And she knows I do. “They’re called the Progeny,” she says. “The creature you saw in the victim’s head. It’s called a Progeny.”
“Shit,” I say, which is about as honest as I can get at that moment. “What do you want to know?”
“Actually, Detective, it’s the other way around. I want to tell you about what I know.”
She’s crazy, of course. That’s the obvious explanation, I realize. She’s escaped from another wing of the hospital. Except her madness is the same color and shade as mine. It has the same details. It’s as if she pulled the madness out of my head and into the world. But that’s not what happened, I know. So that means she’s not crazy, and I’m not, but that the world is.
“What is there to tell?” I ask.
Shaw’s eyes leave the window, look around the rest of the room. “Not here,” she says. “I’ll fetch you a wheelchair.”
3
I always assumed that if you have a clandestine organization then you’d have a clandestine headquarters. Stands to reason. And—I concede this point—Oxford is, admittedly, short on skull-shaped volcanoes. Shark-infested waters— ditto. But there is some pretty awesome architecture. Dreaming spires and all that. I always thought you could bury something beneath the limestone columns and copper dome of the Radcliffe Camera. Hide something in the depths of the Bodleian Library—down between the winding stacks, through miles of books, with just one ancient tome that acts as a lever to open some hidden passageway. So when Shaw tells me, “It’s about two miles to the office,” I can’t help but be a little disappointed.
There is no romance in the term, “the office.” Then again, Shaw seems more likely to fantasize over spreadsheets than biceps and bodice-ripping. I don’t exactly see her as the type to adore purple prose or books with Fabio on the cover.
There again, neither am I.
She pilots the van through Oxford’s tourist-loving heart, and heads toward the train station. She pulls up outside a shabby building thrown up in the sixties by an architect who clearly was less into dreaming spires and more into concrete squares. Shaw fetches the wheelchair from the boot of the car and I heft myself into it.
“We’re in the basement,” she tells me. Which briefly conjures images of secret passageways and hidden riches, but I’m not that hopeful anymore.
Shaw punches a six-digit code into a pad beside the door, her fingers a staccato blur. I can’t follow the keys she hits. The door buzzes. A second door, another code. No beeps, just the rhythm of her nails on the keys. No clues for me. To take the elevator down requires a key.
“No thumbprint scanner?” I ask. Not my best joke, but I’m trying to make light. Then the elevator doors slide open and, of course, there one is. So I don’t even manage that.
Considering how insecure I’m starting to feel, it’s almost a relief when the elevator doors open onto an utterly mundane corridor, lined with mundane gray office doors. The first word that really springs to mind is industrious, except... the place feels too still for that. I expect to see men in gray suits and sensible ties clutching teetering stacks of folders, running from door to door in acute diagonals across the corridor, but instead when I glimpse through windows in doors I see empty rooms, chairs stacked in corners. The word is less industrious, and more abandoned.
“We’re going to the reading room,” Shaw says, taking a firm hold on my wheelchair and pushing me ahead before I have too much time to stare. “I’ll talk while we walk, give you some background.”
I hesitate, suddenly wondering if this is going to turn out to be a rather involved hidden camera stunt, but then take the plunge and ask anyway. “So,” I say, “the Progeny.”
“The Progeny,” Shaw replies. The wheels of my chair make a light thrumming noise over the linoleum floor. “Are you familiar with the Fermi paradox, Detective?”
A distant bell rings but I can’t place it, and shake my head.
“At its most basic,” Shaw says, “the paradox points out that the absence of alien life in the universe is unusual. The universe is big. Big enough that life should have evolved elsewhere, but not so big that we shouldn’t have found any examples. But we’ve found nothing. There’s nothing there.
“This is a puzzle to scientists, to UFO speculators.” Shaw speaks at a measured, even pace. Still, it sounds a little like a pitch. Maybe I was off with the hidden camera idea. Maybe Jehovah’s Witnesses have just gotten all sorts of creative with their recruitment plans. Shaw continues, “Here at MI37 we have the answers. Both of them.”
