A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  A black sphere-thing rose from a docking station on the wall and drifted towards her, arms uncoiling as it approached. It was speaking gibberish, though she thought she recognised a few words. She fled.

  She had expected her legs to give out underneath her as soon as her feet touched the cold metal but was surprised to find she could stand. Naked, she ran at the door. The door opened for her and she bolted from the strange room and the even stranger machine.

  She was in a corridor made from the same dark metal as the room. She paused at an intersection ahead and looked down each of the branching corridors. Every one looked the same as the last. Slowly, it was coming to her. She realised she had to be on some kind of spaceship.

  How much time has passed? It had never felt important before. She remembered the parasites crawling through her skin, then the pain of disease, and finally the burning. Then nothing. No, not nothing – sometimes she thought she felt something trying to reach her through her shell, her cocoon, her home.

  Then she’d woken. She recalled a strange and horrible man in bizarre make-up standing over her. Then she couldn’t breathe, her skin burned and there was noise and light. When it all went dark again, she was sure she had died.

  She wrapped her arms around herself. She was starting to shake – cold, fear, she wasn’t sure which. She wondered if there were any drugs back in the hospital room she had woken in. Just something to calm her a bit. Help her deal.

  She hadn’t heard a sound but suddenly she was sure there was someone behind her. She thought she caught the slightest whiff of tobacco. Her shaking intensified. She closed her eyes and tried to will herself to turn around.

  ‘Please …’ she all but sobbed.

  She couldn’t even hear breathing, but she was still convinced that someone was standing behind her. The smell of tobacco had faded, replaced by a weird absence of almost any scents.

  Slowly she managed to control her fear, though the shaking wouldn’t stop. She half-convinced herself that she’d been imagining things. Slowly she turned around.

  A glimpse was enough. It was the strange and horrible man. He was small, wiry and wearing a horrible brown suit and hat. He was staring at her. She couldn’t read his expression – there was no desire, no lechery; her nakedness appeared to make not the slightest difference to him. No anger or hatred in those cold, dead fish eyes, either. She screamed and ran.

  She sprinted along corridor after corridor. It didn’t matter where she went as long as she put distance between herself and that man. Then she found herself running out of corridor.

  Doors! she thought desperately. There are doors. She made for the closest one, looking for controls but seeing none. She raised her hand to hammer on it as she glanced back along the corridor. The skull-faced man was nowhere to be seen. The door slid open. The room was red inside. She wasn’t sure how many bodies – men, women, animal people. All of them looked as if they had died violently. Many of them were in pieces.

  She staggered back, bringing her hands up to cover her mouth. Strong fingers grabbed her arms, gripping her tightly. She started to scream as the doors to the red room slid shut.

  ‘Shhh,’ the skull-faced man whispered. One of his sharply filed nails pierced her skin and false calm flooded through her. The fear was still there but it mattered less. He let her go. She lurched away from him, bumping against the wall of the corridor. The metal was so cold against her skin. She slid to the ground.

  Cold arse. The inane thought rose unbidden and made her giggle.

  ‘What’s your name?’ The man’s voice, like everything else about him, was horrible. He had a strangely accented, low, croaky voice but unlike the floating machine, he, at least, wasn’t spouting gibberish.

  ‘Talia,’ she said, staring at him. The fear under control, she was fascinated by his grotesqueness.

  ‘Talia, I can either hurt you or drug you, or you can cooperate. Which do you prefer?’

  ‘What are you going to do with me?’ She remembered the red room. The fear was trying to rise within her again. She wanted to move away from the wall. She knew there were dead people on the other side of it.

  ‘Sell you,’ the man said eventually.

  She nodded as if this was an obvious answer. Then she started to cry. The skull-faced man frowned but let her cry, watching her as if it was a test of some kind.

  ‘Don’t hurt me,’ she pleaded.

  ‘I’ll try, but sometimes …’ he said. ‘It’s not easy, you know?’

  She stared up him. The soporific effects of whatever he had spiked her with were battling the terror that wanted to overwhelm her.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she said at last, more for something to say than from any real interest in the answer.

  ‘Scab,’ he said. She snorted with laughter and then clamped her hand over her mouth. ‘Woodbine Scab.’

  ‘Like the cigarette?’

  Scab reached into his suit jacket and drew a cigarette case from his breast pocket. Talia noticed that his teeth were stained yellow. They were also filed to points and capped with silver. He offered her a cigarette. Trembling, she took one. He took one for himself and then lit both.

  Again? He wondered why Scab had killed him this time. Then came the terror. He began to thrash in the strangely murky nutrient gel of the clone tank as he remembered Ludwig, blithely ignoring the Basilisk’s defences, phasing through the craft’s hull and into the converted corvette-class ship’s interior.

  An Elite! A fucking Elite had killed him! What he couldn’t understand was how he was being cloned. He’d run out of clone insurance after the last time, when Scab had cloned him and refused to tell him how he’d died in the first place. More to the point, when Elite killed they tended to infect the neunonics with viruses that not only scrambled memory uploads but could remain hidden long enough to snake their way into insurance company personality/memory backups and destroy them as well.

