Full Frontal Cybertank

by Timothy Gawne

  We walked for a bit, but as we came to one section I found myself becoming strangely anxious. We were the only people around, and it was quiet, but I was overcome with fear.

  “I don’t think we should be here,” I said.

  The professor looked at me strangely. “And why not? This is a public street, and there are no signs saying keep out.”

  I looked around, trying to find an excuse to discontinue our adventure. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t think we should be here. Let’s head back.”

  The professor just nodded. “Yes, I feel it as well. The reaction has been generated by the arrangements of the buildings and roads. It is very subtle, and very powerful. It’s beyond my art, that I can tell you. But still, we have come this far.” The professor put his hand on my arm. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  With his encouragement, we proceeded on. As we covered more ground I found that, while I still felt a sense of unease, I could control it better.

  “You know,” I said, “people are much braver in groups. Is this why you had me come along?”

  “You are perceptive,” said the professor. “I did not lie when I said that I wanted your skills at reporting, but yes, I also wanted your company. For support.”

  I thought about this for a while. “You’ve been here before.”

  The professor looked surprised. “Yes, I have. I just never managed to make it this far, alone. You are indeed perceptive, Mr. Accipeter.”

  We passed by a two-story gray metal building whose peeling sign announced that it was the Amalgamated Scandentia Gimbal Corporation. There were an even half-dozen truck loading bays facing the street, but they were all closed up.

  “Did you ever consider,” I said, “that whoever is capable of doing this might be powerful? Might be, perhaps, not wise to mess around with?”

  “That is always a possibility,” said the professor, “however, if they were truly dangerous we’d be dead by now. I also think that anyone capable of such sophisticated tactics might not be altogether beyond polite discussion. In any event, if they do prove to be overwhelmingly powerful I expect that the worst that will happen to us is that they will make threats that they are obviously capable of carrying out, warn us to keep away from their business, and send us on our way. On the other hand, they may be pleased to be visited by people capable of penetrating their deceptions, and we may learn many interesting things. We will only find out by trying.”

  I looked skeptical.

  “Relax,” said the professor. “You’ve been watching too many bad science fiction movies. In the real world most people are reasonable.”

  I wondered at that. Was it actually possible to watch too many bad science fiction movies?

  We continued on. At last we came to a place where the pressure of fear was almost gone. Perhaps I had adapted to it, or perhaps it was more of an eye in the center of a hurricane sort of thing.

  The professor stopped, and looked around. “This should be the epicenter,” he said.

  I did not notice anything out of the ordinary. Same cracked sidewalks and blank cinderblock and metal warehouse walls that we had passed for the last several blocks.

  “I don’t see anything here,” I said.

  “Indeed,” said the professor. He took two pairs of bulky glasses out of his coat pocket. “Here, these are anti-neglect glasses. They use subliminal flashes of light that have been carefully timed to disrupt any neglect-inducing systems. Theoretically.”

  The professor and I put the glasses on. They were heavy and had thick rims, so that they narrowed my field of view. At first looking through them was strange, claustrophobic, and they gave everything a sort of metallic sheen, but I quickly got used to it.

  I noticed a gaping hole in the middle of one of the buildings. It was about 15 meters across, circular, and headed down into the earth at a gentle angle. Smoke was coming out of it – no, I quickly realized, it was condensation. The air wafting up out of the tunnel must be extremely humid. How could I have missed it?

  The professor gestured towards the tunnel. “Shall we?” he said.

  --------------------

  We wandered around in the tunnels for some time. Some of them were like the entrance: round and smooth-walled. Others were more human: rectangular, lined with cinderblocks or ceramic tiles, with metal conduits running along the lengths. The air was slightly cool and heavy with humidity. The walls were slick with a thin film of water. The dim light came from widely spaced fluorescent lighting fixtures which gave off a greenish glow and buzzed threateningly.

  We came to a place with a small alcove containing an ancient vending machine. Behind its faded plastic windows there were only a few desiccated candy bars remaining, but the machine was dead and could not vend them in any event. I don’t know why, but the machine horrified me.

  As I examined it more closely, I realized that there was no writing on the machine at all – and what I took to be candy bars were something else entirely, possibly mummified rats, maybe something else. It was hard to tell, gazing into the dark recesses of the machine through faded plastic. I could also identify no screws, no obvious access panels… the more I looked at it, the less it looked like a vending machine at all.

  We continued on. Several times we encountered objects that seemed normal, but on closer inspection revealed an unsettling bizarre nature. There was the mop stuck in a bucket – but the mop head was a mass of worms, the handle of the mop was a pipe bolted into the wall and that was slowly leaking fluid into the bucket.

  There was a bookcase full of books – but they weren’t books. They were rectangular slabs of gristle, all slightly different sizes, jammed into slots. Some of them oozed yellow liquid.

  I looked up at the buzzing lights. Superficially they resembled standard fluorescent light fixtures, the kind you can still find in old laundry rooms. On closer inspection I saw that they were something else: each fixture had a pair of glowing greenish-white tubes, certainly, but there were other pipes and mechanisms spread around the tubes like tree roots, whose purpose I could not identify. These mechanisms moved slowly, but only if I was looking away. It was as if the fixtures could tell that I was looking at them – or perhaps it was an optical illusion. Either way, the effect was unsettling.

