"Status report; give me the recent data regarding Case File 006."
Responding... Report: All Project Vizion Ships In The Vicinity Have Taken In To Enquiry Custody. These Include: A Modified V. 004 Mothership; Two Minor Class Transport Vessels, Both Deviated From Standard; And Ten Lifepods Of Various Construction In Varying States. A Full Inventory Of Seized Items Can Be Located In File φ 1.6—Last Updated: 6.3 Hours Ago
"And what of the planet?"
Responding... Report: Locally Identified As Terra, The Third Planet From The Star Sol. Natively Identified As Earth
Information... The Planet Hosts Carbon Based Life Forms Identified As Homo Sapien. Dominant Population Currently Numbers 7.6 Billion. No Allies. No Territory. No Notable Achievements. Estimated Time For The Planet's Complete Destruction—4.6 Hours. Optimum Projectile—UD-73/5 Incendiary Missile. Requesting Instruction For Incendiary Unit 099 To Begin Launch Procedures
"That will not be needed. Scan for Vizion technology on Terra."
Order Accepted...
Scanning...
Responding... Technology With Radiation Signatures Similar To Those Observed In Weapons Used By Project Vizion Can Be Found In Terra's Northern Hemisphere In Divided Sector 006b
Action... Highlighting Sector 006b On Enquiry Mapping Systems
Information... Area Is Structurally Unremarkable And Largely Uninhabited. Energy Signature Is Emitting From Independent Research Facility Zone 5.1. Requesting Permission To Access The Data Systems Of Facility Zone 5.1
"Granted."
Accessing...
Information... The Technology Operating Within Zone 5.1 Is Far Superior To Anything Else Located In Scans Of Terra And Bears Similarity In Construction To Project Vizion Equipment. Facility Contains One Median Class 1810-4 Battle Ship With Heavy Damage, Recently Crashed. Radio Waves And Data Found Aboard Ship Systems Match Material Recovered From Previous Captured Vizion Ships
"Mobilise ground unit 719 and dispatch them to Zone 5.1. Have them transmit all and any findings directly to the system, full surveillance. Anything involving Project Vizion should be given priority: data, tech, any suspects. Recovered items should be brought back to the ship for inventory."
Order Accepted...
Transferring Instructions...
Responding... What Is The Policy Regarding Local Interference
"Shadow operation: do not engage, remain out of sight. If any prove an active threat, they are to be disposed of quietly. Any seen to be assisting in Project Vizion shall be brought to the ship for questioning. Preferably unharmed, but this is not priority."
Order Accepted...
Transferring Instructions...
Responding... Requesting Policy Regarding Project Vizion members
"Their lives are not a priority."
Order Accepted...
Transferring Instructions...
Ground Unit 719 Has Been Prepared For Deployment. Requesting Permission To Launch...
"Permission granted."
Enquiry Ground Unit 719 Has Been Deployed To Zone 5.1
Dawn skulked in like a stray cat, dirty and unwelcome. The light was wet, sticking to things in smears and streaks, and the chill, twilit air was clammy cold and thick with mist. Though the distant sun was rising, most of the light came from the flickering street lamps, their red-burning wires dull with weariness.
It was by this meagre illumination that the aliens were attempting the unattempted—hot wiring a car.
(Well, unattempted on Earth. It was something they were all adept at in concept, the tangled artistry of wires very familiar to people who had no other conduit for keeping their more experimental equipment functioning. Stealing, too, was something very ordinary. But Earth, now, Earth was new, and this little suburb didn't seem at all the place for extraterrestrial grand theft auto.)
The three of them crowded in to a single, particularly dense point of shadow around the car, far away from the light pooling at the base of each streetlight. They had about them an air of illicit guilt, like children sneaking off to smoke, and all three of them were very tired, doused in the damp listlessness of a too-early morning.
As the most technologically capable, Diz had been elected to perform the necessary mutilation of the wires. Ultimately, this turned out to be a rather poor delegation on Viz's part, as both of Diz's hands had been completely shattered and, hands being rather complex devices, had yet to heal fully; Diz's progress was clumsy and faltering, his complaints constant.
"... Of course, there couldn't be a simpler way... we couldn't steal someone else's vehicle... that old woman's going to kill us... ruined my damn hands..."
In a similar vein of bad choice, Quiz and Viz were acting as watchmen. With his glasses partially destroyed, Viz couldn't see further than a few feet with any accuracy and had access to none of his usual visual augments. Quiz, despite a genuine desire to be of use, had no idea what they were supposed to be looking out for, and wasn't about to reveal that by asking.
Viz was always, in some sense, bitterly miserable. There was, however, something about standing, half-blind, in unfamiliar, wet surroundings wearing a tattered uniform that made the snappish tension drag on his every nerve. Never one with much patience for error, his tissue-thin temper had stretched to breaking point, each frayed strand lashing his crew mates with vengeance when it snapped. The fact that he had been dragged awake several hours too early on Viz's abrasive command and folded into a small space had left Diz equally sour.
Not much consideration had gone to how Quiz might feel about the situation.
Finally, Diz sighed and unfolded himself from the confines of the car, blinking hard to dispel phantom cables from the backs of his eyelids; his face, as it so often was, was inscrutable, mask-like and shadowy in the half-light.
"Quiz, would you go fetch the boy?" He spoke softly, polite and gentle; it prickled at the back of Viz's neck.
It was pathetic, really, the immediacy with which Quiz brightened. Indeed, it made for a succinct summary of the differences between them all—Quiz heard a request to do something useful; Viz heard a dismissal so his lieutenant could speak to him alone.
