BLACK SITE

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  The truth of the matter was, even after all that had happened over the intervening hours, he still felt a sincere, and strange, sense of familiarity with Victor.

  There was no other option, though. The incident with Delta and Bravo illustrated that quite clearly.

  Victor's eyes sprang open, his mouth flaring painfully wide. The nanites circulating through the amniotic protein bath, responsible for genetic assembly and growth acceleration, were now operating in reverse. Rather than constructing their cloned subject, the nanites were now in an aggressive pattern of destruction.

  Victor's thick hand slammed against the glass, abnormally large. Far larger than it should be for the fifth month growth plan. Bubbles erupted from his contorted mouth, and the hand came down hard against the glass.

  THUD.

  THUD.

  THUD!

  Victor's legs rapidly twisted in the fluid, creating tiny vortexes as his body turned, his heel smacking against the glass. Small patches of flesh came away in thin, splotchy layers, the cells circulating through the disruption his writhing motions made in the bath. Alpha was again reminded of fish food flakes, an impossible image to shake.

  The aberration's face smashed into the chamber, his nose pressed flat against the glass as another scream erupted, fingers curling long talons against the glass.

  Did he---?

  Alpha looked closer, and…yes. Victor's nails, his claws, had dug a shallow trench into the glass.

  THUD!

  THUD!

  THUD!

  Closer this time. On this side of the glass!

  Echo was slamming open palms against the chamber glass, her actions exciting Victor further, stirring his commotion into a frenzy. Limbs flailing violently, smacking into the glass at four different points, legs and hands working forcefully to free himself from the attacking nanites.

  "Echo! Get away from there!"

  Alpha spun, wrapping his arms around her waist from behind and tearing her away from the synthesis chamber.

  "What the hell are you doing?" he screamed.

  She twisted in his grip, the sudden force surprising him, and she tore free from his arms. She turned, cat-quick, her nails raking across his face, pain lancing through his face as curls of skin peeled away from his cheeks.

  He stepped back, reflexively, raising a hand to ward off another assault. A painful burn radiated across the side of his face, and a pulsing tremor tore through his skull.

  Echo kicked, her foot landing squarely in Alpha's crotch. He grunted and went down on his knees, hard, a projectile of gut-warm coffee bursting from his mouth to splatter against the floor.

  Cold steel pierced the center of his brain, superseding all other pains afflicting his body. He cupped his head in both hands, elbows digging into the floor, and screamed.

  From a nearby terminal, Echo grabbed the seatback of a chair and turned on one foot, slamming the chair into the glass chamber.

  A crack appeared, a small fractured circle radiating through the thick shell.

  She swung again, harder. Then again. And again.

  Again.

  Glass exploded, pointed shards stabbing into Echo's frame as a thick, warm bath of liquid splashed across her. Sirens erupted, warning lights flashing…too late.

  "No," Alpha groaned. His vision was reduced to two small slits, the brightness of the lab facility far too bright. The light pierced his brain, stitching a web of pain across the entire surface of his skull with the staccato of a tattoo gun. Through the thin slits of his eyelids, he saw Echo stumble back, watched a thick, piebald foot stomp heavily onto the floor.

  Echo was crying, but he couldn't discern if it was in pain or fear or joy.

  Alpha rolled onto his back, grunting his way into a sitting position. He cradled his head in both hands, eyes pinched shut, a tacky fluid leaking from the corner of both eyes. He felt a sticky wetness leaking from his ears to pool against his palms. His heels scrambled for purchase, finally able to kick himself back, scooting on his ass away from the monstrosity before them.

  He couldn't be seeing right. He knew that. What he was seeing was impossible.

  Victor's flesh was bubbling outward, expanding, shimmering with an upset watery appearance before hardening into solid, wine-stained colored flesh.

  He's growing.

  Alpha forced one eye to part, at least as much as the aching light allowed, and demanded of himself that he bear witness.

  Victor was no longer a baby. No longer even a child. Victor was immense, and growing larger.

  The nanites should have disrupted this, but—

  Oh, Echo. What did you do?

