Cautiously, I open the door but almost wish I hadn’t. There is nothing that could prepare me for the sight inside the room, though Sunny already tried. The scene is almost identical to the picture he painted, and although there was no way for Sunny to describe the gut-wrenching odor, the horror was well represented.
The old and abandoned genoplant is only half-abandoned. Its design is much like any other with a series of bio-booths lined up ready to construct instantaneous clones from a transmitted DNA signal, but in keeping with its gothic style, the walls are black brick instead of clinical white metal.
In all other respects, this room is a sight of sheer revulsion. Naked corpses lie in varying degrees of decomposition amongst a carpet of skeletal remains. Many of them identical clones, littering the room as though it is some sort of rejection pit at the bottom of a human laundry chute from a morgue. But not all of them are corpses. Two of them are very much alive: naked clones of Veguelle and Makeswift. Each in different corners, they are huddled, clutching at their knees and moaning, but even from here I can see there is nothing behind their eyes. These are mindless lumps of flesh, spewed from the genoplant booths and left until they eventually die, probably from dehydration. And at the center of it all is Sunny on his knees and weeping. He doesn’t see us yet.
Stairs and narrow corridors, throbbing with indigo light from something unseen, lead down behind the booths to other functional areas. I cannot bring myself to step between the corpses or even know what to do with the three suffering men.
“What … is this?” breathes Kayne.
I shake my head, unable to stop glancing from corpse to corpse, unable to process the magnitude of the original abbot’s horrific mistake.
Tennison steps forward, his face grim as he stares around him. “I should have realized. Should have checked.”
“What is this?” Kayne repeats in a desolate tone.
“You remember all those years ago when the abbot told us he had made our greatest sacrifice to Pandora? Remember he told us he had switched it off and that we would all eventually die like the patriarchs of old?”
“I remember, but …”
“I should have checked,” Tennison says, his eyes filling and his voice breaking as he nods to a panel above the booths. “He didn’t do it properly. He cut the power lines, or so he thought. But he only cut the sections that download the mind. The cloning section has always been active … so many brothers …”
“So every time somebody dies,” I finish his explanation, “an emergency signal is received here to clone a new body ready to receive the person’s mind, but that’s the part Abbot Deepseed switched off.”
Sunny, roused from his lament, looks at each of us in turn with tortured eyes, then settles on me. “I told you. You find.”
“What are you doing here?” asks Tennison.
“You go! You go!” Sunny tries to wave us away. “Keitus is—”
“Brothers!” The abbot appears from the indigo-lit passage near the booths.
Kayne inches forward, grimacing as his heel crunches on a skeletal hand. “Abbot Deepseed, please forgive our—”
“Who are you?” I cut in. “You’re not the real Abbot Deepseed. I saw his body, and he died of natural causes weeks ago.”
With no discernable steps, the abbot moves down the stairs like a snake easing itself from the branch of a tree. A secretive smile forms slowly on his lips, but he gives me no answer except for the elation in his eyes.
I press my question further. “When the abbot died his body must have been cloned here like all these others. But the genoplant couldn’t download Deepseed’s mind into the new body, so who took his place? Who or what are you?”
“Keitus Vieta! Keitus Vieta!” Sunny weeps.
The abbot reaches Sunny. He strokes the top of the monk’s head with a scrawny finger. “I like this one. Faithful servant.”
“Answer my question.”
The intensity deepens in the abbot’s eyes, as if he just thought up a perfect answer. “My name is legion, for we are many.”
“Legion?”
“A phrase I found in one of the oldest books in the abbot’s study,” he says. “I thought it appropriate, just as Sunny feels it appropriate to refer to me as Other Place, though neither of those titles can genuinely describe who I am. And the truth is, I am not sure if a description is even possible …” Then the smile falters, giving way to menace. “Or necessary.”
“Did you coerce Sunny to commit murder?”
“Not at all. Sunny believes he has protected them from me.”
