Seclurm: Devolution
Page 35
They felt the cool of the gas assaulting their skin, and a sleepy haze slowly began to settle over them. Rosalyn resisted at first, but soon felt soothed. The cool air was a barrier, a blanket, a comforting confirmation that although everything was wrong, things would still somehow be okay. She wondered if she would dream through the months or years they’d be adrift in space. As she wondered, she thought again of Shauna, vowing never to speak of what had happened to her to anyone—except her family. Yes, that was what she would do. The first thing she’d do upon awakening would be to find Shauna’s family and tell them of the captain’s heroic end.
She thought then of seeing her own family, and the changes that would entail. The previous bad blood that had built up. She had a feeling, although faint, that none of it would matter ever again.
And she faded away into unconsciousness.
EPILOGUE
-Three Days Ago-
Shauna had heard something calling her back into the ruins. She was naked, her strange, new, unfamiliar body so tall and large that it burst through her black jumpsuit and reduced it to shreds as she had awakened from the cocoon. Feeling like a scared little girl, she was now huddled in a fetal position in the corner of the huge, dark, ancient room, looking at the strange changes that were taking place in the awakening ruin. She was still recovering from that short journey through the outside atmosphere into the mountain entrance.
Nothing was as it should be.
She didn’t want to get up. She didn’t want to see her own reflection ever again, as she had just after that hideous awakening when she had not-so-accidentally destroyed the medical bay’s camera. She felt her own body with disgust and incredulity like there was nothing of her true self remaining. Even her brain was different, filled with strange instincts and senses and faint bits of knowledge that she never had before. Her previous life—which she had loved—was over now, and some bizarre, new one had taken over.
Musing on this strange episode, this nightmare of the devolution of Shauna Beele, she thought perhaps the best thing would be for her to kill herself. Though as of now she was lucid overall, she began to fear she might lose what was left of her mind in due time and become something inhuman entirely, perhaps then liable to cause great danger to her friends.
Trembling and weeping, she stood up and went to the edge of a chasm, ready to leap off into cold and unfeeling darkness without thinking.
Something lit up in the corner of her eye. That call she had felt faintly came stronger now, and she could not help but turn and examine a light emanating from a room she had not noticed before. Inside was what looked like a large computer terminal. She went over to the screen and saw a panel below with an embossed outline of a hand-print. With trepidation she placed her hand there—disturbed by her new grayish skin, her long fingers, and the rough feeling to her over-sized body—and the screen suddenly lit up before her.
The alien script that was displayed along with pictures in three-dimensional, holographic computer projections seemed slightly familiar to Shauna at first. She would surprise herself by seeing a jumble of odd lines and suddenly realizing its meaning as plain as day, and press buttons on the screen to parse through paragraphs of information, finding clarity. The more she read, the more she felt she understood it almost completely in some unexplainable way.
Her head ached as it never had before, and she nearly fell over from the shock of everything. Again she almost decided to run back outside to that ledge and leap to the sweet embrace of death.
But something told her to stay. There was more she could do.
After hours at the computer terminal reading and inhaling information, an understanding of almost everything of the alien language came to her, and she recognized what had happened. As she slept in a dark, cold corner alone that night and in the following morning she thought constantly on the terrible things she had discovered, the terrible things she was responsible for. Her messing with the orb—a codex—had awakened this place and started the transformation-causing liquid, called “Seclurm” by the computer, to flow through the entire place—this city. The more she had learned about Seclurm, the more she understood both what had happened to her and what might happen to others. She had been evolved with DNA from the original inhabitants of this city, turning her into a half-human, half-alien hybrid. She had gotten lucky being evolved with humanoid DNA, as the computer made it abundantly clear that being evolved by Seclurm with “feral” DNA from lower-evolved creatures would always result, to one degree or another, in the creation of a monster. With the Seclurm flowing all through the city, all the living creatures surviving here who ingested or were bathed in the substance would transform and become monsters. Possibly including her friends on the Novara, she realized with shock.
