Doc Destructo
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Halloween Section 99: Unslashed
🕑 Added 2022-10-31 19:20:23 +0000 UTCUnslashed
Welcome to Halloween in the Freelands, where things can get a little out of hand…
Port of St. Joseph was a place where holidays mattered. A city of millions inside of a mined out asteroid was the sort of place that demanded beautification and celebration, to drive off the maddening drabness of the otherwise natural and constructed surroundings. The citizens had made it a place where ivy, climbing flowers and birds from multiple worlds lived, and gave it an artificial lake with a very living ecosystem; they’d gifted it beauty that could grow on its own. But the holidays were a different sort of beautification, one that decorated both the people and the itself, and the city council wasn’t picky about spending the effort to make sure everyone Under the Cavern Ceiling had a day to celebrate. This was the working class high-mindedness of the Freelands, that held both that, one, cultural enthusiasm and awareness builds bridges that reinforce a healthy society, and two, you should have a reason to throw a party, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a lot of reasons to party.
Out of every holiday celebrated in St. Joes, though? Halloween was one that had sunk its teeth in deep. It was a symptom of the folks that settled it, that there were a lot of folks from the northern United Americas who were either native-terran or terran-born xenospecies, folks who grew up with very little to celebrate but a day where you could get free candy and watch horror movies even on the free tv channels. These were people who did what a lot of Freelanders did once let loose on their own devices- they chose to live free and live large, and make their city a black and orange horroropolis, where fake blood flowed as rivers and tiny candies were consumed by the shipping container. This kind of enthusiasm was infectious, a sugar-charged potluck of ghost stories and costumes, and in time, people born worlds away who’d never even heard of the holiday were showing up, some just to watch, others bringing costumes of their own, some even wearing the stories and myths of their own people to add to the ghoulish glory.
It was October 31st again, and the city was in the midst of its biggest and best Halloween celebration yet. From Central Square’s parks, volleys of bang-suppressed fireworks launched into the cavern’s highest points and scattered coloured fire across the shallow sky. Scrubber drones nominally set to sponge air of warmth and moisture to avert indoor thunderstorms were also on smoke-eating duty, and they did so while blinking distinct pumpkin-orange and green from their tracker lights, as opposed to their normal calming blue. Citywide, information boards had been updated with union safety standards for wearing costumes at work: you can show up festive, absolutely, please do, just don’t compromise your Personal Safety Gear. On the edge of apartment balconies, in storefronts, in displays in the public squares, were resin-printed pumpkins CAD-carved with spooky faces, the occasional mockable Inner Galaxy scumbag planted among the other monsters. And on every major commercial and entertainment street, there was a party happening, some for the kids and some for the grownups.
The party on Bidwill Street was the kind for grownups, that nonetheless was being infiltrated by older kids. It was the main pedestrian artery for Southland Point, the very heart of its entertainment district, where clubs, bars, restaurants and other neon-bright attractions lined both sides of the street. The north end had a stop on the central canal system, and the south end had a stop on the inter-district tramline, which meant party people from the city’s other sectors had no trouble making their way down to SoPo, and that kept Bidwell packed at nearly every hour, of every shift, of every day. Because, for as much booze was poured and weed was dispensed to adults on their offtime, there were also groups of teenagers, vibing on the benches, lining the arcades, perusing the union super-outlets. The local businesses operated with a system of heavy checks and balances, set up to make sure legalities regarding age restrictions were followed and enforced to the local union council’s satisfaction. But on a critical mass night like Halloween, where the street was so packed it was difficult to walk, and almost everyone was wearing some sort of costume, it was easy for those who hadn’t quite crossed their species’ threshold of maturity for drinking, smoking weed, joining the militia and other mistakes to blend in with those who were more versed with the consequences of their actions.
Casie Bilstein was cogitoi, one born of assembly by her freed parents; she’d lived an accelerated childhood as an AI, and was now enjoying the equivalent of her late teens in a physical frame. She’d been timid for the first few years she had a physical body, as sudden existence in a physical volume, with mass and material, had left her feeling incredibly vulnerable- Exposed Nerve Anxiety, is what synthetic psychologists called it, a form of agoraphobia, except for any physical space whatsoever. But Casie had good friends, friends that liked to call her Billie because it made her smile. Friends that helped her through the process of learning to socialize, friends that helped her learn to make other friends, and perhaps most profound, friends that made it so she could go outside without a heavy jacket and a hood drawn over her head. That she could make it to her last two years of high school in person, rather than remotely.
The welder’s hood she was wearing, meticulously splattered with fake blood, felt somewhat like a regression to her former self when she had first stepped off the tram and onto Bidwell. Even still, she quickly realized that she was doing fine, that her Cutter of the Cold Bounty costume was drawing her attention that she would have shrunk from in previous years. And damn well it should be drawing her attention, she treated the thing like it was homework, recreated it in a garment printer from stills she isolated from the second movie, the one where Legion started wearing a welder’s mask to cover its Face of Many Faces. It was hands down one of the best costumes on the street that wasn’t actually in a contest.
She had a moment’s regret as she passed a stage of costume contestants, wishing she’d thought to sign up for one. Then she saw how little some of the contestants were actually wearing, and realized that maybe it wasn’t quite time in her life for that yet. Yet despite that, she was in the midst of one of those moments of gleeful realization that she was a fool for missing out on something she enjoyed so much, that with a smile, she cursed her nerves for keeping her inside and denying her what she was seeing up and down the block.
