by K.Z. Freeman
We arm ourselves as best we can and creep into the main hangar, our heads low and our steps quiet. Inside, the wide space is dim, illuminated only by shafts of sickly light streaming from the windows high up the walls. The dust-curtain which the tired light illuminates is palpable, thick. I cannot detect any movement, and I can see Calyx checking her wrist-display nervously as the seconds tick away. The light from her instrument is casting green hues upon her face. The sloshing of our plasma cartridges sickens me. It sounds like liquid movements of acid within the bowels of some beast. Our feet clank against the floor.
“The hell is that stench?” Ty grunts and spits on the floor.
I have no answer, and by the looks of it, neither does Calyx. The complex smells like stale meat. We shuffle on, through the dusty interior and eventually reach the very end of the hangar.
Before us, a shaft leads down into the darkness. To our increasing dismay, it’s also the source of the stench. We tie pieces of fabric over our noses and mouths and descend into the hole and down the ladder after Calyx had assured herself, and us, that no ambush awaits us.
Upon reaching the bottom, I spot a faint glow ahead, at the cavern’s end. We carefully navigate the darkness and follow the bend into another corridor with our weapons drawn. Thick pipes run down the length of the ceiling, glistening when illuminated by the shafts of light produced by the flashlights mounted bellow the muzzles of our guns.
We take a few strides into the relative unknown when I hear skittering in the distance and the first attempts are made to try and kill us. Ionized plasma fizzles against Calyx’s static shield-projections and spits over the walls in orange-white plumes leaving tracers on the surface for a second like after images. Before a proper barrage manages to hail down upon us, we rush back around the bend. The wall next to us starts to glow under the pressure of weapons fire. I hear a rattling sound and notice a grenade clanging next to us, billowing fumes.
“Shit,” she hisses.
We shuffle back as my eyes begin to water and sting. I can see Ty scrambling for his backpack, pulling out something. He places it over my head and I can barely hear him over the spank of weapons-fire painting the wall to our left.
“Deep breaths! One, two, three,” he says and I do as instructed. “Now hold it in,” he coughs and does the same himself. His intakes come with harsh whizzing as we continue this for a few minutes. The hallway remains a haze. I can see Calyx positioned in front of us. She’s on one knee, stiff, aiming down her sight, her mouth covered by a rebreather mask I have no idea where it came from. The shooting stops and I begin to hear footsteps. Shadows start to lessen in their length upon the floor to our left. There are three of them, and they’re coming closer. The first peers over the bend, his gun-light trying to pierce the settling fog. Calyx fires and the man’s head simply vanishes. Not even a charred skull remains to splatter upon the wall behind him. She immediately gets up and begins to close the distance in a run, firing as she goes. She yells a muffled rage-scream as counter-fire fizzes over her shield. The two men had moved behind cover, but she doesn’t stop, keeps running. I see two more orange flashes as she reaches and disappears behind the bend. I heard a sound like hot steel thrown into water and know the two men had been incinerated where they stood. By the time the two of us manage to get up and wade to her, there’s nothing left of the two men but smoldering pools of shit-slime.
“You’re a fucking madwoman,” Ty says approvingly, half-laughing.
She sighs, checking her wrist display as we begin to move ahead again, “That’s about it with the shield. We need to be more careful, I think it’s got two more shots in it tops.”
I’m not sure if she’s talking to us or to herself.
“Where’d you even get that thing? That suit?” I ask her, coughing out the last of the gas from my burning throat.
“My father had it stored in his basement. His pet project, I have no idea what powers it. The way he explained it to me is that it works by detecting incoming projectiles and fires a net of elementary particles against them to disperse the things. It doesn’t work well with bullets tho, only plasma.”
“I want one,” Ty says.
We walk in silence for a while, in the dark, our lights fading with alarming rapidity, when we start to hear a deep, thumping sound. The walls shake the deeper we go.
“Mining?” I ask.
“Sounds more like… footsteps,” says Ty.
“We need to press on,” Calyx whispers, her voice clipped behind her mouth-grille. We speed up our trek. I notice the floor had shifted to a slight incline and snakes of cabling are rattling along with the tremors around us. Cascades of stale-smelling dust are caught in our flickering lamps. The hallway begins to shrink around us as we go deeper.
“I don’t like this,” Ty mumbles.
Sweat is pouring down my face and after a good half hour of walking, I begin to feel a headache creeping up my neck. We reach a point where the somewhat smooth walls change and lead into a roughly excavated entrance before us. Our lights suddenly and simultaneously flickered out and die.
