Motility, Hojo had said. That meant movement. Independent movement.
Zack woke up to the horrifying smells of antiseptic, bleach, and ozone. Again he was naked, strapped down to a metal table, and covered in white circular sensor pads. The blinding surgical lights overhead that seared his retinas had become all too familiar. The entire situation was too familiar. It always presaged pain and horror.
His throat hurt from the voice suppressor. He didn't remember anyone attaching it to him; it must have been installed while he was unconscious. Its sharp spikes gouged into his flesh and paralyzed his vocal cords. His right hand ached, but that at least was distant, like an echo, though the strange new changes occurring there reminded him of its reality. As Hojo had promised—threatened?—Zack had at last learned how to turn off painful sensations. Mostly.
He could never turn off the horror and sense of violation, though.
A few days ago, Hojo had cut off his index finger and not allowed it to reattach itself. It was now kept in a nearby container. Zack craned his head to watch his poor finger squirm in the nutrient fluid. It had taken on a life of its own, but he still sensed it. He could even put his awareness into it, experience its confinement firsthand, and knew he could manipulate it. He resisted the temptation to do so. He had also learned that Hojo was studying the way he could control his detached body parts and his copies, and he absolutely wanted to prevent the insane scientist from gaining too much useful information.
Unfortunately, Hojo was an expert at deception and trickery, coercion, punishment, and flat-out torture. Zack knew that, despite his resistance, Hojo had managed to extract a lot of new knowledge from the unending series of horrible experiments.
Para-communications, Hojo called the ability. Anyone else would label it telepathy. Zack knew he could control his copies. Genesis could also control his copies. But Zack had never considered that he'd be able to control amputated body parts that still lived independently.
We can, the familiar voice spoke in his head, so terribly sad. We can.
Angeal, Zack replied, recognizing the voice. What's going to happen this time?
I'm sorry, was all Angeal said. I'm so very, very sorry.
Zack closed his eyes briefly, hoping today's round wasn't too terrible. His body was no longer his own, in more ways than one. It seemed like such a long time ago that he'd freaked out about his humanity, or lack thereof—back when he'd learned of his true origins—but he'd been an idiot then. He had been a mutant, a monster, but his base physiology, while contaminated and hybridized with alien material, had still been fundamentally human. Now, he truly wasn't human, not at all, not any longer. Hojo had forced his cells, his very DNA, to metamorphose into something abominable. Something that didn't belong on this world.
Something truly alien.
The worst part was that Hojo hadn't introduced anything new into his system. His body had already contained everything Hojo needed to work with, dormant but viable. Hojo had only awakened it and brought it to unforgiving life.
Only? Hah. There was nothing "only" about what Hojo had done.
Zack no longer possessed real human blood, just that horrible, purplish-pink-tinged goo. Hojo kept telling him he no longer needed to breathe. In fact, Hojo had said, he didn't need any specialized internal organs at all anymore. He could change them however he wished, or even just become a mass of undifferentiated cells. A true monster, merely imitating a human.
Zack shuddered, and felt the rigid straps holding him down bite into his bare flesh.
He knew the truth of Hojo's words. Hojo had removed so many of his body parts, so many organs. And yet, no matter how much agony Zack experienced, no matter how much he convulsed and gasped vainly for air, with his chest wide open, his ribs splayed apart—without his lungs or even his heart inside—he always lived.
There was never any human blood, just goo, but there was always unendurable pain—and yet he endured.
He had learned to turn off most pain the hard way. Most pain, but not all. Never all. It always took him a few minutes to stop it, and there was always new pain to replace it.
His mind shied away from memories of what exactly Hojo had done to him, to open him up like that, with knives and scalpels, and powered bone saws, and rib spreaders...
No! Angeal's voice screamed at him. Don't think of that! Don't summon those memories!
And Zack shut down those thoughts, but he couldn't help moving on to others. Hojo was taking too long to get started today. Not even any taunts or scolds about his misbehavior during dissections, how he never learned to stop screaming.
How was he still sane?
