Three thousand souls arrive expecting a paradise.
Something has been expecting them.
Imagine that every step you take sends a signal to every tree, every shroom, every parasite. Vibration. Heat. Flesh. Delicious.
Is it dead yet? Can we eat it now?
Welcome to Mairee.
Three thousand souls arrive expecting a paradise.
Something has been expecting them.
Imagine that every step you take sends a signal to every tree, every shroom, every parasite. Vibration. Heat. Flesh. Delicious.
Is it dead yet? Can we eat it now?
Welcome to Mairee.
There is a song in the stone. And if you listen, you can hear the math starting to fail. To unfold. You weren’t there. But you’re next. I’m uplinking this to you because if I don’t, only the stone will remember. It just sits there, waiting for you, before it can get back to being a rock. And if you were going to look away, don’t. If you turn your head now, you’ll miss the moment it decides to notice you. My name doesn’t matter. Where we start does. Not Earth. Not Paradise. You’re on the planet Mairee, the moment the hum of the station changed.
THE UNFOLDING
FREYA HOMESTEAD, MAIREE
The Comms-Bay, usually a hive of digital chatter, was silent. All eyes were on the Mission Commander, Astrid Vilde. And that silence was the loudest scream she had ever heard. She knew it was bad when she heard her own blood rushing in her ears. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. A pump desperately trying to keep the pressure up.
She brought her hand to her quivering lip, as if to hold back the words she didn’t yet dare to speak. She rested her open palm on the edge of the comms console, which normally felt warm. Now it was as though she were touching a corpse. She’d often reminded her staff that fear and courage walked the same corridor. Now she reminded herself, hoping it would help her steady her hand.
“Muro, what do you hear?” she finally said. She crossed to the holoscreen. It rendered the lieutenant, floating weightless in Orbital Three. His thinning sandy hair was sweaty, clinging to his forehead.
Muro scratched his temple. “Nothing, Commander. Total blackout.” In his nervousness, Muro’s brogue accent took over. “It’s like the Fold got flushed. Gone. But the Brisinger… she’s still there. Sort of.”
“What is it?” Astrid cut in.
Muro twitched before he answered. “The carrier wave from the Bris. It’s corrupted, right enough. On an’ off since her crossover. It’s all garbled.”
Astrid leaned closer to the holoscreen. “What’s their last coherent message?”
“It’s… well, listen.”
A jagged waveform appeared in the air. “We are b-being… The c-crew—” The sound cut off in a high-pitched whine like a dental drill biting straight into nerve. In the bay, everyone stopped breathing as if collectively deciding to save oxygen. An ensign froze above the keys. Across the room, a technician lowered his slate. An officer stopped mid-step.
Astrid gripped the console. She pushed down until the tremor in her hands ceased. She forced a breath deep into her lungs, holding it to slow her hammering heart. She turned to her staff, exhaling deeply. “Breathe, dammit,” she said. “We’ll figure this out. Keep listening.”
And with that, the bay remembered to breathe again.
Two beats passed. The composite door hissed open. Ulre Corbin, Head of Logistics, stepped inside the doorway. He noticed the waste of a dead console still drawing power. His black uniform blended into the dim light. He pulled his gloves tighter, finger by finger. The sound of leather against leather was crisp and methodical, as if he were preparing to take the situation into a choke hold.
“Orbital Command agrees,” Ulre relayed. “We initiate the ESP.”
He was too quick to bring up the Emergency Suppression Protocol, Astrid thought, even though contact with Earth and the fleet beyond the Fold was indeed lost. “A carrier wave from Brisinger still persists,” Astrid declared. “They have the key to what happened. If we can restore comms—”
“Irrelevant,” Ulre scoffed, finally stepping inside. His polished boots creaked. Crr-eak. Crr-eak. “We have to move now, Commander. Thousands of lives. Limited resources. Every beat we wait…” He stood firm, letting the silence speak for him. “The protocol, Commander. Only your word is left. The situation calls for it.”
Astrid’s fingernails left marks in her palm. “Get the rationing ready, but keep the stores open. Wait for my order.”
She caught the defiance in his eyes. She wanted to reach the man behind the uniform. “Ulre,” she said, meeting his cold stare. “You mistake my contemplation for inaction. My judgment accounts for the trust among the settlers, which keeps three thousand souls together across the void.”
Astrid turned her eyes to her staff, then back to Corbin. The tension in his frame hadn’t loosened by a millimeter. His gaze didn’t drop in deference. Instead, it slid past her, fixing on the dead consoles. He was calculating. Astrid knew the confrontation wasn’t over. He was bypassing her entirely. But continuing this argument in front of the crew would only drain her authority. So she whispered to him, “This debate is over. Are we clear?”
“Clear,” Ulre bit out. He turned and left, the squeal of his pivoting boots lingering in her ears.
She gave a short nod to her comms chief. “Call an assembly. Homestead Dome.”
What if the very thing you did to survive was the thing that would destroy you?
In search of a better life and new resources, a team of experts set their sights on a new potential living location: Mairee. But while Mairee is abundant with water, a compatible air supply, and grounds rich enough to support agriculture, Mairee is much more dangerous, alive, and knowing than the crew understands before their long journey to a new planet.
While pitching the plan to host a second home on what they call The Delta, it's acknowledged that the plant life is abundant, and not only are these aggressive, invasive species, but many of them are airborne, and some of them display predatory features, like mimicry, camouflage, and maybe even teeth. Readers who read Life of Pi by Yann Martel might shudder at the memory of the island bearing human teeth, and movie enthusiasts might steel themselves for a spacetime edition of The Ruins. Because what they hope to find as salvation on The Delta is much more likely to be their demise.
But it's actually worse than they might think and worse than the reader might anticipate. Because everything is connected: every root, every nerve, every vibration. While that might be portrayed as beautiful, natural, and visceral in a world like Avatar with the Tree of Souls, in this world, being connected could cost you your life. So when 3,000 souls are sent to The Delta for the first time, not only does the world know that they're coming, but they're ready for them---and they're not interested in welcoming the humans with open arms; they're interested in feeding their hunger.
The Unfolding: Mairee, Part 1 by Stuart Nyland lives in the world of ecohorror and has its moments in the body horror genre. While Nyland himself compares this book (and I agree wholeheartedly) with LOST for its surrealism, Annihilation for its biological horror elements, and even The Expanse and Battlestar Galactica, I would also add that this would be an excellent horror read for those who love the moments of increased physicality of Stephen King (Dreamcatcher and Duma Key come to mind) and the ecological horror fiction (definitely Congo and Eaters of the Dead) by Michael Crichton.
But what really makes this book stand out is its writing style and its approach to the plot. Nyland immediately throws the reader into the deep end of chaos and death, but how the human race came to this point is a very slow (pardon the pun) unfolding, and the finer details of the story may not be what the reader expected at all in the beginning. The book works like a puzzle, slowly offering up pieces that the reader must put into place, and while the plot is somewhat graphic in nature, it's palatable and also very poetically done.
This will be an incredible book for someone looking for a book to challenge them and immerse them in the story; if you try to take this one to the beach, you'll forget about the waves and the sand and rock, and you'll fall into this world instead. I'd rather read this one at home with a blanket to hold, and the lights on, and I definitely will be doing so when Part Two comes out, because I cannot wait to see what comes next (you'll see why in the final pages).