Worm

by John McCrae

  “What’s that?”

  “My usual methods, well, you know them. You’ve fought my creations before.”

  “Yes.”

  “These seeds,” he raised one hand, a seed pinched between index finger and thumb, “Are like stem cells. They harbor the potential to become virtually anything. Wherever information is missing, they fill in the gaps.”

  “Like using frog DNA for dinosaurs.”

  “Like using frog DNA for dinosaurs, right. The way I worked it, they’ll decode the information in a very brute force way. The seed starts by forming two bodies, attached by a central hub. I kill the least viable one, it buds and splits again, with copies that are derivatives of the survivor. Usually two to four. Kill all but one, repeat.”

  “Until you have something viable.”

  “Exactly! Takes anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Then I have what’s essentially a plant-animal hybrid, and I nudge it in the direction of my enemies. Or give it simple programming that I can use. Training half-plant rodents to fetch shiny objects, for example.”

  “How?”

  “Trade secret,” Rey said. ”I’m not dumb. I won’t give away the essentials.”

  “Okay. So what’s today’s project?”

  “Oh, I’ll have a dozen projects in the work before I let myself go to sleep. But the big one is that I want to replicate an Endbringer.”

  He glanced at Citrine, saw that she’d gone still.

  “I may need to go talk to Accord,” she said.

  “No need,” Rey said. ”I suspect he already knows. He gave me these samples, no doubt with the idea that I’d use it.”

  “And you can’t even control it? Or he can’t control it? It doesn’t sound like him,” Citrine said.

  Rey paused. It didn’t sound like Accord. Was there another explanation?

  Accord might be planning on killing him after the project was done. Rey kept his creations in line with pheromones, spraying them liberally around his lab and the surrounding neighborhood. They would move to the nearest unaffected location as soon as they were free. Once he did that to Accord’s home, the place would be rendered immune to his own attacks, at least for a little while.

  But it still seemed too reckless for the perfectionist. Was Accord that eager to kill the white supremacists? Or was there another plan in the works?

  “You’ve gone quiet,” Citrine said.

  “Thinking,” he said. ”No, I need things quiet for a minute. There’s a TV in the corner. Watch that.”

  “I can’t. Accord would be upset,” the woman in yellow replied.

  Rey sighed. He crossed the room to the television, turned it on, set it to mute and turned on the closed captions. ”He won’t be upset if I turn it on, will he?”

  “No.”

  “There.”

  He returned to the computer and started working with the Simurgh’s tissue. It was hard to cut, and harder still to slice to the point that he could look at it under a microscope.

  “Crystalline,” he murmured, as he focused on it. The feathers were like snowflakes when viewed at 40x magnification. He scaled all the way up to 800x magnification before realizing that there were no individual cells.

  Was it just the feather? Was it dead tissue, on par with the keratin of fingernails or hair? He used the computer to access a sample of Leviathan’s ‘blood’, and let the hands handle the arrangement of preparing the slide. Being liquid, the blood was easier than the feather.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to use Leviathan’s tissue. Growing a miniature Leviathan in a vat would be a bad idea if that vat was filled with fluid.

  Using Behemoth’s tissues would be just as problematic. The Herokiller could ignore the Manton effect at a range of up to thirty-two feet. Even semi-conscious inside a glass case, it was too risky.

  Had to be smart about this.

  Leviathan’s blood was the same as the feather. Crystals, dense and so opaque that light wouldn’t pass through them.

  There were more tissues. Flesh. More blood. Hair. Damaged tissues and intact ones. He went through each.

  All of it, the same. Crystals. No individual cells. Even the crystals barely differentiated from one another. Truth was, there was more difference in crystals collected from deeper inside the Endbringer than there was in crystals that had come from different parts of the Endbringer’s body; hair as opposed to blood.

  He scraped off a bit of his seed, then added water and the catalysts to splice it with some of the Simurgh’s feather. Sure enough, it started to grow. Each end of the scraping formed into buds, and the buds started to form into basic, foetal shapes, one quadruped, one vaguely humanoid.

  But neither lived.

  The weaker tissue was easier to work with. Assuming it was deriving patterns from the crystals, insofar as the crystals could create or support life, he could use that to work out the peculiarities of how the Endbringers were able to sustain themselves.

  No vascular system, no sign of emergent organs.

  Of course the emerging lifeform wasn’t viable. It wasn’t capable of life in the first place.

  He’d have to take another route. He withdrew a sample of Myrddin’s tissue, then started splicing it with one seed and the ruined fragments of the Simurgh’s feather.

  It was lunacy, tampering with Endbringer-related materials, but he couldn’t shake the idea that he was on to something. He’d sustain the Endbringer tissues with other living tissue that could feed it energy or nutrients. His seeds would bridge the gap. It would take ten or fifteen minutes before he saw any real results. There was other work to do in the meantime.

  A sedated monkey plus a sample of his own tissue and one seed, and he had a homunculus in the works. It would be roughly as intelligent as a very stupid person in most respects, but it would share his own understanding of chemistry, biology, science and botany. It would serve as a lab assistant, and he would need one for a lab this big.

  The rest of the seeds went into another vat to replicate. He’d need more.

