The Maw

by Taylor Zajonc

  Dale ripped open the wrapping and unscrewed his canteen top, pouring powdered milk into the container. Giving the bottle a couple of good shakes, Dale opened up the canteen and took a dripping swig of the sour mixture.

  “You’ve been hoarding food,” stated Bridget. “While the rest of us starve.”

  Dale considered them without answering before raising the canteen for a second sip. For the first time, Milo could see the thick rivulets of dried blood running from Dale’s nose, dripping down the front of his filthy shirt. But Dale had barely brought the bottle to his lips before Bridget reached out and violently slapped it from his hand, spraying the white liquid across the chamber as the canteen clattered to the bare cavern floor.

  “Start talking,” ordered the doctor. “What haven’t you been telling us? You didn’t just find this place down here, did you? You’ve been looking for it. You knew they were down here since before any of us set foot in this goddamn maze.”

  Dale just nodded, a wave of distinct irritation crossing his face before fading once again into a strange placidity. “Are you familiar with Unit 731?” he finally asked, waiting until silence had fallen before speaking. “Do you know how they earned their infamy?”

  “Of course,” said Milo, instantly recognizing the designation. “They were Imperial Japan’s secret military biological and chemical warfare brigade during the Second World War. Their crimes were the stuff of nightmares—tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians subjected to brutal human experimentation, live firearms testing, and weaponized pathogens.”

  “Everyone with even a passing knowledge of medical ethics knows Unit 731,” added Bridget, fury still etched across her face. “They’d vivisect living patients, force pregnancies, test flame throwers and grenades on captured soldiers, systematically rape women and children, infect prisoners with bubonic plague, smallpox, botulism, anthrax—”

  “Certainly,” interrupted Dale, folding his arms over his chest. “And in doing so, they created the most scientifically rigorous and complete studies on trauma and infectious disease in history. A legacy that generations have stood upon, albeit secretly.”

  “And at the expense of countless human lives,” snapped Bridget. “It matters where this data came from.”

  “Data has no inherent morality,” said Dale. “And all you know is what made it into the textbooks. What’s less known is that Unit 731 was no more than a bureaucratic term, a budget line-item for a larger idea, an idea that existed long before Japan’s invasion of China in 1931. Their work wasn’t just applied epidemiology and weapons efficacy experimentation; they possessed an equal mandate to boost the performance of the Japanese foot soldier.”

  The CEO glanced at Bridget and Milo suspiciously before speaking again.

  “This effort went far beyond studying the effects of burns, bullets, shrapnel, and frostbite—all inflicted under controlled conditions by the doctors themselves, of course,” continued Dale. “These men developed an interest in the traditional medicine of conquered cultures. They hunted ancient knowledge. They captured Taman warrior-shamans of Borneo to study their blowpipe poisons. Their jungle-trained shock troops stalked the reclusive Ruk cave-dwellers of central Vietnam, seeking an uncontacted tribe who slept upright, climbed cliffs and trees like apes, and whose secret incantations could supposedly kill. In Papua New Guinea, soldiers and scientists trekked uncharted rainforest in their search for the headhunting Glass Men, losing twenty to disease and arrows in the process—”

  “This is a lot to take on faith, Dale,” said Milo. “I’ve never seen a word of this in any book I’ve ever read.”

  “It was of the highest priority to Imperial Japan, and conducted with the utmost discretion,” continued Dale. “Their covert actions are still a state secret. You have to realize this was a worldwide effort. They investigated remote groups that the Germans dismissed outright in their parallel efforts. Ultimately, it was regarded as somewhat of a failure. There were a few minor discoveries that eventually worked their way into the Japanese wartime medical practice, nothing that could have tilted the war to their favor. But what they found beneath the plains of Tanzania was . . . special.”

