I Have A Theory

Chapter Three, The Flesh

The blue lights guide me to the observation deck, just as Greene described. Pull me, luminescence, moving forward, through the motions. I wonder if Cassius would approve of what I'm doing right now. Scratch my bicep.

Hallway opens, triangular windows finally making themselves visible, though all without is invisible. No stars or moon can penetrate this dark, this far down. Awful.

I walk along the blue-lit corridor, pulling my hand across the window frames as a mile passes below my feet. The longest airplane terminal I've ever walked through: it does a good job of building anticipation for the flight at the end.

Opens up into an octagonal room, windows on all sides, the first light for a while that hasn't been blue. It's outside the place, spaced at regular intervals on top of it. On top of the flesh.

Stillness.

Yaren, the only other person in the room, is as still as I am.

But the flesh is even more so, even quieter, even calmer. Patient--that's how it looks.

Not even close.

The thing is leviathan, older than the oldest thing--its age feels like a postulate, like something I'd be comfortable asserting absent anything else, without fact or evidence to back up the claim.

It's like the ocean, but alive. But also very still, almost dead. Looks like milk was poured and left to rot, left to sour and curdle. Spaces between the light do not feel real, and I imagine anything and everything existing in those places where the flesh is unobserved.

"I wish I had not come down," says Yaren Unbrecht softly. "And I think that is the first step to understanding what this truly is. To know I don't want to know."

I do not nod; one can't nod in response to this. It's a quiet fact, that must be treated with the grim gravity of a diagnosis--I feel like a cancer on the surface of the flesh, like an insect, as though I'm bugging it.

I'm not. It doesn't have human feelings, or if it has them, they are deeper--they are visceral and fractal and meaty. They are made of blood and fiber and sinew. This is the thing. In the darkness, the only thing. This is everything.

Run back towards the central area far faster than I came.

It yawns behind me, and gives a slow chuckle.

All in my head, which, if I'm not careful, will become indistinguishable from reality.

The next thing is my room. I find it quietly, entering the alabaster lobby, clear and pristine, grabbing my suitcase, and keying the blue lights to guide me to the central hub. Dormitories.

They're not really dormitories when I get there--large beds, embedded into walls like tiny, comfortable caves, one atop the other. No one's around, so I quickly change into my maroon sweatshirt and black joggers. Find a ground-level bed and roll into it, claim it. There's a small, fibrous shutter which comes down when I pull it, giving a privacy so complete it's black.

I exhale, and a slow, soft light comes on in the darkness, flowing from the walls like a pulse. Yellow, warm, nice.

I don't know what to do.

Hyperventilation, like the stuff that sometimes struck me after Cassius ate my arm, before I understood the purpose that he wrought across my body, the intent he'd so cunningly actualized into me.

A knock comes. Deliberate, hollow. Two steps from outside. Black dress shoes--I can already tell.

There's a moment where I just don't breathe.