The Breath of Those Under the End: First Draft

This is the start of the short story I'll be submitting to The Expanding Universe: An Exploration of the Scifi Genre. It's super rough, but this is true of all first drafts.

If there's one thing you never want to hear in a biosphere, it's nothing. Silence.

To give you the Cliff’s Notes version of why this sucks so much, bear with me a moment. ANSWER frontier arcologies start out as big gray cubes of compressed building materials. When a spaceship reaches a new settlement planet, the ship drops the arco-cube and base mounting supplies, along with the robot assemblers and one seriously overworked android overseer. The team gets the base situated on the chosen site, disassembles the cube into its component molecules, and then uses the now un-compacted materials to build the first section of the base, from which point on they source and mine metals and minerals out of the surrounding terrain. Meanwhile, the ship and settlers stay in fixed orbit above their soon-to-be home and set up the relay buoys connecting this little corner of the Theosphere to the Dermal Community: that crazily experimental, slapdash union of HuMankind linking worlds, galaxies, even whole other universes through the fluidic interstitial reality we Cellular Scouts refer to as The Drink.

Point being, from that first assembly onward, what you have is a large number of people living in a small artificial space that is constructed and maintained by nanites and other small robots. There's noisy animal livestock. There's machines, air-conditioning, water recyclers, a constant movement of people and things, and in the case of an undersea settlement like Fafnir-Vivid 1, the deep thrum of filtration pumps and the life support system. But when Uhq'ur and I plunged up out of the arcology's arrival pool, the only things we heard - besides the machines - were us. 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. It was dim and poorly lit, everything colored by the eerie blue light that filtered through tonnes of pristine ocean water overhead.

The tulaq craned her elegant head, breath rattling through her respirator. She was lean and leggy, her black feathers sleek with protective wax. Like me, she wore HEGA gear: filters that were proof against viral particles and gas. Unlike me, hers only covered her muzzle and eyes: the rest of her body was sealed from the atmosphere by a thick layer of protective wax. "That was an easy jump. Can we take machine lungs off now?

"Wait." I held a hand up, pulling down our saddlebags. "Let me do a bio-scan and the report, then we can divest if safe."

"I can hear the air move... but no HuMans."

"The air might be moving, but I'm not convinced we should be breathing it." I pulled out our weapons and assembled them, then laid out Uhq'ur's bodysuit and a filter mask for her humanoid form. We'd brought an assortment of aerosols and bladed weapons, no guns. Once they were ready, I rose and crossed to the glass door at the end of the arrival pool room, lay a gloved hand on the surface, and concentrated.

I'm a Phitometrist: what some would call a mage, even a 'wizard'. You know that thing about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic? Well, Phitometry is sufficiently advanced evolution indistinguishable from magic, someone capable of manipulating the substance of the Drink, Phi, in any given local area. Specializations vary. I'm a Biomancer, and that's why Command volunteered me to check out Fafnir-Vivid. My specialization is Life in all its forms.

I felt the interstitial liquid wobble 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.

"Aiiish." 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 cadavarine, putrasciene, skatole... so no dead bodies. I am picking up a holy fuckton of potassium permanganate, though."

Potassium permanganate is violet. Bad smell. Uqh'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 while I 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 while I waited for the connection. "Zealot to Base, logging Jump time at zero seven one five local. Arrival point on Fafnir-1 is intact and atmospherically integral. No reception. No signs of life."

There was a twenty-second delay between my message and the reply: ten seconds through the relay of Radio buoys to Base, and ten seconds back. "Base K. Medical escort is on standby in The Drink, Zealot. Report in fifteen."

Fifteen minutes. We could do fifteen minutes in an underwater tomb and not die, hopefully. "Copy."

I logged the text report. After a moment of consideration, I added '#2Spooky' to the end of it 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 at me, almost sneering, as she pulled on 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 jig 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. It's safe here, but always be alert for skeletons."

