Ricky Fountain is by our bed when we wake up.
“How are you today?”
“The doctor says I can play piano.”
“That’s good.”
“It’s great,” I say. “I couldn’t play before.”
“The old jokes are the best.” Ricky’s lips smile, but his eyes are cold stones on a riverbed. He has a pistol at his waist. As security chief, he is one of the few staff at Porton Down who carries a firearm. I won’t leave here until he says so.
Second morning in the sick bay. I’m bored, desperate to get back to the Lab. My fall didn’t hurt much: bruising on my left arm and a sore back from twisting as I went down. But my helmet seal breached when it struck the Slab, so for the crime of breathing Lab air for a couple of seconds we get four days’ observation. Regulations.
We cannot let them know.
Regulations also dictate that I’m the only patient in the room, and these words are not spoken by Ricky, who watches me patiently. So it should be a mystery where the words come from, but I don’t find it odd. They are just there in our head. And I know they’re right.
“I’m bored, Rick. Ready to get back to work.”
“You know the rules.”
My fall was the second accident. When the Slab first arrived, I wasn’t in the front-line team. But Carey Rogers, the team linguist, got injured and I stepped in. Two injured linguists in a month. It’s like the punchline to a joke. Except Carey’s injuries are no joke. Taking a rubbing of the upper right quadrant of the Slab, she dislodged a hidden hinged aperture. A heavy panel swung open and pinned her to the floor. It took three men to get her out. She’s in a coma at Andover hospital.
Now it’s ten in the morning. Ricky has gone to do whatever he does when he’s not ordering me to stay in the sick bay. My nurse, Annie Engel, breezes in with a wheeled cart.
“Time for those tests I know you love.”
“Highlight of my day.”
Regulations prescribe these tests every four hours: blood pressure, heart rate, lung, kidney and liver function, a range of toxicology tests. None has yet shown anything.
“It won’t take long, Doctor says there’s one less test today.”
“Fewer,” I say.
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m a linguist.”
“That’s one word for you.” Annie wraps the pressure cuff around my upper arm. “Lie back. You know the drill.”
“Annie?” My hand on her wrist. “Am I your favorite patient?”
“Absolutely.” The cuff inflates. My hand remains on her arm. She sits on the edge of the bed, watching the monitor.
“Am I your only patient?”
“That would be telling. Now, move over.”
I suck in a deep breath and hold it: a ghostly fist at the bottom of my lung, pushing to come out. Nurse Engel leans to take hold of the cuff and I sit up to expel a long breath into her face, like I’m blowing out candles on a birthday cake. There are colors in my breath, strands of smoke from a distant fire.
“Oh!” Annie staggers back, shaking her head like a horse bothered by a fly. She blinks. “I’ll -. That’s -.”
“Here.” I hold out the pressure cuff. “We can talk later.”
“Yes.” Her face is pale, and her eyes have been replaced by plastic buttons. “Later.”
The Slab was found by the Halley VI Antarctic research station, perched on the Brunt ice shelf. The station sat close to a large crack in the ice sheet and was due to be moved to a safer location, when heavy calving exposed the Slab. The discovery prompted a spasm of excitement across the world, which faded fast when it became clear that the Slab was all there was. No spaceship, no alien creatures, no sign of a settlement: just a rectangle of mystery metal, eight feet by three, and two feet deep. Once it became clear that this strange artefact wouldn’t explode, the British government shipped it home to Porton Down, the biological and chemical weapons research station, south-west of London.
The Slab was ancient. When Julius Caesar landed in Kent and Jesus lugged his cross up Calvary Hill, the Slab had already been under the ice for centuries. But being old doesn’t keep you in the headlines forever. The public got bored, and the scientists were left trying to work out what on earth it was. Or what off earth it might have been.
