It was my idea to crash the mission computer and kill everything but life support. The paralyzed spider-drones floated by and fit easily into the airlock. They were ejected at well above Deimos’s puny escape velocity. We even got Dr. Kubra to help us attach solid-fuel boosters to the stone.
The spores had already begun to sprout at the foot of the Vulcan Tower. The floor of the chamber was a garden of disintegrating fruiting bodies: soft, pulpy, colorless puffballs falling away to reveal chitinous pupae that twitched disturbingly when you merely looked at them, as if feeding on attention itself.
The pods incinerated all of them.
The jury-rigged guidance system synchronizing the rockets followed through, delivering the 350-ton asteroid on Mariner City in the dead of night when the fires of their sacrifices were visible from Deimos. The Martian capital was exterminated. Vulcan was avenged.
We set out for Earth the next day in Liu Wei’s private yacht. Almost immediately when I began to inhale the gas, I felt her hand in my head, and I climbed out of my pod to kill her and Dr. Kubra. I could read none of their thoughts, but I could hurt them as they could hurt me. If we were the last of our species, so much the better. What centuries of inbreeding would make out of the hideous ménage, I could not bear to imagine.
I should follow them out the airlock, but I can’t. Not until I get back to Earth. I’m holding Bedjina’s pouch of Haitian earth, and I think I’m going to eat it. Not a word, not an image, not a sound from Earth since the moment we dropped the stone on the abomination that was Mariner, a city of two hundred thousand souls.
I’m waiting. I’m only staying alive long enough to go back and see what we did, to see if there’s no one left to speak—or if they no longer need to.
Cody Goodfellow has written five novels and three collections: his latest are Repo Shark (Broken River Books) and Strategies Against Nature (King Shot Press). He wrote, co-produced, and scored the short, Lovecraftian hygiene film Stay At Home Dad, which can be viewed on YouTube. He is also a director of the HP Lovecraft Film Festival–San Pedro and cofounder of Perilous Press, an occasional micropublisher of modern cosmic horror. A collection of his Cthulhu Mythos fiction, Rapture of the Deep, is forthcoming from Hippocampus Press.
The Great Dying of the Holocene
Desirina Boskovich
I find the first capsule as I’m walking along the beach.
At first, it looks like a creature. Some kind of squid-like thing: mutated beyond recognition or perhaps an unknown species.
I squat for a moment beside it, noting the bulbous, misshapen body, the dark, slick arms twitching against the stiff salt breeze.
I decide to take it home.
A shirtless jogger eyes me as I scoop up my specimen. “I’m a marine biologist,” I say by way of explanation. He nods skeptically and pounds on past.
I head back across the hilly sand littered with crumpled beer cans and the husks of dead sea creatures. Back in my residence—a glorified dorm, actually, with blank walls and impressively sturdy furniture—I put the specimen on ice and stash it in the freezer.
For the tenth time today, I check my voicemail, hoping stupidly and desperately for a message from Scott, my supervisor at the Underwater Research Lab (Applied Research Division, Triton Enterprises, LLC). I’ve been on dry land for a month now—about three weeks too long.
Even though it’s what I’ve been hoping to hear, I’m surprised when my former boss’s recorded voice crackles on the other end of the line. The sound waves ripple in and out as if to remind me that he’s calling from underwater. “Mia,” he says. “Was hoping to catch you. Listen, I got your request to be transferred back. I’d love to have you here, but it’s just not in the funding right now. Take care of yourself.”
After that, I pour a couple shots of whiskey and settle down to work on my latest paper. It’s stupid, drinking while writing, but lately, it’s the only way I can bear to think.
I pour myself more drinks. At some point, I stumble over to the bed and pass out, fully dressed, the lights bright above. Once again, I fall into nightmares.
I wake at two in the morning covered in a cold sweat that smells of booze. I swig water to cleanse the foul taste in my mouth, but my brain still feels trapped in the dream.
I grab my specimen and my keycard pass and head down to the lab on campus to take a look.
Approximately three hundred miles off the coast—farther and deeper than any aquatic research facility before—the Underwater Research Lab exists, officially, to study the creatures and habitats of the marine environment and the ocean floor. To map the die-outs, record the extinction rates, and chart the mutations, all happening faster than we can scare up the manpower to observe them. It’s the great dying of the Holocene epoch, the sixth mass extinction in geological history.
My department. What else is there in this era for a scientist like me to study?
Unofficially, the Underwater Research Lab exists in service of far murkier interests. The staggering sums of funding did not come from federal governments dedicated to environmental preservation. Instead, most of the money to build and run this breathtaking facility came from private industry, businessmen with their own aims and means and mysterious questions.
Still, they needed someone to keep filing the reports about the die-out of Thecosomata, maintaining the PR-friendly illusion that the facility exists for scientific inquiry rather than capitalist ambition.
(Thecosomata is a pelagic sea snail—a tiny, gorgeous mollusk that floats on ocean currents like a bird on the breeze. Their calcium carbonate shells are thin and delicate, nearly transparent. Increased levels of ocean acidification are devouring them alive, eating through their fragile armor like paper.)
