Oddlands Magazine: Darkchild by Ian Whates
Jus was glad to be leaving Mars. Man’s presence here was too new, the domes and huts too Spartan. Everything suffered from a disconcerting sense of impermanence, as if Earth’s precarious toehold on this near-neighbour was transitional and might crumble away at any moment.
He had imagined that Mars would feel much like Luna, just a little fresher, but he’d been wrong. Man was so well established on the Earth’s moon that it now felt as if he belonged there. They even had rats and cockroaches for goodness sake, not to mention graffiti. If that wasn’t proof positive of mankind having arrived and put its collective feet firmly under the proverbial table, nothing was.
Mars felt entirely different. The place suffered from an almost siege-like claustrophobia. Jus, able to sense the resultant stress in everyone around him, had been counting down first the hours and then the minutes to his departure.
He only wished that Luna was his current destination. Instead, he was on his way to a place that promised to be even less reassuring than Mars - a station at the very edge of the territory humanity might claim as its own: the asteroid belt.
Man had settled Mars and then moved outward, arriving at the inner belt… where he’d stopped. Oh, there were plenty of reasons - fiscal, political, logistical - many of them all too plausible when spun out silkily by those whose job it was to spin, but they still smacked of justification.
Rumours persisted. Something had been found in the asteroid belt; something which had given the powers-that-be reason to pause.
Jus was about to find out what.
#
Darkchild sat alone.
Her only stimulus, a methodical, unrelenting chink of repetitive sound: water dripping somewhere. Otherwise, there was silence. No breeze, no scent fractured the absolute stillness. Stygian darkness enveloped her.
Deprived of light, of vision, she focused inward, concentrating on herself - touch the only sense that could be relied on - her hands clasped about her knees, her knees drawn up against her chin. She could feel that they were there, but that was all. Her eyes registered nothing.
After a while she started to rock; gently backwards and forwards, clasped knees acting as a counter-balance to her upper torso. She found the sensation soothing, so continued….
#
“That’s her?”
Jus stared through a plate-glass window at a small, sterile-looking room suggestive of hospitals and laboratories. The room was clearly built around a single bed, which supported the supine figure of a woman. Young, he noted, and attractive, or she would have been without the plethora of tubes and attachments that sprouted from her body and temples.
McCreedy came up to stand beside him. As always, Jus found his eyes drawn involuntarily to the unruly shock of ginger hair that crowned the man’s head, like the crest of some strutting cockrel. A brief glance only, then his gaze returned to the motionless girl.
“That’s her,” McCreedy confirmed softly.
“And the artefact?”
“It’s right there, on the table beside her.”
Having been told where to look, he wondered how he could ever have missed the small, metallic sphere. “It seems so innocent, like a trinket or something.”
McCreedy gave a truncated laugh, which emerged as a grunt. “Some trinket.”
“You’re sure it’s a weapon?”
“No, but that’s our best guess.” They stood for a moment longer, each lost in their own thoughts, before McCreedy took a deep breath and said, “Come on, let’s get you properly briefed.”
Jus lingered to steal a further look at the girl and then followed, being led past the window to a small office where Johnson was already waiting.
McCreedy did most of the talking. “The wreckage was found on one of the larger asteroids. Pure luck it was found at all. It appears to have been a building of some sort - a small station is our best guess. At least, there’s no sign of a propulsion system or anything that might indicate it was a ship.
“By analysing the surrounding rock, we’ve ascertained that it was wrecked about 2,500 years ago, but we don’t know how old the structure itself is. The material is completely new to us and we’re still trying to find an accurate method of dating it.”
“Any idea what happened to the structure, what destroyed it?”
“Not as yet.” Jus sensed that the words were a half-truth, but clearly McCreedy had no intention of sharing anything further.
“The only undamaged item we found - at least it appears to be undamaged - was the artefact.”
Jus had studied images of the sphere at length: a dull metallic surface, etched with a series of fine markings, clearly a deliberate design, though whether they represented language or were purely decorative remained a mystery.
“As you’ve seen, apart from its origins, there’s nothing overtly impressive about the thing. It’s just an engraved metal sphere. We know it’s hollow, but the composition of the metal is new to us and obtaining images of what lies within has proved… well, difficult. About all we’ve been able to determine is that it’s a mechanism of some sort.”
“Durable too,” Johnson cut in. “I can’t imagine anything that we’ve built will still be functioning after two and a half thousand years.”
“Assuming it is functioning,” Jus observed.
“Well it’s doing something,” McCreedy pointed out. “Dr. Lees’ condition testifies to that. Of course, whether that represents it functioning or malfunctioning, we have no way of knowing.”
