Those Who Breathe Under the End

If there's one thing a Cellular Scout never wants to hear in an underwater settlement, it's nothing. Silence.

Arcologies are biospheres: frontier communities built on alien worlds for research or settlement. Sometimes they’re on land, sometimes they’re underwater, but they’re always super noisy. Arcos hum with the sounds of living things, machines, air-conditioning, water recyclers, computer speakers… and in the case of an undersea settlement like Fafnir-1, the deep thrum of power generation turbines and seawater pumps. But when Uhq'ur and I plunged up out of the arcology's Jump Pool, the only things we heard were us. The faint hiss of our respirators, the water sluicing off Uhq'ur's wings, my boots as I unbuckled from the saddle-straps and dropped down to the concrete floor. The room that housed Fafnir-1’s Jump Pool was dim and poorly lit, swimming with eerie blue light that filtered through the transparent roof panels overhead.

The Tulaq craned her elegant neck, breath rattling through her respirator. She was lean and leggy, her black feathers sleek with protective wax. Like me, she wore HEGA gear: filters capable of handling viruses, poisons, and gas. I had a Zero suit on, close fitting bio-armor with a sealed full-face helmet, but her filter only covered her muzzle and eyes. A Tulaq’s Phitonic wax was strong enough to protect her during our interdimensional jaunts through the Drink. She could handle some microbes.

“That Swim was easier than I expected,” she said, mind to mind. “Can we take off the machine lungs?”

"Wait." I was busy pulling off our saddlebags. "Let me do a bio-scan and the initial report first. Something’s off."

“Yes. I hear the air move... but no HuMans.”

“The air might be moving, but that doesn’t mean it’s breathable." I removed our weapons and assembled them, then laid out Uhq'ur's humanoid bodysuit and filter mask. We'd brought an assortment of aerosols and bladed weapons, no guns. There were some seriously bad critters in the universe, and contrary to the wet dreams of many a wannabe space marine, a lot of those critters ate bullets like candy.

Once Uhq’ur’s gear was ready, I rose and crossed to the bulkhead at the end of the room, lay a gloved hand on the surface, and concentrated. I'm a Phitometrist: What some would call a mage. You know that thing about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic? Phitometry is sufficiently advanced evolution indistinguishable from magic, the innate manipulation of Phi - the blood plasma of the multiverse - in any given local area. Specializations vary. I'm a Biomancer, which is why we’d been picked for this job. My specialization is Life in all its forms.

The interstitial liquid wobbled around and through my skin, the Phi that cradled and separated the atoms of Reality, and let my senses expand through it. Eyes closed, I could 'see' anything alive within thirty feet or so. The expanding matrix of sensory awareness splashed off the Tulaq behind me, glowing green with vitality, and expanded through the hard walls ahead and... that was it. No bacteria, no animals. No plants. No people. Nothing.

"Shibal no ma." I clicked my tongue, drew a deep breath, and refocused in a different, less specialized direction. I bent the Phitonic scan and switched my focus to the telltale chemicals of decay. "No detectable cadaverine, putrescine, skatole... so no decaying bodies. I am picking up a holy shitton of potassium permanganate somewhere nearby, though."

Potassium permanganate is violet. Bad smell. Uhq’ur did not sound comforted, and neither was I. Where there was Morphorde, there was violet.

"Yeah, I know, but it looks clean from here. We should be good to go. You can change… I’ll call in to base."

I kept my back to her and squatted down on my heels to make the call. From behind me, I heard flesh slither and bones pop, wet sounds that continued to be audible once the ANSWER Comms relay connected. "C.S Zealot to FW02, logging Jump time at zero seven one five local. Jump was smooth, atmospheric NO-presence nil. Arrival point on Fafnir-1 is intact and atmospherically integral. No reception. No signs of life, over."

There was a twenty-second delay between my message and the reply: ten seconds through the relay of buoys to ANSWER’s nearest command center, and ten seconds back. “FW02 to Zealot. Understood. Command requests special attention be paid to the retrieval of a GNOSIS BCI module given to Fafnir-1 for testing. A Med-Vac escort is on proximal standby in The Drink. Report in fifteen, over.”

Fifteen minutes. We could do fifteen minutes in an underwater tomb and not die, right? "Zealot to FW02, duly noted. Report in fifteen. Text following. Roger, out."

I logged the text report. After a moment of consideration, I added '#2Spooky' to the end and sent it off. I doubted Comms would get the joke. Most ANSWER personnel were from times long before or long after the development of 4chan.

"Hey Uhq'ur, have you ever heard Spooky Scary Skeletons?" I bounced up to my feet and turned to see a lithe humanoid woman standing in place of the winged quadruped that had been there just before. She was taller than me, her facial features proud and aquiline. In their native form, Tulaq were greyhound-like in appearance and build, and the refined, lithe look persisted when they shapeshifted. Her hair was black and iridescent, like a fall of long feathers.

