Meeting Infinity (The Infinity Project)

by John Barnes

  “Narsis –”

  I laugh. It comes out a bark. “If I tell you about the case, they’ll purge you too.”

  I sit on the bed, run my hands over my face. With my hands over my face, I don’t see Lisha kneel down in front of me, but I feel the pressure of his face against my thigh. When I look down I see him kneeling on the floor, pressed against me.

  I hesitate. Then I rest my hand, gently, on the back of his neck. I close my eyes, and bleeding agents dance behind my lids, clicks with missing fingers. I see Lisha shoving ear mites into agent eardrums. This is our job. This is what we do. Interrogation, body politic.

  And it was all just someone’s joke. It was Us and Opposition, fighting no one but ourselves.

  “Goodnight, Lisha,” I say, and take my hand away from him.

  He stands and walks to the door and leaves the Priority paper on the floor. He does not turn before he leaves. He says nothing. I wonder if he saw the same things when he closed his eyes.

  Defense sends me a summons at dawn.

  My system is functional now, and wakes me up, displays the message:

  INTERROGATION ROOM 101 DEFENSE SUMMONS IMMEDIATE

  I am still dressed. I walk down to the interrogation offices and palm open the door. The offices are empty.

  I sit at one of the system consoles and wait. I don’t want to go into room one-oh-one. I know I am waiting for someone who is not yet here.

  A shadow appears at the door. One figure. No more Left and Right.

  She is thin and wiry and wears black. Her hair is sandy brown, topping a lean, brow, narrow face. She slips into the office and hands me a blue Priority paper.

  It has my tag number on it, identifying the sender:

  I FOUND KELI

  I stare at the paper.

  “I didn’t send that,” I say, but I did. Of course I did.

  She smiles, and the smile crinkles the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.

  “That’s your tag number, Narsis,” she says. “You’ve done well. We’re happy with your progress, but it appears there’s one last obstacle in the linear progression of your education toward becoming a complete communication system, unbound by mechanical interference.”

  She leads me to room one-oh-one.

  I expect everyone to be in that room. I expect agents. I expect clicks. I expect Lisha. Flire. Gri. Mesta. I expect all of them.

  But she pushes open the door and there, inside, without a filter, is my twisted little bird.

  Jan sits in the center of the floor, tearing at the organic mesh blindfold on his face, squealing and whimpering. He is naked, all limbs, just a broken stick, nothing substantial.

  “We had to kill the cats, of course,” the woman says. “We locked him down there long enough to form a bond that became a linking system. Rudimentary, incomplete. He was never fully functional.”

  I stare at Jan. I can’t stop staring because I can’t bring myself to move.

  “When we killed the cats, though,” the woman says, “it released him, so to speak. There was a great deal of initial turmoil, of course, hence the imprisonment, but we were confident we could bring him here and get him to bond and train his replacement.”

  I realize I haven’t had any kaj for over four hours. I am not numb, I just have a pounding headache, and the sickness in my gut has gotten worse, not better. Some part of me knows I’m supposed to be connecting things, but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t because if I do... oh, fuck, oh, fuck if I do...

  The little woman looks at me, smiling a little as Jan whimpers on the floor, tearing at the mesh on his face. I want to tell Jan to stop pulling on it, to leave it alone.

  “I’m Keli,” I say.

  “I know,” the woman says. “We gave you your orders. Now it’s time for you to become more. It’s the kaj that’s held you back. We didn’t anticipate your addiction. You learned how to connect with our systems and sabotage them, Narsis. Jan’s your catalyst, just as the cats were his.”

  “Stop pulling at that thing, Jan,” I say, finally, but he’s still pulling, and I can see blood at the edges of the blindfold where the skin is detaching from his face.

  The woman steps toward me, rests a hand on my arm. “You’re my system, Narsis. My perfect system. Who do you think drew together all those invisible system strings and tugged those agents into doing Opposition work?”

  Me. I did it. Me.

  I am afraid of needles, of myself, of jack-in knives. I wear steel-toed boots. Glass ceilings. Green thread.

