Seventh

by Heath Pfaff

  Some researches might have been daunted by this first experiment, but I wasn’t. The Tether was completely intact, and all of its systems were still working. There had been biological anomalies, but that was to be expected the first time. I had learned a lot, and had my first real hands-on education on the effects of severe DSD. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but I felt enlivened by the results of the experiment. The horror of what I had witnessed paled in comparison to the threshold of exploration at which I found myself.

  The other-me was gone from the Tether control room. I was now just recounting my own memories, speaking in a soft whisper to myself. I sounded afraid and alone, even to myself.

  "What have you done, daddy?" A young girl’s voice asked from behind me. I didn't turn around to look. I knew it was my daughter, and I didn't want to see the wreckage I'd left of her. "You know the answer. What did you do?" She pressed her question. It was too pointed, too knowing for a little girl of her age. I could hear the malicious intelligence hiding behind her voice.

  "I found the Worm." I answered numbly.

  "Yes. Yes, very good. You found the Worm, and what do you have to do now, daddy?"

  "I have to bring it home. It wants to be free of the abyss." I could scarce believe the words were coming from my mouth.

  "Oh, daddy, you remember!" The child's voice giggled from behind me, and I felt small slender arms wrap around my legs in a joyous hug. "We're so happy that you remember! We knew that you'd be the one."

  I reached a hand down and rubbed it through the hair of my daughter, or the thing wearing my daughter's guise. I could feel the soft curls of her hair mixed with the sticky knots of blood that had formed from the wounds I'd caused. I didn't look down at her. I didn't want to acknowledge she was dead, even though I knew it was true.

  All of my memories were finally falling together, and suddenly I found myself looking back at a life that was shrouded in dark deeds, shadows intentionally left in the recesses of my memories. I did not discover the Worm aboard Odyssey. It had always been with me, watching me and pushing me towards this point in my life.

  I had killed. On multiple occasions I'd had to kill others to make way for my progression through life. I remembered that now. A security officer doesn't just rise to head researcher of a project like Tether without some intervention. I'd falsified documents, paid to have people sent on one-way missions, and in some cases acted directly against those who stood in my way. It had felt right, and every step of the way others had come to my defense.

  There had been several occasions when I should have been caught. In fact, my rise to the head of the Tether Project had been particularly nasty. My research was responsible for the projects foundation, but I had been seen as too unstable to head such an expensive and high-risk effort. They'd initially chosen two other men to head the operation. I murdered them both. I'd been in a rage at the prospect of losing my research to other men, and I hadn't been thinking clearly. I'd ambushed them the night after their party celebrating the assignment to Odyssey, killing them both with my own military issued sidearm.

  I returned home that night expecting to be arrested in the morning, but when I woke up there was no fallout. Later in the day it was reported that they had been murdered following the party by a group of Military-Resistance fighters who had been summarily tracked down and executed in the hours after the murders.

  I remembered the officer that had come to me later that day to tell me that, in light of the tragedy regarding my two senior researchers, I would be taking over the Tether Project. He was the same man I'd seen in the comfort center amidst the mass of black cloaked figures, the man who'd spilled his own insides at my feet like some horrible offering. His name now rang in my head: Colonel Oliver Portue. It wasn't the first time he'd entered my life. How many times had I seen his name at the bottom of my promotion orders? How many disciplinary hearings had he signed off on? Colonel Portue had been keeping a very close eye on my progress. Somehow, he'd known.

  "You know what has to be done now, daddy." My little girl's voice urged from at my side.

  I had been born for this. My life, all of my accomplishments and choices, everything had been steering me towards this moment.

  "You want me to activate the Tether recall." I stated the obvious. Officially the recall system didn't exist. There was no plausible occasion when the Tether shields should be dropped and the Tether drawn back aboard the Odyssey while in the middle of an experiment. There was far too much danger of Deep Space contamination. I, however, had built the recall procedure outside of the system specifications, adding it manually during my off hours so that it would not appear in the plans or manuals for the other techs working on the project. I had also designed it to be activated only from inside the Tether itself.

  I remembered designing the logic systems for the recall and hiding them in the self-destruct subsystems, but I couldn't recall what I had been thinking at the time. I knew, now, what I'd been doing. I'd been doing exactly what the Worm expected of me. My life had been a creation of its will.

  To realize that everything you'd ever done was just the result of others pushing you along a predefined path is a terrifying thing to face. I was a terrible human being. I was a murderer, a liar, and worse, I was set to become the messiah of a dark and vile new reality. Perhaps if my mind hadn't been repeatedly wiped by the nano rebuilds I wouldn't have had such a clean perspective with which to view my own actions, but uncovering all of these memories and feeling so detached from them, I could now see everything with unwavering clarity. James Wright was on a path to destroy humanity, and that was only on the small scale. Existence, from one edge of the universe to the next, and through the very weave of dimensional fabric was at risk. The Worm would bleed through it all, a great darkness marching through time and space, twisting and destroying every last corner of reality.

  I felt a small hand slip into my own.

  "What's wrong, daddy?" My daughter's voice implored.