We're not, said Angeal's voice, again filled with grief. Not really. Not anymore.
Zack clenched his eyes shut. He knew no one could endure the endless torture without going mad. His mind shut down every day, no matter if he was kept in a cell, a mako pod, or a nutrient tank. Especially the nutrient tank. Hojo no longer bothered to feed him, just kept him submerged in a tank of nutrient liquid for hours at a time. (Good thing Hojo was right about him not needing to breathe. At first he always thrashed as though he were drowning, but after a minute or two his new instincts kicked in and his body settled.) Zack's mutated body did not require solid food; he absorbed nutrients directly through his skin. Excretion worked the same way, through his skin, just in reverse. Like sweat, but more. Much more, and different.
Unconsciousness was a relief beyond measure, while the waking world was a hellscape filled with horrors, many still unknown and waiting to be experienced. If he were to be released, be free again, what would he do?
He would murder Hojo! Tear him apart piece by piece, make that unholy sadist experience dismemberment for himself! Annihilate the lab, and Shin-Ra with it. He wanted to destroy the whole world! Burn everything down to the ground and beyond—shatter the Planet, destroy everything, everything, until he was all alone and could finally rest. Anything, anything to end his suffering and seek revenge like the monster Hojo had made of him.
Anything at all. Anything...
What was taking the scientists so long? They had just left him lying here. That couldn't be good.
To distract himself, he twisted his neck and looked at his damaged hand. His right hand. His hand that was regrowing a new finger. A small stub sprouted from the wound, growing quickly and steadily day by day. It was about a quarter the length of his original finger, and even bore a tiny fingernail at its tip. It horrified him, yet also brought a sense of relief that his hand would recover.
Up until recently, Hojo had studied how the various amputated body parts—limbs and organs and skin and veins—reattached and reintegrated themselves with Zack's alien body. But the experiments were now taking on a new, even more ominous turn. Like his amputated index finger, the peculiar ache in his hand where it had once been—and the regeneration of a new finger.
At last Hojo entered the room, air hoses trailing from his sealed white biohazard suit. He was accompanied by only two similarly garbed assistants. One carried a tray of surgical instruments and swabs for taking a variety of biological samples. Samples from him, from his own body. Like his index finger in the jar nearby.
The other assistant carried another tray. This one held three covered round dishes with pale pink agar coated in glistening slime and three flasks filled with cloudy pink nutrient solutions. The man set everything on a stand near Zack's head.
Cell cultures, Zack knew. He had learned so much about lab equipment during his endless sojourn in Hojo's clutches. He knew exactly what the equipment was called, what it was used for. Even if Hojo didn't always explain—though the man did like the sound of his own voice, didn't he?—the assistants talked, and Zack listened.
It was perverse and self-destructive, but he always wanted to know what they were doing to him.
Hojo finally came over to him, with the assistants following in his wake. Shin-Ra's chief scientist—the vile madman—brought out a metal probe and poked at Zack's injured hand, particularly the new stub of a finger. Zack clenched his hand into a fist, trying to protect his finger, but it wasn't fully functional yet and stuck out. Hojo prodded it harder.
"This is proceeding nicely, Specimen A," Hojo said. "I had planned to remove it today to examine its intermediate state, but I think I'll let it continue to grow to maturity instead. We have time to collect more data as necessary. This experiment needs to be run multiple times before we can move on to larger and more complex projects. The regrowth patterns should prove fascinating."
Zack felt a cold rush of dread. Hojo was going to amputate his finger again—and again and again, from the sound of it. Other body parts, too, and who knew what else? All to measure how they regrew?
"I see you're still following ordinary human bio-patterns," Hojo commented, almost like he was scolding Zack. "I've exposed you to so much alternate genetic material, and yet you stubbornly cling to superficial human forms. Such a shame, when you could generate almost anything you wanted." He shook his head, and his glasses flashed behind the clear visor of his biohazard suit. "I suppose it will take some time to rid you of that habit, but you will learn control over your body's new functions."
