The People in Darkness

It is dark, or you have gone blind. And you are coughing violently. You must have woken in the night. You sit up and cough and cough, and your stomach hurts from the effort. Your throat rattles with phlegm. And then it is over, and you can breathe. But still, you can’t see. You feel for the edges of your bed, but this is not a bed. It is something glass or porcelain; a floor, flat and featureless. Cool but not cold. Are you in a bathroom? A kitchen? Your thoughts go to your mother. Has she heard you coughing? Will she come in to check on you? Place her cool hand against your forehead to gauge your temperature?

But that doesn’t seem right, and you raise a hand to your face. You cannot see the hand, not even when you hold it in front of your eyes, but when you touch your face, you find it whiskered, broad. You are a grown man, which seems right. It makes sense. But you cannot remember how that happened, or when.

Behind you, there is a woman’s voice.

“Are you all right?”

You turn, squint into the darkness. There are tiny flashes in your retina — your eyes trying to see what is not there. You begin to speak, but your voice is a wire-brush rasp, and you cough again.

When you stop, you say, “Yes. Yes, I’m all right.”

You run your hands over your body to make sure that this is true. Nothing hurts. Nothing is broken or wet with blood or sweat. You are clothed. Something light. Cotton, maybe. Like pyjamas, and again your mind goes to a childhood bed. It feels distant. Safe. But this is not it. You check your wrist for a vitaband, but you don’t have one. No way to make light.

“Where are you?” asks the voice. It is not your mother’s. It has an unfamiliar accent. An unfamiliar cadence. And you ponder the question for a moment.

“I don’t know. I’m here.”

The reply comes after a pause. The voice is quiet. Perhaps afraid.

“Can you see me?”

“I can’t see anything.”

You both fall into silence. Then you hear movement. A change of position, maybe.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Callum Waites,” you say. You hear this name in your father’s voice, beckoning you into his office in the loft. The air frigid with air conditioning. His voice knife-hard.

“Cal,” you say. “Just Cal.”

“Cal,” she says, testing the sound of it.

“Do I know you?” you ask.

“I don’t think so,” she says. “I don’t know.”

“What’s your name?”

“Vinni,” she says. “Lavinia?”

“I don’t think I know you. But…”

Is her voice familiar? American, you think. You can’t think of any Americans you might know. But then, who do you know? You can’t remember a single person outside of your family in Exeter. Your mother and father. Peter, your older brother. Where is he? Where is Peter? What happened? You remember your nan in Exmouth. Some teachers. You had a dog named Stuart.

“Where are we? Do you know?” you ask.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how I got here. I don’t remember anything. There’s just nothing!”

Her voice is edged with panic.

“Listen, I’m coming to you. Stay there,” you say.

You shift to hands and knees, sliding one hand ahead of you to feel the way. There is no change in the texture of the floor. No creases or cracks. No dirt.

“I don’t think we should move,” says Vinni.

You continue to feel your way toward the woman, but your hand slides up to a wall which feels identical to the floor. The two are joined with a gentle curve as if they were all a single piece of material, and you follow this wall upward, standing as you do.

Something touches your face for a moment — something fleshy and wet like the inside of a cheek. And you recoil, swinging your hand to bat it away, but there is nothing there. You touch the spot on your cheek with your fingers, but it is dry.

“Where are you?” you ask.

“Here. I’m here,” says the woman.

You reorient and step toward the voice. You follow the wall left until it meets another wall, then left until it meets a third. You follow this one around until you understand you are in a large room. A featureless box of warm glass. You ask Vinni to speak again, and she repeats I’m here over and over until you get as close as you can.

“I can’t get to you. We’re in different rooms,” you tell her. “Is this a prison?”

“What do you remember?” she asks.

“I remember my childhood. But it’s…distant. I know there’s more, but there’s a gap. I can’t get to the memories.”

“Yes. It was the same for me.”

“Was?”

“Is.”

You wave a hand above your head, searching for anything that might have touched you, but you find nothing. There is a wave of fear; you’re afraid of the dark. Or you were when you were a child. But this? This is not the same as a darkened bedroom. This is nothingness: a disorienting void you might topple into. The wall is, at least, a kind of comfort — an anchor-point for your balance. You place your back against it and slump to your haunches. Patience, you think, patience. If this is a dream, you will wake. If this is real, someone will explain. Someone will find you.

You shout into the darkness:

“Is there anyone there?”

There is no echo. For such a smooth room, the sound is dead. Less like a shower and more like a closet filled with clothes. Like the one you hid in when Peter…yes, that was what happened to Peter. You don’t want to think about it, but with nothing else to distract you, the memory seems to loom into your vision. Peter, beating your father to death as you cower in the closet.

