Chapter Text
When Jan’s phone rings he nearly has a heart attack. The sound brings him abruptly back to reality, inside the four walls of a building the size of a building, and he draws breath for what feels like the first time in years, knuckling tears out of his eyes. He stares at his phone, exactly as big as it is and lighting up with every ring, and only then does he realize there’s a reason it shouldn’t be ringing. Nobody should know this number. It’s the phone he uses when he needs to make outgoing calls and it has a different, unfamiliar ringtone from the one he uses for employment.
He lets it ring, just staring at it with his heart tripping, until it stops. After about thirty seconds the phone chimes to let him know he has a new voicemail.
He gets up unsteadily to make himself a cup of tea before he listens to it. There is very little more soothing than listening to a kettle bubbling in the kitchen corner of the room. It seems to make a small space filled with steam and comfort—he feels a little guilty indulging in small spaces these days, which is why his bed is a futon in the middle of the floor in an enormous one-room flat that’s 50% window. To get him used to it, to get him used to seeing the void of space outside his window every damn night, so yawningly large that it threatens to swallow him up again—
He listens to the voicemail. Yes.
It’s an old woman he doesn’t know. She doesn’t give her name. All she says is: “Mr. Kilbride, it would be to both our advantage if you would agree to come and talk to me at the Magnus Institute in Chelsea. Do not call me back at this number, but I would appreciate it if you answered next time. Thank you.”
He’s strangely comforted by how her paranoia seems to equal his own. A kindred spirit, as it were. Obviously he’s not stupid enough to actually go, but he does look up the Magnus Institute. Their Wikipedia page says they’re focused on paranormal research; other than that it’s very short. The body of the article seems to be copied directly from their website, which is nice, very legitimate-looking. He closes it and starts on making dinner.
The next day the Magnus Institute calls again. Jan answers and says, “Sorry, not interested,” and hangs up. His phone starts ringing again almost immediately.
“Please, let me speak before you reject my offer,” says the old woman when he picks up, sounding irritated.
“What’s your name, then?”
“Gertrude Robinson, head archivist at the Magnus Institute.”
“And how did you get this number?”
“After three months of trying to find you in the traditional way I decided it would be more expedient to simply look up your contact information.”
He doesn’t understand how she could know that, what kind of organization could give her that—and she’s been looking for him from the moment he set foot back on Earth. His heart crawls up into his throat like a mouse trying to escape from his chest. “…How?” he croaks.
“I have the ability to see these things, Mr. Kilbride.”
“Are you threatening me?”
She sighs. “I’m asking you to visit the Institute and give a short account of what you experienced on the Daedalus. There is no consequence if you refuse, but you may learn something to your advantage.”
So she has all the information—the same way she found out his unlisted phone number by ‘looking’—and she’s offering some of it to him. She’s offering to tell him what the hell happened up there. “Right. Yeah. Okay. Are you open on Sundays? It’s the only day I don’t work.” Well, it’s the only day he’s not required to come in, but a lab tech never actually has a full day off when there are cell cultures to coddle. He can pop in before his train leaves for London.
“I can arrange to be in this Sunday. Thank you, Mr. Kilbride.”
Nobody else seems to be in the building besides Robinson, who opens the door to his uncertain knock. The narrow hallways have absolutely no room for anyone to be hiding and watching him even if they were in at work on a Sunday, but he still feels eyes on him as he follows Robinson into a small room. It makes him nervous, like this is a place he isn’t supposed to be. “What do you remember?” says Robinson with a strange force to her voice, setting down a form paper and pen as he pulls out a chair. “I’ll be in the next room if you have any questions.”
He nearly answers her question out loud but she’s already shut the door, so he starts writing before the clear image of exactly what he wants to say leaves his head. Only after he’s dotted the last full stop does he even look at the other areas of the form. The one he’s done is Description of Incident. There’s also Name, Date of Statement, and Subject of Statement. He can’t think of any way to describe it more succinctly than he just has, so he writes Time spent aboard the space station Daedalus.
It’s been twenty minutes by his watch when he steps out the door to say, “I’ve finished. Now will you tell me what I want to know, Ms. Robinson?”
She holds out her hand for the papers; he sticks them behind his back to show he’s not giving in that easy. “Sit down, then,” she says. He sits across the desk from her. She has a notebook to one side that she must have been reading or writing in before he came out. “What do you want to know?”
“Obviously you already know what happened if you spent months hunting me down for this.” (He brandishes the form papers.) “So tell me what the hell it was about.”
“The Stratosphere Group is an alliance of sorts between three powers, each of which wanted to run a different… test. You were asked aboard the Daedalus to participate in a test on the psychological effects of the vastness of space.”
