Andromeda Expedition

by Carlos Arroyo González

  It was such an important part of him that he decided to get that tattoo of the leprechaun flipping the coin. Although nobody knew the real story, of course. Nor about Intuition, for that matter. That was a secret. He didn't want to divulge one of the fundamental pillars of his business.

  Rarely had he felt such a powerful “impulse” (as it was called in the terminology of the Intuition Movement) as when he saw that hobo in the alley in front of the second-hand implant shop window. So much so that he decided to send him on what was probably a mission on which the future of Humanity depended. Even though he saw in him a darkness very similar to the one he felt the day he went for that walk with Clara in the East Park. But since that day when he had guessed ten times correctly what would come out on the coin, his intuition had almost never failed him. Almost never.

  Now, sitting in a corner of his cell, he tosses the coin once more.

  “Tails,” he says.

  As it spins at full speed, the coin rips intermittent flashes from the hallway halogen light. When the coin lands in the palm of his hand, before he can check to see what came out, the lights go out. And at that moment he knows what is happening, just as he knows that the coin shows tails even though he cannot see it. Soon after, the uproar of shouting and gunfire confirms it for him. It's not a riot or an escape attempt. It’s much worse.

  He had come to doubt the instinct that has led him to let himself be caught. But when the carnage begins, Viper is glad to be behind bars.

  Emily Stockton is watching the cartoons. In that episode, Febles Duck is trying to learn how to jump into the pool from the springboard. But every time he tries, something unexpected happens. On one occasion, he doesn't realize that the pool is empty, and when he jumps in, he embeds himself in the ground, opening up a map of cracks all around him. In another, he bounces three times; on the third, the springboard gives way under his weight and breaks in two. Then when he has made sure that everything is in order, he finally gets ready to make the jump, and his arch nemesis, the Grumpy Cat, appears behind him and pushes him, and Febles falls into the pool in a spectacular way that makes Emily burst out laughing and spills some of the milk she is drinking. As Febles the Duck is planning his ultimate revenge against the Grumpy Cat, everything goes dark. Emily, after a few moments begins to feel afraid, so she calls her mother. A sizzling sound is heard not too far away, in the street.

  “It's all right, honey, the lights are out,” says her mother. Her reassuring footsteps approach. Emily feels a little better. “I'll go and see what happened. It's probably just a power failure.”

  “And you're going to leave me here alone?”

  “It'll only take a moment, nothing can happen to you here.”

  Emily hears the jingle of the keys as her mother picks them up. She still stands in front of the TV, curled up under her favorite blanket, trying to remain as still as possible, as if that could protect her. She hears the front door open and close again. Her mother's footsteps moving away. Not much, but enough to make her feel alone in the dark, where anything could grab her.

  A noise in the street, not too far away. A gunshot? No way, that's impossible. Someone slamming a car door. That's right. But not a gunshot, those things don't happen in real life. But what she hears next leaves her in no doubt. It leaves no room for mental detours. No room for subterfuge. The scream she hears pierces the darkness like a steel blade through a man's neck. It’s a scream from a person she knows very well.

  “Mommy?”

  Her voice barely reaches a few feet from where she stands, cowering in the center of her Febles Duck blanket. Then she hears another scream, but this one is more like an exclamation of surprise. The street door opens, spilling moonlight inside. Cut against that dim clarity is her mother's silhouette, hunched over in a way Emily doesn't like. She doesn't like it at all. Her mother comes in, dragging one leg and holding her belly. There Emily seems to see something glistening in the starlight. Something dark.

  “Emily,” her mother says in a whisper. “In the closet.”

  Emily continues like that. Completely motionless as she watches the figure pretending to be her mother stagger into the house. It is then that a dark creature, a figure that also glows in the moonlight, leaps at her mother and knocks her down. Emily runs to the closet and locks herself inside. She smells mothballs. On one side she feels the hardness of the Christmas tree box. Emily is crying, but she fights with all her might not to sob. In the silence she hears some knocking sounds approaching. When they reach the closet, they stop. A very strong smell, like concentrated bleach, overlays the mothballs. Emily tries not to breathe. On the other side she hears a sound like a dog sniffing, but much worse.