I tried not to know about the research going on in other wings of the facility. Breakthrough techniques in desalination that would allow the treatment plants perched on every coastline to increase their consumption of ocean water with terrifying efficiency. Human body modifications intended to create a new post-human class of divers who could spend indefinite periods undersea, harvesting riches from the teetering ecosystem beneath.
I tried not to know until I couldn’t anymore. The politics shifted. Other things … happened. They sent me back to shore, “to take a break.”
I spend long hours walking the beach because it’s the closest I can get to the world beneath, the one that feels like my only real home.
At 3 a.m., the lab is deserted. The cleaning crew buffs the floors in a room down the hall. The low drone reminds me of the pervasive sound of machinery that hummed incessantly in the Underwater Research Lab, keeping us alive. That white noise comforts me and helps me work.
My specimen, though … it’s an odd customer. Sleek and slimy and bedraggled, possessing too many slender appendages and knobby protrusions. The more I look at it, the more I can’t tell what it could possibly be.
As I cut into it, the carcass emits a strange odor: not a fish market smell, nor the saltwater tang of fresh oysters, nor the dankness of something rotting beneath the docks. Instead, it almost smells like something burning.
A black viscous substance seeps like oil from its appendages.
(In 1989, the year I was born, the Exxon Valdez spilled eleven million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. The spill poisoned 1,300 miles of coastline, killed one hundred thousand seabirds, devastated populations of otters and orcas and seals, and destroyed untold millions of tiny lives beneath the surface of the sea.)
I look and look, but I can only find one eye.
Somewhere in the building, the cleaning crew is playing Latin pop music. The melodic notes reach me in sweet fragments, fading static in and out.
I make another incision, and the dark liquid rushes in a wave, blood spurting from a vein, and a minuscule drop aerosolizes and lands like a speck of dust in my eye.
For a moment, I can see it, hanging and vacillating, dark and pearlescent, a throbbing orb. Instinctively, I blink.
Stupid
and dangerous: undersea creatures can harbor harmful toxins, especially now that we’ve poisoned their world, and the gasping dregs of their species have all gone strange. I shouldn’t be working alone in the lab. I should be wearing more protective gear. I shouldn’t be working while drunk.
I take a step back, wondering if I should abandon this for now.
That’s when my understanding of the creature begins to change.
It seems not so much like a creature but, perhaps, an artifact—a manmade object, like everything else floating in the oceans these days. And then, it seems not so much like an artifact but a thumbprint or a chemtrail—a trace left behind by something else.
The music stops and starts again. It’s coming closer. It’s falling into static. It’s gone.
And then, it seems not so much like a thumbprint but maybe an extrusion, like the jagged iceberg tip of something poking out from its world into ours. The majority of it hidden, contained beneath the surface, folded into an adjacent but alien dimension.
I’m dizzy and stumbling. I’ve got to lie down for a bit on the fresh-buffed floor. I retch but manage not to puke.
Here I am, resting: just like they told me to do when they sent me away from undersea.
The viscous substance drips slowly and persistently from the table to the floor.
Half of the creatures that came to me for study in the Underwater Research Lab were the equivalent of aquatic road kill. They’d ended up tangled and mangled in the intake pipes of the desalination plants, suction-trapped against the membranes, too large to pass through.
The intake pipes don’t discriminate; they swallow plankton, fish eggs and larvae, miniscule mollusks. They devour microscopic creatures by the billions.
Sometimes, I wonder how it must feel for those creatures. They can’t actually feel, not the way we can, and they can’t think, but … still, the idea of going along, minding your own business, when suddenly your entire sphere of existence is upended and destroyed.
Our desires are as foreign to plankton as theirs are to us.
The desalination process produces fresh water, fit for drinking, bathing, agriculture, and watering golf courses. It also leaves a byproduct: a salty, brackish, polluted solution, colloquially termed sludge. This contains chlorines, bisulfites, acids, hydrogen peroxide, heavy metals, coagulants, and more, all of which sallies forth into the sea.
The desalination plants on land still use reverse osmosis, running ocean water through thin-film composite membranes; it takes a lot of energy to force all those swimming pools worth of water through these filters.
At the Underwater Research Lab, hands-on experiments tested nanoporous graphene membranes no more than an atom thick: two-dimensional.
If they could get it right, the whole world could change. With just a little effort, we could drain the seas.
When Ian first arrived at the lab, he was on my side. We were fighting the same fight: stealthily gathering our own research on the ecological implications of the desalination process, the tipping points for ecosystems, the die-outs triggered.
We were together, on that and everything, and it was perfect.
But then, he went on one of their diving expeditions. He didn’t have the body modifications, yet, so he was weighed down with equipment, lumbering and slow—and he came back different. He’d seen something out there. He didn’t know if it was horrible or beautiful, but he wanted to see it again.
After that, everything changed.
Some time passes before I pull myself off the lab floor and head toward home. I leave my specimen where it is, though I know it will quickly grow putrid and rot. For some reason, I don’t particularly care anymore.
The sun is rising as I trek across campus. The campus seems changed: the buildings squat and skewed, brutally oppressive yet somehow banal. I think unbidden of insect colonies and mazes for rats.
