Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 19 / Chapter 21 –>

Later, afterward, the Whiston comm hub, a space he knows. Maybe not this one as much as spaces like it, comfortable places surrounded by logic and energy and possibility. Racks of comm array synchronization servers, lights green and red, amber status displays blinking, flipping characters. The hum of exhaust fans and heat sink exchanges. The smell of ionized electronic discharge, as crisp and pungent as autumn leaves. It’s warm down here, improperly vented with so many terminals and links and passive monitor machines crowded floor to ceiling, sucking up the best efforts of the HVAC units.

And still he smells her on his skin, remembers the feel of her, firm and warm and groping. Remembering makes him feel thick, stupid. Makes his jaws ache from grinding his teeth.

Memory has driven Ray here, in the middle of the night with the door locked behind him and a chair propped beneath the knob. Because he’s out of answers, out of leads, out of his league, frankly. So much has been destroyed, so much more is about to change. It has to change, starting in the morning, as soon as word begins to spread that Frederick is dead, that Emma is bearing Ray’s child. If he doesn’t get some reliable guidance or some conceptualization of truth that doesn’t skitter away when the perspective changes, he’s going to scream until his skull explodes. Even now, with everything collapsing about him, he still has work to do.

That is what a comm hub is–a place of answers, a temple of information. A haven where mistakes can be deleted with a few taps on the keypad, where a simple system wipe creates a clean slate for everybody. A virtual landscape full of potential where failure has no consequences.

How much did you know?

How much!

All of it.

He has been blind and manipulated from the start, from the moment he set foot on Paraclete. From the moment she approached him outside the plush and elegant doors of Madame Trusseau’s theater. While he was hunting Lilaikens, Emma was hunting him.

She showed you to me, how you were made for me. How I was made for you.

But this is supposed to make him feel better somehow. Competent. The tedious, technical mental exercise of aligning satellites and relay beacons, of hacking the broadcast array up on the Port Authority station and embedding a rogue signal, of confusing their bandwidth security agents with chaff, red herrings, a maze of misdirection.

It’s all games; nothing like the real world.

Ray studies the process of beacons linking one to another across impenetrable space, imagining the wave of his signal crashing back along network, routed through accelerators, through folded space and pin sized wormholes. Data shredded, blasted, gathered and reassembled, all in real time and at the speed of light.

He doesn’t even know what day it is on Terra. He’s lost track of everything. And he doesn’t care.

The screen image flickers, splashes from spinux signature blue to starfield black, to a complex governmental seal, some weird variant of the FSA rocket and hanging moons, that blips away before he can study it. An anonymous, monotone automated routing system demands his passcode id, verifies his status, shunts him along the comm tree. Finally, the gray walls of an anonymous office, shadowed and red tinged by late afternoon sunlight filtering through windows he cannot see.

And Jack Holcomb, seated, waiting. He’s probably been waiting for days, expecting this.

“Frederick Whiston is dead,” Ray says. He doesn’t have the energy for a proper salutation.

Holcomb hunches toward the screen, squinting. There’s no camera, no vid signal. Ray is just a disembodied voice to him. “Marlowe?”

“Yes.”

Holcomb brightens at once, his body language relaxes like a sigh of relief. He’s in shirt sleeves, without his tie, out of uniform. It must be Saturday or Sunday. Ray has never imagined Jack as the type of FSA company drone who would come in on his days off. He hasn’t imagined him as anything but a ball-busting jerk.

“I must say it is a pleasure to hear from you. After the reports began filtering in about the Paraclete disaster, I was afraid we’d lost you. The news feeds set us straight quickly enough, of course. And that EED Colonel out there…what was his name…well, he was kind enough to report through official channels that you had arrived safely, and with the Whistons about you, no less.” Holcomb chuckles at this, amused. “It seems you found those Lilaikens a bit more troublesome than you initially assessed.”

There are no Lilaikens, not then, not now, but Ray doesn’t feel like explaining it. It’s too much clogged and tangled minutiae, threads of a tapestry that only fit if you can step back and examine the whole picture in detail. He doesn’t have the desire to even begin explaining.

And he doubts Holcomb would even care.

“Frederick Whiston is dead,” he says again.

“Yes, I heard you the first time.” A distracted, nuisance shake of the head. “Terrible.”

“You don’t sound like you think it’s terrible.”

