“What is that?” said Happy. “What the hell is that?”
Abruptly, the sound shut off. As though all the throats had been cut at once. Suddenly, someone was sitting in front of the camera, staring at the screen. As though he’d always been there, and they’d only just noticed. The image was a man’s head and shoulders, blocking any view of what might have been happening behind him. A man’s face, gaunt with shock and horror… and something else none of them could identify-a strange, almost alien aspect. It took JC a moment to realise that the man wasn’t blinking though tears ran jerkily down his twitching cheeks. When he started speaking, his voice was harsh and strained, actually painful to listen to, as though he’d damaged it from too much screaming.
“The world is over. The world we know is over. Wave it good-bye, we shall not see its like again. I have seen God. Or his angels. And they are not what we thought they were. We… are not what we thought we were. What is Man, but a poor unfinished thing… I have seen the future, and it is beautiful and glorious, but we have no place in it. I can see what’s coming, and I can’t bear it…”
His hands came up to his face and without the slightest hesitation he tore out both his eyes. He threw the eyeballs away, blood streaming thickly down his face. He turned his bloody head this way and that, the dark empty eye-sockets red and jagged where he’d torn the eyelids away, too. And then he laughed, bitterly, painfully, and screamed, “I can still see!”
Something hit the camera and knocked it over on its side. The screaming man disappeared, and all that could be seen was an area of blood-spattered floor. The scream rose and rose, beyond all human limits and meaning, then the screen went blank.
“That’s all there is,” said Melody. “I don’t… that’s all there is.”
“What did he see?” said Happy. “What could make a man do that?”
“He must be dead, now,” said Melody. “He must be dead, mustn’t he?”
“Poor soul,” said Kim. “What do you think he was seeing there, at the end?”
“Don’t let it get to you,” JC said firmly. “Look around you. We just saw this laboratory, this whole floor, being wrecked. People screaming and dying. But look around you… there’s no evidence any of that happened. Do you see any blood, any bodies, or wreckage? Happy, are all our minds being interfered with, to stop us seeing the real lab?”
“No,” Happy said immediately. “I’ve got my mental shields hammered down so tight God Herself couldn’t see inside my mind. And I’m seeing the same lab as the rest of you.”
“So what did happen here?” said Melody. “Did someone… clean it all up? Or was the recording a fake?”
“What we saw on the screen was real,” JC said slowly. “I’ve no doubt about that. But there was no time stamp on the screen. So who’s to say when it happened? I mean, it must have been after the drug trial, but… not enough time has passed to clean up the mess we saw. We’re getting conflicting information here, people. I can’t believe that’s an accident. Someone wants to keep us off-balance.”
“I’ve found something else,” said Melody. Her voice was still shaking from what she’d seen, but her manner was as calm and efficient as ever. It took a lot to throw Melody. “More notes on the drug testing, from one of the doctors involved. He’s putting himself on record as being opposed to the LD50, but only after it had been administered. There’s a lot of mea culpa here, some of it almost hysterical, but… Yes. Here, he’s talking about ReSet, and how it didn’t just re-establish the human body’s factory settings. It went much further than that. You’ve all heard about junk DNA, right? All the DNA in the human genome that’s been there forever, but we haven’t got a clue what it does. What it’s for. ReSet awakened, or activated, all of the human junk DNA and set it to work making it do what it was originally supposed to do. To make us… into what we were supposed to be. There’s another vid file. Do you want to see it?”
“Not really,” said Happy. “But we have to. We need to know what’s going on.”
“Good soldier,” said JC.
“Shut up, or I will slap you,” said Happy.
This time, the doctor’s head and shoulders immediately filled the screen. Middle-aged, balding, in a white lab coat too small for him. There was a spray of fresh blood across the left side of his neck and shoulder, clearly not his. His face was deathly pale from shock, his eyes wide, his mouth trembling. He looked quickly about him, as though not sure he was alone, but there were none of the unnerving background sounds from the first vid file. The doctor squirmed in his chair and took a deep breath, visibly bracing himself. He stared into the camera and started talking, no name, no introduction, no build-up. Just the stumbling words of a man desperate to be heard.
“ReSet never was what they told us it was. Curing problems in the human body was only the first step. The bait in the trap, to get us interested. We weren’t told what it would do next, what it was always meant to do. ReSet had another purpose. He knew. He knew that all along. That’s why he funded us. ReSet was intended to make us all that we could be. All we were meant to be. We were never meant to be human. Not merely human. Somehow, part of our DNA got shut down, suppressed, frozen in place. So instead of becoming what we were meant to be, we got stuck part of the way. What we know as Humanity was only meant to be a stepping-stone on the way to something else. But now ReSet has helped finish the job! Taken the test subjects all the way to the end of the line! They’re not human any more. They’re the New People. That’s what they are. Not superhuman, not more than human… Something else. Gods. And monsters.”
He stopped to laugh briefly, a sad and bitter sound. “ That is what we were meant to be. Gods and monsters? Intelligent design, or evolution’s last laugh? Who knows… All of our knowledge and civilisation was a mistake, because what we were supposed to be would never have needed them.”
He started laughing again, and this time he couldn’t stop. He rocked back and forth in his chair and laughed his sanity away.
Melody shut the screen down. “There is more… but I don’t think we need to see it. I doubt he had anything else to say.”
“So,” said JC. “ReSet rewrote the test subjects, from the bottom up, transforming the ones that didn’t die into New People. Whatever they are. And they’re still here, presumably somewhere above us. Those that survived the process… I think we need to go up and have a nice little chat with them.”
“I just knew he was going to say that,” said Happy. “Didn’t you just know he was going to say that?”
“And what do you mean we, Pale Face?” said Melody. “You heard the mad doctor, gods and monsters, all in the same package. That does not sound like someone you can stroll up to and have a nice little chat with! Give me one good reason why we need to go up and talk with these very scary New People?”
“Because they’re behind everything that’s happening here,” said JC. “That’s why it’s been so easy for us to get answers. They wanted us to know. Be honest, Melody-would you have been able to open up those files so easily under normal conditions?”
“No,” said Melody, reluctantly. “I’m good, but I’m not that good.”
“I don’t think we’re going to be allowed to leave until we’ve seen this through,” said JC. “We’re here for a purpose. I think… these New People want something from us.”