Bob had done the dive twice before. Once with the cable, once with the temperature plates. Both worked fine, but he preferred the subtlety of using the cold. Part of him also liked the idea of hurting the thing, of knowing he could hurt the thing. Regardless, both dives had been no more than one minute of insertion. In and out. No testing other than making sure he survived. Despite all their use of scientist’s logic, the reality is the creature is essentially a giant mass of liquified muscle the size of a T-Rex, and just as deadly. Bob just hopes it isn’t as smart as Joanne thinks it might be.
Smart things find a way. Smart things figure shit out.
“I’m going in,” he says. “What’s its core temp?”
“45 degrees Fahrenheit,” Joanne says. “Docile, not dormant. Still, I wouldn’t linger at the door.”
“Copy that. I’m ready. Let me in.”
After a few seconds, the lock of the inner door rotates. There’s a pop and a gust of visible air as the chilled ventilation of the cube gusts into the antechamber. The thick door opens smoothly, slowly, and Bob—heeding Joanne’s advice, and with the assistance of built-in hydraulics—lifts one heavy foot and steps forward.
Thirty seconds later he’s inside the cube, the door cycling shut behind him. He stares up at the massive folds of slow-moving goo that has been their sole focus of study for these last twelve months, feels a stomach-churning combination of awe and white-hot terror.
“Let’s warm it up,” he says. “It looks a little stiff.”
“Copy, bringing the temperature up to 65 degrees,” Joanne replies. “Careful, he’ll be mobile in less than a minute.”
“I’m aware,” Bob says, grimacing at Joanne’s use of “he” versus “it.” He doesn’t want her, or anyone else, giving the alien creature any semblance of humanity. It’s nothing but a mindless, emotionless substance. An incognizant organism that knows only to feed and feed and feed; but that doesn’t make it smart, or even sentient. It simply makes it alive, and very dangerous. And now that he finally has the software to decipher the strange vibrations that rumble through its core, he’ll prove there’s no language, no emotion, no mind. Just … hunger.
Then he can finally go home. Pull the scientists and the theorists, let the engineers take over and do the only thing that mattered: Keep the damned thing locked safely away. Forever.
Unfortunately for Bob, the only way to cleanly acquire these vibrations is from inside the Specimen, ergo Joanne’s crack about him being an aquarium diver, like the ones sunk to the bottom of a fish tank, opening some long-lost treasure and leaking oxygen like a bubbling fool.
He’ll be diving, all right, but not into an ocean.
He’ll be diving into the blob.
“TEMPERATURE NOW 61 DEGREES … 62 … 64 … keeping it here, Bob. He looks nice and pink, don’t you think?”
Bob doesn’t feel Joanne’s lightheartedness as the concrete slab (lined with pipes that, when flushed with water—hot or cold—moderates the temperature of the cube) gently warms the thick plastic floor. Standing less than ten feet away from the immense alien organism, he watches as it lose the dull gray pallor it takes on when cooled, as the black veins running throughout turn purple, then pink; as the creature’s slick, gel-like flesh brightens to the color of raw meat.
“Okay, let’s see if it’s hungry,” he says. Then, below his breath: “God, I hate this part.”
Bob takes one step toward the massive organism and then—faster than he’d anticipated, then he would have thought possible, even after a year of study—it charges. He barely contains an instinctive scream as, within seconds, the alien creature slams into him, sucks him into its slimy body, engulfing the Suit, and Bob with it.
“Bob! You okay? Jesus, that was fast!” Joanne’s voice sounds panicked, which makes Bob even more nervous than he already is. He can sense the pressure from the creature surrounding him—as it SQUEEZES—its internal composition trying desperately to absorb his flesh, to feed on whoever has been idiotic enough to step inside its lair.
The things we do for science, Bob thinks, and forces himself to relax, to breathe deeply, in and out, in and out. His eyes flick to the monitors. The readouts are all stable. The seals are green.
He’s safe.
“I’m okay,” Bob says, praying his voice doesn’t reveal his anxiety. “All sensors are quiet, nothing unexpected from inside here … but yeah, I guess the Big Booger was hungrier than we thought.”
“All right, yeah, we read you,” Joanne says, still sounding shaken. “Uh, you’re looking good on our end. Robbie says everything reads green across the board … wait … okay, standby ….”
Bob, using the truncated keys built into the fingers of his armored gloves, begins typing commands. He lowers the Suit’s internal temperature a few degrees, but not enough to alter the exterior. Just enough to dry the sweat on the back of my neck, he thinks, still unnerved by the unexpected aggression of the creature.
The original plan had been to build a probe, a robot to do what could be a dangerous, even life-threatening, exercise. But with the development of the Suit, and the complexities that could arise when “engaged” with the organism, it was decided the human element was a necessary one, and the danger, ultimately, nominal.
Now that he’s cocooned inside the Specimen (still desperate to absorb his tissue and coming up empty), Bob’s thinking a probe might have been the way to go after all. Still, he’s in it now, so he tells himself to suck it up and start doing the work he’s here for. He sets aside any thoughts of claustrophobia, of fear, and forces his scientist brain to take over the reins from the ancestral ape. Now is not the time for primal emotions. Now is the time to think.
“Bob?” Joanne says, her voice somewhat calm once more as it comes through the small speaker. “Daniel says he’s standing by to catch the data if you want to activate the translating software. Or we can do it from here. Don’t want to overwhelm you . . .”
“Thanks, I got it,” he replies, fingers working the keys. The small monitor, built-in just above the eyeholes, flickers to life as Bob enters the commands to activate the software and open the Suit’s external microphones—less audio recorders than hyper-sensitive sensors that absorb whatever physical vibrations come from the belly of the beast, then attempt a rudimentary translation. If the vibrations are even close to a patterned consistency, the software will attempt to hack the data into an alphabet, similar to the way a code breaker would have deciphered the clicks and clacks of enemy transmissions during World War II, using a repetitive dialogue of machine-made vibrations that could be transformed into words.
“Bob, I’m gonna tie Daniel into the line, if that’s okay. He’s driving me nuts with his questions ….”
“Yeah, okay.” Bob thinks he hears a small pop from somewhere in the suit. He ignores it, knowing the sensors will pick up any kind of breach. He looks through the eyeholes at the red mass smeared against the other side, wonders if it can see him, if it’s studying him the way he’s studying it.
“Bob?” Daniel says, sounding excited.
“Yeah, Dan, go ahead.”
“I don’t want to jump the gun here, but the computer is picking up some incredible readings. I mean, it’s gonna take a while to break the code, and I need more data, but we’re getting pattern consistencies. I want to try a response test, see if we can narrow down the data. You game?”
“Sorry, Dan, I’m not sure I follow.” Bob’s eyes don’t leave the vein-streaked red covering his vision. “Are you saying this thing is talking?”
“Well … no. I mean, I wouldn’t make that leap. Not yet. But there’s something there, boss. It’s not chaotic enough to be purely biological. There’s a consciousness behind it, or whatever would pass for consciousness in an alien organism . . . look, we can get into all this later. Right now, I’d like you to activate your external speaker.”
“Dan, I don’t—”
“He wants you to talk to it, Bob,” Joanne says, cutting to the heart of it. “Dan thinks if we can focus its responses, we can translate more quickly. And by ‘we’, I mean the quantum computer.”
Bob blows out a breath, taps some keystrokes and brings up the prompt for suit controls. He activates the external speaker, then mutes it, so only the control room can hear him. For the moment.
“All right, what do you want me to say? Other than get the hell off me.”
