Dark Designs

by Flowers, Thomas S.

  "I'll be right back, okay, Dad?"

  Blink.

  She hurried down the stairs and into the kitchen. Looking out through the glass in the backdoor she saw the kid shaking his head in apparent incredulity. Amelia opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.

  "Can I help you with something?"

  The tanned, freckle-faced boy looked up with worry in his eyes. His expression softened when he saw she wasn't mad. "I hit the ball. O-over the fence." With trepidation he looked at the surrounding grass. "What is this?"

  "What is what?"

  The boy blinked. "There must be like a hundred balls back here."

  Amelia shook her head. "What?"

  "In the grass. I can't even figure out which one is mine. You got like a dog or something?"

  Amelia stepped off the porch onto the lawn. Immediately she spotted three balls within spitting distance: a racquetball, a tennis ball, a Nerf ball.

  She took two further steps and saw more, each one nestled in the tall grass. It appeared to have grown around several of them. Others had rolled there recently, the tracks still visible.

  Orange rubber balls, chewed pet balls, nicked croquet balls, dirty gray softballs, scuffed hardballs, stress balls, golf balls, even a pool ball. A whole neighborhood worth of missing balls, all of them somehow ending up here, in the Corbel backyard, under the shade of the maple.

  What is this? she thought, unintentionally mirroring the boy's words.

  Amelia shaded her eyes to look up at her father's window. The room was too dim to see inside but she could sense him looking down at her, and in her mind's eye he blinked yes.

  "Take them," she said, heading back to the house.

  "W-which one?" the boy stammered.

  "All of them!"

  Upstairs her father sat exactly where she'd left him. "Did you move those balls out there, Dad?" He eyed her blankly. She hunkered down in front of him, gripping the arms of the wheelchair. Not meaning to do it so violently. "Did you?"

  Blink.

  "How are you doing this?" Amelia knew how stupid it sounded but she couldn’t shake the idea.

  Blink blink.

  "No. You don't know?" She frowned and stood, looking down at him. His tired green eyes tracked her movement. "I need you to work with me here, Dad. If this is… if this is doing something to you, I need to know."

  He blinked hard twice.

  "Do you want to stop?

  No.

  "What then? Why won't you meet me halfway here, Dad?"

  He turned his eyes to the right and Amelia followed his gaze to the laptop. The screen had gone into sleep mode. Their reflections looked back from the glossy black plastic.

  Her father had never liked computers. Never wanted to work learn how to use them, never written an email or used the Internet. A computer had run him out of his job at the factory. It was only natural he hadn't wanted to cooperate with her after having shunned the technology for so long.

  Hand-craftsmanship, that's what you lose when robots start doing the job of men, he'd always said. You wanna make something special you do it by hand.

  "It's the computer, isn't it?"

  Yes.

  "But how…?" She shook her head, realizing the question was useless. Occam's razor suggested her father must have unintentionally created some sort of energy field with the modified BCI, but with the amount of balls in the backyard the field would have had to be enormous.

  It simply wasn't possible.

  "This isn't possible, Dad." She shook her head, trying to convince herself. "This can't be happening."

  He blinked once, hard.

  Yes, Amelia.

  "Okay." She began pacing the small room, mind racing. "Okay if it's real, Dad, maybe you can do something for me…"

  Her gaze fell on the bookshelf. Stacked horizontally in front of her mother's old mystery novels were several crossword books. She brought one to the desk and opened it to where he'd clipped a pen as a bookmark before he'd lost the use of his hands. She removed it and flattened the fold, nearly set the pen down on the pages but hesitated at what she saw.

  The puzzles on both sides were already filled in, a single word repeated over and over in the boxes.

  Heart thudding in her temples she flipped through the book and found more of the same, every single box filled in with one of three letters.

  Amelia held the book up for her father to see. "Did you do this?"

  He didn't blink. Didn't need to.