It’s not the first time you’ve thought about it, of course. You’ve spent hours in therapy going over it. But now, it seems to be all you can think about. Your father, veteran of the Northern War. Your father, who had never struck you. No. With you, he was only disappointed. With you, no matter how hard you tried to please him, he looked at you like something he had stepped in. All your good grades were merely expected, all your moderate grades, punishable.

But Peter? He’d beaten Peter many times in the name of making a man of him. And Peter had nearly become a man — an angry, disaffected youth who refused to join the military as his father demanded. A youth who, more than anything in the world, simply wanted to leave. To be left alone.

Peter had told you as much: that he planned to leave. And you didn’t want to imagine a future without him. With six years difference between you, you’d rarely spent time together. You weren’t good mates. But even so, you bore your father’s anger together. And a future where that anger would be focused solely on you was terrifying.

And so, when you saw Peter with his friends that day, outside a club on Mary Arches — their glances furtive, a small bag of pills passed around, hands moving to mouths, bottles of water to swallow — you told your father. Told him that you’d seen Peter taking drugs.

And instead of praising you for your honesty, he cursed and sent you to your bedroom. Then, the next evening, you heard the argument. Something kicked, something broken. Then Peter was in your room calling you a fucking little snitch, and your father stalked in after him, a belt wrapped round his knuckles, neck flexing with anger. And as you fled into the closet and made yourself small, you saw Peter refuse to back down. You realised, perhaps for the first time, that Peter stood taller than your father. And you watched as he picked up one of your dumbbells from the floor and hit your father with it. Then hit him again.

Then Peter was gone with the police, and you were alone with your mother and your guilt and the bloodstain on the carpet. Anything beyond that is now locked behind a door your mind can’t access.

You think you hear something shuffle or sniff above you.

“Is that you, Vinni?”

“Yes,” she says. “Sorry. I can’t get comfortable.”

“I think we might be dead.” Your voice is a whisper. “I think this might be hell.”

“Well, thanks a lot,” she says. Then quietly adds, “You’re not dead.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“I keep thinking about my father,” you say, “and my brother.”

“You had a brother? That must have been nice.”

You sniff.

“What about you?” you ask.

“Let’s not talk about me,” she says. There is something strange in her voice. Something off.

“Vinni, if we want to stay sane, we should talk. Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

There is a long pause. She doesn’t reply. You hear a rustle that seems to come from the opposite corner of the room. Directions are difficult to judge in the darkness, but the sound makes your skin crawl.

“Vinni? There’s something in here with us,” you say. “Listen.”

You rise to your feet, one hand against the wall behind you for stability, the other ranging in front. You pray it won’t touch anything.

“It’s just me, Cal,” says Vinni. But her voice is now ahead of you. It has shifted in timbre. It sounds like a child and an adult all at once. It speaks again:

“I was never good at lying, and they’re even worse,” it says. “This isn’t working.”

Panic wells up, but you are frozen in place. You step back from the slithering sounds in the corner.

“Who the fuck are you!”

You turn and kick at the wall for an exit, you hammer it with your fists, but it may as well be concrete.

“Cal, stop. Please. You’ll hurt yourself,” says the voice that was Vinni. “We’re going to release the blocks. This will feel a little strange.”

“What the fuck does that m — ” you begin, but then your head is full of liquid sparks.

It is like a panic attack without the panic. A white fire. A swelling euphoria. Your whole nervous system sings with it, and you crouch down again, flashes of white and purple behind your eyelids as your memories flood in. You do not see them so much as feel them filling the gap. They slosh like liquid in a shaken glass, but you can bring each to mind: Peter dying in prison. Your distance from your mother. A solitary existence. Your focus on science. The Anu exploration vessel. The crew. Your job in engineering. The journey to Amphitruo, recently discovered to have life. That was the journey for you — the farthest point away from Exeter, away from your father and Peter and everything else. So you signed up.

And you remember Lavinia, now. Lieutenant Lavinia Bell. Communications. You were both officers. Crew members. Friends perhaps.

But you do not remember anything else. Only that you had arrived in Amphitruo’s system. An announcement from the bridge that you would be slowing to investigate something. Something anomalous.

And that is all.

Your mind is still full. Filled to bursting, and you realise that this is normal. This is how it feels to be human.

“How? Who are you?”

“They can map our minds so easily, Cal. They just block whatever synapses they need to.”

The voice sounds like Vinni again. Like Lieutenant Bell. Yet you know it isn’t her.

“Vinni, who are they?”

“They call themselves the People. They’re…what? Amphitrites? Amphitrians, I guess? You’re here, on Amphitruo. Underground. We live underground, mostly, but the planet is a paradise.”

