There Has to be More

The containment walls were fifty feet high and made from poured concrete reinforced by a network of interior steel webbing. My manager told me all about it as we toured the bulwarks overlooking the ocean. Waves pounded against the cliff face and Doug kept saying how we worked in the safest research facility on the Copper Coast.

Inside, the halls were damp with sea spray and humidity. The real work stations, Doug kept saying, were climate controlled, but everywhere else was subject to the constant elements. And there were elements, no matter what they did. One hall had a wide swirl of black mold, which three janitorial workers were diligently scrubbing away. It happened more than they liked, Doug admitted. It was just part of the job.

That didn’t bother me at all. I had a desk on the third floor in the back corner with three other component specialists. Doug dropped me off and disappeared somewhere else. My workmates introduced themselves: Jan from Eindhoven, Richard from Leeds, and Melanie from Boston. Jan showed me the workstation, walked me through logging in for the first time, and then proceeded to pretend like I didn’t exist. And none of that mattered.

I had finally made it.

“You want to see where they make it, don’t you?” Melanie from Boston leaned over my desk. She had a birthmark on her forehead, slightly off-center.

Steps echoed as we descended through airlocked doors and onto the main shop floor. Melanie didn’t talk much and if I was expecting some sort of wink and nod and female camaraderie—two young women in a field dominated by older men—I wasn’t getting it from her. Which didn’t matter, since I was too busy staring at my future. Alcor Electronics churned with activity, with lab scientists in white coats and repair teams in neat uniforms moving from one station to the next, the center of the world’s future, where impossible wires were spooled from magic and braided into strands.

The factory was almost a disappointment. It looked like a dozen other factories I’d seen over my short career: immaculately clean, orchestrated and precise, machines clacking away through their specialized tasks. Under it all, a low hum that started in my toes and spread up into my spine like an ink blot. I felt the wires more than saw them.

“How do they do it?” I asked, desperate to understand. This was why I’d come here, why everyone was obsessed with Alcor. Wires which somehow transferred data instantaneously and seemed to speed up internal computation clocks, which wasn’t even possible. They’d discovered something, was all the detail anyone could get from the lab.

“That’s not our department.”

**

Light flickered and dimmed. Power dropped constantly. Doug never showed his face on our floor again, but he was a constant presence in my email. Tasks flowed from upon high.

The Others—what I began to call my three workmates—gossiped about strange corners, doors to nowhere, people going missing. “Jokes,” Jan said when I asked what they meant. Melanie’s smile was plastered on. “All jokes, don’t you worry.”

As the newest member of the Efficiency Team, it was my distinct pleasure to sit in front of the computers as our models churned through optimization schemes. This wasn’t so bad: the wires doubled the speed at which the machines worked and what should’ve taken weeks was only an afternoon. I accepted prompts, made tea, and double checked the system was still processing. There was nowhere else in the world I’d rather be than right there at the tiny desk cluster working for the leading edge in computing technology, tapping the spacebar twice every hour to keep the monitor from cycling off. Even the boredom felt important.

During my third week, I heard voices. Vague, indistinct whispering, and when I turned to look there was nobody nearby. I began to lose things. My wallet went missing, my keys, the laces from my left shoe. Jan dutifully wrote down the items and promised to keep an eye out for them. He didn’t seem optimistic. Doug replied to emails with lots of exclamation points and a few strangely inappropriate emoji.

The bathroom door locked itself. That happened twice. The janitor broke it down both times and seemed more tired than anything else. My car’s battery died, even though I was sure I didn’t leave my headlights on, but a man from marketing gave me a jump without much comment. “Happens a lot,” was all he said.

Low rumbles echoed through the basement of the facility. Doug’s messages seemed garbled, like he couldn’t find the right keys. When I asked for clarification, he seemed mystified: what email was I referring to? He never answered his phone.

I was more than happy to ignore all that strangeness.

We were changing the world.

***

I tried asking other people about how the wires worked. Jan brushed me off more than once. Richard winked at me and that felt creepy enough that I pretended like he didn’t exist. Random scientists in the break room gave me odd looks and smiled through excruciatingly awkward dodges. I bugged managers, media team members, compliance officers, and nobody had a good answer. “Not my department,” most of them said. Some kind of running joke.

I started to wander the building. Dead lights darkened half the corridors. Most of the doors were locked and didn’t seem to have a purpose. I tried to get on the elevator, but the lower levels were all blacked out. The stairwells smelled damp, and they were blocked by electronic gates beneath ground level. My security clearance wouldn’t open them. Moisture ran down the concrete, and I heard something gentle lapping against the walls below, like the deepest sections were all flooded.

I got a report of you taking long walks, Doug said in an email after a month of this. I know you’re just killing time between scenarios, but please stick to our floor, alright? People are starting to notice!!

He was so nice about it.

**

Melanie stopped showing up for work and none of the Others seemed bothered. Richard had that creepy strained smile. When I pressed, Jan only shrugged and said she was taking some personal time off, but how long she’d be gone or what she was doing, nobody had an answer. Her workstation was unchanged. But she wasn’t there.

