Red Cells

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  Zaleski shifted his red-rimmed eyes from Ploss, to Conant, to Stake, and admitted in a fatalistic croak, “Cirvik had a deal with the devil.”

  Twelve

  Doctor’s Report

  “It’s not so much a being, as a colony,” Zaleski said to the little assemblage. He told them the entity that had been killing the prisoners was an amalgamation, a collection of numerous creatures, not all of them heterogeneous. They were symbiotically linked, a united democracy. “I’m reminded of the extinct Earth animal known as a Portuguese Man o’ War, which was not a jellyfish but a colony of zooid organisms. Though in the case of that animal, the zooids weren’t able to exist separately from the colony. That isn’t the case here.”

  “But why take on an anthropomorphic form?” Conant asked.

  “Not sure why that artful collage. Maybe it was to get Cirvik to relate to them more easily, as another humanoid being. Or maybe it was a form they chose to frighten him, and anyone else who might witness the thing.”

  Ploss made a scoffing sound. “This prison is full of Punktown criminals. I’m not sure any form it chose could be frightening enough.”

  Zaleski continued, “But as I told Cirvik, I believe the main reason it adopts that collaborative form is to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. One animal on its own is not so powerful, perhaps not even so intelligent. But it seems to me that, telepathically or otherwise, in a cooperative state they enter into a hive mind.”

  “I knew you were more analytical than you were letting on,” Stake said.

  His pride puffed up by what he perceived as a compliment, Zaleski stated, “I was chosen for this position because of the diversity of the inmates and my extensive knowledge of nonhuman anatomy.” He returned to his point. “It was this possibility, of the conglomeration building in intelligence and strength the more individual animals joined it, that caused Cirvik a lot of fear. What if all the creatures in this pocket were to conjoin? All the creatures inhabiting the interstitial matter beyond this pocket? Cirvik thought if they could do that—combine into an entity made from thousands or millions or billions of individual lives—the final product would be like a god. A god that might cross into our reality and annihilate us.”

  “But he decided to keep it to himself,” Conant marveled, full of horror.

  “We’ve known about these animals going back to the days of ships crossing space through artificial wormholes,” Ploss said. “Before long-distance teleportation took over. Yeah, sometimes you heard stories that they thought these critters might be causing small electrical disturbances, but I never heard of any outright attacks. So why this? Why now?”

  “Maybe because the wormholes in which the animals were formerly encountered were temporary—open only long enough for the ship to pass through—not a permanent structure like the pocket our prison occupies,” Zaleski said. “Or maybe they’re only now, themselves, discovering the process of combining their forms. Even from what Cirvik learned, I still can’t tell you much. The things are a complete mystery. No living specimen has ever survived in captivity. Even their remains in death can’t be preserved; they fade out of existence. So no one has ever learned much about them.”

  “Either that,” Stake said, “or the authorities are keeping some knowledge to themselves, too.”

  “But why the attacks on the prisoners?” Conant asked.

  “I’m getting to that,” Zaleski said. “The main thing to understand is the creature…the creatures, rather…are furious to be trapped in our pocket. The first inmate they killed was in solitary confinement. They apparently chose him as an experiment…not to kill him out of rage, but to try to take control of his mind, so they could speak through him to initiate contact. Apparently they believed that since they can affect electrical fields, they might manipulate the electrical impulses of a human brain. Instead, well, they inadvertently discovered that by trying to occupy the same space as a human being, the reaction would cause his body to become displaced in a very messy way. After that, they took possession of one of the robots instead, and in that way successfully communicated in private with our no doubt very surprised Warden Cirvik.”

  “How’d they learn to speak English through a robot?” Hurley asked.

  “I’m sure they haven’t learned English. A robot they use as a medium is articulating—translating—their thoughts.”

  “Remarkable,” Conant said. “Their intelligence is staggering!”

  “Frightening,” Ploss corrected.

  “Now, I wasn’t privy to whatever discourse Cirvik and this collective had,” Zaleski said, “and he didn’t tell me everything, I’m certain of it. But I do know his main thrust was to placate them.”

