BELUGA

Patrick Loveland

 

Darcy’s eyes fluttered open with a languid resistance she couldn’t place. Was her name ‘Darcy’? ‘Darcy’ felt right. Why, though? She blinked and felt her eyelids fight the same treacle-like viscosity. Was it just her muscles? Atrophy?

She tried to move her head but couldn’t. She took in what was in front of her—then realized it must also be above. She had a feeling of near weightlessness, but from the vague signals her body was sending to her brain, she felt like she was lying supine. Nothing in her body felt specific—couldn’t place toes, thighs, chest, etc.

Above was a swirling abyss of murky shades of grey and dark blue. The slightest hint of connected triangles in a curved surface seemed to—

Something moved in her peripheral vision but it was out of sight before her eyes could catch it. Darcy tried to strain against whatever was holding her head and moved just a bit further, but more murk was her only reward.

Emboldened by that small success, Darcy brought her head back to center and fought the restraints with her chin and forehead.

Darcy had been taken apart.

Her chest was open, her ribs sawed through clean and the sternum and rib ends removed. The organs within had been lifted out and placed in trays of clear plastic and pin-cushioned with something like thin glowing fiber optic strands. The strands connected to smooth, rounded pieces of machinery with rows of tiny pulsing lights. The skin had been slit and pulled away from fat and muscles—which were separated and held apart in something like clear plastic sheathes—and sections of radius and ulna opened like her chest had been, exposing marrow. Her hands had also been dissected and dismantled, but were still connected by tissues and those strange glowing fibers. The fibers and lesser machines seemed to be connected to a larger machine below her she could only see suggestions of.

Darcy screamed but no sound came out.

She didn’t understand how she was still alive. However this had been done to her, it was executed with extreme care and precision—but it still seemed impossible.

It was murkier down past her navel but Darcy couldn’t look at her deconstructed body another moment. She was already approaching hyperventilation—and watching her heart and lungs work through that, connected with translucent extension patch tubes grafted into arteries and air tubes—when a strange head rose up near her own. It was some kind of biosuit helmet with a curved mirrored faceplate over the eye and nose area.

The biosuit wearer rose even further with a strange slowness, and bubbles broke free from the faceplate and floated lazily upward. Darcy’s panicked mind still registered that she must be suspended in some kind of thick fluid. She also caught a glowing name strip on the biosuit chest that read D. ALBRECHTSSON.

The reflective faceplate moved from her face to her open chest area and back, seeming to study Darcy’s body reacting to her fear.

The murk above the biosuit wearer lit up, the triangular suggestions Darcy had seen glowing in a sequence. Starting from the center of what Darcy now saw must be a geodesic dome structure, the triangles glowed then blinked out—either disappearing or becoming translucent.

‘Albrechtsson’ floated up in the viscous murk, tubes and gear attached to the biosuit’s back trailing and following it up. She couldn’t see where the trail led to—but then she saw the suit’s bloody gloves and a long, curved blade like a warped scalpel in one of them.

Through the thick murk and past the almost lotus-like break in the dome paneling, Darcy could just make out stars… then something blocking some of them out.

Albrechtsson looked down at Darcy again, then back up at the thing that was quickly blacking out the sky.

Darcy thought she could hear something like pulsing sirens out past the opening in the dome—but her breathing reached a hard peak and she lost consciousness.

 

Darcy was already moaning and crying into a pillow when she regained consciousness, face-down on what would’ve otherwise been a comfortable bed. She’d never felt so much pain—coming from all over and different types at once. Dull, deep throbbing; sharp, biting; pulsing, layered burning…

She shifted and sobbed into the bed, still clawing into the pillow with one hand as her other searched for purchase on the mattress. Instead, her fingers dug into something softer than the pillow or bed.

Darcy turned her head against the mattress—sucking in air against the pain and feeling saliva drain from around her clenched teeth and down onto the sheets—and saw that she was clutching a beluga whale doll. She threw the mockingly adorable stuffed sea creature off the bed and continued to writhe in agony.

A soft beep sounded from just below her jawline, followed by a pinch in her neck. This barely registered through the pain—until it took effect. In less than a minute, her body pulsed with soothing warmth that seemed to neutralize the acid burn of the pain as a weak base would.

Her sobs became joyous as waves of euphoria washed over her, only to subside as quickly as they’d come—but the pain stayed gone, so her relief was enough. As the pain had lessened, she’d ended up on her side, hands over her tear-clammy face. She took her hands away from her face and even in the dim light of the room, saw the scars.