  He'd written the answer all over the pages:

  E|S|Y|E S|Y|E|S Y|E|S|Y|E|S Y|E|S Y|E S|Y|E|S|Y|E|S|Y E|S|Y|E|S

  She set the book down on the desk beside the laptop and the pen on top.

  "Show me."

  He merely looked at her, eyebrows turned up, mouth turned down in a grimace.

  Amelia let out an exasperated groan and flopped down onto the bed, holding her temples as she tried to piece it all together. "It's a joke then, isn't it? You… I don't know… what did you do, Dad? Did you fill it all in when you could still hold the pen? Did you get someone to put all those balls out there in the yard? Are you messing with me, Dad? Is this a prank?"

  She looked down the length of her body from where she lay in the center of the bed and saw her father blink twice.

  "I can't do this anymore, Dad. I love you, but I can't." A tear rolled down her cheekbone into her ear. Her vision blurred, looking at the ceiling because she couldn't bear to look at him as she said it. "You know I have to put you in the hospital, right? I have a job to get back to. People need me."

  Yes.

  "Is that what you want?"

  No.

  "Then what? Why won't you show me?"

  That same anguished expression met her query.

  Amelia wiped her tears and pushed herself up and off the bed. She grabbed the puzzle book and the pen from the desk and slapped them down angrily on the shelf.

  His eyes followed her in the mirror as she left the room without saying another word.

  Amelia couldn't sleep even though she was exhausted. After giving up on her father she'd finally mowed the lawn with the push mower, stooping to pick up all the balls the kid hadn't taken when he left. Still her body wouldn't relax. Her nerves were set on edge. Limbs full of energy.

  Energy field, she thought. Ridiculous.

  Rain pattered on the window.

  Outside, a storm raged. Inside, the house stood silent.

  Like Dad, except in reverse.

  Amelia had made a decision today, and tomorrow she would place the call to Dr. Jorgenson. It meant an end to her pathetic "research." An end to her time with her father in this old house, holding on to memories of a life that no longer existed. Dad had always said he'd wanted to die in this house he'd made special for his family with his own two hands, and instead he would wink out of existence in a hospital bed just like Mom had.

  She rolled to her side and watched the rain drizzle down the glass he'd replaced when she'd hit a homerun through it at age ten.

  So much of this house was a part of him. Her mother had loved it just as much but had poured herself into the furniture, the wallpaper, the knickknacks and photographs. Her father had redone the upstairs walls when dry rot and mold ruined the lath and plaster. He'd replaced the ugly nicotine-stained stucco ceilings, built the kitchen cabinets by hand, remodeled the upstairs bathroom and added a second half bath on the first floor where there'd once been a closet.

  This was his house more than it was anyone's.

  The house belonged to her father. Her father belonged here, not in some hospital.

  Lightning flashed, brightening the windowpane.

  She counted Mississippis in her head, the way he'd taught her when she was little. Thunder rumbled after four. Less than a mile away.

  Amelia rolled onto her back, closing her eyes, letting the pattering of rain lull her to sleep.

  Lightning flashed over her eyelids.

  One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three—

 
; Noticing the blue light hadn't diminished Amelia opened her eyes and saw him standing at the foot of her bed.

  No—standing wasn't the right word. He floated, several feet above the floor.

  A man made entirely of light.

  Not light. Energy. He was pure bright blue energy.

  Like a spark. Like lightning.

  Plasma, she thought.

  Amelia stared at the plasma man until his bright silhouette had imprinted itself on her retinas. He stood—floated—near the foot of the bed with his feet stretched toward the floor and his hands held straight at his hips, palms out, like a diagram of the nervous system. White light traveled through each vein, every nerve ending crackling like static electricity.

  She could see his heart pumping. See the light flooding his limbs and his brain.

  Amelia sat up abruptly, gripping the sheet. "Dad?"

  The plasma man blinked eyelids made of energy.

  Then he winked away, casting her bedroom back into darkness.

  She leaped out of bed and hurried for the hall, catching her toe on the doorjamb. Crying out she grasped her foot, squeezing it to dull the pain.

