Ascent

by Morgan Rice

  “No,” Chloe begged. “Please.”

  She fought as they dragged her forward, kicking out at the creatures who held her and trying to wrench herself free. She tried going limp, so that they would have to carry more of her weight, and tried calling out for help from anything nearby that wasn’t completely in thrall to the Hive.

  None of it made any difference. They lifted Chloe as easily as if she had been a feather, placing her in the chair and pinning her in place while one of the Purest used a device to adjust the gravity and hold her in place.

  “I am Purest Ro,” it said through a translator box. “These are Purest Gal and Purest Jir. You will be still and silent while we discuss the next step in your examination.”

  “I will not!” Chloe shouted back at the alien. “Let me go. Let me go, and give Kevin back to me the way he was. You’ll pay for this, all of you.”

  She didn’t know why she was making threats. Threatening people who were about to hurt you didn’t work; it just made them hurt you worse. Even so, she wasn’t just going to sit quietly and wait for them to start doing whatever it was they were planning to do to her next. She wasn’t just going to sit there and be their victim, even if that meant that things were worse for her because of it.

  The aliens started to engage in what Chloe guessed was a silent conversation, looking over to her from time to time in the same way that a butcher might look at a carcass, silently working out the best places to cut to get the most out of her. Chloe could only imagine what they were discussing. The best experiments to run on her, probably, and what order to run them in so that she would live as long as possible.

  “I will not be scared,” she told herself. “I will not be scared.”

  She wished Kevin were there. If he were there, he would find a way to pull her out of this chair, and they would run together. They would find a way to get out of here and back to Earth, even if they were somewhere else completely by now.

  Except it had been Kevin who had sent her here, as blank and emotionless as the rest of them, acting as if he had never seen Chloe before in his life. The moment he’d woken up from the things the aliens had done, it had been as if he had been a completely different person. He’d walked out of the room as if she hadn’t even been there. When he’d come back, there had been that cruel edge to him that all of the aliens seemed to have, looking at her as if she were nothing, not seeming like the Kevin she knew at all.

  “Your mind is quite interesting,” Purest Ro said to her, taking out some of the small, tentacled things that they’d used before to examine her brain. “Even for one of your kind, it seems filled with the heresy of emotions. It has been decided that we will explore this first, before we begin to implant and augment you. We will explore your reactions to agony, of course, and to different emotional states, to see how far you can be pushed before your brain shuts down.”

  It said it in the same tones it might have used if it were proposing some small, painless process, rather than her slow murder over however long the aliens could make her last.

  “Remain as still as possible,” Purest Ro said, starting to stick the tiny, tentacled things into place. “We wish to make the placement as precise as possible.”

  Of course, Chloe did her best to move out of the way. She wasn’t going to make this easy for them, wasn’t going to give them anything that they wanted if she had a chance to fight back.

  They gave her no chance, though. Purest Ro fastened the things to her skull, and then the Hive was buzzing through her mind once more.

  Chloe tried to push them out, and it hurt. It hurt like a thousand glass shards cutting into her brain, each one made of light and snagging at her memories. She found them pulling at the memories of her time as a runaway, forcing images into her mind of time spent in doorways and under bridges, in abandoned buildings and in any corner she could find where the more predatory people on the streets wouldn’t find her.

  Each memory seemed to carry with it an entire cargo of emotions. The image of an old woman, still in a doorway, and the moment Chloe realized she wasn’t breathing, brought with it a sense of sorrow and loss. Glimpses of social services and cops from between the slats of a stack of pallets brought fear and a determination never to be taken back.

  That thought was a betrayal, telling them exactly where to go to hurt her most. It brought with it images of the past that she’d tried to run away from: the arguments with the mother who wouldn’t believe her, and who called her a liar. The father who was perfect whenever he was out in the world, and whose face turned to something far angrier, far uglier, the moment the doors were safely shut. Chloe’s memories threw up fragments of sensation, each one bringing with it far too much to cope with: the weight of someone on top of her, the whispered threats if she should tell someone, the pain of the knife the times she tried to make it stop…

  “No,” she told herself, told them. “I won’t think about it all. You can’t make me.”

  They’d called her crazy, called her borderline, made her go to see therapists and put her on so many different medications that it was hard to keep track of them all. Chloe had learned some skills from it, even if they weren’t always the ones that they’d meant to teach her. She hadn’t learned how to control everything she felt, but she had learned how to hide emotions away, and pretend that she wasn’t feeling things… and to use them like weapons.

  Ordinarily, it was just about using words. Chloe was good at seeing the emotions in other people, and saying exactly the right, or wrong, thing. She’d done it too much with Luna, she knew, because it was obvious that she liked Kevin, even if Kevin didn’t seem to see it. Now, though, she took her emotions and she started to ball them up inside herself, stretch them out, shaping them like an arrowhead, or a knife.

  Chloe focused on thoughts of Kevin for a moment, thinking about how much she cared about him, and how special he was. Those thoughts were like a safe space in which she could gather herself up, and avoid the worst that the aliens could throw at her. Chloe was good at using thoughts like that to pull back from the world and ignore the worst things that might be happening in it.