Her hands and forearms were laced with intricate, orderly patterns suggestive of what had been done to her in what she’d assumed was a nightmare—the fluid surgery torture chamber, or whatever it was. She hadn’t felt pain in the chamber, but what she’d seen had done more than enough damage.

She couldn’t go through that again. If that chamber was real—and the scars told her it was—she had to get out of this place.

Darcy tried to focus, but the comfort and relief the shot in her neck had brought were as distracting as the incredible pain they’d replaced.

She sat up on the bed, placing her feet on a warmed pale orange floor. She wore cloth shorts and underpants, and a sleeveless shirt. She looked her body over. Every visible part of her body was covered in interconnecting seams of thin scar tissue—and they weren’t just thin; she could see them clearest when they caught the dim light in the room at an angle.

She touched her head and felt close-cropped hair on top, then kept running her hands back. She felt the hair turn to fresh stubble on a large area on the back of her head and stopped, feeling a new flushing chill of horror as she forced herself to inspect the area with shaking hands.

There were scars there too.

Darcy pulled her hands back in front of her face and watched them shake.

She tried to say, “Why?” but nothing came out of her mouth.

She checked her throat for scars—but a padded collar obstructed her search. The collar was half an inch thick, seamless, and had harder parts under what felt like a woven fiber surface.

The painkillers must’ve come from this thing.

Darcy rubbed her hands up and down her scarred thighs, mostly to stop the shaking. She couldn’t stop the fluttering in her diaphragm or shuddering in her chest, though.

Why am I here?

Who would do something this… wrong?

Think.

Her memory was foggy at best. Her name was Darcy… something. She vaguely remembered having studied something complicated. Probably STEM related. Was this something she’d volunteered for? Like a fucked up clinical trial or something?

Darcy looked around her room—or cell, more likely.

Normal things: comfy bed, clean sheets and pillows, tasteful, minimal nightstand with pitcher of water and glass. The dim light came from glowing panel strips along the bases of three of four dark blue walls, the one with no light strip across from the foot of the bed. The corner to the left of the bed where it met the wall had a translucent waist-high walled area with a hinged section, and what looked like a curving depression in the floor with foot-shaped outlines—she realized it must be a form of toilet.

Normal-ish things: Stuffed beluga whale doll she’d thrown.

Odd things: all four corners where the ceiling met the walls looked cut off with black reflective triangles. Something about that felt bad—like whoever was doing this to her could watch through those triangular panels, or something behind them. ‘Cameras,’ she thought the word was. Nothing felt definite. Everything felt new or off, but like something she should know.

Oddest thing: there was no door.

No door meant no escape. Darcy couldn’t accept that.

She tried to stand but even with the powerful painkillers in her, her legs felt wrong and she had to slump back down onto the bed. She tried again and succeeded, but kept a hand on the bed as she limped around to the foot of it.

How does somebody escape a sealed room?

No door. No windows. No—

She looked up and saw an air vent grate above the bed. The openings were a set of concentric circles held together by an X that ran through them. Darcy climbed onto the bed on all fours, then stood up. She did her best with wobbly legs.

The grate was a seamless part of the ceiling.

Must not trust their guinea pigs to want to stay in their cages…

Too bad.

Darcy slid her fingers into the grating and pulled down, hoping the seamless look was an illusion. There was no give. She tried again, harder. Nothing. She hung by her fingers, pulling her legs up from the bed and hoping her weight could bring it down. It was solid.

She glared at the grate in despair… then got mad.

Darcy redoubled her efforts, jumping off the bed and pulling herself up by the grate, then dropping down as hard as she could. She did this over and over, her anger growing with each failed attempt.

Then Darcy’s fingers started to elongate—the proximal phalanges stretching down from where they met the knuckles. They pulled down long enough that her feet sunk into the bed and she teetered back at an angle. The stretching parts became almost translucent and—

She released her hooked fingers from the grating and dropped, catching the corner of the bed with her butt then rolling off and slapping onto the floor. She was conscious but her bell had been rung. She shook her head and looked at her hands—they were normal again, other than all the scars.

What was that?

Darcy curled up fetal and her sobs returned. Her crying only came out as tears and air catching and shuddering in her throat—she felt like she was moaning, but she couldn’t. In-between the choking sounds her throat was making, she heard a very faint high-pitched sound.

The wall across from the foot of the bed began vibrating—with a low wump sound, it became translucent. It was still closer to solid than clear, but Darcy could make out the dim suggestion of a starkly lit section of corridor. It was pale orange from walkway to ceiling, like the floor of her cell.

