Beacon 23: The Complete Novel by Hugh Howey Read Free Book Online

become?
    Was this me before boot camp?
    This was me back in high school. The real me. What the hell did the army do to me?
    That’s when I hear the scratching noise. Coming from the box sitting on the airlock bench.
    And a small voice that does not seem to be coming from inside my head.

 
     
    • 10 •
     
    Picking up the box, that mirror finish of wood with the hole blown out, I turn it to find the clasp, and again I hear something move inside. I feel the clunk of something heavy hitting one wall of the box. I feel it vibrate slightly in my hand.
    The clasp is really a series of four wood pegs, each bigger around than my finger. I push them in one at a time, and when I push the fourth, it causes the first three to slide back out flush with the box. I push the first three in again, but the lid won’t open. I reset them. Try the first two. Reset. The first and third. Reset. The middle two. Reset. Just the first. Reset. Just the second. And the lid pops open.
    The thing inside shifts again. And then I hear someone say:
    “Jesus Christ on a popsicle stick, took your goddamn time.”
    There is a rock inside the box.
    I look at the rock.
    I feel like the rock is looking at me.
    The rock shifts position ever so slightly.
    “What?” it asks.
    “Hello?” I say.
    “Yeah, hello, what the hell took you so long? I was dying in here.”
    “You’re . . . a rock,” I tell the rock.
    “The fuck I am.”
    I set the box back on the bench and rest on my heels, peering at the little thing. It’s gray with deep pockets of black, little fissures and cracks and pockmarks. One of the black spots is deep and might be an . . . eye? I’ve gone through countless flashcards of alien life for the army and NASA, and I’ve forgotten most of what I had to memorize to get through the tests, but I know there are shitloads of creatures that camouflage themselves either to not get stepped on or to kill the fuck out of those of us who step too close to them. Yet I’ve never seen a creature that looks so much like . . . a rock.
    “What are you?” I ask.
    “Well, since you’re obviously a human, you’d call me an Orvid. And since your accent places you from Earth, you’d obviously not give a fuck what I call myself in my own tongue, so why bother?”
    “You’re a foul-mouthed thing,” I say.
    “This is me shrugging like I give a shit,” the rock tells me.
    “This is weird,” I say out loud, mostly to myself, but I guess partly to the rock. “I mean, a lot of my life has been really freaking kooky and batshit crazy, but this is fascinatingly weird.”
    “Yeah, no shit. I’m on my way to a happy life in Oxford, and next thing I know I can’t breathe and some fruitloop is shrieking and shaking my happy little wooden home and giving me hell for my vocabulary. Jesus, man, I almost just died, and you’re thinking about yourself? What kind of special selfish are you?”
    This brings me up short. My brain is still whirling with the idea that this rock-looking alien is actually alive, so I haven’t considered the fact that a clearly sentient being very nearly just died, and here I am worried about my own feelings.
    “Damn,” I say. “Sorry. Totally. Are you okay? You need . . . like little pebbles to munch on or something?” I laugh.
    “Fuck you,” the rock says. “What I need is some water.”
    •••
    This is me, in a beacon, out on the edge of sector eight, so damn near the edge that I might as well be in sector nine, running the tap on my moisture reclamator, filling a plastic cup with water, then drizzling it on top of a rock in a smashed wooden box.
    “Not on my fucking head!” the rock says.
    I apologize but laugh. The rock has what sounds vaguely like a British accent, which makes everything it says funnier than it should.
    “Sorry,” I say.
    “Just a little puddle, man. And save me some time by putting me in it.”
    I do this. It occurs to me that I haven’t called this in or checked with NASA about what I