Sanity Line

by Zachary Adam

  This blonde one seemed to be the first one to figure out he could thin the herd. The Phantom leaned his head over to her shoulder, and spoke silently, stilly in her ear. “His name is Vidcund Därk.”

  “You have fought valiantly, Agent Därk,” she said, letting an imperious bit of tremolo into her voice. “As has your associate. But surely, mighty warriors such as yourselves now realize the hopelessness of your situation. If you submit, you will be spared.”

  She could tell, at once, that Därk was not the type to yield. He took a defiant step backward, and she could see that the heels of his shoes slightly passed over the precipice. The beating of leathery wings filled the air, and as she looked, she could see her backup plan.

  --The strange flapping was distraction enough for Vidcund, who glanced over his shoulder. There were a pair of flying beings there, their great wings bearing them aloft. He found their form evocative of many things: of moles and bats and mouldering flesh, of ravens and arthropods, but he was certain of nothing about them save that there was nothing about them of which once could be certain, at least not in form. To comprehend the perversions of Darwinian effort that had given them rise was to submit the mind to madness, and Vidcund found that, no matter how tempting such a perversion was, he could not be bent that way.

  Too conditioned, and it was that conditioning again to which his mind fell. Agency had made a machine of him, it seemed. It was written, he told himself, and so must it be.

  Before retort, before Drache’s helpless glance for orders could have changed to alarm, he had cleared leather, and a vital round drilled itself through his cohort, before a close cousin of the same punctured the floor of Vidcund’s jaw and the dome of his cranium.

  There was, he thought, always a way out. The thought had crossed his mind, however, that something about this had a touch of the unreal.

  --Maria’s mind seemed to skip several beats. She had to admire the artistry, the high drama, of such an act, but the almost careless way in which it was conducted unnerved her. Her followers, too, and the followers of the King which she served, had a flare for drama. They had no fear of death, but preferred to inflict it rather than suffer it, where possible, and when they did die, it was in ways so grand and ostentatious as to make whole cultures sit up and take notice – that, at least, was the idea.

  The Phantom turned to her and tilted his head slightly. The damage to his masked face seemed to have already repaired itself. “I am sorry, Cassilda. I was unable to catch them.”

  It took considerable force of will for Maria to remind herself that that was not, properly, her name. “That is… lamentable, Phantom. Do not let it happen again.”

  --He came out of it with a hypnagogic jerk, a sensation of a mighty fall for a great height, and in those few moments where the subconscious yet dominated the waking mind, he found himself thrashing against the glass confines in which he found himself, stirring up a devil of a storm of bubbles from the outflow valve of his mask as he churned the solution in which he hung suspended.

  Time passed slowly. He woke fully, hands still braced against the glass in front of him as his feet braced against the surface behind, and in slow dawning of realization, Vidcund understood. He understood the stars and the intuitive leadership and the strange feelings of proprioception.

  He was Vidcund Därk. Sergeant Dräche was Vidcund Därk. He who had died in the strange city beyond the gate was Vidcund Därk, and the man who had died slowly in Dräche’s arms outside an apartment in downtown Kraterburg, his lungs filling with blood from a police officer’s revolver round, had been Vidcund Därk.

  He was many. And many, were dangerous. Slowly, deliberately, he searched out among the stars in particular. He knew what each were doing, now, what they were up to, what they were seeing and feeling and smelling and tasting. For a brief, maddening moment, he was all of them at once.

  And then, when he found the important one, he gave it his undivided attention.

  --

  “Right, everything will be proceeding on…” Stamatia Dowd reacted with the barest of alarm as Vidcund Därk quite suddenly entered her office. He was dragging a Bluetooth headset out of his ear, and while he waited for her to hang up politely, she noticed several fragments of plastic spilling from his fist and onto the rug.

  “Do you know what, Mister Justice, I’m afraid I’m going to have to call you back.” She hung up, and before she could ask, he answered.