“Both?”
“Yes.” Shaw keeps her measured tone. “Two interrelated answers. I am going to tell them to you. For the first one, I need you to think of a radio.”
“I can do that.” I go with my car radio.
“So,” says Shaw, “a radio. FM and AM. Both radio waves, both ways of transmitting sound. But imagine the dial is stuck on AM. The FM stations are still there, but you can’t get to them. In fact, if no one told you about FM you’d have no way of knowing they were there. For all intents and purposes, they wouldn’t exist for you.”
Just like my car radio then.
Still, flippancy aside I think I get the metaphor. “You’re saying people are like that radio.” I’m a little hesitant, but more because I’m worried about getting it right rather than getting it wrong.
“Exactly.” Something in her tone makes me think she’s smiling, is proud. Her footsteps sound a little brighter.
“So, the Progeny,” I say. “They’re FM?”
“Not exactly.” We turn down more corridors, past more doors. This place is a warren. “You see, there are multiple realities, Detective Wallace. There are, to stretch the metaphor slightly, the equivalent of long-wave stations, medium-wave stations, satellite stations. And yet, eventually, the analogy breaks down. In the end we run out of radio stations. The universe, however, doesn’t suffer from similar limitations. There are myriad realities, Detective. And many of them house intelligent life.”
“How many?” Another question that I don’t really want to know the answer to, but asking questions is a habit detectives pick up.
“I honestly don’t know. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Millions perhaps. But for all that it matters, they don’t matter to us. We’re tuned to one reality and can’t get to any others.”
“So, you’re telling me that’s why we can’t find any other life in the universe and why it can’t find us?”
“I’m telling you that’s one reason, yes.”
We arrive at a second elevator. A retina scan this time. I’m beginning to think there’s no way Shaw is a Jehovah’s Witness. This is way too big budget for them. She’s probably a Scientologist.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” I say, as Shaw pushes me into the elevator, “if it’s impossible to detect these realities, how do we know about them?”
Shaw hesitates for a moment. As if I’ve caught her with a real stumper, as if she hadn’t thought of that one. And maybe it is all just a big fat happy lie. And then she says, “We have a book.”
“A book?”
“Yes, Detective, a book. A book the British government believes... that it believed...” She hesitates. I want to ask the questions about those holes in the conversation, but it seems that other information is more pressing. “It is a book of significant importance.” Shaw has gathered herself, speaks confidently. “A book that contains information which, if disseminated, could unsettle the power balance of the entire world, which, in the hands of just one of the petty despots or egomaniacs in the world, could crack the very surface of our reality like the shell of an egg.”
She pauses, lets the seriousness of her tone, her look sink in. “I’m sure you’ll find it an interesting read.”
It is by far the most threatening offer to read a book I’ve ever received. It’s like an Ayatollah holding out a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses with a wink and a dangerous smile. And right then I bottle it. It’s not worth it. I think I’
d prefer to live with the idea I had a moment of madness, and that Felicity Shaw is just a good guesser.
“You know what,” I say. “I’m not sure I really do remember anything from that night. It’s all a blur. I was very stressed. Think I got some things muddled.”
“It’s not much further,” says Shaw, pushing my wheelchair resolutely on. I don’t think I can get out of here on foot.
We round a corner. The corridor is short and ends in another dull, gray door. Interest has been added by way of a muscular-looking man in fatigues holding the sort of oversized machine gun no one can ever hit Arnold Schwarzenegger with. I have no illusions that I could prove to be similarly elusive.
Coming along with Shaw is starting to seem like a very bad idea.
This time it’s a nine-digit code, plus the thumb scan, and the retina scan, and some voice recognition just for kicks.
I swallow a lot, and rub sweat off my palms onto my pants.
