Author's Explanation:

I recently beat the "Dead Space" trilogy, and as is becoming customary for me, started a canon-altering fanfic instead of writing a traditional blog review. Because IMO movie & game reviews are usually just whiny and non-productive...

My big idea was that: instead of a religion, Unitology SHOULD have been a branch of NUMEROLOGY, and the Unitologists, instead of oversimplified religious zealots, SHOULD have been paranoid schizophrenics like the main character in Jim Carry's Horror stint, "The Number 23". Sanctifying the Markers to create unreachable suicidal fanatics, as is the "Dead Space" canon, wasn't necessary. (As I aim to demonstrate below.) To the video-games' detriment, it felt totally forced, like a manufactured Aesop, quoted out of context, and beaten into our heads like an annoying war drum! (Even if DS's developers were really just copying H. P. Lovecraft's "Call of the Cthulhu".) I mean, wouldn't it be nice if the villains of the Dead Space universe were actually complicated, so that they could actually challenge the hero properly instead of just getting lucky that they have SO MANY 'like-mindless' friends?! Aren't heroes measured by the greatness of their enemies; what is the measure of Sherlock Holmes without James Moriarty?! Or, just take a look at One-Punch Man!

BTW, I'm also drawing inspiration from "Master & Commander: Far Side of the World"
and "Titanic: Secrets of the Fateful Voyage"...just because... ...they're pretty... :-3

BTW, long after writing two and a half chapters of this fanfic, it came to my attention that H. P. Lovecraft (the 'Granddaddy of 20th-Century Horror Literature' himself!) wrote a short piece that IMO has many points in common, called "The Music of Erich Zann". I heard that it was one of his personal favorites, and so like to take that to mean he probably would have liked this, too... (^_^) ...Wouldn't it be nice if I ever FINISHED it?! :-/

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"DEAD SPACE: NUM63R5"

Prologue + Chapter I


The Markers are a virus, a memetic one rather than genetic. Like Theo Jensen's Strand Beasts, it infects peoples' minds rather than their bodies and forces them to serve it, to replicate it, and distribute it across the galaxy, to perpetuate its conquest. Only afterwards do the Markers claim the bodies of their servants as materials for a new race of soulless super-beings... While some few people worship the Markers of their own freewill and desire everlasting unity with the super-beings, more often people are subtly ensnared by them and slowly descend into psychological slavery. Impassive, rational people suggest that the Marker's physical form resembles a segment of DNA; its worshippers say the Marker resembles an Infinity sign, an Ouroboros; and yet, those who discover it their unwitting master say it resembles the headless figure of womanthat is to say, a succubus. At first, they say, she seemed a bearer of light, gracing mankind with intelligence far beyond what comes naturally by means of the pulsating EM signal it transmits. By the time those poor slaves see what she has made them wrought, there's no escape for them anymore, not even in death. All that many of them have left is the intellectual bliss of solving the Marker's equations, which even then, helpless to defy it, they know is a lie.


The crew of the Ivory Star interstellar cruise ship Scheherazade begin experiencing widespread mental collapse en-rout to destination Methuselah. It caught on like the flu: clinical paranoia coupled withto such a degree that it seemed terrifyingly artificialheightened intellect. A few at a time, little by little, people stopped eating, sleeping, and generally taking care of themselves, then withdrew from society, and even hid away in order to avoid their duties. The longer anyone went without being found and rescued from their self-confinement, the worse the condition they were found in; many, just barely alive as though they had been imprisoned and abandoned by their captors, yet without physical restraints of any kind. Wherever such people were discovered was usually snowed in with paper, like rats nests, every last sheet of it covered in disjointed mathematical formulas and calculations. Even, in the worst cases, the writing flowed onto the walls. None of which, upon review by the still-sound-minded, seemed to have any meaning, except for haunting, striking similarities in the content between multiple isolated cases.

Dr. Brunhilde Swanson, an MD and one of the acting-psychiatrists on board the Scheherazade, determines to get to the bottom of this, and assumes the roll of detective as well. Her theory is that...well, she realizes, it would sound crazy for her to say it out loud.