She passed a bar on her left that had rearranged its seats into an ad-hoc theater, the image of Max Shreck as Nosferatu leering from the screen, with the marquee advertising classics of horror early on in the night, and Freelander-made grindhouse bloodbaths later on. Sudden roars that culminated in a hollow bang turned her head to the right, to the roofed-over open air venue that held an orange and black wrestling ring roped with barbed wire and pest-buster charges, surrounded by baying fans; a man in a golden mask and tights stood another wearing Frankenstein prosthetics up from the center of the ring, chopped him across the chest stitches, and shot him into the wire. A cascade of explosions that sounded like hand grenades, yet exploded with only enough force to flush vermin out of ductwork cooked off; Frankenstein’s monster sold like he’d been shot with a dozen large guns at once, hanging in the metal barbs. The golden man dropkicked him free and to the outside, sending arcs of very real blood flying into the front row. One of the fans splashed was dressed like Dracula; he found the nearest camera operator, who framed his bloodspattered face with her camera perfectly as he bellowed like a maniac and punched himself.
She might have stopped in on that, if she didn’t have a time and place to be.
She had no trouble making her way through the crowd. Beyond the fact that her parents had built her with some strength and size in her frame, her costume was making people give her room. But as a group of sorority girls in fairy wings parted like a flight of butterflies to let her pass, she was suddenly overcome by a stark feeling, that made her stand stock still. Like eyes were drilling into her, ocular lasers boring into the surface of her synthetic skin. She hated feelings like that, ephemeral and baseless hunches that triggered cognitive dissonance with her more logical, math-based logic. She didn’t think herself a cold robot, she liked her emotions. She was also just tired of feeling tense for no reason, and wished that LifeNet had excluded the potential for stress and paranoia from its array of emotional experiences.
Even still, she felt it. Eyes were on her, unadmiring.
She had a thought, spotting a stumbling drunk coming in her direction, being held upright by his two friends as he yelled semi-coherent at the costumes. She stood stock still, and when the drunk and his unclear combination of ire and amusement turned to her, she stared him down through her welder’s mask, doing her best impression of the Legion. The drunk clammed up almost immediately, going pale and staring meekly as the Freeland’s most infamous slasher movie villain mean mugged him, hydraulic scrap-shears grafted to a cocked right arm, caked with gore. She turned as he passed, using her baleful gaze as an excuse to get a look behind her.
For a moment, she found herself staring back at what she swore was another Legion staring back at her, another bloodsplattered welder’s mask among the costumed crowd. Then a tanned muscleman that was probably a freed supersoldier, dressed as the Shadow Sentry but for his massive, sculpted chest and arms, crossed in front. He funky-danced as he double fisted candy-coloured cocktails, making himself a very large and festive obstruction. When his spectacle passed, Billie’s double was gone.
For a split second, she felt like she might want to play that last few seconds of video and consider what she’d just seen. Then she realized, it could have also been her old anxiety flaring. In fact, that’s probably what it was: someone with the same costume as her, and the same idea as her. The feeling had faded. So she shook it off, and continued along.
She found the building she was looking for, a multilevel complex with an arissiyan tavern for the first floor, a smoking-allowed arcade on the second, and offices the next two floors up. She had a friend from school, Teo, who’s father worked out of a shared artspace on the 4th. Teo, whose good grades and good demeanor went far to hide the fact he also had sticky fingers, though never to a serious extent- he’d never go joyriding in the family car or shoplift, but he would definitely lift his dad’s work keycard and clone it so he could get roof access.
And it’s not like had he planned a big party, just a very cool one.
She pressed her copy of the key to the access panel, and the elevator door to the upper offices and roof slid open with a ding. Teo liked to brag that if he ever got bored with wanting to do metanet coding, he’d roll up to the local Sendra Clan office and offer his services as a hacker. His sister Kyra liked to cut him down by reminding him he’d never shot a gun let alone taken a self defense class.
The hum of the elevator abated as hit came to a halt and opened its doors, to the renewed noise of the party, only from a higher angle. From the roof, Billie could actually hear the buzz of the scrubber drones working above, faint echoes against the city-cavern’s ceiling. A spread of bang-muted fireworks lit off above her as she exited, and splashed the rooftop with colour. Between a gap in the ducting of the air units, she saw the tent set up by the roof’s railing, the light of a hololithic fire flickering inside. She thought about announcing herself. Then she thought better: she struck a pose, scrap-shears raised and ready to strike, then pulled open the flap.
The flash of a phone camera greeted her. “That’s perfect, you look awesome Billie!” said Kyra from behind the screen, completely unfazed.
Billie lifted the welding hood. “I mean, if that’s all I got out of you, is it?”
“The elevator dinged, we heard you coming,” said Teo. He was Kyra’s adopted brother in no uncertain terms- she was rhidling, and he was terran, but both were siblings in spirit and upbringing, if not blood. He was dressed as one of the undead agent of Reaper Company, a horror comic about members of the Consortium, slavers and other villains being hunted by an undying, ghostly group of OSS commandos.
“Nobody here’s gonna scare that easy,” said Kyra, who was dressed as Iron Isen, a character from a rhidling fantasy novel series called The Akelan Records, a slab-like sword made of stiff foam across her back and a silver streak through her hair. “Just get in here, close the flap. Look, Sunari got us a 30-pack of uh… Sunari, what are these anyway?”
“It’s aljhean,” said Sunari, stooped low inside the tent wearing only a basketball jersey and shorts for his costume, his own little joke to himself about how terrans liked to tell him he should play, despite him having no athletic ability beyond being 6’7 without factoring in his ears. “I think they make it with tea leaves and fruit, and it’s fizzy. It’s kinda like if beer didn’t taste like shit.’