  “Narsis?”

  I am a weapon of the Opposition. I am our weapon. I turned the same agents I interrogated for turning. I’m as mad as Jan. A mad little bird am I.

  “You’ll never understand the nature of our conflict,” the woman says, and when she smiles, I see my own face, the face of an interrogator, she with a license to question, to hurt.

  I hear Jan scream. A long, long scream that turns into a howl. He has pulled the mesh off his face. He’s pulled the skin of his face off with it.

  He holds his face in the palm of his hand.

  I want to burn this woman and watch the country smoke. I want to unfurl the world and repaint it.

  I can do none of those things.

  I walk to Jan’s tortured body. Blood oozes from his skinned face. He’s missing bits of his eyelids.

  I pick him up.

  “What are you doing?” the woman says.

  “Finishing,” I say.

  The woman smiles.

  I carry Jan. He is not heavy. The woman does not follow us. I walk and walk, into the belly of the Defense compound and out, down the long curl of walkway into the Kettering compound. We go through a filter, but Jan is listless, and he is oblivious to the red welts that begin spiraling out across his torso, down the lengths of his arms; his body’s reaction to organic tech.

  I walk past the vast tower of the compound, up to the spiral of residences on the hill, to Jan’s prison. The gate is open. The nurse is gone.

  Jan has his hands curled up into fists. One fistful of my hair, the other fistful of my coat.

  I take him to the bathroom and draw lukewarm water into the bath. His blood is on my collar, my face.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, but I don’t know what for. What could Jan be sorry for? We were made. We did not create ourselves.

  The loss was mine, though. I could have joined him. If we became our own system when he reached for me, we could have fought them. But that would mean giving up myself. I would rather destroy the world than myself.

  When the tub is almost full I turn off the water and place him in the tub. Water sloshes over the lip.

  He closes what he has left of his eyelids and his body lies in the water, languid. He does not struggle against me. He does not question me.

  “I’m sorry,” he says again.

  And I say, “I’m sorry they killed the cats.”

  I press him gently beneath the water. One hand on his chest, the other on his head, and he opens the bloody bits of the eyelids then, and the big blue-green eyes stare up at me from the shimmering surface of the water. Air bubbles leave his mouth, his nostrils. We stare at one another through the surface of the water. Me above, he below.

  A system, apart.

  He does not struggle much. He has no strength left to struggle.

  I leave the drowned body in the tub and walk out into the front garden, back to the gate. From there I stare out at the Kettering compound. The woman will come for me, her perfect system, hobbled without Jan. She will take me off the kaj and I’ll be able to feel everything, see everything, be everything, then. My twisted bird is dead, leaving me and rest of this twisted world.

  I take the silver jack-in knife from the inside pocket of my coat, the one Lisha wanted me to send for printing. I go back to Jan’s body, because there is nowhere else to go.

  I sit next to the tub. I cut away all the threads.

  It is my own blood across my boots.

  A RECON DETAIL brought in
another one just after dawn. The soldiers had donned full biohazard suits; nothing could convince them that this wasn’t contagious. They set the body on a gurney. I wheeled it into a quarantine room and inspected it.

  This time, for the first time, it was a child. A girl, about eleven years old. Half of her face was still visible.

  “THE WHOLE PREMISE sounds ludicrous,” Colonel Terence Jamison said, stirring more sugar into his coffee.

  He wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Thirty minutes off the ship from HQ on New Eden, he sat diffidently on the edge of a foamcast chair in my cluttered office as if visiting a priest to confess sins. Slightly built, soft-spoken, he seemed reluctant to meet my gaze with his pale, milky-blue eyes. Out of uniform, he wouldn’t look like much, certainly not a senior officer in the Seven Planets United Space Corps.

  I said, “Maybe it is ridiculous. After all, we have no documented proof, only anecdotes from, in most cases, unreliable sources.”

  Jamison blinked at me. “Dr. Seybert –”

  “Nora, please.” I am a civilian contractor, and this was a ‘courtesy visit’. Yeah, right.