“The Eye of Pandora,” says Kayne. “Oh, Sunny! You killed them and placed the seal on them hoping that Pandora would save their souls from the abbot?”
“Yes, yes!” Sunny sobs. “Keitus takes things from them. Steals their souls. But Sunny sent their souls to Pandora before Keitus could take them.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Sunny not allowed.” He stares at the abbot, his eyes glistening with tears. “But Sunny try. Sunny paint pictures.”
“Poor Sunny,” the abbot says, gliding toward me now, the sound of human meat squelching under his feet. “Raised within the confines of this monastery—he has no concept of real science. But his superstitious belief does have its advantages.”
I pull the ignition pistol from my robes and aim it at the abbot. “I don’t know who you really are or why you’re doing this, but what you and Sunny have done in this monastery is …” I glance again at the skulls and pulp around us, fighting a fresh wave of nausea. I have to push that aside, see all this as evidence instead of horror if I am to keep my head. “Both of you will have to come back with me to—”
“No,” the abbot says and stops to watch me with apparent interest and the slightest of smiles. “Why do you believe your justice has any relevance to me? I don’t even belong here.”
“But you are here,” says Kayne. “What is this … other place you came from that you think you are exempt from judgement?”
“Brother Kayne.” The name spills from his tongue like vomit. “A man, like so many others here, who prides himself in absolutes, who celebrates the perfection of reductionist principles. None of those ideals will help answer your question or help you understand where I came from.” He motions to a skull by Kayne’s feet. “Can this bone explain to its maker where it came from? Can a ring on the finger tell you where it begins and where it ends? Could your crude books illuminate the glory of heaven or the shame of hell?”
The abbot observes us with increasing contempt. “You cannot imagine what it was like to be snatched up and spat onto this ugly world. I found this body, feeling these emotions, assaulted by new senses, suffocated by the stench of these bodies in the dark only to break my fists against the doors of this tomb until Sunny came to release me.
“So ask no more questions, Brother Soome. I have no concern for humanity’s obsession with rules and justice, and I have no more wish to stay in this place of … of atoms and thought than you would wish to stay in a world filled only with bacteria. If it takes a hundred cycles of your universe, I will drain whatever I need from whomever I choose and go back to where I came from leaving nothing but void in my wake.”
Sunny’s low moaning and the eerie shuffling of the mindless men in the corners are the only sounds as we face the abbot. Kayne is trembling. Tennison is rigid. Hardly breathing.
Creeping terror works its way up my spine, but in defiance, I hold the pistol steady and look directly into Vieta’s eyes. “Brother Kayne,” I say, trying to maintain an air of calm control, “our first priority is to put an end to all of this. Can you repair the power lines? We can at least make sure that if anyone else dies they don’t stay that way.”
“I can.” Kayne treads between bodies toward the panel and examines the circuitry. “I think the abbot … Keitus has rerouted the channels …” He peers around the passage behind the booths. The pulsing indigo light washes over his face. “The power lines are heading into … Great Mother! What is that?”
“What? What have you seen, Kayne?” Tennison asks.
“Watch him,” I bark at Tennison, handing him the pistol before going to investigate.
“You won’t understand,” the abbot says.
I make my way behind the booths and into another area, even larger than the first. The room is equally crowded with the dead, their anguished forms strewn over pipes and consoles, their faces contorted in the agonies of slow death. But in the center is a horror far worse: a writhing human embryo twice the size of a full-grown man, fermenting amongst the bloody filth. Its entire body is punctured with tubes and wires leading from the first room, and angry blue sparks crawl like agitated maggots over the infant’s boiling skin. Sensing that someone has seen it, the abomination struggles into a ball, and a semiformed, lidless eye turns to observe me from behind translucent fingers. The toothless mouth gapes to reveal rungs of saliva and a quivering tongue, lolling to one side as it tries to form words but manages only a strangled rasp.
