Ará Orún Unredacted

 qntm's drafts

 

Warning! These drafts contain potentially limitless spoilers.

 

Another warning! Although these drafts contain potentially limitless spoilers, nothing is real until it's published on the main wiki.

Ará Orún

 

Sandbox peeps: Alright so as a caution, the following was written at very high speed with negligible editing for content, tone, wording or specific facts. The reason for this is that (1) being inside SCP-3125 is exactly this kind of mesmerising stream-of-consciousness nightmare and (2) my intention for the finished chapter is to blot almost all of this out using black blocks, with only fragments peeping through, until Wheeler eventually recovers and the black blocks go away. To do this, I needed a "bed" of material to start from, I didn't want to just jam huge black blocks together, it needed to be realistic. But the material itself isn't up to my usual standard and, I repeat: just because it's written here doesn't make it canon. In the finished product there will only be oblivion, and the oblivion will be canon. Probably.

 

 

 

Previously

 

 

 

But it is.

 

They wrestle him to the ground and pin his arm out flat, forcing his fist open to give access to his left index finger. The dread idea is beating on the door of his mind, methodically, demanding to be let in. It's wrong, the shape of it is awful and it's too big and slick with poison and he knows if he lets it in it'll swamp everything he is, filling his home up with sludge and broken glass. It wants to drown him in it and he knows it'll replace everything he is with swarming wasps and ants and ill-fitting excess metaphor and he knows it's taken the rest of the world already and all of the people around him and he holds out, and he continues to hold out right up until one of the people pinning him produces a pair of wire cutters and begins to work on the metacarpal bone of his first finger, right where it meets his palm, and then he folds. He wants to think of himself as a trooper but the pain of the metal jaws biting away at his flesh, just that first bite, is so far beyond anything he's experienced that it demolishes any will he has. The pain overrides everything else in his existence, it obliterates his resistance. Knowing he's weak, ashamed, on his knees, Yes, he says, yes, he throws the door open, anything to stop it, just be me, take over from this, drive this shell for me so that I can go somewhere else, where this isn't happening to me.

 

And it stands there, in the night outside, and doesn't move. It watches him placidly while the cutting continues and somehow gets worse and worse. Somewhere in reality he's hollering in agony and there is blood gushing from the ragged, filthy incision, and the people holding him grip more firmly so that they can tear enough of the flesh away to reach the bone, and then they try to work on breaking the bone itself, but they don't have enough leverage, and the agony is immeasurable and it fills him up past the eyeballs and he can't breathe through the screaming and they fetch a chisel. Come in! he screams at వ, Please! I surrender. I lose. Kill me. And వ stands there and makes very clear to him: You're going to lose this finger, and after that, you're going to lose the next one too. Because you shouldn't have held out so long. You shouldn't have tried to fight.

 

And at this, he sits goggle-eyed in front of the only thing which can help him, as it refuses, and there's a vicious crack and a tension of tendons and he babbles and bleeds and suffers and it goes on for longer than he ever thought he would even live, he should be dead, and there's no plateau and no escape and he never ascends to a cooler plane where he's unconscious and can't feel it, and the miasma of agony builds and builds and then they separate that digit from his tortured palm, and start on the second, and it's another seeming year before the second cack-handed, imperfect splintering crack, and finally వ steps into him and replaces him and he dies, in incalculable, howling misery, having suffered all that for the same ultimate result.

 

Because the point isn't to dominate. The point is to cause suffering. As much suffering as possible. The point isn't to kill.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

Before the following dawn, the world is ruined. It's a common misconception that the process of the world falling to వ would be chaotic and unfocused. It's not at all, because వ is not chaotic but vast and complex in its structure. Anybody can throw a brick through a window, random chance alone would ultimately break that window, but simple gradually increasing entropy and disorder is simple, and natural, and normal, and inexorable, and unavoidable, and not a vicious, active force with goals and the capability to plan. It requires forethought, and rotten intelligence, and tremendous planning, to detonate the equivalent of a dirty nuclear bomb inside the human memeplex and contaminate every last corner of it.

