She stood at the top of the hill, looking forward.
The black inorganic surfaces and spines that wrapped around her body as armor gleamed in the sunlight, nothing like what she'd started out with fifteen years earlier.
At this point, she doubted she could even be considered human anymore. She'd given that up years ago. Before she was Safeguard. Before the well-dressed lady with the fedora. Before the Guild.
"Are you sure about this? You don't have to do this alone."
A woman's voice, perpetually young. Once wholly artificial, now only when more convenient.
"I'm sure, Dragon. It's my mistake. Not anyone else's."
"Well, we'll be waiting on standby if you change your mind. You know how Narwhal is."
She nodded, knowing that Dragon could see her, but kept her own eyes on her target.
PRT Quarantine Zone #7.
Her first mistake. Her worst one.
Not that anybody called it that, at least not to her face. Behind closed doors, though, it was only a step away from Nilbog.
Arguably much, much worse, considering the scale.
An entire city that had once hosted over thirty thousand souls, now surrounded with a hundred foot high wall, complete with automated turrets at the top. Establishing the quarantine had supposedly been hell.
She didn't doubt it. Not with what she knew about the cause.
Fists tightening, she started forward. There was no entrance, no gate or door or anything. Just the wall. Just the city.
Dragon had been kind enough to disable the turrets for her today, though.
Soon enough she was at the base of the wall, fully in its shadow as it loomed over her, looking all the taller and more impressive despite its hurried construction and appearing just a mishmash collection of steel plates and concrete on the outside.
With less than a thought, her armor thickened, spines becoming more prominent, fingers and toes becoming claws sharp enough to shear through steel like butter.
She crouched, artificial leg muscles coiling, and jumped less than a second later, clearing more than half of the distance up the wall before she dug her hands and feet in, rapidly climbing up to the top.
Her ascent was measured in seconds, rather than the minutes it looked like it would have taken, appearing like a spider scurrying on a wall.
She flipped over the edge, landing on her feet in a crouch before standing.
Then she was there. At the top.
She'd seen satellite images of it, of course. But there was a difference between simply seeing images and
experiencing something.
It was simply…
empty.
Largely just as it had been left, without any change at all: roads and buildings all still standing, alone. The only major difference was the vegetation, which had been allowed to grow unchecked, vines crawling across surfaces and sidewalks bursting from the expansion of trees' roots beneath them.
Looking around from her vantage point, she couldn't immediately see anything moving.
"Dragon, may I have access to the satellite feeds you've got?"
"Of course, Safeguard."
Her vision expanded, no longer just what she could see from her own perspective, but aided by the number of high-resolution satellites Dragon had trained on the location, both permanent for monitoring and the temporary ones specifically for this operation.
The various images shifted minutely, zooming and panning at what seemed like random, but all under her control.
"Safeguard, you're going to give me a headache doing that." And there was Repertoire. She was honestly surprised the woman had managed to be as quiet as she had for so long.
Normally she might have made a bit of fun of Andrea, but today, now, she was simply silent, continuing her search.
Suddenly, she caught a bit of movement, all of the feeds shifting to focus on the area, her own head snapping left to match.
The thing she saw wasn't even close to human.
It was like someone had taken a panther, merged it with a man, covered it in skeletal white bone-armor plates and chitinous spines that looked as lethal as they likely were, and then made it ten feet tall standing upright.
They've gotten worse.
They'd
evolved.
Shit.
She reached over her shoulder, pulling a large black rectangular object in front of her. It quickly shifted in her hands, barrel extending and pieces sliding into place to match the configuration she wanted. Her feet dug into the concrete and steel she stood on to anchor her with a simple flex.
Five seconds to crouch and aim, a rising charge building, and then a sharp
snap-crack as the slug went hypersonic. Less than half a second later the thing's head was conspicuously missing.
"I haven't seen that one before," Andrea commented.
"It's new."
The rifle folded back up to its natural configuration as she put it back over her shoulder. "I'm going in for a closer look."
Without further warning, she jumped off the edge of the wall, gripping the side, fingers and claws dragging through material to slow her descent and make for a quieter landing. No reason to draw more attention to herself than she had to. She had more than enough time for that later.
