Prison of Souls (Science Fiction Thriller)

by Xander Gray

  Inside, we pushed through the curtain into the pulsing glow of the monolith and the circle of beds. All the prisoners slept like the dead, and given their emaciated condition, it was easy to imagine them as corpses.

  Gar lay unconscious beneath the spotlight, hooked up to a feeding tube. He had never been thick, but now he appeared skeletal, his sternum grotesquely pronounced. I wondered how long he had lain with no nourishment before they had begun feeding him intravenously.

  I pointed to a body covered by a sheet, my breath catching in my throat. “Who is that?”

  “My insurance policy.” Slaven’s eyes flickered with dark promise.

  I pulled back the sheet, revealing Crystal’s face. Oh God. She looked so pale. Was she alive? I reached for her.

  Slaven grabbed my wrist.

  I spun toward him, yanked my wrist free, and punched his chest. His torso undulated beneath my knuckles. The impact resonated through the room. Slaven stumbled into Gar’s bed and the I.V. pole crashed to the floor, pulling Gar’s wrist between the bed rails.

  I touched Crystal’s chest, felt her breathing. She was alive. Thank God.

  Slaven seized my shoulders and spun me around. His hand pressed my abdomen. “Stand still or I’ll drop you.”

  “What have you done to her? Why is she unconscious?”

  “She’s been sedated. She’s fine.”

  “How do I know she’s fine?”

  “You’ll have to take my word for it until she wakes up. We have just enough time to fulfill your end of the bargain.” He pointed to an egg-shaped pod partially hidden behind a book case.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I was considering this. Here stood the man who had killed dozens of children during the 1980’s, who had risked my life more than once, who had put me in prison with his lies. He might have put my wife into a permanent coma for all I knew, and now he wanted to place me on strange hardware and conduct a procedure I had miraculously survived as a child.

  I blew out a breath and looked at Navarez. “You want me to do this?”

  Navarez nodded, his face awash in pulsing light. “This part is safe. I promise you. And the fate of the world rests on our ability to know whether Attis was telling the truth.”

  I looked at Slaven. “When my wife wakes up, we start.”

  “Fine.” Slaven folded his arms over his chest. “But know I couldn’t care less whether you ever climb into that pod. In fact, I’d prefer you don’t. It’s a waste of time. I’ve already told Navarez what he needs to know. It’s not my fault he doesn’t believe me, and it’s not yours either. Why should you subject yourself to this when you don’t have to?”

  Navarez raised his forefinger. “Does that mean you don’t want my help destroying the Ouroboros? Because you’re not getting it unless I can prove you’re telling the truth.”

  “I never planned on getting your help.”

  They stared at one another until finally I stepped between them. “I want to know the truth as much as Navarez. This part, I’ll do.”

  Slaven examined the pod from one end to the other. “Get up here then.”

  Chapter

  Twenty-seven

  Slaven checked my position on the platform and pressed a button on the pod. The overhead ring began to slowly rotate, building speed until it blurred, howling and whirring. The floor rattled until dust hovered above the planks. The ceiling trembled, shedding plaster, vibrating spiderwebs. I caught one final glimpse of Navarez and Slaven, and then the world collapsed into tiny squares of light and blew away like snowflakes.

  #

  Doctor McSorley knelt over me in his lab-coat. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. He pointed toward a glowing cube in the corner of the room, beneath a poster of a child reading a book with a contorted expression on her face, captioned Does Your Child Need Help Learning? “We’re going to plug you into this machine over here.”

  I glimpsed my reflection in a wall-mounted mirror—I was eight years old. I might have protested if I had possessed the mind rightly belonging to this child’s body, but I was no mere child, and I needed to see whatever lay within the circuits of that strangely illuminated box. “Go on then.”

  The breathing mask suctioned onto my face with a pop.

