Truth Engine

by James Axler

  A smile crossed her lips as she placed the glob of sand on the ground, scooping more around it to create a little shaped mound. She looked at the sand and thought of what it was she was trying to create—a representation of the girl in her mind, a human fetish made of dust. Brigid moved, her slender fingers working, gathering more and adding drops of water, two or three at a time, to alter the texture of the sand, forcing it to bond.

  The waters had broken between her legs and now Brigid was giving birth to the child of her mind. Was this how it would feel to have a child, to bring life into the world? Was this what they fought for? Of course it was—wasn’t this all that humankind had always fought for? A place to bring new life into the world.

  Brigid pictured Abigail in her mind’s eye, the girl with her round face and innocent smile, her little nose and her eyes that twinkled like jewels. But before her, all there was was sand. Brigid needed to form it into a shape first—a head and shoulders, like a bust. Scooping more sand, she tipped the flask once again from where it rested between her thighs, added just a few drops of cool water to the mixture, making it firm so that she could shape it. A ridge on which would sit an elongated sphere, a head atop the shoulders. It would take time, she knew.

  One byproduct of Brigid’s eidetic memory was that she was a good artist, at least in that she could re-create things she saw with pens, paper and other tools. Focusing her mind, she willed the image in her head to her hands, gradually forming the features of the girl. At first, she had balked at the thought of showing this child to Ullikummis, feeling it was somehow wrong, a perversion that she wanted no part of. But how could a fictitious child hurt her? How could something that had never existed possibly be used against Brigid? She had made her peace with losing Abigail in the Janus trap; the girl’s shape could not hurt her now.

  And so, as the hours passed, Brigid continued to work at the sand, dripping water into the grains to make them firm, to hold a shape. There were no tools in the cave other than the pebbles that littered the floor here and there. Crawling around on hands and knees, Brigid found one that was flat with a sharp point, used this to help add detail to the thing that was forming before her on the floor of the cavern.

  The fictitious girl, Abigail, had been like a daughter to Brigid Baptiste. Stuck in a false reality, she had become attached to the girl, had lived with her, provided for her, taken care of her. It had seemed that they had been together forever. When Brigid had left the trap, had awoken and returned to the conscious world, she had still wondered at Abigail’s fate. The girl’s existence, however one chose to interpret it, had ignited something deep inside Brigid Baptiste.

  Brigid’s hands worked at the sand for a long time, her fingers gathering and shaping the mound of sand until it had the rudimentary appearance of a child’s shoulders and head. The shoulders were almost life-size, ten inches across and sloped downward until they disappeared into the floor of the cave. Brigid played her hands across them like a potter, adding water and smoothing them until they seemed to be something almost human.

  Then she turned her attention to the neck, piling sand to form its thin trunk, adding weight to ensure it could support the head. Brigid was no sculptress, had never really done something like this before. It was a feat of engineering, she realized, as much as it was a work of art, creating a bust that could stand under its own weight, not topple or—more likely, given the suppleness of the medium—slip away.

  She sat on the floor of the cave, working at the sand, piling more on and brushing it smooth, shaping the girl’s neck. If this was what it would take to buy her freedom, then it was an inconsequential price to pay, building a little tribute to her child who never was.

  Several more hours passed, and Brigid felt the aching in her own neck and shoulders. She had been crouched here a long time, working at the sand sculpture, and she needed to stretch, to work out the kinks in her muscles. Brigid pushed herself off the floor with a groan, stretched her legs out before her, one at a time like a ballerina going through her warm-up routine, then clenched and unclenched her hands, wiggling the fingers. She was stiffening up, and exhaustion was creeping in.

  She looked down, staring at the little mound of sand in the orange glow of the magma pods. The shadows cast by the gloomy light seemed to give the sand character, made it somehow more real. It was unsettling, looking at this girl child bursting from the ground, her head just a blank, faceless bump of sand.