After her initial awakening but just prior to her quick and hasty flight through the hull of the Novara, she had spotted Seclurm in small puddles on the floor. Recalling that, she wondered whether a monster had not already been unwittingly created aboard the ship.
She spent all that day exploring the city, avoiding the Seclurm-evolved aliens that were being generated as she did, eventually finding some mechanical, alien materials that could aid her, such as a strange gun called a neutron-scatterer.
As time went on, she got more used to her bizarre body, and the melancholy hours grew less dreary and more focused as her worries turned away from herself and instead to what she could do to help her friends. Her sense of self was starting to return to her, and as horrible as she still felt, she wasn’t quite as horrendously uncomfortable as she’d been a day and a night ago.
She had to admit, as unfathomably uncomfortable as she felt in this evolved body, she had power within her. She was stronger, taller, and faster than humans.
She didn’t quite know what she was now, but she knew she could do something if she chose to. She could put this situation right, she realized. She had to.
She’d learned all she needed to here in the ruins. She had to tell the others now and help them avoid disaster. But how could she? Showing herself to them would only make them as horrified as she had been upon first seeing her evolved form. They would not recognize her nor listen to her.
But they’re my friends. I’m their captain. I have to help them, she thought desperately.
Maybe she still could. Perhaps through a voice they would recognize and not fear, she could help them know what they needed to know. If she prevented them from entering this forsaken place, they would survive. Of that she had no doubt.
Assuming there was not already a Seclurm-prompted evolution happening, or already happened, in that ship.
With her mind made up, she rushed to the ruins’ main entrance and out into the open, cloaked and wearing an alien space suit she had procured, to check on the status of the Novara as well as find a way to communicate with the crew while keeping them unawares. Through a makeshift radio device, she heard some of the conversations taking place and learned that Mitchell and Al were dead and a terrible creature was threatening to destroy the remaining four. Yes, a monster now walked the Novara, somehow. There was much that needed to be done, and with how horrid and mangled she still felt about her new form, she wasn’t sure if she was the one for it.
She began to formulate a plan in her mind. The pieces that needed to happen came to her: she could perhaps overheat the energy reactor of the city and cause it to explode, preventing this from ever happening again.
But first she needed to help save her crew from the alien, which had already caused too much death. The neutron-scatterer would be able to do some damage to it.
She stopped and thought about what happened if she failed. For heaven’s sake, she had already failed, hadn’t she? She was completely unrecognizable now. What was left for her? Trying to help—even if she didn’t get killed herself—might only make things worse.
No, she thought. No, I can’t hold back. If she got wounded, she could always return to the reparation room.
If Rosalyn, and Sam,
and Randy, and Al, and Terri, and Mitchell could not be saved, if she could not save herself, she would certainly not allow her true, Earthly home—everybody she knew and loved—to die.
So, she forgot about how she looked, how she felt. The strange throbbing of her veins, the unfamiliar tone to her skin, the odd structure of her bones. She even forgot about the barren landscape of this forsaken planetoid she surveyed. She felt she would not see it all much longer. Before long she would be only a memory along with this entire place, and the Novara—or at least a piece of it—would fly away free from the contamination of 730-X Zacuali carrying the survivors homeward. Homeward to peace and a safer, warier future.
Shauna wasn’t herself anymore, and she never would be. The money, the wonder, the future she had been looking forward to and experiencing in her life as the captain of the mining crew of the Novara were all lost forever. But an odd thought came to her that, when she recognized that it had come from the human part of her brain and not the alien part, made her smile:
That’s okay.
About The Author
Noah Gallagher
Noah Gallagher was born in American Fork, Utah in 1996, but grew up in New York state. Now living in St. George, Utah, he intends to spend his years on planet Earth ousting the many, many stories stuck inside his head onto the page so that he can live in peace.
Follow him on social media to stay up to date on future releases:
Facebook, Instagram, & Twitter: @Arcreonis
Noah’s website: www.arcreonis.com