Progenitor

by Antony J Woodward

  She tugged the garment down but it revealed itself to be some sort of scarf. It was knitted in a peculiar fashion, strange bubbles of fabric created an odd texture. It felt a little plastic to the touch.

  “Shit…” she cussed.

  She really wanted to put some clothes on. Surely she’d be able to find something of use…?

  She tried the remaining lockers. It took four locked ones before she found one she could open. Inside she found a neatly folded parcel of clothing. She took it and unfolded it. It looked like a bodysuit. A rubbery body suit crafted from some darkly-blue synthetic material. The legs were elongated and bunched at the floor. Far too long for a human. The rest of it looked doable, if not a little snug. She was relieved the new alien kind had been relatively humanoid in shape. Was that a correct term humanoid? The squid-aliens had created the alien race that had created her own race, it seemed inappropriate to call them humanoid when humans were derived from them. It was like saying your grandfather looks like your son.

  She needed to do something about the legs. They were far too long.

  She pictured the squid-aliens in her mind. They had been odd looking.

  They were tall and lean, their bodies thin and a rubbery white. Their arms had been long, narrow and white except for speckled green skin around the outer arms and shoulders. It had been bipedal but the two legs branched at the knee and became two separate shins. The forefront shin lead smoothly into a three toed foot. The shin to the back morphed into a series of hooks.

  Liara took a further look at the legs and noted the split. There wasn’t anyway she was going to squeeze into them, they narrowed far too tight. Probably the same for the arms too.

  “Shit…” she sighed. She was just putting them back in the locker defeated, when an idea occurred to her. She took the bodysuit and headed back into the lab she’d woken in. She stooped and collected a long shard of glass. A quick test with a finger told her it was sharp enough. She cleared the nearest table and laid the bodysuit out. With the blade of glass she set about carving the legs off. She guessed the appropriate length for the legs and arms, hacking away crudely. It took several minutes, several minutes spent wrestling the strange rubbery fabric, before she was finished. She admired her handiwork before she slipped it on.

  Liara had once been a lot more muscular but she seemed to have lost it. Her body was now thin and sinewy, a far cry from the disciplined body she’d once had. Hell, her body had changed a lot in her life. The suit was difficult but eventually it was on. She’d cut the arms highest and had done a relatively even job of it. They came down a few centimetres from the armpit. The legs were a different story. One was midway up her thigh and the other hovered just above her knee. She was a little disappointed but as far as customising alien apparel went she’d done a good enough job. She appreciated the familiar technology of the zip as she tugged the suit close. The suit felt like a second skin on her body. It was only just the right size, hovering between snug and restrictive. She was grateful that it fitted. She hadn’t relished the idea of being naked.

  Liara took a moment to tug the long brown clump of brown hair from her chest before she zipped the zipper up. She got as far as her cleavage and it stopped. She breathed in and pulled it higher. She got a little higher but suddenly couldn’t breath. Her chest was constricted and she couldn’t bear it. She exhaled in protest and the zipper neatly slid back down to her between her breasts.

  In all her life she’d never experienced that. Her breasts had never been that obstructive before. It was novel.

  Her breasts had always been small, a callout to that mantra about anything bigger than a handful is a waste. Her body had always been athletic, slimmed and toned. A dedication to feminising it away from the male body she’d been born into. When the Four back on Earth had altered her gender, it had inadvertently feminised her entire image too. That long slender face had softened, her plump lips had swelled just a little, her pretty eyes had narrowed. Her shoulders had softened, her waist had curved in, her buttocks rising to a pert.

  She had lost that boyishness that she’d spent her early twenties combating, she had become the exact biological woman she’d always felt she was.

  It was a tainted miracle.

  The Four who had granted her the ultimate gift had then raped her. For whatever reason, not that Liara suspected rapists ever had much reason to do the crime. It was this rape that had ultimately led into the events on the Four’s home planet. Being abducted felt like a very long-long-long time ago suddenly. Liara realised she had no idea what year it was anymore. She’d lost touch of everything human. She was now as lost in space as she was in time.

  It was a sobering conclusion.

  She shook herself. This wasn’t the time. She needed to get herself together.

  How many times had she told herself that?

  She was still holding her matted clump of hair in one hand. It was irreversibly knotted.

  She took the shard of glass and began cutting at it. Slowly she cut the matt free. It fell to the floor with a damp splat. The effect on her neck was instantaneous, she hadn’t even been aware of how heavy it had been pulling on her head. Her hair was now a lopsided cut at the shoulders. The left half was longer than the right, but what did it matter? She was dressed in repurposed alien clothes, a dodgy haircut was hardly going to ruin her style.

  Right… Now it was time to get out of here.

  CHAPTER TWO:

  The feelings of abandonment only intensified with every room Liara passed. It was like everyone had suddenly disappeared. She’d felt this way when she’d explored the “Above” back on the Four’s planet. They’d been evacuating in the wake of the clones turning on their masters. Where were these new aliens? Where had they gone?

