"We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows — not even God."
— The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
NOT EVEN GOD
by glenarvon
Sometimes, he thought DX-1118 C was watching him when he turned his back on it, he could imagine it trying to cling to his gloves, piercing the latex to penetrate his skin, he felt like it wanted to climb through the lens of his microscope and fill his entire vision. It was too damn hard to think of this as nothing but another virus. It was too brilliant and incredible. It lived in a way a virus wasn't supposed to and every day, every hour, every minute he spent in its presence, he got that little bit closer to reveal the enigma. He'd pull away the muffling veil and all the secrets of this confounded little thing would be laid bare for him to dissect.
And if it meant sleeping in the lab, if it meant alienating all his colleges and assistants, if it meant brushing off Karen, it was a small price to pay. He was too close now to let it go; three years' work on something even McMullen was convinced he couldn't crack, simply because no one could crack it.
DX-1118 A and B had been quantum leaps in their respective ways, but still, he had known Blacklight was capable of more than even that. It'd been a long time since he had stopped believing he was working on a cure for cancer. Did they think he was an idiot? No, the only thing this would ever cure was life, or possibly the inferiority of life, but he could never tell if it was the end point of evolution or the beginning. It seemed to be both, at different times, depending on the stimuli he subjected it to, depending on the genetic makeup of each individual test animal.
He could sense the pattern there, but he couldn't yet put it into words, he couldn't yet discern it in his results and the cold calculation of the computers, but it was only a question of time. He would get there and Blacklight would be his. He would see what no one else before him had seen, not just the blueprint of life, but its ultimate explanation.
Floor 51 of Gentek was subjected to every conceivable security measure imaginable. Nothing got in or out, unless it had a triple signed permission by McMullen and a handful of people whose very existence was probably need to know. The computers ran on a closed network and the lab offered everything you'd ever need. He should, technically, only be up here when something extremely pressing demanded it. He'd long since stopped finding it demeaning to undress under complete surveillance, not if it meant he got access to the source of his virus. He'd had to push for weeks before he got permission to take his own samples and he'd had needed to use two members of his team as sacrificial goats, blaming some feigned mistake on them just to make his point.
In the beginning, he had been shocked to discover the source of his precious virus was nothing but an apathetic girl, kept behind glass, but both the disgust and the novelty of it had worn off in time. She never reacted to anything done to her, no twitch of her lips, no shift of her eyes and she might as well be dead for all the response she gave.
He wanted to know more about her biology, because it was so painfully obvious how far removed from human she was. He had been told to shut up and do his job, so he had pretended to drop it. An unauthorised search in the floor 51 network had nearly resulted in him being fired from his own project. The progress he'd made by then, however, seemed to have saved him. He wasn't quite certain what being fired from Project Blacklight would look like, but he doubted his resumé would be his worst problem. So he crushed any curiosity and told himself it didn't matter.
Something moved, off to the side in the blurry blindness past the edge of his glasses and he almost dismissed it as a reflection from the screen, some involuntary movement of his own that had caused the light to bounce between so much glass. But it happened again and it wasn't light that moved at all, but the darkness of a solid shape.
He was on his feet before it consciously registered and the released adrenaline resettled low in his stomach in an excited tingle when he realised what had happened.
Elizabeth Greene stood facing him through the transparent wall of her cell, watching him with so much intensity he was surprised the glass hadn't melted away between them. She watched him, wide-eyed and attentive and something that seemed like amusement on a face he had only ever seen as perfectly blank.
"You," she said and her voice had an echo to it, intimately present in the room, vibrating in the empty air between them and coming to him like a touch. "We've waited for you."
Without taking his eyes off her, he walked around the table, drawn to her as surely as if she had wrapped a leash around his neck with just those few words and she had tugged.
Steps lead up to the entrance of her cell. He didn't have the means to open it, but he wondered, briefly, if she would ask him to and what he would do then. Try and trick the system? It was so late at night, he had many hours to do it in and he knew the mechanism well enough. What would she do, once released?
Why did she speak to him only now?
"I didn't know there was still somebody home," he said, facing her through the glass.
