Page 4 of Them

But Lord, did I have to hear about it.

Weisbrot’s paper detailed how aliens—though I was always corrected to use the term “extraplanetary life”—could be conditioned to survive on our Earth. He theorized a way to genetically engineer nearly any carbon-based life-form to breathe in God’s given atmosphere.

Shortly after the thesis’s submission and the Yale commencement ceremonies concluded, the nature of Weisbrot’s genius was brought to our attention. The original paper was confiscated from the New Haven campus, photocopied exactly two times, and distributed to three sites: Maryland’s Jericho Proving Grounds, the Pentagon, and a sleepy airbase hidden away in the sands of New Mexico. A few months later, after an internal scientific review concluded his logic was sound, Weisbrot was approached by Dr. Andrew Brown, a Yale graduate himself, not to mention one of our most tenured civilian researchers at Groom Lake, Nevada. I don’t know how the conversation went, but I imagine that there was much talk of dreams and musings on reality with very few distinctions between the two.

Weisbrot accepted Dr. Brown’s job offer without hesitation. To him, it was confirmation that he wasn’t wasting his time with futuristic fairy tales. To me, it was just another example of our country’s lowest minds still chasing that Cold War thrill, that impulse to push with all our weight against thin air that offered no resistance. A wild goose chase. A waste. Weisbrot was one more kid who got reeled in by the allure of hush-hush secrets, a smart brain with a bad back from too much time slumped over keyboards and science fiction.

When I first interviewed him, a process that my superiors suggested was merely obligatory, he was polite and well mannered. A nice kid with exceptionally steady eyes. I felt bad for him. He could’ve been the one to cure AIDS or cancer. Instead, we lured him away with promises of glory and wild dreams. Hook, line, and sinker, just like all of the other bright-eyed recruits. And how they all would sink, sink, sink into the confines of windowless basements and contractually obligated lies when asked “What was work like today, dear?”

Weisbrot was twenty-three when we first met. Nineteen years ago, by my count. He only lasted eleven. I was right to feel bad, just not for any of the reasons I originally suspected. In the shadow world where people slave to forge lies into truth, I had committed the first error of stripping the truth down to a lie.

The truth of Project Artemis.

The theories go back nearly eight decades, but America’s best and thirstiest scientists failed to make any headway for the first sixty-odd years. I’ll tell you the same thing my predecessor told me: The issue with teleportation is always distance. Imagine this: The average piece of paper can be folded only about seven times by hand; to try to go any further is like trying to fold cold steel.

This was reiterated to me with great enthusiasm as Dr. Andrew Brown hounded me to approve funding of Project Artemis. He didn’t have to kiss my ass about it. As the New Mexico black site’s newly minted chief scientist, he had the power to start tinkering with any invention he fancied, but the science guys never had a good grasp on hierarchy. They scavenged for approval, no matter the source.

Brown explained that the problem they’d had back in the ’50s was that they were aiming too small. A couple of feet, a couple of rooms, even a couple of miles all added up to folding that piece of paper hundreds of thousands of times; it simply couldn’t work.

He spared me the details, the humbug. I was an old Army guy, through and through. The only science I understood back then was the science of winning, so I always begrudged being tasked with equal treatment of the founded and the fantastic. Nowadays I don’t understand much at all, except maybe myself. Everything else came to matter a lot less when I finally considered the possibility of losing.

My point is that, contrary to intuition, it was a helluva lot easier to fold the spirals of the universe just once or twice. “Don’t you see?” Brown would ask me. As if it mattered, as if his vision depended on my willingness to believe. “We’ve always thought too small. The only way to make this work is to go big, to go huge, to span light-years like the wings of cosmic giants.” He told me that exploration didn’t have to wait for starships and astral engines. He told me that we could probe the planets we thought to be habitable right now. We could shoot an arrow into space, catch whatever it impaled, and reel it back home.

The man stirred as the sun began to set. His circadian rhythm was the first of his bodily functions to adapt to the new world order. Most days, he slept from just after dawn until just before dusk, waking every few hours to peek out the window and check that his temporary shelter remained undiscovered. Some days he rose a little earlier, or retired a bit later, and spent the spare daylight preparing a meal or reorganizing his pack.

The second of his bodily functions to adapt was shitting: once every night or so, before sleep. He still pissed often enough, but that would slow down if bottled water proved scarce in the suburbs. He would not, could not, retrieve any from streams or ponds or rivers or such. In the water waited those dark silhouettes, triads of sharp pillars.

The third was his balls. He could not recall the last time he’d touched himself.

