Cannibal

by Ivan Shaman

  Doctor said something, smiling, and looked at Escort, who moved his lips silently.

  “Sorry, I don’t hear you. I’m deaf,” Alex said, hoping that they understood him. Escort turned to the old man and uttered several phrases. He nodded, smiling, and answered. Escort came out and a minute later returned with a marker and a thick notebook.

  “What is your name?” Escort wrote and showed the inscription so Demon, chained to the wall, was able to see it.

  “Alex, and you?”

  Apparently, the young man was an interpreter. Having heard the name, he leaned over to Doctor and said a few words to him, before waiting for an answer and writing the following sentence:

  “Have you met any other reasonable zombies?”

  “We aren’t zombies, we are technocrats,” Alex answered, not quite confidently. In fact, who are we now? How soon will the nanomachines erode? Will they leave our bodies? Will we be perceived as ordinary people? Will we be able to perceive ourselves as ordinary people?

  The interpreter listened to Doctor, but he didn’t write anything and simply showed the sheet of the notebook again and tapped his fingers on it: “Have you met other reasonable zombies?”

  “We aren’t zombies,” Alex repeated tiredly. “A couple of hundred, maybe more. We are technocrats. We were going to calm the juniors down and then negotiate with the people.”

  Doctor nodded and smiled when Escort translated Demon’s words to him. Then, gesturing, he answered, several times expressively raising his index finger.

  “You have to cooperate, then we can start to understand you. You’ll be provided with food, rest, vitamins and medical care.” The interpreter wrote. The old man turned to the prisoner and, smiling, nodded several times in agreement.

  “Okay, thank you.” Alex said. The Japanese man got up and, folding the chair on which Doctor had sat, headed for the exit. “Sorry. When can I go to the toilet?”

  The interpreter opened the door and they left silently. Alex stayed alone. He wanted to go to the toilet, but... Rising on the bed, he once again examined the room around him, but a toilet hadn’t suddenly appeared. Then he tried to get up. The chain that held him was not very long, so it was not possible to move more than half a yard away from the bed. He hoped to the last that the interpreter would be back soon. After a few minutes, his patience ended, and Demon began desperately knocking on the metal wall with his handcuffs. He didn’t know whether the sound was loud, but a few minutes later, several military men armed with tantos entered the room.

  Having tightened the chains with another one, additionally holding his arms and legs, they unfastened the cyborg from the wall and brought him outside. Although, considering that they were on a ship, it was still inside. They went along a long, dark corridor, which was lit up with small, odd-smelling lamps. Another detachment was moving toward them, escorting a technocrat – apparently, a low-leveler.

  Unlike Alex, he was completely naked. He wore a thick plastic collar around his neck, to which were fastened two long metal sticks. The guards dragged him with them. They stopped, opening one of the hatches, and the military men, who led Demon, had to slow down a little so as not to collide in the narrow ship’s corridor.

  One of the guards raised the watertight partition with great difficulty. Alex felt the smell of sweat and urine. He watched with horror as the military men stuffed the naked, barely thinking technocrat into a room full of other similar prisoners. The room was so small that the technocrats weren’t even able to sit down, so they all had to stand.

  The door slammed down, and several large drops that seemed black in the dark fell on Alex’s face. Putting his fingers to his cheek, he realized that it was blood. The Japanese, judging by their facial expressions, swore: they couldn’t close the partition at the end. Slightly opening the door, the military man waved his short dagger and threw aside the bloodied stump of a toe.

  Alex was shocked. Five minutes ago, he was treated extremely politely, but people treated his brothers worse than animals—even worse than inanimate objects. He had to find out what was going on here.

  Pulling the chain, the soldiers brought him to the end of the corridor where there was quite a comfortable latrine. However, they didn’t allow him to remain alone. It was obvious that he was treated as special and exceptional, different from the rest. This was scary, either because, at any moment, he could be reduced to the rank of a thing; or because there was still room to fall and this wasn’t the end or the worst.

