Existence Oblivion

by Kai Ellory Viola

  "Six?!" Justin snapped. "He doesn't need to survive this...pull it as hard as you need to…"

  "Revising," she sent a mild electrical shock through the port. Excruciating pain washed over Elliot, causing him to buck and twist and fit.

  He blacked out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  He came around with a cool cloth on his forehead and a woman hovering over him. It was difficult to see for a few minutes and he blinked, his jaw working. One side felt like he was still unconscious, and wasn't responding. She leaned over him, ran her hand over the flaccid side of his face - he couldn't feel it - and then leaned down and looked in his eye. His eye was uncomfortable, veiled, lidded. He couldn't feel it at all.

  "That's not good. Give me a minute," she said, and reached over to a box at the side of him. It was connected to his port, as she started typing it felt like ice water running into him. He shuddered and shivered again, and then, slowly, feeling began to return.

  "I think I caused that seizure a little too well," she told him, reaching down and disconnecting him. "Lie still. If you move too soon, they might not get everywhere they need to," she added.

  "What's that," he said, his mouth loose and chilled. This lips were tingling and his head pounding. "Hurts," he added and she frowned.

  "It shouldn't," she said, and he blinked again, his vision clear. The vice was slowly residing. "Do you get migraines?"

  "Yes," he said, forcing the words out. There was a ponderous stone in the middle of his forehead, which no matter what he did, he couldn't shift. It was just impossible. He couldn't find a way round it either. Tacky-hard, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he gargled, unable to swallow. Feeling like he was drowning in saliva.

  She frowned again, and adeptly lay him on the side that appeared to still work, connecting his jack port back to the device.

  The last thing he heard was, "What the...?"

  Morrigan's phone rang. She groaned and rolled over, remembering that she'd plugged it into its display, and through a quirk of the lights in the device, she could see if it was worth answering. It rang again. Elliot's color stripe flashed twice.

  "Elliot," she growled, this better be...”

  "Morrigan Roth?" the voice said on the other end. "I have no time to explain," the woman's voice continued. "Detective Peters is....incapacitated. One of our techs spiked him…"

  "Oh crap," she said, blinking. "Hang on, how are you using his phone?"

  "I'm....special," Cerys hesitated after saying that, then continued, "Can you tell me what medication he takes for migraines. I need to synthesize it."

  "Migra - but it's tempered with regular doses of Sero,"

  "I can handle that. Daily Sero?"

  "Yes," she said, then added, "I'm coming to the filming site…"

  "That would be a good idea, but not for the reasons you're thinking," she said, and the phone suddenly cut off with a loud buzz. Morrigan blinked twice, looking at her device. Elliot's band had gone grey - unconscious.

  "Fuck!" she yelled, diving out of the bed, and rolling towards her bathroom, grabbing everything as she went. She fumbled her holster, dropping her gun, and left it lying there until she bolted back through. In her other hand, she was keying Harper's line. No answer.

  The next time Elliot opened his eyes, the colors were normal, but things were still off center. His head didn’t hurt though, which was a relief.

  "What in the fuck was that?" he asked.

  "Spike," she said, tapping on the keyboard. She handed him his phone back.

  "Y'what?" Elliot said, and blinked, trying to sit up. She pushed him back gently.

  "It's called a spike," she repeated. "It's what we're used for," she added, putting the box down and turning to him. "I spike your brain, and take everything useful out - kinda on the principle that your brain retains all of the important memories and protects them in case of certain types of fatal or near fatal brain damage. I help it along with a nanovirus - which was where I hit problems with you. You've got a fragment. And I can't work out why..."

  "A what now?"

  "Fragment. Something in your DNA that protects you from copying. It's as if you were inoculated very young, and your body has partially evolved to integrate that. I've only ever seen it in people that have been experimented on. Some of the prisoners have fragments, but they're inoculated for everything..."

  "I was," he said softly. "Vaccinated I mean. My dad was a lycanthrope."

