Tales from the Bat - Beyond the Rift

October 2066. In a secret military facility, General H.H. Boost discusses the existence of Screamers with his men and the possible implications of the existence of a world beyond their world. A world that could hold the keys to immense resources... or certain doom.

(Proofread and edited by Kaleb O'Halloran)

One step forward. The sound of boots on steel mesh, slowly moving towards the control room. Towers of computers, and tons of other hardware he couldn’t understand the function of, were looking right at him as he entered the premise, marching like a soldier. A soldier, like the guards staring at him from the sidelines, in utter silence, without even a hint of a whisper. They probably wanted to talk about the newcomer – that middle-aged man with fiery, red hair and a strange tribal tattoo around his right eye – but they would never dare to, not in his presence. He smirked. That was what respect looked like. That was exactly what he wanted from his subordinates.

He mentally counted the people within the room. Five trained army professionals, sixteen others, either scientists or technicians. And one corpse, or at least, what looked like one. Were he to trust his gut, the number of soldiers in the room would have exceeded the number of civilians by one point five to one, but it would have probably looked too unnecessarily confrontational – he didn’t want to make the eggheads feel like they were forced to work for him, even if that was precisely the case. They already learned it the hard way when Dr. Shimovitz was found at the bottom of the Irish Sea, after having courteously refused his requests. That had indeed been a pity. Menza Shimovitz was one of the brightest minds in evolutionary biology, widely regarded as the authority on alien lifeforms and pseudohumans. But a bright mind can’t do anything against lead, especially when administered in small-caliber bullets. It had pained him to order his underling to execute the old man, but he needed an example, in the name of national security.

He shook his head. If Vassili was still alive, he wouldn’t have approved. Violence wasn’t something he was used to resorting to. But Vassili was history, at that point in time. The founder of die Fledermaus was no more than a cold body, buried inside a monumental grave somewhere in Austria, at the not-so-venerable age of sixty-two. Death by lead poisoning, lead which had also been administered in small-caliber bullets. Such a shame he had to go, but that was the way of the world. When you are in a position of power, you end up attracting enemies. Sometimes those enemies come from the outside, and sometimes from the inside. And Vassili der Fledermaus (often misspelled as “von Fledermaus”, but it was an understandable mistake) had collected a few too many of them. Despite his family name sounding somewhat ridiculous and on-the-nose (der Fledermaus literally meant “of the bat”, as in the animal, when translated to English), he was a great man, with a refined sense for politics and the way society worked. He knew which buttons to press to bend politicians to his will, he knew how to lobby, he knew how to motivate his followers. At times, though, he behaved like a man from a different century, very old-fashioned, strict and unforgiving, even with himself. No room for errors, no room for vices. Truly an inspiring figure – one he had even considered a father of sorts. An inspiring figure that had to depart from this cold sad world, if the Bat wanted to spread its wings and hunting grounds further.

“General Boost!”

The nearest soldier greeted him with a standard military salute. He reciprocated, then patted on his shoulder.

“At rest, Lieutenant. At rest. How’re things going?”

The lieutenant pointed his finger to one of the scientists.

“Dr. Zojimbo is finishing the preliminary analysis. I believe he may have an update for you, but... uh, sorry, Sir, I don’t understand a word of what he says.”

The soldier pointed to another part of the room, which Boost turned his attention to. There stood a man, most likely in his fifties, with long, greasy, unkempt black hair, glasses, and a messy, short, badly-shaved beard. He was wearing a long, white lab coat and plastic gloves. He was also wearing a face mask, but it looked like it was struggling to stay on right. Boost sighed. In the two years Zvonimir Zojimbo had worked for him, he refused to change even one bit. He was still the usual misanthropic social reject, contrary to most of his colleagues and peers. For all the many negative stereotypes on scientists that existed, he wore almost all of them on his sleeve. Boost would have gladly left him to his own shenanigans at the ESPDeC headquarters in Aubépine, if only there existed another expert of his caliber on the effects of distortion energy on the human body. Sure, there were a few others with the knowledge, if one looked hard enough, but none of them had witnessed those effects as closely as he had, and studied them in such painstaking detail. But when you hire a genius – or a self-proclaimed one, at least – the full package comes with some caveats. Boost knew he had to tread lightly around him and second his weird manias, if he didn’t want to have to dispose of yet another corpse in the English Channel. With that in mind, and mentally preparing for more anger management sessions with his therapist, he approached that disheveled, useful moron who was toying with scalpels and expensive sensors not even ten meters away from him.

“Good morning, Doctor. I hope I’m not interrupting something.”

