Rationality Zero

by Guillen, JM

  “Negative five, gentlemen.” Anya’s voice was tight.

  The woman and the man were still screaming; gurgling cries of anger and horror all rolled into one. I glanced at Anya, and then at the Irrat.

  “Can we shut them up?” Wyatt glanced at the odd dials and switches at the base of the male’s cylinder, even as he watched the shadows.

  “We have no way of knowing what these do, Wyatt.” Anya was checking her readings.

  Then, one of the cold, hooked tentacles reached for me from the brine. I leapt back, swinging both katana, but missed. As I watched that one, a second swiped at my leg, and I felt the hooks tear through the fabric of my slacks.

  “Fuck!” It was agony, was deep, unreasoning terror. I cried out, rolling away from the tentacle even as it tried to curl around my leg.

  Engaging Wraith. I had already begun the process as I linked.

  “Oh, fuck this.” The high pitched whine of the tangler amped up, and I lunged again for the place in the shadows where the tentacle had just been.

  There was nothing there.

  My leg was throbbing agony where those hooks had shredded my slacks and carved coldness into my body. My heart thundered with terror as I wondered if those hooks were how they injected a subject with larvae.

  No time.

  I could feel the aberration laughing, mocking us. It was like knives in my mind.

  “I’ll stop her. You want to move, Anya,” Wyatt’s voice was gruff. I heard him typing. “Over here.”

  Then, WHUF.

  I didn't even turn and look. My eyes were only for those strands of coiled darkness. I watched, my blades held high.

  Then I heard the woman's scream.

  It changed in pitch, from rage to agonizing terror. Wyatt was keying something up, his fingers flying. As he did, her screams choked off, liquid and wet.

  I knew I didn’t want to see what was happening. I had seen Wyatt boil the blood of people while alive. I had seen him reduce the water in their body to absolute zero or force their bones into a gaseous state.

  He was taking care of business, that was all.

  As the woman’s cries choked off, however, I saw the briny pool ripple; I felt the muttering in the back of my mind shatter into angry shards.

  Wyatt, that may not have been—

  I hadn’t even finished my link when the aberration exploded from the brine. It splashed its stinking filth all across us.

  It was like the Vyriim we had seen before, only much larger. As it dragged itself from the pool, it swam into the air, a vaguely squid-shaped mass of bundled tentacles.

  It was horrific grace. It screamed into our minds.

  With less than a thought, the Adept was already in play. I tumbled across the floor, aiming to be directly beneath the bundled mass. Perhaps if I struck at its center with my blades—

  But it was already moving, arcing through the air like some terrible denizen of the deep ocean. It writhed through the air, with a few of the tentacles breaking off, forming smaller clusters, and then rejoining the whole.

  With an urgent intensity, it bore down on Wyatt, dozens of hungry tendrils writhing.

  He didn’t have a chance.

  I watched in horror as one tentacle wrapped around his waist, and two more grabbed the same leg.

  You can fuck right off! I could feel fury and unreasoning terror in his link. The tangler whirred, and then it went off.

  WHUF. WHUF. WHUF. One of the spikes flew wild, piercing the side of another of the glass and metal cylinders. Wyatt’s link devolved into mental agony as the barbed tentacles shredded both clothing and flesh.

  Then it swam back towards the pool of bubbling brine, dragging Wyatt along with it.

  I could feel the adrenaline in his body, the agony of the hooks and the terror of death.

  Still beneath the Wraith, I leapt forward, blades flashing. I couldn’t possibly reach the tentacles that held Wyatt, but I sliced squarely through another one, my blades cutting cleanly. A yellowish ichor splashed against the floor, and the severed tentacle continued to writhe, undulating where it lay.

  In my mind, the creature screamed. Its body turned towards me, several tendrils hungrily seeking.

  I had felt before that the aberrations could sense me through the Wraith, and I still wasn’t certain how that was possible. Now, however, when the creature turned towards me, it didn’t behave as if it immediately noticed me.

