CHANGELING
Shadowrun - 05
Chris Kubasik
(An Undead Scan v1.1)
1
A room.
A white room.
A pungent smell of sterility.
He tried to remember his name, and could not.
A sheet covered his body. Across the sheet thick, taut straps held him down, disappearing over the edge of the bed. Brief images of abandonment in the woods, Hansel and Gretel, danced in his thoughts, then vanished. Before him was a door. Who was behind it?
He felt straps holding down his wrists as well, but could not see them, for the sheet covered every part of his body but his head.
Part of the sheet glowed red, a warm red, where the cloth rested over his legs and chest and the rest of his body. The redness dissipated and faded where the sheet was not in such close contact with his body. At the edge of the bed it was the usual white.
“Hello?” he tried to say, but the word came out as only a dry croak. The effort tore a white pain through his throat, and he swallowed to soothe it.
He turned his head, looking to the left. On one side of the room was a window with blinds. It was dark outside, though across the street he saw the bright red lights of a tall building. A memory came to him. A small bedroom viewed from the doorway. Near the room’s single window, a crib. The room was dimly lit by the yellow light of street lamps. Inside the room was nothing but the crib. This was where he was put at night. His cries went unanswered.
He turned from the memory and saw machinery to his right. Metal boxes that he could make out clearly enough, but, like the sheet, their sides were tinted by warm redness. On a small round screen a red dot blipped up and down.
He realized that tubes ran from another machine under the sheets—perhaps into his arms.
Was he was supposed to do something? Was mere someone he should talk to? How did he get here? He caught another quick glimpse of a memory—a bedroom, getting out of bed, sticky sweat thick on his body, falling to the ground, darkness…. But no more.
He tried to move his arms, and could not. The straps.
Everything was wrong. That much he knew. The world was too red. His thoughts too slow. Something had happened.
He was very tired. He wanted to speak to someone, find out specifics, but there was no one to talk to.
He closed his eyes.
He woke up.
He remembered right away he was in a hospital. He remembered he’s already woken up in the hospital several times.
He remembered his name was Peter.
Peter remembered he had a father.
He remembered that he and his father lived in Chicago. But where was his father? Peter couldn’t remember what he looked like. He wasn’t even sure if his father knew where he was.
He heard movement on the other side of the room. He looked and saw a woman, her flesh iridescent with the glow of heat. Her uniform was white, mixed with warmer patches where her body met cloth. She heard him move and turned to look at him. Her face astounded him; an angel of light.
Her face became brighter, a fear tugging at the corners of her cheeks. She tried to hide it, but her half-step back revealed all.
She formed a weak smile and, then, still facing him, she backed up to the door and let herself out.
What had she seen? He tried to raise his hands to his face, but the straps around his wrists still held his hands down.
He tried to think of what he was. A person. Fifteen years old. Yes, that. But something had happened.
He remembered his father.
The two of them were riding in a plated limousine, back from a party somewhere. Peter felt the weight of the car in its movements around turns and when it stopped. His father looked patiently out the window.
A pane of plastic separated the driver from the two of them, and Peter said, “I met someone at the party.”
His father turned to him, and said, “Hmmm.” His eyes were large and unfocused and frightening. They hovered over Peter like the magnifying lenses of a microscope.
“Her name’s Denise. Denise Lewis.”
“Well, she was there with her parents. It’s not that unreasonable that you’d meet.”
“We talked, and we thought we’d get together.”
His father turned back toward the window. “Hmmm.”
“You know, go out.” Wouldn’t his father at least smile for him?
His father remained silent.
“I really liked her. She’s sharp.”
Still nothing.
“I think she liked me, too.”
They rode in silence a while longer. Peter decided to give his father plenty of time to say something, but many minutes passed without a response. “This is my first date, dad,” he said finally. “I’m pretty excited.”
His father continued to look away from Peter. “Just don’t expect anything,” he said.
“What?”
His father’s voice carried something new, a bit of emotional weight that Peter had never heard from him before. “I can hear it in your voice. You’re getting your hopes up.”
“I’m just happy I met her, and I’m looking forward to seeing her again.”
“That’s what I mean. You’re happy. You have expectations. You don’t have to listen to me. I don’t think you will. You’re young. But happiness isn’t… You’re better off not trying to get it.” His father’s words resonated with a pitiable wisdom.
For a moment Peter thought he’d stop breathing. How could his father say such a thing? Peter couldn’t remember ever being so excited before, and now his father was telling him to have no hope.
He sat back in his seat and clenched his hands together. He wanted to shout at his father, to seize him, to spin him away from his placid position of staring out the window. The impulse building in him was tremendous, both unexpected and dangerous. He wanted to flail his fists at his father’s back, anything to get his attention, to show how angry and hurt his father’s word made him. But Peter did nothing, for deep within his heart, he feared that his father might be right. “Happiness isn’t…” his father had said. True? Peter’s mother had died at the moment of his birth.