Darcy lifted herself up onto her arms.

A boxy, waist-high shape came into the light from the far end, moving in silence. She wasn’t sure if it actually was silent, or her wall was sound-proofed—with a twisting of dread in her stomach, she assumed the latter. The thing stopped at a dark square of wall—like the one Darcy was looking out through, she assumed—did something she couldn’t make out near it, then continued toward her translucent wall. The light in the hallway went out and she could see only the slightest suggestion of the corridor and the boxy shape.

Darcy got to her feet.

With the wall translucent but corridor lights off, Darcy could make out a dim reflection of her face. She had dark eyes and hair. She could make out some freckles—and faint scar lines. She couldn’t remember if her face had been opened up in the chamber…

A light in the corridor ceiling above the other side of her translucent wall came on, and her reflection was replaced by a closer view of the boxy thing as it cruised up to her cell. It was a drone of some kind. Its side paneling rolled up into itself and two manipulator arms retrieved a thick plastic slab from within its bulk. It looked like a food tray.

Food delivery-bot? Maybe it has…

A four-by-twelve-inch section of the wall disappeared somehow and the drone socketed the tray into it and started to ease it in—

Darcy pulled the tray through and went down on her knees, sticking her arms through and grabbing the drone’s retreating manipulators. It pulled one free so she grabbed the other with both hands and tried to heft the bot toward the wall. She couldn’t move it, and switched to trying to find buttons on its surface.

If there’s a door button—

The tray opening in the door attempted to close and sensed her arms. Lights flashed in its rectangular outline, warning of imminent closure. Darcy’s desperation kept her fighting, and that brought her anger back.

The lights flashed brighter and made a pulsing sound of warning now. She closed her eyes and kept searching with one hand while she held the manipulator arm with the other.

Fuck you! Cut my arms off then, you piece of shit!

It did—or would have. The tray opening closed, lights and alarm ceasing.

Darcy could still feel the manipulator and surface of the boxy food drone. She opened her eyes and would have yelped if she could have.

Her arms were in the door. The chunk that had closed was solid, but the sections of her forearms that were where it had closed were translucent—and her arms were still there on the other side. The sections in the door also looked warped and pulsed strangely. Darcy panicked and let go, pulling herself away from the wall, and her arms with her. She fell back on her butt and her back collided with the firm softness and paneling of the foot of the bed.

A rotating glow—like a tiny old-style police roof light—was emitted from a spot on the drone’s topside, and it continued on. The wall vibrated and become opaque again with a whump.

Darcy examined her arms. Once again, scars but otherwise normal. She didn’t know how it worked but she knew if that torture room was real, this warping or phasing was her only way of never being in it again. She got to her feet and placed open palms and fingers against the wall.

She pressed her hands against the wall harder and pushed, but nothing happened. She pushed over and over again, but her hands remained solid.

Why?

How does this work?

Her frustration led to fear, flooding her mind with images of her dissected, impossibly-alive body in that chamber.

Her fear pushed her toward anger.

Darcy’s hands went through the wall, her arms now looking cut off at the wrists. She hesitated a moment, then focused on that feeling of simmering rage and stepped forward. She caught glimpses of the door’s inner workings before stumbling out into the dark corridor.

The collar started flashing and making a high-pitched alert sound.

Darcy forced nightmare images into her mind again and focused on her hands and neck. The collar vibrated as she pulled it out of her neck through the substance of her body, then she examined the interior of its ring. It had layered needle-like barbs for staying in place, and the slightly thicker injection needle.

What is this awful fucking place?

She decided to take a chance that the phasing worked both ways, and focused on the collar even harder—it went translucent along with her hands, so she pushed them through wall to her now empty cell and dropped the collar inside.

 

Whatever this place really was, most of it was underground.

Darcy had snuck through its many dark corridors, hiding from food drones a few times, to a curved hall twice the width of the rest with gray walls. She’d followed it long enough to decide it must be a circle or oval around the whole level. Then she’d tried to phase through that and succeeded, only to go a few feet through metal and concrete—and into solid rock. For a panicked moment she thought she might fall through it. She didn’t know anything about how this power she had worked. As long as she concentrated, she could walk forward on the same plane… but there was nothing but rock for ten feet. She got spooked and hurried back into the curved hallway.

She knew she had to go up, but had no way to know how far.

