Authors: Heath Pfaff
"We're now at the edge of darkness. From here we can almost see it, but – what really matters – is that it can definitely see us. You should know that. You were the only one out of all of us who had been here before. He needs you to find him. He needs you to let him come home."
I stopped and turned to face the hard eyed Shock Trooper. He stopped with me, maintaining a distance of three or four feet.
"Who is "he", and what is the edge of darkness? I've never been anywhere like this before. Are we even onboard the Odyssey anymore?" Keeping my voice calm was a struggle. The words wanted to pour out of me to the beat of my pounding heart.
"He is the Worm, and the darkness is his place. It wasn't always, though. He wants to go home, but he needs someone to find him. …Someone who can carry him out of the void. It can't be just anyone."
"Worm.” I said the name out loud, and then a recollection came to my mind. “I met him, near the comfort center. What is he? Why does he need me? How do you even know all of this stuff, Hobbes?"
"I'm not Hobbes anymore, and you haven't met the Worm yet… only his shadow. You need to remember, James Wright. You need to remember why you came back."
I was about to yell at him, to try and force him to tell me what I was supposed to be remembering, but a female voice from behind me broke my attention.
"James, I didn't expect you home for another week!" It was Odyssey, or at least it sounded like Odyssey, but now her voice wasn't coming from the implants inside my head. I spun to face where the voice came from and suddenly found myself in a different setting. I was in a house that looked vaguely familiar, and I felt strangely heavy. This was the pull of a true planet’s gravity, not the centrifugal force gravity of a ship. The air smelled of plant life and a perfume scent that triggered sparks of emotion that I could feel only distantly.
The voice had come from a petite brunette woman with a warm smile and beautiful brown eyes.
"I had to leave quarantine." I heard myself say the words, though I didn't intend to speak.
"But I thought quarantine was mandator- James, is that blood on your hands?" Her smile had faltered on her face, and it faded into a look of worry.
I followed her gaze to my hands. They were covered in blood. It was still fresh, warm and tacky to the touch. I could smell it, too. It was a scent I had never smelled it before. It was sweet, like strawberries left too long on the vine.
"Yeah, I had to kill them. It’s better this way, trust me. He'll be here soon, and I can’t let you get lost. Oh, Karen, you can't begin to imagine how cold the darkness is." It was my voice, but I had never said something like that. I would never say something like that. This entire scene was madness.
Worry turned to fear on Karen's face. "You're scaring me, James. Who did you kill? What have you done?!"
I felt the corners of my mouth turn up sharply. I was smiling. I was smiling so hard that my face was aching with the contortion. It was awful.
"No, fuck this, no!" I yelled, and I had control again. The woman, the house, the feel of planetary gravity, and the scent of bloody-strawberries faded and I was back in the long, doorless corridor. "It's not fucking real! Why do I keep seeing things like this?! Odyssey is not a person!"
"No, she's not." It was Hobbes, now standing just beside me. I only had to turn my head a bit to the left to see him.
"Then what am I seeing? What the hell does it mean?" I was pleading at this point.
"That voice you've been hearing in your head isn't Odyssey, Wright."
"Of course it is."
"No, it's not. You don't have implants anymore. All of that was removed after you were convicted. You can't communicate with Odyssey, and haven't been able to since you’ve been back on board."
"Then… but, back in my bunk she was talking to me. She gave me the temperature, and told me what was…"
"…happening aboard ship? James, did anything she told you prove to be true? Of course it didn't, because you were never talking to her."
I felt like Hobbes had just slammed me in the head. I felt staggered, confused.
"But when I first met you, your story was similar to mine. You said there was a hull breach…"
Hobbes was shaking his head. "You created that reality for yourself while you were butchering me for my supplies. I gotta give you credit, though. After I saved your life I really didn’t expect you to jump me from behind like that. That was really naïve of me."
"I'm not a killer." I snapped, but the words felt wrong coming off my tongue. I wasn't sure that I believed them. How could I ever do such a thing?
"You want to know the real kicker?" Hobbes smiled for a second, though the expression fell off his face quickly. "We're not even onboard Odyssey."
"Then where are we?"
Hobbes shook his head. "You know where we are, James. You built this place. That's part of what you need to unravel for yourself. The answers are buried in your skull. They tried to take it away from you, but their machines couldn't dig deep enough. Before you left, the Worm wrote your purpose into the core of your being, onto the very bones of your body, and on the inside of every muscle and organ of your flesh. They tried to erase his touch, but it’s just not possible."
"They? Do you mean the medical team? Did they steal my memories?" I recalled my earlier delusion with the doctor saying that my brain could be rebuilt before things had taken a turn for the darker. When had that actually happened? In my mind I remembered being stuck in my room with the shadow-thing on the bed, and then waking up on the stretcher en route to the medical bay. Those two events though, the more I really thought about them, the less they seemed to fit together properly.
"You didn't leave them a choice. They rewrote your mind twice, and it just didn't take. That's impossible, isn't it? That's what they said." Hobbes' body shimmered, rippling like a pond struck by passing breeze, his shape distorting and shifting. I watched as he seemed to shrink and contort until it was no longer Hobbes standing in the hallway with me.
"You begged them to leave your memories intact, but they were worried that it would impair your usefulness on the project." He was now a young boy, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, with brown hair, and two gaping holes where his eyes should have been. The empty sockets seeped black, fetid tears.
"Sean?" The name came unbidden to my tongue.
"Hey, Dad." He sounded solemn.
Memories blasted into my mind, but they were a jumble of broken pieces, as though they'd been painted on a glass tapestry, shattered, and then thrown down in front of me. I could see things, but the order was confusing and nonsensical.
"Do you remember me now?" The boy asked.
