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Editor-in-Chief:
Kenneth Brosky

Managing Editor:
Stephanie Nolasco

Associate Editor:
Janelle Kennedy

"Crust"

       David Brookes

The reason that the six-star resort on the northwest side of the Indonesian Ocean was so popular was the weather.  Rain, shine or monsoon, it was perfect: sun during the long, lazy hours of the day, punctuated by intermittent breezes drawn in from the salty ocean winds; light drizzle during the night (to keep things green) and again, gently, in the morning for just a few minutes.  There were never any complaints, which was why the weather tax for the region was so high.

Light mists and cleverly reflective surfaces concealed the meteorological station that perched on miles-high stilts.  Fine wire-thin conduits siphoned the sunlight from above and cast it down below, as if the station was never there at all.  Transparent sails captured natural rain and stored it for the scheduled showers, and matter transporters evaporated and drew up moisture from the sea to be recycled.  Cloud cover was vaporised to keep the sun strong and the sunbathers bronzed.

Although the station had been a technological marvel twenty years ago, it was now only standard for this kind of upper-class resort.  A good dozen existed all around the globe, but none this large.  And, although its newest member was young and had better things to do than look after what was an old, ailing bundle of piping, he was fanatic about engineering and was happy to arrive at the place after such a long journey.

The foreman greeted Louis on his first day.  He shook his hand in a manly grip, sending waves through his unprepared arm.

‘Alright, kid,' he said, grinning. ‘Glad to have another pair of hands.'

The foreman was glad, it appeared, because the place was something of a dump: the filters were clogged, the matter displacement console had various hot beverages spilled into it, and the metal of the vast pipes that sucked rainwater from the siphons above were full of impurities, so that the water sloshed noisily inside like a backed up sink.  Even though it was something of a luxury to work above such a high-class holiday resort, Louis Temperton felt out of place with a trio of hapless engineers who barely knew how to bleed a radiator.

The engineers, or “Meteorological Maintenance Officers”, were a colourful bunch who immediately drew Louis into their circle of friendship.  They were all upbeat and unassuming, two tall and one rotund.  Two thirds of them were well into their autumn years; the third, lanky Parkers, was young and the quietest of the group.

On Louis' first night, the four of them collected in the central processor, a room that had been adapted into a small snug that doubled up as a games room.  There was a miniature pool table stocked with painted ball-bearings the size of fists, and two viewscreens with illegally-intercepted television coverage.

They were all sitting around the chugging, vibrating processors, which were essentially mechanical valves in the heart of the station.  There was a thin layer of water on the floor from a ruptured purifier down the hall.

Vince, the oldest of them all, was the first to beckon Louis to his seat. ‘Come on, come on, get your ass parked!'

Vince was the most vocal of them.  The most skilled was Grayson, a fifty-year-old veteran of space-age plumbing. When he was twenty, he took an apprenticeship on the International Space Station learning how to deal with autoflush cisterns in zero-G, and then moved on to artificial weather control twelve years later.

He handed Louis what soon turned out to be alcohol, warm and headless in a coffee mug.  Grayson winked from behind his spectacles, one of which was taped over after shattering a long time ago.  Apparently, he had knocked his face against a dislodged tailpipe whilst fixing leaks in the dark.  His tape reminded Louis of a patch, and in their stained, worn clothing Louis couldn't help picturing them now as a swarthy bunch of sailors, telling tales in a waterlogged inn by the coast.

Vince, ancient Vince, was Grayson's mentor.  Vince was hot shit a decade ago, but had apparently taken a fall during the summer and he was facing compulsory retirement.  He was very much enjoying his own drink, which had quite likely been refilled numerous times whilst Louis had been taking his tour.  It was evident in the volume of his voice.

‘Listen to your foreman!  Obey my orders and you'll be fine!  Cross me and you'll feel my wrench!'

He laughed heartily, leaving Louis somewhat perplexed.

‘Do you guys gather here every night?' he asked.

‘Every night,' replied Grayson. 'It's not like we have a huge amount to do up here, you understand.  We make sure everything's in working order—'

‘Or near enough,' said Vince.

‘—And sit back the rest of the time to enjoy the weather we make.  Up here we always get sunshine.'

‘Except at night,' said Louis.

Grayson laughed, and already Louis felt like one of the team. ‘Except at night!  The nights are worst, though.  Don't get me wrong, there's safety in numbers, but every now and again when you're forced to take a night shift by yourself, or when the boiler distends ten-to-midnight and we all have to run to separate corners to patch up piping ... that's when you wish we were in geostationary orbit right underneath the sun all hours of the day.'

‘Why's that?'

‘I'll tell you why,' said Vince, leaning forward.  He was old and silvered, and his eyebrows looked like lemur tails above his deep, experienced eyes.  Those eyes made Louis shiver. ‘The reason why, is that this place has enough bogies floating around to drive you half mad, if you weren't careful.'