The room Shaw wheels me into is bare except for a single low table. Four steel legs, a chipped particleboard surface. There’s a book lying on the table. A four-inch-deep doorstop of a book. Heavy leather covers patinated with age. Moth-eaten pages hanging out at odd angles. The sort of book John Carpenter would throw in to let you know Kurt Russell’s day was about to go south.
But that’s it. There’s no chair. No windows. The door swings shut behind us. I swallow again. Hard.
“We’re off the grid in here,” Shaw says. “No wires in and out. Not even radio waves. We’re in a completely sealed environment.”
“And this is where I read the book?”
“Not exactly, no.”
Oh shit. Oh balls.
Shaw walks away, leaves me sitting there. She reaches out to a small switchbox on the table, next to the book. For the first time I notice that the book is clamped to the table by a metal casing. Wires connect to it, trail down the back of the legs. Shaw flicks a switch. There is a hum like a generator.
“No one reads the book,” Shaw says. “That’s not quite how it works.” Which seems an odd thing to say, because how else could a book work? “It was discovered by a British government expedition to the summit of Everest in 1933, twenty years prior to Edmund Hilary’s ascent. You will find no record of that expedition anywhere. But that expedition—and this book that they found—led directly to the founding of MI37 in 1935, and to the magic arms race of the seventies and eighties. Not many people have experienced what you are about to, Detective Wallace.”
What am I about to experience? What is wrong with the book? Why me? But I don’t have time for any questions because then, without any more ado, she turns back the cover.
For a moment all I see is looping handwriting on a browning page. It’s not a Roman script. Cyrillic? Pictograms? Something between the two. For a moment there is a smell like an ancient library.
Then the page ripples. There isn’t a breeze, but still I see distinct movement.
“What—?” I ask.
The page flips. Then another. Another. One by one. Slowly at first. Then quicker. Until they are riffling past a blur.
“Holy—” I manage.
Then the book explodes.
It is noiseless, but I feel the shockwave blow back my hair. Pieces of paper fly past me in a flurry. And then they stop. Then they hang silently in the air. I sit and stare. It is as if I am in a snow globe, the water abruptly frozen, fixing everything, holding it fast
I gawk. I stare. I try to find a vocabulary for my wonder, my confusion, my fear. I reach out with one hand. I can see the hand shaking, like a schoolboy reaching for his first dance.
The paper moves, is suddenly galvanized. Like a thousand tangram pieces they whirl in a blizzard before us. They reassemble. Slowly they construct a vision before us.
It’s me. It’s me, standing there in the room. A perfect paper replica, my hand outstretched just so. I stare in awe. I smile. It is so... simple, perfect, beautiful... And the paper model smiles with me. I almost clap in delight.
Around the model, paper whirls, a fresh snowstorm. And the statue is shrinking, bleeding paper, receding. Surroundings build about it—the corridor outside, the elevator shaft, the whole building mapped out—but then they too are shrinking, being enveloped by the expanding horizons. Oxford is below me. Before me. The surrounding countryside. There is London, the slow twist of the Thames marked out in rippling sheets of white. Then I see England itself. Europe. Eurasia. The globe spins beneath my feet.
I have lost my sense of space. The walls are somewhere else, some place mundane and abandoned. The zoom out has picked up pace now. The solar system swirls before me. Shaw and myself—suspended in space, even as time accelerates, the planets blurring, stars. Everything receding, shrinking, and it must stop, the sense of vertigo is overwhelming, but it doesn’t, it keeps going, and I keep falling away. I am too large, the universe too small, I am filling the whole of creation with my own existence, something must break.
And then it does. Something tears. Something rips. The white blizzard snaps and darts and something comes through, some barrier is breached, I am sure, a certainty beyond what I see. We are abruptly elsewhere.
But it doesn’t stop. Shockwaves run through the paperscape before me, layer after layer of... something bursts. It feels like the whole of reality is splitting, dividing down and down into infinite slices, and I am stretched thinner and thinner between them.
