THE REJECTS

 

 

1

 

BLAKE HATED THE DARK. A minor phobia that NASA turned a blind eye to in order to keep him in the fold of their “specialized employee” pool. He thought himself a scientist first, an astronaut second. A distant second. But there were moments, jobs like this one, that required, well, extensive travel. Required him to enter the darkest void known by god or man. Space. The endless nothing.

He considered the contrast between one dark and the other. The one out there and the one he found himself in right now, hurtling downward at a speed most humans without his unique training would have likely found nauseating.

The elevator was large, a service lift for techs and mech. A twenty by twenty, black pressurized inch-thick carbon box speeding into the depths of the moon. They’d been traveling nearly three hours, belted into galvanized chairs. A lot of seats were empty. A VIP trip. Regardless of his status, Blake was getting fidgety.

“Heard it was hollow,” he said.

Barbara gave him a sidelong glance. “What?”

“The moon,” he said, smirking. “Heard it was hollow. Didn’t you know? Whole damn thing is a Martian spaceship, created to keep an eye on us Earthlings.”

Their guide, an uptight tick of a man named Norris, slid his attention over to him. His features came in flickering bursts of light as the speeding elevator passed line after line of embedded cathode tubing, spread every fifty feet or so. They were blipping by at a rate of about one per second. Norris adjusted his wire-frame glasses.

“Just kidding, Norris.”

“I was just going to say,” he said, glancing from her, back to him, as if careful how much to say in advance of the big show, “that you are closer to the truth than you realize.”

Blake swallowed, nodded. Didn’t care for the geeky little man. Thought he was peevish and petty. The kind of guy who’d cheat at chess. He looked back at her.

“Kinda far from the jungles, aren’t ya, doc?”

Barbara looked at the darkness of the hard floor beneath their weighted boots. He suddenly felt like an ass without fully understanding why.

“I had to leave a very important project for this,” she said, throwing a steely glance at Norris, who noticed but simply turned away. “Years of work to be finished by someone else.”

“The Africa thing. Eve,” he stated, knowing very well the project she’d been heading up. The hunt for the Mother of us all. The DNA string that tied us all together. Scientists universally mocked the idea, but she was a follower. A leader, rather, he thought.

Norris snorted.

Blake’s brow bent and a muscle in his jaw twitched, but Barbara just sighed, as if relieved to have it out in the open. The hostility.

“I assure you, doctor,” Norris said, looking straight ahead, the pulses of light making him shimmer, “this is more important than any project you’ve ever been part of.”

She shrugged. “Well, whatever it is I’d like to get to it already,” she said, not bothering to look at either of the men riding into the moon with her. “It’s been a damned annoying six weeks.”

Barbara. It had been a few years since they were together, but Blake throught she looked exactly the same. Maybe even better. Kind of hard to tell in the space jockey suits they were all sporting, but at least they were able to ditch the headgear at the top. She was right. Six weeks isolated on this rock. Cut off from everyone, everything back on Earth. Protocol, they said. Top Secret. Until now. The secret was buried deep, whatever it was and whatever clandestine lair they were being asked to opinionate upon. And based on their light gear, it was air-tight.

Blake watched the flickering lights glance off Barbara’s cheek. He didn’t wonder if she still thought of him that way. Waste of his brain’s oxygen.

He knew she didn’t.

“I second that,” he said. “We’re gonna hit Earth pretty soon.”

“Not quite,” Norris said under his breath. It was a quip, but there was something in Norris’s tone that straightened Blake’s smirk. He was getting the feeling this expedition was not of the “pleasant discovery” or “scientific breakthrough” nature he was usually called in for. This felt like something else.

A turbine blew out like a jet engine winding down and the elevator slowed as if riding a flattening bubble of pressurized air. The trap came to a soft stop, there was some loud machinery, a rush of air that mussed his hair and made even Barbara run a hand through her own blond mane, smoothing it down and making him think about her that way all over again.

Blake felt the doors open but saw nothing. He began to squirm a little inside. The dark was total, and astronauts, training or not, could get as squeamish as anyone when trapped in a foreign place in the pitch black. Throwing in the fact the place was approximately a hundred kilometers beneath the surface of the moon didn’t help with the heebie-jeebies. Not a bit.

Norris stepped out of the elevator and overhead lights barked on, illuminating a long steel-floored hallway about the length of a football field. The walls were chiseled moon rock.

A rush job, Blake thought, and stepped out of the box.