  “We need to have a little talk.”

  07 – Questions

  “I understand you’re upset.”

  Vidcund slowly removed his augmented reality sunglasses from his face, holding them at an idle angry in his free hand, the autofile clutched in the other. “I am holding in my hand, figuratively speaking, anyway, a file that pertains to basically my entire life, my raison d’être, if you like, and I find that truly massive sections of it are redacted.”

  “It’s more clearance than anyone’s ever been allowed regarding the original Project Moses, Vidcund. It’s more access than even I get.” Stamatia was careful to keep her tone even and flat, just as Vidcund was doing. An outburst like this was quite out of his character – but today was the sort of day that tended to change that, and she was prepared to excuse it, if only to keep control of an expensive asset. She couldn’t recall having ever met anyone with a past quite like Vidcund’s, but then… the only secrets people hated worse than the ones being kept from them, were the secrets about themselves.

  Vidcund glanced at the page again, returning his glasses to his face so as to read from it. “After the Anfangsburg Tower incident, subject – that’s me, by the way. I must say I love being referred to as ‘subject’. - After the

  Anfangsburg Tower incident, subject was sedated by an Enforcement Department team, lead by someone I can’t identify because it’s redacted, and transferred to secure facility 17A. The only reason I can tell you it’s that facility is because I’ve been floating there reading it on the far wall, because on this document here, it’s fucking redacted.”

  He waved the document in her face, forgetting for the moment she had no way of reading it – the file was loaded on his glasses, not hers. “I’m not even allowed to be told the parts I already know!”

  Stamatia sighed. “Let me see what else I can do about getting you better information, Vidcund.”

  “Thank you,” he said, throwing the autofile sheet back into the stack on her desk, as he prepared to leave.

  “Where are you going?” “Anfangsburg.” The Facility Director’s eyes narrowed down into fine slits. “Vidcund, regardless of everything that’s happened, you still have a job to do. If you want psychological relief, you’ll have to file a debriefing report.”

  “I am going to Anfangsburg because that is where my job is. Gloria Creena is there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Read your HUMINT briefings,” he said, dismissively, and closed the door behind himself.

  --

  PROJECT MOSES ABSTRACT IN 1983, researchers for Slipher Medical began work on human cloning, continuing research from previous Projects: DAPHNIA, ABRAHAM, and GHELLER. Research was focused on continuing the work of Project Abraham as part of the overall Prophet Program, intended to create an artificial humanoid entity which would serve with the firm’s private security.

  Two versions of Project Moses went forward. The first resulted in a single viable subject, Subject 13 (nka Professor James Ivan Derrida), and was considered a failure after this subject destroyed large portions of the testing facility in a successful escape attempt.

  The second version produced 125 subjects, who were remarkable for a shared identity – a trait that was purposefully cultivated. This version of the project, MOSES II, came under Agency Division control after the incident in Anfangsburg.

  --Anfangsburg was one of those teeny tiny towns on the side of the highway that you’d miss if you blinked – not that it mattered, because it was, as Scion had put it to Prince, on the road to nowhere. On
ce a relatively thriving company town for a mining outfit, the 20th century had not been kind to it, and ever since the 60s, the town seemed to be struck on the regular by disasters of one kind or another. Nobody lived here anymore, if they could help it. The census population lowballed it at a fat goose egg – but there were plenty of people who, like the Grey Angels themselves, came here to live under the radar and all but entirely off the grid.

  Niles considered that numbly as he smoked another cigarillo while James pulled off the highway entirely. The scientist had never much approved of smoking, but after a few initial arguments on the subject and one too many insistences to pull over so that the cop could have his vice, James had stopped arguing.

  Former cop, Niles reminded himself. He’d turned in his badge, intentionally or not, the day that Vidcund Därk had hastened along his retirement behind the unforgettable feeling of 9x19mm Parabellum rattling around inside one’s abdominal cavity. He was pleased, at least, to have felled the bastard, before he found out that that victory was less than complete.