  Brigid took a deep breath, let it out with a slow ten count, calming her nerves. She thought back, picturing the girl who had existed only in the faux reality. Her memory of Abigail—of her little munchkin—was just as real to her as anything else she had experienced in her life, Brigid acknowledged. This was the reality of having an eidetic memory; even the most valueless recollections had resonance, stayed with her as if crucial. The others— Kane and Grant—had left the false reality with her, but they had been unaffected, had given little more than a second thought to everything that had gone on in that dreamlike trap with its narrow logic and emotional land-mines. But Brigid would wake now and then thinking of Abi, of her child.

  “Damn you,” Brigid muttered, her hands clenching unconsciously into fists. She saw something of what Ullikummis was doing. He was using her memory of a false reality to show her how little she truly perceived. Angrily, she turned to the mound of sand and kicked it, knocking the sand across the stone floor of the cave.

  The sand tumbled in on itself where the water held it together, crumbling and breaking like a cliff breaking apart and crashing into the sea. Clumps of sand spilled across the floor, hunks of shoulder and neck sprawling across the rock at Brigid’s feet. She stood there, breathing hard, angry with what she had done. This was her chance at freedom, this one simple task, and she was failing it. She was so determined to work out the mind game that Ullikummis was playing that she was creating an enemy not of him but of herself.

  Brigid stumbled backward until she met the edge of the rock chair, slumped into it without looking. “You’re better than this, Brigid,” she whispered to herself. “You can get past this, defeat this monster.”

  Her voice seemed to crack on the last word, and she wondered if she truly considered Ullikummis a monster anymore, or if she thought of him as—what?—a man? No. An Annunaki, then, but not in the way she had seen them before. He had opened her eyes somehow, made her realize how flawed her perception of the Annunaki had been. People in masks and rubber suits pretending to be aliens for a story, a play to fool children, nothing more. That’s what he had told her; that’s how they had seemed.

  Slumped against the back of the chair, her breathing still coming hard, Brigid tightened her fists, pressing her sharp fingernails into the palms of her hands. “You’re better than this,” she told herself. “You’re better than he is.”

  After a while, when she had finally calmed her swirling thoughts, Brigid went back to work. Kneeling on the floor of the cave, she gathered up the sand and began reshaping the figure before her, head and shoulders as she saw them projected in her mind. “Come on, munchkin,” she muttered, dribbling water into the sand to make it bond. “Show your face.”

  Chapter 21

  They had dragged Grant’s unconscious form back to his cell, tossed him inside and sealed the hatch using the command stones that were buried in their flesh.

  Grant had awoken hours later, sprawled on the cold rock floor and feeling the pressing need to vomit. He rolled, retching up a watery drool that looked little different from the meals he had been fed over the previous forty-eight hours. He lay there, leaning on his elbow, head bowed low as he spluttered up the measly contents of his stomach. It struck Grant that he had eaten hardly anything in the past three days, and so he was vomiting nothing more than the yellowish lining of his stomach now, thick chunks of his own secretions slapping against the floor, his nose and eyes streaming thick water tainted with mucus. Ultimately, he drew a breath, felt his stomach finally stop complaining. He still felt sick, and his bo
dy trembled as he rested there on the sand carpet, but the initial need to vomit had passed, quelled by nothing more than a lack of any content left to bring up.

  Grant cursed as he sank back to the cold rock floor, the acrid stench of his stomach’s contents assaulting his nostrils in the closeness of the cave. He had tried to escape while he still had the strength to do so, and he had failed. This was his reward—a beating and sickness.

  For a long while he lay there, trying to fathom a way out of the cave-like cell, out of the complex of tunnels he had seen. They had a mat-trans. That was the key. Despite what Edwards had said, how this place was hell, Grant knew that the mat-trans could be used to take him somewhere else. The nature of the mat-trans system was such that, if used, the unit would send him to a receiver unit, from which he could program another journey and disappear into the ether before anyone could stop him. While his hooded jailers might endeavor to follow him, the boot-up and wind-down sequence would be enough to allow him a second jump before anyone could catch up. And once he’d performed the second jump, that would be it—he would be free. The rest was simply a case of backtracking via the Cerberus monitoring system, which he knew could be utilized to learn the location of this cavernous prison.

