“For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” Matthew 17:20
“The environments of human thinking are not ‘natural’ environments. They are artificial through and through. Humans create their cognitive powers by creating the environment in which they exercise those powers.” Hutchins, 1994, 169
“I have faith in essence as the new creator, innovator, motivator of mankind. Hell with moving mountains, I’m going to fucking re-create the world.” George Havenah, first isolator of essence.
The young, bright-eyed couple in white lab coats leaned eagerly over the cage, staring down at the mouse.
“God, I’m so nervous,” the woman said. She had long brown hair tied up in an unstable ponytail. Threads of it fell in front of her laughing blue eyes as she looked at him.
He had short brown hair cropped unevenly. It stuck up from his head like a badly cut lawn. His eyes were dark. When he looked at her they kindled like a pair of coals. His mouth curved in a rich, mischievous grin. “Margaret, if we don’t try it now, I don’t know why not. The tests are stable, the numbers crunch right, the subject is ready.” He laid a proprietary hand over the mouse’s cage. “At this point we’re just re-running the old numbers. Can you deny it? How many times have you run the ratios?”
“Too many.”
“And what else do we need to do before the test should go forward.” He grinned down at her and moved closer.
She had to tilt her head slight to keep looking into his eyes. Couldn’t stop smiling. “Unless the bosses figure out something new to test which I haven’t thought of—“
“Which I doubt exists.”
“—there’s nothing.”
“So what are we waiting for?” he asked.
She punched him lightly. “We could wait for the Old Man to say that we should move on to this kind of test.”
He caught her arm and pulled her a little closer. “And then he’d say that we haven’t progressed to that point yet. I say we try it.”
“We could get in trouble.” She pouted prettily for a second, and then the expression broke and she laughed.
He held her with one hand and moved closer. “I say we try it.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Margaret caught her lower lip between her teeth, and then nodded. “Okay. Let’s.”
They broke, like partners in a carefully coordinated dance. She went to the back of the room, all serious now, and began uncurling wires from the wall machine. He opened the cage and reached in. The white mouse squirmed, but he kept a firm grip while he brought it closer to the wall and the huge machine there. It looked like a movie supercomputer, with hundreds of switches and dials, but the most pivotal point looked like a small, enclosed cage just a foot square surrounded by speakers, with a vapor-extruding device in the side. He gently dropped the mouse through the top of the cage, then latched the top. Margaret had gone to the side cupboard and opened it with the key card hanging from her neck. She retrieved a small vial with hands as steady as stone, locked the cupboard one handed, and returned to the cage. She slid the vial into the vaporizer and punched in a code.
“How much of a dose is that?”
“Six milligrams.”
“Isn’t that a little low?”
“For the bodyweight of the mouse, no. It’s proportional to what we give first time human users.”
“But if we want to guarantee a reaction . . . ”
She gave him a look. “But we don’t want to guarantee a reaction. We want to see if the machine will allow a non-human animal to apply essence.”
“I think that with a higher dosage we would get a more definitive response.”
“We’re testing the machine/animal interface. Henry, I don’t want to compromise the experiment.”
He leaned forward, his hand covering hers over the mouse’s cage. “You think this will work?”
“Doesn’t matter what I think, it’ll work, or it won’t. It’s the beauty of being a null.”
Henry looked at her, almost serious, but then shook it off. “Then I say we fire up our Superhero Essence Electromagnetic Syncronator. You ready?”
She grinned. “Totally. Turn on the SEEMS machine.”
He pushed the button.
The machine began whirring, pulsing. The entire wall housing the dials began fluctuating and the two people could feel something beginning below the threshold of sound, even though their ears detected nothing. The mouse, more clearly exposed, maybe in that moment understanding something of what was about to happen, began squeaking and moving back and forth in the clear cage.
Margaret reached up a hand and pushed the pump to the vaporized. Then her hand snaked down and caught Henry’s in a solid hold. Frozen at the side of the cage, the couple watched with wide eyes as the substance from the machine flowed out into the environment with the mouse. At first, it had no color, and no texture, like a heat mirage wavering in the air, but it seemed to absorb strength from the unheard, unseen vibrations surrounding the cage. It fell slowly, creeping, becoming like mist, until it gradually fell and began to coalesce around the trembling, vibrating mouse.