  He realized then that she must have reversed the purge. Rather than disrupt the synthesis and promote a breakdown of the genetic material, she had found a way to hack the purge protocols Charlie had enacted. Alpha hadn't seen her leave her own station, which meant she'd carried out a deliberate assault against the program from her own terminal. Rather than eliminate Victor, she had accelerated the growth program.

  Whatever human similarities Victor may have possessed during the fetal stages of growth were absent in his adulthood. The alien DNA was supremely abundant now, those characteristics fully apparent in their total domination over the genetic code.

  Even through the patchwork hide of its body, Victor's muscles stood tautly, cording his arms and legs, chest, and neck like steel rebar. Tall and hairless, easily more than six feet, his wrists and ankles thick, his limbs as dense as tree trunks. His face was expressionless, a smooth plane of thick gray tissue over an immense skull ringed with pointed protuberances and large bony shelves over its eyes.

  Victor lumbered toward Echo, though she stood her ground, her mouth open in surprise. A piercing scream erupted from deep in her throat. Alpha wiped tears away from his eyes in time to see blood drip from her ears. She cupped her head, mirroring Alpha, and fell to her knees.

  Victor reached toward her, his face still impassive even as his fingers wrapped around her skull and gripped tightly. The thick skin of his hand muted the rustling tissue paper noise, but Alpha could still hear it and then he realized with gross fascination that the sound was the tectonic shift of the bone plates of her skull cracking loose and crumpling in Victor's grip. Then the monster raised the deflated skull and jerked his hand, the noise of her neck snapping was sharp even over the emergency sirens.

  "No," Alpha moaned, honestly unsure if he was protesting her death or the looming eventuality of his own.

  A dark cloud enshrouded his mind, the ache in his brain growing impossibly tight. He felt as if his brain were swelling, boiling and bulging against its bony case and threatening to break through. If his skull were to crack open, though, relief would surely follow.

  He reached toward the shards of glass, his palm slicing open in the debris as he sought out the perfect sliver.

  "No," he said again, this time in protest. He was not in control of his own arm, his movements not his own but Victor's. The beast was in his head, manipulating him.

  As he reached for the glass, he felt his brain peel open and the horrors that only Victor was privy to flooded in. What Alpha saw was beyond comprehension, and he felt the fundamental foundations of his reality crack and erupt, breaking beneath new knowledge that had no words and could only be expressed through his loud, agonizing screams, screams that turned his throat raw and left a coppery taste in his mouth. His eyes widened, the light brutalizing him, his face contorting into widespread agony.

  The glass nearly slipped loose of his grip, his hand slickened with blood. He forced his fingers tighter around the shard, the blade slicing through tendons as he embedded the glass into his hand, demanding his grip to tighten further even as nerves fired and died, leaving his fingers frozen and useless. He raised his hand, the glass an arm length's away, and focused on the glittering point that he would soon impale himself upon.

  Not like this. Please, not like this.

  Not like—and in the span of eternity between thought a
nd words, Alpha witnessed stars collapse, eaten alive by black unending mouths, supernovas climaxing and devouring solar systems whole, suns cradled in the cups of enormous hands, the bodies of beings so large he could not process them, could not meet their eyes lest his skull implode upon the sight of them, civilizations rising and falling in milliseconds, all of it broadcast into his brain in a complex system of visions, fractured and divided and spread across a complex web of information shaped like a spider's eye and shoved through a prism, more than his meager mind could handle, and his sanity burst like shattering glass into a hundred thousand pointed shards, and he screamed, coughing loose flecks of blood that danced across his forearm like rain—Delta and Bravo.

  A booming noise rang out behind him, deafening him. His eardrums burst, and the second explosion was a muffled whompf! Victor staggered back, a hole blossoming in the center of his torso, and then a second, higher up and to the right.

  The fog in Alpha's mind cleared, the darkness parting. He tried to release the glass, but it was buried too deep in his skin, his fingers refusing to budge. He had to pinch the point of the shard tightly between the fingers of his opposite hand and pull it free, screaming all the while in agony as he found fresh nerves to ruin.

