He had already gone through the boxes to see what of his research caught Carol’s eye. He had done so to try to figure out what was going on in Carol’s mind, always a difficult problem for him. Thinking like the Commander wasn’t easy, even when she was being straightforward.
“I know of several things that you’re going to find interesting,” he said, to Lori. This one involved one of the mysteries of life that bothered her the most. He went to the box with his most recent acquisitions, this one a piece Stacy had passed to him. She wanted his comments, and he had already sent them off. He expected to see Stacy on his doorstep soon to comment about his response, likely an aggressive ‘What the fuck!’ commentary. He pulled out the manila folder in question and handed it to the Focus. “This document is something Student Arm Billington wrote up, based on a voluntary multi-day mind-scrape Stacy did of Focus Gail Rickenbach, to help the both of them understand what happened during the Battle in Detroit.”
“So, why is this post-mortem any different than…” She speed-skimmed the document, but stopped cold when she got to the interesting section. “Gurgling poo!”
Exactly.
Story-form Transcript of Gail Rickenbach’s Experiences on May 17, 1969
Information provided by Arm Stacy Keaton. Collated and transcribed by Student Arm Grace Billington, March 6th, 1970.
(Page 36 of 39)
Gail Rickenbach stepped between Tonya and the hot acid gunfire, grabbed Tonya and wrestled her out of the line of fire. Blood flew, hers and Tonya’s blood. Hammer blows slammed her body, one, two, many, then too many to count. Her arms around Tonya, she fell to the ground amid the gunshots, the screams and the explosions. Her mind detached from her body and fell into the Dreaming, Dreaming while dying. Insane. Around her, the world pulsed red with blood. She looked down at herself to see her own life ebbing away, and saw the changes in her body that meant she was in the juice metabolism state. Poorly, at that, not even good enough to save her own life.
Panic set in as she saw herself dying, and she began to heal. Her healing didn’t work! She attempted to heal the bullet wound in her neck and a scrape on her arm began to scab over. She tried for a different bullet wound, in her chest, and something in her perforated abdomen began to knit itself back together. Her panic increased and she gave up on any attempt at control, just trying to heal everything at once. Almost nothing happened.
Someone grabbed her, the disguised Focus Forbes, the Transform with the mesmerizing and beautiful juice structure. What was she? Whoever she was, she started to act like a maniac, licking Gail’s neck, sticking her tongue into Gail’s wounds. What kind of sicko behavior was this?
Oh. Healing. She could heal other people! What sort of Transform could heal other people?
Dreaming Gail knelt beside her physical body and this other Transform. This was insane, strange and insane, but the eyes of her Dreaming form refused to leave the Transform who healed her. The Transform with the beautiful juice structure. Gail attempted to help, but her panic rose up again. She still couldn’t control what part of her mangled body she healed.
(Page 37 of 39)
Perhaps if she lost her fixation on the Transform who healed her, she could help. She willed her Dreaming form loose from the Transform. The chaos of the ongoing ballroom fight hit her consciousness like a wooden mallet between the eyes. Pain! Too much pain!
Focus Anderson and her bodyguards had turned to fire at Focus Adkins, but an impossible set of Monster illusions sprang up between them and Adkins. Gilgamesh! His work, as he was caught between Focus Anderson and Focus Adkins’ household. Focus Anderson’s bodyguards, all but one, had not only shot at Tonya, but also at Focus Keistermann and Focus Rizzari. Focus Keistermann’s oversized bodyguard – another unknown Major Transform – took the brunt of the damage, but Focus Rizzari hadn’t been as lucky. She fell, as bad off as Gail, but as she fell she did something with the juice that ripped into Focus Anderson and her bodyguards. In Gail’s slow-motion Dreaming sight, their juice exploded from them. Slowly.
The single bodyguard of Focus Anderson who hadn’t fired ran from Focus Anderson, toward Gail and Tonya. He was an older bullet of a man, about Gail’s height, with a distinguished close cropped full beard that matched his close cropped hair. He held his handgun out and pointed in Gail’s direction. Her Dreaming self shrieked, and to her surprise, the bodyguard turned his eyes to her Dreaming form and met her gaze.
