44
He woke up with an oxygen mask strapped to his face,
surrounded by a series of seemingly identical men dressed
in white, their faces covered by surgeon’s masks.
“He made it,” one of them said. “He’s alive.”
“Any evidence of brain damage?” asked another.
Altman tried to speak, but couldn’t get his tongue around
the words. One of the doctors put a hand on his shoulder. It
was Stevens, he realized; he could recognize him by his
eyes. “Just relax,” he said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”
He closed his eyes, swallowed. And then a terrible
thought hit him: What if this was just another hallucination?
He tried to move his arms, but couldn’t. He opened his
eyes, looking desperately around.
“He’s confused,” he heard one of them say. “Disoriented.
He doesn’t know where he is.”
What was it she had said? You must not give in to the
Marker. You must not allow it to begin Convergence. He
had to tell them. “The Marker,” he whispered. Markoff
leaned close. “The Marker,” he repeated.
“The Marker?” said Markoff. “What Marker? He’s talking
nonsense. Give him another shot.”
Altman shook his head. Or tried. Whether his head
moved or not, he couldn’t say. Either it didn’t move or they
ignored him. He watched one of them fill a syringe and
prime the needle, without being able to do anything about it.
He tried to speak, made instead a gurgling, inarticulate
cry.
“It’ll be okay,” said Stevens, patting his arm. “Don’t worry,
Altman, we’re here for you.”
And then he felt the prick as the needle punctured his
flesh. His arm burned a moment, and then went numb. The
men in white were there for a moment longer; then they
slowly blurred and ran together and finally disappeared
entirely.
When he came conscious again, the room was empty,
except for three men: Stevens, Markoff, and another man
from Markoff’s inner circle whose name he didn’t know. He
was as large as Markoff but thicker, with a brutal, flat face.
They stood to one side of the bed, speaking in whispers
impossible for Altman to make out.
Stevens was the first to notice he was awake. He
gestured at him and whispered something. The other two
stopped talking. In unison, all three moved closer and
stared down at him.
“Altman,” said Markoff. “Still alive. You seem to lead a
charmed life.”
Altman started to respond, but Markoff held a finger up to
stop him. He reached down, removed Altman’s oxygen
mask.
“Are you feeling up to speaking?” asked Markoff.
“I think so,” Altman said. His voice sounded like it no
longer belonged to him, or belonged to someone that was
him but much older.
“You remember Stevens,” said Markoff. “This is Officer
Krax.”
Altman nodded.
“It’s very simple,” said Markoff. “I want you to tell me
everything.”
He did, starting with the moment when Torquato had
suddenly attacked and moving through to his hallucinations.
“Tell us more about these hallucinations,” said Krax.
“Does it matter?” asked Altman. “They were just
hallucinations.”
“It does matter,” said Stevens. “Indeed, it matters a great
deal.”
So, Altman, too tired to argue or make up a lie, told them.
When he was done, the three men withdrew to the far side
of the room, started whispering again. Altman closed his
eyes.
He was on the verge of falling back asleep when they
returned.
For a moment they just stared at him. Stevens started to
say something, but Markoff touched his arm and stopped
him.
“I want you to tell Stevens everything from here on out,” he
said. “Any dreams, hallucinations, anything at all out of the
ordinary, you contact Stevens right away.”
“This is crazy,” said Altman.
“No,” said Markoff, “it isn’t.”
And then they were gone, leaving Altman behind to
brood. He felt more confused and apprehensive than ever.
But a few minutes later the door opened, and a
distraught Ada rushed in, and he had other things on his
mind.
45
After nearly dying in the bathyscaphe, it was as if he was
living a different life, as if the world he had known had
become overlapped by another, ghostly one. He began to
see more people whom he knew to be dead: his father,
sister, a teacher he’d been close to who had committed
suicide, an old friend killed by a car in high school. They
would appear, looking nearly as real as anybody, and offer
vague and sometimes puzzling messages. Some spoke
against “Convergence,” urging him to hurry and “focus your
attention correctly” (as one of them put it) before it was too
late. Others spoke of unity, suggesting to him that it was
somehow too late, that he had misused the resources given
him and showed no signs of learning from his mistakes. All
urged him to leave the Marker alone. He told Ada about
seeing her mother. At first it made her angry, and then it
made her cry. But then, a few hours later she asked him to
tell her about the experience in detail.
