Infernal

“There’s someone in there!”

Richard dropped his gaze to the hundreds of switches and dials on the boards in front of him, frantically searching for some way, any way to get into that room. The man strapped into the chair was in agony, his arms and legs rigid against the restraints that bound him. His head was thrown back, jaw agape, lips peeled back in a rictus grin so severe that the flesh at the corners of his mouth had ripped open and spilled blood down his cheeks and across his chin. Richard could see muscles corded with strain and bulging veins in the man’s throat, fists and forearms.

Richard located a covered button marked Emergency Airlock Release, flipped up the cover and was about to depress the button beneath when Sophia grabbed his wrist.

“You can’t help him!”

Richard looked at her as if she were crazy. The man was trapped and in pain. Another victim of BanaTech’s insatiable lust for power. He had to help him. Nothing could be more important. He shook free of her restraining hand and reached for the release button again.

“Richard!” Sophia screamed. “Stop!”

It was as if she’d slapped him. He stayed his hand and looked at her. Really looked at her for the first time since entering the room. Her eyes were wide, desperate. Terrified.

“If you release that lock,” Sophia said, “the time rift could spread unchecked and we’d die or be trapped here forever.”

“What are you talking about?” Richard moved his hand away from the button and Sophia closed the cover on it.

“That’s Michael Manus in there,” Sophia said, a look of great sadness on her face. “And he is…was a friend of mine. He’s stuck in a time rift that formed when they tried to create an artificial Rip. He’s been there for over fifteen years.”

Richard looked back to the man in the room, still fighting the restraints binding him, still silently screaming out in endless torment.

“Jesus,” he said.

“When the focal point formed,” Sophia said softly, “at the precise moment Michael was pulled in, every Michael Manus Mirror on every Earth we’ve studied died. Each and every one of them suffered a severe cerebral aneurysm.”

Richard was silent for a moment, letting the vastness of what Sophia had told him sink in. Every version. On every Earth. Millions, possibly billions of lives wiped out in an instant.

“Can the Focal Point Generator be shut down?” he asked.

“They tried,” Sophia answered. “They cut power to the ZeVatron. To the inducer coils and other machinery you see arrayed in there. There was no effect. Once in place, the field is self-sustaining. He’s just stuck in there. Forever.”

A thought crossed Richard’s mind, horrible yet unavoidable.

“They should have killed him then.”

Sophia barked a bitter laugh.

“They tried that too. Nothing outside the field seems to affect anything inside it. And once you’re inside it, you’re stuck. That whitish grey stuff you see floating around in there? There are no air currents or eddies in there. That stuff has been drifting around in the same endless pattern since it was pulled into the focal point fifteen years ago.

Richard leaned closer to the window, squinting at the substance he’d at first mistaken for snow. “What is it?”

Sophia sighed. “There were nine techs in that room when they powered on the FPG. They were all supposed to be safe from the effects of the focal point. And they were, until the field began behaving outside the parameters of what had been predicted. When shutting it down failed, Jefferson refused to open the chamber to let the techs out. What you’re seeing is the remains of those nine people. Jefferson burned the room and everyone in it.”

“This focal point,” Richard said as they made their way back up the main corridor to the elevators. “You said it’s spreading. How?”

His curiosity about the Focal Point Generator had not fully been sated but he’d already seen far more than he wanted to here. With the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing that could be done for Michael Manus he only wanted to get back to level three and retrieve his duffel before heading to the kitchen for foodstuffs. Then they would explore the armory in hopes of re-arming before finding a way off this awful base.

“The walls of the generator room,” Sophia said, “are made up of twenty inches of stainless steel and ten inches of porcelain embedded with layers of copper mesh at two inch intervals. A Faraday cage of sorts. You’re familiar with Faraday cages?”

“An enclosure formed by conducting material that blocks incoming electrical fields,” Richard said, nodding. “They block radio waves, cell phone signals, just about any external electromagnetic radiation.”

“Correct,” Sophia said. “What they cannot block is static and slowly varying electromagnetic fields like those generated by the rotation of the Earth. Or those of The Source.”

“The Source?” Richard said.

