Annihilation (8 page)

Was it pity or empathy that I felt for the anthropologist? Weak, trapped, with no
choice.

The surveyor waited for me, anxious. “What did you find?”

“Another person was here with the anthropologist.” I told the surveyor my theory.

“But why would the psychologist do that?” she asked me. “We were going to all come
down here in the morning anyway.”

I felt as if I were observing the surveyor from a thousand miles away.

“I have no idea,” I said, “but she has been hypnotizing all of us, and not just to
give us peace of mind. Perhaps this expedition had a different purpose than what we
were told.”

“Hypnotism.” She said the word like it was meaningless. “How do you know that? How
could you possibly know that?” The surveyor seemed resentful—of me or of the theory,
I couldn’t tell which. But I could understand why.

“Because, somehow, I have become impervious to it,” I told her. “She hypnotized you
before we came down here today, to make sure you would do your duty. I saw her do
it.” I wanted to confess to the surveyor—to tell her
how
I had become impervious—but believed that that would be a mistake.

“And you did
nothing
? If this is even true.” At least she was considering the possibility of believing
me. Perhaps some residue, some fuzziness, from the episode had stuck in her mind.

“I didn’t want the psychologist to know that she couldn’t hypnotize me.” And, I had
wanted
to come down here.

The surveyor stood there for a moment, considering.

“Believe me or don’t believe me,” I said. “But believe this: When we go up there,
we need to be ready for anything. We may need to restrain or kill the psychologist
because we don’t know what she’s planning.”

“Why would she be planning anything?” the surveyor asked. Was that disdain in her
voice or just fear again?

“Because she must have different orders than the ones we got,” I said, as if explaining
to a child.

When she did not reply, I took that as a sign that she was beginning to acclimate
to the idea.

“I’ll need to go first, because she can’t affect me. And you’ll need to wear these.
It might help you resist the hypnotic suggestion.” I gave her my extra set of earplugs.

She took them hesitantly. “No,” she said. “We’ll go up together, at the same time.”

“That isn’t wise,” I said.

“I don’t care what it is. You’re not going up top without me. I’m not waiting there
in the dark for you to fix everything.”

I thought about that for a moment, then said, “Fine. But if I see that she is starting
to coerce you, I’ll have to stop her.” Or at least try.

“If you’re right,” the surveyor said. “If you’re telling the truth.”

“I am.”

She ignored me, said, “What about the body?”

Did that mean we were agreed? I hoped so. Or maybe she would try to disarm me on the
way up. Perhaps the psychologist had already prepared her in this regard.

“We leave the anthropologist here. We can’t be weighed down, and we also don’t know
what contaminants we might bring with us.”

The surveyor nodded. At least she wasn’t sentimental. There was nothing left of the
anthropologist in that body, and we both knew it. I was trying very hard not to think
of the anthropologist’s last moments alive, of the terror she must have felt as she
continued trying to perform a task that she had been willed to do by another, even
though it meant her own death.
What had she seen? What had she been looking at before it all went dark?

Before we turned back, I took one of the glass tubes strewn around the anthropologist.
It contained just a trace of a thick, fleshlike substance that gleamed darkly golden.
Perhaps she had gotten a useful sample after all, near the end.

*   *   *

As we ascended toward the light, I tried to distract myself. I kept reviewing my training
over and over again, searching for a clue, for any scrap of information that might
lead to some revelation about our discoveries. But I could find nothing, could only
wonder at my own gullibility in thinking that I had been told anything at all of use.
Always, the emphasis was on our own capabilities and knowledge base. Always, as I
looked back, I could see that there had been an almost willful intent to obscure,
to misdirect, disguised as concern that we not be frightened or overwhelmed.

The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing
some things and making other things invisible? Always, we were directed to the map,
to memorizing the details on the map. Our instructor, who remained nameless to us,
drilled us for six long months on the position of the lighthouse relative to the base
camp, the number of miles from one ruined patch of houses to another. The number of
miles of coastline we would be expected to explore. Almost always in the context of
the
lighthouse
, not the base camp. We became so comfortable with that map, with the dimensions of
it, and the thought of what it contained that it stopped us from asking
why
or even
what
.

Why
this stretch of coast?
What
might lie inside the lighthouse?
Why
was the camp set back into the forest, far from the lighthouse but fairly close to
the tower (which, of course, did not exist on the map)—and had the base camp always
been there?
What
lay beyond the map? Now that I knew the extent of the hypnotic suggestion that had
been used on us, I realized that the focus on the map might have itself been an embedded
cue. That if we did not ask questions, it was because we were programmed not to ask
questions. That the lighthouse, representative or actual, might have been a subconscious
trigger for a hypnotic suggestion—and that it might also have been the epicenter of
whatever had spread out to become Area X.

My briefing on the ecology of that place had had a similar blinkered focus. I had
spent most of my time becoming familiar with the natural transitional ecosystems,
with the flora and fauna and the cross-pollination I could expect to find. But I’d
also had an intense refresher on fungi and lichen that, in light of the words on the
wall, now stood out in my mind as being the true purpose of all of that study. If
the map had been meant solely to distract, then the ecology research had been meant,
after all, to truly prepare me. Unless I was being paranoid. But if I wasn’t, it meant
they knew about the tower, perhaps had always known about the tower.

From there, my suspicions grew. They had put us through grueling survival and weapons
training, so grueling that most evenings we went right to sleep in our separate quarters.
Even on those few occasions when we trained together, we were training apart. They
took away our names in the second month, stripped them from us. The only names applied
to things in Area X, and only in terms of their most general label. This, too, a kind
of distraction from asking certain questions that could only be reached through knowing
specific details. But the
right
specific details, not, for example, that there were six species of poisonous snakes
in Area X. A reach, yes, but I was not in the mood to set aside even the most unlikely
scenarios.