  He walked over to the glass tube where the Simurgh-Myrddin-plant hybrid was in the works. One had wings rather than legs. He directed a laser to kill it. The other had four arms, but two resembled wings. It would work. He conducted a charge through the fluid to reset the life cycle. It would split in two or three, and he’d kill the remainder.

  Accord must have based this equipment off of the stuff he’d had in his last lab, the one Accord had forcibly ejected him from. The lasers being built into the glass tube were a nice touch, kept everything hermetically sealed.

  In a fit of whimsy, he directed the lasers to a pure light form, then had them fire into the glass case itself. Letters lit up, labeling the projects. Regrowth for the plant that was growing and budding with more seeds. Homunculus for the monkey that was gestating in the second tube.

  And for his real project? It would have to be something fitting.

  Morrígan.

  Beautiful. He studied the three foetal forms that were developing inside, killed two, narrowing down the results he wanted. Like pruning branches.

  The TV started making noise. Rey wheeled around to see Citrine and one of her fellow ‘ambassadors’ standing in front of the TV. The man in the suit with a green dress shirt and a copper lizard mask was the one turning up the volume.

  “I’m trying to work here,” Rey said.

  “Something’s going on. Look,” the man spoke.

  Rey impatiently left his work behind. If he waited too long, a bad growth could be carried on to the young. Wouldn’t do.

  The TV showed a reporter talking. Why was he supposed to care?

  Then it changed to a camera view of an ongoing conflict. Three gigantic armored suits were in open conflict with a small group of people.

  The Slaughterhouse Nine. Here, in Boston.

  One of the suits was deploying swarms of drones, but they were getting cut out of the air as fast as they appeared. Another member of the Nine had a loose-fitting coat of human flesh
draped over him. He stretched it out to grab surrounding buildings and anchor himself in place as a mechanical lizard with a giant wheel on its back tried to haul him in with what looked to be an immense suction.

  The Siberian had made contact with and was tearing apart a third suit.

  A suit high in the air fired off a laser beam, and the Siberian jumped to put herself in the line of fire.

  Whatever happened next, the camera didn’t catch it. The concussive force of the laser hitting was enough to knock the cameraman over, and the image shorted out.

  Rey sniffed. He’d like to see more of Dragon’s work, not because it had anything in common with his own, but because it was good work. But for now, his focus was on his projects.

  With a quick glance, he assessed and executed two homunculus-offshoots and one derivative of the Morrígan. Electrical charges restarted the gestation process.

  The thing was starting to resemble the Simurgh, though both feathers and hair were brown-black in color, it was hermaphroditic and the flesh was more translucent than white. Veins stood out.

  Rey studied it while the thing cracked in the middle, the individual halves separating with a thread of flesh between them. Each of the halves began dissolving and forming anew.

  If it was even half as powerful as the real Simurgh… well, this would be a game-changer.

  And Accord had to know that. Had to be aware that Rey would be working with the Endbringer tissues on this level.

  It wasn’t as though the method of control was that difficult to master. One set of pheromones would make the creation feel fond of something, the other would have an negative effect, drive them away from a person or area. Still another would provoke feelings of anger or hatred, useful if he wanted to bid them to attack.

  If Accord found the pheromones, he could be rid of Rey, and he’d have whatever creations Rey had put together in the meantime.

  It would be at least a day before the Morrígan was fully grown. He had that long to think of an answer.

  The door slammed shut. Citrine had gone upstairs. The lizard-masked man watched the television.

  Time passed, and he watched the results with interest. The Morrígan was now forming with two arms, two legs, and vestigal wings. He let it develop to the point that it was roughly two months old, then killed the offshoots. He started running x-ray scans and doing biopsies, picking through the results to fine tune the internal changes and monitor how much of the lifeform was Simurgh, versus being Myrddin or plant-based. He was judicious and merciless in executing the offshoots, keeping them from growing to a point where there was even a chance of them being sentient.

  The lifeform did, he noted with some pleasure, have a Corona Pollentia; a lobe in the brain that would allow for powers if it developed fully.

  While the man watched the unfolding news, Rey took the opportunity to brew and spray himself with a set of pheromones. His creations would be more favorably inclined towards him now.

  The door at the top of the stairs closed. He turned to see that the lizard-man was being relieved. Had that much time passed already?

  “You being good?” the woman asked. She wore a black evening gown with a slit all the way up to her hip. It would have been alluring, but her mask was black, with black lenses and spikes radiating from the edges. Her brooch was of a black star.

  “Making headway,” Rey responded.

  “One of your fucked up creations broke my leg last year. Please give me an excuse to hurt you. Please.”

  “I’ll pass,” Rey said, turning his attention to the homunculus. He calibrated the signal, pressing two electrodes to his own forehead, then sent the readings out to his creation.

  When it was done, he drained the fluid and vented the chamber. The glass sank into the floor, and the homunculus crawled out, using its knuckles to walk. Its skin was peeling, more like loose bark crossed with scar tissue than flesh.

  “You retain any English?” He asked.

  The homunculus nodded.

  “Spanish?”

  Another nod.