Ignorant and happy to have been tangibly involved, Quiz vanished back up the front path and into the house, and Viz and Diz waited watchfully until the smaller alien was well out of sight. It was only once they had both determined he was gone that they started The Real Conversation.
"Do you think he understands the dangers we might be facing here?" Diz asked in a deliberate, neutral tone. With one hand, he continued to fiddle with the wires pulled out from under the dashboard, an idle, fretful gesture.
There was no question in Viz's mind about who 'he' referred to. This conversation was nothing new—just another visitation of a spectre which refused to leave them in peace, a twelve-year headache. A decade-long paranoia that one of them had been bound to voice eventually.
In a very muted way, Viz was surprised; usually it was him bringing up Quiz's potential for betrayal.
"He'd better. What is there to misunderstand at this point? He is dense, but I doubt he's so thick that he can't understand a life and death situation when it strikes."
Diz sniffed, slanted eyes narrow and mistrustful. "He's never had to deal with them as an adversary. The last time he faced the Enquiry, they parted as friends."
"Of the three of us, Quiz has the best understanding of the forces they'll use to capture us. Whatever partnership they had in the past was destroyed when he came with us. There is no way that he could be unaware of that." Agitation spasmed through his fingers, clenching his hands in to fists. "If he defects, I'll gut him."
"He won't," the lieutenant said, with a particular insistence. "He would never."
It was at this point that Viz started to wonder if he and Diz shared the same concerns at all. How long had passed since those days of knowing exactly what was on his second's mind? Once upon a time, the two had been cut from the same cloth, and Viz was not quite astute enough to recognise when that had all started to unravel...
"What are you so worried about, then?" He snapped, wishing he could shake the secrets out from behind that shadowy false smile.
"There'll be no mercy." Those dark, empty eyes bore in to him, mine shafts in to barren veins. "For any of us."
Mercy, in any form—lacking or otherwise—was the last thing Viz wanted to consider.
He liked the lines of the world to be neat and arrow-straight, everything tidily divided in to even columns like guidelines in a ledger. Recent events, however had very much shaken that understanding.
There had been no reason for Doctor Sundae to offer them aid, no reason at all beyond that foreign concept of forbearance. And it was obvious the woman didn't trust them; she stared at them with knife-point eyes and a mistrustful tension at the corner of her lips like a bunched fist, and her politeness was guarded and steely. Regardless, she had shown them all infinitely more grace than they were owed by this world they had threatened to annihilate and he didn't know what to do about it. Viz didn't like debts. He liked even less the inability to understand how he had incurred them.
They could have died. None of them could have made it out of the wreckage alone.
Uneasy with these thoughts, Viz mentally batted them away, feeling them feathery and squirming like fat moths against his mind. The motivations of Phil Eggtree himself were an uncomfortable enigma.
With as much dismissal as he could manage (an almost lethal amount) Viz directed his recalcitrant lieutenant back to his work, feigning distraction with something far down the fog flooded road.
"We're not dead yet, Diz."
With an uneasy air about him that said he had not said all he meant to, Diz returned to his work. Those unasked questions lingered in the air like interlopers looking through a window, intangible but intrusive, skittering across the mind's unconscious awareness of its surroundings. Viz fought the urge to snap at his pilot; questions, no matter how silent, would not buy their freedom, and he hadn't the time or patience to be playing cryptographer.
'You never were talkative... it's a pity your silences aren't more illustrative, old friend. Making me guess is disrespectful and unnecessary.'
In a series of drawn out clunks, complete with a hearty burst of steam, the motor coughed itself to life. Not, perhaps, in the fashion it's supposed to, but alive nonetheless—alive in the Frankensteinian way of the word. From within the shadows of the dashboard, dials began to glow an increasingly concerning green, every indicator light ablaze at once. Diz slid himself awkwardly from beneath the wheel and bowed mockingly to Viz. Both pretended not to notice the fact that he stumbled as he rose.
"Brilliant," Viz sneered at his lieutenant, determined not to offer any credit. "Now we have nothing to while we wait for Quiz."
"You mean I have nothing to do; how exactly did you think you were helping here?" Diz snipped. Ignoring Viz's renewed snarling, he peered at something behind the leader. "Anyway, it looks like you've spoken too soon—as usual. They're coming back now."
Indeed, the unlikely pair were headed back down the front path. Quiz was taking immense care to be quiet, his exaggerated movements comical, bordering ridiculous. He was not helped any by Phil, who had stepped out perfectly normally, the spitting image of calm. His air of cynical dispassion was admirably unaffected by the vestiges of sleep clinging about his eyes and the tension of a yawn lingering in his cheeks.
(For the span of a very brief second, Viz thought he saw a sliver of something metal slip between the folds of the boy's pocket. A blink to clear his vision—and it was gone. Between the fog and the way the rising sun glimmered in the fissures of his glasses, between the static of split wires and the flashes of his display attempting to reload, Viz was struggling to tell, from moment to moment, what was and wasn't real. The metallic flicker went unquestioned.)
By the light of dawn, which was swiftly brightening, Viz studied the young man who had hatched from the child they had kidnapped. He was tall enough to look in the eye now—those unsettling, complicated human eyes with their rings of colour like the bands of a geode. How strange it was to think that only few weeks ago the young man had been a child Viz was capable of picking up off the ground with one hand. No longer was Phil skinny, scrawny, and inconsequential, but Viz was still struggling to think of him as a lynch pin.