  “What happened to the Japanese team on the surface?” said Bridget, interrupting. “They must have had support equipment, personnel—”

  “There were three Japanese expeditions to the deep,” Dale went on. “Led by Lieutenant Sadao Kawabe, who’d cut his teeth on the caves of occupied China. In the first two trips below, his men reported feelings of euphoria, heightened physicality, and increased memory. They all disappeared on their third and final trip below.” He gestured to the broken and crushed bones around them. “I followed their maps to this passage.”

  “You never answered my question about the men on the surface.”

  “Imperial Japan was not very good at making the right sort of friends,” said Dale, failing to hide a sly smile. “Oral history from this region suggests there were indeed a few dozen men waiting up top . . . too few to fend off the inevitable attack from San warriors defending their most sacred and closely guarded secret. Despite superior firepower, their men were overwhelmed and slaughtered. The last survivor on the surface blew the entrance of the cave to protect their operation and fled with his few remaining notes. Despite incredible initial reports from the subterranean expedition, the loss of their primary team and subsequent wartime realities canceled any further exploration. What few records remained were archived in Japan and later confiscated by American occupation forces in a grand sweep of Unit 731’s human experimentation data.”

  “Why didn’t western intelligence pursue it after the war?” asked Milo.

  “Japanese data was deprioritized, due to a combination of cultural arrogance and the translation expenses. Money changed hands in the early 1960s, and a great deal of the research found its way to one of my family pharma holdings. It languished there for decades until a medical researcher brought it to my attention.”

  “And DeWar’s map . . . it was a fake, wasn’t it?” breathed Bridget. “You concocted the entire rationale for this expedition.”

  “An unfortunate and incredibly expensive necessity to conceal the origins of this discovery. Yes, the map is a fake. It was based on Unit 731 surveys.”

  “So what were we? Lab rats?” snapped Milo. “You led us down here just to see what would happen?”

  “Of course not!” protested Dale. “I resent that accusation. I’m an explorer, a citizen scientist—and I’ve come to believe this cave is the single greatest discovery since the polio vaccine.”

  “It’s like our minds are shredding themselves from the inside out,” whispered Milo, furious. “Every terrible thing I’ve ever seen or done, every regret I have, I experience it all over and over again like it’s the first time. People are supposed to forget things, Dale. Just look at us—we’re falling apart.”

  “You’re missing it,” Dale muttered, irritated at having to explain himself. Now angry, he stooped over to pick up his milk-filled water bottle, slapping the cap shut with an open palm. “Can you even imagine the potential? This place may be the key to total recall, the ability to unlock memory, incredible physical ability, high-level reasoning, the total capacity of the human mind itself! Our abilities are increasing every hour—you’ve experienced it yourself. Imagine sitting before a grand piano for the first time—and then playing Liszt’s Rondeau Fantastique from memory, every keystroke extrapolated in real time. Imagine painting like Picasso, sculpting like Da Vinci, composing like Mozart, programming computers like Bill Gates—hell, trading stocks like Warren Buffett. We’re not talking about the next designer drug. This will revolutionize the world, pour forth the genius capacity of every person on this planet.”

  “A few casualties notwithstanding,” Milo said. “Duck—Isabelle—all those people at the surface—and maybe even Logan too.”

  “I never intended for that to happen,” said Dale, eyes cast downward. “They’re unbearable tragedies, all of them. I�
��ll carry that weight to the grave, and I’d take their place if I could. I suppose I should have known nature has a balance. For every cure, a disease. For every apple, a snake.”

  “Fuck you,” spat Bridget. “You led us in here without disclosing the risks. I thought I knew you, Dale. I thought we were friends.”

  “Listen to yourself!” shouted Dale, face reddening with newfound anger. “This is so much more important than this bickering—can’t you see it? Our world demands we evolve now before it’s too late. We live in a world with nuclear consequences, shepherded by minds that haven’t physiologically changed since the Stone Age. We make our decisions with the same primitive processes as every other upright ape—anger, sexual fixation, self-involvement, no ability to separate fact from opinion or superstition. Our collective decisions will ripple for millennia, and yet our leadership cannot think past the next election cycle, the next fiscal quarter. We live in a world populated by false gods and invented monsters, our societies motivated by petty grievance and tribalism. Even the tools designed to demolish the walls between us have been turned inward upon themselves, co-opted by marketers who sell our own selfish fantasies back to us one click at a time. We have lost our last grasp at any central thread of truth; every day we find our humanity reduced from a common species to a mere nationality, an exponential fracturing that continues through age, gender, ethnicity, education, class, and religion, dividing us until we are rendered entirely alone. But even alone, we find no truth; our every inconvenient or uncomfortable fleeting thought immediately flushed down the memory hole by more and more electronic garbage.”

