Distortion Offensive (9 page)

“Ullikummis,” the old man breathed.

“Bullshit,” Seth spit back.

A wide smile appeared on the old man's face then, his yellowing teeth showing amid his shaggy beard. “Your gateway to utopia.”

From where he crouched on the floor, Richie looked
up at his brother, seeing the strange intensity in his older sibling's eyes. “Utopia?” he snapped. “Look at my hand, man. Look what this old freak did to my hand.”

With that, Richie held forth his right hand, the one that had held the short knife and had merely tapped against the stranger's face. A lattice of blood trickled along the grooves of the skin in a thin veinlike pattern. The little finger had bent inward, just slightly, but it was clearly causing Richie pain.

“What is it, Rich?” Seth asked with a frown marring his dark, handsome features.

“This freakazoid did something, man,” Richie snarled. “He did something to my hand. It's impossible.”

Warily, Seth turned his attention back to the old man, suddenly unsure of what to do. “Is that true?” he asked. “Did you do something to my little brother?”

The old man smiled, yellow teeth visible through the whiskers of his unkempt beard. “You saw for yourself,” he said, his voice oozing like treacle. “I didn't lay a finger on him. He struck me—all I did was took it.”

“Richie,” Seth ordered, “get up here, let me see that hand.”

Reluctantly, Richie stood up in the ill-lit cell and held his hand out for his brother's inspection. Like all younger siblings, no matter how old Richie got, he would always feel like a child when ordered to do something by his brother, always feel that he had to justify how he felt. “Feels like he broke something in there, Seth,” he whined.

Seth reached forward and touched Richie's crooked little finger with the tip of his own. Richie flinched, spitting out a curse as he drew his hand away.

“Hey, fuck, Seth,” Richie howled. “What the hell—?”

“I just touched you,” Seth barked. “Calm down, you fucking girl.”

Richie glared at his brother but said nothing more, holding his hand still so that Seth could examine it. The way it hung at a strange angle, the little finger looked broken. There was blood, too, but just a little from the graze and it was drying already, turning from red to brown as it lost its vibrancy. And Seth saw something else—dust, a charcoal-gray dust lining a single thin streak along the side of Richie's hand.

Seth turned back to the old drunk where he stood held firmly in place by the other members of the gang. The old man looked back at him without betraying any emotion. Taking a pace forward, Seth looked at the man's left cheek, searching amid the man's whiskers to see where the charcoal might have rubbed off. He could see nothing.

“Bring him over to the light,” Seth instructed Hunch and the others. “Let's get a good look at him.”

The old man didn't struggle but simply walked with the gang as they held him in their grip until he was standing directly beneath the single light bulb of the cell. The story was the same—the man's cheek looked normal, no sign of any discoloration, nothing there that would leave the mysterious dusting on Richie's hand.

“What are you looking for, Seth?” Richie asked, baffled. “I hit him, right?”

Seth shrugged. “Yeah, you hit him, Rich. But what hit you?”

“Ullikummis,” the old man replied, his eyes intensely fixed on Seth.

“What is that?” Seth asked. “This some kind of game to you, you drunken bastard?”

The old man shrugged in seeming imitation of Seth's
own movement just a moment before, and the three members of the gang who held him lurched away, losing their grips as though they had been trying to trap running water in their hands. Two of them stumbled into the wall, so unexpected was the movement.

“What th—!”

“Hey!”

Free, the old man reached forward, the movement as swift as a hummingbird's beating wing, and his hand slapped against Seth's forehead with a loud crack that reverberated through the tiny cell.

Seth toppled backward, his feet kicking out from under him with the impact of the old man's subtle blow. Immediately, one of the other gang members, a seventeen-year-old called Turtalia, who had an emaciated frame and a chip on his shoulder, leaped at the old man, reaching his hands around the oldster's shoulders to drag him violently toward him. In a second, Turtalia head butted the old man, a blow almost guaranteed to shatter the man's nose, only to recoil back with a scream. As he fell away from the old man, Turtalia's forehead erupted with blood in a circular wound, almost as though he had been shot through the frontal lobe.

Turtalia crashed to the floor of the cell, blood pouring from his head wound and running into his eyes and down his face. “He ain't human,” Turtalia shrieked as his colleagues readied their own attacks.

The old man stood waiting, his clothes and his breath stinking of the local still. It was clear that the gang had underestimated him now, that somehow this innocuous old drunk possessed a hidden weapon with which he could harm those who came into contact with him. Even so, it took three more attempts to fell him until Seth finally gave the order to quit. Throughout, the old man's
movements seemed effortless, just the slightest of steps to avoid contact, and never once did he actually strike back after that initial blow to Seth's head. And yet, three fully grown young men, street fighters in the prime of their life, fell before him. And when they were done, the old man turned to Seth, who had finally ordered an end to the combat, and he smiled once more.

