For a few days, I was fine. Nothing happened, or nothing seemed to. I was, at least, still alive, not sick, and the suit remained locked in the storage chest, so I had not been outside, at least not for long. I was lonely for the voice of the monitor, but there are, if I am to be honest with myself, enough voices as it is. The loss of one, even that of the monitor, is something I can survive. I was beginning to relax. Hope had begun to return. I would find something, I told myself. There was something buried in the dirt of the closed portions of the tunnel, or some bit of uncorrupted knowledge that when uncovered would allow us to continue, for us to persist until the air became such that we could survive it and participate in a different kind of life, for us to persist until there would be no need for external material to fashion us, where the thought processes enmeshed in a body would be singular rather than multiple, and the answer to all three of the monitor’s initial qualifications for personhood would be met.
I fell asleep thinking such utopian thoughts. There were dreams, but they were muddled, shot through with shadow.
When I awoke, I knew something was wrong. For a moment, I did not recognize my surroundings and thought I must have ascended the ladder again or, at the very least, moved from one portion of the warren to another. But no, I was on my cot, in my room. My arms I had flung back and over my head. During the night, they had slipped over the edge of the cot; they tingled now as if they did not have sufficient blood. My neck, too, had become bent and was now stiff. It was only in forcing it to turn that I realized someone else was in the room, hanging over me in the darkness, motionless, watching.
For a moment, I felt as though one of the selves inside me had been extruded out of my mouth and had taken on physical form. And then the figure, noting my eyes were open, moved, and I saw that it was Horak.
He looked haggard and ill, but his skin had healed, the necrosis of the flesh having vanished. There were still, here and there, little scraps of webbing, as if he had only recently broken from a cocoon.
“You’re alive,” I said.
He did not reply. Perhaps he saw no reason to reply.
“How did you get in here?” I asked.
“I came in,” he simply said.
“How did you pass through the seals?”
He held out his hand and pressed it to my chest, and I felt unnatural warmth to it. “Shh,” he said. “Just relax. Sleep.” Even when he removed his hand, my chest still felt warm where he had touched me.
But I could not sleep. Perhaps I am asleep already, I thought, and bit the inside of my mouth, but the pain did not wake me. If I was asleep, I could not know it, might never know it. For a moment I kept my eyes closed, and then I opened them. Horak was still there, hanging over me, just as, perhaps, frozen, he had hung for years in storage.
I slid up in the bed until I was sitting. Horak did not try to stop me this time, but he observed me as I did so, his eyes swiftly following every movement while the rest of him stayed motionless.
“Do you intend me harm?” I asked.
He did not reply for a long moment, and then he said, “I do not intend you harm. But that does not mean I will not harm you.”
Could I get out of bed and leave the room, I wondered, or if I tried would he stop me? Should I strike him? There were, I remembered, in the monitor, back before the monitor had shut down, back in my earliest days before the corruption had spread, instructions on how to kill a person such as Horak, if person is the right word, in a way that would keep him dead. Unless I was getting confused with something else. I turned my attention inward, peeling back the layers to reveal the thoughts of each self, but this told me little more. Decapitation, I seemed to remember, the filling of the mouth with straw, whatever straw was, the driving of a sharpened stick or stake through the heart, followed by immolation of severed head and body in separate fires.
He said, “If I stay here too long with you, I will make you ill. I have brought the outside in with me, so to speak. I am the outside made manifest.”
“Take the outside out again,” I said.
“I can,” he said. “I will. But to do so I must take myself outside as well. And before I do I have some things I must ask of you. Can I question you?”
“No,” I said.
“No?” he said.
“Please leave,” I said.
“How can I leave until I have answers to my questions?” he asked. “Shall I ask them quickly before you become ill? Or shall I ask them slowly and wait for you to die?”
When I did not respond, he proceeded to question me as if I had said yes after all.
“Was it you who cut the cables and disabled my storage?”
When I did not answer, he waited and then repeated the question. “Why do you want to know?” I asked.
“Was it you?” he asked.
“Who else is there?”
He gave a slow nod and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Exactly. Who else is there?”
When, some time later, I realized this was not a purely rhetorical question, I answered: “No one else.”
For a time he was not there. I felt my limbs heavy and could not get up. I even slept, my eyes open. When I stirred again, I felt a burning in my chest, and when I peeled my shirt up I saw a bloody handprint where he had touched me.
I tried to get up and leave the bedroom. I managed to get my feet out of the bed and onto the floor, but when I tried to walk, I found my legs becoming tangled one with another and I fell, pitching flat onto the floor. From there I could not get up.
