A thousand had gone down to explore, while a thousand stayed behind. Rose was in the latter. Her tour of duty, other than transit to and from the planet, had apparently encompassed several hours on a Dravidian supercarrier transport. Then the planet had simply vanished, taking with it a thousand souls, and Sarkoth Amnon had no choice but to return to Terrus.
This was a mystery for cosmologists to recover. She had a mystery of her own, brewing inside her mind.
The nightmares had started almost immediately.
I dream I’m standing on a landscape of purple. I dream of earthquakes. But my memories say I never landed on the planet.
There’s shooting. I’m in the thick of it.
I’m pulling a man out of a glowing metallic sphere, one that seems half solid and half liquid. I see the hate in his eyes. So much hate.
But I was never on the planet.
The robotic system was still talking.
“What symptoms are you experiencing?”
Off to the side, she lip-read Yves in the crowd. Make it sound bad. They’ll give you better drugs.
She wasn’t so sure. If she made it sound bad, they might give her a padded cell.
“Oh, just some small stuff. Graphomania – compulsive writing. I have weird recurring dreams. I keep losing track of where I am.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.” She felt a bit guilty to bring such minor problems to such an illustrious machine.
Anxiety played on her nerves like a harpsichord. As she spoke, she found herself lightly scratching a manicured fingernail into the piece of plastic beneath the machine. A jagged edge on her nail left scratches.
“Describe the contents of your dreams.”
She spoke for a few minutes. She had no idea on how confidential this information would be. She wasn’t exactly itching to get back to work, but the SADF’s pension for Caitanya veterens wasn’t stretching as far as it needed to, and she’d been considering re-enlisting. Doing a few tours, climbing a few pay grades. No frontier zones, just mindless patrol work in the asteroid belt.
And still her finger kept scratching compulsively, etching words into the plastic.
“...and then another Sphere attacks us from the side, and we take it out, and it’s this…guy. He doesn’t even look at us, he just has his eyes fixed on our leader. We throw him down the hole in the ground, but before he does, he says three words.”
“What are those three words?”
She told it, not sure what the next step was. Would it diagnose her with something? And if it did, would she trust or believe the diagnosis?
The machine, after all, was built by the same people who had sent her into space.
It immediately recited an answer to her, without any gap or pause. She got the sense that it wasn’t even listening, that it had three or four stock answers and the details of each case were irrelevant.
“The symptoms you are experiencing fall within the bounds of normal behavior for soldiers who have used Black Shift technology. Please do not be alarmed by them, they are to be expected and, unfortunately, are still untreatable. The hope is that that they will cease with the passage of time. Until then, please perform what we call “patient-centered care” – advise your loved ones of the disassociated spells and built a support network that accommodates you.”
“What about the dreams?”
“Again, persistent dreams and false memories are a standard part of the process. The memory module you received upon your return to Terrus is accurate to roughly ninety-nine percentage points, and any errors are likely just sampling noise and unavoidable extrapolation. Be advised that your testimony may not be admissible in a court of criminal law.”
She saw Yves mouthing things at her. Ask to speak to a human therapist!
She asked.
“A human therapist will not be able to help you, and is beyond the scope of your military insurance plan.” It went on to list a series of drugs, both free and available with a co-pay, that might modulate some of the symptoms. By then, she’d zoned out, completely unaware of anything except her finger scratching the wall.
Finally, the noise ended with “thank you, and have a good day.” The machine went dead.
Well, that was that.
She was about to leave when someone jostled her from behind. She stifled a cry of alarm and spun, and saw a woman.
An unseasonable scarf and heavy sunglasses obscured much of her features. All Rose saw were two moving lips.
“Don’t speak,” the woman said. “But I’d like to talk to you. Alone.”
The woman pressed a small piece of paper into her hand, and then departed, vanishing into the crowd.
Rose looked at the piece of paper. It had an address on it.