“This is the power he brings,” the outlander hobo stated. “All you need do is accept it.”

Without thinking, Seth brushed the hair from his eyes and felt at the rough skin there where the old man had slapped him. “What is it?” he asked. “This thing? This Ullikummis?”

“What you crave is power,” the old man said, his voice lowering to something akin to a whisper. “Power over those around you, power over the situation you find yourselves in. What Ullikummis will give you is strength. And with strength, power must surely follow.”

As he spoke, the old man waggled the fingers of his hands ever so slightly and, like a prestidigitator revealing a coin that he had palmed earlier in his act, two tiny pebbles appeared in between his fingers, one held in each hand. The pebbles were small, each one little bigger than a person's thumbnail, but as Seth watched he saw them begin to expand, to move and to grow like living things in the old man's crooked fingers.

“What are those?” Seth gasped, unable to take his eyes from the living stones.

“Your future,” the old man replied, and he tossed first one stone and then the other at Seth and Richie as they waited before him, expressions agog.

Like scurrying animals, the twin stones embedded in the flesh of the two brothers and began to burrow
beneath, hiding themselves below each brother's skin. And then the tiny cell began to echo as Seth and Richie screamed in absolute terror.

Utopia was upon them.

Reluctantly, Clem Bryant had agreed to cook four of the six mollusks, warming them briefly in a hot oven, the way one might warm pastries for breakfast, in much the same manner that the Hope teenagers had cooked them in the fire before eating.

“I'm just warming them through,” Clem explained. “All this will do is take the edge off, possibly making them taste less salty but otherwise changing nothing fundamental of their natural constitution.”

“That is what we expect,” Lakesh agreed as he stood beside Clem in the staff-only area of the cafeteria along with Brigid, Kane and physician Reba DeFore.

“Can I just confirm, for the record, that I am thoroughly against this line of inquiry?” Clem stated.

“But you agree that it is a valid line of inquiry,” Lakesh said with a knowing smile.

Clem looked at him, seeing that roguish twinkle in the older man's eye. “I didn't say it was valid, Lakesh.”

“We learn through experience, Mr. Bryant,” Lakesh reminded him. “No amount of reading can replace actually experiencing a thing.”

“And we're about to experience something very few people on Earth have ever experienced before,” Brigid added. “We're going to eat some knowledge.”

“Like the golden apple of Eris,” Clem said. Then he opened the oven door and, using a cloth to protect his
hands, pulled the heated tray from the oven. Atop the black metal tray, four glistening mollusk shells waited, white smoke pouring from their innards through a split in the shells, the fizzy sounds of bubbling coming loudly from inside. As Clem turned them with a fork, one of the mollusks spit, a dollop of fatty liquid sizzling on the tray. Carefully, Clem began spooning them onto twin plates that rested on the countertop beside the oven.

Brigid, Lakesh, Kane and Reba looked at Clem blankly, and Brigid asked him to explain himself.

“In Greek myth, Eris brought the Apple of Discord to Mount Olympus and sparked the Trojan War,” Clem explained as he took the plates to a quiet corner of the large kitchen area. “It's seen as a metaphor for cognitive dissonance, that feeling one gets of holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. The world is round, and yet the ground we walk on is flat,” he elaborated after a moment.

“That sounds surprisingly accurate,” Kane said uncomfortably. “Those kids were seeing more than we were. They babbled, but it wasn't a directionless kind of rambling. They made sense. Kind of.”

As Kane spoke, Brigid and Lakesh took their places at the table. The bubbling sea creatures waited on the plate before them, and Clem had already placed glasses of iced water and paper napkins at each seat. It seemed almost comical in its way, the genteel manner in which they were about to imbibe a potential hallucinogen that may contain all the secrets of the universe.

“On three?” Brigid asked, picking up one of the oil-patterned shells with the napkin. Even through the medium of the napkin, it was still hot to her touch, a sliver of steam trailing from its seam.

Lakesh picked up his own mollusk and brought it close to his mouth. “On three,” he agreed.

A moment later, the two of them had the steaming shell openings to their mouths, and they sucked at the innards, pulling the tiny, jellylike creatures out of the cavity and taking them between their teeth. They tasted salty, the taste of the ocean. Brigid closed her eyes, swishing the bitter taste around her mouth, chewing on the pulpy flesh until she felt she could swallow it. Opposite her, Lakesh did the same. Between chews, Lakesh explained that it tasted a little like oysters or caviar, delicately holding his napkin before his mouth as he spoke.

