The Conformity

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Sssh. I don’t know if he can overhear us.

  Screw that, Jack says.

  During my exchange with Jack, Priest remains staring at me, hands crossed over his cane.

  “So you want to know how I did it,” I say to him.

  He inclines his head slightly.

  I gnaw my lip.

  “I’m a thief.” In my mind, when I thought of my response, it sounded cool, tough. But now that my mouth has made the words, it sounds terribly vulnerable stated so baldly. And I hate it about myself. I take and I take and I give nothing back.

  “All you can think about is yourself, Shree,” Moms said, so long ago. And she was right.

  Priest purses his lips and lowers his head, thinking.

  Jack and I are exchanging glances when he raises his head and says, “I think the reality of it is more complicated. Let me ask you a question.”

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  “Can you take my humor?”

  “Humor?”

  “A poor example. Can you take my personality?”

  “No. But I can take your memories.”

  That troubles him; his face clouds. “This is, unfortunately, true. I cannot express to you how sorry I am that you ever were in a situation where that seemed your only option.”

  Damn it if a tear doesn’t bead his eye. I don’t know what to say to the man.

  “You can take memories, but can you take my personality? Can you take my humor? Can you take my beliefs? My love of music? My abhorrence of poverty? And I don’t mean remove it, I mean, can you take it into yourself? Graft it to who you are?”

  “No.”

  “Then you are not a thief. And I am beginning to think you are the opposite of a thief.”

  “What’s the opposite of a thief?” Jesus. This guy. He could give Jerry a run for his money, answering questions with questions.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It is one who gives.”

  “So, I’m a gift giver? Like Santa Claus?”

  He smiles again, slowly. His lips tug downward, but his eyes crinkle. It’s a sad smile.

  I hate sad smiles. Quincrux never sad-smiled.

  “No. It means you are a gift.” He closes his eyes suddenly and half sings, half chants, “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.”

  The elevator shudders to a stop, and the doors open.

  Fuck me.

  It’s a lab, cluttered with the detritus of research and analysis, filled with large, white electrical machines of unknown use, at least to my eye (and I have the memories of quite a few medical practitioners rattling around in the noggin). There’s an electron microscope. A bank of industrial refrigerators and freezers. There’s a centrifuge. I have to assume the thing stenciled with the words DELIVER TO GENOMICS is some sort of DNA sequencer. There’s something that looks like a clear vat of oil with wires and tubes swimming in its viscous depths. And racks upon endless racks of servers.

  Priest limps through the laboratory, looking about with a dissatisfied air.

  Boom. Boom. A flask rattles on a nearby worktable.

  He gestures at the room. “I show you this because it is my greatest failure.”

  Jack looks puzzled. “How so?”

  “Hiram. He was my student—indeed, my protégé—and I must atone for what he did. I bear the weight of his sins.”

  “He was a prick, that’s for sure,” I say. Then I think a little more. “A monster, really—a murderer, an abuser, a manipulator. But I don’t understand how that was your fault.”

  He limps over to a stool and sits down. He looks tired. At this point, his psyche has settled in Quincrux’s flesh like a tapeworm in a dog’s heart. Now he’s heir to all the excess and damage that Quincrux’s meatsuit possesses. The shattered leg. The addiction to tobacco. Whatever other strange and demented predilections the man might have had. I’ve worn enough flesh to know, it’s hard coming to grips with the physical wear and tear of another body. To take up residence has to be tiring.

  “Pride. When I first came to know Hiram and understood his talents and desires, I thought I could control him, change him for good. And I did, I think, for many years. But when I—” A strange, dark expression settles over his features. For a moment the years fall away and he seems boyish, lost. Lonely. “When I was scattered among them, the people I rode, Hiram reverted to his old ways. His true nature.”

  “Still not seeing how that can be your fault,” Jack says.

  “We’re all tied together, Mr. Graves, in ways that sometimes are hard to understand because humanity is in love with the idea of individuality.”