“I assumed you killed him. If you killed him, it must have been necessary within the parameters of your mission, so it can’t be any great loss.” Holcomb taps a few keys on the pad in front of him. His mouth pops open, surprised. “Ray! You’re running on an open line. Hold on while I reverse encrypt this signal. What could you have been thinking?”

“Screw your encryption, Jack.”

Holcomb tenses, but completes the encryption process. When he’s finished, he presses himself back in his chair, adopts a pose that is casual, thoughtful, bemused. “What’s the matter? You only talk this way when you believe you’ve made a mess of things.”

“Why did you send me here?”

Holcomb furrows his brow, confused. “You know your mission objective. I’ve made your priorities more than clear, I think.”

“Why me?” Jack is just being obtuse. Ray can sense it, like they’re playing a game of wits.

“Because of your unique experience. No one else is as qualified to deal with these particular sorts of complications. That should be obvious to you, especially given the complications that arose on Paraclete.”

Ever the spook, Jack doesn’t even trust Agency encryption. He has to come at everything widdershins, occluding his knowledge of any fact that could tie he and Ray and the mission together. Ray is exhausted with spycraft.

“You’re a liar.”

Jack Holcomb hears him, grins, nods. “Have you recovered the artifact?”

“I didn’t kill Frederick Whiston. The shed killed him. He destroyed Paraclete, and the shed killed him. He was trying to stop me from coming here, and I think you know why.”

“Ray, you’re not answering the questions I’m asking. It’s very difficult to communicate with you if we’re going to be speaking at cross purposes.”

“And you haven’t told me the truth. Not from the very start. Why me, Jack? Why did you send me here? You had no other intention but that I should end up planetside with the Whistons.”

“What makes you think that, Ray?”

“Everyone else seems to have known I would be coming here. And because I know you. You’re a liar and you’re sneaky, and you don’t give a shit about withholding critical information from your assets if you believe it’s in your best interest, just like Ba’dai. I’m telling you now that keeping secrets is no longer in the best interest of this mission. I need to know why you sent me. Me personally, Jack.”

For a moment, Ray doesn’t think he’s going to answer, that Holcomb will just cut the connection and abandon him here, without answers. But Jack presses his lips together, frowning, thoughtful, like this is something he’s been dreading for a long time.

At last, he says, “It was inevitable.”

“Inevitable?”

“The Whistons cannot cast a net so wide without attracting some attention, no matter how clandestinely they believe they’re operating. We keep close tabs on our field agents, even while providing you with the necessary independence to improvise. And when inquiries ripple along the intelligence net about one of ours, we watch those developments closely. The Whistons were determined to make contact with you at some point. At least this way, we sent you on our terms rather than someone else’s.”

“Nobody bothered to explain those terms to me. I guess I missed that memo.”

“It was a calculated gamble, Ray. We didn’t just throw you out there unprepared. If we hadn’t had faith in your abilities–each and every one of us, I mean, all the way to the top of the Agency–if we hadn’t believed you could do this job, we would have brought you in a long time ago.”

“You’ve been planning this for years.”

“To be factually correct, we’ve been grooming you for years, yes. We didn’t know where you would be useful until Frederick Whiston began to blunder about pumping his contacts for classified information, and then the stolen artifact ended up on New Holyoke, and–well, one doesn’t need to be a savant to recognize the emergence of revelatory patterns. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to you, of course. You’re an asset. You bring certain skills and abilities to the job just like every other agent in the field, and we utilize those abilities in the way most likely to achieve the desired results.”

He’s still lying. Sins of omission. “Why me?” Why am I the one?

“Because the Whistons selected you.”

“The shed selected me.”

A slight roll of the shoulders, a barely perceptible acknowledgement. “That too.”

“Jack!”

“Let me see, if I have my calculations correct, you should be in the middle of the much fabled Dao Maed Vitouri there, yes? Correlating that fact with what you’ve already told me about the untimely demise of Frederick Whiston, I can assume that you’ve been paid quite the compliment.” Holcomb offers him a sly, knowing grin. “Have you done it, then? Have you agreed to become the next resource in the grand Whiston genetic experiment?”

Ray blinks at the screen, neglects to breathe. He doesn’t answer because there are no words.

“Emma Whiston is quite an attractive proposal package, I imagine. Certainly, you would find her so, practically irresistible. That’s why I used the term ‘inevitable’ before, you understand. Not only were the shed were determined that this should happen, I think, but Emma as well. That is a devastating combination.”

“You’ve known about this all along.”

