Brian Evenson - Dead Space - Martyr

He looked in. Harmon was right — the hall looked fine, nothing there. There, to the side, were the two lab doors. He would just move forward as quietly as possible, past them, and then he would be safe.

He eased into the new hall, moving slowly, squishing sounds coming from his shoes from the muck in the other room. He could hear movement behind the first door. He held his breath. And then he was past it, almost to the second door. He could hear a sound from behind that as well, a crackling sound and then a low, long whine. He hurried his step a little, was soon past that as well.

He’d already reached the door at the end when one of the doors opened. He didn’t look back to see which one it was, just pressed his card against the scanner and prayed the door would open soon enough.

The low whine came again, louder this time, closer. The door began to slide open and he rushed through it and into the final hall, casting a glance back to see the three-headed spiderlike creature, just standing there near the end of the hall, watching him. It was different from the other one. Its back, he saw, was covered with spikes, which as he watched began to stiffen and stand up. One spat off its back and shot toward him, embedding itself in the wall next to his face. All three of the creature’s upside-down heads hissed in unison, but it didn’t move forward. And then the door between him and it slid shut.

He reached the door at the end of the hall and engaged the comlink.

“Who is it?” came Harmon’s voice.

“Who the hell do you think it is?” said Altman.

“Altman?” he said. “How can I be sure it’s you?”

“Come on, Harmon. Open up.”

“No,” he said. “You have to tell me something that nobody but you, nobody but the real you, would know about me.”

What, was he crazy? “I don’t know you that well, Harmon. I don’t have anything to tell.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I can’t open it,” and cut the feed.

Altman reengaged the link. When Harmon picked it up, he said, “Don’t disconnect. Turn on the vid feed and you’ll see it’s me.”

Harmon did. Altman saw his worried face squinting, peering at him. One hand was clutching something at the end of a necklace.

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “A vid can be faked.”

“You’re paranoid,” said Altman, and then realized that yes, that was exactly what he was. The Marker was making him that way. But, he remembered, Harmon was also a believer.

“Look,” Altman said quickly, “you were the one who told me that the creatures can’t come close to the Marker, right? If that’s true, I must not be one of them. If I was one of them, I wouldn’t be able to get this close. The Marker will protect you if you believe in it. In the name of the Marker, open the door.”

Harmon gave him a long, solemn look that Altman couldn’t interpret; then he reached out and pressed a button ending the vid transmission. A moment later the door opened. Altman walked in slowly, his hands up.

“Ah, it is you,” Harmon said. “Marker be praised.”

“I knew you were coming,” said Harmon. “I just knew.” He was, Altman noted, sweating profusely. His responses were disconnected, his voice zigzagging back and forth between being affectless and flat and a panic-stricken roar. He was clearly not in his right mind.

“Actually, I called you and told you I was coming,” said Altman.

“No!” Harmon said, his voice rising. “You didn’t tell me! I knew!”

“Calm down,” said Altman. “How do you know I’m the one?”

“You’re the only one who has come,” said Harmon, speaking with a calm simplicity. “It has to be you because you’re the only one. Everyone else is dead.”

Altman slowly nodded. He might be able to play Harmon’s belief in the Marker to his advantage, he realized. He wanted Harmon to believe whatever he had to believe to allow Altman to do what he needed to do.

“I came here,” said Harmon. “This is the first place that I came and then, when I saw that they couldn’t come near me, I understood why. The Marker wanted me here. I used to mistrust the Marker, but I was wrong. The Marker is protecting me. The Marker loves me.”

“And me,” said Altman.

“And you,” Harmon agreed. He reached out and took Altman’s arm. His hand was feverish, burning hot. “Do you believe?” he asked.

Altman shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Why not.”

“And have you understood my message?” he asked. He looked at Altman expectantly, clearly waiting.

“Message received,” Altman finally said.

Harmon smiled.

“I asked you to gather some information,” said Altman. “Do you have it?”

Harmon gestured to a holoscreen.

There was a series of holofiles, some of which Altman had seen and some that he had not. There were vid images of the interior of the first bathyscaphe, taken after the bathyscaphe had been brought up. He had seen bits of it before, first in the intercepted vid from Hennesey and then later, from the outside, through the window. As the camera taking the images scanned slowly, he recognized the scrawlings in blood as symbols from the Marker. But, he also realized, they were not in the same order or sequence as they appeared on the Marker. What he’d seen before as a symptom of madness now actually struck him as rudimentary calculations and seemed to contain a glimmer of sense.

In addition, there were analyses of the Marker ’s structure and density, hundreds of dissections of its transmissions, speculations, unproven theories. There was information about the different genetic codes that Showalter and Guthe had read into the signal and the Marker. There were, in the end, more files than he could read — even more files than he could skim. Thousands and thousands of pages and images and hours and hours of vids. What was important and what wasn’t? What was he going to do? How was he to start?

Harmon was crouched on the deck beside his chair, staring at the Marker. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” asked Harmon.

“No,” said Altman.

“It’s good,” said Harmon. “It loves us, I can tell. I touched it and when I touched it, I felt its love.”

“You felt something?” said Altman.

“I felt its love!” insisted Harmon, shouting now, apoplectic. “It loves us! Touch it and you’ll see!”

Altman shook his head. “Touch it! Touch it!” Harmon was still screaming. And so Altman, not knowing how else to calm him, stood up, walked across the chamber, and did.

It was not love he felt, but something different, something that was not a feeling at all. At first it was as if he was experiencing all the hallucinations he had had at once, as if he was experiencing all the experiences any of the others had had, all laid over one another. Most of it interfered with itself, created a kind of blinding static that blotted itself out, but beyond that, and in spite of it, he could see something he hadn’t seen before. He could see that the hallucinations were not a function of the Marker but of something else that stood in opposition to it, of something that was ingrained in his own brain. The hallucinations had been trying to protect them, but they had failed: the process had begun. Now all he could do was try to satisfy the Marker enough that the process would stop but not do enough to lead to full-fledged Convergence.

And then, suddenly, something cleared and he could see past the hallucinations to glimpse the Marker itself. It was as if it were changing the structure of his brain, reworking connections, rewiring circuits, to make him understand. Suddenly he felt he could see the structure of the Marker from the inside, and in a way that gave him a complex appreciation of it. It filled his head and set it aflame, and then it poured out through the cracks in his skull and took him with it.