He was a Transform, the screwiest Transform she had ever metasensed, and not one of Focus Anderson’s own. The instant of contact caught him in place, and in his moment of hesitation the rush of bodies toward Gail and Tonya and their own bodyguards blocked his view and pushed him away. The screwy Transform backed off into the crowd, his handgun now pointed into the air. No longer threatening.
(Page 38 of 39)
The contact with the Transform who attempted to heal Gail drew her back into her body. She metasensed the panic in her Transforms, as they felt her pain and her wounds. Panic at her panic. There was so much juice available for healing, but she couldn’t get at it! It was her damned juice buffer. Perhaps this other Transform, the one who was healing her, could use it.
“Take it,” Gail said. She tried to push it into this other Transform. Heaven – by pushing the juice, she caused the pain to go away – but the juice came flowing back from the other Transform as fast as Gail pushed it into her.
“Stop trying to heal yourself, Gail,” the other Transform said. “You’re just wasting juice.”
“Use mine, then,” Gail said, her voice extraordinarily weak. Gail pushed, and pushed harder. In her mind, connections exploded, a dizzying network of light, and something moved over to this other Transform. Juice?
“Not enough. All you gave me is your supplemental juice.”
Damn. The strength flew out of Gail in an instant, and she floated on an endless sea of warmth. Her body went numb. Her sense of smell vanished. Her eyesight contracted to a narrow cone. “I’m dying,” Gail said, her thoughts becoming words without her willing.
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to die.” Who would move the juice for her household? They would all die.
“No one does.” The person holding her gave up healing her, and just held Gail close to her body.
“You’re beautiful. Are you an angel?”
“I’m Carol Hancock, Gail,” the Focus Forbes person holding her said. “An Arm. Spree killer. Mass murderer.”
(Page 39 of 39)
“I don’t believe it. I’ve never seen anyone so, so, obviously good and angelic before.” The world shrunk to her metasense and hearing, and as she spoke, her metasense faded away. “There’s this bright light calling me, Carol. I think I’m going.”
“Hang on, hang on, keep feeding me juice and I can get this healed,” the Arm said. The Arm did something different now, a different form of healing, something inside of Gail. The Arm didn’t need to touch or use her tongue, because their bodies had become one. Gail danced in her mind with the light, and it was hard to avoid falling, falling into that wondrous light.
“It’s so beautiful. My body…” Gail’s voice left her as she drifted into the white light, in this realm of pure thought. Her household! If she died, they would die! Gail, in one last frenzied moment of panic, grabbed with all her Transform might at anything and everything she could hold, anything to keep her from sliding into the light. Only it wasn’t a physical grab, but something with her Focus capabilities.
She got something. She became it, whatever it was. It felt like another body – the Arm’s? Who else? The Arm’s body was an amazing body, so similar to Gail’s, and yet so different. Now, she sensed exactly where to put that damned juice buffer that hadn’t been doing her any good – she stuck it right there.
Ahhh. The Arm could use it now. Could heal her with it. Gail rode the juice wave until she emptied her entire juice buffer…and then fell into the darkness, knowing she had managed to find a way to save her household.
You Wake Up In A… (continued)
“Big surprise, eh?” Hank said.
“So, you’ve met him, too,” Lori said. She put the folder down on the library table and continued to pace. “What name did he use?”
“Dr. Conrad Adler.” Hank paused. “I didn’t know he was a Transform, but I’m not surprised. Thinking back on it, it’s pretty clear he rolled me.”
“When?”
“I encountered him twice. The first time was in October of 1959. He convinced me to submit my paper on my discovery of the difference between fundamental and supplemental juice to Nature after it got bounced by Cell.” Lori whistled. “The second time I met him was in 1963. In Canada. I recognized him, but I suspect most people wouldn’t have. He was masquerading as someone other than Conrad Adler, with a different voice and personality. A Canadian doctor. What he said etched him into my memory forever – ‘The reason Sieurs fled Quebec was due to death threats from the American Focuses, and over there is their representative. If she as much as twitches in Sieurs’ direction, kill her. Both your future and our future depend on Sieurs’ survival.’ The person he pointed at was Tonya.”
