It came to her that the Device room was set up backward. Or inside out. Back in her goth days, after she and her friends had graduated from Ouija boards, they had made their own attempts to invoke “unclean spirits,” even the devil himself, using ceremonies they got from books and the Internet. Those had always involved standing outside the circle and planning for the demon or whatever to appear inside where it was supposed to be trapped. Not that they’d ever had any success—but she knew how the setup was supposed to look.
So Mortuus had planned all along to offer the kid, probably had the same thing in mind for her. Now here she was, screwed, blued, and tattooed—literally yes, in ways way beyond her tramp stamp and her spiderweb sleeves and the Nick Cave lyrics about some kind of path that spanned her shoulders in $75 an hour calligraphy, framed by little black bat wings.
And had Perdy told herself Mortuus was the one, that “you” who was going to walk down the path beside her? Oh yeah, of course she had, and before him a string of other losers best not mentioned all the way back to the kid’s father, the one who had disappeared off the face within 24 hours of her telling him she was about to pull a Juno, all except for the adoption part. Since she popped out the kid, she’d asked herself many times why she really went through with it. But she knew. She remembered telling herself that having a kid would mean having someone who would always love her, never leave, something no one else could take away from her—like her tats. And look how that turned out. At least she still had her tats. For now.
With the kid gone, Perdy slept on the couch. No way she was sleeping by Mortuus. They avoided each other, which was easy enough because he spent most of his time messing with the crippled Device and she spent most of hers in the bottle.
Outside, nothing changed: no day, no night, just pale gray light that grew neither brighter nor darker. If you could call it light. A not-light. It seeped through not just the curtains, but the very walls and ceiling and was the only illumination they had. Sleep came whenever she passed out from drink. Her watch and their one clock were both dead, so she had no way to tell how long they’d been here, no way to tell whether it was supposed to be night or day, no way to tell how many days the kid had been gone.
Wherever “here” was. Wherever the kid had gone...or wherever whatever had taken him. And whatever it had done with him. But she knew the answer to that one, didn’t she? She needed more booze. Or crystal. Either. Both. Anything.
Across the trailer, Mortuus—Connor—whatever, fuck it—chanted some bullshit spell that was useless without electricity for his Device. It was obvious his “powers” didn’t count squat without the Device. He might as well have been yelling something out of a Harry Potter movie, “Petrificus Totalus” or some shit like that. The kid liked those movies.
Supply of booze exhausted, she shambled through the trailer, heading away from the Wizard’s end. She didn’t want anything to do with that fucker anymore. A zigzag crack almost a foot wide split the far wall in the back bedroom, and the dead gray not-light flooded directly through it. It freaked her out the way the dust motes eddied and swirled in it, as if a breeze she could not feel was toying with them, so she’d shut the door to that room and stuffed a towel underneath it. Mortuus kept kicking the towel aside and leaving the door open, and she kept moving it all back. Now she yanked it open herself. The towel caught and she kicked it hard against the wall. She wanted to see again what she thought she’d seen the first time she looked outside. She knew what it was already, but she had to see it—needed to see it—one more time.
No way to tell how long she watched. Minutes, days. And there it was...
It rose from the dunes, serpentine and nearly infinite. She saw clearly what it was now, a thick tube of bones woven in some complex and unwholesome geometry, ribs and long bones intricately and inexplicably linked, sides spotted with blankly staring skulls, thousands, perhaps millions of them, miles on miles of dem dry bones.
And then it showed her what she had only glimpsed before: the tapered tail, the end of all its convolutions. A child’s ribcage tipped it, topped in turn by a child’s skull, a blunt scorpion sting. The ribcage, the skull, those could belong to anyone. Any kid anyway. Could. Didn’t.
As if aware somehow she was watching, the bone thing raised the end with the kid bones and shook it the way a rattlesnake shakes its rattle, the way a mother shakes a rattle for her baby. The little skull faced her, jawbone bobbing up and down. And it screamed. The scream came from everywhere, but it came from the skull, too. It came from within her skull.