“I could have gotten us beer,” Tyson spoke up, as he looked through the tent window and the railing to the streets below. “You guys didn’t ask.” He was dressed as Buck Helms, a milquetoast middle manager from a Consortium corporation turned unlikely Freeland spy, the protagonist of the pitch-black comedy series Get Buck. He’d gone to special lengths, that the short-sleeve dress shirt he was wearing was a properly upsetting shade of salmon pink, and his glasses were show-accurately unappealing.
Billie made herself at home, next to Sunari. Even though she was dressed like a nightmare, she made sure to brush up against him just a bit, just to let him know. Sunari made a nervous noise, but nervous in a way that made Billie smile beneath her welder’s mask.
“Yeah dude, we didn’t ask,” Teo said. “This algae-an stuff is way better tasting. Try some, Billie.”
“Oh, yeah, I know what aljhean’s like, it’s good. I tend to drink higher proof alcohols, though. More efficient energy nutrition. Vodka’s very refreshing.” Billie said, unfazed. It didn’t occur to her that her until that moment, that alcohol was more of a rite of passage for them, instead of a quick way to top off fuel cells like for her.
“Oh, uh, yeah, right,” Teo said. “Well, sorry we didn’t think to get some of that?”
“I could have gotten us vodka,” Tyson spoke up, as fireworks flashed on his face.
“I know you could have, Tyson, thank you,” Billie said. He was odd, but he was sincere about what he’d at least try to do for his friends, even if nobody was sure how he’d manage three quarters of what he claimed he could do.
Casual synthetic strength let Billie barehanded pop the cap on the bottle of arissiyan alcopop she pulled from the ice chest. She upended it and killed it in one gulp- her systems gauged a minimal recharge of reserve power after catalyzing it, but at least it tasted nice, of sweetened citrus and something like cinnamon.
She was suddenly aware that her friends were staring at her.
“Uh, yes, well, maybe don’t drink yours like I drink mine,” she said, working out the ios glyphs on the label- 6.8% ABV, not terrible, but also not nothing from even what she understood of booze and what it could do to biologicals.
“Yeah, don’t worry,” Krya said, eyes wide.
“That was awesome,” Teo said.
“Look, I’m really hoping we’re not just here to watch her drink, because I think we’re embarrassing her,” said Sunari.
“No man, no,” Teo said, “Like for one, look at this view, the only people that got a view like this are over in University Heights!”
“Or the arcologies,” Tyson said.
“Right, or the arcologies.” Teo added. “And second, right?” He put the beam of a flashlight into his face. “Perfect time and place for it, right?”
“What is that, I don’t get that,” Sunari said, flatly.
“It’s the ghost story thing, I’m doing the ghost story thing,” Teo said.
“That’s a thing that terrans do when they tell ghost stories?” Sunari said.
“I mean I guess, but I’m terran and I don’t know why we do it,” said Tyson, still looking out the tent window, this time following the path of the Halloween-festive scrubbers flitting through the fireworks smoke.
“It looks spooky,” Teo said.
“Or like your dick and balls have a plasma leak,” Sunari said.
“Well okay fuck that,” Teo said, pulling the light out of his lap. “How about this, then?” He put it on the crown of his head, flashing it in his friends faces. When they winced away, he realized that wasn’t exactly doing him any favors either.
“Now I’m even more lost,” Sunari said.
“Yeah, Teo, can you make a point before I start roasting you?” Kyra loved her brother; she did not love how he could use a thousand words to say the equivalent of ten.
“Well I’ll give you a hint: any of you heard of the Darkwater Seeker?”
Heads shook all around.
“It launched out of the shipyard here at St. Joes, built at Maniro-Triton specifically for exploring the really fucked up places, where we really shouldn’t be going but still need to map. Places where if you try to launch probes, they just disappear, because there’s messed-up radiation or exotic particles or the uh, thing where space stretches and it messes up time- chrono-distortions?”
“Temporal distortions,” Tyson said, eyes unmoving from the drones.
“Yeah, thanks. Sorry, I didn’t get a physics block this semester,” Teo said.
“I didn’t either,” said Tyson, quietly.
“Anyway, it’s specifically built to go where people are risking their lives just by flying through, or even passing close by, is the thing. So they send it and the crew out to this place caught between Venom 7 and Venom 8, y’know those messed up dead stars?”
Sunari shrugged, “No, but I’m interested.”
“A big bunch of dead stars, like if zombie-stars were an island chain, putting bad vibes out into the galaxy, that’s what the Venom Stars are, and it’s a big wall of poison and distortion that’s so wide, ships can’t even jump through it safely going faster than light. But there’s a catch: between 7 and 8, crushed between all the messed-up gravity waves and shit they’re putting out, there’s this this Nebula called the Umbral Reef. It’s filled with debris, its so dense that you can only see a few kilometers even with sensors, and because of all the weird shit hitting it from the outside, it’s basically a nonstop ion storm on the inside. But even so, theoretically? A ship could make it through to the other side, with a dialed-in and slow FTL jump, as long as they could find a clean path through. Because even if stuff is messed up inside, it’s not nearly as messed up as it is outside, because all the dust and spacejunk and ions is a barrier against the worse stuff.” Teo talked with his hands as he told his tale, manuevering a five-fingered starship between asteroids only he could see.
“This seems like a really bad idea,” Billie said, taking another bottle from the cooler. She felt the eyes on her, so she offered it to Kyra instead. Hesitantly she took it, and Billie reefed the cap off; she didn’t drink, though.
“But a stable route through would mean direct passage to the unexplored space beyond, without having to go around the Venoms, which is why they even bothered trying. Who know what’s out there, right? Any other ship wouldn’t try it, but the Darkwater Seeker was pretty much built to do it. Like, if it couldn’t, what was even the point of it, it was supposed to be able to handle the even scarier shit that we haven’t even found yet. Like, just head out raw into the frontier.”
