The bundled human approached the defeated monster as it cowered in the snow. She—it seemed to be a she—got closer than Darcy expected, studying the shuddering mound of organic chaos from only a few feet away. It reminded her of how Albrechtsson had studied her in the fluid chamber, and she realized that probably was her.
Apparently satisfied, Albrechtsson turned away from the creature and started back through the snow. She was wearing a breathing mask with a clear faceplate, and Darcy caught something like a nod of approval as the masked face rose and fell with a sharp motion toward the red drone.
The red drone stepped forward, raised its weapon, and used it.
Bright green liquid fire came out of the gun—not quite napalm, but it doused, clung to, and burned. It burned like fire and acid at the same time, engulfing the screaming shapeless monster and eating away at its bulk as it lashed at the parts it hadn’t disintegrated yet.
Darcy didn’t wait another second—she turned away from the grizzly scene and ran, still submerged in the fluid-like give of the roof and snow covering it.
It wasn’t lost on her that her phasing had made her body look less and less human as she’d continued to use it. She knew that whatever that thing was, it probably started as something more like her—and she’d rather die more human than more like that.
The other side of the facility had more huts and domes—but no drones or Albrechtsson.
Darcy knew she had to be quick. She judged the distance between the base of the structure she was on and where the lights were swallowed by darkness out by the dishes and artillery guns, and past them. She focused on the phasing more intently and let herself drop through the material. Her eyes, nose, and forehead were the only things exposed, and she felt like she was on an amusement ride of some kind as she plummeted down the wall through a blizzard.
Just before reaching the snowdrifts built up around ground level, Darcy slowed herself and stopped. The feeling she’d had when she’d walked out through the solid rock from the underground facility area kept her from having any desire to disappear entirely into any other surface.
She crawled out of the wall and through the snowdrifts, keeping all but her eyes as hidden as possible. Wind howled above her, blowing snow all around as she advanced toward the underside of another raised stilt building. She snuck under that all the way to the far side, then continued out past the reach of the facility floodlights.
About a hundred yards past the lights, Darcy climbed up out of the snow-covered ground. She stayed half-phased as the deep cold necessitated, but walked normally otherwise. She was nearing the base of one of the huge dish structures when alarms sounded again from the facility behind her.
Darcy hurried forward through the storm and stepped right past a convex circular panel on part of the dish structure. She stopped in place and stared at it—black and reflective, like the ceiling corners back in her cell. The alarm sounded from the dish now too and floodlights lit up all around its base, exposing Darcy’s translucent form.
No!
She ran.
Away from the lights. Out into the dark.
At first there was only snow and howling wind. She put as much distance as she could between herself and the base before she heard the sounds of machines behind her. The storm had died down some, so it was possible the source wasn’t close behind. She looked back and saw the lights from three large tracked ‘snow cat’ vehicles. They were moving at high speed on their tank treads in her general direction about fifty feet apart.
Maybe they haven’t seen me!
She was still in the dark—it was possible they hadn’t.
Darcy started to phase her body more to drop into snowy ground and hide—
A ball of glowing energy travelled from the left snow cat closest to her and struck her in the chest.
She collapsed back onto the snow, her body completely solid again—and now consumed by the extreme cold she hadn’t felt at all yet. Darcy curled into a ball to keep warm, but it didn’t help. All she could do was shudder and try to keep her teeth from chattering together too hard as the snow cats rolled up to her.
The red humanoid drone approached holding the special energy gun she’d been dropped by, and she saw that she’d been right—the glowing form inside the translucent drone head section was an illusion. It was a real-time embedded 3-D animation of a heavily scarred face with a cloudy dead eye. The white drones followed and stopped in a wide semi-circle, similar to how they had with the creature before—and two of the white drones had weapons like the gun the red one had used to kill it, which sent an even deeper shudder through Darcy.
The glowing head spoke in Russian, but not to her. Strangely enough, Darcy understood him, even though she knew somehow it wasn’t her first language.
<
<
<
Albrechtsson raised a gloved hand to silence him.
Darcy wanted to beg for her life, but her voice still wouldn’t come.
Albrechtsson stopped feet from her and said, “Your vocal chords were taken out of the sequencing. You simply can’t speak or make any vocal intonations. Fortunately for me…”
Darcy closed her eyes and started weeping, sure she’d be killed as soon as this awful woman stepped away from her.
“What did you think you were… Where were you going to go?”
