Dr. Yoshida’s glance flickers across the Kirlian Spectrograph, Mitsuko’s aura – red-black waves of panic overlying brilliant coronae of electric blue and mauve – is violently rent by a jagged shard of purest jet: a forked lance of black lightning cast from the depths of Hell. A silent scream.
The two Yakuza thugs, responsible for Mitsuko’s abduction, loiter close by, perplexed but nonetheless intrigued, still enjoying the light narco-erotic haze of the synthetic aphrodisiacs they’d ingested earlier. They expect to be handsomely paid for their work. The peculiar side show to which they find themselves unexpectedly privy only serves to heighten their feelings of smug self-satisfaction; all is well in their world. How could they possibly anticipate – or even imagine – the ultimate culmination of what is slowly unfolding before them.
Ishiru Okida, the Hakashi Corporation’s would-be assassin, is here too. The Conservatory had provided brief sanctuary after he had narrowly escaped the nano defences’ dispassionate bloodbath that had so efficiently disposed of his companions. But his reprieve had been short-lived. Even if Dr, Yoshida were ultimately to decide to let him live, he would be doomed to survive as a quadriplegic. The Conservatory’s own defences have already inflicted the kind of physical damage that would defy even the most expensive and sophisticated treatments available at any of New Tokyo’s exclusive, bio-scaping clinics. Fatally ensnared by an anemone of bio-web – a type of cyberorganic razor-ribbon that literally grows into the bodies of its victims, his motor-neurone system has been burnt out like overloaded fuse wiring, his muscles useless lumps of atrophying gristle. And now Dr. Yoshida begins to talk, feeling secure as the moment of his triumph approaches, confident in the knowledge that neither Ishiru – or the Hakashi Corporation – can taint it now. He averts his eyes from the sight of Ishiru s useless body; he has no desire to pollute the moment with either gloating or petty enmities.
“When I was a younger man – little more than a boy, really – my tutors used to consider me something of a dreamer. Of course, my academic record was never anything less than exemplary, so they had no cause to discipline me. But there remained something in my manner, the apparent vagueness of my demeanour, that continued to trouble them.”
Dr. Yoshida speaks in a way that lacks either accent or inflexion. There is a slight, purring tone to his voice, suggestive of something feline: androgynous. Aiko, the little, nano-engineered geisha, continues to play. The music of the koto accompanying Dr. Yoshida’s self-indulgent soliloquy transforms it into a recital.
“I used to wonder about the consequences of our species’ first contact with truly alien life-forms. Constantly I would speculate as to the outcome of sexual congress with such beings – be they angels or monsters. Or both. My imagination on this subject was as tireless as it was fertile. I conceived a dazzling array of fabulous chimeras with which we might mate. Choreographed lascivious rituals of courtship display – from the most primitive and grotesque to the most sublime ballets distilled to an essence of conceptual elegance, surpassing even the stylised rconventions of traditional Noh. “I imagined acts of procreation that required multiple partners of subtly variegated gender. Others that culminated in frenzies of autocannibalism or coprophilic ecstasies. Parasitic incubation. Varieties of asexual spawning – including a form of ectoplasmic metempsychosis resulting from psychokinetic stimulation of the pineal gland. Viral pregnancies. “But these were no mere masturbatory fantasies. What, I used to wonder, would be produced by such an extravagant mingling of so diverse – so alien – a variety of seeds, such flagrant pollination? Freaks? Abominations? I could not shy away from the possibility, but my imagination remained unhindered by such squeamish myopia. Even as a boy, though I scarcely knew it, I was searching for a way to subvert the chromosomal order of our species, to avoid the evolutionary cul-de-sac and inevitable stagnation that awaits it. I would imagine myself unravelling the secrets of the DNA helix, picking it apart like a crudely-knotted length of rope, refashioning it into the most intricate of shapes, abstract configurations which would explore every conceivable dimension of the species’ true, Protean potential.”
Dr. Yoshida watches as the helpless Mitsuko is lowered into the Gene Pool, submerged beneath hundreds of gallons of the BioHive’s ripe secretion. The liquid is saturated with oxygen, sufficient for the normal functioning of the human respiratory system.
“But as the years passed, and I waited in vain for the coming race, I suddenly realised that we would simply have to become the transfigured species of which I had dreamt for so long.”
Dr. Yoshida begins to unfasten the belt of his kimono.
