Prison of Souls (Science Fiction Thriller)

by Xander Gray

  “I have to get out of town.” Navarez put down his glass, eyes wide. “Change my identity. Stay off the grid.”

  “Would going to the cops help?” I knew the question was stupid.

  “They operate above the law.” He smirked. “I’m surprised you escaped with your life. They used to be more cautious. They used to hate the very notion of reporters or police, so they found legal solutions to their problems. The whole reason they engineered the Capgras was so they wouldn’t have to steal bodies. Stealing bodies was dangerous. It might attract attention. Whenever anyone got suspicious of them, which has happened once or twice, they covered their transgressions in layers of red tape and lawyers and insulated themselves via their friends in high places. But things are different now.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “They’re more comfortable. Or more desperate. Or maybe they’re beginning their end game and the time for being careful has passed.”

  The waitress returned, flashing her tip-me smile. She put the plate of onion rings and the pitcher of beer on the table, asked if we needed anything, and then waited for us to wave her on and subsequently vanished into the crowd of howling students, balancing an empty tray above her head.

  Navarez pulled the plate to him. “Want some?”

  “I’m fine.” It was surreal, sitting across from a man whose face I had worn twenty minutes earlier, watching him devour onion rings and gulp beer. “Listen, I’m sorry I put you in this situation.”

  “It’s not your fault.” He glanced over his shoulder as a group of ballers shuffled in from the street. “From what you’ve told me, they already knew I was feeding you information.”

  “I got caught impersonating you. That can’t have helped.”

  He leaned back in the booth. “My biggest disappointment is that we won’t work together.”

  “Perhaps you should tell me why you contacted me in the first place.”

  “Ah yes.” He breathed deeply, perhaps collecting his thoughts. “The story you told Attis was correct on one point. What I mean is, the reason I contacted you as I did, via disjointed fragments of information, was because I was trying to pique your interest. I knew the story sounded crazy. I have lived it every day for two years, and it sounds crazy to me. The thing is, I knew, or rather hoped, if I shared enough, something would resonate. You would see some photo or read some article and think ‘I remember that.’ I knew about your seizures, so the photo of the Capgras was no accident. I included verifiable elements, like the social security numbers of the children in McSorley’s experiments, knowing your wife would vet them, bolstering my credibility. After I hooked you, I planned to write a follow up identifying myself, requesting a meeting. I wanted your help. Your willing cooperation. I apologize for the cloak and dagger routine, but I hope you understand why I felt it necessary.”

  The rowdy students and clicking glasses faded into the smoky air; Navarez became my focus. He alone could answer my questions. “You said you wanted my help. With what?”

  He slid his thumb and forefinger beneath his eyeglasses and rubbed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “A lot of what I do for Nexus is tedious and boring, not exciting in the least, but my work is being used for immoral purposes. I gave you the social security numbers of children who died during McSorley’s tests thirty years ago. The word ‘murdered’ would not be hyperbolic. It happened before my time, but my work builds upon the same legacy, and has been used in similar ways.”

  “You’ve killed children?”

  He looked down, avoiding eye contact. “We’re dealing with fledgling technology involving the brain and every major bodily system.”

  “So it’s risky.”

  “And sometimes people die. You wouldn’t believe the network of doctors and bureaucrats Nexus has installed to conceal these crimes.” He reached across the table and touched my hand. “You see how it is, Joshua? Every day I go into work wondering how my innovations will be used to destroy lives. The pain and suffering I’ve caused—I can’t stand it. I’ve thought of ending it.”

  “Ending it?”

  “Killing myself. I hate to be melodramatic, but this is no cry for attention. I can’t go to the police. I can’t refuse the work. My only way out is death. And what really scares me, Joshua, what really keeps me up, is that death might not be final. They might reach me even beyond death, feed the raw bytes of my brain into a computer.”

  “Surely that’s not possible.”

  “Probably not.” He gulped his beer. He appeared to be choosing his next words very carefully. “They are capable of such wondrous and terrible things.”

  “They forced you to work against your will.”

  “If only it were that simple. In the beginning, my crimes were… lesser. I might be asked to illegally procure controlled substances. Whenever I protested, Nexus increased my pay. The money distracted me, but I figured it was a victimless crime—until I found out my work was being used in unauthorized human trials. When I found out, I panicked. I felt sick. I didn’t know what to do. But once I settled down, I decided to do some research. I found out Nexus is financed by a series of holding companies tracing back to seven men in Gasconade County, operating in the same high security facility you visited today. These men have a name for themselves: The Ouroboros. Why they chose such a name, I have no idea. I found no nefarious details in their files, except the holding companies, which wasn’t a smoking gun, and I didn’t know what I was looking for anyway—maybe proof they had done this before. I wrote a nasty letter to one of the holding companies, to show them I knew who they were. I wanted them to feel culpable. I told them I was in no way down with the idea of unauthorized human trials. And that’s when the threats started.”

  “What kind of threats?” I asked.

  His eyes welled up, and he took a deep breath to calm himself. “I have a daughter, Joshua. She is five years old. She is the most important thing in the world. They threatened her. And it wasn’t just the threat, but the way they made it.”

