Crysis: Legion (37 page)
Authors: Peter Watts
There’s no doubt about the sudden vibration that shakes the walls, though. It shakes me loose and slams me down another endless tunnel.
Which actually ends.
Maybe the suit keeps the impact from turning me to jelly. Maybe it just keeps the jelly contained in a human-shaped sack. But I’m on the deck now, and the wind screams sideways instead of down, and I can just barely roll into the lee of some protruding piece of machinery half embedded in the wall. It’s still not even close to calm air: the back-eddy scouring this little wind-shadow is a gale by any standards—but it’s nothing the suit can’t handle, assuming it hasn’t already been damaged beyond repair.
The nuke could go off, and in here I’d never even notice.
Thoughts occur to me. I don’t know if they’re mine or SECOND’s, or even if that’s a difference that makes a difference anymore. Something thinks:
Bad vent design: Too much turbulence
. Something thinks:
Maybe this isn’t a primary vent. Maybe the primaries are offline, or damaged. Maybe the Ceph just aren’t into laminar flow
.
Something thinks:
There’s so much spore swirling around this goddamn suit I can barely see my own feet so why isn’t it interacting?
and I’m pretty sure that’s me. Because the answer’s so bleeding obvious:
It’s an antibody. It swarms to the site of an injury
.
So far I’m just an inert particle in this body. It’s time to turn malignant.
I’m all out of fancy firearms but the N2 comes equipped with a pretty good Kung-Fu Grip. And way down here in the basement of the doomsday machine, there just
has
to be something important to tear at. Doesn’t have to be vital. You don’t have to attack the heart or the brain to get the white blood cells to take notice. Any old chunk of tissue will do.
This outcropping I’m hunkered down against right here, for instance …
I raise my fist, bring it down. Nothing.
Again: a dent. Maybe. Maybe just spots in front of my eyes.
I find something that looks like a seam, hook my fingers underneath, pull. It gives a little. I pull again, putting my back into it.
The panel peels back like the zip-top lid on a can of cat food. Blue light sparkles within.
I go to town.
Blue light recedes. Orange is in ascension. Every time I bring down my fist, copper lightning forks and crackles from the breach. It takes thirty seconds for me to bring this whole segment of passageway alive with electricity.
It takes less time than that for the antibodies to pay attention.
They boil out from the main flow as though someone’s punched holes in an invisible pipe: black angry thunderclouds in search of a parade to rain on. The wind doesn’t seem to bother them; they cut across that howling flow as if the air were dead still. They’re more than smoke, more than particles; they’re a
collective
, a billion microscopic agents acting in unison. I can see them talk among themselves: I look into that seething darkness and I see a million faint sparks winking back and forth as the nanites trade notes and make plans. Structural damage in sublevel whatsit. Power failure in thingamajig twenty-three.
Invader.
Infection.
There
.
They swallow me whole, billow around me like some monster amoeba. The suit catches fire. That’s what it looks like, anyway: that orbital time-lapse of burning rain forests where half of SouthAm is sheathed in orange sparkles. Only the smoke isn’t
rising
from the tiny fires burning across my body; the smoke is falling
into
them, it’s precipitating, it’s
condensing
down into the light. It’s Brazil, run backward. The suit drinks in the spore; the
embers fade along my arms and legs. Nothing else happens for a moment or two.
My fingertips start to tingle. My fingertips start to
glow
.
I begin to brighten from the outside in.
All those black specks, resurrected. All that ash turned back into flame. The particles rise like a blizzard of stars: from my arms, from my chest, from my legs and feet. So much mass, escaping; it seems impossible that any might be left behind. Perhaps my very molecules are flying apart, perhaps my whole body’s ablating into luminous mist.
Suddenly I’m as incandescent as a goddamn angel.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The spire vented, of course. That was the whole plan. It went off exactly when it was supposed to, but not before we’d raped its hanging fly ass; and when all that jizz spread out across Manhattan, it was carrying
our
sperm, not the Ceph’s. The Tunguska Iteration blew those fuckers apart like maggots in a microwave.
They say it was even closer than we thought. All those other spires popping up across the city, those were just beta releases. Tweaks, test runs, short-lived and self-terminating. That Central Park fucker, though: That was the mass-production model. It would’ve been shooting
replicators
. And then you’re not just talking about Manhattan, or New York, or even the whole tristate area. You’re kissing the whole damn planet good-bye. That’s what they say, anyhow. Of course, they don’t really
know
anything.
