Authors: Jeff VanderMeer
But the army’s primary job was to work hard to keep people out while maintaining the
fiction of an ecological disaster area. Annexing the land that comprised Area X, and
double again around it, as a natural expansion of a military base farther up the coast
had helped in that regard. As did the supposed “live fire ranges” dotting the area.
The army’s role had arguably become larger as the Southern Reach had been downsized.
All medical staff and engineers now resided with army command, for example. If a toilet
broke down at the Southern Reach, the plumber came over from the military base to
fix it.
Whitby whipped the jeep from side to side on a rough stretch of road, bringing Cheney
alarmingly close. On further inspection, Cheney displayed the remnants of a body builder’s
physique, as if he had once been fit, but that this condition, like all human conditions,
had receded—and then reconstituted itself in the increased thickness around his waist—but
in receding had left behind a still-solid chest, jutting forward through the white
shirt, out from the brown jacket, in a triumphant way that almost gave cover to his
gut. He was also, according to his file, “a first-rate scientist partial to beer,”
the kind of mind Control had seen before. It needed dulling to slow it down or to
distance itself from the possibility of despair. Beer versus scientist represented
a kind of schism between the banality of speech versus the originality of thought.
An ongoing battle.
Why would Cheney play the buffoon to Control when he was in fact a mighty brain? Well,
maybe he was a buffoon, outside of his chosen field, but then Control wasn’t exactly
anyone’s first invitee to a cocktail party, either.
* * *
Once they’d put the distraction of the major checkpoints behind them and entered the
stretch of fifteen miles of gravel road—which seemed to take all of Whitby’s attention,
so he continued to say little—Control asked, “Is this the route that the expedition
would take to the border, too?”
The longer they had been traveling, the more the image in his head, of the progress
of the expeditions down this very road, each member quiet, alone in the vast expanse
of their thoughts, had been interrupted by the stage business of lurching to a stop
at so many checkpoints. The destruction of solace.
“Sure,” Cheney said. “But in a special bus that doesn’t need to stop.”
A special bus. No checkpoints. No limousine for the expeditions, not on this road.
Were they allowed last-meal requests? Was the night before often a drunken reverie
or more of a somber meditation? When was the last time they were allowed to see family
or friends? Did they receive religious counsel? The files didn’t say; Central descended
on the Southern Reach like a many-limbed über-parasite to coordinate that part.
Loaded down or unencumbered? “And already with their backpacks and equipment?” he
asked. He was seeing the biologist on that special bus, sans checkpoints, fiddling
with her pack, or sitting there silent with it beside her on the seat. Nervous or
calm? No matter what her state of mind at that point, Control guessed she would not
have been talking to her fellow expedition members.
“No—they’d get all of that at the border facility. But they’d know what was in it
before that—it’d be the same as their training packs. Just fewer rocks.” Again, the
look that meant he was supposed to laugh, but, always considerate, Cheney chuckled
for him yet again.
So: Approaching the border. Was Ghost Bird elated, indifferent? It frustrated him
that he had a better sense of what she wouldn’t be than what she was.
“We used to joke,” Cheney said, interrupted by a pothole poorly navigated by Whitby,
“we used to joke that we ought to send them in with an abacus and a piece of flint.
Maybe a rubber band or two.”
In checking Control’s reaction to his levity, Cheney must have seen something disapproving
or dangerous, because he added, “Gallows humor, you know. Like in an ER.” Except he
hadn’t been the one on the gallows. He’d stayed behind and analyzed what they’d brought
back. The ones who did come back. A whole storeroom of largely useless samples bought
with blood and careers, because hardly any of the survivors went on to have happy,
productive lives. Did Ghost Bird remember Cheney, and if so, what was her impression
of him?
The endless ripple of scaly brown tree trunks. The smell of pine needles mixed with
a pungent whiff of decay and the exhaust from the jeep. The blue-gray sky above, through
the scattered canopy. The back of Whitby’s swaying head. Whitby. Invisible and yet
all too visible. The cipher who came in and out of focus, seemed both near and far.
