Chapter 2: "Virus of the Mind"
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They stopped briefly at the carrier "gedunk" bar for a coffee (De-khat. Daria was trying to cut back.), before heading off for business. Which, naturally, involved a shortage of elevators and a great deal of walking.
"'Your first time on a helicarrier, director?" Deming asked, at one point.
"I worked out of the Cagliostro for awhile." Spindoctor huffed in reply. Not quite the same thing, really, as the latter had gone down in Borneo when Daria still used a children's library card. The beast had been a "stone frigate" lodged in the jungle ever since...but still serving the organization well.
In fact, Daria was reminded, as they opened the blast doors to the production hall, their purposes were almost identical. The doors slid apart, and a gust of warm air pushed away the permeating dank of oil and old paint, replacing it with an odor endearingly damiliar...ink.
Fresh ink, and the crisp dust of new paper.
The hall ran through the spine of the ship; a "cathedral of work" a thousand feet long. The metal-plate walkway that ran it's length was mostly empty of equipment-it was only a thoroughfare, wide enough to march through, 20 abreast.
The actual work was done in the 13 goliath machine-blocks that spoked out, staggered, on either side of the passageway, rising to meet the shadows of the ceiling four storeys up, and out to the hall bulkheads a few stone's throws laterally.
The path itself was spotlit, but the long wings faded into a wash of shadow, and the rare glint off of violet metal. Few of the workers were visible-and then in silhouette in one of the plant-block windows, but most of them were there, she knew, just out of sight. In the pits between the machines.
Daria actually smiled, a little. Fritz Lang could eat his pretty little heart out.
A lone crewman-one of her crewmen, actually.-popped into view to her side, rising on one of the industrial lifts linking the thoroughfare and the work pits. The man was an "Ink Viper," plainly, with a a work apron stained almost as dark as his ubiquitous Cobra "bandit scarf."
The Viper manhandled a a fellow traveler off the lift-an industrial trash bin, filled with defective examples of some of the Bifid's primary exports. In this case, literally, it's cash crop...
The bin was, to Daria's practiced lack of amazement, overflowing with fresh reams of $100 bills.
Counterfeit, of course. And it might not all have been money packed in there-Nork "Supernotes" were still only a small fraction of the ship's production. Manuals. Leaflets. Admail, "underground" newspapers, and even the latest copy of Cobra Life magazine; each of the thirteen machine-blocks was a complete publishing plant in itself, and the Bifid, for the sum of all it's glory, a gargantuan, flying print shop.
Anywhere in the world...any time, any place, with just enough lead time, the Bifid could be on station to deploy Cobra's wares. "Mighter" or not...the pen was the spearhead. It laid the path.
The Ink Viper with the bin gave the bulky thing a heave, and started trundling down the walkway-cutting in front of Daria and the Good Doctor. Not a sign of disrespect, probably. The fellow likely hadn't even known there were there.
'Certainly didn't hear us...Daria thought, sourly. The production hall was, as usual, a bellowing cacophony of machines. She couldn't help but eye the Viper's brace of electronic earpieces jealously. For her brief trip through the facility, she hadn't bothered even with ear plugs, let alone noise cancellation headsets with a line to the ship's Muzak channel. She was already starting to regret it.
"...like to express our sincere apologies for the report backlog," Deming was saying-hell, shouting, almost screaming in Daria's ear to be heard. "...but with the results we've been getting-we've been swamped, all of us. I couldn't even get away to the Ryugyong conference..." the doctor glanced at Daria oddly, and for a moment, the spiel slipped away.
"How was it, this year, by the way? I know this was your first presentation-I was kicking myself for missing it..." It was curiosity, in the scientist's voice. Simple, gawkish, curiosity. Very human.
Daria smiled, thinly. "Oh, wonderful. I always wanted to visit Eastasia." She caught herself, suddenly-the ship must have made some tiny change to her altitude or heading, and the floor of the production hall had been long worn down to bare metal. For someone without their sea-air?-legs, it could be fairly slick. Even disorienting...
She became aware of a familiar pang rising in her gullet. Damnit. "Look, 'doc,' how about you start filling me in while we're on our way? I'm all ears." The 'prof,' like most, tended to ramble, once she got on a choice topic...and Daria sure as hell could use a nice, soothing distraction to listen to for a little while.
Deming brightened, visibly. On the nosey. "Oh...! Of course, sir...well, as you well know, Cobra has been far ahead in the field of applied psychotronics for many years. Hypnosis, subliminal programming, even electronic brainwave manipulation.
"However, as impressive as these have been, these processes have always had serious drawbacks. Audio-visual brainwashing is notoriously easy to neutralize with the proper counter-signal, and electronic methods have almost always required close contact with special equipment..."
"...And all of them tend to leave the...'subjects' in a stupor, at best." Spindoctor found herself saying, out loud.
"Well, I...feel that might be a bit of an overstatement, sir-but that certainly raises a valid point; to date, most existing 'thought reform' methods rely on hindering brain function. Shutting down or bottlenecking normal neural activity to obtain a desired change in behavior. Achieved with anything short of actual surgery, this is an inherently unstable condition, which impairs the function of the subject in addition..."
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
In brief minutes, the two had crossed the great length of the production hall, finally giving Daria the reason and motivation to interrupt Deming's oral cavalcade of the history of modern mind control.
"You're preaching to the inquisitor, doctor. I'm here to see what this project brings to the table," Spindoctor said, on reaching the far door. At least the acute nausea passed...
Like almost everything in a Cobra outfit, "door" was a bad understatement; it was the size of an airline hanger, and opened into an elevator platform the size of her old house.
