Distortion Offensive

by James Axler

  Lakesh looked up then, peering slowly about the bustling room, taking in the strange details he had never noticed before. Had it always been like this? Had it always been so vibrant and multifaceted? It was like looking into a kaleidoscope, the patterns and the colors and all those incomplete shapes that worked at some subliminal level to create the world.

  “You guys okay?” Kane asked, his voice sounding far away.

  Brigid nodded, but she felt her head swim uncomfortably with the movement. “It’s started,” she told him, closing her eyes tight for a moment to shake a growing feeling of nausea.

  “Lakesh?” Kane prompted.

  “Started,” Lakesh mumbled his agreement, the word seeming to take flight from his mouth.

  When Brigid opened her eyes again, she was looking at Lakesh, his dusky skin seeming to smolder before her like the last vestiges of smoke from a campfire. “Lakesh?”

  “Yes.” The word came from Lakesh’s lips, although he wasn’t quite sure he had willed it. “It’s quite wrong, isn’t it?” he said. “Quite delightfully wrong.”

  Brigid reached forward, touching her hand on the second mollusk where it cooled on the plate. “Shall we eat the others?” she proposed.

  Lakesh agreed. “I believe that it is time to find out how deep our rabbit hole goes,” he said.

  With that, Brigid and Lakesh each downed their second mollusk, drinking the flesh like some protein shake, which in a sense it was.

  Kane watched the proceedings with an increasing sense of unease, with Reba and Clem standing beside him. Kane had an inherent dislike of things he couldn’t grab, things he couldn’t physically examine and battle with if the need arose.

  GRANT AND DONALD ESCORTED Balam and Little Quav back to the operations room where they could comfortably access the mat-trans and be on their way.

  “It has been a pleasure seeing you again, Grant,” Balam said graciously in his weird voice. “A dubious and unfortunate pleasure, perhaps, but a pleasure nonetheless.”

  Grant nodded, tousling Little Quav’s hair as she waited outside the brown-tinted armaglass door of the mat-trans chamber. “You take care of this little girl, okay?”

  “I shall do my very best,” Balam assured the Cerberus warrior.

  “Try to remember that she’s human, Balam,” Grant said, and there was a warning to his tone.

  “I shall never forget that,” Balam promised.

  Grant held his hand out and grasped Balam’s. “We’ll see you again.”

  “It seems inevitable that you shall,” Balam agreed.

  Then Balam picked up his human charge and carried the little girl into the mat-trans chamber, encouraging her to wave to their Cerberus friends one final time before they departed. From twin aisles of computer desks, the active personnel on shift in the ops center all waved back, the sight of the little girl breaking more than a few hearts.

  The door to the mat-trans chamber closed, then Balam’s interphaser unit activated. A moment later, Balam’s silhouette disappeared into a gateway in the quantum ether, the little girl in tow. They were gone.

  Grant watched solemnly, the thoughts ticking over in his mind. Balam was protecting the girl in the hidden city of Agartha, but was that enough?

  CONTRARY TO THE POPULAR SAYING, it was the second time that proved to be the charm. Brigid Baptiste felt its effects almost instantaneously, and with such immediacy that she nearly fell from her chair. Nothing had changed; the kitchen was exactly as it had always been. She knew that as she stared around the room with wide eyes. But it was different, utterly altered into something Brigid had never seen before.

  We are living underwater, she thought, trying to take in the new sense of being she could now perceive. That made no sense, of course, and the logical part of her brain rejected it, rebelling against such patent foolishness. It wasn’t water, she realized then; it was air.

  Kane’s voice came from beside her, the concern clear in his urgent tone. “Baptise? Are you okay?” He had seen her sway in her chair, and he had worried for a moment that she might topple.

  “We are living underair,” Brigid muttered in response.

