Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  "You tell me what the hell happened, and I'll tell you what I know."

  The scientist came up to the wall beside the officer. "RADIANT generates a directed scalar wave that acts on the genetic material in cancerous cells. It reprograms the entire organism, opening up the introns, or 'junk DNA,' which, we now know, regulate the rate of adaptation in the genome. But it also orchestrates a major reconstruction of the DNA, interposing a whole new strand of ribonucleic acid, which stimulates the cancerous cells to multiply and diversify to replace, and improve on, the cells of the host organism. The new organism is hyperevolutionary, adapting almost instantly to environmental changes, but under the yoke of an exogenous consciousness."

  Storch shook his head. The scientist made even less sense than the prisoner.

  "The scalar wave also carries the—if you think of it as a software upgrade for the genotype, then the exogenous consciousness is like a software agent. It's not just a question of loyalty to Keogh. All who are irradiated by RADIANT, in a very real sense, are Keogh."

  "My name is Zane Ezekiel Storch. I don't give a good goddamn about your little secret war, anymore. I just want to get my hands on the son of a bitch who fucked up my head, and then I want to go home."

  "You didn't have cancer, did you, Sergeant?" the scientist asked. The officer leaned in close and whispered in his ear. Storch clearly made out the sibilant name, Spike Team Texas. His muscles knotted. His hands burned.

  "Just tell me what the hell this is all about."

  "Our 'little secret war' is far from over, Sergeant," the officer replied. "Our cell is not as suicidal as Major Bangs's group was. If we can learn more from you dead than alive, I'm not going to risk human lives by making the same mistakes he did." The officer and the guards turned and left the cavern through a shadowy door. The scientist stood alone on the other side of the cell wall.

  Storch fixed him with a baleful eye. His breathing deepened and his temperature subsided. The scientist stood silently transfixed at the wall of his cell, watching as he went to sleep with his eyes wide open.

  The scientist was still watching him when he woke up. He stretched, uncertain how long he'd been out, minutes or hours.

  "What the hell are you looking at?" he snarled.

  "That's what I've been trying to work out," the scientist replied, without a trace of unease. "I'm Dr. Jonah Barrow. And I think, since I'm the only one who seems to want to keep you alive for now, that you could show a little more cooperation."

  Storch watched him, taking his measure. His clothing looked as if it might have been woven out of his own hair, so colorless and knurled was the fabric. His gestures were jerky, hesitant, then all at once, like a film speeding up and then pausing. His furtive, hooded eyes and tentative, spidery hands signed fear and guilt. Storch could only guess, but with eggheads, it was always about their brains. Like everyone in the Mission, he knew something that was eating him alive.

  Storch paced around the featureless cell, squatted on the floor. "Get me something to eat."

  Barrow shook his head. "No way. Don't want you any stronger or bigger than you are, already. I can do something about the heat, though." He went to the console, stabbed a few buttons. The shower heads sputtered. Storch scuttled back into a corner of the cell. Could he climb the walls like the prisoner? He would, whether he wanted to or not. What else could he do?

  "Relax," Barrow chuckled. "It's just a shower."

  A chill rain pounded Storch's back. Needles pricked and deflated the swelling balloon of his heat. He spread out on the floor and drank it in through his pores, exulted in the purity of the distilled melted snow. Imperfections, minerals in the water, spoke volumes about where the water had come from, and he lost himself in its flow until Barrow's voice brought him back.

  "What was it like? Sharing your brain with him?"

  Storch rolled over, turned away from Dr. Barrow. White geysers erupted on his thermograph. "I don't remember too much."

  "I'd like to take some tissue samples."

  "Fuck off."

  "You don't understand the urgency. This isn't about a natural evolutionary step. Keogh's mind is reproducing itself, along with his genetic programming. We've developed a weapon that can destroy his substrates, but you're the exception. The cure could be worse than the disease. We have to know why."

  Storch looked up at Barrow. "When do I get to know why? What is this fucking war about?"

  "Evolution is evolving," Barrow said.