“We’ve known about the Whiston link with the shed via the Dag Maoudi for some time, yes. We knew what Fram was doing when he revived the tradition of the Dao on New Holyoke. It was clear that something would have to be done eventually, but as long as they seemed to be achieving only minor success in their development of adequate vessels, we were content to wait for them to make their opening move. Then Ba’dai happened, the ring was stolen, the inquiries after you came to our attention. The picture began to clarify itself. So I sent you, hoping that at least this way, you would have a chance to choose rather than becoming the victim of their manipulation.”

“Not from yours, of course.”

“If I had wanted to manipulate you, I would have given you more information to work with in the first place. I let you find your own answers just so I could not be accused of manipulation, even if providing you with some of that data would have greatly assisted you in this process. We recruited you after Ba’dai specifically so you could be prepared for a situation like this. Maybe we didn’t know the specifics, but we knew enough about the shed to understand that any sort of recognition they might display toward you was significant. It meant that they or their agents would have plans for you at some point in the future.”

“You should have told me the truth, Jack.”

“What truth is that, Ray? That the shed wanted you to mate with Emma Whiston? Not someone else, but you. Only you.” Holcomb laughs. “Without having experienced it, you wouldn’t have believed me.”

“But I would have at least known.”

“And knowing, you would have mistaken your usual mission protocol for a valid response. You would have rounded up all the Whistons you could find and executed them before we could learn anything at all about their intentions. You’re a very good agent, Ray, when it comes to containing threats to universal peace, but I’m afraid you’re not the most perceptive of men in more open-ended scenarios. The solution to every intelligence problem is not always to pop unwanted holes into your opponents’ foreheads. Certainly not when those opponents have as elevated a profile as the Whiston family in a time during which the FSA already has its hands full combating an image of military thuggery on the frontier. You’ve made considerable strides in your time with us, my friend, but you will always be in your truest and deepest of hearts a combat Marine.”

He’s right, of course, and even though the calculated obfuscations still want to make Ray reach through his screen and pull Jack’s spine out through his nostrils, at least he understands. He accepts the rationale if not the execution.

But if what Jack tells him is true, then they have been leading him at least since Ba’dai. Or was that even the beginning of it? If the shed could exert enough influence to keep the New Mes zone at war, how hard would it be to put an intelligence branch LT and a grumpy Gunny Sergeant together in such a way that Ba’dai would result? In such a way, in other words, that Ray would be exposed to the shed, recruited by the CIU, enabled to slide from one assignment to the next in such a way that he would end up on his way to Paraclete, to frontier space, to inevitable contact with the Whistons?

These are things he should have been thinking about.

These are questions he should have asked years ago.

Should have, but years ago, he didn’t want to know the answers. He still doesn’t, but now he’s out of choices, out of options. Now he has to ask and comprehend. “Jack, why didn’t the shed kill me at Ba’dai? Everyone who was undefended except me.”

“Instead, it called you brother.”

“Why?”

Holcomb places his elbows on the desk and presses his fingers together. What Ray thinks of as a Long Haul pose. “It’s hard, Ray, both for me to tell you and for you to hear. Complex, and I’m not sure you’ll like what I have to tell you. And you’ll never be able to un-hear it. Knowledge will change everything.”

“You haven’t seen the mess created by my not knowing, yet.”

“And you haven’t even touched the fringes of the mess you’ve created, my friend. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Please, Jack. Just tell me.”

“Answer one question for me first. Is Emma carrying your child?”

“Yes.”

Holcomb closes his eyes for a moment, nods sharply, makes his decision. “All right, then. You’ve set the events in motion one way or the other. You’ve chosen based on who you are rather than what you know, or what you might have thought you knew. That’s the critical point. What I can clarify for you are the possible consequences of that choice, so you can determine your next steps accordingly. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” Ray says, but he’s thinking: Not at all.

“Do you remember what I told you about the shed, about what they are? Where they came from?”

“You said they were created by the Ialdabaoth. That they were supernatural beings.”

“Actually, I said they were like supernatural beings when compared to humans, in terms of their capabilities. That’s a valuable distinction for you to keep in mind. That they were ‘created’ according to the Gnostic record makes them natural by definition. If they were truly supernatural, we would be helpless against them. The shed are a different order of being, potent enough to pose considerable challenges in containing them, strange enough by our reckoning to be completely alien to our understanding. But it is only in their non-supernaturality, so to speak, that we have any hope.”