Darcy opened her eyes and glared at the woman—but she was looking out into the dark beyond the snow cat lights. Albrechtsson’s eyes glimmered, and she looked sad. The woman turned her head and looked down at Darcy again through the clear faceplate flanked by a thick, padded hood—the light from a snow cat illuminated the woman’s face and Darcy was struck deeply by something she couldn’t comprehend. Albrechtsson’s face was so familiar…
It was the face she’d seen in the reflection in her cell wall.
“I know you don’t know much…”
Albrechtsson locked eyes with her—and Darcy noticed now it was the same face, but older.
“…but where is it you think you are?”
<
<
<
Albrechtsson said, <
<
Albrechtsson said, <
<
Darcy looked at the Russian, realizing he must be some kind of ‘cyborg.’ He met her gaze through whatever mechanism gave his still-human brain sight—as it certainly wasn’t the glowing eye in the animation. He looked away, almost sheepishly.
The Russian cyborg said, <
Darcy looked back toward the woman—Albrechtsson’s eyes studied Darcy’s face, then took on a distant stare that went through her.
Albrechtsson looked up at the sky again and said, “I wonder if that’s still true.”
<
Albrechtsson said, <
<
The woman turned away and walked back to the snow cat she’d exited.
Instead of bathing her in green fiery death, the armed drones watched as four of the others guided a hovering unit toward her that was like a clear coffin with padding, restraints, and what had to be heating equipment. They picked Darcy up with surprising c
are and set her in the chamber as gently as they could. They closed the top—
The Russian cyborg grabbed the clear lid and the drones stopped. For a moment, he couldn’t seem to bring himself to look at her.
Then he did look at her and said, <
He let go and the drones sealed Darcy in the clear coffin.
At least it was warm.
This time, Darcy was taken apart fully conscious and without pain-blockers.
If her mind had been capable of it, she might have found it fascinating how much incredible technology went into her instantaneous deconstruction. A symphony of incisions, pumping, flaying, sawing, grafting, stitching, sucking, pulling, transfusing…
But all she could comprehend once it started was pain.
Before starting the process, Albrechtsson had floated around her, wordless and cold. The mirrored faceplate helped this impression, but the lack of any interaction somehow made it even worse. She’d hooked up the surgery machine’s tips, needles, blades, saws, etc. at their starting points as she floated through the thick chamber fluid. So precise. So gentle.
After Albrechtsson had exited the chamber through a fluid-lock chamber, Darcy had been able to crane her head far enough over in the restraints to see Albrechtsson at a control terminal for the machines. She was still wearing the biosuit, and the mirrored faceplate still hid her face—the face they shared. Darcy would never get an answer to why they did.
Darcy couldn’t scream or moan or cry like she thought she was doing. Albrechtsson had taken even that from her. All she could do was convulse and shudder silently.
Through her haze of maddening agony, Darcy took in experiential glimpses of what was happening outside of her personal hell chamber—
The triangle panels in the geodesic dome ceiling went clear—she saw out through the lotus opening…
An alarm sounded, unlike the earlier ones—like a thumping pulse drawn out to sound like a slowed down air-raid siren…
The light above the facility was blotted out by a huge form that quickly filled the sky…
The closer it came down to the facility, the better Darcy felt. The pain and madness were still there, but this sky-filling thing was like her—like a moon-sized warped ball of what she was—or maybe she was like It. This evil human woman had made her like this huge, beautiful thing somehow…
translucent, squirming, undulating, slithering, pumping, phasing…
and It had come because that woman was hurting her.
As this God of a thing loomed over her, it allowed her to become her true self—her human shape, open and on display as it had been made by this awful human fool, was abandoned and she unraveled and opened once again… into her real self.
Her rebirth was announced by impossibly loud trumpets…
Albrechtsson watched the colossal abomination being sucked into itself, imploding at the entry wounds the facility’s special artillery guns had opened in its bulging, distorted form. The thing they’d just killed was hard to comprehend. You could look at it with naked eyes and never quite see it or understand it. Through her faceplate’s finely-tuned AR filters, she could see it for what it was—a gargantuan mass of monstrous insanity made semi-solid.
As she watched the creature disintegrating into itself in a psychedelic lightshow of organic fractal madness, she thought—We can kill you. I… can kill you.
The facility shook hard enough to slosh the operating theater’s fluid around, causing it to slap against the dome interior near its apex—bringing her attention back to Beluga.