  “We’re all snowflakes,” I say, thinking back to Miss Roberts’s kindergarten class.

  Priest looks at me, cocking his head. “I haven’t heard that before, but many years have passed since I have been aware of much more than the entity and keeping my consciousness whole.” He nods, a brittle, slow movement. “The American mindset is that every man is a king, every person special, despite the weight of evidence against this perception. Most lives are dull, full of drudgery. The boredom of existence is made palatable only through the anodynes of media, entertainment, the surcease of pain found in alcohol and drugs. The platitudes of religion. The pleasures of the flesh. Is this not true?”

  I can only nod in agreement.

  “Few strive to be anything more than what their society, their community, their heritage expects of them. The inertia of their lives keeps them from striving for anything more than some artificial idea of normality.” He scratches at his slightly whiskered cheek. It’s been a day or two since our leader has shaved. “And so, the minutiae of daily life don’t differ greatly from individual to individual. They are interchangeable components to the great experiment of humankind.” He sighs. “The truth is that there was an ocean of mindless, animated flesh out there before the Conformity awoke.”

  “Right, so, back to why Quincrux’s shittiness was your fault?” I prod.

  He walks over to a freezer and opens it. The air condenses, and water vapor begins to fall from the opening like smoke. Row upon row of colored, indexed tubes stand revealed, each one capped by a strange-looking mechanical device.

  Priest delicately withdraws one tube and hands it to me. It’s freezing, and I have to shift it from hand to hand to keep my skin from fusing to it. “Hiram Quincrux was special. Unique. As are you, Shreve, and you, Mr. Graves.”

  Weird how he addresses me by my first name, but not Jack. An echo of Quincrux, maybe.

  I look at the tube. It’s full of a red liquid, thinner than blood. The top looks like a mechanical interface to a device. The glass of the tube has a frosty, opaque area for labeling. Someone has written there: HOLLIS – Stasis.

  Priest’s face turns grim. “But he knew the uniqueness of these poor souls. And he did this.”

  Boom.

  “I am to blame,” Priest says, “because I wasn’t here to restrain him or temper his ambition. And so I must expiate that guilt.” He looks at me. “I felt you abroad in the etheric heights as the soldier attacked. What did you learn?”

  “The Conformity soldier is in communication with the Conformity itself. I saw the tether as a sort of golden filament. It’s held together by a tremendously powerful telekinetic force and controlled by an equally powerful telepathic awareness.”

  “Where was the ‘tether,’ as you call it?”

  “In the crotch.”

  Priest nods again, as if confirming something he already suspected. “That makes sense from a purely operational standpoint. The ‘brain’ is situated deep in the body so that it is more protected and signals have to travel shorter distances. Yes, it makes perfect sense.” Priest stands. “Miss Tanzer has offered a theory on the soldiers, and I am agreeing with her more and more as new information becomes available. I would let her tell it to you herself, but she is occupied currently, preparing my plan.”

  “Your plan? You’ve got a plan?” I guess I’m amazed. I always make it up as I go
along.

  “Indeed I do.”

  “Can you both just shut the fuck up and get to the point?” Jack says.

  I raise my eyebrow. “How can I shut the fuck up and get to the point? If I shut the fuck up then—”

  “I will blast you, Shreve,” Jack says, raising his hand.

  Priest snaps his fingers, drawing attention back to himself. “Miss Tanzer was puzzled as to why the soldiers and the Conformity itself weren’t subsuming everyone in its path. Just a percentage.”

  “Yeah, that is weird,” I say.

  “She believes that the Conformity is only subsuming people with extranatural abilities, either fully formed or latent.”

  “Wow,” I say. It’s a stunning idea.

  “What about the worship?” asks Jack.

  “Yeah, what’s up with that?”

  Priest looks grim. “Whatever the entity behind the Conformity, it’s a dark and foreign thing. Bodiless and malevolent. It feeds on psychic energy and grows itself. Prayer and worship are its food, essentially.”

