39

Hendricks woke up in a strange place, some sort of medical facility. The last thing he could remember was being on the bathyscaphe. He and Altman were going down, and then his head had started to hurt so much, he could hardly stand it. After that, it all felt like a dream. There had been some kind of problem. He remembered Altman speaking calmly to him, remembered taking readings, but also remembered the feel of the floor. He must have fallen. Maybe they hit something.

He felt groggy. Parts of his body were numb, and parts of his brain felt like they had been torn out. There was a tube running into his forearm. Maybe they were experimenting on him.

He looked around. He was the only one there.

He moved furtively out of bed, peeling the tape off the tube in his arm and pulling it out. It burned coming out. He dropped it, left it dripping beside the bed, and stumbled to the door.

It was locked.

He stayed there, staring at the handle.

After a while he heard the sound of footsteps in the hall outside. He rushed back into his bed and half closed his eyes.

Through his eyelashes he watched the door open. A woman came in, dressed in white, carrying a holoboard. She walked straight to his bed. His mind pictured him running out the door at the far end of the room, but in the end his body did not move.

“Hello,” said the woman. “How are we today?”

He didn’t say anything, still pretending to be asleep.

“Oh, dear. You’ve torn your IV out again,” she said. “We can’t have that, can we?”

She bent down for the end of the tube. It was at that moment that his body decided to reach up and grab her wrist. True, he was in his body, was watching through his eyes, but it was doing things he wasn’t telling it to do. He wasn’t the one controlling it, which meant there must be someone else in there with him.

As soon as he thought that, it felt like everything was happening at a little distance, like he’d sunk deeper into his body, like he’d never be in control of the body again. And yet he could still feel everything. He watched the hand holding the nurse’s arm pull her on top of him like she was a doll. He felt the jaw opening and the teeth closing around the nurse’s neck, and then a series of wet sounds as the neck burst open and warm blood spilled down across his chin and his own neck. Her wrist, the one he was holding, he saw, was broken, crushed, and the arm attached to it was no longer sitting in the socket right. She was trying to gasp for breath, but there was a hole in her windpipe now and all that came out was a hissing and a mist of blood. Her face was there just above him, her eyes terrified for a moment but almost immediately becoming loose in their orbits as she lost consciousness.

A few seconds later, after his body had done a few more things to her, he was certain she was dead. If he’d been asked to describe how exactly it had happened, he wouldn’t have been able to say, though he was fairly certain he had something to do with it. Or not him, exactly: his body. One moment she was still alive, even if just barely, and then there was an awful blur of things happening. When they stopped, she was dead.

He padded softly to the door and tried it. It was still locked. How was that possible? She’d come through it, hadn’t she?

She must have had a key. He shambled back to her corpse in search of her pockets. But he couldn’t find any pockets. She was too much of a mess. Pushing his bloody hands through the sopping remains of clothing and flesh, he finally found something hard that wasn’t a bone.

He had just straightened up, bloody key in hand, when he realized that he wasn’t alone in the room after all. There was a shape there, in the shadows of the last bed.

“Who is it?” he said.

Don’t you recognize me? a voice said.

He went a little closer, then closer still. It was as if the person was both there and not there at the same time. And then, suddenly, he felt a piercing pain in his head. He staggered. When he looked back up, he knew who it was.

“Dad,” he said.

Good to see you, Jason, he said. Come sit down. I want to have a serious talk with you.

“What about, Dad?”

But his dad wasn’t where he thought he was. He turned around and found him in another bed.

We’re failing, Jason, his dad said. You should leave that thing down where you found it. Convergence is not the only thing that matters.

“Convergence?” asked Hendricks, then had to search frantically for his father, who somehow had moved again.

They want us all to become one, son. He gave a mournful smile, shaking his head. Can you imagine? he said.

“Who’s they, Dad?”

We have to be very careful or there will be nothing left of us.

Then his dad smiled. It was a beautiful smile, like he used to give Jason back when he was very young, just a few years old. Jason had forgotten that smile, but now it all came flooding back.

Tell them, Jason, he said. Tell everyone.

“I will, Dad,” he whispered. “I will.”

There was some noise behind him, but he didn’t want to look away from his father’s face. If he did, he feared he’d never find it again. Then there was shouting. He ignored it as long as he could, but it was too powerful. He turned around and moved toward it.

There was a roar and a flash and he was suddenly on the ground, staring straight up at the ceiling. I should get up and tell them, he thought, but when he tried, he couldn’t move. I’ll just lie here, he thought. “Dad?” he whispered, but there was no answer.