Dr. Silo nodded. “I’m afraid so. Neural disruption resulting in terminal brain hemorrhage. Like an overloaded processing unit.”
I remembered the blood spurting from Momma’s ears, mouth, and nose. Silo was right. I didn’t want to hurt her. I loved her. It was the ants. The screaming ants. They had built a series of tunnels in my brain and there was no way to get them out.
“What are you going to do with me?” I asked.
I tried harder to read his surface thoughts, but I got nothing. I had never met anyone whose naked thoughts didn’t swirl about my head like bothersome insects. It was another reason I stayed inside most of the time. “We have to keep this a secret until you turn seventeen,” Momma always said. “Then you’ll be old enough to apply for Mars Colony. There are too many people on Luna, and they’ll be afraid of you. Mars has less than a hundred miners, and they always need more labor. You’ll have your own pod there, and the pay is good.”
We argued about this plan frequently. “I don’t want to be a miner,” I told her. “I don’t want to live on Mars either.”
“You don’t have any choice,” she would say. “If they find out what you are — what you can do — they’ll dissect you or kill you. Or both. So we have to keep your secret.”
Dr. Silo gave me another glass of juice.
“Well, we’re going to run some tests,” he told me. “Take a look at your very special brain with magnetic imaging and some non-invasive neural mapping. Nothing to be worried about. It won’t hurt a bit. You’ll stay here in the lab with me for a few days.”
“Why?” I asked.
Dr. Silo took off his spectacles and rubbed his chin. “We’ve been waiting for someone like you,” he said. “The first evidence of APA in a lunar colonist. You could be the key to our future.”
“Why can’t I read your thoughts?” I asked. “You don’t have a helmet on, but I can’t see anything. Are you a robot?”
Dr. Silo laughed. “Have you ever seen a robot this lifelike? Human technology isn’t that advanced yet.” I had to admit that he was right.
“Then why can’t I read you?” I said.
“Perhaps you’re not trying hard enough,” he said. “Go ahead. Take a look. Give it all you’ve got.” The smile disappeared from his face. I stared into his green eyes and listened for his thoughts. The ants buzzed in my skull again. Annoyed, but not enraged. Not yet. Some kind of invisible barrier protected the doctor’s mind, like Luna City sitting under its protective dome of super-glass.
“Perhaps this will help,” said the doctor. He reached out slowly and took my hand.
All at once his thoughts came flooding out. Images, memories, formulae, concepts without name or explanation. I was a tiny thing caught in the flood, and it threatened to wash me away completely. My hands gripped the edge of the table.
Visions of the Earth below flowed into my mind, not the images from old movies and documentaries that showed the planet’s past. No, these were recent memories from Earth’s surface as it existed now, a century after the great floods. I saw a single continent rising from the world-ocean, a range of black mountains rising at its middle like the spined ridge of some gigantic monster. In the shadow of these mountains stood a city I recognized from historical studies. Built of ancient stone devoid of color, it grew like a fungus on the side of the black mountain range. Its walls were the size of lesser mountains. Twisted towers defied the Earth’s gravity, rising between domes and bridges of alien design. This was the Original City of the ETs, the Elder Things. The creatures who inherited the drowned Earth when they woke from their long sleep beneath the Antarctic. Everyone on Luna knew this, the most important event in recent history. But now I saw it all in Dr. Silo’s mind, horrible things that most people only suspected of existing down there.
The Elder Things glided between their towers on leathery wings, thousands of them, barrel-shaped oblong bodies with star-shaped heads and a row of five arms like wormy tendrils growing radially from their middles. They resembled plants more than animals, but I saw them feed on earthbound humans harvested from distant islands. The hairy primitives howled as they were forced into huge corrals like so much livestock. They reminded me of the carefully bred sheep we kept in Luna City, and they served the same purpose for the Elder Things.
So it was true. There were humans still living on Earth, spread across those island chains.
I knew the ETs would feed on lunar citizens too, if they could.
“We’re 239,000 miles from Earth,” Momma used to say. “ETs don’t even know we’re here, so we’ve got nothing to fear from them. They roam the Earth, and the waters of the Earth. We’re safe here, where they can’t reach us.” All parents told their children a version of this comforting truth. We could look down on the horror of Earth-life, maybe even understand it. But it could not touch us. The ants inside my head buzzed and whined.
Dr. Silo’s visions continued flashing inside my head. I saw the deep sea bottom now, and a mountain of quivering, snapping flesh that rolled across the sea bed. A seething mass of eyes, fangs, and tentacles swept up every living thing it its path: octopi, swordfish, coral forests, and entire schools of eels. The Elder Things glided through the water like rockets, directing their formless servants across the undersea. They rumbled through through the streets of drowned human cities, toppling hollow towers and further reducing the cities of man to gray mud. Eventually there would be nothing at all left of human civilization. What the ocean didn’t destroy, the servants of the ETs would annihilate.
“They’re called shoggoths…”
I heard the words inside my mind, but they weren’t human words.
Somehow, I understood them anyway.
The shoggoths swept out of the sea like living monsoons and poured over islands one by one. Wailing savages attacked them with flaming torch and spear. The Elder Things flew above the fray, letting their fleshy slaves do the hard work. Shoggoths grabbed up the tiny men and women, tearing them to bits, absorbing human flesh into their own pulsating masses. Hungry ETs swoop down to feed as well. Snake-like tubes with fanged mouths swelled up from their five-pointed heads, wrapping about their victims to slurp at fountains of spewing blood.
The ants in my skull danced and raged.
I blinked, pulling back from the table as I pulled my mind away from Dr. Silo. The images disappeared, and I was back in his sterile lab again. He spoke to me without moving his lips. Now I heard only the thoughts he wanted me to hear.
“Do not be afraid, Jarden,” he said. “You are not like the others of your kind. You are special. We hoped that one day we would find someone like you. It was only a matter of time. It is why we allowed this colony to survive.”
“I know what you are,” I said. My skull buzzed and I heard the crackle of electricity. The lab room was quiet, the Earth spinning blue and silent beyond the window.
“Of course you do,” he said. “And now you know why I don’t need a helmet.”
“You’re one of them,” I said. “An ET.”
Dr. Silo pulled a small device from his pocket and showed it to me. It looked nothing like the other technology in his lab. More like a smooth, five-pointed amulet of green stone. “Molecular manipulation,” he said inside my head. “This device allows me to assume a human form, so I can mingle with your kind. So I can monitor them.”
“How long?” I asked. I remembered the tales of Silo’s advanced age. He certainly looked a hundred years old, if not older. But that wasn’t his true flesh. He was far older than a mere century. Nobody knew how long the ETs lived, or if they ever actually died.
“We don’t,” he responded to my unspoken thought. “We are immortal.”
“So you’ve been here all along,” I said. “You helped found this colony.”