  Grant belched, tasting the bile in his throat. The thought of mat-trans travel was making him nauseous all over again. He had never been a fan.

  He lay there a long time, the ceiling seemingly spinning just a little overhead, until he finally heard something from off to his right, a shuffling, scraping noise. Grant recognized it immediately: it was the sound the walls made when they prepared to move, to shift like water to create a doorway through which one of his hooded captors could enter.

  He turned, watching the wall move as he lay on his side, his stomach still feeling like some echoing chasm within him. The wall parted, the magma lights of the corridor beyond becoming visible through the widening slit. Three people stood there, dressed in the shapeless robes, hoods up.

  “Can I help you?” Grant asked sarcastically, his voice weak.

  One of the hooded figures strode into the room, while the others remained in guard position by the door. The leader pushed his hood back and looked down at the weary figure of Grant. Despite the man’s beard, Grant recognized Dylan, the farmer he had met in Tenth City.

  “You tried to escape,” Dylan intoned.

  “Yeah,” Grant agreed, seeing little point in denying it now. “What did you expect…. Dylan, is it?”

  “First Priest Dylan of the New Order,” Dylan barked, glaring fiercely at Grant’s lounging form.

  “Nice promotion,” Grant observed, stretching his arms out as he lay there, pain running through his body. “Last time I saw you, you were getting ready to return to digging up the earth.”

  “I was introduced to something better,” Dylan said, “found a better harvest to reap. The future.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Grant muttered as his arm reached just a little farther, “that’s one heck of a harvest you’ve planned for yourself.”

  “You disappointed me, Grant,” Dylan said. “Lord Ullikummis said you were worthless, a rebellious blot on the future, made of muscle but with no sense. He said that at the first opportunity you would try to run.”

  “What, you lose a little wager here?” Grant asked.

  “The future will be a utopia,” Dylan said as he looked down at him, “built upon the bones of the past. You could have been a part of that, Grant. Instead, the best you can hope for is to be a slave, if you live that long.”

  “I ain’t real keen on building on bones,” he said, “nor being a slave to a council of idiocy.” Grant’s hand snagged Dylan’s ankle as he spoke, and he yanked with all his might. In an instant, Dylan fell to his knees, his arms reeling as he struggled, but failed to keep his balance. Grant was on him in a second, clambering up the man’s fallen body, fist drawn back to hit him. “You have any other positions opening up?”

  Then Grant drove his fist into the man’s smiling face, even as the guards at the door rushed over to pull the ex-Magistrate from their leader’s body. Grant felt the blackjack crack against the back of his skull with a hard impact, stopped struggling as he was pulled off the hooded man’s body. As Grant was dragged away, Dylan continued smiling, a trickle of blood forming in the gaps between the ex-farmer’s teeth.

  Grant was manhandled, tossed against the wall with brutality. He was too weak to fight back, simply reveled in what little satisfaction he had gained from surprising the leader and striking him.

  “We don’t need to feed this one anymore,” Grant heard Dylan say as he lay there against the wall, the back of his head throbbing from its savage meeting with the blackjack. “Kane has agreed to lead the armies. We won’t need this one again.”

  What? Grant asked himself. They had Kane? But how?

  Grant felt the nausea rise within him once more as, behind him, the door to the cell slid shut on its invisible tracks. If they had Kane, he realized, then he would need to work out a way around the prison, locate Kane before he could leave. And if they had Kane, then it stood to reason they might have Brigid, too. But why would Kane agree to lead their armies unless he was playing some bluff? Impossible—these people wouldn’t fall for a bluff like that, would they? There had to be more to it than that.

  Slowly, Grant drifted into a pained sleep, pressed up against the hard, unforgiving wall of his cavelike cell.

