by Daniel Quinn
“We were so stupid,” he said.
Charlie’s lips halted and he stared at Alpha, a hard and curious gaze.
“That thing… a hybrid abomination, and we made it. It’s old. So, so old. Older than anything. And we made it. Willingly, we made it. Stupid. So stupid.”
Charlie said something, but the movement of his lips only confused Alpha further. Ignoring his clone, Charlie let his head loll to the side, his eyes rolling toward Echo. Alpha followed his gaze and saw she was splayed across the floor in a sheet of crimson, lying terribly still. In her, he saw his own demise and wondered again at how they could be so oddly different.
Idly, his fingers drew shapes in the blood pooled around him. He knew only a hint of the importance of the symbols, but his hand was compelled and moved of its own volition. Forcing himself to focus, he realized he recognized the imagery, an ancient language half-glimpsed from a Victor-induced fever-dream only moments-hours-eons before, these same symbols adorning the buildings of the drowned cities beneath the sleeping god. He sensed a certain weight behind the alien words, the threats promised in each stroke as he connected lines and circles in the gore. A hidden knowledge told him these words were far older than the conceptual universe surrounding him, his fingers drifting through entire dimensions joined together by a language that, if he were able to speak it, would deafen him and contort his tongue so deftly that the muscle would become dead in his throat and he would choke upon it.
Would Papa have approved? he wondered. There was Charlie, of course, who, despite having the same memory load as the rest, had somehow imprinted on Papa’s younger, brasher self, an angry, arrogant twenty-something Raëlian ready to burn down the world with his proofs and theories.
Alpha believed he had been the purest. The first clone of Papa, and the most complete. He had shared Papa’s belief that technology would bring mankind closer to their god, and that the process of cloning and genetic engineering and DNA synthesis would allow them to recreate the progenitor of all mankind and reunite humans with their alien Elohim ancestors.
Victor was supposed to be Elohim, but this was impossible. Rather than a prophet to shepherd mankind through its final days, they had unleashed a gross mistake, a frightening trespass across dimensions. Whatever Victor was, it went by a different name, a far older name.
“The realm of perception he operates on,” Alpha whispered, more to himself than to Charlie, “this is wrong. We have made a horrible miscalculation.”
He wanted to blame Echo, wanted to lay their deaths at her feet, but found that he could not. She was Papa, and Papa was her, and perhaps she was the purest incarnation of them all. Or maybe Victor had simply manipulated her to his own ends. Now she was dead, and it was impossible to blame her for any of it.
When Alpha closed his eyes, he strained to not imagine the horrors Victor had funneled into his head. That kaleidoscopic display of perception across dimensions that his addled brain could not handle. He may as well have been a one-dimensional figure thrust into the 3-D realm, so out of sorts and twisted upon a new reality that fractured his mind and broke the core tenants of them all. All that he thought he knew, all that he thought he was, shattered, and now he struggled to reassemble the various pieces of the self, to unravel the crumpled paper ball his brain had been twisted into. He was only dimly aware of Charlie dabbing a cloth at the corner of his lips to wipe away the drool leaking down his cheek. All he knew was pain.
“Where is he?” Alpha asked. If Charlie answered, he didn’t know. He forced his eyes open and asked again, forced himself to watch Charlie’s lips and to focus on the words, to hear those words past the shrill, soft droning of emergency alarms.
“He went into the ductwork,” Charlie said. “He hit me with a tablet, then went up into the ceiling.”
Alpha followed Charlie’s eyes upward, to the gaping hole above Echo’s body. The displaced lighting flickered in a strobe-like fashion, hanging limply from the damaged ceiling.
A fresh pulse of pain ripped through his brain, forcing him to double-over. A thin, bloody line of drool crept from his lips and he spit onto the floor.
His side was tacky and wet below the ribs. He couldn’t remember why.
“We have to destroy him,” he sputtered. The words were a revelation entirely his own. Something in his soul cracked and shifted, as if a weight had come loose and freed him from rusty chains.
He noticed the bloody script he’d lined the floor with for the first time then, and wondered when and how he had done this. Gibberish, all of it. Strange and arcane, like nothing he had ever seen before. Slowly things shifted in his mind and he began to see clearly, clearer than he thought he had seen in quite some time, although he could not pinpoint exactly when things had grown oppressively cloudy.
Turning toward Charlie, Alpha saw, for the first time, the angry gash and the long, ropy wound across Charlie’s forehead. A deeper, wider tear marred his throat.
“No shit,” Charlie (no, not Charlie) said.
(Charlie’s dead.)
“No, no, no.” Alpha screwed his eyes tightly shut, palm pressed tightly to his temple. A horrible scream ripped through the inside of his skull, angry and misbegotten. He was seeing things, hearing things. Talking to himself. That was it, he realized. That had to be it.
“The mining drones,” Alpha stammered. “We need to bring them online.”
Charlie’s mouth hung open in a rictus of pain, but after a moment he nodded. Or perhaps his head simply lolled as his body slumped. Alpha wasn’t sure, not entirely.
