No Escape

by Alex Scarrow

  Time slowed down still further. And that’s when he saw it.

  One flash of light on the world as day and night looped the planet. One flash, followed by another and another. Artificial light, surely.

  Life? Is that Them?

  The pinpricks of light increased across the surface, at first random, isolated dots, but as the number grew, they began to link up into weblike patterns that could only suggest an intelligent structure.

  They’re showing me their history.

  The webs of light within the night side became hair-thin gray lines on the day side of the planet. Roads? He saw the lines converge and thicken and the blotches of grayness expand like bruising on an apple. The oceans began to show their own stains of color. The whiteness at both ends of the planet began to recede farther, until they eventually vanished. The discolored oceans began to rise, encroaching on the land masses, the gray cities quickly vanishing beneath the advancing olive seas.

  Rex noticed the atmospheric envelope thickening to become foggy, and he realized he was seeing this world rise in temperature, starting to cook itself within a hot and humid blanket.

  Global warming. Not just us, then.

  For a moment, he wondered if he was being shown a history of Their world or given a cautionary lesson with some hypothetical planet. The fog now thickened and became a featureless, solid, opaque envelope.

  The world began to recede beneath him and he sensed its story was over. Suddenly, he was whisked with a disconcerting blur to somewhere else. The sun here was warmer.

  Is this a different system?

  Another world was rushed toward him. The palette of planetary colors was more earthlike. The seas were turquoise, the land bluey green. Hair-thin lines raced toward weblike networks that converged on discolored stains of construction, and Rex watched as they began to break up and disappear, the dark stains of what had to have been vast cities fading to nothing. It didn’t disappear beneath a superheated blanket, which seemed a more positive thing, but its intelligent life vanished. This world’s story ended with a lush and verdant planet-scape, but no sign of civilization.

  Someone was here once. They tried to reach out beyond their world, but only got as far as orbit before…?

  Before what? They wiped themselves out? They ran out of resources? They were erased by a virus?

  Rex was jerked away again and found himself floating above a third world. Like the first two, the telltale signs of intelligent life were there: the crisscrossing trellis of lines, the golden glowing of artificial constructs on the night side. He wondered what fate was awaiting these poor souls.

  He wasn’t kept waiting long.

  His eyes picked out movement, something tumbling, approaching fast.

  An asteroid. It looked the size of a grain of rice to him, but if this planet was Earth’s size, then it could easily have been the size of Manhattan. It smacked into the middle of an ocean with a blinding flash of light.

  As the glare faded back down, he could see the atmosphere recoiling as a shockwave pushed it back, revealing a growing ring of planet surface exposed directly to the vacuum of space. He saw concentric rings of ocean racing out from ground zero; tsunamis that had to be hundreds if not thousands of yards high.

  A mushroom cloud rose from the point of impact, an enormous spout of ejecta that spread out and began to create a shroud that would, he suspected, end up coating the entire planet soon enough. He saw the delicate concentric rings of seawater meet the land and turn into pale white brushstrokes that kept on going. He saw lights on the dark side blink out. And the shroud quickly spread like spilled ink across tissue paper.

  Rex Williams had just been shown a sequence of worlds, dying in different ways.

  Intelligent worlds.

  Chapter 37

  In another dark void, in another place far away, a young man named Jake Sutherland understood what he’d just witnessed too. Unlike Rex Williams, he was much less self-conscious about voicing his thoughts out loud.

  “So. You’ve showed me lots of civilizations dying. Is that a warning or something?”

  His words hung in the darkness unanswered.

  “I was told to come and see. Is this what I was meant to see? Is there more?”

  The darkness remained unresponsive.

  “Hey, Camille? You there?”

  There was no reply from the girl who’d brought him here. He was alone. The sun, the dying world below him, were gone now. Even the faint stars…all gone. A plain, black canvas once more. He was beginning to wonder if that was the show. All done, and please pick up your trash as you exit this auditorium.

  That’s it? He hovered, bodiless, and waited, wondering how long he could exist in this nothingness before his mind caved in on itself, leaving him utterly lost. A day? A year? A decade? A century?

  I.

  A whispered voice. Jake’s attention jerked away from his growing panic. He waited for the voice to say something more.

  I…am…They.

  He looked around but saw only black. It was impossible to tell where the soft, sibilant voice had come from.

  “You…are you one of Them?”

  Them. Yes.

  “Where’s Camille? Where’s the person who brought me here?”

  Not here. Just you. And Us/I.

  He realized he was asking pointless, panicked questions. He’d been shown things, important things, and the next few words needed to not sound stupid, needed to be about what he’d been shown.

  “You showed me some alien civilizations? Real ones?”

  What is “alien”?

  “Alien? It means not from my world,” replied Jake.

  Then yes.

  “Why? Is it a warning? Is it—”

  It is history-truth. What has been.

  He was vaguely aware the voice had spoken a word he’d never heard before, but somehow his mind had automatically done it’s best to translate into a hybrid English: history-truth.