That sweet metallic taste leaked into her mouth again. She remembered The Odyssey, one of the last books she actually read at Del City, how she first imagined herself a siren, so enticing she could lure sailors to their doom, a singer fronting her own goth band. Like Siouxsie, like Chibi. And all the boys who hurt her, spurned her, totally ignored her, led her on—she could destroy them. Then her teacher showed them a picture of the sirens, hideous forms so much the opposite of their beautiful voices: things of bone, crouched on their bone-covered island, more vultures than mermaids. Now Perdy understood their power.
The vast brittle coil slid back beneath the dust, kid-skull-tail pausing to offer her one last shake and scream. Taunting? Inviting? The same in the end.
Perdy left the bedroom and picked her way back across the trailer to where Mortuus stood facing the partly dismantled Device, his arms hugging it loosely and his forehead pressed against its central column. It only took her a moment to realize that he was sobbing quietly. Like a little child. The ruptured floor creaked, and he must have heard her approach, but would neither turn or acknowledge her. She went to him then, found a long-bladed Phillips head screwdriver in the litter of books and tools that surrounded him, and gripping it with both hands, jammed it upward into his back. He hit the floor after the third thrust, but she followed him down and kept going until her arms shook and the screwdriver slid from her numb hands.
Panting, Perdy rose and walked to the front door. It was unlocked, but she had to wipe her bloody hand on her skirt before she could turn the knob and open it. The screen door outside was a wreck, torn screen hanging bowed and shriveled from the top of the frame, only barely connected. She grasped the rickety frame and shoved it aside. It swung all the way around and clattered against the trailer. The sound it made died at once.
The steps were gone, but she paused only seconds before leaping out. Her feet sank several inches into the silver-gray powder. There was no sound, no dust puffed into the still air. Pain shot through her skull and she threw her arms out for balance. Behind her the threshold was just over waist-high. She could climb back in easy if she changed her mind. She was not going to change her mind.
Perdy steadied herself and stepped out to meet it, the bone machine whose screams promised that true rest she sought so long: full oblivion, an option far better than her current state, far preferable to most of her life. She knew it was coming to meet her before it rippled from the dunes and raised its tapered tail. Before it waved for her to follow.
She wondered if her own dry bones would end up near the kid’s. Too late to ask. It had been too late for a long, long time.
THE DIVIDE
Damir Salkovic
“But is it safe?” asked the Lady Ventagne as the trio assembled in the great empty hall at the heart of the castle, where shining chrome surfaces glittered with innumerable lights and screens of ionized particles floated in the perfumed air, images and information filtering across them at a dizzying rate.
“My dear Aril.” The host cast an amused glance in the Lady’s direction. A smirk flitted across his pointed features. In the dim, pleasant light of the vast chamber, his eyes took on a reddish glow, the microminiature processors behind his pupils analyzing the facial reactions of his two guests. “I can recall a time when you did not concern yourself with such trifling matters.” He crossed to the center of the room and ran his fingers along the polished glass lid of one of the three oval-shaped navpod
s.
“Everything’s a laughing matter to you, Jorev.” The third man was tall and stooped, with a hawkish face dominated by a high forehead and angular jaw. He turned his back on the clicking apparatus and flickering gesticular interfaces and walked to the tall latticed windows which commanded a majestic view of the valley beneath the castle promontory. Far beyond, across an expanse of dark pine forest, the high spires and domes of the arcology basked in the last scarlet rays of the sun. One billion human beings living and breathing inside a megastructure of titanium and fiberglass and flexsteel; a repository of souls, a monstrous anthill designed by a deranged creator.
A shudder passed through the tall man at the thought of the crawling multitude; deep inside his brain, a fraction of an inch or so from his amygdala, a tiny glandular implant responded with a microscopic burst of synthetic relaxant. In this gilded age of comfort and freedom from want, solitude was the last great luxury left to man. “What you are proposing has never been attempted before. We cannot afford to be reckless.”
