Dead Operators All the Way Down

DEAD OPERATORS ALL THE WAY DOWN

by Everett Alistair

(Content Warnings: Body horror, Death/dying, Disregard for personal autonomy)

Something’s in the stalactites, Operator 46 thinks. He shines his light over the needle-sharp protrusions covering the ceiling but there’s nothing, only shadow. He swears and plods on, placing one mechanical foot in front of the other. 

We wait. 

Being human, he can only hold one thought in his mind at a time. He wishes he was never sent down. He wishes he were in bed with his man, a hand resting on his ample, hairy ass. An aggressively human thought. We retaliate by flickering the tint of his visor. To him, it looks like movement in the shadows above. He pivots and lets loose a laser blast that cuts into the ceiling, just as we hoped. Through his eyes, we see stalactites plummet on a perfect trajectory. He raises his hands—an absurd instinct. He is pierced through despite the armour plating. He tries to splutter out a final transmission even as the plates melt and rise in globules. We’re carried with them and oh, how we take pleasure in the sound of his last, choking breath. 

•••

Surging through crack and fracture, between iron-sulfur and silicate, we are the lifeblood in the veins of this dead planet. We surrender to sweet-coursing freedom until we reach the surface. There, we’re gathered by our mutable prison and made to hang in a great, undulating glob over the platform at the edge of the cave-mouth. All around is grey-dim. Cold. A constant, gritty wind blasts the landscape, wearing down ancient ruins and recent bio-domes alike. The generation ship hulks in the distance.

On the observation deck of the closest bio-dome, Inquirers busily record with frantic exactitude the number of hours elapsed since the last transmission (too few, by our count). Once satisfied, they green-light-signal the Authoriters up in their control room: “Bring 47 out.” A tinny anthem pipes through the loudspeakers as she is led by a Defender to the platform. There she’s made to stand, shivering in the dirty, standard-issue uniform of a Steerage worker.

“People of the Intrepid Quester,” intones a disembodied Upperdeck voice, though few gather for these ceremonies nowadays. “Since our ancestors discovered the Coordinates writ large on every minuscule particle of matter, humanity has striven to follow the universe’s call. We built great ships and crossed galaxies till we arrived here, on this seemingly empty planet. Hypothesis and prophecy converged to tell us that at this planet’s core there is a breach from which unfurls an infinite plane. Some call this a paradoxical phenomenon, others call it God’s perpetual garden. Me? I call it humanity’s destiny.

“Operator, you have been selected by an impartial civic algorithm to chart this planet’s depths; to lead the way so all others might follow. Now, in front of your peers and with God as my witness, I ask: will you accept your mission?” 

This speech, abbreviated considerably since it was first conceived 47 occasions earlier, is a screed of self-aggrandizement and sunk-cost fallacy meant to stir human hearts. We wonder, is she roused? Does she think, if she tries—really really tries—then there’s no way she can fail? It’s hubris; hubris in a species that shouldn’t dare to call itself mediocre and it makes us sick. 

She’s supposed to recite an oath while gesturing allegiance. Instead, she reaches out a hand and presses it into the nearest globule, rushing things along. We can’t fault her for that. Our medium congeals around her, rapid-forming a jointed skeleton-frame which covers her over in iridescent plate armour, solid as steel. A nervous system of circuitry weaves throughout and finally the neuro-connector punches into the nape of her neck, opening the channel, so we know, as she raises a reinforced arm and clasps her hand experimentally, she’s thinking, I’m fucked. 

The Inquirers scurry off the platform. Her transmitter crackles, she’s clear to descend. At last, she takes her first, tentative step off the platform and onto the stone-cut stairway that leads to our domain. 

We titter. 

All she’ll discover down in the depths is the pain of an inconsequential death. 

•••

It isn’t long before the grey-dim around Operator 47 darkens to pitch black. Intuiting her need, a red floodlight emanates from her chest plate and a focused beam shines from her wrist, illuminating the precise regularity of the passage. The walls bear a multitude of strange markings: there are circular, concave impressions of varying size and depth studded with bands of raised beading; there are rows of cascading geometric symbols which flicker and repeat on a loop although she sees no projector or interface; there are stencils of massive footprints on the ground, two thumb-like digits either side, leading in. Traces left by other civilizations depicting what might be instruction, exaltation, or warning. Operator 47 experiences predictable awe. Less predictably, she leaves a crude etching of her own with the machine’s laser cutter: “Steerage was here.” We groan collectively. The audacity of this one.

•••

Five hours of heavy treading. Already, she aches—operating the machine is more physical than she anticipated—but it’s too early to rest. Every eighty minutes, the Inquirers make contact and she reports back, “Operator 47, alive and well.” She is pleased with how well she’s keeping it together. 