  Many. Civilizations. They come, they go. They never last.

  “We…up until you came, we thought we were alone in space.” Jake had the feeling somebody more qualified in astronomy or physics might have been a better volunteer. “We’ve been listening and looking for aliens for decades.”

  Very much time, very much space. Very little life like us. Like you.

  He played that reply through his head a couple of times before he got the sense of what He-She-They-It was saying.

  “You’re saying there’s so much time and distance between us all?”

  Yes. Never a chance to discover-share.

  Another one of Their hybrid words. The second half of the definition moved subtly like a digital circuit in his mind between the words share and bond.

  We/I, one of these. Once. We/I would last only a short while. Like you.

  “Why? Why only a short while?”

  The nature of complexity. Short-lived. It is fragile.

  Destroys itself. Or is destroyed.

  “But…you’ve just destroyed us!”

  Saved you. You are preserved-stored-alive.

  “You’ve ‘stored’ us? What do you mean by that?”

  Encoded. Reduced. Compressed. Now we can discover-share. Together.

  Camille had talked for a while with him before this dark void. Preparing him. They’d been sitting in a bizarre but pleasant setting of her choosing—a playground. She’d talked about what she called a “bioverse.” A shrinking down of all that mattered on this world into a much smaller space. But then, she’d added, small was really just a redundant word now. Like large, here, there, up, down—language that was inevitably going to fall out of use among the billions that now lived here.

  “You’re saying…this place, this bioverse thing is…?”

  Bioverse is…universe abstraction, minus distance, minus t
ime.

  “It’s the universe?”

  All civilizations, encoded and saved. Ours also.

  Jake let that sit in his head for a moment. “Are you saying what’s happened to us…the infection, the deaths, everything? That also happened to you?”

  Yes. And all others. Transformation-gift to us is now our transformation-gift to you.

  Chapter 38

  “High Tower, this is Eagle One. I’ve got eyes on it!”

  Aviation Pilot Warren “Hooch” Moffat tapped his F-15’s joystick lightly. The horizon swung, his left wing dipped obediently, and through the Plexiglas canopy, he was now looking down at the flat table of the deep blue Atlantic Ocean. The only feature on its surface defied Moffat’s ability to describe it.

  “That’s, uh…that’s a big-ass mother!” He was a pilot, not a poet.

  His wingman, Juice, kept formation beside him, rising up on his right as they both banked left together, describing a wide counterclockwise loop around the distant object far below.

  “Jesus Christ, Hooch…that thing’s made by the virus?”

  Moffat shrugged and shook his head. Their briefing had been hurried and, he felt, not entirely complete. “Maybe.”

  It looked like a floating theme park. That was the phrase that jumped into his head. The pinks, reds, purples, the swirls. The tall central structure looked like some cartoon island volcano ready to spray a geyser of M&M’s up into the sky.

  Holy crap. It even had big bunches of what looked like pink and red party balloons floating above it.

  “Goddamn freak show,” said Juice.

  “Eagle One, Eagle Two, this is High Tower. Just tell us precisely what you two are seeing!”

  “Copy that.” Moffat puffed his cheeks out before replying. “OK, well it looks like a…like some kind of island. It’s shaped sort of like a kidney bean. Mostly flat, but then there’s a…what looks like…a central funnel shape. Similar configuration to a volcanic island.”

  “Eagle One, is the object in motion or stationary?”

  Moffat and Juice were coming around toward the back of the island. He could see the white of breaking water at the front and a long, fading trail at the rear.

  “High Tower, affirmative. This thing’s definitely moving. It’s doing it slowly, but it’s moving.”

  “Eagle One, can you give us an estimated speed?”

  He shook his head. At this altitude, it was virtually impossible to gauge. “Hard to say—less than ten knots certainly.”

  “Less than ten knots, copy that.”

  He looked again at the wake it was leaving behind. The fading trail of foam seemed to be doing a good job of sticking around in a receding straight line, which meant a calm sea. But there was something else he could see there. Something beneath.

  “Juice?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Check out the wake. What do you see?”

  They were now passing directly over it, and Moffat could see his wingman straining forward in his seat and looking almost vertically down.

  “I see…” Moffat heard the soft clunk of his friend’s helmet against the canopy over the radio channel. “There’s something else down there…beneath the wake.”

  They were over it now. The wake was rushing away behind them. They were going to have to do another lap around the island before they got a second look at it.

  “I saw something trailing below the surface. That what you meant, Hooch?” added Juice.

  “Yeah.”

  “Eagle One, this is High Tower. Repeat your last.”

  “Juice and me were just saying it looks like this thing’s dragging something behind it. We’re going around to take another look. Lower this time.”

  “Copy that.”

  Moffat kept his joystick tilted left as they made an even arc around the structure, several miles long, slowly descending three hundred yards in altitude as they did so. Finally, they were coming back around again to approach the viral island. As the front of the island slipped past his left side, Moffat could see much more detail on the surface.

