Axiom

by Gentry Race

“And was there anything peculiar about his behavior?”

  “He’s devout.”

  “And you are not?”

  “He views the Mesons as a sect of Neology.” Solari shifted in her seat, correcting her posture. “Forgive me, Director. My mind wanders.”

  “To let the mind wander is letting go of the grip of reality. You would do well to put that out of your mind.”

  “Yes, Director.”

  “Tell me about the Meson charm you found.”

  “It’s some kind of dosing device. I think it’s hiding the erratum.”

  “Yes, well, this is a problematic situation. The Mesons prove to be the armpit of Annulus. Your subject tonight was a special case—an NPD. Are you aware of this disorder?” he asked, watching the needle on the monitor pulse up and down.

  “Yes, Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”

  “Starting today, I want you to apprehend all eradicates and their family members, too. Annulus will no longer tolerate the imperfection spreading on this station.”

  The needle bobbed slightly.

  “How does this make you feel?” the director continued.

  Solari looked down for a moment, conjuring her inner thoughts. “She has a conflicted Conscious”

  “Soul,” he interjected.

  “Yes, her… soul was suffering. She was screaming about perfection, the Mesons androgen.”

  The needle spiked at that moment, signaling to the director that he had struck an important emotion.

  “Love?” he asked.

  Solari immediately blushed. “Yes, she was talking about love.”

  “And what do you feel about the abstract concept of love?”

  The director watched the indicator closely, noticing her fists grasping the tin canisters tightly.

  “Love of your family?”

  Solari sat silent. Flashes of a hover craft smoldering in a desert setting filled her thoughts of when she was younger. “My family.”

  “What of them?” asked the director.

  “I miss them,” Solari said.

  “Your mother gave you all she had so she could give you the life you have now,” Chellis said.

  “I know.”

  5

  Annulus Tower stood high, crowning the collider like a jewel on a ring. It twisted on center axis and each floor, spiraling up like antennae toward earth. Just beneath it lay the groundwork that made nPrinting possible; the electron tunnels.

  These cavernous tunnels ran incredible depths, decorated with reddish-orange metallic shingle tiles that reflected the high ceilings above. Standing six stories, they almost made one forget they were underground.

  Inside, fiery collisions of electrons amalgamated into clumps of blank, heavy White Matter. As condensation set in, the hot matter floated to the top, storing into the crust and pushing its way to the surface. This is where Annulus White Matter reserves were; the white blood of Annulus.

  Wearing a uniform tight and arranged with militaristic perfection, Louin, the Annulus Tower night guardian, put on his hat and stepped into the elevator. As the elevator descended, he reflected on all his years of service. Doing so brought him pleasure, and he reminisced often.

  The harsh fluorescence of the elevator’s lighting deepened the lines in his face. While most had selected youthful flesh, Louin had insisted on a face he felt reflected the true depth of his experiences.

  In his mind, and in the minds of many others, Louin’s chosen face projected the wisdom and dignity he had earned in his lifetime. An enthusiastic student of physics in his youth, his education had opened doors into a career with the White Matter Manufacturing Department. However, it was when he saved an accident-prone human tourist from a gruesome fate that Louin’s true calling became apparent.

  His newly awakened urge to protect led to his enlistment in the Enconn Corp. Following a thorough survey, the Corps. positioned Louin as a guardian, and he proudly held that position for many years since.

  The tunnels were always dimly lit in the moments leading up to the collision, and the ensuing light show was an incredible sight that affected Louin as strongly on his thousandth time witnessing it as it had on his first.

  Walking his shift route, Louin passed a series of windows. A bluish white streak crossed above him in a wave. He looked up and watched the recoil ignite. Innumerable strands of light streaked four stories above him. Collision was imminent, and Louin felt giddy in anticipation. Instead of the chaotic light display he’d expected, however, the light sputtered out like a spent sparkler.