Moving through the suburban areas, she finally reached the white creature. It was slowly cooling, the amount of mass it had on it making the process slower.
"Some sort of hunter-killer variant, it seems. It appears to be based off of the class-D we've got documented," Dragon commented. "There'll likely be more the closer you get to the hive."
She hummed in agreement.
Without warning, the creature exploded, vine-like tendrils and organs reaching out, as though searching for something, but not finding any hold on her before abruptly freezing and then dropping, leaving nothing more than a mess of white viscera and flesh sprawled in every direction.
It was one of the things that made the Revenant so hard to deal with, because termination just meant exploding and trying to infect as many as possible in the final moments.
It was something she'd never even intended.
Untangling herself from the remains of the creature, she turned towards the center of the city, and then pushed off, only a crater in the road and a wisp of air left behind to show that she'd ever been then.
The overgrown suburban areas gradually turned more urban as she moved closer to the center. The green overgrowth gave way to even more obvious signs of the infection: structures and lampposts draped in the thick white cord of the dead virus, buildings collapsed and torn apart from the outgrowths. And of course, the most obvious sign: the increasing number of creatures, in all shapes and sizes.
She killed every one she came across.
"It looks like our assumption of classes may have been incorrect." Dragon said.
The woman may have been stating the obvious, but it was true. Almost no two were the same, though they all bore some superficial resemblance to each other. Some of the creatures were massive, larger than one of the abandoned minivans that littered the street, while others were smaller than a bicycle.
"The virus mutated." She paused before amending, "Again."
"Yes, it would appear so," Dragon agreed.
"Dragon, why wasn't this documented?"
The woman sighed. "Nobody's really been paying attention to the zone other than the one monitor satellite. Motion sensors on the wall and beyond have never gone off, so I'd assume that the personnel allocated to watch the site were gradually whittled down and then removed entirely to allocate manpower better."
"You can't exactly blame them, Safeguard. Twenty one years without a single change? I'd think keeping someone monitoring it 24/7 would be a waste of resources, too," Repertoire added.
She frowned, but reluctantly agreed in silence.
So things had changed without them noticing. Not good. She couldn't exactly just go in there and start fighting… "Dragon, what was the estimated population of the city post-evacuation?"
The woman's avatar looked to the side, as though looking something up, even though the action was completely unnecessary. Habit, apparently. "Well, there's no chance of an exact count of the infected, but… including the Revenant, it's over eight thousand."
"You've been keeping track of the ones we've dealt with, right?" she asks Dragon, ignoring Repertoire.
Dragon nodded, before opening her mouth. "Six—"
"Sixty-seven, yes. We've covered
multiple square miles of area, and only seen that many."
"Yes? I don't see the problem?"
"We've haven't seen even a hundred, and from adjusting the satellites to focus on downtown, I can only see a few hundred there at most," she said, and a look of dawning comprehension slowly appeared on Dragon's face, simultaneously paling. "So Dragon, if there were over eight thousand infected, and they don't die naturally,
where are all the others?"
Andrea summed the situation up quite nicely.
"Oh, shit."
The virus had never been meant to evolve. It had never been meant to
survive. But in the situation she'd been in —life, or death— she hadn't exactly had the luxury of worrying about that.
The initial vector had been air. Simple, easy, and with a built-in mechanism that would make it break down in an environment of oxygen and nitrogen within thirty minutes.
That would have been great, were it not for the fact that the virus was made to invade human cells, starting with the entire nervous system, destroy their DNA, and co-opt them for their own purpose. Essentially, the virus became immune to the air-vulnerability through the simple fact that human cells were not vulnerable to air, and the late stage of the infected cell simply
was the virus.
In the end, there was nothing left of the original organism, just the virus and the monstrous changes it wrought once the target was fully infected. The resulting organism still produced the virus, not as quickly, but it did. And when the outer cells of the organism were replicating the virus just as fast as it degraded —even if the virus was restricted to the surface that it was already on and not airborne— that meant that
anycontact with an infected, and you were a lost cause.
