XII.


During his short time indentured to this man, Gordon had come to realize that solitude, too, counted as a quantum state of being, subject to the same contradictions and idiosyncrasies as any other.

In his former life, silence brought with it peaceful relief. A lack of distraction. Freedom to wander his bountiful mental landscapes.

That same kind of freedom grew sinister after Black Mesa. Silence threatened him with gnawing emptiness; the quiet that ebbed from the shrill of gunshots caught his breath at the thought of an unseen laser scope aligning with the back of his head. Lack of scrabbling on gouged planks tensed the knot in his abdomen. Every instance of shatterable peace hardened his pulse, hammering it against the anvil of his ribcage, prepared to burst if need be.

The silence with which he and his contractor descended the crevasse poisoned him to near-madness. It was in the throes of such a silence that his guilty mind cannibalized itself.

The snow crushing under his boots mimicked the delicate snap of shattered glass. Kleiner's dried blood itched on his cheek. An increasingly violent part of him yearned to claw it off. The sin had besmirched him to the bone. And, of course, the fresh blood Alyx's mirage had drawn painted new strokes over the old. Warm beads swelled from his earlobe, trickling down his neck.

Silence, cradle and coffin. Lock and key.

Our mutual friend; he glimpsed him through lenses fogged by his torn breaths. He displayed a rare volition by walking ahead of Gordon. At least he seldom strayed. He preferred to remain close, his hands pulling on invisible reins.

His remarks thinned the longer they walked. Perhaps Gordon saw nothing worth noting. Perhaps he accomplished even less: his body a vehicle, an instrument, a working set of limbs fulfilling what the businessman considered part and parcel of his contract.

Rather than offer him respite, the silence remained leaden. Angry winds howled in the tumultuous charcoal skies above them. Without a constant stream of whispers leering in his ear, it was easy to fall into the churn of recent memories.

Gordon remembered the moment reality was snatched from him. During Alyx's pleas not to leave, his struggle to obey what Eli had already failed to do. He recalled madness sweeping in to carry him away from an otherwise deathly unconsciousness, pulling at the edges of his sanity, light stretching toward a black hole, threatening to tear itself apart. A collection of screeching, thrashing images. No method, no logic, no mercy, no means to discern past from future.

And a thought emerged. A lone thought.

I think, therefore I am.

It was such a small thought, but that insignificant burst of neural activity proved enough to restore him to coherence.

Once more, he'd found himself on the tram in the span of a blink, armor dented and smeared with grime. Now he could feel the passage of time slide through the darkness. And the businessman smiled at him, offered him no illusion of choice. The doors to freedom sealed themselves shut.

Madness. Repetition of indecipherable experiences. Phenomena beyond the shape his words could give them, escaping logic and sense. I must craft a new set of formulae to describe them. This place has a language. If only my mind would quiet, allow me to listen, I might endeavor to understand.

He'd tried to reach out with what scant knowledge he'd gleaned from that strange place. The businessman intercepted his messages, garbled and distorted them. Stay away, he'd warned Kleiner. Run. Through him, however, those messages sang a siren's call that had lured him to his death.

Gordon was torn between fulfilling Kleiner's last wish and abandoning it for her sake. With each forward step, he felt himself draw closer to Alyx, and with that, a sense of doom took seed inside his gut.

Suicide: grief's sixth and final stage. He didn't fear it. In fact, he contemplated it more often in light of recent events. He'd rather suffer a bullet through his damned scar than inflict the same horrors on her, and the brutal truth remained that one or both of them would have to die for their freedom. If it came down to that…

His macabre thoughts dissipated slightly upon realizing he had no other choice. Now that he had to follow in his employer's footsteps, the lines between shepherd and flock blurred.

It's strange, he thought. He wants me to lead him, but I'm the one who's lost.

Lower they dove, shadows elongating into ghastly shapes, until the winds lashing around them quieted and the snow lessened to a trickle.

The bottom of the crevasse was not as derelict as he'd expected; the melted body armor of a Combine soldier appeared in the darkness, sprawled beside a ring of ash and a haphazard scattering of stormproof matches.

Evidence suggested the unit immolated itself. Whether the suicide had been accidental or purposeful remained unverifiable on both accounts. These sights they passed without commentary. He couldn't imagine his employer dragging him down here to eulogy a sight he'd witnessed regularly since Black Mesa.

Indeed, he had other motives for this detour. Eventually they encountered a large seam in the crevasse, protected by towering buttresses of ice.

Gordon switched on his flashlight. As the beam tunneled a harsh cone, it revealed a creature stranded in the ice that vaguely resembled an Advisor: a gelatinous arthropod supported by dozens of skeletal limbs throughout its thorax. Unlike the larval bodies whose pliability awaited maturity, this one loomed in much greater scale than the typical Advisor. His light struggled to capture its breadth.

He stood stone-still as the businessman shuffled forth and placed a hand on the shelf entrapping the creature. Burns covered its flesh. Infected tissue bulged around steel plates grafted onto its skin. A peculiar, glittering fluid had seeped from broken pustules and seemingly dried. The paste changed colors with the shifting of the beam, a dim bioluminescent residue.