“You’re talking about weaknesses. Ways in which they can be killed.”

“Not really, no.”

“Do I need to remind you what they’re capable of? They’ve already destroyed four EED ships.”

Holcomb holds up a finger to correct him. “They have been the mechanism for the destruction of four EED ships, Marlowe. They did not supply the intent. Finding ways to counter their considerable strength may be something we’ll undertake in the near future–that’s something that you’ll have to decide.”

“Fine.”

“If we presuppose that the shed are natural beings, evolved along a different track than humans, with different abilities and separate modes of interacting with the physical universe than ours, it follows to some extent that they are mortal entities. They have at least a form of corporeality, of biological systems. They are flesh and blood of a sort, yes?”

Ray remembers squeezing off a score of rounds at point blank range into the torso of the shed, and watching them have no effect. “Of a radically different sort, I guess.”

Holcomb understands, smiles. “I’ll accept your stipulation of degree as long as you yield the general truth of my premise. If an entity is biological, we can assume that it also possesses internal structures not inconsistent with those we see in familiar complex biological systems–organs, blood, cells, DNA, reproductive systems.”

“Jack, we’re not talking about some highly advanced form of Homo profundis here. We’re talking about the biological equivalent of tactical plasma bombs in the hands of hostile forces.”

“Yes and no. In the past, you’ve fixated on my description of the shed as neutral memes, abstractions rather than realities. I don’t think we’ve communicated the complete concept adequately. When I say it, I mean that the shed are neither antagonistic nor benevolent towards us. They are entities with certain characteristics which make them amenable to a certain amount of manipulation by outside forces which may impinge on their ability to carry out their own particular desires. But it is not, as you seem to understand it, the concept of an empty data set waiting for nefarious individuals to populate the space between the parentheses with violence. The idea of the neutral meme is only accurate insofar as it describes the normal state of human to shed relations, which has historically been one of either ignorance or exploitation.”

“Exploitation?”

“How else would you characterize a relationship in which humans summon shed in order to carry out their own designs? Shed as tool, as weapon, as agent of another’s will is exploitation by definition.”

Ray shakes his head, though Holcomb can’t see it. “You obviously haven’t witnessed the Dag Maoudi Dao Maed Vitouri.”

“Not in its current incarnation, no. But I have managed to track down accounts, both recent and previous to the Whiston migration to New Holyoke–though as you might imagine, the Whiston’s were a bit more discreet about the particulars back then. The Dao has a tremendous bearing on our discussion.”

“That’s something of an understatement, given the circumstances.”

“I told you it was a complex question. What I’m trying to accomplish, Ray, is a de-mystification of the shed for you. We’ve talked in Gnostic terms until now, which might have been a mistake, but the Gnostics–their cosmogony as developed in the Bar Ka’heli codices, I mean–really had the best grasp on this material. Mikhail Brezhnaya leaned heavily upon those traditions, and I thought that having experienced what we did together, it would help you make sense of what you had seen.”

Only an academic would consider Gnosticism as a reasonable route to demystifying anything. Ray says, “Get on with it.”

“Right. Well, in that context, we’ve spoken of rituals for influencing the sheds’ behavior by focusing on them as neutral memes. Historically, this has been done through the agency of sacrifice, of blood. What I would ask now, given that we can also recognize the shed as biological entities, is what purpose the blood serves, and what the introduction of blood into the process means about the nature of this alien being. What is the natural mechanism, in other words, that proceeds from the colineation of shed and human blood that allows us to generate predictable patterns in the behavior and activity of this radically different strain of being? What is it about blood that makes all of this possible?”

“I don’t know, Jack.”

Holcomb shrugs. “Neither did I, not at first. See, because I insisted on thinking of the shed like you do, things to be prodded, poked, figured out and studied for weaknesses. I thought that if we were able to acquire a shed for proper scientific study, as it were, this would become apparent. I didn’t even know if such a thing would be possible given their ability to influence human thought and behavior, not to mention that interesting little thing they do with the dissolution of human skeletal material. That type of reasoning was a mistake.”

“You can’t kill them if you don’t know what makes them tick.” It’s something Ray feels obligated to point out.