Very subtly, though, it had a visual "kink" that made it stand out; the quill-and-chessman insignia of Cobra Public Affairs, emblazoned large, and unaccompanied by the emblem of Cobra, proper.
When the Bifid had still been fighting air battles off the Sidra and Sargasso, this had been the gateway to the most sensitive portions of the ship: arsenal, engineering section, "CnC"...a cavern system, physically isolated from the rest of the vessel. The "castle keep."
Most of it had more mundane uses, now, secure as it all was. But the real significance was more...intangible.
Beyond that threshold, officially, you were in "black-tile country." The Bifid, jurisdiction aside, was still command's ship, but this-this was Public Affairs' private territory. Whoever she answered to-this section reported only to her.
In theory, anyway. In practice, really, the distinction was almost academic. Forgotten, if not ignored.
And yet, it was still a reminder that filled Daria with a grim sort of...something. She thought it might even be pride.
They crossed the line, and entered. The silence that replaced the clamor of the production hall as the blast doors closed was as suddenly eerie as it was a relief.
Deming prodded a keypad on the platform. It lurched, hard, but then began an easy ascent with well-oiled smoothness. Spindoctor edged away from a rack of cargo that'd been left on the platform-a rack of high quality bond rag. Safely secured, granted. But with each sumo-sized spool weighing in excess of a ton, she didn't fancy standing in the shadow of a pile of 'em.
The scientist quickly responded to Daria's not quite repeated question.
"Well, director," she said, "the practice of thought manipulation, of course, predates Dawkins' meme theory by many years-the very presence of this division is testament to that. But it has never been undertaken from a wholly scientific approach, with a solid backing of cognitive neuroscience..."
The platform was moving slowly; they'd only risen past two or three decks, if Daria had counted the lights right. "...but even the optimal, greatest examples of concept engineering-like Morrison, or Lucas-were based on at least a groping understanding of archetype theory, and even the works of Bernays" "Peace be Upon Him," Spindoctor tacked on, mentally, "-were built from a primitive form of applied psychology."
The platform glided to a stop near the top of it's shaft, where a door marked "LEVEL X" was already opening.
"...but of course, until now, it's all been 'through a glass, darkly.' Blind manhandling of processes barely understandable. A...'preoperative stage' of development."
"And yours isn't," Daria said, not quite as a question. "You've pulled it off?"
"Well, the proof is in the execution, director," Deming replied. Rather proudly, at that. "...as you'll see tonight."
They had reached the entry gate to the laboratory-a sturdy set of blast doors liberally festooned with with warning signs. Daria was particularly impressed with the one that read "WARNING: TELEPATHIC HAZARD. NO SENSITIVES BEYOND THIS POINT!," complete with the standard "jagged psi" symbol and an icon of a stick figure grabbing at his bursting skull.
Entry security was standard fare-handscan, passcode, mouth check, retinal flash. Nothing unusual, save that the latter always left her half-blind for a minute or so.
Past the outer set of doors, however, was the odder bit. A two-man team-counting the mandatory BAT-were waiting, stationed backs against a partition line crudely painted halfway inside the airlock-like antechamber.
Neither guard turned his (it's) head to within more than a few degrees of the line as Daria and Deming switched between them for the patdown...for recording instruments. Not even a pen was to be allowed in, and the search was thorough-the Guardsman even opened the access panel to examine the toroid chamber of her sidearm before handing the weapon back to Daria.
True, as an officer, she rarely had to disarm...but still, it was unusually off-putting.
On the wall behind the Guardsman, at head level and just beyond the dry brown splatterstain that intersected the line, was a glass pegboard; the one she'd been told to expect. Most of the "Cubby holes" were empty, but there was a plastic case with her codename dymo'd to it on a shelf labeled "VIPs"...
It was protective equipment, after a fashion. The handful of components weighed and took up less space-and probably cost as much-as a pack of cards. But, Daria mused, popping the fitted rubber blinders onto her eyeglass frames they might be just as life saving as the most elaborate armors of Cobra's hazardous environment grunts.
If. If her inspection found anything of value, tonight.
She checked the fit, first. Perfect-the rubber gaskets blotted out even her meager peripheral vision. Though it probably made her look like Doctor Cyclops. Hopefully, they wouldn't fog up.-before she applied the last element: two little plastic discs, dimly translucent, and highly polarized, with a near mirror sheen.
They snapped onto her glasses' lenses, like an ordinary pair of clip-on sunglass lenses (though they were specifically "not intended for outdoor recreation," according to a blurb prominently written on the case. She would never have guessed).
Daria took a look around the room. The "optical seal" held, with not much effect, visually, that she could make out...except that the clear glass in Deming's own eye protection-the other woman wore an almost comical mad scientist-type set of welder's goggles that she'd had pushed over her brow-had apparently turned dark maroon.
"All set, director?"
Daria replied, purely wholly expressionless, with a thumbs up.
"Excellent—If you'll follow me..."
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
It was not actually the first viral weapons laboratory that Daria had ever visited.
That distinction belonged to a pleasant little hovel outside of 'Vegas, during her second year on the job, when Spindoctor'd been dispatched to oversee the PR campaign for a community outreach and free clinic center.
Alas, it was a bust...the most that came out of the whole sorry affair was that Daria finally had the chance to find out what burning napalm smelled like. (Benzene and Durian fruit. Which, admittedly, had smelled like victory at the time)
On the other hand...in spite of the high praises of it's creators, "strain XV-D" hadn't actually been able to infect people just from looking at it.
No, of course not...that would be my bag.
The Dr. Archibald Venom Memorial Laboratory was a long, blazing hive of glowing screens and electronic displays...or should have been. She guessed it was.