I nodded, a knot of emotional pain balled in my chest. "I do. I'm so sorry I killed you." I could see myself doing it. I had used a knife I'd purchased specifically for the task. I couldn't make sense of the events leading up to the incident, but the memory was clear. I saw myself stepping through the threshold of my house and seeing my children playing in the living room. They'd come running to me because I'd been gone for a long time. They’d been so excited to see me home. And then…
The actual memory was shattered. I could see gushes of blood, and flashes of fast, violent movement. The first stroke of the blade tore my daughter’s head most of the way from her body, but my son was so much worse. I'd pushed him to the ground, stifling his scream with the palm my hand. His eyes had been full of terror and confusion at why his father – someone he was supposed to trust, that was supposed to love him – would do this. I could hear him screaming through the muffling seal over his lips, and then I struck out at him with the blade even as it still dripped with his sister’s blood. Again and again I drove the knife into his skull, gouging through the tender flesh of his accusing eyes. It was so easy. I could remember thinking that while I did it. Killing children was so very easy. If only I could kill them all…. spare them all… what?
Spare them all what?
"It's alright, daddy. I know what you tried to do. I understand why you hurt us. But we couldn't get away anyway. He came for us, and now we're with him. So is mommy. You brought him right to us, daddy. You brought the Worm with you, and now he has us. Nothing you did to us is as terrible as that." His voice was so serene and calm, and yet he was saying such awful things.
"I was trying to save you!" I cried, my eyes clouded with tears. "I didn't want you to see..." What? Damn it, what didn't I want them to see? The memories wouldn’t fit together!
"You don't get to cry!" An angry voice snapped, and I blinked the tears from my eyes for long enough to see that my son no longer stood before me. Instead, it was now my wife was standing there. Huge strips of flesh hung from her face, and one of her eyes was missing. Her bottom jaw was nearly completely torn away, only hanging by a few ligaments and bits of flesh. Somehow she still forced her words out clearly. "You gave us to him, James. You brought the darkness into our house, and now we'll suffer forever. You don’t get to cry about it."
"He told me I could save you!" I blurted the words out, and with the words came a flood of coherent memories.
My wife smiled with the last bits of flesh left on her face, and then she vanished, and the hallway around me went completely dark.
When the lights came back up I was once again in a familiar space. The room was ten by ten feet with a chair in the center surrounded by a control console covered in screens flashing data and scenes from various surveillance cameras. A part of my mind insisted that I had never seen this place before, but a voice in the back of my head whispered "home." I didn't want to believe in that quiet voice, nor the realities that accepting it’s words would mean, but at the same time I knew in my heart that it was the truth.
"The Tether Room." I spoke the words the way a devotee of an ancient god may have spoken of the sacrificial altar. As those words left my mouth, understanding finally clicked into place in my mind. The Tether Room was my greatest triumph. This was the outcome of a life of research and tireless effort. It was also, I knew in that moment, the coffin to which I had consigned existence.
The chair in the center of the room spun to face me, and I was confronted with myself - or rather, a version of myself. He was dressed in a sergeant's uniform, a dark blue outfit with silver trim at the collar and an insignia declaring his exact rank and position on his chest. The lines on his face were deep, etched by worry and the pressure of a stressful life. He wasn't… I wasn't a cadet anymore.
Memories continues to flood my mind as I locked eyes with the other-me. I was the man in charge of the Deep Space Shield research project. In particular, I was the man heading a division of research into Seventh Space, the deepest detectable level of slipspace. In a Sixth level slipstream jump, a ship could cross the span between nearby galaxies in an hour. In theory, if we could uncover a way to travel through Seventh Space, we'd be able to cover the same distance nearly instantly, the ship in question needing only to pass through a thin gate of Seventh Space material.
It wasn't as simple as just increasing the power of the shields and pushing the ship further through the dimensions of space. Holding a relativity barrier in Seventh Space had proven impossible. A living thing that passed through that layer of reality for even a millisecond came out twisted and broken on the other side. Physical and mental deformities were not just common, they were guaranteed. Even computer testing proved impossible because things passed through didn’t come back in a functional form, or didn’t even come back at all. Recording devices vanished, or were so deeply restructured and changed that they would never be capable of recording, much less containing functional data.
We had stopped researching it all together. At least we stopped researching it until I reopened the research. I'd joined the military to secure myself a long life, but Deep Space and the sciences involved in traversing them had called to me. Forty years after starting my work as an enlisted scientist I made my first major breakthrough. I invented the Tether system.
Before the Tether Probe, we would try to gather information by sending unmanned probes from standard space, straight into Seventh Space. This meant that we'd have to waste a two-core power source just to attempt to get results, and more often than not lose it in the process. The expense was unbelievable, and the results were awful. With the Tether, though, we had none of the equipment loss and a significantly reduced risk of malfunction.
Odyssey, the first ship equipped with Tether technology, would activate a slipstream jump and move itself into a stable Sixth-level stasis. Once locked in Sixth Space and safe, Odyssey would split its relativity field into two separate divisions, one encompassing the greater body of the ship, and the other surrounding the Tether Room and the Tether itself.
The Tether Room housed the monitoring equipment as well as the head of staff who managed the equipment. It was my research lab, as well as was the only place that one could safely monitor the Tether. "Safely" was the wrong word, though. We thought it was safe... I thought it was safe.
The Tether was an independent probe that contained six sealed rooms to transport "volunteers" and a host of scientific equipment that would relay feedback directly to the Tether Room. The Tether was launched from the Tether Room, connected to the main ship via an impenetrable data-and-power cable. Once the Tether had reached a safe distance, it's Slipstream Drive was remotely powered and the probe sunk into Seventh Space. It worked perfectly the very first time.