Dark Horizons

by Jay Caselberg; Eric Del Carlo

  “Ms. Lawler! Hello!” Mary chirped. “How are mother and baby today?”

  The woman’s eyes widened, as if momentarily startled. She drew her offspring closer. “Fine, thank you. And you are … ?”

  Mary beamed. “Just making the rounds, checking on patients.” She glanced again at the baby. The eye that was visible from where she stood gazed back at her, unblinking. It was perfectly round. The baby’s mother stroked his soft, gray skin while he suckled at her teat with thick lips.

  “Has anyone spoken to you about correcting your little one’s birth defects?”

  The woman’s eyes blazed. Her face contorted into a snarl and Mary took an involuntary step back.

  “How dare you!”

  “I didn’t mean to offend.”

  “Then shut up and go away!” Ms. Lawler’s mouth hung slack with resentment. Mary felt uncomfortable beneath the woman’s burning gaze. She turned away and looked at the floor.

  “You have no right to come traipsing in here and denigrate my baby. He’s not deformed, you stupid cow! He’s the first of a race reborn!”

  Mary looked up at that. What was this woman talking about?

  “I have never lain with a common man,” Ms. Lawler revealed. “But I vacationed in Innsmouth and I swam in the waters. That was nine months ago.”

  She broke off and looked lovingly at her baby before resuming. “Maybe ‘vacationed’ isn’t the right word. Call it a pilgrimage. I drove all the way down to the docks and looked out over the water. I felt something then, energy in the air, and I knew. I dove into the water and he was there waiting for me. He gave me his seed.”

  Mary could stand it no longer. “That’s rape! You’re not facing the truth. Your mind has created this fantasy as a means of escaping the ramifications of your ordeal.”

  Ms. Lawler uttered a scornful laugh. “A fantasy? Step forward and see for yourself.”

  This time Mary found herself taking an involuntary step toward the woman and her baby. She craned her neck to peer at the child. His eyes looked unusual, set extraordinarily far apart in his skull, but they seemed fully functional. Then the woman moved the baby’s swaddling aside a few inches and Mary gasped.

  As the child suckled, what looked like gill slits on his neck swelled and relaxed in spasms.

  Forgetting any sense of medical professionalism, Mary turned and fled toward the door.

  Behind her, Ms. Lawler called out. “My baby is perfect! He is a descendant of Dagon.”

  Mary’s heart raced. She pressed a palm to her forehead and it came back clammy with perspiration. It had to be a trick of the light, Mary thought. The woman had implied certain things, had planted the suggestion in her mind. Mary had fallen for it, had seen what the woman wanted her to see.

  Still, she’d had a shock and needed a moment to collect herself. The approaching sound of footfalls pressed Mary into motion. It wouldn’t do to allow patients or staff to see her in this state. She chose the nearest door, and waved the ID card at the scanner. She darted inside just as the footsteps rounded the corner.

  Mary leaned her back against the door and allowed her eyes to grow accustomed to the dim interior. The pause irritated her; she felt encumbered and unprofessional.

  An array of machines chirped and hissed in the corner. The area had been shuttered by privacy curtains.

  Mary stepped forward. She wiped her sweating palms on her scrubs, refusing to let the unpleasant memories of her interactions thus far today interfere with assessing this patient’s health and diagnosis.

  She swept aside the curtain and looked in upon—nothing.

  At least nothing that resembled a human being.

  Appalled, Mary could only stare.

  “Hello.” The voice sounded perfectly modulated, precise. “Is anyone there?”

  Mary looked at the shape on the bed. “Hello?”

  “Shhh.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I haven’t had the chance to review your charts. What is your name, please?”

  “I’m nobody.”

  “You’re obviously someone.”

  “Then we haven’t done enough.”

  “Excuse me?”

  There was a momentary semi-silence, inhabited only by the sounds of the machines.

  “Doctors removed my kidneys and I now rely on dialysis for survival. My spleen is gone. I am prone to infections but under the care of this facility, antibiotics are readily available.”