“Gross choice of words,” Tyson said.
“Sorry,” Teo said. “So, anyway, they head in. And somehow, against all odds, things go well for the first few million kilometers. They find a path,through all the crushed-sideways rocks and captured spacejunk and the storms, just by going bit by bit. They do a little jump, they stop, they look around for a way forward, and then they repeat, building a course. Except that, once they’re so deep in the cloud, it gets so friggin’ dense that their sensors can’t even tell them if anything is outside it, like it’s a small universe with nothing beyond.”
“Yes, this was definitely a bad idea,” Billie continued.
“But that isn’t the thing that’s getting to the crew, they expected this, they were prepared. I dunno, I guess they took a bunch of Lucid, and were too calm-stimmed to get messed up by that. The thing that was getting to the crew, were the lights they kept seeing when they came out of their jumps. Lights, like something was looking at them from beyond the rocks, shining a beam on them like it was a searchlight, only for it to suddenly turn away, and switch off when they moved toward it with their thrusters. They didn’t know what it was, but they knew it wasn’t a ship, and it wasn’t just because nobody would willingly go in ahead of them unless they had some serious harsh environment stuff onboard. It’s also because that light was shining so bright, in a place so dark, that they figured that it had to be something near as powerful as a star just to generate it. They tried to scan it, but the cloud was so thick, the time their sensors could reach for it… it was gone.”
Silence in the tent. Despite the flashlight on his head, all eyes were at attention and on Teo. Then someone from street level shrieked I’M FUCKING DRUNK, WHO WANNA SHOOT ROMAN CANDLES AT ME, and broke the tension like a pencil.
“What the fuck, dude,” Kyra said, laughing. “Teo, go on, don’t get distracted if we start hearing bangs.”
“Okay, so like, even so with this weird shit, the Darkwater keeps going, because again, they’re ready to run into basically anything, their response to weird shit is to make a note of it and just keep going, freakouts regardless. So they do more short jumps, and keep plotting their path. And every time, the light keeps looking at them, for longer and longer each time, and always from a different angle. Sometimes it’s peering from behind some junk, sometimes its right in front of them, sometimes it’s behind them, but it always knows where they’re going to pop out of their jump. But every time they try to scan it or move toward it, it just winks out of existence.”
“Up until the time that it didn’t.” Teo said, leaving a pause hanging in the air.
“See, there was a survivor to the Darkwater Seeker, one survivor. This poor bastard who didn’t even manage to get into a lifeboat, he only lived because he had on his EVA suit and was working in the hold, on a life support buoy that failed a systems check. As the ship came apart around him, he had the quick thinking to plug into the buoy’s systems and ride it out into the void. For weeks, he drifted, keeping the blind-visor down on his helmet, with the camera feed turned off, because he just couldn’t bear to look at the nightmare he was drifting through. Apparently the only reason he could keep sane is because the buoy’s air supply had Lucid mixed into it, like, it was keeping him tranquilized, and it made it easy for him to sleep and dream he was somewhere else. Made it easy for him to forget what he saw when he first got blown out into space.”
“Wait, you skipped ahead,” Kyra said. “What wrecked the ship?”
“The creature the light was attached to,” Teo said. He let the chill settle.
“He said it was bright like a blue star, hard to look at directly, but he could tell it was contained in some sort of appendage, like an arm or an antenna that held it like a huge, blinding lantern. He tried to look at the rest of it, and then quickly wished he’d gone blind from the brightness instead: A mouth, that was many mouths at once, chewing in every direction, chewing space to pull in the ship, then chewing up the ship. Eyes as big as small moons, like ice frozen in empty skull-sockets. Skin like cold, wet stone, as though mountains had joined mass and learned to swim through the void. So big, he stopped trying to trace where it began and ended, he just shut his eyes because it was too big, much too big. And somehow, he could hear it screeching in his ears. Only for a little bit, but… not like there’s sound in space, y’know?”
“He said that the worst part, is that it sounded hateful. Not like it had found a meal, but a challenger in its territory.”
“So, hold a moment, I need to ask,” Sunari said. “If this survivor had done a bunch of FTL jumps into the nebula with his ship, even if they were short ones, he’d still be millions of years from help if he was drifting on a buoy. How’d he get rescued in weeks?”
“That’s the thing, he doesn’t know,” Teo said, simply and with a shrug. “Like I said, he had his visor down, and he probably couldn’t tell how fast he was going even if he was looking. All he does know, is that he was picked up because the buoy’s distress beacon kicked in on its own at some point during the trip, and he got picked up almost on top of where the Darkwater started into the nebula. Where they were last heard from, alive and intact.”
“That’s a fucked up coincidence,” Tyson said. Now he was focused on the fireworks that were being lit off above the docks districts, far on the other side of the city; he wondered if that was violating safety standards.
“Yeah well, that’s the thing, the guy has a theory for why that happened: it’s because he’s supposed to be a warning. That he’s supposed to tell others what he saw, because It let him live, and sent him back where he’d be found. So he’d tell others. So we don’t come back to the Umbral Reef, looking for the Darkwater Seeker. Or anything else that might be in the nebula.”
Again, silence. Then, smiles.
“That is fuckin cool,” Sunari said, his near-ubiquitous poker face finally cracked into a warm grin..
“I know, right?” Teo said. “Look it up on the metanet too, it’s verifiable information.”
“Yeah, I bet,” Kyra laughed, “on sites that don’t use punctuation, but also use a different colour for every paragraph, and also, the search engine gives you a security warning when you try to click it.”