  Dale gazed from Bridget to Milo and back again, carefully studying them both.

  “Think about it,” Dale ordered. “Please . . . think about it. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You’ve been down here too long,” snapped Bridget. “You want to, what, switch off human nature? Replace it with a pharmacy?”

  “Haven’t we already?” said Dale with a barking laugh. “Would you even know who you are without caffeine? Without alcohol, without cannabis, without antihistamines and painkillers and mood stabilizers and tranquilizers? Would anybody? Hell, even sugar is an addictive drug in all but name, and a relatively recent addition to our diets at that. Our lives are defined by the substances we take—tell me, when was the last time you hooked up for the first time without the help of a few drinks? Or made a new friend? Every milestone in social interaction is heightened or moderated by drugs; we are inextricably hardwired to experiment with our own neurochemistry. To medicate is human; we’ve been doing it since the first goddamn monkey picked up the first goddamn fermented apple.”

  “We got the answers we came for,” said Milo, reaching over to squeeze Bridget’s hand, breaking her angry stare-down with Dale. “I think it’s time to go.”

  Bridget was just starting to voice her agreement when Dale dropped the ragged backpack from his shoulder, yanking DeWar’s leather-bound journal free as the bag hit the ground with a heavy clunk. Dale shoved the journal into Milo’s chest, almost knocking the historian off his feet. He knew the tough, fibrous construction of the journal could handle the rough treatment, but it made him wince all the same.

  “Read it,” said Dale, his voice pleading. “Please. Find the key, find out what’s happening to us so we can bring it to the world.”

  “What does it say?” Bridget asked. “What happened to Riley DeWar down here? Why can’t you read it?”

  “You think I haven’t tried?” said Dale, almost begging. “I’ve obsessed over every page. Please, Milo. Only you know DeWar. I need you to try again—read the journal. This is the entire reason I brought you down here.”

  “I’d like to,” said Milo, shooting Dale a smartass look as he pointed to the bloodstains on his ruined shirt. “But homework seems to give me a bit of a headache these days.”

  Dale slowly shook his head as he gazed at Milo’s chest. “Please,” he repeated. “Try again. It will explain everything, I’m sure of it—I need to understand what’s happening to us.”

  “Don’t do it,” protested Bridget. “Milo—you’re not seriously considering this, are you? Just getting this far has taken enough of a toll already.”

  Milo held the journal in his trembling hands, running a single finger over the embossed leather binding. The first wave of now-familiar euphoria washed over him, the intoxicating madness. Every page of DeWar’s inscrutable, fantastical scribblings flashed into his mind’s eye, the words drawn from a dozen languages. The historian could see it all—every equation and diagram, every hurried inkblot, wrinkle, and stain.

  “Open it,” whispered Dale.

  “No,” said Milo, dropping the book to the floor, the leather slapping against the floor loud enough to make Bridget jump. “I don’t need to open it. I’ve already memorized every page.”

  And with that, Milo once again plunged into the frothing avalanche of his own mind.

  CHAPTER 34:

  THE LECTURE HALL

  Suspended in empty space, Milo was no more than an untethered intellect drifting within a shapeless void. Fear gripped his mind; he’d never allowed himself to go this far before. Though previous excursions had unlocked deep access within his consciousness, this was different, a true nothingness, no remaining connection to his physical form.

  Alone in the blackness, Milo found himself in the awkward position of not knowing what to do next.

  I need a place to work.