“You are always, always interrupting something – my breakfast, my thoughts, my experiments, my sleep. But that’s fine, I can’t expect a brute to have more than one working neuron at a time – let alone two.”

Boost drew a deep breath. In his younger years, he would have immediately smacked that pretentious prick against the floor and smashed all his teeth with a kick of his steel-tipped boots for such a gratuitous remark. Then, Vassili taught him how violence might be counterproductive, with some practical examples, changing his worldview significantly. He had learned how to tolerate an insult or two before going ballistic – which was, admittedly, also what had allowed him to ascend to the rank of General. He looked down at the bed in front of the good doctor. There lied what was definitely a body, but defining it as “human” might have overstretched the definition of the term. Sure, it had two arms and two legs, a head with what resembled eye cavities and what could loosely be called a mouth. But the skin was of a completely unnatural color – a dead gray that looked like it could fade away at any time. The figure had no nose either, and the teeth were just plain wrong, more similar to those of a shark than a man. The eyes were also strange, enveloped in a thin film that had shone a warm yellow, when that being was alive. Of course, Boost had encountered something like that before, but it was still more human than the horrific mockery he was seeing in front of him.

“Major, care to explain to me once again where in the everliving sphereless hell you found this mess of a creature?”

Boost rolled his eyes. Zojimbo was really testing his patience, that morning.

“It’s General.”

“My brain already allocated you as Major, can’t change it that easily. It’s read-only memory, at this point.”

Boost cursed under his breath. Despite being corrected any and every time he mistook his rank, that egghead seemed to not care in the slightest. True, he had held the position of Major when he was working as chief inspector of New Scotland Yard and a representative for the army, but that had been three years ago, when he and Zojimbo first met – at the wedding of one of his subordinates. It felt truly unbelievable, in hindsight. Boost the Butcher as the civil servant officiating the marriage of one of his detectives. He had done that only because Lorenz Kristhhoffer wouldn’t have taken his refusal lightly and would have probably scattered his entrails around France. But, no, that wasn’t the whole truth, he had to be more honest with himself. He had loved that experience, to let a bit of his goofball attitude take the spotlight, the one he kept on repressing in his everyday work. Detective Kristhhoffer was the only one he could be himself with, when drinking together after celebrating a successful case closed. Boost was also one of the first to know about his engagement, as he was excitedly told after the detective’s sudden return from France. It was a shame he couldn’t bring him to join die Fledermaus. Lorenz – or rather, EiN, the name he demanded to be called by – was too black-and-white when it came to good and evil. Joining the equivalent of a Freemason lobby that operated in parallel to the state wouldn’t have matched his tunes. It had been painful to Boost to let him go – he wished things could have been different between them. He truly missed the short time they spent together. Being alone at the top, after Vassili’s untimely demise, had been taxing on his psyche. And that idiotic scientist blabbering in front of him wasn’t helping at all.

“Hello, Major? Hello? I’ll ask again, how did you come into possession of this specimen? And, more importantly, when? The isotopic dating values are all over the place! If we take some of its stomach tissue, it seems to have had no exchange with the outside world for at least five hundred years, which is simply not possible! The lung tissue is more compatible with today’s standard, but try again with some of the other organs”, he said with an overblown emphasis, while making air quotes with his fingers, “and you get anything from fifty years in the past to two thousand. Really, you can almost choose a random number between one and five thousand and you will almost surely find one part of this body that is dateable in that interval, give or take one hundred years! For the everlasting love of the mighty celestial sphere, tell me what’s the deal with this thing!”

Boost stared at him with a slight bit of covert murderous intent, but the question was indeed intriguing – and was in fact the very reason he had wanted Zojimbo to analyze the body.

“We retrieved this specimen, codename Donner, in Euterpe, last year. Do you recall the ruckus surrounding the United Nations convention on the future of distortion plants? We collected it during our cleanup operation, together with the Host of the Walking Night.”

“The one we lost thanks to the incompetence of you and your subordinates?”

“...That one, yes.”

Zojimbo was steadily increasing his risk of becoming haemophage food, that morning. The loss of Aylin Mary Yang at the hands of Delta Team had been a stain on Boost’s tenure and was still hurting him as a painful memory. He was doing everything for the good of his nation, everything – even keeping such a potentially dangerous Reality Oscillation Phenomenon under control – and that was what he got back? Betrayal? That idealistic feline asshole in charge of Delta Team even went on to marry the specimen in question. Boost already knew he couldn’t trust mutants, but that was just a step too far. That overgrown cat really decided to put the security of his country in jeopardy because he wanted to bed her that badly? In comparison, being the covert head of a criminal cartel such as die Fledermaus was a much lesser felony in his worldview, especially if done for what he saw as the greater good. Except it wasn’t one hundred percent true either. Boost wasn’t a philanthropist, nor a selfless man. When his needs and those of his country aligned, he was very content with doing the right thing. However, when they didn’t, his own goals had absolute priority. For example, he was pretty confident the government wouldn’t have greenlit his use of a military-grade killer robot to try and recover his property, but at that time it was the best solution he could come up with, free from the shackles of bureaucracy. Sadly, it didn’t turn out well.