I too am speechless, immobilized by revulsion.
Behind me Kayne has been working furiously. “It’s a host. Keitus has been channeling the brain patterns of our lost brothers into that thing.”
“Don’t move!” Tennison shouts from the other room.
I rush back to see what Vieta is doing. Tennison’s aim is steady, and his eyes are fixed with stony conviction on Vieta, but I know how to read the subtle positioning of his body under the robes: he is terrified.
Vieta approaches Kayne, who is rapidly stripping and fixing wires. “I’m almost done.”
“I’ll take the gun,” I tell Tennison, offering my hand, but he isn’t listening. His fingers, slick with sweat, work around the trigger of the pistol as he follows his target.
Vieta is still moving.
“I’ll shoot!” Tennison shouts as Sunny crawls forward to grab the edge of his robes. “I mean it!” Tennison kicks Sunny aside. “You’ll die, Abbot!”
“I’m do—” Before Kayne is able to make the final connection, Vieta flicks a finger as if cutting a fragile cord with his nail. Kayne jerks awkwardly like a puppet wrenched on its strings, then drops to meet the rest of the bodies.
A moment of stunned inaction grips the rest of us before a series of events unfold so quickly I hardly know where to look: the fetal creature in the other room roars in frustration, a cloned and vacant Kayne slips fresh from the far booth, Tennison fires his pistol at Vieta, and a bolt of searing fire erupts through the side of Vieta’s head, splashing the contents in molten lumps across the wall.
With a cry of utter horror, Sunny lunges forward to wrestle the pistol from Tennison’s hands, and the two of them fall amongst the corpses, fighting for control.
Amidst the confusion I spin around to see Vieta’s headless body shudder, and for several seconds I stare in dumbfounded awe as hair, blood, and bone congeal to form a new head. From another booth, the naked form of Abbot Deepseed, equally as vacant as the newborn Kayne, struggles out only to collapse amongst the human debris, and I stand, too terrified and bewildered to know what to do next.
“Go for help!” cries Tennison. “Lock the door behind you.”
A shot rings out from the pistol, and a fiery projectile tears upward like a small comet between the two struggling men, melting the tip of Sunny’s chin and part of his right cheek and ripping a bloody hole through Tennison’s shoulder. The charcoal stink of burnt flesh mingles briefly with that of the decaying bodies as wisps of smoke mushroom up to the ceiling. Sunny, half convulsing, half shuffling, gives up on Tennison’s motionless form and begins his pursuit of Vieta with moans of mixed apology and cursing.
And Vieta, now completely healed, has the look of a man waking from stasis, trying to remember where he is and why. If I am to do anything, it has to be now while Vieta is still confused.
“Go … for … help,” Tennison croaks, clinging desperately to the last few moments of his life.
“No!” I say, stumbling over Kayne’s body to study the wires and circuits. “Tell me how to finish what Kayne was doing, and you’ll download straight into a new body.”
“No time.”
“There is. Kayne was almost done. Tell me!”
“Red fibers … to red … terminals … easy.” He coughs.
From the corner of my eye I see Vieta turn to look at me. Tennison was right; I’m out of time. Instinctively, I raise my hands in surrender just as Vieta lifts a threatening finger. Any moment now my life will be snuffed out. I stand before an eternity of nonexistence, and all I needed was a few more seconds to repair the genoplant’s circuitry.
Perhaps Sunny will buy me the seconds I need. The distraught monk, still trying to master his own wounds and mind, grasps Vieta’s robes, yanks him back, and roars into the man’s ear, “Sunny not want to go to that place! Save Sunny!”
Does he mean the fetal thing in the other room? Yes! He’s afraid of dying and ending up inside that thing’s mind like all the other dead monks.
“You don’t have to, Sunny,” I shout above his screams. “We stopped it. Help me repair it.”
