by Aaron Bunce
“What are…wait. I see it now. Jacky-Boy…”
“I’m the one talking to you, parasite, not him. You knew something was up with the kid, didn’t you? Something to do with that message. Talk! You saw him do it, didn’t you? You are always watching, peeping, like a creepy little stalker. You noticed but didn’t say anything to us.” Lex shook Poole again, his feet now swinging free from the ground. Her ghostly double seemed to gain substance, her glowing orange eyes shining like demonic flares.
“So strong. It’s what I was trying to…”
“I don’t want you. I want Ayo. Bring him back. Do it, now, damnit! He’ll tell us the truth. I’ve been watching you this whole time, and you’ve done nothing but bullshit us. Stop lying. STOP LYING!”
“I didn’t…know…” Poole gasped, slapping ineffectually at Lex’s forearms.
“Lex!”
She didn’t seem to hear him. Or she could, but couldn’t think past the rage.
“Lex!” Jacoby said again, and moved forward. He reached out and grabbed her forearm, not to wrestle against her, but just to let her know he was there.
She flinched, her head snapping around to him, nostrils flared and ghostly outline pulsing with angry, orange light.
“It’s okay. Let him talk. We’re all on the same side.”
Lex snorted, wrinkled glare snapping back to Poole, and then back to him again. She sucked in a breath, let it out, and then slowly lowered Poole back to the deck. Once her hands came free, Poole blinked out, reappearing somewhere in the darkness behind him.
“I, uh. I’m sorry,” Lex wavered. He grabbed her other arm and braced her weight for a moment. “I don’t really know where that came from.”
“I do…” Poole whispered, “If granted enough time to speak, that is.”
“Are you okay?”
Lex stared directly into his eyes, that odd glow, although quickly fading, still very much there. Jacoby could feel her battle well enough–a violent tug of war between desperate, cold logic and fire-hot, irrational anger. A moment later, she nodded.
Squeezing her arms, Jacoby moved to the far wall, opened the knee-high cabinet’s lid, and pulled out his plasma saw. He scooped out a handful of Fuso fusion plugs and turned.
“Wait…where are you going with that?” Poole asked.
“You know how it is with us, miss half an hour, miss a whole, freaking lot,” Jacoby said, jamming a new plug into the housing and giving it a twist. The saw hummed in his hands, the fusion plug glowing green. A gentle squeeze of the trigger brought the saw to life, the contact points on the shiny, shifelloy blade glowing red.
“He’ll hear you cutting through those doors and be waiting. You’ll take a dozen caseless, antipersonnel rounds in the face before you can take a single step inside.”
“That’s why I want you stacked up behind me. I cut through, he shoots, I absorb the fire, and you get to him.”
“Wow. Wait a second. Absorb fire? I’m currently residing inside your skull. If he shoots you in the face, we both die, bucko,” Poole argued, “Just stop for a second and listen. What I have to say might just change your mind.”
Jacoby let his finger slip off the trigger, the saw promptly going quiet.
“Wait a second?” Lex asked. “Erik took my rifle, as you’ve no doubt guessed. He’s taken Emiko and Shane, too, and locked himself in the aft maintenance room. We’ve got no power or lights, and no heat. Just before we came down here, Lana tried to talk him down, get him to open the door. He told us he felt and heard her. That she was drawing him down there. And you’ll love this part. We are corrupted and not worthy of her…that we need to die. This coming from the guy that tore this ship apart and rewired everything. Basically, the guy we need to land or fly this ship now wants us dead. Why?”
“Okay. It was in pieces before. You must believe that I had most of it, but in my state, I didn’t understand what they meant. But just now…when you became enraged, it was like the final piece that just made the whole puzzle make sense. I know it now. I understand what is happening.”
“I don’t know if that makes me feel better, Poole. Spit it out,” Jacoby said, fighting the urge to snap.