“Shit,” says Ty, slapping his hand against the riffle a few times. I watch him, when something quite different catches my attention. In the cave ahead of us, I notice strange glimmers in the walls, like tiny crystals that seem to refract light that isn’t there. I step into the cave and touch the walls. They are wet, like a sweaty palm. I take the lead, fascinated by the dim light which the crystal’s tiny formations seemed to produce. I notice creatures with long, spindly legs slowly crawling over the jagged walls. They succeed in reminding me of how hungry I am, but I cannot bring myself to even touch, let alone try and chew one of them.
Ty has no similar restraints and I can see him grabbing one of the hairy bastards and throwing it in his mouth without hesitation.
“Idiot,” Calyx grimaces. “How can you even consider eating one of–“
“Food is food, even if tastes foul,” he says, gagging and washing it down with a few sips of water.
In a strange way, I admire his nerves, for the creatures look nowhere near edible, hard-shelled with legs longer than their bodies.
Reluctantly, Calyx grabs one of them. I can see it in her eyes she’s considering eating it as she smells it, its legs flailing about in attempts to find purchase.
“What if it carries a toxin?” she asks.
“We live in a radioactive wasteland and you’re worried about toxins? Are you hungry or not?” Ty says and snatches it from her hand. He bites it in half, it torso crunching in his mouth and its insides spitting out the other end. Even in the half-light, I can see her cringe. Even Ty doesn’t look satisfied, his face looking as though he regrets the decision immediately.
“Not hungry enough, apparently,” I laugh and begin to move on.
We navigate through the passages, closing in on the strange thumping sounds which had started to intermix with distinct grinding noises. There are no digressing paths leading in other directions, so we follow along the narrow space in contemplating silence. I feel somewhat ill as the tension of what we might find becomes palpable. Pebbles munch under our feet, while the bigger rock formations stand near the walls where they have been left in the wake of what had obviously been a hurried hollowing.
I spot movement up ahead, as if something saw us and quickly shifted its frame around the next bend. The figure appeared lanky and its appearance stopped me mid-stride.
“Guys?” I ask. “Did you see it?”
“Hard to see anything over your bulky ass,” Ty says. “See what?”
“You better not be messing with us,” Calyx remarks and forces her way in front of me, the hum of her charged weapon and the orange glow below its muzzle contrasting the surroundings.
“What aren’t you telling us about this place?” Ty asks her. “What are these crystals?”
“I told you everything I know,” she says, aiming down her sight as we slowly continue forward. The grinding becomes louder as we begin to near the bend ahead and
a stronger light greets us upon reaching it.
“There!” I point as I notice the same lanky figure, hunched over something smooth protruding out a section of the wall. It races of ahead as it notices us, its feet slapping wetly upon the smooth ground.
“Ok, now I’m freaked,” Ty admits. “Next time I see it, I’m shooting the damn thing.”
“No,” I murmur. “Don’t, I don’t think it’s of any physical threat to us.”
“How about a threat to my sanity? Did you see how that fucker moved? It’s like… I don’t even have words for it.”
“Have to admit I’m a bit–“
“Guys,” I cut her off, “just chill with the trigger for a bit,” I walk to one of the smoothed surfaces jutting out the wall. I look to see what it is, and my jaw line drops. Within the pod, lit from above and suspended in some kind of thick gel, a figure of a man floats, his hands crossed over his chest and his eyes open wide. They are looking up, jaw hanging, a thick tube running down his throat – I can see the heart pulsing underneath pale skin, his chest rhythmically expanding and contracting. I notice his scalp shaped as though someone had burned it, the skin patchy. His fingertips and toes are cut off. A pang of disgusts shoots through me. I look into his eyes, intently, when suddenly, the eyes stare back. Bloodshot and lidless, filmed with a layer of transparency, the look of them makes me take a step back. I notice veins over its eyes and realize they’re actually closed. They move again and I suspect this emaciated, cryogenic mummy doesn’t even see me, but in suspended in some state of sleep – dreaming. No sooner had I noticed all of this, than Calyx mirrored my thoughts, “I wonder what they’re dreaming about,” she says.
“There’s more here,” Ty yells from up ahead.
So taken aback am I with the prospect of eternal sleep which the beings seemed to be undergoing, that I can barely take my eyes off the shriveled man inside the pod. I move ahead to Calyx, looking within each of the rounded compartments in turn. Most of them are occupied by men, while some house women, their breasts firmly balanced by the gel. Two out of the dozen pods are empty and, by the looks of it, had never even been filled. All of them have long hair snaking in the liquid.
