Ramses was doing a lot of things at the same time today. He deployed a
sophisticated drone to fly around Dome 216, and try to figure out what was
going on. There was inexplicable life support in there. Obviously simply
sealing a dome up didn’t automatically make it habitable. Hrockas had a
complex network of tubes piping in oxygen, nitrogen, and other gases. An AI
managed all of this, making sure that compositions remained at optimal
levels. Some of the oxygen came from the natural thin atmosphere native to
Castlebourne while the rest was from various electrolytic processing plants
placed strategically between the inhabited domes. Carbon scrubbers then
recycled this air as needed. Ideally, they would just be growing plantlife
to do this all for them free of charge, but that kind of infrastructure was
a very long-term plan.
Dome 216 had no such gas pipelines. They were installed years ago, but
ultimately removed and repurposed elsewhere. Nothing should be alive in
here, yet as the drone surveyed the land in greater detail than its
predecessor, it found not only breathable air, but also desert plants.
Either someone was sneaking in, and making changes to this environment, or
there was something fishy going on. In addition to preparing the team for
their departure with their new tandem slingdrive array, Ramses was examining
Romana to see how she was involved. There was a...dark particle monster
lurking in the mysterious dome, and it theoretically came from her. But how?
“How indeed?”
Ramses covered up his patient. She had to be undressed for him to scan
her entire integumentary system properly. They still didn’t really know how
her dark particles were released, or exactly where they lived when they
weren’t swarming around. “Hrockas, this is highly inappropriate, you can’t
just burst in whenever you want.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, this is my planet. All of this belongs to me.”
Ramses didn’t respond to this. Yes, Hrockas technically
owned Castlebourne, but it was its namesake, Vendelin Blackbourne who
initiated construction of the domes before he died and joined Team Keshida.
A great deal of the work since then was completed by others, particularly
Ramses himself, and Baudin Murdoch. Hrockas’ contribution was not nothing,
but it wasn’t singular either.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
“How did you get into this sub-lab? You shouldn’t even know about it.”
“I have particles of my own,” Hrockas replied. “Keeping watch...taking
notes.”
Ramses nodded. “Smartdust. I should have had my countersurveillance
protocols account for that. I guess I just trusted you too much. I won’t
make that mistake again.”
Hrockas chuckled. “Intentional obsolescence has gotten me out of a lot of
jams. Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to give me their
secrets.”
Ramses looked around. “I was getting sick of this place anyway. It’s time to
move on. What did you come in for anyway?”
“I was just checking on your progress. She tell you anything?”
“She can speak for herself,” Romana argued. “And no. I don’t know
anything.”
“I meant, his little tests. Have they given you any insights?”
“Thank you. You can go now,” Ramses said to him pointedly. They would tell
Hrockas what he deserved to know, when they were ready for him to know it.
“Fine. I’ll go.”
“You can take your smartdust with you,” Ramses added.
“Okay.” Hrockas patted himself on the hip, and spoke in a high-pitched tone,
“come on! Let’s go, little motes. Come on! Come on!” He was smirking as he
walked through the holographic door backwards.
“Hey, thistle,” Ramses said. “Purge the dust for me.”
“Certainly, sir.” The biohazard decontamination protocols rained hell
over the little guys, destroying all forms of minuscule surveillance, as
well as all other visual security measures.
“Did my body tell you anything?” Romana asked once the purge was
over.
He rolled a cart around so she could see what was on the monitor. “You have
an aura.” The screen was showing Romana in silhouette, as well as a hazy
second shadow surrounding her. To the untrained eye, it would look like
nothing more than a regular second shadow, created by an additional source
of light. But when Romana moved around, this aura followed her nonuniformly.
It was sometimes lagging behind, and sometimes clearly ahead, predicting her
future movements perfectly.
“So it’s always there, just invisible.”
“It would appear so.”
“Could you take—I dunno—a biopsy, or something?”
“Not invisible as in, a trick of the light. They seem to exist in a parallel
dimension, just as we always suspected. This is where they multiply.”
“Are they alive?” Romana pressed.
He threw up a hologram containing a list. It was the eight requirements for
life. He pointed towards each one like a schoolteacher. “To be alive, an
entity must have complex organization, metabolize chemically, maintain
homeostasis, grow, reproduce, respond to stimuli, adapt or evolve, and
contain coded information.” He swiped at the image. The list remained, but a
couple of the items were crossed out, and a couple of them were highlighted,
while others were left unchanged. “They don’t appear to be very complex,
more like single-celled organisms. If they metabolize, they don’t
necessarily do it chemically. Maybe they process...time, or other forms of
energy? They do seem to be homeostatic. They hopefully don’t grow. They one
hundred percent reproduce by some means. They definitely respond to stimuli.