“After you, commander,” Norris said, and smiled. Showed teeth.

Blake declined taking the lead.

 

 

2

 

THE LAST OF SECURITY DOORS sealed behind them. It had seemed like an eternity of hallways and metallic stairwells, all it of jutting deeper and deeper, like a tangle of man-made arteries, into the belly of the moon.

Blake was about to make a gibe about his hourly rate when he heard voices. Lots of voices.

“Last door,” Norris said, never slowing his quick pace the entire way. Blake felt a pang of embarrassment at how heavily he was breathing to keep up and promised himself a new exercise regimen once he returned to Earth. He was in his forties now and it was important….

“Jesus,” Barbara said.

With a flick of the same ID card he’d used to open the last dozen or so doorways, Norris triggered a large slab of metal the size of a garage door to slide silently away. “Well, almost the last door,” he added, his face slapped with a fool’s grin, his eyes fucking twinkling.

But Blake had no time for Norris, because he was following Barbara through that door, into a city.

“What is this?” Blake asked, almost inaudibly.

Norris wouldn’t stop smiling, a new trait that would drive Blake mad had he the capacity to concern himself with the trivial little man. “We call it The Site,” he said. Blake was waiting for him to rub his hands together maniacally, but he quickly thrust all thoughts of their chaperone aside, took in the wonder of what laid before him.

A cavern, brilliantly lit by light sources the size of houses stuck fast into the carved ceiling and walls. A cavern the size of a small town, easily a mile in length, half that in girth. Men and women in uniform, navy-blue jumpsuits walked and crawled over the surface of the cavern, some wearing goggles, all wearing gloves. They had tools, and—Blake realized with a sudden shock of reality gone sideways—what they were doing.

Barbara looked at him and he met her eyes, his own astonishment reflected on her face, her smile almost beautiful enough to be distracting.

“They’re excavating,” she said.

 

 

3

 

SOMETIME LATER, AFTER MORE STAIRS and another long elevator ride (this time open-air) leading ever downward, the scientists were led to a large canvas tent the size of a barracks. A short, plump woman with frizzled black hair and a maddening habit of touching her fingertips to her lips said each of their names in a loud, garish tone. Blake and Barbara shared an amused glance as they seated themselves in a couple white plastic folding chairs, their names spoken by the woman as if off a call-sheet, in the manner a teacher might list the name of each student prior to class. Blake had to make an effort not to raise his hand.

After the affirmation of identities, the scientist, who revealed herself to be none other than the world-famous archeologist Madeline Cooney—or “Mad C” as the vast scientific community had nicknamed her—had the lights dimmed. A large glowing square appeared on the wall behind her. A slideshow had begun.

Blake’s amusement withered as the brilliant shrew began lecturing about what exactly was happening and why there was a hidden city inside the moon.

By the time she arrived at the part about the giraffe, she had their undivided attention.

“It was thirteen years ago, almost to the day,” Mad C said, her voice scratchy and deep with a slight warble, as if she were teetering near a precipice. “It was a mistake. Three astronauts of the revived Apollo 23 program found her.”

“They were the first base inhabitants, is that right?” Barbara asked hesitantly, a bit out of her field. Mad C nodded enthusiastically.

“Yes. Part of the first hundred of Base One. These three were mineralogists, vacuuming literally tons of moon soil through a roving atmosphere chugger, made to extract mineral and the miniscule amounts of moisture from the dead soil here.”

The slide showed the chugger mounting a grey sandy crest, the background a black curtain. The slide flipped, and it showed a patch of soil, dotted with white.

“This is what they uncovered. Due west of the Grimaldi crater. On the dark side, that is.”

“The side we can’t see,” Blake said without humor.

Mad C nodded shakily, and a new slide appeared.

Barbara couldn’t help herself and rose from her chair. Mad C said nothing as Barbara approached the screen, her fingers reaching for the image. Mad C, her tic momentarily unchecked, was all but swallowing her own fingers with excitement.

“What the hell is it?” Blake said, feeling like the dumbest guy in the room. “Looks like, Jesus, it looks like an animal.”

Barbara turned, tears in her eyes. She looked at Mad C. “A giraffe.”

Mad C nodded. “That’s what we came up with as well.” Here she paused, looked down, shuffled her feet. She mumbled the next part under her breath, as if ashamed, or afraid. “At first.”

Norris piped up from the back of the tent. Blake’s eyes darted to his shadow. He’d nearly forgotten about the little man, made a point not to lose track of him again.

