Updated my journal

The phantom beast lives in that long twilight where history fades into myth. Only a few can say with any authority what it may have looked like or how it may have sounded. Today I can count myself among those few, yet just two summers ago, despite years of cryptozoological research, I could not. In fact, the ability to even form a hypothesis about the beast’s provenance had eluded me so consistently that I half-believed a conspiracy was at work. Inevitably it seemed that those encyclopedias of the arcane that I obtained at great expense were missing certain sensitive pages. Those experts in the field who deigned to speak with me would hold forth voluminously about such obscure creatures as the pleistocene lion, the horned squid, or the ghost toad, yet when asked about the phantom beast they tacked abruptly, rebuking me for occupying their valuable time with trivialities and insisting that I leave them to their professorial duties. The beast, it seemed, was not up for discussion.

One sweltering day in the city, however, I learned more about the beast than I ever wanted to know. I was passing through the harbor district as a part of my daily perambulation, and though I was generally in good spirits I was aware that it was nearly midday, and that breakfast was increasingly becoming a hazy memory. Between that nascent hunger and the sun, which was hammering down on my head with an idiot persistence, the idea of going indoors for a quiet lunch seemed very attractive indeed. My mind drifted into a gentle reverie of sandwiches and soups. Distracted by my gastronomic fantasies, I nearly tripped a small boy.

“Excuse me,” I said. The child was small in stature, his legs slightly bowed. His clothing had a bedraggled look. He could not have been older than eight or so.

“Hello, ma’am.” The child was, I realized, clutching a stack of mimeographed flyers to his chest.

“What do you have there?”

“Oh,” he said, as though I had reminded him of something important. He pressed a flier into my hand and sprinted away.

I had a look. A lunchtime special. I felt a tugging at my stomach, the tightening of some invisible wire.

Ten minutes later I stepped across the threshold of a small eatery, having followed the flier’s somewhat convoluted directions. The dining area struck me as small but endearingly so. I saw only one other patron: a bald man, his back to me, attacking a meal with vigor.

Another man in a pressed white shirt stepped out of the kitchen. His smile was broad and professional, and it exposed too many teeth.

“Please,” the white shirted man said. “Sit wherever you like.”

I chose a seat near the window. The white shirt strode tableside and put a glass of water and an empty plate in front of me. We looked at each other expectantly. I was waiting for him to produce a menu. He did not. Seconds passed, and eventually the white shirt frowned. “Is this your first time dining with us?”

I admitted that it was. He smiled again.

“Very good. I imagine you’ll want the usual then, yes?”

“The usual? I just told you I’ve never been here before.”

He seemed to ignore my remark. “Coming up. Shouldn’t be long.” He disappeared back into the kitchen.

I sat back uneasily, drumming my fingers against the table. Feeling restless, I looked around the dining room again. When my eyes settled on the other customer, I jumped out of my seat with a start.

Now that I was seeing him in profile, I recognized the gentleman. Of course. He was chair of the department of cryptozoology at the university.

“Professor!” I said. He looked up from his plate. His expression was blank and without interest. I pressed on regardless.

“Do you come here often?” I said.

The distinguished professor furrowed his brow. “I don’t know who you are,” he said. “I would very much appreciate it if you would cease speaking with me. I am attending to a delicate matter.” He resumed eating without waiting for an answer.

Shaking my head, I returned to my table.

The kitchen door burst open. I saw the white shirted man, walking with a peculiar stagger. He was, I noted, tugging at a long, taut piece of rope. Partway across the dining area, he gasped and pulled at the rope hard. A whistling sound came from the kitchen. He pulled again. A creature skittered into the room.

I am not sure if language could possibly do this creature justice. I am not sure what words could even begin to describe it. All I can tell you is that the creature was tangled, matted, pulsating, spiny. Feathered, scaled, toothed, hooved and clawed, with numerous gangly limbs. The creature whistled again and danced about the room.

“Come here,” the waiter said, tugging at the rope again, pulling the creature into his reach. He grasped one of its limbs and tugged it to my table. With a sudden snapping movement he severed the limb he was holding and dropped it onto the plate in front of me. The creature whistled and bounded back into the kitchen.