"Alliteration, with a double descriptor." She wrinkled her nose as she zipped up the thin bodysuit she'd brought to wear. "I smell a HuMan joke coming."

"Spooky, scary skeletons send shivers down your spine, shrieking skulls will shock your soul and seal your doom tonight?" I did a little dance with jazzhands and everything, but Uhq'ur just pulled her head back on her neck and stared at me like I'd crawled out of the mud. "Uhh... don't worry. We're at Threat Level 'Not Spooky' anyway.”

“What are you prattling on about now?”

“4chan Skeleton Advisory System. This is serious stuff,” I said. “It's safe here for now, but always be alert for skeletons."

She made a little huffy sound through her nose. At least I thought it was funny.

I went back to the bulkhead and fed an override code into the lock. The heavy door pushed forward, breaking the seal, and opened into a sterile wasteland. It was as dark as a movie theatre just before the previews, just enough to see by, and creeped with a sense of still wrongness. Once upon a time, there had been plants in the pots studding the hallway. They were gone, and so was the soil.

"All the organic matter is missing." I drew a knife with one hand, and armed a can of pressurized peppermint oil in the other. Morphorde – the same critters that ate bullets and gestated in guns – really didn’t like peppermint oil. "Can you hear anything? Because I can't."

"A faint hum. But it might be the ocean."

No sooner than she'd spoken, a loud creak echoed through the walls of the corridor. We both froze for a moment. The ocean. Water pressure. Right.

"If something happened but there's no bodies, the settlers might be holed up somewhere," I said. "We have a map for Fafnir-1, but it’s out of date. We need to update it and see if we can find a panic room or records or something. Command wants us to try and return with their GNOSIS setup."

"A Morphorde experiment?"

“No. BCI. Brain to Computer interface,” I replied. “Basically lets a HuMan link a computer to their mind. You can create teaching modules that feed information straight to your brain, and you can upload and download memories from it and shit. Last I heard, it was still experimental. I wonder why they had it down here?”

“The Ocean above insulates fragile minds from interference. I think I understand, but the concept of mind-injection hurts my Heart.”

That was a literal statement. A Tulaq's heart is literally her soul, a big chunk of exquisitely sensitive crystallized Phi. “Yeah, I agree. Too much can go wrong with BCI.”

We stealthed through silent, clean metal and polycarbon corridors and arched walkways with transparent aquarium ceilings completely absent of life. The ANSWER override codes worked on the doors just fine, revealing nothing but abandoned quarters and spotless common areas. The mess hall was still laid out for the last meal, tables lined with gleaming metal trays and sparkling empty dishes. Everything smelled like bleach. Like a hospital... or a morgue.

The first useful-looking computer terminal we found was in an office, a deck waiting on standby. Without a word, Uhq'ur went to watch the door, her sword in hand. I took the computer, licking my lip as I shuffled into the chair. I booted up my suit HUD and dug into the network. Ding-a-ling, and yay, ANSWER Relay Systems connected.

The holo loaded a double-screen array. The computer belonged to Sandra Hakaal, according to her ID widget, and she had just under a million unopened emails. The last one had been read only three days ago, when contact with ANSWER Command had lapsed. I closed the mail client and focused on scavenging through her documents, and was halfway through dumping the folders to a memory chip when a flash caught the corner of my eye.

The ID widget was back up, but the portrait photo pane was blank. The name was a string of screwed-up fuzzy letters that flickered to a different name between blinks. Linda Summers. The blank portrait stand-in fizzed as well, but no picture appeared.

I closed the widget down again, and navigated through to the map of the arcology. Fafnir-1 was a newish floating biostructure, and I expected the map to fit on one screen. Instead, the terminal flipped out four more screens as the image loaded, one horizontal and three vertical. I pushed back from the desk on reflex. “Holy shit.”

"What?" Uhq'ur glanced back over her shoulder.

"Look at this. This place is huge. They built the arcology and then just... kept bolting shit on in a great big sprawl. While floating underwater. Somehow." I stared at it, trying to make sense of the crazy rat-warren that expanded out from Fafnir’s core buildings.

Aghast, Uhq’ur came over to examine the map herself. “That’s… this base is nearly fifty acres.”

“Fifty acres of badly-planned bullshit,” I said. “Look. None of it goes anywhere, half of it is too narrow for… like… anything. We’re still in the original base, but look. All of this junk is just labeled ‘access corridor’. No wonder I couldn’t sense anything.”

"That can't be right." The Tulaq's nostrils flared. "There's no way the colonists could support that much infrastructure undersea."

“No, but the assembler nanites that built the base could, if they kept drawing carbon and metals out of the sea bed.” Frowning, I downloaded a copy of the map to a new chip and chewed my lip in the moments before my ear vibrated and beeped. I flinched on pure reflex.

