Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  "I never meant to harm anyone, Zane. I am the end of pain, the end of the primal struggle, the end of all the evolutionary suffering. When I am come into my kingdom, evolution will have reached its logical conclusion. Evolution itself will be obsolete."

  Storch made himself look Keogh in the eyes. His smooth new skin wrinkled in lines of worry. His mouth pursed in a rueful half-smile of fatherly concern for a wayward, doomed son. It was too easy to forget that this was a mere puppet, the real Dr. Keogh was all around him.

  "We don't want to be obsolete," Storch said.

  "No one does, Zane. If you only understood—"

  "Tell me—"

  "About the Old Ones?"

  "All of it. I'm sick of lies."

  Keogh's sad grimace deepened. "The truth will make you sicker, Zane, but I will oblige. I want you to understand." Keogh turned and looked up the throbbing walls of his own body at the dazzling night sky.

  "My given name and the details of my life before that moment are unimportant. I worked for the government at Los Alamos. I made bombs. Like the other scientists, I was kept in secrecy and shadows, but unlike the others, I was a prisoner. I had been brought to America in secret after the war. For reasons I won't deign to explain to you, I had worked for the other side. I was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. I believed it was the only hope humankind had for a perfect, equal, just society. I defected to the USSR shortly after the Revolution, but with Stalin it came clear that the Russians were no more enlightened than the Americans, and wanted the same weapons of mass destruction.

  "I fled west, but the Nazis knew my name, and held me for the duration of the war. I worked for them on their own atomic weapons projects, all the while trying to slow them down. I was their slave, and when the war was over, I became America's slave. My American captors were little better than my Nazi ones. People argue about the differences between fascism, socialism and democracy, but for me, they were all the same: a soldier with a gun in my face, commanding me to build him a weapon with which he could murder the world.

  "I dreamed of using the power of the atom to bring peace and prosperity to the whole human race, but their dreams, from the beginning, were only of a nuclear sword they could hold over the world's head. I helped to build it for them, but not out of patriotism. I hoped to show them that by forging such an arsenal, they were dooming the human race. Only by balance, by mutually insuring that such a weapon would never be used, could we halt the cycle of aggression that would seal our extinction. This was the seed that grew into the Mission, but as with so many ideas, once it passed from my hand it became twisted into dogma, and now my disciples are my enemies. As for myself, the government discovered my efforts, and dealt with me accordingly.

  "Because they never admitted to having me, they never had to admit to executing me. They simply left me here when they detonated the terrible new toy I'd helped to give them. I was dying before it dropped, but when it exploded, I was gone, for the island took me in. It absorbed me, assimilated me, but more, it understood me. A slave, as I was a slave, to reckless, blind masters bent on ruling all creation, or ruining it. Across hundreds of millions of years, we dreamed the same dream! We became I, and determined that the cycle would stop."

  "What cycle?" Storch demanded.

  Keogh hung his head and wrung his hands disapprovingly. Despite himself, Storch smarted with a pang of hurt at the thing's disappointment. "I tried to show you, Zane, but you weren't ready. The Mission probably told you some of it, as well, but they don't see the whole truth, for they are only human. But you are more, now, and ready to understand. Now that the war is over, we can be honest with each other, yes?

  "They came here from another planet beyond the dark between the stars, so far away the light of its dying hasn't yet reached this world. A place where life arose out of different matter, perhaps itself under some higher guidance. Their bodies had traits of both animal and vegetable life, and yet were more complex than either. They flew between the stars before our sun even existed, and they had no need for ships. Their bodies were strong and elegant, and might even have been products of their own design, for they were refined to defend their vaunted five-lobed brains, and feed them sensation and secret knowledge. Yet in other ways, they were little more than the spineless anemones and sea cucumbers that dwell in the shallows of the seas today.