Although his voice remains curiously passionless, he is close to euphoria now.
“What would we become: that was the question that compelled, that obsessed, me through the years of tireless research.”
The kimono begins to fall from his shoulders, and he looks down into the Gene Pool, entranced for a moment by his own reflection on its placid surface.
“What am I...... becoming–?”
Ishiru Okida is a young man, twenty six years old.
Until precisely thirty two minutes ago, when the bio-web reduced his body to a porridge of useless sludge, he was at the height of his surgically enhanced powers. Now only two of his faculties remain unimpaired. His eyes: fitted with Compact-I optical implants whose specifications include infra-red, heat vision, laser-scoping and 3-D graphic enhancer. And, far more significantly, his mind.
As well as being an expert in the traditional martial arts, Ishiru Okida is also a formidable psychic combatant.
New Tokyo bio-scapers have implanted the frontal cortex of his brain with a colony of cerebromorphic organisms; cranial parasites artificially bred from an active culture of cortical tissue, feeding off the brainwave energy of their host. The colony’s queen coils inextricably around Ishiru’s pineal gland, enlarged and activated by this benign invasion.
The cerebromophs1 rapid reproductive cycle, as well as boosting the higher functions of the dormant pineal gland, precipitates the formation of new synaptic conduits in the host cerebellum. The metabolised, psychotropic effects yield a startling mutation. Ishiru Okida’s brain has been transformed into a kaleidophonic accelerator.
The kaleidophonic spectrum exists beyond the range of sound, crackling with the endless reverberations of the Primal Event, the ambient cacophony of natural radio static, echoing the cosmic fission whose fall-out condensed to form our coldly expanding universe of seething stars and icy nebulae. The harmonic scale which the kaleidophonic frequencies occupy resonates with the vibrant atonality of quantum interactions. Consciously manipulated they may excite sympathetic responses on a subatomic level, redefining the nature of matter and energy, catalysing new reactions. Unpredictable reactions.
Ishiru Okida may utilise his kaleidophonic capability to project his consciousness onto a plane beyond telepathy or astral travel. In essence he becomes a part of the microverse of quantum physics, a black manta scything its way through an ocean of quarks. His conceptual hyperself radiantly invades the Zen Continuum, the Virtuality hyperzone generated by Dr. Yoshida’s dreaming machines.
Ishiru Finds himself travelling at speed above an arid plain. In the distance, bizarre structures are silhouetted against a pseudo-sky of oozing, impermanent hues.
Although he seems to be approaching them, they remain faraway, shadowy shapes – part megalith, part abstract sculpture. Travelling in the fourth dimension, conventional spatial concepts – up and down; near or far; left or right – retain scant coherence.
The data matrix of the Zen Resonator, Dr. Yoshida’s customised adaptation of the Mitsubishi Zen 5000 Series Psimulator System, is capable of sustaining an unlimited number of Virtual Worlds. Since the matrix has assimilated the discorporated personalities of Dr. Yoshida’s permanent house guests whose excised nervous systems constitute the macabre, neurological bansai garden that is an integral part of the BioHive, perhaps Virtual Hells would be a better description.
&n
bsp; A vast, disembodied mouth floats in mid-air.
Revolving slowly, it emits a continuous, uninterrupted howl of terror and disgust; indescribable grief; unbearable desolation. Enormous columns of glass ants – organised in a complex network that surpasses the intricate symmetry of an electronic circuit board – devise an elaborate system of towering, crystal cones that act as conductors for pulsating beams of bio-electrical energy. Parched expanses of proto-silicon wasteland alternate with bottomless quagmires of non-specific organic tissue which heave and recede to periodically disgorge parodic creatures whose maimed anatomies are ghastly puns on the evolutionary lineage from which they continue to degenerate. Wracked with spasmic tides, these putrid morasses of rancid fat and decomposing gristle were once people. The grotesque menagerie of scuttling, squirming, sexless abortions puked up by their scurfy swells are their malformed offspring: literal embodiments of their phantom nostalgia for the discorporated flesh.
The sky here bleeds. Erogenal tumours blossom torturously in the stunted cancer groves, pungent flowers shedding syrupy tears of fragrant corruption. To merely inhale a single atom of their fatal perfume is to succumb to the ecstatic torments of venereal leprosy: neurones burning out like spent electrical elements as the delirium of sexual euphoria races towards its apex; infected genitalia amputate spontaneously, spurting menstrual blood and semen; ghosts of erotic psychosis haunt the amnesiac labyrinth of trauma dreams.