"FW02 to Zealot. Status Report. Over."

Ten second delay. "Zealot. No signs of life. Something’s wrong with the computer network, and it looks like Fafnir-1 was illegally expanding modules out into the surrounding ocean. Base site has been expanded to… approximately two hundred thousand square meters. Over."

The lower right screen flashed, just before the ID widget popped up again of its own accord. A chill went through my back as it displayed another faceless image. Terry Weber. Then another one opened, overlapping the first. Juana Vega. A third, fourth, and then a clamor of them, hundreds of ID popups crowding the enlarged screens. Dara Rhodes. So Han. Ayana Shade. The portrait photos were either blank or twisted, pictures stretched into agonized mockeries of smiles. The eyes were fuzzed out by lines of distortion across the screen. Sanora Arndt. Olani Sisk. All women.

"Woah." I stood up from the chair, alarmed. "There's some kind of crazy network virus in this system. I think we-"

The ambient lights in the room died, plunging us into darkness. Uhq'ur made a strangled sound, her glowing eyes widening as the air-conditioning vents opened and began to pump freezing cold air into the room and the hall beyond.

In that moment, my gratitude for the sealed Zero suit magnified. "Wow. I can already tell this is going to suck. Do you want to abort?"

Uhq'ur was jumpy but grim-jawed, weaving her head like a bird of prey as we exited into the hallway. "No. We continue. I am not afraid of an un-real virus."

"It could get pretty real pretty fast." I tapped my peppermint oil bear spray can as we continued on.

Uhq'ur pulled up sharply, and I screeched to a stop behind her as she held up a hand and cocked her head. Then she broke into a lope, running on the balls of her feet. I didn't bother to ask why, because as we rounded a corner and slowed, I heard it too. Soft, feminine sobbing echoing off the metallic walls from a closed room down the hall. It was the entrance to a women’s bathroom.

"Hello!" I called out, but held the knife up ready. "We are Cellular Scouts dispatched by Fort William command, here on welfare check! Can you hear us?"

The crying continued.

"So, Korea has a lot of stories that we call 'urban legends'," I said quietly. "Basically myths about how weird stuff happens and precludes some serious horror. Murder, mutilation, etcetera. Just so you know, lots of them start with hearing a girl crying in an empty bathroom."

"I see. And the conclusion of these stories?"

"In the one I’m thinking of, she asks you what color toilet paper you want, blue or red. If you choose either option, she either kills you or makes you commit suicide.

“How charming.”

"Yeah." I looked back at her. "Just so you know, you’re supposed to refuse the toilet paper and run. You want to hold the door again?"

Uhq'ur nodded tersely. She dropped her chin, and the prismatic nictating membranes of her eyes slid into place as she stepped forward towards the door. The temperature was dropping rapidly, and the fog billowing from the aircon vents had a yellowish tinge. Chlorine gas. Purge and Decontamination was online.

I waved in front of the sensor, but the door was locked. I entered the code and stepped back. Uhq'ur gasped, and held her hands up to her face.

The bathroom door opened into a tunnel straight out of a Cubist nightmare. The passageway beyond began ordinarily enough, with smooth floors that merged seamlessly into contoured walls that curved gently out at the sides. Beyond that, everything was carpeted with a sparkling druse of needle-like, black-violet crystal points. They started small and turned savage further down, where the architecture itself began to warp. The walls, ceiling and floor twisted into an eerie, orderly progression of repeated, angled layers, the walls and ceiling rotating clockwise in a square-edge spiral. About thirty feet in, it cut a hard, sharp angle to the right. The crying had stopped.

"This is... uhh... this definitely isn't within the permissible architecture protocols." I drew up beside her, thumbing the pressure nozzle on my can of oil. I had the sudden urge to spray everything in sight. “Wow. Those crystals are pure potassium permanganate.”

"The Violet," Uhq'ur said, her voice trembling. Her eyes tracked something I couldn't see, as if watching ghosts pass by her and into the hall with us. “There was no purge here. It has been taken by the Breath of Those Under the End."

Shit always got real when Tulaq started talking like this. Uhq'ur was a young Tulaq, but her people were ancient: one of the first living things in all the universe, in fact. They could get… abstract. “The Breath of the Who in the What?”

“A Morphorde. They are some of the first Morphorde to crawl from an invasive necromass; they breathe the starving wind that desiccates and mutates.” She stepped backwards, shaking her head. “I will not go further. Explore if you wish… I cannot.”

I was fairly good at translating Tulaq-speak after years as a Cellular Scout. I could conclude that the frigid chlorine gas was the Breathers’ main byproduct, the one that they got their name from, though the permanganate crystals were a mystery. “Mutations? Like pirohulves?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Pirohulves infest, like flies. The Breath of Those Under the End assume control.”