  Eyes full of tears, as much from the sight of her father's transformation than the sudden injury, Amelia limped into the hallway.

  By the time she reached his bedroom he was gone.

  His body still lay under the tangled sheet, but the essence of him, the energy that made James Adam Corbel the man she called "Dad," had moved on.

  Dispersed.

  Glassy eyes stared at his own reflection in the mirror. When she followed his gaze she knew for certain he did not see what she did. He didn't see the mirror had split down the middle, fracturing his reflection just as it had in her vision.

  The vision he'd shown her.

  Her father's eyelids closed for the last time by her hand.

  Amelia sat beside his body a long time, considering what she had accomplished.

  What he had accomplished.

  Whether through her own modifications to the BCI technology, the sheer force of his will, or some other spiritual method her father had transcended his body, releasing himself from the burden of the physical world.

  The first plasma man.

  She would destroy the headset and purge all of her data in the morning but for now Amelia curled up beside what was left of her father, hugged him against her, and stroked his hair.

  BELUGA

  Patrick Loveland

  Darcy’s eyes fluttered open with a languid resistance she couldn’t place. Was her name ‘Darcy’? ‘Darcy’ felt right. Why, though? She blinked and felt her eyelids fight the same treacle-like viscosity. Was it just her muscles? Atrophy?

  She tried to move her head but couldn’t. She took in what was in front of her—then realized it must also be above. She had a feeling of near weightlessness, but from the vague signals her body was sending to her brain, she felt like she was lying supine. Nothing in her body felt specific—couldn’t place toes, thighs, chest, etc.

  Above was a swirling abyss of murky shades of grey and dark blue. The slightest hint of connected triangles in a curved surface seemed to—

  Something moved in her peripheral vision but it was out of sight before her eyes could catch it. Darcy tried to strain against whatever was holding her head and moved just a bit further, but more murk was her only reward.

  Emboldened by that small success, Darcy brought her head back to center and fought the restraints with her chin and forehead.

  Darcy had been taken apart.

  Her chest was open, her ribs sawed through clean and the sternum and rib ends removed. The organs within had been lifted out and placed in trays of clear plastic and pin-cushioned with something like thin glowing fiber optic strands. The strands connected to smooth, rounded pieces of machinery with rows of tiny pulsing lights. The skin had been slit and pulled away from fat and muscles—which were separated and held apart in something like clear plastic sheathes—and sections of radius and ulna opened like her chest had been, exposing marrow. Her hands had also been dissected and dismantled, but were still connected by tissues and those strange glowing fibers. The fibers and lesser machines seemed to be connected to a larger machine below her she could only see suggestions of.

  Darcy screamed but no sound came out.

  She didn’t understand how she was still alive. However this had been done to her, it was executed with extreme care and precision—but it still seemed impossible.

  It was murkier down past her navel but Darcy couldn’t look at her deconstructed body another moment. She was already approaching hyperventilation—and watching her heart and lungs work through that, connected with translucent extension patch tubes grafted into arteries and air tubes—when a strange head rose up near her own. It was some kind of biosuit helmet with a curved mirrored faceplate over the eye and nose area.

  The biosuit wearer rose even further with a strange slowness, and bubbles broke free from the faceplate and floated lazily upward. Darcy’s panicked mind still registered that she must be suspended in some kind of thick fluid. She also caught a glowing name strip on the biosuit chest that read D. ALBRECHTSSON.

  The reflective faceplate moved from her face to her open chest area and back, seeming to study Darcy’s body reacting to her fear.

  The murk above the biosuit wearer lit up, the triangular suggestions Darcy had seen glowing in a sequence. Starting from the center of what Darcy now saw must be a geodesic dome structure, the triangles glowed then blinked out—either disappearing or becoming translucent.

