TWO
A COLLECTION OF mistakes lined the walls and shelves of a defunct ore processing station that had been converted into a storage facility.
Alpha normally enjoyed spending time in this section of the black site, despite the plainly macabre nature of his surroundings. Here, he could gaze upon their past efforts, a mixture of wild successes and stunning failures.
Uniform's termination had left him in a rut, more focused on their past errors than usual. And the questionable viability of Victor continually twisted in his mind as he pondered if the physical aberrations of that particular subject were deformities or a natural occurrence of the subject they were attempting to replicate. Or, perhaps, "recreate" was a more accurate term, as he had never seen nor heard of such a creature in his life.
He slowly roamed through the maze of storage racks, occasionally stopping to soak in the details of their research. Beneath the overhead lighting tract, the liquid preserving the relics of disused flesh and tumorous lumps that vaguely resembled bipedal creatures radiated a warm, amber glow.
The other subjects varied in size and shape and genetic lineage, as did the maladies that had provoked their termination either naturally or through a systematic elimination conducted by the research group. In a large cylinder, Alpha studied lidless eyes that were too familiar, surrounded by a lumpy, misbegotten skull resulting from Proteus syndrome. The lips were far too large, the nose a violently configured clay-like structure, the bones of his cranium stretching the skin and twisting it into overinflated knots that buried one ear beneath a tumor covered in a patchwork clump of hair. The subject had died before reaching full maturity, but the cause had been a deep vein thrombosis rather than a complication from the physical disorders he had suffered.
In another smaller jar was a fetus that had begun showing its trauma at the accelerated equivalent of eight weeks. Because this subject's phonetic call sign was Juliet, the gene structure had been coded to produce a second female. However, the protein structures had been incorrectly sequenced. In normal fetal development, by eight weeks the embryo develops eyes, eyelids, arms, legs, fingers and toes, mouth, lips, fingernails, and detectable brainwaves. Slightly above the now-shortened umbilical cord, a small arm grew from the subject's belly. Its second arm was in the correct position, but grotesquely shortened, with fingers blooming from the shoulder joints. The mouth had failed to separate properly, cutting a small slit of an orifice into the creature's transparent and reptilian visage. Alpha had elected to terminate rather than proceed any further, accepting that they were clearly on the wrong track with Juliet.
Echo had actually cried that night, and he'd held her in his arms, crying with her even though he could not quite articulate why.
Some jars he studied intently, others he gave barely a glimpse. His pace increased slightly, his steps growing heavier, as he recognized the futility of coming to this room.
Victor was unique in his aberrations, his mutations. There had not been anything similar in all the decades of research that had been conducted at this facility. Nothing.
Rather than finding comfort in their years of progress built off these past errors, Alpha found himself further lost and troubled.
His sense of disquietude spiked sharply at the blaring of the emergency klaxon, a notification of trouble in the lab scrolling onto the translucent display overlay grafted across his forearm.
"Put down the glass," Charlie demanded. His voice carried a sharp edge, both hands open and stretched out before him in a plea.
Delta held Bravo in a chokehold, a large sliver of broken glass gripped tightly in his free hand. Blood pooled between the shiv and his palm, dripping down in solitary drops across Bravo's chest. The remains of a drinking vessel lay scattered across the floor.
"We can talk this out, Delta," Alpha said. "Just do like Charlie asked. C'mon. There's no reason for this."
Delta's lips peeled back from gritted teeth, a high-pitched moan curdling deeply through his throat. His eyes were red and watery, and he violently shook his head.
He jabbed the pointed edge of his makeshift blade into Bravo's cheek and drew a jagged line upward, to his temple.
Bravo gurgled a scream, both his hands clutching at Delta's forearm, trying to pry the limb away from his empurpled face. The glass continued up, into his hairline, digging a trench across his scalp and over his ear, up higher across the crown of his head. Blood sheeted down his face.
"Jesus Christ," Charlie said. "Fuck!"
Echo took a tentative step forward, but Alpha blocked her with his arm. He gave her a quick shake of his head.
"Delta. Listen to me."
"NO!" Delta shouted. And then he spun Bravo around and shoved him away, his clone tripping over his own feet, slipping in the pool his blood had made, and fell hard. His hands reached out in reflex to break his fall, his palms slamming into shards of glass tinkling in the widening crimson bath.
Alpha stepped forward, Charlie doing the same but from Delta's flank. If they could get Bravo out of the way, or maybe tackle Delta together, one of them securing the arm he held the weapon in –
And then Delta reversed his grip on the shard of glass and shoved it into his eye at a violently upward angle. They could hear the pointy shard break through the thin shelf of orbital bone and pierce his brain.
Delta roared and tore the improvised blade loose, taking his eye with it. He flicked the eyeball off, then took a deep breath and stabbed himself in the face once more. Then he raised his head back and rammed the glass into his carotid, twisting it on its edge and drawing it across his throat.
He choked on his blood, sputtering it out between his lips as he fell to his knees.
A moment later, he was dead.
Bravo had rolled onto his back with a shuddering moan. One hand reached out, his fingers curling in the gore until he found another shard of glass. Over and over and over, he punched the shard into his throat. By the time Charlie and Alpha were able to restrain him, he was gone, it had happened so fast.