“Holy moly, Hank! He’s patient zero, the reason Transform Sickness spread world-wide!”
He smiled. “So, did you coin that term, or did Stacy? She wouldn’t say.”
The Focus sighed. “I did, a long time ago. Stacy won’t give the specifics of when they met, but he clearly made a big impression on her.”
“That sounds like Stacy.” He paused and eyed the Focus, suspecting he was about to get the same response from her. “So, when did you meet?”
She smiled.
He glared.
She shrugged. “Okay, it was in the first year of my PhD program at MIT. He came into my lab in January of ’63, and introduced himself as Donald Wilson, a businessman, a non-standard Transform, and a member of the Focus Network. He said ‘what am I?’ and gave me permission to run tests on him. I didn’t learn how to metasense him until about half way through the tests – he possessed strange metasense protections, fairly weak and unlike any I’ve run into since.”
Hank was surprised the Focus coughed up the information so easily. “So, since he’s into manipulation, how did he manipulate you?”
She turned away, slightly. “He told me about non-Attendant induced transformations. I didn’t believe him and told him he was full of beans. He argued with me, and, well, I couldn’t get him to back down with my Focus charisma. Not that my charisma was worth much back then; I hadn’t trained it a lick and truthfully spent most of my effort trying to hold it in and not make messes. I told him to put up or shut up, and he gave me a list of five Transforms who had gone through induced transformations. It took me a while to follow up on these leads, but they all did check out.
“In the argument, Wilson said ‘induced transformations are new, which I ought to know, as I’ve been around from the start’. After I agreed to look into his induced transformation allegations, he answered some of my questions, and he said he believed he transformed during a hunting trip in northern Minnesota, in 1937. His story matched his metasensed age.”
“You can metasense someone’s age as a Transform?”
“Most top Focuses can, Hank.”
“Interesting.” Annoying, too. Focuses rarely told him about their undocumented tricks.
“His service record matched much but not all of his story,” the Focus said. “The other things I found out about him were chilling. He’s an accomplished sexual predator, bedding any man or woman who catches his eye. He’s also a crazy-successful amateur archeologist, but instead of science, he’s interested in archeological artifacts for their loot value. I also think he’s looking for signs of old outbreaks of Transform Sickness, but I don’t know if he’s doing so to expose them or cover them up.”
“What service did he serve in during the war?” Hank asked.
“The OSS.”
Hank winced and turned away. “The Allies’ clandestine services were far more chaotic in WWII than they are today, with a strong cowboy ‘anything goes’ mentality. Someone like our patient zero likely also worked in the British, British Colonial, and Canadian services as well. With their resources at his command, there’s no wonder he’s got so many firm identities.” He paused. “But 1937 is too late for our patient zero.”
“I’d wondered,” the Focus said. “If Dr. Sanderson’s Cal Tech team’s latest is correct, catching TS, if there’s no ambient dross around, produces a failed transformation.” Hank nodded. Dr. Sanderson was the latest of many academics to hypothesize that the Nazis created TS by combining the genomes of multiple bacteria. “The reason Transform efflorescences are so rare is likely because they require someone to transform in the area where a failed transformation happened recently.” She paced around to behind him, and laid one of her small hands on his shoulder. “None of this makes me happy. This man is a serious hazard.”
“What’s his game, Lori? What he’s doing doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”
“Someone or something must be backing him,” Lori said. “Until we can discover who or what that is…”
Their analysis would never produce more than useless speculation. He nodded.
“Now about my list,” he said. “Do you see any of these we can work on while I’m here and Carol’s doing whatever she’s doing?”
“I do, but it’s a bit disgusting.”
You Wake Up In A… (continued)
Hank made himself as small as possible in Connie Yerizarian’s office, where she sat behind her desk with her palms down on the surface and looked like the victim of a very bad day. Ever since last Friday night – when he surprised himself and the Inferno household by accepting an invitation to their Friday night extravaganza – he had felt more a part of the household, enough to pick up some ‘you are not a household leader and shouldn’t be here’ vibes from the current discussion.