  Still sitting at the table, Brigid found herself fascinated by the vignettes progressing around her. A human she was, and as human she had come to rely upon her eyesight as her most crucial sense, her primary means of sensory input. Seeing the world now, the room with its sizzling grills and bubbling fryers, it all seemed different. Not new—no, that wasn’t it at all—just different, like seeing it all again for the first time.

  Is this how a baby sees? she wondered. In those first moments when it exits the womb and sees our world for the very first time. Is this what it sees?

  There was a medium before Brigid, she realized, the medium of air with its many components, its nitrogen and oxygen and traces of a dozen more free floating chemicals. Despite herself, Brigid found she was surprised at the water vapor, gathering in clumps around the sizzling cookers, the way it looked like droplets dancing amid this medium they called air. Her eyes turned to Clem Bryant, who was taking a mouthful from his glass of water, and she wondered at how he could move so freely within this cloying weight of air that pressed upon them all like a stifling blanket. Then she noticed the movement, the way the water shifted in the glass as though playing a game, its factions clinging together to hurry joyously down the incline as the glass was tipped toward Clem’s lips.

  Curiously, everything shone in this new reality, everything glowed and sparkled as if it had been sprinkled with icing sugar. The colors were so unusual, colors that Brigid’s mind couldn’t seem to truly grasp, had no name for despite seeing them, like a dream half-remembered.

  Could it be that we never saw the things we had no name for? Were we blind to the world because we couldn’t name everything within it? she wondered.

  Brigid became conscious of something else, too, of the way her heart was beating in her chest, flurrying rapidly to keep pace with the emotions that were running through her. She felt hot, clammy.

  Tentatively, warily, Brigid stood, her eyes roving around the kitchen.

  “Baptiste?” Kane asked again, his voice strangely so close to her now, almost as though it came from within her. Perhaps that was the anam chara bond they shared, perhaps that was how it should manifest, as voices from each other’s body, each other’s soul.

  She swayed as she tried to take a step, discovering that her sense of balance had altered. “It is the weirdest feeling, Kane,” she explained, her voice seeming somehow to come from both her and him at the same time.

  “Tell me,” Kane said, his voice low and encouraging.

  “Like seeing the building blocks,” Brigid said in wonder. “The building blocks of time.”

  Lakesh was still sitting at the little table by the wall, but his reaction to the effects of the mollusk was very different. Where the hallucinogen had seemed to expand Brigid’s sense of vision, Lakesh felt his own eyes burning. They were alien things, eyes not his own. This was true, for Lakesh had had new eyes implanted in his skull when his own had dimmed with age.

  Unlike Brigid, he ceased to concern himself with external input and instead his mind turned within, a scientist looking for answers he knew he had to have. He felt his heart beating, drumming against the walls of his chest in its quest to keep moving, to keep pumping. The blood rushed through arteries and veins, with the fiery intensity of neat whisky.

  Lakesh looked down, gazing at his hands as if they were things he held and not things he was. Ridges and bumps, a mountain range of age displayed in every trough and valley. Then, disconcertingly, he became aware of the layers of his hands, the skin that wrapped the parcel of flesh and blood and bone. He tried for a moment to flex his fingers, found that he couldn’t, as if he had forgotten how to move. He closed his eyes, and beneath the lids he could see the veins there pulsing, rippling before his vision as red blood cells hurtled oxygen through his body. Somewhere deep inside, Mohandas Lakesh Singh felt his heart skip, his bre
athing cease and restart, as though his autonomic functions were failing; it was his brain he knew, the burning of the brain raging through him like a forest fire. He was witness here to something no person could prepare for, something no person should witness. A level of knowledge that went beyond simple fact, into a pureness that underpinned everything.

  “Hold it together, you old fool,” Lakesh chastised himself, though he could not tell if he had said the words out loud or merely thought them.

  The aftertaste of the mollusk flesh swilled around his tongue, an acrid vinegar that he could not seem to shake even after swallowing the second dead creature.

