Dark Designs

by Flowers, Thomas S.

  Normal-ish things: Stuffed beluga whale doll she’d thrown.

  Odd things: all four corners where the ceiling met the walls looked cut off with black reflective triangles. Something about that felt bad—like whoever was doing this to her could watch through those triangular panels, or something behind them. ‘Cameras,’ she thought the word was. Nothing felt definite. Everything felt new or off, but like something she should know.

  Oddest thing: there was no door.

  No door meant no escape. Darcy couldn’t accept that.

  She tried to stand but even with the powerful painkillers in her, her legs felt wrong and she had to slump back down onto the bed. She tried again and succeeded, but kept a hand on the bed as she limped around to the foot of it.

  How does somebody escape a sealed room?

  No door. No windows. No—

  She looked up and saw an air vent grate above the bed. The openings were a set of concentric circles held together by an X that ran through them. Darcy climbed onto the bed on all fours, then stood up. She did her best with wobbly legs.

  The grate was a seamless part of the ceiling.

  Must not trust their guinea pigs to want to stay in their cages…

  Too bad.

  Darcy slid her fingers into the grating and pulled down, hoping the seamless look was an illusion. There was no give. She tried again, harder. Nothing. She hung by her fingers, pulling her legs up from the bed and hoping her weight could bring it down. It was solid.

  She glared at the grate in despair… then got mad.

  Darcy redoubled her efforts, jumping off the bed and pulling herself up by the grate, then dropping down as hard as she could. She did this over and over, her anger growing with each failed attempt.

  Then Darcy’s fingers started to elongate—the proximal phalanges stretching down from where they met the knuckles. They pulled down long enough that her feet sunk into the bed and she teetered back at an angle. The stretching parts became almost translucent and—

  She released her hooked fingers from the grating and dropped, catching the corner of the bed with her butt then rolling off and slapping onto the floor. She was conscious but her bell had been rung. She shook her head and looked at her hands—they were normal again, other than all the scars.

  What was that?

  Darcy curled up fetal and her sobs returned. Her crying only came out as tears and air catching and shuddering in her throat—she felt like she was moaning, but she couldn’t. In-between the choking sounds her throat was making, she heard a very faint high-pitched sound.

  The wall across from the foot of the bed began vibrating—with a low wump sound, it became translucent. It was still closer to solid than clear, but Darcy could make out the dim suggestion of a starkly lit section of corridor. It was pale orange from walkway to ceiling, like the floor of her cell.

  Darcy lifted herself up onto her arms.

  A boxy, waist-high shape came into the light from the far end, moving in silence. She wasn’t sure if it actually was silent, or her wall was sound-proofed—with a twisting of dread in her stomach, she assumed the latter. The thing stopped at a dark square of wall—like the one Darcy was looking out through, she assumed—did something she couldn’t make out near it, then continued toward her translucent wall. The light in the hallway went out and she could see only the slightest suggestion of the corridor and the boxy shape.

  Darcy got to her feet.

  With the wall translucent but corridor lights off, Darcy could make out a dim reflection of her face. She had dark eyes and hair. She could make out some freckles—and faint scar lines. She couldn’t remember if her face had been opened up in the chamber…

  A light in the corridor ceiling above the other side of her translucent wall came on, and her reflection was replaced by a closer view of the boxy thing as it cruised up to her cell. It was a drone of some kind. Its side paneling rolled up into itself and two manipulator arms retrieved a thick plastic slab from within its bulk. It looked like a food tray.

  Food delivery-bot? Maybe it has…

  A four-by-twelve-inch section of the wall disappeared somehow and the drone socketed the tray into it and started to ease it in—

  Darcy pulled the tray through and went down on her knees, sticking her arms through and grabbing the drone’s retreating manipulators. It pulled one free so she grabbed the other with both hands and tried to heft the bot toward the wall. She couldn’t move it, and switched to trying to find buttons on its surface.