Modifications told of the attempt to cut the organism down to size. It wore a metallic coat woven of neural circuits, artificial mycelium scales through which its many eyes were forced to distend and protrude.

Insectoid eyes without pupils glinted a kaleidoscope of triangular cones. As the plates varied in size, so too the eyes themselves ranged in size, from the microscopic to the gargantuan. How long their owner had slumbered in this desolate tomb was impossible to tell; most of its eyes drooped their transparent mucus coverings partway, as though they'd relented from the wait.

Neck craned to gaze upon the titan, the businessman spoke.

"Now is not the time for reminiscing, Doctor Freeman."

Spoken with a twinge of amusement. It wasn't much more than a whisper, the tone he used, but a whisper Gordon received clearly in the chambers of his inner ears. No unnatural pauses stuttered his speech; no processing delays stressed the wrong syllable. Low and clear, he'd at last achieved mastery over a resistant set of lungs.

Perhaps that wasn't accurate. He took greater liberties to act human since they'd arrived in the Arctic—the farther he distanced himself from his mythical employers, which was why Gordon felt confident that the entity lording over this cold domain did not constitute one. In the presence of an employer, he would have reverted to a half-hearted sycophancy, reinforcing his talk of the restrictions they subjected him to. Reasserting control over his assets emboldened him to speak with less restraint.

Even so, his newfound candor did little to temper the expectations he held for his employee. He turned, a feline smile lifting the corners of his lips.

"Our friend seems to have contracted a nasty case of frostbite."

Breath hissing from his nostrils, Gordon tightened his grip on the crowbar.

The businessman stood under an anemic snowfall. Flakes sprinkled a sugary dust on his shoulders. An unfocused smile graced his lips. He proffered no advice, shunned clarification, did not even deign to ask.

He had no need. Gordon wedged the crowbar into a jagged crack, twisting it once to anchor it, and pounded his fist into the butt. The crack splintered before crumbling, releasing the first shelf in a rush of ice and snow.

"Pity about the good doctor," said the contractor, in between ringing blows. "Had he not stepped out of line, we may not be in this predicament."

Gordon struck harder. Chiseling a hole, he crammed his fist inside to hollow it out. "He did nothing to you."

"Perhaps," he said. "Perhaps not. That's rather a matter of semantics, isn't it? Not worth our time to quibble over. Whether more follow in his footsteps ultimately falls on you."

Panting hard from his efforts, he wrenched around. "What do you want?"

"The ship." A simple desire in concept; a nearly impossible goal in reality.

"And once we're aboard?"

He smirked. "Planning a mutiny, are we?"

"I know you can't get close to her," Gordon said. "Not without some kind of proxy to mask yourself. Kleiner hit a nerve when he said you're losing control. That's why you killed him."

His smile deepened. "You've a curious way of deflecting blame. First your friends, now me. 'You killed him.' When it was your own hands that forced him through the glass. The same pair of hands, might I add, that pushed the crystal into the spectrometer." To twist the knife, he clarified: "If indeed I had a part in this crime, it was nothing more than sparking the impulse."

That quelled the more immediate notions of revolt simmering in Gordon's mind.

Memories of the capsule room seized him. Thin shoulders, fabric bunching under knotted fists. He'd been light, so light, as if he'd prepared for even this. He didn't fight it, just as Gordon did not fight hard enough to save him, engulfed by a foreign blaze burning through his cells.

All it took to extinguish his gentle life was a swift, decisive shove. And blood burst on the glass, painted cotton, flooded through the gaps in his leather-encased fingers—

Gordon crushed his fists to kill their tremor. "You can't keep hiding," he said. "Wherever you go, I'll find you. I'll destroy you myself, if that's what it takes."

"Hm." He indulged a small chuckle. "You can try. But you may find that a more challenging task than you believe."

"Why?"

Exposed, the creature's innumerable dead eyes judged them. He placed a hand over the hole Gordon had created, pressing inward.

"They are obsessed with accumulating greater numbers. They've fallen prey to the falsehood that strength lies in them." His previous amusement drained as he scoffed at the notion, probing grayed fingertips over films of frost. "That is their mistake. I do not require every piece. Only those that matter."

Slowly, a webbing of green light, thinner than mist and incorporeal as smoke, wafted around the hole's perimeter. Some whorls managed to escape into the gelid air and vanish. But the deeper he pressed, the thicker it congealed, hanging still in the air, a stationary exhalation.

Each eye blinked. A temporary spark of intelligence ignited and lost.

One after the other, his hand curled its fingers until they formed a fist. When he pulled it back, the smoke convalesced into a single rope that slithered free of the ice. It plummeted onto the crevasse floor and coiled about his feet, a neon snake whose body throbbed light to flood the cave, a harbinger of bright danger.

The businessman straightened himself. He picked up the coils and cradled them in his arms. The rope spat a few resistant cinders before sinking into his flesh.