  There was a small room with a white porcelain toilet in the center, but that was just the first impression. It had no seat, and the lid was a full meter across and a meter above the floor, and folded in odd ways. There were multiple deep openings in the bottom, and something dark sloshed back and forth in one of them.

  The professor said nothing at these odd displays but only nodded and continued walking.

  We were in one of the circular tunnels, when I heard something coming towards us. I instinctively ducked into a side alcove, but the professor stood his ground.

  “Hey, professor,” I whispered. “Don’t just stand there in the open, come over here.”

  ‘Nonsense,” he said. “If you skulk around like a criminal, you will be treated like a criminal. I have nothing to hide.”

  The something I had heard came nearer and nearer. It made a low sound that was hard to describe: rumbling and sucking at the same time. The professor backed out of the main tunnel to crouch next to me.

  “I thought you said to stand in the open,” I said.

  “I might,” said the professor, “have been wrong. Let’s try skulking for a bit.”

  We pushed ourselves flat into the alcove. The thing was preceded by a wave of stink that I find hard to describe. In books one often comes across the term ‘smelled like a charnel house,’ but nowadays most civilized people never experience such a smell. The worst that they might encounter is a baby’s diapers, or a carton of spoiled milk. Well, I now know what a charnel house smells like, and it is more of a physical assault than a mere odor.

  Then it came into view. It was vaguely cubical, but only in the way that a person’s head is vaguely spherical. It was five meters on a side, and moving like a s
nail on a pulsating foot. It left a slick trail of mucus behind it as it passed. But what was most terrifying was not its shape, or mode of locomotion, or even its smell, but what it was made of.

  There is a kind of tumor called a ‘teratoma’ – a wild growth of all possible tissue types. If you have never seen a picture of one don’t bother searching, they are truly disgusting. Teeth, hair, fingernails, eyes, genitals, muscles, brain, all jammed together with no plan. This entire five meter-wide thing was like a single teratoma, a writhing mass of every kind of body tissue imaginable.

  The worst were the eyes. They looked human, but they were spread around it at random, and stared out at odd angles with insane unblinking intensity. Some of them must have been pointed in our direction as it went by, but it gave no sign of having noticed us.

  Finally it passed and disappeared down the length of the tunnel.

  “You don’t need to say it,” whispered the professor. “We should leave.”

  We began to retrace our path back to the entrance, more quietly than when we had entered. I began to hear footsteps from the tunnel behind us. They could have been the footsteps of an unusually large man, but the rhythm was off, there was no set pattern to them. This was more disturbing than it sounds in print: try walking with no rhythm. I turned and caught a glimpse of something tall and shiny…

  The professor ripped the anti-neglect glasses off of my face. He was pale, and trembling.

  “I’ve made a mistake,” he said. “I’ve been so stupid. But without the glasses you should be safe – if you don’t see them they won’t target you.”

  At that point I had only an indistinct impression of blurred shapes and vague motions, and an acute sense of terror. Now most people who have never faced real peril feel that, deep down, they are intrinsically brave. As a journalist I have learned that, faced with physical danger, most people are cowards. I am no exception. I panicked and ran through the tunnels looking for the exit. At one point I slipped on the wet floor and fell heavily on my back, but quickly regained my footing and headed up towards the light and the outside.

  Then I was alone on the sidewalk. What had I been doing here? It didn’t make sense. A tunnel heading into the ground? I examined the nearby buildings: no tunnels were in evidence.

  A Nobel-prize winning professor? There was no professor here. I noticed that I had been taking notes – something about hidden tunnels, and the neurological syndrome of neglect? It read like the plot of a science fiction short story. Yes, of course, and I was here trying to get inspired to write about what it was like to walk through a run-down industrial park. Anyhow, I really needed to get home. The place was creeping me out.

  I re-read my notes – maybe not so bad after all. I wondered if I could get it published somewhere?

  As I started to walk out of the industrial park, I noticed that I was drenched with sweat – probably because it was so hot. But it wasn’t hot, it was quite cool: why had I thought that it was hot? As I walked further I came across a parked red Chrysler minivan. I glanced into the windows: the cloth covering the inside of the roof had fallen down, just as I remembered from my – fantasy? What?

  I caught a taxi home. Once there I noticed that my left upper back was beginning to ache: taking off my shirt I saw that it was wet and slimy in the patch where I had – slipped and fallen? I examined my calendar, and saw that I had indeed made an appointment to see a retired professor earlier in the day, and the times-stamps on my dataslate entries were consistent with an interview.

  I slept fitfully that night. In the morning I took another taxi to the professor’s apartment. The hall and the doorway were exactly as I remembered them – I had been there before. I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. The door was locked, but there was a small glass spyhole in it. Trying to peer through it yielded a few distorted details, but I could tell that there was something bright and yellow in the foreground, and a hint of clutter beyond.

