by Lee
Even at an early age, Hollyoak had suffered a fair variety of manias, any one of which made an average Latelian barely capable of functioning in society. Over time, Hollyoak’s towering genius had more or less crushed and/or absorbed the majority of those psychoses, leaving behind a … man … of startling creativity, but for decades, it’d been a near thing. Every day for years at a time, Vasily had stared into the madman’s eyes, wondering if today was the day he’d put the disfigured Latelian down into the dirt.
For not only was Hollyoak a genius, afflicted with a gamut of mental issues and possessed of a morally bankrupt heart, he’d been a sufferer of Early Onset Protein Deficiency. EOPD –or ‘Shrinky’ as everyone in the system called it behind closed doors- wasn’t so much a protein deficiency as a genetic mystery ravaging a thankfully miniscule percentage of children entering puberty.
Early discoverers of the disease labeled it a protein problem because then –as now- no one anywhere knew precisely why Latelians had been growing bigger, stronger and healthier over the last few thousand years. The going theory was that there was some mysterious interaction of proteins occurring in the body and genetic researchers the system over had long since given up trying to prove or disprove those relatively ancient theories. No one wanted to waste time trying to find answers to a malady that was virtually nonexistent and usually fatal.
Shrinky wasn’t kind. Latelians were born as big, lusty babies and grew quickly, reaching three to five feet in height by the time they hit an equal number of years. More often of late, children were growing quicker still. Vasily recalled hearing of a woman giving birth to a two foot tall child and he shuddered to think of that.
At birth, Hollyoak had been a typical, overlarge baby, which is what made Shrinky particularly devastating. There was material available on the ‘LINKs for anyone morbid enough to witness the agony firsthand.
The horror of the disease was what it did. Or rather, undid.
Shrinky undid growth spurts, ripping, shredding and tearing a young man or woman’s body apart from the inside out, rebuilding and regrowing bone, tissue, organs to create a smaller … ‘Trinity-sized’ … human. One in a hundred thousand children survived. Those that did wished they hadn’t, for Shrinky rarely finished whatever genetic mandate it followed, leaving behind either grotesquely large appendages or petrifyingly tiny body parts. New tissue grown in vats couldn’t be used to replace thusly-affected individuals because the new stuff lacked the markers for EOPD. Grafts were rejected by the poisoned tissue with brutal, remorseless speed.
The Latelian Regime did not permit children to be outfitted with cybernetic limbs because it’d been proven that EOPD survivors were, to a one, miserable bastards who used their mechanical parts to hurt those around them. Even if the replacement limbs possessed no great strength, they were made of artificial elements and worked perfectly well as bludgeons. Shrinky was a ‘survive or die’ disease, the worst of its kind.
The Hollyoaks had done the best they could, but Vasily suspected that even before Shrinky the man had been a lunatic-in-training. The disease had simply given him an excuse to lash out, to be cruel, to transform himself into what he’d become. His first attempts at genetic modification hadn’t been on animals, but on himself, during the final stages of Shrinky; the child’s feverish intellect had discovered a way to retard the pace of his disease. Alas, the ‘cure’ hadn’t come to young Hollyoak quick enough; the only thing the lad had managed to ‘save’ from shrinkage was his skull.
Vasily shuddered. Hollyoak was their very own pet maniac.
Vasily stared at the elevator doors leading into Hollyoak’s dominion, willing them to remain closed.
Sam Hollyoak would’ve been the .01% of Shrinky survivors to be reborn in a perfectly healthy –if smaller- body. He would’ve been perfectly formed, perfectly adapted, able to live and breathe and –as many of the demon’s colleagues believed- perfectly sane.
Hollyoak stood five feet tall exactly. Two feet of that was … was head. The rest of his body was as nature and genetics would’ve preferred, though smaller. The bank robbery Hollyoak’s modified rats had been engaged in was to’ve supplied the teenage genius with enough money to purchase gear for cybernetic augments enabling him to support that freakishly massive head.
The doors opened. Vasily hung his head for a moment before walking into the humungous cavern that was Hollyoak’s Menagerie.