Zack put all his burning, insane hatred into the glare he directed at his tormentor.
Hojo barked out a sharp laugh. "You hate me now, but you will learn. Humanity no longer limits you. You are so much more now. You should embrace it. Once you accept your new existence, you will revel in it."
"No," Zack tried to protest, but only a hoarse whisper emerged. The voice suppressor tore into his throat as his muscles worked.
"You will, but right now it matters little what you think," Hojo said. "In your case, biology truly is destiny." He made an imperious gesture at the two assistants. "Sterilize the surface skin."
Zack endured as swabs and astringent liquids stung his bare skin. The reek of chemicals seared his nostrils. The assistants were not gentle as they vigorously wiped down his entire front and forced their intrusive hands and instruments beneath him. They left nothing untouched. Literally nothing. After weeks—months? Zack didn't know—of such treatment, Zack wasn't the slightest bit embarrassed. He was numb to it.
"Very good," Hojo said when they finished. "Now we'll see if the cultured cells display any preferences for reintegration. I rather doubt it, but one never knows." He looked up at an overhead observation window. "Be sure everything is recorded. No slipups, do you understand? This is a highly important experiment."
"Yes, sir," came a woman's voice from a speaker. "All equipment is running and functioning perfectly. We are monitoring it constantly."
"Good, good." He directed his next order to his assistants: "Vacate the lab." They departed obediently.
"Now," Hojo said when they were alone in the sealed lab, "we will try something new. For the official record, these are cell cultures grown from samples I took from you during our previous experiments." He pointedly looked up at the observation window. "I expect this seems unnecessarily wordy, Specimen A, but such important activities must be recorded down to the last detail."
Zack stared off to the side, refusing to feed Hojo's ego and his need for an audience.
Performing for the cameras and microphones, Hojo gestured broadly at the tray of flasks and culture plates beside the surgical table. "I am using samples of Specimen A's cells taken from his right deltoid muscle, his heart's left ventricle, and his left kidney. Diagrams of the exact sample collection sites are on record. Each sample has been cultured both on a cell culture plate and in a nutrient broth. All media and nutrient mixes were controlled for composition. Temperature and atmospheric conditions were strictly maintained during the growth process as previously recorded.
"All the cell cultures exhibit outstanding vigor and independent motility, with a notable tendency to de-differentiate and self-organize into new, cooperative tissues. Unsurprising, given their basic nature. We shall now test their fundamental Reunion instincts by providing them with free access to each other and their original host organism."
Hojo opened the flasks and removed the lids from the culture plates, exposing the contents. "Now we wait," he added dispassionately. That alarming statement hung in the air like a deadly miasma as he also left the room. The doors sealed shut behind him with pneumatic hisses, the sophisticated equipment maintaining the air pressure so that any contamination was restricted to the lab's interior and couldn't escape outside.
Not very comforting to anyone trapped inside, Zack reflected. He managed to lift his head enough to stare at the cell cultures on the tray. They were sitting at eye level. That seemed ominous.
He felt his heart pound while he waited. Even if his heart was an imitation, even if it no longer pumped blood, it still beat in a steady rhythm—or perhaps he only believed it did. He no longer knew what was real or normal for him. At the moment his pulse was elevated, his fake heart reacting to his stress as he waited for...something. He had no idea what Hojo expected to happen.
That lack of knowledge terrified him.
He counted sixty heartbeats, then seventy. Then eighty.
And then the slime on one of the culture plates—it twitched.
Zack swallowed hard.
The slime twitched again. The slime on the other two plates also twitched. The cloudiness in the flasks thickened and condensed, separating from the pink nutrient fluid and forming balls of greyish-brownish sludge.
Motility, Hojo had said. That meant movement. Independent movement.
The globby balls of tissue slithered forward, out of their plates and flasks, and onto the tray. They each sprouted thread-thin tendrils and several thicker appendages—antennae?—that swiveled around before homing in on each other. Trailing pink fluid, the globs moved together and merged into a single unit, bristling with antennae and tendrils. It quivered in place for seven heartbeats (Zack counted them), then its gloppy body stretched out as it crept forward in a gliding, wavelike motion.