“Have you tried to break it open?”
“No.”
Jus found that hard to believe, despite the instant denial.
“You must understand that it was very early in our investigations when Dr. Lees….”
“Succumbed,” Johnson finished as McCreedy searched for a more delicate phrasing. “She just keeled over while examining the object.”
“This might sound like a stupid question, but are you certain beyond any doubt that the sphere’s responsible?” Jus wondered aloud.
“Positive. The only reaction she’s shown since the collapse was when we moved the sphere away from her, at which point her body went into violent spasms akin to an epileptic fit. No question there’s some link, we simply don’t understand what. We might yet be forced to break into the damned thing, but we’re trying to avoid doing so for three reasons. One, the possibility that anything we do could kill Dr. Lees.”
A touching sentiment, but somehow Jus couldn’t see the authorities halting research into the first functioning alien artefact ever discovered over concerns for the health of a single comatose individual.
“Two, the consensus is that we’re dealing with a weapon here, a means of isolating and entrapping the mind of an opponent, enemy, criminal, or whatever. The military are worried that if we attempt to force the thing open, we might damage whatever mechanism is inside.”
Ah, the military. That at least had the ring of truth about it.
“Three, if the artefact is a weapon, it might not take too kindly to being tampered with and we’ve no idea what defence mechanisms it could have. So whilst we haven’t completely ruled out a bit of controlled vandalism, it’s being kept as a last resort.”
Jus digested that, giving the second two explanations more credence than the first. “And Dr. Lees’ condition since her collapse?”
“Stable, so far. There’s some brain activity, but it’s all at the autonomic level. Enough to keep her body breathing and the blood circulating but that’s about all. The rest of her is simply… somewhere else.”
#
Jus stretched out on a bed beside the corpse-like form, with the artefact on the opposite side of her. At his request, it had been moved a little further away. Maybe it would make no difference whatsoever, but distance appeared to be a factor to some degree, so he reasoned that this might weaken its hold over her a fraction. He wanted every possible advantage here, however tenuous.
Since arriving at the station he had been thoroughly prepped and was now as ready as he was ever likely to be.
So why did memory desert him just as the procedure was about to begin? Why, when he was lying beside the comatose woman and about to go under, could he not remember the most important detail of all?
“Her name,” he said urgently, “what’s her first name?”
“Sara,” somebody answered.
Yes, of course, Sara. He slotted that into the appropriate place within the model he had built in his mind, the mental image of a personality that he held before him.
“Sara.” It became the focus, the word uppermost in his thoughts as he reached out….
Jus was a telepath. Almost. He was the closest thing to that mythical mental superman humanity was ever likely to produce. Despite frequent false hopes, true telepathy had continued to be elusive, but a more passive psionic ability had been confirmed: empathy. There were certain individuals who were highly sensitive and reactive to the emotions and moods of others - a process that went beyond simple response to physical and visual clues, but was instead shown to involve a mental reaction to more intangible thoughts and emotions.
The group of genes responsible had been identified and isolated, then manipulated and bred for. At the same time, genes that were thought to act as natural blocks and inhibitors to the ability were eradicated.
Jus was the result.
In certain very rare cases he was capable of more proactive mental contact, of a limited form of telepathy, but only with those who carried two or more of the all-important genes he himself was packed with.
Hopes of reaching Dr. Sara Lees now rested on this ability. She carried within her several of the tell-tale genes. In fact, it had been conjectured that this might explain why she succumbed to the artefact when no one else associated with the project had.
Of course, since her collapse, the sphere had been handled with kid gloves and few had gone near it, which might also have been a factor.
As Jus slipped into the trance-like state of focus, he concentrated on her name, repeating it in his mind like a mantra:
Sara…
Sara…
Sara…
Splinters of light. He seemed to be drifting within a sea of fractured vision - moving in a previously inconceivable fashion through jagged, bright, blinding shards of discontinuity. Impossible to gaze upon; impossible to look away from.
Sara…
Sara…
Then he was through the dazzle and the eye-burning glare into what waited beyond: complete and utter darkness.
Sara…
#
Darkchild sat alone.
Until, impossibly, something changed where nothing conceivably could. At first it confused her; this disturbance, this disruption in the harmony, the blankness that was her world. Sound, so faint that initially she was able to ignore it. But the sound grew steadily louder, forcing her to acknowledge its existence, to accept this new thing and embrace it as an element of her world, a new facet of the darkness. But still the sound grew; insistent… demanding… unavoidable.
“Sara…”
She stopped rocking. “Go away,” she hurled into the darkness.
