Hole in the sky, p.21
Hole in the Sky, page 21
I must keep my mind narrow. I must walk on the hard spaces. I must be as quiet as a mouse.
Only then will I be allowed to see.
36
Topology of Truth
GAVIN CLARK // Epicenter
Last Contact, T-Minus 2 Hours
As I pick my way down a steep tunnel, I try to keep the rucksack from bumping into the walls of narrow corridors. The middle of my back is sweating from the heat of the CPU. Exhaust fans whir in the dark like whispers in my ears, batteries flopping against the backs of my thighs.
The Native guy, Jim, and his daughter, Tawny, are stuck down here with me. I know they think this backpack is something to laugh at.
But for something this historic, you want to take a few pictures.
An omnidirectional camera and a laser range finder are mounted on a stubby mast poking from the upper frame of the rucksack. The laser is spraying the walls with invisible light and combining that distance information with camera images. Together, they’re building a three-dimensional map of the environment—precise down to the millimeter.
I can check the results of the map just by glancing down. The tablet computer is rigged up to the MOLLE webbing on the front of my BDU. The screen is dimmed but it still hurts my eyes, displaying a real-time visualization of our progress.
So far, that map looks like a wriggling mass of roots. I can see ghostly, elongated shadows where Jim and Tawny pass through the laser range finders to leave negative space. As they keep moving, the map fills in the people-shaped voids in its data.
“Mikayla went this way,” I say, pointing out the route. “The laser range finder is accurate enough to pick up her footsteps in the dust. It, uh, looks like she’s barefoot.”
Jim nods, and he and his daughter move cautiously ahead.
These tunnels are like no natural formations I’ve ever seen. A little over six feet tall, they seem carved out of solid bedrock without any evidence of tool use. Some kind of thin liquid substance is coating much of the walls, transparent with a metallic sheen. And lurking in the glittering silica of the rock, I can occasionally make out vague symbols—like the contours of dark veins hidden just beneath the skin’s surface.
“Be careful,” warns Jim as his daughter, Tawny, runs her fingers over a wall. “We got no idea what it’s made of.”
“It’s old,” she says. “Made by people. Our people.”
My rucksack-mounted sensor suite is clinical in how it relentlessly scans and updates the map. It continues transforming precise measurements into shapes in three dimensions. Black-and-white, to keep things simple.
I like to think of what it’s mapping as “objective reality.” Something that’s been harder to find lately.
But it’s what the sensors are missing that has my respiration rate elevated. It’s the reason I keep running clammy fingers through my hair and squeezing my eyes shut. These underground passages aren’t just blank rock—not anymore.
The world down here is changing around us.
Every step we take, I notice more details blooming in the walls around me. Cave art is scrawled in crude pigment, depicting animals with too many legs, characters from languages that hurt my eyes, and constellations impossible to see from this planet.
The symbols are odd enough by themselves, but I’ve also started to notice splotches of mold. Some of it is creeping, visibly. In the rare cracks in the rock, fierce little plants are stretching barbed leaves. The air is growing moist with the primordial smell of ferns and flowers.
“Hold up, everyone,” I whisper, frowning down at the map. It needs an extra few seconds to finish updating. The floor here is scattered with iridescent flakes of something. Encrustations and sprays of liquid from the shredded remains of a bunch of dead bug-things.
I wait for the map to update, consciously avoiding the mess.
“Why do you bother with that?” asks Jim, nodding at the tablet.
I can still smell the cedar that Jim burned at the entrance, clinging to his hair and clothes. Tawny is a soft, quiet presence beside him.
“Collecting historic data,” I say. “Not to mention, the route out.”
“All this,” Jim says, gesturing to the passage around us. “This is not something we’re ever gonna understand. You know that, right?”
“You’re talking to a career military man,” I say. “Trying to understand our enemies is kind of my whole deal. So…deaf ears.”
Jim nods, smiling a little bit in the gloom. The light from my tablet screen faintly illuminates his face against the wall. The etchings and markings behind him look like ancient writing. The kind of hieroglyphics found from Egypt to Peru to the caves of North America. The Spiro Mounds even, it turns out.
“Don’t you want to understand, Jim?” I ask. “What these walls say? What these people wrote down so long ago? Exactly how this is all happening?”
“Sure, sort of,” says Jim. He steps back and delicately runs his fingertips over the rough walls, tracing the indentations. “But I already know what these markings mean. They mean our ancestors were here. They saw what we’re seeing. They faced what we are facing. And they locked this place up and threw away the key.”
Jim looks me in the face.
“We should be careful we don’t step on our ancestors,” he says.
“That’s true, I guess.”
“There’s truth in everything.”
I’m about to roll my eyes at Jim when I see it. Just over his shoulder. A snatch of familiar camouflage and the scrape of a military boot. Then it’s gone.
“Hey,” I whisper, stepping forward. “Captain Newsome!”
Jim and Tawny watch me as I charge forward, around the next corner. The cavern widens into a small chamber, and I stop suddenly. I feel Jim and Tawny crowding me from behind, following closely—all of us staring.