Linguists weren’t on the original team, but we got our turn after the physicists, biologists and chemists had a go and learned little. Extensive scans revealed nothing about the interior of the block, but they showed that the featureless surface hid something interesting. The smooth exterior was a rigid skin over a pattern of markings beneath. The upper part of the Slab appeared to hold inscriptions, cut into the block like the words on a gravestone and filled in so that to the naked eye the surface was unmarked.
Carey Rogers did her best to decipher the marks from scan photos, but they were not clear enough. After a month of red tape, she got clearance to try to take out the shallow filling and expose the markings themselves. A bit like brass rubbing, but with a cobalt steel drill. The drill team had uncovered a couple of lines, no more than the upper nine inches of the Slab, when Carey suffered her accident. She had learned nothing about the meaning of the words on the Slab, if they were indeed words.
Carey, from deep in her coma, tells me she is now sure they are words, and she knows what they mean.
When I first saw the Slab, it was just as Carey left it, braced upright by wooden struts cemented to the floor. The panel that whacked Carey stuck out like the drawer in a roll-top desk left open by a hurried departure. A technician leaned close to the black surface, stroking it with the tip of a hand-held drill. When it touched the Slab, the drill bit screamed. Beneath the tough outer skin, the material filling the inscriptions was different, softer. When the technician broke through the surface in the right place, clouds of dark powder billowed up from the drill. He had been drilling for some time – the air in the Lab looked like the aftermath of a firework party. I was glad the airtight suit meant I didn’t have to breathe that stuff.
Drilling revealed fourteen rows of symbols, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, but more abstract, with no recognizable pictures. Each row had twenty characters, evenly spaced, so the strict linguist in me said we might be dealing with twenty columns rather than fourteen rows. Some symbols occurred several times, but with less repetition than I wanted and more than 150 distinct characters in the 280. These guys either used some symbols for whole words, or they had a huge alphabet. I hadn’t a clue where to start deciphering this stuff. That first day, I remember wiping the dust from my visor with my wrist, thinking I had found a job to keep me busy the rest of my life.
In the sick bay, a new nurse comes for the lunchtime tests. He introduces himself as Colin. “Where’s Nurse Engel?” I ask, as he untangles cable from the trolley.
“Annie’s not well. She had to go home.” Colin fits the pressure cuff and takes a set of blood samples through the cannula in my left wrist. I suck in a speculative breath, but the feeling isn’t there. Colin will have to wait.
“Is there someone at home to take care of her?”
“I don’t know.” Colin looks up from his clipboard. “I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
When we close our eyes, we are with Annie, seeing her room through her eyes. She lowered the blinds when she got home. Her thin fingers are on her chest. The sound of our breathing is loud. We lift her head and the blind twitches upwards a few inches to allow in the light. I’m not sure how the blind moved, but we don’t have time to think about that right now. Annie has a mirror on the wall at the foot of her bed. Her face in it is pale, framed in a wispy tangle of bedroom hair. Her head drops back to the pillow. The blind snaps down and darkens the room again.
Rest now. Tomorrow.
“I’m sorry?” Colin pauses with the pressure cuff in his hand.
“Nothing,” I say. “Tired.”
We sleep.
History is littered with examples of the misfortune caused by poor communication. Even if you can translate another person’s words, there’s no guarantee you will understand them. In July 1945, still at war with Japan, Allied leaders issued a surrender demand. It said that failure to comply would bring upon Japan “prompt and utter destruction.” At a press conference in Tokyo, Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki said he would not comment, there being as yet no official government response. He used the Japanese word mokusatsu, which derives from the word for silence, but has other meanings, including treating something with silent contempt. News agencies reported that the Japanese government considered the surrender demand unworthy of comment, angering the United States. Within days, they decided to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
The task of interpreting the marks on the Slab was beyond one person. I had a small team, located in a prefab hut near Porton Down’s north perimeter. We faced a language challenge never confronted before. It’s rare to encounter a language of which you have no prior knowledge. On our world, most languages developed in contact with others, so there are borrowed words. People who speak a mystery language may have had dealings with neighboring civilizations, so you might find names or concepts in common. There are also clues beyond the words themselves. If you knew the location a text was found, you could guess words for certain plants or animals. Even with a vanished civilization, there may be clues related to geography, and the culture and language of people who came afterwards.
