CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Chaise-Lounge
Bonka reclined gracefully into his dramatic, velveteen chaise-lounge, staring at the children below him through a transparent wall of bulletproof plexiglass.
"Humble greetings to you, my young newcomers. Welcome to the night your entire lives have led up to."
The teen's eyes, wide as headlights, glared up at him as deer in the road.
"You will be sorted and redirected based on every manner of your person: physical, social, emotional - everything you can do nothing about. Myself, a humble and beautiful Sandpiper, my breast's plumage brilliant auburn and white; I speak now to my humble and frightened fledglings as their bodies rise to the edge of my nest."
The man was, indeed, wrapped in a stunning coat of white and grey feathers; a burst of orange flame dancing across his shoulders and neck in the warm embrace of a downy shawl. Descending from the feathered serpent, his toned and pale arms hovered against his masculine contours, his silver-ringed fingers and tattooed hands raised and curled delicately over the cool air rising from the concrete below his bare feet. Atop his head and concealing his hair was a bowler hat, not round but rising as a pyramid into a stylish pyramid instead, its diamonds and sequins catching the light of the crackling fluorescent bulbs behind him - light that framed his stunning silhouette in ghastly white light.
"As you jump, I ask you all but one thing." Bonka continuned, the shadows enshrouding his visage concealing his lips as they curled into a smile, "You musn't ask any questions."
He half-expected one of the more curious teens, each pressed so tightly tightly together and draped in the eerie luminescence from the windowed room above, to ask boldly why not. Fortunately, they did not - perhaps the air was too hot and gelatinous for any of them to draw breath.
"Through the doors behind you, there is a small room." Bonka went on, "In that room, there is a wide staircase that descends into the darkness of the earth below. Fear not, you will find light, and within that light you will find a long hallway. You will walk through it, single file - do not bump into one another, do not slip, do not speak or fidget nervously. Just walk down the hallway until you find my scientists waiting for you. They will know where each of you belong. Some of you will work, some of you will sleep, and some of you will be pathfinders."
Bonka brought his left hand, glittering with ice and silver, to caress his billowing scarf; crimson feathers shivering like autumn's leaves. With his right hand, he pointed a long, white finger above his spectators.
A white cross appeared in the darkness behind the teens, and the first to turn were the first to have the light catch their perspiring faces. It was a fine string of light that flickered between and below two doors, and the dim reflection in the polished marble floor below them.
Bonka reclined once again against his decadent chaise-lounge, his trendsetting figure hanging loosely from its voluptuous cushions. His gown rose to expose his carved-marble thighs as he crossed his legs sanctimoniously. As the children in the darkness below him marched obediently into the passage that had revealed itself behind them, he brought a thin white glass delicately to his painted-porcelain lips.
From looking at them and from feeling the vibrations of their humble vestments, from tasting the air of anxiety that hung more tightly over some than others, from smelling the confidence and courage that thrummed from behind the other's ribs and into the air with their breath, he could already discern which department each child might belong to. It was not for him to decide, however, and even that had not been his decision.
What bliss it had been for Bonka, when the first reluctant soul had returned from the rift, the incision carved in space; to have learned that a residue had clung, hot and invisible, like tree's sap to the voyager's bloated corpse. Something he could not find, or at once comprehend. Something new to answer to, something new to make decisions - even if he couldn't yet understand its language.
"The serum has been refined, at last." A voice said suddenly beside him, but Bonka was by no means surprised.
He turned to grace the lead scientist of the Cream department with his gaze.
"And not a moment too soon." Bonka finished for him.
"It's even more stable now than we'd ever thought possible. The answer was in further dilution with our amniotic compound."
"An abomination, no doubt." Bonka responded forebodingly, "I can only hope the incision does not spout an incarnation of revenge. I presume, however, that our intentions are forgivable. The process, can it be reversed?"
The nervous scientist's silence was his answer, and Bonka swallowed gravely behind closed eyelids.
"It was a necessary evil, my lord." The scientist croaked hesitantly, his voice naught more than a high whisper through his labcoat's high collar. "Without the further processing, the vapours were still much too volatile, and our workers could remain near it for only a few moments at a time, and even then the facial disfigurations would be horrendous."
"I understand why it had to be done, and I predicted it would be so. I am only sorry that the limits of your human bodies, and the collective of our intelligence, is the cause of this - mutilation."
Through the plexiglass, Bonka watched the last few children reach the staircase in the shadows below.
"We are as bloodied lambs led to the altar," he said quietly. "You and your organic collaborators - and myself, electromagnetism in the frame of darkness, incarnate. We are nothing, if not for this glorious project."
The doors in the shadows below closed with a bang, and at once Bonka could see nothing but the reflection of his frightened eyes, illuminated with the room's white fluorescence, staring back at him against the glass.
What force could this be, that has humbled our usually unshakeable Project 80NKA? Do you forgive the machine's intention? Do you forgive me?
Keep reading to find out! Please follow or favourite if you're enjoying the story, and leave a review if you've got any opinions to share!