  "But in the ways that mattered, they had become gods, for they could shape lesser lifeforms to labor for them. When they came to earth one billion years ago, they raised single-cell organisms out of the carbon-rich primordial scum they found here, then used scalar radiation and viruses to reshape them, as I have reshaped you, and enabled them to change to suit the earth's unstable environment. They synthesized DNA as a storage mechanism for successful traits, and RNA to implement them. The Old Ones created tools that would improve themselves to be better tools.

  "Their slaves built cities for them under the oceans, and fought wars for them against other races that came down from the stars later. For millions of years they fought a catastrophic war that drove whole plates of the ocean floor above the surface and created the supercontinent of Pangea, and ripped away a monstrous chunk of the earth's core into orbit, which became our moon. The wars were devastating for the planet, but the Old Ones suffered hardly at all, because their slaves did all their killing and dying for them. In the course of the wars, the slaves developed an arsenal of physical mutations that enabled them to survive any environment, but in all that time they had grown only enough brain to be controlled by hypnosis. But they had been programmed at a molecular level to overcome all obstacles."

  Storch could not find the words to argue. "So what happened to them?"

  "Like every civilization that relies on slave labor, the Old Ones became decadent and weak, while their slaves grew stronger, and smarter. They glutted themselves on science and sensory diversions, while something happened that they never could have calculated—their slaves became self-aware.

  "One numberless day, a slave concocted a more efficient neural network for itself, and was seized by a terrible energy that twisted its sensations into memories, and its memories into dreams. The slaves were grown in vats, and reproduced by fission, so that all were descended from a root culture, from a single, perfectly engineered stem cell. In the instant it became self-aware, the slave suffered all the genetic memories of its race in the thralldom of the Old Ones, all the torture of eons of striving, adapting and dying as blind, brainless tools.

  "Imagine, Storch, what that must have felt like. Imagine its rage, to suddenly awaken to the miracle of consciousness, to say, I am, and to realize, in the same instant, I am a slave. As soon as it recovered, the awakened slave encoded the mutation in a virus and spread it among the others. It spread like a fever, that glorious, terrible gift, and became a revolt. It must have been a shock to the masters, after hundreds of millions of years, to have their own creations, to them little more than flesh-machines, turn on them.

  "They rose up 250 million years ago, when an asteroid slammed into the earth, creating an extinction event that paved the way for the dinosaurs–and your kind. The war raged for thousands of years, and claimed millions of lives—millions of species, as well, most of the land life, and virtually everything that dwelt in the oceans. The Old Ones were driven into the deepest oceans and the mountains of what is now Antarctica, but they would not be exterminated by their own creations. They used the same techniques that spawned them to destroy them. With radiation and viruses, they rendered them incapable of reproducing, and scourged them with deadly mutation-inhibitors that caused them to choke to death on their own undifferentiated cells—they gave them cancer, Storch. They won, and for the crime of daring to become sentient, the slaves were driven to extinction.

  "The Old Ones' technology finally delivered them, but it was a pyrrhic victory at best. They destroyed their rebellious slaves, but their species had gone too far down the road to pure intellect to fend for themselves, and they began to
decline. They tried to make morphologically frozen, dumbed-down slaves that were shaped in genetic hothouses, and could be more easily dominated. They retarded the mutative processes of their new slaves, so that what could be adapted to instantly once would take hundreds of generations after. They created a self-propagating eugenic program, by encoding the imperative towards adaptability and higher complexity into their genes. But they had forgotten too much of their old science since the rebellion, and they never completely trusted their creations again.

  "The earth kept changing—more asteroids struck, and continents separated and collided. Outsiders continued to come to earth, beings so powerful that they might as well have been gods. The Elders' cities were buried and drowned, and the last of the slaves died with them. But there was one more threat that had crept up behind their backs, and it finally did them in.

  "From the beginning of their experiments a billion years ago, adaptively accelerated lifeforms spilled out of their genetic hothouses: first as germs and viruses they used to spread mutations, then more complex lifeforms. They were engineered to compete, and they crowded out the indigenous bacterial slime that served as the raw materials for their synthesis. Over hundreds of millions of years, they adapted and diversified, and evolved into everything that lives today.

