The Abyss Above Us 1

by Ryan Notch

  Brock’s astronomer friends from around the world who had helped to triangulate the signal, they’d listened to it as well. They would have been the only ones to have done so without being exposed to the mold. The control group. Typing the word “suicides” into the search engine was useless. Page after page of the university came up, from all over the world. Some with very interesting tidbits of information. But he forced himself to wait, because he knew once he started reading about it he wouldn’t stop, as much as he would want to.

  Shaw had a knack for search engines, for weaving his way through the junk with just the right keywords. In this case he found what he wanted in various online astronomy magazines. To Shaw’s surprise not a single one made mention of the research he and Brock had been doing, what they had discovered. He guessed Brock had just kept it mostly secret, and no one had looked through the computers on the campus to find out what they had been up to. No reason to really.

  But when Shaw did find what he was looking for, when he read the first sentence in the first paragraph about it, he felt a sense of fear and unreality greater than any he’d felt since he came to this place. There had been a series of tragic deaths amongst astronomy undergraduate students. A group in South America had driven their jeep off the mountain road coming from the radio telescope. In Hawaii another two astronomers had died by drowning, and a third had disappeared on a hiking tour of an active volcano. All labeled accidents, tragic but unremarkable except in their timing.

  But of course they weren’t accidents, they were surely those unlucky people Brock had enlisted for help. Shaw felt a chill running up his spine and whipped around, sure that someone was watching him even in the enclosed room. A room filled to teaming with shadows.

  Then he started reading about the university.

  The news articles about it were legion, but it was hard to get any real details. Like the Jonestown massacre from decades ago, things like journals or suicide notes were kept hidden by the investigators for a long time. What remained was death counts (which were appalling) and witness statements. The survivors, who invariably had been away on the night of the incident but often had been around the days leading up to it, only could say that a few people were acting “strange”. But most had been just fine, nothing at all to suggest what was coming. And of course, most hadn’t heard the signal at all in the days leading up to it. As far as suicide notes, Shaw suspected they existed. Just not in a form people could read. He remembered what Brock had said about Kit spreading his intestines in an intricate pattern. He remembered also the look in Brock’s eyes as he’d stuck the knife into his guts. Not mindless. Not hypnotized. These actions were with intention. Perhaps a message could be deciphered from the various suicides if one studied them. But there were no pictures to be found online, except those of the emergency workers outside. When men in Hazmat suits are carrying body after body out of a building, even the reporters will keep their distance.

  Shaw read about it for hours, absorbing every detail he found whether he wanted to or not. After a while it was just masochism. After a few hours his eyes were burning from dryness and his head pounding from reading the tiny text on the flickering monitor. Worst of all he felt spiritually sick. He felt the awfulness of the whole thing sinking into him. Like watching the planes crash into the twin towers, you couldn’t get enough of it even when you didn’t want to see it anymore.

  And felt guilty, sure. But ultimately he couldn’t tell if it was more survivor’s guilt (for he was the only survivor) or guilt over having been responsible for it (and he was that as well). One click of a button and an entire society wiped out. Was it really his fault? Could you call kicking the pebble that results in an avalanche your fault? He didn’t know, didn’t know how to feel about it.

  Still he read on until he found what he was looking for, an almost footnote in one of the e-zine articles. It read:

  “Complete sterilization was performed on the lower levels of the University. All pieces of equipment, including several thousand dollars worth of computers, have been incinerated.”

  Meaning no records.

  With that he stumbled off to bed. Feet dragging in a physical reflection of the emotional weight on him. He very badly wanted and needed rest, though knew none would come with sleep.

  Chapter 11

  ********************

  Shaw woke the next morning wondering if the internet could somehow answer another question that had been nagging at him. Specifically, was the alien thing was still here somewhere? If so, there had to be indicators of it. Strange suicides, people picking up the sound of it on radio telescopes and other types of receivers. Little clues here and there, messages in a bottle that would be almost impossible to find in the ocean of information that was the internet.

  His mind started rolling over approaches to the problem, moving much faster with less drugs to weigh it down. And more, the deaths of the astronomers, though grim and sad, offered him hope that he might be able to make some sense of things. The most likely scenario was still that he was insane from mold poisoning, even with the astronomers deaths. But he couldn’t take it on faith anymore just because that’s what he was told. He needed to prove it to himself before he could ever get better.

  So what I need is a web crawler, he thought over breakfast. A program to search web sites for him. Scanning them for very specific information he would program in, and only showing him the most promising ones.

  Back in the computer lab, it didn’t take him long to find some for download. Web crawlers were common. People used them for maintaining web sites, building search engines, and even finding email addresses for SPAM. They were even common enough for him to find some freeware ones.

  Perfect for the man who is no longer allowed to handle money or credit cards, he thought with and ironic smile.

  It took him most of the day and some creativity to program it. He had to try and come up with simple things for them to look for, like “non-Meresin university suicides” and “unexplained radio signals.” But by 4 P.M. the web crawler was ready. With butterflies in his stomach at the potential results, he ran the program and waited for the information.