A dozen decommissioned drones had been mothballed on base. After the veins of ore ran dry and the site shuttered, the drones had simply been deactivated and warehoused. Papa had not been concerned with their resale value; it had been easier to simply shut them away than deal with more trade deals and selling used mechs. They could be used now, though, and set loose across the base and its ventilation grid to hunt and destroy Victor.
Charlie-not Charlie was already working on the tablet, fingers moving nimbly despite the pain contorting his features. One hand was frozen stiff by paralysis, fingers curled into a tight fist. A moment later he slammed the tablet to the floor beside him and screamed, “Fuck!”
“What?”
Charlie-not Charlie laughed, but there was no humor to be had, only mania. “The power cores. The fucking power cores.”
Of course, Alpha realized. They would have stripped the drones of their energy cells while they sat dormant. “I’ll go.”
Charlie-not Charlie looked at him, somewhat confusedly, but nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, good. Get them plugged in and I can control them. God, my head!”
Alpha stood on shaking legs, his whole body weak, and took three shuddering steps to the door, fumbled his way into the corridor beyond. A sticky mess poured from his nostrils and he wiped at it with the back of his good hand, barely curious at the odd coloration and the chowder-like consistency of the lumpy fluid. The pain ricocheting inside his skull diminished the further he got from the lab, but a noisy hum remained, forcing his eyes into half-open slits. He kept his wounded hand pressed to his belly, blood leaking a long trail down the hallway to mark his passage.
The mining drones were primarily autonomous, but there were also manned EVAs. Both would be useless for long-range space flight, and there were no shuttles off this rock. The black site was their home, and, when the time came, it would be their grave as well. Alpha and the rest were all illicit human experiments, and if they ever made it off the rock, Papa would be complicit in any number of crimes against humanity. Papa had left them no way off the asteroid, and they never had any intention of leaving.
As he made his way into the elevator that would carry him into the mech bay, he thought about these implications and the realization that he would die here solidified. What had been merely theoretical and shapeless with the distance of time was suddenly and achingly concrete in its newfound immediacy. If that was what it would take to stop Victor, then so be it. He would see
this operation razed and sucked into the vacuum of space rather than risk that abomination being discovered.
IV
Echo lay with her head resting against his chest, her arm splayed across his narrow hips.
“How do we know what’s real?” she asked.
The question was a common refrain from her, the discussion one they’d had many times. She’d begun asking this question soon after her decanting as she began to explore the memories—Papa’s memories—that were interlaced across her mind. She had spent several days initially disoriented by it all, unable to reconcile the memories of a man with her female features, struggling against the imprint and demanding that her life be her own until she had to be sedated. Eventually, the struggle eased, yet the question remained.
He had no answer for her, then or now.
“Alpha, you have to listen to me,” she said. Her voice rang in his ears, inside his skull, across the open communications channel.
He shook his head. No, no, no. Impossible! He had watched her die. She was dead. It was impossible for her to be speaking with him. He was imagining it, hearing voices.
Victor, he realized. That son of a bitch was playing with him now, distracting him.
He moved down the row of deactivated mining drones, verifying their hull integrity before inserting their power cells. This was going to stop Victor. It had to. And Victor knew it, and was now trying to stop him with cheap fucking parlor tricks.
It wasn’t going to work, though.
“I know who you are!” he screamed, whirling around in the semi-darkness as he screamed to the heavens. Victor was above him, somewhere, and inside him, too, deep inside his head, twisting his consciousness and his memory against him and projecting old thoughts, old desires, old questions.
“I know who you are and I will kill you, do you understand me?”
“Alpha, stop it. Stop and listen to me,” Echo said. “It’s Victor. Victor is inside your head. Do you understand?”
“No fucking shit!” he screamed. Victor, manipulating him, trying to trick him. He recognized the buzzing sensation, the spidery crawl across the surface of his brain, which was the clone’s hallmark. He’d been feeling it since the synthesis began, standing beside the cloning tank while Victor took form. That should have been enough of an inkling to prompt an abortion, to purge the hybrid relic from the tank and reconfigure the systems for projects Whiskey and X-Ray.
But no. He saw now that he possessed every inch of Papa’s hubris and his dangerous, wanton need to always be right, damn the cost.
“Victor is still in the tank, Alpha,” Echo shouted. Her voice quivered in its awful pleadings, stained with tears and a jagged sobbing. “You’re not well. We—I—can help you.”
He curled one fist tightly, the pain and the bandages preventing him from curling both. All his effort brought his injured hand was fresh blood.
He was on the right track, then. If Victor was this worried, would go to these lengths to prevent him from activating the drones, then he was most certainly on the right track.
He was going to start up these fucking drones and sic each and every one of them on Victor, and he was going to destroy the whole goddamn asteroid while he was at it.
Gritting his teeth, he pulled open the battery compartment of the nearest drone and lodged the power cell into place. Managing this was difficult with only one hand, and his shoulder throbbed. The battery was large and hadn’t been easy to maneuver. Pulling the hatch back down, he was forced to use both hands to bear the lid’s weight.