None of this helped in deciphering an object not manufactured on Earth, brought to Antarctica by unknown beings at an unknown date thousands of years in the past. We had to fall back on more technical methods of analysis: are some symbols more frequent than others? Are some combined often with others? These methods only take you so far: some experts said it was impossible to decipher a text for which the underlying language – if it existed – was unrelated to any known language.
Other teams crawled over every piece of evidence that might tell us something about the Slab: who made it and why, where did they come from and where did they go, why did they ship a heavy block of metal across space to leave it on Earth? Was this the only one, or were there others? As weeks went by, no one could answer these questions, and one by one my scientific colleagues fell away as their disciplines failed to unlock the Slab’s secrets. It began to look as if the markings hidden on the surface were our sole chance of learning more.
At night, we take stock of our growing community. In Andover, Carey Rogers has her eyes open, but for all the medical staff know there is nothing behind them. A nurse leans over and adjusts the ventilator tube to her mouth. For long periods we are alone in the room and no one sees the tiny movement as Carey tenses the muscles of one leg and then the next, lifts one hand in front of her eyes and then the other. When the time comes, we will move her from here.
At home, Annie Engel sleeps. It took her a long time to relax into unconsciousness. When I breathed into her, my lungs deflated like plastic bags squashed in my pocket, but even this large breath took time to carry her over. Carey and I soothe Annie down towards sleep, but for a time she resists. At last, she is peaceful, and we three are one.
Tomorrow is my third morning in the sick bay. The following day we can go back to work. I can’t wait. At last, I know something important about the Slab.
Annie Engel is back at work next morning. She has the expression of a Barbie doll. We don’t speak, as she does the tests and leaves. She takes two extra blood samples and puts them in the pocket of her uniform. Later in the morning she will give my blood to other patients.
After Annie has gone, Ricky Fountain visits me again. He has two paper cups of coffee and a bag of doughnuts. “Things are looking up,” I say, as we sip coffee and eat doughnuts. They’re the old-fashioned dunking kind and I dip mine in the coffee.
“All the tests check out,” Ricky says, brushing sugar from his fingers, He looks in the bag but doesn’t yet remove a second doughnut. He’s disciplined. “Ready to go back to work?”
“I was ready half an hour after I got here.”
“You say that,” Ricky says. “But it’s my job to be suspicious. One linguist having an accident is bad enough…”
“Two is careless, right?”
“Worse than careless. We don’t know what we’re dealing with, so my job is to assume the worst.”
“You’ve got your job, Rick, and I want to get back to mine. It was a stupid slip-up. You’ll get no more problems from us.”
“Us?”
“Me,” I say. “And the team, of course.”
Ricky looks at me for a long time before he says, “Make the most of your rest today. I’ll sign you out from tomorrow. But you continue the blood tests for the rest of the week. Get them done before each shift.”
“Thanks, Rick.”
After the security chief has gone, we close our eyes and take stock again. Annie is on a meal break. She leans her back against a vehicle in the car park and lifts her face to the sun. Carey Rogers has her eyes open, watching her hands on her chest. One by one, her fingers rise and fall. Maybe she can play piano now, too. She draws in a long breath and there is something deep in her lungs. Maybe one of her nurses will lean close today and we will grow further.
The sick bay has other rooms, separate from mine. Another patient, Dolores Parker, lies on a bed, eyes covered with a rolled-up cloth. She came in this morning with a migraine. Annie gave her some of my blood and the migraine has gone, flushed away by a surge of feelings Dolores never had before. We lift an experimental hand and touch the pad on our Dolores eyes. We see her arm move from our eyes across the room, where David Ochs sits in the other bed. David came to the sick bay for a routine check-up. Nervous of needles, he looked away while Annie, pretending to take a sample, injected my blood into his upper arm. After this, he felt faint and had to lie down.