The hell of the thing was, aside from the eerie half-light they seemed to cast, most of the tapestry hall of screens looked blank black.
That was the glasses' work, of course, and with good reason. This lab was the center, the Manhattan Project, on the engineering of...
"...Memes. An idea, a concept, or thought process that spreads like a biological virus. Evolution in it's most astract, pure form." Deming summed up, proudly. Spindoctor wouldn't dream of interrupting the spiel-the scientist had obviously worked on it.
"And what nature can spawn through trial and error, science can create through deliberate effort." The two had continued their stroll down the main axis of the lab-glam and grandeur aside, it wasn't all that large. And a liberal amount of divider screens between the department "cells" broke it up further, making it impossible to see from one end to the other.
One of the first kellia she showed Spindoctor belonged to the "Earworm Project" detachment-which was somewhat cluttered by reams of highlighted sheet music pinned to the bulkhead, and a Televiper crumpled over a MIDI controller. Deming had given a concise rundown on the use of fractal leitmotif generation in preexisting music form architectures...though Daria found herself more distracted by a haunting melody she faintly overheard from the Viper's headset.
She found her mind returning to it, as the tour continued...and then for a few weeks afterward.
Dynamic buzzword generations...Aarne-Thompson recalibration...consent fabrication...Jungian fractals...all fine and good. And mostly on schedule, with a minimum of casualties. But besides that...
"...professor," she drawled, at the Vergeltungswitz section, which featured several more polarized-out monitors, and a Baboon's EEG, "...are there any projects you can show me that I can see without scrambling my brains?"
Deming looked taken aback. "Well...sir, I have to insist, these safety precautions are truly-I mean I'm sorry, but if they could be circumvented, there'd be no point in even-"
"...so 'No'. Look, I'm satisfied that you're not just blowing your budget on booze, but this simply isn't an efficient use of inspection time. Mine or yours..." Daria sighed...she'd really been putting this off, hadn't she? "...and we both know that this isn't the main event I came here to see."
The Professor seemed to hesitate, glancing around the department booths-lingering on a couple of rather snazzy looking ones that they hadn't yet visited-before turning back to Daria, with a sigh of her own.
"I...suppose not, sir." She broadly gestured down the lab, head sagging. "The test chamber is right this way, if you're ready." Daria nodded assent, and let the professor lead the way.
Not that she'd show it, but Daria was, in her own way, as depressed as Deming. For her own, quite different reasons.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The test chamber was at the end of the lab; all one could see in the dim light was a full height plate of mirrored glass taking up the terminating bulkhead, inset with a sturdy door. There were a few terminals at the flanks, but the section was pretty bare. Dark. Unsassuming. Quiet.
Company awaited them.
"This is Wong," Deming said, waving towards a blueshirt leaning in an office chair with his back against a wall, thumbing through a copy of Spank. The man's combat gear was sparse-at the mention of his name, he'd looked up, saluting in greeting with a smile; he wasn't even wearing a face mask.
"He's illiterate, and he can't speak english." The perfect lifeguard.
There were a couple of others. Dr. Marks, she'd seen already. And the other one...
He had a good six inched on her, with the flared helmet. The figure stood at parade rest, facing the chamber window. His hands were empty, though she half expected him to be tapping a riding crop...maybe he had one hidden on the bandoliers strapped over his charcoal peacoat.
The man's head craned back, vulture like, to look at the new visitors, before he turned, slowly, on his heals. He was solidly built, to be sure, but overall, the figure's impression was more unsettling than anything else.
Daria took his hand as soon as it was extended.
"...'Interrogator.'" she said, with a nod, very studiously averting her gaze from the faint moire patterns in the man's red faceplate.
"Hey." he replied. He spoke it like a loanword, enunciating just a little too precisely, in an electronic barritone.
"I didn't think you were going to make it. 'Other duties.'" Daria said. In fact, according to the rumor mill, the man had been visiting his predecessor, the first Interrogator.
Who now had his own sanitarium wing, spending his days playing checkers with phantoms.
"Oh, it was pleasant. But I don't see how I could resist an occasion like this."
Knowing him, that was to be expected. So said the knot growing in the pit of Daria's stomach.
The helmet nodded, deeply, over her shoulder. "...but I believe the doctor was just forgetting to tell us the plan for the evening?"
Deming barely showed any irritation. Hardly even a scowl. "Well, sir, it hardly bears reiterating...but this test is merely, humbly, the culmination of the practice of thought reform," she gesticulated, freely, "...the Platonic ideal of rhetoric, and propaganda; the unattainable goal of neuropharmacology's crude fumblings...to imprint upon a human mind as easily as newsprint in a press. Mind control...through pure linguistics!"
Nicely done, Daria thought. And indeed, there was a part of her, not so deep down at all. that brimmed fascination for the prospect. Curiosity, awe, and a note of pride for her part in it. Still just a mousy scholar at heart.
But that lay ashen with dread...
The Professor flipped on the lights in the test chamber with a flourish: the room behind the mirror blazed into view with the whine of spotlights.
Inside, it was fairly bare. A bulky-and visibly old-computer terminal sat in a rear corner; and in the center, at a right angle to the direction of the window, was a single chair.
A very sturdy, reinforced chair.
Deming had already unbolted the chamber door, and ushered in a gray smoked technician. "Warm up the equipment," she said, "the 'source material' will be up shortly."
The tech made a muffled reply as he-Daria thought it was a he-clamped on another layer of cranial protection.
As the door clunked shut, Deming turned back to the visitors. "With your permission...If you're ready, sir?"
Down to her, no less.
Finding her mouth oddly dry, Spindoctor nodded okay.
Deming actually smiled, and clicked her lapel mike.