It’s too early to tell if they evolve. And I have no idea how to test for
any equivalent to DNA.”
“Do they...get angry at you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you getting the sense that they don’t like when you run your tests on
them?”
Ramses lifted his chin in curiosity, and peered at her. “Do you feel an
anger around you? Do you think they’re angry?”
“When I get mad, even at someone I love, like my sisters, I feel...a power.
I feel stronger. Maybe there’s more of them in those instances. Maybe that’s
how they reproduce, by feeding off of the emotion.”
“I don’t know how one would go about feeding on emotion,” Ramses said,
shaking his head as he was struggling to find any evidence to contradict his
hypothesis, and support hers.
She looked down and to the side, but didn’t say anything.
“Have you talked to anyone about this before? Mateo, or your sisters?”
She didn’t look up. “I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what, that they would start to fear you?”
She waited to respond, but then she looked up. “Afraid of being encouraged,
to embrace it. To use it.” She looked down again, and breathed out.
“To exploit it.”
“Shit,” Ramses said, exasperated. “You’re afraid of becoming Buddy. Why
weren’t we worried about this before? Of course you would feel some
connection to him, however dark.”
“I don’t think he did this to me on purpose. I don’t think he understood
what he was getting himself into, how it would affect someone with my
biology, and what was it—my qualia?”
“I don’t think so either. Guy’s a dick, but I think he would have said
something, or hinted at it.”
Romana looked over at the holographic wall. “What if that thing out there
is... I don’t even wanna say it.”
“I think I know where you were going. Do you want me to say it?”
“No, but...someone should.”
“Our child.” Buddy was suddenly here. His swarm of dark particles were just
finishing up retreating into their home dimension.
Ramses stepped between Buddy and Romana. “Do you spy on us?”
“Cocktail party effect,” Buddy said cryptically. “I know when people are
talking about me. I tend to ignore it, but there was something different
about this. I’ve been sensing your dark particles since you left. I thought
it was just residual energy, but now I know better.” He started to step
closer.
Ramses tensed up. “Whoa there, buckaroo billy.”
Buddy stopped. He was stoic, and maybe even respectful? “What I did to you
was wrong; a violation. I didn’t see it that way at the time, but it’s my
greatest regret. I recognize that I am seen as the villain; an antagonist.
That was never my intention. I started out normal, just a little ambitious.
But those ambitions grew, and took over. They became obsessions. I
know it’s crazy to force people to go get me a fruit. Intellectually, that’s
just dumb. I can’t think about anything else, though. It feels like my
purpose in life, and if I ever manage to get it, I’m worried that my next
obsession will be bad. What if I start fixating on vaporizing a whole
planet, or turning everything into paperclips?”
“Why are you telling us this?” Romana questioned.
“Because it could happen to you, and you don’t deserve that. I didn’t. I was
innocent...until I wasn’t. These things are toxic, and while it’s too late
for me, I believe that you still have time.” He straightened up, and cleared
his throat, giving himself a surge in self-assuredness. “I wanna help. I
wanna fix this. It’s my mess, and my responsibility to clean it up.”
“We obviously can’t trust you,” Ramses reasoned. “The first time we
encountered you was because you abducted our friends. And then the next
time, you abducted her.”
“I know, and as I said, that was wrong. Don’t let her become the next
me. Don’t let her do something like that to innocent people.”
“If what you’re saying is true,” Romana began, “then you’re just trading one
obsession with another. Let’s say you fix what’s wrong with me, what happens
to you then? Do you just go back to the way you were, coercing people into
doing your bidding?”
“Like I was saying, I’m a lost cause,” Buddy reiterated.
“Well, what if you become obsessed with self-improvement?” she suggested.
“Well, that’s self-defeating, Romana, it would never work,” Ramses
determined.
“No, I want to hear her out. You really think that I can choose my own
obsession?”
Romana smiled. “I think that you’re choosing it right now, asking for me to
let you help me.”
“I believe that he was asking me,” Ramses said, like an idiot.
She glared at him for a moment before returning her attention to Buddy.
“Might as well give it a shot. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“He vaporizes the world with paperclips,” Ramses gibed.
