On the surface, in some places, the verdigris floated, which they broke with their boots at every step. Even through the air filter, an intense smell of stagnant water reached them.
“I think we're close,” Isaac said. The sensor seemed to increase the intensity with which it illuminated his face.
Fox tightened his hand around the butt of the gun. As they turned right at an intersection they saw a door ajar at the far end. It was a room with the furniture knocked over and littered with something that might well be excrement, some dried forming a whitish crust and some more recent. There were also skeletal remains of various creatures. The most recent looked like some kind of giant tuna resting half-gutted on something resembling a control panel. A cloud of insects buzzed over it.
Fox's hand was so tight around the gun that it hurt. In there even the echo seemed to take on a more cavernous and sinister tone.
“Let's get out as soon as possible, Isaac,” Fox said, aware that he was speaking in an almost inaudible whisper.
“It must be around here somewhere,” Isaac said, alternating his gaze between the sensor and the environment.
Fox looked around with his gun raised. Through the rifle scope everything had a greenish tint.
Isaac walked over to a corner. The sound of his feet stirring the water sounded to Fox's ears like the roar of a waterfall. Isaac pushed aside a clump of brush.
They saw the corpse of a man whose chest read “Amundsen”. His torso had been mangled and his arms were missing. On his head, under his helmet, he wore a kind of metal cap. Isaac removed the helmet from his suit and picked up the artifact. It consisted of a smooth metal plate with several dents in its surface, as if it had been shaped by hand with a hammer. In fact, it could have passed for one of Isaac's inventions.
“This is the pinnacle of luminarian technology. They kept the termens at bay for thousands of years with this.”
“It seems it didn't work out so well in the end.”
“That was because of a betrayal by one of their generals when....”
Something moved in the darkness, very close.
“Let's get out of here,” Fox said in a whisper.
Isaac nodded and they made their way back, shining their flashlights on the surface of the stagnant water in the corridor. In the room they had just left behind, something heavy fell into the water with a splash. When they turned they barely saw a reflection on the water. Then something began to move toward them at full speed. During the brief glimpse Fox allowed himself before he started running he discovered a creature similar to a giant crustacean. Its jaws were chomping angrily and it was drooling a greenish substance. From one of the protrusions on its carapace hung a clump of reddish algae. It emitted high-pitched shrieks that pierced the eardrums.
“Go, go, go!”
They ran through the corridor as fast as the plant- and debris-infested water would let them. Fox slipped and fell butt-first into the water. Behind him, he heard the creature's rage getting closer and closer. He tried to get up in a hurry but only managed to slip away. So he had to force himself to consciously get up slowly, movement by movement, keeping his cool despite the nightmare that loomed over him, despite the pain still lacerating his leg. When they turned at the intersection they immediately understood that they had missed their way, because they had reached a dead end. The only door there was completely sealed by vegetation. They watched as the creature rounded the corner and watched them complacently. It charged at them with its huge claws raised. In the monster's wet carapace the light of the lanterns reflected.
The creature leapt toward them, emitting an icy scream, its jaws and pincers open. Fox waited until the last instant before firing, to increase his chances. Because he knew he would only have one. When they could almost touch the abomination with their fingers, Fox shot through the gaping maw of the creature, which fell into the stagnant water with a great splash. Its limbs were still writhing.
There was a hubbub of clacking and shrieking echoing throughout the spaceship's ducts.
They ran up the ramp lit by the maddening lights of their flashlights. The roar of the approaching creatures grew louder and louder. As Isaac and Fox hooked the ropes to the belts, dozens of those creatures emerged from all the corridors and holes of the spacecraft and ran toward them. Fox's carabiner would not open wide enough for the rope to fit. He struggled uselessly, as dozens of the monstrosities came at him. He examined the joint and removed a thick algae that was clogging the opening mechanism. As the monsters lunged toward him, he managed to clip the rope and pushed himself upward. They ran toward the Titan through the vegetation covering the surface of the luminarian spacecraft. They slid to the wing and ran the last few feet that separated them from the Titan. As soon as they jumped, Isaac started the spacecraft and pulled away, while hundreds of the creatures shrieked in fury and frustration.
The more we explore the human subconscious, the more it seems to expand.
Andreas F. Schultz, M.D., 12th Congress of Neuropsychiatry at Crescington University.
For the rest of the day, Isaac isolated himself in the lab to try to figure out how the neural catalyst works. Occasionally, Fox would hear a thump or something falling. Once he thought he heard a muffled scream.
Through the half-open door, Fox saw Isaac with the catalyst on his head, eyes closed and apparently concentrating on the empty vial in front of him on the marble countertop, littered with the remnants of past experiments and uncleaned pots and pans and miscellaneous instruments that Fox had come to think he kept as bizarre decoration, since it seemed to him that they were in exactly the same position every time he had watched, like the graphs on the control panel.
