by Nick Ryder
“I started my body’s gestation.”
“Nice!” Marie beamed up at the camera her lurked behind. But he wouldn’t be trapped there for long. “So it’ll be soon? How long is it going to take?”
“A couple of days. I’m not sure I’ll put my brain straight into it, though. I’m playing around with putting things back into the system to be altered.”
I watched for the penny to drop with them. Elaine grasped it the quickest, lifting her head from Marie’s lap and giving him a piercing stare. “You think our bodies can be changed?”
“I think so. I just changed the fur on a rabbit without any trouble.”
“It seems like a lot of hassle just to dye my hair.” Elaine’s voice was strained as she said it though. “That’s all you’ve tried?”
“I’m adding some wings and seeing what happens.”
“You want to put us back into the lab and play around with our bodies?” Lisa asked, obviously skeptical.
“No.” A lie. “I’m just telling you it’s a possibility, down the line. I want to do it to my own body, that’s why I’m trying it out. I don’t want to commit to a body I can’t change if it’s not the best it can be.”
“It doesn’t have to be the best,” Marie said. “It’s a body. That’s the most important part.”
“No it isn’t. I’ve got a whole lab here that can make me something amazing, something that can do anything. I don’t want to miss out on taking advantage of that.”
I’d been an idiot to think that I wanted a human body. Ego had been right: there was a huge potential here to make something amazing. It was almost better than a superpower. The ability to choose, rather than just having something lumbered on me.
“This is how I can keep the facility and you safe, by making myself a body that’s so powerful it can do anything.”
Marie’s protests died. “Thanks, Sol.” She smiled at him. “I hope that altering the bodies works out.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“We all do,” Lisa said, stretching slowly again. The movement couldn’t be satisfying at all, but she didn’t seem to mind. “But right now we’re going to watch Indiana Jones. You should join us.”
“Only if you’re skipping the fourth one.”
“Fourth one?” Elaine asked with a grin. “That’s one part of life before the change that I’ve definitely repressed.”
Chapter Eleven
When my body had finished gestating, I looked at it, and was disappointed.
I’d spent so much time ignoring my duties to build something that would be amazing, and it looked awful. It was just like creatures I’d created for my army.
I knew, really, that the reason it looked like them is because I’d created them to make sure my body would work, but now it looked boring and run of the mill.
“It needs … I don’t know, it needs something,” I told Ego. “It’s not right.”
“I agree,” Ego said. A pause. “Solomon, is a body the best idea? Isn’t it best to stay right here? Have full control? Full view of everything?”
I didn’t know how to really respond. “You don’t understand, because it’s not something you’ve ever experienced. Sure, there are cons to having a body. Probably more cons than pros, if you really want to get down to it, but when all is said and done, Ego, I am a human being. I want to sigh when I’m irritated, stretch my muscles out, and I have had a fucking phantom scratch on a nose I don’t have for months. I need to live in a body, or I won’t feel like I’m living life at all. That’s just the way my brain was wired. I don’t feel like a fully functioning consciousness. I feel like nothing.”
“Do you think I am nothing?”
“This is getting pretty philosophical, Ego. I don’t think you’re nothing. I think you are what you are. I think I am what I am. It’s just that I happen to be a breathing, blinking collection of fleshy sacs.”
I waited for an acknowledgement of my silly comment, but he said nothing. Sulking, again. It was happening more and more lately.
“Hell, I even miss that dull ache in my elbow. It was an old combat injury. It sucked, and I wished it would go away every time I lifted weights and it made me stop early, but now … I realize that every single thing I had was a part of me. Every part of my body was me. Not just my brain. That scar on my chin was when I got beat up in middle school. That patch on my leg without hair, that was when I fell off my bike. The mole on my butt I never actually saw properly, my first girlfriend used to trace it and tell me how much she liked it. I’m not just a brain. I am supposed to be a living creature, Ego, of mistakes and aches and muscle and bone. I don’t know how else to explain it to you.”
“Fine,” he said. “Although I don’t recall asking to hear your whole life story.”
I couldn’t help but laugh ... but it wasn’t a real laugh, it was just a reaction of chemicals in my brain and then the memory of the sound I used to make, echoing through our shared consciousness. That was exactly what I had been talking about.
“But, Solomon, I should remind you that this is what you wanted.” He meant the body. My body. “This is what you chose.”
“Well, it’s not right. Not yet. Now I want to change it to something else.”
The girls gathered in the lab one by one to look at it with us, tilting their heads this way and that as they took it in carefully.
“What don’t you like?” Lisa asked, stood with folded arms. “It looks powerful.”
“It looks silly,” I said. “It looks boring. I don’t like it.”
“I didn’t think you wanted something human?” Elaine asked. “This isn’t human.”
“There’s a middle ground,” I replied. “Between something human and something ridiculous and monsterish.”
“So what do you like?” Marie asked. “Any of it? Is there anything you want to keep and build it around?”
“The wings.”