Actually, Roger, I don’t think they even know that much. I don’t think we
have
won. In fact, this is just the beginning. I’m pretty sure your bosses know that, too.
Because Gould had access to Hargreave’s feed. Gould knows what I saw, Gould knows stuff I haven’t told you here today. And if Gould knows, your bosses do, too.
Personally, I think of it as kind of a group home, a mansion with many rooms. And one of the residents wakes up in the middle of the night—hears a noise upstairs, maybe—and goes to investigate. He doesn’t bother waking the others. It’s probably just squirrels, or the cat knocked over a lamp or something. No point disturbing anyone else.
But it’s not squirrels, and it’s not a cat—or if it is, it’s a cat that’s figured out how to use the shotgun on the mantel, and now a gunshot’s gone off in the attic. Maybe there was a scream when the bullet hit, maybe someone shouted out a warning. And all the other gardening tools in all the other rooms, they’re waking up now. They want to know what happened. They want to know where their friend is. Maybe they’re even putting in a call to their owners to come have a look-see.
Hargreave would probably have some really valuable insights right about now, don’t you think?
Well, yes. As far as we know. But come on, Roger; you can’t have forgotten that Hargreave was never in it alone. It’s right there in the name of his company, for chrissake.
So tell me. What do you know about a dude called Karl Rasch?
Emergency Forensic Session on the Manhattan Incursion
CSIRA BlackBody Council
Pre-Testimony Interview, Partial Transcript, 27/08/2023
Subject: Nathan Gould
Excerpt begins:
You remember those constellations I told you about, the ones that kept showing up in the static:
clusters of blue stars, little sapphire pinpricks connected by a network of dim glowing filaments, rotating slowly in midair
. Ceph starglobe, remember?
I bet your guys are going over it right now. The suit kept playing it so it’s gotta be important, right? Some kind of star map. Interstellar trade routes or invasion plans. Maybe the location of the Ceph homeworld. You’ve been poring over that shit ever since you tossed my place; nine, ten hours now? Trying to line up those sparkles with our own star maps, trying to figure out where a planet would have to be in the Milky Way to have that particular constellation hanging in its sky. How many possible matches you got so far? Few thousand, maybe?
I’ll give you a hint. You’re looking in the wrong direction.
One of those stars is under New York. Central Park, if you really want to narrow it down. There’s another under Ling Shan. And you know there’s a shitload more. Dozens more. If you’d waited another ten minutes before kicking in my door—hell, if you’d just asked nicely instead of waving those fucking guns in my face—I could’ve given you a list.
No big deal, though.
I’ve got a feeling everyone’s gonna know exactly where the rest of those stars are, real soon now.
Excerpt ends
.
Emergency Forensic Session on the Manhattan Incursion Excerpted Testimony of Dr. Lindsey Aiyeola Before the CSIRA Blackbody Council, Unknown Location, sometime between September 1 and 6, 2023
.
(Names of all BBC members redacted.)
Excerpt Begins:
Aiyeola: Alcatraz—Prophet, whatever he calls himself now—there is nothing in his file to suggest any aptitude or special training in the behavioral sciences. Certainly nothing to suggest he was capable of the sort of psychological insights sprinkled throughout his interview—and yes, some of them were quite astute.
In hindsight, we made the right decision by using an inexperienced and uninformed interviewer. Lieutenant Gillis couldn’t give
away much because he didn’t know much—and on those occasions when he
did
bluff or dissemble, Prophet saw right through him. In fact, Prophet was in control of a great deal of the interview process.
BB 1: And yet according to your own report,
you
were manipulating
him
. You encouraged him to ramble, to go off on tangents, not only to acquire information about brain function but also in the hope that he’d inadvertently reveal things he might not be likely to in a more formal setting.
Aiyeola: That’s true. And we believe we obtained a great deal of useful information, but—well, we also have to consider the possibility that we were being played, at least in the later stages of the process. The subject’s abilities varied throughout the course of the interviews but the overall trend was upward. Certainly we weren’t slipping anything past him by the end of the interrogation. The question is, how much of the earlier information just “slipped out” and how much was deliberately fed to us.