Standing sentinel over the table, Kane watched as his two friends ate the weird shellfish and prepared for whatever would happen next. Beside him, Reba DeFore checked her wrist chron and unconsciously patted at the medical supplies that she wore in a purselike bag over her shoulder.

 

G
RANT REMAINED WITH
B
ALAM
in the basement interview room, gazing with disinterest at its bland walls and empty notice board. Donald Bry was assisting Balam with his notations on the sprawling map of the Pacific, providing a selection of pens that their visitor might mark the place up clearly in different colors.

Dressed in her blue robe, Little Quav appeared to be getting anxious, and Grant took a step over toward her, towering over the little girl as she looked up at him.

“Hey, how's it going?” Grant asked.

The girl looked wary of Grant, and he realized that his domineering frame had to seem like a giant to her, used as she was to Balam's much shorter figure. The
ex-Mag leaned down, gently offering the hybrid human girl his hand.

“I know it's all a little bit boring,” Grant said quietly, “and maybe a bit scary, too, but you'll be out of here soon enough. Uncle Balam will take you home, okay?”

The girl reached forward, coiling the tiny fingers of her hand around just two of Grant's own, smiling tentatively at him. “Quav,” she said.

“Grant,” Grant replied. “I was there when you were born, right here, just upstairs. I saw you enter the world.”

The girl didn't really understand his words, Grant knew, but she liked to hear his deep, rumbling voice. She had been starved of human contact for three years, hidden away from her own people, or the closest thing that existed to them on this planet now.

“Come on, Quav,” Grant said, standing up and letting her hold on to his fingers still. “Let's go see if Uncle Balam has nearly finished.”

The pale girl walked across the room, hanging on to Grant's hand. The ex-Mag shortened his strides, walking slowly to accommodate her pace. When the Cerberus team had agreed to let Balam take care of the girl they had never considered the fact she would not be interacting with her own kind. In keeping her from the Annunaki they had hidden her from humans, too, the very people her disappearance was intended to protect. If she should turn, if she should grow and embrace her destiny as Ninlil, the Annunaki queen, then Cerberus had no excuse—they had brought it upon themselves if the girl grew up loathing and fearing humankind.

At the desk, Balam peeked up from his work at the map with those dark, sorrowful eyes. “It's done,” he
said, placing a red pen on the table beside the others, extricating his eerily long fingers from its grip.

Grant nodded as he and the little hybrid human girl joined the alien at the table.

“You do realize,” Balam said, “that I could have planted the information in your mind using telepathic suggestion alone, of course.”

“I think we'd all sooner avoid any telepathic trickery,” Grant replied. “It makes everyone uncomfortable.”

Balam nodded in acknowledgment. “I respect that,” he said.

 

I
T TOOK TWENTY MINUTES
for the effects to become manifest. It was strange, a little like slipping into a dream when you were categorically certain that you are still awake. The world, the kitchen around them, seemed normal. People continued to bustle about, pans burbled and bubbled and their lids rocked as steam struggled to escape. Something behind Brigid dinged, a timer assuring the mess cooks that their dishes there was done. Kane stood over the table still, staunchly watching as nothing seemed to change. And yet, as Brigid looked at him, his sleek, muscular, wolfish form standing guard above her like some faithful hound, she saw colors emanating from the exposed skin of his arms and face, like the rays of the sun peeking over a towering mountain.

Brigid had never seen Kane look so beautiful; he was like something from one of the pre-Raphaelite paintings she had seen in her archivist days. The way the light rippled upon him, the way it played across his dark hair and in the grooves of his taut muscles was like some wondrous dance conjured from the very fabric of the universe itself. Strange as it seemed to think it, the light
seemed to enjoy running across Kane's skin, and in its joy it shone brighter.

To Lakesh, an eminent scientist and man of logic, the whole experience was a little like trying to look at one's finger while holding it up close to one's nose. He could see things, and yet the world behind them had somehow doubled, taken on two contrary aspects while remaining fundamentally whole. The table before him was solid enough. It looked as it always had, a flat surface made of lightly colored beech wood, the varnish marred in a few places where things had been scraped against it over the years. And yet somehow it seemed liquid, like something he could see through, see past. Somehow, in some indefinable manner, the grooves, the mars, the little indentations all seemed to be more solid than the tabletop itself, more real somehow. These were ruined things that could no longer change their properties for his eyes, could no longer be more than they really were.