  Mary glanced over her shoulder at the closed door and back at the patient. She said nothing.

  “Doctors removed my uterus at my request. Not because of health concerns but because I believe the lack of reproductive organs is key in helping me achieve my ultimate goal.”

  A dry clicking came as Mary tried to swallow. “And what goal is that?”

  “I want to be nobody, nameless, transhuman.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The patient seemed to ignore the statement. “You know that feeling you get if someone is watching you? To that end I had my eyes removed. Also a total gastrectomy, so that the nutrition I receive goes straight from my esophagus to my small intestine. And as soon as you people can figure out how to rid me of those as well, just remember I’ve already signed on the dotted line.”

  Mary could only gape; the figure lying on the bed had no arms or legs. The patient chuckled at their joke.

  “Following the lead of previous generations,” the voice continued. “I’ve elected to let doctors remove my appendix, my tonsils, and my wisdom teeth. Of course I had them remove all of my teeth at once. The next surgery I’ve elected for is the removal of my tongue and severing of my vocal cords. I’ll have my eardrums punctured. I already asked for the removal of one lung. I’m going to have you people keep whittling away at me until I can no longer be considered human. Only then will I feel safe from his notice.”

  “Whose notice?” Mary hadn’t wanted to ask, but the words had slipped from her mouth anyway.

  “Why, the resident of R’lyeh, of course! He’s coming back, you know.”

  “I don’t believe any of that,” Mary said, though she sounded unconvincing to her own ears.

  “Oh, I didn’t either, until I started having those awful dreams!” the patient confided. “Full-blown nightmares! And in them, he opens his eyes. He has woken at last. And he sees me!”

  The torso shuddered. “The less of me there is, the better my chances of escaping his notice.”

  Mary’s heart broke for the woman and her delusions. The procedures this woman had endured could not have been carried out by anyone who had taken the Hippocratic Oath. She had to reason with the woman, had to get the patient removed from the facility.

  “Please, I need you to listen carefully,” Mary said. “What you are suggesting is dangerous and unnecessary. You are not even assured success! To escape the notice of a godlike being—and I’m not saying I believe what you believe, I’m simply making a point for the sake of argument—you’d need to essentially be dead. Or brain dead.”

  “That’s a splendid idea; a medically-induced coma! Oh, thank you, Doctor!”

  “But I’m not–”

  Just then the door behind her slid open and Mary turned to face the new arrivals.

  “Is it them?” the patient quavered. “Have they finally come for me because I interrupted his slumber? Are they worshippers of Cthulhu?”

  Mary, defeated, didn’t bother to answer.

  “This cannot happen again, Mary.” Dr. Elefante crossed his arms and frowned at her.

  “It won’t,” Mary said, looking at the floor.

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise this won’t happen again.”

  “And you won’t steal the ID card from any staffer in order to gain access to other rooms to spread you poisonous ideas?”

  Mary knew the answer he sought and she gave it. “I won’t steal ID cards. I won’t visit patients’ rooms. I won’t share my beliefs.”

  Dr. Elefante peered at h
er and then relaxed, apparently satisfied. “Mary, what are we going to do with you?” He’d adopted a soothing, jocular tone. “You’re scaring the other patients with your crazy talk about science.”

  Mary felt tears of frustration pricking her eyes. “I know, but I can’t help myself.”

  “You’re not helping anyone.” Dr. Elefante rose and strode toward her. He knelt, reached out and lifted her chin so they were eye to eye. “It’s time to face the facts, Mary. Science won’t save you.”

  “But science is real!” The tears fell now. “Before science denialism reached its peak we had made remarkable advances in medical–”

  Dr. Elefante lashed out, his open palm striking Mary’s cheek and leaving behind a fiery blaze of pain. His lips pressed together to form a thin white line, like the scar Mary expected to have after her procedure. He turned to the two beefy orderlies who had caught her minutes before.