 

వ is a memeplex like an Independence Day city destroyer. It is an apex predator from a completely alien ideatic ecology, more toxic and hostile than anything humans can independently conceive of. Its arrival in human thought is like a wolf on the Galápagos. Humans simply have no protective evolutionary adaptations against it. It is systematic, disciplined, ordered, focused, brutal and efficient. It turns everything it touches into the worst version of itself. Find beautiful things, and smash them or cover them with filth. Find delightful people and break them and disfigure them. Burn anything which will burn. Smash precious things. Pour food into ditches. Waste everything. Make things unusable. Use knives. Blunt instruments. Poison. No guns. Cause pain. Maim, don't kill. Don't kill. It's too easy to kill.

 

Because వ does not arrive uniformly and does not take everybody, because that's not the most effective way to create a hell. Uniformity isn't what it wants, what it wants is enemies and something to exercise power over. How can you inflict pain without a victim? There have to be victims. And so the world quietly and without fuss divides into two groups of people. There are We, who are drowning in and driven by వ, who emit sparkling, livid viciousness in every direction, who radiate terror and exist solely to inflict everything possible on everybody possible who isn't one of Us, and We make up barely a fraction of the world. And there are They, who number in the billions, and are nothing but blunt, worthless gristle for the engine of pain. And they flee, minds perhaps even intact, still operating, breathing and awake enough to understand that they need to flee and they don't want what happens to them to happen, intelligent enough to suffer more than any animal, to understand what they're losing, what the world was like a scant five hours ago, what's come through the doors to greet them.

 

Better to be anything but one of Them. Better to be dead. The thing which drives Wheeler, a kind of contorted wreck of his original self with everything good about him stripped away and fed into the woodchipper, understands this. He was lucky, unbelievably lucky, to be drowned in వ and made into part of it. He was lucky to have the opportunity to pay a scant two of his fingers and a lifetime of pain for grudging late admission. So many people are so unlucky, people he watches through his former eyes, like a country on fire sliding past the window of a room on a luxury yacht, dispassionately and detached even while his are the hands doing the things to Them. It becomes an inferno. After everything has been smashed We begin to build, cement and wire fences and spikes. Someone is directing the effort. In the centre of the city We hack together a kind of series of funnels, where people can be fed in and the door closed behind them, and at the centre of the network of funnels is one of the rare spots in reality where creativity still holds sway, a sick, unprecedented, irreversible creativity. What's the worst thing you can imagine?

 

Wheeler stands atop piles of his work, naked to the waist, bloody up to the armpits, half-blind from the loss of his glasses. Far behind him, as if being shown everything that he's doing on a tiny screen, a pitiful shred of him is intact, and watching, and is keeping a record of what he's become. Will there be accountability? Is any slice of him still responsible? That's a call which may never get to be made, and if it does, the decision will be impossibly difficult for the judge which makes it. This part of Wheeler is frightened and tiny and does not know what to do with the data it is gathering, but it knows that if it is going to do anything, it has to have the data. To work from.

 

The condition he has is incredibly rare, shared by perhaps six or seven people per million worldwide. It's not an anomalous condition, nor inherited; it's an unusual natural artifact of the way that his brain developed. Where are the others like him? How could he know or recognise one? It would be impossible. The majority of them are Them, helpless and understanding the horror of the reality better than anybody. There's just him.

 

It takes an incredible amount of time for this last splinter of Adam Wheeler to begin its work. It puts the clipboard away and adjusts to the new environment in which he's living, the unbearable pressure and heat of the environment వ generates. It's like tuning out the engine noise on an aeroplane. It's not a conscious process. It's natural. Hammered almost completely into oblivion, and suffering under the hammer in its own tiny way, the part of Adam Wheeler which is still Adam Wheeler rolls over in its sleep, and puts a hand out onto the ground and grips at the sheer concrete.

 

And it starts to work against that which it knows to be wrong.

 

It is a long route out of the muck to sunlight. A slow growth, a tiny idea growing from a nearly-killed seedling and finding its way upwards, spreading, taking hold of the filth in which it's growing and transmuting it into something better, hardier. The thing which was once Adam Wheeler regrows. It takes some influence back. It knows that this Wheeler is wrong and the other Wheeler is… is anything but this, which has to be better.