Darcy had climbed onto a medical equipment station she’d found and went through some quick trial-and-error to learn to climb with her phasing ability—all the while trying to ignore that every time she used it, she saw more and weirder pulsing and warping suggestions undulating within her own natural body shapes.

She’d also had to fight the urge to use her phasing to enter another cell like the one she’d been in and see if there were more like her. She’d decided that even if she could get another person out through one of the doors, she wasn’t sure what else getting out of this facility would require—and that could just get more people hurt.

 

Darcy’s forehead and eyes emerged from the surface of a grated floor panel as if from a steamy pond, several floors up from the patient/prisoner levels she’d started on. She held herself in a phased crouch within layered sets of fluid-transfer pipes and conduits filled with shrouded bundles of electronics cables. This flooring was more utilitarian and well-used than the other floors she’d recently climbed up into and out of, and she hoped that meant she was close to ground level.

Satisfied she was alone, Darcy hauled herself up out of the floor and crept down the corridor. More conduits and pipes lined the hallway walls, and tightly enough that it almost felt to Darcy like a movie she felt she’d seen at some point in her foggy past about men on a submarine—which she also half-remembered was a boat or ship that went under the water; and a ship was a boat that didn’t…

This feeling of unsureness about pretty much everything would’ve haunted Darcy, if she’d been willing to stop and really think about it. Instead, she pushed on.

A porthole window in a sealed hatch style door didn’t discourage Darcy’s submarine associations, but as she snuck up to it and peaked in she saw something that didn’t fit with them.

Several strange, bone white figures stood in special stations, motionless. They were the shape of a human man, but with a hunch to the slim muscular triangle of upper body that connected two thick, over-long arms—which ended in something between hands and multi-tools. Where their hips would be there was a smooth inverted wishbone of metal or plasteel housing shocks and struts that connected to the tops of roughly human-like legs. Their heads were on shocks and struts too, and were suggestive of a human head wearing something like a fighter pilot helmet—only all one piece and with a murky translucence that mostly hid complex electronic workings within.

I… don’t think these drones deliver food, Darcy thought, then she shuddered at the thought of what these things could do to her.

More deathbots are probably all over this level…

Darcy lifted a leg and stepped partially into the hatch, boosting herself up and climbing into the ceiling. She was getting the hang of focusing her fear into its own mental compartment for phasing use—and these man-drones didn’t hurt that process one bit.

A few more levels up, it struck her that she hadn’t seen a single other person here. She climbed up out of the floor, crept around a level long enough to get nervous and a little creeped out, then kept going up. Also, it had to be almost thirty levels she’d climbed now, and she had a feeling the one she’d started on wasn’t the lowest…

Darcy’s forehead and eyes came out of a floor and saw only white.

She pulled herself up out of the surface more and it took two more feet for her to see what the white was—she was climbing up onto a snow-covered roof in a blizzard at night. Wind howled and snow blew all around, sweeping across the piles thick enough to not be moved.

What is this, Antarctica? You’ve got to be fucking kidding…

Darcy climbed back down and searched the level for anything resembling warm weather clothes, but found nothing. She couldn’t find evidence of any other humans here—other than Albrechtsson, but at this point Darcy wouldn’t be surprised if he was a robot too.

Having failed to find warmer clothes, Darcy took a chance on something and climbed back up onto the snow-swept roof. She treated the outside as she had the subterranean rock she’d walked through—if she kept herself something like half-phased, she couldn’t feel the cold. She’d also noticed that if she stayed in a phased state, she didn’t have to breathe. That was convenient, but also disturbed her.

Okay, what are we working with here…?

She was on the roof of what seemed to be the largest single structure in sight. It had a tall, complex tower covered in antennae, dishes, and arrays of slightly curved vertical panels in different arrangements. That communications tower was at the center of the large circular roof surface. She rose from a crouch and phase-stepped through the snow piles to the curved edge closest to her. The roof was about three stories up, so her view was decent.

Flood lights here and there, the facility structures were almost obscured by the thick snow rushing through their illumination, along with all the snow blowing between them and Darcy. She could make out suggestions of shapes.

There were prefab structures on stilt supports, Quonset huts, and geodesic domes. The domes filled her with dread—their curved surfaces made up of connected triangular frames were without question the triangles she’d seen in the fluid-filled surgery chamber. She could see three of those domes on this side of the facility alone.

Lightning or something like it flashed on the horizon, the snow so dense the distant brilliance only dimly lit up the sky where Darcy was—but in those flashes she could see silhouettes or larger shapes above the ground level of the facility.

