Monster Nation(110)

'I kept her alive,' he said, over and over. The culmination of his life's work.

He had tried his best to give her back a face. To this end he had bought a porcelain domino mask'the kind found in little girl's bedrooms around the country'and tied it around where her head should be with a length of pink ribbon. From time to time it would begin to slip down and Vronski would patiently get up and readjust it.

He had not bothered to put any clothes on her, though Nilla imagined it would take a tent's worth of cloth to cover her swollen bulk.

'Is she' is she even aware of us?' Nilla asked, dragging her gaze away from Charlotte to look at the thing's husband. 'Can she smell us or something?'

'Please don't,' he hissed.

After dinner he agreed to take Nilla down to look at the Source. On the way she passed quite close by Charlotte. She noticed the mask had been broken at some point and very carefully glued back together.

“There have been some psychological adjustments we had to make,” he whispered, but said no more.

Vronski lead her down two flights of stairs into a room at the very bottom of the museum. It had been used once as a workshop and laboratory and it was still full of crates full of carefully-packed fossils. Vronski offered to show her his best specimens'he claimed to have a nearly intact archaeopteryx'but Nilla was far more interested in the room's other contents. Namely, the Source.

Various items surrounded it'what looked like tikis carved out of wood and shrunken heads mounted on sticks, while elaborate patterns of colored powder lined the floor, but the room was also stuffed full of scientific apparatus. A complicated looking device collected the energy of the Source and sent it through the black cables to where Charlotte waited upstairs. Vronski tried to describe how that worked but Nilla didn't care at all. The Source demanded all of her attention.

It was difficult to say how large it might be'it radiated life energy so strongly that when Nilla closed her eyes it looked like a blazing star. She could feel its power, quite literally'it pushed at her. It blew her hair back. It was beautiful, far more beautiful than a dead thing like herself deserved. Probably it was more beautiful than anything on Earth deserved. It was constantly in motion, its shifting, shimmering rays twisting through the air as if they were threads of gossamer billowing in a pleasant breeze.

It was the beginning, the start of all things. You could feel as much, if you reached out a hand toward it. It made you. It shaped you. From a center that was also an edge it reached out to every cell, to every twisted coil of protein. It spoke the language of chemicals binding together and combining, recombining, a language as softly spoken as pine needles falling on snow. It knew your thoughts. It gave you your thoughts and your feelings.

'I'm sorry,' Vronski said.

She looked up at him. 'For what?' she asked.

'It's just'you've been standing there for fifteen minutes now and I'd kind of like to get on with things. If you don't mind. You can go back to looking at it after you've killed me.'

Fifteen minutes? She had barely started gazing on the Source.

'I'm still considering what I should do,' Nilla said, collecting herself. And she was. She had choices, or at least a choice, for the first time since' well, the first time she could remember. She could kill the man who had started the Epidemic. In the process she would insure that nobody else could ever take the Source away from her'that her unlife would go on forever. Mael would like that. Alternatively, she could do what Captain Clark had wanted. She could shut this thing down. End her own existence, yes. End all the death and pain and horror too.

She thought of the creature upstairs that Vronski called his wife. Vronski had started the Epidemic in order to maintain her life, long past the point where anyone would think she would want to keep it. Nilla's choice was sort of the same. Prolong her own, largely miserable, existence, or choose death. Actual death.

She stalled. 'What is this?' She asked. 'How did you make it?'

'It's a field, a kind of biological field. It's similar to the Earth's magnetic field. Life couldn't exist without it. I didn't make it. It was always there, I just' well. I'm sure you don't want all the details. Imagine a balloon full of air. I stuck a needle in the balloon and now air is rushing out. Except this balloon won't ever deflate'it's constantly being filled back up with new air. This is a singularity, you see, a biological singularity. It's pumping out the raw energy of life itself. Ordinarily that power is used by the cells of living things, both as an energy source and a repository of patterns, a complete set of blueprints for every biological process. The cells control it and manipulate it via a feedback loop we don't really understand. I've liberated some of the energy from that system, to keep Charlotte's body from failing. Unfortunately I had no control over how much I liberated. It grows, it wants to grow. It keeps growing, spreading from one biological cell to the next. You, and the others like you, are the result.'