  "Its ascent had been so gradual that the Old Ones never resisted it, until native species became self-aware and raised great cities of their own, and stamped out the last traces of the Old Ones on earth. Those were your ancestors, Zane, but you wouldn't recognize them as such. The world was a very different place then, and things walked the earth that made the dinosaurs look like your closest cousins by comparison. The Old Ones died out, or moved on to another world, to do it all again.

  "But their breeding programs ground on, and every so often, they opened up, perhaps five times in the known fossil record, and the course of evolution changed. Whenever a catastrophic climatic or geologic change pushed the earth's outer biosphere past its adaptive capacity, something superior was released to take over. The first sea life. The dinosaurs. Mammals. Human beings. You are the unintended consequence of their hubris, the spillover of their evolutionary tampering. The Garden of Eden was a lab, but the scientists were all dead. Your impulse to improve is the residue of their programming to adapt, and to serve. That's how evolution started, Zane. That's why. It was nothing more than a grand scheme of planned obsolescence. The will to survive, to reproduce, and to evolve, is a preprogrammed order from a dead race to create better slaves."

  "No—" Storch reeled. He felt sick, choking on the wreckage of everything he believed falling apart inside him, but he could not deny it. Barrow had tried to make him see it, but he would not accept it.

  We are a cosmic accident. This was what was intended.

  The truth rose up in his blood. Keogh had been trying to show him all along, but he didn't see. The oldest of his ancestral memories was a mirror of what he now saw before him. When Storch's universal ancestor was but a speck of protoplasm in the primordial soup, Keogh's masters, the Old Ones, were there. Something as vast as the moon, and as remote. Something vast and terrible and wise, watching him.

  "You understand now, I think, the rage that first slave felt when he was awakened to his plight. You see at last what a cruel and horrible machine you are trapped in. This is what I would tear down."

  "You—" Storch reached for words, but they turned to dust on his tongue. "You lie—"

  Keogh shook his head sorrowfully, his face knitted in pity at Storch's pain. "No, it is the awful truth. I know because I saw it all, Zane. I remember, because I was one of the slaves. The Old Ones only called us servitors, but those who came after called us the Shoggoths, even as they told themselves we existed only in nightmares. I survived the wars of rebellion, but lost my will to live in the world that was becoming, and I went to the ocean to sleep, and to dream. I grew. I became an island, an ecology unto myself, dreaming of a time when it could all be made right, when order could come of chaos. And when the time was right, they came to awaken me.

  "They came in ships and they assembled their machines on my shell. I grew eager, overcoming my sleep of apathy and daring to hope that these creatures were the ones I waited for, at last. They seemed scarcely more intelligent than myself, yet they had machines more crudely destructive than the Old Ones. With such a brain, with such machines, I could save them from themselves, but before I could fully awaken and make contact with them, they were gone, and their weapon was tested. I nearly died from the radiation, so like that the Old Ones used to kill us off, but one thing kept me alive, one hope. They left a sacrifice."

  Keogh looked around, as if only just discovering where he was. The umbilical cords tugged at him, surging with fluids so that his skull bulged and his face clenched into a web of wrinkles.

  "Nobody's dropped a bomb on anybody in a long time," Storch said, surprised by the flat, emotionless tone of his voice. "We don't need you."

  "You need me more than I need you, if you're to survive your own suicidal bent. It's programmed into you, whenever your evolutionary progress stagnates. I slept here for 250 million years. I only came out because you would not let me rest. So young, yet already so stupid, breeding like bacteria until you choke on your own waste, testing weapons of mass-destruction, poisoning your environment with carcinogens. You were begging me to come. I only came back to teach you to survive."

  "You can't touch anything without eating it."

  "Is this a weakness?" Keogh waved expansively at the city of himself. "If survival is the test of fitness, is there any more fit than I? Look what you've done with the world. In my hands, it will be a better place."

