by Nick Ryder
“Are you challenging my claim to the mountain kingdom?” she asked quietly.
Isaiah glanced to his father, looking for an immediate ally. But Victor, and the rest of the villagers knew Isaiah had overstepped his bounds. Wilbert was known throughout the community to be foul-mouthed but honest. He wasn’t known to make up tales. What he claimed happened inside the mountain meant Cara had access to a treasure cache the likes of which never happened before.
It was a new beginning for them, and they waited to see what she did next.
Isaiah meant to speak. There was something snide at the end of his tongue. Cara took action before he could. Her rapid assault, which included pelting fists, and whirling high kicks to the face, put him flat on his back, knocked the air out of him.
Cara looked as if she barely moved. But she drew her legs together because Isaiah was too close to her skirt when he landed. Before the rolling dust settled, Karl had disappeared into the crowd, as far from Cara as possible.
“I don’t think she’s wearing panties,” someone whispered in the mob.
She walked back toward her father. Cara was hungry but Isaiah’s erratic behavior left her with a sour stomach. Victor left his seat in the theater to comingle and laugh joyfully with his red mates. He ignored his son, acting as if Isaiah had made a mistake.
Sampson looked down at Cara, unsure how to help ease her anger. She wanted everyone to just get along but somehow there were always sides. Sometimes the balance shifted in the power struggle. Sometimes blue gained momentum in the counsel, but red usually had something devious and smarmy to use against the blues.
With access to the mountain, Cara was sure blue had the advantage. It was only a matter of organizing the next scavenger party to find out what else they had. She had something wrapped in a blue cloth. Wilbert carried it to her when she went back to where Sampson and the Widow Barnes shared snake steaks. She put it on the table in front of her father.
He unwrapped the cloth exposing a white coffee mug. There was a chip in the rim but it still said World’s Greatest Boss.
Chapter Ten
The interaction between Marie and the giant rat was interesting, and it made me a little jealous. She had washed the blood out of its fur and made sure it was taken care off.
I craved that physical touch, especially from Marie, the gorgeous girl I’d brought back to life.
I didn’t have a camera in the room she bathed in, which was especially upsetting.
She’d returned wearing clothes. Calling them clothes felt a little ambitious, but they covered the important bits. She’d found a t-shirt that bore the insignia of the US Air Force. On her tiny frame, it covered everything, falling to her mid-thigh. She’d tied a piece of rope around the middle to give it some shape.
It was like he’d taken a girl home and she’d picked a shirt from his wardrobe and was now lounging around his living room in it.
He made a quick check on the next body he was building. Still far from complete.
“We’re in the process of generating more rats.” I felt compelled to tell Marie. She sat on the floor of the lap with the remaining rat’s head in her lap. She petted it like a dog. The automatons cleared the wreckage of the failed science experiment. They hauled away the carcass. I didn’t tell Marie what would happen to it.
“Great!” she squealed. Her hands stroked the rat’s neck behind the ears. Its rear paw thudded against the tiles in response. “I can’t wait.”
“Are you really okay with all this?” I asked curiously. Marie didn’t show a lot of stress. Even after the chase and eventual brutal kill, she had a lot of energy.
“I am.” She looked up at the camera. Her big blue eyes blinked, lashes meshed together like silky black cords. “I don’t know how to explain it. I know I’m supposed to be human. I should be freaking out about all this.”
“I’ve dampened your emotional attachment to your former body,” Ego pointed out. “This allows you to adapt to your new body.” There had still been no mention of the other personality changes.
“But what about the rat?” I asked. “You act like it's your dog or something.”
Marie pulled the rat toward her. She wrapped her furry arms around its neck and gingerly squeezed. It wasn’t just the rat tolerating the manhandling. It enjoyed the affection. She buried her nose in its fur.
“I have to tell you, she is just so cute.” Marie hugged and rocked the rat. “And she smells like warm chocolate chip cookies.”
“Fascinating,” Ego said. “The bond between the rats is so strong that Marie’s connection manifests as a scent.”
“What about other species?” I asked. “What about the girl?”
“Are you going on about that female again?” Ego asked.
“What girl?” Our conversation distracted Marie from her friend.
“Your rat is the only survivor from two people who came into the base.”
There was a switch inside Marie that showed through the red glint in her eyes. “They killed my rats?” she growled.
The fur at her neck stood on end.
“Listen,” I said hurriedly. “We need to consider the possibilities of more people coming here. I think the rats scared them off. I didn’t see any guns. But people are, you know, like cockroaches. Where there’s one, there are more.”
“What are we going to do about it, sir?” Marie asked. The rat turned a few times by her hindquarters and lay down.
The sir quelled some of the jealousy I was feeling toward a fucking rat at the moment.
“Well, we need to continue with more genetics.”
“You’re not making any more rat… people,” she said. “Are you?”
“We’re experimenting with other genetic modifications. Ego has access to other DNA life forms. We’re going to replace the two rats we lost. And we’re going to genetically fuse a human brain to a cat next.”
