Nothing is inflammable, p.9
Nothing Is Inflammable, page 9
Then another explanation occurred to me—it was my own evolution that was finally letting me see things as they truly were. My senses, now heightened. My intellect sharpened.
My calm quickly faded as I went from camera to camera until it seemed as if the more I looked for them the more I would find until every speck of the lab was an electronic eye peering back at me. My life, detailed in monochromatic hyper-detail.
I considered what to do with the Protohuman, still chained to the wall as it had been prior to my attack on Jakobsen. The man’s corpse lay beside it, the spilled blood now thick and dark as I imagined the blood of a betrayed lover would look if you drained them. I stepped over the body without even acknowledging its presence.
I checked my creature’s face to make sure there were no signs of infection but the wounds seemed as clean as my own. I felt Judas watching me and turned to see the monkey standing in the wreckage of its cage. I was certain there was some significance in the gesture but my mind was otherwise occupied.
What was on the other end of that camera? Who was watching me?
I stepped up to one of them, concealed in the rim of my chalkboard and peered into it.
“What are you doing?” I asked it. “What do you want?”
If the cameras were all operational, and I assumed they must be, then it would have been impossible for someone to have been watching all their outputs simultaneously—which meant either a large team of observers or recording devices of some sort. I knew little of such devices but reasoned that they would by necessity have to be fairly close by to safely receive the camera signals and so returned to sounding the walls in an attempt to locate the point at which they left the lab.
It didn’t take me long to find myself at the very rear of the lab’s shorter length and confronted with a dead end. There were a couple more storage cupboards on my right, the room where I had taken Jakobsen to my left and on one side of behind me the room with the desk in it. The mechanical noises seemed to come from everywhere and yet go nowhere and perhaps that was the intention.
I crouched beside a hole I had created while searching for the cameras earlier and pulled on some thicker cabling that protruded. I tugged harder and another small piece of plaster came away as I dragged the cables out. I tugged again, creating a lateral gutter in the brickwork and kept pulling, kept pulling. The gap ran along the wall several inches from the floor and headed for the blank wall straight ahead of me, the dead end. When it reached the junction of both surfaces I had to tug harder still, once, twice, three times, and on the fourth the plaster came away finally and the hole continued into the back wall. And suddenly it came away with almost no effort. I could see just by looking that the debris was of a differing, lighter nature than the rest and kneeled before the gap.
There were no bricks behind the plaster here.
I took out my pen once more, now cracked and bent at the end, and shoved it into the hole.
It went right through with such ease that I jumped a little and dropped the pen.
I heard it clatter to the floor on the other side of the wall.
The other side of the wall.
What?
I pushed my fingers into the gap and tore out some more plaster with shocking ease, enough for me to then put my hand into and without pause I jerked my hand back and a half-foot chunk of the wall came away.
I bent over further and with some trepidation looked into the gap.
There are no words to describe the shock at what I saw.
The hole was small but large enough for me to see it was another room that I now stared into. I knew that couldn’t be, that there were no other rooms in the lab.
And yet there it was.
Not only a room but a room whose only visible wall, directly opposite, was engulfed by a sprawling metal rack from which hung dozens of monitors of varying size and shape bolted onto the framework. Other electronic devices with bright green LCDs were also attached at awkward angles, arranged wherever there was space.
I squinted and could make out the main lab in one of the larger screens. The flash of movement therein matched the skittering of Judas that I heard with my own ears. It was my lab and it was live.
Two lamps with adjustable necks rose out from behind the monitors like curious lizards, both with bare bulbs burning within.
My chest felt as if it was on fire.
There was a worktop at waist level littered with pens and paper and keyboards.
There was a small stack of books, thick enough to be technical manuals.
There was a clipboard hanging from a pin on the rack.
There was a Styrofoam cup with steam rising from it.
And immediately I realized—they were not coming for me because they did not need to.
They were already here.
I felt as if a great shadow had just passed over me like the weight of a morning depression.
They were already here and always had been. Behind the walls. All around me.
All those times I had listened to the insects. Insects that were not insects.
Machines.
Images-thieves and violent observers.
My breath caught in my throat and I began to struggle to find another, falling away from the gap in the wall, from the horrible truth. I pushed myself away on my hands and felt the notebook I had dropped earlier on the ground. I clasped it to my chest, gasping, gasping, continued to back into the room with the desk.
My hands trembled as I flipped it open, unable to look away from the hole in the wall but also unable to remain looking at it, like staring at the creature that has been haunting you in your dreams.
I read aloud to myself.
Seplophobia—Fear of decaying matter.
Phasmophobia—Fear of ghosts.
I kept turning the pages, pausing every time I heard a sound before returning to the words. I could recall each and every moment of that journal, tracing my life through the fears that defined it.
How long had it been since I had added to it? Not since my mother had confiscated it anyway. And I kept turning pages, I kept turning pages.