‘Bogies?'

‘He means little horrors,' said Parkers, quiet in the middle.  He had his hands wrapped around a hot coffee. ‘Like the Water God who haunts the conduits.'

‘Don't be ridiculous,' Vince snapped. 'I mean real bogies.  Like the alligators.'

‘Oh God, don't start with the alligators again ...'

Louis grinned. ‘Never really happened?'

Grayson shook his head. ‘No, it happened, but we've heard the story so many times ... When this place first started out, we didn't transplace water vapour from the sea, we sucked it up in liquid form.  One time we brought up a clutch of these weird mutant amphibian eggs.'

‘They hatched all over,' Vince said, his expression sour. ‘Little bastards running everywhere.  I had to buy new boots, I stamped on so many skulls ...'

‘They were a pain,' Grayson agreed mildly. ‘And there's also that thing we discovered in the filters, remember that?'

‘Some carnivorous plant-beast thing half grown out of the sludge in the water filters,' Vince elaborated, although he clearly wasn't concerned by the memory. ‘Took off Sid's finger.  Show him, Sid.'

Grayson held up his right hand, which was indeed minus one digit. ‘We set that one on fire, I think.'

Louis nodded silently.  Strange things happened all the time; technology had advanced to the point where anything could occur, and with those limits reached people were now mucking around with chemicals and genetics ... Louis had to admit that it made for a slightly more interesting world.

‘Do you have any stories about the other places you worked?' Grayson asked of him.

‘The last place I worked was at my old college, fixing lavatories.  Wasn't much fun, cleaning up after my old tutors when they missed the bowl.  Nothing interesting about it.'

‘I have a story,' said lanky Parkers.  He said it in a way they made them, all three of them, turn and look at him earnestly.  There was something about his voice that urged Louis to listen to Parkers very carefully.

‘You've only been here two weeks,' Vince said dismissively, but he wasn't entirely convinced that what young Parkers had to say was as stupid as his Aztec Water God fixation.

Parkers nodded. ‘Something happened.'  He seemed to shrink a little into himself, and held his rapidly cooling mug with something approaching fear.  He blinked as if trying to purge his mind's eye of some terrifying vision.

‘Happened a few days ago,' he said. ‘I didn't ... really want to say anything.  In case it was a dream or something.'

‘Well spit it out!' Vince snapped, but he was half smiling, eagerly.  A new story in a place like this was something worth hearing, even if it did turn out to be codswallop.

‘I was in Sanitation.  It was after that truck ran into one of the stilts at ground level and it popped all the plugs up here.  And it was dark, because the fibre optics bypass that section on account of all the combi-rotors.'

He said it for Louis' benefit, because Louis was new.  In fact, Louis had been shown the sanitation department as part of his tour, and knew exactly what it was like: some sort of basement.  The air was thick with moisture, as this was where the displaced sea- and rainwater was reconstructed.  Aqueducts and stainless steel conduits took the water through the sanitation process, dredging it clean of sand particles, flora and plankton.  Harsh minerals and other impurities were removed by processes of evaporation and distillation.

The room, which was the size of a football pitch, chugged and sloshed in the darkness.  The only light came through cracks and eroded areas in the floor, which was only a couple of badly-layered sheets of steel.  Light reflected from the island and the sea below burst into the darkness of Sanitation like upward-thrusting spears.

‘I was there with my wrenches,' Parkers said, holding up one hand, ‘and my flashlight.  That was all.  So when I saw it ...'

‘Saw what ...?'

‘Crust—,' he said, ‘crust—'

‘Crust?' said Louis.

‘Crustacean?' Grayson finished.  He gave Louis a quick glance and smacked his lips together discreetly, pointing towards his throat.  He was indicating that lanky Parkers, when under great pressure, stuttered like a clogged drain.

Parkers nodded.  “Crustacean”.  What did that mean?

Vince was the first to speak up. ‘You saw a crab?  Was it a giant crab?'

Parkers shook his head. ‘It was allsorts.  Man-shaped.  Shells.  Normal ones and crab ones, and some with crabs still in.  Seaweed, like little bubbles on strips, hanging from its shoulders like tentacles.'

‘It had tentacles as well?'

‘The seaweed was like tentacles,' Grayson said, the remaining lens in his spectacles flashing. ‘Keep up or keep quiet.  What was it doing, Parkers?'

‘Bent over the aqueducts.  High up.  I had to climb up the ladders to see it, up onto the first walkway.  I thought it was one of you guys, but it didn't move when I called.  It had its hands in the water.'

‘Maybe it was drinking,' Louis said stupidly.  He had been drinking a little himself.

‘It didn't have a mouth.  It had eyes that looked like glowbugs; they were moving around.  Or they might have been buh—bulbs.  I don't know.  It had a lot of parts that looked like they were moving.'

