Jack In The Box

The planet was the fourth rock from a large orange sun. The blue seas surrounding the single continent spawned feathery white clouds that rushed over the yellow, brown, and purple terrain of the solitary land mass.

In the middle of the continent, on its highland plains, a ragged green dot marked the site of the ancient alien colony. There, transplanted flora from another world displaced the native, purple colored plant life.

Beneath the vast grassy knoll, gravimetric sensors detected a distinctive pattern of mass anomalies indicating a vast, spiderweb like structure of tunnels and chambers beneath the surface. Jack Graves looked thoughtfully at the display of the structure.

"Yes, that's just right."

"What is it?" Jinx asked.

Jack examined the floating holographic map closely, and began to explain what he saw.

"The best theory I've heard claims it was a transit system. The precursor to the black oil is white mist, which can form space-like paths through higher dimensions. The exotics would link the chambers here with destinations scattered all across the galaxy using bridges made of artificial reality. The black oil was a waste product, produced by the mist's reaction to untrained minds and the physical world. It drained into the underground reservoirs on the lower levels."

"So people would walk in to the chambers, enter something like a hyperspace shunt, and come out on another planet... fantastic." Jinx meant it, too. It was intergalactic space travel without the need to carry fuel or food or air, without star-ships forcing their way through the vastness of space.

"That's the theory. So, shall we get started?"

Jinx sat down at the command console and began the process of deploying and landing modules on the surface, near the center of the green spot on the planet. She sent down landing modules with with laboratories, drilling equipment, a field hospital, water storage, and a power plant around a grassy knoll near the entrance to the catacombs.

The process took a few hours. Jinx supervised the automated spacecraft and watched Jack Graves pack piles of hand-written notes, clothing, and a carefully sorted collection of ancient statues into travel containers inside his habitation module. He saluted the surveillance camera curtly and sat down in a comfortable chair.

Jinx instructed the computers in Jack's hab to set him down gently in the field of alien grass just outside the impromptu city she had just built. She saw the old man grin as the thrusters jerked his module away from the Apocalypse.

She reviewed the sensor feeds from the last cycle again. There was a signal there, a tiny speck of incredible mass that had been following them since they left the home cluster. It was too small to be a starship, and too massive to be natural.

She had some ideas who it might be, and had taken precautions. In a corner of each container, she hid supplies -- a miniature jump drive here, a thruster pack there, a solid-state fission reactor over there. It was her "Plan B", in case things got as ugly as she feared. She had a way off this far-away rock.

With some reluctance, she left the bridge and entered her own habitation module. Soon she was on her way to the middle of the great green spot of vegetation on the surface of tthe planet.

The next weeks were busy. The first step was to carefully coat the interiour surface of the drilling pipes they would use to harvest black oil from the underground chambers. Since black oil wasn't matter in any normal sense of the word, but rather solidified thought, the pipes had to be coated with a paint containing a miniscule amout of the oil, which would prevent the psychoactive "liquid" from escaping the apparatus. Parallel to this, Jack prepared his reaction vessel, a sphere with an interior coated with the same paint, which would serve as an artificial world for the reconstituted god-forms.

The next step was to prepare the first bore-holes and connect the coated pipes to the reaction vessel. Shortly after work began, a sinkhole appeared in the ground. Jinx sent Jack back to his habitation module and carefully examined the deep hole in the ground. The ceiling of an underground hall had collapsed, distrubed by the vibrations on the surface.

The underground chamber had been turned into an ossurary. In one corner Jinx saw a pile of vaguely spherical objects. She approached the pile carefully, and determined that they were colonist skulls -- flat-faced and round-headed. A tiny spur between the eyes suggested a pointed nose.

No black oil had leaked to the surface. As she went topside to give the all clear, she saw Jack's reaction vessel glint in the setting sun. The round vessel and the rectangular pump in front of the reaction chamber reminded her of the colonists' skulls.

Work continued. The sinkhole was surrounded with a fence of luminous tape, and the ground was soon covered with a maze of pipe leading to the three drilling stations. The derricks cast long shadows over the grassy knoll.

After several hours of work, Jinx and Jack decided that the network of pipes would be able to carry black oil to the reactor. They retreated to a sealed control center and sent the commands to activate the drilling stations.

The first borehole failed. Alams sounded as the black oil sublimated into mist as the drill approached the storage chamber. The second and third boreholes, however, drew the liquified reality from its reservoir and fed it to the pumps and pipes that would take it to the reactor.