* * *
“The terror,” Whitby had said during the morning meeting, staring at the plant and
the mouse.
“The terror.”
But oddly, slurring it slightly, and in a tone as if he were imparting information
rather than reacting or expressing an emotion.
Terror sparked by what? Why said with such apparent enthusiasm?
But the linguist talked over Whitby and soon pushed so far beyond the moment that
Control couldn’t go back to it at the time.
“A name conveys a whole series of related associations,” Hsyu had said, launching
some more primordial section of her PowerPoint, created during a different era and
perhaps initially pitched to an audience of the frozen megafauna Control remembered
so vividly from the natural history museum. “A set of related ideas, facts, etc. And
these associations exist not just in the mind of the one named—form their identity—but
also in the minds of the other expedition members and thus accessible to whatever
else might access them in Area X. Even if by a process unknown to us and purely speculative
in nature. Whereas ‘biologist’—that’s a function, a subset of a full identity.” Not
if you did it right, like Ghost Bird, and you were totally and wholly your job to
begin with. “If you can be your function, then the theory is that these associations
narrow or close down, and that closes down the pathways into personality. Perhaps.”
Except Control knew that wasn’t the only reason to take away names: It was to strip
personality away for the starker purpose of instilling loyalty and to make conditioning
and hypnosis more effective. Which, in turn, helped mitigate or stave off the effects
of Area X—or, at least, that was the rationale Control had seen in the files, as put
forward in a note by James Lowry, the only survivor of the first expedition and a
man who had stayed on at the Southern Reach despite being damaged and taking years
to recover.
Overtaken by some sudden thought she chose not to share, Hsyu then performed her own
pivot, like Grace through the hallway maze: “We keep saying ‘it’—and by ‘it’ I mean
whatever initiated these processes and perhaps used Saul Evans’s words—is like this
thing or like that thing. But it isn’t—it is only itself. Whatever it is. Because
our minds process information almost solely through analogy and categorization, we
are often defeated when presented with something that fits no category and lies outside
of the realm of our analogies.” Control imagined the PowerPoint coming to a close,
the series of marbled borders giving way to a white screen with the word
Questions?
on it.
Still, Control understood the point. It echoed, in a different way, things the biologist
had said during their session. In college, what had always stuck with him in Astronomy
101 was that the first astronomers to think of points of light not as part of a celestial
tapestry revolving around the earth but as individual planets had had to wrench their
imaginations—and thus their analogies and metaphors—out of a grooved track that had
been running through everyone’s minds for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Who at the Southern Reach had the kind of mind needed to see something new? Probably
not Cheney at this point. Cheney’s roving intellect had uncovered nothing new for
quite some time, possibly through no real fault of its own. Yet Control came back
to one thought: Cheney’s willingness to keep banging his head against a wall—despite
the fact that he would never publish any scientific papers about any of this—was,
in a perverse way, one of the best reasons to assume the director had been competent.
Gray moss clinging to trees. A hawk circling a clear-cut meadow under skies growing
darker. A heat and humidity to the air that was trying to defeat the rush of wind
past them.
* * *
The Southern Reach called the last expedition the twelfth, but Control had counted
the rings, and it was actually the thirty-eighth iteration, including six “eleventh”
expeditions. The hagiography was clear: After the true fifth expedition, the Southern
Reach had gotten stuck like a jammed CD, with nearly the same repetitions. Expedition
5 became X.5.A, followed by X.5.B and X.5.C, all the way to an X.5.G. Each expedition
number thereafter adhered to an particular set of metrics and introduced variables
into the equation with each letter. For example, the eleventh expedition series had
been composed of all men, while the twelfth, if it continued to X.12.B and beyond,
would continue to be composed of all women. He wondered if his mother knew of any
parallel in special ops, if secret studies showed something about gender that escaped
him in considering the irrelevance of this particular metric. And what about someone
who didn’t identify as male or female?