“I knew they didn’t give a shit about those tissue experiments,” Jan mutters. “They never even asked for reports. Said they picked me for my psych profile. They wanted a guy who thought he knew how big it was. What a laugh, right?” He leans forward to look Robinson in the eye. “What. Was it.”
“The Platonic ideal of bigness, if you like,” she says, unruffled. “The primal terror of untraversable vastness, of being far from home with no way to return. If you’re interested I have a few more statements about it.”
“I am, yes.”
“Then follow me.”
She sits him in what looks like a shared office, with mugs and packaged snacks strewn over everything, and leaves to find the ‘statements.’ When she comes back she settles in a chair at the other end of the room with her notebook while he flips through the half-dozen files she brought. The first time the name Fairchild comes up it gives him a chill. By the fourth time he’s used to it because it has settled deep into him.
One of the statements, though, stands out as different. The Fairchilds are nowhere mentioned, and dust storms don’t seem vast as much as—just repulsive. The idea of being infiltrated, buried alive from the inside, makes him want to retch or tear the statement to pieces or reach his hand down that man’s throat and pull the foul mud out. But maybe with gloves on.
“You’ve read it, then,” says Robinson. His head snaps around to see her getting up. The sympathy in her voice is the first real emotion he’s heard from her. “I didn’t realize it would have such a strong effect on you, but since it has… you really are marked by the Vast.”
He has a better idea of what that means than he did an hour ago—he recoils. The Fairchilds are marked. That’s why they did this to him.
“You do not have to become something like them,” she says. “As head archivist… I, too, am marked. But I have never once agreed to do its dirty work. I fight it every step of the way.”
His brow furrows and he leans away, tucking his chin as if he’s afraid she’ll go for the throat. “You want me to fight with you. That’s why you tracked me down. Look, I can respect that a lot but I don’t want anything to do with any of this.”
“And you’re under the impression that you can avoid its attention somehow? I’m sorry to tell you, Mr. Kilbride, but the only reason it isn’t watching you right now is because you’re in the domain of a competing power. There is no avoiding what’s already inside of you.”
“Well, what could I possibly do against—literally the biggest thing in the universe! If you know about it, then you know it could obliterate the entire planet without even noticing! There’s no fighting something like that and you’d have to be an idiot to even try.”
She gives the desk a tiny, restrained smile and says, “No, I would not try to fight the Vast right now. I have another target, one that you seem to dislike. I’m sure you want their kind to succeed as little as I do.” He looks up, and he can see in her eyes that she thinks she’s caught him. “You may wonder what they should not succeed in. Once again, if you are interested…”
“I have a real job,” he says, but it doesn’t come out as a refusal. Dammit. “I’m not going to be cooped up in this creepy place with you all week.”
“Nor do I need you to be. The truly important work won’t be for a while yet. I just want you to be prepared for it.”
He rolls his eyes and says, “All right, fine. I’m in.”
It’s not really very much work, anyway. Robinson just wants him to read a bunch of statements on the repulsive dirt-thing every Sunday and then ask him weird questions. What disgusts you most about this? What would you have done if you were there? He doesn’t pay it much mind, because his payment is statements on the Vast, and there’s a lot to take in. The most interesting bits, in Jan’s opinion, are the bits that imply you can get superpowers if you play your cards right. Sure, the statements only mention superpowers that are for hurting people, but that’s because that’s what gets reported, isn’t it?
He doesn’t tell Robinson what he’s going to try, because it will be a real embarrassment if he fails. But it should be safe enough. It’s just… replicating the effects of a panic attack under controlled circumstances. That’s practically a therapeutic technique. Probably. Jan has never seen a therapist about it because he has never been that keen on paying someone to carefully not tell him he’s crazy, and has he tried meditation?
Whatever. The point is he’s about to make the park really big.
There’s no-one to freak out since it’s a miserably cold morning mid-March. Miraculously there aren’t any clouds. Maybe that’s actually part of the powers? But he’s alone, and there’s the pale sky above him. It’s not hard to look through it into the blackness of space behind, to picture his feet tenuously stuck onto the bottom of a tiny orb by gravity, barely keeping him from falling into that sky. His stomach twists and his breath starts to come fast and he mutters aloud: “I am doing this on purpose, so stop freaking out. I can stop it any time I want to.”
