The 88th Floor

by Benjamin Sperduto

  “Dead. Found her facedown in her rig. She’d bled out through the eyes and nose. Still trying to work out what fried her, but there wasn’t much brain tissue left to work with.”

  Rees closed his eyes. She didn’t have to be involved in any of this, could have gone on blissfully ignorant. But he’d needed her for answers, had gotten her in deeper than she needed to be.

  Her death was on him.

  “No one else, then?” Reilly asked.

  “No, just them.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’d hate for anyone else to get involved. There’s enough blood on this case already.”

  “What do you mean?” Rees asked. “Did something happen to Morgan too?”

  “Well, it seems that a few hours after you left the precinct, your John Doe climbed off the slab and smashed in Doctor Morgan’s skull.”

  “Christ.”

  “The killer got away clean,” Reilly said. “Nobody even knew what happened until about four hours later.”

  “Wasn’t anybody watching the damn security feed?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Trouble is, there’s nothing on it.”

  “What do you mean?” Rees asked. “Every inch of that fucking lab is covered!”

  “I wouldn’t have believed it either, but I watched it with my own eyes. One second, Morgan and the body are there and then,” she snapped her fingers, “the room is empty. Not a sign of anyone or a hint that a bloody corpse was sitting on the table a second earlier.”

  “And nobody saw it leave?”

  “Not a soul. And it gets even better,” she said. “After they found Morgan’s body and forensics swarmed over the room, the security feed still never showed his corpse. That’s when I was called in. We never would have found out what happened had I not been able to salvage some of the data from Morgan’s optic implants. They showed some of what the security feed missed.”

  Reilly paused for a moment.

  “I’m… well, let’s just say it was an image I’d rather forget about as soon as I can.”

  Although he could only imagine such a scene, Rees shared her sentiment.

  “Wait,” he said. “Why the hell would Morgan’s eyes record the attack, but the security cameras were fooled?”

  “I wondered that too,” Reilly said. “Turns out, Morgan had his eyes replaced six years ago. Two years ago the city switched suppliers for all its optics and surveillance equipment and every security feed in the police department was replaced or updated. Care to guess the new supplier?”

  “Sircotin.”

  Reilly nodded.

  “My security clearance allowed me to dig up Morgan’s case file on the John Doe and your interrogation of Vandum out of the department’s datatrash heap. After that there were just too many coincidences to ignore so I came to find you. I figured an old school cop might have a useful hunch or two.”

  Rees shook his head.

  “I wish I did,” he said. “None of this makes a damn bit of sense to me.”

  She smiled again.

  “Oh, I think you know a thing or two that’s far more useful, Detective. I wouldn’t have spent the last week looking for you if I didn’t.”

  Rees gaped at her, trying to process what he’d heard.

  “You heard that right,” Reilly said. “It’s been a week since you walked into the Sircotin Technologies building. I had a feeling you’d gone back there, but it wasn’t I tracked down Squibel and went through her search records that I knew for sure. Didn’t make it any easier to find you, though. I turned the whole damn city upside down and never found a trace until you burst into the precinct three days ago raving in some weird language nobody could decipher.”

  Rees sat still, probing his mind for any memories beyond losing consciousness on the eighty-eighth floor of the Sircotin building. He did his best not to think about what had sent him racing through those halls.

  “I… I don’t remember anything,” he said.

  “No, Detective,” Reilly said, “you mean you can’t remember; your mind won’t let you. Whatever you saw in there must have had quite an effect. I need to know what it was.”

  “Why don’t you just go see for yourself?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “The Sircotin building collapsed the same night you disappeared; it just imploded like it had been scheduled for demolition. Killed plenty of innocent people. You’re the only living soul who saw what was going on inside that place. I might have asked your buddy Vandum, but I expect you know what happened to him?”

  Rees nodded as a door clicked open behind him.

  “Doctor,” Reilly said, “are we ready to begin?”

  “Yes, of course,” the doctor said as he walked around the chair to adjust something on the terminal beside Rees.

  “Good, plug him in and let’s get started.”

  Rees couldn’t see the doctor’s face, but he could see the three-inch spike in his hand clearly enough. It was connected to a fiberoptic cable that fed into the terminal. He became aware once again of the pain on the back of his head as the doctor brought the point of the spike closer to him.

  “Don’t be afraid, Detective,” Reilly said. “We’ve installed a cranial datajack into your skull so the good doctor here can interface directly with your brain and tear down those troublesome memory blocks. It shouldn’t cause any permanent–”

  ***

  Rees couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds. He knew that because he was still alive, because he hadn’t been ripped apart by whatever energy had washed over him and prevented his escape. But then the silence caused him to doubt, and he wondered if that was all death would be, nothing but a black void, silent for all eternity.

  Then a soft light swelled up in the distance and Rees realized that he was no longer where logic said he should have been. The rising sun was a queer color, a blend of orange and purple tinged with a bit of brown, and it cast dim light over an equally strange landscape. It looked like nothing so much as a vast plain of wax that had once held a far different, perhaps even majestic, form, but now found its features heaped and lumped into sickly, misshapen columns and piles.

