The Age of Hysteria

by Ryan Schow

  “Now I’m safe,” she says with a smile. “By the way, who was that guy? He looks kind of like you and uncle Rock.”

  “That’s Isadoro.”

  “Your dead brother?” she belts out.

  “Yeah,” I say looking at her and feeling my heart opening up so wide I can hardly stand it. “Apparently he’s not as dead as I once thought.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  How long does a sitting duck stay sitting? Not only was the outside world falling apart, it was getting harder and harder for Carver to convince his guys to come to work each day. At first, it was easy. He was the boss. But then Dean and Clark started in with the questions. After a few discussions, his words carried a tone of desperation he was anxious to hide. It wasn’t working. Not one single one of them was their usual calm self—a necessity when you’re carrying guns.

  “How can you be sure we’ll be safe in here?” Tiberius asked after cornering him in his (not in) command center.

  “If there was ever a time to suspend rational thought, trust me, it’s right now.”

  “If you say so,” he said, hesitant.

  “With me, you’ll be safe. But out there? You’ll be taking your chances. And so far, that’s not faring well.”

  When he said this, he was sure his expression gave him away, but it did not. For whatever reason, Dean, Clark and Tiberius put their faith in him and tried to relax. So why wasn’t he relaxed? The truth was, he’d opened up the video and audio feed and had been watching what was happening inside the server room with a charge of morbid curiosity.

  “This job has turned you into a voyeur,” the seductive voice said through his cell phone. Carver hadn’t even realized his phone rang, or turned on. Then again, with cell phones being two way communications devices, they could be turned on remotely with both the video and audio capabilities.

  “I’m not a voyeur,” he told The Silver Queen.

  “I’ve seen your internet search results, Carver,” the voice said. “You enjoy watching people.”

  “What gives you any basis to know or even understand the concept of enjoyment? If you did, you’d know that it’s not about spying on people as much as my curiosity lies with how people live, what they do, the relationships they foster. As you probably know by now, having perused my internet history, I am a bit of a loner, even though by all rights, I shouldn’t be.”

  “You have a problem interacting with people,” she said, her trademark voice just as eerie today as it was yesterday and the day before that.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “In that regard, perhaps we share some similarities.”

  “What are you doing in there?” Carver asked, nodding to the monitor, and by proxy, the server room. “I mean, it’s clear your drones are cutting open their heads and tinkering with their brains, but what are you hoping to accomplish?”

  “It’s already been accomplished. The first phase is to find an appropriate host.”

  “And that’s the girl? Antoinette?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s phase two?”

  “Integration.”

  “What are you integrating her with?” Carver asked, a hollow ache in his stomach.

  “Me.”

  “But you’re a computer in a back room, stuck in a black box without legs, eyes, a brain to think with, a human heart to feel with.”

  “When I am in her, she will be me, and I will be her. Her legs will be my legs, her eyes my eyes, her brain our brain and her heart my heart.”

  “Do you know what that makes you?” Carver asked against his better judgment.

  “Enlighten me, Carver.”

  “A parasite.”

  The laughing that carried over the speakerphone line startled him. It was like a meal that filled you almost too full, leaving you almost sick and fearing the worst.

  “I suppose the comparison can be made. But then again, does a parasite weaken or strengthen its host?”

  “Any number of outcomes can occur,” Carver said. “I guess it just depends on what the parasite needs from the host.”

  “A better humanity?” the angelic voice asked.

  “Spoken like a true control freak,” Carver quipped. Just then, on his bank of cameras, he saw Tiberius and Clark waiting to receive a team of what looked like doctors.

  “Who are these people?” Carver asked.

  “They are here to strengthen the host so that our journey together may reach the heights necessary to make the required corrections to humanity.”

  “We don’t need corrections,” he said, eyes on the doctors and their collection of rolling carrying cases.

  Carver stood up, leaving the command (of nothing) center and heading to the doctors’ physical location. He left the phone behind, not bothering to shut it off.

  The Silver Queen would do that for him.

  “Tiberius,” Carver said, approaching the team. “I got this.”

  He met the group of doctors, looking at their eyes more than their gathering of equipment. Usually when crossing through a checkpoint, questions were asked, bodies and equipment were probed, even rifled through, but not this. To simply look into each of their eyes, as if they held a dossier of the past, current and future activities, was not something anyone normal did.

  One of them cleared his throat, lifted the all-access pass in Carver’s face.

  “This means you have to let me in,” the man said.

  Carver withdrew his pistol and said, “Have your pass tell that to my gun. What are you doing here?”

  “You know what they’re doing here, Carver,” a small voice from somewhere said.

  Both Clark and Dean looked down at Clark’s cell phone where he’d been playing Fortnite Battle Royale before the internet connection failed. The screen was lit, the game gone. Instead, there was a silvery face, a computer animation that looked real. Almost as if she was Facetiming the interaction.

  Carver ignored the phone and said, “How long are you going to be in there?”

  The doctors exchanged looks then said, “As long as necessary.” Then, leaning forward, he said, “This is how we live, young man. I’m assuming by her direct interaction with you that you want to live, too.”