Mediated through an infinity of phobias, I grew. I ran away from home and I was dragged back. I began to suffocate in my brother’s bubble as if it were me inside it and not him months before the doctors had even dreamed of constructing it for him.
I jumped ahead, recognizing the weeks leading up Dmitri’s coma, the entries thickening, becoming more frenzied as if they knew this was their last chance—then blank pages.
Somewhere nearby, Judas screeched and I paused involuntarily as if expecting it to be his death-wail. He skipped past the doorway moments later, not even glancing up at me and when I turned back to my notebook I saw more entries. I began reading them without thought, then halted.
This was my mother’s handwriting.
I flicked back through the book, eventually reaching my final entries, then retreated back through the empty pages once more until, tucked away into the heart of pages in writing so tiny you could almost miss it, I found the previously undiscovered entries.
About Dmitri. About germs.
Where did she get all the names of these germs from? She noted them like the lists of food she would often send me out with, attaching phrases and afterthoughts with perfectly straight lines that said things like too weak and pulmonary heart failure.
My own mother had stolen my process.
And yet I continued to read as the story of my own life, my own fears, dissolved and those of my mother’s took their place. I began to see how she must have fed Dmitri his terrors piece by piece like carefully assembled segments of aspirin tablets, building up his insecurities at a rapidly increasing rate.
All these years . . .
Siderodromophobia—Fear of trains or railroads.
My head was spinning even more than it had been before I had begun reading. From one upturned reality to another. I sought purchase behind me, my hand trembling.
Was everything fake?
Or was this another trick of Jakobsen and the conspirators?
I hadn’t noticed the notes until now and although I had rarely looked at the book I surely must have had opportunity to witness my mother’s entries before. It would have been the simplest thing for Jakobsen, as my benefactor, to have gotten access to my personal items while I was still in the asylum and make a duplicate or add to the original. But to go to the extent of being able to precisely replicate my mother’s own handwriting? How could he know such a thing? How far would he go to trick me?
I ran my fingers across the scrawls, raised the pages to my face.
I felt certain I could smell her there, in the dust and fragments—all that she now was.
This couldn’t be.
I let the book drop and squeezed my eyes beneath my fingers.
Every reality was becoming as unstable as the next. I needed something beyond reality.
I needed to get away from reality.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Judas said.
“Of course it makes sense. Not only the being as a whole but each part of it can be rationalized. There must be an optimum height, an optimum foot width. An optimum level of scientific competency. Nothing should be safe from the process.”
“But how can you rely on the accuracy of what you produce? No system can be perfect if it is created and administered by an imperfect system. The only possible way to produce a flawless system would be to do so within a pre-existing flawless system—which is a contradiction in itself, for if such a system already existed, there would be no need to create another, thus the nature of perfection.”
Judas paused, adding more weight to his sentiment, but Dziga pressed on regardless.
“Not true, not true,” Dziga said. “This is Darwin, v2.0. This is mechanical Darwinism. The first generation of beings of course would be flawed but I would expect nothing less. But over time that would be weeded out, diluted. Each subsequent generation would rid itself of more and more unnecessary inaccuracies until finally perfection would be achieved. It would be far beyond my own lifetime of course, but this isn’t about me. I am merely the catalyst.”
“This isn’t about you?” Judas questioned. He adjusted himself on the workbench, still toying with an empty test tube encrusted with something brown-black. “How sure of you are that?”
“What are you implying? Of course this isn’t about me.”
“So what is it about, Dziga?” Judas asked. “What is it you are trying to achieve?”
“I’ve told you already. A creature free of the torment of irrationality, of imperfection.”
“And who are you to judge imperfection? You deign yourself fit to define when something isn’t operating as it should? The universe is beyond you, Dziga, beyond all of us. You try to make it fit a pattern that we can understand and you will fail miserably. There are patterns, but they are as far beyond our comprehension as Fermat’s Theorem would be to . . . to a proboscis.”
Judas smiled a little and Dziga couldn’t help but join him.
“Will you play with life, Dziga?”
“I play with nothing.” He looked over at the Protohuman, safely protected now by strips of barbed wire wrapped around his feet and onto the frame he was chained to. “He doesn’t comprehend what is being done to him.”
“And you, Dziga?”
Dziga looked at the monkey hesitantly. “What do you mean?”
“Would you be aware if you were being toyed with as you toy with that? Would you know if you too were the experiment of some other?”
Dziga frowned, struggling to comprehend what Judas meant. Judas merely smiled back, then finally leaned across the bench, across the notes they had been scribbling as evidence during their discussion.
“Would you know if it were I who created you as you created it? What if you were a little experiment of my own, Dziga? Would you know?”
Dziga stared numbly at the monkey.
“When you sleep, Dziga, do I really sleep too? Or do I open my cage and let myself out to scribble down my notes for the day, my comments on your progress? When you leave at night, I am asleep and when you return in the morning I am asleep—but in between? Who knows, Dziga? And if I in turn are merely the experiment of another? Another link in the Great Assay that the universe has sought to place us in? What of that, Dziga?”