“A cat?” she said. The whiskers twitched.
“We’re attempting to work our way up to larger life forms,” Ego explained.
“And I want to get into a body.” I’d had enough of the astral plane that was this system.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Ego added. There was a pang of jealousy in his voice modulator.
“Do you have a body?” Marie asked.
“It’s in the laboratory on level three.”
Immediately, Marie darted from the lounge of the apartments and slipped through the stairwell. The rat chased after her.
“It doesn’t look like much.” She pressed her claws against the glass of the genetic tube. She peered at the body floating in the clear goop.
“It gets bigger,” I pointed out quickly.
The body in stasis was just a hairless naked form. I demanded Ego make sure the body was male. It mattered to me, but not to Ego. I checked the growth of the body to make sure it still had the parts that mattered. I’d noticed Marie’s eyes checking, too.
I hoped that part was definitely going to grow.
“We’re gradually collecting energy from the restored link to the solar panels, but it’s not enough. Whenever we use the laboratories, we’re drawing energy from the rest of the systems.” It felt good to talk to someone other than Ego. It was impossible to have a good conversation with someone who already knew what you were going to say before it came out of your mouth.
“I need you to help us restore some of the camera links. We need to get full access to the base. And now it feels like we’re against a time limit because of the visitors.”
“How can I help you replace cameras?” Marie looked at her claws and flexed them.
“The automatons can help with some of it. You’re just going to be my eyes and ears.”
“And the occasional opposable thumbs,” Ego added.
“There’s got to be more solar energy available. Maybe backup generators or fuel docks,” I said. “This place is too big not to have more resources.”
“Is it really that big?” Marie asked.
I tried to ignore his joke. “It’s ten levels.” I watched Marie wander from the laboratory to the hallway that led to the vehicle bay. “I don’t have a camera in there anymore.”
“The girl took it,” Ego said.
“Is she human?” Marie asked. I saw a flash of white razor sharp teeth and a flick of a tongue. I thought she wanted payback for the loss of rats.
“There were two humans.” Ego jumped in again. “One male and one female.” A hint of disdain in his voice modulator: “Sol thinks she’s hot.”
“I do not,” I stammered.
“Do so!”
“Do— are we doing this?”
“I know you are, but what am I?”
“I think you need to stop with the media files,” I warned Ego. “The girl just looked… healthy is all.” And bronze in the light. Silky strawberry blonde hair and the dreamiest eyes, I added to myself.
“I’m telling,” Ego said. Of course he knew what I’d thought.
“You think there are more of them out there?” Marie stood at the very edge of my line of sight. I’d worried the obedience might make her jealous or possessive, but couldn’t hear anything like that in her voice.
“I don’t know what’s out there. I’m like you. We’re both still learning here.”
“I’m going to check out the area.”
“Can you wait until I have a camera installed in the bay?”
Marie looked back at the CCTV. “Nope,” she said and slipped through the doorway.
There were three more mouths to feed. While Marie didn’t complain about the pistachio-colored slop she had to eat, I knew it was her way of being nice. The rat horde was gobbling up the nutrigel and wanted more as soon as they finished.
When it was time for the next genetic sequencing, I asked Marie to help sort out the cameras in the vehicle bay. She could carry things, but just what relatively little she could bring in her hands made for slow progress.
“What’s that?” she asked when one of the automatons tried to hand her something when she crept from the apartment. Her four rats followed and filled the corridor with inquisitive bobbing heads and runny noses.
“I made it for you,” I said proudly. “Well, I instructed the automatons to make it for you.”
There was a sound like a computer trying to clear its circuitry around a voice modulator.
“Okay,” I conceded. “I asked Ego to have the automatons construct that for you.”
Marie turned it around and around in her hands.
“It’s a harness with a satchel.” Since she had to sleep, I had it constructed through the night. I didn’t realize it until Marie arrived that I stopped sleeping. Only when she wasn’t around, asleep after long days, did I know I was lonely.
“So you made me a purse.”
“It’s a pack you can use to carry necessary supplies when you need them.”
“So, a purse,” she said again. She sniffed the straps and the bag. “It smells funny. What’s it made of?”
“Leather,” Ego replied. “Of a sort.” There were some leftover pieces from—”
I interjected silently to Ego, “—let’s leave out the part about the leather coming from her rats, okay?”
“And there’s a communicator inside,” I added out loud to change the subject.
“Well it smells good, comforting.” She removed the small earpiece carefully, making sure her claws didn’t damage it.
“If you put that in your ear, you can hear me.”
“And me,” Ego added.
It took a few attempts to seat the small device in her ear before the nanobots crawling over the earpiece, and the nanobots crawling all over Marie’s, body met each other, shook robot hands, and worked together to permanently attach the communicator to the interior of her ear canal.
“How’s that?” I asked.
Her eyes crossed, and her teeth clenched so hard I thought I heard cracking. “You don’t have to yell!”
“I think that’s too loud.” Ego made the initial adjustments.