“But why you?” she asked. “Why not me?”
A day later he woke up in the middle of the night to find
Ada staring at him. “I saw her,” she said, her face radiant.
“Like a vision. She was as real as you or me. She was
standing right over there, near the door.”
“What did she tell you?”
“That she loved me. And that we needed to leave the
Marker alone, to forget we ever found it. It must be
dangerous. Or powerful, anyway. What do you think the
Marker is?”
He explained to her what he knew, described the way the
Marker had looked underwater.
“It’s all connected,” she said. “The stories in town, these
visions we’re having, the artifact in the center of the crater.
I’m sure of it.”
At first she was ecstatic about seeing her mother. It had
been, Altman realized, an almost religious experience for
her in a way that it hadn’t been for him. For the rest of the
night she was manic, elated. But by the next morning her
mood had begun to turn. She was moody, depressed.
“Why can’t she be here all the time?” she asked. “Why
can’t she stay with me?”
“But it’s not her,” said Altman. “It seems like her, but it
isn’t. It’s a hallucination.”
“It was her,” said Ada, with a sense of conviction that
worried him. “And I need her. I need her back.”
And just when Ada was at her most depressed and listless,
her mother came back. Altman was in the room at the time,
beside her, and saw it as well. Only what he saw was not
her dead mother but his own dead sister. They both agreed
that something had happened, but had experienced it
differently. They were each shown whomever they wanted
to see. The words spoken were different as well, phrased
to fit the way the person herself spoke when she was alive.
But it all, with a little interpretation, fit into the idea of one
crowning event, Convergence, though the dead were less
clear about what exactly that was, or what could be done to
stop it.
Altman was suspicious. “It’s not real,” he tried to tell Ada.
“We’re being manipulated, used.”
“I know what I saw,” said Ada. “It was as real as anything
I’ve ever seen.” She wanted her mother back from the dead
so much that she wouldn’t listen. It was strange, Altman
thought, that the hallucination—or vision, as she called it,
was constant for her, always her mother, when his kept
changing from one loved one to another. But perhaps it was
simply because he was too skeptical to accept the
hallucinations as anything but delusion and so it had to
keep trying different strategies.
As he’d been ordered, Altman told Stevens about his
hallucinations, mentioning Ada’s as well. Stevens just
recorded what he said and nodded. He seemed tired,
overworked.
“What do you think it all means?” Altman asked.
Stevens shrugged. “You and your girlfriend are not the
only ones having them,” he said. “Others are experiencing
the same thing, and more and more frequently. Only dead
people, loved ones—the sort of people that you’d want to
take seriously. Some people, like you, believe they’re
hallucinations. Others, like Ada, believe they’re something
more.”
“Whatever it is, it wants us to do something,” Altman
said. “But it doesn’t know how to communicate it properly.”
“Not only that,” said Stevens, in one of his rare moments
of openness. “Our hospital ward is full of people suffering
from psychosis and the suicide rate is sky-high. Either it
wants a lot of us mad and dead or what it’s saying is
literally destroying us.”
There was, he noticed, a shift in the way people interacted
with one another aboard the floating compound. There was
a growing feeling that something was happening,
something that they couldn’t begin to understand. Some
people began clumping together in groups, sharing their
experiences with the dead, speculating that the boundaries
between heaven and earth had been broken. Others
dismissed them as a function of the signal emitted by the
Marker, similar to a drug trip. Others seemed to be having
a bad trip: they became withdrawn, confused, even violent.
He was in the laboratory, charting the moments when the
signal pulse was strongest and trying to see if his
hallucinations were occurring at those same times, when he
noticed through the open door people rushing down the
hall. He stepped out to get a better look, saw at the far end,
against the door, surrounded by a crowd now, a scientist
named Meyer, someone he didn’t know very well. He had a
laser scalpel in one hand, very close to his own throat.
“Now, Meyer,” another scientist was trying to say. “Put the
scalpel down.”
“Stay away!” Meyer shouted. His eyes were wild, darting
about in his head. “Just keep your distance! You’re with
them, I know it!”
“Who’s ‘them,’ Meyer?” the man asked. “Put the scalpel
down and I’m sure we can sort this all out.”
“Go get the guards,” someone said.