Enzyme lakes boil and curdle alternately. A polyhedron of shimmering quartzite and amethyst – a vast incandescent cathedral modelled after the scintillating, composite eye of a monstrous, necrophageous fly -looms on the event horizon of cyberorganic interface. The cathedral is inhabited by colonies of sentient bacteria similar in structure to the internal flora that lines the walls of the human bowel.
Cortical smegma. Brain dirt. The spores of psychoactive bacteria absorb the ambient feedback of bio-plasmic energy, processing it; digesting it; and, eventually, excreting the residue in the form of encoded thought-form transmissions. These transmissions, establishing an empathic resonance on the kaleidophonic scale, precipitate a paradox loop which sustains the cathedral’s cohesion and occasionally infects the matrix’s lesser autonomic structures with a digital dysfunction that simulates a condition similar to Tourette’s Syndrome.
Ishiru recognises the cathedral as the conceptual manifestation of the Zen Resonator’s logic/anti-logic drive.
It is this specification that enables all generations of the Mitsubishi Zen 5000 Series Psimulator System to process qualitative data. That allows it to think. To dream..
And what dreams. What nightmares ...... Each facet of the cathedral’s geometric surface is illuminated with an animated, holographic image, illustrating a different version of Mitsuko Hara. In many she appears in ways already familiar to the devotees of the Virtuality Manga with which her name is synonymous: as Mme Garrotte, her lithe form clad in various fetishistic costumes, all-enveloping like clinging, patent leather space-suits, or strategically slashed to reveal breasts, buttocks, hairless genitalia – her porcelain features glacially set in an intransigent attitude of sublime cruelty. Here, too, as the enigmatic Sardonika, mutant anti-heroine of Metal Sushi I & II, occasionally caricatured in the neo-Cubist style that so revolutionised its graphic scenes of metal fetishism and physical metamorphosis. And again as the nameless, alien-terrestrial hybrid featured in Hideo Sakamoto’s cosmic saga, Arcadia Apocalypse: shimmering, reptilian flesh; golden eyes; green-on black, oil-slick-sheen hair – but still that unmistakable poise and physique, the perfect symmetry of her face.
The composition of these images is equally familiar: Mitsuko as strident aggressor or submissive victim – dishing out the vigorous punishment, or else on the receiving end herself......
Straddling a behemoth of a motorcycle, its chromium entrails scintillating coldly, her gleaming, black, polycarbon-encased legs flung widely apart, she languidly masturbates herself with the elongated muzzle of a high-velocity tracer weapon. A forest of squirming, flayed bodies surrounds her, more naked than nature intended. A. gentle rain of vivid blood condensed like crimson dew on her breasts, belly and thighs, her pallidly ecstatic face .........
Elsewhere she is bound and gagged, belly down, her back and buttocks cross-hatched with bloody welts, a majestic, jewel-encrusted scorpion poised on her thigh. Its formidable pincers hack morsels of the oozing meat from one of the ragged lacerations, cramming its busy, toothless maw with the moist, pink delicacy.......... A flurry of limbs; endless arsenals of death-dealing weapons and sadistic sex-toys; legions of faceless extras gouged, beaten, burned, gutted, dismembered, castrated, sodomised, blown away, wasted, artfully skinned; baroque orgies; clinical gang-rape; teeth bared in rictal fits of unendurable agony and/or ecstatic euphoria; death camps; shape-shifting; alien deserts; war-zones; space ships; Mitsuko abused; Mitsuko abusing; charnel-house glamour; torrential cum-shots – close-up, close-up.......... So it goes. So it goes.
Manga. Manga. MANGA. The holograms bleed into one another, splicing, diving, reproducing like a cancer.
What are we seeing? What is this? Amplifications of Dr. Yoshida’s subconscious memory of his own Manga addiction, his erotic obsession with Mitsuko Kara – the instinctive identification of the death-and-ritual fixated imagery of violent pornography with his own iconoclastic superscience, its equally cruel and sensuous disciplines accessed by the input-hungry BioHive, illustrated by the neural-fusion fields of the Zen Resonator’s Virtuality matrix.
This is the conceptual realisation of the psychic feedback that resonates between the twin polarities of the hypothalamus – its associated instinctive drives – and the higher evolutionary functions that lie dormant in the insoluble crenellations of the overlying cortex. An encoded transmission beamed from the darkest recesses of inner-space.