It was terrible, the only consolation being that
without a central nervous system, which acted as a control for the rest of the virus in the body, the virus could do nothing except obey the directive encoded in its DNA: infect. Which namely involved exploding and trying to touch as much of anything in the immediate area as possible.
Bad, and more than a few had been caught by that, but not impossible to avoid.
And then it had started evolving. Bootstrapping itself.
The infected had begun
changing, the virus using the cells it infected in specific ways, becoming creatures that were stronger and faster; predators that searched for and ate anything they could find —despite not needing it— including people. Masses of the virus conglomerated, becoming giant clusters that took over whole buildings, infecting everyone they could before they were dealt with.
She'd only figured out later that it was simply becoming what it was
meant to be, instead of the bastardized, compressed version she'd initially created.
She didn't tell anyone that.
The creatures had never exhibited any real intelligence, simply attacking everything around them. No social dynamics, nothing.
So
where were they?
Her feeds shifted, scouring the area downtown with the highest concentrations as she walked down the bare, abandoned interstate.
"Dragon, I'm not seeing
any signs of where the missing ones could be. Do you?"
The brunette shook her head, but then suddenly froze. "Wait. The large industrial center, a few miles east of where you are… I'm seeing some go in, and others come out, but… they're not the same."
She was shifting her views to that area even as Dragon spoke, and saw what she was describing.
"I've got it."
Vaulting over the edge of the overpass she was on, she dropped to the ground and started moving in the direction of what they were looking at.
She dealt with most of the Revenant brutally, using her strength and speed to snap their necks and then destroy their brains before they could fight back, moving away as they exploded.
No need to waste ammunition—that was saved for the particularly large examples.
The closer she got to the treatment center, the less they looked anything like their previous human selves, appearing more and more monstrous, segmented, skeletal white armor covering them completely. The number of limbs was no longer limited to four, and some were so fast and strong that she would have had trouble if she'd done this five years before.
But this was what she was here for. To fix her mistake, even if nothing came of the result, if the city remained abandoned.
It was the least she could do for the people who had died to give birth to these things.
She worked silently, though Andrea had left at some point and returned with food and a drink, eating while watching and letting Dragon have some of her fries.
Watching this
would be something she enjoyed.
"I could've helped you out with this, Safeguard. It would've made it go a lot faster."
She shook her head. "It's not worth the risk. I don't know if I could have made a vaccine for this or not. It's the product of desperation, and it's as indiscriminate and unforgiving as I was when I made it, if not worse"
The pale-haired woman frowned and leaned back. "At least lighten up a little. That sounded like something
she would say and you're
not her anymore."
"…" Safeguard sighed, standing up from where she'd just taken out another creature with the rifle. "Fine. Do you want to discuss my 'thoughtless lack of personal self-concern in an ultimately unnecessary and pointless crusade' then?" she asked dryly.
"Not particularly," Andrea said. "Why, do
you want to?"
She just gave the video feed she was sending the pair a flat look.
"Also did Yamada really say that? I'd have thought she would be all for this. Catharsis and closure."
"No. It was Lena."
"Are you sleeping on the couch, now?"
"There's no couch."
Andrea's mouth curled into a smirk. "Oh,
really?" she purred.
"Dragon, please get Repertoire's mind out of the gutter. I don't need her writing any more bad fanfiction shipping me with anyone else." There was a yelp as Dragon pinched Andrea's arm. "Thank you."
She shifted her avatar to look right at Repertoire. "You know why that's not possible, too."
"Safeguard, there are people out there who would be
more than okay with being with a 98% robot girl."
"…You'd know," she responded, deadpan.
Andrea looked shocked. "W-was that just a snappy comeback
and an innuendo? How will I ever recover?"
"You left yourself open to it."
"Touché."
Safeguard rolled her eyes, but allowed her mouth to ease into a slight smile.
She reached the crest of the hill she'd been climbing and looked down, at the warehouses and abandoned large brick industrial factories in this area of the city.
It was absolutely crawling with Revenant, reminding her of an ant hive, but one before it was kicked.
"Alright I'm here. I think I could handle them all myself. But there's …a lot more than I expected and this is only outside," she admitted sourly. "Whatever's in there has to be really important somehow. …I'm going to need someway to get in, and fighting is just going to let them know I'm here."