  Confounded, he was intent to investigate. He walked back to the control, and to his astonishment, the booths were dead, leaving him extremely puzzled.

  Standing in confusion, a sleek shadow darted past his peripheral.

  “What was—” Louin blurted out, trying to make out the figure.

  From the corner of his eye, he could see the figure pass into the shadows, leaving a trail of blood. He bent down, touching the red substance he hadn’t seen in years.

  “That was strange,” Louin said.

  “Meson?” a voice whispered from the shadows.

  “Hey! Nobody’s supposed to be down here!” Louin called out as he typed buttons in his arm bistable. Red text blinked on and off that read “AXIOM.”

  “Axiom, I got a…”

  A flash of motion whipped across Louin’s face, scratching his eyes. He fell to the ground, trying to focus his vision. A dark figure came over him whispering to him one more time, “Meson?”

  The air was thick with the smell of human funk when Solari arrived to meet Carter for an impromptu hunt. Steam from the inner sewer wafted up into Solari’s face reminding her of where she was; The Dregs. The Dregs were nothing to see if you were an nPrint. Wet, dark, and covered in the soot left from the Mods that lived there and a carbon-based energy they clung to.

  “I hate it down here,” Carter said, trying to wipe away the filth that contaminated his greaseless skin.

  Solari and Carter crept down the side alley where the smell concentrated. She had a trident-shaped weapon held to her shoulder, and her attention darted back and forth to her second skin that blipped with a solid red dot.

  “The guard said it was calling for the Mesons?”

  “Guard reported it in the tunnels. We got a faint track on it to this location. Report incidents of self-mutilation,” Carter said.

  “A scratcher,” Solari mumbled to herself.

  Solari looked at the Mod Parlor entrance ahead; a nondescript storefront abandoned for the newer and latest upgrade that came and went. Her second skin projected a hologram showing a solid signal from inside and then fading to black.

  “What floor is it on?” Solari asked, looking up at the broken windows at the higher floors.

  “First floor,” Carter answered.

  Solari kicked in the door, rushing in to scan the room with a pin light that shined emerald green from her arm. The musty store of Modded upgrades strung cybernetic hands, arms, and legs across the wall like an orderly collage of body horror. Solari felt uneasy seeing the limbs despite their artificial nature.

  “Clear! Where is it?” Solari said, searching with her mag.

  Solari walked up to a gaping hole in the floor. A dark chasm descended, and she could discern the burnt metal smell of the electron tunnels where the creature was first spotted.

  “He’s on the move! Second floor!” Carter yelled.

  Solari ran to the stairs toward the back to the parlor. A glint of deep red seeped down the steps.

  “He’s bleeding,” Solari said.

  She crept up the stairs, old wood creaking and bowing with each step. Just over the mantel, she took a step nudging a small canister by her foot. She aimed the light down to see an unmistakable trail of small caching tubes. Her light followed the trail to see a shirtless man hunched over, rustling with something under his belly.

  “Eradicate, you have the right—” Solari started.

  The man cocked his head with a dazed lo
ok, dropping another caching canister. As he turned his body, he revealed his hands which were bloodied to the elbows. His chest had been scratched away, exposing the white ligaments of the torso.

  “They are under my skin!” the man said, his face grimacing with pain.

  “He’s a scratcher,” Solari said to Carter.

  Solari shot her weapon, sending a large buckle onto the man’s leg. He cried in pain and picked up another tube, stabbing into his leg.

  “I have to fix it!” he yelped.

  The man injected another tube into his body. Immediately, his skin boiled to a frostbitten black, and his eyes turned white as snow. He scratched open his chest, and Solari watched a man turn into a monster for the first time. She shot round after round from her mag to no avail.

  Carter fired shots, stepping back and watching the figure form and stretch, rapidly growing larger. He tripped a different set of switches on his mag to a higher frequency. Pulling the trigger set forth a constant blast of super conducted magnetic radiation.

  “Meson!” the creature yelled, breaking past Solari and Carter down the stairs.