  I watched him expectantly.

  He downed his beer, filled his mug from the pitcher, and took another gulp. “You have to understand, I was new to the Nexus program. I had never seen a Capgras. When they came to my daughter’s room that night, I thought they were demons.”

  With his hands, he framed the air in front of him. “Perhaps I should paint the picture, so you can understand my fear. It happened last December. Before retiring for the evening, I checked on my sleeping daughter. Her room was dark, lit only by moonlight. I could barely see her on the bed. I crept across the floor to see the movements of her breathing, which is something I’ve always done. But when I got halfway across the room, I saw a silhouette backlit by the moon, standing in front of her curtain.

  “The shape resembled a man, but its arms and legs were too long. I flipped on the light. I will never forget what I saw.”

  I leaned toward him, drawn by his desperation.

  “It was a monster,” he continued. “A skeleton covered in a tight sheet of flesh. It had eyes, black as pitch, and a mouth packed with rows of shark teeth. Its inhumanly long hand hovered over the face of my sleeping daughter. She looked so innocent there in her white nightgown, her eyes closed to the world, and when the monster smiled, I felt something shift in the back of my mind, some piece of sanity slide into the dark.

  “It came at me, pushed me against the wall. Its voice was like broken glass. It said if I didn’t keep working for Nexus, it would kill my daughter, flay the flesh from her bones while she screamed. It told me to look into its eyes so I would know it was serious, and what I saw there, staring back at me, was a void.

  “I spent the next day researching schizophrenia, thinking I had gone mad. I had to talk to someone. McSorley was the only person in the program who worked closely with me, so I went to him. And that’s when things really got crazy. He started showing me all the insanely advanced technology we had developed. It wasn’t just my nanites. We ha
d quantum computers and artificial reality programs that could simulate a real environment down to the level of the individual atom. We had the ability to upload a person’s mind onto a computer network. He told me of experiments where one person’s mind had been transported into another’s skull. I wouldn’t believe any of this was possible if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Finally he showed me the Capgras—that’s when I knew how they had played me.”

  “Why would they come at you like that,” I asked. “Why smoke and mirrors?”

  “You’d have to ask them.” He stuffed an onion ring into his mouth and spent several seconds chewing, perhaps thinking. “I think they wanted me to experience the threat at the most basic level, the way a mouse perceives a snake.”

  “For what it’s worth, I believe you. But you still haven’t said what you want from me.”

  “There’s a reason for that.” He raised his hand to emphasize his next point, but accidentally bumped the overhead light fixture. Colored speckles rotated on the table, see-sawed on the walls. “If I just come out with it, it won’t make sense.”

  I motioned for him to continue, trusting he understood the need for expediency.

  “One of the things that kept me motivated was an assurance my work served the greater good. I thought I was saving the world, if you can believe that.”

  So that’s what this was about. “Are you referring to the rogue planet scheduled to destroy Earth in five hundred years?”

  “Yes.” He wrung his hands. “Maybe explaining this will be easier than I thought, if they’ve already told you the details. I’m somewhat surprised, considering they never told me. But you were wearing my face when they told you?”

  “I was.”

  He nodded. “That makes sense. I guess divulging their end of the world scenario was a last ditch effort to keep me on their team. They must have felt their threats had failed. What they didn’t know was that McSorley had told me that story months ago. He too wanted to keep me on the program. And I believed the story. What besides time travel could explain all the wondrous technology? How else might Nexus have obtained these amazing schematics? It all made sense, and it kept me working.”

  “So what changed your mind?” I asked.

  “I have a source. Turns out, McSorley was never just a regular professor. He was one of the seven, one of the Ouroboros, and he was the first of them to inhabit a Capgras after tunneling here from the future. This was the first time anyone had tried living in a Capgras—they were designed for short term use. The way McSorley tells it, the changes happened so gradually he barely noticed, and I’m taking his word for all this, you understand, but he makes it sound like his conscience disappeared over a period of years until finally he didn’t care about anything except himself. He’s smart enough to understand what he’s doing is wrong, but he says he couldn’t make himself care even if he wanted, and the Ouroboros are more than willing to let him do their dirty work at a distance, spared the goriest details. McSorley was happy to do his part for them until six months ago, when it became clear they would never let him back into the hive—he was corrupted, would poison them. That’s when he came to me, hell-bent on revenge. To elicit my help, he confessed the real reason the Ouroboros travelled back in time.”

  “And that would be?”

  He looked me dead in the eyes. “They’ve been trapped in that server forever. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to be physical. They want to touch and taste and feel. They could have stolen bodies from their own time, but the world of the future is a wasteland rife with disease and famine. Jaded by technology and longing for a simpler era, they came back in time to the earliest year they could reach, which was the earliest year a server could be built to hold them. That’s why they are here now and not five hundred or one thousand years ago. Their goal is simple. Now that they know artificial bodies will not suffice, they aim to steal the bodies of six million present-day human beings and assume the absolute highest positions of world power.”