Dreams had tapered off. Four or seven or however many years ago, at the start of everything, inside the bunker, they were frequent. Horrible. Back when nights were still nights, thick looming limbs coated in living rock would rise up all around him. Visions of exoskeletons that stretched up into the clouds and moved with the certainty of a dinosaur that knew it would never go extinct. Bigger than they should’ve been, than they’d ever appeared on the news. Bigger than anything could’ve ever been.

Sometimes, in the dreams, his neck would whisper tick-tick-tick as the slow, agonized crick of each vertebra reeled back and forced him to bear witness to scores of three-pronged mandibles snapping at the clouds, biting chunks out of them. Sometimes, now, he actually missed those dreams, missed standing beneath the whites of the cumulus and the bright blue sky…

Then the behemoths would step into frame, blood began to rain, and there was nothing left to long for.

After he saw one of those giants for the first time—a real one, not made of pixels and bandwidth, but built of maybe flesh and maybe bone—the dreams stopped. That was during his first week outside the bunker, near the Florida-Georgia line. A day or two after the 7-Eleven. Dusk.

He’d left temporary shelter too early. Hadn’t learned yet. Besides, after those obfuscated years cooped up underground—without daylight or even a clock once the power grid shut down—nothing seemed real. He’d heard the titanic footfalls above his head, but they never dug him up. Nobody, human or otherwise, ever knocked on the door. He went into the bunker after New York fell, before the demons drove south in large numbers. Too tired to run. Too afraid to fight. He still hadn’t seen one then. Not really. But he didn’t need to know the monsters to fear them.

By the time the man emerged, everyone was dead, and they were all that remained.

He’d heard the nightmare before he saw it, mere days since crawling out from his hiding place. A coarse wail echoed over the swampy countryside like a broken raid siren: the clink-clink-gash of the chain mail tail as it dredged furrows in the gravel road beyond.

He was moving through the slash pines, away from the open earth, but needed to see it, needed to see like a child must, after a weary battle with their greatest reptilian instincts, check under the bed for the boogeyman. Yes, that was right, because once you focused on Freddy Krueger’s ridiculous sweater, once you glimpsed the Grinch’s growing heart, once you got a good look at the monsters and all their parts, they weren’t so scary anymore, right?

So he’d ducked into the tree line where woods met field and then field met tractor-trodden road, and he’d pressed his body into the back of a thick oak. The man had arched his shoulders around the curve of the trunk, gripping the bark between them, and begged his breath to slow, to stop, to wait.

The dredging grew louder in volume, climaxed, and then began to fade away. Clink-clink-gash. Clink-clink-gash. Clink-clink-gash. It was only then that he’d mustered the courage to steal a glimpse. Only when he could be sure the hunter’s back was to him did the man have the guts to peek out from behind the tree.

The creature’s three legs, like curved javelins, were naturally an obsidian black, yet gleamed pink with the reflection of the falling sun. Each was at least six feet high, decorated with an inner bladed edge. The trio of legs poked cone-shaped holes into the bed of gravel as they walked their strange, rotating gait. It moved in a tight circle, constantly spinning itself as it lurched down the road. Each leg took care to step over the ten-foot-long tentacle that dragged out behind it. Why do they walk like that? Like a living, spinning top in foul slow motion?

The three perfect legs curved and met one another at a singular, node-like torso, which was covered with a trembling chain mail of scales that seemed to breathe. From beneath, the long anchor of the tail protruded. It dragged on the road behind, clink-clink-gash, and tore at the asphalt with its serrated stinger tip. Clink-clink-gash. Clink-clink-gash.

From the top of its torso rose a solitary, flexible obelisk of tower-stacked stone. A neck topped by a sleepy head that looked more like a mountain than a skull.

Its six eyes, three along each side, were sky blue, each a glimmering lantern in the dying daylight. Its three-pronged mandible maw was slack and panting, as if the repulsive heap of rocks and bone could somehow be tired. The man’s shoulders relaxed. He hated it, yes, but not because it looked like a monster. Not because it looked like a giant meteor or a thinning ozone layer or a nuclear bomb or any other apocalypse he’d imagined. Not because it wasn’t supposed to be or because it was other. Even the dozens, hundreds, of human lives it alone had devoured all fell away and were forgotten.

The man, no longer hidden by the trees, standing exposed in the too-open breaks between them with head held high and eyes thin, hated that it looked at peace. Happy. Content. Like someone returning to their front-porch family after a day of exhausting success. He hated it because he could see that it would not notice him, because it was so obviously distracted, lost in thought. Hated it because the creature’s emotion could be so easily deciphered despite its disgusting difference. He saw this in its eyes: six sky blue eyes that might have been beautiful.