“It’s what we call the energy field that powers the Rips, our RLP’s, the QC’s… just about every instrument BanaTech has ever developed. We can’t define it. Don’t know where it comes from or even exactly what it is. All we know is that it’s there, everywhere, flowing through everything, animate or inanimate. Even the empty depths of space. Dr. Bana found a way to tap into it, to focus it and use it. It’s the foundation for all BanaTech technology.”

As they reached the elevator, Richard stretched his arm out towards the UP button and then jerked it back as a shadowy hand emerged from the stuttering light and pushed the button. Though the door in front of them remained closed, they heard a faint ding followed by the rumble of elevator doors opening. Richard shivered as an indistinct figure passed them before disappearing through the still closed doors. He looked at Sophia and they exchanged a did you see that? look.

“Anyway,” Sophia continued nervously as Richard pushed the button in the present, “the generator room is like a Faraday cage in reverse. It was designed to keep electromagnetic fields from leaking out instead of in. But it can’t block the EM field generated by The Source, and the rift is slowly leaking out into the present.”

A chime sounded and they boarded the elevator. There were no apparitions here and, as the car rose, the unpleasant sensation of something being wrong that Richard had felt since he’d stepped onto level six began to fade.

“BanaTech,” Sophia continued, “has monitored the focal point from the home world for over a decade. It’s growing. The very edges of it have spilled out onto level six causing the phantoms and strange electrical disturbances you experienced. In time it will encompass the entire base, the continent, and then the world. Eventually, though no one can guess how long it will be, the entire solar system will be overtaken. Then the Universe as a whole.”

Richard tried to imagine an entire Universe where time had no meaning. Forward, backward, nil—all subject to the various eddies of electromagnetic radiation surging throughout the cosmos. Black holes first sucking up, and then spewing planets and galaxies back out. Ancient planets growing young and then being pulled back into the galactic jets that had formed them. Solar systems where planets didn’t revolve around their suns, meteors and comets didn’t crash into or pass by planets, all still and frozen in temporal stasis. He couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the concept.

“You don’t fuck with the infinite,” Richard muttered.

“What’s that?” Sophia said.

“Something I read in a book,” Richard said. “Stephen King, I think.”

“I don’t read fiction,” Sophia said. “Reality is disturbing enough.”

“So what’s the point of all this?” Richard asked as they arrived on level three and the doors opened onto the living quarters. “Why build the generator in the first place?”

Richard, his attention on Sophia and the anticipated answer to his question, did not see the shape outside the elevator as he began to exit the carriage. He let out a bark of surprise as Sophia roughly pulled him back inside.

“It’s spreading,” she hissed, flattening herself against the back wall of the car.

Richard looked out into the hall and a thrill ran up his spine and across his skull, as if the hair there had been ruffled by a breeze.

There was a spider in the hall. Its head was the size of a beach ball, its abdomen three times that. Legs the thickness of Richard’s wrist and as long as his body scraped the floor and wall opposite the elevator as the spider busily worked at a spot near the ceiling. Chips fell from ceiling tiles as a spinneret the size of the faucet in Richard’s kitchen ticked against the floor.

“Fiddleback,” Richard whispered, noting the violin shaped marking on the dorsal side of the spider’s cephalothorax.

Sophia dug her fingers into Richard’s arm as the spider turned whip fast to face them. Richard shrank back. The ceiling tile the spider had been working on fell to the floor with a flumph. Richard saw himself reflected in eight black orbs as the spider reared back, planting its legs for attack, and hissed at them like an angry cat. It launched itself forward.

Then ceased to exist as its head crossed the threshold of the elevator.

There was no sound. No pop. No thunder. No slow fade as there had been with the phantoms on level six. The spider had been there, as real and solid as Richard and Sophia—and now it was gone.

Richard stood, pulling Sophia up with him. Without realizing it he had crouched down at the back of the elevator, tucking himself into a near fetal position and making as small a target of himself as possible. Sophia had done likewise, clutching his arm to her chest in absolute terror. He’d have bruises in the shape of her fingers for a week.

When his heart stopped booming in his ears and his blood pressure returned to a more or less normal level, he took several deep, cleansing breaths and looked outside the elevator.

“I think it’s safe now,” he said.

Sophia, nearly hyperventilating at the appearance of an arachnid the size of a golf cart, trembled visibly, her legs weak and unsteady.

“How can you be sure?” she asked. “Those things could be everywhere.”