  Instead, it focused upon Anya, swarming towards her, appendages hungrily writhing.

  No! I spun towards it, slicing as I came. Three more of the aberrant tentacles fell before my blade, spraying a mist of otherworldly viscera.

  I was swinging again when I felt Anya’s scream through my crown. It was like shards of ice, cutting me to the quick.

  Michael! The link carried with it terror and sensation. I could feel the pain as it wrapped itself around her, as it shredded part of her tactical gear and the skin on her arms and legs. The sensation was crushing, and I was horrified to realize that the hooks had a terrible purpose.

  They shredded any barrier between the creature and any orifices that it could use to claim a body as its own.

  It was all happening so quickly. My connection to my friends was so intimate that I couldn’t help but partially experience their pain and terror as smaller tendrils sought ingress to their bodies. I could hear Wyatt as a slender strand was snaking its way up his leg—

  No. No! No! Nooo!

  I lunged forward, attempting to reach for the tentacles that had him, but the entire tangle moved, again swimming back towards the pool of mucous. In a shining moment of clarity, I realized what was about to happen. It would retreat into the brine, dragging my friends with it to those murky depths.

  Then, they were truly lost.

  I only had a moment to think. Anya and Wyatt were across the room from each other; there was no way I could get to both of them. Every time I struck with my blades, it seemed as if more tentacles simply took the place of what I cut away. No, I needed something different—

  The dampener grenades.

  Frantically, I scoured through my pockets. I had no way of knowing if baseline Rationality would slow the creatures, but I knew they had altered things before striking, both times. They were fast, perhaps even too fast for the Adept, but if I could just tilt things, even just a little—

  That was when my hand came to rest on the cool disk of the Tabula Rasa.

  The Tabula was often a last ditch device, and would utterly obliterate all matter within its radius. For a moment I hesitated, uncertain. After all, it could kill us just as easily.

  Then, I heard Anya’s cry cut off. I looked, and saw that the Vyriim had her in the air, carrying her towards the pool. It was suffocating her, forcing one of its tentacles down her throat. She gagged around its filth, tears streaming down her face.

  Fuck this. I’d rather us all be dead than this.

  I grasped the small disk and pulled it out, twisting dials as I did. I knew that some of the settings weren’t exact, but exact wasn’t something I had time for.

  As it began to heat in my hand, I leapt towards the main body of the monstrosity. When I was close enough, I plunged the device into its center mass, trying not to retch.

  The scent, combined with the sensation of dozens of them slithering against me, was mind rending. I pushed as deeply as I could, screaming with horror. I buried my arm to my shoulder, before releasing the Rasa.

  Then, with revulsion burning in my blood, I yanked my arm free.

  For a terrifying moment, I thought I was stuck.

  The second I had touched the strands, of course, they had felt my presence. Some began wrapping themselves around my arm, tiny barbs sinking into my jacket. Still, I had the strength of a man gripped by horror, and I tore free, shredding portions of my inner arm as I did.

  Frantically, I stumbled and hurled myself away from the creature. I could hear Wyatt, screaming in my mind, but Anya had gone silent.

  I didn�
��t even know what radius the device had been set for, as I couldn’t exactly make out the dials in the misty gloom. It could take the entire room, for all I knew, but that would be better, far better than—

  It felt like thunder in my bones. There was a writhing, screaming silence. I glanced over my shoulder, at the abomination hanging in the air, but all I could see was brilliance, burning magnesium white, as the Tabula Rasa obliterated everything in a sphere around it.

  Too large. The thought was maddening, frantic. I set it too large. It will swallow us—

  Then, the field collapsed.

  In an instant, the air in the room crashed into the center of what was now a vacuum, and I was tossed forward, head over heels. The collapse was followed by a loud pealing rumble that I could feel in my skull, and I hit my head against the stone floor, pain blossoming sharply in my skull.

  I slumped forwards, feeling the dark curtain of unconsciousness slipped around me, soft and inviting.

  “No…” I tried pushing myself up, tried biting my tongue hoping that the pain would keep me awake.