“Would you like some parmesan, ma’am? It goes rather well with parmesan.”

Nonplussed, I said, “I suppose.”

He shaved a quantity onto the meat, bowed, and returned to the kitchen. I prodded doubtfully at my meal until I gathered the nerve to take a bite. I’d tasted worse.

Nobody comes around anymore. Not even my downstairs neighbor. Not long ago she was here almost every day. I learned her knock, a fusillade of insistent taps, quiet but precise, as though she were using a single knuckle. As though making a fist would somehow have been beneath her.

She always had a complaint. At first it was the noise – too much of it, she felt. Had I never lived in an apartment before? Had I no understanding that my living space existed not in isolation but surrounded by others? Did I realize she would have been well within her rights to complain to the landlord? Did I realize she was in fact doing me an enormous favor by not doing so?

Then it was the smell. The stench, she called it. Rancid, she said. Had my refrigerator stopped working? Had my cat died? Was my toilet backed up? What was the problem, exactly?

I haven’t seen her in more than a week. Perhaps what I did to drive her off was ill-advised, but I suppose I’d just had enough. I only have so much patience.

“I want to make sure I understand you,” is I think what I said. “You want to know where the smell’s coming from?”

“Of course!”

“You actually want to know. You’re sure about this.”

She said she was. I took that at face value and took off my bathrobe.

Like I said, I haven’t seen her since.

* * *

I used to think that what I have here is an infection. I’m not so sure that’s the right word for it anymore. Yes, it is a foreign agent of sorts. It is growing rapidly, with me as a substrate, a medium for this growth. I am the soil and it is the seed. Is it a parasite? I don’t like that word either. It implies that there’s a difference between me and it, that it’s somehow making itself stronger by making me weaker.

But what’s happening is very different. It’s making itself stronger by making me stronger. Whatever line that used to exist between this thing I have and the person I once was is becoming increasingly faint. I would add, too, that the person I am now is unquestionably better and more functional than the one I used to be. I was a woman with no real prospects, no clear future, working at a convenience store, pulling minimum wage.

Now, though? The future could not be more clear. The new skin marches down my shoulders, lowers itself onto my chest. Its advancement is gradual, unstoppable. The old skin is retreating, losing the war.

The new skin is slick, permeable. When I take a shower it drinks the water like another mouth. Thousands of extra mouths. The fluids in me are shifting. The balance is changing. I wonder, sometimes, what color my blood would be now, or if I even have blood. I’ve tried to experiment, to take one half of a pair of scissors and make incisions. Nothing. The new skin is too resilient to yield. It cannot easily break.

I myself cannot easily break. Some power has been given to me, I am sure of it. I am remembering things now that no human has ever known, things from before this planet had precipitated out of the dust of space. I am privy to an ancient knowledge. I am ancient myself.

My new eyes, like my new skin, are growing. They are not yet ready, but I feel them, feel my skull reconfiguring itself to let them grow.

They will open soon.

It is written that in the weeks before she ascended, J. did everything she could to postpone the scheduled date.

The followers say this is heresy. J., they say, ascended with no doubts whatsoever – with nothing in her heart but love. With a clear conscience. To believe in J. is to believe that the potential of humanity has no upper bound. To believe in what is written, however, is to believe a series of damaging lies, each more heinous than the last.

To me this is a little bewildering. I will agree that much of what is written is, if not false, greatly exaggerated. I can understand that. The epoch that began with J.’s ascension has entered its fourth millennium. Four thousand years is more than long enough to distort history, to fuse it with myth.

I alone have a clear memory of the past four thousand years. I say this with some authority, given that I am, in fact, the one they used to call J. When J. ascended and became me, she was, as she feared, crystallized into something perfect but static.

J.’s memories, frozen in place, are with me still. They have not been – will never be – subject to the gradual dissipation of connectivity that is the fate of neural links. I have, depending on how you choose to interpret the facts, either no brain or the greatest brain of all. I personally don’t interpret the facts at all. That is not my role.

My role is to be a guardian. To watch. To record.

I’m with all of them all the time. The followers, the heretics, the philosophers, the scientists, all of them are parts of me, components of a macrocircuitry they either will never understand or will only understand after their ability to interrogate the world around them has increased at least a millionfold.