The reason for his acceptance of the invitation last Friday was named Lisa Kocian, a new-to-Inferno Transform in her late 30s. He couldn’t see himself actually having an affair with her, or falling in love, but he could see a friendship developing around their academic chatter and Friday nights. She had been an associate professor of psycholinguistics at Ohio Wesleyan when she transformed and of course got fired from her job. She hadn’t known who he was when she sat down beside him one day at lunch and asked ‘So, what sort of freak are you?’
Her tendency to veer off into postmodern academic Marxist cant about textural analysis made him want to wince, though.
“I believe the polite answer is ‘no’,” Connie Yerizarian said. The Inferno head of household shook her head at Lori with a wave of gorgeous blond hair. “The impolite answer is ‘what the fuck’s wrong with you, Lori?’ You haven’t wanted anything to do with our Monster control missions for years.”
Here it came. Hank attempted to shrink further.
“I’m going as Hank’s bodyguard.”
“I didn’t hear that,” Connie said, after ten seconds of dead quiet.
“He’s on loan here from Arm Hancock, this Monster control mission is part of his project, and the whole thing’s paid for by that bag of cash Carol dropped off along with Hank,” Lori said. “He’s here to be guarded, and if he gets as much as a scratch, I’d better be bleeding a lot worse if you want to live through the Arm temper tantrum that will follow.” Pause. “You never mess with an Arm’s prize possessions.”
Connie rolled her eyes and sighed. Theatrically. “Ignoring the entire concept of Doc Pain here being anyone’s chattel slave, which is as crazy as the moon being made out of green cheese, and ignoring the fact that if you die we all die, Lori, then answer me this: why are either of you going along on this?”
Lori turned away. “When a Major Transform or a mature Monster dies, there’s a dross explosion. We need to figure out the scientific details of what’s happening in these dross explosions. Hank’s going to be running tests as it happens.”
&n
bsp; “So you’re not only risking yourselves for research, you’re going to be capturing a Monster and then killing her in cold blood?” Connie’s voice rose to a shriek. “The Nobles will never talk to us again. Monsters are people to them!”
“That’s where your part comes in, Connie,” Lori said. “You need to find us a Monster with such a bad reputation that the most squeamish of the Nobles won’t care in the slightest about what we’re doing.” Pause. “Oh, and round up one of those uncaring Nobles to tag along with us.”
“So not only are you going to be risking yourself needlessly and doing the evil Focus routine, you’re also going to be going up against one of the old dangerous and unkillable Monsters?” She put her head in her hands and growled. “Zielinski, if we get even the smallest hair of blowback from this, I’m not only going to hold you responsible, I’m going to make sure you’re on bathroom maintenance duty for the rest of the time you’re here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hank said. “Of course, ma’am.”
---
Hank flipped through the vibrating document, attributed to Viscount Frederick Dowling, and whistled. The Viscount had reduced the number of standard Monster types from twenty-one to fourteen, and provided excellent proof for his reductions. He had also removed the silly terminology the Nobles and Arms used to describe the Monster varieties. No more ‘Moo’ or ‘Horsie’.
The fourteen were the canids, the boars, the ratites, the crocodilians, the ursinoids, the perissodactyloids (home of both the ‘horsies’ and the ‘moos’), the runners, the snakes, the apes, the rodentoids, the felinoids, the lizardoids and the mantisoids. Hank was amused at the inclusion of the latter, as the Viscount had explicitly referenced Hank’s publications on the previously named ‘Bugs’. Hank considered the mantisoids to be non-standard or Sport Monsters, similar to the ‘fish Monsters’ in lack of commonality. The Viscount had convincingly proven that the mantisoids uncommon nature was due to their difficulty in surviving outside of the tropics and sub tropics. Hank’s work, quoted here, explained how a human woman could morph into a seemingly impossible Monster variety such as a mantisoid and live through the process. First, you turned the skin into a chitin layer, then changed the muscle attachments from the bones to the exoskeleton, then divide her 2 arms into 4, and…
Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two Page 9