“You’re not. And the possessed are on the run in those arcologies. We have them locked down, thanks to the sects. None of those will escalate into a repetition of New York.”
“We hope,” said India. “I’m managing parity at the moment, that’s all. But panic is going to be a factor in the very near future. And that works to their advantage.”
“You’re quibbling over details,” South Pacific said. “The point is, there are methods of solving this problem other than obsessing over Dexter. My policy is the correct one. Confine them while we engineer a permanent solution. If that had been adopted at the start, we would have lost the Brazilian tower ground station at most.”
“We didn’t know what we were dealing with when Dexter arrived,” South America said. “We were always going to lose one arcology to him.”
“Dear me, I had no idea this was a policy forum,” Western Europe said. “I thought we were conducting a progress review.”
“Well, as you’ve made no progress . . .” South Pacific said sweetly.
“If he’s in London, he won’t be found by conventional means. I thought we’d established that. And for your information, total inactivity isn’t a policy, it’s just the wishful thinking of small minds.”
“I’ve stopped the spread of possession. Remind us what you’ve achieved?”
“You’re fiddling while Rome burns. The cause of the fire is our paramount concern.”
“Eliminating Dexter will not remove the possessed in New York or anywhere else. I vote we devote a higher percentage of our scientific resources to finding a permanent solution.”
“I find it hard to credit that even you are playing politics with this. Percentages aren’t going to make the slightest difference to the beyond at this stage. Anyone who can provide a relevant input to the problem had been doing just that since the very beginning. We don’t need to call in the auditors to verify our compassion credentials, they’re hardly quantifiable in any case.”
“If you don’t want to be a part of the project, fine. Be sure you don’t endanger us any further by your irresponsibility.”
Western Europe cancelled his representation, withdrawing from the conference. The simulacrum of London vanished with him.
The cave was at the lowest level of the endcap caverns, protected on all sides by hundreds of metres of solid polyp. Tolton felt quite secure inside it; first time in a long time.
Originally a servitor veterinary centre, it had been pressed into use as a physics lab. Dr Patan headed up the team which the Valisk personality had charged with making sense of the dark continuum. He’d greeted Dariat’s arrival with the joy of a long-lost son. There had been dozens of experiments, starting with simple measurements: temperature (Dariat’s ersatz body was eight degrees warmer than liquid nitrogen, and almost perfectly heat resistant) electrical resistivity (abandoned quickly when Dariat protested at the pain). Then came energy spectrum and quantum signature analysis. The most interesting part for a layman observer like Tolton was when Dariat gave a sample of himself. Patan’s team quickly decided an in-depth study was impossible when the fluid was being animated by Dariat’s thoughts. Attempts to stick a needle into him and draw some away proved impossible, the tip wouldn’t penetrate his skin. In the end it was down to Dariat himself, holding his hand over a glass dish and pricking himself with a pin which he’d conjured into existence by imagination. Red blood dripped out, changing as it fell away from him. Slightly sticky grey-white fluid splattered into the bowl. It was carried away triumphantly by the physicists. Dariat and Tolton exchanged a bemused look, and went to sit at the back of the lab.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to tear off a bit of cloth from your toga?” Tolton asked. “I mean, it’s all the same stuff, right?”
Dariat gave him a flabbergasted look. “Bugger. I never thought of that.”
They spent the next couple of hours talking quietly, with Dariat filling in the details of his ordeal. The conversation stopped a couple of hours later when he fell silent, and gave the physicists a cheerless glance. They’d been quiet for several minutes, five of them and Erentz studying the results of a gamma spike microscope. Their expressions were even more worried than Dariat’s.
“What have you found?” Tolton asked.
“Dariat might be right,” Erentz said. “Entropy here in the dark continuum appears to be stronger than in our universe.”
“For once I wish I hadn’t said I told you so,” Dariat said.
“How do you know?” Tolton asked.
“We have contended this state for some time,” Dr Patan said. “This substance seems to confirm that. Although I can’t give you an absolute yet.”
“What the hell is it, then?”
“Best description?” Dr Patan smiled thinly. “It’s nothing.”
“Nothing? But he’s solid.”
“Yes. The fluid is a perfect neutral substance, the end product of total decay. That’s the best definition I can give you based on our results. A gamma spike microscope allows us to probe sub-atomic particles. A most useful device for us physicists. Unfortunately, this fluid has no sub-atomic particles. There are no atoms as such; it appears to be made up from a single particle, one with a neutral charge.”
Tolton summoned up his first grade physics didactic memories. “You mean neutrons?”
“No. This particle’s rest mass is much lower than that. It has a small attractive force, which gives it its fluidic structure. But that’s its only quantifiable property. I doubt it would ever form a solid, not even if you were to assemble a supergiant star mass of the stuff. In our own universe, that much cold matter will collapse under its own gravity to form neutronium. Here, we believe there’s another stage of decay before that happens. Energy is constantly evaporating out of electrons and protons, breaking down their elementary particle cohesion. In the dark continuum dissipation rather than contraction would appear to be the norm.”
“
“Yes. It would certainly explain why our electronic systems are suffering so much degradation.”
“How long till we dissolve into that stuff?” Tolton yelped.
“We haven’t determined that yet. Now we know what we’re looking for, we will begin calibrating the loss rate.”
“Oh shit.” He whirled round to face Dariat. “The lobster pot, that’s what you called this place. We’re not going to get out, are we.”
“With a little help from the Confederation, we can still make it back, atoms intact.”
Tolton’s mind was racing ahead with the concept now. “If I just fall apart into that fluid, my soul will be able to pull it back together. I’ll be like you.”
“If your soul contains enough life-energy, yes.”
“But that fades away as well. . . . Yours does, you had to steal more from that ghost. And those entities outside, they’re all battling for life-energy. That’s all they do. Ever.”
Dariat smiled with sad sympathy. “That’s the way it goes here.” He broke off and stared at a high corner of the cave. The physicists did the same, their expressions all showing concern.
“Now what?” Tolton demanded. He couldn’t see anything up there.
“Looks like our visitors have got tired with the southern endcap,” Dariat told him. “They’re coming here.”
The first of three Confederation Navy Marine flyers soared across Regina just as twilight fell. Sitting in the mid-fuselage passenger lounge, Samual Aleksandrovich accessed the craft’s sensor suite to see the city below. Street lighting, adverts, and skyscrapers were responding to the vanishing sun by throwing their own iridescent corona across the urban landscape. He’d seen the sight many times before, but tonight the traffic along the freeways was thinner than usual.
It corresponded to the mood reported by the few news shows he’d grazed over the last couple of days. The Organization’s attack had left the population badly shaken. Of all the Confederation worlds, they had supposed Avon to be second only to Earth in terms of safety. But now Earth’s arcologies had been infested, and Trafalgar was so badly damaged it was being evacuated. There wasn’t a countryside hotel room to be had anywhere on the