  He wondered if he was going to be cloned just long enough to appreciate the process of turning into a mentally scrambled freak, with the possibility of being a preprogramed slave to boot.

  He became calmer as narcotics flooded his system. He audited himself. He was a mostly natural insect. It was the usual cloning process. The gel protected his fragile exoskeleton from the ravages of gravity, artificial or otherwise. His neunonics felt rudimentary. Presumably he was waiting for components, assuming that whoever had paid for his cloning was going to rebuild his hard-tech-enhanced body so it could be of use.

  Then it struck him. If he’d been captured, any one of the massively powerful people Scab had pissed off could be holding him. The insect-run Queen’s Cartel – he’d released a virus in their Arclight habitat after killing an extremely expensive blank. The Consortium – they’d wanted the cocoon Scab had been paid by a mysterious client to find. The Church, who wanted to stop everyone getting the cocoon in case it broke their monopoly on bridge technology. Or the Monarchists could be holding him, because Scab had just tried to attack the Citadel of their Elite. But none of this made sense, however. If he’d been captured, why clone him? Why not just drop his personality/memory backup into a torture immersion? The horrible thought occurred to him that he might be the prisoner of some fetishist weirdo who preferred the incredibly less efficient and more time-consuming torture of actual flesh. Oh, excrement, I’ve been sold to some sicko as their insect meat puppet! It was the only possible explanation his slightly addled and drugged mind could reach.

  Through the dirty gel he could see he was in an unevenly paved stone room with an arched entrance. The tank itself was made of what looked like polished dark wood with brass fittings, though he’d had to use his rudimentary neunonics to look up both materials.

  The only illumination in the room came from the tank itself, a transparent-fronted cold storage made from similar material to the clone tank, and some strange burning things in a kind of special
ist rack, which were called candles, according to Vic’s neunonics.

  Fear overcame narcotics when the red-clad monk, a cowl covering his features, walked into the chamber. He was followed by a crystal and wood cylinder, also with brass fittings, floating on an AG motor. A thick, black, viscous liquid flowed around inside the cylinder, apparently with a life of its own.

  His first thought was the Church. That was frightening enough, but it was the realisation that this wasn’t the Church – that he had, in fact, been cloned by a heretical cult – that really made him exude pheromonic terror.

  It was difficult to tell, but he assumed the monk was watching him. He had no idea what the cylinder of black liquid was doing, or even what it was. Then the pain started. He felt something growing through the meat of his brain. Tweaking the pain centres. His neunonics weren’t as rudimentary as he’d initially thought. They were invasive. It was an audit. Whoever was doing it didn’t just want to know something. They wanted to know everything. His mandibles locked open in a constant silent scream. It lasted a long time and stimulants pumped through his system kept him awake through it all. They wanted coherent thought, not the subconscious ramblings of an insect mind modified to be more human so he could embrace his humanophile tendencies and dream.

  He was exhausted and in pain from the exertion of constant thrashing in the dense gel. He recognised the shape of Scab, sitting slouched on the ornately carved dark-wood chair now next to the tank, smoking.

  ‘I had to know,’ Scab said over the ’face connection. It would never be an apology.

  ‘What have you done?’ was all Vic could manage.

  ‘Things have moved on. We … I have the cocoon.’

  Vic was always impressed by Scab’s ability to inspire more fear just when you assumed you’d reached your tolerance threshold for the emotion.

  ‘So give it to your employer and let’s get paid,’ Vic said, with a sinking feeling. Scab just shook his head. ‘In that case, just wait around for any number of people to come and kill you. Can you switch me off first?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not, Scab? Why not?’

  ‘You’re useful.’

  ‘Do you really need me, Scab?’ Vic demanded. The human didn’t answer. ‘Then switch me the fuck off.’

  ‘You tried to kill me,’ Scab said at last. Vic thought he heard sadness in Scab’s voice but then assumed he must have imagined it. ‘But it’s not in you. It must have happened after.’

  So that was what the audit had been looking for. Apparently, after Ludwig – a machine Elite from the Monarchist systems – had killed him, Vic’d been cloned again. Then something happened that made him try to kill Scab, and Scab had him cloned yet again.

  ‘Maybe it was after the fucking Elite killed me!’ Vic screamed. He was pleased he’d managed to emote human screaming across the ’face link.

  ‘Do you want to kill me now?’ Scab asked.

  ‘Fucking obviously.’

  ‘I wasn’t looking for intent. I was looking for the will.’

  This stopped Vic. He often fantasised about killing Scab. He thought he’d always managed to hide it quite well from the human, even during the frequent neural auditing required by their ‘partnership’ agreement, though none had been as invasive, deep or all-encompassing as the last one. Scab was right, though. Even after everything, even after this, he knew he wouldn’t be capable of acting on his murderous feelings towards the human. He was too frightened of him.

  ‘They’re going to send Elite after you,’ Vic said weakly. ‘No amount of being a vicious little prick will help you.’

  ‘I don’t think so. They can’t risk me utterly destroying her. It’s the Church we need to worry about.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s all right, then,’ Vic said, nailing sarcasm.

