“I don’t know if I’ll be able to, myself.” Kim paused. “Probably. I don’t want to talk about it, though. You said something about Monsters having a Major Transform metabolism? Are you saying Monsters are Major Transforms?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“The information isn’t something we like to bandy about when the media is present.”
“They’re intelligent?”
“Any Monster of human size or larger, who’s been a Monster over ten weeks or so, is more intelligent than a human. But – and this is why we’re a little careful about things – they aren’t intelligent in the same way a human is intelligent. Think predator intelligence, not normal primate intelligence. Monsters keep growing and changing, for about four years. After four years, they’ve hit their ‘adult’ shapes, sizes and mentalities. At that point, their brains are as convoluted as ours are – primate intelligence – and they out-mass our brains by a sizeable fraction. The only reason they don’t talk is they rarely possess the vocal apparatus necessary for speech. Most can learn to understand language, if they have a reason to relearn it.”
“They don’t remember their previous lives, then.”
“No. They don’t.”
“What about that thingie, the metawhosits, that Major Transforms have? That’s what the media thinks sets Major Transforms apart from the run of the mill Transforms.”
“The metacampus? Monsters start growing them after two years, and finish late in their third year.” He didn’t want to complicate things by talking about the metamygdala and the other brain changes. “A Major Transform is nothing more than an accelerated Monster, with those four years of change compressed into a several day transformation coma.” This was truer than even most of his colleagues knew. Hank’s own relatively recent discovery that Arms modified their shape based on psychological stress proved that.
“So Monsters have Transform telepathy?”
Hank sighed. He absolutely hated that media neologism. It wasn’t telepathy at all; the metasense was a combination of electromagnetic and olfactory senses. Stoppable by many means, including strong electromagnetic interference. “Some do, but none have even as good a metasense as a Focus. The primary use of the Monster metacampus is to regulate juice storage and Monster basal fundamental juice.”
“Right. Sorry, Doc, that’s a bit above my science level. I’m a business major. Uh…”
Kim ran out of sight, and then vomited. She didn’t talk after that, just moaning and groaning. She had been talking to him to drive the pain away, but that sort of trick would work only for a while.
“Hey, Doc, Hank?” Kim said, perhaps ninety minutes later, her voice a whisper. “Could you talk to me? Please?”
He hesitated for a moment, and then made his decision. He couldn’t help but think of Kim as a person, and as a person, she needed all the help he could give her. If she wanted stories, he would tell her stories.
“Sure.” Hank pulled himself up to where he could see her cell, at least, and started spinning stories. He figured Kim approached the last hours of her human life, the peak agony period. Telling the stories helped Hank keep from thinking about his coming fate, as well.
He talked about treating Focuses and Arms. About how he treated Anne-Marie, the first Focus, and pulled her back into civilization. About how he got himself hooked up with Stacy Keaton and Tonya Biggioni. How, after his life changed, he finally succeeded in getting an Arm to live through her transformation, and how insane it was for Carol Hancock, the Arm with the worst post-transformation adjustment period, to turn out to be the one who lived. How he went to Europe to meet with Erica Eissler, the European Arm, and how he fell into her orbit. How his dealings with Hancock and Eissler cost him his license, identity and freedom. How Carol later broke him out of prison and made him hers. He talked of his time with Inferno, how they and their Focus, Lori Rizzari, were out to save the world from the coming demographic disaster, when the rate of spread of Transform Sickness reached the point where it was affecting people by the millions. How he and Carol and Keaton stumbled into the games of the rogue Crow, Wandering Shade, and sparked the Battle in Detroit, by setting up a wedding as bait.
He then switched over to the Hero’s exploits – how Amy and Crow Midgard went to Europe to help Eissler fight her enemy, the Crow known of as the Purifier, and how they triggered the Bavarian Insurrection. How Amy tricked her way into the Purifier’s presence, fought off his mental control, and killed him, becoming The Hero. How Amy arranged to go on the quest into the Canadian arctic to find and return the Eskimo Spear. How Amy made him the focus of her push the Cause project, and how he succeeded with the juice music project and with teaching a Focus to pass juice to an Arm.
