Dark Matter Presents Zero Dark Thirty by Rob Carroll

Author:Rob Carroll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dark Matter Magazine
Published: 2023-02-08T06:30:18+00:00

This Choir of Ghosts

By Monte Lin

First published in Issue 009 (May–June 2022)

Subject-412 wakes in absolute darkness. Their drug-induced sleep leaves them groggy on the cold, stone floor, unable to shiver. Moments or perhaps hours pass, as their thoughts and memories sift and settle back into place. Lights. The operating table. The head surgeon’s worried brow. The realization hits Subject-412 in the chest: they are the Experiment now.

The Experiment never deviates. After the surgery, the test subject is placed into the Cube and sealed within. The subject receives nothing other than the key, a metal card two inches wide, three inches long, and barely a millimeter thick, randomly encrypted to open the door to the Cube. Once encoded into the key, all other records of the code are wiped. Sometimes the subject enters the Cube in their surgical gown. Oftentimes they don’t receive the dignity; the surgeons claim they can’t afford more gowns.

The Cube has enough air for a few days, but no food or water, so the subject must utilize their new implants to bend the fabric of space-time, reach through the basalt rock, and place the key onto the door to open it. There is no way to open the door otherwise. The surgeons on the other side require a week to decrypt the key, if they even have the desire to do so.

Families receive compensation for handing a subject over to the Complex, enough food and medicine for a year, multiple years if they ration. Desperately needed compensation in a world blasted white, the air dead and choking in ambient heat. The surgeons claim this is the best solution for humanity. They call subjects saviors to make everyone feel better about their sacrifice. “Once you can bend space-time,” they say, before throwing them into the Cube, “you can save us by carrying us from this dying world.”

Subject-412, encased in darkness, cries for what seems like hours. The cold basalt echoes back. They creep along the edges of the Cube, discovering the corners and edges. The surgeons believe the artificiality of the environment should force the subjects to focus. Nothing else exists in this tomb, nothing else except Subject-412 and the key and some scratches on one of the walls. Self-preservation, the surgeons believe, should trigger the implants. They have been wrong four hundred eleven times.

Those who ask why they must do this Experiment this way find themselves outside, their lungs seared by heat and silica. They pound on the steel door of the Complex with the other desperate souls, begging for food, water, and shelter. A couple even try to volunteer for the Experiment but are met with stony refusal: “Your knowledge of the Experiment biases the Experiment.” This isn’t true, but the message is clear. The surgeons are rational, the Experiment is rational, and rationality cannot be questioned.

With nothing to touch except basalt, nothing to hear except their own breathing, nothing to see except darkness, Subject-412 curls up into a ball and retreats into themselves. They fall into a fitful sleep, half dreaming, half awake.

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