Dead Space: Martyr (40 page)

“Where am I?” he asked, and this time the words came out.

“You’re alive,” said the muffled voice through the surgeon’s mask. “That’s all you need to know.”

He tried to move his arm, found it strapped down. The other arm was strapped, too, his legs as well. He struggled against them, arched his back.

“There, there,” said the voice. “You won’t be able to break them. Just relax.” The surgeon’s mask turned to address someone behind him. “Go get Markoff,” it said. “Tell him that Altman is awake.”

He must have drifted off again. When he opened his eyes, there were three people over the bed, looking down at him: Krax, Markoff, and Stevens.

“Congratulations, Altman,” said Krax. “You still seem to be alive.”

When he opened his mouth and spoke, his voice was hoarse, his throat sore. “You killed Ada,” he said.

“No,” said Krax. “Ada killed herself. She started hallucinating and then cut her own throat. She wasn’t strong enough. She wasn’t worthy.”

“Worthy?” Altman asked.

“We need to have a little talk,” said Markoff.

Altman narrowed his eyes. He watched him, warily.

“We’ve talked with your friend Harmon,” said Krax. “He told us everything that happened.”

“You sank the Marker,” said Stevens. “Why would you do that?”

“It was dangerous,” said Altman, his voice barely above a whisper.

“It’s not dangerous,” claimed Krax. “It’s divine.”

“You’re crazy,” said Altman.

“No, he’s right,” said Stevens. “I’m afraid that’s the conclusion that all three of us have reached.”

Altman turned his head slightly in Markoff’s direction. It hurt to move it. “You don’t believe this, do you? How can you believe it’s divine now that you’ve seen what it’s capable of?”

Markoff offered him a hard, glittering smile. “It created life,” he said. “I saw that for myself, saw it take dead flesh and bring it back to life.”

Maybe he doesn’t actually believe,
thought Altman.
Or maybe he’s pretending as a way of bending the others to his will. Just as I did with Harmon.

“But what kind of life?” asked Altman. “It was monstruous.”

“There must have been a glitch,” said Stevens. “The Marker must have gotten damaged somehow. But as a principle, it’s sound. All we have to do is fix it.”

“Or if not fix it, make a new one,” said Markoff.

“After all,” said Stevens, “every indication is that when it was originally working, millennia ago, it established life on earth. Once we have one that’s working properly, it will allow us to evolve beyond our mortal form. It will lead us into eternal life.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s not that at all. You’re wrong,” whispered Altman. “It wasn’t damaged; it was doing what it was meant to do. It meant to destroy us.”

“Then why did it stop?” Stevens asked. “And why did it stop when you began to broadcast its own code back to it, showing that you’d figured out how to replicate it?”

“How do you know about that?”

“You don’t think we left the facility without making sure that we could record everything that went on in it, do you?” said Krax. “We watched the whole thing. We have footage of everything.”

But Altman just shook his head. “You’re wrong,” he said. “It’ll destroy us.”

“The Marker wants to help us,” Stevens claimed. “Harmon has told us what you figured out: the Marker wants to be replicated. It was broken and must have known it was broken. It wants us to make it again so that it can help us. But we’ll improve the technology, Altman. We’ll make one that works and then make it even better.” He leaned in closer. Altman could feel the man’s breath on his face, could see in the man’s eyes traces of fanaticism that belied his calm exterior. “There are sure to be other Marker s, somewhere, on other worlds,” said Stevens. “They will lead us forward. In the meantime, we’ll do our best to try to understand this one and duplicate it.”

“You’ve done a lot to help with that,” Markoff said.

“But this one is sunk,” said Altman desperately.

“It was sunk before,” said Markoff, “and we got it up. You know that as well as anyone. All you did was slow the inevitable down slightly, by a few weeks, a few months.”

“You don’t have the research,” said Altman. “Everything must have been destroyed by the water and the pressure. You’ll have to start over.”

Krax shook his head. “Altman,” he said. “You’re so naïve.”

“Remember Harmon?” said Markoff. “What do you think Harmon was doing while he was in the Marker chamber? He was recording everything, making sure that none of the data would be lost. And then he carried it all away in his pocket. If you’d thought to check his pockets or simply left him to die, you
might have set us back. But you didn’t. You’re far too trusting, Altman. We have everything.”

