Seventh

by Heath Pfaff

  "Of course it is."

  "No, it's not. You don't have implants anymore. All of that was removed after you were convicted. You can't communicate with Odyssey, and haven't been able to since you’ve been back on board."

  "Then… but, back in my bunk she was talking to me. She gave me the temperature, and told me what was…"

  "…happening aboard ship? James, did anything she told you prove to be true? Of course it didn't, because you were never talking to her."

  I felt like Hobbes had just slammed me in the head. I felt staggered, confused.

  "But when I first met you, your story was similar to mine. You said there was a hull breach…"

  Hobbes was shaking his head. "You created that reality for yourself while you were butchering me for my supplies. I gotta give you credit, though. After I saved your life I really didn’t expect you to jump me from behind like that. That was really naïve of me."

  "I'm not a killer." I snapped, but the words felt wrong coming off my tongue. I wasn't sure that I believed them. How could I ever do such a thing?

  "You want to know the real kicker?" Hobbes smiled for a second, though the expression fell off his face quickly. "We're not even onboard Odyssey."

  "Then where are we?"

  Hobbes shook his head. "You know where we are, James. You built this place. That's part of what you need to unravel for yourself. The answers are buried in your skull. They tried to take it away from you, but their machines couldn't dig deep enough. Before you left, the Worm wrote your purpose into the core of your being, onto the very bones of your body, and on the inside of every muscle and organ of your flesh. They tried to erase his touch, but it’s just not possible."

  "They? Do you mean the medical team? Did they steal my memories?" I recalled my earlier delusion with the doctor saying that my brain could be rebuilt before things had taken a turn for the darker. When had that actually happened? In my mind I remembered being stuck in my room with the shadow-thing on the bed, and then waking up on the stretcher en route to the medical bay. Those two events though, the more I really thought about them, the less they seemed to fit together properly.

  "You didn't leave them a choice. They rewrote your mind twice, and it just didn't take. That's impossible, isn't it? That's what they said." Hobbes' body shimmered, rippling like a pond struck by passing breeze, his shape distorting and shifting. I watched as he seemed to shrink and contort until it was no longer Hobbes standing in the hallway with me.

  "You begged them to leave your memories intact, but they were worried that it would impair your usefulness on the project." He was now a young boy, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, with brown hair, and two gaping holes where his eyes should have been. The empty sockets seeped black, fetid tears.

  "Sean?" The name came unbidden to my tongue.

  "Hey, Dad." He sounded solemn.

  Memories blasted into my mind, but they were a jumble of broken pieces, as though they'd been painted on a glass tapestry, shattered, and then thrown down in front of me. I could see things, but the order was confusing and nonsensical.

  "Do you remember me now?" The boy asked.

  I nodded, a knot of emotional pain balled in my chest. "I do. I'm so sorry I killed you." I could see myself doing it. I had used a knife I'd purchased specifically for the task. I couldn't make sense of the events leading up to the incident, but the memory was clear. I saw myself stepping through the threshold of my house and seeing my children playing in the living room. They'd come running to me because I'd been gone for a long time. They’d been so excited to see me home. And then…

  The actual memory was shattered. I could see gushes of blood, and flashes of fast, violent movement. The first stroke of the blade tore my daughter’s head most of the way from her body, but my son was so much worse. I'd pushed him to the ground, stifling his scream with the palm my hand. His eyes had been full of terror and confusion at why his father – someone he was supposed to trust, that was supposed to love him – would do this. I could hear him screaming through the muffling seal over his lips, and then I struck out at him with the blade even as it still dripped with his sister’s blood. Again and again I drove the knife into his skull, gouging through the tender flesh of his accusing eyes. It was so easy. I could remember thinking that while I did it. Killing children was so very easy. If only I could kill them all…. spare them all… what?

  Spare them all what?