I do not know how much time went by. But time did go by, I am almost sure of it. And it was not a dream, I am almost sure of that, too.
When I awoke again, I was back in the bed, only at first I did not recognize I was in the bed because I was also in a suit. Helmet affixed. Horak was there, looking a little less haggard, tapping gently on my faceplate. I turned my head and saw the chest in which the suit had been stored. The lock on it had been broken, torn off as if by some tremendous force.
When he saw I was awake, he smiled.
“You’ll be safer like this,” he said. “We can talk longer. Even so, to be safe, when I leave you should wear the suit for several days, and for even a few days after that do not touch anything that you see me touch.”
I could feel a heat on my wrist, along my sides, on one forearm: where he must have grabbed hold of me to force me into the suit. I imagined the blood seeping from my skin there, and there, and there, and there.
He said to me, “What happened to the others?”
“Dead,” I said. “All dead.”
“Why?”
“Not enough material. I was the last one formed. Now, what are we to form the next one with? What body are the selves to populate next?”
“Formed? Populated?” he asked. “What do you mean?”
I gestured toward my tablature and described its operation best I could. He went over to it and observed it more closely, bringing his eyes close to it, running his finger along its runnel. Then he shook his head.
“That is not the use for which this is intended,” he said.
I shrugged. How did I know its intention? And what did intention matter in a world such as this, on the verge of dying out?
He came closer to me, squinting. He took hold of my helmet and turned it, then moved his body to block the light shining on it and into my eyes, and peered in.
“There is not room enough in the head,” he said. “They should never have done this.” He rapped on my faceplate. Inside, many pairs of eyes opened. “Do you feel that?” he asked. “Where does the sound catch? What part of your skull?”
“I don’t understand the question,” I said. Through the filter of the suit my voice came out sounding flattened, inhuman. More like the voice of the monitor than the voice of a person.
“Do you have headaches?” Horak asked. “Does your skull sometimes feel like it is prepared to split open?”
I ignored him.
“Wouldn’t you like to be rid of all these personalities?” he asked. “All these ‘selves’”—he made crooking motions with his fingers—“imposed upon the organic matter of your brain?”
But if they do not abide within me, where will they go? They cannot reside within the monitor, not now, cannot be stored in that or other ways without danger of corruption. Even with me there is danger of corruption, but less so. Or at least, so Wollem led me to believe, more chance of them someday finding a more permanent home.
But why would Wollem know? He knew little more than I—much less, in fact, considering that his head was not crowded with selves. And yet Wollem was bipedal, an individual thought process enmeshed in a body. In that sense, he met the monitor’s qualifications for being a person more thoroughly than I do myself.
Horak was gone. I was there, still, on the bed, still in my suit. The places where his hands had touched me had stopped aching but were painful and sore, and felt wet within the suit, too, and I imagined the blood vessels ruptured on the surface and the skin weakened too, the cellular walls collapsing, blood beading on the surface of my skin to form the outline of his touch, the contour of a finger, a palm—a different sort of recording of another self. My chest, too, was still wet with blood, slow to heal. But how slow I did not yet know.
I was not sure how many days had gone by. I tried to sit up, to pull myself up, but it was too much effort, too exhausting. I raised my head and let it fall back. Here I was, just one of me, trying not only to control and move the body we occupied but to keep control of the others, to keep them subdued, half asleep, lulled, safe.
After a while, I began to feel ill. I tried again to get up but still could not. My skin felt like it needed to be shed, buzzing and itching as it was, and I could feel my muscles jerking and moving on their own accord, without me having anything to do with them.
I vomited a pale spume that clung to the inside of the faceplate and slowly began to slip down the faceplate’s curve, dripping off and into my ears and hair. The smell of it was acrid in my nose. I tried to get up and this time managed to move enough to roll off the bed and finish facedown on the floor.
Help me I cried. Horak, help me! Though I suspected that it was Horak himself, his contact with me, that had put me in this position. I say I cried, but I don’t know that I even managed to speak. Help me, I cried again, or at least thought.
In my head, pairs of eyes started clicking open like the dead and flinty eyes of dolls. They watched me, attentive. I turned my gaze inward and watched them in turn, and saw faces form around them, mouths too, and saw them become substantial, or seemingly so.
You want me to help you? said one, his jaw slipping awkwardly as he said it, his voice not quite matching the movements of his mouth.
I said nothing to him. I remained motionless.
I can help you, he said. If you let me. Will you let me?
I am willing to help you, he said, after a time. But what I want to know is this: what are you willing to do for me?