  "That would....explain more than you know," she said with a nod. "It's not in your records?"

  "No, it is - it's just not in the publicly released records. My boss...She must have thought about it before releasing the records," he added with a blink. "And you've not got access to CORE?"

  "No, I do. They don't," she said, jerking her head in the direction of the misty cluster beside the glass. "But I didn't look," she added, softly. "Mostly because I didn't want Justin downloading it later," she added with a small wince.

  “He can still…?”

  “No. He thinks he can, but I’ve finally built a small partition. I’ll protect it, don’t worry,” she said with a distracted smile.

  Morrigan tried Elliot’s phone again and got no answer. Service said it was available, but couldn't ping it - it was broadcasting enough to be of use, but not enough to locate him. As far as she knew, he was on a closed set, just outside the city.

  She switched her phone to hands-free, dropping it on the dash, and said, "Harper!" sharply. She wasn't sure, really, whether to be amused that she could say it as sharply as that and the machine recognized that, or that it didn't when she didn't say it as sharply.

  Once, she'd caused hilarity in the station when chatting a way and saying "give me a minute I just need to phone," then said "Harper!" as if he'd spilled her favorite coffee all over her. Or he was a cat piddling on her carpet. She snorted.

  This time it went through straight away. "What's up Morri?" the sleepy voice said almost at once. Since the incident with Beth, he'd barely slept too - she'd always suspected there was some sort of weird, co-mingled relationship going on between the mentor, the student and his wife, but she'd never pried. All she knew was though the death had hit Elliot like a deep impact asteroid, tearing through the world and out the other side, Jack had been flattened by it. He was just a caricature. A sad, soft, quiet man who didn't do much - after being shot, all he seemed to have was Elliot and Beth, and now....

  Now it was hard to pull either of them out of the funk they were constantly in.

  "Nothing's up exactly. Just..."

  "Weird phone messages from someone trying very hard to convince me it was fine, on Elliot’s line…”

  She sighed, "Yes. And he seems to think he's on-site with a Mark 5," she added, without hesitation.

  Harper coughed - a harsh sound as he gasped for breath. "He's got a what on site where?"

  "Mk5 - at the prison," she elaborated, "except I spoke to a medic, about 20 minutes ago. She said that Elliot had suffered...I'm not sure what exactly, actually, but was asking about his medication. She had his phone," she added.

  "You phoned to say you thought Naire was there earlier?" he questioned.

  "Yeah, it was just a 'stupid rumor'. It's tagged on the police network as being a lie, with a time stamped photo of Naire's current tagged whereabouts offered as evidence,"

  "And you believe it?"

  "Unit one hasn't been - exactly - kept in the loop, but yeah, I think so. I'm not sure why, but it's too easy right now. They normally don't release those images, even when the rumors are that he got loose."

  "So, what are you wanting to do?" Harper finally asked. Morrigan stopped, and chewed her lip. She waited so long to answer that he said, "Morri? Still with me?"

  "Yes," she said, then continued, "I'm just pulling up to your house - I'll take you with me and we'll go help out at whatever is going on. Because I know it's not what they're saying. It can't be…" she added.

  "Give me five," he said. He hung u
p and she returned her attention to the road.

  Harper lived in an area that had seen better days. Old and ramshackle, the two art deco statues that were obviously added as an architectural whimsy were maimed - missing legs, arms, heads. All that was left was a disembodied torso that looked like they should be doing a work-up to discover cause of death, hovering precariously above the pristine statuette plinths.

  Vines and other plant life was swarming all over each of them, though unsurprisingly, the areas they were covering were like ropes across torsos - breasts and genital areas were stark, white and visible.

  Jack finally pushed the tatty, stained-glass door open and limped out. He'd been shot in the spine almost a year ago, and was still struggling with rehab. No matter how good the nanites, even they couldn't fix some things without issue. And sometimes - just occasionally, Morrigan wondered if Jack had opted not to be 'fixed'. He'd changed again these last few months - after Beth's murder, they all had.