She didn't get that, either, but at least one of us was amused. I gave my visor the mental command to lift as I went back to the door and fed an override code into the lock. The door wooshed open, and I sniffed as an unpleasant chemical odor swept into the entry pool room. Chlorine vapor... lots of it. And nothing else.

"Damn. It's like the whole place purged. I think we just upgraded to 'Pretty Spoopy.'" I drew a knife in one hand, and armed a can of pressurized lemon oil in the other. There were a lot of critters in our line of work that really didn't like lemon oil, but really liked bullets. "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 be holed up somewhere," I said. "We have a standard map of this arco model, but it's not customized to this particular settlement. We need to update it and see if we can find a panic room or records or something."

"I agree. This place disturbs my heart."

That was a literal statement. A tulaq's heart is literally her soul, a big chunk of crystallized Phi, and it's really sensitive to nasty environmental ambiance.

We transversed silent, clean metal and polycarbon corridors, arched walkways with transparent aquarium ceilings. The ANSWER override codes worked on the doors we came across, revealing abandoned quarters and spotless common areas. The mess hall was still laid out for the last meal, tables lined with gleaming metal trays and empty dishes. As we went deeper into the the complex, an oddly familiar, skin-creeping smell prickled my nose and stirred something primal and unpleasant in the back of my mind. Fafnir Vivid smelled 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, cued my faceplate back on, and booted up the HUD.

Ding-a-ling, and yay, ANSWER Relay Systems connected to the local servers. The holo loaded a double-screen array, and I set about navigating through the owner's desktop. Her name was Dr Sandra Hakal, according to her ID widget, and she had just under a million unopened emails. I closed it and glanced aside at the directory as it zoomed up, and glanced across when a flash caught my eye. The ID widget was back up, but the portrait photo pane was blank. The name was a string of Wingdings, that fizzed and then transmuted to a different name. Linda Summer. The blank portrait stand-in fizzed as well, flickering, but no picture appeared.

"What the...?" I closed the widget down again. Creepy as hell, but I don't scare easily. One of the perks of being a biomancer is the ability to fine-tune your own body. One of the things I chose to modify was my autonomic nervous system. When you're in my line of work - xenobiology and Planetary Scouting - you really don't want to be prone to jumpscares. Nothing like

I navigated through to the map of the arco, and that made me sit up. I zoomed in and out to check that my first impression was really real. "Aiyahh... Holy shit."

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

"This place is huge. They built the arcology and then just... kept bolting shit on in a great big sprawl. Underwater. Somehow."

"That can't be right." The tulaq's nostrils flared. "There's no way to do that undersea."

Frowning, I downloaded a copy of the map to a new chip - not my WarWind suit - and chewed my lip in the moments before my helmet buzzed. Even I flinched a bit.

"Base to Zealot. Status Report."

Ten second delay. "Zealot to Base. No signs of life. Something is wrong with the computer network, and it looks like Fafnir-Vivid was illegally expanding modules out into the surrounding ocean. Over."

The ID widget popped up again. Terry Weber. Then another one opened, overlapping the first. Juana Vega. A third, forth, and then a clamor of them, IDs crowding the screen. Dara Rhodes. So Han. Ayana Shade. The portrait photos flickered and twisted, stretching the pictures into agonized mockeries of smiles. The eyes were fuzzed out by the lines of distortion across the screen. Sanora Arndt. Olani Sisk. All women.

"Woah." I pushed away, and stood back. "There's some kind of crazy network virus in this system. I think we-"

The ambient lights in the room died, one by one, flickering into darkness. Uhq'ur made a strangled sound, her brilliant blue eyes huge as the airconditioning vents opened and began to pump freezing cold air into the room and the hall beyond.

In that moment, I was really glad I'd put my visor up. "Wow. I can already tell this is going to suck. Do you want to abort?"

Uhq'ur had enough nerves for the both of us. She 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 a virtual virus."

"It could get pretty un-virtual in here pretty quickly." I tapped my lemon bear spray against my thigh 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 bathroom.

