Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator Page 3

  She ignored the reference. “‘Suzy turns.’”

  He shrugged, tried it. “‘Username and password do not match.’ This isn’t the way, Allie. There are over one hundred trillion combinations – and that’s just the alphanumerics. We don’t have a serious method for shrinking the search space. Suzy’s old enough, and smart enough, to keep secrets from us. Three fails in a row, and I expect it to lock us out, while flagging an attempted intrusion. We’re wasting our time.”

  The message got through, then, and Alison doubled-back. “The chessboard thing …” she mumbled. “Yes, I get it. Suzy’s brain has escaped. Years ago, actually. So, what’s the next move?”

  “Suzy opens it up for us, what else could it be?”

  “You think she would?”

  “Better than one-in-a-trillion chance, and we’re still ahead.”

  It was nearly midnight. Steps, coming down the stairs. Guiltily, they re-positioned themselves, away from the machine. Suzy opened the door.

  “What on earth are you doing up young lady?” Alison asked, activating a deeply-grooved formula.

  “Weird dream,” Suzy replied, her voice slurred with tiredness. “I wanted a drink of milk.” It wasn’t clear whether she was even awake.

  As Alison steered their daughter into the kitchen, Jack lay back on the rug, closing his eyes. Walls of closed code spooled down across self-stimulating retinas, in random flurries. Winter was whispering outside.

  §08. There wasn’t much milk in the fridge. Order had drifted. Alison estimated the contents of the carton dubiously. Maybe somebody could re-stock before breakfast in the morning. She poured what there was into a glass, and handed it to Suzy.

  “This dream?”

  “It wasn’t a nightmare.”

  “Really?” Alison countered skeptically, recalling her own recent lies. She noticed her daughter’s thin pajamas, and bare feet. “You must be freezing.” Jack had left one of his heavy winter jumpers dangling messily over the back of a chair, thoughtlessly abandoned, an arm inside out. “Here, put this on.” She should have been rushing Suzy back to bed, but there were things that she wanted to know.

  “It was more of a puzzle,” Suzy volunteered. “Umm, what’s the word – abstract. There was a shape, but it didn’t make sense, as if it didn’t fit into space, and it had a direction, a tilt, I don’t know how. You were in it, too, and Dad, trying to work something out. There were so many signs, buried inside each other. It raced my brain too fast, and I woke up.”

  “OK honey.” She couldn’t help hoping for more.

  Suzy finished her milk and started to get up, then sat down again. “Something’s going to happen, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” Alison had already switched. “I don’t know, something’s always happening.” She didn’t want this conversation anymore. “It’s really late. You’ve got school tomorrow.”

  “You know the weirdest part of the dream, Mom?”

  Of course she didn’t. (Please let that be true.) She shook her head, but the negations were tripping over each other, getting confused.

  “There was a stage, close to the end, that somehow wasn’t my dream at all. It got tangled up with this house, or another, like it in a way, but not quite, with corridors, and halls, and connections. I remember thinking, I’ve wandered into Mom and Dad’s room. Even there, in the dream, I knew what it was saying. I’d taken some strange turnings, in the dark, and crossed into a dream you were supposed to be having. Not that it was yours, either, not really. It was its own place. I thought Dad’s good at geometry, he’ll be able to explain it, but you’d been there more, somehow, so you’d be particularly familiar. Then I was awake, without noticing, and felt thirsty. It wasn’t really scary, but it was odd.”

  “Honestly Suzy, you’re the most peculiar little person sometimes.” She didn’t know whether to laugh, weep, or shudder. She looked at her watch, theatrically. “We definitely have to get you to bed.”

  §09. Galaxies are not scarce. There are at least one hundred billion in the universe, with each containing roughly one hundred billion stars. That’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – or ten sextillion – stars altogether, perhaps many more. It’s an unintelligible number, and then an awe-striking one – and then a horror story.

  This non-fictional horror story is very special. It has a name that owes nothing to the flights of literary imagination. This is science’s own, soberly-delineated nightmare. It is called The Great Filter.