BB 2: Excuse me, but I’ve only just been brought into the loop concerning the esteemed Mr. Alcatraz. Would you be so kind as to give me some examples of these “abilities”?
Aiyeola: His linguistic skills have improved significantly over a very short period of time. His memory has become eidetic. According to his file he was originally right-handed; he is now functionally
ambidextrous. Levels of comprehension, retention, and recall are increasing literally by the—to make a long story short, he is simply becoming
smarter
. There’s some indication that the growth in his abilities is following a sigmoid curve, in which case they’re bound to level off at some point. At the moment, though, we’re not entirely certain where that might be.
And of course, there is the troubling fact that he still insists on referring to himself as “Prophet,” although he is fully aware that he is not Laurence Barnes, and that Laurence Barnes is dead.
BB 3: Why would Alcatraz “feed” us anything that wasn’t true? I’ve seen the man’s record: He wasn’t top of his class, but he’s a good marine. I see no reason to question his loyalty.
Aiyeola: That was a different person, sir. We don’t know who or what Alcatraz is anymore. We don’t know what’s going on in there, beyond the fact that his integration with alien technology has probably changed his—well, his outlook. We
do
know, thanks to Dr. Gould, that he was privy to specific information about Charybdis technology—his ability to hack the City Hall hive is difficult to explain any other way than by accessing some kind of memory archive from the N2’s previous occupant—and that he was not as forthcoming on that subject as he might have been. I will also admit that
I find his remarks to Lieutenant Gillis about having to “choose a side” more than a little worrisome.
BB 1: In light of your position that he may have some special knowledge of the Ceph, what do you think of his take on their motives?
Aiyeola: He made a number of good points, sir. Certainly the Manhattan Incursion doesn’t make any tactical sense as a conventional invasion, and even Hargreave’s Gardener Hypothesis leaves a number of issues unresolved. Prophet’s take makes more sense, but it’s all pure conjecture at this point.
BB 1: Do you agree that the Ceph are not primarily interested in invasion?
Aiyeola: I believe that when we are talking about the Ceph the very concept of
invasion
is almost certainly inadequate.
BB 1: Would you care to elaborate on that, please.
Aiyeola: Are we
invading
an anthill when we build a drive-through bank machine on top of it? Probably, from the ants’ point of view. And if some small fraction of those ants survive—if they manage to get out of the way and set up a new colony somewhere else—are we incompetent invaders because we haven’t exterminated all of them? Have they
beaten
us, if the bulldozers came and went and left some ants alive? No, because we weren’t trying to wipe out an anthill. We were putting up an ATM. But you can’t explain currency, finance, automated
tellers to an ant. It’s impossible for them to comprehend our acts as anything other than a devastating attack by a god-like force that the ants—for some mysterious reason—were able to fend off.
BB 3: So your opinion is that we’re irrelevant to them.
Aiyeola: I have no idea whether we are or not. All I’m saying is, given such a vast gulf in technology and biology, it might well be physically impossible to ever fully understand what happened in Manhattan. What might happen in the future.
BB 2: I think that what Dr. Aiyeola is suggesting is that we concentrate on the immediate tactical threat, and not waste valuable resources on an impossible quest to comprehend the incomprehensible.
Aiyeola: Excuse me,
[REDACTED]
, that’s by no means what I’m suggesting. I said
might
. I profoundly hope that someday we are in a position to understand Ceph motivations. Unfortunately I can only think of one way to do that.
BB 3: And that is?
Aiyeola: Become very much smarter.
BB 1: Alcatraz may prove useful in that regard. Assuming we can crack that particular nut.
BB 2: Well, whatever the Ceph are doing here, we can safely assume it matters a great deal to them. They wouldn’t have gone to the enormous cost and trouble of launching such a large-scale—
Aiyeola: With all due respect, sir, we have no way of knowing what constitutes an “enormous cost” to the Ceph. This is a species with an interstellar reach, a species that can teleport macroscopic objects—including, apparently, living organisms—over interplanetary distances. This whole campaign might have been a trivial investment to them—perhaps no more expensive than bending over to retrieve a dropped set of car keys. All we know for certain is that Hargreave stole their technology.
Maybe the Ceph just wanted it back.
Maybe they got it.