Hands on hips, I brought up the map I’d downloaded from the malfunctioning computer. “Duly noted. This tunnel must be the work of the assemblers… only nanites could pull off something like this. Could these Morphorde, say, infect a bunch of nanobots?”

"I don’t know." Uhq’ur brought a forearm up to her nose and mouth.

“I'm going to call back to base. You should get back to the jump pool and stand by while I find the server room. We can get into the engineering logs and take a record, then get out of here. This is way above our paygrade. We need a RUBICON team."

"As you say." Uhq'ur idled by nervously while I took a picture, logged into the relay and set up my messages. I copied it to FW02 – Cellular Scout Comms – and FW01 as well. Fort William 1 managed ANSWER’s rapid response teams, the RUBICONs. They could come in with flamethrowers and armor better suited to fighting Morphorde.

“FW02, Fafnir-1 has been compromised by aggressive NO-infection," I said. "It appears to be lesser Morphorde, CAT-1 or CAT-2. No reception, no signs of life, extensive repatterning of the arcology. We are requesting reinforcements and will wait on standby before we continue the mission. FW01 copy?”

We waited for the relay in silence, watching the crystal corridor for movement or change. Eventually, the hum of the return message tickled my ear.

"Entry Number Twenty-Six." A female voice, dulcet and tremulous, broke into my helmet against a background of twisted, discordant static noise. “Everything grows constantly. We go deeper, deeper in and twist. It hurts. I wish we could just… reach someone. Anyone. ANSWER, Longriders, Li’Chee… GOD, I don’t even care anymore.”

"What?" I tried to disconnect, but the transmission continued to override the relay link. "Uhq'ur, can you hear this?"

Uhq'ur was shaking, her jaw clenched, hand fisted around the hilt of her weapon.

"I don’t even know how we’re still afloat." The woman on the radio sounded tired, defeated. "We're all… twisted up back here. It’s like cancer. Sandra led a team to the Comms room, security’s trying get past the blockade, but anything they manage to clear just grows back. If anyone finds this, you need to get out of here. Send for RUBICON, or… just… leave."

The transmission cut, and then my HUD pinged amber. Transmission rejected. Attempting resend.

"Shit. We’re cut off from the relay." I brought up the log, scanning it. "My radio’s pinging. We're jammed."

"Something is here. We need to Riverjump and get out," Uhq'ur said, shaking her head. "Do not worry about our orders. We are not welcome here."

“Go back to the jump pool and stand by. I'm in Cat-4 grade gear here. There's nothing in this building that can get through my suit, but there are things here that might want to get to your Soulstone." I shook my head. "Go hole up, head off the Medic team if you can. For all we know, the virus is going to screw up our jump coordinates, and they’ll end up torn to pieces across three different dimensions. We have to reestablish a link, at least."

"I am a confident Swimmer but… yes. The Breath could interfere with my navigation.” She sighed, brows knitted. “I will retreat to the water. Make haste."

I checked the seals on my suit to reassure myself, and then doused myself head to toe in peppermint oil. It used up about half the canister, but added another level of security, however flimsy. Some years ago, I’d messed around with my body, improving my response to stress and raising my threshold for fear, but I had to admit that even I was freaked. Me and cancer had a history, and as any Cellular Scout who survived more than a year on the job could tell you, the ‘lesser’ in ‘Lesser Morphorde’ didn’t mean that they were any less dangerous than Greater Morphorde. Lesser Morphorde were microscopic and mindless, and capable of turning HuMans into brooding chambers for all sorts of terrible shit.

My boots crunched down on the brittle permanganate as I picked my way inside the needle-lined maw of the hallway, knife and canister at the ready. Lights trapped behind a haze of purple flickered and spat, and I had the unpleasant sensation of being watched as I climbed into the hopper-shaped core and turned the corner. A high, agonized scream pierced the air behind me.

“Uhq'ur!” I turned back and ran, only to screech to a stop. The fake bathroom door was being disassembled by a creeping carpet of black things, each unit so small that the mass of them looked like white and black television snow. The assemblers. Behind them, I sensed a shadow... Uhq'ur's lifeforce, flitting like ball lightning as she fought on the run from something I could not see or hear. "Uhq'ur! Wait!"

There was a crackle overhead, like the feedback from a speaker, and then a soft sound that echoed off the dark, angular contours of the crystal corridor. The sound grew from a murmur to an angry, distorted amalgam of voices, each talking over the other so completely that they became completely unintelligible. Laughter, babbling, pleading, screaming.

"Shit!" I moved back uncertainly and tried to connect to Uhq'ur's link, which I should have been able to do even with the relay jammed. It rang once, before the call diverted to an unknown ID. "God Dammit!"