  “He mustn’t have placated too well,” Stake said, “if prisoners continued to die.”

  “Was it still trying to use a human being as a medium?” Conant asked.

  Hurley ventured, “Do you think it’s feeding on their souls, or life force, or something? Their energy?”

  Zaleski shook his head. “Cirvik was afraid the colony would grow and become godlike…but what he did, in a way, was to teach it to be a god.”

  “How so?” Conant asked.

  “By feeding the monster sacrifices.” Zaleski paused a moment for them to digest that. “Their fury is great. You know how frustrated and angry our own prisoners get. They need to lash out at something. That’s why they form opposing gangs, kill and rape each other: as an outlet for their rage. Maybe Cirvik lied and told the collective he’d try to talk to his superiors about freeing them from the pocket. Maybe he promised he’d look into moving the prison to a new pocket and shutting this one down. I don’t know entirely what he said to try to keep them from killing us all; I’m just extrapolating here. What I do know is that Cirvik wanted me to help him understand the nature of the monster, and how we might consider destroying it.”

  “Did you have any ideas?” Ploss asked.

  “No. And…and to be honest, I was afraid to suggest anything.”

  “Afraid?”

  “You never know when this thing is watching us,” Zaleski said, lowering his voice to a whisper to emphasize his point. “I was afraid of the monster discovering I meant it any harm.”

  “So it was better to just sit back and let it go on killing prisoners, huh?” Stake said.

  “Are you bleeding for them, Mr. Stake?” Zaleski retorted.

  “You don’t think what’s happening is wrong?”

  “Do you think these prisoners haven’t done wrong? Every man who’s been killed by the monster has been a murderer himself. One of those men gunned down a clerk and four innocent customers in a convenience store robbery. There’s your same body count right there!”

  “So was Cirvik actually assigning victims to this thing?” Conant asked, incredulous.

  “I believe he was.”

  “I still don’t understand why!” Ploss said.

  Zaleski explained, “The monster’s rage is a volcano that Cirvik was throwing sacrifices into every time it rumbled. Killing alleviates its fury. It must feel…vindicated when it obliterates a victim like that. For a while, at least. But when its level of pain becomes unbearable again, it needs another ‘fix’ of violent expression to vent its emotion. It may be a safety valve; not so much devised by Cirvik to give its rage direction—instead of simply killing us all—but a safety valve the monster has imposed on itself.”

  “Because?” Ploss prompted.

  “Because maybe it doesn’t really want to kill all of us. Maybe it’s been trying to keep its rage under control as best it could. But now…it seems like that control is fraying. It’s been fired upon, attacked, for the first time. And now with Cirvik dead there’s no telling what will happen. It may no longer be able to restrain itself. It is, after all, apparently a mass of angry individuals trying to hold it together as one rational, intelligent entity. It might very well be greatly conflicted with itself. Like any governing body.”

  “Cirvik sent it after me,”
Stake said, “didn’t he? He told the thing I was a threat to it somehow.”

  Zaleski smiled thinly. “I’m sure he manipulated the poor lost soul with some rationale, Mr. Stake. But I can assure you, I was not a party to that plot. Nor any of it. I was horrified, frankly, by much of what Cirvik confessed to me. But do you think I could have swayed him to act in any other way than he did?”

  “He didn’t act at all,” Ploss grumbled. “He just let this situation go on, waiting for it to solve itself. Meanwhile, how long did he think the prisoners’ deaths could continue before he really had to answer for that? And how long did he think he could satisfy this monster with an occasional offering while it waited for what it really wanted? And now, here we are paying the consequences…wondering if this thing is going to shut down our life support!”

  “We need to find a way to kill this thing!” Hurley said. “Maybe I did hurt it when I shot it. We should set a trap, or some kind of ambush.”

  “And if we take a stab at that and fail? We’ll sign our death warrant for sure,” Stake said. “I say if Cirvik could talk to it, so can we. I think we need to try to reason with the thing.”