As ever, the sound was a solid wall of force. At any given moment, Hollyoak and his equally deranged crew of ‘scientists’ were at work on a list of projects too numerous –and hideous- to actually concern yourself with. Having made the mistake decades ago of being informed of every single experiment, success or failure, Vasily preferred these days to be kept apprised of success alone, and then, only rarely. The nightmares of those early failures still haunted him.
The Menagerie stank, as well. Too many of their top scientist’s disciples failed to see the need for personal grooming, either because those precious few moments in the shower took time away from the next greatest thing or because they flat out didn’t care what they smelled or looked like. Hollyoak certainly didn’t care. Most of the time the gnome-like scientist was rank enough to blister a man’s nose from thirty feet.
Everywhere he looked, bright orange work Suits vanished into cracks and crevices, reducing the clamor and din of the Menagerie to a mild hum. Hollyoak’s ‘crew’ knew better to remain in his presence. It’d taken less than three deaths to convince them all to find the time to be elsewhere when the OverCommander arrived.
Vasily repressed the urge to grimace. The cavern was particularly fetid today and he feared he was going to have to burn his clothes before he met with anyone else. Alyssa had bought the shirt he was wearing as a love-token. It was a nice shirt, and now he was going to have to explain what’d happened.
“Ah!” A warbling, high-pitched, voice echoed through the cavernous workspace. “OverCommander! Good of you to come! Please, this way, this way, yes, over here!”
OverCommander Vasily wanted to punch Hollyoak every time he spoke. It was an awful thing, wanting to do that, but he couldn’t help himself. The military man simply couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do the things to themselves that Hollyoak had done; through the years and decades, as his skill in making things grow and change had become more and more all-encompassing, Hollyoak had begun grafting cybernetic parts onto himself.
True, many of the new parts were there to assist the man, but when it came to his own flesh and bone, Hollyoak lacked all sense. One of his most recent … adjustments … had been to his larynx. For whatever reason, Hollyoak had decided it was a necessity that he be able to speak directly to his machines in their own complex language, a decision that'd permanently raised his voice several octaves. For some reason the augment had also required the addition of … gill-like slits… on either side of the man’s neck. It was grotesque.
OverCommander Vasily had authorized a continual scrutiny on everything coming out Hollyoak’s mouth. The ability to speak to machines was one that struck him as unsavory and almost certainly dangerous; to him and all of his advisors, it was a toe through to the other side of the man-machine restrictions and the last thing they wanted was another ADAM.
Hollyoak was nearing the end of his much-celebrated and successful career as the Regime’s top scientist. Once the war started, Hollyoak would be of no further use to anyone.
“Up here, OverCommander, over here! Hello there!” Hollyoak waved one of his stick thin arms and, grotesquely, the two metallic hands attached on either side of the ones he’d been born with waved at different times.
Every time Hollyoak did that, Vasily was uncomfortably reminded of birds fluttering in the air. The leader of the God soldiers looked to where the pipsqueak-voiced Hollyoak was shouting from and grimaced. The good doctor was standing on the massive chest of a dismantled Gunboy. In point of fact, if he wasn’t mistaken, Hollyoak was standing ankle deep inside the chest cavity, poking around
with a stick.
Vasily shut his eyes. Hollyoak grew a step closer to being more trouble than he was worth. Stalking over to the huge mountain of flesh and metal, Vasily shouted, “Come down, doctor, if you please, sa. I have no wish to shout.”
“Quite right, quite right, sa, all apologies.” Hollyoak collapsed his sensor wand, stuck it into a pocket of his blood and gore-soaked lab coat and climbed nimbly down the ladder. He loved his extra hands; they gripped the sides of the ladder strongly, stronger than his own hands could’ve ever managed. At the bottom of the ladder, he turned and made to move towards where the OverCommander stood when he recalled the giant’s dire warning concerning extra limbs. Unhappily, Hollyoak removed the extra hands with deft twists and tucked them into a pocket.
Frowning, Vasily stared thoughtfully at the bank of Screens relaying data from the Gunboy corpse. There was a lot he didn’t understand. More than he liked to admit. He supposed he was all right with that, if only because it wasn’t necessary for him to know everything. At the end of the day, all you truly needed to know was how to control those who knew everything. He pointed at the Screens. “This is why you called me?”