But Meyer overheard. “No guards!” he shouted, and
lunged forward, cutting off two of his friend’s fingers with the
laser scalpel.
The man screamed and fell backward, and Meyer turned
in a circle, brandishing the scalpel until everyone stood at a
little distance from him. He brought the scalpel back to his
throat.
“It’s too late,” he hissed. “We’re all dead or good as
dead. We cannot escape. Get out now before you become
one of them.”
And suddenly, with a swift, vicious movement, he
whipped the scalpel through his neck.
The wound was bloodless at first, slightly cauterized by
the scalpel, but then the blood began to pulse, a thick jet of
it spurting from his severed carotids. He gave a ghastly,
gurgling scream, the air hissing strangely from his mouth
and from his slit windpipe, and then took a step forward
and collapsed.
A few moments later, guards were there covering up the
body and hustling everyone away.
“What happened?” Altman asked one of the scientists
passing back by his door.
“Meyer went crazy,” the man said. “He started screaming
in the lab about the end of the world and then he stabbed
Westerman through the arm with a broken pipette. Then he
grabbed that laser scalpel and ran here.”
“But why?”
The man shrugged. “Who knows,” he said. “It’s just like
when that guard shot a technician last week for no reason
then shot himself. These things just happen.”
He sometimes found himself on the edge of a group,
listening to them expounding. The focus was usually on the
Marker, the name that Altman had learned to call it from his
hallucination having caught on with others as well. Altman
didn’t know who had first suggested that the Marker was
the product of alien technology, but the idea had caught on
quickly, and now many of the researchers in the facility
were convinced of it. There was a good deal of speculation
about the originators of the Marker, why it had been left
there, what it meant, and whether they should tamper with it
or leave it alone.
One day, on his way from his room down to the
submarine bay, he found the hallway blocked. Six or seven
people were gathered in the hallway, a group consisting of
both scientists and guards. One of the six, an older
scientist, addressed the others. When he saw Altman
coming, he fell silent.
“Excuse me,” said Altman, and slowly pushed through,
the people shuffling out of the way and allowing him to
squeeze past. It was strange. He was, he was sure,
interrupting something, but wasn’t sure what. Mutiny
maybe?
The answer came when, just as he reached the edge of
the group, the scientist began to speak again.
“You must free your flesh, and unify with the divine nature
of its construction . . .”
A religious meeting of some kind. Some crazed sect, no
doubt, or perhaps members of different faiths getting
together. He hadn’t seen anything resembling a chapel in
the floating compound, though Altman, not a religious man
himself, hadn’t realized this until now. He slowed, kept
listening, trying to get a sense of who these people were.
“We must lose ourselves to find ourselves,” said the
scientist. “Convergence is the only salvation. For I hear this
in its whispers, unless you can understand what it means to
become one with the Marker, you shall not have eternal
life.”
The word Marker, coming at a moment when he
expected to hear a deity referenced, made Altman shiver.
He continued hurriedly on. Only once he’d left the corridor
did he realize that what he had witnessed was the
beginning of some kind of new religion, this one based on
the Marker. It scared the shit out of him.
· · ·
In the days that followed, he overheard such talk more and
more frequently, even from Ada. Their opposing
philosophies of the Marker had come between them to an
even greater degree than his unwillingness to stop doing
things that might be dangerous. In a matter of a few short
days, their notions of the world had become radically
different. He realized at a certain point that they’d begun to
avoid each other when they could. He still loved her, but he
felt like he was losing her and didn’t know how to get her
back. Despite that, he was still surprised the first time he
saw her on the fringes of one of the religious groups.
“Can we talk about this?” he asked her, drawing her
away from the crowd.
“I’ve been trying to talk to you about it,” she said, “but you
just won’t see the light.”
“That’s not talking,” he said. “That’s preaching.”
They fought and fought, and Ada threatened to leave him.
Even though he knew it was hopeless, that their relationship
was in the process of dying, he agreed at least to hear her
out.
It was in listening to Ada that he began to get a clear
sense of the believers’ philosophy. They believed the
Marker to be divine, that it had been sent to them by God,
for humanity’s benefit. We must believe in it and bend
ourselves to its will and then it will heal us. It will unify us
and make us free and perfect. A strange mishmash of
Christianity and paganism, it gave people something to
hold on to in the face of the uncertainty and anxiety about
the Marker. Soon, Altman realized, a new problem would
emerge, as everyone on board, just like he and Ada, would
be split between believers and unbelievers.