“How’s that?” I whispered.
“Perfect.” She slipped on the satchel. The straps pulled tight, so the bag pressed against her chest.
“We don’t know what kind of range it has. We wanted to make sure before you went outside to test the communicator.”
“We’ve already been outside,” Marie said, as if it were as routine as making a sandwich. “The area at the garage door has a platform and a road that winds along the mountainside. We went all over that area earlier.”
“I would advise not venturing outside until we have more security in place,” Ego said sternly. “The probability of you returning unharmed a second time is…”
“Let’s just take one step at a time,” I said. “Help us with the cameras. We can start figuring out how much of this base is worth keeping online. I had the automatons set traps in some of the areas. It’s important we stick to a schedule, and you know where all the traps are.”
“Oh, I know where all the traps are.” Marie crossed her legs and examined the claws on her right hand. She found a thin piece of steel and used it as a nail file.
“How did you find the traps already?”
“I can—” she waved the file in a circle, considering her next words. “I can see them.”
“That’s not much of a trap if you can see them.”
“Not like see them.” She stared at my camera and twitched her nose. “It’s like seeing a shimmer or a cloud around something. When the automatons are in any area for a long time I can see their… aura, I guess you might call it, as well.”
A klaxon sounded in the central laboratory.
“The cat is ready for reanimation.” Ego had put the brain inside the skull. With the success of Marie, I was hopeful to find Cassie. But there were a lot of brains to choose from and no labelling system that helped me with the selection process.
“It might be a good idea if you waited outside the laboratory until we make sure everything is okay.”
I watched the fur on Marie’s shoulders bristle. We still had a lot to learn.
“Maybe I can start repairing the cameras.”
“That’s a great idea.” I wanted her to feel useful. “I’ll have Ego assign an automaton to you, and it will show you what you need to know.” I waited a moment. “Listen, I hope you’re okay with all this. It’s a lot easier this way with the genetic coding. For some reason, it’s easier to build rat and cat hybrids than pure humans. We just don’t have the existing knowledge for it, yet. You saw my body.”
“I did.” She wiggled her small pointy nose, making her whiskers jiggle with it, and flared her nostrils. “It needs a little work.”
“I know. That’s the problem. We’ve got everything we need to build anything, except humans, apparently.” I sighed. It sounded like a processor fan speeding up and slowing down. “Can I ask you not to go outside again until we’re ready? I don’t want anything to happen to you. We don’t know how far the communicators go. And we don’t know what happened to the people out there. We don’t know how many there are. And we don’t know if there are any more of those things running around out there.”
Marie cocked her head looking at the camera. “You really care, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.” If I had a face, I would have smiled. “Thank you for your help with the cameras.”
Marie gave a small smile and I thought I saw heated patches on her cheeks beneath the fur.
“Any time, sir,” she said, and scurried off. Four very eager giant rats trailed after their queen.
Chapter Eleven
The cat had a particolored coat with white legs and a white belly. The patches of colors were predominantly black and orange. The ears differed in that one was black fur, the other brindle. A cascade of red hair surrounded her, falling just below her shoulders. The eyes were emerald green. A black slit in each responded rapid
ly to the light inside the laboratory.
Like Marie, the face was framed with fur rather than covering it. A button nose sat in the middle and whiskers sprouted from the cheeks.
Ego had informed me that the stats were good. She would have outstanding strength, dexterity, and intelligence that would make her a formidable fighter.
“Chatte d'Espagne,” Ego said triumphantly.
“What?”
“It’s French for female cat of Spain.”
“But why?” I asked, and if I had shoulders, I would have shrugged.
“The calico cat is genetically predisposed to be female.”
“We only have female brains.”
“True, but to be completely sure we had the genetic make-up of a female cat, I thought it best to have a calico,” Ego said smugly. “A calico cat is genetically matched to the color of the coat and linked to the X chromosome.”
“Is that important?” I asked.
“Well,” Ego said and let it drop.
We watched the birth of a new species. The automatons had moved the tube to the floor, allowing for a smoother transition from sleep to waking up and not worrying about falling on the floor once she realized she wasn’t completely human anymore.
She was beautiful. Sleek and elegant, she had the trademarks of a feline on a grand scale. A furry tail hung over the side of the table, twitching a little. Her hands and feet were those of humans, like Marie’s, but with catlike variations. The palms of her fingers were soft, pink and padded that would allow her to grip better. Her nails were hardened claws, but not as sharp looking as Marie’s.
She was naked, too, and I wondered how her obedience levels would be compared to Marie’s. I knew Ego had lowered them.
I itched to get into my human body as she stirred, arching her back and pushing her tits up and closer to the lens of the CCTV cam. Her tail lifted into the air until it swished across the broken ceiling tile. As if waking from a cat nap, she hadn’t quite realized the full extent of her new surroundings. I was thankful to Ego for streamlining the process, but his dampeners didn’t eliminate the shocking panic. The emotions were there; they just took the back seat and let the body take care of itself.