"Lab speaking...ready to begin first series. Send up the first Maruta."
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The Brute emerged into the chamber, appearing out of a shadow black passageway hidden behind a wall panel.
He was arcane looking, and every bit his role, to say the least...
Bright wedges of eyes glaring out from under a sack hood; a shirtless, proud display of muscles; a loop of rawhide hanging on a wide belt...hell, Daria was surprised he was actually wearing shoes.
He almost stormed in, one arm taught behind him, dragging a chain at neck level.
His guest trailed in, stumbling, after.
They—"she," it was a woman—was a burly, solid specimen, almost disproportionate to her height, and fitted unflatteringly in a hi-vis jumpsuit.
The forearms were bare, as were the hands, and looked powerful—though with an unhealthy skin pallor settling over a normal bronze, sure sign of recent time cloistered indoors...and which were clutched furiously around the chain to a collar.
The young woman's face sneered with indignation as she fought her forward progression, actually managing to stall in her tracks for a second, seemingly by sheer force of will, straining alarmingly hard against her bonds.
A brief flash of neck revealed, Daria couldn't help but notice, hardly a sign of redness, but also a rather large mole. The collar had not been fastened long.
The halt in the procedures was brief, as another pair of figures soon appeared from the doorway; two much more mundane guards, compared to Slave Master, though odder equipped.
The closer one raised his impliment—a silver, spindly thing, terminating in tuning fork-like prongs...Spindoctor thought it was called a "Megafauna"-something-or-other—into a lazy shoulder stance, and prodded it into the prisoner's shoulder.
There was a glowing, Jacob's Ladder effect down the prongs, and the woman jumped forward, yelping from shock. She wheeled around, shackled wrists raised in an impotent whimsy of a threatened blow, rattling off invectives at the guard even as Slave Master tugged her towards the chair. It was muted, behind slabs of glass and metal, but it didn't sound like english—not American english, anyway, not from the lip motions, Spindoctor thought. Too fast, and too controlled. And the pitch was wrong...
A part of Daria was musing, grimly. She couldn't help it, wondering where they'd found the unfortunate in the chamber. A slave? Not likely...she didn't look it; she obviously hadn't been missing many meals. Probably not a penal battalion, either—she didn't have the bearing. No crushed spirit, but no feral, tooth and claw resistance, either—not like someone who knew what was coming.
Maybe they'd just "knocked over" a prison bus. It was known to happen—if recruiting was low, or Cobra needed some people who wouldn't be missed.
They got the subject into the chair with a surprising lack of manhandling. It was no sign of kindness, though—just practice. This was an assembly line procedure, no need for wasted effort. The chair itself did a lot of the work, as it operated on a scheme of pressure and control points; manacles sprung out of the frame automatically, as soon as a limb fell into position. Clasping over key leverage points, six clamps would hold a body as securely as a straightjacket.
They were taking more care with the head, and as the technicians hooked the Ludovico restraints into place, Deming started up again.
"First subject is...just out of the 18-24 range, 'normal'"—she said the word with a note of disdain—"I.Q., no history of mental illness or neural injury. There were noted tendencies towards Conduct Disorder, but examination shows all personality disorders to be within acceptable tolerances." So, not a psychopath, just a blackguard. "...but more importantly, the subject is functionally literate, and bilingual..."
Inside the chamber, Slave Master made a final tightening on the head strap, and flashed a thumbs up towards the window; Deming rapped on the chamber door's observation window. Happily.
As the crew filed out, Deming nodded to Spindoctor, beaming. "The first test Memotype is a sixteen word polyglot phrase of English and Spanish, generated by supercomputer under our linguistic guidelines. Grammar, vocabulary, and subject chosed are calculated to be statistically impossible to occur in normal human conversation...of course, none of us has actually seen it ourselves.
"This is, of course, merely a proof of concept design. Early in the development as we are, we've already developed single-language 'Armements' to achieve the same effect."
For the record...Spindoctor thought. "That being?"
Deming puffed up, happily. "In brief, a neural short circuit. Once received and analyzed by the brain's Wernickes Area, it will produce a corrupted engram, derailing higher cognition and sending a massive stimulus to the brain stem via the hypothalmus. The effect..." the professor gave a whimsical shrug, "...'fight or flight.' A turnicated, warped form. In this case, 'flight.' Pure terror, to a level unexperienced outside of a prey species..."
"'Wow'," Interrogator cut in, drawling, cocking his head. "Impressive...and as subtle as an ice pick to the skull."
"Well...yes, sir, but it's only an example of phase one of the series—psychosomatic effects, like hysterical blindness, astasia-abasia, pseudoseizures, aphonia...admittedly crude, prototypical efforts, but the more intricate applications aren't that far—"
"I think we all know how useless newborn babies are, Professor." Spindoctor said, "let's see the dance, all right?"
"Y-yes...yes, Spindoctor! Marks!" Deming beckoned, waving.
The frazzled, bearded old scientist in a lab smock and a pair of horn rims scurried up front, gripping a thin case before him like a drink tray.
Before he could speak, Deming snapped the order, "Begin loading the code phrases into the server."
Dr. Marks backed towards the the most grandiose of the room's computer terminals, cracking open his cargo as he walked, withdrawing the item inside.
Deming explained; "For safety reasons, the phrase data is normally kept bisected, except for testing. We'll transmit it to the test chamber now..."
"I see," Daria said, "...though I haven't seen one of those in awhile." She nodded towards the terminal. "...that's not a 5-1/4", is it?"
"Eight-inch, single sided, read only." Marks piped up—she'd have thought he was mute, or at least wasn't listening. "It can store almost six hundred and fifty kilobits of data—and it needed almost half that for this test series alone!"