All around and looming above the facility grounds and beyond the immediate perimeter she could see, there were huge radio telescope dishes. It reminded her of something she vaguely remembered was called SETI, but the dishes and support structures here were even larger. There were other shapes too—mostly outside the facility perimeter—and Darcy’s best guess was they were something like huge resting artillery guns.

An alert sounded from speakers all over the facility.

Shit—they must’ve figured out I’m out of my cell!

Darcy ducked down instinctively, but she wasn’t even sure how visible she was in her phased state. She let herself drop through the roof a bit, and crawled through it and the snow with just her eyes and the top of her head poking out above the windswept surfaces.

But no one came for her. No spotlights. Nothing near her changed.

She progressed around the edge of the circle slowly for a few minutes, still looking for a way out. There was nothing visible in the dark blizzard, and no lights in the distance at all. If this was Antarctica or Alaska or Canada or Russia… she was in for a hell of a walk with no compass, food, or water—or clothes and boots for that matter. She knew all of these items were important, but still it was distant why she did.

Lights glowed around the circle edge off to her right and even over the blizzard she could hear strange-sounding voices.

Darcy crawled over to that edge but stayed hidden in the snow and roof.

A spotlight followed a strange form that kept diving and tumbling out of its circle. The form shambled between a Quonset hut and one of the raised buildings. Through the whipping snow and dark, Darcy saw silhouetted humanoid forms cut off the form’s escape route in the distance—it threw itself up into the stilt structures under the building. The circle of light found it again and it flung itself through the openings between the stilts, climbing with several misshapen limbs indistinguishable as legs or arms before throwing itself some distance again.

Another group of humanoid forms approached the panicked amorphous creature from near the base of the building Darcy was on—she saw it was a team of the bone-white ‘deathbots’ she’d seen earlier. It occurred to her from how well they blended in that the coloring was a form of camouflage. They held strange guns that looked like big assault or particle rifles, but with thick cables running from open ports in their hunched triangular torsos to the back of flat rounded-square panels on the end of the guns perpendicular to their length.

The drones took positions a few feet from each other and aimed their weapons at the escaping beast. Spotlights from their head sections came on and startled the creature, stopping it in mid climb—and Darcy saw at this distance that it was translucent, with the vague suggestion of having once been human. But now it had too many eyes, all of them deep black but clouded as if with cataracts—and those cloudy parts caught the drones’ lights with an iridescence and as they darted around, they trailed an eerie psychedelic distortion of the light as well.

Its mouth broke open at an unnatural angle and a few other openings came apart within its warped, pulsing interior. From the depths of its pulsing innards, an unearthly howl rose and its haunting sound cut into Darcy’s mind, even over the blizzard.

Whatever the drones’ guns fired, it was invisible—Darcy thought of riot deterrent microwave emitters—but she could hear them vibrating as they went off.

The creature’s howl became a shrill, chittering cry, and it dropped to the snow below the stilts. It writhed and collapsed in on itself in places, reforming different shapes as it whined—tentacles, malformed appendages of no obvious purpose, the suggestion of bones and organs growing at an exponential rate under a taut exterior layer that acted like a skin around an animal—or several—evolving in real-time.

The wave-guns went off again, vibrating louder.

The interior shapeshifting and chaotic self-birthing slowed and the frightening monstrosity collapsed its shape into what seemed like a defensive posture. Then it mewled and sobbed in its own weird way, but the straining mess of flesh, fluids, and organs had lost its face and head in the process of whatever it was doing and Darcy couldn’t tell where the sounds were coming from.

Then she finally saw another human.

A well-bundled human form trudged up to the half-circle of drones through the snow, followed by another drone that was different from the others—if they were bone-white, this one was dried-blood red. Its head section also seemed to contain a glowing actual head within its jet fighter helmet-shaped translucent plasteel, which Darcy thought must be some kind of display or surface projection illusion. This red drone had a different gun too—no square panel, fat barrel with holes along its length, and a soccer ball sized spherical tank near its shrouded rear pistol grip.

The bundled human approached the defeated monster as it cowered in the snow. She—it seemed to be a she—got closer than Darcy expected, studying the shuddering mound of organic chaos from only a few feet away. It reminded her of how Albrechtsson had studied her in the fluid chamber, and she realized that probably was her.

Apparently satisfied, Albrechtsson turned away from the creature and started back through the snow. She was wearing a breathing mask with a clear faceplate, and Darcy caught something like a nod of approval as the masked face rose and fell with a sharp motion toward the red drone.