 

When it reaches the surface it finds that there is no longer a Sun, figuratively or literally. The journey is torturous. Fighting back against the radiation which soaks the world is like pulling an iron spike out of his own skull. Find someone weaker than you and hurt them as much as you possibly can. It's good for Them. No. It's like cutting off another of his own fingers. Broken pieces of metaphor. There's a ray up there, a narrow red nourishing sunbeam. He follows it, out of the funnel, through a crack in its fence, over the top of the walls. And he wanders, malnourished, underwatered, down the empty, screaming streets, and out of the city, and far north, along a battered, trashed highway.

 

There are other people, They who recognise him as one of Us, who avoid him at every cost, and others of Us who pay him a passing glance of puzzlement at the fact that he seems to move in a different direction from the infestation, not pursuing Them whenever he sees them. He doesn't carry a knife or a pair of pliers. His shoes are undone. But We are driven more by the need to drain suffering from the ones who are bursting with it, and We go past him, after the other.

 

And he walks, tottering under a black Sun which to look at would resemble a black hole. He needs to get away from the core. The idea of వ pervades every cubic metre of existence now, and he walks through it, like lightly slashing weeds, head bobbing under the weight of the extra individual in him. He walks dumbly after the light source, drinking from it. A kind of thread unravels behind him, an infestation being slowly wound out of him, particle by particle.

 

A black slug drops from his tear duct, falls to the asphalt and shrivels. And another.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

He regains consciousness on a hard, scrubbed floor in a wide, cool corridor. He is lying against one wall of the corridor, as if tossed there like a ragdoll, with his back to the wall and his right arm stretched out, clenched into such a tight fist that his finger joints are hurting. He releases the fist, gasping. Disoriented, aching, he rolls and plants his other hand on the floor, and it's then that he discovers what's happened to that hand.

 

He reacts as he must react. He clutches the stubs where his first two fingers were, and screams and cries hopelessly at the echoing building, for a long time. Nobody answers him.

 

The last thing he remembers, he was playing Shostakovich. He was flying through it, unimpeded. In his mind, he can hear what he was playing, note-perfect, right up to the instant the memory cuts off. And he can't think of what comes next. Instead, that last incomplete snippet of music goes around and around in his head, abruptly ending mid-note and slowly fading back in again from a few seconds back, an earworm. He can't jolt himself out of it. He's a stuck record. He can never play again.

 

He tries to make the right shape with his remaining fingers. His hand won't do it. He rubs his eyes with his… his good hand. He feels like garbage, hung over, dehydrated. He's missing his shirt, and his arms and chest are almost grey with muck.

 

He can never play again.

 

He sits there, huddled, for a long while, being small and unhappy and lost. He knows he's going to have to move eventually. He's working his way up to it.

 

He looks up the corridor, eyes gradually recovering. He can see alright without his glasses, as long as he doesn't have to do much reading. He's in a school. There are notice boards, banks of lockers, a rainbow mural. The place is deserted and silent. There is a dull red light coming through the windows in the classroom doors on the far side of the corridor, suggesting that the Sun is low on that side of the building, rising or setting. He has taught one-off music lessons in one or two schools, but he doesn't recognise this one.

 

With some trepidation, he examines his bad hand. The stumps of his fingers are lumpy and uneven and have healed badly. A mass of scar tissue and scabs, and no stitches in sight. As if the digits were removed with great imprecision. Hacked off. Or bitten off? It troubles him that he can't remember. His memory is normally so sharp and clear. He thinks he's thinking clearly, but when he concentrates, and tries to access the lost time, something in that gap pushes him back. A fierce red heat.

 

It occurs to him that, though his severed digits have healed very badly, they have healed. They certainly aren't bleeding, although there's a continual ache. How long would that take?

 

How much time has he lost?

 

What the hell happened?

 

Way down the corridor, away from the classrooms, an office door is standing ajar. In that office, a telephone starts to ring.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

The office is poky and dimly-lit, piled high with paperwork. Two small desks, battered office chairs. He finds the ringing phone and picks up.

 

"Hello?"

 

The voice is synthesised, female. "Mr. Wheeler?"

 

"Yes. Who's this?"

 

With a measured tone, the robotic voice replies, "Mr. Wheeler, you have been sick for an extended period of time. I will be pleased to answer all of your questions, soon. But not now. There is a woman in room W16. She is dying."

 

"I— I'm not a doctor."

 

"I know. There is nothing you can do to save her. Nevertheless, you must go to her. Now."