"Jesus Christ," Charlie said again, his face white as a sheet, he was nearly ready to faint.
Alpha turned away and looked toward the synthesis chamber. Toward Victor.
That…thing…seemed to be watching them. A sharp bolt of pain dinged across the inside of Alpha's skull, forcing him to look away, to look back toward the grisly chaos of Delta and Bravo's bodies lying prone only a few feet in front of him.
Alpha and the remnants of his team of duplicates gathered around a semicircular conference table. A steaming cup of coffee sat before each member. The display monitor projected information from Delta's autopsy report atop the center of the table.
"The glass shard entered at a forty-degree angle, and pierced Delta's brain. However, you'll see a rather severe abnormality to the surrounding region of tissue."
Echo leaned closer to the projection, her slim fingers hovering over the imagery. "It almost looks like—"
"Jelly," Charlie finished. "But…from a stab wound? That's not likely."
"No, it's not," Alpha agreed. "The amount of physical trauma is highly inconsistent with the findings. Yet, somehow, the frontal lobe is nothing more than mush."
"What about Bravo?" Echo said.
"Nothing outside of what was expected. His injuries were consistent with what we observed. This," Alpha waved toward the projection, "was the only abnormality I could discover."
"Maybe a degenerative condition?" Charlie said. "Could it be a sequencing failure, some type of genetic breakdown?"
Alpha shrugged. He had another theory, but not one he was quite ready to share. He was more curious about the path of this conversation and whether or not his duplicates would arrive at a similar conclusion.
"We can rule out suicide," Echo said.
"That was never really on the table to begin with," Alpha said.
"Why not?"
"I've never felt suicidal. Charlie, have you?"
Charlie s
hook his head. Each of them had been curated from the same genetic source, Papa, and each had the same cerebral mapping and memories of their progenitor. Papa was not genetically predisposed to depression and had never had suicidal impulses, which meant that his progeny had never experienced either. With the genetic factors largely accounted for, that left only environmental factors, and the mining station was kept as relaxed and comfortable as possible. A psychotic break of this scale, in the case of Delta, was simply improbable, if not outright impossible.
"So, what then?" Charlie said.
Alpha took a deep breath, steeling himself. "Victor."
His duplicates exchanged glances, and a slight, fleeting wash of relief swept across him. They knew, he realized, chiding himself for feeling surprise. Of course they knew. They had to.
Echo pursed her lips, incredulous. "Are you suggesting that Victor telepathically controlled Delta and Bravo? That he used some kind of mind control to manipulate them into killing themselves?"
"Not just manipulated," Alpha said. "Consumed them. Whatever control Victor was able to exert over Delta was enough to turn a part of his brain into pudding. We cannot simply allow this level of power to continue unchecked."
"For fuck's sake," Charlie sputtered, turning toward Echo with venomous intent. "Victor is still developing. He's not even reached post-birth viability and already he's able to mentally dominate another organism and exert his will."
"If that's so, then we've created the first legitimately viable telepathic humanoid," Echo argued. "The potential research applications of this are extraordinary! And you want to flush it all away?"
"Yes, I do," Alpha said.
"We can't."
"What are your thoughts, Charlie?" he asked.
Charlie merely shrugged. "The project is a failure."
"Or a remarkable success," Echo said. Alpha noted the way she occupied her chair, her body slanting in his direction, one leg tucked beneath the other, her hand gripping the sole of her bare foot. She'd kicked her shoes off onto the floor, as she usually did at the start of meetings such as these, another unique habit unshared by either Alpha or Charlie.
Despite himself, Alpha let loose a sharp bark of laughter. "You're both right, in your own ways. Victor represents both a success and a massive failure. Regardless, what we must do next is clear. Purge Victor."
Charlie nodded.
Echo shook her head, eyes wide. "No! This is it. This is the breakthrough we've been looking for."
"It's not," Alpha argued. "This is larger than that, and goes well beyond our mission parameters."
"We cannot simply destroy him."
"We have two dead crew!" Charlie nearly came out of his chair.
"We're looking for answers about the origins of mankind," Alpha stressed. "Our common ancestor, the so-called missing link. This isn't it."
"The Creator," Echo began, but Alpha cut her off immediately.
"Victor is not the Creator. Victor is an aberration writ large."
"Wait. Just wait." Charlie shoved away from the table and stood. "All of the experiments have used human genetics as a baseline. We've been steadily regressing backwards in each subsequent experiment, filling the gaps with a variety of Homo genetics predating modern man. We should be getting closer to a less complex, less evolved ancestor."
"Victor certainly looks less evolved," Echo said.
Charlie paced the length of the table, his hands gesticulating rapidly with his words. "Yet if we're saying he's the cause of Delta's erratic behavior, that implies a certain degree of complexity that would not exist in a lower-level ancestor."
"Even that's not entirely accurate." Echo's eyes rolled, "And you know it! The evolution of communication is remarkably complex. There have been plenty of studies regarding telepathic communication in animals, communication through pheromones and non-vocal signals, the way they somehow innately know when disaster is about to strike, like an earthquake, and prepare to flee. They possess a certain something that we don't, or perhaps no longer possess. We merely evolved to possess vocal communication, rather than telepathy. We cannot rule out its absence in these so-called 'lower-level' beings."