  Could I trust a story relayed to Navarez by a person driven insane by his cybernetic body? Could I trust myself to know? “I don’t mean to rush you, but I think it’s time you explain how you intended to benefit from my help.”

  He looked toward the ceiling, into a cloud of cigarette smoke. “The Ouroboros talked like you were magic. When McSorley converted your brain to nanites—“ He paused. “You know McSorley’s connection to all this, right?”

  I nodded. “Oh yes.”

  “Okay. Okay.” He glanced around, clearly flummoxed. “Anyway, they said your consciousness slipped through time. They have no idea how. You scared them. I think they were afraid you’d see the truth.”

  “Wait, back up.” I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly.

  “And now you know why I didn’t just come right out and answer your question.” He raised his hands in a questioning gesture. “You slipped through time.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “Exactly what it sounds like.” He shook his head. “Attis claimed she encountered you in the future after the first time McSorley magnetized you. McSorley had a phrase for it, something like spontaneous time-stream modification. No, that’s not right. The word was disclosure. Spontaneous time-stream disclosure. According to McSorley, Attis said it was like a curtain being pulled back in her memory, revealing the way things had always been. I won’t pretend to understand. All I know is your brain cells zipped back and forth to various points upon your own personal timeline, and it scared the hell out of the woman in charge.”

  “Is that why she framed me?”

  “Framed you?” He looked puzzled. “Are you saying you didn’t shoot McSorley?”

  “I am innocent.” My fists tightened.

  He nodded. Was he humoring me?

  He popped another onion ring into his mouth. “Your ability to time shift scared the Ouroboros, but I see it as our one great hope—you alone can determine whether Attis is lying about the future. My work has caused pain and suffering in the present, but I need to know whether it’s worthwhile for the human race long-term.”

  I felt the world coming full circle, an endless ring, a snake eating its tail. “When McSorley ran off, did he take a bunch of those cubes with him?”

  “You mean the quantum computers?” He stared at me for several seconds, perhaps sensing my confusion. “Those glowing cubes back in the lab are quantum computers. Yeah, he took a whole truckload.”

  “I know where McSorley is.”

  “Yeah?” He clunked his glass onto the table, spilling foam.

  “He’s masquerading as a corrections officer at Gasconade Prison.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  I told him everything—the glowing cubes stacked in the old death row building, the unconscious prisoners strapped to hospital beds, the metal plate in Slaven’s forehead.

  Navarez slid his dish aside. “There is a stratification pod missing from the lab—a giant egg-shaped thing with a spinning blue wheel. Is it at the prison?”

  “I saw something like that in what I now believe was a simulation,” I said, “but if there’s one in the actual prison, I never saw it.”

  “He must have it. No one else would have stolen it.”

  “Why does it matter?”

  He placed his hands flat against the table and stared at his mug. “Thirty years ago, McSorley injected you with nanites and placed you on the stratification pod, subjecting you to a strong magnetic field—you slipped through time. I’d like to duplicate the effect. I know it sounds scary—thirty years ago, it was—but we’ve worked out the kinks, and besides you’ve already proven you could survive the unpredictable currents of a far less refined process.”

  “The hell you say.” I wondered how many children had died to work out those kinks. “How do you know it will even work?”

  “Your time slippage likely involved the pod’s magnetic field interacting with your unique brain chemistry post-transference. Those variables have not changed.” />
  His answer seemed logical—beyond me, but logical. “And it’s safe?”

  “Of that I am certain.” He held my gaze.

  I sighed. “Even if I trust you, how can I trust Slaven?”

  “Who?” Navarez sipped his beer.

  I blew out a breath, momentarily overwhelmed. “Sorry. I never mentioned—Slaven is McSorley’s new name. Listen, I get what you’re thinking. Maybe we could work a trade with McSorley. You want to borrow McSorley’s stratification pod and use my services for your little time slippage experiment. I need my body from McSorley so I don’t go crazy or die. And McSorley needs something—God knows what—from me. If I agree to this cluster, I’ll get shafted.”

  “How do you figure?” He looked around the smoky room. “No one has a larger personal stake in this than you.”

  “That’s true, and it’s not just my body. McSorley may also know where my wife is.”

  “He took her?” His eyes widened.

  “Maybe.”

  “Then how can you not work a deal with him?”

  The problem was, I didn’t know if McSorley knew anything about my wife’s location or if I could survive whatever he had in store for me. “We can’t go marching down to the prison without getting some answers.”

  “I agree.” Navarez nodded. “Thankfully, that’s easily remedied.”

  #

  Navarez paid the waitress with cash and then led me down the street to a store called Cell Phone and Beeper Plus. He bought the cheapest prepaid they had with a functional web browser, paying by cash again.

  I followed him across the street, into the shadows of a deserted park. A play area with a huge plastic slide and monkey bars sat untended in the moonlight, the shadows of its myriad poles stretching across the manicured grass like tentacles. We sat on a bench beneath a canopy of pines. Wind whistled high above, traffic droned in the distance, and we huddled like thieves in the dim glow of the cell phone.

  He typed the name of the prison into a search engine. “You said he’s using the name Slaven?”