The Darkness of Matter

The Darkness of Matter: Chapter 7

The black men showed up at Jacob's house after dark. It was quite late, past ten o'clock. Up in his bedroom, Jacob was already bathed and changed into his pajamas. He sat crouched in his usual corner with a puzzle, alone in the cozy dark, listening to the voices drifted up from the porch alongside the scent of honeysuckle. The men spoke in slow, lazy cadences that were meant to reassure.  

He heard Lillian, puzzled at first and courteous, followed by anger and fear in her voice. He crawled to the window, but could see nothing in the soft circles cast by the streetlights. Something was off, though. He froze for a moment, uncertain of what to do. Then he caught the faint whine of a car engine coming and he knew.  

They had been watching him since January. Men and women in plainclothes, carefully camouflaged to blend into the environment. At school; on the way home; on weekends. No one else noticed them, but his voices had warned him. He had tried to tell his mother but he had only worried her, and she had taken him to a psychiatrist for further evaluation. After that he had shut up, even after he had found the bug in their house. 

He estimated that he had ten minutes, maybe less. The men in black were using the soft approach, asking his mother's permission, gambling that he didn't know; others, of course, were already creeping towards the house through the backyard. Methodically he pulled out his backpack. He threw in a power bar from his closet, clean underwear and socks, his pocket knife, two hundred fifteen dollars and sixty three cents from underneath his mattress, and a compass. Lastly he took the tiny flash disk where he had copied the contents of Lillian's computer. It was that that they were after-that, and the brain behind it: himself. He could do nothing about the former; to destroy her data beyond hope of retrieval he would have to smash the platters in the hard disk to smithereens and there was no time. But at least he had scrambled the variables. 

Taking a deep breath, he swung himself over the windowsill and grabbed onto the drainpipe, shimmying lowly down into the bushes as he'd practiced over and over. The metal trembled slightly, but held; Jacob was skinny for eleven. He waited in the bushes till he heard Lillian's sharp cry cut through the night, and then he ran, low and sure like a cat through the shrubbery, resisting the impulse to go to her aid for it was he they were after, not her. 

Abandoning all pretense of civilization, he at last let himself go towards the siren call that had been calling him all through the long spring, towards other beings like himself; and the moonless night aided his escape. 

*** 

Seawater filled the windows as Chelonia hit the water. Tthe water sloshing against the window was a translucent jade green, darkening rapidly as the submersible moved away from the surface. The whirr of motors and the air blower filled the little space. 

The temperature cooled rapidly as they descended. Helen reached for her sweatshirt and wool leggings, trying hard not to kick Joao, the pilot, as he hovered over the dashboard, monitoring the power systems. The inside of the sphere was barely more than two meters in diameter. 

Joao grunted, and she rushed to the view port, straining to see through the murkiness. "Oh," she gasped, as a long luminescent string of slime slipped past, slapping briefly against the plastic window. She grabbed for her notebook as the sea began to come alive, glittering with life beyond her wildest dreams. "Jackpot," she muttered, eyes fixed to the view. "Joao, record the coordinates, will you? This is one place we'll definitely have to revisit." 

They were moving slowly enough that she could barely feel the rate of their descent. It would take almost five hours to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench at this rate. She rearranged herself as best as she could between the oxygen tanks and the carbon dioxide scrubbers, and reached for her notebook to review her notes as the last vestiges of sunlight faded from the water, turning the surrounding sea inky dark. She felt the old familiar excitement coming, at odds with the primal terror of being trapped so far down in this alien world. João seemed to feel it to0, hovering between the controls and another porthole.