  “Not today,” she told herself. “Today, they’re going to hurt for it.”

  Chloe dove back into the stream of minds trying to mess with hers, and she plunged her emotions into them, striking out with them like the weapon they were. These were minds that hadn’t experienced emotions firsthand, after all, and Chloe found her emotions hard enough to deal with even after a lifetime of doing so. She cut and hacked with anger, threw fear over their minds like a net, and hardened love until it became something to plunge straight into a heart, rather than something that seemed to fill it up to the brim.

  “This is my mind!” she yelled at them. “Not yours, mine!”

  She lashed out at them, cutting at the links to her, and at the links between them, slashing them like they were an old pair of jeans ready to be made into cut-offs. She attacked because anything was better than not doing it, because she refused to sit there quietly, whatever they threatened to—

  One of them reached into whatever part of Chloe’s brain was responsible for pain, and it squeezed.

  Chloe screamed as she came back to herself, sobbing with the agony of it even when the member of the Purest let go of its grip on her mind. One of them stood, moving forward, and somehow Chloe knew this had been the one to hurt her like that. It had a look of satisfaction, as if it had almost enjoyed doing it.

  “That is enough,” the alien said. “This is foolishness, caring about emotions.”

  “Yes, Purest Lux,” Purest Ro said, bowing its head in acquiescence.

  “There is nothing to be learned from pursuing such a thing,” Purest Lux continued, “and it comes dangerously close to breaking our most important strictures. The emotions of lesser beings are a contamination, not a toy to examine.”

  “You are correct, of course, Purest Lux,” Purest Ro said.

  “We must act in the way that is best for the Hi
ve,” Purest Lux continued. “This… creature is too contaminated with emotion to work with its mind, but its flesh may still be of use. What are your plans for the next stages of processing it?”

  “We believe that it is a suitable candidate to test the interactions of implants on,” Purest Ro said. “After that, Purest Jir and Purest Gal have suggested either dissection or use as a host for one of the species that must be grown.”

  Chloe thought of the creatures that had burst out of aliens in one of the first rooms she’d seen. They were talking about using her as a combination of incubator and first meal for monsters!

  “You disagree?” Purest Lux asked.

  “Since the human will be partly changed by any implants, would there not be benefit in transforming it completely?” Purest Ro asked.

  Purest Lux stood there for several seconds, considering Chloe. “This creature is too uncontrolled to be of use. It could not be commanded to the Hive’s satisfaction. Test what processes you wish on it, but then give it over to be devoured. There are plenty more humans where it came from, after all.”

  “Yes, Purest Lux,” Purest Ro said, and again, Chloe had the sense of deference there. “Your wisdom benefits the Hive.”

  Purest Lux ignored the comment, turning to Chloe and staring at her. Chloe had the sense there of hatred on a level that had nothing to do with ordinary human ideas of it, or even the kind of hatred that she felt for all of them right then. This was a hatred that wouldn’t even call itself that. It simply saw any life that was not like itself as an inconvenience, an obstruction to be removed. It was the kind of enemy that couldn’t be talked to or reasoned with.

  Worse, it was one who had decided that Chloe needed to die.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Purest Ro kept pace with Chloe as they took her through from the viewing chamber into one of the implantation spaces and prepared to experiment on the human female further. Most of its fellow Purest didn’t follow; apparently, looking inside her mind had been more than enough for them, without looking at the procedures that would follow.

  Oddly, Purest Ro found itself thinking that perhaps it would be better for it not to be a part of those procedures either, and not just because of the fury that still punctuated Chloe’s fear and horror as she glared out at them. There was the duty to the Hive to consider, and Purest Ro could not neglect the things that had to be done in its name.

  “Place the human in a holding field,” Purest Jir said, as they reached the implantation chamber.

  This was one of the more advanced applications of the technology that the Hive had stolen from their neighbors so long ago. It was odd, Purest Ro thought, that it should think of it like that, when all knew that the Hive had the right to take everything that would make it stronger. Why else would other things be in the universe, after all?

  The servitor creatures lifted Chloe into a spot in the middle of the room, and now, instead of pinning her in place, the gravity caught her in direction after direction, sending her tumbling so that no one way was down for more than a fraction of a second. It meant that she hung in the air, unable to act.

  There was something, Purest Ro realized, both elegant and somewhat cruel about that.

  “With which devices should we begin?” Purest Gal asked.

  “Perhaps a bonded symbiont?” Purest Jir suggested.

  “Or a graft,” Purest Gal said. It picked up a metal replacement for a humanoid arm, clearly far too big. “What percentage of replacement do you think that human’s form would tolerate?”

  “No!” Purest Ro exclaimed, but then caught itself. “That is, that seems like an inefficient way of going about this. It would be difficult to return the human to an unaltered state for further experimentation after removing its limbs.”