  Searching his mind for options, Milo played with the idea of a cubicle—no, think bigger—or better yet, a scientific laboratory, a library, maybe even the familiar comforts of his Georgetown apartment.

  Perhaps a lecture auditorium?

  The image of Gaston Hall leapt into Milo’s mind, conjuring the 700-seat jewel of Georgetown University into being. His consciousness floated over the viewing gallery, looking across the commanding coffered ceilings, the gilt-detail frescos, the sunlight-pierced arched windows.

  Alone within his mind’s projection, Milo felt wholly at ease creating an imagined representation of his body; selecting the English-cut suit he’d always wanted, the gray jacket complete with notched lapel and oh-so-fashionable ticket pocket.

  I could use a few visual aids, thought Milo as he stepped up to the podium, tugging at the hem of his crisp wool jacket.

  No sooner had Milo completed the thought than chalkboards and easels, projections screens and posters materialized in every corner of the room, each bearing pages of Lord Riley DeWar’s tight, scribbled handwriting and sprawling equations.

  I could use some help.

  As Milo concentrated, the doors to Gaston Hall burst open to accommodate a flood of former colleagues and professors followed by a veritable sea of historical philosophers, codebreakers, translators, doctors, and explorers, all neatly lining up to stare at Milo with expectant faces.

  He leaned forward to the podium, tapping the microphone, the echoing thump of his finger reverberating through the revered chamber.

  “Let’s get to work,” announced Milo.

  Thump.

  Thump. Thump.

  He’s not breathing.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Goddamn it, Milo—wake up.

  THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.

  Milo! Wake up! Now!

  Gasp.

  The room came groggily into focus, the dim rays of Bridget’s headlamp like glass shards in his eyes. Spikes of pain radiated through his skull. Blood flowed freely from his nose, bubbling across his lips and collecting in his stubble. He felt weak, barely able to lift a single hand to shield his face from the light. His chest and rib cage hurt worst of all; it felt as though he’d been sacked by an all-pro defensive tackle at the one yard line.

  Milo tried to speak but could only croak, lifting his head just enough to see Bridget crouched over him.

  “He’s back!” announced Dale from outside of his narrow vision.

  Milo slowly turned his head to see Dale sitting on the ground beside him. Brid
get had hung a lamp from the nearest rock, dimly lighting the chamber in yellow tones.

  “Can you hear me?” said the doctor in a whisper, gently pulling back Milo’s eyelid to examine his dilated pupils.

  “Yeah,” confirmed Milo, turning his head to cough his airway clear, spitting blood onto the sand. “I can hear you.”

  Bridget sighed with relief, closing her eyes in silent prayer before opening them again. “You were in that trance for hours,” she finally said. “I thought you’d stopped breathing at one point.”

  “I feel like hammered shit,” groaned Milo as he attempted to sit up from the hard, cold ground.

  “Just relax,” said Bridget, gently pushing him back. “Don’t try to get up. Take your time before saying anything else.”

  “Did you do it?” whispered Dale. “You decoded it, didn’t you?”

  “Every scribbled word,” whispered Milo, locking eyes with Dale.

  “What was inside? What happened to him down here?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” said Milo, shaking his head. “It was so much more than a travelogue. He didn’t use it to record events; he used it to write these . . . insights . . .”

  “Insights?” repeated Bridget. “I don’t understand.”

  “Conceptual insights,” said Milo. “It’s hard to explain. His journal was almost like a book of ideas, all decades ahead of their time. He extrapolated from existing research, solved theorems, conducted thought experiments. His journal held initial theorization on some of the most important scientific discoveries of the early twentieth century.”

  “Like what?” demanded Bridget.

  “Like . . . all kinds of things,” Milo replied. “DeWar outlined the third law of thermodynamics, the concept of the atomic nucleus. Drag and lift formulas for fixed wing aircraft. He even quantified stellar synthesis, the cosmological process by which all heavy elements are formed within solar bodies. Dale . . . he may have been the first person to hypothesize the Big Bang.”