He said nothing about the current crisis.
Eventually, he ran out of stories.
“You still with us, Hank?” Kim said, voice strong again.
“Yes.”
“I guess this is it.”
Her last half hour.
“I hope you don’t take this wrong, but after listening to your stories, man, you’ve got some big head problems, you know.”
“After dealing with Major Transforms for fifteen years, I suspect I long ago ceased to be sane. I suspect being owned by an Arm for four years would warp anyone.”
“I’m not sure I would want to know you, outside of a nice safe prison cell. I mean, you sound like someone who’d give those Nazi death camp doctors a run for their money in the evil race.”
“I’ve been compared to Joe Mengele many times, Kim. I hope in the long run that I’m not that bad.”
“The arrogance of ‘saving the world’ as an excuse for what you participate in is simply astounding.”
“Still.”
“Still nothing. You, dear doctor, have suffered the perfect karmic fate. You know why?”
“Why?” Low juice made it hard for him to anticipate Kim’s argument.
“In your stories, you only mention Transforms, like you and me, as prey. Dinner for Arms and Chimeras. Cannon fodder for the Focuses. People who turn into Monsters, to be shot and killed. Doc, I think you may be worse than the evilest of the Major Transforms. Being turned into a male Transform and going into withdrawal is just, well, fitting.”
Kim was right. He hadn’t mentioned any Transforms in his stories. He had always been fixated on the more interesting Major Transforms. Save for during his stints in Inferno, he had never done a thing for Transforms. Directly. Now, as a bit of karmic payoff, he would pay for not helping Transforms like himself. No bevy of juice pattern slinging Focuses would be coming by to rescue him. Not a single one of the Major Transforms he helped along the way thought he was worth rescuing.
He startled to standing when he heard the snap of a rope, then gurgling, and finally, the creak of a rope swinging, weighted down by a dead body.
Kim hadn’t even said goodbye. She hadn’t thought he was worth the air.
---
Many minutes later, he dried his eyes, and went to lie down on his bed. He firmly ignored the contents of the bed underneath.
If he somehow survived Patient Zero’s cunning assassination attempt, could he make amends? Was there anything he could do? Was Gail right that his research career was over? Or did he accept her statement as truth because of her Focus charisma?
Transforms often suffered, or worse. Even in Inferno, Lori had set up the Friday night flings simply to make the lives of her Transforms better – and she gave her Transforms leave to run their own lives, one of the few Focuses to ever do so. Their lives remained miserable. Lori said the other Focuses were little more than drug pushers, though Lori’s arrogance faded once she realized her Friday night flings were just as addictive. Perhaps the Romanian solution might be the right one. They executed all their Transforms on sight. Transforms certainly had expanded the concept of evil, had certainly made the world a darker place.
Save for a few, the world didn’t yet know. Soon, they would. Ca
rol’s next big project was a huge war against the Hunter Chimeras. They wouldn’t be able to cover up that war. By the time they finished the world would know exactly how much evil Transform Sickness spawned.
Could he do anything about it, if by some miracle he survived?
Not that he could think of now. He could, though, pledge to himself to dedicate his future research to helping the Transforms and the poor normals stuck in Transform households. Give them some sort of lever on the Major Transforms. They needed it. Carol thought she owned him? Well, she failed her responsibility by leaving him here alone, newly transformed and vulnerable. He needed a real Focus, someone like Lori, but more intelligent, more driven, with more potential and with more empathy toward her household. Someone who would listen to him. A young Arm, intelligent but not corrupted by Keaton. A Crow with even an ounce of sense. A Noble – hell, that was the real lack. He didn’t understand what sort of Chimera he needed. Despite the help he had given Occum and the Nobles over the years, he still didn’t understand them as well as he understood the Focuses, Crows and Arms.