“This is where things have gone wrong in the past,” Henry said.
“Do you have the recorders on?”
“They automatically activate when the SEEMS is matching molecules.”
“We have to record this. We have to . . . this is amazing.”
As they watched, entranced, the darkening substance wrapped around the mouse, distorting their sight of it, pulsing and pulling like a cloud.
And then, suddenly, as though reaching a critical moment, the right beat of the unheard music, the blackness snapped in around the mouse and the vague cloud and the animal were both completely changed. Trembling, the now black animal bared its suddenly sharper, longer teeth at the couple. It had huge pale green eyes, and a red, lobster-like tail that was far too long and dexterous. It hissed at them, a forked tongue flickering between the fangs, and then began to spin itself like a cartoon Tasmanian devil, hitting the solid clear cage again and again.
The man and the woman pulled back, huge smiles on their faces. Henry pulled her into a hug, and somehow his lips found hers. Margaret melted into him, her hands traveling over his shoulders, his waist, his hips. When they pulled apart, her bright eyes glowed almost feverishly into his.
“Henry, it worked,” she whispered, almost shaking from the joy.
“It worked,” he agreed.
“We transferred the ‘superhero’ essence from a latent-creator human being into a non-human, non-receptive being through the artificial stimulation of a EM synchronator.”
“A synchronator you perfected from human experimentation. Margaret, you are a genius.” He kissed her again. “Will you marry me?”
She laughed, half-giddy, half-startled. “Henry, this is quite a time to ask.”
He looked down at her. His dark eyes were not laughing. “I know.”
She licked her lips. While the transformed mouse rammed itself again and again into the bulletproof plastic of it’s cage, she raised herself on tiptoe, and draped her arms over his shoulders, her entire body touching his. Her lips met his, and this time, her kiss was all the answer he needed.
“I can’t believe that you would be so reckless!”
Sober and serious, clothing and lab coats neat and orderly, Margaret VanHadin and Henry Carpenter sat in the Old Man’s office, facing his ire as calmly as they could. The head of their branch of the Superhero Essence Research and Development Agency was a heavy-set man with a red face and a burning temper. Thin wisps of white hair escaped his comb over as though blown upward by the heat of his frequent exasperation.
“It was hardly reckless, sir. All the preliminary testing had been done. Transference was the next logical step.”
“Miss VanHadin, I don’t care if you thought that transference was the next logical step. We go through procedure at every step. At this magnitude of research, there are details to be covered and petitions that have to be laboriously passed through interminable Board meetings and committees. You can’t just walk through and sneer at authorities and regulations that have been put in place for the preservation of our human race against possible essence accidents. It’s simply not done”
“With all due respect, sir, if we had waited for the Board to approve the petition, the experiment would not have been completely for another three to four months, and by that time countless amounts of valuable research time and talent would have been wasted. It was a reasonable risk.”
“Reasonable risk? Reasonable risk! Blessed suns! Mr. Carpenter, one would almost think you had failed your Board Exams, as opposed to passing in flying colors. Are you aware that if you had failed drastically, you could have destroyed this facility? That we are still not aware of the effects of the SEEMS/essence interaction? That at the very least, you would have wasted a precious vial of the essence? Are you aware of how much effort it requires to distill that from a latent-creator?”
Henry stiffened slightly. “I am aware of that,” he answered. “My family has many latents. I’m am intimately familiar with the process.”
“Each of our failures wastes our limited resources. If we are to remain competitive in the global environment our program must expand, but we have barely enough to support the current operations, and you go off making use of our limited resources with out the permissions of the authorities!”
“If the essence had not attached to the subject, we could have removed it from the environment and returned it the passive state,” Margaret said. “We would have wasted nothing by the experiment. And if the reaction had been negative, that too would have been valuable information. We wasted nothing by the experiment.” Her hand crept into Henry’s beneath the table. She gave it a squeeze while the old man couldn’t see it. “This interview is not about what has happened, but what could have. How can I promote two young people who have completely cast aside authority on several occasions? It would be a ridiculous choice, and I’ll get a hell of flack for it.
Henry looked up, startled. “Promotion, sir?”