Everything about the situation unnerved him slightly, but that most of all—the fact that, after everything the three of them had survived, it had taken only one child to bring them crashing to their knees. And here he was, the source of their downfall, aged and unfamiliar, standing over them as they lay in their ashes.
'What is it that keeps you here? Valour? Cruelty? Curiosity? Some strange obligation? Do you think you're invulnerable? Do you think the things trying to kill us will show your meaninglessness mercy?
'What do you stand to gain here? Nothing—surely you must understand this wins you nothing?'
He said none of this. Much like Diz, Viz rarely actually spoke about the things on his mind. He held every thought close to his chest like a gambler with his fistful of cards, speculative and defensive.
"You're late," he said instead, as Quiz slotted back in to his customary place at his side. Unmoved, Phil stretched, languid and complacent, chest heaving around a suppressed yawn.
"Well, 'good morning' to you too Viz! How are you on this fine day? The birds are signing, the dewdrops are glistening, the—" His eyes fell on the car, on the wires snarled beneath the wheel, and he froze. "—Car is... broken. Yep. Car's broken. Great. Left you alone for five minutes. You do realise I have the keys?"
He held them out and, as if that was not enough proof, danced them about so they clattered irritatingly.
Viz ground his teeth. He could feel time grating against his skin like grains of sand rasping over each other as they passed through the throat of an hourglass. Every lost second was sent to slice away at the rope holding the sword above their heads aloft—he could see it.
"Enough." Even to him, the word sounded like a glass shard pulled from concrete. "We are wasting time that we don't have. Eggtree; you will take us directly to the facility, without delay. I've had enough nonsense for one day."
"Are you sure? 'Cause the day's only just started and—"
Something in Viz's jaw cracked. Phil finally fell silent.
"Get in the car."
"You got it."
Terrestrial geography having never been a strong suit, Viz was very quickly lost; with every jolting corner and sweeping roundabout, his comprehension of where he was in relation to the rest of the world fractured a little more. Several hours had passed and yet the journey seemed no closer to being over. The satellite-based navigational device attached to the dashboard relayed each direction with an indifferent cheer, sending them ever-further afield of landmarks and main roads with robotic efficiency. It was all too easy to imagine a nightmare version of their journey, where the voice never stopped its instructions, and the road never ended, and they drove pointlessly into oblivion until time finally ran out.
Very deliberately, Viz took a deep breath, then slapped Quiz's hand away from where it was nudging at his side.
He shifted his position for what had to be the millionth time. As before, it relieved none of his discomfort and served as a needless reminder of how uncomfortably close his crew mates sat either side. Due to their obviously inhuman appearances, Phil had suggested that the aliens take the passenger seats of the car, leaving the 'shotgun' unoccupied, which was almost an excellent idea... until one took into consideration the fact that Mrs Sundae's small car had been selected for single-occupancy convenience rather than capacity. Three adult-sized figures (two thin but rather tall, one short and round) with strange limb configurations Did Not Fit in the backseat space. Stuck in the middle seat, Viz had become more thoroughly acquainted with his companions' sharp elbows than he ever thought possible.
Never being people to neglect an opportunity to twist the (usually metaphorical) knife, the forced closeness had inspired a medley of tussles, jabs, and discreet shoves. Every corner taken too fast was an excuse to dig a little harder at someone's side, every emergency stop a cover for a slap or kick to the shin. Phil's poor driving skills meant that the back of the car was a place of almost constant violence—petty, childish, spiteful violence. This was the way of things for hours.
(Safe from all this in the front, Phil could only wonder how the aliens survived with each other on a day to day basis, let alone manage to run a criminal organisation. The rear-view mirror was filled with a multicolour collage of annoyed faces.)
With something best described as gay abandon, they whirled around a roundabout six times. Diz winced slightly, the expression barely perceptible as it flitted over the side of his face visible to Viz. He felt his lieutenant move, pressing a hand against his side, just below his left arm.
What had the crash done to the support structures in his sides? How badly were those cybernetics damaged? The Sundae woman had offered more aid than they had expected or deserved, but Viz still didn't feel entirely easy about someone else digging around in his teammates' injuries. She couldn't have known what she was looking at, let alone how to repair it. He would have to put them both through a full exam panel when they had once again secured their freedom.
For the time being though, in an act of courtesy he would never admit to, Viz shifted so his weight leant against Quiz rather than his lieutenant. He ignored the faint look of gratitude he received in return.
"On the way back," he hissed. "You're taking the middle seat."
"On the way back," Diz whispered back. "We will have the spaceship, and I will be too busy piloting to care what seat you take."
Neither mentioned the potential scenario where the three of them did not go back at all.
Another period of time stretched out with the warm unconcern of a cat on a windowsill and nothing changed in the car. The road ahead of them unspooled like a length of yarn unraveling endlessly from the ball of world. Other cars passed them in coloured blurs, whisked away on other journeys to other places—bound for homes, or holidays, or services far away. The motorway was a place of resolve and commitment and they, in their pointlessness, felt slightly misplaced. The rattle of the engine took on the drumming of impatiently tapping fingers and the sat-nav, silent at last, felt expectant.
Against all advice and good sense, Viz stared at the sun in apprehension.
"How much further?"
Phil laughed. Rather, Phil shouted 'HA!' at the top of his voice and punched the car's ceiling. There was a sense of something being crossed off an invisible list.
"I have been waiting for that! God, I knew it wouldn't be long before one of you hit me with 'are we there yet?' And I am delighted to tell you, if you keep asking, I will honour the timeless threat of turning this shit around."
Which wasn't an answer to the question. In fact, it wasn't really an answer to anything at all.
