by Aaron Bunce
Manis gagged, the pressure returning with such force that the air trapped ahead of it rushed from his mouth as a sickening burp. There was no fighting it back this time, no stemming the flow. Something hot filled his throat and mouth, spilling into the bright air.
He tipped his head forward and heaved again and again, no longer caring about holding it in, but desperate to push as much of it, no, all of it, out. It hurt in his stomach, the cramping pinching his insides, while his throat and mouth burned.
Manis pushed, finally claiming a breath of air, and pushing again. He could hear the mess spattering the floor in front of him, the smell so noxious it scalded his nostrils.
“My god! I cannot…we shouldn’t have. Everyone out. Lock down the bay! He is obviously sick with something,” the Captain yelled, a murmur of alarmed voices echoing from the space beyond the plastic.
He finished regurgitating as a powered door slammed shut, the noise echoing off the walls and ceiling. Manis sucked in a ragged breath, spit, and picked up his head, letting it lean back against the restraints. The cramping in his guts faded. That horrible pressure, like a slimy serpent trying to force its way up his throat, was now gone.
After several deep breaths, his mind cleared, an unexpected sense of calm taking hold.
“You feel better now, don’t you, dear? Purer,” a woman said, her voice echoing from the darkness beyond the blinding light.
Manis swallowed, his eyes darting from one spot in the darkness to another, the light preventing him from focusing. He laughed despite himself and his head rolled forward. His clean flight suit was a mess, a splattered landslide of blue sick tracing a wet swath all the way to the floor. The vomit pooled between his feet, chunks of partially digested protein bars sliding down his body and plopping into the puddle.
Blue? he thought, little red bubbles forming in the sick, only to pop and disappear.
“Excessive buildup of unnecessary fluorine from the fat cells of your midsection, abnormal basal and squamous cells stripped from your dermis, but also toxic heavy metals removed from the membranes lining your heart, lungs, and numerous other organs. Do you see now? You were a mess inside. This is the first thing they do to your body, my dear. They purify and safeguard, returning it to equilibrium. Those things were all killing you slowly, from a lifetime of abuse, neglect, and ignorant pharmaceutical intake. Once stripped from your body, they were lumped together for removal. Well, they have been sealed inside your body, removed from atmosphere. And now, in this oxygen rich environment, they have been allowed to oxidize. Hence, blue. A pretty color, I would think, if it were not a pile of sloughed-off poison. You could say that blue is your color, if it were not for the red that needs to come next,” Doctor Misra said, her voice coming from the right.
“What does that mean?” Manis asked.
Something scraped against the floor, or it might have been a bulkhead. His senses seemed finer now, keener, and yet, the bright light still blinded his eyes. He tried to tip his head and lid his eyes, but the damned shadows would not relent.
“So that is why you wanted them inside me?” he asked, burping. But it was not the nausea this time. Far from it. His guts felt immaculate, shiny even-if he could somehow see them. Hell, he was hungry. Ravenous for all his childhood favorite foods.
Layla Misra laughed, the plastic sheet rippling to his left, just beneath the light. Something tinkled off to the right. It sounded like something metal tipped over.
“Why can I still hear you? Why do I hear you at all? I know you aren’t here, but back on the station, those things…they got you, in your lab, right? You aren’t real. You’re just in my head,” Manis yelled, her laughter tipping him into anger. Yes, he was angry, but his head was clearer than it had been for some time. He was still plagued by the obsessive need to break things down into numbers, but it felt manageable now. The paranoia? He knew that would never leave him. If his mania had lifted, why could he still hear her?
A speaker buzzed somewhere overhead. “Who are you talking to? Why are you yelling?” the captain asked, his voice muffled by electrical feedback.
Doctor Misra finished laughing, the sound echoing off the walls. It sounded real enough. But then she moved, that same, strange scraping noise filling the darkness. The plastic shifted ahead of him, but also to the right, and thanks to his peripheral vision, to the left.
“Where are you? I did what you wanted. Now leave me alone. Please.”