"You ever tried not killing them?"
She froze, focusing on Repertoire. "What?"
"Well, I mean, they're yours, right? Have you ever tried like,
not killing one?" the woman asked. "'Cause that's basic minions 101."
"These aren't
minions," Safeguard growled. "They're people-eating monsters."
Andrea shrugged. "Well, yeah. But you still made them. They can't even affect you, right? You said their whole thing is infection. So why would they bother you at all if they can't get you?"
Her toes dug into the cement beneath her as she tensed in frustration. "That's not…"
That's not how it works, she wanted to say.
But she didn't know if it was.
She ran over the genetic sequence in her head, pulling apart and decompressing the original nucleotide encoding that she could remember like it was yesterday. Her own DNA was spliced in wholesale, an extremely inelegant solution to blacklist her from the infection, but the best she'd been able to do at the time. And at that point she'd truly only been concerned for her survival, not how prettily it was done.
According to what she knew, that blacklist made the virus become non-aggressive and inert when it tried to invade the nucleus and found her own DNA there. When the cell died and was cleaned up, so would the virus.
"That's how it works on a cellular scale. But that would make
no sense to scale up to an entire organism. The virus can't magically tell who I am from a distance. It's stopped right at the last step of infection," she explained.
"Your DNA's what's being used as the template for comparison. Would it be possible to use that to simulate your appearance and have the non-aggression be imprinted?" Dragon asked.
"No," she answered immediately.
Dragon looked at her intently, and she relented after ten seconds. "…Alright, fine,
maybe. The changes that the virus makes to the central nervous system are extremely complex. I still don't entirely understand the components of the virus that enable it to do that. Yes, in theory there could be some sort of… innate knowledge based on the contents of the virus which includes knowing what I look like. But the chance of that is so unlikely as to be effectively impossible, much less that the non-aggression would retain association with that on such a large scale."
"But it's not zero~" Andrea sang, twisting around in her chair.
This was bloody idiotic.
"
It doesn't work like that," Safeguard growled.
"Prove it," Andrea returned, suddenly staring at the camera with a serious expression. "
Prove that it doesn't work like that. You of all people should know better than to discount the near-impossible."
Fucking…
"
Fine," she said tersely. It wasn't like she'd be in any danger. "I'll prove it. And then you'll say I'm right.
And buy me lunch at that new place on Adelaide."
"And if I'm right you have to go on a date with someone. A
real one," Andrea returned easily.
Her hands clenched and unclenched. Fine. It wasn't like she was going to lose anyways.
The nearest lone Revenant was… five blocks west and two north.
Without waiting, she spun on her heal and started off towards it, threading through the abandoned buildings and streets.
When it was just around the corner, she stopped.
"Helmet off."
"What?" she asked Andrea.
"How do you expect them to recognize you if you're completely covered? Helmet. Off," Repertoire told her.
Ugh.
She let go of the armor around her head, the various hardened layers separating into dozens of sharp yet flexible tendrils and then retreating back down her to her neck and body, like liquid vines growing in a reverse time-lapse.
"Happy?"
"Ecstatic," Andrea responded blithely.
She rolled her eyes and took a breath.
This was stupid.
…
"I want to note for the record that I think this is a completely stupid idea."
"So noted!" Andrea returned happily.
She abandoned her stealth and stepped out from behind the corner.
The Revenant stopped, and then swung around to look at her, looking like some sort of dinosaur-lion with a disturbingly human facial structure. It stared at her for a moment, and she tensed, ready to move at any sign.
But it just stared at her, and then turned back around and began walking away, continuing its previous path.
What.
No,
what.
"HAHAHAHA I TOLD YOU! SAFEGUARD'S GOING ON A DATE~"
"Th-that
doesn't make any sense. Wh-wha… How…" she stuttered.
"You're the most qualified person to say. If you don't understand it, I don't see us doing much better," Dragon said calmly.
Was it because she wasn't human? Could they discriminate like that?
But that didn't make any sense, because this body was designed to imitate humanity so closely as to be practically undetectable that she was different, everything from body heat to pulse replicated. That could be stopped, of course, which was part of her stealth mode, but in disabling her stealth they'd been restored.