I confirm what I’m seeing on my tablet. Objective reality. Two people-shaped voids in the data.
The remaining soldiers of my fire team are standing together in the middle of a small opening, facing away from us. Their fatigues are dusty, and they’re missing a lot of equipment. But from what I can tell, it’s Captain Newsome and the soldier called Chapman. Both men are focused intently on something resting on the ground.
Neither responds to my call.
Obscured by their legs, a complex titanium structure is laid out on the dusty floor. It’s our portable high explosive, designed for maximum structural impact. Rather than antipersonnel, like a thermobaric, this device is seismically tuned to bring down buildings or collapse caverns.
But it already detonated.
And yet I’m looking at the same model of weapon: the fail-safe.
I take a couple of steps forward.
“Captain Newsome, sir?” I ask. “Are you okay? I thought…”
Still facing away from me, the stocky soldier reaches up and pulls down the brim of his cap.
“Get it prepped for detonation,” says the captain. “Those are our orders. Not much time left.”
I can feel Jim and Tawny watching as I take another hesitant step closer.
“Sir?” I ask, forcefully. “Uh, Chapman?”
Neither of the soldiers turns, still huddled together in conversation. As I move closer, I notice their torn fatigues, a tourniquet on Chapman’s thigh, and a boot that has overflowed with blood. He’s working on the fail-safe while he whispers to the captain, who seems to be standing watch.
Chapman’s voice breaks as he says, “Are they alive, Captain? How could they be living? There’s metal coming out from inside their skin.”
Newsome puts a hand up, hisses at the other soldier to shut up.
“What’s that? You hear something?”
I clear my throat, listen to it echo off the walls. “It’s me, sir. Are you all right? I didn’t know you made it. I thought you were lost in the explosion.”
The two men face the darkness away from me.
I’ve had enough. I step forward and clamp a hand over Newsome’s shoulder. As I pull to turn him around, vertigo sweeps across my vision.
With both hands, I try to pull him to face me. It’s as though I’m dancing with myself, spinning in circles. No matter how hard I haul on his shoulder, I can’t make him turn around. He keeps spinning but I never see his face.
And a sudden certainty settles over me—he has no face.
I let go of the soldier and back away to where Jim and Tawny are watching. Captain Newsome is still standing there with one arm up for silence. He cocks his head to the side and listens. Turns to the private and speaks low and urgent.
“Okay, fail-safe is online. We’re good for detonation,” he says. “Can you still run?”
“Yeah, Captain. If I have to.”
“Best do it.”
The two soldiers hobble around the corner, leaving the titanium bones of the bomb sprawled in the dirt, gleaming in my headlamp.
Jim and I make eye contact, pressing ourselves against the wall of the cave. He wraps a protective arm over Tawny as we wait a couple of breaths.
Nothing happens.
“Jim?” I whisper. “Any ideas? What was that?”
“It was a dream,” says Jim. “Or maybe a memory.”
The last time I saw them. Their backs were to me.
No, no no no.
“A distraction,” I say. “A psyops weapon. Designed to mess with your mind.”
For some reason, Jim looks amused.
“There’s truth to everything,” Jim repeats.
I lift the tablet off my chest and show it to them—it’s gone blank. The opening is empty now. Even the gleaming bomb went away when we weren’t looking.
A disappearing act. Impossible.
“I think we need to go back toward the surface. Look, we tried. Mikayla is gone. Every one of these nexus points has half a dozen tunnels leading out. Let’s follow the map out while we still can. We can wait for a rescue from up top.”
“Either that, or they’ll drop another bomb,” says Jim.
Jim and I stare at each other, neither of us willing to back down.
“Wait,” says Tawny, pushing out from under Jim’s arm. She takes the tablet in both hands, face illuminated ghoulishly from below as she stares down. The kid holds the tablet naturally. Jim frowns over at his daughter, worried.
“Can you, like, zoom out? Rotate it?” she asks, already making the motions on the screen.
“Yeah, why?”
Tawny expels a breath in the darkness. Murmurs in awe.
“It’s repeating,” she says. “The tunnels in the rock. It’s a pattern.”
“What?” I ask. “Show me.”
Tawny’s finger traces the curves of the rock, the folding route we took to reach this spot so far down.
“It’s like a leaf, or a seashell,” says Tawny. “Repeating, see?”
And as I stare, the pattern comes into focus.
“It’s a fractal,” I say. “A shape based on a repeating pattern. And if that’s true, oh wow. The software can fill in the rest of the map.”
Jim nods at me and Tawny, impressed.
“Wado,” he says. “Let’s have a look.”
I lean against the wall and begin typing on the tablet.
“I’m taking the existing model and filling it in with a best guess, based on the sequence. In a minute, we’ll see an estimate of what the whole complex looks like. It’ll give us the general shape of this anomaly.”
Shaking my head, I look back down at the finished map.
“Oh boy,” says Jim at the sight of it.
I pinch the screen to zoom out and let the image of the tunnel structure rotate slowly in our view. As it turns in place, the four-lobed shape of this underground complex becomes clear to everyone.
The image is unmistakable. The familiar folds of a cerebrum. Gray matter.