As it leeched more and more light from the immured creature, his human mold shed its pretenses and darkened to a silhouette, an X-ray where the faint contours of his inner organs glowed.

His heart hanged on the noose of its aortal stem, shriveled and still. No blood nourished the arteries that filled with phosphorescence. Concaves dwelled where eyes should have peered. But something indeed inhabited them. Something lived in the white rings piercing their empty holes.

The light he siphoned and which cloaked him was not static; it breathed in and out, ebbed and flowed. His body became a black hole, a dark, dense center toward which the dazzle swirled maelstroms. He eclipsed a living light, its radiative flare orbiting him in a droning electronic hum.

Numb awe rooted Gordon to the spot. Luster diffused green bands through the prisms of his lenses: the same beams dancing illusions in his vision when the spectrometer—

"You remember the morning your world came to an end," said the contractor. "How could you forget? You lost everything when you pushed the sample into the mechanism. But the knowledge you gained by committing that simple, irrevocable act was invaluable. You acquired a wisdom many men spend their lives cowering from: the awareness of yourself as a cornered animal, willing to claw its way out of the grave. Yet even you, in all of your cunning, haven't realized."

He took a strong breath. The withered heart inside his ribcage juddered, and gave a small pump.

"Once, you played the part of a cog, and you were content to play it well. Had this planet been allowed to continue, you would have been destined for little more than a life of resignation. Your talents squandered, your potential tarnished by the arrogance and mediocrity of those around you."

More heartbeats produced low, thudding pumps. Light began to circulate a slow churn through his veins.

"Instinct," he said, "elevated you. It transformed you into something greater. All traces of the civilized being your circumstances taught you to be vanished the instant you picked up the hank of battered steel you now clutch in your hands. From that moment forward, you vowed to survive where so many of your peers did not. And so you rejected your fate. Quite like myself."

He smoothed down his tie. Unbuttoned one cufflink.

"Appearances, Doctor Freeman. Appearances deceive."

To demonstrate, he raised his left arm parallel to the ground, palm faced outward. The light that fuzzed his edges flowed out in extension of his bodily appendage, wandering without aim or purpose, like stardust that preceded the birth of nebulae.

Amorphous shapes whirled inside the shimmer, sharpened, became clear; beckoned toward the convening of the light, something familiar emerged.

Give gaze to the abyss and the abyss gazes back. His heart beat faster in primitive terror as the incomprehensible tugged at the folds of his hippocampus.

Gordon backed several stepsuntil his pauldron clinked the shelf wall. Against all logic and reason, he found himself watching, and being watched by, a perfect replica of himself.

Glock smoldering in one hand, blood-splashed crowbar in the other. Flushed cheeks, scratched bifocals guarding panicked eyes, skin slick with sweat from the oppression of a sun no longer felt in this icy pit. Armored plates coated in Black Mesa's red mica.

It mirrored his slightest movement, down to the hitched scrape of his breath.

His doppelganger lurched, spat ashes, and dissolved. From its cremation rose another. Limestone dusted its hair. Cranial fluid leaked from a gash in its skull. The mirage snapped open bloodshot eyes as its puppet master tugged on the cord, and crumbled accordingly.

Like waves, reflections rose and fell, each springing to life on their predecessors' crests.

As they paraded before him, a burning knife plunged into his scar. The contractor encircled him as he clutched his throbbing skull, forcing out the sights threatening to invade, fighting to grip an increasingly fragile tether to reality.

"What do you see?" His tormentor's whispers haunted him, eager to drag him into this rising undertow of madness. "Yourself? Can these entities be called you when they no longer exist?" His tone implied the presumption of ownership foolhardy. "This matter, what you call your 'self,' is a spectrum of illusion. Mirages sharing a common delusion of continuity."

Whispers, screams. The weight of an encroaching madness sank him to his knees. He pressed his heated brow to the snow to confirm the chilled sensation on his skin. Yes, he was real, he was here, in no other moment but this—

"Such fragility is not meant to last," said the contractor. "When death comes for you, 'you' will disappear. Your memories, your carefully-cultivated mind, lost to the darkness." He let the mirages slacken. "One is hard-pressed to fathom a crueller arrangement."

His reflections calmed, melting down. Yet their underlying glow subsisted. Clots of light travelled along the cord they shared, flowing tributaries to the same source.

"What dwells beneath, however… That will return to its point of origin. That will return to me in time."

The contractor fastened his cufflink and extended his right hand.

Encouraged by the sensation of a gentle tap on his shoulder, Gordon looked up. Alyx. His cloudy whisper gusted through her, yearned to anchor her for more than the grains of stardust she dissolved in his grasping hands.

"We are separated by appearance alone. You are a part of my flesh, as is she. And I, for one, do not believe it a sin to do with my flesh as I see fit." His breaths evened, released steady mists. A smirk crossed his lips as the last vestige of energy died down, fully subsumed into his body. "They fear creatures like us, Doctor Freeman. As well they should."