  Vic hung in the tank in silence for a while. He could see the red glow of the tip of Scab’s cigarette through the murky gel.

  ‘When will this be finished?’ the insect asked.

  ‘All I can promise you is a quick and easy death if I have any control over it.’ This last was difficult for Scab. He was uncomfortable admitting the possibility of a loss of control.

  ‘I’m not like you, Scab. I want to live.’

  ‘It’s the best I can do. It’s either that or I leave you in a torture immersion with the longest time dilation I can find.’

  ‘Audit me again, see if I can kill you now,’ Vic ’faced with real venom, but they both knew it was only bravado. They both knew he would do what he was told.

  3

  Britain, a Long Time Ago

  Back when Germelqart could still think, back when there was more to him than pain, more to him than burning in the chest, agony in the screaming muscles in his legs and arms as he tried to keep swimming, back when he was a man, he wished he had never read Herodotus. He wished he had never heard of the Cassiterides, the Tin Islands, and the moon-touched Pretani who inhabited them. Wished he had never signed on with his friend and captain Hanno to use his gifts to navigate the Will of Dagon in his god’s name.

  The beach was not getting any closer. It was a dream. Once, he lived for the sea, but that was the warm blue sea within the Pillars of Herakles, not the cold, grey seas surrounding this land of mists, monsters and madmen.

  It took a while for his exhausted mind to understand what the feel of the silt through the water meant. He was crawling as much as he was swimming now. He dragged himself onto the beach and collapsed, gasping for breath, trying to draw air into burning lungs.

  He could not quite manage thought yet. He saw but did not understand the black, greasy smudge of smoke in the air coming from the giant burning, man-shaped cage to the west of the island on whose beach he now lay. He could smell burned flesh and effluence. Even if he had been thinking clearly he would have struggled to understand why the giant burning man of wood and metal had started to disintegrate and fall into the water.

  Once, he had known that the dark tendrils in the water were blood from the hundreds who died there, reduced to a crimson froth in the feeding frenzy of the things that were neither shark nor human. The creatures that had been waiting for them in the water.

  Now he just about understood that the black ships with hulls made of skins – the Pretani called them curraghs – that he saw surging through the water against current and wind were bad. Crewed by demons. He did not have the strength to crawl away from the black ships. He lay on the wet sand under what passed for a sun god in this cold northern land, letting the little waves break over him.

  As the burning in his chest subsided, as thought slowly returned and with it understanding of his surroundings, he noticed a figure standing among the sharp grasses of the dunes further inland. He wore a robe of some kind, but even from where the navigator lay the robe looked filthy and stained. The figure held a staff with various small items hanging from it, and there was something wrong with the man’s face.

  Germelqart understood that there were people running across the sand towards him. He wondered if they were coming to help him. In this cursed land he thought probably not.

  Bress knelt among the smoke and flame, leaning on his now quiet sword stained with the blood of Fachtna, the warrior from the Ubh Blaosc, the Egg Shell. They had failed. It meant less than nothing to him.

  There had been enough meat left in him to feel the pain of the Muileartach, the primal goddess who dwelt beneath the waters. Her pain had been caused by the suffering he wrought in Crom Dhubh’s name to summon Llwglyd Diddymder, the Hungry Nothingness.

  Crom Dhubh’s touch, that ever-present, disgusting violation, had been lost among the Muileartach’s screaming. Now he felt the tendrils of the ‘Black Crooked One’s’ presence creeping through his mind as the wicker man started to disintegrate. The cage of wood and metal was returning to its constituent parts. Hiding the evidence of its violation of history.


  It was a mistake to kill the warrior. The words were like rotting silk in his mind.

  Only in light of your failure, Bress thought. Even in his armour, the heat of the flames was becoming too much against his immortal skin. The wicker man felt progressively more unsteady underneath and around him.

  Our failure, Crom Dhubh reminded Bress as his flesh started to smoke and blister.

  I did what I set out to do … what you wanted me to do.

  This Fachtna could have shown us the way to the Ubh Blaosc. The slaves of the Lloigor are one of the few threats to us left. There was no anger there, not even real reproach. Reproach or anger would have required some connection, some recognition on the part of the Dark Man that Bress was an equal, or even something remotely similar to him. If that had ever been the case it was a long time ago.

  The whereabouts of the Ubh Blaosc are only important in light of your failure, Bress reiterated. He didn’t add that this was because things still existed. He didn’t have to. Crom Dhubh, the Dark Man, knew his thoughts. There was no reply, but Bress could still feel the other as a corrupt presence living like a parasite in the back of his mind.

  What now? Bress asked. His lungs were full of smoke but he did not cough, nor did tears stream down his soot-stained face. All around him the metal and wood framework of the wicker man looked as if it was eating itself.

  Nothing. It was little more than a distant hiss.

  He was discarded. No longer required. He had expected to feel something – relief, maybe, even so far from what could laughingly be called home. Maybe even loss as the Dark Man’s presence bled out of him. He felt nothing.

  He stood up as flames reached hungrily for his flesh. The wicker man shook beneath him with every movement. He searched for feeling again as he strode to what remained of the edge of the platform. There was no sky now, only thick, greasy, black smoke.