Chapter 10: The Technomancer
Author's Notes:
This is a much shorter chapter than usual, but a word of warning; it is very disturbing. Any squeamish readers might want to wait for the next chapter. Don't worry, you won't miss anything crucial.
Song: Atrium Carceri – "In Chaos Eternal"
Voltram Sykes paced in his private quarters, holding a hand to his face, or what was left of it, anyway. A small robot zipped towards him, carrying an emergency kit. Sykes dipped a hand into a jar on the tray and lifted out a handful of foul-smelling grey sludge. Sykes pressed his slime-covered hand to the side of his face and almost groaned with relief at the sensations of pins and needles in his left ear, which had threatened to fall off earlier. In the mirror, Sykes inspected himself. His orange eyes glowed inside deep sockets in his skull-like face. A black metal mask covered his nose and mouth. Wires and cables protruded from his head in place of hair, idly moving and twitching.
Sykes looked down at the container in his mechanical hand, and scowled. The jar was nearly empty.
Listening to the broadcasted command from Sykes' mind, the little robot crossed the room and pulled open a heavy metal door. Sykes strolled through into the chamber on the other side.
Rows of humans hung from hooks like so many butchered hogs. Some had eyes and mouths stitched shut with heavy black twine. Others were missing limbs and fingers. In their kaleidoscope of agony, one thing was constant. Every single human in that room was alive. Sykes strolled past a man whose face had been peeled away like an orange skin. Maggots writhed in the expanse of infected, bleeding flesh. As he approached, the man's lidless eyes began rolling madly in his head, and he tried to scream. All that came out was a rasping gurgle, because Sykes had long since disconnected the man's vocal chords.
"Why?" came a voice from somewhere in the depths of the room. Sykes followed the source of the noise to a small cage. The woman inside the cage was missing both arms and legs, supported by a web of straps keeping her torso upright. What remained of her body was crawling with mechanical spiders, burrowing in and out of exposed flesh. The woman spoke again, every word an effort. "Why are you doing this to us?"
Sykes reached out with one robotic hand, slashing the woman's face with a scalpel. "For the advancement of humanity," he rasped in his electronic voice, before walking away.
Reaching the end of the line, Sykes stopped. On a table was a large glass jar. Inside the jar floated a shapeless grey mass crossed through with black lines; human brains, stitched together to form one collective mass of neural tissue. Behind the patchwork brain, a row of tables held more humans. There was no need for more than basic restraints. The bodies on the gurneys did nothing but occasionally twitch. Glowing cables snaked from the base of their empty skulls, running to a terminal underneath the glass jar. Sykes examined a body closely, and cut into its arm with a blade on his hand. The body he'd sliced didn't move, but the other twelve bodies on gurneys thrashed against the leather straps holding them there.
Sykes walked back through the rows of unfortunate souls to a man with grotesquely swollen legs, each one easily two feet across. The man spasmed and pulled against his restraints, and were it not for the stitching over his mouth, he would have been howling in agony. Sykes bent down and twisted a metal tap embedded in the side of the man's left leg. The tap immediately started dripping the same grey sludge from the emergency kit. Sykes placed the jar underneath the tap and walked to a large metal box. Through a small window, a man could be seen huddling on the floor, his naked flesh smoking. Four enormous elements on the room's ceiling sent wave after wave of crushing heat down on the man inside. Sykes turned to the temperature gauge on the wall, showing ninety-four degrees. "Fascinating," he mused.
Just then, a message popped up on his inner retinal display. "Test Subject 43 located." Sykes stopped in astonishment. After years of searching, he had finally found his best work yet. Sykes quickly returned to the jar he'd left behind, turned off the tap on the man's bloated leg, and calmly left the room. The experiments were coming along nicely, but there was still much to prepare for Subject 43's return.
Author's Notes:
So, that was Voltram Sykes. Creepy bastard, if I do say so myself.
His appearance was inspired by a combination of entities:
-The Scarecrow from Arkham Knight
-A Dark Eldar Haemonculus from Warhammer 40,000
I hope I made a sufficiently terrifying and horrible villain.
Leave feedback, please! It really helps.
-the Seacopath