  "It's alright, daddy. I know what you tried to do. I understand why you hurt us. But we couldn't get away anyway. He came for us, and now we're with him. So is mommy. You brought him right to us, daddy. You brought the Worm with you, and now he has us. Nothing you did to us is as terrible as that." His voice was so serene and calm, and yet he was saying such awful things.

  "I was trying to save you!" I cried, my eyes clouded with tears. "I didn't want you to see..." What? Damn it, what didn't I want them to see? The memories wouldn’t fit together!

  "You don't get to cry!" An angry voice snapped, and I blinked the tears from my eyes for long enough to see that my son no longer stood before me. Instead, it was now my wife was standing there. Huge strips of flesh hung from her face, and one of her eyes was missing. Her bottom jaw was nearly completely torn away, only hanging by a few ligaments and bits of flesh. Somehow she still forced her words out clearly. "You gave us to him, James. You brought the darkness into our house, and now we'll suffer forever. You don’t get to cry about it."

  "He told me I could save you!" I blurted the words out, and with the words came a flood of coherent memories.

  My wife smiled with the last bits of flesh left on her face, and then she vanished, and the hallway around me went completely dark.

  When the lights came back up I was once again in a familiar space. The room was ten by ten feet with a chair in the center surrounded by a control console covered in screens flashing data and scenes from various surveillance cameras. A part of my mind insisted that I had never seen this place before, but a voice in the back of my head whispered "home." I didn't want to believe in that quiet voice, nor the realities that accepting it’s words would mean, but at the same time I knew in my heart that it was the truth.

  "The Tether Room." I spoke the words the way a devotee of an ancient god may have spoken of the sacrificial altar. As those words left my mouth, understanding finally clicked into place in my mind. The Tether Room was my greatest triumph. This was the outcome of a life of research and tireless effort. It was also, I knew in that moment, the coffin to which I had consigned existence.

  The chair in the center of the room spun to face me, and I was confronted with myself - or rather, a version of myself. He was dressed in a sergeant's uniform, a dark blue outfit with silver trim at the collar and an insignia declaring his exact rank and position on his chest. The lines on his face were deep, etched by worry and the pressure of a stressful life. He wasn't… I wasn't a cadet anymore.

  Memories continues to flood my mind as I locked eyes with the other-me. I was the man in charge of the Deep Space Shield research project. In particular, I was the man heading a division of research into Seventh Space, the deepest detectable level of slipspace. In a Sixth level slipstream jump, a ship could cross the span between nearby galaxies in an hour. In theory, if we could uncover a way to travel through Seventh Space, we'd be able to cover the same distance nearly instantly, the ship in question needing only to pass through a thin gate of Seventh Space material.

  It wasn't as simple as just increasing the power of the shields and pushing the ship further through the dimensions of space. Holding a relativity barrier in Seventh Space had proven impossible. A living thing that passed through that layer of reality for even a millisecond came out twisted and broken on the other side. Physical and mental deformities were not just common, they were guaranteed. Even computer testing proved impossible because things passed through didn’t come back in a functional form, or didn’t even come back at all. Recording devices vanished, or were so deeply restructure
d and changed that they would never be capable of recording, much less containing functional data.

  We had stopped researching it all together. At least we stopped researching it until I reopened the research. I'd joined the military to secure myself a long life, but Deep Space and the sciences involved in traversing them had called to me. Forty years after starting my work as an enlisted scientist I made my first major breakthrough. I invented the Tether system.

  Before the Tether Probe, we would try to gather information by sending unmanned probes from standard space, straight into Seventh Space. This meant that we'd have to waste a two-core power source just to attempt to get results, and more often than not lose it in the process. The expense was unbelievable, and the results were awful. With the Tether, though, we had none of the equipment loss and a significantly reduced risk of malfunction.

  Odyssey, the first ship equipped with Tether technology, would activate a slipstream jump and move itself into a stable Sixth-level stasis. Once locked in Sixth Space and safe, Odyssey would split its relativity field into two separate divisions, one encompassing the greater body of the ship, and the other surrounding the Tether Room and the Tether itself.