“Thank you, you can go now,” Romana said to Ramses. He was being
mean-spirited with Buddy, albeit plausibly justified. She was just joking,
though, because she couldn’t do this without him. If anyone was going to
figure out how to save her from her own dark particles, it was the one
person in the timeline who both was smart enough, and cared for her. Buddy’s
knowledge and experience were equally invaluable, and since he was offering
it, they had little choice but to accept.
“All right,” Ramses relented. “If you want to help, I will set aside my
reservations, and remain professional. But in the end, I still don’t trust
you, and I will go to any lengths to protect my people from you.”
“I would expect nothing less,” Buddy acknowledged.
There was a pause in the conversation, which Ramses volunteered to break.
“Do you have any ideas off the top of your head, errr...?”
“Yeah, I think it’s time for me to meet my child,” Buddy figured.
“Okay.” Ramses was immediately regretting his decision to be civil. “We
don’t know if we should frame it that way. The dark particles that you gave
her are hers now, and if she made a particle baby, that doesn’t mean it’s
yours. Okay?”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Ramses knew that Buddy was being sarcastic, but that
didn’t make his statement untrue. “I’m choosing to believe that you didn’t
father a child with a fifteen-year-old girl.”
“She’s not fifteen anymore.”
“She was when you...impregnated her,” he shouted with airquotes. He
threw up a little in his mouth.
“Okay, okay!” Romana cried, trying to shut down the argument. “Ramses is
right. We’re not calling it anyone’s child. We’re not calling it a
child. It’s a...fuck!”
Ramses calmed down. “We’ll just call it the particle entity. It doesn’t have
to be an extension of you in any way for most discussions.”
“Great.” Buddy clapped his hands. “Let’s go meet—not my—but
a particle entity.”
“That’s not the next step in this process,” Ramses told him.
“It is for me.” Buddy spun around, and disappeared into his dark particles.
“He’s gonna get himself killed,” Romana warned.
“No, wait!” Ramses knew what she was about to do. He growled after she
called upon her own dark particles, and disappeared too. He teleported the
regular way, grateful that he could always pinpoint her location.
They were now standing in a desert. A swarm of dark particles were flying
around in the distance. Another swarm was farther down the hill in the
opposite direction. According to the drone’s readings, they were multiplying
faster than ever, and showing no signs of stopping. The particle entity,
however, was nowhere to be seen. They still had time to get out of here
before it spotted them. “It might kill us,” Romana contended.
“Then you should leave, so if it kills, it only kills me,” Buddy calculated.
“What if it kills you because it’s made up of my anger, and I’m angry at
you?” Romana proposed.
While they were looking at him, Buddy was scanning the horizon, searching
for the entity. “Then Team Matic will finally have defeated me, just as they
once promised.”
“We should go,” Ramses said. “This is not the way. You start small, and work
your way up to the more dangerous experiments. We do it like that for a
reason.”
“That’s too cautious, not how I operate, and my efforts are about to pay
off.” He was looking down at the ground a few meters away. Dark particles
wafted up from the sand, forming themselves into a blob, which assembled
into a humanoid figure. It developed approximations of human facial
features, but only as creases and pits. It was a great example of
body-horror. Its mouth moved. It was trying to speak, though no sound
was coming out, probably because it didn’t have vocal cords, or anything
else that a normal person would need to function as a living organism. Buddy
gave it a Vulcan salute. “We are of peace...always.”
The entity jerked its head to focus on Buddy, reinforcing Ramses’ assertion
that the particles were responsive to stimuli.
“I am your father,” Buddy said to it, much to everyone’s chagrin, including
the entity’s.
It reached out, and took Buddy by the neck. It was trying to strangle the
life out of him.
“I told you!” Romana yelled. She took the entity by its arm, and attempted
to pull it off of Buddy, but it was superhumanly strong, and barely paying
her any mind. She continued to pull while Ramses urged her to let go. “No! I
am your mother, and you will do as I say!”
The entity released Buddy from its grasp, and stared at Romana. It was
impossible to tell what it was thinking, or even if it was capable of
thinking at all. Without any warning, the particles that it was made up of
blew up like a balloon, and enwrapped her. They both disappeared.
“Do you know where she went?” Buddy asked Ramses after they were gone.
Ramses tried to focus on their bond to one another, but he wasn’t getting
anything. Dark particles were evidently the one thing that could block the
signal. “No.”
“I do.” Buddy walked towards him, almost menacingly, and transported
them both away.