The young woman who’d entered the dome tub had become something very different over the course of what Albrechtsson thought of as the ‘beckoning process.’ Albrechtsson studied the warped mess of translucent tentacles, organs, misshapen bones, mouths, and too many eyes that had so recently looked human and resembled her in her youth…
Albrechtsson keyed a set of commands into her control panel, and the fluid in the dome ignited bright green—it burned away all of the organic material in the dome, then was extinguished by a catalyst fluid before being sucked down a large drain in the chamber floor.
The entry wall to Beluga’s room vanished and Albrechtsson stood in the corridor a moment, just looking around. She stepped in and walked to the stuffed animal on the floor. As she picked it up, she heard automaton steps out in the corridor—less rigid though, so probably Spichak. She walked out to the corridor and saw the glowing representation of his old, grizzled face looking happy for first time in decades.
Spichak said, <
<
<
Albrechtsson said, <>
She flashed Spichak a half-smile and walked past him toward the lifts.
Spichak said, <
<
<
<
<
Albrechtsson said, <
She started back down the hall but stopped again.
Without turning back she said, <
Albrechtsson entered her dark personal quarters and walked through to a clear plasteel picture window—installed in the curved surface of the highest level of the main facility, most of which was underground—without turning the lights on. She raised the beluga doll toward a curved shelf above the window but she caught sight of one of the snow-swept operating theater domes out in the storm and hesitated. She lowered the doll and stepped away from the window and shelf.
On the way to her large, comfortable bed, she grabbed a bottle and lowball glass from her dining area. She set the bottle and glass on a nightstand, crawled onto the bed, and collapsed into large pillows stacked atop it.
She cried for about ten minutes, then rolled over onto her back and composed herself as best she could. She poured three fingers of ancient rum into the glass and downed half of that in one pull. She sucked air through her teeth as the rum she’d quaffed burned, in spite of its luxurious smoothness.
“Open comms—Spichak.”
After a few beeps, Spichak said, <
<
<
Albrechtsson said, <
To herself she repeated, “I know there are.”
<
<
<
Albrechtsson sipped her drink and turned the doll in her other hand.
<
<
<
Spichak sighed in a digital rasp and said, <
<
<
<
<
She sipped her drink and looked across her quarters at the shelf above her large, curved window and the storm it sheltered her from. In the dim light from the facility external floods coming in, she could make out twenty-five other stuffed animals resting on the shelf. The darkness of the empty spot between Antelope and Crab—and the dolls that continued all the way from Dove to Zebra—threatened to swallow her.
<<‘After this many cycles…’>> she said, mocking Spichak’s words and their cruel implication.
She opened a drawer in the nightstand and took out a pressure syringe. She pushed the devi
ce into her neck and injected herself with its warming fluid. Her eyelids fluttered and almost closed. She looked at the beluga doll and sipped her drink until her arm drooped in time with her eyelids.
“Ad… infinitum…”
Her arm fell onto the bed, the glass tipping out of her hand. It rolled away and dribbled the last of the liquor onto the bedspread in a curved trail.
Darcy Albrechtsson slept.
WOLFENCORN
Lydian Faust
Dr. Talia Ambrose stifled a laugh as she flicked an errant gob of eyeball jelly from her lap, and it landed in the poodle’s water dish. The pink pooch eagerly lapped it up.
“Oh, Mister Fluffer-butt, you were thirsty, huh?” cooed the vile woman sitting across from her.
Dr. Ambrose didn’t know why she’d been summoned from her lab for this impromptu lunch meeting, but she certainly didn’t appreciate the interruption. Not that she had a choice in the matter.
“She needs to see you immediately,” Chad, the company’s public relations manager, had said after bursting into her lab unannounced.
“No. Absolutely not. I’m very busy here. Besides, that’s not part of my job, Chad. I refuse to keep meeting with her. She wants product and I give her product, but I don’t need to go chit-chat with her.” Talia dropped her scalpel with a clang on the metal table for emphasis.
“Talia,” Chad sighed. "Look, I get it, I know, she’s horrible, okay? But she owns us. Not just the company, the whole island. You, me, everyone. We don’t have a choice.”
“Own?” Talia snorted. “She doesn’t own me. I can leave any time and work anywhere in the world. Perhaps she needs to be reminded of that.”
“Okay, well good for you, Dr. Ambrose, but if you don’t go have lunch with that bitch, she’ll fire me on the spot. My whole life is here. I’ll be destitute. Please? For me?”
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