‘So what did you do?'

‘I walked a bit closer, and then it looked at me, and then it jumped into the water.  It broke into bits and washed away before I could stop it.'

‘Did you check the filters?'

‘There was nothing there but the normal sludge and guh—grit.  It's like it completely disintegrated.'

Parkers fell silent, perhaps afraid of the memories, perhaps embarrassed by his impediment.  His face had gone waxy in colour and constitution.  He didn't look well at all.

While Grayson fussed over him, pushing a heavy, square-set bottle into his hands and telling him to drink up, Louis got to his feet.  He'd had more than a few gulps of some golden booze, though he had no idea what it actually was.  He wasn't a drinker, and by standing he'd confused the gyroscope in his brain and almost fell.  He left the room and clumped noisily up some metal steps, towards his little room.

The walkway was tilting a little; or was he the one who was tilting?  His senses were both dulled and exaggerated in the way that only alcohol can grant you.  It was his unbalance that causing him to kick the back of his own foot and send him falling against a metal railing.  He hung there like a wet sweater, figuring out the best way to get his limbs back in the right configuration.

Something glinted on the opposite walkway, far across the great cavern beneath the primary pump housing.  The space was criss-crossed with walkways and vertical elevator shafts, and it was through this industrial net that Louis saw the ragged shape in the side of one of the semi-circular aqueducts.  It gleamed in the minimal light shining from below, a rough mark on the usually smooth surface of the giant pipe.

Louis approached, suspecting corrosion or other damage.  At the back of his mind was, of course, the story that Parkers had just finished telling, a shallow story of a half-glimpsed monster that didn't frighten Louis, nothing so serious, but made him uneasy.  He was looking across the very Sanitation department in which Parkers had seen the monster, his “Crustacean”.

Trying to shrug off his disorientation, Louis approached the damaged aqueduct.  His footsteps rang out on the steel walkway, suspended a hundred feet up from the floor of the department.  The sound echoed back at him twice, once from each side, further upsetting his concentration.

He arrived at the aqueduct, which was eight feet tall, smoothly curved and silver in the half-light.  The section of damaged metal was a patch about two feet wide by three feet tall, but it was the result of no corrosion Louis had ever seen.  Corrosion didn't cause the growth of tiny barnacles or bizarre black seaweed, straight out of the steel.

He reached out.  His fingers touched the wet, glistening patch of corrupted metal.  It moved and he pulled his hand back quickly.  There was a sparkling residue on the ends of his fingers.

It wasn't corrupted metal at all, but a foreign object pushed snugly into a hole in the huge pipe.  Now that his drunkenness had been evaporated by anxiety, he could make out the point where the aqueduct had been sheared away and the crumpled, half-organic form fit seamlessly in.

It looked like the bulk of the object was inside the aqueduct.  Fearful and too stupid to turn back to shout for his new friends, Louis approached the nearest door in the pipe and pulled it back on its chunky hinges.  Tentatively, he leaned inside.

The should have been no light inside the aqueduct but for what was creeping in around the edges of the door, but Louis could see that something was making the water sparkle from within.  The light the water exuded was faint, barely enough to glance up the sides of the curved walls.  It barely illuminated the crouched figure that Louis could only just make out in the gloom.

It was large and man-shaped, its knees bent into points.  Its back was pushed against the inside of the piping, neatly filling in the hole that it had evidently cut sometime since its encounter with lanky Parkers.  It had no flesh, only struts of metal and twists of cable, bunched into an approximation of musculature.  Entwined amongst this were great thickets of seaweed, spread like reptilian fins; somehow fixed to the synthetic skeleton were clusters of shells, of small stones, of waterlogged detritus too obscured by shadow to make out.  Man-made rubbish, tossed into the sea and forgotten, somehow reconstituted into this creature.

It had its long fingers pushed into the trickling water that ran along the bottom of the aqueduct's interior.  One hand had seven fingers, three of which made from what looked like bicycle spokes.  The others were a half-crab, pincer and all, fitted onto the wrist somehow.  Its second hand was a simple chunk of driftwood, shot through with wire-thin slivers of metal, broken and hinged.  From these makeshift appendages flowed an indefinable something , faintly iridescent.  It ran through the water like glitter.

Afraid but gripped by a strange curiosity, Louis dipped his fingers into the water.  There was a splash as the figure yanked its appendages free of the stream and jerked its head towards him; its bright round eyes, electronic and red and shuttered like traffic signals, glared at him through the darkness.  An unearthly keening sound, something like the groan of a strong wind, filled Louis' ears.

He ran, stumbling noisily out of the aqueduct and over the grid metal of the walkway.  He heard a screech of metal and turned back briefly to see the creature pulling itself out of the hole in the aqueduct, folding its limbs impossibly as it moved backwards, freeing itself and straightening up, hands dripping with moisture.  Parts of it moved organically, as though beneath the crusty remnants of the ocean there were living sea snakes, or cables shifting like sinew.