We are five now. We have been patient, but when I get out of the sick bay, we must move fast.
In the early days, when the world was excited about the Slab, not a millimeter of its surface was unexamined. They scanned it with x-rays, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance imaging. They tested it with acids, alkalis, and a range of chemicals diverse enough to confuse Marie Curie, let alone a humble linguist. But the Slab was made of no substance ever encountered before. The surface was as inert as any material could be: it didn’t oxidize, didn’t react to strong acids, small flakes of it did not combust or melt at high temperatures. These features made the Slab hard to date, but radiocarbon analysis showed traces of plants that died out in Antarctica three million years ago.
Beneath the outer skin, most of the Slab was equally puzzling, and difficult to test. Nothing seemed to touch it: no drill, no laser beam, nothing. It was like a giant M&M, except the tough coating enclosed an even tougher interior, except for the inscriptions, where the outer skin covered the softer, more powdery substance, filling the shallow grooves of what we hoped were words.
By the time we started drilling them out, the world was no longer excited. Even some of the people working on the Slab were bored. Maybe that’s why the powder that I first saw thrown up by the technician’s drill had not yet been as thoroughly examined as the rest of the Slab. This was an oversight.
We lie awake after the sick bay goes quiet. We need less sleep now. At home, Annie sits in front of her television, the sound muted. In Andover, Carey lifts her fingers one by one. Dolores went home in mid-afternoon. Her husband made dinner for their children while she went to bed. She pretended to be asleep when he joined her, but now he snores beside her while we watch the pattern of light on the bedroom ceiling, thrown there through a gap in the curtains.
David was driven home by a workmate. He went to bed and slept for three hours. Now he is awake, staring at the picture on his bedroom wall, a print of ‘Nighthawks’ by Edward Hopper. David always liked the look of the woman in the red dress. He read once that Hopper modelled her on his wife, Josephine. David thinks she looks like Carey Rogers, whom he has never met.
Next morning.
“Not sure you look like a man who wants to get back to work.”
I didn’t notice Ricky Fountain come in, but there he is. I need to stay focused.
“I’m sorry,” we say. “Daydreaming.”
“I’m signing you off to return to work, Language Boy.” Ricky has an unlit cigar, which he rolls back and forth in his fingers. I remember now who he reminds me of: Edward G Robinson in Double Indemnity. I wonder if Ricky is aware of the resemblance. I bet he is. The cigar suggests he cultivates it.
“When can I start?
“As soon as this morning’s tests are done.” Ricky leans forward. “But you tell me the second you notice anything unusual. Anything at all.”
Nurse Annie appears in the doorway. She has a minor surgery pack in her hands. If need be, she can open it and be at Ricky’s shoulder before he can turn. We can see the manufacturer’s logo on the plastic handles of the two disposable scalpels, as I meet Ricky’s gaze.
“I’m working on an object made by people from another world,” I say. “Do I only have to tell you if I notice something more unusual than that?”
“Funny guy. You know what I mean. Joe Public might have forgotten about the Slab, and our bosses might be getting bored, but I get paid to worry.”
“Don’t,” I say. “No more accidents.”
“That’s the thing about accidents.” Ricky stands up and slips the cigar in his pocket. “They tend to happen when you think they won’t.”
Annie stands behind the admin desk in the corridor as Ricky leaves. The pack with the scalpels is in her pocket.
After my tests I am free, and I move fast. I go straight to the Lab, a short walk from the sick bay, across the scruffy patch of grass in the center of Porton Down. It’s a cold morning, and the wind off Salisbury Plain cuts through my thin shirt. It’s blowing from the southwest, as it often does, and I think about the wind streaming away from us and blowing toward London. Anything carried by that wind could be among the teeming millions of the capital before the day is over.