“Damn this place reeks,” Ty says. “It’s not just me, right? These compartments smell worse than the others.”
“Indeed,” I nod. Calyx doesn’t seem to have the same problem, the rebreather mask still covering her face.
“Where’d you get that, anyway?” I ask her.
“It extends from the suit’s collar.”
“The more you tell me about the suit,” Ty remarks, nudging us along and trying to get us to leave the smooth-floored sections of the cave due to its smell, “the more I want one.”
We walk around the next bend and to the left, when I come face to face with a gun, pointing at my chin.
“I’ll use it!” The man saying the words is shriveled beyond what I thought possible. He stands as almost nothing else but skin and bone, naked but for a strap of fabric hanging loosely around his one shoulder, covering his genitals and stomach. “I told you before, I don’t want any more of you down here, now go back!”
“More of who?” I ask him as Ty and Calyx move to surround him. The man instantly becomes unsure at who he should be aiming at.
“I may not see very well, but I still remember the hum of your guns, you bastards. I told you to leave, but you keep drilling, don’t you?! You just keep fucking drilling!”
I sense the tension radiating from the man and feel the projectile coming before he even pulls the trigger. The man is weak, and the gentle recoil alone makes the ejected plasma go wide and over my head. The discharge hisses over the wall behind me and I feel the heat of it as it passes by. Ty grabs the man’s wrist. The wretch yelps and shouts in defiance as Ty grips him into a headlock.
“Please! Don’t!” he pleads, nearly melting in Ty’s grip. “Don’t kill me, please. I beg you!”
“We have no intention of killing you,” I tell him. “Just calm the fuck down.”
“Speak for yourself,” Ty says.
“Liar!” he spits as though he were told the most grievous fabrication of truth he had ever heard. “You lie and you lie and lie and…”
He keep repeating the words over and over, sobbing in his misery, his ugly, wrinkled face leaking tears. He attempts to wipe his eyes with his free hand and I notice the tips of his fingers missing. I look down at his feet. His toes are gone as well. I feel bile rise at the sight. I can handle people getting shot, even bleeding or being torn to pieces, but disfigurement had a weird place in my psyche for some reason I knew I would never quite understand.
“Just calm down and he’ll let you go,” I tell him.
“Fuck that,” Ty grunts. “I’m snapping his scrawny little neck.”
“Ty…” I sigh.
I can see even behind the fabric covering Ty’s face that he had just pursed his lips, unsure for a moment if he should pay any attention to me. He lets the man go, but grabs him by the hand again as he tries to waddle away.
“Just let me go, please! I don’t want anything to do with you and your guns,” he pleads.
“Would you listen for a moment?” I say behind gritted teeth. “We aren’t the military, we have their guns. We’re looking for our friend’s father. Can you tell us what those sounds are?”
He looks unsure at first, his eyes darting about as though contemplating or weighting the possibilities that what I’d just told him might be the truth.
“You’re not the military?” he asks.
“We killed the military,” answers Calyx calmly.
In that moment, his eyes and face practically light up. His words come with a sort of joyous bounce. “In that case, friends, you have my deepest apologies for attempting to shoot you. I beg for your forgiveness in my transgression.”
“Fine,” Ty snaps. “We forgive you, I guess. Just tell us what those sounds are.”
The man’s expression changes somewhat after hearing Ty’s voice again, but remains hopeful. “Please, come into my office, I have a proposition for you all.”
“You have an office? Are you fucking kidding me?” Ty snickers.
“I am most certainly not playing you for a fool, lad,” he answers calmly. “Now, please, follow me.”
His shift in speech disturbs me more than seeing him walk, or should I say limber ahead. His right hand never leaves the wall until he takes a right in the tunnel’s fork. We walk behind him a few dozen strides, then into an open compartment behind a thick blast gate. He compulsively checks the machinery within, makes sure every knob is in its proper location and every computer functioning. The knobs look like they haven’t been moved in a decade. Although how he knows the machines are still running I don’t know. Somehow I was certain he would eventually feel the need to tell us.
The walls are one big machine, with screens so caked in dust I can barely see anything on any of them. What I can spot are numbers and strange curving lines that constantly make speeding, green colored waves.
