Ravenous Dusk (31 page)

"—Thought we'd lost you, Zane. What have they done to you? We need you, Zane, now more than ever. Was it ever as clear to you, as now? They hate you for what you are, because they know, even now, you can destroy them—"

"He seems to know you."

The prisoner's eyes flashed, mercurial sclera catching the dim light of the cavern. Under his husky, rambling voice, Storch felt an almost subsonic ululation, faster than words or thought, speaking to him in an eons-dead language that still echoed in his cells.

Storch clung to himself to keep from hurling his body at the prisoner. He tore his eyes away from the gaze of Cyril Keogh. Behind his jailers, he could make out monitor screens—cameras trained on him, measuring his heat output, red-white plumes around him like a volcanic halo. "He's not in me," he tried to explain. "He's dead—in here. You killed him."

"We understand so very little of the process," the dreadlocked scientist said. "Enlighten us."

The officer pushed another button on the console beside him. A Christmas string of warning lights blinked and winked. Green, heavier-than-air clouds of malachite green tumbled into the prisoner's cell like cotton candy.

"They're afraid of what you are, now. They're even more afraid of what you represent. The end of their tyranny—"

The cloud spread across the floor of the cell and touched the prisoner's heels. His face crumpled in strain and he crawled up the wall like a beetle in a killing jar. His hands and feet were gnarly with unfinished suction cups, and they carried him up the featureless wall to the ceiling.

"Tell him what it does," the officer said.

"The lysosome catalyzer agent dissolves animal cells and kills just about anything on contact, but reacts as an enzyme to cells with the tertiary DNA strand synthesized by RADIANT. It causes the lysosomes– the organelles that break down waste in the cell–to proliferate and eat the nucleus and the cell walls. The ravaged cells call out to their neighbors to divide and heal the organism, but on cells in the mitotic state, the lysing agent initiates a chain reaction–"

"Now, Zane!" the prisoner shrieked, and the ululation became a piercing whine, like a high-speed data transfer, like claws trying to get purchase in his head. "Strike now, or you'll be next!" Storch battered his ears to keep the sound out, but it was so loud, now, it seemed to come from

his own head.

Is that you, God?

No one answered. No one told him what to do.

"As you can see, it gets ugly pretty quick."

The brilliant green clouds piled up in the next cell. The prisoner screamed. The jailers watched.

Storch could see nothing but a wall of crystalline emerald vapors in the cell for a very long time before he heard a rasping death-rattle and the flat thud of the prisoner's body hitting the floor.

Storch held himself stock-still. His eyes would not close.

The officer was right on the other side of the barrier, watching him intently, waiting for some tell-tale sign.
This is a test, the motherfuckers want to see you crack, see whose side you're really on—

The prisoner rose up out of the murk and slammed into the wall. A goodly portion of him sloughed off on the plastic, crazy red snow angels. Steadying himself against the wall, the prisoner tried to ululate at Storch, but there was nothing left with which to make a noise. Where its face had been, a seething tangle of tumors bubbled and liquefied. Tendrils, fragile, barbed things, like the arms of a sea-star, erupted from the mass and spread across the wall, desperate, questing roots, seeking a way to touch him and leach off his strength. They were two of a kind and all alone in a hostile world, shouldn't they share their resources for mutual survival?

Storch's hand on the wall. He could feel the terrible heat from the tendrils through the inches-thick plastic, could feel its horror, anguish and abandonment. Why wasn't he helping? He was one of them…

A naked skeleton slumped against the wall, cracking open, turning itself inside out as the marrow burst and streamed into the gutters with the rest.

He could feel their eyes crawling all over him. He struggled for words. "When the light—when it hit me, I changed, but he got into me. I didn't ask for it, and I didn't see you motherfuckers trying to help. I don't remember much of anything from then until I woke up with your boy trying to burn me up."

"Where do your sympathies lie now, Sergeant?" the officer asked. Behind him, Storch saw himself on-screen, a towering infra-red inferno. He looked at his hands. Was he changing? Into what?