  As scientifically-disciplined inquisitiveness pulls life apart into chemistry, its mysteries are alchemized into an astounding normality. Life requires nothing very extraordinary for its existence. Its known replicator molecules are not devoid of intricacy, but they are simple enough for earth’s dominant mammals to have reconstructed, while still unaided by thinking machines. Sheer cosmic noise, of which there is of course plenty, suffices as a source of variation. The natural selection mechanism that sifts through trillions of copies, extracting and propagating the most functional variants, is a pure – and indeed utterly inescapable – automatism. Chemical stock is abundant, suitable thermic conditions common. Nothing obvious stands in life’s way. According to the ever-more insistent suggestion of mainstream scientific intelligence, the universe should be teeming. Really, it should.

  All available general evidence points to a galaxy pulsing with life. The specific evidence, therefore, is chilling. For none is to be found, beyond our own, solitary case.

  What do we know about the Great Filter, really? We have a name for it, if only a provisional one, which says something. It has acknowledged existence. In the terms of the philosophers, it is rigidly designated. Something there is, of which we know nothing, except that it efficiently exterminates all advanced civilizations, at a cosmic scale.

  We're still around – for now, Turner thought, settling back into the absurdly comfortable chair Alex offered favored guests to his office.

  “Drink?”

  Turner pulled-up the time on his watch – it wasn’t yet 4pm. He raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t be such a goddamned Puritan Jack, it’s been a long day. For you too, I can see. It will grease the synapses.” He was already pouring one for himself, with exaggerated appreciation. “It’s a truly excellent single malt … My God, perhaps the universe does have a purpose.”

  “Go on then, you degenerate,” Turner laughed. “As if I can say ‘no’ to that.”

  Alex reached under his desk for a second tumbler. “Cigar?”

  “I thought that was strictly against the rules.”

  “Special dispensation, didn’t you know? Got it written into the employment contract.”

  “Anyway, no, thanks, nicotine jolts me around too much.”

  “Mind if I do?” Alex asked, with apparent sincerity, opening a matt-silver cylinder to release what had to be north of thirty bucks-worth of hand-rolled fragrant tobacco leaf.

  “Of course not.”

  “So you’re back on the Filter nonsense?”

  “Only as a minor side-line.”

  “Still.”

  “Curious whether there’d been any developments I’ve missed. All the fiddly standard candle calibration stuff has been distracting me from the speculative cosmology discussion recently.”

  “‘Developments’ – holy shit – you’re serious, aren’t you? I think I might have a link to some website you’d find helpful, tracking down the connections between unusual levels of yeti activity and Area-51 …” A phone trilled. "Sorry Jack, I have to take this. Don’t go anywhere." He spun his chair around to face the landscaped campus panorama of autumnal copses and lakeside lawns, encapsulating himself in a wireless bubble, as he clicked down the mic from his headset. “Yes, this is Professor Scott. Yes, I’ve been expecting your call. We’re good to go. A couple of proposed budget revisions – they’ve already been forwarded to you. The deadline’s OK, as long as we get everything we need. Great. That’s great. Sure, let’s do it. Great. Yes. Superb. Catch you at the convention,
Brian. Gotta go.” Click.

  With the Deep Space Systems Nanowave Modulator contract confirmed, he swiveled back, undistracted, thread unbroken. “… but it’s worse than that, isn’t it Jack? It’s philosophy. I mean, holy fucking shit, didn’t the last beating you took from me do you any good at all?”

  “The Great Filter is empirically inferred,” Turner insisted stubbornly. “It’s not even conceptually-dependent upon the Anthropic Principle.”

  “Woooh boy.” Scott was enjoying himself. “‘Empirically inferred.’ I love that. Truly and woodily. Trouble is Jack, when you run through all the catastrophe scenarios, you find that none of them hang together. AI catastrophe doesn’t work – you know that. Killer machines of any kind are just more hidden aliens. Simulation traps can’t complete the probability calculus, and in fact nothing plausible can. Get to the end of the list and ‘poof’ – no space yetis.”