“That’s what I’m talking about. There is an interesting psychological phenomenon among humans, largely post-Enlightenment, to assume that there is an intellectual or moral evolution occurs over time. We believe we’re better equipped than our forebearers to ascertain Truth because we have acquired more knowledge or understanding. More facts. Thus, we say that they were superstitious, whereas we are rational. They believed in magick; we have discredited magick in the name of science. We grapple with our limited understanding and proclaim ourselves wise–in the process, discounting the wisdom of the past and the culture from which it emerged as criminally unenlightened. What I would posit is that magick, superstition, ritual and science, theory, the vaunted scientific method–all of these are nothing more than metaphors for acquiring comprehension. The metaphors we use explain some phenomenon well, and others not so well. Sometimes we would be better suited to step outside the currently accepted metaphor or paradigm.

“This is largely what I’ve done by discussing the shed in Gnostic language–terms that would be considered anathema to observers who have not had the direct experience of the shed. Because the shed make more sense to us on a mystical and superstitious level. It is the only way in which we can begin to understand them given our present level of knowledge about them, about xenology, about the way in which the universe itself functions.

“But from the Gnostic perspective, I can examine the ritual interactions with the shed, and from the proscriptions of ritual, I can infer certain things about the nature of the shed, about their fascination with blood and rings, their strengths and vulnerabilities, and about the types of things they seek as a species. Not only what it is they can do, but what it is that they want and think and feel when operating outside the influence of human exploitation. Understand, ritual is not superstition, Ray. It is symbolic language. The acts carried out in ritual behavior are codifications of principles and facts established through the painstaking study and understanding of observable phenomenon. The ritual may not explain why the principles exist–it doesn’t aim to illuminate the mechanism–but it most certainly does describe what works in a given situation. Ritual is a map to the terrain of an undiscovered country.

“So, I observe from ritual itself, like the Dag Maoudi Dao, and reports of ritual recorded in the past that an effective route for interacting successfully with the shed is the spilling of blood. Not just the blood itself, but the willing, sacrificial shedding of blood. Yet, you and I have both observed that nothing happens to the blood that is offered. It is not absorbed into the being of the shed. It is not transmogrified into some other substance which the shed seems to find useful. The blood itself seems to have no physical value whatsoever.”

“So what’s the point?” Ray asks.

“Exactly. What is the point of Brezhnaya’s martyrs, or the Dao’s victims, of little Micah Uytedehaage?” Holcomb muses over this, his eyes alight with fascination. “And what if I tell you that there is no point? The blood serves no actual purpose except as a form of currency. What if I said that the only reason that the blood has any efficacy, is because we value it so highly? We know the meaning of blood, that the offering of it is an extreme and costly measure, reserved for the greatest of exigencies. Then, the meaning of the blood changes. It is not valuable except as a conduit of intention. It is communication of desire.”

Ray snorts at him. “Sure. And we’ve gone around killing our own kids and folks from our communities because rats and pigs and cows were too valuable to waste, is that it?”

Holcomb pauses, a pained expression on his face. “That may be precisely what I mean. The shed neither ask for nor require blood. But it is meaningful to us, to humans, and the more sentient the bearer of the blood to be spilled, the more beloved, the more psychologically valuable it becomes.”

It is not a perspective Ray is prepared to appreciate with Jack’s level of detachment. He shakes his head unhappily and invites Jack to continue.

“Look, the ritualistic shedding of blood as offering is thematic in the human perception of reality. Thematic and ubiquitous. It is a recognition of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. Both human and animal sacrifice have been documented in almost all known cultures as a method for interacting with divinities, or forces perceived as divinities. It is the first expression of all religious impulses. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness, yes? The blood is the life. This is my body broken for you. This is my blood, shed for the remission of sins. Do so in remembrance of me. Blood is communication. Blood is communion with the supernatural. It is the symbolic elevation of human consciousness above the level of the mundane. It is the passcode into rarified planes of existence. Blood is willingness to sacrifice and to be sacrificed to the will of another, greater being, and representative of an agreement to give one’s self over to another standard, another code of behavior, a different thought paradigm.

“This is what claims the attention of the shed. Blood as metaphor for desire to enter into dialogue, into a relationship. This is also not without precedent. As a good Midwestern boy, you will recognize a reference to Abraham, the Hebrew patriarch. What was he asked to do? To shed the blood of his only son, Isaac, the child of promise. It was not the blood that Yahweh desired, but the willingness to sacrifice, to reaffirm the Covenant. Or even better, God, after the Christians had made him over, sent his son to shed his blood for human redemption from sin, as a bridge between man and divine and a conduit through which the two could communicate. These things you have been taught, I assume. These things Ahriman knew when he wrote about the shed. He had emerged from a culture in which actual sacrifice was still a staple of religious thought, just as legitimate and accepted as depositing your tithe of jingling coins in the collection plate, but which was still understood as both physical act and symbol of intent to either maintain an existing relationship or to establish a new one.