“It’s too big,” Norris said. “Slide!”

Behind the projector, someone clicked to the next slide, and they all turned to stare.

It was the giraffe bones, all laid out now on a tarp, orderly as could be. The puzzle assembled. Next to the giraffe were measuring sticks. A few of them. Barbara counted quicker than Blake.

“My god,” she said, more amazed than afraid. “It’s nearly thirty feet tall.”

“And the bones are too thick,” Mad C added. “Thick and strong. Fossilized, yes, but even extracted we could tell that the bones were denser, stronger. This animal would have been thirty feet high, nearly five feet wide, and strong as ten bulls.”

Blake looked at the bones, at the two women. He shook his head. “This makes no sense. You’re telling me there are giant giraffe roaming the moon? What the hell is this?”

Mad C raised a hand and the lights popped on in the tent, the slide image swallowed by the light. “The giraffe, we think, was an anomaly,” she said, then started to follow up her thought, but paused, re-thinking her approach. “It was too close to the surface. The rest were much, much deeper.”

Barbara looked at Blake, then sat down in a chair, a dazed look in her eyes. It was too much for her. Blake stepped behind her, put a hand on her shoulder, not fully knowing if he was supporting her, or himself. He looked to Norris, still smiling, then turned back to Mad C.

“The rest?”

 

 

4

 

THEY WALKED PAST HUNDREDS OF bustling, agitated excavators, each with their own flurrying purpose. The entire floor was littered with bones.

“This isn’t a dig site,” Blake said, looking around in wonder. “It’s a goddamned tomb.”

Mad C and Norris exchanged a quick look, as if something in Blake’s words struck a nerve. Barbara couldn’t keep her eyes from the ground, her biologist brain kicking into overdrive as she recognized species after species.

“It’s Noah’s Ark up here,” she said, smiling, her fascination at the discovery overriding whatever mystery it revealed. “That’s a bear… and a lion,” she said, pointing to raw assemblages of bone structures laid out on temporary platforms around the site. “My god is that…” she said, pointing to a far-off stage where the creature was being rebuilt vertically, supported by a thin framework of metal mesh.

“Tyrannosaurus Rex,” Mad C said over her shoulder, as if naming a type of flower Barbara had noticed on their walk through the park. “And that’s a Brontosaurus bone,” she said, pointing to a three-foot long gray wedge walking by in the gloved hands of a young woman, who smiled and nodded as they passed.

Mad C continued. “We’ve also found species similar to Triceratops, Velociraptors, a Baryonix… thousands more or rare pre-Cambrian fossils.”

Barbara gave Mad C a quizzical look. “You said similar?”

Norris stepped up quickly, intervening.

“There will be time for you both to study all the remains we have discovered in this, rather bizarre, site. The most important thing you need to know, what has led you here, is that these fossils, although similar to those found on Earth, are not exactly the same as the species with which we are familiar.”

Mad C continued for him. “There are anomalies in every single sample. Mostly size related, like the giraffe. These creatures were…bigger, stronger. Some of the fossils, however, are smaller than the species we have on Earth. Some are different in other ways.” She shrugged. “More savage. More dominant. Smaller brains. Bigger brains. Too many feet.”

Norris pitched in. “What we do know for certain is that the creatures we have found here, well, they just wouldn’t work on Earth.”

Barbara stopped walking, rested a hand on Norris’s sleeve. “What do you mean, wouldn’t work?”

Norris shrugged. “For different reasons, our biologists have concluded that none of the species here, if brought to life on Earth, would survive. Or, at the least, thrive. They’d all be extinct within one or two generations at the most.” He looked blandly at what appeared to be a fossilized chimpanzee, as if considering it, then continued. “If these moon creatures were all we ever had on Earth, the entire planet would be quite barren.”

“Except for humans, of course,” Blake said quietly.

“I suppose,” Norris said, not sounding too sure.

“Okay, so I’ll ask again,” Blake said, annoyance now creeping into his voice. “What the hell is this place? These fossils, where did they come from? How are they here? I get there are variances, which, from a biological perspective, I appreciate. But if these creatures never lived on Earth, where did they live?”

Norris started to speak, but Blake held up a hand. Norris’s mouth shut.

“But those questions, to be frank, are just a trivial footnote to a bigger issue here.”

Norris sighed. “Which is?”

“That you two know more than you’re telling us,” Blake said, his tone now devoid of all humor, and patience. “I don’t like secrets. There’s a threat here.”

