Voices teetered, gasped and murmured forbidden promises and lustful lies. Commands barked, whimpers pleaded, screams rang long and loud. A whispered prayer underscored as a last attempt of redemption before life was ripped, torn and consumed.
The being named Alex Mercer felt it all. Felt, not heard, because it was inside of him; a part of the matrix of neurons and memory he had meshed with his own existence. Each vision and sound a ragged mess as he had not learned how to farm information without razing the ground into barren wastes.
He had too much; so many imposing their quirks and experiences on his own tattered psyche. If he hadn't been a near blank it would have cracked his sense of self and he would have been as mindless as the pink-skinned hunters that roamed the heights. If he hadn't had the narcissistic and self-centered mind of his first consumed host as a template, he would have been a chaotic mess swaying between catatonia and animalistic territoriality like Greene.
Yes, he was aware that he wasn't truly Alex Mercer anymore than eating a hamburger makes someone a cow. He was even aware that thinking of himself as a 'he' rather than an 'it' was presumptuous and inaccurate. Those were terms reserved for actual people.
A man can moo without being a cow, why shouldn't he allow himself the indulgence of the same?
That last train of thought is very unlike the doctor-scientist that was once Mercer. The man wouldn't have cared either way. Inconsequential and inane; grammar for grammar's sake. He would have only cared if it was used by others to diminish him and then he would plot some harsh retribution that far outweighed the initial insult.
No, this casual and slightly humorous insight came from a bit of brain matter from an up-and-coming reporter that snuck her nose into Blackwatch's business and died as a quick meal, an easy target, as Mercer tried to escape poisonous red mist.
She valued words and their intricate meanings that went past paltry definitions and into cultural groundwork. She also liked greasy fast-food and mocked her vegetarian colleagues by oinking, mooing and clucking as she ate several bits of processed animals.
Another slice of soul, an octogenarian war vet of one the lesser known American conflicts, would have loved that reporter till the end of time as she had been exactly the type of woman he had searched and never found during his long, bachelor life. The old man had almost revealed Mercer's location when he was casing a military compound, intent on sneaking inside.
That was near the beginning, when he killed because it was easier than skulking in the shadows, before he realized that the voices stuck around; the last rage of thoughts ringing loudest in the maelstrom that was soon becoming what he could only describe as his soul.
Several fervent religious bystanders had him believing that yes, he had a soul and yes, he was condemned to a variety of hells. The more forgiving religions accepted him with unabashed love and that was worse than any vision of eternal damnation.
No matter what anyone says of New York and its people; atheists, true atheists are a rare breed.
Zeus. Yes, an easier moniker than Alex Mercer, more comforting than the blacklight virus or monster; Zeus could grasp the mind of Mercer the easiest and more completely than the rest. And just like them, the loudest thought was the last and in Alex's case that was escape and vengeful anger. It had curled his being into an uncaring beast that slaughtered for convenience's sake.
Even walking down the sidewalk was a test of frustrated will in those first days as he only wished to remove everyone from his path, to bulldoze through them no matter the loss of life. He settled to simply push everyone a step too close and even then pedestrians would be smacked by a car from time to time, a sudden obstacle on the road.
It is not a fair representation of the man that Alex Mercer used to be. He had loved, somewhat; had strived to accomplish in his life, however crookedly; had toyed with the forces of nature in ways man was not meant to and through his actions chaotic pestilence had been unleashed on an unsuspecting city.
Not a perfect man, but one nonetheless, so Zeus could not think very little of him.
Yet, he looked down on the scientist because from his skewed point of view, Mercer had been very...well, very one-dimensional. Once more, it's not fair to think badly of the deceased as they cannot defend themselves and there are still large chasms of memory that Zeus will never uncover of his previous foster life.
Still, besides the point, he had consumed his targets of interest in a manic need to know more and these businessmen, soldiers and scientists tended toward the sociopathic and heartless thus hardening Zeus' resolve to be ruthless and uncaring.
Yet, there were cases of mistaken identity and he grabbed the wrong person; or he was wounded and in need of quick recovery; or had gone slightly insane and rampaged through the streets killing hundreds in a few moments.
He avoided the killers and soulless researchers a bit after those episodes. It always brought the worse out of him and the more he consumed, the more the web spread and interconnected reinforcing the predominant traits of bloodlust and detachment.
Of course, not every soldier was a coldhearted assassin, not every scientist an unethical Mengele; and the unlucky civilians that crossed his path? Most of them were mild-mannered and ever increasingly scared as their city crumbled before their eyes.
When he was revealed to the masses as not only the person responsible for the bioterrorism attack, but also a deranged serial killer, it had gotten… odd.
In line with popular belief about New York and its people; the strange and unbalanced are decidedly not a rare breed.
A suicide club had managed to track him down better than any cloak and dagger operative. After the third gleeful fist-pump and shout of victory as organs were ripped and slurped into his red-black biomass – a cheering, not screaming group of onlookers high-fiving each other – he swore off the volunteer meals as he didn't want to pick up whatever behavioral trait led to viewing gruesome death as a worthwhile reward.
Then there were the targets that made sexual insinuations as a bargaining tool to survive or outright tore their clothes off. It didn't matter as Zeus had no sexual inclinations as he retained the centers that dealt in memory, not desire and emotion. His physical desires stripped down to the recollections of others, classifying himself as a straight male because most of his consumed preys were straight males.
Just like any figment of emotion like anger and despair, it became a part of him, only he produced no testosterone, or any other human hormone, anymore to fuel it.