"I don't hold any grudges. I just want to know—what I am."

"What was it like?" the scientist asked. He hit a switch and fans came on in the next cell. The green fog hoisted up like a curtain, leaving only a dewy carpet of scum on the floor, and a clump of cloudy suds draining into a gutter.

"You tell me what the hell happened, and I'll tell you what I know."

The scientist came up to the wall beside the officer. "RADIANT generates a directed scalar wave that acts on the genetic material in cancerous cells. It reprograms the entire organism, opening up the introns, or 'junk DNA,' which, we now know, regulate the rate of adaptation in the genome. But it also orchestrates a major reconstruction of the DNA, interposing a whole new strand of ribonucleic acid, which stimulates the cancerous cells to multiply and diversify to replace, and improve on, the cells of the host organism. The new organism is hyperevolutionary, adapting almost instantly to environmental changes, but under the yoke of an exogenous consciousness."

Storch shook his head. The scientist made even less sense than the prisoner.

"The scalar wave also carries the—if you think of it as a software upgrade for the genotype, then the exogenous consciousness is like a software agent. It's not just a question of loyalty to Keogh. All who are irradiated by RADIANT, in a very real sense,
are
Keogh."

"My name is Zane Ezekiel Storch. I don't give a good goddamn about your little secret war, anymore. I just want to get my hands on the son of a bitch who fucked up my head, and then I want to go home."

"You didn't have cancer, did you, Sergeant?" the scientist asked. The officer leaned in close and whispered in his ear. Storch clearly made out the sibilant name,
Spike Team Texas
. His muscles knotted. His hands burned.

"Just tell me what the hell this is all about."

"Our 'little secret war' is far from over, Sergeant," the officer replied. "Our cell is not as suicidal as Major Bangs's group was. If we can learn more from you dead than alive, I'm not going to risk human lives by making the same mistakes he did." The officer and the guards turned and left the cavern through a shadowy door. The scientist stood alone on the other side of the cell wall.

Storch fixed him with a baleful eye. His breathing deepened and his temperature subsided. The scientist stood silently transfixed at the wall of his cell, watching as he went to sleep with his eyes wide open.

The scientist was still watching him when he woke up. He stretched, uncertain how long he'd been out, minutes or hours.

"What the hell are you looking at?" he snarled.

"That's what I've been trying to work out," the scientist replied, without a trace of unease. "I'm Dr. Jonah Barrow. And I think, since I'm the only one who seems to want to keep you alive for now, that you could show a little more cooperation."

Storch watched him, taking his measure. His clothing looked as if it might have been woven out of his own hair, so colorless and knurled was the fabric. His gestures were jerky, hesitant, then all at once, like a film speeding up and then pausing. His furtive, hooded eyes and tentative, spidery hands signed fear and guilt. Storch could only guess, but with eggheads, it was always about their brains. Like everyone in the Mission, he knew something that was eating him alive.

Storch paced around the featureless cell, squatted on the floor. "Get me something to eat."

Barrow shook his head. "No way. Don't want you any stronger or bigger than you are, already. I can do something about the heat, though." He went to the console, stabbed a few buttons. The shower heads sputtered. Storch scuttled back into a corner of the cell. Could he climb the walls like the prisoner? He would, whether he wanted to or not. What else could he do?

"Relax," Barrow chuckled. "It's just a shower."

A chill rain pounded Storch's back. Needles pricked and deflated the swelling balloon of his heat. He spread out on the floor and drank it in through his pores, exulted in the purity of the distilled melted snow. Imperfections, minerals in the water, spoke volumes about where the water had come from, and he lost himself in its flow until Barrow's voice brought him back.

"What was it like? Sharing your brain with him?"

Storch rolled over, turned away from Dr. Barrow. White geysers erupted on his thermograph. "I don't remember too much."

"I'd like to take some tissue samples."

"Fuck off."

"You don't understand the urgency. This isn't about a natural evolutionary step. Keogh's mind is reproducing itself, along with his genetic programming. We've developed a weapon that can destroy his substrates, but you're the exception. The cure could be worse than the disease. We have to know why."