  “Nora, to tell the truth, I’m not even sure why I’m here. Someone up the chain of command got a bee in their bonnet.”

  He was not telling the truth, and had Jamison ever seen a bee? I hadn’t. Both New Eden, where I’d been born, and this outpost on Windsong pollinated their native plants by wind or bird. I knew exactly why Jamison was here, and both possible outcomes of his mission.

  Neither was good.

  “Dr... Nora,” he said, “shall we get started?”

  I AM ELIZABETH DiPortio. I hate my life. I choose this change. It can’t be worse.

  “MY GOD,” JAMISON said. And then, “I didn’t know...” And finally, regaining composure, “Briefing pictures were inadequate.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  We stood beside the gurney. The ‘spiders,’ which were not really spiders, had done more of their work. A thin, filmy web of very fine, dull red filaments was being spun over her naked body. The spiders worked unevenly; her forehead, neck and genitals were as yet completely uncovered, while her eyes, neck, and budding breasts were already sealed into the cocoon.

  Jamison’s face twisted in revulsion. “Why don’t you wash it all off her?”

  He knew the answer to this already; it was in ten years’ of situation briefings. So we were going to be playing games. He would pretend ignorance, hoping that my answers would reveal whatever information the Corps thought, suspected, or hoped I was holding back. There wasn’t any, but try convincing HQ Special Ops of that. I knew as much about Jamison as he did about me; I have friends at HQ. The stakes here were too high to not play along.

  So I said, “We tried internal and external laving, in the early years. Twice. Both patients died. You see the ‘spiders’ but you don’t see the biofilms that have invaded her nostrils, mouth, anus, vagina, ears. Those early autopsies revealed them. She’s being colonized by sheets of microorganisms, changed from the inside out. Go ahead, you can touch her – both spiders and microbes have already attuned to her DNA. They won’t do anything to you.”

  He didn’t touch her. “Is she in pain?”

  “No.” He’d never glanced at the monitors, which showed plainly that her brain waves registered no pain. He was not a doctor.

  “Who is she?”

  “We verified that only a few hours ago. Her name is Elizabeth Jane DiPortio, a Corps dependent. Her mother is a grunt at the mining base; she’s been sent for and will be shuttled here from the coast. Her father is a civilian dependent and, preliminary report says, a drunk. He may have abused her.”

  “This wasn’t seen and dealt with?” Disapproval dripped off him. Not compassion – disapproval. Drunk or abused dependents did not meet Corps regulations. Under his mask of diffidence, Jamison was a martinet. And he handled Windsong’s gravity, lighter than New Eden’s by point two gee, like a man used to a lot of interstellar travel.

  “Colonel,” I said pleasantly, “Alpha Beta Base has over 6,500 people now, military and civilian. We can’t see and deal with everything.”

  He nodded, blinking in that deceptively harmless way: Nobody here but us rabbits. “Tell me what is changing inside her.”

  “Her digestive flora – the microbes from her mouth to her rectum – are being destroyed, augmented, or replaced with ones that are part of the biofilms. Which are, of course DNA-based – panspermia, you know.” I was being condescending. He didn’t react. “Most of her organs are being modified only enough to accommodate the new microbes, with the exception of her vocal chords. They’re being drastically reconfigured to make sounds at a pitch above human hearing.”

  “To communicate with what?”

  “We don’t know. Maybe only each other. It’s a big planet, Colonel, and the Corps is still just a speck on it. Two specks: base and the mining operations in the mountains.”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling, without mirth, in response to my condescension. I hated him. “I know. How do the... the...”

  “We don’t know. Some Terran spiders inject their prey with venom that digests tissue. Maybe these spiders are injecting something that denatures DNA, or activates parts of it. Maybe the microbes are injecting some of their own DNA into the host and taking over selected cell machinery, like viruses. But most likely the process has no real Terran analogy.”

  “How much of this microbial activity is affecting her brain?”

  “Some of it, although it’s impossible to quantify. The smallest invaders are the size of viruses. They can get past the blood-brain barrier just as some viruses can.” This was why Colonel Jamison was here.