Lakesh looked up then, peering slowly about the bustling room, taking in the strange details he had never noticed before. Had it always been like this? Had it always been so vibrant and multifaceted? It was like looking into a kaleidoscope, the patterns and the colors and all those incomplete shapes that worked at some subliminal level to create the world.

“You guys okay?” Kane asked, his voice sounding far away.

Brigid nodded, but she felt her head swim uncomfortably with the movement. “It's started,” she told him, closing her eyes tight for a moment to shake a growing feeling of nausea.

“Lakesh?” Kane prompted.

“Started,” Lakesh mumbled his agreement, the word seeming to take flight from his mouth.

When Brigid opened her eyes again, she was looking at Lakesh, his dusky skin seeming to smolder before her like the last vestiges of smoke from a campfire. “Lakesh?”

“Yes.” The word came from Lakesh's lips, although he wasn't quite sure he had willed it. “It's quite wrong, isn't it?” he said. “Quite delightfully wrong.”

Brigid reached forward, touching her hand on the second mollusk where it cooled on the plate. “Shall we eat the others?” she proposed.

Lakesh agreed. “I believe that it is time to find out how deep our rabbit hole goes,” he said.

With that, Brigid and Lakesh each downed their second mollusk, drinking the flesh like some protein shake, which in a sense it was.

Kane watched the proceedings with an increasing sense of unease, with Reba and Clem standing beside him. Kane had an inherent dislike of things he couldn't grab, things he couldn't physically examine and battle with if the need arose.

 

G
RANT AND
D
ONALD ESCORTED
Balam and Little Quav back to the operations room where they could comfortably access the mat-trans and be on their way.

“It has been a pleasure seeing you again, Grant,” Balam said graciously in his weird voice. “A dubious and unfortunate pleasure, perhaps, but a pleasure nonetheless.”

Grant nodded, tousling Little Quav's hair as she waited outside the brown-tinted armaglass door of the mat-trans chamber. “You take care of this little girl, okay?”

“I shall do my very best,” Balam assured the Cerberus warrior.

“Try to remember that she's human, Balam,” Grant said, and there was a warning to his tone.

“I shall never forget that,” Balam promised.

Grant held his hand out and grasped Balam's. “We'll see you again.”

“It seems inevitable that you shall,” Balam agreed.

Then Balam picked up his human charge and carried the little girl into the mat-trans chamber, encouraging her to wave to their Cerberus friends one final time before they departed. From twin aisles of computer desks, the active personnel on shift in the ops center all waved back, the sight of the little girl breaking more than a few hearts.

The door to the mat-trans chamber closed, then Balam's interphaser unit activated. A moment later, Balam's silhouette disappeared into a gateway in the quantum ether, the little girl in tow. They were gone.

Grant watched solemnly, the thoughts ticking over in his mind. Balam was protecting the girl in the hidden city of Agartha, but was that enough?

 

C
ONTRARY TO THE POPULAR SAYING,
it was the second time that proved to be the charm. Brigid Baptiste felt its effects almost instantaneously, and with such immediacy that she nearly fell from her chair. Nothing had changed; the kitchen was exactly as it had always been. She knew that as she stared around the room with wide eyes. But it was different, utterly altered into something Brigid had never seen before.

We are living underwater,
she thought, trying to take in the new sense of being she could now perceive. That made no sense, of course, and the logical part of her
brain rejected it, rebelling against such patent foolishness. It wasn't water, she realized then; it was
air.

Kane's voice came from beside her, the concern clear in his urgent tone. “Baptise? Are you okay?” He had seen her sway in her chair, and he had worried for a moment that she might topple.

“We are living underair,” Brigid muttered in response.

Still sitting at the table, Brigid found herself fascinated by the vignettes progressing around her. A human she was, and as human she had come to rely upon her eyesight as her most crucial sense, her primary means of sensory input. Seeing the world now, the room with its sizzling grills and bubbling fryers, it all seemed different. Not
new
—no, that wasn't it at all—just different, like seeing it all again for the first time.

Is this how a baby sees?
she wondered.
In those first moments when it exits the womb and sees our world for the very first time. Is this what it sees?

There was a medium before Brigid, she realized, the medium of air with its many components, its nitrogen and oxygen and traces of a dozen more free floating chemicals. Despite herself, Brigid found she was surprised at the water vapor, gathering in clumps around the sizzling cookers, the way it looked like droplets dancing amid this medium they called air. Her eyes turned to Clem Bryant, who was taking a mouthful from his glass of water, and she wondered at how he could move so freely within this cloying weight of air that pressed upon them all like a stifling blanket. Then she noticed the movement, the way the water shifted in the glass as though playing a game, its factions clinging together to hurry joyously down the incline as the glass was tipped toward Clem's lips.