His hand lit up in a brilliant, fresh spike of pain and he saw Echo even as he tried to blot her words out of his mind. She was lying on his chest, a pink bubble forming on her lips. His hand burned from the lacerations the glass had opened in his flesh, and he could feel her blood pooling between them.
Not like this, he’d thought. Please, not like this.
“Alpha. You need to remember. You need to get a grip.”
The lid slammed down into place, and he buckled at the searing pain in his belly, forcing him to collapse to his knees, his useless hand pressed tightly to his stomach. His shoulder burning.
“Charlie,” he said. “That’s one done. Start her up.”
He knelt beside the mech, panting heavily. A thick, coppery taste lingered in his mouth and throat.
“Charlie. Start her up,” he said again.
The machine was lifeless, though. He began to second guess himself—did he forget something? Was there a start-up sequence or something to go through? Some method of priming the drone he’d failed to realize?
“Charlie’s dead,” Echo said. “You killed him.”
“Fuck. You.”
He forced himself to his feet, dragging the cart stuffed with batteries behind him. He felt terribly weak from the blood loss and knew it was only a matter of time before he died. He couldn’t let Victor live, though, couldn’t risk somebody trying to salvage the station’s remnants and coming across the creature. Finding him and dying at his hands. Or worse. God, what if, somehow, Victor made it off the mining platform? With his degrees of perception and ability to deceive, to play such twisted mind games with his prey, what would he do to the sky colonies on Venus, or on Mars or Earth?
At the next drone, he repeated the process of battery installation as best as he could. Two down and already he was significantly weaker. Sweat poured down his face, yet he felt frighteningly cold.
The lid slammed down like a gunshot and he felt an explosion in his torso. A second in his shoulder, and he staggered back and fell, the hallucination so vivid. He tripped over the cart, upending it beneath him and sending a cascade of large, heavy batteries across the floor. His bony hips crashed into the corner of a battery, sending fresh agony through him, his head cracking against another.
He lay there a moment, moaning. And remembering.
Charlie with his prohibited firearm. Guns were banned from the station, had been even as a fully operational mining colony. In the depths of space, a gunshot inside an enclosed facility was too large a threat. Somehow Charlie had come to possess one, likely pilfered from the remnants of station security from ages ago.
Charlie had shot him, twice. In return, he had opened Charlie’s throat with the glass shard. Alpha had passed out briefly, and when he woke Charlie was staring at him, a gory hand wrapped around his ruined throat, lips moving but making no sounds. And then his lips had stilled.
“No,” he said. “No, that isn’t what happened.”
He fought against the memory, his own mind rebelling against it, dueling factions within him screaming for and against.
“We tried to purge Victor,” Echo said. “You attacked me with a chair, busted up my terminal. Do you remember?”
“No,” he said, but with no trace of conviction.
“There was glass everywhere from the monitors you destroyed. You stopped us from purging Victor, and then you came at me with a glass shard. Do you remember?”
“No,” he lied. Tears ran freely down his face.
“Charlie tried to stop you, and you killed him.”
“I—”
“I’m dying, Alpha.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
Breathing through his nose produced a gravelly noise as liquid roiled deep in his nostrils. His nose and sinuses were so clogged, he had to breathe through his mouth. He wiped again at his face, drawing away moist gray clumps lined with red stains against the back of his wrist.
So this is what happened to Delta. The thought made him chuckle.
He forced himself to roll into a sitting position, his guts squelching, and he could swear he felt the rubbery bulge of intestine threatening to spool free from the hole in his belly.
“I don’t know what’s real,” he said. Echo whimpered over the comm channel. He thought she may have been trying to laugh.
Hallucination or not, he understood Victor’s plan. Such a simple plan. They had tried to kill him, and so Victor had, in turn, tried to kill t
hem. Alpha had been his weapon.
He saw it all now with awful clarity. Victor, in his tube, small and piebald and deformed, barely human. He wasn’t growing, hadn’t broken free of the tube. The purge had begun, and he’d lashed out in self-defense. Delta and Bravo had been killed after Uniform had failed to achieve satisfactory synthesis and had been purged. Had that been a warning, or revenge? He didn’t know, but he knew Victor had been responsible for manipulating the men toward their deaths.
But information, intended or not, was a two-way street. Alpha had learned things no human mind should be privy to.
He saw, too, what Victor had ultimately realized was the only possible outcome, and what Victor’s manipulations of him had been aimed toward.
He dabbed at the wound to his belly, digging his fingers into the ragged hole torn into him. Fresh paint for his brush, he thought, and he drew new marks across the floor beside him. Ancient sigils that put the god to sleep, even if too late.
Alpha slowly, painfully, got his feet beneath him, shoving himself upward from the prone cart for balance. He and Victor had a similar end-goal now, and he was quite content to deliver the creature’s final wishes.
His steps were aching shuffles and it took him far longer than it should have to make his way toward the computer terminal. He keyed in the necessary sequences to start up two of the mining drones, their battery cells weak but carrying enough of a charge to carry through one last assignment.
Their thrusters powered on, their large insectile bodies unfolding from their resting racks to deploy. They arced through the warehouse and turned toward the freight elevator to carry them higher up and into the station, to the laboratory where Victor waited.