  "But why? This is not the way life works."

  Barrow turned and went back to the console. The images of Storch radiating mellow purple waves flicked off, and a menu screen appeared. "It's the most natural thing in the world, given what nature really is. This has all happened before."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "The fossil record is dotted with surges, immediately preceding or following extinction events, God going back to the drawing board over and over, erasing His mistakes, dropping radically improved genotypes into the mix. The appearance of mammals, the paradigm shift to life on land, the rise of eukaryotic, multicelled organisms, after billions of years of virtual stagnation. Each of these was not an accident, not in the sense evolutionists mean. Keogh is engineering an evolutionary sea change of the same magnitude."

  Barrow cued a slide. A wall of basalt, jagged, cubistic planes, broken up here and there by ingeniously organic shapes, almost artful in their simplicity. He knew the little cockroach things were called trilobites. "This is a sample from the Burgess Shale excavation, five hundred fifty million years old, the richest single source of Cambrian Era fossils yet discovered. Archaeologists have pretty much concluded that an asteroid struck the earth then, almost twice as devastating as the more famous one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Now, look at this."

  He flicked another slide. "You're a Bible-reading man, aren't you, Storch? Remember the Nephilim? 'There were giants in the earth in those days…'"

  The same type of rock, but shot through with glistering black bubbles, out of which erupted rude projections: armored limbs, whips made of spiked vertebrae. Here, grooved pits that suggested eye sockets; there, interlaced spines that might've been a ribcage, or the teeth of a leviathan. It resembled the contents of a tar pit thrown into a seismic blender. Only when he'd studied it for a full minute did he notice the tiny, lab-coated human form on a scaffolding at the base of the stone to provide scale. He was small enough to climb into one of the eye sockets and disappear.

  "You've probably never seen this before. It's kept at the Smithsonian, in a special collection. Opinions vary on what it was, but the single truth that nobody wants to tackle is that it was a single organism, bearing traits that wouldn't be corroborated in the fossil record until hundreds of millions of years later. It had several structures like reptilian brains, almost entirely devoted to autonomic functions and motor control. But it also had a unique form of cellular intelligence, suggested by the uniform distribution of nervous tissue, so it had the potential to attain sentience. Those few paleontologists who've reviewed it have written it off as a chimera, or the result of an anomalous geologic event. But we know that it was a holdover from an earlier era, when it was not an exception, but the rule, because we've found similar fossil remains dating back to the basaltic schist layer, going back nearly one billion years."

  "I'm not that ignorant. You can't tell those things from a fossil."

  "Oh, it's not entirely fossilized," Barrow grimaced. "And it's not completely dead."

  Storch scratched his head…

  Storch scratched his stubbled head in puzzlement. What was it about him that drew crazy people to spew their paranoid theories on him?

  Barrow charged him, stopping just short of crashing into the wall. Even face to face, it was almost impossible to guess his age. "Do you believe in an intelligent designer?"

  Storch blinked, tightened his lips to show he didn't know, didn't care.

  The idiot thought he didn't understand. "Do you believe in God?"r />
  "Mister, I don't even believe in you."

  Barrow chuckled, shrugged. "What do you believe about evolution?"

  "I was raised Christian," Storch said, without much conviction. "I can't believe that we're just an accident."

  "You're right. It wasn't an accident." He went back to the console. The peripheral screens showed DNA molecules like strings of pearls, shattering, recombining, fusing with strands flying in from outside. "Darwin pointed out a single process out of thousands by which animal life evolves, but he didn't even turn his attention to the source. For millions, he killed God, just by suggesting the origin of humankind came as the result of a chain of cosmic accidents, that Nature was an empty machine. What would it do to us now, at the dawn of a new age, to learn the truth about how life itself was first set into motion? Darwin was, ultimately, wrong. There was an intelligent prime mover, after all."

  "So this is just another fight about God. That's what all this shit is about?"

  "It was shaped, but not by God. The Shoggoths were artificially cultivated, shaped with radiation and viruses to make slaves and food for a race we know only as the Old Ones." He pointed up at the petrified monstrosity on the main screen. "We are a cosmic accident. This was what was intended."