Hmm. Could he arrange to get put in a Noble household as a Commoner male?
Right. His brain was slow. The most advanced Commoner males had a sixty point IQ deficit. Like that, he would be useless.
Shit. It didn’t matter, because in a few days, he would be dead, anyway.
16.8 (12/30/72)
Squawk! “Hey, boss, you win the bet. The woman karked herself.”
“Roger that. I’ll send down the disposal squad.”
Hank woke up, his muscles nearly frozen in place. He slowly sat, his mind filled with complaints the entire way. People worked, actually worked, in this condition. He couldn’t believe it. He walked over to the front of his cell, unsteady on his feet. He watched the guard open Kim’s cell door, and listened to him make crass comments about stiff dead bodies and comparisons to his current lovers.
Five minutes later, two orderlies came by, with a body bag and some cleaning equipment. Hank let a smile cross over his face when he improbably recognized one of the orderlies. Finally, a break. He raised a mental middle finger at Patient Zero, whose assassination attempt had just failed.
“Dick!”
Dick Svetsrichen had once been Carol’s operations manager for her entire operation. Later, Carol demoted Dick for incompetence. Dick didn’t take the demotion well, and embezzled a bit too much of Carol’s money in his new position. Carol hadn’t been happy. Poor Dick. Amazingly, Dick survived, a bit brain-addled, but he somehow got himself turned into a janitor. Later, after his mind recovered, he had begged his way back into Carol’s favor and worked himself up in the Littleside management, as the facilities manager.
“Whoh! Hot damn!” Dick said, after he turned to see who called out his name. He changed the channel on his walkie-talkie, and pressed speak. “Hey, Tom, I think I’m going to get the reward for the Doc. He’s down here in the fucking no-hope-Transform bin.”
Hank winced, and winced again when the other orderly sliced the rope and let Kim’s corpse fall to the concrete floor with an unceremonious thump. “At least when they hang themselves, we don’t need to worry about straightening out the stiff,” the other orderly said.
Had he been that crass? Surely not. Yet, he remembered acquiescing to Carol’s worst with barely a bat of the eye. The word ‘triage’ came to mind, for instance…
---
“Forget this blathering about this ‘patient zero’ crap. I want you behind a desk working on juice patterns,” Gail said. Hank sat on one side of her desk, Gail on the other, tapping her fingers. She wore blue jeans today, a fluffy white blouse and had her hair tied back in a ponytail.
“I recognize your wants,” Hank said. His head remained filled with cotton and he felt three steps removed from the universe. Angry and aggressive, Gail’s charisma no longer touched him. “I need juice. I need a tag. I need a place to sleep.”
“You’re an employee of Littleside, now. I don’t have time for this. You missed two days of work. That’s coming out of your paycheck.”
Hank scratched his head. “Paycheck?”
“Surely Carol pays you.”
“Gail, I…”
“That’s Focus Rickenbach-Schuber.” She gave him a funny look as she spoke.
Hank doubled over in agony. She had done something to his juice! She hadn’t even tagged him or touched him! Dammit, she used his own juice pattern system against him and sent him into periwithdrawal! He invented this technology to help the Transform community! What sort of weapon had he given the Focuses, anyway?
He collapsed, writhing, now down on the floor. His hand swiped his forehead and came away wet with sweated-out blood. A moment later, Gail raised him back into his previous low juice state.
“You need to earn your tag, mister. Earn your juice. As I said, I don’t have time for you and your games. You either work at your assigned job, or…”
He looked up at Gail, quizzically. She leaned forward, forearms crossed on the desk and her expression cold. He hadn’t expected Gail had this side to her. Yet, her people did tell horror stories of bad juice management in the past, people in low juice because she couldn’t control her emotions. Hadn’t Carol taught her better?
Carol had at least taught Gail the stone face routine.
Yet, as he well knew, the mature side of emotional loss of control was wielding one’s hot emotions as a weapon.