“Okay, this whole thing has happened in layers, so stick with me. I will try to be thorough. When Anna first encountered the message that corrupted my program in her implant, I registered a peculiar frequency. That on its own is not unusual. Reality as I know it is full of energies, flowing and bouncing against one another, overlapping in a dizzying display. But this frequency was somehow tied to a word, and not the sound waves created by your vocal cords, either. The word was emitting the same energy in its written form as it did when spoken. Strange. But that knowledge did not help me understand how it so deeply corrupted my simple little program.”
Jacoby listened, the muscles in his forearms knotting up and cramping. He released his grip and let the saw swing down against his leg.
“Then the pulse engine fired, and you hit your head…well, rather hard. When you regained consciousness all those days later, I thought your double vision was simply a side effect of the damage to your frontal and pre-frontal cortex. That portion of your brain, after all, is responsible for interpreting data from your eyes, beyond your functions of memory and dreaming. At first, I thought your mind was interpreting the data incorrectly, a sort of conscious dreaming episode. That would explain why you could see double–one your conscious mind was trying to interpret from optical input and another your more deeply embedded psyche was analyzing and trying to rationalize, using data from damaged memory. After all, that was the only way I could explain why the two versions of each person you saw weren’t always moving or behaving in exactly the same manner.”
“Jacoby, I’m getting really bored with science time here,” Lex said, tapping a boot. “Let’s say we take that saw upstairs and cut our way through a freaking door or two?”
“No, wait. You have to listen,” Poole urged, coming forward. And for the first time since he saw his dark double, the splintered personality the alien chose for his real-life avatar, he looked frightened.
Jacoby extended his hand, gesturing for him to continue.
“I know you noticed Erik and how his dreamlike duplicate seemed to be missing or operating in completely different places and times. Then you guys started talking to him and I noticed something peculiar. His body was emitting the same frequency I picked up from that message. Although it was stronger. And I don’t know how, but when he was standing close enough to you, Anna, or Soraya, it blocked my communication ability with the transmitter cells in their bodies.”
“He’s infected with something? Maybe something not unlike you? Is it possible he’s had it since we left the station?” Jacoby asked.
“I don’t know, but I think I would have picked up on it before now,” Poole admitted. “I’m just going to come out and say this next part, because honestly, I don’t know how it makes me feel. It wasn’t until I started releasing more microbes into your body, and just now, when Re…I mean, Lex blew her top. But I felt a similar resonance inside your brain, Jacoby. I realized that the injury you sustained didn’t cause a malfunction in your frontal cortex as I first thought, but it actually caused you to become ultrasensitive to something you had not perceived before. Those ghostly, shadowy outlines you see hovering over top the others isn’t some weird dream version your brain is trying to rationalize. You are receiving and comprehending an entirely different bandwidth of energy they are emitting. Somehow, through violent trauma, you have reprogrammed your brain to perceive their astral form.”
“Astral form?” Lex asked.
“Yes-yes-yes. The term isn’t perfect, but it is the best I have to work with right now. Think of it as a version of you self-attenuating at a slightly higher level of existence. Anna might reference it as ‘space time’ from her physics books. It is still you, but elevated. Now, here is where we jump into theory and things get both weird and scary.”
“We’re just now gettin
g to weird and scary? Shit…” Lex scoffed.
“Weirder…” Poole corrected. “I believe this presence named in the message from Titan…this T-T-T…” Poole sputtered, still unable to say the name.
“Tal-Nurgal?” Jacoby offered.
“That one,” Poole said, offering him a high five. “Although it may be present on our plane of existence, it might not be conscious or cognizant, hence the message to ‘awaken it’. But seeing this frequency, the resonance within the message, I have come to believe that it might just be reaching out, perhaps calling for help…it is just communicating in a medium that humans are not supposed to be sensitive to.”
“What kind of thing are we talking about? That doesn’t sound like something I want to meet,” Lex asked.