The Old Man’s eyes twinkled, no matter how hard he tried to suppress it. The white hairs flew around his head like antennae wafting in the air. “Young people are nothing but trouble, especially when they repeatedly cast aside authority. However, when they always abandon the guidance of their elders in favor of successful experiments that allow us to precipitously advance our understanding of the ‘superhuman’ essence, what exactly should be done? Promotion seems like the only logical step, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Are you serious, sir?” Margaret’s blue eyes were bright and amazed. She clenched Henry’s hand.
The Old Man leaned back in his chair. “How would you like to take charge of the Los Laros site?”
“Are you serious, sir?” Henry leaned forward on his chair.
“Am I ever anything but serious, young man?”
“No, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Yes, thank you, sir.”
“Don’t mention it. You both start at the end of the week. And by the way, congratulations on your engagement.”
They looked at each other. “What, sir?”
The Old Man grinned. “I’ve reviewed the tapes of your last experiment, and the angle was informative. Congratulations. Be sure to invite me to the wedding. Dismissed.”
Blushing furiously, the two young people stood, saluted, and scurried out of the room.
Six Month Later
“How are they today, Wilson?” Margaret smiled at the chubby lab tech bowed over the microscope.
He adjusted the focus but didn’t look up. “Have you heard that he’s going to start non-living testing today?”
She stopped dead, on hand resting on the table where she had been about to pick up the reports on the essence exposed bacteria Wilson was studying. “Who?”
“Carpenter.”
“Henry?” She picked up the report and walked to what they all knew informally has her desk. She set her bag on top, pulled open the top drawer and dug out a pair the plastic gloves. “You have to be mistaken. We’re months away from non-living testing at best. And at worst, we have no idea what the reaction would be between essence and the circuitry in any of the non-human robotics that have been proposed. That’s a ridiculous idea.”
“He’s obsessed with that damned ratio. He’s crazy.”
“Henry’s driven, but not insane. His experiments have all produced viable, applicable results.”
“Applicable?”
Margaret tossed her hair back. “I believe that they will eventually be applicable.”
“And what’s the bloody point of shooting up a machine when we have no idea what kinds of instabilities that will result in? I mean, we’ve already gotten acid burns out of the damn experiment. What’s next, he’s going to start dipping people’s hands in the damn essence, seeing how it burns at different levels. Seeing when he can get a table to tell him the answer to the universal question?”
Margaret stopped. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
“Damn right he shouldn’t have.”
“How’s your hand?”
Wilson held up the right hand and flexed it. She could see the pale line of scar. “Fine,” he said, with a nasty edge to his voice. “Stuff basically cauterized the blood vessels as it ate its way through.”
“He didn’t mean that.”
“Didn’t he?”
“He didn’t. And before you try to discredit the experiment, remember that I believe in the ratio as well. There’s a synchronization level when most human being respond to essence, and another level for animals, why not a point at which non-biological matter also interacts?”
“Because essence responds to thoughts, and tables don’t think.”
“If we’re judging ability-to-think using essence synchronization levels, then I can’t think either, and I personally won’t agree with that assessment.” She tried to draw him into the joke, but he had none of it.
“VanHadin, it’s an abomination, what Carpenter is trying to do. And he’s going to get people killed.”
She sat next to Wilson and leaned over the microscope. He scooted his bulk sideways. “I wouldn’t worry about it that much, Wilson. He’s not going to try anything. I mean, after what happened to your hand, he would be stupid to push protocol, much less endanger personnel again.”
Wilson didn’t bother to veil the bitterness in his eyes. “If that’s true, why has he set up Lab Eight for the testing? He’s also commissioned what he termed ‘sufficient amounts of essence to allow a viable experiment.’”
Margaret shook her head. “That can’t be right.” She tried to smile, but Wilson’s steady lack of expression drained her own. “That can’t be right. I’ll talk to him.”
“You do that. And when he shoots you down, VanHadin, try to knock some sense into him.”
Disturbed, Margaret left the office without commenting on the bacteria. Still wearing the rubber gloves, she went to find her fiancé.
Henry looked up from the prone robot in Lab Eight when she walked in and gave her a huge grin. “Margaret, you look gorgeous today.”