Nevertheless, he approached those that unknowingly appealed to that lifeless part leisurely, with the thousands of moments of slow caresses and heartfelt touches swirling in his mind, and stroked along their chins and joined lips to give them a last flare of hope before his tongue grew too long and pierced their skulls.
By this point, there were too many fearful screams and gibbering pleas swirling inside. The glimmer of salvation was a blessed relief to experience in his ever-developing web.
Variety was good. It was also bad for Zeus as it pieced and cobbled pieces of humanity and morality. He started to see things differently, started to realize the beauty of a sunrise, the joy of a child's laugh and the heartbreak of a last goodbye. All cliché, true, but it was new unexplored territory for him.
He had started to care. That was why he looked down on Mercer, because the man hadn't been emotionally strong enough to give a damn about anyone besides himself.
Still, mistakes were made and prices paid.
Zeus had snuck up on a woman his jagged memories would paint as a high-level mover and shaker at Gentek. Quiet and slow on a street empty enough that he could consume her out in the open with no one the wiser, he wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her quickly.
Her hands grasped his arms to regain balance, mouth open to sound out her surprise. Though she'd never get the chance as Zeus rapidly snapped her spine and fed himself with every ounce of her flesh.
The woman was not part of Gentek, couldn't even tell the difference between bacteria and a virus. Instead, she was a mundane mother of two, her children toddlers still, and she was out looking for her good for nothing husband that had gone out hours ago to look for a bit of milk. They were out and the kids would start to complain if they didn't get their fill of mac&cheese.
Mercer recalled that that particular grocery store had been rammed by a tank he had carelessly shoved out of his way, funnily enough at about the same time the husband had left to the corner store.
She had seen the wreckage of course, and hoped beyond hope that it was like that before her husband showed up. He must have gone someplace else and had a hard time tracking down even milk substitutes since the supply trucks were showing up less and less often. With everyone milling about on the streets, minding their own business in a city that never sleeps, not even for a biomonstrous invasion, there could not be any possible way that he laid dead inside of a store, ignored like every death by a people that cared so little before and now no longer even pretended concern.
So, she wandered the streets, stopping by her apartment to eye the kids and leave a message to her wayward loved one to stay put when he comes home.
And just as she was about to let the pit of her stomach drop all the way down and accept that her dear little John-bon would never keep her waiting as he's always too much of a sweetheart; just as she was about to turn back and head to her dvd-hypnotized children and hold them close; just when her heart was about to shatter into a million pieces, the virus turned man had hauled her up just as her husband had on their wedding night. A scary unexpected lift, those years ago, that ended in giggles on the floor as he wasn't strong enough to keep them both up.
It was the first time Zeus knew sudden, overwhelming joy. It was the first time he wept, ignored by passersbys that only saw a chubby and mousey woman clutch her head and wail in grief.
The pain made Zeus wish for the simpler days of Mercer's one-tracked –though easily distractible- vengeance. Finally, he understood why the man tried so hard to repress his emotions. It not only hurt. It remained.
It remained as he stumbled to the woman's, Margaret's, apartment and hugged children that would never be his.
It remained as he called number after number of her friends, only to find disconnected lines and hurried messages that they were going to try and get out of Manhattan.
It remained as he packed their bags with keepsakes and photos of their deceased parents and wrote on their chests and backs the phone number and address of their grandparents in Michigan. Permanent marker, no telling how long the quarantine would last.
It remained as he left them in a decrepit stone cathedral, the nuns herding hundreds of new orphans and abandoned children. If it weren't for the hunters and Elizabeth Greene being able to track him, he would have made the mac&chesse the way their mom had known precisely how to do. More milk than water, for added flavor.
It remained, then he consumed a company soldier on a roof and it blended into the rest of the web; diluted yet still present, another voice drowned by the cacophony as it became part of the growing tide of endless sounds. After several other kills, it grew ghostly. Nevertheless, it was there and it had changed him.
They had all changed him.
Mercer may have been a shell of a man; a scientist that had exposed himself to Greene and carried capsids of a runner strain that would soon perish in his body as only women could be carriers. And if he had not held a vial of the cognizant virus, modified to be less virulent, more chronic than acute to allow closer study, and shattered said vial at his dying feet. If he had chosen a different path, not in the station next to expert parkourists practicing jumps, then Zeus would not be. An acrobatic prototype unknowingly created by freak chance and a bastard's last 'fuck you' to the world.
Zeus came off as bipolar to the inhabitants of the quarantine zone; saving people from mutated beasts one second, crashing helicopters into filled-to-capacity buses the next. In truth, it was a mere reflection of the city's soul. Its greatness and decadence, its charity and greed, its heroes and villains.
He was a creation from many. A Frankenstein's monster pieced from the minds of countless dead. Not Frankenstein. Forget what pop culture and Halloween propaganda would pump out to the masses. Mary Shelly's book was about a mad scientist, not the abomination he had created.
He had consumed an aspiring writer and knew this as well as commanding any military vehicle.
Alex Mercer was Frankenstein.
Zeus, his creation, a mad mix of turmoil and hasty experimentation.
Whatever allegory anyone would piece together from this was excessive babbling.
What matters is that at the end, even though the monster had found humanity, it was still deemed too grotesque to live and died in hatred fueled flames.
He had thought that the blast from a nuclear explosion would be similar in metaphor enough even as he raced away back to the shoreline.
Sadly, fortunately, regardless, it wasn't and he had to live with it. Had to live with all of it and all the voices of the murdered that claimed a piece of his inner being, for now till his own sense of self succumbed to their cursing, pleading and querulous demands. /lj-cut
A/N: Written as an exercise to try and grasp how I would like to represent the character from the game. Check out the new livejournal community 'prototype_fic' for more.