  Didn’t stop him from keeping a detective special under his overcoat, or indeed, quite a bit of the rest of his equipment. Handcuffs, pepper spray… even a few things he wasn’t supposed to have, like a CS grenade.

  “Then what are we doing here? What’s so important it couldn’t have been a phone call or a message or something?”

  James shrugged, pulling his sweater back on as he put the car into park. “There is, as you may or may not have known, a memorial here to the ’67 outbreak.”

  “Who would want to visit a memorial to a disaster that wiped out a whole town, built by the people that made it worse, no doubt?”

  “I don’t know,” the geneticist replied, stepping out of the car while his partner in crime did the same. “And neither does Archangel. But he would really, really like to.” Niles hauled their two clamshell cases out of the trunk as he looked up to the monument (leaving a third box behind), which they had parked in the shadow of. It didn’t look particularly like anything, to him – a flying wing of monoliths, maybe, tall and white, and about the only thing in this town that looked remotely clean. “… Archangel is paying us our usual rates so that he can have a few pictures of a reminder of a government fuckup?” “You’ll learn, eventually, just how good his hunches usually are.”

  Niles tossed the stump of his smoke to the ground, and in looking down to crush it under his heel, his rising sense of contemplation immediately caught James’s attention. The scientist stepped over to him, asking, “What is it?”

  Before their feet, a three-armed figure that was quite familiar to Niles as the object of his perimortem obsession, graven into the cement surface of the memorial’s terraced base as though it were there by design.

  Beneath that glaring distraction, however, Niles began to feel a hunch of his own building. The structure’s shape and construction… the platform itself, or dais, if you preferred, was arched. An unusually strong shape, and a departure from the angular structure and arrangement of the five pillars.

  Suddenly, it clicked for him. There was something under the monument itself! James smirked somewhat, and took one of the cases from him, setting it down to open it. “I told you his hunches were good.”

  --While ritual for the Cult of the Sleeping Eye was everything, and full of pomp and decadence which would put the Catholic Church under Borgia to shame, among the three elders, matters were much more informal. They had their meetings wherever it was convenient, and did little more than lounge about, enjoying a good meal of whatever was available, legally or otherwise.

  “I have been consulting the sands,” Baha was saying, in his typically pompous fashion, “And I believe I have located the unaccounted-for seal.”

  This captured Gloria’s interest immediately, and she stopped picking her teeth to look at him. Baha was referring to the oldest problem the cult had faced, apart from the Great Infidel and the Shar-kin. As their final act before fading into the obscurity of history thanks to the cancerous perversions Gloria and Crowe had infested their sources of power with, the White Keepers of Tererra had enacted multiple seals across what was now the Union’s territory. These seals were as plugs in a dam, stopping up those points where magic, and Those who bled it, could enter the world.

  The unfaithful masses of the world thought of the legend, as they knew of it, as heroic self-sacrifice on the part of the White Keepers, and those that continued to uphold the tradition were as powerless as every other hedge wizard or would-be neopagan, and viewed accordingly. Just another hokey ancient religion, in an age that was leaving even the grandest of those behind.

  Many of the seals were accounted for. A few had already been broken during the cult’s more recent heyday in the 90s. Three remained – one lost to legend, one known but well-defended in Kraterburg, and one, also known, that was at rest beneath one of the many museums in Terrerra. The Wellspring, it was called, was one of the more significantly-placed seals, but there was little need to act against it yet, as it was poorly defended.

  “Oh?”

  “There is a Great Seal, or so I estimate it, in Anfangsburg. Would you like me to investigate it?”

  “No, dear. We must be subtle” Gloria turned her head slightly. “Crowe, my sweet?”

  The great mountain of a man, rippling

  disproportionately, lifted his proportionately-diminutive head from the skull he was holding.