“Are you seriously going through with the non-biologic matter experiment? We’re months away from safe testing.”
The grin dropped and he pushed away from the machine. “Well, this is sudden.”
“We haven’t even satisfactorily determined the interaction of essence with non-biologic matter. We aren’t anywhere near determining how to animate that matter through the use of the essence. This could be incredibly dangerous, Henry.”
“That’s exactly what they said about integrating essence with non-human animals, and that was nothing but hot air.”
“You almost took off Wilson’s hand with your last unscheduled experiment. You’ve been reckless.”
“I’m going to be more careful. I’m not involving the staff any more than is necessary this time. This is strictly a hands-off experiment. Please, don’t worry. But it has to be done. This is the next logical step, Margaret.”
She stood their, shifting from foot to foot.
He watched her for a second, and then turned back to the robot. “Would you come look at this piping for me?”
She came forward slowly, and just as slowly crouched beside the robot. It looked a bit like a giant metallic spider pinned to a bug-collectors board. She craned her neck to see the indicated piping without getting too close to the electronics itself. “Henry, we know that essence can be volatile. The early years had some bad experiments with non-compatible human hosts. The Board controls are there for a reason.”
“But we’re not under the controls, Margaret. The Los Laros site is specifically meant to tackle the new ground no one wants to accept. We break the ground, and the rest of SERDA catches up to what we’ve accomplished with essence. We have to maintain that tradition of success or none of this is going to be worth it.”
She frowned at him, more interested in the dark circles around his eyes than in the wiring. “Henry, what’s gotten into you? You weren’t so keen on this last week.”
“It’s nothing.”
She reached out and grabbed him by the dust-smudged, white collar. “This is not nothing. Why did you storm out of my apartment yesterday? You had a letter from your family?”
“That’s none of your . . .”
“Are we or are we not going to be married? We haven’t set a date, but I have the engagement ring right here.” She wiggled her fingers at him, and the band stood out, stretched against the thin plastic of the glove. “Good couples talk to one another. Good couples tell one another things.” He tried to pull out of her grasp and she just held on harder and gave his head a little jerk. “And we are going to be a good couple.”
He stared at her for a second. His eyes were hollow, and then they became darker, almost. “You’re right. You’re so right. Thank you.” He grabbed up her hand and kissed it, holding her eyes. The old heat flickered up in his gaze and he seemed to want to pour that heat over her. “I should tell you everything.”
She ignored the fluttering in her stomach and glared at him. “Yes, you should.”
He laughed, and pulled her closer, but she didn’t quite believe the sound or the affection.”
Margaret batted his hand away and tried to keep her tone light. “So, tell me.”
They were alone in the room, but he rested his hands on the opened skin of the robot, and checked for the locations of the cameras that invariably papered the Lab walls. He ducked beneath one of the ribbed, spider-like legs and pulled her under as well. “Help me with this circuit,” he said aloud, as he pulled her down and positioned her so that neither of their mouths could be seen by the cameras. Their bodies were touching, and he rested his hands on her back and shoulder. Henry kept his voice low.
“You know that my brother Joseph is a latent, and in the essence extraction program?”
She nodded. “You’ve told me he was stronger than you were when you were in the program.”
His mouth quirked. “More accurate to say that my essence was never stable enough to be collected. And, in some ways, maybe I wasn’t stable enough. But my brother has been in the program since he was ten.”
Margaret took a deep breath. “That’s a long time.”
“And it’s not an easy process. My parents are concerned that he might be becoming unstable.”
“Then he should be let out of the program. They’ve done that before.”
Henry shook his head. “But that was when there were fewer labs working with the essence, when it was strictly human experimentation. Now we have non-human experimentation and non-living experimentation. And strong latents, like my brother, are not so easy to come by. Some of the essence that we deal with in this lab may very well have come from my brother.”
She snuggled closer to him. “So what do you think will happen?”
“God, I don’t know. He might snap. It’s happened before. And then when that happens, there’s nothing that they can do. Do you know what the essence does to a person once they have been over-stimulated and opened up for draining?”
She shook her head.
“Sometimes it tries to take the latent over as a host. And even thought he has been producing the essence, he won’t be compatible with the essence. And I know you understand what happens when essence comes into contact with a non-viable host.”