Jinx and Jack remained inside the sealed control room until the last traces of the leak had dissipated. Both had gained a healthy respect for the dangerous properties of the black oil since the mission began, and neither wanted to risk a second exposure to the psychically toxic substance.

Jack arranged his catalog of long-forgotten idols and recordings of epic poetry while they waited. Jinx considered their situation, and decided to tell him what she had learned.

"Jack?"

"Yes, Jinx?"

"We're being watched."

"I know."

"Does the name Leviathan mean anything to you?"

"Leviathan? Lynnie Chelm? That's an odd choice for an agent..." Jack seemed worried.

"That's what I thought. You remember my vision, right?"

"Yes. The Corporation decided to turn the god-forms into weapons and send them against the Reyll. What's that have to do with anything?"

"Lynnie has always had contacts with the Grays. He's been working for the military intelligence since he started working as a super-villain. I don't want what I saw to become an accurate prediction of the future-"

Jack interrupted Jinx. "I'm sorry, but this experiment is too important to sabotage. The Corporation needs to discover what direction our spirituality would have developed without Reyll influence. Without this information, we won't know how to rebuild our culture once the Theocracy has been defeated. We won't have a plan for the future."

Jinx considered for a moment. "I understand. I just want you to know something - if Lynnie comes down here and tries to hijack your work, I won't be able to stop him. He's a walking black hole."

Jack looked at Jinx. "I see." He seemed disappointed, and Jinx wondered if Jack believed that she was unwilling to fight Leviathan.

They waited in silence until the all clear alarm sounded.

The work continued as the orange sun rose. Jack stayed inside the control room, relaying images of statues and artworks and recordings of poetry and epic stories to the receiving area of the reaction chamber. As Jinx teleported around the work area, checking the integrity of the pumps and seals, she felt the receiving area filling with information.

After exposure to Jack's data, the receiving chamber formed a negative image of the gods, monsters and heroes of the distant past. The next step was to expose this negative image to a large quantity of black oil, forming a positive echo of Fe Arran mythology inside the sealed reaction vessel.

Jinx was a sensitive mystic, and could feel the presences inside the chamber. As the sun set, she could sense the songs of the world she and Jack had created, and the whole work area was illuminated with a strange sort of ghostly light. Jack was exhausted and exalted by the work, and Jinx accompanied him through the radiant, pulsing darkness to his habitation module for a well-deserved nights' sleep. Jack turned and smiled at her as he stepped into the threshold of his hab.

"It's alive, Ms. Bubastis."

"I know, Jack. It's beautiful."

She made her way to her own habitation module, listening to the songs of their reconstituted world. The music had taken on a brassy edge; she had to struggle to not remain and listen to the driving strains of the reactor. As she undressed and sat down on her bed to rest, she felt a thrill as the war-drums began to pound.

Sleep came reluctantly. She awoke at sun-rise.

Their new world was no longer singing. There was only a dull psychic pounding coming from the reaction vessel. Jinx dressed hurriedly and rushed to wake Jack. They proceeded to the control room. He looked his age, and was visibly disappointed by the results of his experiment. They sat down at the control panels in silence, and Jack broke the anguished silence.

"What happened?"

"I'm not sure, Jack. Can we see inside the chamber?"

"Do you really want to look?"

"No." Jinx felt the thumping rhythm from the chamber in the back of her mind. "But we need to see what happened."

"Yes." Jack activated the psychogram that had recorded the life inside the chamber. They saw the world inside the chamber for the first time - a gray plain of rotten flesh. Structures like rib cages dotted the surface, and rivers of partially clotted blood flowed into a scab-sea filled with offal and corruption.

Jack's almost hairless ears looked a little green as he regarded the scene with horror. "What happened?"

Jinx took the controls, and sent the point of view searching for the source of the relentless thumping she heard in her head. From a mountain of tumor-like meat, a tower shaped like a spinal column rose into the heavens. At the top of the headless spine, a tiny figure pounded at the vaults of heaven - the outside of the reaction vessel. Jack recovered a little as he examined the figure pounding its tiny fists against the walls of its prison.

"Nyqll?"

"What? Didn't I-"

"Yes. Yes, you saw him in your vision. He was a minor monstrosity from the pre-Reyll mythology of the B'Tonghwa-"

"The Hunters? He's a figure from Hunter mythology?"

