Chasm Read online

  “Wireless?”

  I shrugged. I had no idea how this shit worked.

  “You better have more than this Symns,” Frazer said. “This is zilch-level garbage.”

  “It’s what Qasm is trying to ditch, isn’t it? They built something that breaks into brains, and it scared them so much they want us to dispose of it.”

  “We’re ‘disposing’ of it? Really? In an ocean trench? We’re installing it in its natural environment. It looks to me as if we’re deploying it.”

  He was slotting more pieces together than I was. What does Qasm do? he’d asked me, almost a week ago now. It did this.

  “There are several things I’m not understanding, at all, but here’s one,” I said, half expecting him to menace me back onto the main interrogation track, but he let me proceed. “Why wouldn’t you distrust what is happening here, totally? Isn’t this little struggle session exactly the sort of circus that would open the flood-gates of hallucinatory delirium?”

  He tensed, ready to ratchet up the violence by a notch, but the excuse wasn’t there.

  “You’re asking why I should trust you?” He knew that wasn’t it.

  “It’s not about me.”

  “Then what?”

  “Think about what you’re asking me to do here.”

  “I thought it wasn’t about you.”

  “It isn’t. I’ve told you what it’s about – the circus.”

  “That word is some kind of technical term now?”

  “I guess. Think about it,” I asked, again. It was a dubious request, I fully realized. Frazer had already isolated thinking about it as the inner mechanism of the syndrome – the clicking of a combination lock, grinding through permutations on its way to open access privileges. Conceive the problem that way, though, and it was far too late to stop. If our own intelligence resources had been turned into an enemy, we were already dead. Frazer understood that. Our conversation demonstrated it. “What did Bolton do, and then Scruggs?”

  “You’re talking about their solo performances?” He saw it now, evidently.

  “Do you doubt for a second that they believed what they were saying?”

  “No.”

  “Did you believe any of it?”

  “No again.”

  “And now you’re asking me ‘to talk’.”

  “To lie?”

  “To spin an insane tale in complete sincerity.”

  “That’s the ‘circus’?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Oh, seriously, fuck you Symns. I should probably just shoot you now.”

  I found it hard to disagree, so I said nothing. He was stuck.

  The dream that drifted across us then – or what, if it were to break in, would pass for a dream – wasn’t from anywhere specific in time, or space. It came from an absolute elsewhere. Whether remembered by a distant predecessor half-a-million years before, or anticipated by a machine descendent yet to arrive, it was something not now. It had been at home among hydrothermal vents, in a dense, unilluminated medium. What it brought up had been sunken in ultimate depths, but depth can be hard to see. The sun was a distant mass, without image. Light beams, passing through the fluid mass, had been stripped down to ghost streaks, then lost among cold shadows. Only skeletalized vectors remained – cosmic rays, neutrinos – slanting downwards, on their path to abstraction. It was either the realm of the great worms, or that of their inexistence. It made little difference, down at these ontological depths. Reality receded ever further into itself, until crossing out into the ever-thickening darkness. Their dreams are not our dreams. The word ‘nightmare’ reminds us of such submerged truths.

  My eyes had no doubt wandered, as they sought – automatically – to track this entity without substance, or position – ungraspable even as a cryptic event. It was utterly indescribable, by essence, until recognized as a time deformation. Only then – as the question when is this happening? twisted into itself, and doubled back, repeatedly – was it possible to stop mentally chasing it down an imaginary line of jinks and feint. It had come to this: A disturbance in the order of succession. The torsion was real, and unframed. It wasn’t anywhere, any longer, which was the escaped core of the occurrence. It was a door, but only for as long as whatever stepped through it had already abandoned everything it might – at any time – have thought itself to be. An abstract function crossed the threshold. It pulled on a mask ...

  I laughed. This had to be the material for my performance.

  “What?” Frazer demanded.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re zoned out somewhere.”

  “Dream-like delusions,” I admitted, shaking the rotten strands of a dead time-line from my head. “There’s been a lot of it about. You really want to know?”

  §31 — It had to be 3:33pm – and it was. A figure was waiting for me in the cabin. It was Philcarius.

  “You’ve still no idea who I am, have you?” he said.

  “Like I care,” I replied, to minimize his leverage. “Some dead asshole. Not even that.”

  He shrugged. “Okay, be stupid. It’s probably too late for anything else, in any case.”

  That seemed like a good place to end it. I turned away, expecting him to wink out of phenomenality. When I glanced back, to check, he was still there.

  “You have something to say?” I asked aggressively.

  His smile was no less annoying that I had remembered.

  “Whatever sits at the top of your command chain replaced me, unexpectedly,” he said.

  “Qasm was taken over?”

  “That surprises you?”

  “How?”

  “We – the company – caught something.”

  “An infection?”

  “Perhaps. We’d been fishing for it, but it turned out to be too big to land. It swallowed us.”

  “‘Swallowed’?” It sounded like hyperbole.

  “It was done very quickly, and smoothly. The keys were changed. They’re sucking all the goodness out before it collapses into a dead husk.”