  “That makes sense, Purest Ro,” Purest Jir said. It picked up a silvery creature, ignoring the way its form shifted and thrashed, seeking flesh. “So, a joining then.”

  The three of them moved toward Chloe, who took one look at the thing in Purest Jir’s hands and screamed, her terror obvious. It made no hint of difference to the others, but Purest Ro found itself… troubled by the idea that the young human should experience so much fear.

  There was nothing it could do to alleviate that fear as the others pressed the symbiont to Chloe’s arm, the inner teeth of the living metal creature biting down into her and making her scream again.

  “Note the nuances of human screams,” Purest Gal said. “Perhaps I will produce a knowledge collection on their various types.”

  Ro’s fellow Purest said that as if the screams meant no more than the trilling of Xatha bats in the eaves of the counter-spin warehouses. Could they not see that this meant that Chloe was in pain, and that she would give anything for it to stop? It took an effort of will for Ro not to step forward and rip the device from Chloe’s arm. Only the knowledge that doing so would harm her far more at this point stopped it.

  “Now the first serum,” Purest Gal said, pressing a syringe into Chloe before Ro could even think to stop it. She cried out again, and Ro winced in sympathy.

  “This serum is a mutagenic one,” Purest Gal explained. “The effects are somewhat unpredictable, but if it produces usable results…”

  “They could be bred into a new servitor species,” Purest Jir finished. “What else should we do with it? I still say that a metal graft would—”

  “No,” Ro said, firmly. When the others looked around, it realized that it had spoken too loudly once more, and thought quickly. “We are meant to be scientists, not mere… tinkerers. Already, we have two processes progressing in the human. Introduce more before we observe the results and it will be impossible to know what causes the results we get.”

  “I suppose you are correct,” Purest Jir said. “Perhaps then we should leave the human for a while and see what changes the serum bring? Then we can decide on what to try next. I will tell you now, I will be arguing for metal grafts.”

  “We should base our next moves on the evidence,” Ro said.

  They left, and Ro found it curiously difficult to simply walk away from the human without looking back at her, spinning helplessly in a web of gravity. In the past, it had had no difficulties with performing even the most difficult and complex of procedures on subjects, yet today, two relatively simple things had it concerned about the subject’s safety.

  It was odd.

  To try to remind itself that this was just one more experiment among many, Ro set out among the other stations, looking at other subjects, listening to the way they responded to the experiments… to their screams.

  “What is happening to me?” Ro asked, recoiling from a room where subjects were slowly being farmed for bacteria, held in place while a range of diseases were bred inside their forms.

  The next room was one where they were testing the training responses of subjects from different species, trying to find methods that would make them more useful as servants than the complete control used when they first took a planet. The screams from inside that room made Ro unwilling to even look into it.

  There was room after room there, with experiments that Ro had helped to run, testing everything from physical transformation to the spliced breeding of new creatures and simply the testing to destruction of some of their creations. In one pit, two giant, spider-like creatures that looked like variants on the same genetic pattern fought so that the Purest above could determine which combination of genetic tweaks would prove superior. Ro turned away from it as quickly as the rest.

  Purest Ro felt… well, that was just the issue. It felt, and not just the pure harmony that came from being a part of the Hive. It felt disgust, and fear, and horror. It felt sadness every time it heard a scream, and that was almost impossible to understand. Before, its connection to the Hive had let it reach into the minds of everything linked to it, but it hadn’t found emotions there, because the Hive eliminated such weaknesses. Now, it was as if Ro could imagine what others must be feeling and reacted to it instinctively.
Was this… empathy?

  Empathy. Just one of a great many forbidden concepts, cast down as the things that had caused the wars among their people so long ago. Emotions were dangerous. Emotions caused conflicts among the Purest. Emotions were…

  …overwhelming.

  Was this what the human, Chloe, felt like all the time? No, that couldn’t be possible. How could anyone contain so many layers of feelings without bursting apart? Ro had to walk away from the sentient experimental rooms, finding a quiet seating space among a selection of hydroponically grown plants that were meant to be experiments in oxygen cultivation and food variation.

  It was strange that Ro had never considered the beauty of it before. The golden spires and the restored spaces of the home world were beautiful, of course, but theirs was a beauty restored exactly as it had been, constructed mathematically, not because the Purest had a true, emotional appreciation of what that beauty meant.

  Now, Ro looked at the beauty around it and wept. Not just from the beauty of it, although that was a part. There was so much more to it. There was the horror at what was going on in every corner. There was the roil of emotions long buried bubbling up inside Ro’s head. There was a sense of guilt that threatened to overwhelm everything, forcing Ro to remember everything it had done… he had done. He was not an it, not some meaningless cog in a mechanism, but a living, breathing creature capable of making choices and feeling things for himself.

  He felt so many things now; so very many.

  Ro knew the moment when this had happened to him, down to the instant. It had not been some slow process of realization, or the kind of logical process of persuasion that the Hive preferred. It had happened in one moment inside Chloe’s mind, when he had felt the emotions there, and she had used them like a weapon to lash out.