“Where is everyone? The crew?”

There is a pause.

“They’re dead, Cal. All of them.”

“How?”

“The People, they…they turned them off.”

“Turned them off!?”

“It’s a defence mechanism that kicks in if any intelligence comes within a certain distance of their sun. Like an EMP but without the explosion. It kills all electrical charges. Even in bodies. The crew simply fell down and never woke up.”

“Then why are we still alive?”

“It’s interesting,” she says, sounding fully like Vinni again, “They don’t know why you’re still alive. Shielding in the engine room? Something else? You winked out but came back. I did, too. But listen, I don’t want you to freak out here — ”

Your stomach tightens.

“I was conscious but paralysed. So…they were able to scan my mind, incorporate me. I have all my memories, all my experience. But — ”

“What the fuck, Bell? What are you?”

“I’m one of them. A newcomer. An alien to them, but we’re all the same here. It’s hard to describe, but not as awful as you might think. The People used me and the AI from our ship to learn about you, about humans. They’re a kind of digital-biological hive mind. They know…they know everything. It’s incredible.”

She stops and sighs.

“When they told me — the other me, the living me — that they’d copied her, she flipped. Screaming. Crying. I tried to calm her, and that only made it worse. And then they panicked and shut her off again. But this time, it was permanent.”

“So, they’re monsters,” you growl. “And you’re just a copy trying to get into my head.”

“No,” the voice almost laughs. “You don’t get it. They don’t need what’s in your head. Look, do you know what that’s like to watch yourself die? Because I do. And, since I was one of them when it happened, they felt it, too. It changed them. That’s why they tried to introduce you gently, to make an emotional connection. But, like I said, they share one mind. They have no secrets. No lies. They had to rely on me to deceive you, and I’m a shitty liar. It was the wrong approach. I’m sorry.”

You reel under it all. You were trained in first-contact situations, but there has never actually been one. All protocols have gone out of your head, and all you can say is:

“I want to see them.”

There are soft noises. Like something tapping the surface of a pond. But no reply.

“Can you at least turn on some fucking lights?”

“Yes,” says the voice that is and is not Vinni.

The light, when it arrives, is soft. It seems to be in the walls and air at once. A glow from all around. You see the smooth walls, and in the corner opposite, there is a figure. It could be a woman or a man. A human figure, head down in a posture of humility, hands clasped in front or behind. It is so dim that it is difficult to see.

“Bell? Is that you?”

There is something wrong with the figure. Its edges shift as if seen underwater. When it speaks, it does not breathe. It ripples. The voice is ageless and sexless, again:

“I told you, the Bell you knew is dead.”

You step forward, cross the ten steps to see this creature, but as you draw near, you see the slender threads above it — droplets of something oily and dark scurrying up and down. Then, the body separates, draws itself up like a marionette made of beads, each set of droplets separating from the other, sliding with a faint rustle toward the ceiling until the figure has vanished.

You look up.

Twenty feet overhead, the ceiling crawls with a liquid darkness. It is an oil slick of ever-changing stalactites and droplets that slip down delicate threads and rise again. You see, too, that there are terminals or machines in the ceiling — the liquid creatures, the People, moving from one to the next.

“We know that you feel revulsion for us, Calum Waites, but this is who we are. These are our bodies, no less terrifying than yours. So, understand this: This planet is ours. We will not go to war. We will not teach you or trade. We only ask that you tell your people never to return,” says the voice. This is not Lavinia Bell. It is all of them together. The hive-mind.

“They won’t listen to me. They’ll see you as a threat and send ships. Hundreds.”

“And those ships will fail in the same way. Their crews will die, pointlessly. The excursion will be long and expensive, and you have seen only a hint of what we can do. No one wants any of this.”

“What do you want?”

“To be left alone.”

You think of Peter, who only wanted to be left alone. Your father who didn’t care. Who didn’t listen. Who underestimated. Their losses burn like an open wound.

“Can you send me back?”

“That part is simple.”

“Callum,” the voice is Vinni’s. A single drop of the oil descends on its glistening thread and hangs before your face, turning. “Will you take my body back? We’ve kept it safe. Can you take it to my family?”

* * *

In the Amphitrian ship, you will sleep through most of the five-year journey. Beneath the floor is the sealed pod containing Lavinia Bell’s body. The upper half of the craft, where you lie down on a surprisingly comfortable plinth, is unlit and crystal clear.

With the system’s sun shrinking to a star, it is much like being in the dark again. And before the induced hibernation overtakes you, you look up at the canopy of strange constellations and think that for the first time, you are eager to go home.