A table without contents but dust stands in the middle and a huge, reclining and padded seat behind it. After he is satisfied that all things are still in their proper place, he sits down, leans back and rests his elbows on the seat’s handles. He touches the tip of his fingers together, what was left of them anyway, and taps them slowly. The sight of it is revolting.
“Please, take a seat,” he says. There are no other chairs in the room.
“Look you mad fuck,” Ty spits, “start talking or we’re leaving.”
The man releases an exasperated sigh and annoyance flashes over his features. “Look, can’t you just play along? It’s been a long time since anyone else but brutes with waving guns came in here.”
“And you know we aren’t brutes how? Just because we aint the army?” Ty asks.
“Just tell us what you know, please,” I add.
“Is not a single one of you even remotely interested in what those pods you have witnessed are?” he
inquires.
“Not really,” answers Ty.
“Cryogenic stasis?” Calyx asks.
“Oh! You have an educated one in your midst, I see,” the man says, bursting with excitement. “But not quite, my dear. Now please, remove your rebreather so I can hear you properly, my ears aren’t what they used to be, you see. You will find the air in this compartment quite properly filtered.”
“Merde,” Ty spits.
She did so, taking a deep breath and the man smiles, nodding, “Good, good, now tell me, how do you know of such technology?”
“My father told me about them, and many other things. Let’s just say we had a very different concept of bedtime stories.”
“Could I be privy to the name of your father, perhaps?”
“Why don’t you tell us your name first,” I tell him.
“Ah, of course, manners are a fleeting concern in such a state as mine. Forgive me. My name is Eli Gregor Sambojevich. Most of my colleagues call me El. But they’re all dead now.” An expression I could not quite place changes his features.
We introduce ourselves in turn and the man nods. Even Ty, although reluctant, joins his voice.
“Now, my dear, your father?” Eli asks.
“His name is Nikola Sever.”
Eli practically falls of his chair. He stands up and walks to her. “You’re Niko’s daughter?!” His fingers, what’s left of them anyway, grab her and grope her face. She grimaces at first as the stubs of his fingers rub her cheekbones, but indulges him. “Dear god, you do have some of his features.”
“You know my father?” she asks.
“Know him? I was practically his assistant!”
“Where is he? Tell me!” she demands.
“Now, now, like I said, I have a proposition for you.”
“Tell me where he is!”
“Pha! The same volatile spirit, I see he has not passed on only his looks.”
“Tell me!” she presses.
“No.”
She grabs him by the throat and hold until he starts to turn blue. I jump in between them and try to pry her off him, but she doesn’t let go. “He won’t be able to tell you anything if he’s dead!” I remind her.
She holds on for a while still, her grip lessening, then lets go.
Eli braces himself over the table and grabs hold of the sore spot on his neck with one hand, coughing.
“Please, just hear my proposition,” he rasps between belches.
“What is it?” I ask him.
“I desire to get back inside the pod.”
“The pod in the corridor, aye?”
“Yes,” he nods. “I need to get back. There is nothing left for me out here.”
“Why? What happens in the pod?”
“What if I told you can step into a pod, a pod that is preprogrammed so you create your experience within it. Preprogrammed in any way you desire, so every situation you are faced with can turn into your favor or be stirred into the best possible outcome without effort. A pod where there is no sadness or regret, where every possibility is open to you, where you are forever young and the sun never sets. You can live your life in any way you want, you but program this life and its parameters before you enter the pod – you cannot do it while you are already in. You can never go back out again. You forget there was – or even is – a life outside the pod. Every experience and sensation you feel while inside it is as real as the reality which you now sense and perceive. The pod becomes your reality. But you may never go out again, you shall live and die within this pod. Would step into, would you merge with such a device?”
“That’s what they do?” I stare, astounded.
“Precisely that.”
“If you can’t get out once you’re in, how are you outside now? How did you even get out?” Calyx asks him.
“I do not know how I was able to survive my excision from the pod,” says Eli. “When the soldier sbegan their drilling, mine and a friend’s pod got shattered. I alone survived, him they buried under a pile of excavated stones, you probably took note of the smell. It’s a persistent beast. But more to the point, we had never taken anyone out of the pod in our experiments, we simply assumed the shock would be too great for the brain to handle and would lead to an almost definite stroke or a fatal brain aneurism.”
“How will you get inside a shattered pod and fill it with liquid?” I ask.
“I will not go into one of the shattered ones, I will go to an already occupied one.”
“How?” demands Ty.
“There’s a man who is on the edge of his life, his functions aided by the pod itself for over twenty years now. His brain is still functioning, but only barely, I will take his place within the chamber.”