The disk slid home with a satisfying clik, and the latch on the front of the drive bezel snapped closed.
"Another precaution, of course. Limited cross compatibility reduces the chance of misuse."
"Or espionage, I take it. 'Can't be more than a dozen of those left in the world." If Cobra hadn't built it from scratch, it had to be older than she was. Considerably.
Which also meant...she did the arithmetic for 'kilobits' in her head. Then rechecked, disbelieving. Small. Damned small. Enough to contain an overly aggressive poem, maybe, depending on the format.
A lot of fuss over such a little thing. Of course, the core of Fat Man had been a lump of metal the size of her fist...
Marks' terminal beeped, and the tech inside the chamber made an overlarge "OK" gesture.
"Code banks loaded, system armed."
The wall opposing the fettered unfortunate had been painted matte white; there wasn't that much glare when the screened overhead projector in the chamber snapped on. Just a ghastly white reflection in her eyes—which the subject met with a fresh snarl. Maybe the light hurt...
Marks spoke, "Beginning test of item Aklos-1, version zero-point-nine-niner, test one, series bet-"
"Final warning, King-Yellow Event. 20 seconds to Zero Time. Put on Goggles or Turn Away"...said a recorded voice, as a computer stepped on the doctor's line.
"...predicted time of action is 8.5 seconds."
A "cherry top" beacon light on the ceiling flipped on, twirling a rotating band of light. Not bad...they'd at least give someone epilepsy. No klaxon though. Maybe they were slipping.
The subject inside the chamber was moving again. Muted by layered glass and metal, the tone was almost inaudible...but plain with outraged fury.
Daria realized she'd been staring at the woman's face intently enough that she'd almost missed the countdown entirely...
"6...(a beat)...4...3..."
A mollyguard was flipped away, exposing a marasca red tab under a hand's shadow.
"2...1...mark."
The tech brought his thumb down on the switch. Something flickered onto the screen.
Then there was nothing.
Nothing.
True, but deceptively so...the subject had gone quiet. Not struggling, not making a noise. Nothing.
The facial expression was almost unreadable. A slack, dulled surprise, more than anything else...except for the eyes. Hard as it was to see, with all the equipment in the way, they'd gone almost...like a hint of...
"...not even kind of scared," the masked man at her side said.
"A few more moments, please. The average person only reads four words per se—"
The scientist couldn't even finish the last one when the shriek came.
Daria startled—though she didn't jump, though few wouldn't have—she'd glanced around the lab, and it seemed that few hadn't.
"And that definitely isn't," the Interrogator quipped, with actual emotion in his voice. She couldn't help noticing that he'd dropped a hand to gunbelt level.
Much to her own surprise, so had she.
Damned understandable, though...mere words did that noise disservice. "Scream" or "shriek" were for sounds made by a voicebox, to audify feeling, even at it's most insensate, primal tapping.
This...howl...was emotion.
"Howl" was wrong, too...storms "howled." Storms weren't alive. This...this had the raw power, mindlessly unrestrained of a gale, but it was no tempest of dead gasses. Quite the opposite...
They could hear it clear enough through the chamber's thick walls. She wouldn't have thought a person could make that kind of a racket, let along maintain it. She didn't envy the poor tech.
The bound figure's transformation was very sudden, but alarmingly total. Teeth flashed, the body arched against the restraints in electric spasm; every inch of exposed skin seemed to dance with coursing tendon. Muscles didn't ripple—there was nothing left for them to move against.
Daria didn't want to think about the contortion of the thing's spine...she watched, anyway, engrossed helplessly.
She could hear the murmurs behind her, from the lab staff. Nowhere near jubilant.
He'd been right...definately not afraid.
"'Fight or flight,' eh, professor?" Spindoctor said, over her shoulder, grateful for a few moments stolen away from the spectacle. "Half right, anyway..."
Deming was rattled, but not off guard. "An...unexpected development, sir, but not a failure. It did work—and this was simply a test..."
Daria frowned, hmming. She had a point, at that. It took a show of willpower to force her gaze back towards the window.
The thing—if it could still see—had to be literally seeing red, by now; the whites of both eyeballs had gone burst red. It hadn't been a true spasm that'd seized it, she could see now—at least, not any longer.
It was straining against the chair.
Spindoctor thought it might break it's own back if it kept it up. The heavy arm restraints actually rattled against the frame; red marks had appeared at the wrists.
"Don't worry," Deming said, reassuringly, to the unasked question, "the restraints are tested to 500 foot-pounds. They'll hold."
To the doctor's credit, she was right. In a few seconds, to her horror, they did.
Even as the subject tore her way out of the chair with a sickening crash, and lunged across the chamber with a scramble of flesh against slick metal—the limbbands and Ludovico harness had held. Perfectly.
It was free in a lurch, stumbling forward, ruined arms splayed like gull's wings flaring for decent.
Something splattered on the glass. Dark, and ruddy.
In the lab, there was hardly time to gasp, not even enough to swear...and simply no time to react.
The tech in the chamber didn't even have that much. He'd already pushed out of his seat, against the wall—the figure looked more like a mannequin than a human being, swaddled in enough lab gear to cover all traces of flesh, down to the eyes. But his was, disturbingly, becoming the most human looking creature in sight.
What goggled, machine-blank facemask hid, his own hands betrayed—pulled up, palms splayed open and outward. A futile, instinctual attempt at protection. Pure fear.
The subject...what was left of the Maruta had sighted in on him before it was moving—that it could do it at all was astonishing; it had to be en pointe on bare bone.
It charged 'cross the distance and—not so much was upon him as into the man. Through him.