The Slab stands sentinel in the middle of the Lab. While I have been in the sick bay someone has added a couple of new struts at the base, as if stronger support for the Slab might have stopped me falling over. I have a new hazmat suit, my initials already stenciled on the left breast. No one, however, has done anything about the fine dust from the drilling, and there is a grey skin on the floor and workbench. Mushrooms of dust bloom from my footsteps as I walk across the Lab. I stand with my visor eighteen inches from the Slab.
I remember what I was doing when I fell: leaning close, taking pictures of a group of characters about halfway down. I can’t remember now why this was important, but it doesn’t matter. We no longer need to translate the symbols. The Slab has delivered the message; my task is to make sure it’s received.
Imagine alien visitors to our world, deep in prehistory. They find a world teeming with life, but with no species yet capable of mastering technology, building spacecraft, leaving Earth. The visitors are not fools; they know lifeforms can evolve. Hiroshima is long in the future, but its story of violence following miscommunication would not surprise them. They know the risk to them and others beyond Earth if a species emerges that uses technology but struggles to understand others. The aliens communicate perfectly among themselves, a group mind. They believe all sentient life should share this gift.
The Lab is air-tight. The UK chemical and biological program shut down in the 1950s, but the base still produces small quantities, to develop countermeasures to such weapons. The Lab was not built for quarantined alien artifacts, but it can do the job. There is a wheeled vacuum cleaner in a corner. It’s a model used for clearing up and filtering hazardous waste. Someone should by now have used it to clean up the dust from the drilling, but they haven’t. I ignore the heavy cleaner, because I have brought in a hand-held vacuum unit. It’s unsuitable for hazardous waste. What’s more, it can blow as well as suck.
Through the armored glass window I see Gordy McDermott, the technician on duty. He looks up when I switch on the hand-held and touches a switch on the desk in front of him.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
We ignore him. My little dust buster churns a cloud into the Lab’s air.
“Hey! Stop that.”
Annie is behind him. Through her eyes, we see the back of Gordy’s neck tense as he hears her. Through my eyes, we see him flinch as she slips in the scalpel behind his ear. It’s a shame. I like Gordy, but there’s no time to do this any other way.
“Quickly!” Carey says, from her bed in Andover. She’s right. Ricky Fountain is approaching the outer door of the secure area that contains the Lab. We watch him through the eyes of David, ten paces behind. Annie moves Gordy’s body aside and stands over the control desk. She doesn’t know the controls, but I do, and I guide her hand to the switch to release the inner Lab door. I place the dust-buster on a desk, blowing a stream of Slab dust toward the door, which I wedge it open with a chair. I step into the air-lock and hit the emergency release button. A siren shrieks.
Blue light strobes across Annie’s face as she walks beside me to the exit. A swelling cloud of dust ushers us outside, where we emerge to see Ricky and David ten yards in front of us, with two security guards beyond them.
“Stop there!” Ricky shouts. He holds a hand up. “That suit needs decontamination. Go back inside.”
Annie steps left, I go right. I unclip the helmet and drop it. Ricky keeps his eyes on me, but he talks to Annie.
“Nurse, he has to go back to the sick bay, but first we need to do the decon.”
“You’re too late.” The words come simultaneously from me, from Annie and from David. Ricky’s eyes flick left to right and back again, his face a study in baffled horror. I take another step to the right, pulling Ricky’s attention with me.
“Look, I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” he says. “But we can sort this out. Just go back inside.” He sounds patient, as if dealing with a child. He ignores the dust from the Lab that flows like thin smoke past his ankles.
The perimeter fence is twenty yards away. I stride toward it, as Ricky shouts, “Stop!” Annie’s eyes watch Ricky point the gun at my back. David’s hand is inches from the back of Ricky’s neck. There is a shout from one of the guards behind him.
Something strikes me hard in the back and throws me forward to sprawl on my stomach. There are tiny jewels of blood on the grass beneath my face. I roll over, thinking maybe I can get up, but it hurts too much. I lie still, looking up at the empty sky.