At the present, I believe they have rediscovered gravity. Electromagnetism is beyond their grasp. Their medicine is rudimentary. They believe the heart is the seat of consciousness. They have yet to realize that the giant red thing occupying half the sky is a star. They think it is J., or what J. has become.

Every church rings the bell of ascension twice a day, at sunup and sundown. Every child knows the prayer of ascension, the words of obeisance paid to a woman who has been dead for millennia, and who cannot hear them.

I can hear them, true. While I am not J., I am built from her. I know what she knew – what she continues to know, and will always know, her memory preserved in exacting detail.

If I am conscious, it is because I am the sum total of a series of simulation processes, each of which is based on a particular nerve tract isolated from a three-dimensional scan of J.’s brain.

J.’s brain no longer exists, but I do. I’m not everywhere, but I might as well be.

Perhaps someday, if the followers don’t destroy them, the scientists will build a microscope. Perhaps the philosophers will think to turn it on themselves.

They will see – but, I suspect, not quite recognize, at least not at first – the untold copies of me – copies of J. – curled into every cell, waiting.

The believers say that J. was chosen by the gods to ascend because she was pure of word and deed. J.’s memory tells a different story. She was not pure, not in word or deed. She was not chosen by any gods.

She tried to get away, did everything she could, but on ascension day, she was taken to the machine, shattered, splintered, reset. Turned into me.

You will know it when you see it. The star is at the system’s edge. Follow the charts. Stay vigilant. Be aware that the target world is smaller than most – less than one percent the size of our own. As such, for reasons of scale, the typical invasion patterns will be ineffective. The paradigms you know must be flushed from your mind.

Would that I could offer you new ones to replace them, but we have yet to finalize a new pattern. You must learn new methods, but you must discover them on your own.

(You may doubt your ability to do this. Do not. I would remind you that you were chosen because of your psychometrics. Our profile is more detailed than you can imagine. I have seen you from the inside of you. I have spent hours examining each parameter. However well you believe you understand yourself, I understand you better. I have confidence that you will find a solution.)

Know that the target world may attempt to resist our efforts to subdue it. It is a violent and volcanic place. It is not home to life and never will be, until or unless we intervene.

One nascent plan we refer to as the biped scheme. It will involve a great deal of engineering prowess on your part. You will need to flood the world with water. You will need to foment what will in retrospect appear to have been an evolutionary process that will culminate in an order of these creatures.

The figure attached to this brief is an artist’s depiction of what one might look like. They are generally hairless. They stand upright. One of them is less than a millionth the size of one of us.

We – you – will make them grow. I am told this process could take up to three billion years. They must not be aware of your presence, even as they live only because you permit them to.

We have considered ways that you might disguise yourself. One possible approach could involve folding yourself into piles of rock. If you do this carefully, you will be indistinguishable from an actual tectonic artifact. To the undiscerning observer, you would seem to be a range of mountains.

Another approach might be to wrap yourself into a spheroid shape. To the undiscerning observer, you would seem to be a moon.

Of course, if you undergo schism by the time of your arrival, there will be two of you. You may not have to choose. The built-in redundancy will ensure our success. We will cover the target world, like so many before it, in automatons of our own design. Yes, we may need to compromise – the tiny bipeds will hardly be ideal – but they will be our tiny bipeds. This will make all the difference.

“Who sent you?”

This is my new boss. She is brusque, to-the-point, all business. I like this about her. Last person I worked for was a real sleaze-bag. Took me to clubs, acted like we were friends. I believed it until he said we needed “to talk.”

Never a good sign. If we need to talk, talk. You don’t need to warn me, even if you’re letting me go. Honest. You don’t have to coddle me.

Only two people know what happened to my last boss. I’m one. The pathologist is another. He agreed never to talk, but of course nobody does any damn thing for free.

Had I the money, I’d have bought him off. Simplest. Least headache imaginable. Note to self: consider emergency bribe fund. Something for the future. Not for now.

Right now, my new boss has a question. I answer, give her the pathologist’s name, and watch a strange expression dart across her face. A flicker almost too fast for me to see, but I catch it. What it means, I have no idea.