“Hey, I’ll show you when we get home, this shit’ll blow your mind. There’s a reason why we haven’t tried to find a way through the Venom Stars since.”
“Yeah, because they sound like they’ll kill you for looking at them, or even thinking about them,” Kyra shot back. “Which is why I find it kinda hard to believe that something could live around them. Or between them, I suppose.”
“Mmmmnnn, I dunno, my family’s dealt with some weird stuff living in space,” Tyson said, finally looking inward from the tent window, the hololith fire glinting in his eyes.
“Yeah, like what?” Kyra challenged him.
“Y’know Stockton, my cat? Had him for five years now?”
“I love Stockton, he’s such a nice guy.”
“Right, but he used to be my great uncle’s cat. My great uncle died 27 years ago, when his ship fell into a temporal anomaly. Everyone uh, they died, when, uh…” He paused. Tyson didn’t have a relationship to speak of with his great uncle, but it was hard to say that what happened next, happened to a member of his family. “They got aged really fast. To death. They said my great uncle was about three hundred years old when they found him and he looked like a mummy without bandages.”
“Oh,” Kyra said, her face going dark. “Uh, sorry.”
“Yeah well, the thing was, that was everyone except for Stockton, because they found him in this one little corner of the tweendecks, that the salvage crew could tell hadn’t been got at by the anomaly. Or maybe that it had been, and it just made time flow slower instead of faster. Whatever it was, Stockton had only been left alone for a few days. He was hungry and sad but, he was fine. That was five years ago. Now, he’s just a regular 11-year-old Maine Coon. Nothing wrong with him. Doctors say he occasionally sheds chronotons but not enough to be harmful.”
“Is a chronoton what I think it is?” Teo asked.
“Probably, now that you know what Temporal Anomaly means,” Tyson said.
“You’re being completely serious,” Billie said to Tyson, not as a question.
Tyson nodded. “Next time you’re over, I’ll show you the certificate the Wadjet Archive people gave us. Stockton is an officially catalogued Freeland Alien Artifact. The weird thing is about the whole thing? I can’t decide if he got lucky or if… he knew, something, somehow.”
Spooked silence and tense smiles, again.
“But I mean, he’s happy enough,” Tyson said, his laugh so sudden it was almost a cough. “It doesn’t bother him, I don’t let it bother me.”
“You should have told me that last time I was around,” Sunari said. “When he was all curled up on me. I’ll remember to shake his paw next time, I didn’t know I was sitting with a celebrity.”
“Yeah, sorry, it’s just, some folks get a little weirded out, like he’s radioactive or something,” replied Tyson.
“Like he’s possessed by a usaro-zana,” said Sunari.
“What’s that?” asked Tyson.
Sunari shifted in his seat, straightening himself from his slouch and asserting his height. “Well, that’s the trouble, because the Consortium mostly destroyed what we knew about them, and this is a problem. Because now we don’t know if it really was some demon myth, or an actual parasite that attacked animals that might be still out there.”
“Yeah, okay, but like, what is it?” Teo interjected.
“So the name means,” and Sunari paused to actually think about what it meant. “I guess it translates closest to ‘curse spine’. From what we know about it, it was something that could get in through an animal’s mouth, burrow into their spine and take control of their body. It turns them bad. Really bad. Like if a spinal cord was a really long and evil worm.”
“Augh,” Krya stuck out a tongue.
“Yeah, and that’s the extra-awful thing, because we don’t know if they were real or not, and if they still exist, because the Consortium thinks they’re a ghost story from the Old Cultures and so they burned most of the records about them, along with almost every other book written in the Provinces Era.”
“So Reconstructed Arissiyan History is a pretty cool class, huh?” asked Billie.
“My parents wanted me to take it, but I’m glad I did. I wound up learning about High Minister Lusaran Areos, who was well-liked but died young, because he was mauled to death in his sleep by his pet haran, that he raised from birth. All accounts said that haran loved Aeros like an older brother, yet it had torn him limb-from-body. Worse, it killed two more estate guards trying to get loose before the rest managed to put it down, but the records say that one of the people that killed it? They saw something squirt out of it as the final hit landed, and that it slithered into the reeds and into the Phyras river.”
Kyra made a sustained ahhhhhhhhh, and clawed shaking hands at the air.
“What the record can’t decide on, is if it was something that originally crawled out of the river, or it was something conjured from a rival looking to debilitate’s Aeros’ party’s sway in the province. Like some kisek evil Minister breathed in some burning bone-dust and said a prayer backwards, and this thing crawled out of Naskavar, looking for a job.”
“And you don’t know if these things actually still exist, if they actually did in the first place?” Teo asked, his eyes wide.
“Anything like that could be hiding in Rysia’s sewers. That planet is a wreck, but it’s made for things like that, now,” said Sunari. That planet, he described his species’ homeworld.
A noise rattled from outside the tent. Something like an empty can or a piece of conduit falling and dropping on the ductwork, then rolling onto the roof. Five of them went still.
“See, there’s one right now,” Sunari said, breaking the silence.
“That is not fucking funny,” Kyra said, leaning all 5’5 of her diminutive mass at him and threatening him with a pointed finger, claw unfurled.
“I dunno, I’m laughing,” said Sunari, a smirk spreading across his face.
“I can make your smile permanent, you watch me,” Kyra said, low and fuming, jabbing with her claw, her tail beating against the tent nylon. “Stab your fuckin eyes out, at least. I hate… slithery shit.”
Another sound. Less metallic, more like something sliding on the roofing material, barely audible. Only Billie and Sunari heard it, and they straightened and stared toward the tent flap.
“You two alright?” asked Teo.