She chuckled quietly and the many-voiced echo was there again, her expression painting something wicked and otherworldly on her youthful face. She twitched forward, perhaps in an attempt to frighten him. She placed both her hands to the wall and leaned in, bringing her face so close to the glass, her breath left a thin sheen of mist on it.
He had not flinched away at her sudden movement, in fact, it was all he could do not to lean towards her. The very presence of the glass annoyed him, close enough to touch. If she understood her own nature, who knew the secrets she could reveal?
"What do you mean? You've waited for me? And who is 'we'?"
She watched him curiously, tilted her head in an animal gesture. She laughed again. "We…" she said and paused so long the silence became nigh unbearable, until it felt his chest would cave in under some imagined pressure.
"…are."
He frowned, trying to read in her face and finding nothing familiar there. He decided to try something else, "Finding me wasn't that hard, I've been working on this floor for over a year. You should've seen me around."
She put her head to the other side, tittered again her strange, alien laugh, "We've not waited for you like that. We've waited for someone like you, and we had to wait so long. Do you know how long it's been?"
"I've no idea how long you've been here," he said honestly. It had never even occurred to him to wonder. Up until now, she had been barely a person to him at all and even now, he wasn't sure she was a person at all.
"Too long," she breathed and the mist climbed up on the glass until only the piercing, poison green of her eyes was still visible. It lasted only for a moment. "So many scientists came, and before them, so many soldiers, but they were all the same. They could not see, they did not match."
"Match?" he repeated.
She smirked "Me," she said with pointed, obvious irony. "Do you know what happened to them all? Where they went? How they died?"
He had, of course, known he couldn't possibly have been the first to work on this virus. He knew he was good, but he was also young and unproven. He didn't have a name yet, no reputation with nearly enough pull for a project like this unless others had tried and failed. But that wasn't what this was about, was it?
"What did happen to them?"
"Blackwatch takes them," she said. "They clean up behind them. They recruit, or they kill you. And they will not recruit you. I can tell what you are doing, I know where it's going to go better than you."
On impulse, following some secret drive, he took the last step to the glass and found her hands, placed his own above them and leaned forward, looking down at her.
"You think they'll shut us down," he observed. Condensation ghosted between them, obscuring his vision briefly. "But I've never been closer. If they want Blacklight, I'm the only one who can give it to them."
"What if they don't? What if they read in your notes, your progress reports? They will be afraid. Unlike you. You don't fear that part of me you keep in the fridge and shape and change until it does your bidding. They are afraid of that even more, as they should be."
In many ways, the realisation that she was not human was liberating, more than her silence and compliance had ever been. Looking at her, sometimes, he would still just see the girl and the suffering she must have been subjected to. This… specimen… was something else entirely, but she was also just behind glass, like the parts of her he kept in the fridge.
He stepped away from her, partly just to show he could, but mostly to see what she would do. He stepped around the cell, trailing his path with his hand, as if he was leading her. Her gaze trailed him for a moment and secret amusement flared there. She shivered into motion to follow, delicately on skinny legs.
"Why are you talking to me?" he asked again. "Why now?"
"Time is ticking out, I would hate to see you go as the others have."
He glanced away from her, briefly, hiding a laugh of his own. "I don't believe you. There's something you want."
"What everything wants. Life, food, a mate, shelter."
"Freedom," he picked up her narration, watching her, trying to read in her face and despite its human appearance, found nothing familiar there. "Power. Knowledge."
She chuckled, the long lashes framing her eyes cast long, spidery shadows over her cheeks, shivering with the laugh. He thought he could imagine warmth slowly breaking through the glass, though he knew it was impossible.
"Do you want them to be in awe of you?"
It was scripted, in a way, a back and forth they might have had many times before, borne on the mood of this strange night when she might give him what he had sought for so long. But he didn't want this to be given, he knew he could find all the answers on his own, he could just take, with or without her permission.
Still, her multi-echoed voice was enthralling, it felt good, an insidious touch on his skin. He was willing to listen to her a little longer.
"You didn't answer my question," he said. They had finished a half circle around her cell and the walkway ended there, so he stopped and turned to face her, placing both hands on the cool glass, fingers spread out as if he thought he could push through. After a moment, she aligned her fingers with his, though distorted through the thickness of the glass.