  "So. Where are we going?"

  "That is the hard part," she told him with a soft smile. "There's three places they could be," she said, chewing her lip. Her skin was stark, pale and almost bruised - the color of an apple going off. Her eyes looked hollowed out in the bright backwash of her car's lights, a panel between them glowing green and scrolling fast.

  "So?" he asked.

  "So, I'm running some...checks. I'll have an answer, I hope, before we get to the point that we have to move away from the others, that we'll have a definitive answer?"

  "They're all roughly in the same direction?" he said, surprised.

  "Yeees,” she said, dragging it out. "They're all in the old prison hubs on the outskirts to the west. It's the only places big enough to hold the things they're doing. And I'm hoping," she continued,” that they've tried logging in with..." just as she said it, the panel made a pinging sound. "Like that," she said, with a grin. There was another ping, and then another, and her face fell. "They can't be logging into all three with Elliot's ID…" she said.

  "Plan B?"

  "What's that?"

  "Give me a few minutes..."

  Harper made a couple of phone calls, each more harried and stage-whispered than the last. His eyes took on a haunted look on each yes, and Morrigan had to wonder what he was trading to get this monumental favor. Whether Elliot would even notice that it was not just her and him putting their jobs and relationships on the line. She doubted it, and instead, reached over and put a comforting hand on his thigh.

  Finally he said, "They think it's the middle one, with secondary filming taking place in the two other units you've got marked," he added. "But they also think Naire is there, and that there's a dormant contagion under it, which they're planning to blow up, so I'm not entirely certain my sources are even on the same planet as us, let alone reliable," he added with a wry grin. She blinked.

  "That might just narrow it down though," she said with a smile. "Only one is tagged as a biohazard," she added, and pulled out into traffic.

  "Not the middle one?"

  "No. But that just means they were trying to delay you and expecting you to jump without checking. We're not doing that," she said grimly. She looked behind her, looked at the traffic across the road, hit the brakes and fishtailed, then shot off towards the second one on the list.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  "Let’s have some FUN!" Claudia crowed. Elliot bit his tongue, but Justin at least had the good grace to look embarrassed.

  "They're ahead of schedule," Justin said, passing Claudia some information. "We're down to 11 prisoners, though I don't think that's any such bad thing."

  "And five survival experts," Elliot said, dully.

  The two survival experts had died off air as well, though, when it happened, Elliot was sure that Claudia was trying to wrangle the techs into taping it. Perhaps for the 'uncut'. Neither had been at the hands of prisoners – one had accidentally fallen into the pits that opened up under his feet, as one of the Mk2’s hit the wrong config button, the other thinking he was being stalked, getting into a corner and dying of an apparent heart attack. Both weighed heavily on Elliot. Three had been removed – one right at the beginning, and one through the fixed vote.

  Two more stadiums full of viewers had come online, joining the feed, and the numbers surged.

  It was uncanny. Elliot was feeling sleepy and doped. He knew now that they'd introduced something to his nanites, and that he couldn't do anything about it. But Cerys had flushed that now, and slowly things were becoming clearer. Slowly. But to purge out, he needed to sleep and he couldn’t.

  The techs and producers were all passing notes, and Justin had leaned over and looked at Elliot's slightly glazed expression, grinned and told him to go get coffee. His legs were weak and wobbly, and he couldn't remember how he'd gotten back to his station, but the cool hand of Cerys at the back of his neck made him feel better. She helped him up, and handed him a coffee, before nudging him towards the rec room.

  Justin pulled her to one side and said something, his voice sounding bored, but the inaudible edge still hovering at the edges of Elliot's hearing, before turning to him with a smile.

  "We're about to hit one of the big votes, and we'll need you here for that, he said, and then moved off again, “Go get something to eat, for pity's sake, you look like you're the walking dead," he added. Elliot nodded, trying to pretend he was as weak as a kitten, and moving off with Cerys in a half daze.

