The Benefits of Talking To Yourself - Part 1

    Isaac wasn’t giddy, like they thought they’d be. Quitting their job after a long overnight shift felt good in the moment, but now, walking out to their car, the thought about what they’d do tomorrow crept into their mind.

    Isaac walked out to their car, cheap plastic bag of belongings threatening to tear open right there on the pavement. The sky was just starting to shift from deep midnight blue to the cold grayness of summer morning, and the birds were starting to wake up, their chilly bird calls adding to the morning humidity.

    Corn towered either side of the county road home, lopsided headlights poorly illuminated the potholes in the road. The morning news program was talking about the election in sixteen months, muffled by open windows and the combined sounds of engine and wind.

    Fifteen minutes later, Isaac arrived home, and setting the weakening bag down on the porch to find their keys in the pale morning light, heard a noise.

    Probably one of the neighbors, they concluded. Isaac’s neighbors were special cases, every one of them. Running a quasi-illegal auto-shop wasn’t really a problem, it was their drunken yelling, power tools grinding away at one in the morning, and patent refusal to just be neighborly that got to them.

    Fiddling with the key in the door, Isaac heard the noise again. Closer.

     “Uh…” Isaac hazarded, sweeping their front yard looking for anything or anyone. It didn’t help that Isaac was afraid of the dark, even though the sky was lightening further and the sodium street lamp on the corner did its best to push back the darkness, the shadows still dominated. “Hello?” they mumbled, barely under their breath.

    The morning air was silent, Isaac’s heart wasn’t. Pounding in their ears was the fear of being followed home by someone looking for an easy mark. Isaac didn’t remember being followed home, there were no headlights in their rear view mirror.

    Isaac glimpsed a shadow. There was a shape, peering around the corner of the house. They could see a flash of pink as the shadow retreated from view. Fumbling with the doorknob and jamming the key into the deadbolt, Isaac rushed and opened the door, slamming it shut behind them, clicking both locks back into place. What the fuck?

    Then there was a moment of clarity: All my shit’s still out there.

     Isaac hunched their shoulders, which reawakened the pain in their shoulders from that terrible fucking bed in work release, and leaned over the window sill next to the door. They couldn’t see any movement in the direction of the stranger. Still, though, they decided not to retrieve the bag until the sun was fully up.

    Coffee gurgling into the pot, Isaac was pacing back and forth in front of the window, looking at their phone.

I’m glad you’re ok axyl but… why not call the cops? Their friend said.

bc fuck the cops. they haven’t hurt me or stolen my stuff yet, i’m not calling the cops. Isaac typed back.

    Their phone buzzed with a couple more replies, Isaac ignored them, spying something stranger.

Do tigers live in colorado? They asked. 

no, lol. are you on drugs? Someone replied.

No, seriously, Isaac quickly switched to the camera app, and zoomed in on the unmistakable striped tail poking out from around the corner of the building, waving gently, fur sleek and shiny, only disturbed by the breeze.

woah holy shit

Yeah i’m calling animal control.

     A voice behind them chuckled. “No you’re not.”

    Spinning around quickly, Isaac reflexively chucked their phone at the intruder out of pure, distilled panic.

    “Why’d you do that?” the lean figure asked, the shape of her smile leaking into her words, phone clutched in a hand… a furred hand.

    Stunned stupid by their decision to throw away their only means of communication, Isaac was further stunned more stupid by, irrefutably, what looked like their fursona, clad in black and purple athletic wear, strong midriff resting on long legs trained, no doubt, to jump as if spring-loaded. She reached up and pulled a strand of purple hair away from her eyes, sharp claws striking a sense of danger into the human.

    “Hey, A, I think you broke her,” another voice joked, this one lower in pitch and less feminine, but Isaac couldn’t physically tell the one carefully putting away a lock-picking set into its case from the one smiling at the contents of their phone. The only difference was their outfits.

    “X, you need to learn to hide better,” the one scrolling through the phone said.

    “Still getting used to this thing,” she said, pulling her tail to the front. “What are you looking for in her phone anyway?”

    There it was again… her. Isaac felt a little jump in their chest the first time but was more focused on the second of the two intruders at the time to pay it any mind.

    The first one smiled, flashing a fang, “Ah, here we are!” She turned the phone around, revealing a drawing of the tiger, “The artist got my good side in this universe!” Her smile turned smug.

    “It’s always nice to be seen, isn’t that right, Axyl?”

    Isaac fainted.

Re: VLHC Dark Matter discovery

From: d.evans

To: s.gerkin.local7newsroom

Shauna,

We evolved to survive, not see the world as it truly is. That's the simplest explanation i can give you at this time. You may deduce more once you have finished reading my report, but for now it will suffice.

I was an engineer at the Very Large Hadron Collider, just outside of Chicago. Almost 150 miles of vacuum and magnets under my purview that need to be reasonably well-kept in order to peer deeper and deeper into the fabric of the cosmos.

I was on shift the day concern was raised over some of the findings. The raw data was fine enough, just what sensors spit out into their memory banks after every collision. The usual stuff. But once the data scientists took that data and constructed models out of it, looking at the shape and curvatures of the detritus left behind every colliding pinprick of mass and energy, I'm told a cold fear gripped the man who first laid eyes upon it, and he smashed his computer monitor against the ground. HDMI cables and power cords flailing around the room like whips flogging cattle, he didn't stop until every last screw was dislodged and sheared and scattered across the white tile floor

Clearly shocked at seeing what was normally a calm and well-adjusted man flying into a pure rage, the rest of the team were slow to get back to work, but once a replacement monitor was sourced from a storage room and the computer awoken from sleep mode, the second physicist to take a seat at the workstation processing the countless data captured like a fly in a spider's web froze stiff and refused to even respond to the concerned queries of her colleagues.