  If there’s a door button—

  The tray opening in the door attempted to close and sensed her arms. Lights flashed in its rectangular outline, warning of imminent closure. Darcy’s desperation kept her fighting, and that brought her anger back.

  The lights flashed brighter and made a pulsing sound of warning now. She closed her eyes and kept searching with one hand while she held the manipulator arm with the other.

  Fuck you! Cut my arms off then, you piece of shit!

  It did—or would have. The tray opening closed, lights and alarm ceasing.

  Darcy could still feel the manipulator and surface of the boxy food drone. She opened her eyes and would have yelped if she could have.

  Her arms were in the door. The chunk that had closed was solid, but the sections of her forearms that were where it had closed were translucent—and her arms were still there on the other side. The sections in the door also looked warped and pulsed strangely. Darcy panicked and let go, pulling herself away from the wall, and her arms with her. She fell back on her butt and her back collided with the firm softness and paneling of the foot of the bed.

  A rotating glow—like a tiny old-style police roof light—was emitted from a spot on the drone’s topside, and it continued on. The wall vibrated and become opaque again with a whump.

  Darcy examined her arms. Once again, scars but otherwise normal. She didn’t know how it worked but she knew if that torture room was real, this warping or phasing was her only way of never being in it again. She got to her feet and placed open palms and fingers against the wall.

  She pressed her hands against the wall harder and pushed, but nothing happened. She pushed over and over again, but her hands remained solid.

  Why?

  How does this work?

  Her frustration led to fear, flooding her mind with images of her dissected, impossibly-alive body in that chamber.

  Her fear pushed her toward anger.

  Darcy’s hands went through the wall, her arms now looking cut off at the wrists. She hesitated a moment, then focused on that feeling of simmering rage and stepped forward. She caught glimpses of the door’s inner workings before stumbling out into the dark corridor.

  The collar started flashing and making a high-pitched alert sound.

  Darcy forced nightmare images into her mind again and focused on her hands and neck. The collar vibrated as she pulled it out of her neck through the substance of her body, then she examined the interior of its ring. It had layered needle-like barbs for staying in place, and the slightly thicker injection needle.

  What is this awful fucking place?

  She decided to take a chance that the phasing worked both ways, and focused on the collar even harder—it went translucent along with her hands, so she pushed them through wall to her now empty cell and dropped the collar inside.

  Whatever this place really was, most of it was underground.

  Darcy had snuck through its many dark corridors, hiding from food drones a few times, to a curved hall twice the width of the rest with gray walls. She’d followed it long enough to decide it must be a circle or oval around the whole level. Then she’d tried to phase through that and succeeded, only to go a few feet through metal and concrete—and into solid rock. For a panicked moment she thought she might fall through it. She didn’t know anything about how this power she had worked. As long as she concentrated, she could walk forward on the same plane… but there was nothing but rock for ten feet. She got spooked and hurried
back into the curved hallway.

  She knew she had to go up, but had no way to know how far.

  Darcy had climbed onto a medical equipment station she’d found and went through some quick trial-and-error to learn to climb with her phasing ability—all the while trying to ignore that every time she used it, she saw more and weirder pulsing and warping suggestions undulating within her own natural body shapes.

  She’d also had to fight the urge to use her phasing to enter another cell like the one she’d been in and see if there were more like her. She’d decided that even if she could get another person out through one of the doors, she wasn’t sure what else getting out of this facility would require—and that could just get more people hurt.

  Darcy’s forehead and eyes emerged from the surface of a grated floor panel as if from a steamy pond, several floors up from the patient/prisoner levels she’d started on. She held herself in a phased crouch within layered sets of fluid-transfer pipes and conduits filled with shrouded bundles of electronics cables. This flooring was more utilitarian and well-used than the other floors she’d recently climbed up into and out of, and she hoped that meant she was close to ground level.