"Entry Number Twel- twelve." I heard the same woman from before speaking through my hijacked comms link, her voice blurred and distorted on every other word. "Jacinta gave birth to this... thing todurrrr-today. It killed her. That's the fifteenth one to die like this. We hhhhh-ad to put her in the compactor and flush her through the blackwater system…”

The assemblers could kill me. They could efficiently disassemble my Zero suit, exposing me to whatever pathogens were in the air, and they could probably disassemble my body if they put their collective mind to it. Uhq’ur could survive without her clothes – I could not. There was nothing to do but move forward.

Shoulders hunched, I slunk down the crystal corridor like a dog. The ambient noise swelled when I reached an area of wall where the crystal structure turned inward, an effect something like a lamprey's mouth. There was a door behind it, sealed over with a crumbling layer of minerals. I turned my knife around to the glassbreaker end and struck at it, chipping the brittle layers off, sheets angular purple glass. It sloughed away and shattered on the floor, hissing as the chlorine gas oxidized it black. I cleared the barrier quickly, skin creeping with the anticipated sensation of something crawling on it.

The voices in the hidden speakers swirled into a furious hissing sound as I punched in the override code. The light by the door flickered green, gears grinding as it fought to open, then turned red. The door slammed shut.

As I wrestled with the door, the log started up again suddenly enough to make me jump. "The assemblers walled off the residential unit and we can't get to the jump pool. The- We rrrreeeeee-treated behind Bulkhead Five and locked ourselves in with the communications ahhh-aarrrrrr-rray. We’ll trrrry GNOSIS. Maybe we can get control of the assemblers again."

"Would you just shut up for half a second?" I dialed the code in again, and when the door opened, I jammed the knife hilt into the crack that opened. The panel turned red, and the motors in the door ground relentlessly as the speakers crackled with angry, terrified shrieks and cries. The whole goddamn building was possessed.

"Can anyone hear me?" A different feminine voice crackled over the link through the noise, buzzing against my eardrum. "Is the buoy relay operational? Hello? Zealot? Are you here?"

I froze, fingers wrapped around the edge of the door. My callsign. I didn't know anyone in this colony other than Uhq'ur. "Roger? Uhq'ur, is that you?"

Silence. The door continued to whine, but it wasn't strong enough to break the hilt of my knife.

"Uhq'ur, do you copy?"

The link disconnected with a click and went dead, and it was only then that I realized. The voice had been weirdly modulated, like a series of individual words strung together by a computer. Something was listening, but it wasn’t Uhq’ur. I’d just made a terrible mistake.

The lights stopped flickering and turned red as a claxon pierced the building from end to end, whooping as a series of thumps, felt but not heard, rumbled the floor under my feet. The chattering black noise cut off as a smooth artificial voice came in over the PA system. “Preparing full atmospheric purge. All escape modules released. Life scan negative–”

"Hey, what?" I left off the door as the recitation continued, looking up and back. "Hey!"

"All personnel evacuated. No biometrics detected. Relay system notifications disabled. Purge initiated."

My gut thrilled with fear - real, genuine fear – as all sound disappeared from the hallway. The door stopped trying to slam closed and went still. I wrenched it open, switching to nightvision as a low hiss filled the air. There, I took a moment to steady myself, feeling out along the Phitonic threads to get a grip on what was happening around me. The oxygen-nitrogen level was dropping, displaced by... argon. The base was purging its GOD-damned life support system.

My suit could do a lot of things and take a lot of damage, but it wasn't a space suit designed to keep me alive in an airless environment. Zero suits had a single emergency cap of breathable air that could be drawn on in the event of a badly placed jump in or out of the Drink – about five minutes’ worth, which was plenty of time for a disorientated Tulaq to get her bearings, re-enter the Drink, and swim for safety, but not enough for this.

"Hello? Zealot? Are you there?" The woman spoke again. This time, I heard the synthesized falseness of the voice, the borrowed soundbytes of Uhq’ur’s voice. Something was in the arcology's network, a virus circulating and replicating in its 'blood'. It was capable of thinking, learning and plotting... and it was not my friend. “Please tell us where you are.”

In a few short minutes, the atmospheric integrity of the base had dropped to 96%, seeming to decrease a percentage point with every other breath. The instinctive urge was to breathe faster and run somewhere, anywhere, where I wasn’t going to slowly choke to death. Instead, I brought up the map and tried to orientate. Eventually, I worked out where I was: the medical bay. Fafnir-1's medical laboratory was just up ahead. The Command Center and the servers were in the next quarter, if I could just get to it.

I ran with my eyes glued to the map, and careened around a corner where I nearly ran headlong into a bizarre spiderweb of carbon, metal and mutated flesh that blocked the corridor. For several lightheaded seconds, my mind didn’t want to put the pieces of what I was seeing together, to make sense of it… until she moved. It was a woman. Her torso hung limp and broken from her shoulders, her lower body meshed into the net from the hips down. Her abdomen was grotesquely swollen, the skin drum-tight. I could see the veins under the surface of her belly. The blood that flowed through them was black.