  Having returned to his cell under the strict supervision of the guards, he realized that now, perhaps, all technocrats were also stuffed in cells or barns. Or, perhaps, they were just being killed, as they had been on recent nights. Without disassembling and slowly, with knife strikes.

  He wasn’t able to look out the window to understand what was happening outside. And he wasn’t able to understand where he was—on a cruiser or other ship. Having nothing to do, Alex soon fell asleep.

  He was awakened a few hours later. The same guards, talking to each other, unfastened his chains from the wall and attached him to an additional handcuff. Pulling him with small batons, they took Demon back out into the corridor. This time he was led in a different direction. They walked along the dark passages until the military men finally reached a guarded door.

  Behind it, there was a spacious infirmary with a lot of beds. Obviously, it was designed to carry out three operations simultaneously. Two tables were currently free. On the third one, surgeons were finishing up an operation, stitching the neck of a patient. At first, Alex thought that it was an injured man. Noticing that the man was twitching a lot, Demon drew attention to his irises. The patient, obviously, was a technocrat from which an implant had just been removed.

  They are probably trying to make people of us again, Alex thought, when he lay on the operating table. Finally, it isn’t the worst option to become human again.

  Just at that moment, the doctor finished examining the patient and turned to Demon. Alex’s arms and legs were tightly gripped with soft, but strong bracelets, and a hoop closed over his forehead. His left arm with the plasma gun was fixed in several places.

  “What’s going on?” Alex asked, trying to turn his head to the doctor, but he wasn’t able to move. “What are you going to do?” The doctor only smiled and waved his hand.

  A sharp, unbearable pain pierced his skull as several thick, durable needles entered his skin at right angles and stuck into his cranial bone. He shouted crazily, but he couldn’t lose consciousness. Even when a part of his scalp was cut away and they started drilling his skull, he remained conscious.

  The pain, which seemed unbearable, was burgeoning with more and more terrible forms. It was a real torture, but he regained enough strength to shout. The recent agony from rebirths and level-ups seemed to be a slight, relaxing massage compared to this. He didn’t know how long it lasted – half an hour, an hour or a week. The pain so overwhelmed his nature that every second seemed like an eternity.

  His last strength left him, and he only involuntarily jerked when the doctors were picking at his brain. They cut off his claws, several protective growths, and the layers of skin from several parts of his body. At the end of the operation, when the implant had been pulled out, one of the doctors wanted to cut off his left arm, but the second one stopped him with a solitary gesture.

  He was carried back to his cell on a stretcher. Thoughts didn’t want to move inside his empty head. His skull, along with his skin and hair, had been set back. The doctors had only taken a few pieces of his brain. Alex finally understood why they were being kept on the ship. They weren’t prisoners, they were experimental rats, or rather… experimental zombies.

  He lay on the bed and thought that there was no excuse for this, but there was an explanation, which was very simple and logical. People were afraid of them, so they pulled out the implants. Therefore, they studied cyborgs in order to be ready for a new war – if it came. It was just that all this was redundant. Implants an
d nanomachines didn’t work anymore. Technocrats no longer existed.

  The next time he was woken up was a few hours later. Staggering, he sat down on the bed, obeying the silent commands of the military. A tray with some soup, a piece of bread, and a cup of brownish tea was placed on his lap. Alex knew that he had to eat, but he swallowed with great difficulty, although the food was actually really tasty.

  When he had finished eating, the guard took the tray and went away, leaving the door open. A few minutes passed before Demon began to stir. A feeling of weakness rolled in waves more and more, until the forces left him. He realized that he had been poisoned. Something had been put in his food to check his reaction.

  While he was vomiting and turning inside out, several doctors were watching with interest from the corridor. Not as a show, but more as an exciting experiment. When the contents of his stomach and gastric juices were over, several soldiers gathered everything together in transparent plastic bags carefully and left, closing the door behind them.

