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The double doors were huge, thirty foot high, culminating in a sharp gothic arch. They had been carved from the same grey, volcanic stone as the rest of the complex. There were no hydraulics, electromagnetic motors or indeed any mechanism to assist their opening. The figure, garbed in black, strained against the heavy gates. There was a low groan as they ground on their hinges and swung inwards.
The chamber beyond was suddenly illuminated as strip lights flared into brightness. All at once the air was filled with a cacophony of shouts, sobs, curses and pleas. The figure strode into the room, his leather coat flapping bat-like about him.
The room was a narrow, arching cone, the walls indented with a hundred alcoves. In each alcove, surrounded by an impossible paraphernalia of wires, tubes and supports, was a single human head. It was this macabre chorus that produced the din that now echoed about the room.
"Come now, you whingers," the tall, black-clad man said, "we made a deal."
"We didn't know it would be like this."
"Let us die!"
"Give me back my body."
"We've been through all this before," the man replied, for all the world like a spider at the centre of his web. "Life or death. I let you live. You were all fools to incur my wrath in the first place." He seemed almost bored with their protestations.
"This isn't life!"
"This is hell."
The tall man continued. "That is life, my friends. Life is pain. Life is suffering. Life is agony. You are indeed fortunate that you learn this lesson so well. Most poor souls linger on in ignorance." He smiled. Behind elegant spectacles with exquisitely delicate gold frames his ancient eyes swept upwards over the many shrieking faces. Despite the years behind those eyes, he looked hale and young, if somewhat pale.
"Silence!"
The room was still. The disembodied faces contorted as though they fought some unseen compulsion. The man breathed a contented sigh.
"Brother?"
Now the cacophonous choir became almost a single reverberating voice.
"This place is just so goth," was the amused sentence uttered by the heads, in unison.
The tall man smiled.
"It's my supercomputer," he announced proudly.
"Really. A biological supercomputer. How very interesting. It doesn't seem very happy about the idea."
"It doth protest too much. The personality is residual and rather fluid. Very few of the brains retain any individual identity at all. All that they have really been able to hold onto is a general air of grievance which becomes quite tedious when you are running mega-part molecular models, I'll tell you. So what's it like being dead?"
"Yeah, yeah! Getting by. It fucking smarts at first though. Couldn't the lady just have shot me?"
"That would be far too easy for a Yon-Ju-Shichi associate."
"Nice girl though. Pity she couldn't stay for tea."
"Yeah, with you coming over all Bela Lugosi? It's a good job she topped you when she did. You were going senile."
"Hah! Rude! Anyway, I have come from the Land of Shadows with important tidings, my brother." The heads delivered this line with deadpan solemnity.
The man replied in a singsong voice. "Pray tell, oh dread phantom, what intelligence the Plutonian shades would impart to me."
"Medico. The meteoric fragments. One of them has been stolen."
"I see. Do we know by who?"
"Do you remember that minor felon we used to steal Dowling's diary? You know the diary I mean. By that Victorian engineer with the automaton."
"I have looked at the spectrometry for that 'automaton'. It is no such thing. Victorian material sciences definitely did not stretch to mosaic semi-metallic lattices like that stuff. Whatever it is, that thing, Dowling had nothing to do with its construction." The man started to pace, grasping his hands behind his back.
"Well anyway, it is the same guy who stole the fragment along with the cryptograph schematics."
"Scudblat?" The tall, spidery man paused and smiled. He met the gaze of one the heads, now manipulated by a dead puppeteer. "Do you think there is a connection?"
"No," the phantom ventriloquist replied. "I think that there is a synchronicity."
"With QE there is no difference. Sympathetic magic."
"Agreed. The situation is becoming..." The heads paused. "The situation is becoming interesting."
"I'll tell you something even more interesting."
"Pray tell."
"Have I told you about the Angel of Ruin?"
"One of the Crucible Bio-E packages, judging by the name."
"Indeed. It is still undergoing testing and will remain classified. The GSSA are keen to prevent it from becoming a public domain package. It, like most Crucible bio-ware, requires a certain sort of temperament."
"I still haven't forgiven you for giving Titus the Killing Prayer package for his and Persephone's birthday."
"I know. Do you think for some strange reason I care? Titus can handle it. He even enjoys that 'darker nature'."
"That is why I haven't forgiven you."
The Chief Executive of the Crucible BioTech Laboratory smiled. "Fortunately I do not suffer from guilt."
He continued,
"Anyway, one of my Angel of Ruin prototypes has been insinuated into a Medico laboratory. Heavily squikked of course. She thinks she is doing a job for a data broker."
The heads spoke quietly,
"This is excellent news. Have you had chance to analyse the fragment?"
"Ah! The prototype has gone AWOL."
"That would be the 'darker nature' you are so pleased with," the heads chorused.
"Shut up," the man snapped. "You are not funny even for a dead man."
"Find it."
"Do you not think that I might be trying?"
"Very well. I have little choice but to trust to your competence. Any news from your contacts at Arecibo?" The heads offered this last interrogation almost as an afterthought.
"Yes. They have identified a parallax in the region of point one of a second."
"Not peculiar motion?"
"There is no peculiar motion. Israfel is coming right for us." The man grinned broadly.
"Assuming a demilight, that still gives us a century or so to prepare for his arrival. For the time being the fragments are the priority. The automaton is inert and hopefully will remain so for the moment. At least until we can find out a bit more about it..."
"I am looking forward to the autopsy."
"I thought you might be. But be careful. We have a good few years before we have to deal with the extra-terrestrials. The fragments are the only piece of this sorry jigsaw that have any immediate potentiality. Find your Angel of Ruin before she ruins the plan."
"Yes. She is being hunted as we speak. I am going to be having very cross words with her."
"Good. And I'll follow up a lead of my own on the other stolen fragment."
"Okay. Good. Well, good bye then."
"Bye, T-Boy."
The ghost having released them, the heads once more began screaming obscenities and laments. The gangly figure in the centre of the room turned and sloped out of the room, closing the doors with some relief on the din of the bodiless.
Geoff Hinkley, 01/02/01
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