Prologue. Zurich 2066. What the Girl Saw.
The Girl stood in the doorway of the laboratory, the brightness of the lights streaming harshly out into the dead of night through the window. The Girl held the key tightly in her hand and fingered the card key in her pocket.
Okay, she thought, I'm here now... I've gone to far. She crossed the room quickly to the heavy iron door dominating the opposite side of the room, reinforced with a hard-light shield and a pin number lock. The Girl took the card key and pressed it to the sensor, deactivating the shield. It had been easy for her to steal the card, she simply waited until her professor had fallen asleep, half drunk as she always was when not working late in the laboratory with her student who stood alone in the lab now. The pin number had been much harder. The student had waited until it had been dark and pretended to get along with the tasks given to her when in actuality she had been watching the professor punch in the numbers, 2064. The same year she had joined the project. The sneak felt a deep pang of guilt as she punched in the numbers. She took a deep breath to calm herself as she put the key in the door and hesitated. I could be kicked from the project, no, if push comes to shove I'll blackmail her first, I'm to important too the project anyway, she should have told me what is in the room, I tell her things about me. She didn't want to blackmail her though and hoped she could return the card and keys to her sleeping mentor before she woke up. The Scientist held her breath as the door swung open on oiled hinges.
And what she saw would stay with her for the rest of her life.
The smell coming from the room was the sickly-sweet stench of rot, the floor being covered in a black cloying mist that the Girl had smelt many times before and had made theories as to where it came from. She knew now, in the centre of the room was a still breathing corpse. The limbs of the thing had swollen out of proportion with the rest of the body, muscle tissue ripping through skin to reveal the red underneath the blackness of the skin. The skin on the torso had grown black and necrotic, the black mist emanating from the skin as the skin retracted and rotted along with corrupted flesh. The Girl watched through horrified eyes as the muscle and skin grew back almost as soon as it evaporated, the place where the genitals should be had been mutilated beyond recognition of the sex of the thing and connecting to the genitals was a syphon collecting a gently glowing gold liquid, incongruous in its beauty to its surroundings, the same liquid the girl had willingly injected into herself and had only a moment before been considering to use as blackmail. Blind eyes glared from a broken, emancipated face and they were pointed right at Angela.
Angela opened her mouth to scream and felt fingers clamp around her mouth in a steel grip.