Forward. Toward him. He sensed it as it sensed him. It was part of him—separated yet one.
Zack stared at it. The damned thing reminded him of a great big mutated slug. A few handspans away from his chest, it stopped again, quavering, and he felt its agitation, its excitement, as he might feel shivery gooseflesh on his own skin. He felt its involuntary, instinctive desires, and felt them echoed in his core being.
They were one.
He felt it as it pulled together into a rounded glob, slightly flattened as though it was crouching, and then as it sprang into the air.
Zack gasped at the wet impact on the center of his bare chest. The blob immediately flattened out into a slimy mat, covering as much surface area across his chest, neck, and stomach as it could manage. It sprouted tendrils all over, hundreds, thousands, like weird, animated fur, all fine as hair, so fine he could barely make out individual strands. And then the entire mass started to dig in. Thousands, millions, of tendrils burrowed into his skin, seeking out tender flesh, winding between the cells themselves.
He felt it. He experienced it—it was part of him and he was part of it. He knew exactly what it was doing, exactly what was happening to him and how his body reacted, how it yielded to the invasion, encouraging and welcoming the joining. He knew exactly how it felt to the blob as well as to himself. It was—it was joyous. It took his breath away. They were the same; they were one being.
Somewhere above him, Hojo's voice hissed over the lab's loudspeakers, "Interesting. I didn't expect the merging to work quite like this among the different specimens."
Shut up! Zack wanted to scream it to the heavens—he tried, but he'd forgotten the voice suppressor in his throat and only a hiss of whispery air came out.
He was one of the specimens Hojo was talking about...
The feelings of joy and welcome increased. He longed to embrace the furry mat, while he also fended off his human gag reflex; he was caught between ecstasy and revulsion.
They're your own cells, they're your own cells, he chanted in his head. It's just like when other body parts reattach. It's the same, it's all the same. They'll just be reabsorbed.
It didn't help.
You can control it, he thought. You can stop it! But that was what Hojo wanted. Zack knew he couldn't, shouldn't. He didn't even really want to, not deep down. He wanted it to happen, he wanted to experience it fully! In any case, Hojo was watching, recording everything, analyzing, learning. Who knew what he'd do when he could build bio-machines to telepathically control Zack's very cells?
The mass on his chest felt pleasantly warm and glowed just a little. Zack despised himself for enjoying the heat, the sensations of blending, and he shuddered. He wanted it to stop; he wanted it to go on forever. Instead, he told himself to simply endure it, to just let it happen. Let it happen! Don't fight it, don't embrace it, just let it happen. He chanted that to himself, into his own head, over and over. It'll be done soon! The cells are part of you! Let them come home.
Welcome them home.
Against his chaotic emotions, his entire body relaxed, becoming pliant, and anticipation ran parallel to his fear, growing until it blotted out everything else. He dropped his head back against the table, closed his eyes, and let the rapture of Reunion overtake him.
The furry mat of slime dug deeper into him, spreading networks of roots and fibers beneath his skin and into his muscles. He felt it all. It was vaguely similar to the experience of a limb or organ reattaching, but not localized and this time there was no preceding trauma of amputation to mask the subtler sensations.
No, he thought while his flesh engulfed the tendrils, no longer merely yielding to their intrusion but actively pulling them in... No, this wasn't like a limb; it was more like when a large layer of living skin reattached itself to raw muscle and fat—Hojo had done that to him, too—but this was deeper, far deeper, and without the agony of having been flayed alive. Instead, warmth and strange tingling sensations filled him, almost sexual yet different, as his body betrayed him, its tissues opening and parting to accept the new flesh, enclosing around it, embracing it. Absorbing it.