The thumping noise got worse. It peaked in mid-afternoon and died down by the time I left for the day. Lights kept flickering and dying, and no matter how many times the maintenance staff changed the bulbs, they wouldn’t last for more than a few days. Dozens in and out each week. A vast warehouse of dying light fixtures. The water in the bathroom stopped working for three full days, and management only said they were working on it. I lost the laces to my other shoe. My keys appeared one morning in the top drawer of my desk. Jan said he had no clue how they’d gotten there and maybe I’d just missed them this whole time.

Nobody wanted to talk about the noise. The constant low-range groan that crawled deeper into my bones every second I spent in that place. I ran my simulations, I wrote my reports, and sometimes I felt like I was a part of something important. But there was still the noise.

***

I got Melanie’s address from the employee directory. I didn’t expect it to be that easy, but I guess Alcor didn’t care about privacy. I took a half day that following Monday and drove out to her apartment building. It was nice, modern, the kind of place a young, well-paid professional would live. There was no doorman, only an intercom and an electronic lock system. She sounded surprised I was there but let me up.

I expected someone tired, gaunt, broken-down, sickly. How could she be anything but decrepit and on her deathbed? How could anyone walk away from our technological miracle? We were at the center of a world-changing shift in processing ability and what we did now could reverberate down the ages. That was our immortality.

Nobody in their right mind would give that up.

The Melanie that answered the door didn’t match the Melanie in my head. She smiled big, and I realized it was the first time I’d ever seen her looking happy. The bags under her eyes were gone, her hair was thick and well-kept, and her skin almost glowed.

We sat at her little kitchen table. Her apartment was tidy and decorated with draping plants and mid-century prints. “Have the dreams started yet?” she asked, pouring tea, and only shook her head when I pretended like I didn’t know what she meant. “You’ll get them soon. Everyone does.”

I probed around the edges of what happened. I asked her questions: did something go down that I wasn’t aware of? Did Richard try to touch her or something? Was she physically unable to keep working? She answered as patiently as she could, but made it clear she was heading out soon.

“Richard’s fine, just weird, and Jan’s wrong. I’m not going back to that place. I know it’s hard, but just do me a favor, okay? There’s an override in the elevator. Security knows about it, but nobody really cares. Flip open the bottom hatch and press the blue button. That’ll get you into the basement.”

“Why would I need to go down there?”

“Just take a look around sub-level three. And when the dreams start, don’t take them literally.” Her smile faded and she put her hand on mine. Her skin was warm and intensely human. “Walk away when you’re ready and don’t look back.”

***

The wires were a miracle. Instantaneous transmission. Processing clocks doubled. And no extra power draw. They broke all kinds of rules and sent the scientific community into a frenzy. Long, aggressive articles claimed the wires were fraud, were snake oil, that Alcor was somehow faking the miracle. Except Alcor wasn’t hiding the wires away. Those same scientists could see for themselves. Their research labs placed massive orders, yards and yards of enormous wound spools of the stuff, and every test they ran came back with the same result: the miracle was real.

But the papers continued, a steady stream of vitriol, denying the proof they saw with their own eyes, and the blogs backed them up. The world teetered on a second computing revolution, but nobody wanted it. Alcor was dragging everyone forward, even as they struggled and screamed. The wires were going to change everything for the better, and each new post claiming some potential horror, some contrived reason why the wires were actually bad and wrong and evil, each one made me want to get involved even more. I wanted to be at the center of history.

It took me three weeks before I followed Melanie’s instructions. Maybe fear, maybe just frustration, kept me churning through tasks. Doug’s emails came at strange hours. The bathrooms were locked every day after three for the safety of everyone involved. I lost my keys again, and that’s what finally did it. They’d been right there, and then they were gone.

The blue button looked just like the one in my dreams. Except my dream button opened its dripping wet maw and pulled my fingers into its mouth lovingly before biting them off and chewing them to pulp. This button, the real button, was only plastic. It clicked and the elevator dropped down to the sub-basement level.

I stepped out into a damp concrete corridor. Lights continuously flickered overhead as if the power down here was tainted. It felt like a horror movie, except there were men and women walking past, most of them friendly, some of them in lab coats, and none bothered to ask me what I was doing. They probably assumed I belonged, that I was one of them.

And I was: I wanted this place more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. We were promised so much when I was younger. We were told computers, technology, the internet, it was all going to change the world and make things better.

But it hadn’t yet. Instead, technology amplified the problems that have been around forever, the same old stupid human failings that we couldn’t ever seem to solve no matter how hard we tried. Very smart people could sit around and point out all the ways we’d screw up, and we’d go ahead and screw it up, and none of that would matter. Writers had been doing it for centuries, going all the way back through recorded history, from the French Revolution to the implosion of Athenian democracy. Technology was supposed to bypass all those stupid failures, or at least it was supposed to give us an escape hatch through which we could wriggle ourselves and find something better on the other side.

But there was nothing else.

Then Alcor came along and created something so incredible it made people panic, and the same hate and denial that had always been there lurking inside the worst parts of people flooded out in mucky waves.