“Hssh,” Sunari mimed covering his mouth, his ears twitching.
Nothing.
“Uh, guys,” Billie said eventually, “I didn’t want to say anything earlier but, uh. I think someone might have been following me when I walked here. Someone that was dressed, uh… exactly like me.”
“Wow, so… full Cutter of the Cold Bounty getup? With the hydro-claw and everything?” asked Teo.
“Yeah, it looked like mine, too. Really… well put together, I mean,” said Billie, unsure if she was making sense, grappling between the polar opposites of ‘gut instinct’ and ‘sensory error’.
“Ooooh, maybe you got Refracted,” Kyra said.
“Oh yeah,” Teo said. “That’d be fucked.”
Billie blinked at Kyra, momentarily snapped out of the moment. “Refracted?”
“Yeah, Refractions, what happens when you get zapped by… zetatons? Zeta radiation? Is that it?”
“People think it has something to do with zeta radiation and the multiverse, but they aren’t sure,” said Tyson.
“You know about this shit too? You’re sure you didn’t get a physics block?” asked Teo.
Tyson shook his head. “Wadget Archive people again. They made sure Stockton wasn’t a Refraction, or anything else nasty like that when they tested him.”
“Okay, but… what are they?” Billie interjected.
“So, the best that I understand it, is that out in deep space, in the No-Sectors? You can sometimes find these areas where our universe is… weak. As in, threadbare, like it’s been worn out somehow. That if you pass through it, you can sometimes trigger weird echoes of another, different version of yourself to appear in the same place, going the opposite direction. Sometimes entire ships get copied, but other times, they just get suddenly invaded with half-done space-clones of the crew, whose brains are haywired and they only really act according to the person’s own deepest wants. They’re like, dumb-but-clever mimics, they don’t know stuff on their own, but they can piece things together from what they got copied with. And almost all of them want to murder their original, because they think they’re the original and the original is the impostor.” Kyra emphasized her words by playing a shell game with her own hands.
“Yeah, guys, you know how I worked on wanting to go outside?” said Billie. “This is making me want to go in the opposite direction.” She tented her fingers, tapping her fingertips.
“Ah, don’t worry, Billie, they’re just a scary story astronauts tell,” Teo said.
“Yeah, no, they’re real, sorry,” Tyson said. “About one in every one hundred militia missions tracked by Union Central is against Refractions, they show up that much. Section 99 gets called in to kill big swarms of them, all the time.”
“Yeah, because your uncle in Section 99 told you that,” Teo cut him off.
Tyson let out a low sigh. “Okay you got me on that one. Hold that one over me forever. But I swear, I can show you Stockton’s certificate.”
“And these things can just… get anywhere? Like you said entire ships of them can come out of nowhere?” Billie was getting nervous.
“Yeah, no, Billie, don’t be worried, I was just joking. Refractions don’t live for very long, they sort of turn into dust after a few weeks and I don’t think any have ever made it out this far. We’re right in the middle of the Freelands, and they tend to show up out on the frontiers,” said Kyra, realizing in that moment that her friend wasn’t having fun. She knew what Billie’s finger-tent thing meant, it was self-soothing.
“If scientists are right, it’s because they’re made of stuff not from this universe, and this universe’s entropy levels eat them alive,” Tyson said.
“You’re sure you don’t take physics?” Teo said.
“Union Central has a free book on them, I couldn’t sleep one night and read all of it to fall asleep,” replied Tyson.
“Did it work?”
“... no.”
The sound became danger.
Sunari heard it first, his young arissiyan senses capable of discerning a single reed being snapped at 20 paces- beneath the latent noise of the party at street level bouncing off the ceiling of the city, a footfall, directly outside the tent door, heavy and stabilizing. A hand reached through the tent flap, and tore the entire front end of the tent up and off its moorings on the roof.
It was Legion, looming and giant. His scrap-shears were poised at the end of a cocked arm, light glinting from the hololith fire along their heat-treated edges. He was silent from beneath his welder’s mask.
The screams were involuntary. On reflex, Sunari grabbed Billie and pulled her beneath him, and Tyson reached to pull both Kyra and Teo into his corner of the tent. But they were ultimately paralyzed, as more than seven feet of monster towered over them, power whining into the hydro-actuators on a cutting tool made to slice through sealed airlocks, let alone flesh and bone.
And then, over the sounds of their own terror, both Billie and Sunari heard another voice yelling, from one rooftop over, two storeys up:
“HEY DUMBASS,” the man roared, falling like a bombshell, “BET YOU WON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU!”
Despite himself, the Cutter of the Cold Bounty looked over his shoulder. He caught a superman punch across his masked chops that cracked like a hammer on stone. It turned his head back around and knocked a string of spittle out from under his face-shield, staggering as he lost balance and rolled shoulder over shoulder away from the tent.
“HAH, MADE YOU LOOK!” the man practically squealed with delight as he hit the roof, his solid mass landing in a graceful three-point stance. From what Billie could see of him from her position, the jeans and the work boots looked normal enough, but the wolf mask and letterman jacket combo he was wearing had to be a Halloween thing.
Legion scrambled up with speed he didn’t typically have in the movies, where he’d get knocked down and just vanish. Instead, this version of Legion bent up at an unnatural angle, twisted and reoriented to face the Wolfman. Both Billie and Sunari could hear the low sound of whirring- motors moving, muffled like the sound was coming from inside of him. They watched as he clasped the blades of his scrap-shears, like he was relishing the feeling, hunched low like an animal.
“Yeah, I get it, but you can’t beat the classics,” the Wolfman said to him and his bravado. He put his fists up, almost like a boxer, only with an odd little series of flourishes that none of the kids could recognize. From the eyeholes in his mask, an emerald light glared for a moment, then died away.
