From Levi Denikin
I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know how long it will be before you read this. The company that ran this facility—that runs this whole moon, really—they’re powerful, and a lot of smart people work for them, but they’re certainly not safe, and they don’t tell the truth. I hope they will leave their creations here to rot, to die—if they even can die—but they might be trying to bring this facility back online, or repurpose the space, or even be trying to salvage some of whatever those things are. Whatever brought you here, you should leave. Immediately. You might stand a chance of getting back to the surface, behind the thickest steel intergalactic wealth can buy, if you leave. But I am not getting out. They sealed us in. Left us to die in our hundreds.
I thought we just made chemicals here. Bio-computational substrate manufacture. That’s our stated industry. That’s the work I was a part of, in my own small way: pulling the future out of the future and into today. I believed in the work, even if I was just a janitor; but not anymore.
10:17pm. Night shift. That’s when something went wrong. I was cleaning a fermenting floor—you have to polish the chrome plating right off and then re-plate it to be sure there’s no contamination—when what felt like every alarm in the facility started going off. Don’t know if my ears’ll ever recover. People started running. I think only a couple minutes went by and I started seeing engineers and technicians come running past, babbling about an explosion, an escape, a wa v e from the lower levels.
“What lower levels?” I asked. The fermenting floors were housed on the lowest level of the facility, so I thought. 3B: 300 feet below the surface. Perfect for creating laboratory conditions on an industrial scale.
“6A,” said the pale young man I had stopped. “We’ve all got to go.” He didn’t say anymore, just gave me that deer-in-the-floodlights look—I swear he got another shade paler as I watched—and took off running.
I knew then for certain something big was going on, but I couldn’t stop anyone else, so I just followed the crowd. There were more people around me than I had ever seen here. And more and more kept coming in from branching hallways and hidden lifts. Some of them were injured: puncture wounds, missing strips of skin, embedded blades or sheets of a metal so reflective it blinded me as they rushed past. A few had missing limbs. I swear one had a missing head. All of them had the same look as that young man, save for a few I recognized. They worked with me. They didn’t know about these “lower levels” either.
There are four industrial elevators on level 3B, and each can carry 50 people at a time up to the surface. The lines to get on were barely lines but the few people in suits and their entourages managed to get on before anyone else, somehow. I waited—maybe an hour? It felt like an hour. I know I felt the increasing press of bodies and the increasing smell of blood and the slick screaming from somewhere behind, b elo w, and then I was on.
I was so close. Maybe 20 feet from the surface, from safety, when the lift slammed to a halt. From above, I heard the awful sound of those massive chemical containment doors shutting and sealing. Then welding. Then, the intercom:
“Attention employees. There has been a critical security breach in the research and development wing. All underground access has been sealed to prevent a moon-wide infestation. Rescue teams are on the way as we continue to monitor the situation.”
They weren’t. They aren’t. Of course they would never, not for us. All the important people were saved, and we were now part of the experiment. You might be too, if you’re reading this.
All our energy, our drive to escape, died at once. We stood or sat, staring at nothing, contemplating our fate. After a while, I realized I wasn’t just hearing the elevator’s electric hum, but another one too—something outside. Something crawling slick on sharp metal points on the outside wall. Then that something banged, hard, on the wall; and another something pierced a stinger through, dripping bright purple venom. Someone screamed. Someone hit a button, the wrong button, because it sent us down into those de p t hs, the source of whatever was attacking us. The lift rattled, and jerked, and the things outside were (I hoped) thrown off, before finally we came to a stop.
The hallway down here was blacked out, whether by them upstairs or th em down with us. The elevator wasn’t though, and it revealed the streaks of blood and strange green fluid on the white-tiled floor. It also revealed the th in g.
It had no being, fundamentally no wholeness, even though it existed as many parts in one connected physical space. It was obviously impossible, not dead only because it had never lived, and difficult to describe in terms that are or were real. It hurt to look at. It hurts to think about—I can only do so one part at a time. It was biological. I think it used to be a person. One of its spots probably used to be a face. It was certainly able to scream.
And maybe it’s this non-wholeness or maybe it did something to me or maybe I just blacked out, but I don’t remember much after that. In fact, I think that non-wholeness makes them really good at hiding. I’m almost certain now I’ve seen them wandering the facility before, t ame d, but it hurt too much to perceive them.
I’m pretty sure everyone else on that elevator is dead. I remember the acrid smell, all viscera and chemicals. I remember the way its flat, mirrored surface shredded the man in front of me like it was a forest of blades, even though it was a flat sheet of metal.
Somehow I ended up here, in what looks like a panic room. Totally safe, but totally alone—except for the corpses. These ones are at least regularly dead. And there’s enough supplies here to keep me going for a good long while. I just don’t know how well the door will be able to keep out the thi n gs that used to be people. The things they were making down here.
And I don’t know how long it’ll be before the t hin g in the corner notices me. Unless it already has.
I hope to God somebody finds this.
Please remember me.
Writer | Leland Culver ’24 | gculver24@amherst.edu
Editor | Mike Rosenthal ’27 | jrosenthal27@amherst.edu