“Preposterous.”
Judas pushed a few of the sheets in front of Dziga, turning them to face the man as he did so. Dziga glanced over the scribbled notes of times and places, activities—his activities.
“Was Jakobsen another of your pawns?” he asked the monkey. “Which part did he play?”
Judas shrugged, scratching absently at the sores that still littered his body. “That we shall see when the results are written up.”
Dziga’s speech had begun to slow, his mind thicken. He was vaguely aware of the proboscis climbing down, scrabbling across the floor and into the upturned wreck of metal that had once contained him.
“Judas?”
“A cage within a cage, Dziga,” Judas replied from behind the rusted bars. “Who’s after you, really? A cage inside a cage—Inside another, inside another, inside another . . . ”
Chapter Ten
Wherein Dziga summons Dmitri for help
I came to on the floor of the main lab, the needle I had used to inject myself still in my hand.
Judas remained in the ruins of his cage, asleep or dead, one or the other.
The tatters of my hallucination lay around me like the torn pages of my notebook, little snippets of tragedy and terror. I listened to the sound of the cameras adjusting, dilating, focusing. Beside me, the Protohuman watched me with disinterest, its face wet in places from reopened wounds.
Did it even matter what I did now?
Jakobsen and his co-conspirators obviously had, and always had, complete control over me. The bars to my cage had been revealed and yet here I remained, untouched. I pondered why they remained silent. Were they truly so confident that I was powerless towards them?
Well I would not be intimidated any more.
I stood too quickly, blood rushing to my head and my newborn face so suddenly that it unbalanced me and I had to lean against the worktop for support. I worked my way along the counter to the door and out into the corridor.
The walls were chipped and cracked, pieces of plaster and broken wire littering the floor, dark gaps holding darker eyes that were staring back at me. Had I really done all this?
My boots crunched on the debris as I walked to the end of the passage and then around the L’s corner and for a moment I thought that perhaps I had hallucinated the hidden room as well but the hole was still there and the glow of the monitors leaked out. I paused before the gap and the machines adjusted to watch me.
I swung my foot back and kicked just above the opening, breaking into it further.
Again.
Again.
Plaster dust sprayed into the air around me, chunks of mortar scattering into the corridor and the observation room and I already knew there would be nobody in there waiting for me. Judas screeched behind me then ran off again. Finally the gap was large enough for me to walk through and I got a better look at what lay within.
Everything was switched on, everything working. The coffee cup was still there but no steam rose from it. It reminded me of the scene from a ghost ship, of sudden, hurried abandonment.
I was out of breath from my efforts as I stepped into the room and it felt like another world. There was a latent heat within, the static buzz of so much electronic equipment and every monitor was filled with the lab. The room was little bigger than the rack of equipment itself and was, as I had suspected, empty. There were no doors or hatches that I could see, no way in or out except for the hole I had battered in the wall.
It didn’t make sense.
And yet that in itself made sense.
I wasn’t supposed to understand—any of it.
I approached the desk and peered into the Styrofoam cup I had noticed when first peering into the room, still hot enough to be steaming. I sniffed the cup and it gave off the hideous stench of stale coffee and it was cold. Looking closer, I saw a little row of indentions in the cup’s rim—teeth marks. There was no kettle or heating device as far as I could see, no pipes to tap into my water supply.
I scanned the notes spilled across the desk and layering the keyboard but the scrawl was so illegible that it almost appeared as if the text was deliberately mangled. Nonsense. Across the bank of monitors, I surveyed my lab’s every corner. Little synchronized clocks sat on the top of each screen, counting away the seconds of my surveillance. I stabbed randomly at a few keys on the keyboard but nothing obvious happened. I flicked a few switches and turned some dials on a slim control panel bolted beneath the monitors and the images therein switched to another position, another room, another angle. I turned the dial again—click—and I was looking down at myself. I turned it again—click—and the camera presented me with a medium close-up of the Protohuman, slumped against the wall, and beneath it, Jakobsen’s peacefully decaying corpse.
They knew, of course, they knew, what I had done.
They knew everything that I had done from the moment I came to the lab, monitoring me as intimately as they had back at the asylum. The question wasn’t if you were being watch—but by whom.
So why had I not been punished? Again the thought occurred to me that perhaps the man wasn’t the central figure to this whole affair, that he was just a bit player. A patsy, a goat they were willing to sacrifice.
What part did everybody else play in this, if Jakobsen was merely a part?
The Engineers? Surely they had no involvement in this prior to my contacting them—unless that had been a deliberate intervention meant to look like serendipity or chaotic guidance. Their disheveled, ramshackle style didn’t suit the grandiose nature of this scheme and also if they had access to the sort of control over me that I was now witness to, what was the necessity of my barbaric mutilation and that of my creature? What did that achieve?