“Sara.” The sound now hung menacingly close. It had found her.
“What are you?”
“A friend.”
She turned the word over in her mind, examining it. ‘Friend’. It seemed vaguely familiar. “What is ‘friend’?”
“Someone to talk to, someone to share with, someone who stops you from being alone.”
Sluggishly, long unused mental processes began to come to her aid, bringing with them memory, causing her to counter with, “Someone to talk about you, someone to betray you.”
“Who to?”
That gave her pause. She turned the question around, grappling with ideas that were not so much new, as long-forgotten. Still she came back to the reality that she was alone. “Friend?”
“Here.”
She could sense it now: a nebulous presence, the shadow of a personality. “Where are you from?”
“Home.”
Another word with overtones of the familiar, a word that brought with it a sense of warmth and comfort. She tried to think, to reach beyond the darkness, beyond being alone… but failed. And when she turned her attention outward again, Friend had gone.
#
Jus pulled himself upright. A smile creased the corners of his mouth for no apparent reason, perhaps a manifestation of the relief he felt at being back. The first thing he focused on was a curly mop of ginger hair.
“Well, were you able to reach her?” McCreedy wanted to know.
Jus nodded, “After a fashion.”
“How do you mean?”
He sighed, pausing to find the right words, words that would convey some sense of what he had just experienced. “She’s locked away in a place of total darkness,” he said at last. “Mentally, I mean. Nothing else there, nothing at all - there’s no light and no sound except for this…” What was it? What had he heard at the fringe of awareness?
“Water,” he realised. “The sound of dripping water. That’s the only stimulus.” He gave an involuntary shudder. “She’s completely isolated, and yet something pushed me out.”
He remembered again the irresistible force that had gripped his mind and ejected him, thrusting him swiftly towards consciousness just as he was starting to make progress. What had done that: Sara? Or the sphere itself?
“But you reached her,” McCreedy persisted, oblivious to all else.
“Yes, I reached her.”
“Can you bring her out?”
Again Jus paused, considering his answer. “I think so. There was a definite reaction from her; awareness and even a limited dialogue.”
He stood up. “Give me half an hour. I need to grab some food and I’ll take the opportunity to go through her file again. I’ll pick a strong image to focus on, probably from amongst her parent’s reminiscences - a memory from her childhood or some other likely trigger. I need to draw her back into herself.”
“So soon? You’re really that hopeful?”
“Yes. We made progress. I want to build on that rather than let it slip away.”
“It’s your funeral.”
That from Johnson. Jus gave the man a long, cold stare before leaving.
He was tired, but came back as promised. He sensed the importance of a quick return. There was something in that darkness that sapped the will, eating away at the very soul. The longer Sara spent there, the more difficult it would be to retrieve her - Jus felt it instinctively. He was determined to re-establish the link before it faded from her mind.
As he settled down beside her recumbent form, he found his eyes drawn to the artefact, resting so innocently on the far side of her bed. Despite McCreedy’s assurances that they had not yet tried to break it open, he wondered whether in fact they had made the attempt and failed.
Not that it really mattered. Now was hardly the time for such distractions. Now was the time to concentrate, to reach out and make contact with Sara Lees once more.
Sara…
Sara…
Again he was surrounded by dazzling, fractured light, before slipping into dark, soul-sapping emptiness.
Sara…
As before, he pushed her name out in front of him, questing, straining for a response, the slight tug, the twitch that would herald contact.
Sara…
Sara…
Nothing. Despite all his efforts the dark remained bleak and unyielding, the emptiness unbroken.
Eventually he ceased calling and paused to collect his thoughts and gather his energies. Either Sara was unable to sense him this time or she chose not to hear….
Sara…
Determined not to give up, he sent the ripple of thought ghosting through the darkness again. For what seemed an age he called, at first with increasing desperation and then with growing resignation, as he came to accept his failure. He never once caught a hint of another human soul.
At length he stopped, defeated, and set about returning from the inner to the outer world. He very deliberately allowed his concentration to dissolve, waiting for the familiar relief, expecting to slip back to consciousness…Only to fail at this as well.
There was no glare of lights, no McCreedy and Johnson hovering anxiously…just the all-pervading darkness. Panic swept over him. He calmed himself, surmising that it was tiredness and lack of concentration that prevented his return. Once more in control he tried again, but failed as thoroughly as before.
And then he sensed something, at the very edge of his mind’s perception. Not Sara, but something ghostly, tenuous and intrinsically strange. It was gone before he could be certain of anything. Despite his every effort, nothing else encroached on the emptiness.
