by Tony LaRocca
“You… you’re…”
“I’m a cyborg from NorMec, or at least the remains of one. You call our cyborgs Abominations, and you’ve been brainwashed to call your own cyborgs monks. Last, but not least, you’ve been brainwashed to worship three of our — NorMec’s I mean — most powerful cyborgs as the Ophanim, the Magistrate, and the Ingegno. There is a fourth, but let’s forget about him for the moment.”
Tish swallowed. “But Brother Asher —”
“Lied to you,” Maryanne said, cutting her off. “You were never really dead, your mind was just erased over and over, and how you saw yourself within the Sage and what you remembered was changed. But the real you was here, half–frozen within a tank. Not just you, but everyone you knew. Actually, he didn’t really lie, because he thought it was the truth. He’s a prisoner as well, he just doesn’t know it.”
Tish shook her head. “I feel like I’m about to explode. I just don’t understand anything.”
The pale amputee in the tank rolled her eyes. “Like I said, I wish that I had enough time to tell you everything, but I don’t. The Ophanim is not a celestial being, she’s human. She was a scientific experiment, along with the others. They were just regular people who NorMec Gov. turned into cyborgs, ones much more powerful than the likes of Asher or me. Got it?”
Tish nodded.
“The Ophanim’s cybernetics could give birth to swarms of nanomachines,” the woman continued. “Those are tiny, microscopic robots. When she let them out into the air, they could enter a person through their nose, mouth, tear ducts, asshole, or whatever, and mutate or destroy their DNA. She was a walking, talking, biological weapon. What’s worse is that she managed to use the automated systems to operate on some of you out here, and turn them into cyborgs as well. She implanted them with robotic insects, complete with nanomachines of their own. They’re like smaller versions of the mutants, except that they’re under the control of their hosts. Those are your monks and their ‘children.’ When the time was ripe, she and the other two were planning to send them out to ‘cleanse’ the world. The repeated resurrections were just her way of training them. Still with me?”
“No.”
“Too bad. Now it gets tricky, because there are all kinds of nanomachines, and not just the types that like to muck up DNA. There are also ones that mimic life. Get a few million neurons and glial cells together in the right combination, and you’ll wind up with a brain. No one really understands all the whys, they just know the how. Well, it’s the same with him.” She pointed to the canvas beneath the strobing light. “That’s my son. Or rather, it’s millions of nanomachines reenacting his thoughts, memories, and personality. My real son died, but this conglomeration is the same. That’s Matthew. You met him down in the tunnels of the loop.”
Tish stared at the painting. “How did he get here?”
The blue lights in Marianne’s one good eye whirled as she bit her lip. She shrugged. “I’m still trying to piece that together. Your ‘angels’ did things to me that I’d rather not discuss, but I managed to escape — what was left of me, anyway. I hijacked one of the empty tanks above, and used it to heal. The system’s not that hard to hack into, especially since it’s old technology. I was able to hide here and there amongst the people, and wreak a little havoc. Eventually I got bored with being one of the sheep, so I disguised myself as a shepherd. I snuck into the middle ranks of the Church, and made them think that I had been there all along. I named myself Sister Theresa, after my mother. The three originals left almost everything to the Sage and let it run itself, but computers are extremely literal. You just have to show them exactly what they’re looking for. If you tell a computer that tires are round and shaped like a torus, it’ll try to change a flat with a chocolate doughnut, possibly with sprinkles. I let the Sage see what it wanted to when I needed it to, and everyone left me alone.”
Tish pointed to the fanning emerald needle of light. “So where does he fit in?”
“A few months ago, I discovered a new player in the system. He could change the reality of the Sage itself, but he wasn’t any good at covering his tracks. To use the vernacular, he was a bit of a noob. When they reset the last resurrection experiment, what little memories he had got erased along with it. Within an instant, he found himself lost, confused, and vulnerable. I was curious, so I went to take a look.