  “But it’s just worship, right,” Jack says, raising his hands, a great mass of fingers. “Worshipping something, praying to something … It’s not actually doing anything. It’s not creating anything.”

  Priest looks at Jack sadly. “Have you been listening, Mr. Graves?” He doesn’t go so far as tsking but I get the impression he’s thinking about it. “Everything is connected. We are—all of us—part of a great tissue that expands and contracts and breathes and shivers and thrums. We are a wave front. The human wave front. And what happens to one of us affects us all. Do you not understand this?”

  Jack shakes his head. “It’s bullshit. New-age crap. I do what I decide. I have free will. I’m not just part of the machine. Because if what you’re saying was true—which it isn’t—we’re already part of a conformity.”

  “Precisely. And now that unity is being threatened.”

  Boom. Boom-boom.

  I’m holding a freezing tube full of the essence of one of my friends while a walking tower of flesh is banging at the mountainside, wanting to either squish or subsume us. At a certain point, all the jibber-jabber becomes useless.

  “This is all just dandy. But what’s your plan?”

  Priest limps around the worktable. He withdraws a set of keys, opens a steel storage compartment, and waves us to assist him. “That black box. Please remove it, Mr. Graves.”

  Jack picks it up with a grunt, and I see it’s the same sort of matte-black box that the Orange Team implemented during the ill-fated attack on the Towson Veterans Hospital. Priest presses a button, and a compartment opens on its face. There’s a mechanical interface inside it, including a suspiciously familiar-looking outlet.

  “It is relatively simple. You place the weaponized genome here. It locks in and drains into the device. There’s a synthetic organism in there that will, once you press this button, go into a frighteningly strong paroxysm of psychokinetic energy. It is, in essence, an extranatural bomb. Once triggered it will, in a matter of moments, bond with the weaponized genome and release its energy.”

  “So, this is the stasis bomb we kept hearing about?”

  “It is and it isn’t. It’s whatever genome you place inside it. And it’s good for only one burst.”

  “How many of these things do you have?” Jack asks, awed.

  “Just the one.” Priest gives a bitter laugh. “That box costs more money than it cost the United States to set mankind on the moon. Billions upon billions of dollars.”

  “One device? But how many genomes?” I ask.

  “Many. Thirty or forty.”

  “So you’re telling me Quincrux took that many kids and … what? Weaponized them? Killed them? Couldn’t he just take their blood?”

  He shakes his head. “Everything is connected. To weaponize an extranatural ability, it must be collected at the moment of genesis within the individual and harvested. The ‘donor’—and I use that term loosely—does not survive.” He waves a hand at the tank full of thin, transparent oil. “It is a frighteningly complicated process that I’m afraid, with my antiquated knowledge of science, I did not fully understand.”

  We’re silent for a while, the only noise our breathing and an intermittent boom sounding in the subterranean laboratory. It’s par for the course, really, that these avaricious men would harvest children for their own ends. What does it say about me that I’m not even surprised?

  “So,” I say, breaking the silence. “The plan.”

  “There are two more exits from this bunker. One on the other side of the mountain. Once again, I must ask you to be bait, Shreve.”

  I laugh. “Again? You didn’t ask the first time.”

  His face colors, and I think for an instant that he’s going to get angry with me. Because that’s what adults do when confronted with my cunning repartee. But he doesn’t. He looks ashamed, has trouble meeting my eyes.

  “The soldiers are drawn to the brightest of extranaturals—”

  “So you’re saying they’ll come after me?”

  “Yes, they will follow you.”

  “What about the Liar? Cameron? Or that girl … the one with the sex-thing—”

  “They will be evacuated. Both have been …” He thinks for a moment. “Both have been ill-used by Hiram. They are exceptionally strong, it’s true. But they are nothing compared to you. You have expanded beyond all our knowledge of extranatural abilities. And neither of them has a connection to Quincrux, which means a connection to the entity, as you have.”

  Jack looks at me with worry corroding his face. “I’m going with him.”

