The Argus Deceit

by Chuck Grossart

  The shadow man remained the same, though. A man in black, holding Connie, his grip steady even as her body changed furiously in his grip.

  He placed the gun to the side of her head.

  Brody willed himself to keep his eyes open, as he didn’t want Connie to feel alone. She’d told him how scared she always was, alone in the darkness. He would never be able to reach her or hold her in his arms again, comforting her in the face of such terror, so Brody would do the only thing he could do. He would stay with her, staring into her eyes, until it was over.

  The changes were coming almost too fast to discern, as if the whole world was nothing more than a series of four pictures being projected at an insane rate of speed, with his and Connie’s bodies changing with them. But within the blurry cloud of motion that was Connie’s form, one thing remained the same.

  Her eyes. Two pinpoints of life, of reality, shining back at him.

  The scene began to shrink as the swirling shadows pressed inward, erasing everything in their path. Eating the stage.

  Connie closed her eyes, and Brody knew it was almost over.

  And then, it was.

  The shadow man’s hand rocked as the pistol fired, and Brody watched Connie’s head jerk to the side—as a kid, as a young woman in her twenties, as a teenager, and as a woman in the prime of her years, each with a fountain of blood issuing from her temple—and then the shadow man released his grip, allowing her body to slump over.

  Brody felt his heart break, and he let his head drop to the ground, every bit of strength now sapped from his body, along with his will to live. Against his face, he could sense the ground shifting from asphalt, to grass, to a warehouse floor, and to a hardwood hallway . . .

  Connie was dead, and this was the end.

  Brody was alone now, alone in the darkness. The pain was gone.

  And for the first time he could remember, Brody dreamed.

  It’s a hot, humid summer night.

  He can’t sleep, and it’s late. Well past midnight.

  He sees a bright light outside his widow, as if someone is shining a spotlight at their house. He goes to his window as the light fades. He sees nothing, at first.

  There’s something moving in the backyard, coming toward their house in the darkness. He can’t tell exactly what it is, but it scares him. Deeply.

  He hears a crash downstairs, followed by the muffled voices of his parents in the next room. Hears his father open their bedroom door. The floor creaks as his dad pads down the hall toward the stairs.

  He opens his door slowly and peers into the shadows down the hall. He turns and sees his mother standing in their doorway. She looks scared.

  The voice, telling him not to run with something sharp. It’s her. Even though Brody realizes he’s dreaming, he knows he’s seeing the face of his mother—his real mother—for the first time in—

  His father flips on the downstairs light.

  He hears the sound of a struggle. Screams.

  His mother runs downstairs, orders him to stay in his room and shut the door.

  He doesn’t want to follow her, but he does. He has to.

  He stands at the top of the stairs, frozen by the scene below.

  They’re in the house. The things from the backyard. More than one.

  Long, thin bodies, glistening. He sees their eyes.

  His parents are on the floor. Not moving.

  A pair of large, black eyes spy him at the top of the stairs. The thing comes for him.

  He runs down the hall toward his parents’ room, tries to slam the door, but the thing crashes through.

  There’s nowhere to run. No place to hide.

  Its arms pin him down, and he feels the coldness seeping from the thing’s hands into his shoulders. It leans in close. Soulless black eyes twitch in their sockets only inches away, reflecting the face of a terrified little boy. A little boy named Brody Quail.

  It lifts him up.

  And takes him away.

  Chapter 36

  Lead didn’t wait for the tech to signal it was safe, and ripped the visor from his face. He sat up from the immersion pod, his head still spinning from the emergency retrieval. “That’s it! Disconnect now!”

  The techs were already working on it, severing the connection between Brody’s pod and the main controller. Long, glistening cables—more biological than mechanical—ran from the far end of the chamber to the head of each of the pods, ending in a series of tiny filaments, which entered the bodies near the base of the skull, irrevocably intertwined among the sulci and gyri of the cerebral cortex, like the roots of a tree. A few feet away, the techs were doing the same with the other active pod.

  These two were the last of the 756 people they’d found on this doomed, godforsaken rock, the fourth planet in the Argus system. They’d been able to successfully disconnect nearly 600, but the rest had been too far gone.

  Lead swung his legs over the side of his pod and dropped to the floor a few inches below. He was breathing heavily, and his heart was racing. It had been close. “Time until critical escape?”

  “Three hours, sir,” one of the console techs answered. “You weren’t in there very long. We’ve got more than enough time to reach a safe-escape distance.”

  At first, Lead was shocked that he’d been diving (the slang term for what they were doing when they inserted themselves into the grid) only for roughly twenty minutes. Then he remembered how time had a completely different meaning when one was swimming in the grid. Whole lives could play in one of the subject’s minds in the matter of a few hours, and the diver would experience the same warped passage of time. “Were you the one who pulled me out?” Lead asked.

  The tech nodded. “Barely. You cut it very close, Commander. The environment has completely disintegrated.” He hooked his thumb toward the rear of the chamber, where the controller sat, a large, bulbous shape jutting out from the curved wall, with hundreds of cables running to each of the pods lining the chamber’s cavernous interior, all but two of them now empty. “It’s nonfunctional now. All the readings are flatlined.”