  And then the darkness returned, and his body collapsed to the floor.

  A shrill droning in his ears returned Alpha to consciousness. The emergency alerts, he realized, but they were quiet, too quiet, as if he were listening to them from deep below the water.

  Charlie's lips were moving, but he couldn't make out the sound of the words. Those lips were a strange pale blue color, and Charlie's flesh was a stark, unnatural gray.

  Alpha was wrapping his hand in medical gauze to halt the bleeding, and the skin itched from the surgical glue that had been used to seal the lacerations.

  His ears were plugged, he realized, in addition to the deafness from ruptured eardrums. He could feel the thick bullets of blood lodged in both ear canals. In between those was a horrible, rending pulsation as his brain beat against its skull cage, pounding fiercely. His nose ran, leaking a curdled, gray substance over his lips, down his chin.

  His brain was fighting to be free of the awful visions trapped in its folds. He wanted to shut his eyes against them, but that only gave those sights a fresh reality. Unbidden, the impossibilities returned to him and he stared again upon a drowned city and the massive figure sleeping over the flooded remains. That enormous, hulking piebald beast, its skull overlarge and barren, bony ripples distorting the slick flesh coating its skeleton. Red, massive supernovas for eyes, their brightness burning through the seams of closed lids, unable to contain the burning heat trapped beneath. And its mouth, a wicked bony cage set atop writhing tentacles that grew from its jaw and chin. This beast, this monster – a devourer of entire cities, a world killer whose belly was filled with the remains of entire planets it had gorged upon.

  "We were so stupid," he said.

  Charlie's lips halted and he stared at Alpha, a hard and curious gaze.

  "That thing…a hybrid abomination, and we made it. It's old. So, so old. Older than anything. And we made it. Willingly, we made it. Stupid. So stupid."

  Charlie said something, but the movement of his lips only confused Alpha further. Ignoring his clone, Charlie let his head loll to the side, his eyes rolling toward Echo. Alpha followed his gaze and saw she was splayed across the floor in a sheet of crimson, lying terribly still. In her, he saw his own demise and wondered again at how they could be so oddly different.

  Idly, his fingers drew shapes in the blood pooled around him. He knew only a hint of the importance of the symbols, but his hand was compelled and moved of its own volition. Forcing himself to focus, he realized he recognized the imagery, an ancient language half-glimpsed from a Victor-induced fever-dream only moments-hours-eons before, these same symbols adorning the buildings of the drowned cities beneath the sleeping god. He sensed a certain weight behind the alien words, the threats promised in each stroke as he connected lines and circles in the gore. A hidden knowledge told him these words were far older than the conceptual universe surrounding him, his fingers drifting through entire dimensions joined together by a language that, if he were able to speak it, would deafen him and contort his tongue so deftly that the muscle would become dead in his throat and he would choke upon it.

  Would Papa have approved? he wondered. There was Charlie, of course, who, despite having the same memory load as the rest, had somehow imprinted on Papa's younger, brasher self, an angry, arrogant twenty-something Raëlian ready to burn down the world with his proofs and theories.

  Alpha believed he had been the purest. The first clone of Papa, and the most complete. He had shared Papa's belief that technology would bring mankind closer to their god, and that the process of cloning and genetic engineering and DNA synthesis would allow them to recreate the progenitor of all mankind and reunite humans with their alien Elohim ancestors.

  Victor was supposed to be Elohim, but this was impossible. Rather than a prophet to shepherd mankind through its final days, they had unleashed a gross mistake, a frightening trespass across dimensions. Whatever Victor was, it went by a different name, a far older name.

  "The realm of perception he operates on," Alpha whispered, more to himself than to Charlie, "this is wrong. We have made a horrible miscalculation."

  He wanted to blame Echo, wanted to lay their deaths at her feet, but found that he could not. She was Papa, and Papa was her, and perhaps she was the purest incarnation of them all. Or maybe Victor has simply manipulated her to his own ends. Now she was dead, and it was impossible to blame her for any of it.