The red drone stepped forward, raised its weapon, and used it.

Bright green liquid fire came out of the gun—not quite napalm, but it doused, clung to, and burned. It burned like fire and acid at the same time, engulfing the screaming shapeless monster and eating away at its bulk as it lashed at the parts it hadn’t disintegrated yet.

Darcy didn’t wait another second—she turned away from the grizzly scene and ran, still submerged in the fluid-like give of the roof and snow covering it.

It wasn’t lost on her that her phasing had made her body look less and less human as she’d continued to use it. She knew that whatever that thing was, it probably started as something more like her—and she’d rather die more human than more like that.

The other side of the facility had more huts and domes—but no drones or Albrechtsson.

Darcy knew she had to be quick. She judged the distance between the base of the structure she was on and where the lights were swallowed by darkness out by the dishes and artillery guns, and past them. She focused on the phasing more intently and let herself drop through the material. Her eyes, nose, and forehead were the only things exposed, and she felt like she was on an amusement ride of some kind as she plummeted down the wall through a blizzard.

Just before reaching the snowdrifts built up around ground level, Darcy slowed herself and stopped. The feeling she’d had when she’d walked out through the solid rock from the underground facility area kept her from having any desire to disappear entirely into any other surface.

She crawled out of the wall and through the snowdrifts, keeping all but her eyes as hidden as possible. Wind howled above her, blowing snow all around as she advanced toward the underside of another raised stilt building. She snuck under that all the way to the far side, then continued out past the reach of the facility floodlights.

About a hundred yards past the lights, Darcy climbed up out of the snow-covered ground. She stayed half-phased as the deep cold necessitated, but walked normally otherwise. She was nearing the base of one of the huge dish structures when alarms sounded again from the facility behind her.

Darcy hurried forward through the storm and stepped right past a convex circular panel on part of the dish structure. She stopped in place and stared at it—black and reflective, like the ceiling corners back in her cell. The alarm sounded from the dish now too and floodlights lit up all around its base, exposing Darcy’s translucent form.

No!

She ran.

Away from the lights. Out into the dark.

At first there was only snow and howling wind. She put as much distance as she could between herself and the base before she heard the sounds of machines behind her. The storm had died down some, so it was possible the source wasn’t close behind. She looked back and saw the lights from three large tracked ‘snow cat’ vehicles. They were moving at high speed on their tank treads in her general direction about fifty feet apart.

Maybe they haven’t seen me!

She was still in the dark—it was possible they hadn’t.

Darcy started to phase her body more to drop into snowy ground and hide—

A ball of glowing energy travelled from the left snow cat closest to her and struck her in the chest.

She collapsed back onto the snow, her body completely solid again—and now consumed by the extreme cold she hadn’t felt at all yet. Darcy curled into a ball to keep warm, but it didn’t help. All she could do was shudder and try to keep her teeth from chattering together too hard as the snow cats rolled up to her.

The red humanoid drone approached holding the special energy gun she’d been dropped by, and she saw that she’d been right—the glowing form inside the translucent drone head section was an illusion. It was a real-time embedded 3-D animation of a heavily scarred face with a cloudy dead eye. The white drones followed and stopped in a wide semi-circle, similar to how they had with the creature before—and two of the white drones had weapons like the gun the red one had used to kill it, which sent an even deeper shudder through Darcy.

The glowing head spoke in Russian, but not to her. Strangely enough, Darcy understood him, even though she knew somehow it wasn’t her first language.

<<That could have been worse…>>

<<She should never have made it this far,>> Albrechtsson said as she made her way through the snow toward Darcy.

<<We had no idea she could do any of that. You didn’t seem to eith—>>

Albrechtsson raised a gloved hand to silence him.

Darcy wanted to beg for her life, but her voice still wouldn’t come.

Albrechtsson stopped feet from her and said, “Your vocal chords were taken out of the sequencing. You simply can’t speak or make any vocal intonations. Fortunately for me…”

Darcy closed her eyes and started weeping, sure she’d be killed as soon as this awful woman stepped away from her.

“What did you think you were… Where were you going to go?”

Darcy opened her eyes and glared at the woman—but she was looking out into the dark beyond the snow cat lights. Albrechtsson’s eyes glimmered, and she looked sad. The woman turned her head and looked down at Darcy again through the clear faceplate flanked by a thick, padded hood—the light from a snow cat illuminated the woman’s face and Darcy was struck deeply by something she couldn’t comprehend. Albrechtsson’s face was so familiar…

It was the face she’d seen in the reflection in her cell wall.

