Cosmic Heart
Awaken.
You don’t recall losing consciousness, just as you do not recall the circumstances which led you to do so. The fog of sleep clears with what little information you do have: This facility, with its stark walls of white and polished steel, is where you work and have called home for several weeks. The drills underneath the platform were aimed at an anomaly in the Earth’s crust beneath the ocean floor, and they were meant to punch through to it at some point today. What does not come to you is what has gone wrong.
The existence of this wrongness is obvious enough. The alarms have been running for long enough to wear out the sirens and leave only the blinking red lights on each corner of the break room you now sit in, and the only other detectable sign of life is a tiny spider you spot skittering towards the door beside you. Outside, you can hear the sounds of faint footsteps. Perhaps it’s a rescue worker, you reason, or at least someone who knows what happened here. You climb to your feet and push open the door.
Down the hall stands a single person, perfectly still and facing away. You recognize them from their clothing as one of your colleagues and a member of the research team, but with some sort of substance covering the back of their white coat with a deep black. You call out their name to no avail, and you approach.
Your hand sets on their shoulder just as the tiny spider climbs onto their foot. This grabs their attention, and you watch each of some twenty eyes of varying sizes track you from their places covering the creature’s head. The being you once knew, if only in passing, was gone; replaced by this perversion of humanity. You turn and run, with little direct attention given to the vague sound that you detect on the edges of your mind.
The creature begins to follow, shockingly nimble despite its limping gait, and you round the corner down the hallway you know to lead to the elevators. Your attention, however, is pulled towards the bathroom to your right. Something inside is pulling you mentally towards it, and you cannot find the strength to resist. You shove the door open and lock it behind you.
Inside, you are drawn towards that which calls you so persistently: the mirror above the sink. It appears just as it always has, reflecting the room behind you with the slightest green tint. What’s missing, however, is you. Your reflection is nowhere to be found, despite standing squarely in front of the polished surface. In stunned curiosity, you reach out and touch the mirror.
A loud bang rings around you the moment your fingers graze the frigid silver glass, which becomes crossed with cracks to the point of being useless. Like a gunshot, the sound rings for a few seconds before dying down, but leaves behind a foreign, but distinctly recognizable sound that fills the cool and misty air that now occupies the facility. You hear it as a slow tone of a bell, or perhaps a metallic clang drawn out to flow through the empty halls with no end. You hear soft hissing or whispering intoned into the ringing, but a pair of far more present sounds that draw your eyes to seek out their source.
The first is a very clear insectoid scuttling. You see a pair of abnormally large spiders climbing frantically towards the door, now barely hanging on its hinges. Their legs are thick like claws and their bodies pitch black, save for a conspicuous white abdomen striped with electric red cracks. They seem to be moving towards the source of the second noise: a set of voices. You don’t hear them converse, or even seem to acknowledge one another. They each sing to a rhythmless tune in a drowned and gurgled voice. Your curiosity draws you out towards them.
What awaits you in the hall are three creatures, not entirely unlike the one you’d narrowly escaped before touching the mirror. Humanoid, stumbling, but this time covered in a mass of eyes that envelops their shoulders. They pay no mind to you, instead marching towards the stairwell leading down to the drill maintenance deck. You can feel that they are moving towards the source of the bell tone chiming around you with no end, and you follow them quietly. Perhaps the source of this sound will let you return things to normal, perhaps your curiosity has gotten the better of you, or maybe you just want to see it for yourself.
You move more freely than they do, allowing you to get closer and closer behind them. Once you are nearly upon them, their singing is joined by another, more subtle sound. You can hear them quietly weeping through the notes pushed out through an indiscernible respiratory system, but it doesn’t seem to be sorrowful. It sounds like a mix of jubilation and terror, like a mind teetering on the brink of shattering. You round the corner and smoothly glide down the stairs. You can’t quite place it, but somewhere deep in your psyche, you know what these three creatures, now petrified at the sight of you, are feeling. You know they simply don’t understand.
A spider crawls up the stairwell while you descend, followed by three more. Each of them seems larger and louder than the last, with the fourth pausing when you focus on it. Its abdomen rotates, and you are met with a blue iris and black pupil in the center of its white expanse. The spider stares, then scuttles away faster. You feel your breath hitch and reach the next landing on these decidedly endless steps. In the stainless steel wall, you can just make out your silhouette being reflected back at you. You still have two arms, two legs, a torso and a head; all seems to be in order. An unknown duty filling your mind, you touch the wall.
Another sharp bang followed by deeper ringing. The wall in front of you is crossed with a thick, black fluid. The ringing you’d heard before is now deeper, stopping and starting up again every few seconds in a steady rhythm. Around you are huddled creatures, each nothing more than a mass of eyes perched on still-clothed legs. Unlike the previous, less grotesquely-malformed ones, these do not cower in fear or attack in a primal rage. They stand in organic motion, their eyes twitching to take in your presence and trembling in their fleshy sockets. You turn.
The stairs seem to drop off into nothingness, with the low ring pulsing from deep within the abyss below. You feel each tone pull you towards the edge, and the creatures clear a path for you. Standing on the edge, you gaze, pulling your own eyes downward to pick out the very slightest of harsh, orange light twinkling from the depths. It fades and shines with each pulse of the bell—no… beat of the heart. You know it to be a heartbeat—and swallows your stare into the endless black expanse that once held the facility’s lower structure. You reach out your hand and it pulls again.
You can’t remember falling or landing, but you regain yourself at the bottom of the void. Nothingness encroaches upon you and the entity which called you: an expansive orange mass slowly pulsating, making a deafening ring shake the air itself. Its surface, from what you can see, seems to be a crystalline stone, but moves and shudders like a living organ. The heart pulses while you approach, its surface shimmers and shifts. You see the clear, orange-tinted reflection, a pulsating mass of eyes, formed into a humanoid shape. Tendrils of black fluid hang from the mass like a stole draped around the neck. You lift your hand, its hand moves with it. You emit a sound, gurgled and echoing in the vast emptiness. You regard the heart fondly and set a dripping palm on its surface. Your vision shifts while the arachnid eyes climb onto it and return to their place crawling along your eye-covered body. You aren’t concerned. You know the heart better than any of the others. You were chosen to become more than human. Your mind is a small price to pay.
