* * *
“If you can see it, chances are it doesn’t exist.”
Five times we did it. Over five consecutive orbits we threw ourselves between the monster’s jaws, let it chew at us with a trillion microscopic teeth until Theseus reeled us in and stitched us back together. We crept through Rorschach’s belly in fits and starts, focusing as best we could on the tasks at hand, trying to ignore the ghosts that tickled our midbrains. Sometimes the walls flexed subtly around us. Sometimes we only thought they did. Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.
Sometimes we got caught in the open. The Gang would squabble amongst itself, uncertain which persona was which. Once I fell into a kind of waking paralysis while alien hands dragged me away down the hall; fortunately other hands brought me home, and voices that claimed to be real told me I’d made the whole thing up. Twice Amanda Bates found God, saw the fucker right there in front of her, knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that the creator not only existed but spoke to her, and her alone. Both times she lost her faith once we got her into the bell, but it was touch and go for a while; her warrior drones, drunk on power but still under line-of-sight control, staggered from their perimeters and pointed their weapons along bearings too close for comfort.
The grunts died fast. Some barely lasted a single foray; a few died in minutes. The longest-lived were the slowest on the draw, half-blind, thick-witted, every command and response bottlenecked by raw high-frequency sound buzzing across their shielded eardrums. Sometimes we backed them up with others that spoke optically: faster but nervous, and even more vulnerable. Together they guarded against an opposition that had not yet shown its face.
It hardly had to. Our troops fell even in the absence of enemy fire.
We worked through it all, through fits and hallucinations and occasional convulsions. We tried to watch each others’ backs while magnetic tendrils tugged our inner ears and made us seasick. Sometimes we vomited into our helmets; then we’d just hang on, white-faced, sucking sour air through clenched teeth while the recyclers filtered chunks and blobs from our headspace. And we’d give silent thanks for the small mercy of nonstick, static-repellent faceplates.
It rapidly became obvious that my presence served as more than cannon fodder. It didn’t matter that I lacked the Gang’s linguistic skills or Szpindel’s expertise in biology; I was another set of hands, in a place where anyone could be laid out at a moment’s notice. The more people Sarasti kept in the field, the greater the odds that at least one of them would be halfway functional at any given moment. Even so, we were in barely any condition to accomplish anything. Every incursion was an exercise in reckless endangerment.
We did it anyway. It was that or go home.
The work proceeded in infinitesimal increments, hamstrung on every front. The Gang wasn’t finding any evidence of signage or speech to decipher, but the gross mechanics of this thing were easy enough to observe. Sometimes Rorschach partitioned itself, extruded ridges around its passageways like the cartilaginous hoops encircling a human trachea. Over hours some of them might develop into contracting irises, into complete septa, lazy as warm candle wax. We seemed to be witnessing the growth of the structure in discrete segments. Rorschach grew mainly from the tips of its thorns; we’d made our incursion hundreds of meters from the nearest, but evidently the process extended at least this far back.
If it was part of the normal growth process, though, it was a feeble echo of what must have been going on in the heart of the apical zones. We couldn’t observe those directly, not from inside; barely a hundred meters towards the thorn the tube grew too lethal even for suicidal flesh. But over those five orbits Rorschach grew by another eight percent, as mindless and mechanical as a growing crystal.
Through it all I tried to do my job. I compiled and collated, massaged data I would never understand. I watched the systems around me as best I could, factored each tic and trait into the mix. One part of my mind produced synopses and syntheses while another watched, incredulous and uncomprehending. Neither part could trace where those insights had come from.
It was difficult, though. Sarasti wouldn’t let me back outside the system. Every observation was contaminated by my own confounding presence in the mix. I did my best. I made no suggestions that might affect critical decisions. In the field I did what I was told to, and no more. I tried to be like one of Bates’s drones, a simple tool with no initiative and no influence on the group dynamic. I think I pulled it off, for the most part.
My nonsights accumulated on schedule and piled up in Theseus’s transmission stack, unsent. There was too much local interference to get a signal through to Earth.
* * *
Szpindel was right: the ghosts followed us back. We began to hear voices other than Sarasti’s, whispering up the spine. Sometimes even the brightly-lit wraparound world of the drum would warp and jiggle from the corner of my eye — and more than once I saw boney headless phantoms with too many arms, nested in the scaffolding. They seemed solid enough from the corner of my eye but any spot I focused on faded to shadow, to a dark translucent stain against the background. They were so very fragile, these ghosts. The mere act of observation drilled holes through them.
Szpindel had rattled off dementias like raindrops. I went to ConSensus for enlightenment and found a whole other self buried below the limbic system, below the hindbrain, below even the cerebellum. It lived in the brain stem and it was older than the vertebrates themselves. It was self-contained: it heard and saw and felt, independent of all those other parts layered overtop like evolutionary afterthoughts. It dwelt on nothing but its own survival. It had no time for planning or abstract analysis, spared effort for only the most rudimentary sensory processing. But it was fast, and it was dedicated, and it could react to threats in a fraction of the time it took its smarter roommates to even become aware of them.