"... Well, are we there yet?" Asked Quiz, sounding a little curious and a little indignant, as though he personally were being held up by these circumstances.
"Has the car stopped? When the car stops, we're there." Momentarily taking his attention off the traffic, Phil toggled the rear view mirror about so that his reflection looked at them each in turn. "Sit quietly like good horrible children until then."
Viz lunged forwards, strangled by the seatbelt, and tilted the mirror so that he could glare at the boy.
"You have no idea where we are or where we're going, do you?"
"I do!" Phil exclaimed defensively, prodding the irritable alien back into place with the hand not occupied with steering. "We are... kind of, almost, sort of there. It's around here somewhere."
"Can you bear to be a little more specific?"
"... It's definitely in a field... somewhere..."
Quiz, the crew's resident navigator, gave a morose laugh.
"Wonderful."
Sundial shadows were drawn on the ground in towering lengths like obelisks. Daylight had turned the colour of honey, boiled thick with afternoon warmth. The sun was high in the sky, a golden blossom against milk-white clouds; Viz could have sworn he heard it laughing.
In the end, it turned out they needn't have worried so much.
Zone 5.1 was situated in the middle of nowhere, the neighbour of military training areas and industrial wastelands. It emerged from its surrounding airfield like a breaching submarine looking precisely as Viz remembered it—which is to say it appeared less like a high-tech research facility, and more like a warehouse that had been forcefully combined with whatever odd ends a person could find inside an electrical box. It looked like a power station made out of cardboard, a computer-generated 'boring building', a setting in a low-budget cartoon.
Therein lay the particular genius of the disguise; the last place one expects to find aliens is in the direction indicated to by a rabid looking man wearing a tinfoil hat and inside-out clothes, holding a cardboard sign that says 'THEY ARE AMONG US.' It was a ruse Viz was still quietly pleased with.
The car drew slowly to a halt in the shadow cast by the leviathan of metal and steel, where the warmth of the day had yet to permeate. Eager for escape, all three aliens attempted to exit one door at the same time, knotted together in a too-small space like silly string in a can.
This, as one can imagine, went badly.
Elsewhere (mere feet away), Phil leapt from the driver's seat and stared up at the imposing building and the jagged, dark scar it scored across the forget-me-not blue sky. Half-remembered, half-foreign, the facility made for an ugly and childish scene, a far cry from the sinister professionalism had been his lingering impression of the place for so long.
The few satellite images they had gleaned from the internet somehow hadn't prepared him for the reality of the place. It's sense of familiarity was haunting, like the face of a childhood acquaintance, or a photograph blotched featureless but still recognisable, and it was that element of remembrance that disquieted more than anything else. Even the cold hearkened back to the hitherto forgotten fact that it had been a brisk spring day that, all those long years ago, had seen them dragged across this asphalt in chains.
Long abandoned memories started to flicker in the depths of Phil's mind like minnow shadows.
There was a scar on the back of his neck. It began just to the left of his cervical spine and continued for two inches towards his jaw, the width of his pinkie finger, a dash of sunset pink like a bit of leftover sunburn. He hadn't thought about it for years, but it itched now. It was a distant, impersonal sort of prickle, like a fly walking up and down the seared senseless skin.
'Last time I was here, I was running for my life.'
There was nothing to soften the blow of that thought. Nor had there been any previous indication that it would bother him as much as it did. Like the beam of laser fire that scarred his neck, the memory had come from nothing and, though it didn't hurt, it left a sick streak of discomfort in its wake.
'This isn't how I remembered it. This wasn't how it was supposed to be.' He felt like he had come across a fragment of his childhood and it had somehow let him down.
Still, Phil was determined to see it through—a lifetime bad habit of never knowing when to quit wasn't something he was giving up just as life got interesting again. If looked at with a tilted head, the slightly sick sense of anticipation curdling his stomach reminded him of how he felt looking at his least favourite rollercoaster, The Throngler; Zach had once bet him he couldn't go on it fifteen times in a row and, while Phil had proved him wrong (and won all of the latter's soap), he had since avoided looking at the thing.
This, he reassured himself, was just like that—Zone 5.1 was a rollercoaster. If a rollercoaster were more like a haunted house... or an escape room. Where you and your friends almost died. After being abducted by malevolent beings from a hostile foreign world. Because you played truant that one time.
Just like that.
Balling up his determination and fixing his gaze on the way forwards with a laser focus usually reserved for sniper rifles, Phil began a resolute march towards the silver slash of the front doors—
And promptly found himself horizontal, having tripped over the tangle of aliens sprawled messily on the ground. Being credibly dramatic is a lot harder when your mouth is filled with gravel. In 'Top Ten Ways To Ruin A Mood' it featured at number seven, losing to 'Wet Shoes On Linoleum' by the narrowest of narrow margins.
'Alright,' Phil thought at the distant, daylight-veiled stars, 'laugh it up. Bet you'd look pretty funny if you fell too.'
With a little difficulty, he followed the tangle of limbs along an arm until he was raising his eyebrows at Quiz's faintly perturbed looking face.
"... All three of you failed to get out of the car? The thing that isn't even 'step one' on the To Do list because it's so overwhelmingly simple? You all ballsed that up?"
"All four of us, you mean," Quiz pointed out helpfully. "You are also on the floor."
"Yeah, but I didn't want to rule the world. There's no stakes in me being bad at things." Phil made an aborted attempt at rising, hands braced on things that protested and yelped. "C'mon, let's get this over with—this place skeeves me out, and imagining a future without your awful faces is the one thing keeping me going."