“There is nothing to fear.” Jorev Krissat gave an inward sigh of frustration. A century ago neither of his two companions would have bemoaned his recklessness. The elites nurtured a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh, a banal meat-prison for the mind and the spirit. But everyone changed, given enough time. Eternal youth—or its close approximation—could be had at the cost of a weekly fortune in hormones and chemicals, of biannual DNA recoding; yet no cure had been invented for the decaying of a spirit grown sluggish and fat with ennui. Jorev’s elegant, slender hands described a circle. “The navpods are equipped with first response equipment and surgical devices, both macroscale and of nanite size. Medscanners to monitor our bodily functions. A Leiden switch keyed to our brainwave oscillations. State-of-the-art machinery used in deep space travel.” He chuckled into his trimmed beard. “Which, in a manner of speaking, is what we are about to do—delve into the deepest space known to man.”
The stern, disapproving expression remained unchanged, but Jorev could see the tall man struggle with his thoughts. Feyn Osair was one of the grandest intellects of the millennium, a versatile scholar whose contributions to the fields of astrophysics and controlled fusion had changed man’s understanding of the universe. His illustrious career had been spent probing the gulfs between the stars and the planes of the atom, unraveling the secrets of matter and energy, of fundamental forces and hidden dimensions. Yet beneath the facade of the relentless scientist, incurably drawn to the truths that lay in depths unlit by the spark of human knowledge, was a man haunted by insecurity and hidden fears, by a deeper, darker hunger. Feyn Osair hid his inner demons well, but over the years Jorev had picked and chipped away at the thick wall of indifference and silent irony behind which his friend’s true face lay. A scientist of Osair’s caliber would not—could not—pass on the opportunity.
“Tell us about it again,” said Aril Ventagne, her delicate fingers turning over the curious wreath of leads and circuitry that connected the navpod to the user recumbent within. She would be the one to convince, thought Jorev. An aristocrat by birth, the product of a dozen generations of genetic engineering, a noble bloodline from which every chromosomal imperfection had been meticulously expunged, the Lady Ventagne was renowned not only for her comeliness and elegance, but also a mind of tremendous sweep and depth, an intelligence that dwarfed even the prodigious mental faculties of Feyn Osair.
“Certainly.” With a flourish, Jorev brought up the navigation menu of the Sapientia on the central particle-screen. Simultaneously the three empty navpods came to life: a low purple glow suffused the interiors and lights and symbols flickered across the glass lids. Automated injectors equipped with a cocktail of nerve and tissue serums emerged from the carbon-fiber sides. “All three of us have indulged in the program over the years—as a simulation matrix, a playground for extrasensory adventures, for languid dreams and fantasies that transcend the boundaries of flesh and organs. But the Sapientia is much more than this: within its repositories is contained the totality of human knowledge, sensation, emotion. The pleasure and entertainment nodes comprise only an infinitesimal part of the network.” He glanced at the tall man, who nodded his patrician head.
“The Institute used a part of the network for the first thought-experiments on hyperspace,” Feyn Osair said. “But long after we’d ceased to use the Sapientia as a direct interface, the network continued to store every byte of data entered into or generated by the Institute’s internal grids.”
“Every byte of data ever generated, by every computer on the planet.” Jorev kept his processor-enhanced gaze on Aril’s face, following the movement of the tiny muscles beneath the porcelain skin. “Every effort of the human mind to pry into the nature of the universe—in science, in philosophy, art, literature, religion—is stored within its repositories. Every emotion felt by man from the dawn of sentience to the modern age, from the summit of our hopes and noblest speculations to the pit of our darkest fears and superstitions. The Sapientia is the human condition translated into holographic memory and nanocircuits—the ethogramic essence of mankind.”