  Satisfied she was alone, Darcy hauled herself up out of the floor and crept down the corridor. More conduits and pipes lined the hallway walls, and tightly enough that it almost felt to Darcy like a movie she felt she’d seen at some point in her foggy past about men on a submarine—which she also half-remembered was a boat or ship that went under the water; and a ship was a boat that didn’t…

  This feeling of unsureness about pretty much everything would’ve haunted Darcy, if she’d been willing to stop and really think about it. Instead, she pushed on.

  A porthole window in a sealed hatch style door didn’t discourage Darcy’s submarine associations, but as she snuck up to it and peaked in she saw something that didn’t fit with them.

  Several strange, bone white figures stood in special stations, motionless. They were the shape of a human man, but with a hunch to the slim muscular triangle of upper body that connected two thick, over-long arms—which ended in something between hands and multi-tools. Where their hips would be there was a smooth inverted wishbone of metal or plasteel housing shocks and struts that connected to the tops of roughly human-like legs. Their heads were on shocks and struts too, and were suggestive of a human head wearing something like a fighter pilot helmet—only all one piece and with a murky translucence that mostly hid complex electronic workings within.

  I… don’t think these drones deliver food, Darcy thought, then she shuddered at the thought of what these things could do to her.

  More deathbots are probably all over this level…

  Darcy lifted a leg and stepped partially into the hatch, boosting herself up and climbing into the ceiling. She was getting the hang of focusing her fear into its own mental compartment for phasing use—and these man-drones didn’t hurt that process one bit.

  A few more levels up, it struck her that she hadn’t seen a single other person here. She climbed up out of the floor, crept around a level long enough to get nervous and a little creeped out, then kept going up. Also, it had to be almost thirty levels she’d climbed now, and she had a feeling the one she’d started on wasn’t the lowest…

  Darcy’s forehead and eyes came out of a floor and saw only white.

  She pulled herself up out of the surface more and it took two more feet for her to see what the white was—she was climbing up onto a snow-covered roof in a blizzard at night. Wind howled and snow blew all around, sweeping across the piles thick enough to not be moved.

  What is this, Antarctica? You’ve got to be fucking kidding…

  Darcy climbed back down and searched the level for anything resembling warm weather clothes, but found nothing. She couldn’t find evidence of any other humans here—other than Albrechtsson, but at this point Darcy wouldn’t be surprised if he was a robot too.

  Having failed to find warmer clothes, Darcy took a chance on something and climbed back up onto the snow-swept roof. She treated the outside as she had the subterranean rock she’d walked through—if she kept herself something like half-phased, she couldn’t feel the cold. She’d also noticed that if she stayed in a phased state, she didn’t have to breathe. That was convenient, but also disturbed her.

  Okay, what are we working with here…?

  She was on the roof of what seemed to be the largest single structure in sight. It had a tall, complex tower covered in antennae, dishes, and arrays of slightly curved vertical panels in different arrangements. That communications tower was at the center of the large circular roof surface. She rose from a crouch and phase-stepped through the snow piles to the curved edge closest to her. The roof was about three stories up, so her view was decent.

  Flood lights here and there, the facility structures were almost obscured by the thick snow rushing through their illumination, along with all the snow blowing between them and Darcy. She could make out suggestions of shapes.

  There were prefab structures on stilt supports, Quonset huts, and geodesic domes. The domes filled her with dread—their curved surfaces made up of connected triangular frames were without question the triangles she’d seen in the fluid-filled surgery chamber. She could see three of those domes on this side of the facility alone.

  Lightning or something like it flashed on the horizon, the snow so dense the distant brilliance only dimly lit up the sky where Darcy was—but in those flashes she could see silhouettes or larger shapes above the ground level of the facility.

  All around and looming above the facility grounds and beyond the immediate perimeter she could see, there were huge radio telescope dishes. It reminded her of something she vaguely remembered was called SETI, but the dishes and support structures here were even larger. There were other shapes too—mostly outside the facility perimeter—and Darcy’s best guess was they were something like huge resting artillery guns.