  “Of course,” Priest says. “And any others who wish to go with you. Your team of aptly named Irregulars.”

  “We’ll take that bomb, too.”

  “That will preclude flight.”

  “You have a vehicle for us?”

  “Yes, a troop transport. Captain Davies and Mr. Negata will accompany you. They have both volunteered.” His face looks grave. “I will be honest. There’s not much government left, as you might imagine. Our scientists at the Society have taken readings, and the general radioactive levels have risen around the globe, indicating there have been significant nuclear exchanges. Without people to tend them, many nuclear reactors have had critical failures. The fabric of society and civilization is torn. A Conformity hangs in the sky above Washington and almost every other major city on Earth. This has become an extinction-level event now. We’ve been in radio contact with the US Air Force, what’s left of it. I have been able to get assurances from General Hodgson that an airplane will be waiting for you at the Bozeman airport in three hours. You will make for that.”

  “Should we lead the Conformity toward a population?”

  He shakes his head sadly. “Bozeman is where the soldier came from.”

  “So that’s it? We drive off, lead the soldier away? Catch a plane. And you’ll be here?”

  His pause is entirely too long. “Yes.”

  “Do we return here?”

  “No. You’ll go away from here. Far enough from the Conformity soldier to have time to regroup. To look for solutions. I will find you and come to where you are.”

  “That’s the plan?” I ask, incredulous.

  “That is the plan. You will lead the soldier away so that we might evacuate all of the other Society members, and the remaining Army and research fellows.” He touches the matte-black surface of the bomb lightly.

  “When do we go?”

  “Immediately. I shudder to think of how many people die each time the Conformity soldier attacks the mountain. Cameras show it’s sloughing off flesh”—it’s easier to think of them as flesh than individuals—“at a great rate. Mr. Holden and the remaining scientists estimate the Conformity soldier has lost at least ten percent of its original body mass.”

  “So, thousands have died.” The death toll is staggering. Mind-numbing. And I brought one down.

  “Yes. And thousands more will. It is inevita
ble. We must try to preserve the subsumed, but we also must focus on the unincorporated. They must be safe.” He limps a few steps forward, stops, and turns. “So you will lead the soldier away, to the east. Once the soldier is distant and the rest of the campus’s population is loaded on transports and well out of the valley, I go into the ether and reveal myself to the creature. You will have to stay alive long enough for that.”

  “What? You’re going to throw your life away?” I said.

  “No. I will call the thing to me and see if I can wrest control of it away from the Conformity.”

  “Shit on a shingle, man, you’re crazy.”

  “They say desperate times call for desperate measures. That saying was old even when I was young.”

  “And you think you can take control of it?”

  “It will be a terrible struggle, I’m sure. I will burn bright as I may in the ether, to draw its attention to me. And should I succeed in this contest, we will have a way to take the fight to the Conformity itself.”

  “And if not, what then?” Jack asks.

  “You will have to find another way.”

  “I should do it,” I say.

  “No.”

  “I am stronger than you.”

  “You are, this is true. But I am not inconsiderable. The entity knows me of old. Whatever amount of the Conformity’s awareness is invested in the soldier, it will be drawn to me once I reveal myself.”

  “Damn. That’s some Gandalf shit.”

  He looks at me, puzzled.

  “Forget it. Modern cultural reference.”

  Silence again, and this time the awkwardness is dialed up a few notches. He doesn’t say it, and I don’t want to ask. But it’s there. Those etheric heights. “When you do this, I’ll need to be there, uh, at least in spirit,” I said.

  “Yes. Literally. Your astral self will need to bear witness,” Priest responds.

  “Shit. I hate that word. Astral,” I say.

  Jack snorts. “Asshole.”

  I laugh. Priest looks ineffably weary. “Alas, I forget that you are so young. So very young.” He passes a hand over his eyes as if to sweep the fatigue away. “If we all survive this, I hope you will forgive me for burdening you with such responsibility.”