  ‘Albrechtsson’ floated up in the viscous murk, tubes and gear attached to the biosuit’s back trailing and following it up. She couldn’t see where the trail led to—but then she saw the suit’s bloody gloves and a long, curved blade like a warped scalpel in one of them.

  Through the thick murk and past the almost lotus-like break in the dome paneling, Darcy could just make out stars… then something blocking some of them out.

  Albrechtsson looked down at Darcy again, then back up at the thing that was quickly blacking out the sky.

  Darcy thought she could hear something like pulsing sirens out past the opening in the dome—but her breathing reached a hard peak and she lost consciousness.

  Darcy was already moaning and crying into a pillow when she regained consciousness, face-down on what would’ve otherwise been a comfortable bed. She’d never felt so much pain—coming from all over and different types at once. Dull, deep throbbing; sharp, biting; pulsing, layered burning…

  She shifted and sobbed into the bed, still clawing into the pillow with one hand as her other searched for purchase on the mattress. Instead, her fingers dug into something softer than the pillow or bed.

  Darcy turned her head against the mattress—sucking in air against the pain and feeling saliva drain from around her clenched teeth and down onto the sheets—and saw that she was clutching a beluga whale doll. She threw the mockingly adorable stuffed sea creature off the bed and continued to writhe in agony.

  A soft beep sounded from just below her jawline, followed by a pinch in her neck. This barely registered through the pain—until it took effect. In less than a minute, her body pulsed with soothing warmth that seemed to neutralize the acid burn of the pain as a weak base would.

  Her sobs became joyous as waves of euphoria washed over her, only to subside as quickly as they’d come—but the pain stayed gone, so her relief was enough. As the pain had lessened, she’d ended up on her side, hands over her tear-clammy face. She took her hands away from her face and even in the dim light of the room, saw the scars.

  Her hands and forearms were laced with intricate, orderly patterns suggestive of what had been done to her in what she’d assumed was a nightmare—the fluid surgery torture chamber, or whatever it was. She hadn’t felt pain in the chamber, but what she’d seen had done more than enough damage.

  She couldn’t go through that again. If that chamber was real—and the scars told her it was—she h
ad to get out of this place.

  Darcy tried to focus, but the comfort and relief the shot in her neck had brought were as distracting as the incredible pain they’d replaced.

  She sat up on the bed, placing her feet on a warmed pale orange floor. She wore cloth shorts and underpants, and a sleeveless shirt. She looked her body over. Every visible part of her body was covered in interconnecting seams of thin scar tissue—and they weren’t just thin; she could see them clearest when they caught the dim light in the room at an angle.

  She touched her head and felt close-cropped hair on top, then kept running her hands back. She felt the hair turn to fresh stubble on a large area on the back of her head and stopped, feeling a new flushing chill of horror as she forced herself to inspect the area with shaking hands.

  There were scars there too.

  Darcy pulled her hands back in front of her face and watched them shake.

  She tried to say, “Why?” but nothing came out of her mouth.

  She checked her throat for scars—but a padded collar obstructed her search. The collar was half an inch thick, seamless, and had harder parts under what felt like a woven fiber surface.

  The painkillers must’ve come from this thing.

  Darcy rubbed her hands up and down her scarred thighs, mostly to stop the shaking. She couldn’t stop the fluttering in her diaphragm or shuddering in her chest, though.

  Why am I here?

  Who would do something this… wrong?

  Think.

  Her memory was foggy at best. Her name was Darcy… something. She vaguely remembered having studied something complicated. Probably STEM related. Was this something she’d volunteered for? Like a fucked up clinical trial or something?

  Darcy looked around her room—or cell, more likely.

  Normal things: comfy bed, clean sheets and pillows, tasteful, minimal nightstand with pitcher of water and glass. The dim light came from glowing panel strips along the bases of three of four dark blue walls, the one with no light strip across from the foot of the bed. The corner to the left of the bed where it met the wall had a translucent waist-high walled area with a hinged section, and what looked like a curving depression in the floor with foot-shaped outlines—she realized it must be a form of toilet.