  As the light grew brighter, he saw bizarre, winged shapes circling in the sky overhead. Confused, Rees staggered toward the sun, but within a few steps he found himself on the precipice of a towering cliff that overlooked something… horrible.

  He could find no words to describe it, none that could convey the hideous nature and instincts of the swelling mass of flesh, fangs, and eyes.

  A few hundred of its countless eyes turned on him and Rees screamed.

  The sound of his cry echoed painfully throughout the eighty-eighth floor and he staggered when he found himself back in familiar surroundings. Hastily rigged work lights strung along the ceiling provided enough illumination for Rees to see clearly now and he quickly found his gun on the floor. He picked it up and placed the barrel to his temple.

  “Please, Nicholas, don’t do anything rash.”

  Rees’s mind snapped back from the brink and he turned to see a tall, striking man wearing ragged, wrinkled suit encrusted with dried blood. The man should have been a stranger, but the suit, and the seven bullet holes still visible on it, was too familiar. There were two new holes as well, fresh blood dripping from each.

  “You’re confused,” Kurush said, “afraid. You’re wondering how it is that you could be in two places without moving. You’re wondering how it is that I can be standing here before you now.”

  Rees pointed his gun at the man who should have been dead.

  “Oh, come now, Nicholas, we’ve been through this already, haven’t we? It was Vandum’s charge to do the same so that we might be here tonight, though he knew it not. At least give me the chance to speak.”

  Rees wanted to squeeze the trigger. He tried to squeeze the trigger. But nothing happened. His finger would not budge and Kurush simply stood there looking at him without a trace of concern.

  He lowered the gun.

 
; “Isn’t it beautiful?” Kurush gestured to the unfinished, crooked walls around him. Rees tried to speak, but found that his voice no longer worked.

  “Do you understand what you’re looking at, at what generations of work have achieved? I wasn’t always just an architect for Sircotin, you see. I’ve held its hand since its inception, from one innovation to the next, always working towards a singular goal. This building is the very essence of what the company was built to achieve; it’s a transmitter, a direct line of communication to the true essence of the universe.

  “I once thought as you do, that all attempts to improve man lead to folly. I resisted change just as you have done while everyone around you reshaped their lives to accommodate the ingenuity of great minds. But then I saw the truth. I reveled in the brilliant, magnificent energies of creation, of the great swirling chaos from which true greatness is born. We think ourselves creatures of reason, of logic, but that is not our true nature. Tell me, Nicholas, do you dream?”

  Rees didn’t want to nod, but he did.

  “Of course you do,” Kurush said. “And do your dreams not seem more vibrant and alive than this banal prison we’ve created for ourselves? That is because we are born of dreams, Nicholas, not of reason. We are shaped in His image, the fruits of His terrible and divine genius. Even now He seeks to reach across the cold gulf of space and touch us, to give us but a glimpse of our destiny. It’s a grave burden to endure such secrets for so long, Nicholas. You must help me now to carry on the work of a thousand lifetimes.”

  A part of Rees’s mind, the rational, conscious portion, tried to raise his gun again, but his body would not obey. It was too much under the sway of his unconscious mind, the dreaming mind. And it had seen. It had seen it with Rees’s own eyes, seen the swelling, pulsating plain of flesh and bone; it had seen the thing that would drive mankind to horrors and virtuosities beyond his meager imaginings. It had been but a glimpse, but it was seared in his soul so strongly that even death would not free him from the sight of it.

  Trust those eyes of yours, Detective.

  Had those words been a warning or an invitation? Perhaps there was no difference between the two.

  Kurush stepped closer and placed his hands on Rees’s head.

  “This is not the end, Nicholas,” he said. “There is never an end, only the infinite beginning.”

  And then Rees saw more.

  The horror of the previous sight was but the surface of a power unfathomably greater than even a madman could conceive. The man who called himself Aran Kurush, the man shot dead only a day earlier, carried Rees through the nightmare until he could at last go no farther had to turn away before his very being was incinerated.

  But Kurush did not look away. He offered himself up to the annihilation of his insane-savant lord’s embrace and for one brief instant, the essence of its crawling chaos bleed into the eighty-eighth floor, seeped through the cracks of time and space to brush against the waking world. A rush of catastrophe and mad invention swept across the globe with the speed of a wayward thought, reshaping lives and altering destinies for all time.

  Then it ended.

  The air quivered around Rees as the Sircotin Technologies building, perhaps unable to reconcile the impossibility of what had taken place within its walls, collapsed from the strain of the event. But Rees was no longer there. He floated aimlessly in a cold, nameless oblivion, his mind still struggling to rationalize, to forget; anything to blot out the madness undergirding the true nature of the universe. It tried to deny the irrevocable changes that exposure to such truth had wrought upon Rees’s body, to convince him that he could simply return to the empty, rote schema of conscious existence.

  But he had seen.

  ***

  Agent Reilly, having experienced but the faintest of glimpses into Rees’s memories through their direct neural connection, leaned forward in her chair and exhaled, trembling. After a few minutes she called the doctor back to the interrogation room.

  “Do you have the results?”

