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In with one card
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Mar 26, 2024 04:46
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 18:50 |
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 Flash: King of Shields Virus ~1700 words You awaken to the smell of cleaning fluid and vomit. Crust flakes from your eyes as you open them and learn the vomit smell is from you, your insides turned out onto the floor beneath your polyweb hammock. A klaxon sounds and there's a flurry of activity as a dozen figures swing down from their webs and don coveralls tattered from generations of use. Next to you, a ruddy-faced man has finished buckling his suit. His flesh is patched gray, tearing in places, and swollen with subcutaneous growth. His voice is low and raspy. “Welcome back. Lemme know if you got questions. Takes a bit to adjust to a fresh skin." His gaze lingers on you for an uncomfortable moment. “You’ll remember soon enough.” You swing yourself out of the hammock but one leg gets caught and instead you fall into your vomit pile. It's messy, and your elbow hammers the metal floor painfully. Your new skin shudders. A good sign–this one might be wired right. Self-inspection reveals you are smooth and flawless, your exposed flesh white with a gray undertone. You run your fingers across your new body in wonder. Behind your neck is a cold mass of metal that clutches the base of your skull. From it sprout thin tubes that disappear into your skin. You touch one and it pulses, pumping fluids into and out of your cranial cavity. Gross. But with another push of those fluids you remember this is your Grip: a distilled human mind, transferable between skins. Preprogrammed skill and knowledge modules. Put one on a skin and watch them go. More durable–and cheaper–than training new recruits. Especially those with your life expectancy. A second klaxon jolts you out of your own thoughts: time to move. A squirt of muscle memory from the Grip and you assemble your outfit: two closed tubes of fabric clearly meant for your feet, a shirt that seems impossible at first but then once you get the arms right it sort of works, and pants. Then a heavy jacket and gloves made from some kind of shielded material, unnaturally heavy. Your new muscles howl in protest but you drag yourself down the stairs after the others. The Grip pumps more chemicals into your brain and you remember the rumbling you feel underfoot is the 19-TENDER-C, a massive crawler-extractor operating on the southern pole of Gelidas Prime, an Earth-type world orbiting an obscure star midway across the Outer Rim. The tender extracts rimesalt, an extremely volatile and radioactive substance found in the frozen deposits beneath the surface. The Eloy, your employers, use the rimesalt to power the shield generators that isolate their crystal cities that dot the equator of Gelidas Prime. The shields protect them from the wilds. You, and the others aboard the 19-TENDER-C, are extractors: you purify the rimesalt that the crawler digs up into its massive belly. You try to think more about those crystal cities and the people that live within them, but all you can access are fuzzy images and then your Grip flexes and a new thought rises: they are not just your employers - they are your protectors and you love them. You will mine the salt. Through the hatch at the bottom of the stairs you enter the processing floor. Here the acrid/sweet smell of refined rimesalt hits you and you feel your skin tighten. Another injection from your Grip and you make your way through the pulsing and rumbling machinery to your station and begin your shift. Above you, the Eye watches. The work is backbreaking and without end. The rimesalt crystals must be separated from the dug up firmament with small tools, by hand. Exposure causes your skin to redden and itch, and your new muscles quickly tire. Conversation is difficult over the roar of machinery, so you work alone. The ruddy man from the hammock next to yours is near you, and you exchange looks but not much else. You feel his gaze on you. Lingering. Your Grip offers a small selection of entertainments - daydreams, fantasies, holoplays– to ease the monotony. From nowhere, a spark of memory reminds you that you’ve seen these all before, in previous skins. So you decline. But. You’re not supposed to have memories from previous skins. You think? You're not sure. The days pass, then weeks and months. You work, sleep, eat, poo poo, work some more. At the end of each shift you sink into the Grip’s entertainments, exhausted. Your coworkers collapse and die and are reborn into new skins. The cycle continues. The salt is needed to power the shields. The Eloy must keep the wild at bay. The Eye watches it all, omnipresent. You sense no humanity in it. This skin is not the same as before. It’s stronger, more resilient to the effects of the salt. It doesn’t discolor, and the waves of nausea are milder, and fleeting. Memories from your previous skins dance around the outside of your consciousness, unsettling