The shriek was an awful, gnashing cry—and the tech lifted—actually lifted off his feet—belly plunged through, tunic fabric drawn taut, soaking red, skewered on ulna and radius...
The man didn't cry out; perhaps he was only muffled, or it had simply been too fast for even that.
His head bobbled, quick, half-vital and out of time with the mad frenzy of blows the Thing landed with it's free...limb, now more like a poor parody of a club, and wielded with subhuman finese.
Somewhere behind Daria, the Professor found her voice. "G...get the VIDET on deck! NOW!" she croaked.
"They won't come in time..." Daria blurted out, in an almost whisper, not even thinking. Too transfixed on the horror before her.
Dr. Marks covered for her—probably by sheer accident. "That's right—if It causes much more instrument damage, we'll lose the experiment data!" The man was almost frantic in his earnestness.
With due concern, at that. The brute was straining, hefting the weight of the pitiful bulk skyward, and bashed the charnel mass down, very hard, into the latter's control terminal.
It crumpled, buckling under like so much scrap. The cathode tube of the monitor had blinked once, white spider-webs of cracks rippling through the glass, before imploding.
There were hardly any sparks, less than she'd expect, but the mangled electronic innards of the equipment went out with a fury—she could hear the arcing pop! thunderfall of low voltages on bare metal.
The man was down, dashed like a ship on a reef, and the Thing was not yet done; it focused a lidless, repulsive leer at it's leavings, and tore down to make work with a flexing jaw...
Daria, to her hazy puzzlement, found that she was in front of the chamber door, staring at the scene through the loophole window.
Maybe she'd done it unknowingly, just to get a better view—or at least a clearer one than the main window, splattered with—
But she was already reaching for the door handle, her mind appraising the situation—even at her most impulsive, she was not foolhardy—and responding, grimly.
The Thing's back was to her, matting the other figure. Her brain raced. No fancy shooting, not that you even could. At this range? A shot'd go through and...even at the lowest...I don't even want to get in there with...don't dare screw around—not with that. Looks like you'd need an elephant rifle already...only got one shot; if you just piss it off...'saw how fast it...'only chance he's got, unless you wanna count on the lab rats and torquemada...
A steely hand appeared at Daria's left bicep, and gently shoved her aside.
"Beat it, please." The Interrogator said, with icy calm, taking Spindoctor's position in front of the door before rapping the window glass with his knuckles. "'Ay, enfer destine!" the man barked, startlingly loud—possibly it was amplified by the gear in his helmet.
The outburst's effect was unquestionable. In the chamber, the Maruta jerked up, swiveling around with an awful, bare-eyed glare at the direction of the lab.
"Listo para un juego de 'hay un Dios'?" Interrogator said, helmet bobbing luridly to his words. It was a simple visual cue, Daria realized, to focus an uncertain listener's attention. Still, the effect garnered a mocking flavor.
In the chamber, the Thing's ire was raised, again, as it parted it's lips for a renewed scream. It's teeth were no longer even close to white.
There was a snap-hiss as the handle lock cracked open—the masked man must have overriden the door code to do it that fast—and the pressure seal bottomed out. Daria took another pace back, then doubled it.
With his left hand, he cast open the door, wide. The thing was already on it's feet, scrambling. But what escaped was as intangible as it was overwhelming.
The sound, in it's full, awful glory loosed itself, first, and rising; driven ahead like the deluge, was fear itself. The door had been a mental barrier as much as a physical one; horror had sieved through, which inspired panic...but danger and it's dread terror had been secured.
Now gone, the thick, leaden wave that had been held back washed into the lab, and Daria couldn't help but be caught in the moment's awful flow.
The clock crawled forward as the thing in the chamber loped forwards, howling it's charge, drawing out the detail of the instant into sharp, terrific clarity...
The wild, jutting flurry met the threshold, unstopping, image changing in hue as it passed from one flavor of lighting to another. It was all but in arms reach, and grasp. And closing, barreling like a freight car at the man ahead. Inescapable.
His fist flexed...and Daria heard a metallic, squalling rattle.
For a frozen second, he was horribly perfect in form—the vision of a 20th century Artemision...and his arm wheeled forward—fist charged with a glinting implement.
The baton connected with the Maruta's lower back, at just about pelvis level. The legs swept up, the Thing's own momentum carrying it forward even as it lost control of it's direction, sprawling backwards in midair.
Interrogator was moving again—still, he'd never paused, his other hand joining the grip on his weapon as it swept clear underneath the hulking form, and he reversed the swing like a pendulum.
The second blow braked the Thing's forward travel, as it "clotheslined" Itself into the piston that disappeared with a fibery CRACK into it's throat.
A few sparkling jewels caught Spindoctor's eyes, hovering, splitting, and coalescing into new dribulets as gravity hurled the leviathan to the deck.
The final strike met it halfway down. The man had been turning imperceptibly, dancelike, with a fraction of movement and he was at It's prone flanks as he brought the weapon down. He plunged the club down like a mallet, one handed, center mass. Something leapt from his hand, with that same high ring as at the start of the attack.
The tip of the baton smashed into the Thing's torso with crushing force, driving it down to the floor like a slab of meat; sternum visibly sagging under a dark smear on the fabric of the jumpsuit...joined shortly by the pattering of the last drops of flying blood.
It was over. It had barely started, and it was over.
Daria noticed the man was breathing, slow, but very deep, as he knelt to inspect his handiwork.
"Is she..."
"Not quite." he said, tapping the tip of the cosh against the Thing's forehead, and gently pressing it down, recompressing the spring piston as he forced the last resisting part above the limp body back against the floor. The teeth were still snapping.