Alpha cleared his throat, interrupting them. "We've been working our way back through generations of genetic drift. Yes, we are looking for a common ancestor. And I think we have found it, actually. We've just not found the right one."
"Explain," Charlie said.
Alpha shrugged. "We're looking for a direct ancestor to man. I think what we've found is much, much larger than that."
Charlie stopped his pacing. "You think Victor is an ancestor to—"
"—to all life," Alpha finished. "Yes. And I think this aberration goes back much further than just life on Earth."
Echo stared at him, open-mouthed.
"Jesus, you're even crazier than she is."
Alpha had pondered the question of Victor on his own for quite some time. Each of them had, and it had allowed them to think freely and arrive at their own individual assessments. Although they oftentimes reached the same conclusions, occasionally one of them managed to surprise the others with an out of the box scenario. Alpha realized now that his was the most out of the box bit of speculation at the table.
He sipped at his coffee, taking the time to savor it while he thought of the best way to approach his explanation.
"Our universe is but a single strand in the multiverse. We know of eleven dimensions in the multiverse, and it's extremely likely that there are many more in any one of those possible universes within the multiverse. Within all of those various dimensions, within all of those various strings and strands of the multiverse, imagine the enormous—the seismic, really—potential for life. We're so keen on how life began on our planet, whether or not there's other life in our universe, but just stop and consider. Consider life beyond either of those things and think about life outside of our own realities, just for a moment."
Echo paled. Charlie looked flabbergasted and sank slowly back into his chair. He crossed his arms over the tabletop and stared hard at Alpha, but said nothing. What Alpha was describing was Papa's supreme hope – a discovery of not just Elohim, humanity's cosmic father, but perhaps even of Elohim's creator.
"More than thirteen billion years ago there was an explosion, which led to a singularity. The question has always been, what caused this explosion. Of course, we have no answer, no way of knowing, really, but we do have plenty of what ifs. What if this singularity originated elsewhere in the multiverse and caused a breach, or a quantum explosion, an entanglement of some sort, and whatever life existed at that point of origin was turned into the same stardust each of us are made of?
"Victor is not a human ancestor. Victor is the ancestor, his genetic construct blown apart and seeded across our dimension and reborn in the primordial ooze that gave rise to life itself. And we've corrupted it, perhaps not knowingly but certainly willingly, giving it shape and form. We've taken something far more alien than us and twisted it to our own designs. Whatever Victor was originally, it wasn't like us. We've stripped away generations of the human genome, seeking an ancestral baseline based off our own junk DNA, junk DNA that Victor, in whatever small way, was a part of, DNA that helped guide the way we evolved.
"And now we've tried to recreate it, and we have made a considerably sizable mistake. Victor is not a pure ancestor. He's not a pure anything. Not anymore. Right now, he's a mistake, and we have to destroy him."
Quiet descended following his words. His throat surprisingly dry, he took another long pull of coffee.
"The amount of progress this signifies, though," Echo said. "The years of research we could build off of this. You say he's not pure, but what if this is only a start. We could make him pure over time with enough synthesis and enough finesse."
"There's a factor you're not considering, Echo," Charlie said. Alpha could see in the man's eyes where he was going before the words were spoken.
"If Alpha is correct and Victor is
an extra-dimensional being, things can only get worse from here if we persist. We can only visualize three dimensions. We have no idea how many dimensions Victor inhabited, then or now, and what limitations we would be placing on him if we forced him to exist in our three dimensional world. Imagine all of the things he could see or do that we couldn't. Delta and Bravo already got a taste of that in the lab. Whatever it is that might be created from this failed gambit is not worth pursuing. Not if we value our own sanity, and, more importantly, our own fucking lives."
"This meeting is over," Alpha said. He turned toward Charlie and nodded. "Purge Victor."
THREE
ECHO'S FOREHEAD WAS pressed against the glass, as was her hand, which laid atop Victor's, his webbed fingers splayed in perfect alignment to her own. Both had their eyes closed, and Alpha felt a perverse pang of jealousy at the sight, as if he'd caught them in post-coital basking.
"Does it hurt you?" he asked, indicating his head. This close to Victor, his head was dully throbbing and he wondered what Echo must be feeling.
"It's a strange sensation," she said after a long moment. "But not painful. It's more…cottony."
She opened her eyes and slowly pulled away from the synthesis chamber. Each movement was subtly marred with the hesitancy of regret.
"What was he to you?" Alpha asked. He was troubled by Echo's display, and the way she was acting was entirely inappropriate. He was glad that Charlie had stepped out to get fresh coffee after initiating the purge and could not see this display. Victor was a test subject, nothing more. So why was she acting like this was a personal loss?
More to the point, what had she been hiding?
What don't I know here? Alpha wondered.
"He was a part of me," Echo said. "All of us are each a part of the other. Do you not feel a kinship to him?"
"No," Alpha lied. Echo merely rolled her eyes, reading him clearly.
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