Norris gave him a pained smile but did not meet his eyes. “Quite observant. Luckily for you, we were just coming to that, commander.”

The quartet of scientists passed out of the large chamber and into a smoothly paved tunnel. Naked light bulbs were strung along the ceiling, now only ten feet above their heads. Blake looked at the smooth walls and his brows furrowed. There were etchings.

Blake stopped. “Wait,” he said.

Norris turned back to him impatiently. Mad C and Barbara paused a few yards ahead, their faces blurred shadows in the dimly lit corridor.

“I’m not going any further until you two start answering questions. I’m here as a representative of NASA and the United States Government. I’m not a schoolboy touring the Natural History Museum. Coyness is no longer an option.” He looked at their faces, landed on Norris. “Understand me, Dr. Norris, when I say I want you to answer my question, I mean right this goddamn second.”

Norris’s eyes shifted to Mad C, who had her fingers on her lips, mumbling quietly to herself. “Very well,” he said.

“Thank you,” Blake said, shifting his weight like a cop putting away his sidearm. He pointed to the etchings. “For starters, what are these markings? They’re not human.”

Norris didn’t look away from Blake. “We believe it is a calendar. Not unlike the ancient Mayan calendar. There are similar patterns. We’ve been studying them for years.”

Barbara moved to the wall, ran her fingers along the embedded string of interwoven shapes, a series of dots and lines running beneath it. “Some of these…yes, this is very close to the Mayan word for Male.” She moved down the hallway, pointed at another. “This one. It looks like….”

“Earth.”

They all looked at Blake, who had his finger planted on a triangle-shaped etching, intricate designs decorating its interior. Barbara nodded in agreement. “Possibly.”

Mad C put her hands together, a gesture of prayer. “Please, if you’ll just come with us. We have to show you and then you might understand. We hope you will. It’s why you are here.”

Blake fumed. He hated the idea of being toyed with, having information dangled and held back. He decided to play along a few moments more. If he still didn’t have the answers he wanted, he would move on to more dramatic means of inquiry. He smiled gamely. “Lead on, doctor.”

Mad C offered a slight bow and, turning, continued down the narrow corridor, going deeper and deeper toward the cold center of the moon. Blake followed, the scribbling of aliens chattering all around him, the mimicking skeletons of Earth’s beasts scattering the floor behind.

 

 

5

 

PAST THE END OF THE corridor was another large door. This one guarded by a hand sensor. Blake noticed it was the first to have this level of security and felt a surge of intensity. Wherever, or whatever, it was they were being led to, the destination was apparently now just the thickness of a steel door away. His hands clenched as Norris splayed his palm on the black pad adjacent to the door.

Mad C turned to Blake and Barbara, her lips twitching with unmistakable nervousness. Or excitement, Blake thought. Jesus, she’s sweating.

“You’ll both have a lot of questions. Please trust that we will tell you everything we know.” She looked at Blake, met his eyes momentarily. “Everything.”

Blake nodded. A loud beeping emanated from the door as it slid into the wall on silent rails.

For the first time, Blake noticed that Norris had lost some of his swagger. He swallowed, his hand not leaving the pad, and allowed Blake and Barbara to step into the room ahead of him.

“I’ve seen it,” he said, almost abashed, as if it were not an action he was eager to repeat.

Blake stepped inside, and his breath caught in his throat.

“My god,” Barbara said from just behind him.

Blake studied the far side of the chamber – a room a hundred yards wide and twice the height – and saw a glimmering outline of bones the size of a Chicago skyscraper. Massive spotlights buzzed like insect swarms as they blasted their beams skyward. Blake followed the light, his mind trying to understand the scope of the creature they were looking at. He felt more than heard Norris stepping up behind him.

“Amazing, isn’t it,” Norris whispered, as if for Blake’s ears only.

Blake spun, horror on his face. Norris simply smiled, stared up at the creature. “The last of the rejects,” he said, louder this time.

Barbara, who’s face reflected awe versus the stark terror Blake felt, turned to face them. “Rejects?”

Mad C, who had been standing by the door quietly, stepped closer. But not too close, Blake noticed. “One theory we are postulating. All of this, all of these samples … they are the ones who didn’t make it. God’s waste bin, I suppose,” she said, laughing nervously. “For our planet, at least.”