Which he could do as well. Low juice or not, he refused to let Gail do this to him.
“Even Carol knew enough to seduce me into her service rather than coerce me with raw power. Even Tonya Biggioni knows that the primary tool when breaking Transforms is the reward, not the punishment. Even Winifred Adkins knows…”
Whatever she hit him with, he passed out cold.
---
Hank sat up from his position on top of a mound of dead bodies. He blinked, unbelieving. No world appeared around him, just a mound of corpses on a flat plain of, of, what? Flatness. He sat on Terry Bishop’s back. Terry’s lifeless body stopped somewhere just south of the third lumbar vertebrae. Around him, he recognized Jim Simpson’s corpse, and Bill Fentris’s, and Tina Williams’, and…
“Good illusion, Gail,” Hank said. “I’d expect this quality from Lori, but not…”
“This isn’t an illusion,” a female voice with a French accent said. Anne-Marie Sieurs, the Madonna of Montreal.
Startled, Hank looked around. Nothing.
“If it isn’t an illusion, then what is it?”
“This is your perception of the Inferno household superorganism.” All those dead, every one of them from Inferno. But, perception? Perception with what?
“Where are you, Anne-Marie? I don’t see you,” Hank said. Had he died?
“I’m not there, because it isn’t my place to be there. You’re in the Dreaming.”
Hank put his head in his hands. “I can’t be. That would mean I’m a Major Transform, and I’m not. Am I?”
“Thankfully, no. Your location is a clue, though.”
“A clue? To what?”
“The solution to your problems.”
“I’m done solving problems, Anne-Marie.” He paused. The Madonna was the strongest Focus in the Dreaming. However, she couldn’t be communicating with him, because he didn’t have a metacampus, the receiver for the Major Transform’s mental radio. How could this even be possible?
Anne-Marie sighed, a long drawn out affair. “We’ve had this discussion before, Hank. The answer remains the same.”
“You think my best work is ahead of me? After all I’ve done and all that’s happened to me?” An old lesson from years ago, at another time he had fallen.
“Of course. The world doesn’t look saved, Hank.”
“Annie, look at me. I’ve been reduced to being a mere Transform, tied to a Focus for the rest of my miserable life. Unless I find the right Focus, and find some way to break free of Carol and her control, I’m going to go nuts. Retirement looks like th
e only viable option, but only if I can survive Gail, which doesn’t look likely at the moment. She refuses to listen to a word I’m saying.” He paused, and Annie didn’t answer. “I guess I can always wash dishes for the rest of my life. Dishes, lab glassware, they’re all the same.”
“Hmm. I would say you get quite depressed when you have low juice, and downright suicidal in periwithdrawal. When Gail restores your juice, you’ll understand. You might want to keep that in mind when you tell your owners your personal foibles. You do seem to have forgotten that we all have owners.”
“You’re laughing at me.” She was. Hank could practically hear the giggle in her voice.
“You deserve laughter. You know enough to make yourself useful again. All the clues are right before you. You don’t need to break free of Carol. Or even find your mythical perfect Focus and Crow. You’re thinking backwards. Make use of what you learned from Giselle, from Patterson’s setup, and from how this conversation is possible. Pick the good points out of the bad.”
“Cryptic as always,” Hank said. “You could just tell me the answer.”
“But I don’t know the answer,” Anne-Marie said. “I just know what cryptic things to say that will allow you to find the answer. Don’t make that damned pedestal you’re putting me on too high. Talk to Van, Gail’s wife.”
Hank stopped, thought, replayed the Madonna’s last sentences in his mind. “Did you mean to say the last?” Gail’s wife?
“Of course I did. My advice is cryptic enough as it is without me making it worse by misstating things.”
Hank shivered at the implications. Marital troubles between Van and Gail? He hadn’t noticed. Of course, inattention could easily be the problem, not noticing the right things at the right time. This deadly personal flaw was a well-known old friend of his, one that had almost gotten him killed by Arms on numerous occasions.
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