  When Alpha closed his eyes, he strained to not imagine the horrors Victor had funneled into his head. That kaleidoscopic display of perception across dimensions that his addled brain could not handle. He may as well have been a one-dimensional figure thrust into the 3-D realm, so out of sorts and twisted upon a new reality that fractured his mind and broke the core tenants of the all. All that he thought he knew, all that he thought he was, shattered, and now he struggled to reassemble the various pieces of the self, to unravel the crumpled paper ball his brain had been twisted into. He was only dimly aware of Charlie dabbing a cloth at the corner of his lips to wipe away the drool leaking down his cheek. All he knew was pain.

  "Where is he?" Alpha asked. If Charlie answered, he didn't know. He forced his eyes open and asked again, forced himself to watch Charlie's lips and to focus on the words, to hear those words past the shrill, soft droning of emergency alarms.

  "He went into the ductwork," Charlie said. "He hit me with a tablet, then went up into the ceiling."

  Alpha followed Charlie's eyes upward, to the gaping hole above Echo's body. The displaced lighting flickered in a strobe-like fashion, hanging limply from the damaged ceiling.

  A fresh pulse of pain ripped through his brain, forcing him to double-over. A thin, bloody line of drool crept from his lips and he spit onto the floor.

  His side was tacky and wet below the ribs. He couldn't remember why.

  "We have to destroy him," he sputtered. The words were a revelation entirely his own. Something in his soul cracked and shifted, as if a weight had come loose and freed him from rusty chains.

  He noticed the bloody script he'd lined the floor with for the first time then, and wondered when and how he had done this. Gibberish, all of it. Strange and arcane, like nothing he had ever seen before. Slowly things shifted in his mind and he began to see clearly, clearer than he thought he had seen in quite some time, although he could not pinpoint exactly when things had grown oppressively cloudy.

  Turning toward Charlie, Alpha saw, for the first time, the angry gash and the long, ropy wound across Charlie's forehead. A deeper, wider tear marred his throat.

  "No shit," Charlie (no, not Charlie) said.

  (Charlie's dead.)

  "No, no, no." Alpha screwed his eyes tightly shut, palm pressed tightly to his temple. A horrible sc
ream ripped through the inside of his skull, angry and misbegotten. He was seeing things, hearing things. Talking to himself. That was it, he realized. That had to be it.

  "The mining drones," Alpha stammered. "We need to bring them online."

  Charlie's mouth hung open in a rictus of pain, but after a moment he nodded. Or perhaps his head simply lolled as his body slumped. Alpha wasn't sure, not entirely.

  A dozen decommissioned drones had been mothballed on base. After the veins of ore ran dry and the site shuttered, the drones had simply been deactivated and warehoused. Papa had not been concerned with their resale value; it had been easier to simply shut them away than deal with more trade deals and selling used mechs. They could be used now, though, and set loose across the base and its ventilation grid to hunt and destroy Victor.

  Charlie-not Charlie was already working on the tablet, fingers moving nimbly despite the pain contorting his features. One hand was frozen stiff by paralysis, fingers curled into a tight fist. A moment later he slammed the tablet to the floor beside him and screamed, "Fuck!"

  "What?"

  Charlie-not Charlie laughed, but there was no humor to be had, only mania. "The power cores. The fucking power cores."

  Of course, Alpha realized. They would have stripped the drones of their energy cells while they sat dormant. "I'll go."

  Charlie-not Charlie looked at him, somewhat confusedly, but nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, good. Get them plugged in and I can control them. God, my head!"

  Alpha stood on shaking legs, his whole body weak, and took three shuddering steps to the door, fumbled his way into the corridor beyond. A sticky mess poured from his nostrils and he wiped at it with the back of his good hand, barely curious at the odd coloration and the chowder-like consistency of the lumpy fluid. The pain ricocheting inside his skull diminished the further he got from the lab, but a noisy hum remained, forcing his eyes into half-open slits. He kept his wounded hand pressed to his belly, blood leaking a long trail down the hallway to mark his passage.