Poole shrugged. I don’t know. Something incredibly old and large, perhaps. Something…cosmic. Your presence doesn’t physically lapse into that layer of existence I would call the ‘astral plane’, but in a way you project an echo there instead. Some would theorize that it is your soul, or if that term doesn’t work, the energies comprising your non-physical self.”
Lex shivered, shook her head, started muttering, and turned to pace. Jacoby watched Poole for a moment, the paltry flashlight beam ebbing and flowing with the redhead’s movement.
“So, what happened to Erik?” he asked, lowering his voice. “And the program from Anna’s implant? You’re saying this being…however it is reaching out, has affected them both? What can we do to help them? And are we at risk?”
“My working theory is raw. This being’s name serves as an extension of its will. A voice without voice, kind of thing. The resonance it is emitting severed poor Erik from his astral form. No longer tethered to his physical body, this being latched onto his astral form and is using it as a direct means of control. That is, if it is controlling him. Or it could just be a strong form of suggestion. I am practical, Jacky-Boy, but you could say that my eyes have been opened to an altogether different layer of reality. One with a far stranger potential than I ever thought possible.”
“So, how many other places potentially received that message from Titan, and are those people being affected the same way?” Lex asked.
“It is a very real possibility that Erik’s alignment, the energy binding the various layers that comprise him, were already weakened. I think it reasonable to assume that anyone like him, meaning with similar makeup or their situation, should be at risk. There might have been a hundred other reasons why he was most susceptible in our little troop. We simply don’t have enough data to know. I don’t know why Shane wasn’t affected in the same way, but it could have been proximity or priority of this…being. I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that I believe it is my presence in you lot that served to protect you from the same fate.”
“And now he has my gun and wants us dead. Not…cool,” Lex breathed. “I know you probably don’t want to think about it with everything else going on, but consider this. Do we really want to find out what is down there on Titan? I think you can guess my answer. But I don’t want to put this invisible ‘Poole’ armor to the test if we come up against this thing.”
“I’m right there with you, Red. Mark me in the ‘cautious and avoid if possible’ category,” Poole said. Jacoby noted that his slipup and use of her hated nickname did not result in more anger.
With that, Lex mounted the ladder and started to climb. She muttered quietly to herself, the light dimming as she moved away.
Jacoby watched her climb, his gaze inexplicably drawn to the ghostly form kissing her outline…what Poole described as her astral form. He suddenly wondered why they looked different, some even taking on the features of their dreamworld equals. Were they inner representations of the person–who they believed themselves to be, or perhaps who they wanted to be? Or, since it was his perception, was it how he viewed them?
They had also acted out of sync with their physical doubles when Soraya appeared to be pointing and trying to tell him something. Jacoby had to wonder if their astral forms were perhaps more aware, or receptive of energies or activities their mundane selves were not. If there were two pieces of them, sometimes working independently of one another, could there be more? Jacoby suddenly wondered how many slivers of them existed, branching, and touching different planes of what Poole described as “existence”.
“You surprise me, Jacky,” Poole said from the darkness. Jacoby lightly squeezed the saw trigger, the contact points immediately glowing to life. Poole’s outline appeared in the subtle, scarlet glow. It was practically devilish.
“How is that?”
“I just dumped the motherload on you—told you that you can see something no one else alive can, that something out there exists…so monstrous even its name has power. And for all the times I’ve ridiculed you, belittled you, called you two thirty-five, insinuating you are as dense as uranium, how did you respond? Not with jokes, not with denial, or anger. You asked logical questions and considered the ramifications. And just now, you were pondering the depth and nature of your very existence. You have grown, changed, in ways the others cannot see. You are far more intelligent than I ever wanted to admit, and for that I am deeply regretful. I am sorry, meat sack. Truly.”
“Don’t be too sorry, brain slug, I’ve got a lot more stupid on deck.”
“Oh, I think your variety of stupid is exactly what this group needs. Color me excited!”