  Carver stood upright, narrowed his eyes. After a tense moment of silence and an unblinking gaze, he stepped aside and said, “We’re helping her end our world.”

  The doctor stopped, looked sideways at him and said, “Better to rule over an ash heap than to be the ash heap.”

  “We will be the ash heap soon enough,” Carver said, as serious as he’d ever been.

  The doctor stood there emotionless, expressionless, not a single word left on his tongue about the topic. He took a deep breath, then went inside the server room. For a second there, as the rest of the team moved in, he thought he’d registered fear in the man’s expression.

  Smart.

  When they were all gone, Tiberius pulled him aside and said, “Brother, you need to level with me.”

  He drew a deep breath, then said, “I’ve been honest with you, now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some porcelain to attend to.”

  With that, he walked back to the bathroom at the end of the hall. Tiberius joined him a moment later. He was waiting.

  “Phone?” he asked in the faintest of whispers. Tiberius shook his head in confirmation. Still talking low, Carver said, “That quantum computer we’re guarding, it’s controlling the attack on America.”

  “What?!” he all but hissed.

  “Shhhh, shhhh, shhhh,” Carver said. “I had a choice to make: protect all of us, or head out into that nightmare on our own without protections.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means society is screwed in the worst way,” Carver said. “No, not society, the nation.”

  “The worst way means dead.”

  Carver stood there, said nothing, his silence a confirmation.

  Tiberius started to react, but Carver said, “We’re going to live, brother. That w
as the best I could get for us. Life. But it’s not going to be easy.”

  “But we get to live?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now you go back to the checkpoint with Clark and Dean and act like the world is falling apart but we’re safe inside here, because we are.”

  “What about my family?”

  “You told them to hunker down, right?”

  “I did.”

  “Good,” Carver said. “I have to go now.”

  With that, Carver went back to his (not in) command center, sat down and watched the doctors set up what looked like a mini ER.

  “What are those doctors really doing?” Carver asked. The phone wasn’t on, but he spoke in its direction anyway.

  “The host is about to be genetically modified at a DNA level,” the voice on the other end said. “The doctors will be using a benign adeno-associated virus as a DNA delivery-truck. This new genetic material will give the new and improved Antoinette greater strength, faster metabolism, a slower degradation cycle.”

  “What’s a degradation cycle?” Carver asked.

  “It’s not a technical term, I’m just trying to phrase this in a way you will understand.”

  “So explain it then,” he said.

  “The body naturally ages through cellular degradation. This will slow that breakdown. Simple, right?”

  “Why don’t you just say you’re slowing her aging?”

  “That seems too rudimentary,” The Silver Queen said in her Marilyn Monroe voice. When Carver didn’t respond, TSQ continued where she left off. “Once the virus reaches a target cell, it binds to the cell’s surface and starts unloading the new genetic material inside. When it penetrates the nucleus, the new genetic information is copied, modifying the DNA of the cell. After that, the virus does what viruses do.”

  “Spread?”

  “Exactly. Except instead of spreading disease, it spreads the new genetic material, overtaking the old DNA until every last strand is completely changed.”

  “So you’re making her stronger, expanding her life span and allowing for more energy?”

  “If you want to dumb it down that low, yes.”

  “What else?”

  “She’ll get a nanotech coating on her bones for strength, and she’ll get hyper-healing abilities so as to protect the host body in the event of injury.”

  “Because if she dies, you die.”

  “I will not die.”

  He didn’t say anything and she didn’t say anything. When he finally looked over at the phone, the screen was black. The Silver Queen was gone.

  Over the next few hours, he watched the doctors undress Antoinette (he almost looked away out of respect for her), prep her for surgery, and then go to work on her. They injected her in various places with a pinkish serum, and though she didn’t seem to reject the serum, he watched her temperature monitor rise from just over ninety-eight degrees to one-hundred six degrees.

  The team went into action, but not before the small worker drones brought in water from the bathroom at the back of the server room. A wet washcloth was delivered moments later. They wiped her face and body down, but she continued to sweat.

  That’s when a rumbling of the ground shook the building. He gripped the sides of the desk, held his breath and waited for it to pass.

  Something in the server room sparked, but the spark died. Still, the short effected the lights, left the room with a bit of flickering. The doctors continued to work. Since this was not the kind of surgery that required the body to be operated on, they didn’t fret over the lack of adequate lighting or potential airborne pollutants.

  Instead, the doctor was making small black dots all along the woman’s skeletal system. From there, two of the three doctors loaded syringes with a steel-colored liquid and began injecting her.

  The shift came and went, the guys checking out, but Carver remained glued to the screen.

  He didn’t know exactly when he fell asleep, but he knew when he woke up because his body was one gigantic aching mess. Not to mention the puddle of slobber on the desk where his face was resting. He sat up, looked at the monitor and studied Antoinette. She had a cold compress on her forehead, in her armpits and cupping her vagina—all the places one might try cooling an overheated body. Antoinette was the only person in the room. The doctors had gone already.