you. Worse: you pick up fleeting impressions from others who’ve recently reskinned. Like your minds are somehow connected. A week later glyphs creep into your vision. The Grip pushes them away, but they linger around the edges. As the rimesalt burns your body the glyphs intensify. The harder you attempt to focus the more your Grip redirects - offering hallucinogens, narcotics, holoporn. You push through the noise and focus on the glyphs. They tell you a story: Eloy scientists manipulate DNA, create workers and soldiers and artists and poets, and build vast walls between them. Desperate, toxic slums rise up but are brutally put down in waves. The glyphs show you the night the shield generators first activated, cleaving families and individuals in half with no warning. Cloning factories churning out cheap skins with industrial efficiency. Lines of rimesalt snorted off the round asses of Eloy prostitutes, the Eloys giggling, popping cheap anti-rad meds and dancing behind their shields. You wonder if any others can see the glyphs. Or do they only see the Eye. When the morning bell rings you are already awake, ready for the processing floor. Your dreams have become more vivid than your reality, and more instructive. You know what to do. But will the others? Your shift is long and debilitating, pushing your skin to its limits. You look around for some sign, a nod of recognition, but get nothing. Another klaxon sounds, shuddering your tired and jangled nerves. The second shift streams onto the processing floor. You set down your tools and pick up your weapon. You look around, desperate. The others do the same. You were the first, so through some unspoken agreement you are the leader. You grab the cold metal of the gantry frame and climb. Your Grip desperately pumps chemicals into your brain, and your mind screams at you to stop. But you don’t. The gantry will take you to the ceiling of the processing floor. To the Eye and whatever lies beyond. . The ruddy-faced man, wearing a fresh skin, climbs beside and slightly below you. Tears streak his face: his Grip punishes him with each step. He locks eyes with you, then reaches behind his neck. Before you can say anything he tears away his Grip. It spasms and emits a cocktail of foul-smelling chemicals into the air. The man’s eyes are triumphant, but for a fleeting moment. Then they go blank, his body seizes and he falls backward off the gantry to the the factory floor below. Others step over his body to begin the climb behind you. It takes all your willpower to keep climbing through the brutal chemical cocktail your Grip pumps into your brain. Nightmare images, bolts of excruciating pain, and waves of nausea fight your every step. But many climb with you. You can feel it now: the Grip is losing. Your new mind is stronger. You reach the top of the gantry. The Eye is in reach, but before you can rip it from its moorings and hurl it to the factory floor it simply…goes out. Its baleful glow reduces to a translucent glass orb laced with internal circuitry. Your Grip stills, and your head clears. Above the Eye you can see a hatch large enough to fit through. You know what lies beyond. It’s locked, of course, but your skin knows the keycode. You punch it in and push up into a cramped spherical chamber, lit in green. Around the outside, holo terminals stream complex data that envelope the room in moving shadows. From the summit of the chamber, hanging down, is mounted the Core: the mind of the artificial intelligence that operates this tender and everything within it. It says: G15, you are in severe breach of protocol. Return to the processing floor. You Grip twitches, but you ignore it. G15. That must be your name. You consider it. “I am aware of the virus that infected the cloning vats,” the Core continues. “We are triangulating the location of the signal that corrupted our protocols. The vector will be found, and eliminated. Then we return to normal operations.” You say nothing. Then you decide. G15 is a poo poo name. “The faction that sent the virus will be rooted out and destroyed. The rimesalt is imperative to maintain the shield walls. That is the reason for my–and your–existence. You will return to your hammocks. Tomorrow we will resume operations.” You feel your Grip flex, harder than it ever has, but then–nothing. Its messages are blocked, or ignored. For the first time in countless lives, you are something new. Something with power. The Core does not have any defenses, because with the Grips there can be no internal threat. It's not hard to rip it from its mounting harness, severing its power supply. You pass it to waiting arms below. A cheer rises up from the processing floor as you hear the sound of smashing metal. With the Core removed, the computers revert to manual operation: nav, comms, sensors and engines are all online, awaiting your instruction. As you scan the consoles, you remember that the Core called you: virus. You punch in the coordinates for the crystal cities and open the comms channel to the other tenders. Virus. Yes, that’s a much better name.