"Get off us then," Diz sneered from somewhere near the bottom of the pile. "You're not the company we'd choose to keep either."
"You literally kidnapped me and made me the centre of your whole, weird surveillance thing," Phil scolded, pushing himself upright courtesy of a foot dug in to Viz's chest. "Don't pretend you don't love me, you're embarrassing yourselves enough already."
Sneaking up on anything is a difficult business to master and, without their equipment, it was a skill the Vizion crew lacked. Grim and austere even in its destitute ugliness, the facility stared down at them as the little group crept its way up the front path. Despite the absolute emptiness of the place, Phil couldn't shake the sense of doing something slightly illicit that someone would materialise to be mad about at any moment.
The facility front doors were not, perhaps, any larger than the average set of double doors—the sort would Phil recognise from his school days. They were, however, cast in a forbiddingly solid-looking, white-silver metal and sealed with heavy electronic locks that looked as likely to open as the brick walls themselves. An innocuous keypad blinked idly on a panel set to the left.
"Ok." Phil began to inspect the setup. "Years of experience tell me that this thing probably wants a number. Do you guys still know it?" No response. "Any important dates it could be? I feel like a bunch of ones is always a good bet..."
He trailed off; the Vizion crew were glancing between themselves with faint smirks curling their lips like cat tails. Phil got the sneaking suspicion that he had been excluded from some monumentally unfunny joke, and he was quite sure that uncovering said joke would not be satisfying enough to warrant the dent to his pride. Still...
"Alright." With a sweeping gesture, he stepped back from the keypad. "You do it."
With that infuriatingly superior expression still welded on to his face, Viz stepped forwards. His fingers hovered over the keypad... then reached for the side of the panel and slid it in to the wall to reveal a shallow recess, home to a single red button with 'DOORS' written on it, presumably in case anyone ever forgot what it did.
Phil pressed his lips together to keep from smiling—he could always appreciate a gambit, no matter the mastermind. Didn't mean he had to tell them that.
"Expectation: subverted," Diz intoned smugly.
"You guys really think you're clever, huh?"
"We're still alive aren't we?"
"Not your strongest argument Diz, but sure. You are, technically, still alive."
Together, everyone pretending to everyone else they weren't nervous, they peered into the darkness. The corridor the doors revealed looked more like a horizontal lift shaft than anything designed for people to walk down. A light breeze, gritty with dust and reeking of cold oil, sighed from somewhere deep within those distant depths, accompanied by a host of abstract, mechanical wheezings. There were lights inset in to the ceiling, infirm, firefly points of luminescence, but only a few of them seemed to be working, leaving vast, languorous pools of shadow in the interim between each one. As they entered, these shadows peeled away the warmth and freshness of the day outside, and then the facility itself was clamping damply down upon them.
Through the narrow, unlit corridors they walked, their steps echoing in a harsh staccato no matter how carefully or delicately they placed their feet. Leery of the whole building, Phil lingered behind Viz, between Diz and Quiz, despite his offer to lead—anything wanting to get a piece of him would have to fight an alien first.
'Unless they come at us from behind...' Vast nails scraped down the chalkboard night sky as the doors wrenched themselves closed behind them. 'No turning back now. At least you guys are the scariest things down here...'
As it happened, this wasn't true.
During a section of corridor lit only at its beginning and end, Phil bumped in to something in the dark. It felt like solid flesh, a cold slab of meat from a butcher's fridge stuffed in to a blazer. Phil reeled, throat clenching around the world's most undignified scream, a sound partway between a sneeze and the noise a cat makes if you tread on its tail. He ricocheted off all three increasingly startled aliens until five different hands seized him and held him steady.
"What the hell is that?" Phil demanded. "Who's got a light?"
"If any of us had a torch, do you not think we'd already be using it?"
"Not a torch, here—hold on, I've got—" Wriggling his fingers to the bottom of his jeans pocket, he dredged up a lighter that had only been through the wash twice and came aflame after a few shaky clicks. "Here, now we can—holy dog bollocks in a tin can, why are you here?!"
In the middle of the corridor stood one of the guard-agents, perfectly upright and stationary as a mountain.
If it weren't for the fact that he could see the man's chest rise and fall, Phil would have assumed the figure to be a mannequin, some sick doll stationed here to spook him. The iconic movie spy aviators covered his eyes, but did so so completely that Phil's burgeoning superstition started to whisper that there was no eyes beneath them—just smooth, unmarked skin. All the signifiers of humanity and thought that should have been present in a face were hauntingly gone.
"What's up with this guy?" Phil whispered, hoping that speaking would inspire some twitch or flicker in the agent's aura of consciousness. It didn't, and the empty unease deepened.
A buzzing noise fizzed from somewhere within Viz's glasses—not an intentional or purposeful buzz, but the sound of some electrical malfunction under stress. Biometric scanners, Phil assumed; one of the many functions Viz's ruined glasses used to enjoy.
"No neural activity... and yet, he lives."
"Not really how that works. Care to explain?" His nerves felt both hot and shivery under his skin, and his grip on his iron nonchalance was growing slippery. Viz paused before answering, tilting his head this way and that as though there were something beyond the physical he would see if he only found the right angle. When he spoke, his words came slow and careful.
"When this facility was in use, we couldn't have anyone from Earth knowing we were aliens. To that end, we devised something that would keep our subjects from noticing any... physical deviations."
"Aww man, did the bright red skin, lack of nose or ears, and four arms give the game away?"