Margaret winced and squeezed his hand. “And if he’s not stable, even if he can use the essence, he’ll be like an unstable user. They can’t use that in any part of the SERDA program, and . . . there’s nothing they can do. What do you think will happen?”
“I just hope he can hold on. I’ve been . . . I’ve been writing him letters, but I don’t know if that will be enough, you know? And . . . he’s my brother. I just . . . that could have been me, you know? We were never close but just to think about what he’s going through . . .”
“I’m glad you talked to me.”
He patted her hand. “Me too. If I had been just a bit stronger, that might have been me instead. But here I am. Did you know that the weaker latents study essence instead of producing it? I think that the government believes we’ll understand it better because we can create it? We need to make a difference, Margaret. We need to push forward, or everything we’ve done is for nothing. They’ll never understand the genius of it all.”
“I’m still not sure that this is the best experiment to be trying right now.”
“This is the only one that’s coming up. The only one we’re ready for. The experiments that we could do are non-vital. And we have to produce results from this lab. Truth doesn’t just appear of thin air. If it does, it’s just a mirage. We need facts, experiments.”
“Wilson thinks . . .”
“Damn, Wilson. And damn Chezney and Orson too. They’re a bunch of old women unwilling to accept challenges or change. This is about our future, Margaret, and we can’t let a bunch of visionless weaklings stand our way.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“Life is dangerous. Kiss me, and believe I know what I’m talking about. Come on, we went to school, Margaret. We learned together, we are making history here. Kiss me, Margaret.”
She kissed him, and the cawing worries in her head faded to the back of her mind, overwhelmed by the touch of his lips and tongue against hers.
When they parted, she swallowed carefully. “I’ll want to go over the plans for your robot twice. I’ve always been better at the details. If we’re going to do this, let’s make everything perfect that we can control.”
He grinned. “Yes, let’s.”
They stood in the observation tower. Wilson sat at the main control panel, his bulk overflowing his battered chair, flanked by a bony, horsy-faced, black-haired mane named Chezny and the tall, almond-skinned woman Orson. They each wore an expression carrying varying parts of worry, distaste and fatalistic acceptance as they gazed down at the spider-like robot sprawled in the next room beyond the bulletproof glass.
Wilson shifted. He glanced at Henry and Margaret and tilted his head to Orson. His voice louder than necessary, he said, “The last non-living matter experiment with essence was less than satisfactory, don’t you think, Irrivanna? Hardly worth wasting essence for a complete lack of effect.”
“Yes, indeed,” Irrivanna Orson said in her heavily accented voice. She seemed oblivious to Wilson’s actual audience for the comment, and kept her eyes locked on the spider as thought it embodied the demons of her homeland. “It was waste, and the readings before the abort worrisome were.”
“Yes. A wasteful, worrisome experiment shouldn’t be followed up by a larger experiment on the same vein, should it?”
“Shut up, Wilson.” Chezny’s face was hard and angry. “It’s not like he’s going to listen to you anyway.”
Margaret, standing beside Henry looked over at them and frowned. She leaned closer to him. “I can’t help reconsidering. We shouldn’t be doing this right now, Henry. We haven’t gotten where we are today by ignoring the advice of the people we work with. We should abort right now, do some more tests, come back when we have more support.”
He grinned down at her. “Don’t worry, my love. I won’t let anything happen to you. Okay, everybody, are we ready?”
The other three made weak, dry affirmatives. Orson and Chezny moved to their own desks, slid on their headphones and began typing. They took a handful of quick readings, and then Orson gave them a jerky thumbs up.
“Requesting permission to activate the synchronator?” she said.
“Go,” Henry said.
Orson typed in a command and the SEEMS machine groaned into life, the vibrations from the great speakers positioned around the prone robot visibly shaking with the effort of synchronizing the environment. Even from the multiple protections and layers of bulletproof glass, the researchers could feel the vibrations in their bones.
Henry took a deep breath. “Okay. A kiss for luck, my love?”
Margaret gave him a quick peck. They’d made the kisses a tradition before each experiment. It still felt strange, new. She associated those small kisses with the jitters of a new experiment, with the idea of their new love. The others watched them with worried eyes.