  “Would you like to go to Anfangsburg and break a Great Seal?” He gave a slow nod, and rose, lumbering off, lowering his head to squeeze his massive shoulders through the archway. Gloria watched him go, with a mixture of a mother’s concern and amusement on her face. “… It won’t be long for him now, I think.”

  Baha watched him go. “Why do you suppose he is changing so much more rapidly than the rest of us?’ “He is simply more connected to Him than the rest of us,” Gloria said, taking on her ecclesiastic air. “But don’t lose faith now, little brother. Soon, we will all be one in Glory.”

  --Driving was out of the question, in Vidcund’s estimation. He was growing somewhat disoriented and distracted, for now that he knew the truth of his many bodies, he felt the need to check in on all of them, his consciousness shifting around like a housefly, if only to identify little more interesting than feeding, before blinking to the next life. He wondered, without overly caring, what his momentary shifts in perspective was doing to the autonomous minds of those bodies. After all, there was a point when he had been so invested in one of his clones that he had thought it was his only body, while Drache, who was, by all rights, as much Vidcund Därk as any of the others, certainly seemed to carry on as normal.

  The revelation of his true identity, or state of being, however you chose to look at it… it had opened up more questions than answers. He was certain the answers to many of those questions were, themselves, questions, or would be, once he had come to contemplate them.

  Anfangsburg was too remote and unimportant to have a dedicated facility, he would have thought, but as it turned out, it did – a small one, dedicated to, as near as he could tell, general purpose surveillance. It wasn’t even particularly concealed – it was listed as a Air Self-Defence Force radar installation for Space Division, probably to excuse the extensive sensor infrastructure that had been emplaced there.

  Even better, it was minimally staffed, mostly automated, and the one person who worked there was one of his. And so, as he had done before, he retreated, thinking his way back to the tank, to that supreme sense of relaxation that came with the weightlessness of full immersion. Then, he just had to reach out and touch that star with his mind, and ignore the unease of knowing there were other things moving among them.

  These were all analogies, of course. Even in his later career, when he had gotten quite used to this, he would not have been able to tell you how it had functioned, because it used framework no normal human possessed. It was like trying to learn how to light up your thorax – the human mind couldn’t comprehend those mot
ions, because it didn’t have those systems.

  But either way, he stepped out into the still, foggy air of Anfangsburg without the slightest care for who this body had been, when it wasn’t being him. It didn’t matter. This Vidcund, like all the others, had existed for the sole purpose of being there when he needed it.

  What he needed it for, he wasn’t entirely sure yet. He was off of his balance; experiencing sensations of doubt in himself he’d never had to deal with before.

  Somewhere out there, he suspected, was Gloria Creena, or at least a sizeable portion of her cult. That gave him a job to do, an objective, a purpose.

  Did his role in the world have to change merely because his perception of his place in it had?

  He checked the load of both of his handguns and then set off down the road toward the town proper. Walking, perhaps, was best. For now, anyway.

  Once he sorted these feelings out, he thought, he might put in for some upgraded vehicle requisitions.

  --

  Dr. Hanson Crantz, an employee of the original company, was the primary researcher on the second phase of Project Moses. An expert in the genetic coding applications of Teleneurology, Dr. Crantz was also a part of the research team in the original project. In a debriefing for Agency Division, he stated the goal was to “create one or more ‘hives’ of enhanced human subjects and research their usefulness in teamworkstructure settings.” Dr. Crantz then went on to state that “in respect to Subject 7, we succeeded tremendously. Perhaps too well.”

  Dr. Crantz was treated with amnesiac drugs and, after suitable recovery, now works for Magnussun Arms Inc, in their biowarfare development department. His files and communications are monitored continuously by Agency Division to ensure that research into similar projects is not pursued.

  --Scion glanced once around the immediate area before lifting his mask as he looked down at something on the ground, to get a better look at what looked like a patch in the stone that made up the terraced base of the monument. He lowered it back into place before rising again. “You’re the detective. What’re you thinking right now?”