“I know you don’t know much…”

Albrechtsson locked eyes with her—and Darcy noticed now it was the same face, but older.

“…but where is it you think you are?”

<<How would she know that?>>

<<Octopus knew more than she was supposed to—why couldn’t Beluga?>>

<<True…>>

Albrechtsson said, <<We are so close. This kind of thing cannot happen again.>>

<<At least we have her back. Only two left from this cycle and they both ‘evolve’ and escape on the same day…>>

Albrechtsson said, <<Maybe if they could transfer some human staff out here, we’d have less trouble with these automatons being outsmarted.>>

<<Hey, I’m human. Just less… meaty than I used to be.>>

Darcy looked at the Russian, realizing he must be some kind of ‘cyborg.’ He met her gaze through whatever mechanism gave his still-human brain sight—as it certainly wasn’t the glowing eye in the animation. He looked away, almost sheepishly.

The Russian cyborg said, <<So that’s me, an army worth of drones, and you—you’re human too, remember?>>

Darcy looked back toward the woman—Albrechtsson’s eyes studied Darcy’s face, then took on a distant stare that went through her.

Albrechtsson looked up at the sky again and said, “I wonder if that’s still true.”

<<Huh?>>

Albrechtsson said, <<Have them warm her and transfer her to the operating theater. It’s close now… or it soon will be. I tuned your pulse gun based on guesses—make sure you hit her with it again if she starts to change at all.>>

<<Understood.>>

The woman turned away and walked back to the snow cat she’d exited.

Instead of bathing her in green fiery death, the armed drones watched as four of the others guided a hovering unit toward her that was like a clear coffin with padding, restraints, and what had to be heating equipment. They picked Darcy up with surprising care and set her in the chamber as gently as they could. They closed the top—

The Russian cyborg grabbed the clear lid and the drones stopped. For a moment, he couldn’t seem to bring himself to look at her.

Then he did look at her and said, <<This is more important than I could ever say in words… Please understand that.>>

He let go and the drones sealed Darcy in the clear coffin.

At least it was warm.

 

This time, Darcy was taken apart fully conscious and without pain-blockers.

If her mind had been capable of it, she might have found it fascinating how much incredible technology went into her instantaneous deconstruction. A symphony of incisions, pumping, flaying, sawing, grafting, stitching, sucking, pulling, transfusing…

But all she could comprehend once it started was pain.

Before starting the process, Albrechtsson had floated around her, wordless and cold. The mirrored faceplate helped this impression, but the lack of any interaction somehow made it even worse. She’d hooked up the surgery machine’s tips, needles, blades, saws, etc. at their starting points as she floated through the thick chamber fluid. So precise. So gentle.

After Albrechtsson had exited the chamber through a fluid-lock chamber, Darcy had been able to crane her head far enough over in the restraints to see Albrechtsson at a control terminal for the machines. She was still wearing the biosuit, and the mirrored faceplate still hid her face—the face they shared. Darcy would never get an answer to why they did.

Darcy couldn’t scream or moan or cry like she thought she was doing. Albrechtsson had taken even that from her. All she could do was convulse and shudder silently.

Through her haze of maddening agony, Darcy took in experiential glimpses of what was happening outside of her personal hell chamber—

The triangle panels in the geodesic dome ceiling went clear—she saw out through the lotus opening…

An alarm sounded, unlike the earlier ones—like a thumping pulse drawn out to sound like a slowed down air-raid siren…

The light above the facility was blotted out by a huge form that quickly filled the sky…

The closer it came down to the facility, the better Darcy felt. The pain and madness were still there, but this sky-filling thing was like her—like a moon-sized warped ball of what she was—or maybe she was like It. This evil human woman had made her like this huge, beautiful thing somehow…

translucent, squirming, undulating, slithering, pumping, phasing…

and It had come because that woman was hurting her.

As this God of a thing loomed over her, it allowed her to become her true self—her human shape, open and on display as it had been made by this awful human fool, was abandoned and she unraveled and opened once again… into her real self.

Her rebirth was announced by impossibly loud trumpets…

 

Albrechtsson watched the colossal abomination being sucked into itself, imploding at the entry wounds the facility’s special artillery guns had opened in its bulging, distorted form. The thing they’d just killed was hard to comprehend. You could look at it with naked eyes and never quite see it or understand it. Through her faceplate’s finely-tuned AR filters, she could see it for what it was—a gargantuan mass of monstrous insanity made semi-solid.