“Imagine my shock when I recognized him. He resembles his father quite a bit, or at least how Mal looked before his Ascension.” She held up her claw as Tish opened her mouth. “Never mind. The point is, he’s the spitting image of what the computers had predicted our son would look like. He was meant to be the template of the next Cyleb generation. I was supposed to be the mother of thousands.
“So, I traced his path. I got behind the scenes as far as I could, and discovered there was an access tank hidden down here. It was originally built for maintenance and surveillance. Someone had managed to hack into it without anyone noticing. Like I said, where I come from, this is ancient technology. So, I crawled down here to see. You think you have a hard time with ladders? Try it with this.” She waved her prosthetic in the air.
“I found the dead third–gen in the tank, and my son’s canvas alongside of this contraption. He lives on as a painting, in pigments mixed with nanomachines. The laser reads the information from the microscopic robots faster than your eye can see, and transmits it into the Sage.” She tilted her head towards the capsule. “They must have arrived in that thing. I’m guessing that it was created at the Watervliet Arsenal. Mal had always wanted to get his hands on that factory. There are tunnels that span from here out across the continent. The Ophanim plans to use them to deploy the order, whenever they’re ready. These two must have managed to breach one.”
“Why?”
“That’s the real question. As far as I can figure, Malachi must have sent them. He must have worked out the purpose of this place. It’s not just a proving ground for the Ophanim’s monks, Tish. It also guides the gestalt weapons that have turned WesMec into a wasteland. They’ll do the same to NorMec, unless we stop them. Mal probably thinks that he’ll be able to control them, but no one can.”
Tish’s eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t WesMec, it wasn’t our weapon. It was you. It was your Shadows.”
“No,” said Marianne, shaking her head, “that was your government putting you to sleep so they could stick you down here.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I wouldn’t believe me either.” The ravaged woman sucked a breath from her clear plastic mask. “But it really can’t be helped. Imagine swarms of your Agents of Chaos devouring everything they see and shitting out sand. Not Life Sands, but barren dust. That’s what’s left of WesMec. There’s just too much interference between all of the subconscious minds to control them. Your Holy Trinity can try to rewrite everyone’s brains, try to make them homogeneous, try to give every person the same glorious purpose, but it just doesn’t work. Nature wins out over nurture, in the end.”
“Everyone… everyone is dead?”
“Not everyone. There are a few million left, frozen here and at other automated installations. As for the rest, yes, they’re dead. And everyone in NorMec will die as well, if those three have their way. Please, will you help me?”
Tish wrapped her arms around her naked chest, and nodded. “Okay.”
“Great,” said Marianne. She gestured to the stylus in Tish’s hand. “I managed to build one of those from the workshop on this level, but I only had enough material for one. Eventually, it burned out.” She nodded to the side of her tank. Another silvery paintbrush had been tossed into the corner. Its silken, transparent bristles lay scattered around it. “I thought that I could help him. There’s something wrong with his arm. I tried to fix it, but I just made things worse.” The claw at the end of her stump twitched. “See that?”
“See what?”
“Exactly,” said Marianne, “it’s broken too. The crème–filled center doesn’t hold, every
thing falls apart, etcetera, blah blah blah. I don’t have the tools to fix it, and the maintenance drones can’t throw a replacement down without busting it. So, you’ll have to do it for me.”
“Do what?”
The woman pointed to the painting that stood before the flickering laser. “I need you to look. I know that it hurts your eyes, but you need to look as hard as you can, and tell me what you see.”
Tish knelt before the blazing jade line of light, and stared at the canvas. Its glare made her eyes sting, but she kept them open. She could barely make out the figure beneath. “His face looks like it’s from a horror movie, or something. Like his head is almost a skull, and his thin lips are stretched out to his cheeks.” She peered closer. “He looks like he’s on fire, inside.” She jumped to her feet, her eyes wide. Her jaw dropped. “It’s… it’s…”
“The Clown, I know. The Ophanim is convinced that he is really Malachi, his father, so the Sage has made it so. You can’t talk a nutjob out of their delusions, and whatever happens to him in there happens to his paint out here.”