  Now initiating type III emergency resuscitation protocols. I could hear the prompt in my crown, but it seemed impossibly far away. Rerouting viral mecha operating parameters.

  My heart seemed to explode as the adrenaline poured through my system. I pushed myself up, gasping, with my eyes wide.

  I could hear Anya, gagging and retching. When I opened my eyes, I saw her on all fours, sicking up a good two feet of writhing tentacle. It was severed from the whole, and the ground was covered with similar, still writhing appendages. They were dying, strands that had been left, sliced neatly in two when the body of the aberration has ceased to exist.

  Then I felt Wyatt over the link.

  He was broadcasting, but not words. Instead, it was a panicky mix of pain and terror, laced with horrified bewilderment. I turned towards him, and saw him frantically prying one of the severed tentacles off of his face. The tendrils were twitching reflexively, pulling at the barbs embedded in his flesh.

  The left side of his face was a ruin.

  Wyatt! Horrified, I sprinted to him. He cautiously peeled the tendril from his head, and I felt my heart fall to somewhere around my knees.

  Wyatt’s left eye was completely sliced from his face.

  Hoss. I could feel his searing pain, and knew his heart was hammering in his chest, but also feel him trying to steady himself. He threw the tendril in disgust and cold fury. Glad to see you.

  Fuck. I gaped at him, completely lost for words. Wyatt, I—

  I’m sending calibrations for your viral mecha. Anya’s link felt… weary, exhausted in a way I had never heard from her. These are suggestions for tissue regeneration and pain management.

  I heard the whirring as the packet hit my crown. A brief perusal showed almost half of my mecha being geared for pain management.

  Anya. Wyatt groaned in agony as he sat up. His shredded face was macabre. These settings—

  Will not restore your loss, Wyatt. She retched again, bringing up a small, writhing tendril.

  No. He shook his head. You’re suggesting that we recalibrate using viral mecha that we need for survival. We still need oxygen, need basic biological requirements.

  “Yes.” She sat up, wiping her mouth. Her voice sounded positively dainty in the cavernous room. “These settings will reduce us from having three hours twenty-three operational minutes to fifty-three operational minutes. However, we will be pain free and capable of almost full operational standards.” She gave the tiniest of smiles. “We will conserve energy further by not using the comm. It’s the best we can do. If we must, we can use the dampener grenades and the tangler to create save havens for ourselves as we traverse the topia.”

  It still sounded dire.

  Still, there was little choice. We were all about to topple over, and Wyatt was probably in shock, even though he still had the strength to snark.

  If we didn’t make the calibrations, we wouldn’t make it much further than this room, regardless.

  “We can go back.” I let the words hang in the air for a long moment before speaking again. “We were closer to Rationality on the other side of that hatch.”

  “I wager my right eye that the intel we need is on this side of the hatch.” Wyatt’s tone was flat. “I think Anya needs to get all the readings that she can.”

  “Our life expectancy,” Anya’s eyes were distant, but then she looked at me, “will not increase by a great deal on the far side of that hatch.”

  We were all silent for a moment, and I knew that the choice was made. I made the appropriate alterations to my viral mecha, and the burning pain where I had been struck with the tentacles faded into a numbness.

  It was perhaps the only way we would survive.

  I was the first to stand. The room was still dim, but the screaming from the cylinders had stopped. Peering through the darkened glass, I could see that the young woman inside was dead, surrounded by tiny filaments of blackness, floating lifelessly in the water.

  In fact, every strand in the room seemed to be dead or dying.

  The Tabula Rasa had worked just as intended— the parts of the creature caught in the blast radius had simple ceased to be, as the device obliterated everything within range. In the floor, beneath where the aberration had been floating, was a hemispheric shaped bowl, part of the floor that had been carved into nonexistence.

  “The room looks clear.” My voice echoed oddly in the gloom. I let my vision drift through the various spectra of light, but couldn’t see anything moving except for us.