We are inside some kind of brain.
The structure stretches a mile down into the earth, each tunnel mimicking a neuron. The branching and folding match the spread of dendrites. The electrical activity I’ve been picking up in the walls must be neuronal. And not far below where we are standing is a wide, flat shape that I recognize as a cerebellum—the seat of consciousness.
My lips curl into a smile. I have to stop myself from letting loose a hysterical laugh. Jim puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder, his face calm and still. Finally, I think I understand what it is we are faced with down here.
We are walking the corridors of an alien god-mind.
And it’s been dreaming with us.
37
Horizons
MIKAYLA JOHNSON // Epicenter
Last Contact, T-Minus 1 Hour
It feels like I’ve been walking a long, long time. Down here, in the glowing darkness, where veins of silver light trace patterns of thought. At some point, for some reason, I started thinking of myself as a pulse of electricity traveling a neuron, following a mind’s rhythm—looking for a place where I can say hello to its owner.
I want to whisper in its ear. I want to say, Wake up, old thing from the abyss. We’re a part of each other. So give me the dreams I want to dream.
Show me the motherfucking universe.
It’s lingering here in these walls, flickers of memory—the recollection of things that have happened yesterday and things that happened before the first human memory was formed. All of it together feels like an expanding chaos, hot and burny in my head. But, you know, in a good way.
I must remember to keep my focus narrow.
Something is scraping against the rock. The noise sounds predatory, insectile. And I’m the one causing it. I frown because I don’t remember my legs hinging themselves backward like this. Does it feel unnatural to be running on the ceiling? On the walls?
My arms are long and black and barbed—pulling me forward like the shadow of an electrical pulse.
Unnatural, sure.
But I’m outside nature, now. An intellect like mine transcends those basic ideals. I’m existing independently of the anatomy that evolution delivered me in, as a mechanism for surviving the world long enough to procreate. Luckily, my mind doesn’t care which platform it happens to be running on.
I’m the manifestation of my own reality.
My old buddy Nix did what was necessary to carry me through these dangerous dreams. And one of the things Nix apparently needed was to striate the skin of my arms with long channels like razor blades, so that I kill what I touch. It needed to sink multifaceted eyes over my face, to let me see through darkness and stone and flesh. It needed to protect me by making me better.
I don’t think I’ll ever blink again. And I don’t want to. Because I will never willingly turn my eyes away from the glory of what I’m about to discover.
Running, skittering, my claws tearing chunks from ancient tunnel walls—I am a fury of limbs falling and scrabbling through time. It has all become such a blur that I’m daydreaming, slowly disassociating. It’s a shock when I’m spit out, ejected into a massive space, a great hall of thought, the structure of reality itself.
Finally, on the verge of first contact.
A black lake spreads out far below me, perfectly still, the liquid waiting like thick oil under a low rock ceiling. The pockmarked faces of countless other passages open to this room. Thousands of these dark holes perforate the rock walls in various diameters, like the glassy eyes of a tarantula.
The lake surface gleams with traces of greenish light. Occasionally, dark shapes seem about to emerge before sinking back. I know these things I am seeing are half-remembered thoughts. Forgotten dreams. Lessons never fully learned.
“Here I am,” I say, kneeling.
My voice sounds strangled—the half vibrato of a broken machine combined with the strangled growl of a fairy-tale beast.
Everything in my career, in my life, has led me down here to this black lake. I am looking at the thinking apparatus of a nonhuman entity. The Entity can run its mind on the architecture of this place, carved by people thousands of years ago.
I push my barbed fingertips into the chalky stone and press my forehead against the cavern floor in genuflection. The ground feels cool and hard against the plastic ridges now protruding from my forehead. Curling my fingers into claws, I dig into the rock to feel the energy and power flowing past me into those dark waters.
Flashes of memory. Knowledge of lost times. Welling up in words that make sense only while I’m seeing them in my head.
I see sentient machines, their ornate chitinous shells steaming and popping as they are lazed from an orbiting platform, the cruel weapon winking like the eye of god as it scours their world clean.
Lying down flat, my thrashing body gouges divots in solid rock as more impossible memories flood through me.
A Native man, naked and brown, over twelve feet tall, smiling gently, calves coated in flecks of gore as he strides over the backs of a thousand writhing crows. The birds are ignoring him, busily pecking and swallowing an endless plain of raw organs, harvesting nourishment from a mother world in her death throes.
Mile-long migrations of muscle strands wriggle up through thermoclines of a buried ocean on a far-flung moon. Underwater filament cities crash in slow motion through dense clouds as their inhabitants implode into pockets of over-vacuum—their minds departing for new dimensions in bursts of gore-stained bubbles.
A god-computer spears silver tendrils through a million miles of blood-red solar flares while it harvests an M-class sun.
So many places, so many peoples—and all of them wanted to know this dark creature we invited to sleep here. The Entity is a bloodied reflection of those who have gorged on their own desires. My tongue feels coated with the iron taste of blood as I watch the Entity digesting alien nightmares.
Oh my god. Why the fuck am I here?