And this is the truth of things. These—the rational part of me still left in the swirling madness realizes— are the dimensions Shaw was speaking of. Each of them a universe to itself. Infinite infinities. And with this realization comes a change. The space around me is no longer expanding, I no longer expand with it. The paper blurs, rustles, whispers over my skin. A change in focus. I am some place now, somewhere definite. Not here, but somewhere.
It is cold here. I feel it, a chill, my breath suspended as a thousand ice particles before me. I shudder and the paperscape shudders with me—a tremor through reality. Shaw is there. As frozen as the water in my breath.
Something is coming. I can feel it, a pressure in the air. I cannot see it yet. But something in the way the paper moves, the way it shifts and presses in. Something vast. The world is crushing down. And still I cannot see it. Until I realize that everything I see is it.
This thing, this presence—it fills the sky, fills the world. It is everything around me. Some vast scaled sheet of its being obliterates all horizons, all distances. And I am insignificant before it. I know that. A dust mote. Nothing more.
I am sobbing or screaming. Because I know. This is death. This thing in the sky, that is the sky. It is death pure and implacable. For it is hunger and I, even small insignificant I, am food, and I must be consumed. I must be. I must fill the vast void of its hunger. Everything must. Even the heat of this place has been consumed. It is death and it comes on.
I barely realize I am on my hands and knees. I barely realize the paper is retreating, blowing away, rearranging itself neatly, page after page lying down to rest between leather covers.
Shaw closes the book. Tears and snot dribble from my face. They puddle on the bare concrete floor beneath me.
“They are called the Feeders,” Shaw says. “The Progeny are their children, and they are bringing them here.”
4
Shaw helps me back into my wheelchair. I feel like a puppy someone just kicked. Shaky in a way I haven’t been since I was four and couldn’t find my mother in a department store.
“Others have done worse,” she tells me. And there’s a kindness in that, but it’s going to take significantly more to reassure me everything’s all right on the Western Front.
Because everything isn’t all right. That’s the whole point of this, I begin to realize. You don’t have secret military intelligence departments to look after things that are just peachy on their own. They put things together because—
“The Feeders are coming.” Shaw repeats the fact. “It’s important you underst
and that.”
Understand? I can barely comprehend. She’s trying to expand my mind, but I think my mind’s rubber might have perished. It won’t stretch that far.
“The Feeders are the other reason for Fermi’s paradox. Just as we know of the multiple realities, so have other races known. But those other races are gone. Are dead. They have been consumed. The Feeders have consumed everyone and everything capable of communicating with us. And they intend to do the same here.”
“Why?” I ask. “Why here?”
Shaw shakes her head. “There is no why that we’d understand, Detective. They are aliens. Their thoughts, motives, are alien. We are simply a place where their spawn, the Progeny, landed. They send them out like spores. At least that’s how we understand it. Blast them out into new realities without thought or reason. The Progeny that landed here found Earth fertile ground. Now they seek to draw their parents to them. To feed us all to them.”
Oh God. Oh bollocks. That’s enough. Staring into the future is like staring at that unrelenting paperscape sky.
“However,” Shaw says, “that does not mean we intend to go down without a fight.”
There’s steel in her voice. Flint and iron. A little bit of bombast to be sure, but to be honest I could use a little jingoism right here, right now. Fighting back. Making a stand. That feels like the right response, like what should be done. I attempt to make my jaw as steely as possible, but I fear all I’ve done is give myself an underbite.
“The Progeny are here for a reason, Detective.” Shaw talks with the same sense of efficiency, the same economy of words as she has since picking me up at the hospital. “The Feeders have not sent their children here simply as a homing beacon.
“The barriers between realities are not as easily broken as suggested by the book. One does not simply fumble through, like a child wandering into a magical wardrobe. It is a difficult process. We are on one side of a locked door, the Feeders upon the other. The Progeny are here to pick the lock. We, MI37, are here to stop them.”
No Hero Page 3