  “Bastards,” Alex muttered hatefully. “You could have given me some water.”

  He didn’t want to eat, just to sleep, and so he fell asleep. For a few minutes, at least. Then a soldier came in and woke him up by hitting his face with a cold, wet rag.

  “What do you want?” Demon asked, but the soldier had already left. However, as soon as he fell back asleep, it all happened again. And again, and again.

  At first, he swore, then he begged and threatened. Gradually, fatigue became so strong that he simply couldn’t help falling asleep. He could feel it as he was shaken, beaten across his face, and doused with water, but he didn’t react.

  Then the doctor came to the room, which had become a torture chamber for him. He woke up as if scalded by a stimulant injected into a vein, which was now worse than a drug.

  “How many reasonable zombies have you seen?” was written on the sheet of paper that the interpreter again held in front of his face.

  “Go to hell,” Alex said, trying to fall into a desired dream. He was hit hard, and he woke up again for a minute.

  “Where are they hiding?” The soldier standing next to the doctor wrote. Alex didn’t answer, and he was hit, again and again. The pain went through his body, but his severe lack of sleep overpowered it. The doctor stood up with visible displeasure and stuck a small syringe into his shoulder.

  His reality turned inside out: the walls turned into the ceiling, the beds into ships, sailing across the sky, and the officer, interrogating him, turned into a ridiculous looking pink unicorn. Alex couldn’t hold off his laughter. He laughed for a long time until he realized that he heard himself. A big tortoise saddled the unicorn, which turned into a butterfly, and then the surprised Demon took his ear and brought it to his mouth.

  “Hi, Ear,” he said, looking at the piece of his own flesh.

  “Hi, Rabbit,” the ear replied, turning into a ladybird and flying away.

  “Ladybird, fly to the heaven.” Alex began to hum, waving at it with a flipper. Or was it a daisy? Or a beak? The world gradually turned into an abstraction, and when all the colors turned black, he finally fell asleep.

  Chapter 32. Escape

  This dream was intermittent. Apparently, they tried to wake him up several times, but Alex woke up himself a little later on.

  “The truth serum didn’t affect him,” one of the doctors said. Alex was being carried along the corridor on a gurney.

  “Oh no, it affects him perfectly, it’s just not the way we expect. A re-autopsy is needed to determine the cause of his hearing loss,” the other replied, going a little distance. “This is an interesting mystery, because his body is stuffed with nanomachines.”

  “I insist that we remove the gun. Imagine what a breakthrough could await us! A unique internal weapon,” the first one said.

  Shit, I not only hear, but I also understand Japanese, Alex thought, trying not to show that he was awake.

  “We can see the mechanisms at the autopsy, but there is no need for any amputation. We still need to figure out the way that it interacts, and then we need to find the source of the energy. The last thing is the most important!”

  “The most important is to find his rational brethren before they regain their power,” a military man said, walking nearby. “Otherwise, we are waiting for a repetition of the massacre, only now we don’t have any electromagnetic weapons to stop everything.”

  “Don’t worry, Captain. Everything will be fine,” one of the doctors said. “We haven’t found any signs of the nanomachines’ activity yet – either in the blood or in the flesh of the subjects.”

  “The fact that you haven’t found them doesn’t mean that they don’t work,” the military interrupted him sharply. “When will you extract all the neural interfaces from the infected ones?”

  “Within two days, no more. Now we’ll conduct a series of tests with necrotic abnormalities, and then we’ll return to the extractions.”

  “Do it.” They were fast approaching a set of steps. “What’s happened?”

  “Captain, tanks!”

  “Bloody Russians. All right, gather everyone. You two, follow me.”

  “But, Captain, what about the patient? We need some security.”

  “You haven’t let him sleep for two days, and then you have pumped up with drugs. He won’t do anything. I need every single one of you now.”