  “Yes, Detective Rees’s DNA seems to be rewriting itself. While much of it matches his own records, other sections already appear to match that of the body Doctor Morgan examined.”

  It wasn’t quite the report she’d expected. Perhaps there was still time.

  “Thank you, Doctor. Will he regain consciousness when you remove the input jack?”

  “No, not for several hours.”

  “Then unplug him and get your equipment out of here.”

  After the doctor left, Reilly pulled her chair up to the table to write her report on the case. She didn’t know how to begin the report or how to end it. If it was Rees’s fate to tread the same path as this mysterious Aran Kurush, then his body would have to be incinerated, although there was a chance that even that might not halt its cellular activity. Perhaps, she thought, the ashes could be encased in concrete and buried far below the surface, or even shot into the cold reaches of space.

  Rees twitched as she scribbled down her thoughts. She wondered if he was dreaming, if when he woke up he would remember the things his mind had worked so hard to conceal. Perhaps, she thought, she had destroyed what remained of Nicholas Rees and given him over to madness. Even if she hadn’t, how long would it be before he was transformed into something more, or maybe less, than human?

  Every time he moved, a stray thought about what she had seen in his memories came to her mind. It was oddly appropriate, she thought, that the two of them were closed in that room together, for they now shared the same burden of a terrible knowledge that would haunt him for eternity, and her until her dying day.

  Reilly stopped writing and looked up to see that Rees was awake and staring directly at her. There was something in his eyes she hadn’t noticed before, something cold and alien.

  “Hello, Amanda.”

  She reached for her sidearm, but she was too slow. Rees tore free from his restraints effortlessly and flung the table across the room with a flick of his wrist. Before she could take aim, he slapped the gun out of her hand, seized her by the throat, and hoisted her up against the wall.

  “Please, Amanda,” he said, smiling, “don’t do anything rash.”

  Her eyes darted up to the corner of the room where she knew the observation cameras were trained on them. For a moment, she wondered why no one outside had reacted to the situation. Then she remembered what had happened to Morgan under the watchful eye of Sircotin’s cameras.

  “I’m so glad that you want to share in my experiences,” Rees said. “Your doctor’s clumsy prodding could only recover so much, I’m afraid. There’s so much more for you to see!”

  Reilly tried to talk, but she scarcely had enough air to breathe.

  Rees leaned closer to her and fixed his inhuman gaze upon her eyes.

  “Such lovely eyes you have, Amanda. Top of the line construction. Sircotin’s DeepSight 2600 series, yes? A wonderfully sophisticated design, though I’m not sure they can handle what I have to show you. Suitable for a glimpse, yes, but to see it whole?”

  Reilly’s vision flickered as her cyberoptic implants received a transmission from some foreign source. The features of the room twisted apart and Rees’s face melted away to reveal a vision from the deepest corridors of a mind that was no longer recognizably human.

  Slowly, an image took shape and Reilly screamed. She reflexively threw up her hands to blot out the sight, but the direct link to her eyes remained unobscured. Frantically, she dug her nails into her skin and tore at the soft flesh surrounding the implants.

  “Yes,” Rees said. “Such beauty… ”

  Blood ran down Reilly’s fingers as she ripped into her eye sockets to grasp desperately at the source of her torment. Finally, she severed the tiny wires that connected the cyberware to her nervous system and her vision went black.

  Rees released her then and her body collapsed in a limp heap. The intense, burning pain radiating from her mangled eye sockets was almost soothing compared to the horrible images scorc
hed into her shattered mind. Her entire body shook as she sobbed uncontrollably.

  “You’re not ready, Amanda,” Rees said. His voice was at once distant and frightfully close, seeming to come from many mouths at once. “Perhaps when my work is done, you will be. Everyone will be.”

  Plunged in darkness, Amanda Reilly remained at the mercy of her memories. She did not hear Rees leave the room or hear the dying screams of the men outside. Little more than a broken shell, her body quivered sporadically. The garbled sounds coming from her throat echoed against the metal walls of the interrogation room.

  Microscopic nanites were already working to repair her damaged tissue and her artificial heart soon stabilized her metabolism. By the time her backup team arrived to investigate Rees’s escape, her physical wounds would be repaired.

  But there was no technology on Earth that could hope to restore the fragmented remains of her sanity.

  Thank you for reading The 88th Floor!

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  If you enjoyed this story, continue reading for a sample chapter from The Walls of Dalgorod, an epic fantasy novel available now from Curiosity Quills Press in Amazon Kindle and Trade Paperback formats.

  THE WALLS OF DALGOROD sample

  PROLOGUE

  A hideous shrieking woke Lyov just before dawn.

  Disoriented, he rolled out of bed and stumbled to the armor he’d stripped off just a few hours earlier. His wife clamped her hands over her ears as she sat up.

  “What is that?” Anushka asked.

  “The horses. Something has them spooked.”

  The sound died by the time he pulled on his hardened leather hauberk, replaced by the low droning of blown horns. Lyov strapped his sheathed sword around his waist. The blade was old, chipped, and dull in places, better suited for battering an armored man in the practice yard than for cleaving flesh.