  Chapter 22

  Those whom the gods would destroy they first turn mad.

  Brigid’s stomach rumbled, reminding her of her need to eat. She had toiled over the sand sculpture for a long time, shaping it to look like the cherubic little girl in her mind’s eye. Abigail had been a part of her life for a short period of time, and yet Brigid felt that she knew her. Not in the way she remembered other things, the way her perfect memory would retain the tiniest detail, but in a way that exists only within a person, when love is felt for another. Abigail was the daughter she had never had, Brigid knew, a horrible trick to mess with her mind. In constructing her image from the sand, perhaps this would be a cathartic experience, to finally make solid the dream she had buried deep within her, and so see it for the fallacy it was.

  The girl looked like her, like Brigid, with her flowing hair and her soft face. Brigid’s face was harder, the planes a little sharper, but the girl looked similar enough that their family resemblance was clear. The shoulders appeared to slope down into the cave’s floor now, the neck springing above them in a slender line. Above that, the head, the face, the hair behind. Brigid had spent a long time working at the hair, carving its intricacies, adding detail to create the illusion of substance and depth. She had used the sharp, flat-edged pebble to draw more detail there, marveling in the twisting, tangled lines she was carving from the sand. Abi had always had twisted hair, never sitting still long enough to let Brigid run a brush through it. By keeping the sand wet, Brigid found she could make it hold a shape, and could carve into it with miraculous detail and extravagance.

  The Annunaki were masters of genetic engineering, and it dawned on Brigid as she worked at the little sculpture that Ullikummis might use it as a template, bringing the child to life somehow, crafting her from clay just like the myth he had spoken of. Could he do that? Would he do it simply to spite Brigid, or perhaps appease her?

  It seemed unlikely. Ullikummis was many things, willful and brutal, perhaps, but he was not spiteful, had demonstrated no capacity for spite.

  On the front of the sculpture, the face remained a blank thing. It had features, Abigail’s lines of jaw and cheek, her little nose. But the mouth had yet to be added, and the eyes were just hollows in the sand created by the heel of Brigid’s hand pressing lightly against the moist surface. Still on her hands and knees, Brigid gathered more sand from the far wall of the cave, scooping it up in her hands and adding water to make it cling. The water bottle was almost empty now; she had to tip it almost entirely upside down to get just a few drops out of it.

  �
�I should drink this,” Brigid whispered to herself, as if afraid the sand child would hear. But Brigid didn’t drink.

  She made her way back to the sculpture that rested close to the chair, the little head and shoulders protruding from the ground, and she brushed gently at the face, smoothing the forehead the way one holds a sickly child. Carefully Brigid took the damp sand from her hand and worked it into the forehead, low across the ridges above the hollow, empty eyes. Then she plucked the sharp pebble from the floor once more and began shaping the eyebrows with it, chipping carefully away at the ridges of sand until they formed the delicate lines of Abigail’s brows.

  She had patiently worked at the sand representation of Abigail for a long time when Ullikummis made his presence known. Brigid turned, peering behind her and seeing the great stone figure standing amid the deep shadows of the cavern, the magma traceries running like fire over his huge body. He had not spoken, but there had been a scraping noise, his foot against the cave floor, perhaps, or his hand brushing the wall. He may well have been there for minutes before Brigid had noticed, hours even. It was in that moment that she appreciated how quiet Ullikummis’s movements could be. Here he was, a grand thing covered with stone, yet when he chose to he could move in silence, giving no hint of his presence to the unwary.

  Brigid fixed him with a stare. “You don’t look like the other Annunaki,” she said.

  Ullikummis smiled as he stepped from the shadows to reveal himself fully to her. At eight feet tall, he towered over her as she knelt on the floor, working at the sand sculpture she had made.

  “My father changed me,” Ullikummis explained, “before I was born. The Annunaki have ways to change things—they understand genetics in a way your humans have yet to comprehend. I was changed while still growing in the egg, prepared for what I was to become for my father.”