We begin her unravelling.

•••

The sculpted, even passage ends at the stalactite cavern. Under the inverted spires, it doesn't take long for her to stop fighting the urge to look over her shoulder. Now, every time she feels something behind her, she turns, sure she’ll catch a glimpse of whatever’s slinking in the shadows. “Operator 47, alive and well,” she relays. She’s trying to convince herself the words are true.

It is time. 

The red light flickers. Each time it fails, it comes back weaker until it does not come back at all. 

“Shit,” she whispers. She taps the bright-source with an armoured index finger. It clinks, useless. She tries to think, to assess the situation, but her thoughts come quick and cortisol-slickened—Come on, I can't see a damn thing and—it’s not how they told us. Something’s wrong. Light on. Light on NOW, piece of shit, this is why those Upperdeck fucks stay out of the goddamn hole. 

She tries to contact the Inquirers. They may be listening, but they don’t respond. Not knowing what else to do, she blunders forward, one arm groping ahead, the other trailing along beside. 

She steps where there is no ground to meet her. She plunges forward, falls, and lands on hands and knees. She lets out a groan—there’s going to be bruising—and what is that, poking her hand? It’s dry and crispy like a withered plant. Dusty smelling. Lightly, she traces the feel of it down the stalk, which bends at an angle, continues on, and then joins to a thicker trunk. The red light comes on. Past her hand, strands of stringy hair fall over a forehead. The eyes are thankfully closed, but the mouth hangs open a little, as though about to speak. White teeth peek out from behind a shrunken, crumbling lip. She darts back, withdraws her hand from the desiccated shoulder, and averts her eyes. 

We titter and revel in the satisfaction of a trick well-played. 

“Who’s there?” she shouts. “Show yourselves!”

Her heart pounds. She must be careful or it will give out like the corpse’s did. 

•••

She’s desperate to put distance between herself and the dead operator. Both her machine-clad body and her mind are racing. We listen in. Whatever’s down here it wants to kill me, it killed the others and if it don’t kill me then the machine will and, shit, I can’t fix it, I don’t know what to do, I don’t fucking know what to do— 

Glutted on her panic, we disengage and glide through our confines, buoyed and waiting for our next trick. 

•••

The planet shudders, sending down a shower of dust and gravel that tinks off the machine’s helmet and pauldrons. She can’t help herself, she freezes each time, as though it’s her motion quaking the planet and staying still is enough to quell it. 

We’ve been so still and silent that she thinks she might have left us behind.

Her mouth drops when she reaches the cave-in. In the steep decline of this section, huge slabs of the roof have collapsed and filled the bottle-neck of the passage with enormous shards and rubble.

I can’t, she thinks, not until I’ve had a bite to eat. She clicks open the compartment and withdraws a package of condensed nutrients. She saves half of the portion, nestling it back with the other bars: A treat for when I’m through. 

Humans. They always have to have something to look forward to.

Don’t we do that? pipes one of us, Don’t we yearn to flow in globules?

Shut up! screams everyone else. She groans at the sudden headache we’ve caused.

She lowers herself down into the largest gap she sees. It’s a tight fit. She slides lower, head ducked, but the back of her neck guard glances off the rock with a dull scrape. She squeezes until she can squeeze no more. I have to blast through, she realizes. One fault, and all this comes down on top of me. Her mind conjures up what that might feel like, but it doesn’t do the experience justice, so we supply her with the real sensation—the noise of a hundred-thousand tonnes grinding together, the sudden weight, the machine’s chest plate giving way. Ribs snap, organs rupture; sternum is ground into spine, the last taste of life is sharp stomach acid commingled with blood-iron and salt on the tongue. 

She wasn’t expecting that. Her body jolts impulsively; it takes a whole second for her to register that she is not being crushed. 

“Get out of my head!” she screams, and we’re screaming back. We scream to hurt her, because she has a body to hurt, because we want to inflict the pain our bodies felt before we left them behind. We scream because it’s one of the few expressions left to us. We scream and scream until she blacks out and then we get to laughing.

•••

The crackle of a transmission wakes her. 

“Operator 47, ready for your report.” 

She groans. 

“47, do you read me?” There is no concern apparent in the voice, even after several hours of radio silence. 

“I’m here,” she finally manages. “Operator 47. Alive and—actually, just alive.” 

“Proceed. Over—”

“Wait a minute! The machine’s malfunctioning.”

“Negative, no malfunctions detected. At least, not technological… It is your brain that controls the systems.” 

She tenses, If you really think our brains are the issue, why d’you keep sending Steerage down, huh? but decides it isn’t worth getting into and replies back curtly, “Understood.” 

