W. M. Gee is a writer who specialises in teen, horror, fantasy and sci-fi stories. His works often explore real world problems from adolescent perspectives, because — hey — we’ve all been there, right? In his free time, he loves writing poetry, reading sci-fi and painting minis. In 2021 he was awarded the people’s choice Golden Comma Award for his teen novella, "The List." He published his first teen-horror novella (ebook and print), "The Woodcutter's Daughter" in 2023. He lives in London but longs to own a lighthouse and listen to the sounds of the sea.
Read more by W.M. Gee right HERE.
WE DID IT TO OURSELVES
by
W.M. Gee
When Javier awoke, the screaming had already started. Through steel and airlock, through bulkhead and ballast-tank — something in Urchin-12 was howling, and gibbering, and banging.
Javier lay in bed trying to remember his orientation. A too-nice woman named Sandra had shown him every inch of the undersea phytoplankton seeder-sub from the upper science decks to the lower machine-houses. He’d been distracted by her non-regulation Geelong Cats sports-pin. All he could remember from the orientation now was ‘Go Cats!’
The screaming was coming from above him. Somewhere in the restricted Halford-Dominguíz-only sections of the science labs. A manic, end-of-all-things madness, drowning in its inhumanity. It was taken up by a different kind of screaming. Terrified and pleading; cocooned in inaction; wrapped in the false hope that the first screamer remembered rules and reason. Javier listened to the sounds of a struggle. More screaming. A gunshot. Another. Silence.
After, there was movement. Someone had survived. Someone was moving towards him, their feet banging down the metal ladder of the Urchin-12. Shuffling along the passageway towards his room. Javier recoiled under his bedsheets at the repeated sounds of a heavy thump followed by a dragging sound; a near-inhuman gait. Repeating all the way up to his door. Then stopping. Slowly, the wheel began to turn.
“Don’t come in!” Javier shouted, the words a shield of absurdity.
The door opened. A bloodied officer stood on the other side, favoring her uninjured leg. Lieutenant Lincoln.
“I thought—” Javier gabbled. The lieutenant interrupted him.
“Listen up, rich kid. Boat’s fucked to shit. It’s my job to get you off her.”
Javier tilted his head at the ‘rich kid’ comment.
“I know whose son you are, Javier Dominguez,” Lincoln replied. “Nephew,” Javier corrected, bruised. “I’m the boss’— I’m the ship’s mechanic.”
“Apprentice mechanic,” Lincoln intoned. “And she’s a boat. Not a ship.”
Javier fell silent.
Lincoln led him through noiseless passageways and empty junctions towards the upper decks.
“Main ladder’s right behind here,” Lincoln informed him, opening the hatch. “Watch out for—”
But she didn’t need to warn him. He already saw it on the other side.
A circular, fleshy mass lay on the decking. Javier sprang back immediately with a, “Fuck!” Then a “Dios mío!”
The disk-like substance seemed to be moving! Writhing and convulsing with strange urgency. Brownish, foul-smelling liquid oozed from it and pooled beneath with each purposeful convulsion.
“They’re all over the Urchin,” Lincoln growled.
“What the hell are they?” Javier replied.
Lincoln didn’t answer.
Javier looked closely at the veiny, poros flesh of the thing. Something glinted in the mass, something that didn’t belong there. He reached for it, but Lincoln stopped his arm. She produced a pair of gloves from her uniform, donned them, and slid her fingers into the thing. It quivered slightly under her touch as she retrieved the object. It was a sports-pin. Javier’s hands held onto his stomach as his tongue held onto the words: Go Cats! Lincoln tossed the pin. They ascended the ladder.
The upper science floors were a mess. There were more of those disk-like things underneath workstations and across benches. They oozed brownish-liquid like the first. Javier had once visited a dying grandfather, but the cancerous smell of offal in that sickroom had nothing on the fetor of this lab.
It was then that Javier noticed the noises. The low thrumming of the engines, the gentle hiss of the air-recyclers: background noise, tuned to silence in the ordinary, now screamed out of it. Despite the earlier gunshots, there were no bodies up here.
“Should be 37 people on this boat,” Lincoln announced, looking around the lab ominously.
“You think those disk-things got the crew?” Javier asked.
“I think those disk-things are the crew,” Lincoln replied.
Advancing further into the lab, Javier saw it first. On the whiteboard. Where once there had been notes and observations, numbers and hypotheses, a panicked sweep of the arm had erased them. In their place, written over and again, in more than one hand (or was it one hand, growing increasingly erratic?), were the words: WE DID IT TO OURSELVES.
“Someone was saying that,” Lincoln informed Javier gravely. “Repeating it over and over. Like he’d lost his mind.”
Javier eyed the flesh-disks again.
“Or something took it.”
Lincoln limped over to one of the workstations and hacked away at the keys. The H-D logo and disquieting slogan ‘Crafting Better Climates’ faded.
“Fuck me!” Lincoln cried.
Javier’s throat tightened, his palms grew sweaty.
“What is it?” he asked, stepping over. A lab report stood open on the unlocked screen. He didn’t need to be a scientist to see what had disturbed Lincoln. The final section of the report had been overwritten. There on the screen, again and again, in caps and lowercase and runningalltogether were the words: WE DID IT TO OURSELVES!
“What the hell happened here?” Javier asked.
Lincoln scrolled back through the report. Javier’s eyes caught terms that he recognized: “infectious mutation”, “extreme denaturing”, “mental incapacitation.” They were together with terms he didn’t: “saprotrophic superorganism”, “heterotrophic basidiomycota”. But at the top, in the abstract and loud as sin, was written: “direct result of phytoplankton seeding.”
“Don’t you see?” Lincoln asked.
Javier looked blankly.
“We increased phytoplankton yields. Using basidiomycota. To produce more oxygen from water. We’re 60% fucking water!”
“We fucked ourselves over for a bigger goddam percentage?!”
Lincoln looked pained.
“We did it to ourselves,” she crowed.
Javier stopped cold. Lincoln’s head turned, her body twisting in the chair at an impossible angle. Her eyes pleaded with him. Like there were things she wanted to tell him. But all that would come out was: “We did it to ourselves!”
“No.” Javier cried, backing away.
He saw the distress pool in the lieutenant’s eyes. The look of fear, then realization, then abject terror as the truth of it took her. Her eyes would not remember rules or reason.
“We did it to ourselves,” she cried, and her face wept brownish, filthy liquid. Then she was upon him.