She Rose to the Challenge (aka A Blatant Play For Votes for Masochist/Charmer)
The bathroom stalls of the Spy's Demise are as lavish as any Syndicate executive's. Rose knows this because she took a look around an executive bathroom when she was taken around with Donald. They're also soundproofed, which is why she has locked herself in one to have a cry.
She feels so empty. Hollow. Violated. Even worse than... than some of the early times, when she was with constructs who weren't nice to her. Not nice at all, especially once Alexander and Serafina were out of the picture. Rose had learned very early in life that she could be made to do things. And enjoy doing them. But nothing like this.
Except she... she didn't kill anyone this time. But when she killed people because she was made to like doing it before, they were bad people! Except were they bad people? She doesn't know. And now she's hollow and empty and it wasn't for the Union. Or it was for the Union, but not for the right Union and Control is now bad and she has a member of Control in her head and nothing makes sense any more and now there's just a gaping hollowness in her stomach. It's like she just woke up and the sky was green and she can't rely on anything any more and everyone is acting like everything is all the same except it isn't because
nothing is the same, why can't they see it?
Without the iron-hard certainty in the Union, she feels lost. All alone. Is... is this how all the people who talk dismissively about 'constructs' live? How all the Masses live? How even Sera lives?
Rose hugs herself. She wishes Sera was here. She wants her mother. She's glad she's not. Because if she was here she might have hurt her and... and... and if she was here then Rose would have to face up to the fact that Dr Rosario was one of the people who made her like this. Who put the things in her head. Who had the authority to use those things to make her do whatever she wanted.
D-d-does she even love Sera? Or was she just made to love her?
She bursts into tears again. No. No. She can't think that. She... she... Sera has made plenty of sacrifices for her. She... she knows she has. But it's still her fault those things were in her! At least partially! So... so what does she do?
Rose blots her eyes on tissue paper. She can't let Serafina know. Because if she lets her know how she feels, she might... she might put it back in. Or she might stop loving her. So she has to hide it. At least... at least until she knows that Sera loves her really. And that means she'll just have to... to make Serafina think that the distress is just about nearly being made to kill Donald. That now she's back to normal and everything is all right. Yes. If... if she acts like everything is normal, maybe she can just make everything work. After all, everyone else manages. The Masses manage. She... she can find a new centre and maybe it's just like a wound and the gaping hole in her soul will close and she won't feel like she's trying to walk on quicksand.
She can't let Sera know what she feels. Because without the trust in the Union, she only has the people who are nice to her and as long as they keep on treating her the same, as long as they don't think she's any more broken-defective-wrong than she was before, they won't have her put down. She's... she's fine! She's going to be fine! She looks at her reflection in the mirror, and her tear-stained, red face. She'll... she doesn't want to die! Or be... be put in any of the machines that they use to reprogramme broken constructs.
Thorn steps into view in the mirror, somehow supplanting Rose's reflection without her noticing. She has a black eye and her hair is seriously mussed and her halo has been apparently shattered and is currently being held together with duct tape. She's carrying a blood-splattered crowbar. "Well, revenge is sweet," she says to no one in particular. "Who'd have thought it?"
"Please go away," Rose whispers.
"Rose, Rose, Rose, you're just so cruel," Thorn says mockingly. "Here I am, having one of the best days I've had in months - the look on her face! - and here you are, trying to ruin things for me. Can't you ever think of my feelings?" She rummages through her pockets, and pulls out a pair of wings, and then starts putting them on. "Until she regains consciousness as a figment of your imagination, you've got me again. She's an old lady. She needs her rest. So, really, I was doing her a kindness." She shakes out her crowbar, splattering blood over the wall. "We really do both like helping people."
Sitting mutely, Rose hugs herself. "I'm just... just a meat doll they made. Who can... could be made to do whatever they wanted," she whispers. "You were right. Please go away. I... I don't want to see you. Even if you were right."
"I'm not going to leave, no matter what pretty little lies you say. You see, the thing is, Rose," Thorn says, leaning against the wall and playing with her crowbar, "I am your adversary. Just like her." The bathroom lights catche her bright green eyes, their reflections gleaming like tiny suns. "The idiot who made a receptacle for the insane remnants of a forgotten age which ran screaming and mewling from things like us. But unlike her, I won't lie to you. You know I hold you in contempt. You know I think you're a pathetic naive child who refused to look behold the programming they stuck in your head. And then she did what I couldn't do, and
broke you so she could pluck out all those twisted words. I'm not going to tell you pretty little stories. I'm not going to coddle you and tell you everything's going to be all right. You know I don't like you." She looks impressed as she looks Rose up and down. "Although I must say, for all that she pretends to be the nicer one, I haven't managed to hurt you like she did. She did an excellent job."
Rose shudders convulsively, choking back a sob.
"Oh, of course it hurt. Boo hoo. Old growth must be cut away so new growth can come in. The fire ecology must burn so new life can spring forth. Power requires sacrifice," Thorn says mercilessly. "Your Progenitors have it very right. Nature red in tooth and claw. Not like the idiotic mewling Verbena out there who dresses up like a character from a film and does her magic involving crystals and nice thoughts and diluted down water. You Progenitors understand that the songs of birds are dominance calls and attempts to get sex. Plus, you do lots of animal sacrifice in your labs to increase your knowledge and train your graduate students. All those monkeys cut up and used for drugs testing. As I said, power requires sacrifice."
"Studying animals helps people learn," Rose says. She just wants to say what Thorn wants to hear, so she'll go away.
"That's the story you tell yourself," Thorn says, grinning. "You kill them, and then poke around inside them. Just like the haruspex, you gain knowledge from them. What's the difference? Save that one teaches you about the arts of time, and one about life."