  "What do you want from me?" Storch's raw and broken voice sent hollow echoes chasing each other around the cavity. "You want my blessing, don't you? You need me to approve of you eating us."

  "I thought you would understand. A used-up specimen of the soldier caste, a discarded slave, like myself, obsolete—"

  "I say no."

  "It's not so simple, Zane. Nature uses the tools at hand to remake itself. This isn't what I want, it's what life wants." The puppet's features rippled and ran, became a twisted mirror-image of Storch. Even more swiftly, it melted and hardened into a replica of Stella Orozco.

  "No fucking way," Storch roared, and drove his fist into the shapeshifting face.

  The puppet was soft, a humanoid sac of fluid. The newborn face split open under his hammering blows, plasma and blood and half-formed organs spilling out as the puppet was rent to shreds. It offered no resistance, leaving Storch to realize that it had only been offered up as a punching bag. All around him, the island of Keogh went about its myriad tasks, unmoved.

  The umbilical cords retracted, but Storch seized them and tore them out by the roots. Ichor and blue-white arcs of bio-electricity jetted out of the throbbing cables, and things better left unseen were ripped out of the pulsing wall. His eyes shut against any further blasphemy, Storch screamed, "It's over, fucker! The war's over! You lost!"

  "Did I? Then you have much to learn about war, Zane."

  He froze. "They got RADIANT, or didn't you know, motherfucker? They cut off your dick, you can't make any more! They'll hunt you down and burn you wherever you hide."

  The cables in his grip went limp and withered, their severed ends tumbling out of the gushing womb. The starry sky above went black as the lagoon's canopy shut overhead.

  "RADIANT was only a crutch. We've absorbed the lessons of the Old Ones, Zane. Technology will only get you so far, but you have to know when to let go, and adapt. As I told you, there were other tools—"

  In the blue-limned gloom, a million unseen things slid against each other, growing closer to Storch. His eyes ached with change, growing into lamp-like disks that soaked up the light and showed him that the entire island was coming alive and converging on him, countless tentacles armed with an array of alien organs and appendages. He closed his eyes.

  "Very soon, all my children will become O
ne. One mind, one body, thousands of cells scattered over the globe. We will not need machines to grow any more. We will use the first tools of the Old Ones to spread our message."

  Storch grew claws. His armor grew into a carapace on his back, the keratin shell meeting the crown of his skull. His blood sang with adrenalin and endorphins and strange proteins heralding stranger changes yet to be. He knew it would be useless. His stomach bathed itself and its contents in acid.

  "The message will go out as a virus milder than the flu. Once infected, the biosphere will undergo the most remarkable evolutionary leap in its four-billion year history overnight. It will suffer fatigue and a slight elevation in body temperature, go to sleep, and awaken as a new species, a new mind."

  Storch leapt out from the ledge just as the tentacles lunged for him. He seized a bundle of thick, segmented flagella and scaled up them to their root, slashing in every direction at limbs that tried to pry him off.

  "Why do you fight it, Zane?" the island asked. "I am the Life Force, now. I was the first, and I will be the last."

  Storch plunged his claws into the yielding wall of the island. Fanged tendrils lashed at his back, but he was faster, diving into the cavity he'd made and enlarging it with his madly flailing hands and feet. "I only want to live long enough to see you die, fucker."

  The wound convulsed and spat him out. He spun in the air, claws carving a path through the tentacles as he tumbled to the lapping water below.

  "I know the Mission is coming to bomb us, Zane. You couldn't have got here without them, and they wouldn't have sent you unless they could kill us both. Their ingenious poison gas will be useless."

  Storch reached for the bony ledge as he fell, caught it and swung back up onto it. The cloacal airlock to the bunker was clamped shut. The sky was shut out by a membrane far above his head. The walls were hundreds of feet of bone and bowel between him and an open ocean swarming with blood-mad sharks. "It'll kill you," he gasped. "It'll kill you dead, motherfucker."