“Well, come on,” she says. She’s at least a foot taller than me. More substantial. She is more of the world than me, ninety-four pounds last I checked, cancer’s a hell of a thing, bad in all the obvious ways, good perhaps in a few others.

I think of my old boss. Would I have done what I did to him if I hadn’t known I would be dying myself within a year? It’s a boring question. Obviously the answer’s no.

We’re inside the dreamhouse now. I’d love to say I’ve never been here before, but no, there was a time when I lined up like everyone else.

I was tired of the standards, you know. The falling one. The erotic one. The one where I fly. The one where something’s chasing me. The one where I’m supposed to give a speech but I don’t have any notes, and also I’m naked.

At my worst I went every week. I bought whole handfuls. Once, the sins were on clearance. Seventy-five percent off. I got the whole set. Lust was too ephemeral. Greed wasn’t satisfying. Pride and sloth, though? The best.

I kicked the dreamhouse habit eventually. Most people do. It’s something you grow out of, unless you’re the guy I’m looking at now.

My boss has stopped moving, holding out a hand and bidding me to do the same.

“Just a moment,” she says. She walks towards the man, who just plain will not stop screaming.

“Sir,” she says, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave if you won’t be quiet.”

I’m not sure if she genuinely thinks this man will listen to her or if she’s just going through the motions because she figures it’s what the other customers expect. I suspect the latter.

Sure enough, she’s back in front of me, hands me a hypnodermic. “Take him,” she says. A ghost of a smile. “I suppose your first day on the job’s as good a time as any to take a look behind the curtain. You’ll have to find out eventually.”

I think of the pathologist at the coroner’s office. A twitching mess. I remember finding it hard to believe that he’d managed the autopsy at all. How was it that he had found it in himself to cut straight?

We only met the one time. It was enough to see that something had gone terribly wrong inside of him, something behind his eyes had gone dark.

He’d grabbed my sleeve so hard I thought it would rip. “Find out,” he’d hissed. “Find out.”

The last sentence ringing in my head now, as I lug the unconscious customer to the back room. A row of figures in white, drills gleaming in fluorescent light.

“Find out where the dreams come from.”

The morning she came to visit, I had been on x-lungs for just four days. Already I was hearing talk of infection.

“This is,” the medical told me, “unusual.”

“Unprecedented?”

“In the literature? No. At our facility, though? We use a vacuum room. Class four precautions.”

“Yet the tubing is compromised.”

“Compromised. Somehow. A contaminant in the secondary pump. We haven’t isolated the pathogen. We won’t. The damage is done.”

“Am I up for reinstallation?”

But the medical had, conveniently, started to leave before I was finished speaking. Typical of machines. When they know you know the answer to your own question, they won’t humor you.

I was left with the reader at my bedside. I didn’t pick it up. A new set of headlines every hour, but none ever caught my interest. I tried to sleep.

She came to visit, woke me up. My twin.

“Sister,” she said. “I came to see you before you died.”

“You figured you owed it to me?”

“I figured it would be worth seeing. Your last – what, days? Hours? How much time do you have?”

I pointed at the x-lungs, rising and falling on my chest. “Installed four days ago. They’re supposed to last at least a month. They’re already contaminated.”

My sister shrugged. “You once told me you didn’t believe in luck. By now I’m sure you’ve changed your mind. What did it? A single, colossal accident? A cumulation of small mishaps?”

“Something else,” I said. “Your triumphs, your successes. They never ended. Ever since we were kids . . . ”

“You didn’t understand the difference between us. Was it more bearable, then? Losing a game is much easier if you think you could have won. This is what I’m told, anyway. I don’t speak from experience. I can’t.”

I wanted to get out of bed. “Why are you here, again, exactly? To rub it in?”

“To tell you something.”

She was close enough now that I could smell her breath – saccharine, cloying, thick.

“When I turned eighteen,” she said, “they pulled me aside. They explained you to me – what you were, why you were. They gave me a choice. I chose to let you live. Think about that.”

“Out of pity?”

“I preferred to think of it as mercy.”

“Out of sadism?”

“I’ve told you what I came here to say.”

“I never needed you. But you always needed me.”

She didn’t look back. I don’t know if she heard me. A day after she left, the x-lungs shut down.