“Our contingent, led by Lieutenant Seamus Ondra, retrieved both specimens at ground zero of the massive Reality Oscillation Phenomenon that engulfed the city center. The specimen known as Host of the Walking Night was escorted to a dedicated facility and contained there. The specimen known as Donner was instead first brought to a nearby military hospital, as its condition seemed to deteriorate very quickly. Its vital functions ceased not even one hour later. It screamed in pain for the whole duration of its passing. We carried out a summary analysis, but to avoid the risk of losing the body, we decided to freeze it and place it in a sterile chamber for as long as needed to retrieve an expert on the matter. That expert being you, Zojimbo. Only, I couldn’t really let you work on it without first testing your skills on other, less important cases. The existence of the Donner specimen was – and still is – to be kept under the strictest military secret.”

“Well, jeez, of course it died in the span of one hour! Look, look at these scans! Notice anything wrong with them?”

Zojimbo waved a stack of printed photos and diagrams under Boost’s nose. He grabbed them, looked intently at the black and white ultrasound pictures, searching for the purported details he was supposed to discern. Then he shivered. Even to his untrained eye, there was clearly something unusual in those scans. Something unsettling.

“What the hell? A stomach isn’t supposed to look like that. And... is that a liver? Why there are two of them? Three kidneys? And – wait – no connection between his esophagus and stomach? Are those sponges supposed to be lungs?!”

He lifted his gaze from the papers, stared at the scientist with contempt, his face turning redder and redder.

“Zojimbo, what is this, an out-of-season April Fool’s joke? A creature with internals like this wouldn’t be able to survive for even one minute, let alone one hour!”

“You tell me, Major! Are you even sure this... thing was alive in the first place? Because you’re not the only one who thought this looked like a bad joke. This mess could have been generated by putting together disjointed concepts about human anatomy, feeding them to a blender, puking into the blender, pouring the result into wooden casts of random shapes and asking a kid to place them in the correct spots. It’s just wrong… like something out of those documentaries about generative AI from the early ‘20s! You know what I mean, Major? Spheres that look like cubes, fingers that shouldn’t exist – that kind of thing, but with internal organs instead! And it’s real. How this... thing could live for more than a minute is a mystery!”

Boost looked back at him, then at the ultrasound pictures.

“So you’re telling me...”

“That this organism couldn’t possibly have been alive, yes. Its organs, its whole body composition, the structure of its veins... nothing, absolutely nothing is in the right place. Yet, this creature walked, talked, and caused several thousand euros of property damage. You mentioned a ROP earlier? There was a giant ROP there, correct?”

ROP. Reality Oscillation Phenomenon. Every inexplicable event that was caused or thought to be caused by its proximity to a distortion plant was given that label. The Walking Night was one such example, as well as the massive disruption witnessed in Euterpe. Boost didn’t want Zojimbo to bring the discussion in that direction though, not yet. He first wanted to learn what else the sphere-obsessed egghead in front of him had in store. Just as he went to open his mouth…

“There was, yes.”

Someone else replied in his stead. To Boost’s surprise, the voice belonged to the lieutenant who had greeted him before. He was standing there, staring blankly in their direction, raising his index to underline his response. Boost looked back at him with a ‘who said you could talk?!’ stare that could have killed a puppy, prompting the lieutenant to shrink back into the background. However, Zojimbo was more than willing to keep listening.

“No, no. Don’t stop. Tell me more.”

Boost glared at Zojimbo, then back at the soldier. He rolled his eyes, waved his hand as if to begrudgingly give permission.

“Lieutenant Ondra, if you please...”

Seamus Ondra nodded weakly, slowly stepped forward.

“When I reached Euterpe with the rest of the extraction team, the city center was enveloped by a sort of... red and black bubble. Inside the bubble, we found part of the city as we knew it, but mingled together with several inexact reproductions of other real places. That wasn’t the weirdest part, though… Most of the space was occupied by what amounted to a reddish desert, under a bloody sky, filled with long, contorted tentacles and puddles of ooze. We took back some samples of both the sand and ooze, to analyze them later in the lab. They showed the same dating anomalies as the creature’s body, if I remember correctly.”