“We also have all of Guthe’s research,” said Stevens. “We can learn from it what went wrong with the Marker and learn how to repair it. We ran our first experiments, synthesizing and reproducing the creature’s DNA, while you were still unconscious. Hermetically sealed labs, a variety of fail-safes. We’re being a great deal more careful about it than Guthe was, though most likely hallucinations were to blame for his rashness.”

“And to be frank,” said Krax, “watching you struggle past them taught us a great deal about how to control them. We wouldn’t be nearly as far along without you.”

“You’re making a terrible mistake,” whispered Altman. He was very tired. He was helpless, couldn’t do anything. But maybe soon. All he had to do was regain his strength. Once he regained his strength, he’d do everything he could to stop them. “If you go ahead with this, it’ll mean the end of humanity. Maybe not right away, but soon.”

“That’s what we’re hoping for,” said Stevens. “If we go ahead with this, we’ll reach the next evolutionary stage. We won’t be human; we’ll be better than human.”

“Good-bye, Altman,” said Markoff. “You’ve been a worthy adversary. But this time you’ve lost.”

Once the three of them had left, a doctor who had accompanied them to the door returned and whispered in the surgeon’s ear. The surgeon nodded his head, and then filled and primed a hypodermic. He pushed it into Altman’s arm. The world grew gray, slowly faded away.

2

When he woke up, he was still strapped down to a bed. He was alone in a small room, something very like a cell. He struggled against the straps, but they were firm.

He slept, he woke, he slept again. Occasionally a nurse would come in and change the bag of fluids hanging beside him. His head throbbed. Once when the nurse came, she took out a small pocket mirror and held it so he could see himself.

His head was wrapped in bandages. He hardly recognized his own face.

“There, see,” said the nurse, and gestured to the top of his head. “That’s where you had your accident.”

“Accident?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Where you slipped and fell.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” he said.

She smiled. “After head trauma, sometimes things can get confused,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I know exactly what happened.”

Her smile looked painted on, fake. “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” she said. “Those are the rules.” She backed slowly out the door.

A few minutes later, the door opened and a man with a hypodermic entered.

When he woke up again, he was in a different place, a place that didn’t just look like a cell, but was one. The bandages were no longer on his head, though a lump and a healing wound were still there. They had unstrapped him, had left him lying on the floor. He got unsteadily to his feet, his muscles weak from disuse.

The room was white, without mark or other design. There was one door, small, in the middle of one wall. High above him and out of reach was a vid recorder. A small toilet in the corner, a food dispenser just beside it.

He went to the door and pounded on it. “Hello!” he called. “Hello!” Then he pressed his ear to the door. He heard nothing.

He waited, tried again. Nothing happened. And then again. Still nothing.

Hours went by, then days. The only noise that did not come from himself was the clunk when food came down the slot. There was no way for him to control when it came, no button to push. Suddenly there was a clunk and the food was there. He saved the containers and they slowly filled one side of the room.

He felt like he was the last man on earth. He felt like he was going mad.

He withdrew deeper and deeper into himself, paid less and less attention to the outside world.

Then the dead started to return, one by one, to keep him company. All the people whose deaths he felt responsible for, sitting around him, judging him. There was Ada and Field,
Hendricks and Hammond, and others he couldn’t recognize. It was just him, and his guilt, and the dead.

And then he awoke to find that he was no longer in that room, that instead he was sitting in a chair at a large table. His hands were cuffed to the arms of the chair. Across from him, on the other side of the table, were Markoff and Stevens.

“Hello, Altman,” said Markoff.

He didn’t answer at first. It was strange to be in a room with living people, almost unbearable. He couldn’t believe it was really happening.

“Altman,” said Stevens. He snapped his fingers. “Here, Altman. Focus.”

“You’re not here,” said Altman. “I’m hallucinating you.”

“No,” said Stevens. “We’re here. Even if we’re not, what will it hurt you to talk to us?”