I recoiled, stomach churning. The growths on the wall and her limbs looked like uterine tumors, white and fibrous. The sight and smell of this place – necrotizing flesh, disinfectant, metal, the weird, skin-ruffling smell of advanced cancer – took me back to memories I really didn’t want to relive, memories that made the artificial bones in my legs ache with remembered pain.

“Hhhhhhhhh….” Her breath, frosting in the air, was green-yellow. She was not alive, but her lips were moving... and as I stared, I realized she was mouthing the same word over and over. Please.

“Oh GOD.” I had awful hunch about what was growing inside of her, and it was nothing I wanted to tangle with. “Are you… I mean… can you..?”

The woman’s rotten eyes rolled up to look at me, staring without recognition. Her lips were cracked and blue, face hollow... but there was something still in there. Something HuMan was still trapped inside the corpse.

"Cellular Scout Seung Angkor.” I edged forward, voice cracking. I still had half a can of peppermint oil, and kept my finger on the nozzle as she swayed. Something was moving under the skin of her belly. “Can you hear me?”

"Hear… everything," she whispered. Now that the life support was off and the air cycle had stopped, I could hear her broken voice in the unnaturally still air. “Please. Can…cer. Please.”

The surgery to remove the cancer from the bones of my legs was a distant childhood trauma, a half-remembered violation. There were still days where I felt like there wasn't a part of me that someone's hands hadn't touched. My marrow. My heart. My lungs. Gorge rose in my throat. The Morphorde had bought cancer to HuMankind, among other things… viral parasites who’d burrowed into our genome and screwed with the code to further their own replication. Our very own Pandora’s Box.

"What's your name?" I asked. It was important.

"C... Ckttt..." Her word faltered for a moment. "Cait...lin."

Names were a powerful thing in the hands of a Phitometrist. My stomach stopped fluttering quite as hard. "Caitlin. Can you tell me what happened to you?"

She looked down at herself, and squeezed her eyes closed, fighting madness at the ruin the Morphorde had made of her body.

“Caitlin. Stay with me, okay? I'm sorry. I won’t leave you like this, I promise.” The old sense of social guilt rose in me. I was causing her pain with my imposition.

"Base assemblers... they dug down. We didn’t have enough oil to com-complete… base. They found a fossil deposit. Sea bed." She couldn't lift her voice above a whisper. "It wasn’t oil. The a-assemblers turned black. Went crazy. Spread through vents. Infected everyone."

The Breathers of Those Under the End could infect nanobots. Great.

"Air turned bad. Men died. Women... women..." she continued, trailing off. Her skin was beading with bleach instead of sweat. "Cancer. Rapid, catastr-strr-ophic. Hours… only hours."

The backs of my arms prickled with gooseflesh. The assemblers were everywhere, watching my passage like millions of little spiders. If they broke into my suit… GOD. I already had cancer written into my genes. I was screwed. “Okay. Then what happened?”

"Buoy failed. No radio. No signal." Caitlin lifted her eyes, gaze wandering over the black mirror of my visor. "Survivors... started security protocol. Went to C-C-Command.”

I frowned. "Uploaded?"

"Please. It’s cold." She shuddered again. A trickle of black fluid leaking from her mouth, and I took a step away from her as her belly roiled. Something was pressing from behind the skin, dark and angular.

“What did they upload, Caitlin?” I kept an eye on the motion, squeezing the knife until my knuckles creaked.

"Memories. Copies. Mind... copies. Uploaded."

They’d used GNOSIS? A nervous thrill passed through me. "They... actually tried to upload their memories to the system? Why?"

"Warning. To warn." Tears leaked down the woman's grimy cheeks. "Memories... not separate in the network. They thought… they could make records. Control assem…blers. But there was no space."

My imagination put the pieces together with horrifying certainty. "GNOSIS can’t be advanced enough to handle multiple people, it was never designed for that... Oh my GOD. They merged together. They went mad in there."

"Mad," she wheezed. “Too… close together.”

My pulse was thundering in my ears now, heart racing. I consciously slowed it down, leveraging the Phitonic control writ into my body. "So now they’re haunting the base. Where are the bodies?"

"Command," Caitlin said. "Don't... don't go... "

The last word garbled as she coughed. A gout of fluid flooded down her chin. Her torso suddenly went rigid. The dark shape inside her shifted, and then began to struggle, forcing its way up against her diaphragm. Her eyes widened, pupils shrunk to pinpoints. There was nothing in the known universe that could help the soul still trapped inside her, except death.

"I'm sorry." It seemed like the only right thing to say. I used the can to spray my knife blade, and then went in for the kill.