Then came the sound. So faint at first that it barely registered, seemingly more the echo of a noise than the noise itself; but once he was aware of it, once his attention became attuned to its presence, there could be no mistake: the monotonous, unrelenting plink of dripping water. Jus had never heard anything more terrifying in his life.
He clasped his knees, drawing a crumb of reassurance from that small human contact, even though it was only with himself. After a while he proceeded to rock, gently backwards and forwards. He found the sensation soothing, so continued.
Darkchild sat alone.
#
It was an older McCreedy who stood by the bedside, his crown of ginger hair now shot through with grey, though it was still as unkempt as ever.
He was talking to Carlton - the latest in an apparently endless line of bureaucrats whose questions were always the same, or at best variations on a theme. By McCreedy’s side stood Henke: a diminutive, frighteningly efficient woman who had joined the project after Johnson left acrimoniously more than a year ago.
The project had become a very different affair, scaled down as events superseded its prominence. A second alien facility had been discovered, one in better condition than their own, and Mankind had finally shaken off the paralysis caused by stumbling across the presence of an ancient alien intelligence within the Solar System. He had moved beyond the asteroid belt, reaching the moons of Jupiter.
Funding had been systematically cut and McCreedy accepted that it was only a matter of time before they were closed down completely.
There was only one bed now. Sara had slipped away one day, the monitors showing that all brain activity had ceased. Perhaps, in a sense, it marked some sort of victory for her; perhaps it had been a deliberate step - an escape from that dark, isolated hell.
The monitors showed that in Jus at least, life remained. Sanity was another matter; the monitors had no means of judging that.
“You’re sure this will work?” Carlton asked.
McCreedy’s eyes flicked to Henke, knowing what his answer would have been but hoping that she might offer greater reassurance.
“No,” she replied curtly. So much for reassurance. “But we have little choice. He’s dying.”
“It should work,” McCreedy muttered.
“It should,” she confirmed. “But this is alien technology.” A reminder intended purely for Carlton’s benefit. “We think we now know enough to bring him out, but the only way we can ever be certain is by making the attempt.”
“Do it,” Carlton instructed after a pause.
McCreedy sighed with relief. It was the authorisation they had been waiting for.
Ironically, the breakthrough had not come as a result of their own efforts, but through the work being carried out on the second station. Its far less damaged computer system enabled the other team to avoid many of the frustrations and dead-ends that he and his people had blundered into here.
Somehow, the aliens had adapted the asteroid they built upon to supplement their computing capacity, realigning the molecular structure of the very rock around them to provide increased storage and processing capabilities. The experts were still struggling to come to grips with the concept; McCreedy had no intention of even trying to.
Some of the alien language had been deciphered and the ancient systems had begun to yield scraps of the secrets they held. Most of the big questions remained unanswered - who were these ancient visitors to the Solar System, where had they come from, what had destroyed their stations and, most important of all, were they still around? However, amongst the fragments of information that had been recovered was what appeared to be a reference to their artefact.
McCreedy and his team finally had a clue to the sphere’s true nature.
“So it’s not a weapon, after all,” McCreedy murmured, mostly to himself.
“No,” Henke agreed, oblivious to the rhetorical nature of the comment.
She spoke in such a calm, neutral manner. Was he the only one who found the truth so very humbling? “A game,” she continued in the same matter-of-fact tone, “a mental puzzle - how to escape from the dark.”
“An executive toy,” McCreedy sighed. “Something to break up the monotony of a routine day - whatever that might mean for Them - intended to be no more than a few moments diversion.”
He could not suppress an involuntary shudder, causing both Henke and Carlton to look at him sharply.
“I was just thinking,” he said by way of explanation, his own gaze fixed upon the figure in the bed before them. “If this is what one of their toys can do to us, to two such fine minds, what would happen if we ever did stumble across something they actually designed to be a weapon?”
Neither of them seemed to have an answer to that; nor, McCreedy felt certain, did anyone else.
Author Bio:
Ian Whates, a member of SFWA, is currently the Development Director for the BSFA and editor of their Matrix magazine. He has been fortunate enough to sell a total of 17 short stories during the past 20 months, most recently appearing in the anthology Futures from Nature (TOR Books, 2007), and Storm Consantine’s magazine Visionary Tongue (January 2008). His most recent sale was to George Mann of Solaris Books for a new anthology, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 3. Two of his short stories from last year have been longlisted for the BSFA award for best short story. In 2006, he founded a small independent publishing company, NewCon Press, which published the British Fantasy Award nominated Time Pieces in 2006. disLocations, published in 2007, was included on Locus’ recommended reading list as one of the best anthologies of the year.