Vieta is already on his feet, pushing Sunny aside. The temporary distraction is probably my last chance, but this time I change my strategy knowing that securing my resurrection is not enough. I dive for the discarded ignition pistol and fire off two shots at Vieta. The first explodes behind his head, but the second is a perfect hit, and Keitus Vieta is a fireball thrust back against the wall.
Sunny, caught in the backwash, flames lapping across his robes, is alight in an angry glow as he leaps aside, screaming.
I run into the next room where Vieta’s abomination is still writhing amongst filth and fibers. The lidless eyes watch me with cold comprehension as I aim the pistol at its head.
It takes less than a second. The indigo pulse becomes a shimmering blur of red heat as the creature’s fluids burst aflame through its skin. I reel from the heat, hoping I still have time to fix the genoplant before it’s too late.
In the other room Tennison gazes upward, his face bereft of pain or emotion, but his shallow breathing tells me he is still alive. Sunny is a blackened husk propped up against the far wall, flames dancing over his charred robes, but also not dead; his cloned replicant has not yet emerged from any of the booths.
Vieta is very much alive. A morbid curiosity makes me watch him, surrounded as he is by bodies, two of them his identical but soulless twins spawned by the booths. Vieta stares at me. His expression is almost unreadable, but I am certain I see grief or perhaps misery at the loss of the fetus. He looks at Sunny, then from corpse to corpse as if trying to understand this new sense of loss he is experiencing.
Snapping myself from the distraction, I turn back to the genoplant circuitry and take a few seconds to connect the fibers. A crackle and thrum of power tell me I’ve been successful. Sunny and Tennison can at least be saved, and I’m secure too.
“Won’t … work … won’t … stop him.” The whispered words come from Sunny’s cracked mouth. “Only … he … can save everything … only Salem Ben. He … must remember … Prometheus … Cataclysm … Wade.” Surely the last incomprehensible thoughts of a dying man.
Hopefully the genoplant will repair him now that it’s fully functional again. Once he’s reborn all this will be behind him. But what about Keitus Vieta? He won’t die, and we don’t even know how powerful he really is or where he came from. But if I have delayed his plans, so can others.
“Whoever you are and whatever you were doing, we’ve stopped it,” I tell Vieta.
He looks at me, his expression shifting from grief to hatred. “I’ll just have to begin again.”
“Then we’ll stop you again.” I raise the pistol.
He glances at the repaired circuitry, then at Sunny, and a cold smile twists his lips. “No. Not you. But I am curious about him and what he knows. Sunny understands the future. You do not.”
And with that, Vieta lifts his finger, and both he and Sunny slump forward, lifeless. At the same time there is the crackle of failing circuits behind me. Either the repair has failed or Vieta did something to it in his final vengeful moment.
For a few seconds I stare, dumbfounded, then two booths surge to life. From one, the body of Abbot Deepseed falls out, looking as vacant as the previous two, but from the other booth Sunny steps out, younger than before, fresh, but still with the stoop. His bulging eyes are far from empty, and in his face there is a malevolence that seems out of place for Sunny. But not for the fake abbot. With sickening revelation dawning, I realize: Keitus Vieta has chosen a new host, a host who has far greater skill with the Codex than anyone else. And now he is looking at me again, lifting that finger.
A distant scream—most likely my own—the involuntary sound of my body’s protest as my mind falls into a waiting chasm. Feeling is gone. Tactile senses are dulled to numb obscurity, and all that’s left is the sensation of falling forward into blackness at nerve-stripping speed. Dimly, I am aware of what will come next. Every civilization has a name for it—Apollo’s chariot, Walkabout, the tunnel of light, the Quantum Uber God Purge.
A blinding explosion of imagined suns floods my synapses at the last second, the magnitude of the experience matched only by an all-consuming silence. It’s the pinprick glimmer that stretches into the cold-white nova, devouring me, promising the afterlife, but delivering only disappointment. I know this moment as the neural flush, the system-controlled transition from dreamed life back to lonely reality.