  Lead—Commander Demetrius Pitcairn—looked at Brody’s pod. The team of experts was carefully cutting the neural connections between the controller and his brain, and at the same time preparing Brody for immediate transport. The body, after all these years, barely resembled a human being anymore, so thin and emaciated, but his mind was still in there, waiting to be freed. “Is he going to make it?”

  One of the med techs looked up and gave the commander a thumbs-up. “We’ll have him ready for transport in the next twenty minutes, Commander.”

  His people were good at what they did, unfortunately because they’d done much the same thing hundreds of times over.

  Pitcairn stepped to the girl’s pod. As he looked down at her, he whispered her name. “Constance.”

  “Sir?” a tech answered, not sure what his boss had said.

  “Constance. That’s her name. Constance Drake.” He shook his head, wishing he hadn’t been forced to use the weapon. The bond was so strong between her and Brody, though, so the only way to break Brody’s mind away from the controller was to make him see her die. The girl’s environments had collapsed a few weeks ago, and much to their surprise she had established some sort of connection to Brody’s environments. They wouldn’t be able to take one without the other. “When will she be ready for transport?”

  “We’re finishing up right now, Commander. Maybe ten minutes.”

  Pitcairn nodded and stepped away.

  The mission he and his team had trained for, then executed over the span of the last seven months, was finally coming to an end.

  Within the hour, they would have the last of the subjects onboard and be on their way home.

  To Earth.

  They would leave Argus IV, and its last inhabitant, to face the fury of a supernova.

  As Commander Pitcairn stepped closer to where the Last One sat, he could feel the tingle in the back of his mind as the cre
ature reached out to him.

  It was weak, near death, and had resigned itself to its fate.

  you take them

  Pitcairn had never gotten used to hearing the creature communicate this way, speaking inside his own head. He had eventually learned how to communicate back: by thinking the words, not speaking them. Yes, we will.

  that is sufficient

  Pitcairn had always sensed a lack of emotion from the creature, a trait of the species and a reason behind their endless experimentation, but this time, he could almost feel a sense of relief coming from it.

  you leave now

  As he turned away, Pitcairn felt a pang of pity for the thing. It had been left alone here, tasked to keep the place running, keep the experiments going, until a more suitable location could be found. That’s what it had relayed to him, anyway, and he saw no reason for the creature to lie. Still, what it and its kind had done over the course of centuries was sickening. Thousands, if not millions, of human beings—people just like him and his family, and the team here trying to save their own kind—had been taken, submerged in these pods, and forced to endure lives not their own. Experiment after experiment without end.

  Some of the ones his team couldn’t save had been here since the early 1900s. Both Brody and Connie had been taken as children, back in the latter part of the twentieth century. And many more had been taken after them, all the way up to the point that the aliens had to abandon their facility.

  So many years had passed, so much had happened, and all the while, they’d been here, on this stinking rock, submerged in bio gel, kept alive, kept from aging as a normal human would, until the creatures had skipped town, left a caretaker behind, and for a reason that even it wasn’t aware of, never returned.

  The Last One was what Pitcairn and his team had called the creature. Fitting.

  “Commander, we’re ready to move them.”

  Pitcairn looked around the cavernous chamber for the last time, knowing that he’d done his job. He hadn’t saved all the victims, but he’d saved the ones he could. “Get them on the shuttle and tell the pilot to prepare for immediate launch. Contact Oneiroi and let them know we’re finished here.”

  “Yes, sir. Our equipment?”

  Most of their equipment had already been transported back to the Oneiroi, except for what they’d needed to use for the last two pods. “Leave it.”

  “Roger, sir.”

  Pitcairn was the last to depart, and as he walked toward the exit tunnel, he could feel a slight tingle in his mind. The Last One was trying to reach out to him one final time.

  not supposed to happen this way was all it said.

  Pitcairn didn’t look back.

  Chapter 37

  Brody was in the darkness again, floating, without feeling, without purpose. It was a familiar place, and yet different. He was suspended in an eternal expanse of nothingness, but the sensation was different from his time in the shadow. And then he heard a voice.

  The sound was faint, as if coming from far away, and he couldn’t quite make out what the voice was saying. He became aware of other sounds, too. Beeping, whooshing, and heavy vibrations, like machinery being pushed around, moved into place.

  He was cold. Every inch of his skin was freezing. He tried to move and felt something warm grasp his forearm. The grip was firm, unyielding, and he couldn’t move his arm no matter how hard he tried.

  “He’s starting to come out of it,” a voice said, still so faint, and not a voice he recognized. Awareness came quickly. He could feel his limbs, his fingers, and his toes; he could feel his chest rising and falling, but he wasn’t breathing, at least not on his own. There was something down his throat.

  He panicked.

  He tried to kick, but the same warm, firm hands kept him from moving.

  They’re holding me down! They’re killing me!

  “Keep him steady,” the voice said. “Bio readings are improving. Get ready to remove life support.”