She pocketed it, meaning to throw it away once she was sure she wasn’t being watched. There were so many crazy cults on the streets now. The woman was probably a recruiter for the Neo-Cluniacs or the Cyber Rosicrucians.
She joined Yves at the side of the queue.
“Who was that bitch?” Yves asked.
“Don’t know. Gave me a card with an address. Probably just a weirdo with religion on the brain.”
Yves steered her from the building. “Let’s go.”
“Clubbing?”
“No. Home.”
They walked away, arm in arm, as the next in a series of veterans stepped up to discuss their problems with a robot.
The day would wind on, and gradually the sun would set. As the artificial light kicked in, shining from a completely different angle, an observant bystander would see three words etched on the plastic with a fingernail.
THE EXPERIMENT ENDS.
Back at their apartment, they didn’t waste time getting comfortable.
"Why don't you turn out the lights, and light a candle?" Yves asked, her clothes in a pile beside the bed.
Rose nodded, and left the bedroom.
She’d met Yves in Neo Mumbai, not long after her tour of duty ended. After a few weeks of knowing each other, they decided to try living with each other.
They'd found a few hundred square meters in one of Sydney's western suburbs. Newly developed. It was just a blank tenement, with no walls, no decoration, just a few pipe fittings and electrical outlets.
They spoke to some polymaterial designers: people who could control the atomic spacing of crystalline and amorphous polymers and reshape them in seconds. They gave detailed instructions of the walls, the furnishings, the overall aesthetic.
One hour and nine minutes later, they'd moved in to a fully furnished apartment. The designers apologised for the slightly abnormal delay.
Aged metal brassware. Flaky wallpaper, peeling off the walls like dead skin. A floor that creaked as you stepped on it. They wanted the apartment to have a voice, to vocalise with him.
The floor was synthetic hardwood, as dark as a series of piano keys. Rose took off her shoes, feeling the fibers against the soles of her feet -
- I was standing on purple rocks, a wind blowing dust around my combat boots -
She struck a match, and lit a burnt fig candle in a blue danube jar. The flame wavered, seeming unsure of itself, before taking hold and deepening the shadows in the dark apartment. The wick in the candle, like all of the house, was just a clever facsimile of the real thing. It was a digital filament, sensitive to sudden changes of angle.
If the candle fell to its side, the flame would instantly go out. There had not been a fire reported in Sydney for nearly ten years.
- There flames erupting from gun muzzles, staccato bursts of fire trying to drown out an earthquake, and not even coming close -
She stared past the flame, the way it illuminated a series of scratches on the wall. Three words. Always the same three words. She'd left that single sentence scratched on paper, on polywood, on every plastic that allowed her to mark it. And she remembered doing none of it.
The experiment ends.
- But I remember his eyes. My life forks, like a river flow
ing into two different oceans. In one of them, I spent a few hours on a Dravidian transport, orbiting the planet. In the other, I was down there on the ground. And I was staring into his eyes. -
"You're taking a while," Yves called from the bedroom.
"Sorry."
She brought the candle into the bedroom, and shut the door behind her.
By the flickering light, she saw Yves' naked body. She was restrained, hands tied to her ankles by Rose's clever shibari knotwork. The red rope cut tight lines into her alabaster pale flesh, trapping her inside a spiderweb of Rose's design.
Rose sat the candle down, and started running fingernails over Yves exposed back. The woman shuddered, taut muscles convulsing under the knots. By candlelight, Rose saw the wetness between her legs, her clitoris throbbing with need.
"I'm not crazy," she told Yves.
"They all say that."
Rose’s fingernails continued to touch the other woman's back, at first moving in meaningless whorls and gyres, then tracing out letters, then tracing out words. They grew longer, like worms extending their tails.
THE…
THEEXP…
THEEXPERIM…
THEEXPERIMENT…
"Stop playing with your food,” Yves said, smiling into the pillow.