He realized that his father had swallowed the pain of his wife’s death and kept it tight in his throat, and now he was suggesting that Peter do the same.
He opened his eyes.
A man stood over Peter. His body glowed, the white lab coat lit from within by the heat of his body.
His father?
No.
Peter turned his head. His father stood on the other side of the bed, looking down at him. A bright, warm glow emanated from his flesh. The clinical and indifferent expression of his eyes turned the face into some-dung demonic.
“Dad?” The word came out dry and nearly silent. His father did not respond, but continued to stare down at him. The dark smudges under his eyes told Peter his father was very tired.
The man in the lab coat cleared his throat. “Peter?”
Peter turned to him. He realized the man was a doctor. The doctor smiled. Peter was relieved for a moment, then realized it was a lie. The man was only forcing the smile.
“Yes?”
“Peter, you’ve been through a lot in the last month….”
Month?
“…and I don’t want to exhaust you. But you’re past me worst now. I want you to understand that.”
Peter looked back to his father. He tried to raise his hand, to hold it out so his father would take it, but it was still tied down.
“I’m… I can’t move.”
“We’ve had to strap you down,” said the doctor. “You’ve had periods of intense violence over the last several weeks. For your own safety, we h
ad to make sure you couldn’t do harm to anyone.”
Peter ignored the doctor. “Dad, am I going to be all right?”
His father remained silent, then looked away. “I don’t know.”
Peter heard the doctor gasp. “Dr. Clarris…”
“I don’t!” his father snapped.
It was as if William Clarris didn’t even know his son was in the room. “Dad…”
“Excuse me,” said his father, who then abruptly turned and left the room.
The doctor rushed after Peter’s father. “I’ll be right back,” he threw out over his shoulder.
“No, it’s all right,” Peter began to say, but the doctor was already gone.
Peter stared up at the ceiling. He felt his chin begin to tremble, but he didn’t want to cry, so he tried to remember things from his past. He remembered he liked to drink milk, and for a moment he thought some was available, sitting on top of one of the machines, but then nothing was there. He remembered too that he went to school. He saw an image of a teacher by a flatscreen, displaying notes for a lecture. But he couldn’t remember what he did in school. He learned, he knew that much. But what did he learn about? Words, numbers, frogs, cells. All he could remember were pictures. The rest was gone.
It was while Peter was remembering that his father talked with him about schoolwork that the doctor returned. He’d slapped a fresh, new false smile across his face.
“Well, Peter, I think it’s time you and I had a talk.”
“My father?” He kept his words simple, for it hurt to speak.
The doctor raised his hands to dismiss Peter’s worries. “He went for a walk. He’s been very concerned about you, and he just needed some air. He’ll be back later.”
Peter believed the doctor, and then he didn’t, and then he decided he couldn’t do anything about it either way, so he said nothing.
“Peter, do you know what’s happened to you?”
Peter shook his head.
“How much do you remember about… the world, Peter? Many people who’ve been through what you have often lose a bit of memory.”
Peter tried to remember what kinds of things the doctor might be referring to. “I remember my father. A party. Waking up in the middle of the night.”
“Hmmm. Well, Peter, you’ve been through what we in the medical world call ingentisization. That is, your body has fully expressed its genotype, and it turns out that although you looked like a homo sapiens sapiens all your life, you actually are a homo sapiens ingentis.” He smiled reassuringly, but Peter was not reassured. He had no idea what the doctor was talking about.
“Ingentis?” Peter asked.
The doctor folded his hands before him and paused before answering. “The common term, the media term, for what you are is troll, Peter. Do you remember that word?”
He thought hard, and then images came to him. Huge people, gray and green, with massive teeth and large red eyes. He nodded.
“Do you remember anything about the history of Unexplained Genetic Expression?”
Snippets. “It surprised people. Before I was born.” Magic?
“The UGE cases started just before the Indians used shamanistic magic to get portions of the western American states ceded to them. Magic, for lack of a better word, was altering much of the world. Some children, born of human parents, suddenly began to transform into another species. Some were short and stocky, others tall and thin, with long ears. The media started calling them dwarfs and elves, as if they were living embodiments of mythical creatures. But, of course, they weren’t. They just happened to match the image of dwarfs and elves from children’s stories. They were homo sapiens, just a new subspecies. What the media called dwarfs were homo sapiens pumillonis, and what the people called elves were homo sapiens nobilis.”
Peter vaguely remembered some of this. “And there are homo sapiens robustus and homo sapiens ingentis.”
“Yes. And all are human. All are human beings. The media calls them metahumans.”
But something caught in Peter’s thoughts. “Why different names?”
“What?”
“Why not ‘elves’? Why not ‘dwarfs’?”
The doctor’s voice raised in pitch. “Because they’re not elves! They’re not dwarfs! Those things don’t exist!”