I’m struck with the urge to destroy everything I see, to burn it all down.
I should sleep.
Back in my residence, I close my curtains against the rising sun and hope for sleep without dreaming, but the dreams come back as they always do—I caught them from Ian, sleeping entwined in his narrow bunk night after night.
I dream the jagged silhouette of a forgotten city, rising like an ogre from the deep.
We marvel at our own power, changing the planet in less time than the lifespan of a tortoise. But the stars have been changing, too.
There were times when Ian tried to tell me what he’d seen.
Somehow, he’d gotten separated from the others. He was ambiguous on the details. He’d struck out on his own for a moment, over-confident and over-eager; he’d lingered to inspect a specimen; and when he’d looked up, he was alone in the murky waters as far as he could see. The narrative varied in the telling. Finally, he admitted that he had no idea how it happened: in one moment he’d been in a place he recognized, not far from the rest of the crew, and in another moment, it was like he was on a foreign planet in an alien sea.
And there, looming suddenly ahead, a ruin surrounded by swirling waters—there was the city, half-submerged.
He tried to explain its demented angles, its tortured geometry, its sick illusions.
I tried to tell him that, enchanted by the overwhelming strangeness of the deep, he’d stumbled his way into a waking dream.
He remained obsessed.
I began to worry that he might be going insane. Living underwater does that to some people … sends them off the deep end.
For someone like me, who’d never found my land legs, it was the opposite. The Underwater Research Lab was filled with strange, secretive types, weird loners with weird obsessions, and I’d reached a place where I finally belonged.
But now, Ian wanted a different kind of belonging. He wanted to join the divers. He wanted to become like them: modified, altered, post-human.
“I have to find that city,” he said. “I have to see it again.”
I begged him to take a leave on land. Instead, he sought out the director of the aquatic bodymod program—highly illegal but an open secret—and volunteered.
They were ecstatic to have him. They’d been confined to operating on lifers from the prisons: the kind of people who’d sign away all their rights forever in exchange for a shot at freedom, the kind of people they could control. A marine biologist like Ian was a major coup.
Once they were done, he could never go onshore again. Sure, there were rumors about the program, but that didn’t mean human beings with flippers and gills were allowed to stroll around on land.
The surgeries were physically traumatic and intensely painful. He’d come back from the lab after yet another invasive procedure—bone-breaking, bone-grafting—pale and weak and woozy from the drugs and still shaking with the pain.
Sometimes, in my nightmares, I hear him screaming. I wake with a start to comfort him, but the screaming is only in my head. It’s all a dream.
Mid-afternoon, I wake feeling sick. My throat is dry, and my vision is blurry, but none of that is particularly out of the ordinary. I pick up my phone, dial Scott’s number. As I listen to it ring and ring, I plan out what I could say. It goes to voicemail. I hang up.
I microwave a frozen burrito and eat it standing over the sink. Then I head back to the lab.
It’s empty: unusual for this time of day. The specimen lies crumpled on the table, dry and deflated, nothing more than an empty sack of skin. Greasy trails like the path of a snail streak the table. The dark puddle gleams and glistens on the floor beneath, larger than I remembered.
I poke and prod the wrinkled specimen, take a few samples for testing, then dump it in the trash.
I should clean up the dark puddle too (leaving pools of organic waste on the lab floor is highly against protocol), but I feel uneasy about this. It doesn’t make sense, but the more I look at it, the more I feel a kinship to it, as if we’re the same, as if it’s colonized me with that one tiny drop.
Perhaps, I’m part of it,
too, and it’s part of me, as all things in the universe are connected and united, if only around the edges and the tips.
(There are creatures that seem to be alive but aren’t and creatures that are alive but don’t seem it, unless you know how to look. Like coral: an animal, a colony, a living structure. In the Indian Ocean, living banks of corals that have thrived for a thousand years are rapidly going extinct, unable to cope with the heat currents we’ve dumped into their seas.)
Speculatively, I watch the dark puddle as it watches me, and I think, “You deserve this. You can stay.”
In gracious thanks, it allows me to dab one small drop upon the tip of my tongue.
Ian begged me to join him. “I still love you,” he told me, “and I don’t want to be alone.” He had changed beyond recognition, both inside and out; he’d changed into something else, and he wanted to change me too.
“You love the ocean,” he said. “Imagine this. No more boundaries. No more walls. That whole life on land, you know it’s an illusion, right? This is real, down here. The cosmos unaltered, the planet as it truly is.”
“Well, kind of,” I commented dryly. “But we managed to change it a good bit, too.”
“There are deep places,” he argued. “Deep places where everything that lives is completely unaware of our existence. Deep places where we never existed at all.”
These conversations reminded me of my childhood when all I did was read about the sea. Everyone thought me strange, busting out at inappropriate moments with my tender treasure trove of ocean facts. Even then, I knew where I belonged.
Because the beautiful thing about the ocean, no matter how much you think you know, no matter how much you learn, it’s vast and deep and alien, and there’s always something more to learn. There’s always room to hide.
Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity Page 32