The symbiont inside of the woman's body punched up through her throat, a long, dripping black jointed spine that filled her mouth and split her lips at the corners. It swiped blindly as I drove the blade in under her sternum. It felt like ramming a knife in through a hard-shelled crab, crunching and slipping across hard armored skin before it plunged into soft tissue. The thing inside her convulsed around it, nearly tearing the weapon from my hand. I hung on grimly as it struggled. Caitlin went before the DOG did, but soon both parasite and host hung limply from the bizarre fleshy wall. My ears were ringing, lips numb and mind distant as I pulled the knife free and stepped back. Combat training had kicked in, and there was nothing but a roaring wall of white noise where grief should have been.

I glanced at the Phitometric overlay on my HUD as I broke into the MedLab. Atmosphere was at 85... 84%. I had fifteen minutes, tops, before argon gas displaced all the breathable air.

Fucking think. Everything has a solution, Angkor. I paced, glancing around the room, the metal tables and cabinets full of chemicals. I had no idea what had happened to Uhq'ur, but knowing what Morphorde usually did to primordial Phitonic creatures like Tulaq, I couldn't count on her being alive. ANSWER protocol was to keep trying to contact for an hour before they sent in a rescue team, who would likely find nothing except my frozen, desiccated corpse. I had to make contact and get back to the Jump Pool. If I could break through the crazy pseudo-AI, I could message the off-planet relay system.

I went to the chemical cabinet and opened it, staring at the array of plain labeled jars, tubs, and bottles. I’d worked in labs for most of my adult life before Scout training, and in theory, everything I needed to escape with was here. All I had to do was find a way to sneak through the Morphorde that were defending the server room.

All personnel evacuated. No biometrics detected.

I looked back to Caitlin's body, and the web of assembled necrotic tissue that had been woven from her. The system hadn't recognized her as being a threat. Only me, and Uhq'ur.

A plan began to form. A good plan, but not a nice plan. Then again, there was little about biology – and biomancy – that could ever be considered 'nice'. Life is dirty, and so is survival.

* * *

Getting the cancerous tissue that had consumed Caitlin to grow was not difficult – getting it to stop was harder. I coaxed it into spreading over my exosuit like a slime mold, a flexible, thin sheet of tissue that sizzled on the peppermint oil coating. By the time I was done, the atmosphere of the arcology was at sixty percent, but I could move freely through the increasingly disturbing core of Fafnir-1, unmolested by the seething swarms of infected assemblers. With a section of map up, I hurried towards the Command Center with a jerrycan sized jug of glycerin in one hand, a sealed dark brown bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid in the other.

There was a pattern to the madness of the assemblers and the possessed network. The seemingly haphazard proliferation of structures surrounded and shielded the IT facilities, the server room and communications center. The closer I got to the heart of the arcology, the weirder it became. The corrupted minerals pulled from the sea floor had been turned into spike traps and used to seal doorways and twist tunnels. All the organic material in the base had been recycled into Morphorde brooding chambers: creeping purple and white slime that cocooned black, tumorous buboes churning with anti-life. Here and there, the mutated forms of animals and people could be made out in the walls. They were all dead - their necromass expelled nothing but chlorine, a cloud of gas that was compressing under the argon and now swirled at knee height.

The Command Center door was sealed around the edges with a bulging plug of mangled violet tissue. Laboring for breath, I found a good patch of potassium permanganate crystals and stomped them to powder, grinding them under the hard sole of my boot. Once I had a good amount of pulverized violet-black sand, I crouched down and chopped it up into piles. Sweat poured down my face while I worked, splashing the inside of the visor before the suit could wick it away. I was dizzy with hypoxia, but had to hold off activating my emergency air for just a few more minutes. I was going to need it to run.

I scooped up the violet powder and laid a thick trail of it along the edge of the bulkhead, pressing the rest to the meat sealing the door. It only started twitching when I began to carefully splash sulfuric acid onto it. Wherever the acid touched the potassium permanganate, it turned to bubbling, tar-like black sludge.

Stage one accomplished. I gathered up the rest of the permanganate in a baggie and sealed it shut. The next step was to slop glycerin over the line of crushed purple stone, and then back away - quickly. I withdrew most of the way down the hallway, and braced inside the open bulkhead as the glycerin soaked into the powder. The assemblers swarmed it in a fine rippling sheet, drawn to the developing chemical reaction. I would have held my breath, but I was already seeing white spots. It felt like altitude sickness. The atmospheric monitor on my HUD had turned red. 58%. 57%. Oxygen was at 18% now. Not good, for me or for the power of the fire.

There was a hissing, rasping sound... and then the line of potassium spewed a plume of smoke, gushing like a flare, followed by a dull, crumpling roar as it ignited in a ball of flame that rushed up the sides of the door to the newly created brown Manganese Heptoxide... which exploded with enough force to rattle the corridor.

The assemblers at the site were toasted in a burst of black smoke. A whine pierced the hall as I stumbled forward, panting, and pushed through the smoke to kick the door in. The fire was still going - and spreading. As I'd learned in my first year of medical school, the fun part of making fire with chemicals is that the chemicals don't go away: they ooze flaming doom over any available surface until the reaction has completed. The fire caught the larger crystals, and those began to smoke and ignite as well. Great stuff, science.