He doesn’t try to stop it, though—secretly he doesn’t quite believe that he can, and he doesn’t want to become certain. Instead he glares up at the void, daring it to flinch first—
and he feels his feet leave the ground as if gravity has been switched off. He takes a deep, shuddering breath. He breathes it out. He… this isn’t quite real. No, it is. No, if it is there’s nothing he can do now. If he’s going to float slowly into the vacuum of space and asphyxiate as his fingers fall off from frostbite, then that’s what’s going to happen. It’s sort of soothing to know that he’ll die well before he leaves atmo. He glances below him at the park and finds it’s much smaller than it should be. Further away? No, just smaller, like looking at it through the wrong end of a magnifying glass. All of Manchester is so tiny he feels like he’s looking at a model. But that’s not important right now; he turns his head upward. He’s spent so long imagining exactly what kind of a thing could make that noise, and now it’s an issue again. He almost wonders how far away it is before realizing it doesn’t matter because it’s that big. He’s already in the palm of its hand. He was born there and he’ll die there.
He comes to with something warm in his ears, lying on the sidewalk staring blankly up at the tear-blurred sky. There’s a woman kneeling over him who says, “Oh my G-d, he’s awake. Sir, can you hear me?”
She sounds muffled, but he can. “Yeah,” he says, and sits up, hunching over to wipe his eyes where she won’t see. Dark blots appear on his trousers. Hell, this is the most useless superpower ever. He can make the sky big, have a panic attack, and then start bleeding from the ears. The X-men would be green with envy. Maybe he should try making something big that isn’t literally the biggest possible thing already.
He brushes off the woman who’s currently trying to explain that he’s had a seizure and call him an ambulance, and he walks away from the park as quickly as possible. When he glances behind him the woman seems very far away, so maybe this whole thing has a practical use.
He tells Robinson about it on the phone the next weekend (she’s in Geneva for what must be some kind of library science conference). She listens silently until he’s done and says, “That was certainly a bold sort of hypothesis testing. But it does seem like you have real power. If you choose to apply it to stopping the ritual…”
“Of course I’m going to stop the ritual. It’s disgusting, even if it wouldn’t end the world.”
“I did tell you that it won’t end the world.”
“As good as. What, are you trying to un-convince me? I’m with you, Ms. Robinson. I just need to know how to control this so I can stop the Buried when it’s time.”
She sighs. “I cannot help you as much as you might think. I make it my policy not to ask for favors, so I have limited experience. The one power I am confident in using is the power to compel people to give me information. Unfortunately it’s unconscious—it came with the position, so I never had to cultivate it. I may be able to suggest further tests, though.”
She suggests further tests. In a moment of idiocy a couple weeks ago he mentioned the panic attacks or whatever they really are, and Robinson wants to make them test cases because of course she does. Almost every Sunday he comes in to the silent building and tells her that he learned to make his bag bigger on the inside, or that he still hasn’t figured out how to redirect the ever more frequent panic attacks but here’s what he tried. She’s an attentive audience, asks good questions, and he starts to think of her like the principle investigator for this project. She’s not the worst PI he’s had by a long shot, although she goes to more conferences than any of them. She calls him late one Saturday night in May from the Kara Sea, of all places (when he looks it up it turns out it’s in the Arctic), to tell him not to come in the next day.
“And what kind of conference is this?” he asks, amused.
“No conference,” she admits. “An expedition. It’s similar in character to what you and I have been working on. I’m calling to tell you that if I die stopping this—”
“Hang on! You’re going to stop a ritual and you didn’t mention it until you were literally on the boat there? And you might die?”
“To tell the truth I was afraid you might try to come along,” she murmurs, her voice almost lost in crackling static. The signal breaks up completely for a moment while Jan bites his tongue on some pointless comment about him not being good enough. When it clears up he can hear her saying, “It makes no sense to risk both our lives here. If I die, you will need to stop the Buried by yourself. So listen carefully.”
He takes notes while she details the important locations and contacts, though he keeps having to tell her to repeat things or triple check that he heard right and he can tell by the end she’s as fed up as he is with the shit connection. He shifts the phone to his other ear and says, “Okay, got it. But this is all pointless, because you’re not going to die, so have a great trip. I’ll see you next Sunday, shall I?”
It’s impossible to get any fine tonal information over a connection this bad, but he fancies she’s smiling a little when she says, “Yes, Mr. Kilbride, I’ll see you then.”
She comes back alive, thank G-d. Jan was not ready to do something like that on his own. Nor was he really ready to break into the Magnus Institute every Sunday with her spare key and possibly get arrested while trying to explain that technically he was her assistant, see, here’s his employment contract, it’s just that nobody else knows about it because we’re both paranoid fools. So he sees her on Sunday and tells her about the latest experiments. She’s distracted, though. Her hand keeps pausing in the middle of a sentence and she seems to have difficulty focusing on him. After almost ten minutes of trying to explain the experiment with the sponge he gives up and asks, “Look, are you all right? You seem kind of…” He waves his hand in a vague, uncertain way.