There is another crack of gunfire as one of the guards shoots David, but not before he cuts Ricky’s throat with the scalpel he took from Annie’s locker. Annie steps forward with her hands above her head.
“Don’t shoot,” she says. “I’m unarmed.”
The David part of us goes away, his death leaving a sad absence. I think I will soon go with David and that leaves only Annie, Carey, and Dolores. But soon there will be more, because the dust from the Lab is dispersing across the parade ground and blowing through the mesh fence. Already, the two guards have inhaled the dust, and with the rest of us so close it works rapidly. They look dazed, standing over the bodies of David and Ricky as if uncertain what to do. I sense their Joining.
The dust will spread. The carefully engineered spores within it will multiply. People will breathe it and they will Join us. Even now, as my blood drains into the grass, our strength steps up with the addition of Ahmed and Solly, the two guards, who fall in either side of Annie, with their backs to the Lab doors. A small crowd of techs and admin staff has gathered in front of them. Some have already breathed the dust. My eyes are half-blind with tears, but I am happy.
It took intelligence and skill to build the Slab, to transport it from the stars and leave it where we would find it. Intelligence and skill beyond anyone working alone, as much as building a hive is beyond a lone bee. I don’t know who made it, but I know why.
Charles Darwin said: “It is the long history of humankind that those who learned to collaborate have prevailed.” However closely people work together, they make mistakes. Countless conflicts have shown that no human truly knows and trusts what is in the head of another. Juliet fakes death to be with Romeo, but he does not know about the fakery and her apparent death leads him to take his own life. British prime minister Chamberlain comes back from Munich, believing he has secured peace in our time, only for Hitler to launch a world war the next year.
The beings who made the Slab were different. As they traveled the galaxy, they found worlds where the native wildlife included fiercely individual and aggressive creatures. They knew that some of these lifeforms might one day evolve to the point where they could travel off-planet. The Slab-makers must have been horrified at the thought that on some distant day their descendants could come face to face with such unpredictable beings.
Their solution was the Slab: a gift for us and an insurance policy for them. They studied the life on these planets and considered which creatures might achieve toolmaking, civilization-building dominance. Examined the physiognomy of these creatures and considered how to help them make the most important evolutionary step up, to a level where they could communicate with the Slab-makers, if ever they met. Solution: an engineered fungal spore, inert until dispersed into a moisture-bearing atmosphere. Tailored to the genetic code of the dominant mammal, it opens between those affected the deep layers of communication and cooperation so natural to the Slab-makers.
A soft breeze caresses my face. Far above, a ragged flag of cloud sails on a deep sky of china blue. My blood soaks into the soft earth. I am dying, but I will live on in people yet to be touched by the spores that swirl up into that flawless sky.
The guards have dropped their guns and taken up position alongside Annie and David. None of them looks my way, but they share my view of the sky, share the tingling sensation in my hands as blood drains away, even as they converge on the confused group of people ahead of them on the parade ground.
I close these dying eyes, as others open. Annie sees a young woman from Admin sway in front of her and then Annie’s face is visible through this young woman’s eyes. In Andover, Carey sits up as her doctor leans to adjust the cannula in her wrist. He is too surprised to resist as she grips his head with both hands, clamps her lips to his and expels a powerful spore-rich breath into his mouth. Soon they will walk together out of the hospital.
I sink back into the embracing earth. I spread through the dust, flowing out across the base and the fields beyond. One by one, our new selves wink into being, stars emerging on a summer night, drawing me away into the growing darkness of our new world.
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Chris Barnham writes stories about strange things happening to ordinary people—sometimes involving time travel, sometimes ghosts or monsters, and occasionally things that are harder to explain. His short fiction has appeared in Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, PodCastle, and elsewhere, including annual Best of British Science Fiction collections. His novel, The Wrong Ghost, is due in 2027 from Dreamsphere Books. Find him at www.chrisbarnhambooks.com. |
Beautifully unnerving!
Thanks, Alex. Glad you liked it (if “unnerving” is something you like!)