They merged, his own flesh welcoming the squirming tendrils that insinuated themselves into his very being, and— It was pure violation. It felt good, it felt right. He hated himself so much for enjoying the experience. He and the foreign tissues joined and merged, blended together, and united into a single, blissful whole. So fundamental, so natural, so shameful, so alien, so repulsive—
He wanted it, his body yearned for it—
He couldn't bear it—he couldn't—
It was a clear, bright day outside Midgar as he jogged along the city wall. The sky was green-tinted blue and the air marginally cleaner than within the city proper. A few puffy white clouds hung above, eerily motionless. Colors and edges seemed too sharp, and all was dead silent. No insects made a sound, no birds, not even a stray monster. Midgar's walls rose high, slashing the barren, dry landscape like blunt cleavers. The whole world was still, unchanging. Static. Unreal. Like time itself had ceased.
Zack's breath huffed as he ran, and he glanced to his companion. Angeal jogged beside him. A black tee-shirt bearing the logo for SOLDIER stretched across his broad shoulders, and he wore standard fatigue trousers and boots. Zack looked down at himself. He was dressed the same.
Angeal wasn't even out of breath. "—good for you. Just because we're enhanced doesn't mean we can neglect cardiovascular fitness or physical training. Use it or lose it, SOLDIER. Not even mako can change that fact of life." He didn't even break his rhythm during the speech.
They'd both been here before. Everything, identical. Zack remembered. He remembered, and suddenly understood. He halted abruptly. "Oh no. I get it now," he said. "This is your happy place, isn't it?"
Angeal turned, came back to him, and tilted his head in a silent question.
"This is your safe place—where you hide from the things that have happened to you, the things Hojo did to you." The things Sephiroth and I have done to you, too, Zack thought, remembering that Sephiroth had beheaded Angeal twice. "This is where you live now."
"It's better here," was all Angeal said.
Zack was struck with how wistful Angeal sounded—almost childlike, but with a mature, bitter edge as well. "Oh my gosh," Zack murmured. "It's really that bad. I should have known; I should have understood. I'm so sorry, Angeal. I wish we'd gotten you away from Hojo so much sooner."
Angeal's safe place was training on a sunny day—with Zack.
It wasn't his childhood home in Banora. That had been ruined for him when Genesis and Hollander had used the town as their base and committed their own atrocities there, and when his mother had killed herself there. Then Shin-Ra had bombed Banora into nonexistence. No, Angeal couldn't go back to Banora.
It couldn't be anywhere in Shin-Ra, either—not the corporation that had created him and used him, that had later handed him to Hojo for obscene experimentation.
Nor could it be a time with Genesis or Sephiroth, his closest friends, considering all that had happened to tear them apart, and all that had happened after that.
Everything was tainted for him now. Everything except training with Zack.
How humbling.
"We should always just meet here first," Zack suggested. "Skip Hojo's lab entirely, you know?" That was a great idea, if he did say so himself.
"It's your dream," Angeal told him.
"You mean I get to choose?"
"I don't decide how your dream is structured."
"So I get to choose. Or rather, my subconscious chooses." Zack sighed. It made sense; he was full of fears about about Angeal and the lab. Naturally his subconscious was selecting terrible memories. Apparently, Angeal provided imagery but otherwise had no say in what memories Zack dreamed about. Probably they only returned here, to jogging outside Midgar, because that was the place Angeal had retreated to when his mind...shattered.
How many times had he broken apart, put himself back together, then been broken again?
He was still broken. Hadn't this version, this incomplete ghost of Angeal, said so in another dream from before? He relied on Zack's mind to have form. "We're back to that whole business of you being a construct of mine again, aren't we? My mind is holding you together right now, isn't it? But you can just be yourself now. We're safe here, I promise. It's okay to put yourself back together while we're here."
Angeal tilted his head again and said, "Someone's calling you."
"What?"
"Someone wants you."
Zack strained his ears. In the far, far distance, he heard someone call his name.
"You have to go," Angeal said.
"I don't want to leave yet," Zack insisted. "We need to talk more."
The voice in the distance got louder, more demanding: "Zack! Za—!"
"Not yet!" Zack yelled and then the ground opened up beneath him and he fell into a gaping chasm.