“Sacrifice is a transaction. It is the individual saying to the divine, I will do this thing at great emotional or financial cost, and in return, you will behave in a fashion that is predictable to me. An equally binding agreement, Ray. A contract. In the absence of sacrifice, of blood, of obedience to this imperative, both the individual and the divine are released from obligation to behave in patterns which are exclusively beneficial to themselves.

“So, sacrifice is obedience to an agreement. It is a show of good faith. Obedience, in turn, is based on thought, reflection, recognition of positive consequences to the establishment of this relationship. As a byproduct of cognition, then, obedience as a pattern of behavior stems from connections made within the brain. Connections are synaptic hardwiring, which is biological. Thus, in order to achieve obedience and a plane of consciousness in which one may interact with the divine, the individual must change the physical structure of the brain. What I’m trying to say is that devoutness is not a nebulous moral concept. It is physical, biological. The synaptic networks of the obedient are similar; their brains are wired in the same sorts of ways. And the hardwiring reinforces the likelihood of certain patterns of behavior leading to additional obedience by closing off the existential potential to behave in ways that run contrary to the pattern of obedience. Obedience changes us. Structurally, neurally. It makes us different than we otherwise would have been. And it is only through this structural change, this biological adaptation, that we are able to commune in meaningful, reciprocal ways with the divine. We become like them. We become able to receive their communication without the conduit of ritual because we are more like them than we are like other human beings.

“This was the message of the Biblical Jesus, was it not? It is not blood that allows us to touch the mind of God–thus, the shedding of his blood as a final and perfect sacrifice for all men in all times–but a symbolic, continual sacrifice of obedience that would engender the rewiring of synaptic connections within our own brains that would give us access to communication with a different order of beings which we had hitherto considered as divinities. Be ye transformed, as the Apostle Paul put it, by the renewing of your minds.”

“You’re talking about a form of symbiosis.”

“A very specific form, yes. A neural compatibility. That’s why I stressed that they must be, in one way or another, corporeal. They have minds that operate somewhat like our own. They have will and intention and the ability to communicate with like minds.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

Holcomb sighs. “Everything.”

“Tell me how.”

“Do you remember that I once told you that the word shed means ‘adversary’? That this is how people formerly understood the idea of demons and angels, as neither good nor evil, but instruments of divine will?”

“I remember.”

“And now I’ve told you that the shed are biological, living entities. Creatures like us, and with whom we have coexisted for millennia, though we have been largely unaware of them.”

“Except they caused wars, strife, violence. Their influence, even when unmolested, has never been positive.”

“But it has been adversarial in the manner I described. The shed push us. They push us in a way that seems antagonistic. But is it in the same way that an influenza inoculation seems antagonistic to a young child who knows nothing of disease? I told you once that Ialdabaoth created the shed in repentance, for crafting a world founded on duality, for forming humanity. He made the shed to destroy us or usurp us and regain his right standing with the Godhead. Except that once he is done, he realizes to his horror that in the meantime, God has given his imprimatur of legitimacy to mankind through the divine spark. Ahriman tells us that Ialdabaoth realizes his error and takes the shed again, alters them, reproduces them by the hundreds, the thousands, and fashions them as adversaries to elevate humanity’s imperfect existence. He conceives the shed no longer as antagonists, but as instruments of divine will to goad us to a higher plane of being above the mud and muck and depravity of our base natures. Look, we’re speaking in the language of religion, because that was the only language Ahriman had to describe what he knew. It was the language Jesus had to understand his experience. They were describing a phenomenon outside the realm of human experience and attempting to give us a way to relate to it.”

“So what are you saying?”

“When you observe a shed, what do you see? Something like a man, yes? Large, of course, powerfully constructed, but also aesthetically pleasing. A figure that inspires awe on a deep and primitive level.”

“Yes,” Ray agrees, too slowly.

“And?”

“It’s difficult to describe. It’s like an afterimage of lightning. Something else behind the shed, but inside it at the same time. Something different. With tentacles, eyes.”

Holcomb nods. “Alien.”

“Yes, alien.”