  For the first time, he looked directly at me. “I want to see a finished product.”

  “They are not products, Colonel. We call them ‘moths.’ And we don’t –”

  “Moths? Do they have any sort of wings?”

  “No, of course not. I admit the name is a little fanciful. We don’t keep them on the base after they emerge from the cocoons. They head out to the bush.”

  “But some wander back. One is here now.”

  His intelligence was better than I thought. The Warrens tried to keep their son’s visits a secret.

  Jamison said, “I want to see Brent Warren.”

  WE AM ELIZABETH DiPortio. We hate my life. We choose this change. It can’t be worse.

  THE FIRST ONE was an accident. Ten years ago, Corporal Nathan Carter, Private Sully O’Keefe, and Private Sarah Lanowski went off-base to ‘party’ in the bush. This was really stupid because Windsong is home to predators, including one beast as large as a rhinoceros. There may be even larger, more dangerous animals on this huge, mostly unexplored continent. But the three soldiers were all young and, like young everywhere, considered themselves invulnerable. There was alcohol, drugs, sex. The next afternoon O’Keefe and Lanowski, already AWOL, staggered back to the base. Carter was missing. A search detail found him a quarter mile away. The spiders and biofilms had already started cocooning him. We put him in quarantine, laved the filaments off him, hit him with broad spectrum antibiotics and anti-virals and everything else in the medical arsenal. His heart stopped and he died.

  Since then, there have been twenty-two more. Some were accidents, some may have been suicides. Most occurred at the mining camp, a rougher environment in both geographical and human terms. Here, where the ground is flat enough for the spaceport, it’s easier to maintain the chemical-soaked perimeter that keeps out the spiders. No one has ever been cocooned within the base.

  Elizabeth DiPortio deliberately walked off base, alone, at night. Brent Warren was taken at the mining camp. He was the only moth, until Elizabeth, who had a family here to return to.

  The SPUSC skimmer set down a mile from base, on a flat meadow between woods and the river. A rover already sat there. The pilot turned off the engine. Jamison said to me, “That’s not a Corps rover. The family has its own?”

  “It belongs to their church, which
loans it to them. The Warrens are good people, Colonel. A close family, which may be why Brent made his way from the mining camp back here, and why he wants to see them every few months.”

  “How does he –”

  “He just comes here and waits. Eventually a dronecam spots him and someone lets the family know.”

  His mouth tightened. “A Corps dronecam.”

  “Which is not diverted from its usual business by noticing Brent.” The more I saw of Jamison, the more frightened I felt.

  “Where are the Warrens and... and him?”

  He had almost said ‘it.’ I snapped, “How should I know?” He looked at me – quiet, diffident, rabbit-harmless – and said nothing. I added, “We wait.” I climbed out of the skimmer. Jamison followed. The wind that gave the planet its ridiculously lyrical name blew in our faces. Warm, sweet-smelling wind, neither breeze nor gale, blew from sunrise to sunset.

  A few minutes later, Gina and Ted Warren emerged from the trees. They had their little girl with them, whose name I couldn’t remember. Brent trailed behind. Just a normal family, out for a Saturday walk.

  Jamison drew a sharp breath.

  Brent Warren walked lightly, fluidly, like a dancer. He was naked. The cocooning stage lasts for about a week – sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. We don’t know why. What emerges is not human. The form still has two legs, two arms, torso and head. The dull-red skin bristles with tiny projections – not hair, not fur, not scales – whose function is unknown. It’s the head that causes revulsion.

  Brent’s face bulged in a round, smooth ball. The two early autopsies showed that tissue had been added beneath the skin, containing organelles of unknown function that sent tendrils deep into the brain. On the surface of Brent’s face, features had been minimized. His nose was now two small nostrils, his mouth a lipless slit without the levator muscles that enable smiles or frowns. Above the face, on the top of his head, was a second, smaller bulge. Only his eyes remained the same, gray flecked with green, and it was into their son’s eyes that the Warrens mostly looked.