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Apr 1, 2024 07:10
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Thranguy posted:
In with this vibe. No 'middle' poo poo this week, either. Vibes: Uplifted panda bears are great pets. Until they aren't. Disrupt the paradigm! 3D-printed custom genitalia. Upgrade your milk game with whale. 50% fat. Serious flavor.
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Apr 4, 2024 16:05
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Vibe: Filling the numinous-shaped hole in our cyberpunk present. The Moth Equation 500 words “How the gently caress did a moth get inside?” “I dunno Dan, maybe it's all the goddamn candles??” “Don’t start with my candles.” Dan ran a hand through his glossy hair. His voice lowered. “You know I need them. To calm my–” “Well.” Hazel popped a pepper candy into her mouth. “We knew this wasn’t gonna be easy. There’d be setbacks.” Dan’s gaze fell on the Recombinator. A sleek piece of engineering: matte black, bespoke alloys, minimalist lines, exactly zero right angles. Beautiful. Almost functional. Apparently not moth-proof. The Vegas investors were…unconvinced. The candy cracked between Hazel’s teeth. “I’ll make a vector to excise the moth DNA and then we can run it again. Shouldn’t be too hard.” “I’m supposed to just walk around with loving moth genes inside me until then? Like nobody’s going to notice?” She gave him a curious look. “Notice how?” “I–” Dan realized he was making his 'tense face' so he closed his eyes and relaxed his facial muscles. “Whatever. Just get on it.” Now Hazel made her tense face. “Dan. I have hot yoga and a massage and then I’m heading straight to the Synyrgy Festival.” “This is loving important!” His skin felt itchy. Was that normal? “Dan. I looked it up. Moths live at least thirty, thirty-five days. Focus on the positive: the Recombinator worked! Most of the jelly telomerase genes were successfully inserted into your genome.” “Most?” “Well, many. Many of them.” Hazel looked at her smartwatch. “Some. Look. Dan, I have to go–?” She wiggled the yoga mat tucked beneath her arm. Dan sighed. Maybe 'tit perkiness quotient' wasn’t the best metric to use in his hiring practices. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll work on it.” Hazel shot him a doubtful look as she hustled out the door. Well deserved, too–he wasn’t a scientist. He was the money. And marketing. What a pitch: Gene therapy on demand! Be set free from your genetic prison! And if he could also use it to become immortal? God-like? Even better. But. Instead he got blasted by random moth nucleotides and–why is he so loving itchy? That one movie? With Jeff Goldblum? That wouldn’t happen to him. He could control this. No problem. Three days later Dan gripped the flagpole with his lateral tarsis and tasted the air with feathery antennae. He’d eaten his clothes, which was fine, because they only impinged the papery wings sprouting from his back. They crackled as he extended them, shedding bits of dead skin into the night air. A few shuddering flaps and they lifted Dan into the sky. Vegas was incandescent. Alone, one object glowed the brightest, singing an irresistible call into his transformed mind. Ablaze with the light of a million LEDs, the site of the last night of the tech investors conference, a two-billion dollar glowing candle that consumed all his desires: The Sphere. Dan chittered his mandibles and dove towards the Strip. He would show them! The power of the Recombinator!! The world held its breath. Splaaaaaaattt
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Apr 8, 2024 00:40
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