At first Markoff’s guards ignored this, but as the groups
became larger and more dynamic, they started to break
them up, presumably on Markoff’s orders. But this only
seemed to make people want to meet more frequently. It
seemed an indication to many that there was something the
military didn’t want them to know.
Meanwhile, plans to raise the Marker continued. There
was still a great deal of excitement, but it had
metamorphosed into fervor on the one side and
apprehension on the other. Altman went down in the
bathyscaphe twice more, both times alone, both times to
supervise the robots attaching cables to the net that now
contained the Marker. Twice more, hovering near the
ocean floor, he hallucinated Ada’s mother. She repeated
what she had said before, but it was no clearer this time.
“Where exactly shall we leave the Marker?” he asked her.
The Marker, as long as it lives within this sphere of
gravitation, is where it must be.
What the hell does that mean? he wondered.
“What is going to happen to us?” he asked.
You must not study it. If you do, you will succumb to
Convergence, she declared. Perhaps it is already too late.
“If we converge, what will happen?”
You shall finally begin, from the new beginning.
“What does that mean?”
You shall be made one and you shall lose yourself.
He came back up to the surface feeling even more
confused than before. He thought maybe the believers were
right. That the Marker was something divine. He thought,
What if it’s a homing beacon for an alien race, something
to call them down to us, the forerunner of our own
destruction?
No, he was not the sort of person who was easily given to
belief. He didn’t know if he believed in God, and he
certainly didn’t believe in organized religion.
· · ·
Late one night, while he was getting ready for bed, Ada
nowhere to be seen, probably hiding from him, a knock
came at the door.
He went to the door. “Who is it?” he asked.
“Field,” said a voice through the door. “Let me in.”
Field? Why would Field want to see him? They hadn’t
gotten along well since they’d first come to the floating
facility.
When he opened the door, it was to find Field flanked by
a dozen others.
“What is it?” asked Altman upon seeing them.
“We need to talk to you,” said Field. “Please let us come
in.”
Not knowing what else to do, Altman did. They filed
solemnly in, one by one, standing in place or sitting on the
bed, filling the room.
“We’ve come to ask you to lead us,” said Field.
“Lead you? Lead you in doing what?”
“You’ve seen it,” said someone from the crowd, Altman
didn’t see who.
“Seen what?”
“The Marker,” said Field. “You’ve spent more time
around it than anyone else. We know what happened on the
bathyscaphe. When it killed others, it left you alive. We
know that it converses with you. You have been chosen.”
“How do you know what happened on the bathyscaphe?”
Altman asked.
“We have brethren not only among the general
population,” said Field. “We have many close to Markoff.
You understand, more than anyone else. You must guide
us. You are our prophet. It is the Marker ’s will.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Altman. “You want me to
lead you as the prophet of your religion?”
A rumble of assent shivered through them. For Altman,
time seemed to have slowed to an excruciatingly slow
pace. He moved back until he was touching a wall.
“Did Ada put you up to this?” he asked.
“Please,” said Field. “Tell us what to do.”
“No way,” said Altman.
A collective groan arose from the crowd. “Are we not
worthy?” asked Field. “What must we do to be worthy?”
“I liked you better when all you did was sit at your desk for
eight hours a day,” said Altman. “And I didn’t like you much
then.”
“You shall lead us,” said Field. “You cannot abandon us.”
“I don’t believe in the shit you do,” said Altman.
They stared at him, astonished. When he looked back at
Field, he saw a crafty expression had fallen over his face.
“This is a test,” he said. “He is testing us.”
“I am not testing you,” he said evenly.
Field smiled. “We understand,” he said. “Now is not the
time. We shall watch and wait. When the moment comes,
we will be ready to come to your side.”
“I’ll say it again,” said Altman. “I am not a believer.”
“But you will be,” said Field. “I know. You may be a
reluctant prophet, but you are a prophet nonetheless. I have
seen it in a vision.”
“Now is not the time,” said Altman. Get the hell out.”
They filed slowly out, each stopping to lay a hand on his
arm or shake his hand, touching him as if he were some
sort of good luck charm. His skin was crawling.
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