He watched the scene from the half-light of the corridor, interrupted only by the flickering of a halogen tube hanging from a tangle of wires. Isaac squeezed his brow with two fingers and a small orange-spotted frog appeared inside the jar. After hopping around a couple of times it remained motionless, except for the throbbing of its pulsing jowls. Isaac made a note in a notebook next to the jar. Fox knocked on the door. Isaac gasped, and seeing Fox he waved a quick hand gesture for him to come in.
“This is amazing. It's going to be revolutionary,” Isaac said.
Inside the lab smelled of novocaine and ammonia. Fox sat down on a wobbly stool next to where Isaac sat.
“I present to you the neural catalyst.”
He held out that hunk of metal. Fox weighed it in his hands. It was lighter than it looked at first glance. It was hot, almost to the point of burning his skin. Inside it hummed some kind of electronic device.
“How does it work?” He said, placing it on his head without losing sight of the frog that was watching him from its glass prison.
“First of all, it’s important to insist that its use still carries great risks. Unexpected side effects. This marvel channels our thoughts and materializes them at a point in spacetime. But it was designed by a race very different from ours, with a neural system very different from the human one. Apparently they came up with it by observing the differences between the physical world and the characteristics of that same physical world represented in the maps of their neurons. It was a logical evolution. And it turned out that only a step separated them. And it is that step that this device, the pinnacle of its technology, goes through. Perhaps I could adapt it to the characteristics of the human brain, but I'm afraid there's no time.
Fox took it off and looked at it, wary of that horrifying slab of mangled and deformed metal. He placed it on the countertop, withdrawing his hands with alacrity, as if at any moment it could shock him or worse.
“And what kind of side effects could be expected in its current state? Hey, is that buzzing sound normal?”
“If not used with extreme care, and in fact, even then the risk of interference is very high, unwanted thought intrusions can occur. Residues of the subconscious, crossed thoughts,” he chuckled, “In one of the first tests I tried simply to get the door closed when I opened my ey
es. What happened was that when I opened them I saw a shoe land in the middle of my forehead. It was an absurd thought that had crept into my mind at the last moment. But you can imagine the consequences if these side effects were much more serious than a shoe slap.”
Fox then noticed that there was something odd about the frog's anatomy. The legs, it seemed to him, did not follow the correct angles corresponding to an amphibian skeleton. And the eyes were located at the front of the head instead of at the sides. And yet there stood that aberration, breathing and waving its yellowish jowls, looking at Fox with a haughty gaze, as if contemplating an insect.
“It seems to me that you have just discovered another drawback. Most of the time we don't have accurate information about what we want to create, so the results can be... inaccurate to say the least. As you can see, my knowledge about the anatomy of a frog is not very accurate.”
“But what about its internal organs? Have you thought about each and every one of them, and every cell in its blood?”
“Good question. That is one of the examples where it seems that the catalyst makes ‘automatic’ use of information from our subconscious. If we were to dissect this frog now we would surely find a more or less accurate approximation of an organ system. Of course there would be countless errors, and even strange things that we would never imagine finding in there, although the animal could continue to live perfectly well in spite of them. It would be an incorrect system but it would do the job of keeping the creature alive.”
Like this damned spacecraft, Fox thought.
“It's kind of sinister,” he said.
“It is. At the moment. But imagine the possibilities. In medicine, for instance,” he shifted in his seat. “Another drawback is that sometimes it seems to pull things out of the deep end of the well. As if it throws the bucket too deep.”
Fox had an increasingly pressing need to stay away from the thing. Isaac shifted once again on his stool.
The neural catalyst began to expel a thin plume of white smoke through a slit, accompanied by a high-pitched hissing sound. Isaac opened a drawer full of junk and pulled out huge tongs. He grabbed the catalyst and dipped it into a bucket full of water at his feet, where it sighed a long hiss. Fox was aware of how close he had come to scorching his head.
“Even if you manage to make it usable for humans I think you should make it look a little less scary if you intend to sell it. It looks like a medieval torture instrument.”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, of course. I took a break to sketch some ideas.”
He opened the messy drawer again and took out a crumpled piece of paper which he spread out on the counter, in the gap between the test tubes, the tongs, and the Nortoniensis frog. Drawn with the sloppy fluency of someone who has done many sketches without knowing the basic principles of drawing, it depicted the design of the final version of the neural catalyst, suitable for human use. It was the same sinister pot now cooling in the bucket, but there were arrows pointing to various areas and indicating things like, “Here, a streak of orange paint.” “Here a clock.” “Here a thermometer.” At the top it read in shaky letters: “NC3000”.
“It's very good, Isaac.”
“Yes, I'm very happy,” he licked his lips.
“When can we go back?”
“I’m very tired. I think it'd be wise to get some rest tonight. The life of mankind is at stake, and I would not like my exhausted brain to play a dirty trick. As soon as I wake up, I'll try to use it to get back.”
“In the meantime, can we head back to shore?”
“I'm afraid the amphibious system has also broken down. Without the right tools it will be impossible to repair it. Fortunately, we have the catalyst. But at least for tonight, we will have to stay here.”
With that said, he retired to his bedroom.
The Fairy Forest fell silent. It seemed to hold its breath.
