Echogenesis

by Gary Gibson

  Gary Gibson

  Echogenesis

  First published by Brain in a Jar Books 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by Gary Gibson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Gary Gibson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  First edition

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

  Find out more at reedsy.com

  “The universe is not for man alone, but is a theatre of evolution for all living beings. Live and let live is its guiding principle.”

  - Virchand Rhagavji Gandhi

  Contents

  1. THE LANDER

  2. THE POOL

  3. THE INTERFACE

  4. THE STARS

  5. THE STREAM

  6. THE BAY DOOR

  7. THE COMMAND DECK

  8. THE TRUCK

  9. THE LOVERS

  10. THE VOTE

  11. THE RIVER

  12. THE CAMERA

  13. THE HOWLING

  14. THE HERD

  15. THE SEARCH

  16. THE FOREST

  17. THE MANIFEST

  18. THE SIEGE

  19. THE AFTERMATH

  20. THE BONES

  21. THE CASING

  22. THE BUILDING

  23. THE BRIEFING

  24. THE OLD MAN

  25. THE CANOPY

  26. THE ORBITER

  27. THE MESA

  28. THE CONFLAGRATION

  29. THE INTERROGATION

  30. THE DRAWBRIDGE

  31. THE TSIOLKOVSKY

  32. THE LAST EXPEDITION

  About the Author

  1

  THE LANDER

  Sam opened his eyes, then squeezed them shut again, overwhelmed by painfully bright light. He waited a few seconds then opened them more cautiously, peering upwards through slitted eyelids to see that the light came through a small, square window set barely an inch or two above his nose.

  Waking felt like surfacing from a long, deep dive into an ocean, as if he’d slept a thousand years. He discerned somewhat groggily that the window was set into a flat expanse of burnished metal.

  He tried to lift a hand and press it against the glass, only to feel it bump against the same metal ceiling into which the window was set. Twisting his head from side to side revealed walls made from that same, silver-grey metal pressing in close against his shoulders.

  It was unpleasantly like being trapped inside a coffin. Or maybe, Sam thought with a lurch of terror, it was a coffin.

  And that raised the question of how he’d wound up here when he’d been…

  Where had he been?

  The last thing he remembered, he had been walking through a crowded street market in some Asian city composed of slab-like conurbs, their rooftops obscured by low clouds. The air had smelled of kimchi and spiced tofu, and he recalled how close and warm and humid the air had been, and how his shirt stuck to the small of his back in the sweltering late evening heat.

  And now he was here, wherever the hell here was, without any clear sense of how he had got from one place to the other. And if not for the—sunlight?—streaming through that tiny window, he’d have had every reason to think he’d been buried alive.

  The thought filled him with a kind of despair he’d never before experienced. Sam pushed his hands hard against the lid of the coffin—if coffin it was—in his desperation to escape.

  The lid felt cool and hard and utterly unmovable.

  This can’t be happening.

  It had to be a dream, if an unpleasantly vivid one. Who, after all, could possibly want to put him through such a terrifying ordeal? He had made enemies back in the refugee camps—it would have been hard not to. But to do this to him…? This was insane.

  Then he tried to swallow, only to discover that something was jammed deep into his throat, forcing his jaws apart. He started to hyperventilate, but managed, with some considerable effort and a lot of twisting around, to worm one hand up between his chest and the lid of the coffin to his mouth. His fingertips brushed what felt like a corrugated tube extending from between his jaws before curling, so far as he could judge, around the back of his head.

  He came very close, then, to losing himself entirely to panic. He gagged as if he were choking. Managing to hook two fingers around the tube, he violently twisted his head from side to side, working the tube free. Its rough texture scraped against his tongue and the roof of his mouth as he kept tugging at it.

  At last, coughing and gasping and his heart pounding so furiously he feared it might burst from his ribcage, the tube slid all the way out and fell to one side. For a few moments, Sam lost himself to a coughing fit.

  Was the air getting warmer, he wondered? How long did he have before it ran out? How—?

  The fingers of his other hand found something that felt like a latch or switch set into one wall of the coffin. As soon as he touched it, the lid swung upwards along one side with a faint hiss of hydraulics.

  Strange, alien smells rushed in on Sam, carried on a wave of humid heat. He sat upright with a lurch, greedily sucking at air that tasted warm and sticky and blinking furiously in brilliant sunlight. Looking down, he saw that he was naked, a catheter clipped to his penis, while further investigation revealed a second catheter snaking out from between his buttocks.

  He pulled both of them free, one after the other, swearing under his breath at the discomfort. Then he levered himself over the side of the coffin and onto the ground, stalks of grass pressing against his naked flesh.

  His panic slowly subsided, replaced by short-lived elation. He was free…but where was he?

  Licking lips that were dry and gummy, Sam looked up to see smoke trailing overhead. He swallowed, his throat still painfully raw from the breathing tube, and tasted gritty ash carried on a breeze.

  Looking around revealed that he was in a wooded glade. Except the trees all around him were quite unlike any trees he’d seen before: they resembled trees insofar as they had upright trunks and branches that spread horizontally, but starting from a point a few meters above the ground their trunks bristled with sharp-looking spines. And the colours of the leaves were…wrong, somehow.