  “Get her prepped for surgery,” he instructed the one to her left, a fellow with a blond crew cut and ruddy complexion. “Use a full array of jawed leeches to drain the bad blood from her. Then notify me. We’ll start electro-shock therapy for her feminine hysterics, and if that doesn’t work, I shall perform a frontal lobotomy.”

  Mary struggled as they secured her with heavy duty zip ties to a wheelchair. Sensing imminent defeat she shouted, “Your beliefs are flawed and follow no logic! Can’t you see that?”

  “Shut up!” Dr. Elefante lunged, his expression livid. He gripped her face so tightly that his nails pierced her skin, drawing rivulets of blood. “Shut your mouth right now! We will continue as we have, despite your heresies and blasphemies, in our time-honored tradition. And when our creator arises in chaos and destruction from the nucleus of the cosmos to devour the earth, you’ll see once and for all the emptiness and futility of your faith in science.”

  He released her, his voice now hoarse with emotion. “Hail Azathoth.”

  “Hail Azathoth,” the orderlies echoed.

  The door slid open at the flash of a metallic card, and the blond orderly pushed Mary’s wheelchair out into the hall. Mary cast one last despairing look at Dr. Elefante, now behind his desk and conversing with the orderly who had stayed behind.

  After the door slid closed, her escort bent and whispered in her ear. “I believe what you say is true.”

  Mary drew in a shaky breath and looked up at him, hope rekindled. “You do?”

  “No!” the orderly laughed. “What I believe is that you are one crazy bitch who’d be better off locked up or dead. Now keep your science propaganda to yourself and I won’t have to hit you … as much.”

  He wheeled her down the hall in search of an available operating room. Mary seethed in silence until at last they reached an open chamber.

  “I’m gonna cut you loose and you’re gonna climb up onto the operating table without any trouble, you got it?” The man loomed over Mary until she nodded. He cut her free and she rose. She filched the scalpel from an adjacent tray just as easily as she’d stolen the employee ID access card an hour prior.

  Mary flicked the instrument and cleanly severed the carotid artery before the orderly even knew what happened. He shouted and floundered about the room but to no avail; he had no real medical training. Mary, meanwhile, gracefully bled out, successfully completing her permanent escape.

  MOTHER LODE

  DAVID N. HOENIG

  “BRING US IN SLOW, Derek.” Captain Narcisse Renault’s fingers played over the console by her command chair. “Park us right alongside and match rotation at local coordinates, ten meters distance.”

  A woman of few words, she’d just said more than she had in a week. Since the third of our crew, Wraith, was mute, it was a good thing I didn’t mind silence. It gave me time to think.

  I didn’t really need the captain’s directions, being wired directly into the Pat Hand as her pilot. I had direct input from all the ship’s sensors, and they were sorted through a neural interface in my brain where they were translated into sensations like sight and touch. It all helped me ‘feel’ the ship when flying insanely dangerous missions. The asteroid we approached was rotating in all three dimensions, and had sharp, mountainous jags all over it which could shred our hull like it was made of puff pastry if I screwed up.

  I didn’t screw up.

  I heard the captain exhale softly. She touched a button on her command console, and spoke.

  “Wraith?”

  I made a minor adjustment to the attitude of the ship, perfectly matching the asteroid at the coordinates we’d abstracted from the computer file on the Errant Thought … I checked my board’s readout … just under five days ago.

  Wraith entered the bridge. An amazing engineer, he’d served with the captain on various ships for over twelve years. I’d worked with him for two years aboard the Pat Hand, though he was still something of an enigma to me. He’d lost his voice about seven years ago in an accident which had partially decompressed the Hand into vacuum. The damage to his vocal cords was irreparable, but silent or not, he was still a wizard with ship’s systems. After two years on the ship, I wasn’t sure which characteristic the captain prized more, his technical skill or his silence.

  “We are here, Wraith,” she said to him, pointing at the main monitor which displayed the uploaded map we’d taken as salvage from the derelict nearly five days before.

  The engineer grunted something indistinct, but damned if the captain didn’t somehow understand.

  “I know.”

  Even after two years on the Pat Hand, I didn’t have a clue as to what his sounds meant and that irritated me. I whirled around to face her. “Translation?”