"Neither did you."
He leaned closer, gaze digging into her's, pinning her there, a sample in a petri-dish, his alone to control. "Do you want me to release you?" he asked and added, "Yes."
He wasn't sure it was true or not. Awe. It was not a term he used, not something he had ever thought to apply to himself in any way.
She tilted her head again, birdlike, and turned to walk again, back on the inside of her cell, pulling him with her. He took the hands from the glass and watched her go, head tilted in an echo — or a mockery — of her own gesture, though he was barely aware he was doing it.
She stopped, looked back at him and smirked. "They will kill you," she said.
She waited and said nothing more until he relented and joined her again, followed her as she walked the circle of her cell again. He kept his hands away this time.
"I doubt it," he said.
"Wait, then," she said and he thought there was an edge in her voice, an undercurrent of razors scraping away at her velvet. "Watch. They will start by questioning all your results, all your data. They will restrict your access. Then they will ignore you, or at least pretend to. Your colleges will begin to vanish."
She paused briefly, then said, "It'll be too late by then."
He stopped at the door, still half-convinced this was where she was leading him — or trying to lead him, anyway — but she just continued on as if she hadn't even noticed and the door meant nothing to her.
He fell in step beside her again. There was a grace in her movement he had not seen, or at least not appreciated before, something feline and supple, other than human to match her voice and everything else about her he knew. For a moment, he thought he could hate that glass and he would release it's hold on her just to feel her under his hands, writhing. The image was both sick and arousing in equal measure, but it didn't frighten him, it thrilled him.
"You should wonder what it could do," she said in a tone that would have been conversational from anyone else, and in any other place. "What it could give you."
It. Blacklight. His creation. He knew what it could do to monkeys, but the mutations it caused seemed random, no discernible pattern yet. Blacklight didn't follow direction. When it did, or indeed, if, the story would be far different.
He gave a short laugh, low in his throat, it scratched the delicate tissue there.
"It doesn't have to give me anything," he said. "I will have it all anyway."
This seemed to amuse her, put a mischievous spark in her eyes. She returned to the gurney, sat back down on it where she had been in all the time he'd known her. She folded her legs under her in a movement too smooth to be possible with bones and joints and imperfect flesh. She turned her head away from him, her gaze travelled through the glass and the dark air to where he had been working, to the petri dish in the isolation chamber.
She said, "Come find me then. If you live."
He followed the direction of her gaze, thought of the Blacklight samples and imagined forming them under his bare fingers, bending the most extraordinary virus in existence of his own will. It wasn't fame he wanted, though he'd take that too. It wasn't money or even power. It wasn't awe, as she claimed. Or at least, it wasn't all. He just needed to know if he could do it, see through it, make that DNA dance. And if no one else ever knew, if it stayed a secret between himself and Blacklight and Elizabeth Greene, it'd be enough for him.
"And if I die?" he challenged.
She tittered a slow laugh. "I gave you the warning you need. What you do with it, is yours alone."
She became impassive again, but now that he knew she was capable of so much more, he thought he could still see the spark in her eyes, the way she was laughing at all of this to herself.
He looked over her prison and suddenly the containment cell didn't seem so secure. It was just glass and metal, after all. Her gaze seemed to trail him through the lab as he returned to his work, distracting like a caress, thrilling and alive and Blacklight was still watching him, still waiting. Perhaps the yearning was mutual, perhaps it wanted him to unlock its full potential as much as he needed to do it.
Greene had an agenda, he could tell, though whether her brain was too alien for him to comprehend her goals or not, he didn't know. He wouldn't just play into her hands like that, but there was no reason to disregard her warning.
He considered the samples. He trailed a long finger over the vials in front of him and resisted the urge to close his hand around them, but he couldn't just waltz out of the lab with a sample of Blacklight. He'd have to be careful, watch his step and his enemies, play it smart. He supposed he was lucky he was one of the smart ones.
In her cell, as if she could read the resolve on his face, Elizabeth Greene blinked only once and the corners of her mouth twitched just slightly before she was perfectly still again.
End of Not Even God