And even when it couldn’t — when the obstinate, unyielding neocortex refused to let it off the leash — still it tried to pass on what it saw, and Isaac Szpindel experienced an ineffable sense of where to reach. In a way, he had a stripped-down version of the Gang in his head. Everyone did.
I looked further and found God Itself in the meat of the brain, found the static that had sent Bates into rapture and Michelle into convulsions. I tracked Gray Syndrome to its headwaters in the temporal lobe. I heard voices ranting in the brains of schizophrenics. I found cortical infarcts that inspired people to reject their own limbs, imagined the magnetic fields that must have acted in their stead when Cruncher tried to dismember himself. And off in some half-forgotten pesthole of Twentieth-century case studies — filed under Cotard’s Syndrome — I found Amanda Bates and others of her kind, their brains torqued into denial of the very self. “I used to have a heart,” one of them said listlessly from the archives. “Now I have something that beats in its place.” Another demanded to be buried, because his corpse was already stinking.
There was more, a whole catalog of finely-tuned dysfunctions that Rorschach had not yet inflicted on us. Somnambulism. Agnosias. Hemineglect. ConSensus served up a freak show to make any mind reel at its own fragility: a woman dying of thirst within easy reach of water, not because she couldn’t see the faucet but because she couldn’t recognize it. A man for whom the left side of the universe did not exist, who could neither perceive nor conceive of the left side of his body, of a room, of a line of text. A man for whom the very concept of leftness had become literally unthinkable.
Sometimes we could conceive of things and still not see them, although they stood right before us. Skyscrapers appeared out of thin air, the person talking to us changed into someone else during a momentary distraction — and we didn’t notice. It wasn’t magic. It was barely even misdirection. They called it inattentional blindness, and it had been well-known for a century or more: a tendency for the eye to simply not notice things that evolutionary experience classed as unlikely.
I found the opposite of Szpindel’s blindsight, a malady not in which the sighted believe they are blind but one in which the blind insist they can see. The very idea was absurd unto insanity and yet there they were, retinas detached, optic nerves burned away, any possibility of vision denied by the laws of physics: bumping into walls, tripping over furniture, inventing endless ludicrous explanations for their clumsiness. The lights, unexpectedly turned off by some other party. A colorful bird glimpsed through the window, distracting attention from the obstacle ahead. I can see perfectly well, thank you. Nothing wrong with my eyes.
Gauges in the head, Szpindel had called them. But there were other things in there too. There was a model of the world, and we didn’t look outward at all; our conscious selves saw only the simulation in our heads, an interpretation of reality, endlessly refreshed by input from the senses. What happens when those senses go dark, but the model — thrown off-kilter by some trauma or tumor — fails to refresh? How long do we stare in at that obsolete rendering, recycling and massaging the same old data in a desperate, subconscious act of utterly honest denial? How long before it dawns on us that the world we see no longer reflects the world we inhabit, that we are blind?
Months sometimes, according to the case files. For one poor woman, a year and more.
Appeals to logic fail utterly. How could you see the bird when there is no window? How do you decide where your seen half-world ends if you can’t see the other half to weigh it against? If you are dead, how can you smell your own corruption? If you do not exist, Amanda, what is talking to us now?
Useless. When you’re in the grip of Cotard’s Syndrome or hemineglect you cannot be swayed by argument. When you’re in thrall to some alien artefact you know that the self is gone, that reality ends at the midline. You know it with the same unshakeable certainty of any man regarding the location of his own limbs, with that hardwired awareness that needs no other confirmation. Against that conviction, what is reason? What is logic?
Inside Rorschach, they had no place at all.
* * *
On the sixth orbit it acted.
“It’s talking to us,” James said. Her eyes were wide behind the faceplate, but not bright, not manic. Around us Rorschach’s guts oozed and crawled at the corner of my eye; it still took effort to ignore the illusion. Foreign words scrabbled like small animals below my brainstem as I tried to focus on a ring of finger-sized protrusions that picketed a patch of wall.
“It’s not talking,” Szpindel said from across the artery. “You’re hallucinating again.”
Bates said nothing. Two grunts hovered in the middle of the space, panning across three axes.
“It’s different this time,” James insisted. “The geometry — it’s not so symmetrical. Looks almost like the Phaistos disk.” She spun slowly, pointed down the passage: “I think it’s stronger down here…”
“Bring Michelle out,” Szpindel suggested. “Maybe she can talk some sense into you.”
James laughed weakly. “Never say die, do you?” She tweaked her pistol and coasted into deeper gloom. “Yes, it’s definitely stronger here. There’s content, superimposed on—”
Quick as a blink, Rorschach cut her off.