“I don’t,” I start to say. “I mean… help me out here Calyx.”
“As long as he gives me information about my father, I don’t care,” she says.
Her words are good enough for me. The ramifications of the act don’t escape me, however, and I cannot bring myself not to ask, “How do we know this man you speak of is at the end of his life? And what makes you think your life has more value than this man’s, even if his functions are aided by the machine?”
“It is not a question about who is more deserving of it!” the man snaps, suddenly angered. “I have cared for these men and women, held their lives in my hands for almost two years now. Look at me! I deserve to be in that pod!”
“Selfish old prick,” Ty snarls. “We don’t need his information, let me snap his neck now and be done with this. You can have your dreamscape then, old man.”
The man moves behind the desk, eyes fearful. “No, please, I beg you, I am telling you the truth, the man has no more than a year to live, while I still have decades, you cannot leave me like this!”
“What would you have us do?” asks Calyx. “What needs be done?”
“So… you will help? Truly you will?”
“Just tell me what you need me to do before I tire of looking at your ugly face.”
“I have already programmed a peaceful death for Aren, the person that I shall replace. His brain will fool his heart that he is dying in his bed, surrounded by his loved ones. His heart will stop gently, instead of the shock which he would experience upon disconnection with the life-support systems. All you have to do is wait for me to get into the machine after he is out and press this button here.” He points to a square on the high-standing machine behind the chair. “Obviously I can’t press it and be inside the machine at the same time.”
“What difference does it make?” I ask. “Won’t it be worse for Aren when he feels his heart slowly stopping than having it stop immediately?”
“I have programmed a pleasant transition, he won’t even notice it until it’ll be too late.”
“He’s lying,” says Ty.
“I thought you said you can’t program anything once the subject is in the pod? That all the programming must be done before hand.”
“I have had enough time to devise this simple, yet incredibly complex system into the machine,” says Eli.
“When will you tell me what you know about my father?” Calyx demands.
“When I am inside the pod. There will be a minute before I am fully incased within the gel and won’t be able to speak. But a minute shall prove more than adequate for me to say what I have to say.”
“He’s a snake,” says Ty. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up laughing in our faces.”
“Think for a second you twat,” the man snarls back. “Would I risk your rage and a chance for its vengeful drive to shatter me out of the pod again? I will tell you all I have promised, you need not worry about that.”
“To be fair, though, you haven’t promised us anything that would be of note. What could you possibly offer us that would be so important?” Ty asks him with more calmness than I had expected.
“Do this for me, and you will find out, otherwise, you might as well kill me.”
“I say we leave him
here,” says Ty. “Continue on through the tunnel system.”
“No,” Calyx says. “Let’s go, old man. To the pod.”
We stroll back to one of the pods in the center and I immediately become suspicions. The man within doesn’t look old, or dying like Eli claims.
“I have enabled the protocols, you might want to step back a bit,” says Eli. We press our backs to the wall and observe as the man begins to convulse and thrash within the pod, his back arching, his chest rising and falling as the glass opens up from below and the pink fluid begins to gush outward. The wired strapped upon him tear bits of overgrown skin as they snap away, the cable in his mouth gushes out and the man heaves. We step aside to avoid getting soaked by the liquid pouring from the pod, only Eli stands, almost as if reveling the touch of it and its steaming, smelly warmness. The expunged stench is awful, like a mix of petroleum and feces. I see Calxy’s mouth-grille extend from the suit’s gorget and over her face. The man falls from the pod and on his face, rolling into a fetal position where he draws slow, shallow breaths.
“I thought you said he would be dead,” Calyx says.
“He will be soon enough,” says Eli dismissively. “Now, one of you get back, wait one minute, and press the button I showed you.”
“Ty, go,” I say.
“Hell no,” he protests. “I want to hear what he’ll say.”
I sigh and decide to go myself, knowing there’s no way I’d convince Calyx to do it, the look in her eyes pleading me not to even ask.
I reach the computer and find the key in question and check some of the displays while I wait. I press it and head back. I can hear Calyx shout “What!” and pick up my pace. I come just in time to see Eli close his eyes. I look at them both, their eyes filled with expressions of surprise and shock. I open my mouth to ask what Eli had said, when I hear a whimper from the man that had fallen out of the pod. I kneel beside him as he turns on his back. He opens his dead, milky eyes for a moment. He doesn’t say it even though he tries. He want to know why we let him out.
CHAPTER 8