  Nor, he now discovered, was the grass on which he sprawled any kind of grass he had seen before. In texture and appearance, it looked and felt more like woven matting.

  The surprises didn’t stop there. He stared, baffled, at his hands. They were pink and baby-soft, the hands of a teenager or a man in his early twenties—not a man approaching middle-age. His belly was flat and firm in a way it hadn’t been since at least his mid-twenties. Newly youthful skin stretched over smooth musculature.

  Then another memory came to him and with it a vague fragment of purpose: he had been looking for someone in that city of conurbs. But as to who, he had no idea. All he knew was that nothing mattered more than finding them…whoever they were.

  An insect—or rather, some hallucinatory abstraction of an insect—buzzed past him on wide gossamer wings. Sam stared after it, watching as it darted between the weird-looking trees and out of sight.

  Then he tried and failed to stand upright. He felt as weak as a newborn, as if his muscles were unused to the simplest of tasks. It took three consecutive attempt
s before he was finally able to stand upright, albeit somewhat unsteadily, and black dots edged his vision for several minutes after.

  He became aware of the harsh whine of a drill and the clatter of what sounded like machinery from somewhere out of sight amidst the trees. Looking around, he saw more coffin-like boxes identical to his own scattered all across the glade. Including his own, Sam counted fifteen. All but one stood open and empty.

  Hearing a metallic click, Sam glanced down in time to see a drawer slide out from one side of the coffin from which he had emerged. It contained what looked like clothing. Shaking it out, he found underwear, soft but durable-looking slip-on shoes, and a light brown jumpsuit.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he pulled the clothes on. His hands shook as he pulled up the zip on the front of the jumpsuit. It was enough to calm his nerves a little.

  Turning in an unsteady circle, Sam tried to figure out from which direction the sound of machinery came. Then he glimpsed one corner of what might be a building past some bushes that appeared blackened by fire: their branches dripped with foam, while the column of black smoke he had earlier seen rose up above the trees from some point beyond them.

  Sam made to move towards the building, hoping he might find someone there who could tell him where he was, and why. Then he hesitated, catching sight of a face through the window of the only coffin that remained sealed.

  It occurred to him that coffin probably wasn’t the right word for them: they looked more like emergency medical pods of the type used to evacuate critical patients from war zones, their exteriors partly hidden beneath a myriad of tubes and life-support mechanisms.

  Peering through the unopened pod’s window, Sam saw the face of a young Asian woman, a ribbed plastic tube extending from between her jaws. Her eyes were closed as if in sleep.

  He tried banging on the lid. Her eyelids flickered, but she showed no signs of awakening. He tried feeling around the edges of the lid, hoping he might find some way to open it from the outside, but without success.

  In that instant, Sam became sure he was being watched. Looking over his shoulder, back in the direction of the half-burned bushes, he was startled to see a young man—a boy, really—wearing a jumpsuit identical to his own. The boy leaned out from behind a fire-blackened tree trunk and started when he saw Sam looking his way.

  ‘Hey!’ Sam yelled, raising a hand.

  The boy turned without a word and darted back towards the building and out of sight.

  Sam set off after him. He couldn’t manage much more than a weak, stumbling jog that set the blood roaring in his ears. Rounding the smouldering remains of a bush, he very nearly collided with a construction robot similar to the ones he’d once used to build refugee camps.

  The machine stood almost two meters tall, with half a dozen flexible limbs that gave it the appearance of a mechanized octopus. Several of its limbs grasped a canister and hose, from which it sprayed chemical foam onto blackened trees.

  Sam backed away, not wanting to get hit by the foam spray, and stumbled up against a tree.

  He caught movement from out of the corner of one eye and turned to see a spider the size of his hand clinging to the trunk, just inches from his face. He stumbled away from the tree with a yell, then stopped to stare at the thing.

  It wasn’t a spider, he saw now…but what it might be was a lot harder to say. It resembled a starfish more than anything else. Except, so far as Sam knew, starfish didn’t climb trees.

  He turned, hearing voices from the direction of the building. The boy Sam had seen moments before reappeared, now accompanied by four others, none of them looking older than their late teens or early twenties. All wore the same style and colour of jumpsuit.

  Was it possible, Sam wondered, that they were the ones responsible for locking him inside a medical pod?

  In which case, he thought, maybe they were coming to put him back inside it.

  He backed away, wondering if he had the strength to make a run for it. Perhaps if he could find his way to a road he could flag down a car. Or—

  Turning to flee, he crashed straight into a young Asian woman coming the other way. She let out a scream, her eyes wide and terrified.

  He saw then it was the girl from the last unopened pod. It seemed he had managed to wake her after all. She had been in the act of zipping up her jumpsuit when he had very nearly knocked her to the ground.

  ‘Please,’ she asked in heavily accented English, her voice trembling so hard she could hardly get the words out, ‘where am I?’

  ‘You’re the last two,’ said a voice from behind them.