  Solari looked over the stairs to see the creature jump down the hole it came from. “He’s going back to the tunnels!” Solari called out, and with a firm grip, she swung her body over the railing in a dive for the escape route.

  Her body slid down the scratched-out pit, dropping through streams of electrons and onto the highly reflective glass shingles. High above she saw the colliding electrons, their hot quarks spiraling off to their frantic deaths and absorbing into the milky receptive ceiling above. This was the birth of White Matter. On the ground, drips of blood trailed into the distance.

  Carter dropped onto his feet just behind Solari. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Solari said, steadily aiming her mag. She walked steadily into the over lit tunnels and past control sets every fifty feet. “Maybe the caching is causing some sort side effect.”

  “If it gets a feed from Annulus, how are we going to stop it?”

  Solari paused for a moment, thinking over what Carter had just said. “That might be it.”

  Solari ran to the control set, fingered over several holographic dials, and stopped on a red one that read White Matter Feed. She flipped the switch down and raised her second skin, accessing another group of commands.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Carter asked.

  “I need to hack past the VPN,” Solari said, typing in the command ECHO_REQUEST.

  She typed the instructions, waiting for a ping and found the center switch, enabling the bypass. The lights flickered above in response as Solari and Carter began to strobe.

  “Are you crazy?” Carter yelped. “You probably shut down half the city’s feed!”

  Solari exited the set, punched in more commands on her second skin, and printed the signal booster to increase her feed supply.

  “Here, this will keep us from strobing, and that thing will be so weak it can’t withstand our ammo,” Solari said, handing him a small puck-like device as she kneeled down and pulled an explosive from her waist.

  Noises in the shadows rustled not far ahead. A massive chest being scratched away moved out to the open, blood oozing from its cavity.

  The creature jumped onto Solari’s chest, furiously scratching at her torso. She felt the searing pain as her flesh was scratched away, but it repaired instantly. The creature knocked the explosive from her hand and sprung towards Carter.

  It wrestled with Carter, crawling around him like a spider securing its meal. Solari rose to see the creature fumbling with a familiar shiny device—the explosive. She felt the flash of heat and a burst of hot air hit her face in a final pulse of defeat.

  6

  Emotionally, Solari felt nothing. Blackness all around her as she floated, weightlessly, waiting for her reprinting to start. This was her memory space also known as memSpace. The realm between her inner self, her reality, and her dreams. Some would call it the subconscious, but Solari just thought of it as her backup space.

  She tried to keep her mind clear of thoughts. In this space, you have access to all that you were and ever will be. Solari knew one could tumble down the many memory wells, prolonging the reset process. It was the reason Annulus to nPrint physically first as the infinite memSpace of one’s consciousness can be daunting and uncontrollable.

  A slight breeze brushed over her face, twisting her brown wavy hair. It was distinct, yet hazy. She felt separate and yet apart.

  The breeze turned to a gushing wind, pushing her hair back in dancing tufts. Her weight shifted as she opened her eyes to see she was high above the atmosphere of Annulus. She liked this viewpoint as the ever-encircling station faded into the distance. She could see Earth above in full, crisp blue blotted in the remaining cities left from the Big Flare.

  As she flew between the two worlds, the narrow strip of rocky red landmasses passed below her. She could see the Far Side and waterways cutting into the newly formed landscape like scars on a human’s imperfect.

  For a moment, she felt motionless with Annulus and the Earth moving though this was short lived as she noticed the Earth changing. The heavy forested trees of evergreen shifted color to a bright grayish white as they whipped past her in heavy streaks of motion.

  A Silicon Forest, she thought.

  She loved the swirling ribbons of clouds that reminded her of the lace trim dresses her mother would wear.

  If only my mother could see me now, she thought.

  Solari tilted her body and realized she could change her trajectory. She flew higher now and closer to Earth as her curiosity had been perked. The white forests seemed to pull away, leaving a giant ocean and a tiny speck of land making its way towards her.