“It’s because it doesn’t look at all human,” Lisa suggested. “The face is too wolf-like. I’m wolfish, but my face doesn’t have a snout. You’ve gone too far.”
She was right. Now she’d pinpointed it, I could see it. It was more monster than human, and that was just a bit too far for me right now. The girls had had their brain chemistry played with to make them accept their new bodies without a second thought, but I wasn’t letting Ego go anywhere near my brain chemistry. I had to truly accept whatever I had my brain transplanted into.
“Why don’t you start with a human blueprint and work from that?” Marie said. “Instead of patching together animal bits and manipulating it into a familiar posture … it’s weird.”
“Good idea,” I agreed. “Okay. Yeah. I’ll go back to the drawing board. I want to play around with this body while I’m deciding what to change though. I want to know if I can breathe fire like the lizard. Ego, can you add the fire sacs and see what happens?”
“Yes.”
“Great, thank you.”
“We got a lead on the tribe yesterday,” Lisa said while Ego worked.
“What?” I asked. “Why didn’t you say anything until now?”
“Because I’m not supposed to be looking for the tribe. You’ve told me a hundred times.”
“Oh.” I suppose I couldn’t fault her there, but the fact she had not come straight to me with any and all information made me uncomfortable. None of them had come to me with any information.
Then I saw Marie and Elaine’s faces.
“What?” Marie’s surprise echoed mine. “You never said anything. We didn’t see anything.”
“Maybe you didn’t, but I did. When we were out near the north side of the plateau I saw signs of someone having been there recently. There was a collection of sticks arranged into a pattern there, it was under a rock face. A good sheltered place. I can’t see how the sticks would end up like that unless a human had done it.”
“A pattern? What kind of pattern?”
Lisa pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and presented it to the came
ra so I could see. “I did that from memory when I got home, but it’s pretty close.”
It was hardly anything artistically competent, but Lisa was right, it hadn’t been done by accident. Sticks sat in a circle around the outside, creating a border, and then inside symmetrical patterns had been created. It was like a poorly crafted mandala. Maybe something spiritual.
“How far from the facility?”
“Miles. It was four hours of running that got me there, and we move quickly.”
“So no immediate danger, then?”
“I don’t think so, but–”
“Sol,” Elaine interrupted with a sharp tone. “There’s something wrong with your body.”
The previously white fur of the torso I’d created was smoldering. The skin was black and orange, and looked molten rather than just burned. It glimmered in the cold light of the lab, and didn’t seem to be spreading even though it was still alight.
“What’s going on?” I asked Ego, the shock of seeing my body on fire having weakened. It took a moment for me to remember that my brain hadn’t gone anywhere near it yet. I pushed away phantom pains quickly.
“The fire sacs don’t appear compatible with the body.”
“Non-compatibility? We haven’t had any of that yet, have we?” First mutations and now non-compatibility. New phenomena emerging within just over a week. It was true that I kept pushing for new things, but nothing had failed before.
“I haven’t seen it until now,” Ego admitted. “But I’ve been operating with autonomy on our previous creations. I’ve altered things to ensure compatibility when I’ve seen the potential for problems. When you give me a direct order, I don’t have that autonomy.”
I hummed. “The flesh doesn’t seem to actually be decaying,” I said, still hypnotized by the glow of the embers. “It’s not spreading.”
“Nerve readings suggest that, if a brain was implanted into the body, it would be feeling pain.”
“A lot of pain?”
Ego showed me a graph I didn’t understand, but it had a hell of a lot of red on it.
“I see.”
“The more powerful you try to make something, the more chance it has of going wrong,” Ego advised. “Powerful components are more complex. In this case, the structure of the body is not compatible with this fire sac, whereas the snake and lizard bodies dealt with the mutation just fine. My initial thought is that it’s a general mammalian incompatibility, but I will look deeper. In general, the more we add, the worse it will work if it works at all. We are none of us trained in creating life.”
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
“They might be more complex, but the results are powerful enough to warrant the effort,” I argued.
“The loss in nutrigel could devastate us with just a couple more mistakes like this,” he pointed out quickly. I could feel the irritation of being stuck with him, and being involved in yet another setback and debate, swirl hot through my mind.
“I’m going to do this, Ego, whether it kills me.”
“It could end up destroying a lot more than just you,” he snapped back.
I was ready to start a real blazer of an argument when sirens started blaring, even louder than the angry white noise in my head.
“Another burst pipe?” Lisa asked, wincing.
Ego was the one to answer; I felt him shift through the cameras speedily. “Intruder,” he announced.
Chapter Twelve
I was immediately at the camera looking out at the solar panels. A group of six men and women were standing looking at the panels, huddled together.
“What?” one man demanded loudly, throwing up his hands to the others.
For a second I wondered if they somehow knew I was there, but they didn’t look toward my camera at all.
“Don’t know,” another replied.
“Solar,” a third intoned, speaking as if words were new to him.
