—there had been a cloud of dark reds and purples that faded at his touch; when his mother and father were getting a divorce, the house had choked him with sticky browns that oozed depression; the most beautiful colors he'd ever seen had been around two people in love.
The colors were a thing of relaxation, permission—a phenomenon only seen when one gave up control. They were there until you tried to look directly at them and then they went away, remaining only at the edges of one's vision or disappearing behind closed eyelids. That was how come they were so easy to forget, to pretend they never existed.
The one time he'd spoken to his father about the colors, he'd been offhandedly reprimanded, scolded for saying a wrong thing and made to feel ashamed—in such a short while after, the colors had all but gone away. They became difficult to see, and he had to remember to look for them instead of relying on them to show themselves. They were a secret language he did not want to forget, but in time their brightness would dim and then fade altogether.
He'd still been very young when one day William was left to play with the other children on the banks of the streambed, to beat the water with his long sticks while his mother sat at the clumsy picnic table and stole away her secret cigarette. No one was watching him.
The other kids had all shied away from him, aware that something about him was off, and William found himself in the center of an empty space on the shore while the screaming and the horseplay went on all around him. He didn't mind.
There were insects scuttling in the mud and the muck down close to the water; he'd held his open palm over them and watched them gather in response to the opalescent cascade coming from it, bemused at how they formed a seething mass that responded to his gestures. He'd pulled his hand away and smiled, and they'd dispersed as if they'd never been there.
His mother had been standing behind him, angrily stubbing out her cigarette. "Don't do that! Bad!"
The smile receded, but did not go away. A potato bug crawled off his fingertip and tumbled between some rocks.
"I'm sorry mother, I didn't mean to scare you," he'd said. He hadn't.
"Why are you talking that way? What's wrong with you? You're freaking me out. Come on, let's get you home and get some dinner into you and put you down for bed." They'd left the park and gone home.
They'd had spaghetti for dinner that night.
Lee straightened his tie, tightened the tuck of his spotless white dress-shirt and adjusted his glasses. He hadn't gotten a chance to mentally prepare himself ahead of time for what he was about to endure—department heads never personally called for the IT staff unless something had gone drastically wrong, like international crisis wrong. Nothing good would come of this. Sometimes, if someone had screwed up really bad—or was a spy for a foreign nation—they'd quietly disappear and never be seen in the workplace again.
It was never good when the brass wanted to see you; they were all ex-military, and he was and always would be a civilian contractor. He supposed that was why he never landed any of the big tickets and was always stuck in maintenance. He didn't mind that. He just wanted to keep his job, which he'd always tried to do to the best of his ability, and his life, for one more day.
He swallowed a couple tablets for the headache and pushed the door open.
It turned out to be nothing more important than replacing some server banks in the restricted wing.
Normally they'd have given it to Jensen, but he was out sick again today and there'd been no one else qualified to do it on duty; they were HomSec computers and he was the only other one on staff with the security clearance to enter the building. It was a simple swap and drop, but you had to have a badge card and an armed escort or they wouldn't let you anywhere near it. The gate had a laser-beam that stabbed you in the eye to take retinal prints.
So much ado for the collecti
ng of people's emails. He hoped the Agency enjoyed looking at pictures of sandwiches as much as he did, and hoped they had to look at every last single damn one of them.
Walking down the long rows of towering stacks, the noise and heat and vibration from the machines set his head buzzing again.
"Hey, do you mind if I take some aspirin?" he asked his guard, feeling stupid.
"What do I care? Knock yourself out." The guard was unimpressed by his willingness to cooperate with authority. His headache was killing him.
His doctor had diagnosed him with cancer, an aggressive tumor the size of a lemon squatting on his frontal lobe. He hadn't suffered any permanent visual loss yet, beyond one short-lived incident the day before, but the doctor had told him to expect it. He hadn't even told his wife yet, much less his boss. This was supposed to be his last day, before he went into surgery the following morning. They didn't want him taking any chances. It was going to be now or.... It was going to be now.
The guard brought him to the end of a bank of machines, the last of them darkened and silent, then turned away and started walking back toward the door.
"I'll be in the hall," he said, without turning around.
He put the spare server units down on the ground and fiddled for the screw that mounted the burnt component to the framing. A sudden throbbing caused him to stop, put his hand up to his sweaty forehead, and wince away from the popping sparkles flashing in his eyes. He kneeled in front of the computers frozen with pain, and when his vision cleared it left behind a man-shaped patch of sparks that loomed up immediately next to him and appeared to be staring at him intently. His mouth gaped in wonder and he began to recoil, when he thought, rather than heard, the voice directly in his head: "It sees me?"
Lee called out, "Oh, hell no!" and backed away from the creature of molten light, crab-walking into the wall behind him and bouncing to a stop. The creature didn't move. He panicked in short, gasping breaths as the images overwhelmed, a flood of information gushing from the creature and washing through him.
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