CHAPTER TWELVE - Flower Child
The shape of a boy rose from the large vat in the middle of the circle of white-coated scientists. They stared quietly, watching the slime of pink and white drizzle down the body's contours, drips of milk that stretched and dropped from the boy's brow and lips and into the white surface that encircled him below his shoulders. A boy, thin and smooth, formed from melting white wax beneath the flickering fluorescent bulbs that stretched across the ceiling in rows above him.
A small, feminine scientist broke the silence first: "Product 80-05," she spoke firmly, "what is your name?"
The boy, white crystal, remained static - not a ripple crossed the milk's surface between his breast and the vat's rim.
"Product 80-05," she said again, louder now, "what is your name?"
Still not a sound kissed her ears, except for the low hum of the towering white and silver machines that filled the room around her and her peers. For a long moment, each of them had begun to think they'd retrieved another Indecipherable, until suddenly:
"You've told me my name; I am Product 80-05."
His voice startled everyone who heard - it was dark and warm as a river of black chocolate, smooth and captivatingly inhuman - a bird's call against the roar of a spreading flame.
"What are you?" The scientist asked.
The boy was still again, even the falling drips over his rounded seams had smoothed into the unblemished gloss over his bust; a statue birthed of white mercury. His hand rose from the cream, barely stirring the surface, and stopped when the tips of his porcelain fingers met where his gaze would be, had his eyes been uncovered.
"I am roses; I am daffodils and lilies. I am towering sunflowers and violet flowers of creeping thyme. I am the petals of marigolds."
The inquiring scientist stirred anxiously: "But what-"
Product 80NKA extended his arm across her breast to indicate she should remain silent. She closed her lips with a start.
80NKA's hurried movement was not undetected by the figure, who turned its head to look at the commotion. Just like the boy's voice, his movements were remarkably alien and fastidious for a creature as young as he.
Peeling his arms further from the waxy residue, the boy extended his arms to either side, gracefully pressing his fingers against the vat's edge as he hoisted himself into a standing position.
It was only upon regarding the fully-revealed figure that the scientists realized it was not a boy at all. The body's shape was completely androgynous: subtle, reclined curves wrapped its form where one might expect to find sex-determinant attributes, and the child's bones, wrapped in linens of vanilla white, gave no indication one way or another with its structure and design - no distinguishably wide pelvis, no particularly broad shoulders, a neck fine but firm, carrying the body's round head with profound grace. As the figure reclined its pose into stunning contrapposto, it lifted its left hand to gently graze just below its brow. The cream, severed into a juxtaposition of shining wetness where it was just submerged and the matte velvet above that had dried in the cool laboratory's air, melted away from the figure's face to reveal two round pearls: its eyes.
One scientist, tall and broad, stepped forward heavily and extended forth his hand, gloved with black metal. Responding, the waxen figure, silent and stoic, observed his reach with apparent curiosity; its head swivelled slowly, a lily-white mantis, cautious and curious.
"Please come with me," the scientist insisted firmly, his hand perspiring within the gauntlet.
With the same swift decisiveness as it had accepted its name, the figure extended its reach into the large man's armoured fingers: an astonishing portrait of a butterfly in the maw of an iron lion. The child stepped over the vat's brim and followed the man away, its footsteps silent and graceful as freshly fallen snow, or as finely-shaven coconut in a field of meringue. Only the stride of the barreling scientist could be heard clopping through the chamber's large steel door, rimmed with blinking white lights, and the two faded into a sheet of darkness.
"We have enough, now." A small scientist, her voice naught more than a mouse's squeal.
80NKA nodded. "Yes," he assured her, "and now we must make preparations for the penultimate phase."
Another scientist had retrieved what appeared to be a large, boxy vacuum. Above its wheels and out of its front, a large, organic tube oozed forward, rimmed with an exoskeleton of steel and blinking lights. Pulling a large lever on the machine's back, the vacuum roared to life. The scientist flopped the tube into the vat, and began sucking up the cream that remained in it. As it was sucked away in rattles of running ultraviolet, it left no residue against the shining steel basin's interior.
Against the groan of the machine, 80NKA grinned. His face a shadow below the white fluorescent bulbs above him.
"Product 80NKA," another white-coated individual spoke hesitantly, "this will be our final opportunity to reconsider the course of action you have decided for us. When these bodies are-" he swallowed, struggling to find the words, "when they're - tested - when they encounter-"
"Silence!" 80NKA shouted, and at once everyone stood up straight. Other scientists murmured to one another their dismissal of the presented concerns.
"Why wait another moment," 80NKA spoke darkly. "We begin Phase 27 now."
What the hell is happening? Why are you still reading this, a parasite of want that suckles at the notion of Life's Blood? Who was the child born within the vat? Was it you? Was it me?
Keep reading to find out, and please leave a review to let me know what you think!