Secrets of the Antiwave

PART 2 | Chapter 10: The Project is Over. CONFIRM?

When a hunter's quarry sustains a lethal shot -- it runs. It runs faster than it's ever run before. The quarry is convinced that even death can be surmounted through sheer determination. Like all of us, they attempt to outrun their mortality. And the closer their demise approaches, the faster they go. Even when their organs collapse, they rage against the dying of the light. Even when their heart no longer beats, their empty eyes still stare.

Four months after the MFC, the SMO was a worm-eaten carcass, abandoned by the hunter.

We were living in filth, insects had usurped Rutherford's throne, and the last of our credits had been spent on expired muck. It tasted worse than vomit. Joy was a distant recollection, which may or may not have been real. Now all we had was a painful sensation of meaningless that built up in our disaffected lungs like powdered charcoal. None of that mattered, we said to ourselves, we were still making progress. But try as might, we couldn't pretend to be blind forever. The sinking vessel which we manned was about to fall apart.

As it turns out, the constant bombardment of impossible particles produced by our experiments had bored billions of microscopic holes throughout the entirety of the SMO. Ceilings collapsed, pillars toppled, and writhing cockroach nests fell from severed pipelines. We all felt a terrible shaking deep beneath the floor. Stubborn as we were, we knew it would only take one idiot protester to sneak into the facility, one avalanche of concrete debris to make them a martyr, and one investigation team to ruin all our work, reveal every secret we had, and lock us behind bars forever -- if we were lucky, that is.

On January 24th 2088, we deactivated our half-dead generators. The equipment we couldn't carry, the labcoats we wouldn't need, and whatever fragments of withered hope we had left -- all of it was piled into the core bunker, sealed behind a self-sufficient force field. One last time, we listened to the beautiful songs of our planets and our star, before disassembling the transceiver, tearing off the mechanical limbs of our soul. Many years into the future, I would return to very same bunker under very different circumstances. In 2088 however, I thought I was leaving forever. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, my heart was about to implode.

Stevenson vowed that he would die here, McGregor divulged that he had no one and nowhere to return to, Dmitrev, who had been deluding himself for all these many months, was seeing the SMO's state of disrepair for the very first time; Jackson, DeVille and Keller breathed in dust and talked of melancholy-gold nostalgia, Xu and O'Harris got drunk and threatened to kill the protesters with their fists, Mitra and López held them back, and Winthrop stayed eerily silent, his face an emotionless pavement. I did my best to console McGregor and together we pried Stevenson out of his dorm, while he pleaded for us to leave him here to die.

None of us had ever paid much attention to the main gate before. Although we had looked, but until today, we never saw. Ahead stood a giant's corpse: gnarled and rotten, dented and slashed, eviscerated by a thousand cystic plagues; islands of seaweed puke, surrounded by an ocean of molten-red cancer. The door was enormous, taller than a skyscraper, wider than five Jupiters put together, larger than the Universe, forever impenetrable and crucified upon its own impossible weight.

Dimitriev fell to his knees and cried, his figure made tiny and pitiful by the vastness of the towering monolith. Voices were shouting on the other side, far louder than usual. They knew that we were leaving. They could sense our demise. The lions and tigers and bears, the sharks and spiders and snakes -- all the creatures that went bump in the night, all of the reasons that man was afraid of the darkness, awaited our appearance.

Dimitriev smashed his fist against the floor, starting at greyish stains of fallen tears. He said something in Russian in a voice that was far beyond broken.