The doctor’s excitement made Peter nervous, so he remained quiet. He perceived a flaw in the doctor’s argument, but his thoughts were too confused for him to successfully point it out. Peter’s silence made the doctor smile. “There. You see? You’ll get better. Right now, your memories are confused. When your body changed, so did your brain. It rebuilt itself. And during that process, you lost some of your memory because memories are stored in the patterns of the brain. But some of it is still there. Some of it you’ll have to re-learn. But you can do it.”
Peter ignored the words. “What am I? I’m a sapiens ingentis?” A prickling ran up his spine. Only now did he put the doctor’s words together.
“Well, the first thing you have to keep in mind is that you are still you. You must hold this very close, Peter, because this is where most people in your condition get lost. And these days a case like yours is very rare. Spontaneous UG-Expressions haven’t been common since 2021. In the last two decades most people are born as their genotype directs. People like you, who live all the way to adolescence as one phenotype, and then radically change to another phenotype… often think they have become someone else—something else. They have not. You are not.”
“I feel like someone else. My head. Like… slow.”
The doctor looked down. “Yes. There will be differences.”
“Everything is red.”
The doctor nodded. “Yes, your eyes are seeing differently. My eyes are sensitive only to normal light, the visible-light spectrum. Your eyes are also sensitive to the infrared wavelengths, to heat energy. In conjunction with your normal vision, you also see heat expressed as a red-coloration shift…” The doctor trailed off. “It will be strange at first, but you’ll grow used to it.”
Peter remembered the nurse’s reaction to him. What had been hazy for the last few minutes became clear. “I’m a troll.”
“No! You are a human being.”
“I’m ugly.”
“Beauty changes, Peter.”
He thought of his father’s departure. His own father could not bear to be near him. A scream rushed up from deep inside and ripped through his throat. He had to get out, do something. Move. He twisted from side to side, rocking the bed back and forth. He howled. He wanted to break free and slam his hands into his head. He wanted to die. He wanted to feel so much pain that he could just die.
The doctor drew a hypodermic needle from his coat pocket and raised it toward Peter, the needle looking huge and dangerous. Peter lifted his head and tried to bite the doctor’s hand. The doctor pulled back and ran for the door. “Orderlies!”
Peter felt the strap around his right hand begin to stretch. He focused on that hand.
A clatter of footsteps at the door caught his attention. The doctor was back, bringing with him two big men. Taking positions on either side of Peter, the orderlies forced his shoulders down. But at that moment Peter finally broke the right-hand strap, and swung his fist up toward the orderly on that side. His fist slammed into the man’s belly, the impact lifting the orderly up off the floor and throwing him against the wall.
Peter turned wildly toward the second orderly. He didn’t have a plan, he just wanted to hurt someone. But before he could swing his fist to the left, he felt the hypo needle sting his left shoulder. Turning his head, he saw the second orderly and the doctor jump back.
Still enraged and frantic, Peter pulled himself up and grabbed for the strap around his left hand, then froze, transfixed by the image of his right arm.
The arm was massive, as thick as the thigh of a normal man. The flesh was grayish-green, layered with red heat, and it was rough, with thick, horny knobs growing along it. The hand was huge, the long fingers
tipped with hard, sharp nails.
Then Peter looked down at his enormous body. Although covered in hospital whites, he could tell he was now nearly three meters tall.
But he was getting groggy again. Things were starting to blur.
He turned his head again to look at his hand. He raised the hand up before his face, both horrified and fascinated that the hand could be his.
And then all went black and a dream washed over him.
2
He dreamed he was back in his house.
The cramps had started in the middle of the night, waking him up doubled-over in pain. It felt like nails or pins inside him. inside his stomach, trying to pierce their way out.
He shivered, thinking for a moment it was winter and that someone had left the window open. Then he remembered the party and that it was the end of summer and not very cold at all.
The sheets of his bed were soaked with sweat. It felt awful and he wanted to get out of bed, but feared he’d be even colder out from under his blanket.
“Dad?” he said weakly. He had wanted to shout it, but discovered he couldn’t.
He pushed the sheets off the bed, feeling his muscles sore and stiff. He touched his fingertips to his chest, then pulled back his hand in horror. Something was very wrong. His skin felt hard and rough. He looked down at his body, which was illuminated by at street lamps outside his window.
He looked normal… except for the calluses covering his chest and stomach. Slight, barely visible, but there. He pressed his palms together. The same. He’d grown up hearing stories of the plagues that killed mil-boos at the start of the century. Was this another one?
He stepped out of bed. He had to get to his father; he had to get help.
A dizziness grabbed hold of his vision. He took only three steps before falling to the ground. His legs felt as though they weren’t his. “Dad?” he said weakly, dragging himself toward the bedroom door. When a light went on in the hall, accompanied by the sound of footsteps, he stopped.
A fuzzy silhouette appeared in the doorway. “Peter?”
His father came and knelt beside him, beginning to probe and poke at Peter’s skin with his hands.
05 - Changeling Page 1
