Free Authority by Jeff VanderMeer

Cheney’s
     creature?
    He pressed forward: “But the director didn’t agree.”
    “No,” she admitted. Control wondered what kind of betrayal that had been. “She did
     not. She thought these were all pluses , that we were too concerned about the usual measurements of suitability. So we deferred
     to her.”
    “Even though she had the bodies of the prior expedition disinterred and reexamined?”
    “Where did you hear that?” she asked, genuinely surprised.
    “Wouldn’t that speak to the director’s own suitability?”
    But Grace’s surprise had already ossified back into resistance, which meant she was
     on the move again as she said curtly, “No. No, it would not.”
    “She suspected something, didn’t she?” Control asked, catching up to her again. Central
     thought the files suggested that even if the unique mind-wiped condition of the prior
     expedition didn’t signal a kind of shift in the situation in Area X, it might have
     signaled a shift in the director.
    Grace sighed, as if tired of trying to shake him. “She suspected that they might have …
     changed since the autopsies. But if you’re asking, you know already.”
    “And had they? Had they changed?” Disappeared. Been resurrected. Flown off into the
     sky.
    “No. They had decomposed a little more rapidly than might be expected, but no, they
     hadn’t changed.”
    Control wondered how much that had cost the director in respect and in favors. He
     wondered if by the time the director had told them she was attaching herself to the
     twelfth expedition some of the staff might have felt not alarm or concern but a strange
     sort of guilty relief.
    He had another question, but Grace was done, had already pivoted to veer off down
     a different corridor in the maze.
    *   *   *
    There followed some futile, halfhearted efforts to rearrange his office, along with
     a review of some basic reports Grace had thrown at him, probably to slow his progress.
     He learned that the Southern Reach had its own props design department, tasked with
     creating equipment for the expeditions that didn’t violate protocols. In other words,
     fabrication of antiquated technology. He learned that the security on the facilities
     that housed returning expedition members was undergoing an upgrade; the outdated brand
     of surveillance camera they’d been using had suffered a systemic meltdown. He’d even
     thrown out a DVD given to him by a “lifecycle biologist” that showed a computer-generated
     cross section of the forgotten coast’s ecosystem. The images had been created as a
     series of topographical lines in a rainbow of colors. It was very pretty but the wrong
     level of detail for him.
    At day’s end, on his way out, he ran into Whitby again, in the cafeteria around which
     the man seemed to hover, almost as if he didn’t want to be down in the dungeon with
     the rest of the scientists. Or as if they sent him on perpetual errands to keep him
     away. A little dark bird had become trapped inside, and Whitby was staring up at where
     it flew among the skylights.
    Control asked Whitby the question he’d wanted to ask Grace before her maze-pivot.
    “Whitby, why are there so few returning journals from the expeditions?” Far, far fewer
     than returnees.
    Whitby was still mesmerized by the flight of the bird, his head turning the way a
     cat’s does to follow every movement. There was an intensity to his gaze that Control
     found disconcerting.
    “Incomplete data,” Whitby said. “Too incomplete to be sure. But most returnees tell
     us they just don’t think to bring them back. They don’t believe it’s important, or
     don’t feel the need to. Feeling is the important part. You lose the need or impetus
     to divulge, to communicate, a bit like astronauts lose muscle mass. Most of the journals
     seem to turn up in the lighthouse anyway, though. It hasn’t been a priority for a
     while, but when we did ask later expeditions to retrieve them,