Legion sprung from his stance, kicking a shallow track in the roof as his feet found purchase. His pounce was an almost flat arc through the air, but his swing was wide and completely clumsy, a hook thrown by a drunk, resolved in the form of a cinematic nightmare creature. The shears clasped through the swing but cut nothing but air, and on reflex, Legion slammed his massive right down like a hammer, thinking the Wolfman ducked. He hadn’t; impossible speed and shot him up and through the closing blades before they could slash tight. Again, the Wolfman fell out of the air and drilled the monster across the face with a fist that registered like a gunshot.
The Cutter of Cold Bounty, as silent as death was certain, grunted in pain, and drew in a sharp breath. He wheezed as he recoiled with the blow, and from beneath the welding mask, Billie heard him exhale, “aww shit, ah, fuck.” That was when Billie realized this wasn’t like the movies.
“Don’t tell me,” the Wolfman shouted as he landed, falling into a crouch and hacking in with two hooks to the big man’s kidneys. “You spent everything on the arm, blew your entire wad on the support package to mount the fancy pigsticker,” the Wolfman continued, stinging Legion with jabs as he loaded up his right arm, green light flaring in his eyes. “No targeting system, no threat sensors,” the wolf continued, and when Legion got his unaugmented arm up to block the storm of lefts, the wolf sunk low and blew the air from his lungs with a right straight to the solar plexus. The monster made a miserable sound as he bent at the waist, knees buckling, almost sitting down into a chair that wasn’t there. “Hey look, no augmented cardio or pain inhibitors either, you’re awesome at being a cyborg, really got a sustainable plan for your evolution down. You fucking cosplayer.”
“YOU DON’T FUCKING CALL ME THAT!” The voice Legion spoke with was higher than Billie was expecting, and only about half as rough. He didn’t sound like the spirits of thousands of colonists committed to the void via greed and incompetence, possessing the body of their last surviving neighbour in stasis to enact revenge.
He sounded like he needed a hug. But also that nobody wanted to or should hug, because he was That Sort of Person.
‘Legion’ found his footing just enough to swing with a wild upcutting slash, his shears snip-snip-snipping through the arc. With one smooth and simple step, the Wolfman turned himself sideways and away from the attack, giving the metal-ripping doom-arm a little push that was as much an insult as it was a parry. Even still, the big man was lopsided and probably didn’t have great balance to begin with- it was enough to make him turn and stumble…
…directly towards the torn open tent, and five teenagers still frozen by the sight of two monsters clashing.
“I’LL SHOW YOU I WAS BORN FOR THIS,” the man under the welder’s hood raged, and he spread the blades of his arm wide, reaching for them.
The kids screamed again, but when ‘Legion’ found himself stopped in his tracks, they just boggled soundlessly, eyes wide, gape-jawed. From behind, the Wolfman had dug hands like vices into the big man’s hips and dragged him back with force. ‘Legion’ hammered at his grip; the Wolfman obliged by letting go with his right and driving it up between his legs, aiming to send his balls back up into his gut. Big man let out a gasping yell and went wobble-legged again, and that’s when the Wolfman waistlocked him, buckled him in, and bridged him backwards onto the dome of his skull, suplexing him so hard he rolled.
‘Legion’ tumbled onto his back and tried to get a base beneath him, but before he could press off the deck, the Wolfman fell from the sky on him a third time, this time pinning a knee to his chest and handing him lefts and rights across the mask like they were free advice. “A whole city full of victims, and you have to pick the most obvious group,” said the Wolfman, driving shots into the welder’s hood like he was pickaxing a rock face, denting it inward. “The kids that snuck off to drink underage, you fucking cliche!”
“I’m not cliche,” the voice beneath the mask growled, “I AM LEGION!” His right arm rose with sudden mechanical speed and precision, bending at a hidden third joint, angling for attack.
“THAT’S NOT EVEN THE LINE, ASSHOLE!” A young voice called, and drew the masked man’s attention enough that he froze in his movement. It was Billie, holding high her own mask, screaming “IT’S ‘WE ARE LEGION.’”
“Sh, sh-” the big man stammered. “SHUT UP!”
The Wolfman swiped a hand across his face, plucking the full-face visor away in a snap-tight grip.
“My mask…” the big man peeped, his voice a murmur, though his neck was corded with steroid muscle and his face was stippled with acne. The kids saw him clearly: not a Face that was Many Faces, but the face of a man who was wishing he’d stayed in that night, bloody, broken nosed and missing teeth despite his protective gear.
Protective gear that the Wolfman then slapped backhand across his face with force, snapping it in half and shutting his eyes with a burning sting. “Yeah, that’s the thing about being a cyborg,” the Wolfman said, shifting his mount on the big man, grabbing his bionic arm like a metal tree trunk, and rolling him onto his side. “You aren’t ready for it, because nobody ever really is,” he continued, bending the arm at the elbow, hooking it and stretching it tight against his shoulder.
“Welcome to Prime Time, bitch,” said the Wolfman, planting his foot onto the big man’s neck and pulling with augmented might. As green light rose from the light in his wolf mask’s eyeholes and he roared like a beast, the arm came away from its bionic socket, blood and hydraulic fluid flying like a fountain water feature, with a sound that was half crunch-rip, half squeal-creak. The big man howled until his lungs fried, his rudimentary augments backfeeding damage report data directly into his nervous system, turning it to raw, acid agony. Then he drew in a phlegmy breath and screamed again, eyes wide, drooling.
When the Wolfman put the razor-points of his own right arm an inch away from his eyes, he stopped.