“I know, Ray. I’ve seen it. The apparent body is not the actual one. It is rather a projection of expectation–a form the shed assumes for our benefit.” Holcomb pauses, thoughtful, chewing his lip. “Why do you suppose it would do such a thing?”

“Because it doesn’t want us to see it as it really is.”

“Or because it is aware of our bias against the unfamiliar. Perhaps the shed projects the corporeality it does to make us comfortable in its presence.”

“And why would it do that, Jack?”

“Don’t you know? Hasn’t the mhuruk-a of the Dag Maoudi told you?”

“Because it wants to commune with us.”

“Commune, Ray. Not communicate, I think. That’s why it pushes us, because we don’t commune. That is why the shed are adversaries. They’re seeking a way to commune with us, to share their minds and thoughts and advanced knowledge with us. Not because they wish us harm, but because we are backward, destructive, evolutionarily stunted. We have wired our brains for war, for taking, for isolation and obtaining resources to satisfy the demands of our individual bodies. War and strife, call them what you will, they are ultimately an evolutionary mechanism. War thins the genetic herd. It promotes the survival of certain traits, certain genes, certain capabilities. War directly influences evolutionary development by insuring the survival and propagation of specific genetic types. The weak are eliminated; the strong survive, reproduce. Left to themselves, the shed subtly influence our evolutionary direction by pruning away the genetic predispositions that are not compatible with their ultimate goal.”

“Which is?”

“They seek to inoculate us against our own natures, as it were. The shed want to elevate humanity, to move us away from a culture of exploitation to one of brotherhood. Exploitation of ourselves, of them for our own ends.”

“Are you telling me they just want to get along?”

“No. I’m telling you that they’re attempting to provoke us to change, Ray. To sacrifice our way of being in order to become something else, something they perceive as better. They would say to us that we could, if we choose, if we heed them, evolve to become like them. Ageless, enlightened, with the very structure of the universe opened up to our direct control. And not just our control in an egomaniacal sense, but from a new perspective, with new insights, new understandings within a great community of enlightened beings. In the context of shed-consciousness, everything changes in ways we do not have the language or the ability to describe, possibly to even conceive. It is the becoming of something completely alien to what we are now, and the embracing of our citizenship in the greater order of beings. A completely post-human experience.”

“You make that sound like it’s a good thing, Jack.”

“You don’t think so? Or are you confusing the intent of the shed with the intent of those who would exploit the shed ?”

Ray frowns, uncertain of what to think. “Tell that to Emma. Tell her what a pleasant experience it is to be invaded by the shed.”

“Emma already knows, Ray. She is the vessel. She has already been changed. She was genetically constructed to emulate neural patterns with which and through which the shed could communicate. Just like you.”

For a moment that seems eternal, those final words hang in the air, echo inside Ray’s skull. He has a sudden and suffocating experience of a balloon inflating inside his mind, filling him with pressure and emptiness.

Just like you.

“Why would you say that?”

She showed you to me, how you were made for me. How I was made for you.

Jack Holcomb takes a breath, gathers himself. “You asked me why the shed at Ba’dai didn’t kill you. You asked me why I sent you to New Holyoke. My answer to you was that it was inevitable, because it is the will of the shed. Because the two of you are the same, Ray. I told you that the shed are creatures. Not spirits, not gods. How do I know that? Because I’ve read it in the most convincing of all sacred texts–in the biological text of the human genome. Of your genome. Your DNA profile was as revelatory as the vision of any Biblical prophet. I’ve pored over it for hours, studying chains of amino acids that no human eye has ever beheld. And I’ve run hours uncounted of simulations designed to estimate the physical, cellular, neural changes this type of genetic encoding would produce. All of those simulations have been compared to detailed Choi Diagrams of your actual neural structure, and in turn against the vast neurological profiling databases at Stanford, Tokyo, Helsinki. And what I have learned, Ray, is that you are unique. Unique within the context of the entire human community, wetwired differently, perhaps, than any man who has ever lived. You have neural-cognitive patterns that we can’t even begin to decipher. They form a matrix of synaptic waves that are unprecedented, alive with baselines and cognitive-net conglomerations we’ve never seen.”

“No,” Ray whispers. “No.”

You are the one.