  And waited…and waited.

  The problem was that the machine was just too slow. He needed it to run at least twenty instances of the web browser at once, which slowed the processor down to the point where it could hardly run the program.

  He left it and went to dinner, more because of enforced scheduling then fatigue.

  First thing the following morning, Shaw was back to work on the computers. He spent most of the day altering the program to spread the work out to all the other computers on the rec-rooms network. Using the combined processing power of the group.

  “It’s really what networks were built for,” he explained to Walter. “So it’s actually one of the easier aspects of this whole thing since I’ve done it so many times before.”

  “You mean a lot of people combine computers this way,” asked Walter.

  “Oh yeah. At night at the Pixar movie studio, they use the power of every computer in the company to do the rendering of the animation that was drawn during the day.”

  “You mean the computers are actually doing the animations? Seems kind of a cop-out.”

  “Well not really. The animators draw the creatures moving from place to place. But if a monster is covered in blue fur, it’s impossible in man hours to draw the movement of each individual hair. Not to mention the effect of each ray of light reflecting off each hair. So they design physics for the hair and for the light, and let the computer figure out how it would move in real life.”

  “And any computer can do this, they don’t have to be special?”

  “For the main work it helps, but for the grunt work no. It’s all just math.”

  “So you just spin the information through the circle of computers here and let them sort it out as it goes.”

  Shaw nodded. That wasn’t exactly correct, but Shaw liked the analogy. The discussion
reminded Shaw of the first worldwide use of home computers as a giant network. The SETI project, which was tasked with recording signals from space and analyzing them for signs of intelligent life, was decades behind in its processing of the signals it had so far recorded. Even though it had only recorded a tiny piece of the signal bandwidth out there, the computers couldn’t process it nearly as fast as it came in. So they let home users download a program that processed little pieces of the data as a screen saver program while the computer was idle. Over a hundred thousand science and space lovers downloaded the program and the entire thing was caught up in a tiny percentage of the time.

  He’d always liked the idea of computers all over the world working on a single problem. Of course they hadn’t found a thing, not yet anyway.

  “Guess they weren’t looking in the right place,” said Shaw to himself.

  “What was that,” asked Walter?

  “Nothing. You ready to spin this thing?”

  “Lets do it!”

  Shaw did, and was forced to stop less than ten minutes later. The computers rapid downloading was taking up so much bandwidth that he realized he must be locking up the internet for pretty much every employee in the entire building. He could only hope no one would have complained and started talking about it in such a short time, or else someone might get the idea it came back to him. It was the kind of thing he’d have to run overnight, and check on in the morning.

  Shaw was excited about the results of the program and, as usual, didn’t expect to sleep. It was getting harder to relax now that the drugs were largely out of his system. But he did fall asleep, and for the first time in months he dreamt.

  He dreamt he was in the rec room. It was dark, lit only by the monitors. They were all on DOS and lit the room with the kind of false black glow that comes from a computer monitor displaying a mostly black page. The door was open and the hallway was pitch dark. Up above the rows of chairs were likewise shrouded in shadows. He wondered if something was up there, moving in the darkness. Or something out in the hallway, looking in on him. He wanted to check, but was afraid to.

  He sensed somehow that the computers were connected to somewhere else, somewhere far away. There was typing on the screen and he knew it was someone trying to communicate with him. He couldn’t read it though, just a jumble of dream mangled letters. Then the voice came over the speakers, or maybe in his head. It was reading aloud what it had wrote.

  “What are you doing now, Shaw?”

  “I’m spinning the information,” he replied. He typed as he talked, trusting his fingers to work out what his eyes couldn’t. “It’s the only way to make sense of it.”

  “I know. It won’t ever work on one, one is only a point. A point is only the first.”

  “Where are you,” Shaw asked, then regretted it. He didn’t know why, but he was afraid the answer would tell him something terrible.

  “Where you left me. I’m in the black room. I’m always in the black room.”

  “Doctor Hemah?” Shaw asked.

  “You need the data, Shaw. You need the data to finish the program.”

  “I don’t have anymore data,” Shaw typed into the keyboard. “All my data was destroyed.”

  “My data. But people have so many eyes.”

  The words filled him with horror. And in a way that wouldn’t make sense while awake, he knew exactly what they meant. Then something started to come into the room from the open door. Something he couldn’t see because it just kept getting darker, but he knew it was there. His fear so engulfed him that when he couldn’t flee the room, he fled the dream. But he didn’t wake up, just slipped into the haze of constant shifting he’d been in every night since the first one. Fleeing from place to place within the shadows of his own mind.

  Chapter 12

  ********************

  In the morning he remembered the dream, every detail of it. He didn’t think he had ever before remembered a dream that he had not woke up from immediately afterward to allow it to cement in his conscious mind. Of course as real as it had seemed, he knew it was nothing more than his own fears manifest. There was no more black room.