Interrogator nodded, daintily, into the room it had burst from. "How about him?"
Daria edged forward, sidling over the heap in the doorframe. Over her shoulder, she could already hear Marks wailing over how much data they had to salvage...
The uproar had knocked the projector slightly off-kilter at some point, and the image was skewed, flickering. She couldn't help catching a glimpse at it as she entered—words blurred, beyond recognition by the safeties and the damaged equipment, in two lines on white. The last character looked infuriatingly like a "?"
She hurriedly focused her attention back to her goal, at the remains of the workstation. Her heart sank.
"Well, going between the blood loss, and the penetrating organ injuries..." The poor man was obviously very dead. The sizzling equipment's wreckage sparked, intermittently; bright, harsh blue embers falling on the enmeshed body. It didn't even twitch.
Or electrocution...She frowned. Cobra electronics were notoriously overclocked—a practice that had long given them a decade-odd lead over Silicon Valley, but system failures that were typically catastrophic...
An unsettling thought occured to her. Turning away from the whole sad spectacle, she called out the door.
"Say, doc...was this thing connected to anythi..." she stopped cold. "Um...Doctor Marks?"
The man stood—more leaned, or perched—in front of the server terminal, hands braced ready over the keyboard. Where he'd frozen, gargoyle like, in his tracks.
All but his eyes. Even Daria could see that from here...all but his eyes. Uncovered, and glinting in the screen light. Quivering nystagmiclly.
"Doctor..." she repeated, in a low tone.
The scream that tore from the man was, if less bestial than the ones that had shortly preceded it, no less terrifying for the difference.
It was not—or not merely—a feral bay of rage. It was madness given voice.
The noise, by grace, was struck short as Interrogator swept in behind the doctor, and decked him. Cleanly, at the base of the skull. Marks' fingers rattled across the keyboard as he crumpled to the floor.
He dragged the doctor's body back, by the shoulders—as another tech automatically hopped up to take his place.
The tech glanced at the monitor, paused a moment, and shrieked. Hands clawing at his skull.
Interrogator got ahold of the poor man just as another fresh technician made for the vacant duty station—maybe he had a notion he could shut it down, or the procedure was just drilled in too well—when Wong seized him by the lapels, very loudly belting out an unintelligible clamor. Daria didn't understand the words, but she didn't need to...she could recognize a chewing out when she heard it.
Wong shoved the tech away, and spun into the terminal seat. Spindoctor tensed, but the blueshirt seemed unfazed by whatever horror had seized the display.
Amazingly, the man looked to be actually navigating the display with the trackball—how the devil he was using it at all, she couldn't guess. Pictographs, maybe?
There was little time to ponder. After a scanty tense few second, Wong pounded the desk in a huff—damnedly foolhardy, with Interrogator coiled to pounce again, but Wong paid him no notice, wheeling on his heel, and storming towards the test chamber window.
He drew a practically contraband marker from a bandolier, and with a flurry of motions, had scribbled on the clean side of the gore splattered glass...
It was a quick, hideous little cartouche; a sketch of a smashed computer, smoke twirling up next to a haunted looking face, orbited by some deranged swirls, skulls, and sundry other crazed glyphs. A jagged arrow connected the first cartoon to a smaller one, identical except for an unsmashed computer, more jagged lines from that to a crowd of even smaller, simple drawings of the same...
Wong added a big "!", ran an arrow from it to the tiny faces, finished the whole thing with a flourished underline.
It was better than nothing, if a bit crypti...
Crap.
"What the Hell else was that thing wired into?" she asked. Deming stammered, or tried to.
"The server!" Spindoctor snarled, like a mad dog. "What's it daisychained into?"
"Ev...not—not everything," the scientist said, trying to reassure, "No vital systems—flight controls, engineering, ship operations, all fine. Just lots of connections to unimportant sectors—ah," she started counting off on her fingers, and Spindoctor could imagine the woman's masked eyes rolling to a tally. "...the entertainment net feeds, the order line to the production floor—"
"'Order line'?" Interrogator said, with an enigmatic hint to his voice.
"That's right—for pre-production work, test batches...we do-"
"The presses." Daria hacked in, with deathly cold.
"Good call. I'd have just thought thought the earphones." Interrogator finished. He seemed impressed.
Deming blanched, fingers curling in recoil. "Gods...there must be hundreds of-"
"There's over a thousand Vipers on that floor." Spindoctor said, grimacing. "How long is the update queue?"
"I-I think every five minutes. I'm not sure, but Marks should kno—oh." Deming trailed off, eyes drifting to the lump in front of the terminal.
Daria checked her watch; 7:23 pm. And then just as quickly realized that that told her jack, as she didn't actually know when the supposed five minute cycle started.
"Shut it down."
"But I c—there's no manual..." Deming glanced again at the heap of would-be computer operators, wringing her hands. "Wong!"
She wheeled on the man, almost dragging him towards the terminal, making a frenzied pantomime of "cut it." But he was objecting, loudly. Whatever he was trying to get across, though, it didn't sound like mere reluctance—Daria caught the words "beng kui" repeated, with adamance.
The exact meaning was lost, but the gist seemed clear to her—either he didn't know how to shut it off, or he knew it wasn't going to work. There was no telling what exactly he'd seen on that basilisk monitor...
She checked her watch again. The minute digit clicked forward, at that. Damn it.
The two were still arguing...and as Spindoctor drew her hand up, and leveled it.
"Excuse me" she said, cranking the seer slider under her thumb all the way to "max."
The debaters' attention diverted, just as a power cell frisson came through the the ergo grip in her hand.
"...roll off."
Her arm wagged sideways before she zeroed the pistol back on the server housing.