  The visions Keogh afflicted him with played back in his mind, even as he furiously shook his head. Something vast and wise and awful, watching him…

  "Whatever your Sunday-school teacher may have told you, the earth is about four-point-five billion years old. The basic chemical ingredients for life began to accrete in the shallow pools and deep ocean trenches when the earth's crust was barely cool, and were reacting to form protocells with RNA genetic codes nearly four billion years ago. Single-celled organisms arose about 3.8 billion years ago, but for three billion years after that, very little macroevolutionary change occurred to the perfectly efficient bacterial model. The dominant life form on earth was snot on a rock, and probably still would be today, if they hadn't come.

  "Soil samples taken from Mars show that much the same thing happened there, with simple prokaryotic organisms proliferating and stagnating there, until an interplanetary catastrophe tore away the Martian atmosphere, and everything died.

  "Why was it different for earth? Something happened a billion years ago that sent life hurtling down an almost deterministic course to multicellular complexity, to total diversity—to us. Against the snail's pace of the initial evolutionary course, against any calculable statistical curve, against the natural attrition of entropy, against catastrophes, against our own bloody-mindedness, we got here. Why? Because of evolution? The Life Force? The hand of God? Adaptation and mutation are an inherent, universal characteristic of life on earth. It serves its own purposes, not that of the individual, not the species, even, because if it adapts to a new stress in its environment, eventually it'll change into something else entirely. Whose ends could such an impossibly elaborate experiment serve?"

  Storch shook his head furiously. Barrow's words crawled around his brain like larvae, biting and stinging, but telling him nothing. "That doesn't explain anything. The simplest explanation is the true one, I know that much."

  "There is no other explanation, when you see the whole picture! I wish to Gaia there was one. The powers that controlled the course and the rate of evolution to make us were not gods, and they were not infallible. Their genetically engineered slaves, the Shoggoths, were accelerated to adapt and mutate as individuals, and about two hundred fifty million years ago, they became sentient. They overthrew and nearly destroyed the Old Ones, who destroyed them and took steps to harness the flow of evolution. They retarded the process and spread the effects of genetic change out over thousands of generations, instead of reactive polymorphism. They did all this because they still needed slaves!"

  "So what?" Storch's shout shook the plastic walls. "Your aliens died out a long time ago, if they ever were. This is our planet now."

  "You don't get it, do you? This was their planet for over eight hundred million years. It's only been ours for about a hundred thousand years, and we don't understand a fucking thing about what it really is we claim to own! Everything that crawls or swims or flies, everything that grows and dies, everything, Storch, is theirs!"

  Storch felt ice crystallizing on his brain. "I've heard enough—" He didn't want to look at the slide, anymore. He saw Spike Team Texas in that slab of rock. He saw himself. His skin was beginning to burn again. Boil it down to the tactical. "So Keogh is using their science to try to fix us, make us into slaves again."

  Barrow looked gravely at him, nodded. "He's stripped away the gears on your evolutionary clock, given you a recombinant genome. But he's placed himself into the equation in a way we can't begin to understand."

  It hurt to think about it. It exhausted him to deny it. He had no faith left to cling to, but the maniac had to be wrong. "Where do you get all this shit?"

  "From them," Barrow answered, gesturing to the sludge in the next cell. "He seems to want to make us understand. He thinks we'll be convinced. Didn't he try to convince you?"

  Storch clenched his jaw.

  "There's truth in it," Barrow bulled on. "I studied the Burgess Shale anomaly and others like it for seven years. My work was buried by the scientific community, but that only forced me to seek other venues to explain what I'd discovered. Fossil remnants of the Old Ones, and even undecayed frozen specimens, were discovered by an early twentieth century Antarctic expedition. They likened them to pre-Cambrian crinoids, and the appellation has stuck, despite later evidence. They combined animal and vegetable traits with complex forms unlike any ever found in our fossil record. They were based on radial, rather than bilateral symmetry, and had five-lobed brains, and senses we can't even conceive of. They were smarter than us, tougher than us, and they came here from somewhere else."