Boost nodded while rubbing his chin, lost in his thoughts. Ondra’s summary was indeed correct. The samples from what some members of the strike team called the “hell dimension” or “shadow desert” had a weird chemical composition that quickly decayed when examined in the lab, as if the laws of physics behaved slightly differently within that bubble. The Carbon-14 dating also yielded contrasting results, with differences of centuries, if not millennia. No sample of the tentacles was retrieved, though – they were not considered a priority, at that time. In hindsight, they should have taken some material from them too. He looked back at the corpse, the body with those blackened eyes, that mouth that screamed in pain from the bottom of its non-functional lungs. Boost turned to the lieutenant.

“So, it could only live inside its own pocket dimension? Not much different from a fish in a bowl.”

“But what of the other corpse we retrieved, Sir? The specimen we have here was alive and well when we zeroed in on him, but on the way back we collected another body, one with a gunshot wound through its head. Where is that one now?”

Zojimbo’s eyes widened as he stared at the soldier, then back at Boost.

“A... another one? You have another one of those?!”

Boost lowered his gaze, chuckled nervously. Ondra truly couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut. He took a mental note to find some cruel and unusual punishment for him, like sending him on a week-long night shift to collect used condoms from the trash cans of Le Coq Heureux for important genetic analyses required to identify a criminal in hiding. Yet, he couldn’t shove the lieutenant’s words back into his throat, now that Zojimbo had already heard them. But, for some reason, he felt oddly excited by that development. Something in his brain had clicked. The other body. Or rather, bodies, plural. That was the connection, the one connection he needed to verify, the one connection that looked so far removed from the realm of possibility he thought he was mad for even contemplating it. Now, the pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall into place, the very same place too: the other corpse Ondra and his team retrieved had such a messed up internal anatomy that there was no chance in hell it could have once been a living organism. It was wrong, completely wrong, but in a wildly different way from what the current specimen showed. Two hearts. That detail had haunted his mind for weeks. That thing had two hearts, one of which not even connected to any vascular system. He thought... his scientists thought, too, that it had to be a hoax, a prop of some sort, a puppet used by the real Donner. But, in hindsight, it all made sense. Everything made sense.

He nodded, stared back at Zojimbo, careful to avoid directing his burning gaze at Lieutenant Ondra for now.

“I guess an explanation is in order. The reason why I wanted you to analyze this corpse, more than one year after collection, is that... hold on, I think it’s easier if I show you the pictures. Strictly confidential, alright? One word out and you’ll take a permanent vacation to the bottom of the Thames.”

Boost made his way to a monitor hanging on the nearby wall, passed his index finger on its controls, let his retina be scanned by a small lens. The screen sprang to life with a cheerful jingle, showing a welcome message addressed to Heinz-Harald Jacob Jessen Lewis Damon Michael Sebastian Boost. He heard muffled laughter in the background, the voices of the soldiers who were unaware of his full denomination and probably found it funny. He growled, taking a mental note of which of his subordinates would require some disciplinary action. He hated how the identification system kept on displaying his whole name. He hated his parents too, for deciding to give him such a comically long sequence of names, probably the result of some twisted bet. He knew that five of his seven names (“Heinz-Harald” counted as just one) weren’t shared with any other living or deceased relatives from the last four generations – he had scoured through the family tree to try and guess where they came from – but he had never had the guts to actually ask his parents about them. They were still alive and enjoying their retirement in a country home, though, proud of how their kid was now a renowned army leader. Maybe he could finally inquire about it, after fifty or so years. It would be a good occasion to dine together, argue with his father for hours about how the repeal of the Morelli laws had been a bad thing for society, and be asked by his mother why he hadn’t settled with a significant other yet – for the seven hundredth time. In hindsight, it was amazing how they hadn’t divorced after such a long life together, and that he was getting along with them rather well – despite their wildly different views on mutants and pseudohumans. Maybe it had to do with the period they were born in. They were both alive and well into their teens when EXODUS made first contact in 2011, and witnessed the Helsinki disaster in 2014 firsthand. They saw how those space lizards offered to help with rebuilding Europe in the aftermath of the disaster, despite their difficulties with human languages. Boost was convinced that both his parents must have had an affair or two with a devsk or a shoiga in their young age. The thought of one of his parents bedding an alien lizard made him shiver.

