“Sorry, Celeste Walker. I’m real.”
“How’d you know my name?”
“I told you, I’ve been down here long enough to know things.”
This time the voice had a direction to it. It was right behind her. Celeste turned around and found herself looking at Grace in the flesh. There was no degradation this time. She was real.
“How’d you get in here?”
It was Grace’s turn to point upwards. The vent hatch in the ceiling of the module was open.
“You came in quiet.”
“You gotta be, down here,” Grace said. “We’re not alone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Roaches. They’re all over. Waiting for life signs to dip, and then they swarm in, harvest our meat for the CIs. Return to base and feed it back into the Crawl.”
“Feed it back in? What for?”
“Nuke-pacs. Proto-matter for the v-borns.” Grace shrugged. “Could be either or both or neither or something else. I don’t know where it goes exactly. I see the leftovers gushing down the pipes. You wanna see a Roach? They’re well nasty.” She tapped at the neon-braille on a wristband she was wearing.
A nightmare cut from glass and obsidian lunged out of the tepid air at Celeste. It was too close to avoid; its claws sank into her – and passed straight through, as if she wasn’t there, or it wasn’t. It existed somewhere between a spider and a cockroach, with two intensely glowing red LED eyes. It moved smooth and slick as feedback flow.
“That’s a Roach?”
“Yeah, well nasty bastards. They come out during night-cycle, mostly, but you need to keep an eye out. When life signs go down, they’ll be there. Faster than death. Come on, enough gas spent on this, you’ve got places to be.”
“I do? There’s nothing down here.”
“What you know. Not what I know.” Grace said with a smile. She bounded back up into the vent that led out of the module.
“But what about these other people?”
“Someone, not me, picks and chooses who gets invited. Even then, some who get asked don’t come. Why deal with the real when you can spend the rest of your life jacking off in your favourite sex-dreams, right? Still, you been picked, and you look like you’re choosing to come, so get a hurry on.” Grace reached down.
Celeste took her hand and let herself be hauled up and out of the module, leaving behind the meagre remnants of her life.
“What was that?” Grace asked.
Celeste knelt, peering back down into the module. Mickey Mouse was ringing again. She watched his one working LED eye flicker plaintively at her. After a few more moments passed, it went black and he went silent.
“Nothing to worry about,” Celeste said, “show me the yellow brick road.”
“Mon plaisir,” Grace replied.
The ventways were tight, long and narrow. Grace explained they circulated basic air-recyc between the modules, doubling as maintenance hatches – and a way in for Roaches when someone’s corpse had to be collected.
Something shifted nearby, in the dark.
Celeste froze. “Thought you said they only come when life signs fade.”
“They do. And you’ve left your module – counts as death to them. You’re easy meat now.”
“You didn’t tell me that before.”
“Would you have come out if I had?”
Celeste said nothing in response.
“Exactly.” Grace whispered. “No going back now, for you or me.”
They went on; Grace in the lead with Celeste coming after her, crawling on hands and knees through the network that wound around the zeroed modules like an intricate representation of the Flood’s countless threads, channels and streams. It was grimy, cold, and slow-going. The slightest sound echoed for miles, always answered by the sound of a distant scratching and scuttling. At those moments, Grace would stop and so would Celeste – then, they would wait. Wait and hold their breath as Roaches spread out, scanned and probed. Always out of sight, but you could hear them clear. They glimpsed flickering red eyes on the search. Heard the internal chatter of scan-sequences; the talk of so many insects. The odour of partially-digested offal grew thicker and more fragrant the deeper they went into the network. In places the stench intensified and, below, Celeste could see they were passing over areas where colossal vats rested, full of oozing matter dumped in from the mouths of numerous pipes. “That’s where they all end up,” Grace said, “the zeroes. The ones who don’t come with me like you did.”
“So that’s where we all go in the end. Not exactly heaven is it?”
“Sugar, proteins, and amino acids. Primordial soup. It’s what’s leftover. We end as we began,” Grace said.
A metallic screech jolted them out of their reverie.
“Don’t they ever rest?” Celeste asked.
“No. They’re incapable of it, until they catch their targets. We’re rogue meat, outside modules. That makes us target.” Grace paused. “Be still. Don’t breathe.”
Ahead, Celeste could see a Roach blocking their path.
“Stay quiet. They’re big on movement.”
Seconds ticked by as Celeste held her breath. Eventually, the Roach chirruped icily – an all-clear signal to its compatriots – and moved off down another ventway.
The two companions moved along again, taking it easy, taking it careful.
There, something else up ahead. Laboured breathing. Awkward, broken sounds of bodily movement. It was a man, prone and badly injured.
“Allah, what happened to him?” Celeste whispered.
Grace looked the man over. He was wounded, looked as if he’d gotten himself caught in something big with teeth. Flesh and muscle were shredded down to fibre in places. His legs were a ruin that would never walk again. “Someone who got out without our help, by the look of things. You find ’em sometimes. No system is foolproof. There’s a trick to tripping a system, and someone smart can find it without help. He must’ve crawled around for days, couldn’t get back into a module.”
They started to move past him.
A hand grasped Celeste by the wrist.
The man was alive.
His eyes flickered open. “Help… help me… please… it hurts…”
Fingers dug into her flesh like they were cast from steel. His eyes were crazed with alone-sickness. He needed her. Needed someone. Needed others so he could stop being lost on his own in the dark.
“Please… the Roaches’ll find me again. They’ll turn me into dispose this time. I’ve seen it… their jaws and claws… I don’ wanna be paste…”
She looked at Grace. The young scavenger shook her head. “We’d have to drag him all the way. Go real slow. Too slow. The Roaches’d get us, all three. We’ll all be paste then.”
The man’s fingers dug harder into Celeste’s arm. “Allah, please! Don’t leave me. Stay till I die leastways.”
Grace shook her head emphatically. “Can’t. We stay. We all die.” She drew a length of moulded carbon from her belt and flicked her wrist. A shimmering blade of light extended from it: a neo-knife. “You let her go, or I finish you,” Grace told him.
He mewled wetly and relinquished his grip, eyes streaming with tears. “If you gotta go, jus’ kill me… please… I don’ wanna be paste…”
Celeste glanced from the man to Grace and back again.
“Kill me, please!”
From not so far away, came a chorus of machine-cries.
“We gotta go,” Grace said. “He’s killed himself. Us too, if we don’t move now.”
Grace turned and went. Celeste looked after her. She looked back at the man for a moment. His mouth was working but no words were coming out; only moist, laboured breaths. She opened her mouth to say something, but didn’t. She followed Grace, feeling sick and cold inside at what they’d done. She stopped and turned around – a mistake.