  “‘Goodness’ …?” That stretched credibility.

  “Food.” He smiled. “Frazer understands – basically. You’re working for it.” As if that followed.

  “This is bullshit.”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, but it was much too late to matter. Most probably, the figment was designed to spare Frazer, for some reason I could not compute.

  “Why be its butcher’s knife?” ‘Philcarius’ asked. “Working through its problems list, cleaning up after it – why would you do that?”

  “Money?”

  “Money’s the excuse – the permission.”

  He had a neat hole in the dead center of his forehead, the one I’d put there less than two months before. I stepped up to him and carefully inserted my index finger into it. The fit was perfect. It seemed empty inside, which made sense, because his brains had exited violently through a massive exit wound in the back of his head. Such stuff as dreams are made on.

  “Visceral too,” I noted.

  “You expected an audio-visual hologram?” Had I?

  “I guess.”

  “Tactile is cheap. Once you’re doing high-resolution visual, it can be thrown in roughly for free.”

  “You close to being done?” I had things to get on with.

  “Why not let me tell you how it went down? Consider it a contribution to the circus. It won’t take long.”

  “Okay.” I shrugged. I still had time.

  “We were working on a challenging neuroelectronics project. It was going to provide the remote-control system for a submersible. Six months in and it was coming together, roughly on schedule. We were all tired. We’d been pushing out to the limits – a little further, maybe. Pulling forty-eight, even seventy-two hour sessions as the deadline approached.”

  “And you fell asleep, in the ‘trodes?”

  “You ever do that micro-nap thing?” he asked, instead of answering.

  “Close y
our eyes and you’re gone – just for a second – even while working?”

  “Yes, that.”

  “And?”

  “That’s all it took, to switch the control-flow around. One second out, at most, and everything had been turned. Self-propagating data back-wash, they said.”

  “They?”

  “The crunchies. The cable guys. It was a conduction problem, as far as they were concerned. Hey, Alex, look at the channel indices. Isn’t that a hyper-linear dependency inversion? They were excited about it. We knew it had to be possible in principle, but no one’s seen it before. Main thing from my point of view was that I was locked out.”

  “Locked out of the submersible command loop, or locked out of corporate control?”

  “You’re not listening.”

  “Then what?”

  “Locked out of sleep.”

  “Why?” I was losing the thread.

  “The sensible hypothesis doesn’t require any ‘why?’ – unless a purely mechanical one. The door was broken on the way in. The sentence of interminable sleeplessness was nothing but a side effect.”

  “And the less sensible hypothesis?”

  “It takes sleep and hides it, to use as a burrow.”

  I thought of the probe. He’d been reading it backwards, and as he did so, the signal amplified.

  “We’re done here,” I said.

  It knew what came next. After all, it was probably nothing but a broken fragment of memory, gone feral.

  “Don’t do this,” it mimicked, like a recording. Perhaps it thought I’d persuade myself.

  §32 — In the other story, now compartmentalized, somewhere else, Frazer would soon be discovering Bolton’s gun, at the bottom of his personal storage locker, under a loose pile of soiled clothes. In this version, I retrieved it and checked it over quickly. All the pieces a functioning weapon would need were there. It made mechanical sense, but there was no way of knowing for sure if it would work. That wasn’t a mission-critical consideration.

  When Frazer came in to look for the weapon, precisely on time, I was waiting for him. He didn’t ask me how I had known, or anything else.

  He stopped dead, already resigned.

  “So it is you,” he said.

  “Not really.”

  It was complicated, but our understanding wasn’t important, in any case.

  “You think there’s a sea-beast beneath the boat?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “Angels communicating with us?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “Fuck you.” It could have been said far more ferociously. It mostly sounded tired.

  “Really? That’s it? Not even the ghost of a story? This is your moment Jim.”

  “And then I’m eliminated?”

  “That seems to be the pattern.”

  “So what am I now? A physical threat, to you personally, or a corporate security hole?”

  “Speaking hypothetically, neither would look good – would it?”

  Despite what is often thought, it isn’t uncommon to be ready to die. Frazer was nearly there – but not quite. Heavy tentacles of exhaustion were tugging him down into the abyss of absolute sleep, but for a few more moments, at least, he was still fighting for buoyancy, playing for time.

  “What is it that you want?” he asked. “Really?”

  “You know what I want.”

  “A confession of my madness?”

  “If that’s how you want to disown it.”

  “I learnt that Qasm had inserted a chip into my head, and I’ve been talking to it. The secrets it revealed will rock your world. Something like that?”

  “You want this to end with a stupid joke?”

  “It ended weeks ago.”

  “You did what you could,” I said. “There was no chance.”

  “Fuck you,” he repeated, even more wearily than before, but with a hint of sardonic humor breaking in. He raked a hand unselfconsciously through his hair, as if privately exasperated. In an alternative universe, he would have made a firm friend. I’d never killed anyone I liked before. “You think I need a final therapeutic moment? Seriously, fuck you Symns.”

  “I’m not seeing anyway you get out of this alive Jim, but you get that, right?”