  Turner was stunned into silence. His mouth actually fell open, idiotically. After a few seconds, however, Scott’s smile of complacent triumph provoked him into a response.

  “Sorry Alex, but that’s absurd,” he mumbled, almost inaudibly, unsure how to restore his argumentative bearings. What would even count as a logical step forward at this point? If Scott could rest his mind so comfortably upon ‘reasoning’ from mere utilitarian convenience, were there any real limits on his thinking at all? “Why would we even begin to believe that we can comprehensively enumerate how things could go bad?”

  It was too late. For Scott, the exchange was already over. Turner could see the disengagement happening, Scott’s gaze wandering, a sluggish indifference creeping into his voice. “You’re telling me we should be terrified of something we can’t even imagine?”

  “‘Terrified’ I don’t know, but basically, yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

  “Come on Jack, listen to yourself. That isn’t science. I don’t know what it is … statistical heebie-jeebies of some kind. It reminds me of that demented ‘Doomsday Argument’. Another monster conjured up out of the unknown by unconstrained probabilistic reasoning. At a certain point, you just have to be sensible – and by that I mean minimally sane, like there are no fucking space yetis sane. If it’s unthinkable, it’s not a problem, right? It’s no more than a bad dream. You shake the philosophical cobwebs out of your head and get over it. …”

  It had been a pleasure, as always.

  §10. Alison glanced at her watch. There were several specks in the queue. She delegated them to the embedded secretary with a few habit-honed needle taps. It was Friday night, getting late, and professional responsibilities were on hold. All that mattered now was the time.

  “Where the hell is Suzy,” she grumbled irritably. “It’s past ten.”

  “Carol warned us about the length of the movie,” Jack replied, soothingly. “It could be another 15 minutes.” Then, seizing the opportunity: “So, this Filkin guy, ‘the zombie’, what happened to him?”

  “He killed himself,” she replied flatly. “I didn’t care at all, either way. It was an ending.”

  “So you’ve no idea why?”

  “Come on, Jack!” she almost laughed. “‘No idea?’ You know how many lunatic ‘ideas’ get served up to me every day? I’m up to my nostrils in ideas. Ideas are fucking pollution. There are always ideas.”

  “OK, OK.” He was smiling too. “Seemed like a loose end in the story somehow. I guess not.”

  She had wandered over to the window, reflection buried in the dark. Sporadic snow-muffled traffic noises drifted in. The stars were like ice crystals, as the poets had always said. The stilled year waited for nothing in particular. Occasional flakes meandered downwards, to expire upon the glass.

  “It’s madness, isn’t it?” she said. “To think that his name and the source of his death could have any connection? I’d never imagined insanity could be so cold.”

  “There’s chance,” he tried. “You were gambling on worse than trillion-to-one odds yesterday.”

  “That’s because I didn’t understand.”

  The door buzzed.

  Once Suzy was inside, Carol thanked, the door closed, the car’s Doppler-shifted vanishing complete, negotiations proceeded rapidly. There was only one item on the agenda, and Suzy grasped it almost immediately.

  “Go in without me, and you’ll be dead in ten minutes. Go in with my carrier and you’ll trash it. So I’d have to guide you.”

  “Would you?” Alison asked, before Jack could complicate the proposal.

  Suzy’s ambivalence was palpable – a jagged oscillation between compliance and resistance. “This isn’t going to go away, is it?” she asked eventually.

  “No, it isn’t,” Alison replied firmly.

  Suzy had been protected from the details of the school consultation, but she understood enough to realize that it hadn’t gone well. “I don’t know what you expect,” she said, with a hint of petulance.

  “What should we expect?”

  “Darkness. Pain,” more calmly factual than Gothic.

  “Well, if that’s to be the discovery, maybe you shouldn’t be spending half your life in there.” The soliton of controlled anger was not well hidden.

  Jack placed his hand on Alison’s knee, the message economically conveyed: we need her cooperation. Suzy noticed, and pretended not to.