Rose lost the ability to focus, lost awareness of what her hands were doing. She reached for the fig-scented candle, feeling the reservoir of melted wax slosh inside, and began to pour.
Yves hissed like a swan as she felt the hot wax touch the light cuts on her back. Her posterior chain muscles spasmed with each excruciating drop. The thick wax cooled and solidified almost instantly, covering the cuts in thick mucous-covered wax, blending in with the excitement-flushed skin.
Rose vaguely heard Yves say something, but couldn’t quite make it out. Strange. She was right next to her, but the bound woman’s words no longer seemed capable of reaching her.
She removed the candle from the glass holder. Then she struck it hard against the edge of the bedside table. There was a crunch, and sharp edges of glass were biting into her hand.
But all of that was noise, hardly noticeable, just like the voice of Yves Gullveig.
“Rose, can’t you hear me? Rose? Rose!”
She held a jagged knife of glass in her hand. It glittered like a leaf of ice.
She was far away, floating like a butterfly encased in ectoplasm, reliving the planet again. Caitanya-9.
- We threw him down the pit. He was gone. Vanished. So what was it that came back out of the ground like a ghost? -
“Rose! Talk to me, you stupid cunt!”
Yves was screaming now.
She lowered the blade of ice to Yves back, and started cutting. The back was so clear and pure, like a sheet of paper.
Skin parted, separating like an opening mouth. Beneath and beyond was a world of red, vomiting blood.
Yves shrieked like a klaxon.
- We made it back on the ship. Narrow escape. Lots of us didn’t survive. I couldn’t look back, I could just feel the raging wind, the clouds of dust as the land moved –
She kept cutting, writing the only thing she needed to write on Yves pure skin. The woman thrashed and jackknifed around, struggling to escape even after Rose put a knee on her back.
T…H…E…E…X….
The wounds gaped, spewing red over the bedsheets as if in commemoration of the god of war.
Finally, the shibari rope snapped, and Yves legs came free. She kicked out with pain-fueled strength, one foot catching Rose’s midsection and hurling to the ground.
Instantly, the illusion came apart, and Rose was back in her body.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Yves cried, struggling free of the ropes. Tears were streaming from her eyes. “What are you? Some kind of fucking psycho?”
Rose was about to ask what did I do? Then she looked at the bedroom and kept her mouth shut.
It looked like a massacre had taken place. The bedsheets were stained with red, and the cuts on Yves back bled profusely. The woman was shouting and crying simultaneously, words alchemizing into sobs and back again without any loss of information.
“I was telling you to stop. I was telling you to stop. Why didn’t you listen to me, Rose?”
Rose sat on the ground, shaking her head. She couldn’t comprehend any of this.
Yves didn’t even wait to hear if an explanation was forthcoming. “You know what? Get out. You can spend a night on the street.”
“But…”
Yves seized her by the arm. She was rough. The woman’s eyes sparked with fire. “If you try to stay, the Solar Arm Constabulary is getting a call. I consider you a danger to my safety, and it’s my name on the lease.”
“Can I at least…”
“No. Get out. Now.”
Rose was half-led and half-shoved out the door. She felt like a mannequin. Before, her body had moved without input from her brain. Now, her brain was screaming for it to do something, say something, but she was frozen in shock.
“What were you trying to write, anyway?” shouted Yves. “That ‘the experiment ends’ thing? What does that even mean?”
“I’ve told you before, I don’t know. Maybe I just need someone to talk to, to figure it out with…”
“Well, something’s ended tonight. Maybe it’s this sicko Jeffrey Dahmer shit. Maybe it’s our relationship. You can come back in the morning and tell me.”
The door slammed shut, and Rose found herself giving an answer to three inches of wood. She heard a lock click into place.
She sighed.
She looked around at the street. It appeared to be night-time. The public had recently voted on 10 hours of day, 10 hours of night, and 4 hours of twilight. The constantly changing day and night cycles played havoc on her internal biorhythms. But then so would not having a bed.