  “Go dispose of the slides. Consider everything a top priority biohazard.”

  The homunculus found a pair of rubber gloves and began cleaning up the mess from the early experiments.

  Rey studied the Morrígan. Alarms were set to go off if it approached one month of age. With Myrddin’s brain tissues and the current state of growth in Simurgh-derived parts, there was little to no chance that it would achieve any degree of self awareness.

  A glance out the window that overlooked the street showed that it was getting dark. He’d been here all day.

  The door slammed at the top of the stairs. He sighed in irritation. Time was passing too quickly. Would this one threaten his life too?

  There was a crash, and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He wheeled around.

  The woman with the black dress had slammed into the television set. She had holes in her as though she were a piece of Swiss cheese, and more of her had been torn to shreds.

  A body fell down the stairs. The man with the lizard mask. Dead, though not so mutilated.

  The woman who came down the stairs had an unusual body type accented by her style of dress. She was almost like a boy, she was so thin, and her strapless dress hugged her upper body, but the lower half billowed around her. Her hair was long and white, her eyes wide with irises and pupils small. Her lips had been painted black.

  Her arms though… machinery had been crammed into the arms, and they’d been extended to nearly twice the length, the fingers drawn out long. Sparks flew as the woman moved one arm, and she winced.

  The second individual skipped down the stairs, stopping at the bottom to admire the laboratory.

  Her eyes fell on Rey.

  “I know you!” she said.

  “I know you too, Bonesaw,” he said. Without breaking eye contact, he tapped a key on the computer, prompting a flood of nutrients into the Morrígan’s solution.

  “Nice lab.”

  “It’s not mine.”

  “Man, it’s… this is nice stuff. Being constantly on the move, you miss out on stuff like this.”

  “My old lab wasn’t this good,” he said. Make small talk. ”Who’s that?”

  “Damsel of Distress, with some modifications by yours truly. Damsel for short. Better at controlling her power now.”

  “Hi Damsel.”

  Damsel looked at him, spoke in a whisper he couldn’t make out.

  “And who’s this?” Bonesaw asked. She approached the glass case with the Morrígan inside.

  “Morrígan.”

  “Looks like the Simurgh.”

  “She is. In part. The other half of the genetic base is from Myrddin’s tissue. Everything that bridges the gap is a really complex fungus.”

  “Cripes. How do you even manage something like that?”

  “Trade secret,” he said. He watched as Damsel approached the widescreen TV, picked it up where it had fallen to the ground, and held it in front of her, staring at the image, no doubt some mention of what the other members of the Slaughterhouse Nine were up to in Boston.

  “I’ll get the answer out of you, you know.”

  “I know,” Rey admitted. ”But I wouldn’t be a self-respecting tinker if I didn’t at least pretend to protect my work.”

  “True.”

  Bonesaw turned her attention to the homunculus. She poked it in the stomach and it growled at her in response.

  If he let the Morrígan out now… Bonesaw was staring at the homunculus, and Damsel was focused on the TV…

  But it would die if he let it go now. It was too young. Every two or three seconds it sat in the high-nutrient solution would be a week of growth. He’d need it at least at four or five years of age before it was capable of moving and acting, and he’d still be depending on it having powers rather than a defunct corona pollentia.

  He’d never experienced a stronger emotion than he did when he saw another set of feet appear at the top of the stairs. They mad
e their way down, and each step brought more of the figure into view. If it was another member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, he’d die. If it was one of Accord’s ambassadors…

  He’d probably still die. But there’d be a chance.

  It was neither.

  The man reached the bottom of the stairs, turned his head to survey the scene. He wore a visor that combined the movable visor of a knight’s helm with a high-tech equivalent, and the points where they met his helmet were shaped like a lizard’s frill or a dragon’s wing. He held out a rod in one hand, and it unfolded into a spear of ridiculous length.

  The lizard theme… if the machines Rey had seen fighting the Slaughterhouse Nine were Dragon’s, was this one of her assistants? Someone working under her?

  Or her?

  Damsel wheeled around, extended one hand, but the man in armor was quick to step around a pillar for cover. Damsel’s power ripped into the pillar, warping and tearing space in a chaotic storm.

  The man in armor ducked and rolled to reach the next piece of cover, one of the stainless steel desks. He arrested his momentum with one outstretched arm, then kicked the desk with both feet. It slammed into Damsel.

  He hopped onto his feet in a single movement, slashing with the spear’s point. The tip struck Damsel across the eyes, blinding her. He reversed the spear and swung it, and the spear-butt caught her in the side of the head. She was knocked down onto all fours before she could direct her power at him again.

  The man dug the spear’s point into the ground to help propel himself towards her. His leg flared with a gray blur as he reached her, and be brought it down onto her back from above.

  It sheared through her as though she weren’t even there, cutting her in half. He kicked out to obliterate her head and one of her shoulders in a single movement, disabled the gray blur, and set his foot down with a thud that rang through the underground laboratory.

  Bonesaw didn’t seem disturbed by the loss of her teammate. ”Don’t think I don’t recognize you. You were Mannequin’s pick. Armsman? Armsmaster?”

  The man in armor pointed his spear at her. ”Defiant now.”