The two gaped like fawns for a split-second before absorbing the hint, and scrambled aside.
The charge diode on the weapon blinked rapidly, then went steady.
Daria squeezed the trigger.
There was the slight baby's breath of pressure against her palm as the pistol discharged, recoiling against the dulcet keen of liquid fire lancing into the air.
The bolt of weapon plasma struck the server at half a mile per second. A little ifrit of flame jetted from the impact on the machine; the housing instantly washing over with a rippling corona, dissipating into flashing blue tendrils that licked the air, sputtering, before dying away with an echo of a shriek.
Spindoctor lowered the gun barrel—there was a bloom of carbon scoring on the computer's casing, but nothing more. No obvious damage, and the dull half-light of the shielded screen still shone.
"Surge...protector!" Deming squeaked out, "...It's shielded!"
Daria scowled. Superb. Of course that piece of scrap was up to underwriter standards...
She checked her gun; the charge light beside the slider was pulsing slow, reposed orange.
That had done it. The energy cell was dead. Her glower hardened.
Death ray my ass. Damn lousy piece of...she had half a mind to trade the bloody thing in for something better. Like a rock.
She almost didn't notice the Interrogator moving, again, sidewinding over to the blighted machine.
The man swiveled, looming, on his heel towards the blonde, with a beckoning arm. "All right, then. I guess it's my turn. Professor?" He waved his gauntleted fingers inward, and the scientist, albeit with a breath of hesitancy, stepped forward, almost reflexively.
The hand clamped down on Deming's left shoulder; the woman stiffened, petrified.
"'Yoink.'"
The man's other hand had snaked up, unnoticed, and he plucked something off the professor's lapel—the little ogive and black curl of wire of her radio mike.
Device in hand, the Interrogator pushed the woman aside, gently, and turned back to the terminal. He knelt, slightly, to plug the wires into what curiously didn't look like a visible port. There was an electric crackle, and the man's helmet nodded. He leaned towards the pickup and quickly recited,
"Blutbann, 'In The Grass,' Prep Ranger Solo Two. Verify."
There was a sort of "shimmery" noise from the computer, which the officer seemed to take as a good sign...
...as he promptly stood, and snapped the polarizing screen off the monitor with the back of his hand.
Daria swore. "What the Hell are you—" she started, flinging her hand towards her glasses, but cut short.
On the terminal screen was an image of herself...to be precise, of her in that very moment, backlit by one of the lab's wall sconces on the perse bulkhead.
She lowered her arm, the image followed. From the point of view of the monitor frame, it looked like.
Interrogator slid into the station chair, and started pecking at the keyboard. The view changed, flickering to a different shot of the lab, with blocky numerals in the corner of the screen.
Clever, Daria thought, just as the professor piped up.
"You—you have cameras in my labs? My labs?" she said, indignation cresting.
"You assumed we wouldn't?" the masked man drolled, not looking up.
The screen was flashing very quickly. Spindoctor hoped he knew exactly where what she guessed he was looking for...was.
Steady, girl. she thought, rubbing at a tautening neck rope. Don't get antsy...
"Why didn't you do that before?" Deming spat. Speak of the devil...
"Now you're just trying to pick a fight." Interrogator said, calmly. "This is a ROM shell, anyway...the server's still runni—aha."
A new image had appeared onscreen, and the man leaned in towards the juryrigged mike without giving it another glance, and spoke—a ghostly echo of his voice rumbled through the ship a second later;
"Attention all personnel, emergency order. Stop all contact with—"
The last words were mirrored in Daria's mind. "—aw HELL."
He'd looked up at the screen again—really looked this time, seen it.
Seen the throng swarming over the production deck.
It even wasn't a true mob, or a pack—that was plain enough. It was not the movement of grouped beings moving in concert.
The...thing they saw on camera was acting as one organism. Mindless, gestalt flowing and bunching to stimulus. Like a mold, or a carpet of maggots. But these were people.
Were people.
Her people.
In the cluster at the center of the hall, a fusillade of streaking indigo was petering out, gone increasingly wild, and not visibly slowing the mass of bodies that pressed in, before the nucleus of blue figures at the core was overwhelmed, and the light died out.
"What was that?"
"The Viper Detachment." Spindoctor cut the professor off, utterly leaden. "We never canceled the security request..." she nodded, sideways, to the smokey test chamber, without taking her eyes off the monitor, "...they were on their way here."
She could just make out a fuzzy pair of shapes somehow struggling out of the horde, onto clear deck. One was stumbling; slow, and desperate, and did not get far before it was swallowed up again. The other one was faster, in a mad sprint. One of the other shapes on the press machine-blocks saw it, and lunged off in pursuit.
It was a forty foot drop, and the attacker fell far short. It hit the deck, and went still.
Others on the blocks followed it. But there were plenty more waiting.
The Interrogator made a rattley sigh, and slumped forward.
"Well, I guess that's it for backup," he said, drumming his fingers against his mask. "At least we're fairly okay in here."
The Bifid's klaxon sounded just as the first screams tore out of the lab.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Author's notes: The original publication used a gruesome little illustration of Wong's drawing, rather than a description. Alas, this couldn't be supported in this format.
For the record, "Slavemaster" is actually a character from the original GI Joe cartoon, I didn't make him up. (In fact, technically, of all the named characters in this story so far, only one is an original character. And he's named after one from the show.)
And, as promised, and if anyone's interested...the official soundtrack playlist is available here: youtube-dot-com/playlist?list=PL8A79E9BF212541FF)!
Still to come, more gore, more cameos!
Daria and associated characters are © MTV networks; GI Joe and associated characters are © Hasbro; all other characters are the property of their respective owners.