She gives him an imperious glare but her heart clearly isn’t in it. “Don’t fuss over me, Mr. Kilbride. I get enough of that from my assistants. Mi—” And she stops in a way he’s never seen from her. Gertrude Robinson is not one to show uncertainty.
He wants to offer to go for a walk or get coffee or something, but that’s not what they do. They meet in secret in the empty Archive and never appear in public together. He doesn’t have it in his power to comfort her at all. He shrugs, uneasily. “Well, you’d better pay attention then, hadn’t you. I can’t exactly email you my notes.”
She gestures for him to keep talking, so he does.
She does get better in the next few weeks, though he doesn’t figure out what it was about. Maybe she was shaken up by almost dying; she still refuses to tell him what happened on the Kara Sea, only that it was the Spiral’s ritual she interrupted.
Her ‘conferences’ tail off, which makes Jan suspect that most of them were never conferences to begin with. Sometimes he has to skip weekends because there’s too much to do in the lab, but since he has no other way of contacting her he has to phone. It feels strangely like calling his mother to check in, which he hasn’t done in over a year now. He’s checked her Facebook enough to know she’s still living in Edinburgh and she’s all right, but that’s it. He misses her occasionally with a startling forcefulness, like it bursts out all at once when he’s been ignoring it too long. He was a good son, once. He used to come over on Sundays to help clean, and they’d do the crossword together and she’d make sour cream pancakes with green onions. Now he does a sort of paranormal crossword, a cross-reference-word, and has stale biscuits from a packet he suspects Robinson stole from one of her assistants’ desks. So she’s not his mother, nothing like her, but he can’t help but wonder how her assistants find it.
For the first time he decides that the archivists are worth looking into.
The Institute’s employment records aren’t public, of course, but with just a little snooping he’s able to find the names of a few assistants on their things in the shared office. He’s particularly interested in the desk that’s just been cleared out, but of course there aren’t any personal effects there any more. Unexpectedly the place he finds traces of the assistant who’s quit is in the archives themselves. Many of the files are labelled in the same round, cheerfully illegible handwriting he remembers from the cleared-out desk, and one—about a kid who’d gone missing in 1985—has a note about its origins. Sure, he can’t read most of the note, but he can read that it’s addressed to Gertrude, signed Michael :).
With that information Jan can confidently place him as Michael Shelley, who is still Facebook friends with several of the other assistants and library staff. He hasn’t posted anything since last Thursday, but nobody seems to miss him yet. His last post reads: getting on the plane now!! see you all in a week!! no internet where im going :(. From the normal frequency of his posting (incessant) Jan concludes that he never came back from Robinson’s field expedition. To the Spiral’s apotheosis. Yeah, he can put two and two together. The only question is whether Robinson planned it that way.
He puts his phone in his pocket and tucks the file under his arm before continuing to look through the rest of the files in the box. Since the Archive has no organizational system whatsoever, coming across useful statements is utterly to chance. He hasn’t found many so far, but looking for them is still more useful than rereading the ones he’s already taken notes on. They’ve only got about a month left before the ritual is supposed to happen—no idea how Gertrude calculated that—so he’s focusing on recent statements that have something to do with dirt or being underground.
He’s got a reasonable stack of them when he leaves the room, closing the door behind him with his foot—and nearly walks into someone he’s never seen before. The man, who dresses like he’s rich, looks as surprised as Jan feels. “Er, hello,” says Jan. “Don’t mind me, I just work here on the weekends.”
“I wasn’t aware that we had weekend-only employees,” says the man. Sounds rich too. “Who hired you?”
“Ms… Robinson?”
The man props up his elbow in one hand and leans his cheek on the other with a sigh. “I’ve never known Gertrude to hire new assistants without telling me. What a pickle.”
“Well, no, hang on, I have a photo of my contract. In case someone thought I was breaking in, I felt it was a bit of a danger.” He juggles the files awkwardly to get to his phone and keeps nearly dropping them while he pages through his photos to get to it. The man leans in to peer at it, then brightens up.
“Well, that’s all in order, then! Sorry to have alarmed you, Mr. Kilbride. I’m Elias, I’m the head of the Institute.” He holds out his hand to shake, and Jan has to hurry to put his phone back in his pocket. “I must say, it’s good news that Gertrude’s found another assistant. She keeps managing to lose them. One almost wonders if she’s feeding them to something!”
His irritating little chuckle pretty much confirms Jan’s suspicions. He hoists up the files and goes around Elias to start down the hall. “That what happened to Michael? Something ate him?”