Black static. Such emissions of bio-plasmic energy can be calibrated and quantified in the field of the Zen Continuum, and some theorists regard them as the psychic equivalent of the Deadly Orgone Radiation theorised by Wilhelm Reich.
Ishiru Okida unleashes the destructive potential of his kaleidophonic talent, manifest in the form of glittering shuriken – a shower of the scalpel-sharp, star-shaped projectiles once favoured by ninja assassins disrupting the quantum interactions that define the cathedral’s conceptual integrity, the intricate thought-form architecture of the Zen Resonator’s logic/anti-logic drive. Chain reactions of psychic fission are initiated. Event horizons of inexorable catastrophe expand in irresistible, seismic waves.
Its work done, Ishiru’s hyperself realigns with his physical being. The prison of meat coalesces hotly around his astral form. The cloying sludge of dead and dying tissues engulfs him like quicksand, hauling him down. Pain enslaves him, its animal hunger vast and insatiable. He grapples unsuccessfully with the urge to vomit, hawking a wad of blood and phlegm onto the floor.
Dr. Yoshida’s kimono falls to the floor. Arms outstretched he invites the scrutiny of his audience. “Well,” he says, his bland voice echoing with a hollow, almost disembodied quality, “here I.... am–”
Dr. Yoshida unveils the fruit of his becoming with an appreciable air of pride. Repeated acts of mass congress with his slimy coterie of sexual symbiotes – perverse, excruciating orgies which set the fertile secretion of the Gene Pool boiling – have resulted in a metamorphosis that distinguishes him as the forerunner of his long-dreamt-of, transfigured race.
His flesh is semi-transparent, veined and colourfully diaphanous, salamander pink; peacock blue; radiant crimson and mauve; colours merging and blending with one another constantly as the sludgily clear mucilage disperses the Conservatory’s ambient illuminations like a prism – its texture resembling the slimy gel that contains the spawn of toads, frogs and other forms of amphibious life. The torso and limbs lack muscle definition, as if the palpable ooze had simply congealed on the bones. The internal workings of the cardio-vascular and respiratory systems; the convoluted plumbing of the alimentary canal; ar
e plainly visible through the rippling layers of glutinous proto-flesh. So, too, is the entire network of new organs: palpitating tubers of gristle and fat that pump and pulsate with unnamed enzymes; glands swollen with fermenting secretions.
Two rows of distended psuedo-mammaries, glutted with curdled lactic slime, like hideously bloated abscesses, clearly distinguish Dr. Yoshida’s transformation as an essentially sexual metamorphosis. As if to counterpoint the blurring of genders, his misshapen abdomen and groin culminate in a large, penile tube of suppurating, cartilaginous tissue approximately six inches in diameter. A spiral disk of gristly muscle supplants pursed lips and sphincter, the rhythmically throbbing, moist aperture at its conical head. The entire lower torso is deformed by scrotal protuberances, wrinkled and hairless, pink-grey like brain tissue, their inner structures variegated and compartmentalised like clusters of grapes or the inside of a pomegranate. Regular, gelatinous sacs house the translucent, oblong pods that bear the virulent spores, the seeds – of his new species.
“So, what do you .... think?” asks Dr. Yoshida, pirouetting like a high-school debutante previewing her prom gown. “Be brutal–”
The two Yakuza thugs, Tanaka Matsubara and Hineshi Sato, gawp speechlessly, reaching instinctively for weapons that have been deactivated by the dome’s security systems. Their criminal instincts are already alerting them to the fact that Dr. Yoshida has no intention of reimbursing them for their services.
Ishiru Okida’s gaze moves to the Gene Pool, his Compact I optical implants switching to a split-screen Kirlian Spectrum/graphic enhancer function. Mitsuko’s aura is as vivid as the aurora borealis, flushed with violent hues of panic and fear. But the graphic enhancer reveals something else: the Gene Pool is alive with Nanomachines.
The enhancer augments the normally-imperceptible coronae of their minute energy emissions, so that the BioHive’s secretion glows like a satellite photograph of the ocean radiant with the cold iridescence of dead plankton. Ishiru understands what it is that Dr. Yoshida has planned, having glimpsed something of the internal machinations of the BioMech process when he accessed the Zen Continuum.
The Starry Wisdom Page 27