“Mmm. I don’t think so,” Richard said, pointing out into the corridor. “Look.”

Sophia looked where he indicated. The ceiling tiles and far wall were unmarked. No crumbs or larger pieces littered the floor.

“Whatever time that thing came from,” Richard said, “it must have gone back there. There’s no evidence out there that it was ever here.”

“Then let’s get our things,” Sophia said, “and get the hell off this level.”

Richard and Sophia made their way to the living quarters, nervously scanning the corridor ahead and behind for signs of more untold horrors,

Time, Richard thought as they crept along, is an artificial construct of the basal ganglia at the base of the human brain; useful for cataloging events that take place in that person’s life. It’s the mind’s way of telling a chronological story. Events can conceivably occur in any order. Forward. Backward. Simultaneously, or not at all. Hence: Time does not exist.

“That spider sure existed, though,” he muttered aloud.

“What?” Sophia startled, looking in all directions at the mention of a spider.

“Never mind,” Richard said as he entered the adjoining rooms they had shared and retrieved his duffel. “Just thinking out loud.”

“You might want to think faster,” Sophia said from the doorway, a nervous edge in her voice. “Our little trip down to level six must have set something in motion. “We’ve got more company out here.”

Richard slung the duffel over his shoulder and poked his head out into the corridor. Sophia had backed up against the opposite wall. Her gaze was fixed on a diaphanous figure moving towards her. It was no spider, but just what it was, Richard couldn’t say.

It was a wild conglomeration of bird and beast taller than the corridor, its head covered in a great plume of feathers that reached up to and passed through the ceiling. Two legs covered in large brown spots continued up the torso where they disappeared under what appeared to be some ornate, feathered material. Two arms emerged from a great bulk of feathers that covered both shoulders and descended down the back like a cloak. The left arm faded out of existence just below the elbow while the right ended in a hand that clutched what looked like a staff topped off the head of some great cat; a cheetah perhaps. As it moved closer Richard stepped out into the hall for a better look.

“Don’t let it touch you!” Sophia hissed.

Richard stopped, heeding her warning.

The figure paused at the sound of Sophia’s voice. The mass of plumage atop its head turned in her direction. The figure jerked backwards, as if in surprise. Richard heard no sound, but knew the figure spoke when he saw the jaw working. Then it continued on past the elevators before turning and disappearing into a solid wall.

“What was that?” Sophia said.

Richard took her elbow and guided her towards the elevators.

“I think he was Mayan,” Richard said. “Probably of some importance considering the ceremonial garb. You said Oxwitic was built atop the ruins of other Mayan cities. This must have been one of the old tunnels your corps of engineers widened out for use.”

“He saw me,” Sophia said as they entered the elevator

“It seems he did.” Richard pushed the button for level one. “You probably gave him a good scare. The Mayans were deeply steeped in superstition. If he saw you the way we saw him, he probably thought you were some sort of ghost or bad omen.”

“This is bad, Richard,” Sophia said. “If the spider was from the future of this world—and believe me, there’s nothing like it in any of the research I’ve done—and that Mayan was from the past, then the focal point is expanding faster than anyone predicted. Time is overlapping, becoming muddled. If we don’t get out soon we could be trapped here.”

The hardened woman Richard had fought side by side with was gone, replaced by a scared little girl seeking reassurance that the nightmare she was experiencing was not real. That the noise she heard under her bed was nothing more than a creaking floorboard, the shape in her closet a pile of toys and not some monster come to claim her soul.

The elevator stopped on level one and the doors rolled open. Richard stuck his head out and scanned the hall. No spiders. No Mayans or other phantoms out of time. They may have left all that behind on level three, risen past the edges of the time rift where what he thought of as present time was firmly in place. On the other hand, a six legged, tentacled beast from hell could be lurking just out of sight down the corridor.

“We’ll have to risk it,” he said. “We need weapons, water, and some form of transportation. And since there’s no way of knowing when a Rip within reach will open up, we’ll need some way to carry oxygen with us. The atmosphere out there won’t sustain us for long.”

Sophia took a deep breath, visibly shaking off the fear that had crept over her. She pulled the Beretta from her waist, checked the loads, and chambered a round. Here was the Sophia Richard knew. The outcast. The rebel. The researcher turned warrior.

“Follow me,” she said. “I know the way.”