“You don’t sound surprised.” Elias does sound surprised, which makes Jan smile faintly.
“I mean, have you met her?” he says over his shoulder, since Elias isn’t following.
He’s not exactly as unconcerned as he tries to sound for Robinson’s asshole boss. If every ritual needs a sacrifice to stop it, then he’s next in line. It’s a fair trade, obviously, more than fair. From what he can tell the other side usually needs hundreds of people to make it work. But is saving this tiny planet really worth Jan’s tiny life when the Vast could snuff out every human on Earth in the next second anyway? Robinson keeps assuring him it won’t, with the complete unconcern of someone who avoids thinking about it entirely; without anyone to be afraid, she says, the Vast won’t be anything at all.
Yes, but counterpoint: it’s probably got other planets to terrorize. Galaxies full of them. Jan’s not sure if he believes there’s other intelligent life out there, but come on, a universe that size? If you just look at the probability there’s no way there’s nothing. And a lot of them are probably just as scared of getting lost a long way from home.
He tips the files onto the cleared-out desk and says nothing to Robinson. He needs to have at least a week to think this through, and maybe he shouldn’t tell her he knows at all. It might be kinder. No, hang on, she’s got to have some kind of informed consent procedure for normal people giving statements, there’s no way the Magnus Institute isn’t accredited by the ORI. Not that Robinson particularly is into informed consent… but it might make her feel less guilty when Jan dies for her?
This is such a fucked up thing to be thinking about.
On the 29th he gives his two weeks’ notice to the lab where he works. Dr. Bronson, surprised, asks why, and he has to tell her he’s moving to America. Seattle. Had a great opportunity come up, plus my sister lives there.
Dr. Bronson didn’t know he had a sister.
Well, yeah, there are a lot of things she doesn’t know about him. Quiet type, Jan.
His last day of work is the 14th, and the flight isn’t until the morning of the 17th, so he goes to the Institute and finds it locked and empty. Robinson, when he calls her, says she’s not even in London today and he might as well just go home. That’s five hours out of his day wasted, but it could be worse: he could have not wasted them and spent them staring at the high ceiling of his flat thinking about his upcoming death. Three days.
On the 16th he takes the longest walk he possibly can, until he’s utterly exhausted.
On the 17th he gets to the airport at five in the morning and spends the next eight hours trying to conceal his near-constant panic and its attendant Vastness from the people in the seats next to him, until finally he’s so exhausted he falls into a dead sleep. He only wakes when a flight attendant hesitantly shakes his shoulder. “Are you all right, sir?” the flight attendant says. Jan sits up properly to find that the cabin is nearly empty. “It seemed like you were having kind of a rough time.”
“Fine. Thank you.” Jan undoes his seatbelt with clumsy fingers and the flight attendant helps him get his bag down from the overhead and he walks out into a terminal that is much too large and much too busy. He tucks himself into a corner, which only makes it seem bigger, and dials Robinson.
“You’ve landed, then,” she says by way of greeting.
“Yeah. Where should I meet you.”
“You should see signs for the light rail stop once you’ve exited the terminal. I’ll be at the car rental.”
“Okay, see you soon,” he says, but she’s already hung up.
He makes his way to the car rental center without really knowing where he’s going or how long it took. But Robinson is waiting for him in the lobby, and when she turns to look at him she says, “Good Lord, Kilbride.”
“Planes do weird stuff to me now,” he says. Good thing he won’t be flying back. Will she be able to get a refund on his ticket? “Don’t really want to talk about it. You’ve got a car already?”
Robinson drives, because Jan isn’t really fit to; in silence, because he doesn’t think she likes music even conceptually. Now at least he’s free to stretch out the long road behind them so he’ll have something to concentrate on. Bad luck for the other cars, he supposes, but it does mean they get to Olympia in only half an hour. Robinson takes pity on him and orders food to eat in their motel room, and then she takes even more pity and tells him to check all their supplies and information. The supplies really aren’t necessary if all goes well, but you can never count on that. He eats decent pizza and pours music into his own ears while she calls the people she’s hired to observe the site. He goes to sleep decently ready to die.
He feels less and less ready to die every second of breakfast and the twenty-minute drive to Bucoda. By the time the car stops the roof has ballooned out like a circus tent, Robinson has twice looked at him as if to say do try to keep it together , and he’s started crying, all before the sun has even properly risen. “Jet lag,” he mumbles at her. She ignores him and pulls the car to a stop in the empty road in front of a… an enormous pit. She does not slam the door or actually do anything that indicates she’s annoyed with him, which is kind of worse.