  Emily mentally shouts for her father.

  Klaus walked trying to orient himself by the moonlight. Among the trees, fireflies were indistinguishable from the eyes of the wolves.

  Martin S. Puncel, The Fairy Forest

  For several minutes he had the feeling of being falling. At any moment he expected the final blow. However through the torrent of water that accompanied him on his fall, his back made contact with a slippery surface with a slight slope that became less and less steep. During the dizzying descent, the lights of his helmet illuminated around him a kind of cartilaginous membrane whose protuberances were rushing past. The rest was just darkness. He was trying to look up when the fall stopped with a violent crash. He rolled onto his back, dizzy and disoriented, staring at the darkness around him. A distant roar, like thunder, rattled everything and reminded him of where he was.

  All around him, the light from the helmet reflected off a pale mucous-like surface. He stood up and walked a few steps. Following the perimeter he discovered that he was in an oval-shaped space about three hundred feet in maximum length.

  The fluffy room returned his cough in a damp echo.

  During the fall the catalytic converter had slipped off. He looked around with the light of the flashlight but did not see it.

  When he looked up, about thirty feet on one of the walls, he saw a membrane in the center of which there seemed to be an opening. He tried to climb up there, but only ended up slipping and filling himself with the slimy substance that coated everything.

  Through the wrinkled center of the membrane, a creature emerged that looked like the arachnoid that had come out of the shell. It moved into a dark corner, staying out of Fox's field of vision. Shortly thereafter it reappeared. Hooked on one of its protrusions it carried the neural catalyst. The creature disappeared through the membrane again.

  “Hey, wait!”

  Fox tried to chase it, but only managed to slip away and fall flat on his face on the soft surface of the monster's interior.

  Soon after, another one of those beings appeared. It stood still for a few moments next to the opening, as if assessing what the intruder that emitted that light could be. And it began to descend.

  Fox drew his gun and fired at the looming horror, a jumble of sharp limbs and bulbous protrusions. The shot grazed the creature and landed in the membrane. The leviathan shook violently and bellowed. The world turned upside down and Fox went flying. He managed to grab hold of a fleshy column. When all was calm again, he looked around for the creature. Behind him he heard a loud screeching sound. When he turned around, the nightmare was lunging at him. He struggled as the tubular valve throbbed anxiously over the visor of his helmet, searching for a suction point. Fox felt the weight of the arachnoid pressing him down with its pointed legs into the fleshy sliminess. He pulled the knife from his belt and stabbed the arachnoid, which let out an almost porcine scream. He stabbed it again and shook it off. The creature fell to the side with a muffled splat.

  He cut the tips off four of its limbs and hooked them onto his forearms and over his feet using the fasteners of the suit. He walked to the wall and carefully stuck one of those claws in; then a foot. He was surprised at how well they gripped the slippery surface. He climbed to the center of the membrane and stepped through it, penetrating into the
depths of his own mind.

  In there the silence was only broken from time to time by some distant dripping, and the monster's heartbeat, always present like the solemn ticking of a cyclopean clock that marked the countdown of Humanity. He looked around. I was in a tubular area of about fifty feet in diameter that faded into a dark horizon. It was a tunnel formed by a pinkish mucous membrane traversed by a tangle of thin, blackish, throbbing veins, like the roots of some dark, wretched tree desperately seeking sustenance. At regular intervals, fleshy columns and buttresses rose up, dripping with a viscous substance that caught the lantern light and twisted it in its tortuous descent. Under the restless lantern light, their shadows danced over the passageway intertwining in twisting angles of dank darkness. Smoky puddles dotted the path. The beam of the lantern pierced the vaporous columns that ascended in sinuous spirals like souls trying to leave this nightmarish place.

  His boots sloshed on that fleshy floor, which with each step sank slightly under his weight. A drop fell into one of the puddles and a hissing sound echoed through the passageway, like the warning of a snake.