Melanie was wrong. She had to be wrong. She’d turned her back on the miracle and I had to understand why. I had to figure it out, because what if those voices had been right? What if, despite everything, they’d been right, and they didn’t even know why they were right? I couldn’t handle it, and so I started opening doors.

There were labs in the basement. I pretended like I was looking for Billy Goldman, but nobody had ever heard of him since he wasn’t real. This place buzzed with activity and strange flares of that bad feeling and the hum was even louder down here. It was so deep I could almost forget it was there, like it had become a part of my heartbeat. I kept going, door after door, following that corridor, until I reached another stairwell. This one plunged down and down, the walls damp and moldy, and the smell was overwhelming. A thick, fishy scent, like whatever would be left if the entire ocean boiled, reeking and deeply alive. The stairs ended at another door, dimly lit by track lights around the floor, and I pushed through.

It looked like an observation room. The far wall was all glass, but it looked out into a black chamber with only the faintest suggestion of light. There were couches against the opposite side, chairs lined up along the other, and recording equipment on a table. Computers hummed softly, processing something. The floor squished underfoot, the rug lightly wet, and mold bloomed on the ceiling like a massive black spiderweb. I walked forward, toward the glass, feeling sick as the hum intensified, like I was standing right next to its source.

I stared into the chamber through the glass and caught only hints. The light from the hallway leaking under the door reflected my own face back at me. It was a bare rock cavern, absolutely enormous, easily the size of the entire research facility and then some, roughly chipped away, and I thought I saw water lapping a few feet below the window line. Steel support beams crossed the ceiling.

And something was out there. Something dark and massive, a mountain in the center of this place. The humming was coming from that thing, and when I pressed my hands to the glass—

Scales caught the light. Bloody, rotten flesh, like a fish scraped with knives, scabbed over and greenish-black. Like the Alcor colors. Squid-like, but also lizardish, a bulbous head and a long torso, fins or maybe legs like fins, a ridge-lined spine and small thorny protrusions, and a long maw with the barest hint of an eye. It filled the cavern to the brim, lying sedate in the water with enormous bands of steel wrapped around its throat, its torso, its arms and legs, thick cables connected to the rock keeping it in place. Oozing sores glistened oil-slick rainbows. Wounds covered it, geometric and purposeful, as though it were being harvested. And if it had opened an eye at that moment, if it had looked at me, I would’ve known what it was. What it was thinking and what it felt.

Instead, it remained dormant. The hum in tune to its massive breath. I held up my phone and took a video, hand shaking, not thinking about anything but the truth at the heart of everything I loved, before leaving that place behind.

**

“There’s nothing you can do about it.” Melanie stretched her legs out and watched an older couple walk along the park’s path. “Even if you posted that video, nobody would really believe it.”

“They would,” I said because it had to be true. “At least, someone would.”

“Okay, and Alcor would spend their billions ruining your life. What’s the point? What would it even change?”

I looked at the coffee in my hands. “That thing is the secret. That’s how the wires work.”

She seemed more resigned than sad and put a hand on my arm. I flinched slightly, and realized I hadn’t been touched in a while. Not since the last time I saw her three months back. She looked at me like I was a skittish animal. I wondered how I seemed from her perspective. Greasy hair, bags under my eyes, aged ten years in less than two. I must look like she did back when I’d first started: worn down and dangling over the edge.

“Everyone figures it out eventually and nothing changes. Even if the world knew, I think most people would shrug and move on with their lives. Maybe they’d even be relieved. Mystery solved.”

“It’s horrible.”

“So’s everything else.” For a few brief moments, I caught another flash of the Melanie I’d first met: hunched and tired, worn down with the weight of what she knew and all the strange hauntings attached to that place. Formerly a true believer, now something much worse. Complicit in a way she couldn’t explain. Filled with rationalizations.

“I wanted it to be real.” I must’ve sounded desperate, but if anyone would understand, it was her. “All my life I kept thinking, there has to be more. This is everything? This is the entire world? There just… there has to be more.”

“There is more,” she said. “Alcor has it chained up in their basement.”

“They’re stripping its scales for computer parts.”

“Yeah, they are, but have you started wondering where they got it from?” She wasn’t looking at me. The sky was a deep, unnerving blue, and a young man wearing camo fatigues walked past. I wrestled against the paranoia. “Forget about Alcor, okay? Move on with your life.”

I stayed on that bench a while longer after she was gone. My coffee went cold. I kept thinking about the monster in the basement, about its sheer size, about the hum of its breathing, about the dreams. It was alive, impossibly, horribly alive, and it was suffering. All for our miracle.

Melanie was right. Nobody would care. If anyone believed, there might be a brief outcry, but the world would move on. What was another corpse to progress? It wasn’t even human. What was more suffering? The world drank down sacrifice.

My fingers hovered over the post button.

Why ruin my life?

There just had to be more.

I turned off my phone after the first DM and went home.

Thanks for reading! Please jam that like button repeatedly so I know this story isn’t just clogging up the inboxes of ghosts. I truly appreciate you reading and subscribing! Happy holidays if you celebrate, and I’ll see you all again in the new year.