Hollyoak clattered up onto the gantries that allowed him to be closer to the big Screens. Digging into a pocket, he pulled out his sensor stick and started pointing things out for the OverCommander. “Yes yes, yes indeed, this is, well, no, this … yes, this is one of the reasons, yes. The … my Gunboys.”
“Do you have them both down here?”
Hollyoak bit back a laugh at the thought of that. His home filled with meat. That was funny. But the OverCommander wouldn’t find it funny. He’d thought of the Gunboys as men, still. “No no, no. Too much … soldier. Not enough space. Besides, when they … when they died, they started decomposing quickly. Couldn’t save the meat for the God soldiers, sorry so sorry, too spoiled and even Onesies won’t eat bad flesh unless … pressed. No no, saved the tech as best we could, being repurposed as we speak.”
One of the doctors cybernetic lenses, grafted onto the side of his head, moved of its own accord to cover his eye and his brain sparked and stuttered with information flowing from the OverCommander. Hollyoak frowned and moved the lens away. The OverCommander didn’t like being … being looked at like that.
Vasily nodded. It was a shame about the flesh not being salvageable, but there was nothing for it. Personally, he was surprised that the crews had managed to get the two Gunboy carcasses back to The Peak as quickly as they had. Though, he reflected, the reclamation crews’ speed undoubtedly had more to do with death threats for their entire families should they fail than any earnest desire to do their jobs quickly.
Death threats worked particularly well in a Regime. Mostly because the Regime really didn’t believe in ‘just’ threats.
Hollyoak spoke quickly to his machines, commanding the Screens to display the little animation he’d designed for the OverCommander, one of his lenses catching the dark mood that crossed his guest’s face as he did so. Hollyoak made a mental note to not talk to the machines in the OverCommander’s presence again. How could he have forgotten?
“This, this, this…” the doctor said, “is what happened to my ‘boys. Sa.”
Vasily watched the Screens thoughtfully. The simulation was disconcerting. “Something burrowed its way through them?”
“Oh my yes!” Hollyoak chirped brightly. “Pumping out tremendous amounts of heat as well! A sun’s worth, sa OverCommander! Cooked my children like shubin! The armor plating kept … what was that noise earlier? It seemed like there was a fair bit going on, sa. All manner of soldier stomping and tromping and making noises. Disrupted my investigations for a little while. Most distressing.”
“It was a war, sa doctor.” There was little enough harm in telling the doctor. There was every chance he’d forget soon enough anyways.
The multitude of lenses and artificial enhancements grafted to Hollyoak’s head flexed and shifted, rotated and … did whatever they were supposed to do. “A war you say? Hmm, most … most interesting. A man in a Suit? Perhaps? Armor? An Enforcer?” Hollyoak plucked at a lip, wished he had his extra hands on. “Why aren’t we all dead then?”
“Did the Enforcer kill our Gunboys?” Vasily demanded, pulling the doctor back on track.
Hollyoak blinked and his lenses stopped moving. “Hm? Yes yes. Most definitely. Nothing else could’ve, would’ve.”
“Why on earth would an Enforcer tunnel through all this flesh?” That was excessively strange, even for a Trinity Enforcer who’d decided to attempt suicide only a short while ago. Vasily allowed it was possible that the decision to burrow through the massive Gunboys to kill them might’ve ruined whatever vestiges of sanity remained, but still. The decision made no sense. Enforcers possessed weapons of mass destruction, the smallest of which could have most definitely made short work of their Gunboys.
Hollyoak plucked at his lips again, worriedly. He had to tell the OverCommander but didn’t want to. The man would find out eventually and Hollyoak remembered from previous experiences that the OverCommander liked to be told bad news right away rather than read about it later. Worse still, he went into a towering rage if bad news wasn’t described in full detail.
“Doctor?” I am waiting.” Vasily wanted to disappear the doctor now, but Alyssa needed his genius still. When Hollyoak wasn’t tinkering with flesh, he was working on engines that would send their hulking troopships through the vast inky blackness between solar systems. Without those engines, the war would be pointless. They wouldn’t be able to reach the nearest solar system with any meaningful time left, let alone begin conquering the entire array of solar systems in their own galaxy.