He’s right,
said Altman.
What will it hurt?
And then he remembered Hennessy, dead from listening to a hallucination; Hendricks, dead from listening to a hallucination; Ada, dead from listening to a hallucination. On and on and on. His eyes filled with tears.

“What’s wrong with him?” Markoff asked.

“We broke him,” said Stevens. “I told you it was too long. We’re real, Altman. What do we have to do to prove that we’re real?”

“You can’t prove it,” said Altman.

“Do something, Stevens,” said Markoff. “He’s not any fun like this.”

Stevens darted forward, slapped him hard, then again. Altman reached up and touched his cheek.

“Did you feel that?” asked Stevens, his voice gently mocking.

Had he felt it or had he only imagined feeling it? He didn’t know. But he had to make a choice: either speak to them or ignore them.

He hesitated for so long that Stevens, or the Stevens hallucination, slapped him again. “Well?” he said.

“Yes,” said Altman. “Maybe you’re real.”

And as he said it, it was almost as if they became more real. But if he had insisted they were hallucinations, would the reverse have happened? Would they have merely faded away?

“That’s better,” said Markoff, his eyes starting to gleam.

“Where’s Krax?” he asked.

Markoff waved the question away. “Krax made the mistake of becoming expendable. What we’re here to talk about, Altman, is you.”

“What about me?”

“We had to figure out what to do with you,” said Stevens. “You’ve caused a lot of trouble.”

“That stunt you pulled in Washington,” said Markoff. “That was in very bad taste. I wanted to kill you for that.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Markoff glanced briefly at Stevens. “Cooler heads prevailed,” he said. “As it turned out, they were wrong.”

“I’m the first to admit it,” said Stevens.

“You were no better once you came back,” said Markoff. “You meddled with experiments, caused a tremendous amount of property damage, did everything you could to get in the way. Once the setback occurred on the floating compound, I thought,
Well, they’ll tear him apart and transform him into one of them, and I’ll be at home with my popcorn and candy, watching it on the screen.
But that didn’t work either. Instead you sank a billion-dollar research facility.”

“We almost had you killed when we picked you and Harmon up from the boat, but Markoff wanted your death to be the perfect thing,” said Stevens.

“Yes,” said Markoff, “the perfect thing.”

“You’re both crazy,” said Altman.

“You’ve used that one before,” said Markoff. “You need to come up with a better insult.”

“Would you like to hear our plans?”

“No,” said Altman. “Send me back to my cell.”

Stevens ignored him. “Once we have the secret of the Marker worked out, once we have the new Marker replicated, we’ll share it with the public. Until then, we’ll give them little tastes, something to prepare them for what’s coming.”

“That’s where you come in,” said Markoff.

Stevens nodded. “Seen in that light, you have played right into our hands. It’s not enough for just us to believe. Since it’s a matter of the salvation of the human species, we need to spread the belief. What better way to do that than to start a formal religion? That way, when the right time comes, they’ll be ready.”

“Not everybody has to know the full extent of what’s really going on,” said Markoff. “Indeed, it’s better if only a few of us really know the details, only a select inner circle. It’s always better to maintain a little mystery, initiate people slowly, gradually. Keep the power in the right hands.”

Altman found his hands were shaking. “But I got the word out,” he said. “I went public. People will know.”

“Yes, you did,” said Stevens. “Thank you for doing that. The word you got out was that the government is hiding something that the people should know about. Think about it. We’ve looked back over all the footage, all the interviews you did. You were conflicted enough about whether the Marker was something to
be feared or something to be studied, and so you remained vague. We can spin your comments any way we want. By the time we’re through with you, not only will your little stunt not hurt us: you’ll be considered a saint. You got the word out first, Altman—you’re the one who started it all. Everyone will believe that you were the one who founded the religion.”

“I’ll never go along with it,” said Altman, dread rising in him.

Markoff laughed. “We never said we needed you to go along with it,” he said.

“Like any prophet, you’re more useful to us dead than alive,” said Stevens. “Once you’re dead, we can let the truth—our truth—build up around you and you can’t do anything about it. You’ll be larger than life. We’ll write histories of you, holy books. We’ll erase what we don’t like about you and make you fit what we want. Your name will be forever associated with the Church of Unitology. You’ll come to be known as our founder.”