  Thirteen

  Visitation

  Klaus, the chief of maintenance, contacted Assistant Warden Conant on his wrist comp when he couldn’t get through to Warden Cirvik. After being apprised of the warden’s death, the maintenance chief said, “Oh my God. Well, sir, I wanted to tell the warden that I still can’t bring up the power to full. Ironically, there are firewalls up that were installed as an antiterrorist safeguard, so an enemy couldn’t gain access to our power systems. They’re seeing me as the enemy, so I haven’t got around those firewalls yet. But anyway, on my monitors I noticed some funny activity going on in the chapel. I sent a tech down there to look into it in person and…well, he said some scary stuff is going on in there.”

  “What scary stuff?” Conant asked, peering down at his wrist comp’s tiny screen.

  “Jesus was talking to him.”

  Conant looked up at the others gathered close, and Ploss said, “I’m going there to have a look myself.”

  “Let me come with you,” Stake said.

  “Why? You should be back in your cell, I think.”

  “I’m trying to help you out here, isn’t that plain? I saved your man Flaquita’s life, didn’t I? If this thing is a collective working together, then we need to do the same.”

  “What’s in it for you, dick? No one’s paying your fee.”

  “I could be paying soon with my life. All of us might.”

  The Choom security chief nodded slowly. “All right, whatever you say, war hero—let’s go.”

  * * *

  The Trans-Paxton Penitentiary’s chapel was a single room, not very large, close to the prison’s recreation yard. Just as in the rec yard, every wall—but also the ceiling and floor—was a vid screen. Depending on a schedule, dictated by a relevant day of the week or time of day, the chapel’s screens could be changed to transform it into a Christian church, a mosque, a synagogue, or a place of worship for any number of nonhuman races.

  When its door slid open and Security Chief Ploss, the guard named Hurley, and Stake stood at the room’s threshold, they found that currently it was in the semblance of the Sistine Chapel in miniature. The ceiling, featuring Michelangelo’s paintings God’s Creation of the World, God’s Relationship with Mankind, and Mankind’s Fall from God’s Grace, gave the illusion of being vaulted. Along with this artist’s The Last Judgment there were frescoes by other artists such as Botticelli, and mock windows along the walls, and the floor was mock tiled in marble and colored stone. The men stepped into the room with wariness more than reverence. The few rows of pews were all empty. The maintenance tech had fled long before they’d got there.

  “Hello?” Stake called out. His voice echoed a bit. “Are you in here?”

  A flicker of static interrupted the image all around them, above them, under their feet, and then in an instant a new reality had seemed to solidify. They felt they had been teleported, for now they stood in a Buddhist temple. There was much red and gold, gold dragons entwined around red support columns. Joss sticks, without truly giving off incense, appeared to smolder in the urns of sand into which they were poked. At the front of the room, beyond the pews, a huge gilded figure of Buddha sat on a blooming lotus, his ears long-lobed, eyes closed, smiling serenely. And then, without his eyes opening, Buddha’s lips moved.

  Buddha’s voice was uninflected, crackling and a bit garbled as he said, “Where is the Director?”

  “The who?” Ploss said.

  “He’s dead,” Stake spoke up. “He tried to kill me and one of his own men. You have to understand…the Director as you call him, Warden Cirvik, was not a good man. He didn’t have anyone’s best interest in mind. Not the prisoners, not his own staff, and not you. He was not truly helping you. He was not your friend.”

  “Not truly helping us,” Buddha echoed in his dead, static-distorted voice. “Not our friend.”

  “He forced us to kill him. We had no choice. But now that he’s out of the way, the rest of us want to help you for real…help you somehow. None of us mean you any harm.”

  “Harm,” Buddha said. “You harmed us. That unit.” One of Buddha’s golden arms lifted from his lap, and still without opening his eyes he pointed to Hurley. The guard who had fired upon the skeletal apparition that had killed the Dacvibese prisoner in Stake’s cell.

  “Hey, you killed one of our prisoners!” Hurley protested. “You’ve killed a bunch of our prisoners!”

