Cyrillic script

Somewhere beyond, the machine's rumble pulsed, a frequency deep enough to vibrate bone and memory, its presence oppressive, as if the walls themselves resented any intrusion, as if they'd grown thick with secrets, salted into concrete.

Rusted cables draped like veins from the ceiling, looping into stacked racks of analog equipment so old that some labels were in Cyrillic, some in nothing but numbered tape.

The ceiling dripped.

Our boots splashed through water-pooled ankle deep, black as oil and just as iridescent, the tang of salt and corrosion thick enough to taste on the back of my tongue.

At the central node, seven reels mounted to a battered projector faced the warped wall.

Each reel's case had a name scrawled on it, Cyrillic and Roman.

Roman letters for the recent, Russian for the old.

All missing crew.

We circled the core, searching for a logic.

There, at the base of the tank, a webwork of crude switches, tagged with slips of yellowing tape, numbers in both English and Cyrillic.

He tried to ward it, aid a guess, fingers probing the symbols.

Not to keep those out, but to keep the others from bleeding in.

The fourth was a perfectly good Petrarchian sonnet, reviling the current administration and the political party of which Len was a registration-day member.

The fifth was hand-lettered in the Cyrillic alphabet and illustrated with geometric diagrams.

Len put it down and stared shakily at Moira.

No, go on, she said.

Date, January 1973.

I spun through the battered log, translating from patchwork Cyrillic, sketches of the reef's geometry, notes about teams experiencing recursive consciousness events, drawings that mapped perfectly onto our symmetrical shrimp, the mirrored palm prints, the doubled coral shapes, bodies folded not in water but in memory, self within self, distorted faces scrawled double on the page, never quite aligning.

Nothing was new.

The reef had mapped itself through people like us before.

I don't know if it's just noise anymore.

Sometimes if I stand next to Raj, my hands tingle like they're not quite mine.

My logs, sometimes I catch myself starting code in Cyrillic and ending in English.

The time stamps drift, back and forward, as if I already wrote them.

The subs haul up closest pitiful pitted, alive with red algae.

but it's what's stamped into the metal deliberately as if over existing insignia that's odd, not Cyrillic, not standard issue, and partially gouged away.

Inside, all is quiet except the faint whine of our gear.

But near the rear, cradled behind warped webbing, is a sealed box solidly heavy despite its size, lead-lined.

In the dark image reproduced in his book, a small pale shape is visible.

Prima compared it to a reversed Cyrillic, A, and claimed that it lay exactly where Irina had felt the thread being tugged.

He acknowledged that the mark might have been a defect introduced during the imaging process, but believed that he recognized it from somewhere else.

Similar signs, he wrote, had occasionally appeared in photographs he had taken inside houses he considered haunted.

Illiteracy still ran high in China because of the difficulty in memorizing the tens of thousands of ideographs which made up the written language, so each man carried a chop to imprint his name.

Officially China used the alphabet, spelling out the Chinese words phonetically, and, significantly, they had chosen the Latin alphabet of the Western nations rather than the Cyrillic of the Soviets.

But old usages die hard.

Kandron imprinted the ideograph on the page, then beside it he wrote, "'Ying Li' in Latin Characters.' The clerk's respect for this old man went up a degree.