  The Tether Room housed the monitoring equipment as well as the head of staff who managed the equipment. It was my research lab, as well as was the only place that one could safely monitor the Tether. "Safely" was the wrong word, though. We thought it was safe... I thought it was safe.

  The Tether was an independent probe that contained six sealed rooms to transport "volunteers" and a host of scientific equipment that would relay feedback directly to the Tether Room. The Tether was launched from the Tether Room, connected to the main ship via an impenetrable data-and-power cable. Once the Tether had reached a safe distance, it's Slipstream Drive was remotely powered and the probe sunk into Seventh Space. It worked perfectly the very first time.

  Of course, we sent it in completely unmanned the first few times, and I reaped the glory from the data we gathered.

  “We were learning so much, the research value was phenomenal.” The uniformed version of me spoke from across the room. “We even discovered a way to stabilize the slipstream field in Seventh Space. Jimmy, we were going to be responsible for revolutionizing space travel! Can you imagine?” There was a cold light behind the other-me’s eyes.

  “But then Karen called. She was angry, irate! She demanded that I come home and spend time with my family, or she was going to file for divorce and custody of the children. I tried to explain to her how important my work was, how close I was to finding the final answers we needed, but she wouldn’t listen. I couldn’t leave my work. You know that! We couldn’t leave. No one else could pick up the research where we’d left it.”

  “I cut off contact with her and the kids. If she wanted a divorce, then she could have one. I focused all my energy on the project and made a formal request to start human testing on the Tether Project. It took less than 24 hours to get permission to go forward with testing. The congressional officers were thrilled with the progress we were making and they wanted us to lock down this new technology as fast as possible. Obviously it would have been a huge boon to our frontier movement, and would give us a huge tactical advantage over all other alien races we’d encountered who believed even the mere thought of using Seventh Space was taboo.”

  “The Venture arrived one week later with a host of ‘volunteers’ for our experimentation.” The other-me gestured to the computers in front of him. “Come, look. You need to see the result of our research.”

  I hesitated for a second, trying to decide whether I really wanted to see what I was about to be shown. My curiosity won out. As my memories were rebuilt, my desire to see the results of my own research was growing stronger.

  The screens at the console were each full of different sets of data, but it was the seven central displays that caught my eye most keenly. Six of the cameras covered rooms whose design was intimately familiar. They were small cells with nothing more than a closet, a bed, a desk and a chair with a few feet of space between the furnishings to move around. There was a flashing red light in each room, which I could see on the full spectrum display even when it wasn’t flashed on. I knew from experience that for the occupants of those rooms when that light went out they were completely wrapped in darkness.

  The seventh camera covered a room much larger than the others that housed a collection of computers and sensors, equipment for taking readings and managing the systems necessary to keep the Tether running while it was undocked from Odyssey.

  “The red flash means that the Tether Probe has undergone the drop to Seventh Space. Watch the occupied rooms.” My own voice spoke from behind me, a whisper in my ear.

  I turned my focus back to the six rooms, noticing for the first time that each of the beds had someone laying in them. At first they were all still. In fact, they were so still that I wondered if they might be dead. My eyes drifted to another screen and I could see a list of vital signs scrolling across the display. They weren’t dead, just deeply asleep.

  One of the sleeping people sat up with a start, tossing his blanket to the ground and nearly falling out of bed in the process. He was looking around wildly, as though he’d been startled awake by a sound. I noticed that he was dressed in a uniform like the one I was wearing, a plain one-piece gray jumpsuit with a barcode on the chest.

  “Who’s there?!” His voice came softly over the surveillance line. He seemed to relax a bit, as though someone had answered.

  “Has it started yet?” He asked a moment later.

  “I feel a little sick.” He spoke once more, and it again seemed like he was replying to someone. I knew that he wasn’t, though, because the Tether could only pass data in one direction. There was no one for him to be talking to.