 

"I feel like I'm… I'm not the best person to do that. I'm not in the best place today."

 

"It has to be you. There is no one else."

 

"…Who is she?"

 

There is a pause. It is as if the entity on the other end of the phone is unable to choose her words. "…She is important. Go now, please. She does not have much time."

 

Wheeler is at a loss. He doesn't seem to have the strength to not do what he's told. He doesn't have any other direction to go in. The phone handset is corded, or he'd take it with him. He frets a little about not being able to take it with him. "You'll still be here?"

 

"Yes."

 

He leaves the handset off the hook. He goes back along the silent corridor. He finds the door numbered W16 and peeks through the safety glass into the orange-red-lit classroom, squinting at the sunlight which floods it from the far windows. It's still not clear to him whether it's dusk or early morning. There is nobody in the classroom that he can see.

 

He opens the door and goes in. Elaborate, colourful biology posters and coursework displays, desks in disarray, scattered books and felt-tip pens, brightly-coloured backpacks. He takes a pace or two up the central aisle, not seeing what he thinks he should be seeing, and turns around, and jumps, startled. There is a huge chalk sketch on the blackboard, a highly realistic rendering of a woman's head and shoulders. He would swear the board was blank when he walked in.

 

The image is moving. It's as if it's being drawn and erased and redrawn, five or ten times per second. The woman looks about his age. Her face is framed with masses of hair, although with the negative colour effect of being drawn in white chalk on a black background, it's difficult to tell what colour her hair ought to be. The one splash of colour comes from the thick, bright blue frames of her glasses.

 

She looks distraught. And she seems to be saying something, and though there is no sound, there is text written beside her:

 

Adam?

 

He says, "Yes?"

 

She says,

 

I remember everything

 

And then the words scrub themselves out and become,

 

I can't forget a single minute of it

 

More lines come out. Each new thing she says erases the old.

 

I've been living it over and over again

 

I know everything he did now

 

I was blind, and he ran rings around me

 

I made mistake after mistake

 

He killed everybody I love except for you

 

After this, her lips stop moving. The last phrase lingers for longer than the others, before scrubbing itself blank.

 

Wheeler spends a long moment absorbing the final statement, turning it around, trying to figure out where, if anywhere, it slots into his life.

 

He has never seen this woman before.

 

But… is that true? He studies her features, and his memory cycles around, and he unearths something deep and significant in his past, a bizarre encounter he hasn't devoted thought to in what feels like a century. Her! That one time at the hospital, remember? You gouged a chunk out of your foot, backstage, after a show. You spent half a night in the emergency room, and she was there and you got talking. Who was she, now?

 

A… government agent, or at least in that sphere. She was unreal. On a whole other level from me. Tough, skilled, beautiful, sharp like a sapphire. We talked about music. Film scores, and the trash which passed for TV sci-fi those days, and David Lynch. It was… well, you don't know, that early, but… it was promising.

 

But nothing happened. They patched up my foot, and we never went anywhere.

 

Did we?

 

"Marion," he breathes. He's almost got it. He holds a hand up, fearful, as if motioning for her to stop. "No. This can't be—"

 

I sent you away, because I was trying to save your life

 

He remembers. It reconnects, all at once, the years upon years of inextricable shared life. There's too much energy there. It crashes through him, violently, it's like grabbing a frayed electrical line, it's like being shot. He stumbles backwards, disbelieving. He never imagined how much he was missing. "No. No, no. Marion."

 

And it didn't work

 

"What happened to you? I should have been there!"

 

And he ruined the world

 

She is inconsolable.

 

And now you have to live in Hell

 

"Where are you? Someone said you were dying—"

 

I'm already dead. I'm the memory

 

But now the memory is dying too

 

He's found his way into Heaven, and he's ruining it

 

Like the Earth

 

"What do you need? I'll stop him. I'll help you. I'll do anything I can. I love you."

 

She says nothing.

 

After a moment or two, Wheeler realises that her image has frozen.

 

He goes up to it and peers at the chalk work. With trepidation, with his right hand, he reaches out to the heavy chalk shading of her hair, and touches it with one finger. He leaves a dark dot. The chalk dust is real, on the board and on his finger. She's just a drawing.

 

She's gone. It's all gone.