  When he reached the end of the conduit he found that there was no continuation forward. He listened for the slightest clue that might lead him to the creature that had taken the neural catalyst. He heard a growing clatter and saw the arachnoid creature slip through one of the openings. Aided by the limbs he had severed from the creature, he reached the entrance to that new tunnel. Here the dark striae seemed more abundant. He immediately discovered that numerous entrances opened from this path, in all directions. The shadow of the arachnoid, enlarged by the light of the flashlight, slipped through a conduit descending at a rather steep angle. He tried to descend in a controlled manner, holding on with his newly acquired limbs, but after a few feet he slipped and began to descend at full speed. He struggled to hold on to the mottled mucous membrane around him but to no avail.

  He shot out and rolled over rough goo, the helmet light and flashlight spinning in a merry-go-round of demented visions. Once he stopped, he found that he was just inches away from one of those puddles, only this one was as big as a lake. Clouds of steam were rising into the darkness. The arachnoid was crawling across the lake along one of the walls, the catalyst hooked on one of its protrusions, teetering over the lake of acid. The monster's heartbeat reverberated more intensely there.

  Fox climbed up that fleshy striae through which a dense, transparent substance seeped. The hooks he had stolen from the creature seemed not to grip well, and he had a tendency to slip downward, so he advanced not in a direct trajectory to the other side, but in an oblique line upward to correct the loss of height. Foot, hand, foot, foot, hand, without looking down. The small waterfalls of goo that seeped between the striations he clung to collected the violet light of his helmet's LEDs and carried it on its slow descent, like lazy cascades. He dared to check the other side and found that he was already very close. The arachnoid disappeared down a tunnel, the catalyst clattering over its chitinous body.

  It was then that the monster, the leviathan in whose entrails he found himself, suddenly changed the direction of its trajectory and Fox lost his grip. He was thrown downward, flailing uselessly with his borrowed limbs. So instead of trying to hold on, he propelled himself by wedging a foot between one of those grooves. He landed on the other shore, though the sole of his right boot hissed in the bubbling liquid of which the lake was composed. He quickly rubbed his boot against the wetness of one of those walls. He felt an increasingly intense heat in his foot until it finally stopped. He checked the sole and saw that a large hole had appeared but it had not gone all the way through the rubber. He was tempted to lie down on the ground, let it mold around him in a slimy embrace, contemplating the darkness that covered him, and let himself drift off, into a perhaps eternal sleep, rocked by the pumping of the monster's heart, as the ground closed its silent embrace into a fleshy sepulcher. It was then that he heard a cough.

  “Hello?” he said to the darkness.

  The echo of his voice was followed by a pitiful wheeze, a labored breathing accompanied by a faint whistling sound. A familiar sound that chilled his blood.

  Fox turned to the opening from which it came. There was a thin membrane blocking the entrance. He reached out his hands and it turned out to be like a soft net curtain, the closest thing to something delicate he had seen in that place.

  Again that truncated breath, followed by a longing hiss that tore the bonds of a memory, making it as present as if not a single day had passed.

  He was in a small room. He had to duck his head as he walked. He scanned the room with the flashlight and then he saw them. Collapsed in a corner lay two men. One of them was not moving at all. The other was lying face down. His chest seemed to rise faintly from time to time. They wore a dark blue spacesuit. Fox came splashing over the unsteady ground, and didn't recognize the emblem. It looked like something generic. Something that after all, he reminded himself, had been created by his mind in a fleeting instant of terror. The one that still seemed to be breathing raised an arm and muttered something resembling a word.

  “Are you real?” said the man in a broken voice.

  That's what I should be asking you, Fox thought.

  He noticed that the man's oxygen level indicated the minimum level with a red circle. He transferred some of his reserve until both were half full.

  The man coughed and took several deep breaths. The wheezing gradually became normal breathing.

  “Thank you,” he said when he was finally able to speak. His voice had taken on a low, rumbling tone like a tuba.

  “I must keep going.”

  “What's the rush? We just met,” his voice ended in a low gurgle.