  "Nothing, I just… there is so much to think about." I answered, trying to decide what I should do. What could I do? I knew what I wasn't going to do. I might have been a monster all of my life, but I wasn't going to let the Worm out into the rest of reality. Perhaps it would be the only selfless thing I'd ever done in my worthless life, but it would be the most important thing by far.

  Something bit into my hand and I let out a loud shriek and tried to draw back my hand. It bit in harder, and I looked down, for the first time, at the thing pretending to be my daughter to see that its hand was wrapped around my own. However the flesh of my little girl’s clenched fist had shriveled away and spines of white-gray bone were rupturing through the scraps that remained like a hundred needle-thin teeth ripping through decaying flesh and cutting into my hand where she held it. My blood ran down over our joined hands in a steady trickle.

  I screamed again and tried to pull my fist away. The little girl thing looked up at me with empty eye sockets, its head connected to the body by a thin strip of spinal cord and muscle far too long to be any child’s neck. Her jaw hung gaping from the joint and her tongue was swollen and black. There was a terrible light burning up from her torn-out eyes. It was red like blood, and where it cast its glow it felt like touching a metal pole on the coldest winter day, a chill that would burn exposed skin like fire.

  The flesh of my palm tore against the needles of bone, but my hand wouldn't come free.

  "Liar, daddy! You're a dirty fucking liar!" She screamed, but her gaping, glowing mouth didn't move as the words spilled out. "You can't deny your purpose. You can't deny the Worm!" She began to tug on my arm, pulling me towards the door even as her needle-fingers ripped my flesh.

  I pulled back, not sure where the demon wearing my daughter's flesh intended to take me, but positive I didn't want to go with it. The pain was excruciating. The shards of needle-like bones penetrating my hand were so deep I could feel them sliding against the bone of my fingers and cutting through the tendons of my hand. Resisting was imp
ossible. The creature was impossibly strong and I soon found myself being dragged along the floor at a run, as giggling laughter filled the air around me.

  We were out the door of the Tether Room and into a hallway in a moment, and then we passed through another doorway, one that I knew didn't exist in any rational schematic. We finally came to a stop in front of a heavily sealed bulkhead. We stood in a very tight corridor that I recognized quite well.

  "We're on the Tether Probe again." I groaned, between clenched teeth. The pain in my hand was so severe that I had to fight back nausea. "How did we get here?"

  Again the air was filled with the giggling laughter of a little girl, but when the voice spoke it was a dark and ominous crepitation. "This is our world, James. The doorways lead where we want to go, and the hallways open on any street, or any place we wish." The daughter-thing reached out and touched the door in front of us. "This, though, is your door. You have to open it."

  "I can't. My security clearance is revoked. I don't have access to the systems on the Tether anymore." The words were true enough. They certainly wouldn't have let me back aboard the Odyssey and the Tether and still allowed me access to such highly volatile equipment.

  "James, don't lie to us." The grip on my hand tightened, and I felt bones in my hand begin to shatter. "Open the door."

  "Fuck!" I screamed and pounded my good hand against the bulkhead. "I can't open the door! I don't have access!" I shouted, sweat pouring down my brow.

  My daughter's arm, the one gripping my hand, ripped in half along its length and rows of razor- sharp teeth tore from the split flesh, turning the entire limb into some kind of elongated mouth, like a nightmarish crocodile. The limb disjointed at the shoulder and lurched towards my arm. I tried to pull away, but it already had me by the hand so there was nowhere for me to go. Thousands of needle thin teeth ripped into my arm and began to grind away at bone, sinew and muscle.

  "Alright, no, stop!" I screamed, throwing myself towards a control panel at one side of the door. The teeth did not pull out of my left arm, but they stopped chewing and grinding away at my body. I popped the release on the panel and reached inside. Just beyond the wiring interface was a small keyboard and terminal meant for running diagnostics. I ignored the onscreen prompt and typed, slowly and carefully.

  P - R - O - S - P - E - R

  It was from an old lullaby I'd heard when I was a child.

  Prosper by the sleeping sea

  in mists and shadows drawn,

  Dreamless nights forever be

  wrapped in morrow's dawn.

  The song had been about a kind old king trying to save his city from an attack by creatures from the sea. The city had been called Prosper, and for some reason that first stanza had always stuck with me. I never recited it aloud or wrote it down anywhere, but those first few lines were engrained in my mind. When I had planned the backdoor into the system, Prosper had been an easy choice. It wasn't a highly difficult to decrypt password, most hashing software would likely solve it in less than a minute of searching, but no one even knew the backdoor existed. If there is no back door, why would anyone ever be looking for it?

  The door slid open to reveal the onboard control center of the Tether Probe. It was a very small room, large enough for two or three people to stand in together, but not much else. It wasn't built to be occupied. In fact, once the Tether Probe was launched, no one should ever need to manually enter the room.

  The monster-thing dragged me into the control room, ripping at my arm if I tried to resist its urging.

  "The time is now. Do it, James. Bring us home." It commanded, the jaws of its twisted arm grinding down more firmly on my ruined left arm.

  I let out a strangled grunt of pain and fell to my knees in front of the central control panel. The screen was already on, streaming information data on power throughputs and shield maintenance levels. When I had activated the Propser code it had already begun to prepare for emergency action. After all, that's why I had created the Prosper subsystem.

