Project Icarus

“Everything in this life starts and ends with money.”

That seems especially poignant now. He said it softly, like an apology – just before he raised the handgun and shot me through the right eye, so my spasming body tumbled back into the freshly dug hole in the forest floor. There was a blinding flash, I remember that. I recalled a short-lived point of agony and there was that intense smell of barbequed steak, which I realised was my brain cooking with the bullet’s heat. I know now that it was just my brain, and not my mind at all. Everyone has the wrong idea about the mind. It’s not a singular item, the mind is a landscape, a planet, a network and a universe.

I had assumed Professor David Lewis had been my friend as well as my project partner. He had occasionally come into the house after a long shift with the Petri dishes and microscopes. It was normally after a spontaneous invite from my wife, to sit to a late dinner with my family. He always perched there at the head of the table, upright like a robot, respectfully and quietly, and he listened to Sue as she probed him about what I was like to work with. He was incredibly diplomatic in his responses. I regarded that as professional. He would often side-glance suspiciously to observe my two teenage kids, Mia and Gerry like they were rare birds in an aviary, fascinating but otherworldly.

‘Money’, he had said. It galled me to think of it. How much money is enough? His final statement to me was not only an apology, it was also an admission of guilt.

To be a ghost is lonely. As a scientist, it was still fascinating.

You are adrift. You can see everything but you can hardly do anything, to act. You travel in time and space, at the speed of thought. Your home no longer belongs to you – you can be in it and do little but observe, the meals, the chat, the hugs. You are in prison when you die, it is a prison unlike any other – as an inmate, although you are free to roam you are reduced to an eternal voyeur. You feel no touch. It’s much like a lucid dream. You can move limbs, you can move in directions, sometimes you can even move objects, but cruellest of all, you remember all the things you used to do when blood surged through veins, when the heart pumped and when the breeze swirled around your hair follicles to make them stand on end. There is genuine grief when you understand that your voice is lost to the living. You can scream hard and long, and it’s rarely heard.

My mind took me instinctively to the laboratory’s small, cluttered office, to our office, when David had returned there. He looked strange from above, his bold patch, his hunch. I could tell he was exhausted mentally, despite his collected, purposeful demeanour but he was not shedding tears, he was not curling his head into his hands. It was clear, he was a psychopath, despite all those shared moments and long nights in the lab that we endured together, it was already just noise in the past for him. You can train a parrot to say it cares about you, but it’s just words to a beast, words it picked up to mimic, it won’t give a shit.

He sat in my office chair and keyed in my password. How he had gotten hold of that, I couldn’t say. My desktop sprang up with a picture of my family holding each other and smiling during a walk in the woods. The mouse’s screen arrowhead tracked to a file, a file I knew well, labelled Icarus.

When it opened, all the blueprints and patents appeared in alphabetical order. He grinned. I hated him for that, more than for shooting me, it was a grin of a Judas without pity, of someone who had planned and succeeded to deceive and steal against all values and all odds.

I was the lead scientist. I had set the project up, secured private investment funding and done most of the legwork. He had been assisting in the shadows under the cosh of an NDA, basically helping me out and doing my bidding for eight years. I thought, on some level, that was what made him happy – he had never come across as a leader, a visionary. He was always behind people, listening but not saying.

We had been studying Hydra, a tubular organism no more than 10mm long, that defied the ageing process naturally. I had finally cracked the ‘Holy Grail’ code to immortality and had a sequence that could be converted into a pharma product. It was to be the new Moonshot, a modern miracle, the ultimate prize for the ultimate prizemoney. It was understood between us, in a pact, that we both would be rich beyond imagination and never age another year with our modern miracle of science. He either did not trust me or did not want me in the limelight. I realised now, that compromise of any sort meant an unacceptable burden to David’s searing ambition, he did not intend to share glory or riches. He was a scoundrel, and his soul was frozen on his bones.

As he downloaded my files into his device, he checked over his gun, inspecting the magazine for the remaining bullets. He was not finished yet. How would he, how could he cover all this up? I knew my family were in mortal danger. He would blame me, he would put me in a frame somehow, I knew that much. He’d say I was mentally unstable and suicidal or that the last thing he heard from me was that I threatening to kill my family and disappear. He would then be free to declare that he had finished the project by himself. I somehow knew all this instinctively, another fascinating condition of being a deceased being.

It occurred to me that time’s march meant little in this state, I was vaguely aware of the potential divergent destinies, and I could feel them already made, glimpsing the spreading patterns of time and space.

I knew David was a brilliant mind and I liked him but there had always been a side of him that scared me a little. He was devoid of something basic, he lacked a key ingredient of warmth.

“He’s just a hyper-focused specialist,” I had often told Sue. “There’s more to him than you see on the surface.”

All I could do now was stare at him from my ethereal domain, inches from his clean-shaven chin, stare into those ice-blue, calculated eyes, and see him for who he was. I could sometimes hear his thoughts like half-formed echoes, that was how it worked, and they told me that my family was in danger, real danger.

It was up to me to stop him. It was clear I had a strong purpose, even as my pale flesh was being devoured by worms underground.

I found myself through willpower, standing, if you can call it that, in the master bedroom in our house. The curtains were drawn shut. Sue was there, the shape of a curled fossil in the heavy duvet. Sleeping pills were untouched on the bedside cabinet, beside a drained bottle of wine. The kids were nowhere to be seen. I lay beside her, I can’t remember how, but I did it and I reached out a hand to her ear. I could see my hand but as it reached her ear it faded.

She sat bolt upright in instantaneous panic.

“…. Is that you?” she whispered, “Babe? Are you in the bathroom? You said you’d be home last night. I stayed up… Huh… Where are you…Babe?”