  Fox was aware that he had not yet looked at the corpse's name. The letterhead, of course, read: Capt. Fox Stockton.

  The other one grabbed him by the arm, while looking at him with a smile through which streams of blood trickled down and landed on his uniform, just like that day in the Chinatown apartment. He had thick dark circles under his eyes and his lips were chapped. His beard was growing wildly, like a wild vine that had taken the helmet visor as a support. He watched him with watery eyes.

  Fox knew that if he dug deep enough into the undergrowth of that beard he would find a pale scar on his neck, and if he looked in the pocket of that uniform he would find a notebook full of suspicions and accusatory scribbles. Ominous and senseless diagnoses generated by his own subconscious, surprised by the weight of guilt.

  Little Klaus followed that trail, hoping that it would lead him to the village and not to some monster's den.

  Martin S. Puncel, The Fairy Forest

  Fox released his grip with a sharp jerk and broke into a run. He entered the only other passageway besides the one through which he had come into the narrow room. A greenish glow filtered through the membranous walls of the conduit, defying the perennial gloom of that realm. Behind him, the laughter and roars of Edelmann/Bruce approached, echoing off the fleshy walls of the tunnel.

  He ran through a network of tunnels, following the monster's heartbeat, until his lungs would not allow him to take another step. When he stopped he found that Edelmann/Bruce's roar had faded.

  When he looked up he saw that he had entered a huge room, a bioluminescent palace that reached as far as the eye could see. It was like being inside an emerald, crisscrossed by glowing beams and columns that rose to a sapphire ceiling. Up there they crisscrossed in a symphony of dissonant angles, weaving their greenery into a monumental tangle of chaos and beauty.

  He observed those forms that almost looked like a new architectural style, as if his mind in that instant of digression had bothered to design that marvel inside that colossus even though no one would ever see it. The small irregularities and imperfections of that place were what gave it that majesty and that feeling of being something unique. Like the human being, actually. Perhaps, Fox thought, beauty is what it is, throughout the universe, and man is a mere intermediary for its pr
opagation. He also wondered if the ghosts that inhabited that place would know how to recognize it. Or if, on the contrary, they would cross that place from time to time with no other concern than to detect some possible intruder between the columns and the arches, or some scrap to drag into the monster's interior.

  And in an attempt to divert his attention from the nightmare into which he had plunged, he reflected on what would happen if the formula for perfect beauty were found, if such a thing could be within human reach. Would it not lead to perpetual boredom? Accustomed to the imperfect, finding such a thing might make us never want to return, as if after traversing dark, slimy tunnels we would reach a place of unsurpassed beauty. We would want to stay there forever. And then, in time, boredom would set in. And maybe someone would go back into those sinister and intricate tunnels and rejoice in those uglinesses and dangers. And he would cry out the beauty of his horrible discovery, and many would follow him in there again, fleeing from the perpetual ennui of perfection.

  Up there, the arachnoid carrying the catalyst slipped through an opening. Fox ascended a beam steep enough to allow him to move forward. The beam's glare crept up his uniform as if trying to integrate him into the majestic and insane architecture.

  The incline became less steep as he gained height, until it became something like a bridge that carried him through the glare of the huge room.

  Somewhere behind him thundered the voice of Edelmann/Bruce. If that palace had a voice, that would be it.

  Fox was concentrating on not falling off that narrow luminescent walkway. The bridge ended at a dark entrance that led back into the monster's flesh. Fox's heart was pounding inside the helmet, still racing. As he stepped through the entrance, he turned the flashlight back on. A wet, throbbing conduit of pale flesh furrowed with dark striations. A few feet away he turned to the right. He came to a room that was like a squashed sphere, as if he were inside an egg. The entire surface of its shell was perforated by hollows that oozed a yellowish substance. The holes seemed to have been dug into the fleshy wall. Their edges were jagged as if someone had broken through using primitive tools. On the other side of the egg there was an exit with a larger diameter than the rest of the dozens of holes. A murmur, as if all the spectators in a stadium were chewing with their mouths open, reverberated in that place.