silver in the diffused sunlight of the dim day.
Sensing her approach, he turned to smile at her, a smile that faded when he saw her. He was holding something in his fingers, something she would never have thought to pack in her own bag. He was feeding a piece of beef jerky to Django.
Chapter 9
Darius Marlowe was a man with many keys. He had an ID that served as a key to the building that housed the lab; he had a magnetic card that served as a key to the lab itself; and he had a photo of a sigil drawn in condensation on the surface of a foggy mirror—a mirror misted with the water of another world—on his phone, which served as a key to the mind of Dr. Leonard Martin, who was himself a kind of key to the best 3D printer at MIT.
He flashed the sigil at Dr. Martin as he entered the lab. It probably wasn’t necessary to show it to him every time, but Darius wasn’t sure of the rules for keeping the suggestion effective, so he didn’t take any chances. His recent communications with Charobim had focused on only his most vital technical questions. The face-to-face summoning was an exhausting process, one he resorted to only when the instructions from his dreams required clarification.
The dreams had grown more vivid now that he slept at the Fenway Towers, close to the mirror. Maybe it had nothing to do with the mirror. Maybe he was developing some part of his brain, some facet of his active imagination through regular exercise. He thought of it as a kind of muscle deep in his brain, something serpentine coiled around his amygdala.
Martin had glanced up at Darius’s entry with perfectly lucid curiosity on his face, but at the sign of the pharaoh his features slackened immediately, and, resembling a lobotomy recipient, the distinguished scientist shambled to a corner of the lab to busy himself with whatever amusements he could find there (probably the non-Euclidian sculpture he’d been building out of coffee stirrers whenever Darius visited) and clearing the way for the protégé to use the lab.
Darius opened the glass specimen case at the end of the bay and checked on his latest prototype. It was a thing of beauty: a bionic larynx built in the Plexiglas box of the 3D printer from bovine cells, silicone, and silver Nano-particles in a mere five hours and then left to cultivate in a Petrie dish for two weeks, a process accelerated by a formula that Charobim had inscribed on the mirror one midnight. Dr. Martin would have been duly impressed if he were in his right mind in Darius’s presence. But then, if the professor were in his right mind, the student would have been ejected from the lab by campus security long before he’d had a chance to exhibit his genius for biotech innovation.
The project followed a trail blazed by McAlpine and Mannoor at Princeton, where they had developed a bionic ear that could transmit and receive electromagnetic frequencies beyond the natural human range. But their models took four weeks to cultivate and couldn’t detect acoustic sound waves. The work of Charobim and Marlowe would never see the pages of a peer-reviewed journal, but it broke new ground in that it produced actual acoustic speech via a voice box made of similar biosynthetic materials for the vocal folds, cartilage, and epiglottis. Of course, the production of language depended on the entire vocal system from lungs to tongue and teeth, but Darius wasn’t interested in making it speak English or any other known language.
He had built the Voice Box of the Gods to reproduce a lost language, the first language, which man had once sung in wordless adoration of the dark gods who had birthed him from the amniotic tide pools of his marine incarnation.
It was a language of vowels and overtones preserved by the priest class of ancient Sumer long after the evolution (or devolution) of the human organism had left such utterances behind. Some volumes of occult history claimed that the priests had cut out their own tongues or
Sensing her approach, he turned to smile at her, a smile that faded when he saw her. He was holding something in his fingers, something she would never have thought to pack in her own bag. He was feeding a piece of beef jerky to Django.
Chapter 9
Darius Marlowe was a man with many keys. He had an ID that served as a key to the building that housed the lab; he had a magnetic card that served as a key to the lab itself; and he had a photo of a sigil drawn in condensation on the surface of a foggy mirror—a mirror misted with the water of another world—on his phone, which served as a key to the mind of Dr. Leonard Martin, who was himself a kind of key to the best 3D printer at MIT.
He flashed the sigil at Dr. Martin as he entered the lab. It probably wasn’t necessary to show it to him every time, but Darius wasn’t sure of the rules for keeping the suggestion effective, so he didn’t take any chances. His recent communications with Charobim had focused on only his most vital technical questions. The face-to-face summoning was an exhausting process, one he resorted to only when the instructions from his dreams required clarification.
The dreams had grown more vivid now that he slept at the Fenway Towers, close to the mirror. Maybe it had nothing to do with the mirror. Maybe he was developing some part of his brain, some facet of his active imagination through regular exercise. He thought of it as a kind of muscle deep in his brain, something serpentine coiled around his amygdala.
Martin had glanced up at Darius’s entry with perfectly lucid curiosity on his face, but at the sign of the pharaoh his features slackened immediately, and, resembling a lobotomy recipient, the distinguished scientist shambled to a corner of the lab to busy himself with whatever amusements he could find there (probably the non-Euclidian sculpture he’d been building out of coffee stirrers whenever Darius visited) and clearing the way for the protégé to use the lab.
Darius opened the glass specimen case at the end of the bay and checked on his latest prototype. It was a thing of beauty: a bionic larynx built in the Plexiglas box of the 3D printer from bovine cells, silicone, and silver Nano-particles in a mere five hours and then left to cultivate in a Petrie dish for two weeks, a process accelerated by a formula that Charobim had inscribed on the mirror one midnight. Dr. Martin would have been duly impressed if he were in his right mind in Darius’s presence. But then, if the professor were in his right mind, the student would have been ejected from the lab by campus security long before he’d had a chance to exhibit his genius for biotech innovation.
The project followed a trail blazed by McAlpine and Mannoor at Princeton, where they had developed a bionic ear that could transmit and receive electromagnetic frequencies beyond the natural human range. But their models took four weeks to cultivate and couldn’t detect acoustic sound waves. The work of Charobim and Marlowe would never see the pages of a peer-reviewed journal, but it broke new ground in that it produced actual acoustic speech via a voice box made of similar biosynthetic materials for the vocal folds, cartilage, and epiglottis. Of course, the production of language depended on the entire vocal system from lungs to tongue and teeth, but Darius wasn’t interested in making it speak English or any other known language.
He had built the Voice Box of the Gods to reproduce a lost language, the first language, which man had once sung in wordless adoration of the dark gods who had birthed him from the amniotic tide pools of his marine incarnation.
It was a language of vowels and overtones preserved by the priest class of ancient Sumer long after the evolution (or devolution) of the human organism had left such utterances behind. Some volumes of occult history claimed that the priests had cut out their own tongues or
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