“Ah. Yes yes, well, you see, the problem is this, sa OverCommandersa.” Hollyoak swallowed nervously. “And, and, and I must say, we … I … that is to say, there was no way to know that the … the power source was so … unstable. It seems that … that it seems that if this Enforcer had just, I don’t know, blown Polyphemus’ head off that the … his generators would’ve exploded and so would have all of his weapons and everything. The … the same with Tmolus, sa. Did you kill the Enforcer?”
All his lenses pressed flat against his head in preparation for being hit.
A black rage consumed Vasily for a minute. He gripped the edge of the gantry that the diminutive Hollyoak stood upon and breathed deeply. To think that those Gunboys had been lumbering around Central City like gigantic morons! “Are you sincerely telling me that if the Enforcer hadn’t killed our Gunboys in this grotesque manner that they would’ve exploded on their own? Destroying Central? How could you have missed something like that?”
Hollyoak held his hands in front of his body defensively and he struggled to avoid shouting to his machines for help. There was no telling if the OverCommander would survive the onslaught and that would complicate his life. The lenses arrayed around his head flexed upwards and out and started asking for permission to begin lazing the OverCommander’s head off and he denied them access to the avatar protocols. The doctor was pretty sure killing the OverCommander would complicate things. “The … the … the science behind those generators was … difficult, sa! Offworld, as you say. Is he dead? Gunboys Mark II will be better than the last! I promise!”
“No more Gunboys, Hollyoak.” Vasily let go of the gantry. “Ever. They were a perversion.”
Hollyoak pouted but said nothing. If the Chairwoman wanted more Gunboys, there would be more Gunboys. Vasily’s disdain was an antiquated adherence to an outmoded military mindset. The future of war rest in horror’s welcoming embrace. “Oh! Yes, the Enforcer? You keep not answering.”
“We are uncertain, sa doctor, if the Enforcer is dead. We fired the Old Gun at him and then that was it.”
“So that was what that noise was!” Hollyoak nodded. “Didn’t they used to fire that before Final Games? Can you not find his body? We have those satellites, scanners, and everything in space. I would love his body, sa. To carve into bits and pieces to see
what makes an Enforcer tick! Just think of the progress! We don’t even know if there are people inside those Suits! We must find his body!”
“There is a distance of sixty-eight thousand miles between the point of impact and the eventual landfall of the slug used in the attack, Doctor Hollyoak.” Vasily said politely. He agreed that taking possession of an Enforcer would indeed further the Latelian Regime’s causes a million-fold, so the man’s ghoulish glee was … ignorable. “A search is underway. It will take time.”
“Of course of course! Time! If only we had more of it, yes? Time and time and time again.” Hollyoak rubbed his hands together excitedly. “I cannot wait!”
Vasily wondered if Hollyoak’s modifications weren’t responsible for his insanity. “This report could’ve been made through a proteus, sa doctor. Why did you call me down here?”
Vasily would’ve preferred that above anything else in his day so far.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Hollyoak scratched at his nose. “I’m certain I did.”
“I assure you, sa doctor, you did not.”
Hollyoak pointed a finger at the roof. “Ah. Yes. Well. I should like permission to kill Sa Gurant.”
Vasily tilted his head to one side and for a long, long moment, stared thoughtfully at Doctor Hollyoak. His mind –long used to building scenarios and filtering through the most likely of outcomes thanks to his storied career in the military- couldn’t quite figure out what to do with Hollyoak. It was infuriating. For all his usefulness, the OverCommander could not help but feel that the mutated doctor was worse for the Regime than Garth Nickels. “Sa Gurant is already dead. He was killed in The Museum.”
“You see … you see … that isn’t … no. That’s not right.” Hollyoak went to speak to his machines, remembering at the last second the look on the OverCommander’s face and tapped away at his proteus instead. Gurant’s body flared onto every Screen. “Well, no, that’s not right either. He … died, yes. Was dead. Now he is not.”