  The flat “ground” at the front looked like several dozen acres of an open slaughterhouse.

  “Looks pretty damn gross down there,” said Juice.

  “Uh-huh, you can say that again.” He could see blisters and boils, ropes of what looked like intestines, ribs and folds of dry flesh, all of it sunbaked and leathery.

  The cone shape in the middle of the island loomed toward them. Hundreds of thread-fine tethers emerged from the volcano’s crater, holding the party balloons in their big, jostling clusters.

  As they zoomed past, several dozen of the tethered clusters were released, a cloud of red and pink orbs detaching from their threads, rising quickly and spreading into the sky like a flock of startled birds.

  “Jesus!” He instinctively twitched his joystick to the left to give it a wider berth.

  “Jesus!” echoed Juice in his earpiece.

  “This is High Tower. What just happened, Eagle One?”

  “Floating objects, like balloons…a whole bunch just detached and scattered.”

  They were past the cone-shaped central structure and now fast approaching the rear of the island. He craned his neck to look down again at the leathery, organic landscape. This time, though, it seemed to be alive with movement.

  “Shitty shit!” gasped Juice. “You see that?”

  He could. A number of dark orifices in the ground had puckered open like whale blowholes and squeezed out what looked like soap foam. As the foam spread out and diffused, he could see that he was actually looking at a swarm of creatures of varying sizes.

  “Eagle One, what are you seeing?”

  “Creatures. Everywhere. Thousands. Millions of them!” replied Juice.

  “High Tower, this is Eagle One. The structure must have a substantial portion below the waterline. That’s where they’re all coming from.”

  The two F-15s roared over the rear of the island, and Moffat craned his neck to look down to his left at the island’s long wake.

  He could definitely see something down there under the water—something thick and pale, the faint ghost of an object that seemed to extend back, beneath the bubbles of the wake, as far as he could see, becoming lost in the flash of the sun on the ocean’s rippling surface.

  “Looks like it’s dragging a thick line or something,” said Juice.

  “Repeat your last.”

  Moffat replied, “The island seems to be dragging some sort of thick cable behind it.”

  “Cable?”

  No, that wasn’t the right word. “More like an umbilical cord.”

  Chapter 39

  “Will the president even bother listening to you?” asked Freya.

  Tom hunched his shoulders as he steered the jeep slowly along the Via Monumental. The road was busy, not with cars, but with ox- and horse-drawn carts and rickshaws stacked high with goods for trade. He honked the jeep’s horn to clear a space through the logjam and began to weave his way forward.

  “He may do. We go back a long way. We used to be army buddies.”

  “But if there’s a viral formation approaching Cuba, this island thing, he’s going to be really twitchy? Nuke twitchy?”

  “Uh-huh. If I can’t reason with him, I might be able to take him down.”

  “You’ll get shot, won’t you? He’s got guards, right?”

  “Well, let’s hope plan A works. If the virus is on its way, Trent needs to be convinced to talk with it…or…”

  Be taken out.

  Ahead of them was the Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro, a stone castle that dated back to Spain’s colonial times. Before the outbreak, it had been a well-visited tourist spot just outside the city with a large manicured lawn out front. Now the area was being used daily as a contraband marketplace wher
e supplies of homegrown and undeclared food supplies were being brought in to trade.

  “Dammit!” he cursed.

  They should have headed back into the city sooner. It was eight o’clock already, and the roads going into and coming out of Havana were clogged. Less than an hour ago, Tom had woken up, emerged from the “bioverse,” to find himself in this jeep, parked at a rest stop beside a field of cassava plants. He realized he understood everything—why the virus was here, why it had done what it had done. It was wary of the human survivors and the damage they could inflict with the weapons they had left.

  He had to get to Trent before Trent made a terrible mistake. But if the president knew he’d been touched by the virus, he was likely to order Tom shot and burned without a second’s hesitation.

  Seeing was the only way to comprehend it all.

  He now understood what had happened to Earth. And why. His journey into that bizarre inner universe had been like a visit to a planetarium or a wild virtual-reality ride in a theme park. But it had made perfect sense. If isolated pockets of life existed across the impossible-to-travel expanse of the universe, then the only chance they’d ever have to meet would be in a much smaller one. A microscopic cosmos.

  “You OK?” said Freya.

  He nodded. “My mind’s still reeling from all this.”

  “It’s a total head trip all right.”

  He nodded. “Our language just can’t explain it. We don’t have the words.” He honked the horn again and cleared a space down the side of a short line of tethered sheep. “I don’t know how the hell I’m going to convince Doug to allow himself to experience what I have.” The jeep rode up on the curb, then bounced down to the road beyond. “Freya, when did you first suspect that…that the virus had gotten inside you?”

  “Before we got to Southampton, I was using a cane. I was getting almost to the point where I needed a wheelchair.”

  “What was wrong with you?”

  “I had MS.”

  “Multiple sclerosis?”