Control still couldn’t tell from his examination of the records that morning if the
iterations had started as a clerical error and become codified as process (unlikely)
or been initiated as a conscious decision by the director, sneakily enacted below
the radar of any meeting minutes. It had just popped up as if always there. A need
to somehow act as if they weren’t as far along without concrete results or answers.
Or the need to describe a story arc for each set of expeditions that didn’t give away
how futile it was fast becoming.
During the fifth, too, the Southern Reach had started lying to the participants. No
one was ever told they were part of Expedition 7.F or 8.G, or 9.B, and Control wondered
how anyone had kept it straight, and how the truth might have eaten away at morale
rather than buoyed it, brought into the Southern Reach a kind of cynical fatalism.
How peculiar to keep prepping the “fifth” expedition, to keep rolling this stone up
this hill, over and over.
Grace had just shrugged when asked about the transition from X.11.K to X.12.A during
orientation on Monday, which already felt a month away from Wednesday. “The biologist
knew about the eleventh expedition because her husband was careless. So we moved on
to the twelfth.” Was that the only reason?
“A lot of accommodations were made for the biologist,” Control observed.
“The director ordered it,” Grace said, “and I stood behind her.” That was the end
of that line of inquiry, Grace no longer willing to admit that there might have been
any distance between her and the director.
And, as often happened, one big lie had let in a series of little lies, under the
guise of “changing the metrics,” of altering the experiment. So that as they got diminishing
returns, the director fiddled more and more with the composition of the expeditions,
and fiddled with what information she told them, and who knew if any of it had helped
anything at all? You reached a certain point of desperation, perhaps thought the train
was coming faster than others did, and you’d use whatever you found hidden under the
seats, whether a weapon or just a bent paper clip.
* * *
If you quacked like a scientist and waddled like a scientist, soon, to nonscientists,
you became the subject under discussion and not a person at all. Some scientists lived
within this role, almost embraced it, transformed into walking theses or textbooks.
This couldn’t be said about Cheney, though, despite lapses into jargon like “quantum
entanglements.”
At a certain point on the way to the border, Control began to collect Cheneyisms.
Much of it came to Control unsolicited because he found that Cheney, once he got warmed
up, hated silence, and threw into that silence a strange combination of erudite and
sloppy syntax. All Control had to do, with Whitby as his innocent accomplice, was
not respond to a joke or comment and Cheney would fill up the space with his own words.
Jesus, it was a long drive.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of enabling of each other’s dip-shittery. It’s almost all we’ve
got.”
“We don’t even understand how every organism on our planet works. Haven’t even identified
them all yet. What if we just don’t have the language for it?”
“Are we obsolete? I think not, I think not. But don’t ask the army’s opinion of that.
A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.”
“As a physicist, what do you do when you’re faced by something that doesn’t care what
you do and isn’t affected by your actions? Then you start thinking about dark energy
and you go a little nuts.”
“Yeah, it’s something we think about: How do you know if something is out of the ordinary
when you don’t know if your instruments would register the progressions? Lasers, gravitational-wave
detectors, X-rays. Nothing useful there. I got this spade here and a bucket and some
rubber bands and duct tape, you know?”
“Hardly any scientists at Central, either. Am I right?”
“I guess it’s kind of strange. To practically live next to this. I guess I could say
that. But then you go home and you’re home.”
“Do you know any physics? No of course you don’t. How could you?”
“Black holes and waves have a similar structure, you know? Very, very similar as it
turns out. Who would’ve expected that?”
“I mean, you’d expect Area X to cooperate at least a little bit, right? I’d’ve staked
my reputation on it cooperating with us enough to get some accurate readings at least,
an abnormal heat signature or something.”
Later, a refinement of this statement: “There is some agreement among us now, reduced
though we may be, that to analyze certain things, an object must allow itself to be
analyzed, must agree to it. Even if this is just simply by way of
some
response, some reaction.”