As she watched the creature disintegrating into itself in a psychedelic lightshow of organic fractal madness, she thought—We can kill you. I… can kill you.

The facility shook hard enough to slosh the operating theater’s fluid around, causing it to slap against the dome interior near its apex—bringing her attention back to Beluga.

The young woman who’d entered the dome tub had become something very different over the course of what Albrechtsson thought of as the ‘beckoning process.’ Albrechtsson studied the warped mess of translucent tentacles, organs, misshapen bones, mouths, and too many eyes that had so recently looked human and resembled her in her youth…

Albrechtsson keyed a set of commands into her control panel, and the fluid in the dome ignited bright green—it burned away all of the organic material in the dome, then was extinguished by a catalyst fluid before being sucked down a large drain in the chamber floor.

 

The entry wall to Beluga’s room vanished and Albrechtsson stood in the corridor a moment, just looking around. She stepped in and walked to the stuffed animal on the floor. As she picked it up, she heard automaton steps out in the corridor—less rigid though, so probably Spichak. She walked out to the corridor and saw the glowing representation of his old, grizzled face looking happy for first time in decades.

Spichak said, <<You were right! We can kill those bastards!>>

<<Or whatever it is those new guns do…>>

<<Come on! Who cares what they do? If the space monster is gone, it’s fucking gone!>>

Albrechtsson said, <<I suppose.>>

She flashed Spichak a half-smile and walked past him toward the lifts.

Spichak said, <<Hey…>> and she stopped and looked back.

<<Yes?>>

<<Does this ever get easier for you?>>

<<What’s that?>>

<<Doing this to… parts of yourself.>>

Albrechtsson said, <<Better to use ‘parts’ of myself… than anyone else or theirs.>>

She started back down the hall but stopped again.

Without turning back she said, <<And… no,>> then continued on to the lift.

 

Albrechtsson entered her dark personal quarters and walked through to a clear plasteel picture window—installed in the curved surface of the highest level of the main facility, most of which was underground—without turning the lights on. She raised the beluga doll toward a curved shelf above the window but she caught sight of one of the snow-swept operating theater domes out in the storm and hesitated. She lowered the doll and stepped away from the window and shelf.

On the way to her large, comfortable bed, she grabbed a bottle and lowball glass from her dining area. She set the bottle and glass on a nightstand, crawled onto the bed, and collapsed into large pillows stacked atop it.

She cried for about ten minutes, then rolled over onto her back and composed herself as best she could. She poured three fingers of ancient rum into the glass and downed half of that in one pull. She sucked air through her teeth as the rum she’d quaffed burned, in spite of its luxurious smoothness.

“Open comms—Spichak.”

After a few beeps, Spichak said, <<Yes, ma’am?>>

<<Prep another set. Mem-plants must be immaculate.>>

<<We killed it. What good—?>>

Albrechtsson said, <<We killed one. I know there are more.>>

To herself she repeated, “I know there are.”

<<Understood.>>

<<And Spichak…>>

<<Yes, ma’am?>>

Albrechtsson sipped her drink and turned the doll in her other hand.

<<Retire the Beluga subject designation.>>

<<After this many cycles through? You’re honoring this one? That’s new…>>

<<Call it what you like. Any other B animal will do.>>

Spichak sighed in a digital rasp and said, <<Yes, ma’am. Anything else?>>

<<Just wake me up when they’re ready for birthing.>>

<<The gestation takes almost twenty hours—>>

<<And you can wake me when that’s finished.>>

<<Understood,>> Spichak said and closed comms on his end.

She sipped her drink and looked across her quarters at the shelf above her large, curved window and the storm it sheltered her from. In the dim light from the facility external floods coming in, she could make out twenty-five other stuffed animals resting on the shelf. The darkness of the empty spot between Antelope and Crab—and the dolls that continued all the way from Dove to Zebra—threatened to swallow her.

<<‘After this many cycles…’>> she said, mocking Spichak’s words and their cruel implication.

She opened a drawer in the nightstand and took out a pressure syringe. She pushed the device into her neck and injected herself with its warming fluid. Her eyelids fluttered and almost closed. She looked at the beluga doll and sipped her drink until her arm drooped in time with her eyelids.

“Ad… infinitum…”

Her arm fell onto the bed, the glass tipping out of her hand. It rolled away and dribbled the last of the liquor onto the bedspread in a curved trail.

Darcy Albrechtsson slept.