  She stopped suddenly, her attention snagged by a room she’d idly glanced into. She back it up and investigated. This room wasn’t like the others, it was filled with large boxes of flashing lights. It reminded Liara of server towers, the way the lights blinked felt familiar. But it wasn’t the towers that caught her attention. It was the large tube before her. It was almost as tall as her and it was filled with bubbling water that frothed upwards before being pumped back down. In the middle of this water the strangest sight drew her eye. It looked like a pillar of flesh. A long unsymmetrical growth of red muscles, fleshy skin and dark organs in no particular fashion. A disturbingly random collection of organs she faintly recognised.

  Liara’s stomach froze over. Just what was she looking at? She approached the glass.

  This organism had no arms, no legs, no eyes - hell it had no features that one could use to identify it. It was like one long growth of flesh. It pulsed slightly, as if it was breathing. Liara’s hand touched the glass. It was lukewarm.

  Whatever strange organism was inside reacted to her presence with a ripple of movement. It flexed a little as if it recognised her.

  With a shimmering effect, layers of muscles and flesh folded away in the centre and a long trail of tentacles unfolded from it. The tentacles were as thin as hair and they were jet black. They parted and moved just like… hair. They were strands of hair not tentacles. A strange limb shifted out, emerging from the cloud of hair. It was blue-ish, like it was bruised. Liara was transfixed as it extended out as far as it could. At full length it barely stretched more than a few inches from the body. The bruised flesh tilted, revealing a narrow slit.

  The comparison to a penis hit Liara in the face like a brick. She gasped, retrieving her hand. She wasn’t sure if she was disgusted, horrified or pitiful. Perhaps an uneven mix of all three? The slit opened and revealed a creamy white eyeball. The iris was milky and greyed, the pupil narrow and useless. The extension wafted in amongst the plume of hair and danced in the soft gentle upward stream. Liara stepped back.

  What the hell was it?

  Sensing Liara had retreated the organism slowly curled back inwards.

  Liara kept retreating till she was back in the corridor.

  She’d
seen some bizarre things in her time, but what the hell was that?

  She wouldn’t even know how to describe it.

  It was like nothing she had ever seen before.

  The door slid open behind her with a hiss.

  She jumped and spun on the spot.

  Another strange fleshy monstrosity greeted her. Only this was a long spiralling mess of flesh. She closed in, her face slack with horror and disbelief.

  This one was long and thin like a snake, a snake made of random tufts and patches of flesh and hair. Four blind eyes lined one side, appearing to be halfway along the organism’s body. This organism had developed bones, four little spikes of broken and misshapen bones jutted out near the base for no apparent reason.

  Liara didn’t get close to this one. She didn’t want to.

  She clamped her eyes shut. What the hell were these creatures? They didn’t seem natural in the slightest. It felt like they were experiments, there was no way nature could make such monstrosities like that. Only she suspecting she was looking at rejected experiments. At failures.

  As she stepped down the corridor and rested against the wall this thought hit her hard.

  As the doors slid shut with a hiss she felt a kinship flush her. She too had been a failure, yet by the gamble of life she’d been not been anything like them.

  Had the Fours made awful mistakes and failures like that when they were creating her…? Were they Liara clones?

  Her breath caught. Were they her clones? Were those monsters previous iterations of her? Were they clones 1-7? Her stomach that had frozen over began to bubble with nausea.

  Surely not… They would be on the floating city…

  Oh God, was she on the floating city? The city the Fours had repurposed to engineer Liara clones. Was it the Fours who had brought her back to life? But how? They were all dead, how could they bring her back? So had the new aliens brought her back to life? But why?

  Her head began spinning like a tornado.

  Yet again she had no idea what was going on. It was another nightmare she’d entered in the middle of.

  She needed some air suddenly, only the air in the corridor felt thick and muggy.

  She turned off the wall and navigated left, following the corridor round the bend.

  Her chest felt tight and she could feel the beginnings of a panic attack.

  Ahead an orange door beckoned. She stumbled against the wall and slid along it.

  Her heart was pounding in her chest like a pneumatic drill. Her chest felt tight, sharp needles were stabbing into her lungs. Her skin was breaking out in a sweat.

  The panic attack had begun digging its claws into her mind.

  She fell to her hands and knees in front of the door, it hissed open and an automatic light blinkered on.

  She was panting and struggling to keep her shit together. She didn’t notice the stairwell before her. She was staring at the grey floor and concentrating on that. She needed to pull it back together. She’d done this before. She’d survived this type of nightmare before, she urged herself to get a grip. The realisation that everywhere she turned was a fresh monster hiding in the shadows wasn’t helping. She felt a little defeated by the futility of it.

  She’d woken up in the middle of another hellhole.

  Another mystery where she didn’t hold any answers. She was getting pretty tired of it. She’d become a woman who kept waking up to monsters running around.

  Slowly her concentrated breathing calmed her spiked pulse and she began calming down. Her mind soothed itself, smoothing out the jagged frazzled storms of ideas and letting her inner voice gain control. Her chest pain eased and she became aware of herself once more.