  Life support? Where the hell was he, and what were these people doing? For a moment, his eyelids parted, and bright light flooded his senses. Brody didn’t understand what was going on—it had never happened this way!

  “That’s it,” the voice said. “Remove the endotracheal, slowly.”

  Brody felt something slide from his throat, as if they were tearing his lungs out. It passed his lips, and he felt someone quickly wipe his mouth.

  He heard new sounds, a strange gurgling, a choking, and realized it was him.

  Something else was in his mouth, soft and flexible, and he heard sucking noises.

  “Airway is clear, Doctor,” a second voice said.

  Doctor? Was he in a hospital?

  “Looking good.” The first voice again. “Patient is breathing on his own.”

  And he was. Brody could feel himself breathing, his chest rising and falling when he wanted it to. But even such a simple act was difficult, and his chest hurt terribly. His breaths were shallow, and he had to fight for every lungful of air.

  He tried to open his eyes again and squinted into the brightness.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder, this time warm and comforting, as opposed to trying to hold him down.

  “Can he hear me?” someone asked.

  “We think so,” another answered.

  Then the voice asking the question spoke again. “Welcome back, Mr. Quail.”

  Chapter 38

  Three Weeks Later

  On Board the Terran Transport Carrier Oneiroi

  Every moment seemed to blend into the next for the first few days.

  There were sights and sounds completely foreign to him, strange and confusing. There was pain, terrible bouts of unbearable agony coursing up and down his arms and legs, that seemed to last for hours. He couldn’t speak no matter how hard he tried; his voice just wasn’t there anymore. He couldn’t even scream.

  There were machines all around him, covering his mouth and his eyes, and wires and tubes that he was sure were sticking into his body, even though he couldn’t feel them or raise his head to look.

  Brody was in a hospital, and the people here, all dressed in white from head to foot, were working to keep him alive.

  He’d been in the same room since he’d gained enough awareness to realize what was going on around him, the doctors coming and going all throughout the day, checking, poking, prodding, checking again.

  There was no night and day here, just bright lights every moment he was awake. He would drift in and out of consciousness, but it was different from when he would go into the darkness. This was less frightening, even relaxing in a way. He was actually sleeping. The world around him didn’t change every time he woke. It remained the same.

  The day came when one of the doctors entered his room without wearing the all-white suit; his face was uncovered. He sat by the edge of the bed and told Brody that he was going to live. That he had a long, tough journey ahead, but he was going to be okay. And that he was going home.

  Home.

  A simple word, but one that didn’t hold a lot of meaning for Brody. Was home in Culver, West Glenn? Was it Garland Trail or Joshua?

  The memories of those places were still fresh in his mind, as were his final moments there, when the shadow man had taken Connie from him.

  He sensed no ill intent from these people, none at all, but if they had been behind the shadow man and his games, then they were not to be trusted. Trouble was, he was in no position to resist. He had no strength; he would try to lift his arms, even wiggle his fingers and toes, but if he tried too hard, the pain would start all over again, and the doctors would press the buttons that would put him to sleep.

  He wanted to ask so many questions: Who were these people, and where were they taking him? Better yet: Where had they taken him from?

  In time, the answers came.

  Brody was awake when a different man entered his room. Tall, handsome, and wearing some sort of uniform. He carried himself with authority as he walked to Brody’s be
dside and sat down, scooting his chair closer so Brody could see his face.

  Brody’s eyesight had improved quite a bit since the first few days. The lights weren’t as bright and no longer made him wince. Some things were still fuzzy, at a distance, but the doctors had said that was normal and his vision would improve. Brody looked into the man’s face. The eyes that stared back at him were warm, honest. The man was an impressive figure, but Brody wasn’t scared by him.

  “Mr. Quail, I’m Commander Demetrius Pitcairn. I know you can’t speak—yet—but I wanted to drop in and see how you were doing. Is this a good time?”

  Is this a good time? It’s not like I have any choice in the matter. I certainly don’t have anything better to do, now, do I? The doctors told Brody how to communicate by blinking his eyes once for yes, twice for no, and three times for unsure. Brody blinked once, and the commander nodded his head.

  “One blink means yes, correct?”

  Brody blinked once.

  “I know this must be very confusing for you right now, and you must have a million questions, but I want you to understand that we’re here to help you. We’ll answer all your questions, in time, as soon as your strength improves. I promise.”

  One blink.

  “In the next few days, the doctors are going to provide you with an implant that’ll help you speak, and afterward, work to get you up and about.”

  Brody wanted to ask what had happened to him. Why couldn’t he speak? The questions were too numerous to list, but he had no choice other than to wait. The frustration was beyond description.

  “It’s going to be a tough road for you, Mr. Quail. I’m not going to lie. But there’s something you need to know that might make it a little easier.”

  Brody involuntarily tried to nod his head but couldn’t. Instead, he just blinked. Once.

  “I was with you during that last . . . day you were in your . . . worlds.”

  He’s having trouble finding the right words, Brody realized. And if he was there, then where? He’d never seen this man before, at least he didn’t think so.