Any other animals treated her like a completely normal human like this.
So it
couldn't be that, it had to be some instinct, like Dragon had proposed.
She collapsed, leaning upright with the weapons on her back against the side of the building and running black-armored fingers through short-cropped hair.
"I don't…"
What did this mean? Was she more like Nilbog than she'd thought? Was she just him but a Tinker?
"You're not Nilbog, Safeguard," Dragon said.
…Oh. She'd been broadcasting over the commline without realizing it.
"Which can be definitively proven by what you're trying to do now. Nilbog would never kill his own creations, no matter what was required to make them."
Right. Okay.
Step 1, find out what was in those factory complexes.
Step 2, deal with what ever it is.
Step 3, kill everything else.
This was workable.
She levered herself off the wall. No point in re-enabling stealth if it wasn't going to do anything.
She wasn't sure what to think about this development.
Don't think about it.
Her journey towards the warehouses and industrial complex was hurried, rushed. She didn't pay the Revenant any mind, and they didn't note her other than a few looks when she passed them.
It made her metal skeleton itch.
The buildings and structures were steel. Large. Rusted.
Crawling with Revenant.
She turned her head, eyesight flicking over features rapidly, finding a pattern to the movement and then following it deeper in.
They didn't attack her, but they also didn't acknowledge her.
After seeing exactly how aggressive they were to others, it was disturbing.
She wound her way through pipes and storage tanks, moving inward, until she reached a large building with a hole in the side of it that the Revenant were crawling in and out of like ants.
"Once more unto the breach, dear friends," she said under her breath.
"Henry V, Act 3, Scene 1," Dragon responded, and Safeguard just gave her a
look over the video feed before refocusing on the hole.
And then she stepped forward
It was dark. Dark and damp and
breathing.
Almost immediately inside the building had been a hole in the ground, white viral growth spreading out from it, and she was left with no choice but to go into it.
The walls themselves were white, cord draping and hanging from the surfaces, and the tunnels held pustules and clusters of fungal-like growth that pulsed and waved in a non-existent wind.
With every step she took she sent out an ultrasonic pulse, building a sonar map, and revealing just how massive and complex this place was.
She kept to the the main stream of Revenant, letting them sweep her along, following the path of least resistance.
She had to be down there for twenty five minutes before they finally emerged into a giant room that glowed with blue and white crystals. The Revenant spread out, moving over to large sacs at the side of the room, tending to them somehow before moving around again.
Still, that wasn't what drew her attention.
No,
that privilege was awarded to the giant blue crystal at the center of the room—directly beneath a large chandelier-like white crystal growth—cut into the likeness of a throne on a three-tiered dais, and the nude feminine figure that sat upon it
Because she knew that face.
And even as she looked at it, even as she checked her optical systems multiple times for errors and found none, she watched the slight smile on the face spread into a wide grin, the lips parting to form words even as the figure stood and stepped forward, descending a step with each sentence.
"Welcome home, Mother."
"Welcome home, Sister."
The bleached-white girl in front of her reached out to cup her cheek, and the last thing she remembered was Dragon shouting her name over the scratchy comm link as the girl smiled warmly.
"Welcome home…
Riley."
SyNaPSe
Worm/Tsutomu Nihei
Prompt said:
Riley triggers with a Nihei-inspired biotinker ability. Unable to save her family, she instead creates a virus while continuing to play Jack's game that quickly infects and kills the Nine... and doesn't stop.
This is actually pretty old, I've had it around for like… a year? At least? And it's not doing any good sitting around collecting dust, so I figured I might as well post it and see if you guys want to see more. It's also un-edited (as in, my editor has not looked at it and torn it to shreds) and unbeta-read, so it might not be up to the usual quality you guys expect? I don't know. Is it?
In conclusion, I'd like to ask:
- Would you like to see more?
- What would you like to see explored?
- What did you think of the chapter?
- Considering I was (at least in part) trying to replicate Nihei's storytelling style and overall atmosphere in written form, do you think I succeeded?
- Was the twist at the end compelling?
- Do you think there should have been more dialogue?
- Anything else?