“Hm. They were right,” announced a fourth. The others nodded and kept looking at the fourth speaker as if waiting for instructions. He must have been the leader. He was better dressed than the others, his furs more colorfully adorned, and thick. He had a bird’s nest of hair on top of his head that was a shockingly bright orange. It had to be natural—I couldn’t imagine hair dye was on the list of priorities for savages.
With him were five more. Another man and four women. The girls had been right, they spoke like cavemen, in broken sentences rather than fluent English.
They hadn’t found the entrance to the facility yet, maybe I could avoid having to face them at all.
I found the girls huddled around a screen projecting what the camera at the solar panels showed.
“It’s them,” Lisa confirmed. “Some people from the tribe. I recognize one of the women.”
“What should we do?” Marie asked.
“Nothing yet. They haven’t got– oh.” As soon as I said it, one of the women noticed the entrance to the facility. “Never mind.”
“We should go and defend,” Lisa said.
“No,” I instructed. “We’ve made defenses for the facility. Let’s see how well they do.”
Marie was practically bouncing in her chair at the suggestion, and I hoped they worked as well as she seemed to think they would.
I’d locked and sealed the door to the facility, but they made quick work of dislodging it with their metal weapons—swords and daggers—used like crowbars.
That brought them to a corridor littered with traps. They stopped, crowded in the doorway, and then one stepped forward. The woman stepped straight onto the pressure plate and the floor collapsed beneath her. Three shrieking rats were hunkered, ready to accept her, pointed fangs bared.
They didn’t get very far. The woman fell instantly, and the rats attached themselves to her right legs, ripping away flesh.
But the man, the leader, caught her before she fell all the way in and hauled her out. Swords sliced at the rats that had sunks their teeth into the meat of her leg and were dragged up with her. They regrouped, and managed to decide on their next course of action without speaking.
Marie was scowling on the couch as she looked at the dead rats, and I didn’t think the rest of the pressure pads were going to make much of a dent on the tribe.
But the woman who had been mauled was limping. She didn’t have the enhanced healing granted by our nanobots, and that put us at a serious home advantage.
The leader took a sword from his scabbard and crouched down, tapping the next floor panel with a metal instrument. It didn’t react to his touch, so he stepped onto it. Nothing happened.
“Wait,” he said, and continued to use his technique on panels for the rest of the corridor. Some fell away, revealing rats and snakes that were too far below the level of the corridor to jump up and do any damage to invaders.
I’d thought having them far down was important, so that the people who fell in wouldn’t be able to get out again, but now that decision was coming back to bite me.
The whole group made it to the other side of the corridor without another incident. The mauled woman limped and moved more slowly, but the wound definitely wasn’t fatal.
Not to anyone in the facility, anyway. I supposed that the people stuck outside in the desert might not understand infection anymore. How much information really had been lost in the change? Had they been thrown right back to the dark ages out there? What on earth had happened to this group of people that had made them act so … primitively?
At the end of the corridor, there was another door. They again pried this open without much effort.
“What do you think they’ll do now?” Lisa asked, stood with folded arms beside the screen. Her back was straight and her lip curled just enough to reveal the beginnings of her lethally sharp canines. The bird perched on her shoulder took away from the intimidation factor a little. I fought the urge to tell her I was going to make her an eyepatch next and stick her back into gestation to give her a wooden leg.
“I do
n’t know.” This was the problem with the facility. It was a labyrinth. The entrance corridor was one straight line, but after that there were a thousand twists or turns that someone could take, and if I hadn’t had access to the blueprints I wasn’t sure I’d know where everything would lead even now.
The tribe didn’t seem to know either. They had three options ahead of them. Left, right, or straight on. All three directions contained traps. I’d booby trapped the entire of the first level. There was nothing on there that I needed for the day-to-day running of the facility, so it worked best as a defensive level.
They went left.
“Dammit,” Marie muttered.
“Not the one you were hoping for?” I asked.
“This neverending rat slaughter is getting a bit old,” she replied.
“You never know, maybe the rats will be the ones doing the slaughtering this time,” Elaine said, stroking the back of her lizard in time to the swishing of her tail against the metal wall of the room. She was sat on a bean bag on the floor, looking entirely relaxed, elegant and disinterested despite the invaders currently prowling along their corridors, just two floors above them.
They opened the left door and were pounced at by the half-dozen rats behind the door.
These weren’t the normal rats that were beneath the trapdoors. I’d altered them genetically to have stickier feet, like some of the spider specimens I’d taken from spiders who had managed to make the facility their home. That meant that when the door opened, and one woman stepped through, two rats that had been laying in wait above the door dropped down, their fangs aimed at her neck.
She screamed, and the sound was agonizingly human. It was so easy to forget that they were exactly the same as us when I was here behind my camera screens.
But so were the people I’d fought against in the military. The most important thing was that I knew it was necessary.
If these people got into the facility without resistance, it would put me and the girls in danger. I was just protecting what was mine.
They were actively trying to harm it. I’d warned them that this wasn’t somewhere they could just stroll into. It was guarded, protected, owned.