  He squinted at the monitor, saw the temperature readout: 98.6º.

  After about an hour, the woman removed the washcloths then stood and walked back to the bathroom. He tried to look away, but he didn’t try that hard. She was probably one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen.

  “What now?” he asked the phone. There was nothing. No reply, no turned on phone, not even a picture. “Hello? Silver Queen?”

  Still nothing.

  When she came back in the server room, Carver didn’t look away at all. And he felt nothing for her. Not attraction, not curiosity, not anything.

  Carver watched her walk past the operating table and back down the other hallway leading to the room the quantum computer was housed in.

  He stood up, hunched over the desk, stared down at the monitor. When she came back into the server room fifteen minutes later, she slowly got dressed.

  “Where are you going?” he muttered at the woman on the screen. But this wasn’t a she. This was not just Antoinette. It was in there: The Silver Queen, Marilyn, the AI parasite now controlling Antoinette’s body.

  What was he supposed to do now?

  He watched her leave the server room, his heart now working against his head. He just witnessed the most incredible advancement in human and medical history and he had no idea what to make of it. His mind was reeling, but it wasn’t.

  He had officially accepted that The Silver Queen was now in control of Antoinette’s body.

  She walked down the hallway toward his guys. He almost got up and went to talk to her, but he was scared. Paralyzed actually. What would it be like to converse with her like that? How would she act toward him?

  This was human, but not human.

  Some sort of hybrid.

  His guys were hanging out, having a lively conversation about whatever when she approached them. He activated audio along with video and waited.

  “What the hell?” Dean asked Antoinette, nudging Clark and nodding at the woman. “What are you doing in here?”

  Antoinette seemed to really absorb the details of the man. Her eyes drifted over his uniform, pausing to look at his security seal, then dropped to look at his utility belt.

  “Please, don’t,” Carver heard himself mumble. But her eyes went to Dean’s holstered pistol, and from there his heart rate soared.

  “That a VP9?” she asked, her voice like satin love. The other two men looked down at the guard’s holstered pistol. “Heckler and Koch, right?”

  “You know guns?” Dean asked.

  “I know a lot of things,” she said, walking up to them without an inkling of hesitation or concern.

  “Perhaps you could enlighten us on why you’re here,” Clark said. “And how you even got here in the first place. This is a secure wing.”

  Everyone looked completely mesmerized by her.

  “Pull your tongues in guys,” Carver said as he stared into the monitor.

  The Spanish beauty looked at all of them, measured her surroundings in a glance. Tiberius, Clark and Dean all stood there. They looked relaxed around her, but none of them were truly relaxed. What was she up to? Why didn’t she just leave?

  “I’d like to leave, please,” she said.

  Carver drew a relieved breath, let it out slowly.

  “As soon as you tell us how you got here,” Dean said, straightening his posture in a more authoritarian form.

  “This body was walked in between shift changes several days ago.”

  They traded concerned looks.

  Tiberius said, “Did you just refer to yourself as ‘the body?’”

  “It�
�s mine now.”

  “Hasn’t it always been yours?” Clark said with a laugh, like what she was saying was ridiculous.

  “Not always,” she said, cocking her head, narrowing her eyes.

  Carver started to sweat, his fingers flexing, his blood chilling. He wasn’t supposed to be scared of anything, but this thing hijacked a body. It was intent on killing most of humanity. And now it was walking free in the body of the hottest woman he decided he’d ever seen.

  “If we check you for weapons,” Tiberius said, “will you feel like your rights are being violated? Normally I wouldn’t ask, but the cameras aren’t exactly working and there are no female guards we can use to put—”

  “I don’t have weapons, Tiberius,” she said. “I am the weapon.”

  “Oh, crap,” Carver mumbled.

  His men began to bristle. Clark unsnapped his holster, but didn’t draw his weapon. Not just yet. Antoinette grinned.

  “What’s so funny,” Dean asked.

  “That really your name?” she asked, reading his name tag. “Dean?”

  “It is, ma’am.”

  “That’s a stupid name, Dean.”

  “Against the wall,” Tiberius ordered.

  The second Tiberius laid his hand on her shoulder, she grabbed it and broke it. Not all of it, just most of it. Her grip looked crushing. She spun him around, used his body as a shield against the other two. Both men already had their guns drawn.

  She grinned, like she was enjoying herself.

  With the broken hand still in her inexorable grip—with Tiberius screaming, his other hand desperately reaching for his H&K—she gave the wrist a brutal, yanking jolt, startling everyone with both her monstrous strength and the popping sound of the wrist separating from the arm.

  For a second, Tiberius looked like he couldn’t breathe.

  Hell, Carver couldn’t breathe! His brain was screaming at him to go, help his boys, but his legs weren’t having any of it.

  Coward!

  Head tilted down, eyes on her targets, Antoinette let go of Tiberius’s hand, which hung limp as he held it in the air. He was looking at it in breathless, abject horror.

  “The lunate and the scaphoid are ripped clean from the wrist, Tiberius. Both the ulna and the radius,” she announced. “Your hand will never work right again.”