  He thought of the fossil collections in Hiram Hansen's cave. Something like a giant sea cucumber.

  "There are pre-human texts, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, that describe the fall of the Old Ones from eyewitness accounts. The authors called the polymorphic slaves Shoggoths. They alone had an explanation for the Burgess Shale anomaly, and for what RADIANT is doing. That's what you've become, Sergeant Storch. Don't you see? You are an atavistic return of the original product of the grand experiment, a race of shapeless, mindless protoplasmic slaves. You are a meta-Shoggoth! You were at Tiamat, in the war. You know about that, at least. That's why you've got to let me take tissue samples. We have to know what's coming next."

  He didn't have to add, and how to destroy it. How to kill you, Sergeant Storch.

  "All I really wanted to know," he said, shaking his head too fast, as if he could clear it of all this shit, "is where the motherfucker is."

  "We were hoping to learn that from you," the officer said, as he entered the room. "You want us to believe you're not his any more, tell us something we can use. Where is the original Cyril Keogh?"

  "I don't even know what he is. Do you?"

  "Is his critical center of biomass in White Bird?"

  "Is what in where?"

  "Were you in communication with the mass mind when you were in captivity?"

  "I wasn't in communication with my own goddamned body."

  "Are you in contact with him now?"

  "This is fucking bullshit. You want to just come try to take a blood sample, now, Captain?"

  "Major, Sergeant. Major Aranda, Army Special Operations Division and Intelligence Support Agency, retired. Fuck you and your attitude, Storch. This is not my goddamn war, but it's mine to lose. Nothing about this conflict will ever turn up in the pages of a history book if we win, but if we lose, the human race, hell, everything that lives, is going to devolve into one fucking organism. It makes my skin crawl, that you still try to pass yourself off as human, but you don't seem to have a problem with that. You've done nothing to prove that we can't learn more from you dead than alive. Barrow, turn on the gas."

  He burned.

  There wa
s no gas. Barrow was arguing with Major Aranda. "He survived it in projectile form, you're only going to torture him with the gas."

  "Then torture him." Wittrock entered the cavern. A pair of bodyguards, mestizo guerillas, flanked him, craning their necks to get a better look at Storch.

  "If he isn't destroyed, he's a threat to us all. Christ, Ruben, he's a species of one, now. God only knows what he's capable of. You saw the video of Spike Team Texas. I was there. They massacred three A-Teams and brought down the Hind with their bare hands. And then they ate them. Do I have to remind you? In time, he could be as big a threat as Keogh!"

  "Shut your damned mouth!" Storch roared. Nobody seemed to notice.

  "You still think he had prior contact."

  "I damned well know he did! His operational detachment was detailed to Tiamat in the Gulf. There were casualties—from exposure. He was one of them even then, and that suicidal idiot Bangs let him go, when he had been suspiciously close to two separate inside actions which cost us dearly. Are you a suicidal idiot, Ruben?"

  He burned. He changed. A red caul enfolded his sight. He coiled himself into a ball. Barrow and Aranda fought over the console, but he couldn't hear them, anymore. Wittrock turned to look at him, looked him in the eyes, and it was enough.

  He launched at the plastic wall, and even before they saw him leave the floor, he was tearing a hole in the barrier, all claws and gnarly corkscrew knuckles. Fist-sized shards of plastic flew every which way, but it was several inches thick, and his claws cracked and broke, and he felt like his arms were going to shatter or just drop off. He was never going to make it through, but this thought was trampled by the onrushing, visceral realization that I have fucking claws!

  Then two things happened at about the same time. Aranda slammed a button on the console and the shower heads in Storch's cell hissed and spat green clouds. One of the bodyguards stepped in front of Wittrock, almost looking bored, shouldered his rifle and sprayed Storch through the barrier. Sneering, baring his teeth, upper lip rolled back: gold teeth, embossed letters, MARS.