  Something moved before him, swirling in his vision, and he realized with a start that his eyes were still closed, that whatever he saw was only within him. Black on white, the stripes of a zebra, a pattern that promised to make sense but would not resolve, no matter how hard he studied it. Something else moved then, whirring in front of him, and he opened his eyes, seeing the figures moving all about him. It had been their shadows that had played on his eyelids, their movements that he had interpreted as zebra stripes amid the redness of his own skin. Brigid was standing, but she looked pained, her body bending in on itself like the crooked man who lived in the little crooked house.

  As Lakesh watched, Brigid staggered, seemingly in slow motion yet still right, falling forward, stumbling into the wall before him and lurching onward, as if lost. The powerful figure of Kane was following just a few steps behind the redheaded woman, and Lakesh could hear his voice calling to her, but it wasn’t in the room where he was. Instead the voice seemed to come from the far end of a torpedo tube, a muffled, eerie echo like the voice of a spirit, of Biblical God.

  Brigid’s hair seemed so bright in the lights now that it shimmered like flame, the reds glowing and burning, glowing and burning. In fascination, Lakesh watched it, wondering why it didn’t hurt, what all those flames might hide.

  Baptiste herself was muttering something over and over. Two paces away, Kane could hear them for what they were—nonsense words: “Namu amida butsu.”

  Brigid’s lips continued to move and her eyes darted back and forth as she tried to make sense of sensory input that seemed to change too rapidly for her. The swirl of air hung before her, its currents moving around and around in circles and curlicues. It was hypnotic, drawing her full attention so that she had to make a conscious effort to not look at it, to not be trapped by it like some awful, mesmeric thing.

  Beyond that swirl of air, Brigid saw the people and the shadows that they cast and, as she forced her eyes to focus past those beautiful currents of the air, she saw something hiding in those shadows as they played over the walls. The black of the shadows held red, a trace of rich scarlet amid the darkness. The word came back to her, horrifying and familiar, and suddenly her lips stopped their incessant “namu amida butsu” movement and she opened her mouth wide and unleashed an ear-piercing scream.

  As Brigid began to scream, Kane reached and grabbed her, pulling her away from where she had lurched against the wall as if drunk, clutching her to his chest. “Baptiste,” he urged. “Baptiste, snap out of it. Deep breaths. Snap out of it now.”

  Beside Kane, Reba DeFore was readying a hypo of sedative, wondering if she should act. She looked at Kane for approval and he shook his head.

  “Wait,” he instructed. “Give her a moment. She’ll come around—won’t you, Baptiste?”

  Brigid seemed to ignore him. It was almost as if she was no longer aware of his presence. She pushed against him, leaning on his chest with all her weight, as though she was trying to shove him off his feet.

  Kane stood firm, his legs well spaced to provide support as the screaming woman pushed at him. “Snap out of it, Baptiste,” he urged again, drawing all the authority of his Magistrate vocal coaching into his command.

  For a moment, nothing happened. And then, as abruptly as she had started, Brigid stopped shrieking, stopped pushing at Kane with all her might. Now, like a lifeless doll, she sagged against him as he drew her close, and Kane found himself propping her up as her whole body began to slump like a rag doll.

  When he looked at her, Kane saw that Brigid had buried her face in his chest, hiding her eyes from the bright lights of the kitchen like a frightened animal. Her shoulders were moving up and down as if she was struggling to breathe, as if she were crying in great racking sobs. But she seemed normal now, no longer tripping out.

  “It’s okay, Baptiste,” Kane said, emphasizing her name each time he spoke. “It’s okay now.”

  Across the room, Lakesh still sat at the table with Clem Bryant standing close by. Lakesh had been silent throughout Brigid’s strange episode, and he had barely moved since imbibing the flesh of the second shellfish. As Kane watched, the Cerberus leader drew his shaking hand close to his mouth and reached inside with the tips of his index and middle fingers.

  “What the hell…?” Kane began, and he took a step toward Lakesh, still clutching on to the limp form of Brigid Baptiste.