  She looked annoyed, probably at having to speak further. “He doesn’t like the fact that there were only corpses on the Errant, and the only undistorted log entry in their computer was the one which contained the location of this asteroid and the strike at these coordinates. Frankly, I don’t really like it either. We don’t know what went on aboard that ship, but here we are anyway.”

  I saw Wraith nod vehemently in agreement.

  “But Captain …” I glanced from one to the other, taking in both disapproving faces before continuing. “The derelict’s log showed they had discovered a lode of platinum in that spot below us on this tumbling mountain, and that makes it worth mega. But we found their ship a hundred thousand kilometers and a couple of weeks away, moving out-system. If someone had found the data on this mother lode, they would’ve come back and started mining already, right?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe whoever did it is a bunch of psychopaths and they get off on killing people and don’t give a gene-modded trout’s ass about the platinum. They could be holed up somewhere out of line of sight, just waiting for us to pull our pants down trying to get at the ore.”

  “Look, there’s absolutely nothing out there on prelim scan, and the drill site which was documented in the Errant’s log is right below us and pristine. Remember, we found them pretty far away, and that’s plenty of space for something totally unrelated to have happened. If they were victims of pirates or marauders, there should have been wounded or signs of a fight, and we didn’t see any of that.” I started ticking things off on my fingers. “There could’ve been disease, radiation, an imbalance in their life support …”

  Wraith interrupted with an unhappy noise.

  Renault translated. “An imbalance which later corrected itself?” Silence reigned a moment as she looked first at Wraith, then back at me. “Give me full scan.” Her clipped tones cut off further speculation.

  I turned my attention to the external sensors and explored throughout the entire spectrum the ship could process. When nothing dangerous could be found in a three-hundred-sixty degree look, I started probing the asteroid with active electromagnetic pulses. Reflections of those probes were also run directly into my sensorium, and came across like touch. Overall, the sensations through the neural link were actually pretty addictive. When I used them like this, I felt like I had the kind of visio
n Superman only wished he’d had, and giant fingers to reach out and caress anything out there I wanted to.

  “No radiation other than background,” I said after a few moment’s work. “There’s something super dense about ten meters beneath the carbonaceous surface, and which measures roughly twenty by forty meters. Computer modeling says the best match in the reference log is for platinum.” I was about to say more, but saw Wraith and Renault standing like statues, watching the thing on the view screen. I felt the silence of the ship like a spacesuit around me, and chose to respect it.

  Nobody said anything for a few minutes, and then the captain heaved a sigh. “Wraith, please go EVA.”

  He made an unhappy sound and looked my way briefly, then back at the captain. I saw the moment where his resistance to her request faded into something like resignation. I wanted to say something reassuring, but I really didn’t understand what was bugging him. Okay, the derelict’s crew were dead, sure, but space was a dangerous place. If the Errant’s log and my readings were accurate, our entire futures rested just under the surface of that asteroid, ready for the taking.

  Before I could find the right words to say, Wraith nodded his acquiescence to the captain, and left the bridge.

  The engineer’s reluctance made me a little self-conscious, so I accessed the sensors to scan everything again to make sure I’d made no mistakes the first time about any additional risks out there. After a check, everything still looked clear, and I reassured myself that Wraith’s radiation exposure would be minimal over the hours he’d be outside the ship.

  A few minutes after I’d finished my repeat look, my console camera showed Wraith suited and entering our airlock. He carried a compact device with multiple bulb-like containers on its surface. He cycled the lock, and went out into vacuum, tethered to the ship via an umbilical which would exchange his air during the extended EVA.

  With tiny jets of compressed air that I felt more than saw through my link to the ship, he moved to the asteroid, settled onto it and connected himself via crampon to the rocky surface. I observed him deploy the drill he’d brought, and align with the center of the subsurface metallic mass. I then watched avidly as it began to eat into the asteroid with ultrasonic fragmentation, suctioning up and sorting the chemicals it took into the different collection bulbs.