She just couldn't dare to move, to turn away, to even give herself away to whatever beastly thing had her gripped in its attention by muttering a single syllable.

Paramedics were called and shuffled rapidly down to the underground offices that operate this massive complex that sprawls under Kane and Du Page counties.

Atmospheric readings were taken to make sure there wasn't a gas leak, psychiatric tests were administered to the other colleagues to rule out the possibility of mass hysteria.

Nothing was definitively proven. The only sureity was that this one collision of many that occur every second in this collider had released some thing that activated fight, freeze, or flight.

The administrators at Fermilab called in what experts weren't already on site working. The data was doled out in parts, just to be sure, and the individual snapshots of this three dimensional web of decaying particles scattering in every possible direction, carrying with them the energy that for a single fraction of a fraction of a second made this one spot in the universe the most like the conditions of the Big Bang, were all individually deemed safe to look at. The problem came with the combination of the information. Two voxels of space were placed together in the software, then three. Eventually they had half the data filled in, the scrutineering eyes of the several scientists grew ever more skeptical as what appeared to be one of many collisions that run through the VLHC was forming from its constituent parts.

I was in the room for this part, sweeping up the shattered plastic shell of the former monitor and checking to make sure no other wiring was pulled from its sockets in the hardware's sudden excursion. That's when I glanced the screen, just out of the corner of my eye, and i felt something deep inside me churn, and i felt the overwhelming urge to turn away. I felt my muscles move on their own, like a whole-body reflex. I only stopped when i realized i was gasping for breath, sweat suddenly apparating on my forehead.

I was terrified. The most terrified I'd ever been in my life, and I suspect one of only three people that have ever felt that level of terror in the entirety of human history. The reflexive and primal nature of the reaction has led me to believe this is an ancient feeling, one shared not by our other hominid ancestors, but only experienced in the earliest life forms that were able to feel fear, compelled to use it as a means of survival.

Some psychiatric evaluations later, I was sent home ashamed. What could have let me fly off the handle that bad? Clearly it wasn't just in my head, but it clearly originated there.

That night, in my nightmares, I saw what can only be described as the ur-predator. It was formless and sly, black as night but it blended into the sunlit forest floor it chased me through. It was unlike any other creature I'd seen in biology books or in the most twisted of fiction. It lived in the gaps between light and dark, in the gaps between things. It was small, microscopic if it needed to be, and massive, dominating the landscape when it wanted to be. Its camouflage served to hide its description, but at the same time was noticeable in the uncanny ways. It patrolled in the unknown and prowled the margins of existence in whatever setting my subconscious made up to escape.

Out of the corner of my eye, on the piercing white computer screen, i saw its tendrils choking the bosons as even they tried to flee its presence. How it escaped the notice of the three physicists humming and hawing at the screen, I don't know.

The following Tuesday, after the long weekend, I heard the beast in the hushed gossip of the other physicists, in the unsure and unbelieving table conversation in the cafeteria. I saw its fangs in the concerned glances i received, i felt its gaze in the invisible area directly behind my head.

Sitting down with my tray in that cafeteria, with multiple sets of eyes on me, I got an email from an astrophysicist in New Zealand that had heard the news. Gossip travels faster than light, it seems. They mentioned their research into the peculiarities of dark matter on the cosmic scale, to mirror the peculiarities of the substance in the atomic scale that Fermilab interrogates. I was about to forward it to the other member of staff here that shares my forename, assuming it was a mistake, before I saw the phrase, "ur-predator."

They asked if I saw this dark being in the data, choking and compressing anything it came into contact with. The anomalies discovered in the newest data from the James Webb Space Telescope mimic the behaviors of slime mold, of ant colonies, of severed cephalopod tentacles grasping blindly for an anchor. If this observation of anomalies--found concentrated in the regions of space where dark matter was predicted to be most abundant--could be correlated with subatomic behaviors, the astrophysicist believes they had discovered the solution to the question plaguing physics.

Dark matter was strangling galaxies, herding their component stars into tighter and tighter revolutions around the galactic core beyond what the conservation of momentum would allow. Dark matter was tying together entire galaxy clusters beyond the scope of gravity itself. From the strained, twisted, fleeing lines on the data i glimpsed on the monitor, it was doing the same to the very stuff of matter. It was herding. It was chasing. It was hunting.

Dark matter refused to be detected, or even refused to interact with matter, because it didn't want to.

It was remaining out of sight, intelligently and deliberately.

And it was at this thought that I took my tray of untouched food, tossed it onto the disposal rack, and walked out of the VLHC complex for the last time.

The very drive of evolution is to survive. There's no recourse. There's no points for good behavior, or being the smartest. The only way through is to avoid the threat. Fight, freeze, flee. I choose flee.

I'm now in a boring office job, handling paper files and analog systems. The only displays in the entire building are seven-segment displays on old retro watches. I choose to reply to this email now only to perhaps serve as a warning to the rest of the scientific community in the wake of this discovery.

It is a breakthrough that will change our understanding of the universe, for the worse.

I hope now you can see why.

Your fellow survivor,

Dominic