By the time we were ready to cross the border, we knew everything … and we knew nothing.

*   *   *

The psychologist wasn’t there when we emerged, blinking into the sunlight, ripping
off our masks and breathing in the fresh air. We had been ready for almost any scenario,
but not for the psychologist’s absence. It left us adrift for a while, afloat in that
ordinary day, the sky so brightly blue, the stand of trees casting long shadows. I
took out my earplugs and found I couldn’t hear the beating of the tower’s heartbeat
at all. How what we had seen below could coexist with the mundane was baffling. It
was as if we had come up too fast from a deep-sea dive but it was the memories of
the creatures we had seen that had given us the bends. We just kept searching the
environs for the psychologist, certain she was hiding, and half-hoping we would find
her, because surely she had an explanation. It was, after a time, pathological to
keep searching the same area around the tower. But for almost an hour we could not
find a way to stop.

Finally I could not deny the truth.

“She’s gone,” I said.

“Maybe she’s back at the base camp,” the surveyor said.

“Would you agree that her absence is a sign of guilt?” I asked.

The surveyor spat into the grass, regarded me closely. “No, I would not. Maybe something
happened to her. Maybe she needed to go back to the camp.”

“You saw the footprints. You saw the body.”

She motioned with her rifle. “Let’s just get back to base camp.”

I couldn’t read her at all. I didn’t know if she was turning on me or just cautious.
Coming up aboveground had emboldened her, regardless, and I had preferred her uncertain.

But back at base camp, some of her resolve crumbled again. The psychologist wasn’t
there. Not only wasn’t she there, but she had taken half of our supplies and most
of the guns. Either that or buried them somewhere. So we knew the psychologist was
still alive.

You must understand how I felt then, how the surveyor must have felt: We were scientists,
trained to observe natural phenomena and the results of human activity. We had not
been trained to encounter what appeared to be the uncanny. In unusual situations there
can be a comfort in the presence of even someone you think might be your enemy. Now
we had come close to the edges of something unprecedented, and less than a week into
our mission we had lost not just the linguist at the border but our anthropologist
and our psychologist.

“Okay, I give up,” the surveyor said, throwing down her rifle and sagging into a chair
in front of the anthropologist’s tent as I rummaged around inside of it. “I’m going
to believe you for now. I’m going to believe you because I don’t really have a choice.
Because I don’t have any better theories. What should we do now?”

There still weren’t any clues in the anthropologist’s tent. The horror of what had
happened to her was still hitting me. To be coerced into your own death. If I was
right, the psychologist was a murderer, much more so than whatever had killed the
anthropologist.

When I didn’t answer the surveyor, she repeated herself, with extra emphasis: “So
what the hell are we going to do now?”

Emerging from the tent, I said, “We examine the samples I took, we develop the photographs
and go through them. Then, tomorrow, we probably go back down into the tower.”

The surveyor gave a harsh laugh as she struggled to find words. Her face seemed to
almost want to pull apart for a second, perhaps from the strain of fighting off the
ghost of some hypnotic suggestion. Finally she got it out: “No. I’m not going back
down into that place. And it’s a
tunnel
, not a tower.”

“What do you want to do instead?” I asked.

As if she’d broken through some barrier, the words now came faster, more determined.
“We go back to the border and await extraction. We don’t have the resources to continue,
and if you’re right the psychologist is out there right now plotting something, even
if it’s just what excuses to give us. And if she’s not, if she’s dead or injured because
something attacked her, that’s another reason to get the hell out.” She had lit a
cigarette, one of the few we’d been given. She blew two long plumes of smoke out of
her nose.

“I’m not ready to go back,” I told her. “Not yet.” I wasn’t near ready, despite what
had happened.

“You prefer this place, you really do, don’t you?” the surveyor said. It wasn’t really
a question; a kind of pity or disgust infused her voice. “You think this is going
to last much longer? Let me tell you, even on military maneuvers designed to simulate
negative outcomes, I’ve seen better odds.”

Fear was driving her, even if she was right. I decided to steal my delaying tactics
from the psychologist.

“Let’s just look at what we brought back, and then we can decide what to do. You can
always head back to the border tomorrow.”

She took another drag on the cigarette, digesting that. The border was still a four-day
hike away.

“True enough,” she said, relenting for the moment.

I didn’t say what I was thinking: That it might not be that simple. That she might
make it back across the border only in the abstract sense that my husband had, stripped
of what made her unique. But I didn’t want her to feel as if she had no way out.

*   *   *

I spent the rest of the afternoon looking at samples under the microscope, on the
makeshift table outside of my tent. The surveyor busied herself with developing the
photographs in the tent that doubled as a darkroom, a frustrating process for anyone
used to digital uploads. Then, while the photos were resting, she went back through
the remnants of maps and documents the prior expedition had left at the base camp.

My samples told a series of cryptic jokes with punch lines I didn’t understand. The
cells of the biomass that made up the words on the wall had an unusual structure,
but they still fell within an acceptable range. Or, those cells were doing a magnificent
job of mimicking certain species of saprotrophic organisms. I made a mental note to
take a sample of the wall from behind the words. I had no idea how deeply the filaments
had taken root, or if there were nodes beneath and those filaments were only sentinels.

The tissue sample from the hand-shaped creature resisted any interpretation, and that
was strange but told me nothing. By which I mean I found no cells in the sample, just
a solid amber surface with air bubbles in it. At the time, I interpreted this as a
contaminated sample or evidence that this organism decomposed quickly. Another thought
came to me too late to test: that, having absorbed the organism’s spores, I was causing
a reaction in the sample. I didn’t have the medical facilities to run the kinds of
diagnostics that might have revealed any further changes to my body or mind since
the encounter.