As the smoke blew back and I got a good look at the Command Center, stumbling into a scene that would have given Giger nightmares. The assemblers had woven the corpses of the colonists in and around the server towers and the communications array, swamping the control panels in the collective AI’s mad efforts to reclaim their bodies. As the hallway behind me burned, the tumorous mass of Morphorde in here seethed with confusion. Wheezing like a fat man at the end of a sprint, I walked a line of permanganate and glycerin in a labyrinthine circuit around the towers. Tendrils of grey goo reached out from the walls, lashing blindly, but they slapped off the layer of sinew I'd meshed to the skin of my suit, not recognizing the living body that trembled underneath. I splashed more sulfuric acid around, as close to the potassium as I dared. It sizzled, turning to explosive brown sludge whenever it contacted anything purple... and that was when I activated the emergency air supply, gasping greedily as I staggered back out into the barbecued hallway. I made it to the far bulkhead, and slammed it closed before I sagged against it, panting and shuddering.

The amalgamated memories of the colonists screamed through the PA system, the chaotic, panicked screams of people who were dead, but whose copied minds thought they were burning alive... and then cut off. I fought for breath and focused on my body, leaning against the door as it thrummed and shuddered.

Every act of Phitometry began with a breath. Phi wove through every layer of a living body, able to be played like an instrument if you had the Gift. I exerted my will and my heartrate dropped, lower and lower, until I could hear each heartbeat thundering in my ears. My breathing slowed. Five minutes of air became fifteen, probably.

I pushed off, forcing myself to a stumbling jog as I desperately tried to connect to the ANSWER relay. It pinged once – ten seconds gone – and then connected.

"Comms Zealot, Echo, Echo, Echo!" I shouted the emergency code, trying to hear myself over the roaring of my slowed metabolism. My temperature was dropping, fingers and feet clammy and cold. "I’m headed for the jump pool! Send a Recovery Team!"

A shock rumbled through the base around me, throwing me off my feet. Enhanced reflexes or not, there was nothing I could do but catch myself as the floor buckled and arched. The walls were sloughing off, the hallway dripping like a Salvador Dali painting as I recovered and scrambled back into a run. I figured a capacitator had exploded until my ears prickled with the sound of pure dread: The thundering of water, tons and tons of it, spilling into the base as the assemblers, driven to fury by the crazed ghosts in the network, began to tear the arcology apart around us.

I ran past the Medbay, a rat fleeing through a crumbling maze, and reached the first crystal corridor just in time to watch it close. Giant unseen hands were squeezing and twisting it like a crumpling sheet of paper. The route to the jump pool was sealed. Shaky with disbelief, I tried to connect to Uhq’ur’s link and got nothing but white noise.

The water was only one problem – the other was something I could already feel in my bones. Pressure. The Arco was sinking, and the air pressure was increasing rapidly… and that left me with one final option. I could only hope the ghost logs were still current.

I changed track, jaws clenched as I sprinted for the nearest dive chamber. This end of the base was where the escape vehicles had been until the crazed ghosts had jettisoned them, but the structure was almost untouched, free of crystals and tumorous waste. The dive center looked like a museum, clean and perfect. Grim-jawed, I slammed the heavy bulkhead closed and sealed it off, then panted my way across to the nearest Atmospheric Diving Suit.

An ADS is ridiculous to look at. They’re like the Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, or some robot from a 1950’s sci-fi sitcom: Huge, silvery suits with bubble faces, independent atmospheric pressure, and six to eight hours of life support. They were good to around three thousand feet, and if I was lucky, the fitting system still worked. If not, then I was going to make a point of breathing in the argon. In one way or another, I’d fought this kind of Morphorde my entire life, and damned if I’d let them take me now.

I unsealed my Zero suit and pulled the helmet off, then went around the back and punched the button to start the fitting cycle. All I could do was wait, and hope. I was already holding my breath, counting down the seconds of silence until, finally the motor kicked in and the rig thrummed to life. The ADS hissed and opened out. Trembling with cold and relief, I stepped in, closed my eyes, and waited for the exosuit to finish as more explosions rocked Fafnir-1.

Every Korean story is supposed to have a moral, and the moral of my story is this: ‘Don’t dig out alien fossils from oil shale you fucking morons, because Jesus Fucking Christ, what do you think is going to happen??’ If you’re listening to this, remember my earlier advice: Always be alert for skeletons, especially ones in Atmospheric Diving Suits. Assuming I get back, I’m going to (with all due respect) punch Colonel Galverson in the asshole he passes off as his mouth for sending me and Uhq’ur in here alone – and if I can’t, then you should.

At the very least, this will make one hell of a report. Now BRB, I have to figure out how the hell to swim in this thing.

C.S Zealot, signing out.