  She could do this. She’d survived Mount Kailaish, she’d survived the alien planet - this, whatever it was, she could survive too. She just needed to keep a grip and she needed to dig deep. Again.

  “I’m a survivor,” she whispered to herself.

  She closed her eyes and exhaled sharply.

  She slowly righted herself to her feet.

  She felt a little jittery but she felt in control.

  The stairwell ended on this floor, she was stood at its base. It was impossible to determine how high it led, it was built into the wall. The steps were crafted from a dark metal but the rest of it was sculpted from the same white panels.

  It appeared to be her only option.

  She took them slowly, emerging at the top warily.

  A new orange door hissed open with her arrival.

  She was looking at another corridor. It spanned all the way to the end. She glanced right. It went on for a considerable distance. It was the same size as the floor below. Where the previous floor had been made of little cubicles, this floor instead had larger rooms it seemed. She couldn’t decide whether to head right or straight ahead.

  There was no discernable pull either way. They were identical and equally as uninspiring. She decided to head straight ahead. The monochromatic colour scheme was rather depressing. As flawed as humans were, you couldn’t deny their creativity and fondness for colours. It seemed the alien races took functionality to the extreme. There was a new junction, it offered right and appeared to lead to the centre of this floor. She decided to continue in the same direction. She realised she’d not passed any doors, nor seen a single window in her travels on this floor.

  She reached the bend and stepped round it. The lights were out in this stretch of corridor.

  Black silhouettes stopped her in her tracks. They were framed against the working lights from the opposite end of the corridor. They may have only been silhouettes but Liara could recognise them as the squid-alien kind by outline alone. There was four of them and they were struggling with a door before them. Two of them were wrestling with what appeared to be lengths of metal. Were they trying to prise open a door?

  Liara hesitated on the spot. Should she approach? One of the group broke off and disappeared to the right. Liara decided to close in but keep her distance. She slid up against the wall, aware that she’d have been a silhouette herself should they have turned her way. Against the wall she was lost in the shadows and thus almost invisible. She came up to a large metal box, about the same width and height as a vending machine. She used that to peer from.

  The aliens were talking to each other. Their spoken language was strange. It sounded like whale songs only played in reverse. There was an eerie way their sounds rolled up and down the register. It didn’t feel right to overhear their melodic conversation in the current context.

  From her new vantage point, which was only a few metres away, she watched on. Two of the squid-aliens were struggling and desperately trying to prise open the door. Whereas all the other doors Liara had encountered opened vertically, this one opened horizontally. There was no doubt a significance to this difference. The third squid alien was pacing, talking to the other two. She may not have understood the language but she understood the aliens were pretty desperate. She could feel their anxiety even if she didn’t speak their language.

  The feelings of isolation and loneliness may have evaporated but Liara was acutely aware that something was wrong. Why were the aliens trying to prise the door open? What had caused them to abandon the lower floor? And why were they so nervous?

  Liara knew she’d inadvertently been woken at a very bad time. Something was amiss but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  She kept peering from around the block.

  Were they friendly? The squids had brought her here, surely there was a reason?

  But why? She felt suspicious that her “resurrection” had something to do with the chunks of meat growing in tanks downstairs. That fact alone gave her pause for concern…

  Overhead there was a loud thumping and banging, like someone was in the vents. It thumped and bumped its way past Liara and disappeared out of earshot. The aliens hadn’t noticed it, or hadn’t paid any attention at least. They must’ve sent someone up into the vents to try and escape.

  Escap
e… That’s what they were doing. That’s why they were wrestling with the door. But escaping from what? What had happened here?

  There wasn’t any sign of a struggle, except that one laboratory but it might have not been a struggle at all. Liara wasn’t sure she’d interpreted everything correctly. Were they just trapped down here? Was Liara’s awakening just an untimely accident? Was she even supposed to be awake? That pot of questions in Liara’s head was starting to get full and beginning to run the risk of spilling over.

  She watched the third alien walk further away, it stepped into the light of the furthest stretch of the corridor. It was wearing a long white coat, a white so white that it gleamed off the lights over its bald head. Its milky skin was speckled with brown spots. She couldn’t see its face as it walked away.

  There was a loud bang and thud.

  Then a shrill bloodcurdling shriek. It sounded like a tiger roar that had been pitch-shifted.

  The two aliens at the door looked up instantly, abandoning the lengths of metal in the door. Their joint scream was high pitched and cut abruptly short.

  They’d attempted to split away from each other but something rushed from in front of them and tore into them before they could even move. Their screams were abruptly halted as this new shape attacked them. It was tall, bipedal and shaped like nothing Liara had ever seen. Its long arms caught the two squid-aliens, judging by the sudden squelching gurgles it caught them both by the throat. From its silhouette Liara could see it bore similarities to the squid aliens, she caught a glimpse of tentacles near where she guessed was its mouth. Its back was neatly ridged with elongated vertebrae that extended out a couple of inches. It had a long thin tail that must have been the length of its own body. The new creature must’ve sank its mouth into one of the aliens as there was a snap of bones and the sound of flesh being torn free.