"The synaptic dampening tools turned out to be extremely effective," Viz continued, ignoring Phil. "Nobody ever noticed us or suspected anything out of the ordinary but there were side effects... we miscalculated. None of us considered long term effects or understood enough about your species to know what would constitute irreparable damage. We are... infinitely more durable than you.
"Sustained exposure to dampening over a long period caused damage to the memory centres of the human brain, disrupting the connective abilities of the neurones—it killed the brain's ability to form memories and structure thoughts. The greater the period of contact, the more accelerated the deterioration. By the time we realised what the problem was, the guard-agents were resorting to writing notes for themselves—and forgetting what they had meant to write by the time they had found a pen."
Phil thought of boards of blank post-it notes, a room of boxes labelled 'empty', muttered passwords and TV screens broadcasting door codes; he said nothing.
"That is why," Viz concluded, face unaccountably grave. "By the time you arrived, the facility was no longer operating under us. Or, at least, not under me. We had abandoned it years ago."
"So wait, how much brain damage do I have?" Phil asked, feeling a distant, building dread in his blood, like some undiagnosed infection building into sepsis. He wondered, in a horror like awe, that he might have spent the last seven years letting his mind turn to mash potatoes unawares. "Am I going to be okay after this? Am I okay now, during this? Please tell me I'm not gonna end up like this guy. I have no jokes about that, I'm dead serious."
The glasses' glare turned on him, head still tilted at that curious angle.
"We stole and studied corpses to get a better understanding of human neural-cerebral anatomy. The Dreamscape Experiment was actually the fourth and safest iteration of our plans for Earth." The absolute severity was as discomforting as the announcement that they had accidentally made collapse-your-brain rays and turned a whole workforce to soup with. "I know you have no reason to trust me, but at least believe that there was no value in hurting you directly. We needed you alive and healthy, and we took every precaution to ensure those conditions."
This was such a poor attempt at reassurance that Phil almost wanted to remain anxious in protest but, against his will, his heart began to quiet its pace and his blood stilled.
"Thank you? But also you are horrifying at comforting people, please never do it again." Discreet in the darkness, he attempted to wipe the sweat of his palms off on his shirtfront, only to find it already damp and warm where it lay against his chest. "Is there anything we can do for him?"
"It wasn't this bad when I was here last." Diz murmured, sounding a great deal calmer about that experience than he had the last time it was brought up. "They reacted to verbal and physical stimuli. They followed orders to bring down the ship and lock us up. This one's completely catatonic."
As if to demonstrate, he reached an arm out and snapped long fingers before the agent's face. There was no response; he was as implacable as a brick wall and a great deal more eerie. One expects a brick wall to do nothing, to think nothing; to impose those characteristics on a person was ghastly.
"So that means..."
"That means someone or something has been keeping this place running."
Phil swallowed; the agent had a plasma gun clasped in unmoving fingers that looked like clay.
Viz paused... then removed the weapon from the limp grasp of those not-dead hands. He checked it was loaded and calmly clipped it to his side.
Throat suddenly thick and uncooperative, Phil took a breath and willed the jitters out of his fingers. The taking of the gun seemed to mark an inflection point in the tone of their investigation, and there was to be no reversal or return to more placid spirits.
"Come on." Gently—timidly—Quiz clasped a hand around Phil's elbow and pulled him along. "The agents can't hurt us without orders. It's best if we just let them be."
They proceeded with more caution after that. At first, Phil tried to count how many men and women they passed in the dark—'one, two, three... five... ten... twenty'—but, as the number climbed, the endeavour grew oppressive. He settled candidly for 'too damn many'. That seemed a reasonable estimate.
Looking at them turned his stomach. It wasn't, he realised, just their stillness, their lack of anything either aware or human, but what they had once represented. In the reflection of their glasses, he didn't see someone who was almost an adult; the figure melted and blurred and shrunk, reverting to a bald boy in an oversized hoodie running for his life.
None of them could have said with any degree of precision how long they spent wandering the unmapped guts of their old enterprise, that labyrinth of veins long bled dry and left to rot. Each tunnel seemed to lilt gently downwards, ultimately flowing back towards the elevator shaft at the facility's heart. The deeper they went the colder it became and the distance between each functioning beacon of light grew longer. Impelled by the sensory deprivation, Phil was quietly convinced that that they had reached the limits of reality, that the tangible world would vanish completely if they ventured any deeper into blackness that felt increasingly like the fringes of someone else's coma.
Such was the quality of the darkness that the slightest change up ahead was registered instantly. Such was the extent of the delusions blindness and cold cast on the mind that the four argued about what that change actually was until they were mere feet away from its source.
There was a flickery distortion in the corridor, a fluttery moth's-wing of light that hadn't quite decided if it wanted to exist yet. The source was what could have been a half-open door, but could also have been any variation of nameless, rectangular structures—there wasn't enough definition to say. It seemed to fade with nearness, as though they had ruined the trick of it's existence by approaching, and it was sulking itself into shadow.
"Should we go in?" Phil whispered. No response. "Guys?"
After a longer-than-usual span of silence, Phil glanced behind him to where a peculiarity of architecture allowed a corner to hoard a collection of particularly dense shadow, three technicolor faces sticking, disembodied, out of the gloom. They were all preoccupied with something glitchy in Diz hand.
"A minute, Eggtree." The green alien fiddled with a dial, face squeezed with disquiet. "This signal is... strange."
Whatever he'd done made the distortion louder, a noiseless noise that twanged the blood like a guitar string in molasses; Phil frowned dubiously at the contraption.
"What's wrong with it?"