  Reba DeFore held up her hand to stop Kane from interfering. “I believe, even in his addled state, he knows just what he’s doing,” she explained.

  As Kane watched, Lakesh gagged and then pulled his hand away from his mouth, a rush of vomit bursting forth and splattering over the empty plate and table before him. Kane cursed, and a few of the cooks in the immediate area called out, well aware of the hygiene implications of Lakesh’s act. Clem hushed them with a word.

  Lakesh continued vomiting, bringing up a watery drizzle of oily yellow gunk until the gunk turned to nothing more than foamy spittle. After thirty seconds or so, Lakesh’s vomiting subsided to dry heaving, and he drew a deep, pained breath. Clem knelt beside him, pulling a handful of fresh napkins from a loaded dispenser and handing them to Lakesh.

  “Here, Lakesh,” he urged. “Deep breaths and I’ll get you some more water.”

  “Th-thank you, Clem,” Lakesh said, his eyelids flickering as he struggled to take in the scene around him. After a moment, his eyes fixed on Kane, who still stood clutching Brigid’s shaking form close to him. Kane helped her drink her own glass of water.

  “How is Brigid?” Lakesh asked, his voice sounding a little hoarse from the strain he had just placed on his throat by forcing himself to disgorge the weird mollusks.

  “She completely freaked out,” Kane admitted. “What the hell were you two seeing?”

  “Perhaps the wonders of the universe, my friend. I’m not sure,” Lakesh said vaguely. “I started to become caught up within myself, trapped in the ego, I think—inner space—and I knew that if I didn’t eject this stuff from my system it would overwhelm me. I’d be trapped looking inward forever.”

  “You’re overreacting,” Kane said, though he didn’t feel as sure of his words as he tried to sound. “Those kids we saw in Hope came out of it and seemed normal pretty quick.”

  “How long between imbibing the flesh and their return to normalcy?” Lakesh queried.

  Kane thought for a moment, then gave up. “Fair point,” he said. “We weren’t there when they ate the stuff.”

  After taking a long draw from the fresh glass of water that Clem had provided him, diluting whatever vestiges of the mollusks remained in his system, Lakesh began to speak once more. “This is a powerful—and I use this term with reticence—hallucinogen. Its effects began almost instantaneously…”

  “You ate two,” Kane reminded him.

  “But neither was very big, Kane,” Lakesh continued. “I can understand why Balam was so concerned about humans even touching them. They are quite exceptionally powerful and effective in altering one’s perception field.”

  “Reckless is what I call it,” Clem muttered, shaking his head.

  “I agree,” Lakesh said, “but, as I said before, sometimes one has to learn through doing.”

  Still propped up in Kane’s arms, Brigid began to move, pushing herself away from him.

  “You okay?” Kane asked, and Lakesh echoed his query a sec
ond after.

  “My head is swimming,” Brigid said, “but I wouldn’t want to eat a plateful of those!”

  Lakesh looked woozy as he sat at the table, where Clem had removed the vomit-drenched plate and was cleaning the countertop with a cloth dampened with sterilizing solution. “I would suggest water,” Lakesh proposed, “and lots of it. It should dilute the effects Brigid is still feeling.”

  Reba agreed.

  As Kane paced across the room to the water cooler, Brigid continued to speak, not really addressing anyone but simply following her natural instinct to archive information. “This is so weird,” she said. “I should feel scared, but I don’t. I feel tense, but not scared. Just a sense of discomfort. It’s almost like I had too much sensory input at once and my mind couldn’t process it. Whatever is in those sea creatures, it has a crazy effect on the human brain.”

  “I quite agree,” Lakesh said, feeling the beginnings of a headache itching at his skull.

  “Like Eris’s Apple of Discord,” Clem reminded them both. “You’ve seen simultaneous, conflicting views of the world and been unable to process which is the truth, for perhaps they both are.”

  Kane returned with a new glass of water, which he handed to Brigid. “I think it’s time we all found out what this library is all about, then, don’t you?”