Tish stared at the glowing, grinning monster of her nightmares, and back at Marianne. “Your husband is the Clown?”
“He’s not my husband, he was — look, kid, we don’t have time for this. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
“He’s the one who released the Shadows. He killed everyone in WesMec.”
Marianne groaned. “Tish, I promise you, while Malachi and NorMec have much to answer for, that was not us. He’s just another cyborg. He’s just another man.”
Tish shook her head back and forth. “You’re the Whore of The Prince of Lies.”
“I’ve been called worse, but no. Please, forget whatever you learned in Sunday school, and just listen to me.”
“Stop it!” She put her hands over her ears. “Ophanim, Great Wheel, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be —”
“Tish!” the woman shouted, causing her headset to whine with feedback. The young woman who less than an hour ago had been a girl stopped her desperate invocation. Her brown cheeks glistened with tears. “Listen to me, please. Think of Matthew. He helped you. All he cared about was you, and if you were okay. I’m not going to bully you, I’m not going to threaten you, I’m not going to guilt — okay, maybe I am guilting you. Sue me. Look at him, try to see through what she’s done. Millions of lives are depending on him right now. So please, just listen.”
Tish sniffled. “To what?” she asked. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “What do you expect me to do?”
Marianne gazed at the painting. “He’s a good boy, I mean man. I think this process has aged him, somehow. I don’t understand why, but it has something to do with his arm. I was wrong to try to fix it. I realize now that he needs it to be separate.”
“So?”
The amputee tilted her head towards the bank of computers. “Like I said, he was not any good at covering his tracks. The Sage has records of how his nanomachine–paint was before I messed with it, before I made him vulnerable to her schizoid hallucinations. There’s a jack about halfway down, and all the way to the right. Plug your stylus into that, and you’ll be able to use it to clean away the damage that the Ophanim and I have done.”
Tish stared into the battered Cyleb’s luminescent, sapphire eye. “I don’t know,” she said. She glanced at the painting. “He is the Wicked One, the Spirit that Works in the Children of Disobedience. You are his bride, his concubine, and you hurt me. You hurt me more than anyone else ever has.”
Marianne slumped into the viscous liquid. “I am sorry,” she said. “I know you have been through hell, and I’m asking so much for you to understand, but it was an —” Her head jerked up, her one seeing eye wide. “Hold on a second,” she said. Her mouth worked silently. A mirthless chuckle escaped her lips. “Oh, you over–reaching bitch.” She smiled, but it was cold, and hateful.
Tish swallowed. Up until that moment, despite all of her fears, the woman had seemed kind and compassionate. Now, a look of cruel, vindictive fury glowed in the Cyleb’s eye, and it chilled her. “What?” she asked.
“The Ophanim,” Marianne said. “She’s tapped into the vegetation libraries and subroutines.” Her breath came faster and faster. “I have to go,” she said. “I have to help him. I’ll be trapped again, but whatever you do, do not disconnect me. I don’t care if I’m stuck in there forever.”
“Wait,” said Tish. “Please, don’t go.”
“If you want to help me, then help Matthew. Help the one person besides your parents who actually gave a shit about you. I’m sorry, sweetheart. You’re a good kid, you never deserved any of this. If I never see you again, I wish you happiness. You’ll have to make your own luck from now on. Don’t forget about the air.”
“Wait,” said Tish. She reached out to her, but the woman’s blanched and battered face had gone slack, her one, luminescent eye rolling back into her head. Like a marionette whose strings had been cut, her scarred body fell limp, and sank beneath the iatric fluid’s glistening surface.
Matthew hacked and sneezed as he fought to catch a breath — any breath. The tunnel swam before his itching, gunk–coated eyes. Its copper plates had completed their transformation into pitted brick and cobblestone. The barbed moss that had once torn at his flesh crept across its surface in fuzzy waves of green and brown. Tangled roots and vines poked their way from cracks in its grout. He searched for the elevator and its technology that he, as Malachi, could possibly use for defense, but it had vanished.