I’d never seen anything move so fast before. There was none of the languor we’d grown accustomed to from Rorschach’s septa, no lazy drift to contraction; the iris snapped shut in an instant. Suddenly the artery just ended three meters ahead, with a matte-black membrane filigreed in fine spiral.
And the Gang of Four was on the other side.
The grunts were on it immediately, lasers crackling through the air. Bates was yelling Get behind me! Stick to the walls!, kicking herself into space like an acrobat in fast-forward, taking some tactical high ground that must have been obvious to her, at least. I edged towards the perimeter. Threads of superheated plasma sliced the air, shimmering. Szpindel, at the corner of my eye, hugged the opposite side of the tunnel. The walls crawled. I could see the lasers taking a toll; the septum peeled back from their touch like burning paper, black oily smoke writhing from its crisping edges and—
Sudden brightness, everywhere. A riot of fractured light flooded the artery, a thousand shifting angles of incidence and reflection. It was like being trapped in the belly of a kaleidoscope, pointed at the sun. Light—
—and needle-sharp pain in my side, in my left arm. The smell of charred meat. A scream, cut off.
Susan? You there, Susan?
We’re taking you first.
Around me, the light died; inside me, a swarm of floaters mixed it up with the chronic half-visions Rorschach had already planted in my head. Alarms chirped irritatingly in my helmet — breach, breach, breach — until the smart fabric of the suit softened and congealed where the holes had been. Something stung maddeningly in my left side. I felt as if I’d been branded.
“Keeton! Check Szpindel!” Bates had called off the lasers. The grunts closed for hand-to-hand, reaching with fiery nozzles and diamond-tipped claws to grapple with some prismatic material glowing softly behind that burnt-back skin.
Fibrous reflector, I realized. It had shattered the laser light, turned it to luminous shrapnel and thrown it back in our faces. Clever.
But its surface was still alight, even with the lasers down; a diffuse glow, dipping and weaving, filtered through from the far side of the barrier while the drones chewed doggedly through the near one. After a moment it struck me: James’s headlamp.
“Keeton!”
Right. Szpindel.
His faceplate was intact. The laser had melted the Faraday mesh laminated onto the crystal, but the suit was sealing that tiny hole even now. The hole behind, drilled neatly through his forehead, remained. The eyes beneath stared at infinity.
“Well?” Bates asked. She could read his vitals as easily as I, but Theseus was capable of post-mortem rebuilds.
Barring brain damage. “No.”
The whine of drills and shredders stopped; the ambience brightened. I looked away from Szpindel’s remains. The grunts had cut a hole in the septum’s fibrous underlayer. One of them nosed its way through to the other side.
A new sound rose into the mix, a soft animal keening, haunted and dissonant. For a moment I thought Rorschach was whispering to us again; its walls seemed to contract slightly around me.
“James?” Bates snapped. “James!”
Not James. A little girl in a woman’s body in an armored spacesuit, scared out of her wits.
The grunt nudged her curled-up body back into our company. Bates took it gently. “Susan? Come back, Suze. You’re safe.”
The grunts hovered restlessly, alert in every direction, pretending everything was under control. Bates spared me a glance — “Take Isaac.” — and turned back to James. “Susan?”
“N — n-no,” whimpered a small voice, a little girl’s voice.
“Michelle? Is that you?”
“There was a thing,” the little girl said. “It grabbed me. It grabbed my leg.”
“We’re out of here.” Bates pulled the Gang back along the passage. One grunt lingered, watching the hole; the other took point.
“It’s gone,” Bates said gently. “There’s nothing there now. See the feed?”
“You can’t s-see it.” Michelle whispered. “It’s in — it’s in — visible…”
The septum receded around a curve as we retreated. The hole torn through its center watched us like the ragged pupil of some great unblinking eye. It stayed empty as long as it stayed in sight. Nothing came out after us. Nothing we could see. A thought began cycling through my head, some half-assed eulogy stolen from an eavesdropped confessional, and try as I might I couldn’t shut it down.
Isaac Szpindel hadn’t made the semifinals after all.
* * *
Susan James came back to us on the way up. Isaac Szpindel did not.
We stripped wordlessly in the decon balloon. Bates, first out of her suit, reached for Szpindel but the Gang stopped her with a hand and a headshake. Personae segued one into another as they stripped the body. Susan removed helmet and backpack and breastplate. Cruncher peeled away the silvery leaded skin from collar to toe. Sascha stripped the jumpsuit and left the pale flesh naked and exposed. Except for the gloves. They left his feedback gloves in place; their fingertips forever tactile, the flesh inside forever numb. Through it all, Szpindel stared unblinking beneath the hole in his forehead. His glazed eyes focused on distant quasars.
I expected Michelle to appear in her turn and close them, but she never did.