There was a curious sensation on Louis' hand, where he had touched the silver water; it was a tingling, tickling form of mild pain.  He felt a headache develop quickly, like a reaction to poison or radiation.  Images and pseudo-memories flickered incomprehensibly in his mind's eye, and he knew somehow that the creature was half machine, that it was creating and releasing hundreds—no, thousands—of other tiny machines into the water: nanites, that had burrowed under his skin.

They were benign.  They carried signals and created thought patterns to explain the creature's situation.  They didn't do very well.  Fear coalesced nauseously inside his stomach.  It was looking for something, or someone, and had been brought here completely by accident but hadn't the intelligence or will to escape.  How could it?  It had been here days and had yet to even discover the elevators, let alone learn how to use them.  It was some kind of damaged, artificial intelligence struggling to subsist in an alien place.  All it could do was search.

The nanites were benign, but Louis was getting another impression from the creature.  If this was what Parkers had seen, how had it fallen apart and reconstituted itself?  Or were there more than one?

No, that was unlikely, thought Louis as he moved, hiding behind a hunk of machinery (old, and in need of a square metre of limescale remover by the sound of it).  His ragged breath sounded ridiculous in his ears.  He had never run for his life before, and even now—with that monster getting ever closer—he could hardly believe that he was doing so.  Except ... perhaps it was only an assumption that the creature had malign intentions.

Swallowing air like a dose of courage, he stepped into the open.  The approaching figure stopped.  It regarding him without recognisable emotion.  Its organic components looked dead and brittle.  Its metal aspects shone dully.

A voice came from somewhere within it:

PLEASE DEACTIVATE ME FIRST  

Louis' mouth went dry. ‘I—I'm sorry?'

HELP ME FIND

‘I don't think there's anything I can do.  To help you, I mean.'

SUNDA STRAIT

It shambled forward another step, claw-hands half raised.  It was a mess of broken shells and tiny, tumbling grains of sand.

CHESTER PANG.  HELP ME FIND.

It must have recognised Louis' confusion, his desire not to help but to be anywhere near the thing.  It lunged, reaching to grasp his forearms and catching hold of one.  A sharp metal spoke bent against his unprotected skin, then popped under tension and cut a narrow tear across his wrist.  He yanked himself free--the thing was tall, but it wasn't that strong--and drove the heavy butt of his flashlight into its jagged shoulder.  A curve of plastic broke away and out spilled a clutch of tiny, half-dead lobsters.

With the dazed creatures clattering around his shoes, Louis chose flight over fight and turned to run.  A metal talon gripped his shoulder and pulled—

HELP ME FIND—

—whirling him around and sending him off balance; his shoulder struck the corner of a conduit cover, sharp and dull at the same time—

— MR PANG.   MR PANG.   SUNDA STRAIT

‘No, wait—'

Louis' fist came up, brandishing the flashlight, then arced, plunging its glowing head down into the chest of the creature.  Light splintered through dozens of cracks and holes in the creature's imperfect body.  Louis yanked defensively, raging, and pulled a huge portion of the figure's artificial torso free of the main structure.  It broke, chunks dangling from seaweed and cables.  It seemed that Louis had compromised the thing's integrity; it couldn't hold itself together; the torches that were its eyes flickered and pinged like spent bulbs.  The entire thing collapsed into a pile on the floor.

‘What the hell was that?'

Vince came clanging up the step from the central processor room, wholly rat-arsed and closely followed by Grayson and lanky Parkers.  They gathered must have heard the yelling and come stumbling, just in time to gather around a sad-looking pile of debris.  There were a few live sea creatures in there, jumping sand-fleas and a crab with its shell half staved-in.

‘You been sweeping behind the generators?'

‘You kidding?  I didn't sweep up even when I was a janitor.'

Louis found the brevity refreshing.  Unfortunately it didn't completely ward off the terror that still lingered—small now, already being stored away—within his trembling bones.  The adrenaline was wearing off.

Vince saw him begin to fall, and grabbed his elbows. ‘Hey buddy, you okay?  Stand up straight, will you?'

‘You saw a little horror?' Parkers requested quietly.  He caught Louis' eye in a way that forged an emotional chain, instantly. ‘Did you manage to get any ... explanation?'

Louis shook his head. ‘None at all.'

‘Come on,' say Grayson, ‘let's get you to your bed.  Big day tomorrow—you get to scrub the organic waste disposal unit.'

‘Now I know you're kidding.'

Grayson laughed, and even Vince gave a chuckle, but that was it.  Parkers lingered a little too long over the debris, putting his heel to a scuttling something, and then kicked it all—stones, shells, metal, plastic, crustaceans—to the side of the walkway, out of the way.

. .