  Someone woke up on a different screen. They sat straight up and looked directly into the surveillance camera, as though they could see the array hidden behind their wall. They got up out of bed, walked to the center of the room and stopped, their gaze never moving from the spot. The full spectrum lighting made their eyes glow as though they were made from blue fire.

  A scream sounded from one of the other rooms and I turned my attention to the screen just in time to witness an explosion of blood and human shrapnel erupt from one of the beds. Bone fragments ricocheted off the walls of the room, and chunks of flesh covered almost every surface. My stomach turned, but I couldn’t look away.

  The sound of vomiting brought me back to the first subject. He was doubled over in the corner, retching loudly.

  He said something that I couldn’t decipher followed by what sounded like, “…don’t show me that…” and then he was back to turning his stomach inside out.

  A woman screamed and I looked to another screen to see a female lurching out of bed, clawing at her abdomen with her hands.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck it hurts!” She kept screaming.

  “James.” A separate voice spoke, and I looked across the cameras looking for the source, but no one was talking. The first to wake was still vomiting, the second was staring at the camera, slightly swaying in place, the third was still dead, and the woman was now writhing on the ground clutching her stomach. The other two occupants hadn’t moved yet.

  “Get it out!” The woman was screaming. She’d begun to rip into her lower stomach with her hands, actually tearing the flesh with her fingernails. I was sickened, but again I couldn’t pull my attention away.

  I was obviously witnessing severe DSD firsthand. The stasis field around the Tether wasn’t calibrated correctly. The Tether itself was fine, but those onboard were still being affected by the Seventh Space radiation. I would need to study the data closely to determine exactly what had gone wrong. The biometric readings of the test subjects would be invaluable. With a few more tests I could start to zero in the frequency of shield modulations needed to stoop DSD effects from occurring. I would have to try a tighter spectrum shield with the next group. I figured that had a higher c
hance of success, but if that didn’t work, I could run a loose spectrum shield and compare the biometrics to see which had been more effective.

  Once I knew which direction to tune the shields, it would just be a matter of hammering down the last few details. In a month or two I could have my answers.

  I looked down at the cameras again and noticed something strange. Two of the test subjects were now in the same room. The two that hadn’t yet been awake were now both awake and sharing the same space. They sat facing each other, one on the chair and the other on the bed. How had that happened? Those compartments were not physically connected at all. What had I missed while day dreaming? I would need to back up the recordings and find out, but first I wanted to see what they would do.

  “James Wright.” A voice spoke, startling me so badly I almost loosed my bladder. I looked up at the other screens and noticed that the second to wake was now standing on his chair, his face just a foot away from the recording array’s hiding place. “He’s coming James. He’s coming.” The man reached up his hands, grabbed his own head, and sharply twisted it to the left in one deft motion. There was a loud pop as his neck broke and he fell to the ground, his leg kicking sporadically.

  I sat staring at his twitching corpse for a time. How did he know me? I didn’t recognize him. Someone must have told them I was in charge of the experiments. That seemed the most likely explanation.

  My attention was drawn from that screen as a new, disturbing noise assailed my ears. It took me a second to place it amongst all of the screens before me. The two subjects who were in the same room had, it seemed, begun to eat each other. They were literally ripping pieces off one another and cramming them into their mouths as fast as they could. There was no fighting, no struggle or trying to get away from each other. It looked more like an eating contest, both men trying to out-eat the other as quickly as possible.

  I looked back over all the cameras and then checked the vitals on each of the test subjects. Only those last two remained alive, and their stats were erratic and fading. The first to wake was now lying in a pool of blood and vomit. I wasn’t entirely certain what had killed him, but it was quite clear he was dead. The second had broken his neck. The third had exploded. The fourth, the female, had dissected her own womb. She lay in a pool of bloody bits of flesh, her own biological matter caked to her hands. The fifth and sixth were just now finishing themselves off.