  Sam turned. The first boy—the same one he’d seen watching him—had come to a halt a few paces short of them. He was short, with pale, straw-coloured hair, and eyes that darted here and there as if never quite sure where to settle. His companions hung back a little, regarding both Sam and the girl with a mixture of curiosity and fear.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ demanded Sam.

  ‘Joshua Fuchs,’ said the first boy. ‘And you?’

  ‘I…Sam Newman.’ He regarded Joshua with uncertainty. ‘What am I doing here, Joshua?’

  ‘Jesus,’ said one of the other boys, his tone reproachful. ‘Doesn’t anybody know a damned thing?’

  Joshua shrugged. ‘Can’t tell you, Sam. We were all kind of hoping maybe you could tell us why we’re here.’

  Sam looked at the girl by his side, then back at Joshua. ‘Why would you think I’d know?’

  ‘Because you’re the last to wake up,’ Joshua explained. ‘And none of the rest of us knows why any of us are here.’ He nodded to the girl. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Sun Ae Sok,’ the girl replied, her voice still trembling and her arms wrapped tight around her shoulders despite the heat. She didn’t look older than twenty or twenty-one.

  ‘How about you, Sun?’ Joshua asked. ‘Can you tell us where we are? And why?’

  She shook her head. ‘The last thing I remember, I was asleep on a long-haul flight to Vancouver.’

  Joshua grimaced. ‘Join the club. The last thing I remember until a couple of hours ago was sitting in my office in Geneva.’

  Sam swallowed. ‘So there were people in the other coff—I mean, the other pods? Who are they?’

  Joshua shrugged. ‘Sure. They’re all sorts. And as far as any of us know we’re supposed to be anywhere but here.’ He cast a look around and shrugged. ‘Wherever the hell this is.’

  ‘How many people?’ asked Sun.

  ‘Fifteen altogether,’ Joshua said to her, ‘including you two, now you’re awake.’

  No, thought Sam. It had to be some kind of trick. He pushed a hand through hair that was thicker than it had any right to be. ‘There has to be—’

  ‘An explanation?’ Joshua finished for him. ‘I’m sure there is. But we haven’t found it yet.’

  ‘All right,’ said Sam, ‘in that case, do any of you have a phone? Online access? Or even some idea what part of the world we’re in?’

  ‘Nope,’ said one of the others, stepping closer. ‘No phones, and no damn idea.’

  ‘What about that building back there?’ asked Sam, nodding past them. ‘What’s in there?’

  Joshua frowned. ‘Building…?’

  ‘I think he means the lander,’ said one of the others.

  ‘Right.’ Joshua nodded. ‘Easy mistake to make, I guess.’ He turned back the way he’d come, signalling to Sam and Sun to follow. ‘Come see.’

  Sam hesitated at first, then followed Joshua past the blackened trees, Sun trailing behind. When he glanced back at her, he saw that her lips were compressed into a thin line, her gaze constantly darting around like she was utterly terrified.

  Which, on reflection, she had every right to be.

  They passed out of the trees and into a wide clearing in the forest. Sam saw, at last, that what he’d taken for the corner of a building was instead part of a huge, fat-bellied aircraft with oddly stubby wings. It was easily forty meters in length,
its wingspan casting long shadows over the not-quite-grass.

  And judging by the black smoke billowing up from its rear, it had suffered a very bad landing. Foam had been liberally sprayed all over its fuselage as well as most of the nearest trees.

  Then Sam looked again and realized it wasn’t precisely an aircraft after all.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘It looks like—’

  ‘A spaceship,’ said one of the two boys who had accompanied Joshua. ‘Specifically, an orbit-to-ground lander, but not of a kind I’ve seen before. We think something went wrong when it tried to land, and it crashed against some boulders over on its far side.’

  ‘The fire had mostly burnt itself out by the time I woke up in my own pod,’ said Joshua. ‘But it must have been pretty hairy when it first got going.’

  Sam nodded, too numb at the sight to think of anything much to say. A couple more construction robots, identical to the first but armed with cutting torches, clambered around a part of the craft’s upper hull, where a long gash had been torn.

  Sam felt an insistent pressure building up somewhere behind his eyes and pressed one hand to the side of his head. Dizziness washed over him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Sun, sounding concerned.

  ‘I’m fine. I just…’ He shook his head.

  ‘Feeling okay?’ asked Joshua.

  ‘All this is just a little…overwhelming.’

  Joshua nodded, his expression sympathetic. ‘Trust me when I say I know exactly what you mean.’

  Sam stumbled after him, and they made their way past the lander and over to the far side of the clearing. A number of other boys and a few girls sat or stood together on the not-grass. They all wore the same brown jumpsuits. He wondered if they were as young as they looked, or if like him they had woken up to find themselves staring at smooth-skinned hands and unexpectedly flat bellies…

  One, a round-faced girl with blond hair and skin so pale it was almost translucent, sat red-eyed and sobbing, while others had the faraway blank expressions of people dealing with varying levels of shock. A few sat together in a tight cluster separate from the rest, facing each other and talking quietly but animatedly.