Blake looked away from her, disgusted, and brought his focus to the impossible monster creeping up the wall before him, the bloated skull a dim cloud in the higher recesses of the room. “That theory has one very important flaw,” he said, walking toward the wall, past the spotlights, hoping that seeing the thing’s bones up-close would make it more logical, less maddening.

Barbara approached close enough to stand beside him, her head tilted upwards, as if trying to somehow capture the sheer scale of the beast. She put a hand on his arm. He did not pull away. “The others,” she said, speaking out loud the very thought that had been hiding in the shadows of Blake’s reason, just waiting to step into the light and announce itself. “We’ve seen, well,” she paused, searching for the right word, “…variations, at least, of the others. The giraffe, the dinosaurs … those animals are all ones we know about, have seen or studied. But this … this doesn’t exist.”

Blake abruptly shook his head. His thoughts felt fuzzy, as if he’d just had two shots of whiskey. He turned to find Mad C and Norris, but they were on the opposite sides of the lights, nothing but shadows. He started to call out to them, but the words seemed disconnected from his brain, the meaning behind them slippery.

He closed his mouth.

He barely registered the large sliding door of the chamber sealing shut. He turned to Barbara, hoping for assistance, for grounding. He hadn’t noticed her hand leaving his sleeve.

Her face was waxen, her jaw sagged; her eyes were glazed over, trance-like.

“You will both be given instruction,” Mad C said.

Blake unzipped his jacket. Sluggishly, as if moving underwater, he reached inside, found the cold metal of his sidearm. The buzz of the spotlights grew louder. Too loud. He felt it vibrating through his teeth, crawling through him. Infesting. He squinted into the bright spotlights, the beams grew halos, the room beyond them darkened. Tunnel-vision pressed in on his senses,

He pulled his sidearm free. Pointed it toward the spotlights.

“I assure you that won’t be necessary,” he heard Norris say, his nasally voice coming from beyond the lights, but also from inside his head. “Mankind has no further need of weapons,” Norris added in an arrogant, hateful tone. Then he laughed—a hysterical, choked sound that chilled Blake’s spine.

Then Blake heard another voice. This one came from deeper in his consciousness, buried beneath layers of reason, speaking in a language he could not understand, could not fathom. He blinked rapidly, pressed one hand to his temple, tried to will the voice away, to focus his thoughts, stay inside himself, stay himself.

He saw the blur of a blue outfit. One of them was moving behind the lights.

Mad C.

Blake raised the gun and fired. One spotlight exploded, the thick surface of the light blew outward in a cloud-like spray of glass dust, but the light continued to shine blindingly.

He fired again, into the shadows.

The voice inside him grew louder. He stopped firing, staggered, dropped to his knees.

And he understood. Understood his role. His instructions.

For the coming.

He squeezed his eyelids shut, the last fragments of sanity flayed like ripped curtains, his mind now fully occupied by the voice. The instructions. The visions shown to him.

He forced his eyes open, the world a blur through the sudden rush of tears. Barbara was standing once more, her eyes clear. She studied the bones of the creature, the one only slightly different than the ones already on Earth, ready to reveal themselves with the flickering of a dimensional gap, a light-switch effect that would finally unveil the horror, enable the merging.

Norris and Mad C, or at least the things they were now, suddenly stood before him; stared down at him with pity.

Mad C kneeled, looked into his eyes. “This will be easier for you if you open yourself to the inevitable. We are ready to evolve, commander. Can’t you see that?”

Blake steadied himself with one hand. He had the creature’s instruction.

But he also had his training, the only thing that kept him sane for a few more critical seconds.

Blubbering like a child, he raised the gun and fired it into Mad C’s face. A burst of spray went up behind her head, dissolving the strength of the light’s beam. She slumped toward him.

The voice was no longer a voice. It was a command. It was pushing him out.

He sensed more than saw Norris running for the door. He lifted his gun to fire again, but it was too heavy, the voice too loud.

Damn them all, he thought.

He felt a hand rest gently on his shoulder. He looked up into Barbara’s face. She was smiling. She got on her knees beside him. She pulled the gun from his hand, now weak, now beaten.

He looked into the eyes he once knew so well, saw the unshakable calm there. Saw the understanding. He shook his head, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“I won’t do it,” he said. “I’ll die first.”

Barbara put a hand on his cheek, still smiling. He thought about their time together, the beauty of her. For a moment, the voice went away, his head filled by a sudden rush of humanity, of all that it once was.

He felt the cold metal under his jaw.

“We know,” she said.