  #

  I couldn’t tell if I was dreaming or hallucinating. All I knew for certain was that my mind had opened like a well, drawing in information. Facts upon facts rained down, flooding me. It was as though a thousand encyclopedias had been hardwired directly into my brain. The data came in random, unrelated bursts, here about the homogenization of milk, there about the life expectancy of soldiers in ancient Rome, pages flitting through my mind too rapidly to comprehend. And yet somewhere in the maelstrom, I realized I had glimpsed a fact about the future. Humans had—past tense—colonized Mars in the year 2137. How was it possible to know such a thing?

  I allowed this question to spread like tar until I actually felt the stream of data change directions, focusing more tightly, until it pointed exclusively toward the future. I saw the world as it would exist in 2042: global population nine billion, the Great Barrier Reef a calcified husk rotting in the acidic waters off the coast of Australia. I tried to focus on the fish still pecking at the dead juggernaut, curious to know what terrible thing had happened, but I felt time pulling me even further into the future.

  By 2092 the average laptop computer would be capable of performing the equivalent of all human thought over the past 100,000 years in ten microseconds, and most people would be surgically altered with microchips so they could interface with their hyper-intelligent devices. I lingered there, watching studious men in suits connect themselves directly to glowing servers, wires running from brain stem to flashing computer port, their eyes scanning the empty air. The years burst forward again, too many to count. I watched in horror as countless men, women and children transferred their very souls to digital bits, the empty husks of their bodies rolled back into the earth as fertilizer.

  A female voice erupted through the torrent of data—a frequency distribution etched in red on the back of my eyelids. “How are you here, Joshua Briar? This should not be.”

  I had no hands with which to reach out, nor a mouth with which to respond. The endless vistas of information collapsed onto a flat red line, the death of a heartbeat. I heard a sound that might have been my own distant scream, and still the knowledge poured through me, a great river of knowing.

  A window opened on the year 2337, and I watched seven people in white gowns network their minds into a glowing supercomputer called the hive. These seven—McSorley and Attis among them—were the first humans to successfully combine their minds. They called themselves the Ouroboros after the mythological snake eating its own tail, reappointed to represent the endless power of shared knowledge. Two years later, in 2339, world governments built a larger hive capable of hosting a significant portion of the world’s population, appointing the Ouroboros its gatekeepers. I watched all of it happen in fast forward: the technicians building the machine in a concrete bunker, followed by the government officials ushering seven suited individuals into the gloom, patting them on the back, and motioning toward the servers. I understood every detail, from the size of the smallest microprocessor to the names of each member of the Ouroboros. I even knew the type of light bulbs in the ceiling of the bunker and the brands of the politicians' shoes.

  Again that voice, sharp as lightning: “Joshua Briar, how did you travel into the future?”

  Even if I could have responded, I wouldn’t have known what to say. The question didn’t compute. If I had traveled through time, it had been to the past. I knew this because the last time I had looked in the mirror, I had been a child. So what possible meaning could this strange voice intend? What answer might it seek? Was it possible that, upon being ported into the glowing cube, the individual atoms of my mind had passed into the future? That right now my eight-year-old body was lying outside the cube, while my consciousness tunneled through microscopic
wormholes within the quantum processors, into epochs unknown?

  Attis’ voice exploding: “You must leave the hive immediately! You do not belong here!”

  I filtered through the data, searching for any reference to the end of the world, to a rogue planet. I had become a search engine, my mind locking in on the apocryphal collision, forming a picture of a gas giant invading the blackness of our solar system. A feeler extended from my mind like a whip, stirring billions of bits.

  I saw Attis standing next to Quentin Navarez in the basement of Nexus, and then it dawned on me that I was seeing my last conversation with Attis, before she had discovered my true identity. How strange it was to watch myself from the outside, to see me wearing the face of another person, to hear me speaking with another’s voice. I saw the scene as a disembodied spirit. I turned my attention to the towering monolith behind her—this is our ark—searching its depths, and detected millions of disincorporated souls swimming within its digital entrails. And in their cloistered minds I knew the truth.