This is a problem.
She didn’t have her nanomesh computer suit, or her purse, or any money. She’d have to find a public shelter, and she didn’t know where to look.
She was a soldier. She could go to sleep anywhere, but not in Sydney. The liquid-crystal displays carpeting the streets burned your body when they got hot, and the Constabulary hassled you.
She remembered the card, and tried to recall the address.
Memories had gotten her into this mess, and they could get her out of it.
Caitanya-9 – March 18, 2142 - 1500
It was cold back at the camp. All of the Defiant were wearing at least two thermal nanomesh suits, and they still shivered. Someone had smashed some crates, and lit a fire.
Caitanya-9’s atmosphere had limited amounts of oxygen, and the fire was a guttering, barely-existent thing that seemed almost ashamed to be there. Copious squirts of propane gas produced suffocating, oily smoke, but not much heat.
They formed a close ring, making plans.
“Where’s Ubra and Zelity?” Emeth’s newly minted lieutenant Noritai said.
A voice spoke from around them, seemingly coming from all directions at once.
“A better question, where are you?”
All of the Defiant were well trained, and well discliplined. But they quailed as a humanoid figure suddenly appeared in the middle of the fire.
Wreathed in flames, Andrei Kazmer stood before them.
He wasn’t fully human, but the human part of him was the only part that made sense. His skin seemed carved from purple rock, each vein like a streak of white calcite. He was taller than he’d been before, more physically imposing – Kazmer had always been a big man, but now he towered over everyone by several inches. He seemed like a precocious mountain that had learned to walk.
His eyes were completely black and featureless, like the two black moons.
“Did you see the Wipe?” He said. “Wasn’t it beautiful? The flash in the heavens that erased ten thousand worlds like the mistakes they always were? I was there, my consciousness a part of the gamma rays. Just as my consciousness is a part of the world you now stand
on, and the air you now breathe.”
He tapped Emeth’s chest with a purple finger. “Want to know what’s in your lungs? Me.”
“So you performed the Wipe,” a woman called Sankoh said. “Terrus is destroyed.”
“No. You are now in the Horsehead Nebula, far from home. Tomorrow I might be somewhere else, and you can watch me vaporize some other system. That requires that you live. You might want to get working on that, by the way – some of Sarkoth Amnon’s pawns still haven’t realized that the board is flipped.”
The gigantic man-god leaned closer, and Emeth was far too afraid to recoil or even move.
“The Wipe is always running,” he whispered, and although their faces were nearly at kissing distance, Emeth could feel not a single movement of air leaving the man’s lips. “I choose the time, but it is always running. It loops, and each detonation re-sets it for the next one. Want to feel the countdown for the next one?”
Andrei Kazmer held out his wrist, and Emeth felt for a pulse.
There it was. Irregular, but with a timing that was obviously numerical.
beat…beat beat beat…beat beat beat beat…BEAT….
He couldn’t help but think of the pulsing sound that had come from within the earth. Was it now inside Kazmer’s veins?
Before he could figure out the time, Kazmer took his hand away.
“Time will pass. Maybe a lot, maybe a little. I will use the Wipe a few more times. Then we will go back to Terrus, and you can watch me flay the entire human race into subatomic particles. It will give me great pleasure to know that our useless species is finally gone.”
Emeth held his hands held out placatingly.
“…Andrei, please listen…”
And that was all he got out before Andrei Kazmer destroyed him.
Andrei extended a finger towards the bonfire, and the fire snaked out into the air.
Everyone watched as a whipcord of pure flame danced through the air, moving with no fuel and nothing visibly sustaining it. It trailed like a snake before a snake charmer.
…and then Andrei snapped the finger on to Emeth. Instantly the fire became a roaring tsunami, engulfing the man, a blast furnace engine with him at the center. Waves of heat pummeled the surrounded people, and they all fell back.
Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2) Page 5