When Henry walked away to spy over Chezny’s shoulder, Margaret patted her forehead with the edge of her sleeve. She’d never been this tense before a test. Margaret sat down at her consul and checked all the readings. She was strictly observing this test, but she still checked twice. She was very careful.
“Are we ready at panel one?” Henry asked. He was asking Wilson.
The heavy man sighed and flipped is last go switch.
“Everything’s steady at panel one,” he replied. “Ready.”
Henry nodded. “Good. On my mark. Three, two, one, go!”
Orson hit the switch that triggered the release of essence. Almost instantly, it came into contact with the metal and wire and semi-organic robot that had been specially prepared for it.
Margaret’s bones aches as the SEEMS reached a new pitch. She felt uneasy. The essence created a color as soon as it entered the field. It looked like some semi-sentient, bloody mist. It moved so slowly that it could have been molasses, almost as though it did not want to move toward the robot.
“I’m getting resistance,” Chezny said.
“Yes,” Orson said. “Point eight three.”
“And I’m getting a Rivaly rating of three from the applicators. The stuff doesn’t want to leave the storage pipes.”
“We had this same resistance issue with the larger animals.”
“And when we tried to overcome, and did, the damned beast practically broke the building down once the essence was absorbed. It’s not too late abort.” Wilson’s hands were steady over his keys, while Orson’s moved wildly, trying to compensate for the decreased speed.
“We abort when I say so, and not one second before,” Henry snapped at Wilson. “Increase the pipe pressure.”
But that was unnecessary. Suddenly, the entire wall of airy molasses once creeping through the pipes broke and rushed headlong into the robot, filling all of its artificial limbs almost to bursting with the artificial, life-giving essence-blood.
In living hosts, the essence covered a creature, sometimes sinking in, sometimes becoming a part of it, and then flowing out like a creating stream. But the essence did not cover the robot. It crept through it, as though uncertain of its welcome. It did not sink in, but flowed along the channels that had been built for it. It flowed and filled it, and then the long arachnid legs began to twitch and spasm as essence sank in and made sentient a thing that had not previously had a mind. They watched it move, and Margaret felt the first breaking, breathtaking, horrified exhilaration as it actually moved before them.
And then the entire thing twisted on itself and the metal rusted, broke and dropped away instantaneously and before a pulsing twisted mass of flesh that clung to the shape of the spider.
Wilson swallowed hard. “That is not supposed to happen.”
Orson’s hands blurred over her keyboard. “I’m strengthening the protections.”
“That will just make the essence contract,” Chezny said.
Wilson snarled. “Want to die do you?”
“Shit, we need to abort!”
Henry didn’t hesitate, and if he felt fear, it was buried somewhere he couldn’t find it. “Kill it,” he said. While Orson stopped the essence flow and Chezny killed the great SEEMS machine, Henry flipped open the protective cover on the giant red ABORT button, jammed his passkey into it and thrust his thumb down.
The Lab Eight protections, designed against nuclear accidents, went down hard on the writhing, now semi-living spider. It convulsed and made a sound that was not strictly audible, but their minds interpreted it as sound, as a sound that reached into their minds and twisted until it hurt. The four latents in the room winced, lowering their heads, as thought they could block out the sound by will alone.
The first few seconds cut through Margaret’s brain, and she dropped, whimpering, and she put her hands over her ears ever though she knew it would have no effect.
The spider twisted, choked, and imploded like a sun, that horrible, horrible sound smashing against the sides of the room even when there was nothing that could have been creating the noise but an amorphous mass of livid reds and bloody golds that threw itself upward and against the barriers they had dropped.
The goo broke through the wall. There may as well have not been a wall in its way. Wilson through up his arms and screamed. Chezny looked up in shock, and it swallowed him without a sound. Orson had enough time to lean back in her seat and close her eyes before the dark, soft, burning-like-acid substance covered her and broke her down to the bones.
And Henry threw himself over Margaret, covering her, wrapping her in his arms, and with his last breath, she heard him begging God to keep her safe, oh please, just keep her safe, oh God, please just keep her safe . . .
And then they both vanished in the burning, twisting, ever-screaming mass of darkness and pain.