“But what you’re proposing is no mere jaunt into the information nodes.” The long, green eyes of Lady Ventagne narrowed in suspicion. “You want us to venture into the deep underbelly of the network, to use the navpods to...” here she trailed off, as if unable to bring herself to say the words. She turned away from the particle-screen with a sigh.
“This is madness.” Feyn Osair ran his hands through his thick mane of dark hair. “The Corridor is a no-space, a room with no doors or windows, inaccessible from a civilian port. But that’s the least of the impossibilities. Mind-linkage has been abandoned as unfeasible—and abhorrent. It cannot be done.”
“For the right price, nothing is impossible.” Jorev reached for a crystal decanter and poured amber liquid into three tumblers. “The Fleet has been testing neural interface arrays for close to two decades in deep space operations. A direct link between the pilot and the pseudo-AI of the navcomputer minimizes reaction time delays and allows simultaneous response to multiple stimuli and inputs.” He handed out the tumblers to his companions. “These three pods represent the latest in navigational interface development. They are not connected to a navcomputer, but to a neural interchange device, the first of its kind. Each one of us will be able to feel what the other two are feeling, see what they are seeing, taste their thoughts and reactions. The device, in turn, connects to the network access port. In this state of altered—broadened—perception, we can enter the Corridor as a single, composite mind.
“The Corridor is a dark, uncharted sea, a Stygian abyss teeming with monstrosities. But are these true abominations of the mind, or are they impressions distorted by a flaw in our perception, by the narrow, warped lens of the brain, incapable of comprehending the absolute nature of phenomena around us? What lies in the deep reaches of the collective subconscious of mankind, hidden from our meager senses?”
“What is it that you expect to find?”
“Who is to know?” A fevered note had entered the voice of the host, and a slight trembling of the hand that held the glass betrayed the surge of emotion. “The meaning of life? The ultimate truth? God—or the Devil? Or perhaps only echoes of a savage, animal past. Perhaps what we call sentience is nothing but a high refinement of bestial instinct.” He stole a glance at the face of the ancient clock of carved wood and brass by the door. “I have obtained a techgrade-two access token to the Corridor node. It expires at midnight. You have a little over two hours to decide. In your glass is a psychotropic compound that will open the doors of perception and facilitate the mind-linkage. Drink it and lie in the navpods; the machinery will do the rest. Or forget what you saw in this chamber, and we shall find other diversions to amuse us.”
There was silence, but in their faces he read his answer. The glasses rose in a toast, the amber liquid refracting the many-hued light of the room.
A mild tingle and a sensation akin to fall
ing as the neural interface plug entered the connector at the back of his head. Jorev willed his body to relax and traced the familiar pattern across the navpod screen. Behind his eyes the drug was already taking effect: motes of indefinable color swam across his field of vision and his senses felt curiously heightened. Sinking deeper into the memoryfoam bed, he inserted the extrasensory lead into the miniscule socket under his left ear and placed the wreath of blinking circuitry atop his head.
The lid-screen went blank, the image now datavising directly into his visual cortex. For a moment disorientation took hold, two visual inputs—one datavised, the other received through his bioengineered eyes—melding together, strangely superimposed. The pod’s medscanners took note of the soaring stress hormones in Jorev’s blood and reacted by injecting a small dose of calming agent. The conflicting images solidified, came into sharper focus.
Two prone forms, blurs of red and orange and yellow hues, lay in the remaining two navpods. In the dim purple glow of his own container, Jorev’s lips stretched in a smile. His friends had not failed him.
He initiated the interchange apparatus and opened the neural communication channels between the navpods. This was the crucial, dangerous part that he had kept from the others: the initial contact between the cortices, two infinitely complex, fragile networks of perception and reasoning centers meshing together. If an aberrant pattern emerged, one that Jorev could not control, the resulting ripple would tear apart the fragile substructure of both psyches, resulting in organ damage to the brain and psychosis. Aril would be the first, he decided; preliminary tests had shown her mind to be more pliant and resilient.
Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Page 19