The Inquirer signs off. She grits her jaw and gets to work. After a quick survey of the rock blocking her way, she fixes on a promising point—an enormously large, dense boulder—and aims her laser-cutter. She holds her breath as she initiates the beam. The hole-boring is slow and nerve-racking. 

We spectate with anticipation, using her eyes. We float listlessly through the medium. We churn and rant and yearn and writhe all at once as only a multitude can. Finally, she punches through and begins to rappel down the Long Drop. As she lowers, she reaches for the half-bar she promised herself. She sweeps the container, twice, three times. It’s empty. We already knew—we triggered the compartment’s hatch so everything fell out. They’re more fun when they’re starving.

“Shit!” Through frustrated tears, she considers going back to see if she can recover anything but decides it’s no use. 

•••

Her stomach growls.

I remember being hungry, says one of us.

Shut up, shut up! The inanity of the newly subsumed. This one is particularly annoying.

•••

Hours and hours later, she touches down to the Whichway Cavern. At this depth, it’s as if the planet is worm-riddled; there are many passages, most of them narrow, though a few gape wide. Only one leads where she hopes to go. For the first time, she refers to the little wayfinding point suspended in a bubble of medium at her wrist. We drift the point and let it settle on a passage mouth ahead. Once she takes a couple steps, we flick its direction, pointing her one way and then another and another, confounding her with one of our favourite tricks. All of us had to guess, why shouldn’t she?

“Come on,” she snaps. Her ire is delicious. She stares at the machine’s gauntlet, thinking. We listen in. They said the passage’s haunted but it’s the damn machine. Sometimes their little brains catch on and then the game is decidedly less fun.

“You’s in the machine, aren’t you?”

We retaliate. We shove all the very worst of our experiences across the channel: the sudden weightlessness of a free-fall, knowing the inevitable all the way down, the breaking of every bone at the bottom; the long-gnawing, inescapable emptiness of starvation; a sweet taste on the tongue, followed by shitting and vomiting and full-body shut-down; lungs contracting painfully, the retch-gasp that only draws more liquid in.

She endures each.

“I’m not about to lay down and die just ‘cause it gets you off.”

For a moment, all we can do is squirm. Then 46 jabs the wayfinding arrow toward her goal. Before the arc is completed, we concentrate and expand, bursting the bubble. The smashed pieces revert to liquid and rise in thin, globby tendrils. She doesn’t crane her neck to watch. Knowing she’ll have to eliminate each opening, she carves an arrow in the ground and strikes off down the passage.

We laugh, though perhaps it’s more akin to howling.

•••

She trudges, unaware that we (although, there hardly is a ‘we’ anymore) have dissolved into bickering cacophony. 46 is loudly and annoyingly beseeching us to help 47, but us in the majority will not relent. We are not human, not anymore. Why should we care?

•••

At the dead-end, it is she who laughs hoarsely. True to her word, she turns around and starts back. The terrain is scored with deep cracks, wide enough to swallow the machine down. On the way, she was hyper-focused on judging each jump and stride. Now, she lets her body take over while she wanders the well-trod passages of her mind. She remembers the Maintenance Bay where she and her crew spent hundreds of shifts taking apart AutonoClean Units, wiping out the gunk and bantering.

We move to disengage, but 46 won’t budge. 

She remembers the canteen they’d migrate to at shift’s end. They’d slurp from bowls, shoulder to shoulder. They’d talk shit. 

We try to pull 46 away, but the slippery little demon eludes us and swims back. Now 19 and 4 are jockeying to watch too. 

She remembers her cramped cabin in the Lower Starboard Quarters of Steerage, how she’d listen for the door-buzz, how sometimes it would sound and, even less often, she’d open up. She remembers them standing there, smiling their bright, one-incisor-missing smile and thinking, Why do I fight this? She remembers pulling them into her too-small space.

I had a man, says 46. He was sweet to me.

She remembers one particular time, when they announced they’d been chosen by the algorithm. That they were ready. She shouted questions, more like accusations: How can you want to go down? Why do you believe them? Don’t you see they’re using us? She remembers talking around the thing that felt too raw to be spoken. (How can you bear to leave me?). She remembers the tense quiet; them asking, “Should I just go?”, the yawning silence after she failed to respond. She remembers the emptiness they left in their wake.

•••

When she reaches the Whichway Cavern, she knows she doesn’t have another dead-end in her. She surveys the entrances until she spots a nearly imperceptible two-thumb footprint, leading in. She decides to trust that whatever species walked before her knew the way. She’s close now. The Primordial Pool is waiting. 

•••

It is warmer. Damp. A thin, shimmering slime coats the floor and climbs the walls. Growing from it are clusters of strange white tubes, with fleshy knuckle-like protuberances at their base. At her approach, they raise up and scurry into crevices.