  Her body rotated as she realized she wasn’t flying along Earth but falling into it now. A glow formed around her body, exciting the fourth state of matter—plasma. The heat rose around her as she entered the atmosphere, and violent wind forced her hair straight back.

  She looked back at Annulus, glimpsing the faint trail she left behind. Soon, she noticed her feet were missing, then her legs, and then her feet. She broke apart as small fissures climbed and cracked up to her face. She looked up to Earth that was just moments away before sudden coolness hit her. She was in the Ocean.

  Fluorescent white lighting shone on Solari’s soft skin, revealing her shimmering peach glow as she laid in the windowless Med Bed room inside Annulus Tower. Her body sloshed gently in a small tub filled with gelatinous semi-translucent liquid. Two ports opened, resting her body on a soft mat as the liquid drained.

  “White Matter condensation complete,” said a monotone voice.

  A myriad of white robotic arms gently readjusted sensors and stimulators to exercise her new muscle tissue. Each limb was layered with perfect flesh, tendons, and skin.

  Her head was crowned in a NIMBUS device and her memories felt faint but akin to a calm sea. She winced her eyes while her vision refocused. Then she remembered the blast, an erratum and a manifestation.

  “How do you feel?” said a stark voice from across the room.

  Slowly, her vision focused on Director Chellis, dressed in his white garb with eyes that looked weary.

  Solari sat up, pulling the monitoring pads off her body, and hanging her feet off the Med Bed. “Fine.”

  “You need to be surveyed for an erratum,” Chellis said, a keen eye of distrust displayed across his face.

  “Director?”

  “You need to check for stressors,” he continued.

  “Director, I’ve reprinted hundreds of times. I don’t—”

  “You didn’t reprint,” Chellis said flatly.

  Solari was taken back by the comment. “Didn’t I reset and reprint?”

  “Another team found you above the tunnels. You didn’t reprint back to the Med Bed like Carter. We reset you.”

  Solari sat there in quiet astonishment.

  “How did you get out of the tunnels?”


  “I-I’m not sure,” Solari answered. “What about the scratcher?”

  “Nothing was found,” Chellis confirmed.

  A silence fell over them. Solari tried not to look at the judgment in Chellis’s eyes.

  “Last night was the first time Annulusian citizens feared for their souls,” Chellis said.

  Solari looked confused. “Sir, I was taking assertive measures—”

  “No! You had no right shutting down the White Matter feed!” Chellis yelled.

  “Sir, we’ve never seen a manifestation like this! The memCaching—”

  “I don’t care if the Mesons are making the memCaching drug. I said I wanted them under a NIMBUS and in Axiom—not nPrints living in fear.”

  “But sir, I think the caching is causing an overdosing side effect.”

  “How did you do it?” Chellis demanded.

  Solari wanted to lie but knew she could not keep the truth from him. She turned her arm and typed instructions into her second skin. “My sister. She designed it when we were younger.”

  “An illegal tap?!” Chellis said furiously.

  “It’s a signal booster,” Solari said under her breath.

  “Captain Solari, I have looked out for you since your days in the academy, and I have never seen behavior like this from you.”

  “Sir, I didn’t want to let that creature get away. My record—”

  “I now have an investigation on my hands.”

  “An investigation?” Solari asked.

  Chellis lifted his arms and a second skin rose, projecting a faint hologram above it. The hologram displayed footage of crowds of nPrints strobing. “People were in fear of their freedoms last night. A commission has been formed to oversee how Annulus is performing.”

  “I see,” Solari said, embarrassed.

  “The commission has asked me to reprimand you with suspension until further notice. Sol, I’m sorry I have to do this, but it’s out of my hands.”

  Solari winced her eyes as a faint tear ran down her cheek. “I understand.”

  “This includes your PSYOP access to the feed,” Chellis continued. “You need to rest your soul and recognize your faults.