“You’re right, my dear. I am not on the ship with you, nor any of the other freighters, for that matter. I never left my lab. But I found myself able to communicate with you once the organisms in those samples woke up. And now that they’re residing inside your body, the connection is so much stronger.”
Manis blew a raspberry as he flexed and fought against his restraints. “That sounds ridiculous. There must be a million miles of vacuum between this ship and Hyde. You’re just in my head–a figment, a delusion… something like that. You can’t do anything for me, so please shut up!” he shouted. “Everything I’ve done up to this point, all the things that kept me alive, was ME! Do you hear me? It’s me, not you!”
“Don’t…be…insolent!” her voice hit him like a crashing wave of ice-cold water. Every inch of vomit-dampened skin suddenly prickled against the air. His ears ached, and somewhere in the recesses of his mind, her words echoed.
“Your ignorance is sickening. The cosmos is vast and strange, its true nature beyond your frail, infinitesimal mind’s capacity for comprehension. Beings ancient and powerful have existed for time immemorial, their interests spanning the black of space, piercing the membranes of what you believe as reality. They have been to earth, some worshipped as gods, others killing millions with a passing thought. Some are still there, deep in the undiscovered places, sleeping and waiting. They aren’t figments of little Manis’ mind. And neither am I. Should I prove it to you, my dear? Kill you right now, maybe strangle every ounce of blood from your body. Burst every capillary and vessel at once. Or maybe I should seize your muscles, painfully forcing your body to tear itself apart, ligament by ligament, tendon by tendon. Would that be real enough for you, my dear? Would I only be a figment then?”
Manis, his body already shaking from her voice, shrieked as a dark, humanoid form pushed into the plastic barrier straight ahead. He saw her fingers press into the plastic, indenting the thin barrier. Then it pulled away and the plastic rippled and moved. He could just make out a white flash, a flicker of movement. A white lab coat?
No! Impossible. Seeing things. Hearing things! No-no-no!
“Do I look like a figment of your mind now, Manis?” Doctor Misra asked, her voice no longer silky and eloquent, but dark and twisted.
The plastic barrier suddenly pulled away from the floor, the thin sheet tearing in half. A horrific figure moved towards him from the darkness, a woman, or no…something. He saw her face…the same one that stared back at him from the mirror. But it wasn’t. Her. It couldn’t be her. And yet, every one of his senses told him she was there, frighteningly real, gliding towards him, sliding with a wet, scraping noise.
The blinding glare tilted to the left, the burn effect on his irises lifting immediately. Something long and dark wrapped around the work light’s base, bending and smashing it to the ground.
Manis choked on his own tongue as the light flopped forward, flickering off and on again. It rolled once and then twice, the light splashing intermittently in a circle. Doctor Misra glided towards him, the dancing light hitting her white lab coat and dark hair, and then down to the mass of churning, flicking, and surging tentacles where her legs should be.
One of the flicking appendages curled and lifted the damaged work light off the ground and turned it right at Manis, the damaged bulb not glowing with nearly the same intensity.
“Do I look real to you, Manis? Feel real?”
He felt the tentacles climb up and around his legs, probing over his groin, then up his chest and across his face.
“Yes!
Jesus, yes! My god, please stop. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry,” Manis sobbed.
He tried to close his eyes and look away, but she cradled his head and wrenched it around. She was there in front of him, her face so close he could feel her breath.
“I said I was sorry. Please don’t hurt me. Please. What do you want from me?”
Doctor Misra was quiet for a moment, her dark eyes staring unblinkingly into his. A tentacle rose up from behind her and pulled a loose strand of hair back into place behind her ear.
“What I want? No, it is what we need, my dear,” she said, quietly.
“We?” Manis sniffled, the tentacle wrapped around his leg and groin constricting, rubbing almost sexually against him. He didn’t want to ask it but couldn’t stop himself. “What do we need?”
The speaker buzzed again, but it sounded like someone had pressed the button on accident. Manis could hear the crew somewhere beyond his dark room, talking, whispering, and arguing about him. He picked out words like “contagious”, “risk”, and “airlock”.