Martin S. Puncel, The Fairy Forest
“Look what I have found. Don't say anything to Norton,” Dr. Edelmann held up a cloth and showed him a bottle of a vintage more than twenty years old. “We're going to get very rich. You know that, don't you?”
The last person in the universe Fox would have a glass of wine with at that moment was Dr. Max Edelmann, but now that they were almost at the end, he thought, why not celebrate after all?
He took a sip. It was good.
“Hey,” Fox said, “How about going upstairs? This place is getting on my nerves.”
Edelmann looked at him in silence, assessing what he had just heard.
“Feeling overwhelmed?” He gathered his beard into a ball of curly hair. Finally he parted it again with a broad smile, “Who wouldn't be? This place is nerve-wracking. Let's go upstairs.”
They climbed the stairs to the top.
“What's more,” he continued, “what do you say we take off our helmets? We could use some fresh air. Even if it's not the healthiest in the universe.”
Fox took off his helmet. He felt fresh air on his face that carried a scent of salt and ozone. Very fine droplets wet his face. He closed his eyes and let himself be caressed by that extraterrestrial air. All around him, the dark waves of the Great Ocean were rolling in a dance of gentle wiggles around the spacecraft, which was waiting for the moment to take flight. All the engines had stopped, and the Titan stood waiting, rocking in the Great Ocean of Erebus.
Edelmann raised his glass and Fox toasted. They sipped it without speaking, gazing at the surface of the ocean where the evening sky was reflected. Fox tried to keep those last images of Erebus in his memory. Then he tried to penetrate the unfathomable secrets of those waters. As he became aware of the depth they were advancing, he felt dizzy. It was then that he noticed the cardboard box at Dr. Edelmann's feet. A powerful feeling of unreality came over him. He drained his glass.
“The last one,” Edelmann said, refilling it. Then he did the same with his own. “It seems as if there's always a cloud hanging over your head, Stockton. Are you going to tell me what it's all about? It'll remain a secret between patient and doctor.”
Fox stared at a wisp in the clouds. It appeared to be shaped like a knife.
“I don't know what world you've been living in, but I'm not your patient,” he noticed his somewhat clumsy tongue.
“I understand. Yes, we all have our little secrets. If I may, from the track record you've demonstrated during the mission, I'd hazard a guess.”
“What's in that box?”
“I see you're not interested in my suspicion,” he laughed. “Don't worry, I understand. I suppose you're afraid of what I might say. That I might... get it right.”
“Stop.”
“Okay, good. Of course, of course. I really have nothing to reproach you for. You've been a great help to me, Captain.”
It seemed to Fox that several hundred feet around the spacecraft the water was darker than what was beyond. A huge black stain followed them. He stared at the rippling surface, trying to make out something else. Wasn't that one a huge eye the size of an aircraft carrier? And wasn't that other one a vast plain of scales reflecting the shimmering ripples on the surface?
Edelmann grabbed him and pushed him over the edge. As Fox was about to fall into the water, he grabbed him again and laughed.
“Are you out of your mind?” Fox said. He felt as if his heart was about to burst out of his mouth.
When he looked back into the water, he saw nothing but the calm surface of the Great Ocean, the translucent roof hiding a world of darkness.
“A little joke. You have little sense of humor. I guess the air is starting to get to you and has made you more irascible.”
Fox could almost see Edelmann mentally taking note of that little experiment. Fox, for his part, took note of the way he would like to strangle him.
“Have you ever felt like punching someone?,” Fox said. “It's for personal research. A little project I've been working on for some time, you might say.”
Edelmann laughed. A frank, open smile tha
t Fox had never heard from him before.
“Well, I was certainly wrong about your sense of humor. You know what? Violence is an interesting resource, after all. And mostly useful. We've been using it since we were nothing more than cells floating in the primordial waters.”
I'd give you a primordial slap, Fox thought.
“When we sense impending violence rising within us,” Edelmann continued, “we go into an animal mode, mostly triggered by a cocktail of chemicals that focuses all our energy on destroying whatever is in front of us. That which is contesting our survival.”
Fox imagined the exact point at which it would dispute his survival with his hand open, and visualized those ridiculous goggles flying into the water.
“And the hard part, what our newly arrived frontal lobe hasn't even remotely learned to do yet, is to tame that brutal, ancestral part. Some have it perfectly on a leash, and when they ask for a paw, it gives it, and when they tell it to sit, it sits. But others...” he made that gesture, gathering his beard, while he explored the depths of Fox's eyes, as if he were looking for a huge eye followed by a back covered with scales, each one the size of an ocean liner. “Let's say that what they have is a rabid dog that they don't know how to control, and that at most they can go around looking like they have everything under control, when they know that they themselves don't know when the destruction will be unleashed again.”
The silence that followed was interrupted by a resounding clap of thunder that shook the Titan's hull. The rain began to pour down as if a valve had been opened in the dirty atmosphere that enveloped them.
It would be so easy to push him off now, so easy to say that a draft threw him into the ocean, Fox thought.
Andromeda Expedition Page 14