  They were the apocalypse.

  They had been human once, but now they were alien, the result of living detached from their bodies for hundreds of years. They would do anything to return to their original form. They would remake the world in their image and assume its most powerful positions. We would be their slaves.

  #

  I felt myself slipping away from the raw currents of data. My eyes opened, and I was lying on a platform in a hospital room, a blue disk whirring around my head. I looked down at my hand and saw the frail hand of a child. I was a boy, eight years old—more precisely, a time-traveling adult wearing his childhood body.

  I could still feel all the knowledge of the hive pulsing at the base of my skull, but it was leaking away, leaving me how it had found me: fragile and ignorant. McSorley stood next to the machine, frantically pressing buttons on the console.

  “It’s a good thing we got his mother out of here. His vitals are all over the place,” McSorley said to his assistant, a young woman in a lab coat. “This isn’t right. None of the other children reacted this way.”

  “None of the other children lived,” she said. “Maybe this is good.”

  “This is subject 49.” He glanced around the room, as if he had lost something. “Was he the one with the hyperactive pineal gland?”

  “And the strange activity in his parietal lobe.” She tilted her head in thought. “Should we stop?”

  McSorley shook his head angrily. “We can’t stop in the middle. Who knows what will happen.”

  I focused on the lights, a drunken Ferris wheel whipping overhead, and felt myself slipping back into darkness. Before I closed my eyes, I turned to McSorley, marveled at the youth of his face, his red cheeks and piercing eyes, the animated way he darted from one side of the machine to the other, checking hoses and cleaning ports while the blue wheel separated his movements into frames. I passed out.

  #

  When I opened my eyes, I lay in a surgical bay. The exposed fluorescent tubes above me seemed distorted, bowed in the middle, as though viewed through a lens. When I sat up, the lights swirled in concave arcs.

  “He’s doing it again.” The voice belonged to young Doctor McSorley. “Come here.”

  His assistant stepped into the room. She was young—mid-twenties—wearing heavy eye makeup. When her eyes lighted on the orb floating above me, her jaw dropped, and she stepped backwards. “What is that?”

  McSorley retrieved a scanner from the counter. “When I told Attis about this, she said it sounded like Joshua’s brain had interfaced with the pivot dimension.”

  “Which pivot dimension?”

  “Spatial.”

  “But the spatial is smaller than the temporal.” She walked toward the floating orb. “Does that mean he’s got them both?”

  “Maybe. Most amazing of all, that orb may be a target bubble sending coordinates through subspace to some other, unknown location.” He waved his hand over the orb, careful not to touch it. “Attis wants to see if we can use his ability for something she calls wireless tunneling. Nanite brains can swarm short distances on their own, but often we use tubes to guide them to the right location, just to be safe. But Attis wants to see if we can instantaneously transport a consciousness across vast distances. For that to work, the idea has always been to bridge the distance through subspace via the pivot dimension.”

  “If the Ouroboros travelled so easily back in time, why should they have any trouble traveling across space?”

  “Once they travel back in time, they’re stuck using the past’s technology to traverse space. Remember, the ark was stationary, a solitary target requiring only one temporal connection directly from the future. Attis wants to nail six million moving targets halfway across the world with a series of complex medical treatments—that’s a different beast.”

  She held her hands toward the orb, as if in supplication. “And you’re saying this boy can do all that on his own?”

  “Not too close.” McSorley pulled her back. “Listen, I don’t know what the boy can do.”

  “We haven’t even isolated the spatial pivot in our particle accelerator yet. It might take thirty years, even with Attis’ help.” She stared, transfixed. “The boy is doing this on his own?”

  “We think so.”

  “But how?”

  “We don’t know.” McSorley shook his head, and then sighed.

  Their babbling faded into the background. My skull vibrated and pain radiated behind my eyes. In the heart of the orb, an impossible distance away, a red organ pulsed. I drifted toward the orb, away from my body, light as wind. In the center of the red heart I saw a white cube, opening now to reveal a purple cloud.