  And yet Shaw knew what Hemah had meant, or at least what his own subconscious had meant. The only question was whether to pursue it or not. Despite everything, he still didn’t really know whether he could trust himself or not. If the mycotoxin had poisoned him, it might still be in his system. Or maybe it had damaged his brain for good, worn holes in it like poor Jimmy. He spoke of it in private therapy later that day.

  “So how do you know, Doctor Morrow? How do you know when you’re delusional, and when you’re not anymore?”

  “Shaw, do you believe an alien being that no one could see came down to Earth, killed everyone, and then left,” asked the Doctor.

  Left.

  “No, Doctor,” replied Shaw. “That’s not what I believe.”

  “Well then you are making progress. Part of it is trusting your doctors, trusting in the therapy process. You can’t rush it. You’re going to have to learn new ways of acting, of feeling.”

  “And what if I never can learn them? What if I end up being destroyed by the…mold poisoning. The same way I destroyed all those other people with it.”

  “You have to let go of your guilt. You had no way of knowing something like that would happen. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “But is that really true? I could have left well enough alone, could have found another way to do my job.”

  “When I was growing up I had an uncle like you,” said the doctor (who was big on using stories from real life in his sessions). “His car used to make a weird rattling noise that would drive him crazy. It wasn’t that loud, and the car ran pretty good and you couldn’t hear it at all over the radio. But just its existence was intolerable to him. He had to know what it was. So he took the car apart for three days straight until he found it. A loose screw somewhere in the engine, I think. The thing though, is that he wasn’t a great mechanic. He got the car put back together OK, but it never did run that well ever again. He just wasn’t the type to leave things well enough alone. It’s just in your nature Shaw.”

  Is it? thought Shaw. Is that how I am?

  He didn’t have time to voice his thoughts. There was a commotion from outside the room. Yelling, then screaming.

  “Stay here, Shaw,” the Doctor said as he left to investigate. Shaw followed him a few seconds later.

  He followed the noise to the common room. At first he couldn’t see for the crowd of patients watching and orderlies fighting someone. But then they parted enough to see that someone was lying on the ground. The tiny motionless form made it clear who it was. Hector Valentine. Shaw only caught a glimpse but it seemed his skull was misshapen, an eye pushed out of its socket. He wasn’t sure though, his mind wouldn’t process it right. People shouldn’t look like that, he didn’t know how to see it. He wanted to step forward and help, but didn’t know how or if he should or what someone is supposed to do. He remembered his hands being covered in Brock’s blood, remembered this feeling.

  Poor Hector. He saw the man the orderlies were wresting to the ground. It was Walter!

  He must be trying to help Valentine, Shaw thought.

  The orderlies were keeping him away so he didn’t make things worse. But what was on Walter’s hands? His clothes? Blood? What was he screaming?

  “She’s mine! He’s a little monster and he tried to take her! She didn’t want him! Look at him, I broke him open and look what came out!”

  The horror of the scene overwhelmed Shaw. He heard a high pitched tone filling his ears as the realization dawned on him. He couldn’t take it any longer and ran, ran back to his room and through to the bathroom, shutting the doors behind him. Even so, he could still hear it. Hear the screams. Could almost see the savagery of the attack it would take to inflict that kind of damage on the tiny mans skull. The awful truth of the situation was right there, beyond escaping from. Walter really was insane. He could p
retend for a long time, act for a long time like he was normal. But he wasn’t. Shaw now knew beyond a doubt that Walter and everyone else here really was insane.

  And he was not.

  Chapter 13

  ********************

  Collin arrived at Alex and Noel’s at promptly 8 o’clock. To Collin’s double disappointment (but not surprise) Alex was, as usual, not ready to go yet. And Noel was, as usual, not planning to go with them.

  Collin was content to wait. Jack hadn’t shown up yet and things didn’t really get started up at the bar until 9 anyway. Besides that he had expected to wait, on account of Alex taking more time to get ready than any woman Collin had ever known. It was almost ritual, Collin standing in the kitchen talking to Noel while she did paperwork at the kitchen table, trading long range jibes back and forth with Alex in front of the bathroom mirror. It was relaxing, just hanging out like that.

  Or at least it used to be. These days it was never quite relaxing hanging out with Alex and Noel. More and more it was like a police interrogation, the kind where you know you’re guilty but are pretty sure the interrogators don’t yet. He had to choose every word, every glance, to very carefully not say the words that were at every moment on his mind. “I’m in love with her. I’m in love with your wife.”

  Luckily, Collin was used to pretending. He pretended no matter who he was with. Pretended to be normal, to be funny, to be easy going, and outgoing, and not the kind of egghead who saw everything in the world as various mathematical equations. Pretended because he knew that if he acted like he really was in his head, he wouldn’t have the few friends he did. It seemed sad when he thought about it too much, but when he didn’t think about it too much it seemed kind of fun to pretend. Kept him from getting trapped in his head.