  "Activate the recall, James. Now." It twisted my arm as it spoke, and I felt the bone snap at the shoulder. The pain felt distant, though, as if I was almost witnessing someone else's suffering. Surely it was shock beginning to set in.

  I placed my palm on the screen before me and a second later a new set of menus popped up. The palm reader was not part of the designated system specs, and it was programmed to recognize only one imprint, mine. The menu that popped up was simple.

  Recall or Cancel. Two choices. If I cancelled the recall, I would be put into the secondary menu, which would give me the option of activating the self-destruct system. Once activated, the Tether would disconnect itself from Odyssey and use the remaining system energy to melt down all energy cells onboard. Within 30 seconds, Tether and everything aboard it would be a ball of molten death.

  I had never contemplated suicide before. In fact, I had never truly contemplated any great, selfless act.

  I reached out and pressed cancel. The system stalled for a moment as it changed modes. The thing at my side seemed to know what was I was doing as I did it, despite not being tall enough to see the screen. I felt the bone-teeth in my arm clench down, and with a great ripping my arm tore free of my body.

  "BRING BACK THE RECALL." Its voice hammered the insides of my head, as though the sound were coming from the center of my brain and bursting outward like shrapnel from a grenade. Its body split and contorted as it lurched over me, spitting out the crushed and mutilated remains of my left arm as it rose up in size. The thing that stood over me looked nothing like my daughter anymore. "YOU WERE BORN FOR THIS, WRIGHT. ACTIVATE THE RECALL, NOW!"

  One of the limbs that had been an arm grabbed for my exposed back. I felt a sharp pain as claws dug into the flesh at my spine, its razor-sharp hooks catching on my vertebrae, and then I felt myself being shoved to my knees. Pain shot through my remaining arm and my legs like electric pulses as raw nerves were twisted and contorted by the articulated claws wedged into my spinal column. I was slammed chest first into the control panel just as the console reset and new options appeared.

  Self-Destruct or Reset?

  I had never done anything selfless before. What would it feel like? There was no more time to decide what I should do.

  I hit the Self-Destruct.

  Even as my hand brushed the button I felt my spine snap. I flopped to the ground, my legs feeling completely useless.

  "HOW DARE YOU?! HOW DARE YOU!" The dark thing that no longer looked like my daughter hovered over me, its humanoid face a mask that couldn't begin to cover up the evil beneath. "YOU HAVE NOT KNOWN WHAT SUFFERING IS, JAMES WRIGHT, BUT YOU WILL NOW!" Red glowing eyes, eyes that burned with cold hate, hovered above me and I felt a sensation like fire begin to lick at the pieces of flesh I could still feel. Was it the self-destruct, or something worse? I didn't know. I couldn't know...

  I woke up on Odyssey, in the recovery room of the medical bay. I don't know how I got here, or what happened between that last moment, and my waking up now.

  Are we done? How many more times do I have to retell this story?

  END LOG

  Chief Medical Officer: Diane S. Truden

  Analysis:

  After some observation and initial preliminary interviews and testing, it is my personal opinion that subject James Wright is suffering from one of the worst cases of mental DSD on record. His recounting of events is chronologically inaccurate, disjointed and completely nonsensical. It is my opinion that he is attempting to appease his guilt over the murder of his family by placing himself in the role of some kind of savior in a sick fantasy world he has created. Unfortunately, further tests cannot be run at this time due to malfunctions in equipment within the medical bay.

  I have not yet ascertained the relative truth of his admission to murdering multiple parties over the course of his military career, however I will be applying for complete access to his service record to validate all claims he has made. His assertion that he is the pa
wn of some kind of cult is obviously fantasy, but I do think that an inquiry should be made into the actions of Colonel Portue, if only because he was in fact responsible for having Wright reassigned to the Tether Project as an eligible test subject. According to Colonel Portue’s statement contained in Wright’s file, his recommendation was solely based on Wright’s criminal history and the ruthlessness in which he murdered his own family. However, it’s a possibility that because of Wright’s connection to the research, Colonel Portue did show a certain amount of favoritism and if so, that might warrant an official inquest.

  As for James Wright's retelling of events aboard the Tether Probe, it is unfortunate that his version is now impossible to disprove, as radiation from the Deep Space jump seems to have corrupted the data recordings in all surveillance files. We can obviously assume that Wright's information is - at the very least - mostly incorrect, since the Tether Probe was recovered safely and in one piece after it dropped out of Seventh Space. Is this a sign of Wright's "recall" system? Personally, I don't believe so, but we have technicians looking into it and should have further information within 24 hours.

  As I said, the medical equipment is currently malfunctioning or we would be sending in-depth biofeedback scans with this report. Attempts to properly scan Mr. Wright have returned gibberish from the machines. We should have those problems corrected in the next 24 hours as well, and once available I will forward your department those readings.

  The most frustrating aspect of this entire experiment is that we have our first living Seventh Space survivor, but between his addled mind and our radiation problems, we have almost no data to review. What should be a great triumph of science has become nothing but an aggravating failure.