  The cloud swirled, and I detected the mind of Attis. This monster, along with McSorley, had architected my downfall. I wanted to confront her, to demand accountability, but she was too far away and too alien, a cloud swirling in a bubble. I couldn't reach her.

  As if in response to my frustration, a tether of energy burst from my forehead. Crackling and spitting plasma, it whipped around the room like the tentacle of a dying octopus. McSorley and his assistant appeared not to notice. Was I imagining this?

  I concentrated on the tentacle—it slowed, straightened, and finally snaked into the bubble.

  Attis’ voice exploded in my mind. “Stay away from me, Briar.”

  The tentacle snared Attis, yanked her through the bubble, and flung her toward a legless, half-constructed Capgras hanging on a rod from the ceiling of the surgical bay.

  The Capgras turned its head and spoke with Attis’ voice. “You transported my consciousness against my will. How?”

  McSorley spun toward the Capgras. “Attis?”

  The Capgras looked at him. “Get me out of this thing!”

  “How did you get out of the server?” McSorley ran to the Capgras and pressed his hands over its waxy head, peering into its purple eyes.

  The Capgras pointed at me. “He did it.”

  I sat up on the table. The bubble collapsed with a pop. McSorley’s assistant looked from me to the Capgras, her eyes wide, hands raised defensively. She looked lost.

  McSorley straightened his lab coat and approached me cautiously. “How are you doing these things?”

  “I don’t know.” I felt an infinite web of galaxy clusters spinning inside me, spreading the light of creation through my veins. “Somehow you made me like this.”

  Attis transformed the Capgras—it became visibly human, still with no legs, still hanging obscenely from a hook. Her artificial body was naked. I wondered if it had crossed the minds of McSorley or his assistant that an eight year old boy should not be staring at a naked woman—whether she was real or not—and then realized how absurd the thought was given all the trauma they had willingly subjected me to.

  Attis dangled from the hook, twisting gently. She had looked so much older when I had met her at Nexus HQ. Clearly both she and McSorley had chosen to age like mortals.

  W
hy? To assuage suspicion?

  McSorley seized her shoulders. “Let me kill him. He’s unpredictable. He’s too powerful. We can't control him.”

  She rocked on the hook. “He’s a baby. We can’t kill him. Besides, he has talent. He may prove useful.”

  “You’re tempting fate,” McSorley said.

  “Never you mind.” Attis grabbed McSorley’s coat and pulled, swinging toward him on the hook. “Now get me out of this thing. I don't belong in a Capgras. You know they’re not safe.”

  If I intended to confront Attis, now was the time. But she was the only thing protecting me from McSorley, so I bit my tongue.

  McSorley fitted the Capgras with a breathing mask and pressed a button on the cube. Attis rocked backward, eyes cast upward. A purple cloud roiled through the plastic tube.

  Then a tunnel of light opened around me and I plummeted into a million spastic colors.

  #

  I lay in a dark room, propped on a pillow, watching McSorley and his assistant. Louvered lights on the wall cast shadows of their legs across the white tile floor as they walked between sleeping children in hospital beds.

  “I hope they live.” The assistant sounded fragile.

  McSorley leaned against a bed. “The children are stable enough to leave the clinic, and if complications arise, we have friends who can erase any record of these experiments.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” She was crying. “They’re so young.”

  “If we don’t do as we’re told, they’ll kill us.”

  “Bullshit, Edward.” She leaned forward, hands over her face, muffling her voice. “This is our responsibility. We chose this.”

  “We did not.”

  “We did!” She snatched a Kleenex from the dispenser on the counter. “We chose to lay the threats of the Ouroboros on the doorsteps of these children and their families.”

  “You knew what you were signing up for.”

  “What difference does that make?” She pushed him—the bed behind him rattled. “What we did was wrong. Say it. I want to hear you say it.”