He sighed. That was not the right moment for those thoughts. The reason he switched on that screen had priority over everything else. He brushed off the chuckles and scrolled through several folders, before finally landing on the correct one. He opened it. It contained five pictures, with dates ranging anywhere from three months prior to just a couple days ago. Zojimbo could still only see the previews, but it was enough to make his body jolt. Ondra kept his mouth shut, waiting for his boss to talk instead. All other soldiers followed suit. Boost appreciated the silence. Exactly what he needed to forget about his name debacle.

“In the past ninety days, we have retrieved five additional samples. All designated as non-living.”

He zoomed in on the first picture with an elegant gesture. A gray body, cloaked in a black habit, was lying face down on the asphalt, its fingers stretched and twisted at an inhuman angle, its arms almost dislocated.

“This was in Tel Aviv, Israel. According to unreliable, third party accounts, this creature appeared out of a red fracture, shrieked for one minute as if in absolute pain, then collapsed and laid motionless.”

Another gesture, another picture. Another body, in what looked like a field of wild grass.

“Avigny, France. Found by a local excursionist. No live reports on its original status, except that it was inactive when retrieved. This body, though, had a face – or something resembling one. The gray skin meshed with a texture more similar to human tissue near its head, allowing us to perform some basic checks. The individual was identified as Antoine François-Marie LeJarme, an Encorp operative who took his own life in 2052.”

Ondra looked at Zojimbo, trying to gauge his thoughts on the revelation, maybe find a comforting lack of surprise, as if that was something easily explainable. Zojimbo’s face, though, had lost all color and was catatonically focused on the display. He seemed to want to say something, but all he could do was stutter. Boost looked back at his audience. The soldiers were murmuring, the scientists too. He could feel the atmosphere had become heavy, but all eyes were on him. It was time to bring the show to the next step.

“We thought it was a stage prop or something of that nature, especially because LeJarme’s original head was… not in a state to be reconstructed so easily. The man’s actual corpse is also still stored where it should be – six feet under, in a French graveyard. Thus, the body that was retrieved in Avigny cannot be his. Moreover...”

Boost gestured three more times, bringing the other three pictures into focus, creating a collage of dead, cloaked bodies.

“...all five of the samples we retrieved presented internal anomalies. Organs that shouldn’t have been there, some duplicated, some similar in shape but of completely different functions, some similar in function but of completely different shape. In all cases, though, no credible witness could testify with absolute certainty that those... things were alive, even for one minute. Thus, we filed those as either limited irregularities or what amounted to a publicity stunt. For a while, we even thought it was viral marketing for yet another B-movie based on the events of Euterpe... until one of our scientific consultants reminded us of the Donner specimen we hadn’t analyzed in detail yet.”

Boost gazed at the silent crowd in front of him, at each and every one of their stunned faces.

“I was hoping to find out there was a significant difference between those Donners and this Donner... but, apparently, that was too much to ask for.”

One hand raised, one of the soldiers shaking it nervously. Boost nodded.

“Corporal Byle?”

“If I may, we do have first person accounts of one Donner, most likely the same Donner, being spotted in Euterpe, then Northern Algol, and later, in Euterpe again – without any connections to a wide-scale Reality Oscillation Phenomenon. If all Donners we have analyzed were unsuitable for living, how is that possible?”

“Maybe that Donner was different. Maybe it was the only one who could act on its own. Or maybe he was the only copy whose internal defects didn’t make it impossible for him to live – at least for a limited time. There’s also a chance that every Donner we’ve analyzed has been a biological construct of some sort, built by the one true Donner to make us believe there was more than one of them. But, until further analysis, speculation is all we have.”

That wasn’t the full truth. What scared Boost the most wasn’t the existence of the bodies, no. It was the part that he didn’t speak of openly, the two working hypotheses that he had built with other Fledermaus operatives and that he didn’t want the army to catch wind of so soon. One, that there was a slim chance one or more Donners survived their one-way trip and were now roaming the world, hidden in shadows, right as he was speaking. And, two, if that wasn’t the case, it still meant that something or someone was trying to intrude on their reality, from that “hell dimension”. Something that got lucky once, with one usable Donner pawn and that, most likely, hadn’t been able to replicate its original success yet. Something desperate enough to send half-baked copies without so much as basic functioning anatomy, but also able to somehow access information from the other side – like LeJarme’s face. Which meant that the opposite also had to be true, that they could build a bridge towards that crimson desert – an inverse Reality Oscillation Phenomenon. In front of his scared audience, Boost wore a tired smile. Discovering more about what lied beyond the rift could have been the gateway to more power... or to horrors beyond belief. He didn’t yet know if he was ready to face that risk. Only one thing was certain to him, though: sooner or later, they would have found out.

With or without their consent.