On the other hand, Marlow Valentine, a student dishwasher, has fewer inhibitions about speaking his mind, and casually strikes up involved discussions with anyone he bumps into. Most of these conversations, as Marlow's supervisor, Uriel Gonzales, who often overhears them, realizes, sound increasingly like Mensa material. Furthermore, as he points out to Marlow, three of the people whom Marlow has talked to (people most other folks would have been intimidated witless by: lauded professors of Haptic Cybernetics, Subquantum Cosmology, & Radio-Pleomorphic-Resonance Bioengineering, respectively) recently ended up on the short list of the most extreme paranoids. Perhaps, Uriel suggests, Marlow should have his head examined preemptively. Marlow, who was naturally slightly nerdy anyway, concurs that lately he seemed to have been strangely outdoing himself, and says he'll consider it.

"Why?" he wonders later, once alone in his tiny quarters. "Why should I go? If they find something wrong, they'll want to fix it. Maybe," Marlow rationalizes, grasping for excuses, "the cure could be worse than the curse. Maybe..." The truth is he was already aware that something was beginning to take hold of himsomething exhilarating, terrifying yet positive. "Maybe, I'm better off this way. Maybe we all are; since when did intelligence become a disease, anyway?" At the same moment, however, Marlow wonders if acceptance couldn't be a strange function of one; such a disease could take its victims down without a fight. Sure, that was all well and good to recognize in theory; but once enlightened, one grows fond of being enlightened, like one who was born blind and then cured late in life grows fond of being able to see. Until what stage of his ruin, Marlow debates with himself, would this gift still seem worth holding onto, supposing a shrink actually could put him back to normal and he has to face a choice? Marlow supposes that, whether he means to or not, he will just wait and find out the hard way how far he's willing to fall. "Should I be worried that I'm okay with that?" were his last thoughts of protest.

One night, according to the time, for out in Space it is always night, after dinner, Marlow Valentine can't help himself but swipe an ionophonic (plasma-electric) viola that someone had left behind in the Dining Hall. Until now, he had never known that an impulse of curiosity could be so powerful, outweighing even such profound guilt as he was left with; he'd never stolen anything in his life, let alone anything possibly so valuable as a professional's instrument. But nowadays, Marlow found himself becoming more and more confused, as if here and there pieces of his mind were falling out and his self-awareness was starting to resemble a Jenga tower mid game. Marlow had been hearing music in his sleep; he HAD to learn to play something with which to express it, or else he WOULD go mad.

When he returned to his quarters with the instrument, however, Marlow noticed for the first time that its walls were already covered in the strange script known only to the paranoids. For a moment, he wondered what the script meant, and how he had written it if he hadn't known what it meant. Then, as if his mind were a set of eyes and they were adjusting to a dark room, gradually Marlow became able to read the symbols again, and remembered they were his formulas. The formulas he was working on for his music! A deep feeling that all would be well swept over him, empowering him, until he lifted the instrument to his chin and did a splendid impression of Jack Benny. Thunderstruck by its difficulty, he almost rage-quit and smashed the viola on his night table, only halted by a sudden funny feeling that he held is own life in his hand. "Dammit," his better nature squirmed in defeat; he couldn't possibly return it to its rightful owner nowever. It would seem like cutting off his right hand, lame though it was. An ephemeral thought occurred to Marlow that a career musician, such as he had stolen the viola from, would probably feel similarly about it. That night, he slept cuddling the viola and its bow like a teddy bear.

When he awoke, he discovered that it too was now inscribed over every square inch with unrecognisable formulas. Someone was banging impatiently on his cabin door. He had overslept, he saw, by hours; no, wait, his chronometer had stopped. "Strange." He got dressed and went out. The first person he encountered froze in her tracks at the sight of him and dropped some glass lab equipment she had been carrying. She hardly took notice of the glass breaking over her stockinged feet; Marlow noticed the tremor of fear she tried to disguise in her voice as she asked if HE was okay. "Your face... Your arms," she indicated. Somehow, he hadn't noticed there were equations scratched into his skin, just like he (he guessed it was he) had inscribed on the viola. "Security," she whispered into the collar of her lab coat. Marlow spun on his heel and booked it back to his cabin, where he changed into a long-sleeved shirt, brushed his hair over his face, and madly tried to wipe the walls clean of evidence. The only thing he managed to do successfully was hide the viola in his cabin's tiny air vent before his door crashed inward.