  An alert sounded from speakers all over the facility.

  Shit—they must’ve figured out I’m out of my cell!

  Darcy ducked down instinctively, but she wasn’t even sure how visible she was in her phased state. She let herself drop through the roof a bit, and crawled through it and the snow with just her eyes and the top of her head poking out above the windswept surfaces.

  But no one came for her. No spotlights. Nothing near her changed.

  She progressed around the edge of the circle slowly for a few minutes, still looking for a way out. There was nothing visible in the dark blizzard, and no lights in the distance at all. If this was Antarctica or Alaska or Canada or Russia… she was in for a hell of a walk with no compass, food, or water—or clothes and boots for that matter. She knew all of these items were important, but still it was distant why she did.

  Lights glowed around the circle edge off to her right and even over the blizzard she could hear strange-sounding voices.

  Darcy crawled over to that edge but stayed hidden in the snow and roof.

  A spotlight followed a strange form that kept diving and tumbling out of its circle. The form shambled between a Quonset hut and one of the raised buildings. Through the whipping snow and dark, Darcy saw silhouetted humanoid forms cut off the form’s escape route in the distance—it threw itself up into the stilt structures under the building. The circle of light found it again and it flung itself through the openings between the stilts, climbing with several misshapen limbs indistinguishable as legs or arms before throwing itself some distance again.

  Another group of humanoid forms approached the panicked amorphous creature from near the base of the building Darcy was on—she saw it was a team of the bone-white ‘deathbots’ she’d seen earlier. It occurred to her from how well they blended in that the coloring was a form of camouflage. They held strange guns that looked like big assault or particle rifles, but with thick cables running from open ports in their hunched triangular torsos to the back of flat rounded-square panels on the end of the guns perp
endicular to their length.

  The drones took positions a few feet from each other and aimed their weapons at the escaping beast. Spotlights from their head sections came on and startled the creature, stopping it in mid climb—and Darcy saw at this distance that it was translucent, with the vague suggestion of having once been human. But now it had too many eyes, all of them deep black but clouded as if with cataracts—and those cloudy parts caught the drones’ lights with an iridescence and as they darted around, they trailed an eerie psychedelic distortion of the light as well.

  Its mouth broke open at an unnatural angle and a few other openings came apart within its warped, pulsing interior. From the depths of its pulsing innards, an unearthly howl rose and its haunting sound cut into Darcy’s mind, even over the blizzard.

  Whatever the drones’ guns fired, it was invisible—Darcy thought of riot deterrent microwave emitters—but she could hear them vibrating as they went off.

  The creature’s howl became a shrill, chittering cry, and it dropped to the snow below the stilts. It writhed and collapsed in on itself in places, reforming different shapes as it whined—tentacles, malformed appendages of no obvious purpose, the suggestion of bones and organs growing at an exponential rate under a taut exterior layer that acted like a skin around an animal—or several—evolving in real-time.

  The wave-guns went off again, vibrating louder.

  The interior shapeshifting and chaotic self-birthing slowed and the frightening monstrosity collapsed its shape into what seemed like a defensive posture. Then it mewled and sobbed in its own weird way, but the straining mess of flesh, fluids, and organs had lost its face and head in the process of whatever it was doing and Darcy couldn’t tell where the sounds were coming from.

  Then she finally saw another human.

  A well-bundled human form trudged up to the half-circle of drones through the snow, followed by another drone that was different from the others—if they were bone-white, this one was dried-blood red. Its head section also seemed to contain a glowing actual head within its jet fighter helmet-shaped translucent plasteel, which Darcy thought must be some kind of display or surface projection illusion. This red drone had a different gun too—no square panel, fat barrel with holes along its length, and a soccer ball sized spherical tank near its shrouded rear pistol grip.