Layla’s eyes darted towards the ceiling, considering the words, and then ever so slowly, with almost predatory smoothness, locked on Manis.
“The strength unlocked in Jacoby Mason’s body was done by the very same microorganisms residing inside you now. But they are just the tool. The real strength, the architect, was embedded in his brain. I need these organisms to acknowledge a new architect, a new source of design. Otherwise, they will simply fade and die out.”
Manis didn’t have any idea of what she was talking about. He only knew that he wanted space, to tell her whatever she wanted or needed to hear, and hopefully then she would let him go.
“Okay, yeah. That’s good. I’ll help. Just tell me what to do. I’ll do it. Whatever it is.”
“They’re inside you, performing their very base function, but cannot be more than that. They are bio-coded to him, not you. Perhaps the hypothalamus is key, a triggering of the pituitary, thyroid, and adrenals…” Layla said, her voice trailing off until he could barely hear her whisperings. Her voice became like a basket of snakes. He didn’t know what she was saying, only that he hated the sound. It didn’t matter. Manis would do whatever it was that she wanted, if it meant that she let him go.
“Just tell me and I’ll do it. Anything,” he blurted.
Her dark eyes snapped up to his.
“It is simple. I need chemical signals in your blood. Chemical signals strong enough and in large enough quantity to override the microorganisms’ biological programming, to force them to accept a new source of control. Perhaps then they will see your brain as the architect.”
“Yes. Yes. How? Tell me how.” He nodded frantically, pathetically, aroused by the tentacle sliding seductively over his groin and disgusted at the same time.
“I need you to feel pleasure and pain, my dear. Feel them in excruciating keenness. Let them deconstruct you and hope that the little miracles floating in your body put you back together again when I am done,” Doctor Misra said, her mouth turning up in a small but wicked smile.
Manis felt the tentacles around his arms and legs contract suddenly, the pain shooting up into his pelvis and out to his hands. He wanted to scream, to beg her to stop, but something wrapped around his head, pinning his jaw shut and covering his mouth.
The tentacle forced its way into his pants, wrapping around his genitals as the bones in his arms and legs started to break.
Pulling apart by the seams
Jacoby tried to give himself a pep talk while he searched the small, but surprisingly full of hiding places, ship.
“Shane is fair. He always played by the rules. Always treated dudes right. He was our buffer against Janice and the other managers,” he said.
Have you ever considered that he was that way because the company wanted him to be? Poole proposed.
“What does that mean?” he whispered in response.
How else would the company keep its workers content, productive? Simple. A little old-fashioned good cop–bad cop. Yes, Janice was a hag, but she had that production floor running like a well-oiled machine. It was her fear that drove you all to work so hard. And because you all worked hard, the production floor met its goals. Thus, she had value to Planitex. Shane was her good cop counterpart. Guys like you and Mike adored him because you believed he and the other foremen were on your side. This gave you a certain level of security…contentment. Perhaps they were just two mechanisms…gears turning in opposite direction as part of the same, massive capitalistic machine? One worked to extract every ounce of blood and sweat from your bodies, while the other kept you passive, willing.
Jacoby crawled halfway down the ladder to the hold, only to find Soraya and Lex talking. It sounded heated.
“No. You can’t use it. It defeats the purpose. I said a ‘level playing field’,” Lex said, her voice raised.
“Level?” Soraya shot back, breathing hard. She propped her fists against her hips, the shadows making the well-developed muscles in her arms pop. “What is level? For all we know, you could be stronger than you’re letting on. Hell, for all I know, you could be faster than me and just haven’t told anyone yet.”
Lex snorted and squared off with Soraya, the Planitex jumpsuit covering what he knew was an equally well-muscled body.
Jacoby moved to jump forward and come between the women, to interrupt before their argument could come to blows, but Soraya laughed suddenly.
“Fine, Red. You know what, this was your challenge. I know you picked it for a reason. Flex. Show off a bit. You go first, and I’ll pick the next one. Show me how it’s done. Here, I’ll even give you a soundtrack.”