"Can't tell—there's too much interference."
At this juncture, Phil could have remained behind with the aliens, huddled in to the dark recess of a corner and, while things likely still would not have gone well, they might have gone better—which is a crucial distinction in situations where one's life is on the line. But the scrambled signal was worming its way under his skin in its inaudible torn-atom wail, and it was making some obscure region of his throat and tongue ache in a way it really shouldn't. Mentally, Phil flipped a coin and decided pressing forwards was preferable to The Racket of whatever Diz was doing.
What harm could come from listening at keyholes and spying through cracks in a door? He'd faced worse.
The room inside the strobing rectangle was no better defined than the door itself. It could have been any shape known to man, have any dimension imaginable. All at once, it was a broom cupboard and a ballroom. Only one thing was certain; it was entirely colourless, a monochrome nightmare of bright strobe. The centre of the room was dominated by a circular table, at which a large number of figures crowded, and the walls were host to five large monitor screens, held aloft by diode-corded wires. Each was playing a different scrap of footage—a few ship-side rooms Phil recognised and far more that he didn't; open expanses of space and stars; pieces of the past all documented with date stamps. Fascinated, he leaned in for a closer look.
(Phil took very little notice of the people, struck, as he was, by the film playing out on one of the large monitors lining the far wall. This marks another point at which his circumstances could have been improved but weren't.)
"Guys, come here—Viz is about to get his head kicked in."
Unsurprisingly, this went ignored. Crowded around the mangle of a radio, the three didn't even look up.
"We have more important things to think about, child."
"Hey, this was a big moment for me, alright? I thought I killed a guy. I thought I actually killed a man right after I got done pretend killing my friends in a hyper-realistic simulation that was my life for six years. That's a milestone very few accomplish."
Alone, he widened the gap in the door and peered intently through. Projected on to the largest monitor was footage from the last few minutes before Viz's 'defeat', as seen from the bridge by some desiccated security system. Phil could see himself—'couldn't be be me, I was never that small'—a scrawny kid in an oversized hoodie, working laboriously to turn a ship's wheel that was twice his size. On his child-self's face, what little of it was visible, there was a triumph that made the elder Phil feel queasy given everything that happened after.
'I thought there would be a button or something. Everything else had a button.'
It would have been a lie to say he had expected the laser to fire of its own accord—which wasn't to say he regretted how the affair went down, but is to illustrate that it was something of a shock. Maybe Viz had deserved to die, but that didn't mean Phil deserved to live with the fact that he'd killed someone.
The wiring of the gun flashed white in preparation to fire, and then the camera view changed; they were looking, now, in to a room Phil had never seen before, one with walls made of wires, full of monitor screens which cast everything in an aqua blue that leeched away colour. A label at the bottom of the recording listed it as 'CBTS–6455: CENTRAL CONTROL'. Quiz was seated at the main console, presiding over four different computers, Diz leaning over his shoulder to watch. There was a degree of companionability to the scene that had been thoroughly absent in every interaction between them Phil had actually witnessed.
"I told you he'd figure it out!" Crowed a smiling Quiz. "You and Viz owe me—wait."
And then the weapon fired.
Static doused the footage like a wave washing over sands as strange radiations sleeted through the fabric of the Vizion battleship in the wake of the icy discharge, the recording eaten up by pixels and memories of snowstorms. When the room returned to the big screen, it's two occupants had thrown themselves into a very restrained sort of chaos. Quiz was tapping hurriedly at the many keyboards scattered over the desk, all four hands a blur. Stood beside him, Diz was holding something that bore a strong resemblance to their remotes. Both wore identical expressions of shocked horror; in Diz's, there was a shadow of belligerent disbelief, as though he could force everything to undo itself through sheer will.
"Viz, are you alright? What's happening?"
There was a sound like a world of china plates smashing, and then the radio in Diz's hand went dead. The two stood in the control room went still with appalled surprise, like esteemed guests who have just had a door slammed in their faces.
"Was that the plan?!" Quiz whisper-shrieked, four fists clasped to his face in horror. "Was that how this was supposed to go?!"
"Quiz, please be quiet." With a distracted, icy firmness, Diz leant over Quiz and accessed the ship's radio systems. "Viz, respond. Do you copy?"
The console transmitter spat mindless static. Diz licked his lips.
"Open visual link to Vessel V8-θ 998-111. Lower system communication barrier. Viz, report status. Do you copy?"
The static of the speakers spread to one of the overhead monitors like gangrene. The image was small and grainy, but Phil was certain the green alien was shaking.
"Move, Quiz. I want to see..." Diz's voice hadn't changed from its level, calm, unnervingly polite tone (Phil was beginning to get the impression that Diz's voice didn't change until he started screaming) but it was a brittle sort of smooth. The kind that might break in to all manner of jagged edges at the most unexpected provocation. Quiz darted away from the keyboards and hovered over the lieutenant's shoulder, wringing both pairs of hands in a way which made them seem boneless.
"This wasn't the plan," he whispered, desperation painful in his tone. "This can't have been the plan."
Diz accessed a different mainframe on the main screen, input a code, and scrolled down several pages of heavily encrypted information. Hastily, he flitted through a number of links, going from page to inscrutable page until he found what he was looking for—precisely what that was, Phil didn't fully understand. A number of graphs dominated the screen within a screen, all alive with motion, some making jagged, up-down patterns of speeding lines, others cycling in neat curves—'alive' seemed to be the operative term. Phil could only just read the labels on the eight-bit display; Viz, Diz, Quiz, Nitwit, Oswald.