  “You tried to break in, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” Unhesitatingly. It didn’t really matter how she knew, or what she thought of it. If it appeared as a sign of clumsy desperation, that might help.

  “Alright then.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “I said ‘alright’.”

  “When?”

  She re-angled her wrist to glance at the time. “Username ‘Suzyxwvut’,” she said. “Password ‘phylundhu’.”

  §11. Looking around in this strange space, Jack realized just how definite his quickly-extinguished expectations had been. The word ‘game’ had been bound in his mind to tacit convictions that already seemed laughably false. Through sheer inertia – a “failure to update” he would once have said earnestly – he’d been prepared for an environment that announced its artificiality through limited resolution. Even were it not discernibly pixelated, it would be somehow cartoonish, and sensually shallow. The discrepancy was shocking. He concentrated his attention on the gray horizon, struggling to collapse its depth into the graininess of electronic illusion. Clouds coiled heavily around distant peaks. A storm was coming.

  His genre assumptions had been no less inaccurate. Suzy had never spoken about it much, she’d simply disappeared into it. There had been packaging at one stage, though, and perhaps some kind of illustrated booklet. From those, an impression had assembled itself automatically, grafted onto a mnemonic backdrop of legends, fairytales, and childhood fantasies. He had anticipated an elaborate stage-set, designed for chivalric romance.

  It wasn’t like that. Everything was wrong, or almost everything – scales, styles, atmospherics … In its expanses, as in its details, there seemed too much of it to be for anything. There was a jagged harshness here that no story could soften.

  Neither Allie nor Suzy looked much like themselves, but he recognized both of them immediately. Age differences had been compressed, but only moderately. They were still two parents, with their child. The adjustments to their features were subtler still, although weatherings, hardenings, and scarrings now suggested a familiarity with extremes of endurance and casual cruelty. Alison had the posture and expression of a stone-cold killer. Compared to Suzy she was a picture of humanitarian sensitivity.

  He and Alison were dressed in utilitarian black clothing, frayed and stained, designed for walking through rugged terrain, and well-adapted to the climate. Various clips, belts, and pouches were conveniently provided for collecting stuff. It was a game, after all.

  Suzy’s attire echoed there’s stylistically, but it had been modified by long years of adaptation. Her utility slots were neatly cluttered with items and implements
of obscure provenance and purpose, systematically scavenged from various distant corners of this cryptic world. The predominant ashy black coloration of her clothing was disrupted by irregular stripes of vivid green. They were wasp markings, evidently. She had become venomous enough here to post a warning.

  They stood on a ridge, high enough to be cool, but the landscape around and beneath them was densely jungled, steamy and voracious. Tropical vegetation gnawed at a fractured terrain of slippages and chasms. Scattered throughout the scene were untidy jumbles of human habitation, bursting from the tangled foliage like ulcerations.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s so …” The thought had not completed itself, but it was heading through ‘grim’ and ‘melancholic’ towards ‘crushingly oppressive’ or worse.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Suzy anticipated with eager inaccuracy. “Bigger than the world, somehow.”

  Something massive towered behind them. At first he mistook it for a mountain, perhaps an extinct volcano. It tapered to a summit lost among clouds. Only gradually did the realization dawn that this was an artificial structure. His mind reeled at the impossibility. Then he remembered where he was.

  “Ashenzohn,” Suzy said. “It’s old.”

  “Old?” He didn’t want this. His mind recoiled, exhausted and shuddering. Already psychologically bruised from spatial super-saturation, he had not begun to consider the time-dimension, also opening into shattering expanses. Of course, it was going to have been sensational, but somehow he had not been ready for it, and it was all far too much. He shut his eyes, but the sucking vastness still impinged. Where a headache should have been, there was instead a kind of tumbling outwards, a vacuuming away of self.

  The colossal mound, however, screwed monstrously into the sullen sky, was something he understood. It had to be. That, now, was inescapably obvious.

  “I know what it is,” he said. “It’s a space elevator, or what’s left of one. The ruins of a terrestrial base station.”

  Suzy was looking at him fixedly, her face illuminated by something close to awe. “How did you know?”