  Another burst of static, and the scene again changed, this time to a more humble Christian church with stained glass windows and at the front of the room, a life-sized statue of Christ upon the cross. But though his head rested forward with his eyes closed, he had already pulled one arm free and it was pointing to Hurley as Buddha had done.

  “Give us this unit,” said Christ in that same emotionless voice, the voice of the chapel’s computer system.

  “What?” said Hurley. He put his hand to his holstered gun, but Stake quickly laid his own hand over the guard’s wrist.

  “No,” Ploss said. “We won’t do that! We won’t give you people to kill like Cirvik did.”

  “We are angry,” Jesus said.

  “So are we!” Ploss replied.

  “We are angry,” the statue repeated, its pointing arm unwavering.

  Stake eased Hurley’s hand away from his sidearm, whispering, “What are you going to do, kill a vid of Jesus?” Then, addressing the image of the crucified Christ again, he said, “There has to be a way out of this situation where nobody gets hurt any more. Not us, and not you. But you have to let us have our power back! You have to let us call home to our leaders so they can figure out a way to help you. We can’t do it on our own. You have to stop blocking our communications!”

  In a blink, their surroundings were once more replaced. This time the men stood inside a gigantic metal head, one of the massive iron busts of the Choom god Raloom. Before them stood a white stone statue of Raloom’s wife, Lupool, her wide Choom smile benevolent. But she too was pointing one slender arm at Hurley, and despite her gentle smile, when her lips moved, she said, “Your leaders would destroy us. Destroy us to protect this place.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” Ploss snarled, trying to look sturdy, but Stake could tell the Choom was quivering with bottled-up fear and rage of his own. “We can get them to sympathize with you if you will just…stop…killing…our prisoners!”

  “Whatever he might have promised you,” Stake said, “Cirvik never tried to find a way to release you. He was only appeasing you one sacrifice at a time. Let us call our home office. I’m sure they’ll listen and can let you out of this pocket one way or another, even if they have to ferry all of you out in our transport pods!”

  “The Director warned us about this unit.” Lupool shifted her alabaster arm. Now she pointed at Stake, as if she recognized him at last. “The Direc
tor warned us that you would tell your leaders to come here and kill us.”

  “He only wanted to get you to kill me so I wouldn’t find out what was going on.”

  “You would find out…and tell your leaders…”

  “But our leaders are the only ones who can help you!”

  “Lies…you are trying to trick us…”

  “It was Cirvik who was the liar,” Stake told the ghostlike statue, “not us!”

  Under his breath, Ploss said, “I ought to give you to the thing to calm it down, make it back off and restore power.”

  Stake looked at the man sharply. “You had better be kidding me, Ploss.”

  The looming security chief glared at him. “What if I’m not? I have to think of the greater good.”

  “There’s nothing good about sacrificing people to these things!”

  “Chief,” Hurley said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you do that.”

  Ploss switched his glare to his underling, but said, “Back down, Hurley—I was only speaking hypothetically.”

  “You aren’t like Cirvik,” Stake said, “I know you’re not. And neither is Conant. More sacrifices isn’t the answer. We have to keep reasoning with them. That’s why they’re speaking through the chapel right now. However angry they are, they’re fighting to be rational.”

  Lupool suddenly snapped her head to one side, as if she had detected a sound the men couldn’t hear. In a flash, the interior of Raloom’s head reverted to the Buddhist temple, Buddha seated on his lotus flower with his head turned to the side in the same way. Then static, and back to the Christian church, Jesus with his head turned in the same direction and his eyes now staring open.

  Ploss’s wrist comp beeped and he lifted his arm to answer it. Over the Choom’s shoulder, Stake saw the prison’s head of maintenance systems, Klaus, smiling on the wrist comp’s screen as he announced, “I just called Conant, Chief. Good news: I overrode the firewalls, and put up new ones of my own. Full power restored. Better than that, I’ve cleared communications. Conant is sending out a distress signal right now…help will be on the way. Colonial Forcers, and more pods to evac the prisoners if need be.”