"I see," Rose says.
Thorn leans in. "You're not listening, Rose," she says softly. "Well, let me put this in ways you'll understand. Your body is dying. Reina doesn't even know about the drugs you need to survive. She hasn't been taking them. So that means you're going to have to force yourself to get up, get out of this toilet stall, and go to the bar and get your hands on whatever drugs they have. Which is a lot." She smirks. "Reina doesn't even know what many of them are - she just banned Donald from taking them."
Rose nods, lips in a thin line. It's just another reminder of how she's... she's a captive of her own flesh. And now that she... she thinks about it, she does feel the vague ache and tiredness of her mitochondrial function dropping. It's intended to incapacitate her if she runs away. Make her an easy target for recapture. They can follow her blood.
She has maybe twelve hours before she's too weak to do anything.
***
Rose is at the bar, drawing up the list of what she needs, when Donald tries to approach.
"How are you feeling?" he asks, and automatically looks down at the list. "What's that?"
She's got her story prepared. He can't help her, and it won't do any good to have him worrying over her. "Just... just a small medical issue, Donald," Rose says, putting on a brave face for him. "Remember, I need some unusual dietary supplements because of my body. Reina wasn't taking them. I can synthesise them myself easily with the right raw ingredients. There's no need for you to worry."
"That doesn't sound small," he says, frowning.
"I'm a fully trained doctor, Donald," Rose tells him. "My body is a laboratory in its own right. As long as I can get the right precursor chemicals, I can synthesise what I need inside me. It's fine."
Donald gets a look at the list. "Bleach?" he asks. "LSD? Heroin? Absinthe?"
"I need oxidising agents. Sodium hypochlorite and calcium hypochlorite serve that purpose. Ethanol is always useful for synthesis. And Lysergic acid diethylamide and morphine are good carbon structures which I can use for some of the more complicated structures." Rose tries not to let on how important it is. "I've gone several days without them, and if that... that
thing gets in here, I want to be at 100%."
He looks at her, narrowing his eyes slightly. She puts on her best innocent expression, and forces herself to smile at him.
"You walked off before I could say anything," he says. She can read him. He's suspicious. "I just wanted to say..." he trails off. "If you want to talk to me about... I don't blame you. At all. I know... there are lots of people out there who can make people feel what they want them to. If you... if you felt like you wanted to do it, it wasn't your feeling. It was just something forced on you."
Rose would almost laugh if it wasn't so sad. She's just meat and chemicals, just like anyone else. Well, apart from Iterator cyborgs. There's no difference between 'I felt it' and 'drugs in my brain made me feel it'. She considers what she can get away with. "I know. I'm not fine, but I'm feeling better than I was," she says. "I... I locked myself in the toilet and had a cry and... and that helped. I just... I just need you to keep some of the RDs away from me. Some of them were talking a lot with Reina and... and I don't think I can pretend to be her well enough to fool them." She smiles at him, a watery smile she designs to tug at his heartstrings and play off her looks. "You could really help me if you do that."
Yes. She'll give him something to do. Something which makes him feel happy he's helping her. He can't help her. He's not a biologist or a psychologist or an expert at in-vivo chemical synthesis.
***
Back in the toilet cubicle, Rose takes considerable amounts of the carrier bag of drugs and bottles and shunts the contents into a temporary stomach she forms. Sitting on the closed toilet lid, she enters an analytic trance, focussed entirely on the workings of her body. If it wasn't for her haemo-vicissitude grafts, she couldn't do it - but with them, reforming part of her insides into a high end chemical workstation is trivial. She breaks out in a sweat as she buds off several new ventricles, uses thick muscular walls to energetically mix the contents, and then begins fractional distillation of the toxic mix of recreational chemicals, her body temperature rising from the heat of the reaction.
By the time she's done, she vomits back up a refined mix into several glass bottles she brought along, stoppering them. That should be enough to last her for two weeks. She could make more right now, but the chemicals have a limited shelf life without proper storage. She'll just need to carry the reagents around with her. And she's feeling more energetic already, because she's taken the first of her catch-up doses. Her mitochondria read out is already improving.
But this is the easy part. Because there's something else she needs to do.
"This is going to hurt. A lot," Thorn says smugly from the mirror. "Are you sure you aren't going to just run away?"
"I know," Rose whispers. "I'm poisoning myself. And turning off my defences. It'll hurt. I can take it."
It's simple, from a certain point of view. Her bone marrow is what's making the tracker blood. It has prion-like elements which will modify any blood in her system. So she needs to infiltrate her bone marrow with vicissitude-made plasmids, replace it with a modified version which doesn't produce the modified blood, and then kill all her old blood cells in one go with a way which won't trigger their reactive countermeasures so they don't modify her new blood cells. And then make the new blood before she dies.
Very 'simple'.
***
It hurts. It hurts a lot. But because the cubicle is silenced, no one can hear her scream.
She blacks out, her brain going into emergency preservation mode from oxygen deprivation.
***
Rose comes to. She's still alive. Lying on the ground, anaemically pale and dribbling denatured blood, but alive. She checks her readouts.
She... she didn't get them all. Their count is minimal, but it's increasing rapidly as they convert her new blood cells into more of them. But there's few enough of them that she can get them with an auto-immune response. Even if it'll hurt, because as soon as the blood detects an assault from an enlightened procedure it'll try to clot and shut her down.
Rose stuffs her face full of chocolate from the bag, to fuel the energy intensive procedures, and then triggers the auto-immune systems, hacked to go after her tracker-blood.
She blacks out again.
***
Still alive. This time she's clean. Anaemic and sick and her body is a battlezone and everything hurts.
But clean.
Success.
Just going to... to take a nap now.