  “I’ll take your word for it.” Wyatt was fastening a Confederate flag handkerchief around his head, covering his eye and stanching the bleeding.

  Then, he stood, shouldering the tangler again. He stepped to the edge of the pool, and I heard his gear start to whine.

  “Let’s make certain that no more squigglies can have their happy birthday in here.” He fired one, then a second spike into the pool, his fingers gleefully keying in some destructive spite.

  “There will be dozens of these rooms, Wyatt.” Anya’s voice sounded so… tired. “The intel we have on the creatures is that when they invade a topia, they come in swarms of thousands. This one pool isn’t remotely enough.”

  “Invade?” I turned towards her. “Is that the assumption now? That the Vyriim are invading Rationality?”

  She looked towards me. The tiniest bit of a patient smile teased the edge of her lips.

  “It’s not an assumption, Michael.” She stood. “Every piece of tactical data we have on the creatures states that colonization is their primary goal. They’ve never been encountered in these numbers so close to Rationality.” She shrugged. “I think it’s apparent.”

  I hated that she was correct. Still, all logic pointed in the same direction. There had been hundreds of the creatures in just one of the cylinders. Positioned this close to Rationality, this wasn’t just a simple incursion.

  It was invasion.

  It was all out war.

  “Well, they can’t use this one.” Wyatt his one final key. “We should move, though. I bet this stuff smells even worse while boiling.”

  “Roger that.” I picked up one of my katana from where I had apparently dropped it. “There’s another door, it’s just on the far side of the room. I glimpsed it while saving everyone from a horrific fate.”

  Faster next time, yeah? I could feel Wyatt’s playful grin over the link, and I couldn’t help but chuckle.

  He amazed me. I knew his viral mecha were cloaking his pain, but the fact that he could still tease, even in the face of having his eye ripped out…

  Wyatt wasn’t defeated. Even in the face of physical disfigurement, of only being alive for another few hours, and the invasion of our world, he was still himself, still refused to stay down.

  That was who we were.

  We weren’t out of this yet, but we were a long way from beaten.

  20

  We wandered through
several small rooms after that. Most of them seemed dedicated to equipment of various types; Anya believed they were used to power the machinery in the spawning room. Regardless, we saw no one as we went, and Anya took readings the entire time.

  Still, the building reminded me far more of an old office building than a hideout for Irrational terrorists, or a breeding ground for any human aberrations.

  It was about three minutes later that we came across the first of the massive doors. It reminded me of the bank vault style door that we had dropped through to come here. Above it, there was a brass plaque that looked as if it had been installed yesterday.

  Dhire Lith

  “What language is that in, Anya?” I remembered, then, that I had forgotten to tell her about the Russian I had overheard.

  She peered at the letters. “None that I know. We can analyze it if we contact the Lattice again, but without it, I cannot say.”

  “When.” I put my hand on her slight shoulder. “When we contact the Lattice.”

  She smiled up at me sweetly. “Of course.”

  We decided to ignore the large round door for the moment and continued down the hallway, passing another window. Like before, it looked out onto a night sky.

  “Not home, that's for sure.” Wyatt peered through the glass. The sky was more violet than black, and there were millions of visible stars. The land around us was a desolate waste, and the moon hung low, its light orange and sickly.

  It gave me nausea just looking at it. The sky seemed to writhe, and bleed. It was bent.

  It was wrong.

  At the end of the hallway was another set of double doors, still looking like any doors one might encounter in an office.

  Anya was already taking readings. “Still at ambient zero.”

  I nodded at Wyatt, and cracked open the door. His fingers were tense on his keys.

  No one.

  Inside was a laboratory. It looked quite sterile, with several metallic surfaces. There were worktables with unfamiliar gear, and a shelf with binders of notes on lined, yellow paper.

  Anya's fingers were twitching rapidly. “Zero. But,” she tilted her head, as if listening to echoes that only she could hear, “I have traces of Irrational activity. I can't do a weave analysis without the Lattice. If I could, however, I believe that it would show that Rationality is often altered in this room.”