  Alex tried to clench his fist imperceptibly. His fingers obeyed with a little difficulty. The doctors silently carried the gurney to the operating room, and then he tried to figure out what to do.

  “Where are all the orderlies?” One of them asked in surprise. “There must be two-”

  His speech was suddenly interrupted, replaced by a gurgle. The second man screamed heart-rendingly, but his scream immediately broke off. Alex slowly opened one eye. Over him, breathing heavily, stood Kris with a blood-stained blade sticking out of her hand. Her body was translucent, although the blood left a few visible spots.

  “Hi,” Demon said, the only thing that came to mind. The woman, who hadn’t expected it, startled. “Are you here to set me free?”

  “Not only you. Everyone,” she said, rummaging through the pockets of the men she had just killed for the keys to his handcuffs. “Jane said that people had dragged you here.”

  “Glory to the Light, she is alive.” Alex sat on the gurney with a lot of effort. The world was spinning and jumping around him. “It sucks that I can’t go.”

  “You must. I’m not going to stay here for long,” the woman remarked. “We have about ten minutes before they realize that there is only one tank.”

  “Do you have enough shells?”

  “A dozen. Certainly not enough for five hundred people.” She grabbed his arm and led him toward the entrance. It was really hard for Kris: her legs were weak and trembling slightly. “While Marcus is maneuvering there, we need to get out while we can.”

  “It’s easy to say, but on this floor, at least two hundred low-levelers are locked up. They are stuffed into the rooms like sheep. There.” He showed Kris the door, behind which there were certainly technocrats. Putting him against the wall, the woman forcedly raised the door. The stench of human waste instantly filled the corridor.

  “Get out! Get out! Out!” Kris shouted. They simply looked at her, not reacting in any way. Desperate, the girl pulled several technocrats out into the corridor, but they remained standing. “Damn it. What shall we do?”

  “Run,” Alex said dryly, slowly moving in the direction that seemed right to him.

  “And just leave them? They aren’t guilty that the Light has left them!” She wanted to stop him.

  “But it hasn’t left you. Your disguise works,” Demon said, not stopping.

  “It was jammed, and now it’s working all the time.” The girl shook her head in frustration. “But everything else doesn’t work.”

  “Everything is better than being weak and without an implant,” he retorted. Kris looked up, uncomprehendingly, and
Alex pointed to his neck, and then to the low-levelers’ necks. “They have extracted our neural interfaces.”

  “Bastards,” the woman muttered. “Then we need to get out faster. Do you know the way?”

  “No. I thought you would know.”

  “Where are you going then?”

  “In the opposite direction to where people have gone. So, do you know the way out or not?”

  “No. I’ve stumbled upon you almost by accident.” She shrugged her shoulders. “So, the option to head to the other side isn’t the worst.”

  They opened some more doors, but each time they couldn’t make the low-levelers move. Then the time for altruism was over. In the iron corridors of the cruiser, the sounds of many feet echoed.

  “Hurry up.” Kris whispered and, grabbing Demon’s arm, she pulled him forward quickly.

  He tried to move his legs as fast as he could, but they were still catching up. The steps were getting closer.

  “There they are!” A voice came from behind, and almost immediately after that, a gunfire rumbled. Fortunately, the corridor was winding, and they hid from their pursuers behind one of the turns. “Don’t let them get to the back deck!”

  “That’s a good idea,” Alex muttered in surprise. “There and then to the right,” he said as he showed Kris the direction.

  “But there is just a dead end!” Kris screamed and pulled him the other way.

  “Fool, there is no dead end, there is just the sea. Faster.” He broke free and stumbled as fast as he could. Kris, who had let him go, hid behind one of the pipes. As soon as the first soldiers passed, she pounced on the nearest military man from behind, obtaining his submachine gun and shooting the front ones from behind. Alex was worried about her, but he hoped that people wouldn’t be able to shoot a translucent figure in almost complete darkness.