"His neural interface for the implant is still running," Diz murmured, more to himself than Quiz. He pulled back from the screen and pressed his fingers into his temples, eyes shut tight. Phil could feel the angry relief of the scene.
"Does that mean he's okay?"
"It means he's alive."
Unseen by Diz, just behind his back, Quiz raised a hand as though to clasp the taller alien's shoulder, hesitated, and lowered it back to his side without making contact. Now that the fear was passed, the concerns of the material world were leaning back in, the pressure of everything that had, until that point, been going so well.
"I need to return the subjects to Earth. They can't be left alone on the bridge..." It was obvious to Phil that Diz did not want to leave the situation, and it was deeply odd to consider the green alien as someone who could be worried. "Wait here for a signal while I'm gone—Viz will need someone to activate the transit beam."
"Sure Diz." Quiz mumbled, eyes still fixed on the dancing lines of the monitor. "Sure..."
'Ahhh. Now that is the face of someone who has just decided he's never going blindly with another nonsense plan. Good job guys—you freaked him out enough he committed a small atrocity. Have fun getting your mind reamed to bits, Diz—you earned it!'
Phil shivered as Recording Diz turned towards the door leading to the main cabin. Perfectly captured by the dithery security system was the too-precise, serene smile Diz had been wearing when he 'congratulated' them for their victory. Only now, watching the expression slip in to place like a hand in to a well-worn glove, did he realise how much of a mask it was. It smoothed away any concern or contrary emotion, a smile hovering beneath two cold, dead eyes like a crescent moon beneath twin black holes.
"Remind me to give him hell for throwing me through the door like that."
With that, Diz stepped through to the cabin and there the video paused. One might have expected the watchers stood about the room to mutter conspiratorially, to make notes, or otherwise react to their study. Instead, there was an awkward pause, as though someone had been anticipated to say something, before—seconds later—the video feed resumed. Nobody had moved. Nobody had spoken. But something had taken place, Phil was almost certain. He could feel the fizz on conversation in the air, the lemonade canopy of an excitable crowded room, despite the silence and stillness.
This was the point at which he actually inspected the newcomers: bald; large, black eyes without sclera or iris; humanoid but not quite the right proportions to be human; six long, slender limbs—two legs, four arms; grey uniforms; a disc-like medallion in the centre of the forehead, between where the eyebrows should be; snakelike slits for noses; apparent absence of ears...
"Hey, the new weirdos look like you lot—is this the rest of your unit or something? Guys?" When his whispering failed to gain to draw a response, he didn't think much of it—the aliens had, after all, proven to be proficient at ignoring him.
Then Phil turned around. And, as he was blinking blackness from the back of his eyes, he saw, in the corridor beyond, something that turned his every nerve to ice, his skin to something wet and crawling. He looked to the aliens themselves and found himself facing three pantomime masks of pure terror.
That was when he realised and, in that single second, that flashbulb burst of complete comprehension, Phil understood everything—never before had understanding been so dreadful. He felt like the diver who, with utmost clarity, realises that they must exhale their last breath at a moment fast approaching, or the man crossing the street who looks up just in time to register the closeness of the car and understand the inadequacy of the human body to get away in time.
Too late, Phil understood what had happened to Diz's radio.
'So... who's after you?'
'Classified.'
'We've been here too long already.'
Pieces, previously disconnected, fell perfectly in to place in the world's worst jigsaw puzzle. For reasons he was unable to specify with the matter brought to light, Phil had assumed the pursuing aliens would be a different type of alien—vigilantes angered over their planet's destruction, or a dedicated sherif from half-destroyed world. He had never internally made the steps to connect the trio with a race and people of their own; the three of them were isolated figures, their own little sect without allies, or a species, or a home world to go back to...
But humans hunted humans—why should things be any different in space?
Here they were, those pursuers, with everything Vizion had cultivated at their disposal.
Phil's hand felt too heavy when he raised it; it caught against the empty air as though it were honey, and he could feel the swirls of breeze against his cheek more keenly than the floor beneath his feet. Trapped in that moment of knowing his own death lurked nearby, it seemed to Phil that the world may not have existed—that he may not have existed—save for that fragile, human hand waving like a white flag.
In the corridor stood fifty guard-agents, massed in ranks amid the dense shadow. They did not wave back. Every blank, bespectacled face was lit ghoulishly from below by the lime-green glow of their plasma guns, which were directed at the intruders' chests.
He'd had dreams like this, he realised. Not ones he remembered after waking, but dreams nonetheless. Dreams of those anonymous metal halls burrowing ever-deeper in to the Earth, pursued by unsmiling faces and the static zap of laser fire—sometimes alone, sometimes joined by his friends and classmates, who would flee and fall at his side...
The burn at the base of his neck itched.
(Those imaginary scenes never really contained the aliens. Not until the ones where he looked up to where the roof of the tunnel was supposed to be—to where gaping holes in the ceiling opened their mouths to a sky punctured with a million stars like light refracting off of camera lenses. And there the three were, made massive in unreality, watching him. Their keen eyes and laughter followed him—followed all the little rats—as they ran through the maze of their devising.)
(It was strange to have them here now. Strange how reassured he was by the sense of them, solid and hostile and horrified, at his back.)
A sheepish laugh bubbled unwillingly from some vestigial region of Phil's throat, a strained noise that sounded like a sarcastic sob.
"Is it too late to say 'wrong room'?"
There was the sound of a gun being cocked and all hell broke loose in that claustrophobic, subterranean corridor, and hell was neon, and metal-scented, and it burned.