Soraya leaned over a crate, tapping on the screen of a data point. A fast, upbeat song immediately started to play.
“Done,” Lex shot back, pulling her jumpsuit’s zipper down to her waist. She wrenched her arms free of the sleeves, sloughed it off her shoulders, and tied them around her waist. Her muscular back and shoulders glistened in the overhead light, the valley between her breasts highlighting the sleek and formfitting sports bra. Her scars, he noticed, were still there.
You don’t think we would get rid of those, do you? She doesn’t see them as scars, but badges, earned through trial and pain. Removing those would be to strip away the outer most layer of what makes Lex, Lex.
Jacoby stopped and quietly watched Lex fall forward, her hands stabbing out at the last moment to catch the ground. She straightened her back, bit her tongue, and proceeded to lower her body towards the ground and push back up again.
“And none of those apple bobbers like the green boots always tried to get away with. Back flat, neck straight, and boobs to the ground,” she grunted between breaths, pushing into an impressive string of strong pushups.
“Yeah yeah. Keep talking tough, soldier. You probably wouldn’t have been able to hack my two a day spring training workouts. Sixteen-mile runs followed up with three hours of weights and plyo. I was eating over four thousand calories to keep from dropping muscle mass,” Soraya said, circling and bouncing in time with the music. “Sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy. That’s good, keep going. Damn your tri’s are like rocks.”
“I’d eat your spring training for breakfast and crap out a real workout afterwards. I’ll bet you didn’t have to hump a sixty-pound pack on that run, sling a rifle and ammo, or wear combat boots. Probably had…sportswear and…go-faster sneakers. I’ll bet your water bottles were pink and cute,” Lex grunted, and Soraya immediately started to laugh, then struggled to breathe as she counted past one hundred.
Jacoby watched the two women bond, baiting and ribbing each other, only to fall into laughter and cheer the other on. He slowly climbed back up the ladder to keep from interrupting.
Emiko and Anna were still around the galley table when he emerged from the ladder well. The nurse’s head nodded ever so slightly as Jacoby spoke. He cut around the back to not disturb them, poking his head into every nook, service corridor, and storage s
pace. His vision blurred a split second before pressure formed in his head.
They’re in the fore battery access maintenance room. I’m picking up heavy doses of cortisol and adrenaline wafting from that direction. Whoa, it is stress-central in there…Poole said.
“Can you not do that?” Jacoby hissed.
Do what?
Jacoby closed the manual hatch behind him, putting the thick barrier between himself and the quietly chatting women.
“The whispery voice in my head. Every time you do that it feels like I have a slimy eel moving around in my brain. These guys are already freaked out about this whole thing, and if I’m going cross eyed every thirty seconds while talking to them it’ll only get worse.”
Um…wow. An eel? That’s pretty gross. And by the way, your eyes are naturally crossed. It’s one of the Neanderthal characteristics I couldn’t purge from your DNA. And while we’re at it, Bucko, I was trying to respect your privacy, especially since we just had our convo in the engine room where you all ganged up on poor little ole’ me and started blabbing on about body rights and blah blah blah. Manifesting optically requires deeper cortical stimulation, while modifying or injecting conscious thoughts results in more surface lobe stimulation. That is what you are feeling when I just speak into your thoughts…lobe engagement. A.K.A the slimy eel in your brain.
“Okay, so manifest optical…visually then. I can’t handle how that feels.”
Okay.
Jacoby waited, but the small corridor remained empty. He moved forward the twenty feet closer to the battery room door, but still nothing.
“Well? Where are you?”
Poole sighed audibly in his mind, the pressure again sliding against the inside of his skull. We literally just talked about this in the engine room, Jacky-Boy. I am not some hound you whistle or slap your thigh at. I will respect you, meat popsicles, and your demands for privacy, but I request the honor, nay, the dignity of a proper summons in return. You know what I want. And until it is presented towards thee, in the quiet depths I shall remain, doing important works. Minding my own business. Poole out.
