“You’ve had something back from my world.”
“Yes. I wanted to talk to you about that today but you seem to be very disturbed by what Pew said…”
He sat back in his chair. “I’m sorry. It just… got to me.” He coughed, and put a hand to his throat as pain stabbed at him. “You say there are skeletons in the streets?”
“Yes. And worse. I’ve spent several evenings going through the material I was sent. It wasn’t pleasant.”
His expression turned from anxiety to sympathy. “If you want to talk about it, I might be able to help you understand.”
“I’m the therapist, Iokan. I’m here to help you. Remember?”
“Of course.”
“When the expedition went back to your world, I asked them to send me information that might be relevant to your therapy. So I have your service records now.”
“I see.”
“I also have a lot of material from the last few weeks before the end.”
He frowned. “That’s not why I gave you the codes.”
“No, but it confirms a lot of what you’ve said.”
He paused for a moment. “You mean you believe me now…?”
“We have your reports on the Antecessors. What they really are. How they attacked you. How you tried to defend yourselves. It’ll all go to the ICT. They’ll take it into account.”
“I hope they’ll reach the right decision.”
“That’s not up to me. We need to look at what happened to you. I’d like to go through some of the material today, if that’s all right?”
“Certainly.”
“Some of it’s going to be distressing. Do you feel up to it?”
He coughed, and swallowed. His voice was still rasping, but he seemed determined. “I’m sure I’ve seen worse.”
“Let’s start with how your world is now.”
I turned the wall into a screen. “Here’s a view from orbit.” I foregrounded a full shot of the planet: it looked like any other Earth, save for broader icecaps. “Let me zoom in on your part of the world…”
I pushed in towards the Indonesian islands, the hub of Zumazscarta, Iokan’s nation. Then further in towards an advanced city: wide green spaces bridged by shuttletubes hanging between skytowers that stretched their shadows across the parks. But several shuttletubes were smashed, lying in pieces on the roadways and parks below, and fire had burnt charcoal holes in the parklands.
Further down in scale, there seemed to be debris scattered everywhere, as though rubbish hadn’t been collected for weeks. Closer still, you could see it wasn’t rubbish that filled the streets. It was the remains of the city’s inhabitants. A view of the central square of the city showed it rumpled and spotted with corpses.
“This is where we found you,” I said. “Here’s a view from the ground.”
A handheld camera walked through an ancient imagining of hell. Many corpses had been reduced to skeletons with tattered rags around them. Some were still in the final stages of decomposition. Lips were peeled back from teeth. Eyesockets lay empty. A torso roiled with maggots beneath the skin. Verminous mammals darted from empty rib cages to a suppurating groin, picking away at the remaining meat. A swamp of bones floated in a pool where hundreds of people had drowned themselves.
Iokan looked away and blinked at tears.
“Would you like me to stop?” I asked.
“No. No, go on,” he said, rubbing his eyes and turning back to the screen.
“This is what it looks like across the whole planet. We haven’t found a single survivor other than yourself.”
He swallowed back the horror. “They’re… safe. With the Antecessors.”
“And they chose that?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“I’d like to move on to some of the files we found. I expect you’ve seen a few of these before.”
“Probably,” he admitted. He looked up at the wall without focussing on any one thing as I backgrounded the video and brought up an interface for the documents.
“This is an early one.” I magnified a report dated six months before the end of Iokan’s world. He looked outside. “Iokan?”
“Yes. Let me just…”
“Do you need to take a moment?”
“No, no, I’m fine…” He took a sip of his chakchuk, and grimaced. “It’s gone cold…”
“I’ll order some more,” I said. “Tell me about the document.”
He scanned it while I ordered another mug of chakchuk.
“I remember this…” he said. “There were a few suicides we looked into. Lights were seen by neighbours around the time they died, and they were found with smiles on their faces. We decided there wasn’t enough to go on so we closed the case.”
“But you changed your minds later on?”
“Yes. There was a theory the Antecessors were testing their methods. Most of the victims—” He paused, correcting himself. “Most of the people involved were elderly. There were only about six or seven cases. No sign of interversal interference, just a few people dying oddly.”
“There’s a memo attached, from later.”
“Yes. It looked like the same thing as, as what we saw later on. We never knew for sure. If it was the Antecessors, then they’re safe.” He shrugged, helplessly.
“Let’s move on. Six months later.”
I let video play: a compilation of news reports. A family had jumped in front of a shuttletrain: the father and two children all had happy smiles on their faces, even as the mother reached out for them, screaming. Three random workers in a skytower had got up from their desks at the same time, walked to a viewing platform and jumped to their deaths. In a research lab, dozens of chemists lay dead after one of them allowed chlorine gas to flood the building. A junior officer had opened the weapons storage lockers at a barracks. Four soldiers took weapons and shot themselves. The news stations switched into crisis mode, cataloguing each new act of horror.
A chime at the door announced the arrival of Iokan’s chakchuk. I brought it to him as he watched the news roll on. He let it sit before him until I pressed pause.
“From what we gather, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” I said. “They were only reporting the most sensational incidents. A lot of individuals were dying by themselves as well.”
“Yes,” said Iokan, his attention far away in time.
“There’s a Department Zero document from this date…” I brought it up. “What can you tell me?”
He gulped back his chakchuk and rubbed his eyes. After a moment to gather himself, he looked back up at the screen.
“I remember this. They managed to stop a man from killing himself. He was in a pharmacy, picking up a prescription. He was normal until they handed over the pills, and then he took them all at once. His stomach was pumped and we interviewed him afterwards. It says there’s an artist’s impression of what he saw…?”
“Yes,” I said, and brought up the next page. A pastel-style sketch of a glowing light: pure white in the middle with a rainbow of refraction around the edges. Subtle shades of polygonal forms at the centre.
Iokan gasped. “That’s them. It’s one of… them.” A chime came in my ear; my pad showed a suddenly high pulse rate for Iokan. A smile of joy twitched around the edge of his mouth. Then he remembered his surroundings, and reached for his mug to drink. His pulse came back down.
“There’s a reference to another casefile,” I said. “It’s dated about thirteen years earlier. Your name’s on it.”
He nodded. “I think I told you before. It wasn’t the first time we’d seen them. We found an ancient machine that made them, and there was an Antecessor trapped inside the system. My commander set it free. When they cross-referenced it with what the man from the pharmacy saw… well, that’s why I was brought onto the investigative team.”