Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)(10)

At the time, I was seeking oblivion, and I sought in those blank, anonymous faces, even the most painfully familiar, a kind of benign escape. A death that would not mean being dead.





02: INTEGRATION

In the morning, I woke with my senses heightened, so that even the rough brown bark of the pines or the ordinary lunging swoop of a woodpecker came to me as a kind of minor revelation. The lingering fatigue from the four-day hike to base camp had left me. Was this some side effect of the spores or just the result of a good night’s sleep? I felt so refreshed that I didn’t really care.

But my reverie was soon tempered by disastrous news. The anthropologist was gone, her tent empty of her personal effects. Worse, in my view, the psychologist seemed shaken, and as if she hadn’t slept. She was squinting oddly, her hair more windblown than usual. I noticed dirt caked on the sides of her boots. She was favoring her right side, as if she had been injured.

“Where is the anthropologist?” the surveyor demanded, while I hung back, trying to make my own sense of it. What have you done with the anthropologist? was my unspoken question, which I knew was unfair. The psychologist was no different than she had been before; that I knew the secret to her magician’s show did not necessarily mean she was a threat.

The psychologist stepped into our rising panic with a strange assertion: “I talked to her late last night. What she saw in that … structure … unnerved her to the point that she did not want to continue with this expedition. She has started back to the border to await extraction. She took a partial report with her so that our superiors will know our progress.” The psychologist’s habit of allowing a slim smile to cross her face at inappropriate times made me want to slap her.

“But she left her gear—her gun, too,” the surveyor said.

“She took only what she needed so we would have more—including an extra gun.”

“Do you think we need an extra gun?” I asked the psychologist. I was truly curious. In some ways I found the psychologist as fascinating as the tower. Her motivations, her reasons. Why not resort to hypnosis now? Perhaps even with our underlying conditioning some things are not suggestible, or fade with repetition, or she lacked the stamina for it after the events of the night before.

“I think we don’t know what we need,” the psychologist said. “But we definitely did not need the anthropologist here if she was unable to do her job.”

The surveyor and I stared at the psychologist. The surveyor’s arms were crossed. We had been trained to keep a close watch on our colleagues for signs of sudden mental stress or dysfunction. She was probably thinking what I was thinking: We had a choice now. We could accept the psychologist’s explanation for the anthropologist’s disappearance or reject it. If we rejected it, then we were saying the psychologist had lied to us, and therefore also rejecting her authority at a critical time. And if we tried to follow the trail back home, hoping to catch up with the anthropologist, to verify the psychologist’s story … would we have the will to return to base camp afterward?

“We should continue with our plan,” the psychologist said. “We should investigate the … tower.” The word tower in this context felt like a blatant plea for my loyalty.

Still the surveyor wavered, as if fighting the psychologist’s suggestion from the night before. This alarmed me in another way. I was not going to leave Area X before investigating the tower. This fact was ingrained in every part of me. And in that context I could not bear to think of losing another member of the team so soon, leaving me alone with the psychologist. Not when I was unsure of her and not when I still had no idea of the effects of my exposure to the spores.

“She’s right,” I said. “We should continue with the mission. We can make do without the anthropologist.” But my pointed stare to the surveyor made it clear to both of them that we would revisit the issue of the anthropologist later.

The surveyor gave a surly nod and looked away.

An audible sigh of either relief or exhaustion came from the psychologist. “That’s settled then,” she said, and brushed past the surveyor to start making breakfast. The anthropologist had always made breakfast before.

* * *

At the tower, the situation changed yet again. The surveyor and I had readied light packs with enough food and water to spend the full day down there. We both had our weapons. We both had donned our breathing masks to keep out the spores, even though it was too late for me. We both wore hard hats with fixed beams on them.

But the psychologist stood on the grass just beyond the circle of the tower, slightly below us, and said, “I’ll stand guard here.”

“Against what?” I asked, incredulous. I did not want to let the psychologist out of my sight. I wanted her embedded in the risk of the exploration, not standing at the top, with all of the power over us implied by that position.

The surveyor wasn’t happy, either. In an almost pleading way that suggested a high level of suppressed stress, she said, “You’re supposed to come with us. It’s safer with three.”

“But you need to know that the entrance is secured,” the psychologist said, sliding a magazine into her handgun. The harsh scraping sound echoed more than I would have thought.

The surveyor’s grip on her assault rifle tightened until I could see her knuckles whiten. “You need to come down with us.”