He looked back towards the door at the end of the crypt. Perhaps he could trap his tormentor in the looping corridors he hoped lay beyond, as Zeta, his mother, had once been trapped with him.
Talya loomed above him. The brittle shell of her skin danced and swirled around the white sun at her center. It opened and closed to give him peeks of her diseased glow, as if she were performing some sort of gruesome striptease. He glanced at the moss behind her. If he had the strength, he could grab her, and throw her against it. It might seize her with its hidden thorns, and give him a chance to escape. He stared at it, his puffy eyes desperate for focus. Within the span of a few seconds, the vegetation had grown lush and thick over every visible surface.
All at once, he understood.
The vines and roots whipped from the walls, wrapping themselves around Talya’s body. The flayed, blazing woman threw her head back, and screamed. The foliage burst into flames wherever it touched the inferno of her soul, but its onslaught continued. The moss seeped from the wall to smother her chalk–like feet as the first–generation Cyleb writhed.
Matthew slumped against the wall, clutching his chest. He could feel the attack on his immune system begin to wane, but he still coughed and sputtered, his body shaking with chills.
Another molar fell from his rotting gums, and landed in his windpipe. His eyes bulged as it lodged within his trachea. His glowing hands flew to his throat. He was no longer coughing, because he could not cough. He no longer sneezed, because he could no longer breathe. His chest felt as if it wanted to explode. He fought against the panic that threatened to seize his mind. He had to find something — anything — that he could use to perform the Heimlich maneuver, but there was nothing in the crypt except for Talya, the two corpses, and the burning vines. He placed a bony fist in his abdomen, wrapped the other around it, and jerked up against his ribcage, but his trembling muscles were too weak. He wanted to scream in rage and frustration. His mother had returned to buy him time and was suffering for it, while all he could do was squirm on the floor and choke.
He fought against the dark cloud that swarmed the edges of his vision, and forced himself to jab his leathery fist beneath his ribs once more.
Tish leaned against the cool glass wall of the tank, and stared at the comatose woman who floated inside. Every few seconds, forks of silvery lightning flashed beneath the surface of her pale skin. The stubs of her amputated limbs were puckered and rough, crisscrossed with the sca
rs of torture and butchery. Tish could not stop looking at them, and tried to imagine how it would feel to have parts of her body chopped off. True, this person was the enemy and the Bride of the Destroyer, but how could anyone who could do such things to another call themselves good?
She swallowed. The scriptures said that Abominations were evil, but this woman had not been evil, she had been nice. In a world full of jerks, she and Matthew had been kind.
She coughed. Her tongue felt as if it were made of sandpaper. She was thirsty, and soon she would be hungry as well. What would she eat or drink? And, if the Cyleb was to be believed, what would she breathe? She ran her hands over her mature, unfamiliar body. Over the past few months she had been a chubby child, a skinny one, and then, somehow, a plant. Yet here she was, a grown woman. She could ignore many things, but not the evidence of her senses.
But what did she say about tricking a computer into seeing what it wants to see? asked a voice from the back of her mind. What if she’s the one who’s lying? What if this is the dream, and your life before was real?
She shook her head. She could debate such possibilities forever, there was no way of knowing anything for sure. But once she really looked at the situation, Marianne’s explanation made much more sense than acrobatic trees and wasp–infested monks who could bring the dead back to life.
In fact, when held up to the light, everything about the Church seemed downright silly.
An alarm, far off in the distance, cut into her thoughts. Her head snapped up. She examined the electronic paintbrush, and turned towards the bank of computers. She found the correct port, and plugged in the stylus. It vibrated between her fingertips, so faint that she could barely feel it.
She knelt, and squinted once more into the flickering emerald glare. The man within the painting had curled into a ball, and was punching his fists into his belly. Despite the grin that stretched his terrifying face, an expression of pain and dread haunted his eyes. Good, she thought, let him suffer.