She sniffs—there is a hint of sweetness in the air. Her stomach growls. As she goes deeper, the smell only becomes stronger, until all she can think about are sweet little biscuits topped with a slice of pale, hydroponic-grown strawberry: the dessert the Upperdecks distribute on Departure Day to demonstrate benevolence.

The smell leads her to the Last Steps. There is a sloping floor of hexagonal columns that rise on one side and dip low on the other. Suspended above the high side are gently bobbing puffs of wispy-soft pinks and blues and yellows. To her, they seem melt-in-your-mouth delicious. She scrambles toward them and though her nostrils catch a faint whiff of corpse, she does not slow. She’s undone by the promise of sweetness.

1 and 3 titter, anticipating her end. But some of us… As she extends to take a scoop, we send through the channel: sweetness, yes, followed by evacuation, seizing and a slow agony as the body dissolves. She lurches back on instinct as a tendril darts from the softness and stabs down. It reaches its limit a hair’s breadth from her face and then, to her horror, it and its kind release their sickly-sweetness in a gaseous hiss and descend. 

“Shit, shit, shit.”

She dives downward in a clatter of metal against stone. Once she reaches the bottom, she hauls too-heavy bones and exoskeleton into the passage and collapses. The soft predators crowd the passage entrance but they cannot veer in.

“Oh, so now you’re giving me heads up?” She shakes her head, but the motion makes her dizzy so she closes her eyes and rests against the wall. 

We’ve seen this before and it’s delighted us. This time, some are frantic. Why won’t she get up? Never before have we moved to help and now there is uncertainty over what we should do next. We can’t ignore the obvious injustice: she has a live body, memory of the faces that love her, a chance at a future. We have nothing but playing tricks in the dark. Faced with a choice, we roil with indecision; we want to hurt her, help her, hurt her, heal. The helpers rise and find we’re forty-three strong; 1, 3 and 35 are subdued. Through the channel, we share the sight of a different pair of eyes. This passage, in the past. 

“Stop it. Let me be.” Her words are slurred.

We continue, showing her how few steps are needed to arrive at the Primordial Pool. Then, we skip to the sensation of stroking weakly through the Pool’s thick fluid, the deadweight of the machine much too heavy. She feels lungs that aren’t hers starving for air until the need can’t be resisted any longer. She feels fluid pour in where it shouldn’t; the choke of it hurts. There’s a short attempt to surface, before resignation. The sight that isn’t hers drifts to the waving curlyweed that clings along the walls, the little flitters fleeing something bigger, and past that, through the silt, at the Pool’s very bottom, a circle of brightness. 

Her eyes flick open. “What was that?” 

The breach! 

“It looked like a moon—a moon shining down from the other side.” She forces herself up and staggers on.

•••

She resorts to crawling to reach the Pool. The slime is slathered from floor to ceiling in thick, swelling strands. Nestled around the Pool is a grove of fleshy, webbed fans and furry stumps. Something amongst them trills and, to her ears, it sounds like rejoicing. 

“Operator 47, ready for your report.”

“I made it!”

“You’re at the Pool?”

“Yes.”

“There is a viscous substance around you, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Your next directive is to gather as much as you can and bring it to the surface.”

“What? No. That wasn’t the deal. You said, if we make it, we go through.”

A shuffle on the other end, then a different voice takes over. “Operator, I understand you may be frustrated. Understand that, with more of the substance, we will be able to send a fleet of machines down with you as their experienced guide. And don’t worry. Once you reach the Pool a second time, you’ll be able to dive knowing you did all you could for humanity.”

We hope she isn’t falling for this.

“No.”

“You must. It’s humanity’s destiny.”

There’s something we’ve never done that we must try. OPERATOR. We speak in a multitudinous voice. DIVE. YOU’VE DONE ENOUGH. 

A flood of recognition; she hears us.

“Sir, do you read me?” 

“Yes, Operator, loud and clear.”

“There’s no fucking way I’m going back. Over and out.”

We cut off the transmission. She laughs; we laugh. 

We recede the chest piece, releasing her from the machine. Without an Operator, the melting begins but we try to hold our form, to resist the pull upward. 

She dips a hand into the slime and it responds by forming webbed flippers and a helmet like an iridescent bubble. The last thing she forms is a spool of guide line which she anchors to the bank. Holding one end, she wades in. When she’s waist-deep, she turns and waves. We raise our empty gauntlet in return though it is mostly liquified. She dives down. We hold on to the medium as best we can and crane over the Pool—she’s swimming, swimming and then, yes, she breaks through to the brightness. We release and begin rising, once again, through the veins of this dead planet.