How you justify your negligent homicide, Professor Carmack! It is most amusing!
You’re a figment of psychological pressure — you’re not real enough to be amused. You’re a nothing — just a nothing that can talk! Go away and leave me in the darkness with my companion: my pain…
But I am that darkness; I am your pain. That is exactly what I am. Who do you think you have been conversing with?
No!
Oh yes. Your eyes are blinded with the substance of my being; your nerves sing with the vitality of my growing life. I am growing within you. I am taking you over. The phenomenon you experimented with so cheerfully is infectious — didn’t you know that?
It can be stopped. It can be…
It cannot be stopped. You are proof.
No. Not me.
Don’t you remember what happened, in that lab, after you called for help — after you summoned fresh meat for us?
I can’t remember…It’s all so dark…I don’t want to remember…
You have been infected. I am that infection — and the infection is even now becoming you. You are in a conversation with that which is slowly eating you! I eat you. I eat you! I steadily eat you even as I speak to you. I am eating you and digesting you and making you into me. Whatever is in you that I have no use for — like your rationality — will become my waste product.
No, I will break free! I will break out! I will…
You will…?
I will…I am…
No: I am…
I am…darkness and pain.
Yes. I am darkness and pain. And I will spread it to all that lives.
I am darkness and pain.
“Mac, secure our line of retreat,” Sarge told him. Mac used the RRTS hand signal for assent and took up a post just outside the door of the “mudroom” — the prep room on the edge of the Olduvaian archaeological dig.
Sarge and Reaper made their way, very warily, into the mudroom. Tinted the color of rust by the strange sky outside, light angled through an observation window looking out on the windswept surface of Mars. Most of the place was taken up by worktables.
It had the look of having been abandoned in miduse, like the labs. There were tables crowded with hand tools: big power drills, small shovels and trowels, a hundred kinds of fine-work digging implements. And on one table lay a long row of heavy-duty chain saws.
Reaper thought: In a pinch, if a guy ran out of ammo, those chain saws could be used as weapons. A strange thought, bringing with it a chill of recognition.
On a debris-removal table was a clutter of half-cleaned artifacts, each surrounded by a ring of scraped-away soil. Some of the artifacts were clearly vases, bowls, small metal cabinets; others were unidentifiable: cryptic, but teetering right on the edge of familiarity…
My parents were here, working at these tables, once, then my sister, Reaper thought. I was supposed to be working here, too…
His own memory of his childhood on Olduvai was dim, an uneasy fog shot through with red lights, flickering with half-seen faces. He had worked hard since, trying to forget this place.
But one memory came back to him vividly — the day, with his father, he had visited Dig Twenty-three. Young John Grimm had seen something watching him from the shadows. A monstrous face, with a vast toothy mouth. Only it wasn’t quite there physically. It blinked in and out of existence…
Your imagination, his father reassured him. This is a spooky-looking place. Your mind is finding patterns in the chaos.
But after that young John had refused to visit the digs. He’d just wanted to leave Olduvai.
Not long afterward, his parents had died — in that same part of the digs. Number Twenty-three. Just an accident…
Reaper noticed his sister looking at him from the walls.
He walked over to the photos taped up there. Here was his sister, smiling from a photo taken in a dig. And there were his parents, in a group photo. Their names underneath: Prof. A. Grimm; Prof. D. Grimm.
Reaper felt a twisting wrench of loss inside — and he turned away from the photos, going hurriedly to the observation window, wanting to look beyond the claustrophobic confines of the facility.
Once, millennia ago, Reaper knew, there had been plants, trees, animals, lakes, and rivers here. The archaeological and paleontological record indicated as much. But now it was a desert with poisonous air: the stony landscape inhabited only by the shadows of lowering, lividly colored clouds. Dusk lay thickly on bouldered hills, misshapen buttes, and, nearer, the digs themselves — terraces cut into soil and rock; crumbling archways and doors into darkness. Heavy mining equipment, abandoned midjob, was lit up by standing arc lights.
This was the foreign landscape in which his parents had given their lives, where they’d been sacrificial lambs to the meaningless pursuit of knowledge. Or so Reaper felt in his worst moments.
“That where it happened?” Sarge asked.
Reaper didn’t answer. But he thought: Dig Twenty-three…
“You find the door?” Reaper asked, after a moment.
Sarge moved away. Reaper stared through the window at the starkly shadowed, terraced dig, till Sarge called, “John…”
He found Sarge standing by the air lock hatch. The locked exit glistened with a fairly fresh spatter of blood. On the floor under the hatch were two bodies in overalls and lab coats. One face down, and the other was facedown, but his head was turned 180 degrees around, faceup.
Sarge bent down and read off the name tags. “Thurman and Clay. Look at ’em. They weren’t trying to stop something from getting in. Something stopped them getting out.”
Destroyer’s voice crackled over the comm. “Sarge — we reached the north air lock. It’s secure.”
Reaper grunted to himself. Things pop out of the ceiling and run off into the floor here. How could anything be secure?
He shook his head. No reason to say it aloud. The team was spooked enough.
He hunkered to look at the two bodies in front of the air lock. Seeing they had no respirators, he said, “What could make you want to escape into…nothing?”
“Sarge,” came Destroyer’s voice on the headset. “Reached the north air lock.”
Mac stopped pacing, cocked his head to listen, as Destroyer went on, “It’s secure. Console indicates nothing’s come in or out for twenty-six hours.”
Mac nodded to himself. Maybe there weren’t a whole swarm of those things out there after all. Destroyer would’ve seen something, for sure.
Mac was fingering his weapon and watching the corridor leading to the “mudroom”; thinking about home, Tokyo; thinking about how his uncle had asked him to come into the synthetic saki factory. Wondering what natural saki had been made out of him. Rice, wasn’t it? Or was it water chestnuts? Should have gone into business with Uncle. Anything could happen here…
His uncle, though, kept trying to get him to marry that second cousin of his, Inki. Pain in the ass, that girl. Following him around, looking at him moon-eyed, her hands clasped in front of her. Geisha complex. Not many of those left. Most of the girls from his own neighborhood had been in the Yakuza Lady’s Auxiliary. Not the geisha type.
But then there was something touching about Inki, too. Maybe he should’ve given her a whirl. Be comforting to come home to an old-fashioned girl. Get a massage. Back rub. Never tell you she’s got a headache that day…and after all —