“Run…” I yelled. I could feel my mouth stretching to exaggerate the noise only I could hear.

Nothing. She scanned the shadows of the room, confused, sensing something was off. She brought a hand to her forehead as it began to pound from the alcohol that had swelled her brain. I could see her lips were wet as if a prelude to vomiting but she breathed away the pain and stumbled from the bed toward the dresser like a toddler attempting those epic first steps, zigzagging into the furniture with a thump.

“…Babe?!” she repeated, uncertain.

She looked around confused. No-one.

“Weird?” she groaned.

Her mobile began to vibrate on her bedside table so she grappled it toward her head, squinting, expecting it to be me. To her surprise, it was not.

“…David?”

Her face began to tighten and I could hear his monotone voice on the other side of the line, weaving a lie to get her to open the door. It was like a vampire demanding permission to step into her home, to cross the threshold.

She continued; “So you’re coming around right now. I’m not ready for visitors to be honest. Where the hell is…. oh… He is, is he? Tell him to come over himself… okay, if it’s important, I’ll let you in. You’re where? Outside the house, now?!”

I found myself drawn downstairs. He was there, a shadow of a head and shoulders through the misty door glass, a spectre of evil on the doorstep, waiting. In his jacket pocket, he was clutching the gun handle, and he was trying to control his breathing and measure the tempo of his speech, to make sure she didn’t sense his dark intentions.

I strode straight through the closed door toward him and tried to grab his sleeve.

For a second, he was confused, looking about and checking himself. I had affected him. It was my rage, my focus, it amplified me somehow. I would have to learn how to use it fast.

“Sue, where are your two lovely kids?”

It was a misstep. I could sense a small flag of alarm in Sue’s brain, a hard, solid intuition from a mother.

“Why do you ask?” she blurted, awkwardly feeling it might be too rude a response as she was still a little drunk and reactionary.

“Just curious, I can usually hear them…”

Sue stopped for a second to observe the silhouette at the window of the door. It didn’t feel right, everything, it was not right. I think she could pick up my thoughts too, a faint two-way open channel.

“Yes!” I yelled. “He wants to kill you! Sue! Run!”

Our Icarus project had been relatively secret. It had to be. Sue was a loose end. She would know instantly I was not suicidal, far from it. She would work out his lie if he spared her and he knew it.

A single bead of sweat slid down his cheek. He was unravelling. The door was in his way. Someone might see him there waiting, a dog walker, a kid on a skateboard, someone out for a run.

“I… No, I mean he… just needs a couple of files from his study. It will only take a second. I promise!”

I reached my hand into his jacket and focused my rage on the trigger of the pistol. It worked. The gun fired through the jacket, through the floorboard of the porch, sending splinters flying.

“Shit!” he shouted, jumping a foot in the air in shock.

By the time he had kicked the door off its latch, Sue was upstairs, prizing open the bedroom window. It led to a shallow sloping roof which she climbed on and with a newfound dexterity she jumped two metres to the garden below, rolling as she hit the lawn to soften the impact. She was working it out as she fled. There was something about David at the door when he was waiting to come in, a noticeable change that told her his mask had slipped. He was oozing his intent through the airwaves, it was hard to describe how tangible that was, as if his mind, a shell for all these years had suddenly sprouted thick tentacles unravelling to grip for prey.

I followed him upon his shoulder, and as he peered out of the window, leaning on the thin wooden edge, with his plans ruined, I focused my rage on his wrist supporting him on the sill. His arm gave way, wobbling and slipping beneath his weight so the only way was forward. He tumbled over and over the tiles, spiralling over the edge of the lower level roof and landed hard on his neck on the ground with a sickening ‘snap’.

I waited for a few long, quiet moments and watched him slowly stand up, uncurl his back and look around, unaware of any transition.

He was surprised at first that he had not sustained any injuries until he glanced back to the garden to confront his own contorted body, with his head twisted almost all the way around. I walked or perhaps glided, so I was in front of him and looked him dead in the eye. He seemed to shiver.

“I don’t get it… You’re dead…” he gaped.

His voice seemed small.

Around him, I could feel the presence of strange creatures, they were rounding on him, circling him, they were not human, they were not of Earth. This was new. I almost longed for a notebook, a camera, something to record the findings. What were they?

It was as if they could smell his mind, whatever they were. It was as if the aroma, the taste of evil, was alluring to them. Perhaps, I supposed, they were like the bottom feeders of the oceans, cleaning up the garbage and unwanted debris that sunk to the deepest depths. They were attracted to the strongest stench, like flies landing on a rotting corpse for food.

“All this time… All this time…” I grinned at him sarcastically. “We can live forever.”

“I can’t see the sun, where is the sun?!” he winced in shock.

The growls alarmed him as I watched him spin about defensively. He seemed to shrink and fade into a growing darkness which began to swallow him slowly, envelope him piece by piece, from his head to his feet. He was darting and shaking, glitching away from the middle place we existed in.

“Where am I?” he pleaded with dread in his words, and his hands began to flinch as if bitten by unseen teeth.

“You got greedy, and I guess Project Icarus will be lost now, maybe it was never meant to be… “I said calmly. “Welcome to the rest of your life…” I scoffed.

I watched him curiously, as he vanished into a blur of fading grey patches.

I assumed, no, I knew, that I could remain there, in the strange other place for as long as I could bear it, but I also knew, that would not be long at all.

As a scientist, and as a family man, I realised, that that life was meant for the living, that was my hypothesis based on the evidence I had seen. A state of matter can change its form with external events, like a solid turning to liquid, which turns to gas, but when it does, it changes its purpose. I had fulfilled my purpose in both the places I had experienced, it was time to change again. I was excited to see what was next.

The End