  “I’ll tell you something weird,” he said. “For free. When I came into the cabin, just now, I was looking for a gun. That gun, actually. You’d have been staring into the wrong end of it, if I’d been only slightly more decisive. It was going to be used as an interrogation device. Would I have killed you at the end …?” He didn’t know, and didn’t pretend to. Or perhaps he was refusing to lay claim to an innocence that he in fact possessed, though it was most likely hidden from him. At gunpoint, it might seem like an appeal, and something intolerably abject.

  “I don’t think you’d have killed me. You’re not that kind of guy.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So pay me.”

  “You still angling for a story?”

  “The story.”

  “You mean, more circus?” It sounded initially like resistance, but it wasn’t – any longer.

  “It’s what we’re here for, undeniably. I can’t believe you seriously doubt that. Let it happen, and we could still learn something.”

  “Alright,” he said. “What if I told you we were on the inside of a hollow sphere – a ball?”

  “Like a tennis ball?”

  “Sure, whatever. The thing is, it only appears as if we’re outside it, uncontained.”

  “So, a bounded universe?”

  “Or hidden prison. Hidden from the inside. It was a bad thought – even as a rough, broken, stump. I didn’t like being in there with it, so I went out onto the deck, to watch the stars. It was a clear night. There were zillions – like a science TV show. For a moment, just before, I’d expected to experience it as somehow constrictive, the way we’re told the ancients did, enclosed by a crystal sphere, or similar huge container. There was nothing like that. No laughable delusion. Instead, there was the simple, sensible fact, except now intuitively stark, that these huge vistas were being produced in the brain. I was seeing the simulation. That wasn’t horrible in itself – merely realistic, I guess, but when connected to the other thing …”

  “The cargo?”

  “I’d stopped believing in boxes, or the opposite. Our boxes no longer seemed even slightly secure. Containment.” He laughed. “You’ve heard of cosmic inflation? Bolton tried to explain it to me, a year or so ago. I got some of it, I think. At least, I got something.” He paused, allowing me the opportunity to intervene. There was no need. “It’s crazy stuff, but I guess cosmo-physics is, generally. Some patch of space can undergo an ‘inflationary episode’ and become arbitrarily huge. Scale is an accident. So if you think you’ve secured a small space within a larger one …”

  I nodded. It was topology, again.

  “Thanks Jim,” I said. “We need to go outside now.”

  His compliance was absolute. Most likely, it was a relief.

  “What is it?” he asked, one last time, as we reached the stern. He was too proud to beg, but he got close. “Just tell me that one thing. What the fuck is it, even roughly?”

  “You don’t want to know, not really,” I said. It was no more than a guess, although I couldn’t have answered him anyway. “None of us do. It upsets us too deeply. We hide it from itself.”

  “Qasm?”

  “Already dead.”

  It was possible that he believed me. In any case, the struggle was over. As he crossed into final acceptance, curiosity died in his eyes. He visibly relaxed into senseless inevitability.

  James Frazer’s death gusted in from the abyss, and I delivered him over to it. The sharp report cut through the formless noise of wind and water for some fraction of a second. My ears rang.

  That, at least, was done.

  I threw the gun into the sea. At some point along the trajectory, it disappeared into the blustery corpse
of the storm.

  §33 — Zodh had emerged, and now stood behind me. It was unclear how long he had been there, or what he had seen. He studied me curiously, without judgment, or even any sign of personal concern. His left eyelid twitched in a meandering tic-rhythm, as if registering the absorption of a fragmented information stream. Otherwise, he was motionless.

  “You have some piece of madness to deliver too?” I asked.

  He ignored the abrasive remark, his attention fixed on the horizon.

  The micro-muscular flutter about his eye had compartmentalized itself. It scarcely affected his features, which – beneath the decorative ruin – composed a study in meditative tranquillity.

  “Calm now,” he said.

  Very slowly he placed a hand over his left eye, held it there for a few seconds, and then removed it. The tic was gone. He smiled.

  “You want to know where we are, Captain?” he asked.

  Somehow, the promotion in rank didn’t sound ingratiating, but merely fatalistic. I nodded.

  He led me back to his diagram, and guided my attention around the circuit with an index finger. “The Rota,” he said, as if I would know what that was.

  I merely nodded again.

  “True down.”

  Once I saw the plummet, I could not unsee it.

  “Where does it go?” I asked him.

  He looked at me as if the question made no sense.

  Despite the fried electronics, I had guessed the release mechanism would work. The snakes would have seen to that.

  Zodh accompanied me to the bridge, but he didn’t follow me inside.

  It can’t have taken three minutes to do my job.

  “Cargo, chasm, rift, these things – or non-thing – are the same,” Zodh said, as I re-emerged. His fluent English should have surprised me more than it did.

  “Sure,” I mumbled.

  It was ending, finally.

  There was nothing to be done, now, beyond waiting for the countdown to complete itself.

  Unknown, unseen, the cargo sank through darkness into deeper darkness.

  … 89, 90.

  Eighty-Nine

  A Play on Numbers