Storch looked up at Barrow. "When do
I
get to know why? What is this fucking war about?"

"Evolution is evolving," Barrow said.

"But why? This is not the way life works."

Barrow turned and went back to the console. The images of Storch radiating mellow purple waves flicked off, and a menu screen appeared. "It's the most natural thing in the world, given what nature really is. This has all happened before."

"What are you talking about?"

"The fossil record is dotted with surges, immediately preceding or following extinction events, God going back to the drawing board over and over, erasing His mistakes, dropping radically improved genotypes into the mix. The appearance of mammals, the paradigm shift to life on land, the rise of eukaryotic, multicelled organisms, after billions of years of virtual stagnation. Each of these was not an accident, not in the sense evolutionists mean. Keogh is engineering an evolutionary sea change of the same magnitude."

Barrow cued a slide. A wall of basalt, jagged, cubistic planes, broken up here and there by ingeniously organic shapes, almost artful in their simplicity. He knew the little cockroach things were called trilobites. "This is a sample from the Burgess Shale excavation, five hundred fifty million years old, the richest single source of Cambrian Era fossils yet discovered. Archaeologists have pretty much concluded that an asteroid struck the earth then, almost twice as devastating as the more famous one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Now, look at this."

He flicked another slide. "You're a Bible-reading man, aren't you, Storch? Remember the Nephilim? 'There were giants in the earth in those days…'"

The same type of rock, but shot through with glistering black bubbles, out of which erupted rude projections: armored limbs, whips made of spiked vertebrae. Here, grooved pits that suggested eye sockets; there, interlaced spines that might've been a ribcage, or the teeth of a leviathan. It resembled the contents of a tar pit thrown into a seismic blender. Only when he'd studied it for a full minute did he notice the tiny, lab-coated human form on a scaffolding at the base of the stone to provide scale. He was small enough to climb into one of the eye sockets and disappear.

"You've probably never seen this before. It's kept at the Smithsonian, in a special collection. Opinions vary on what it was, but the single truth that nobody wants to tackle is that it was a single organism, bearing traits that wouldn't be corroborated in the fossil record until hundreds of millions of years later. It had several structures like reptilian brains, almost entirely devoted to autonomic functions and motor control. But it also had a unique form of cellular intelligence, suggested by the uniform distribution of nervous tissue, so it had the potential to attain sentience. Those few paleontologists who've reviewed it have written it off as a chimera, or the result of an anomalous geologic event. But
we
know that it was a holdover from an earlier era, when it was not an exception, but the rule, because we've found similar fossil remains dating back to the basaltic schist layer, going back nearly one billion years."

"I'm not that ignorant. You can't tell those things from a fossil."

"Oh, it's not entirely fossilized," Barrow grimaced. "And it's not completely dead."

Storch scratched his head…

Storch scratched his stubbled head in puzzlement. What was it about him that drew crazy people to spew their paranoid theories on him?

Barrow charged him, stopping just short of crashing into the wall. Even face to face, it was almost impossible to guess his age. "Do you believe in an intelligent designer?"

Storch blinked, tightened his lips to show he didn't know, didn't care.

The idiot thought he didn't understand. "Do you believe in God?"

"Mister, I don't even believe in you."

Barrow chuckled, shrugged. "What do you believe about evolution?"

"I was raised Christian," Storch said, without much conviction. "I can't believe that we're just an accident."

"You're right. It wasn't an accident." He went back to the console. The peripheral screens showed DNA molecules like strings of pearls, shattering, recombining, fusing with strands flying in from outside. "Darwin pointed out a single process out of thousands by which animal life evolves, but he didn't even turn his attention to the source. For millions, he killed God, just by suggesting the origin of humankind came as the result of a chain of cosmic accidents, that Nature was an empty machine. What would it do to us now, at the dawn of a new age, to learn the truth about how life itself was first set into motion? Darwin was, ultimately, wrong. There was an intelligent prime mover, after all."