"Hello!" I called out, but held the knife up ready. "We are Cellular Scouts Seung Min-Joon and Uhq'ur of Fort William Base, here on welfare check! Can you hear us?"

The crying continued.

"So, where I'm from, we have these things called 'urban legends'," I said quietly. "Basically myths about how weird stuff happens and precludes some serious horror. Murder, mutilation, ecetera. Korea has a lot of these kinds of stories. Just so you know, lots of them starts with hearing a girl crying in an empty bathroom."

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

"She's a violent ghost missing the bottom half of her face who will slit your mouth from ear to ear with a stanley knife. Then you go insane and commit suicide. Or she asks you what color toilet paper you want, blue or red. If you chose either option, she either kills you or makes you commit suicide."

"I detect an ongoing theme."

"Yeah." I looked back at her. "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 they did while we were in The Drink as she stepped forward towards the door. The temperature was dropping rapidly around us and the smell of bleach was so powerful that I put my visor back up and my HEGA filter back on. The chemical reek was being carried in on the frigid air howling from the aircon vents. P&D had been activated again - Purge and Decontamination.

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, details that were soothing to beings like Tulaq, and what of that I could see was carpeted with a sparkling druse of needle-like, black-violet crystal points that turned it into something between a geode and Iron Maiden. As it went down, the architecture began to warp, the walls, ceiling and floor twisted into an eerie, orderly progression of repeated, angled layers, like a hoppered bismuth crystal or the core of a hollow step pyramid. The surfaces were non-reflective, murky black, with floor and wall and ceiling rotating clockwise in something that could be climbed like steps. About thirty feet in, it cut a hard, sharp angle clockwise. 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 and fighting the urge to spray everything in sight.

"Potassium permanganate crystals," 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. These are 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?”

“Morphorde. They are the first to crawl from the necromass; they breathe the starving wind. The wind that scours, desiccates, and infects.” She stepped backwards, shaking her head. “I will not go further. Explore if you wish… I will not go inside there.”

Uhq'ur’s smooth skin was flaking up with its protective wax. The crazed shapes that receded ever forwards and up were stressing her out, badly. She wasn’t the only one. Hands on hips, I brought up the map I’d downloaded from the malfunctioning computer. "This tunnel isn't on the map. And this is supposed to be a bathroom, not crystal porn. We're dealing with high weirdness, but I don't sense any magic. No Phitometry, which makes sense… This base didn't have a resident Phitometrist. This has to be the work of the assemblers. Only nanites could pull something like this. There's no way that any human had a hand in this.”

"There can be no magic in their scour, Zealot. Only sickness... and suffering." Uhq’ur brought a forearm up to her nose and mouth, but did not touch them together.

“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 and see if we can get into the engineering logs. This is seriously weird, but I think whatever is in this system is bluffing."

"As you say." Uhq'ur idled by nervously while I took a picture, logged into the relay and set up my message.

"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 going to search for network logs and biometrics and jump back in twenty. 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, spoke over the intercom against a background of twisted, discordant static noise. "Everything grows constantly. We go deeper, deeper in and twist. It hurts. Please, please make us stop growing."

"Fucking hell." I swore in English and Korean in turn, trying to disconnect, but the transmission forced itself through the HUD. "Uhq'ur, can you hear this?"

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

"Cancer is life without a kill switch," the woman on the radio said. Her voice was tired now, defeated. "We're all twisted up. We won't ever get away. Don't come here, don't ever come here again. Go... GO!"

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

"Shit. Something's cut us off from the relay network." I brought up the log, scanning it. "It's pinging. We're jammed."

"Something is here. We need to get back to the jump pool," Uhq'ur said, shaking her head. "Do not worry about the logs. We are not welcome here."

I was freaked out. Maybe not on a base hormonal level, but the message chilled me all the same. Cancer was the one thing that Biomancy couldn't touch. I knew that all too well. My shins were artificial, and they ached in the frigidly cold air.