  "Don't overact," she said with a soft smile, "you've not been that badly incapacitated," she added. He smiled, one-sided and she sighed. "Though, I might have been a little rough," she continued, "You'll need a backup check by your physician before you're allowed back on duty."

  "Seriously?" he asked. She nodded, "There was always a plan to run a flush on you after this event," she pulled him gently towards the coffee room, touching the glass and making it translucent and watery. "And before you ask why I did that, the glass will project us walking into the room, across to the coffee machine, and then it will show you collapsing. But before it does, you and I have exactly four minutes to talk. There's something else going on, something I can't find plans of, but is definitively planned. I need you to find out what," she said.

  "Excuse me?" Elliot said, blinking. He suddenly felt much clearer, the ice cold truth of what he'd seen impinging again on him. "And it's nice to see you back with us Detective Peters," she said sardonically. "Purge walls are great, aren't they?" she added.

  "Purging what?" He looked around him. Alertness washed over him, and he didn't feel the pressure of his mind being restricted. It was difficult to notice until it was gone, but suddenly, Elliot felt as if he'd been unfettered for the first time in weeks.

  "I have a few questions," he said, and she inclined her head.

  "Of course…"

  "Tell me what's going on."

  "I can't," she said honestly. "I know bits of it. I know that you've been inoculated for this event starting as far back as three months ago. I know they're planning something, but I don't know what. I know not all of the prisoners that have been presented haven't had matching DNA files, and the aberrance isn't easily explained by altering viruses," she said. "I know that your Morrigan, and your 'Harper', are headed this way as we speak, though I could not pull who either were without arousing suspicion. St Clair has a feed on all external information pulls that aren't two calls on your phone. After two calls, it'll trigger a check, and that will be removed."

  "I've made more than two," he said.

  "Yep, but not since I spiked you," she said.

  "Spiking - how you grab memories for clones?" he said. She inclined her head, suddenly looking sad.

  "You spiked me…"

  "I pretended to," it was said simply, without artifice, but he suddenly knew it was something she'd done completely outside of programming. Something she'd done completely beyond the bounds of what she was supposed to, and for that he had to be grateful. “I did access what they wanted, but you’ve downloaded th
at onto your VR, it’s an easy memory to pull. I’m sorry though, that block you had up shattered under my fingers. It looks like it was put in at your first inoculation.”

  Elliot nodded slowly. “I’ve been phoning my dead wife for weeks,” he said, almost numb.

  “You have. That block wasn’t put in by…it’s not CORE,” she said. “Not unless the code has changed again.” He nodded slowly, changing the subject.

  "And when they discover that deception?"

  "There's something you should know about us Elliot," she said. "My type of clone are more robot than human. That is deliberate. But I'm still part human. I'm still part of a project that shouldn't be, and for that, we want to make Naire pay. To do that, we have to prove our worth to CORE. So, I'm choosing to save you, even if that sacrifices me. I want to show you that we can overcome our programming, and I want to show you that we can be of use to your department."

  Elliot paused, thinking. The recent spate of high profile clones had done nothing for the department's ideas of equalizing the rights of clones. And he knew they were hunted and taken down rather than supported - no matter what Morrigan's department did, at the end of the day, the 'victim' was then institutionalized.

  Elliot blinked.

  "Where are we?"

  She smiled - the sadness echoing into her eyes. She looked more human then, than ever. "Clone storage 2. Didn't you know?"

  Elliot stopped and thought for a minute. He'd been told that the unit was filming at an old prison. He hadn't thought to question it further - in fact, when he'd been finally briefed finally he'd been assured that the building was not one of the ones marked as hazardous due to the last Naire outbreak.

  "Wait, what?" he said, confused.

  "Clone storage 2. Where the viromassicre was," she said again, patiently. "I'm not entirely certain that your vaccinations have worn off, she said, frowning. He shook his head slowly.

  "No, I know what you're talking about, but I can't remember...I didn't drive to Clone storage 2. I've been there before…"