Holcomb doesn’t bother with his protest. “And for years, I’ve asked myself, what does this mean? How did it happen? Did the shed somehow seed it into you, tamper with your development while you were still in the womb? Is it some form of spontaneous mutation? I don’t know, Ray. I don’t know, and I don’t even particularly care. But it’s clear that you are something other, something set apart from the biological community of men. The aberrations in your DNA affected the structure of your brain, the way you think and perceive. They call you brother because they recognize you as one of their own, with a mind genetically structured to resemble theirs, with synaptic patterns that are compatible. To them, you are shed, one with whom they may commune. And through communion, they finally, after all these eons, see the opportunity to actualize the dream they’ve had from the beginning, the vision Ahriman only dimly perceived.

“You constitute an evolutionary leap. Your genes, released into an amenable pool, could birth an entirely new species of man who could operate in a neurally symbiotic relationship between us and the shed. Which is precisely what the Whistons have striven to become for all these years with all of their eugenic tampering and surgical procedures, their drugs and Dag Maoudi rituals. You are naturally what they have sought to become medically, mechanically. Fram Whiston went to New Holyoke with the intention of cramming generations of eugenic neural predisposition and biological tampering into the smallest time frame possible, seeking both a way to enter into communion with the shed and a mechanism for controlling them.

“I said you were unique, but that’s not precisely true. You are unique in nature. Emma Whiston is a construction from that same mold. She is scientifically unique, as it were. Your genetic counterpart. The shed perceived the perfection of the match between Emma and you, and they knew also that your offspring would be a different being all together. Your child is poised to inherit a genetically predisposed neural structure that is completely compatible with the neural structure of the shed. Not marginally, like you and Emma, not something merely good enough, but a true hybrid being. A new creation, a living, biological metaphor for intention, human in form and shed in consciousness, heir to the glories of both races.”

Ray tells himself that it’s more lies, more fantasies. Holcomb is assembling a structure of argument that has no foundation except illusion. Impossible to be believed. Because if he chooses to accept it as fact, it follows that everything else must change, basic assumptions he has made about himself, his reality, his experience. Once you accept certain basic concepts, Holcomb had once told him, once you add an acceptance of the supernatural to your reality, the universe becomes a different place. The old rules cease to apply. You are transformed–you, your perception, because the universe itself is as it has always been.

But he can’t accept this. He is not what Holcomb claims. He is not shed.

Except…

You are the one. The Dag Maoudi have known it. Emma knows it. Even her mhuruk-a has told him so. Everyone has accepted it as fact except him. Everything that has happened proceeds from that assumption, and to deny it is to make all the suffering and sacrifice and murder meaningless, a case of mistaken identity.

They have obligated him to accept this burden, to accept their reality and their definition as his own. Anything else is selfishness.

You are the one.

“You sent me here for this?” Ray demands, choking. You sent me here to destroy me?

“No. I sent you so you could choose.”

“Choose?”

“Whether you would accept or reject the future the shed have chosen to offer us. After all of this time and struggle, sacrifice and exploitation and misunderstanding, your child leads us all to a cusp. Will we commune, follow, become, or will we turn away and go back to what we have always known.” Holcomb stops there, considers Ray gently but implacably over the vast kilometers of space. “It is not fair that you should bear this burden alone, Ray. You would not, left to yourself, choose to be the arbiter of humanity’s destiny. But it is your destiny nonetheless. The shed have selected you to make the decision for us all.”

“I can’t make a decision like that, Jack.” He should be outraged, savage, but he doesn’t have the capacity for it. There have been too many lies for him to feel anything but a grinding sort of exhaustion.

“You’re the only one who can make it, Ray. You’re the only one who is qualified. The only one who really has the capacity to understand the complexity of the offer that has been tendered. You’re the only one who can see both sides, shed and human, with equal clarity. That’s why we sent you to New Holyoke. We knew you would evaluate, perceive, judge. And in the end, you’ll have to decide whether or not you will willingly open the door to a new stage of human evolution beyond our reckoning.”

“And what am I supposed to do?”

“Do as you’ve been trained. Assess the situation. Evaluate whether the intended effect is good or evil in your estimation. If it is a threat, eliminate the principals.”

“That’s a comfort, Jack.”

Holcomb laughs. “Either way, I will be most interested in reading your post-action report.”

“You’ll be lucky if I even bother to come home.”

“You have to come home, Ray.”

“Why is that?”

“Because even though I was horribly rude in neglecting to pass along my congratulations, as the expectant father, you still owe me a fine cigar.”

<– Chapter 19 / Chapter 21 –>

Filed under: A Vessel for Offering Tagged: | A Vessel for Offering, blog novel, blook, Darren Hawkins, science fiction