  Back home I used the internet to check the satellite views of the area I had walked out of: it was a decrepit industrial park, with no surface traffic, just as I had remembered.

  I thought more about what the professor had told me: the great power of a neglect field is not that it makes you ignore something, but that it causes your mind to edit its own memories to explain away your ignoring something.

  People lie. Memories lie. Physical evidence – it may be misinterpreted, it may mislead, but it does not lie. Even amongst my fellow journalists I have a reputation for skepticism, for never letting a lead go, for being a pain in the ass. I am not going to drop this.

  There are surely surveillance videos of me walking to the industrial park, as well as position tracking records for my cellphone and dataslate, credit card receipts for my taxi rides, and logged records of my checking the satellite scans of the industrial park. If this was some secret government or megacorporation project I should already have been arrested, or at least threatened. Why not? It can only be because whoever or whatever is behind this is so arrogant, that they have no more concern about a single human than a human has about a single ant.

  As my name is Alvin Accipeter, I’ll have to see what I can do about that.

  --------------------

  Well. This appears to be a modestly amusing, if minor, piece of science fiction from the 21st century, but what of it?

  “My name. It has my last name. Accipeter.”

  Are you sure? It seems like an odd name for that historical epoch. Do you have any supporting references for this?

  Alvin shook his head. “No, the cryptocalypse must have wiped them all out – you know how spotty the records are from that time. But it resonates. I remember! That was my name! It was real!”

  So you are saying that there was an alien species living on earth in your time, that hid in plain sight using some sort of neurological jamming system?

  “Yes, exactly,” said Alvin. “Although they might not have been alien. They could have been a more advanced species that also evolved on the Earth. I don’t have any evidence for that one way or the other.”

  Well, then what were they doing? Trying to enslave the humans, or wipe them out?

  “That’s something else I could never figure out. Their motives. They may have just been keeping to themselves, and using the neglect field to avoid having to deal with us. Or maybe they wanted to study us. Or they found it amusing to watch us, as a human enjoys going on a safari. Or something more sinister, or obscure. They never told me.”

  Do you have any objective evidence of this?

  “Some,” said Alvin, “but it’s thin. There are surviving seismic scans from the 23rd century that, when pieced together and reanalyzed, show evidence of unusual tunnels beneath the city where this story happened. I’ve also got memories of technologies that you cybertanks say had not been developed during my time. But I am certain.”

  I am always open minded, and I’d not call your story logically crazy – certainly there could have been an alien species that made itself psychically invisible to the early humans. I’ve seen (and done) much stranger things myself. But without more support, the story seems only, well, a story. And anyhow, even if true, it’s ancient history now.

  “Is it?” said Alvin. “And what if these creatures are still around? What if they are nestling unseen in the middle of the cybertank civilization, and they’ve blinded you the way they blinded us? Don’t you keep telling me that, essentially, you are psychologically human?”

  Oh come on now. Yes, we are psychologically human, but we’re far more advanced than the early biologicals. We have sophisticated signals-warfare and anti-jamming and cyber security systems, at least 20 major senses… we’d be immune to anything like what was described in your story.

  “Perhaps,” said Alvin. “But if they were always looking over your shoulder, they could see what you were developing, and how you were evolving, and always stay one step ahead of you. They could still be here, unseen. They could be right outside this house. They might be
here, in this attic, right now.”

  By reflex, I looked around the attic with my humanoid body. I also deep-scanned the house with my main hull outside. There was nothing here but Alvin, myself, and an attic full of random objects.

  Anything is possible. But that sounds a little paranoid. I mean, I could make up an infinite number of plausible but unprovable ideas – like, we are all trapped in a hyper-real computer simulation run by seventh-dimensional Teddy Bears. Everyone that I know is really a hyper-intelligent alien that is just pretending to be human. I am really Genghis Khan having a strange dream after eating too many of those funny looking mushrooms my chef served up today (and when I wake up I will have him gutted and fed to the dogs). All of these things could be true – but thinking about them is pointless. You might as well join Leadfoot and go full solipsist.

  Alvin frowned. “I know that, but I know my memories, they are real.” We both sat quietly for a time. “There is one possibility. Do a deep scan of my brain. It should be possible to tell memories that were actually laid down by physical experience, from those that are delusions. Can you do that?”

  Not me. But it should be possible. Schadenfreude could do it, if anyone can. Or Frisbee, or Dead Cat Bounce. Although I suspect the process would be extremely invasive. Definitely unpleasant. Are you sure that’s something you want to go through?

  “I have been sitting in this attic for centuries, trying to remember. If I am, as you suspect, delusional, then I would learn that and make my peace with it. But if not, then I need to know that as well. Can you help me set that up?”

  Yes I can, if you are really sure. Frisbee, for one, would find it a challenge. I’ll make some calls.

  Suddenly Alvin stiffened, and he turned pale. “When I was fighting them, I learned a few tricks. Ways of thinking, of looking at the world sideways... But there is one thing you must never forget.” He took out a marker pen, reached over, and drew a large letter “A” on the back of my right hand.