"Yes. An evil king, who kept prey imprisoned inside his city. The hero Mathlld followed the rivers of blood from his fortress and called upon the spirit of Darneth to grant him the wisdom to stop Nyqll in his evil ways. Nyqll was a representation of the very first attempts at animal husbandry by our species. In ancient times, the hero led an army to destroy Nyqll's fortress and free his subjects and his prey into the welcoming forest, beyond the reach of his burning hand. Slash and burn agriculture, batteries of meat animals, slavery, fear and hate..."

Jack stopped talking. His lower lip trembled as the horror of what had happened became clearer to him. "...the bad guys won. We made a world where evil won."

Jinx watched the tiny, deformed figure pound against the thin coating isolating the inside of the reaction chamber from the outside world. The thing stopped, and turned to face the point of view displayed on the view-screen. Thinking quickly, Jinx pounded the button to cut the feed before she had to look into the depraved creature's eyes. She turned to face Jack.

"We can flush this, right? We can start over?"

"I... of course-"

Jack was interrupted by a sudden sharp seismic shock. Jinx spoke. "Leviathan. Lynnie just make planetfall."

Jack looked at her, eyes filled with fear. "You have to stop him. It wasn't meant to turn out like this."

Jinx fetched a large container from the corner of the room, and pulled out an ion driver. She slotted a power cell into the unwieldy gun. "I'll do what I can, Jack. I told you I can't stop him." She looked around for a moment for the gun's gas bottle. "You have any extra black oil lying around? This gun's not gonna do much to him, but the oil might."

Jack didn't hesitate, and pulled a small sealed flask from beneath his desk. "Can't you use you mental powers against him?"

Jinx carefully dispensed a small amount of the substance into the chamber of the ion driver. "Not really. He has gravity-based senses and his mind has collapsed into a monad hidden behind an event horizon. If we're lucky, some of the black oil will get through to his naked singularity, and we'll be able to get the hell out of here."

The ground began to shake. "Get some cover, Jack. He's gonna be on top of us in a minute."

Jinx teleported outside and turned to face the column of smoke that rose from an impact crater on the horizon. A green and brown cloud of dirt and shredded vegetation was barreling towards the grassy knoll.

Her mind began the Marksman's Mantra as pulled a lead on the dark figure rushing towards the site. She pressed the trigger, and a dirty bruise-colored fireball of plasma struck Leviathan in the chest.

His massive form stopped for a second. Jinx began to teleport to Jack, but felt a sudden, wrenching shock.

She rematerialized in front of Leviathan. He grinned broadly. "That was trippy."

Her world turned incandescent white an instant later as Leviathan struck her, sending her skipping along the ground. She skidded to a stop and lay in a crumpled, bloody heap, unable to move her legs. Leviathan closed in on the control room.

"Hello, Doctor Graves. Don't bother hiding. I need something from you."

She heard sheet metal tear like paper. "Oh! Bad idea, there, little buddy. Lemme help ya with that." Bones snapped, and Jack Graves screamed. "Hey, stop yelling! We're gonna have a little drink of that moonshine you two were brewing. Right this way, man." Jack moaned as Lynnie dragged him to the reaction vessel.

"OK, lemme get my shot glass."

Jinx felt a wave of terror as the reaction vessel opened. Jack tried to reason with Leviathan. "Don't do this. The experiment failed. We-"

"Naah. The experiment worked just fine, little guy. Here, bottoms up!"

Jinx's body was healing, but her legs were still numb and immobile. She heard a moment of struggle and felt a terrible panicked fear. Jack screamed and gurgled, fell to the ground and began to thrash.

There was a growling noise, a sub-bass throb, as a series of wet pops replaced Jack's struggling.

"Huh. That was some messed up-- WHOA! Down boy!"

A noise like fire. Lynnie screamed in pain. "OW! Get in the box! Get in the--"

There was an electric hum and a sucking noise. Jinx felt Lynnie's footfalls as he approached her position. She was still paralyzed.

Lynnie held a hammerspace box in one hand. Jinx could feel the malignant presence of Nyqll imprisoned inside the container. Lynnie looked down at Jinx.

"Hey, listen up. I could have pasted you back there, but I just gave ya a love tap. You'll get better. Plan for me is a mind-wipe and a nice cathartic rampage. You just lie there and heal, OK? See ya back in the cluster."

"...Lynnie? Destroy the box, Lynnie. You can't let that thing out..."

"Not my job. Be seeing ya!"

With a single leap, Lynnie propelled himself into orbit. The ground liquefied and collapsed, and Jinx was swallowed up, taken down into the ground where the dead things go.