-4:52 Until Entry
Lex found the others clustered around the aft maintenance passage. The gals stood around a small pool of light shining from a battery powered illuminator in Anna’s hand. It was just as dim as hers. No wonder, they’d been operating off reduced power and lighting for so many days, Erik and Lana had practically exhausted every work light they had been able to scrounge together.
Exhausted every flashlight working to kill us. Douchebag. And it’s going to get dark. Real dark, she thought and started to pace. Lana turned to her and took a breath to speak, but Lex turned away on purpose. They had doubts, probably a crap-ton of them, but she wasn’t in a place to play a million questions.
Lex was angry. No, she was pissed. Erik broke into her locker and took her weapon. That was rule number one. Don’t let someone else get their hands on your weapon, she thought, reciting the rule in her head.
Now they were as good as dead, and it was her fault. She stopped facing the bridge, the forward window now full of blue-green world. Or was it orange? It seemed to change color the closer they got. Titan. The sight of it made her heart flutter, her stomach tighten, and hands ball up.
What was down there? Was any of that stuff Poole told them possible–that Jacoby could see their…astral forms? If any of it was real–the station, the outbreak, the talking critter in Jacoby’s head, then it all had to be. That meant they were speeding towards something unknown and incredibly dangerous. And what…? Lex thought, trying to configure the timer she’d been running in her head—just a little under five hours. Damn, it had been eight just five minutes before. Time always did move faster when it was inconvenient.
“Fuck!” she cursed and stomped a foot. She couldn’t punch time, couldn’t call it a d-bag, or duct tape its stupid mouth shut. It was one of the few damned things she couldn’t control. And that meant she had to hate it. It’s already on the list.
She lost her cool with Poole, and even though the snide turd deserved it, she felt the fool, nonetheless. But she didn’t understand how her anger felt…it was so unlike any tantrum she’d had before. It made her feel powerful, strong. Was she turning into Jacoby? Get mad, unleash unbelievable strength but lose more than a bit of control in the process. Or was she just holding on to too much stuff at once…Ayo, the whole messy nature of their little crew, and the stuff she wanted to say to Jacoby but couldn’t seem to convert into words.
“You can’t explain it all yet. You don’t understand it. Don’t spend your time worrying about it. Control what you can control, Lex,” she whispered and turned back to the
group, just as Jacoby reached the top of the ladder.
Damn it, she cursed silently. You’re just making excuses again, putting it off. Procrastinating like usual…
Jacoby moved directly towards the aft passage door, and Lex skipped forward to meet him, cursing herself every other step. Anna and the others initially rushed over and surrounded him.
“…what’s the plan?”
“It’s worse than we thought,” Anna said, talking over the others.
When isn’t it? Lex thought, angling between Soraya and Lana to get closer.
“You’re supposed to say, ‘never mind, everything worked out while you were gone. We’re good’,” Jacoby responded. He looked smaller than before, somehow deflated.
That would be entirely too unrealistic for this group. We need to pick up the slack and stop putting everything on his shoulders.
“That box Erik had Shane help him carry to the back, care to make any guesses as to what was in it?”
“I’m really not in the mood to play twenty questions, right now, Anna.”
Lex snorted, empathizing fully with Jacoby’s apparent lack of patience.
“The navigational computer, the battery relay controller, the climate system sensor modules from the galley, both births, and the hold. In short, every computer we would need to pilot the ship and or control the climate and temperature on this end of the ship. Erik has wired or rerouted all control, for everything, to the aft compartment.”
“How didn’t we see this coming?” Soraya asked, pushing forward.
“Because we needed him,” Lex growled. “We freaking needed him to fix the ship and do everything else that you two couldn’t or didn’t want to do.” She pointed at Lana for the last part. “And when you’re in the meatgrinder like we have been, you either trust the people you’re with, or you don’t. It’s not like we had a choice. He’s messed up. He betrayed us, and you know what, it doesn’t matter why. All that does matter is this–how do we deal with him now? What is our next move, and do you all have the stomach to do what is needed?”