“Hey, you ever been killed with your own torn-off limb? Because let me tell you, that’s a cyborg thing,” the Wolfman said, blood and oil dripping from his gory improvised weapon.
Then he turned, like he could feel the five sets of eyes staring at him. From the wreckage of the tent, he gave a friendly nod to the costumed teens looking on like timid woodland creatures.
“Hi kids,” said the Wolfman. “Having a Happy Halloween?”
As a unit, the kids screamed, loudest of all this time. As a unit, they found the fire escape, and leapt down it. All but the one also dressed like The Cutter, Billie, who looked on, finding it hard to look away.
The Wolfman turned back to his prey. “So, you want a taste?”
“Sir I am so sorry, very extremely sorry,” said ‘Legion,’ his voice plaintive and bassless. “And I’d really like to back out of this as much as I could, if at all possible.”
“Oh please, look at you. It’s a little late to start making good life choices,” said the Wolfman, who then headbutted him to sleep. “Jackass,” he muttered to himself, standing off the hulking wreck of a wannabe movie monster.
An exhaled ‘woahhhh’ escaped Billie, and she regretted letting it slip; it made the Wolfman catch sight of her. He stared, his fierce veneer unmoving.
“Nah, go on, I’m not here for you, this is the one of you I’m after, you’re fine,” said the Wolfman, his voice friendlier than the mask would let on.
“Well it’s just, that was like that one part in Legion Takes New Providence. Except, uh, the boxer won, not Legion,” said Billie, meekly, still holding up a piece of the wrecked tent as a shield.
“Yeah, sorry, I don’t watch a lot of horror movies kid,” the Wolfman said. “I got enough scary stuff in my head as is.”
“Right, sorry,” said Billie. She paused, thinking of if she should say if she wanted to say.
“That was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said, deciding to be honest.
“Thanks kid,” the Wolfman said. He put a finger the side of his head, pressing through the wolf mask to where Billie presumed his ear was. “Yeah, it’s Canine, I got the fuckhead, he was about to slice up some teenagers, like I said he was gonna try to.”
There was a pause, like the other side of the line was talking.
“You know exactly who I’m talking about, and don’t act like I pulled that out of my ass, yeah? I don’t even watch these fuckin’ movies and I called that one,” the Wolfman said, indignant. He sounded like a pretty put-upon sort of lycanthrope.
Another pause.
“Thank you, that’s what I was looking for. And send extra hands, please, boy’s on the gas big-time and I don’t want anyone throwing their back out dragging his big ass down to street level. Yep. Gotcha, Happy Halloween.” He said, sounding more like a friendly pup again.
“Hey kid,” the Wolfman called to Billie. “Call your parents.” In an instant, he became very, very scary once again.
---
Community Security needed a wide berth to work with in order to truck off Wilson Gallows, but they didn’t let the necessary work shut down the part- they let it go on around them, and let gawkers gawk.
Wilson was one of those troublesome sorts who had gone and let a minor setback become the driving force in his life. Carson Stern had retired from the role of Legion, and in his mind, he was born to wear the welder’s hood in his stead. But like so many people who were born for a part, the casting director disagreed with him. He didn’t get the call back, and worse, the movie he would have been in (should have been, in his mind) was tongue-in-cheek, a wink and a nudge look at the earlier shlock and cheese in the series. Wilson hated the idea of people making fun of Legion. They were making fun of the monster he wanted to be. So over the course of two years, Wilson decided he’d stop acting the part, and start living the gimmick.
In his mind, they’d made the old Legion a joke. But when they saw what he’d do, on the night of the Cold Bounty’s reaping, nobody would be laughing. That’s what the message he sent to St. Joe’s city hall read.
He’d sent it on October 20th, 11 days from Halloween, one day for every movie in the Cutter of Cold Bounty series, and that’s how a lot of St. Joes’ security community had sussed out when he’d strike. Others had just looked past that logic, and figured he’d try to move on Halloween, because it’d be the one day of the year when he could dress like his hero and not get spotted the second he stepped onto the street. Under the mask, with his big scary cutter-arm, Wilson looked like the genuine article, but given the amount of work he’d put into himself, the sheer amount of Juice and mutagenics he’d pumped himself with ahead of the installation of his kit-job bionics, he was actually more of a beast than anyone that’d ever played Legion on camera.
At least physically. Mentally, he was still an angry little boy, and while that was all well and mockable, people in charge of St. Joes’ security knew that mockable people were frequently the most dangerous.
Carried out in a neckbrace with glazed eyes, loaded into the back of an ambulance on a oversized backboard, though? He seemed to be pretty done being dangerous. At least on that Halloween.
One of the people watching from the barricade was Teo Tasarak, with his adopted father Januk.
“Dad, I am so, so sorry about all this, but in my defense, I don’t think even you thought this was going to happen,” said Teo, holding his costume’s helmet in his hands.
“Boy, we’re going to talk about the key and the drinking, but I agree with you completely,” said Januk, looking at the now-armless cyborg with the I-want-to-go-home facial expression. “That is messed up.”
Kyra sat with Tyson, who was still waiting for his mom to come pick him up. “So, does this mean werewolves are stronger than demons? I mean, what even is Legion?” she asked him, looking for anything at all to talk about that wasn’t what just happened.
“I mean, the sixth movie went to this whole weird demonic place, but he was originally just one surviving colonist in stasis that got possessed by all the other colonists on the ship that died, and wanted revenge on the folks who didn’t keep proper watch over their shitty life support systems,” Tyson said. “And then a bunch of other people afterward, for some reason.”
“So like… he’s a Frankenstein, then?” said Kyra.
“Eh, close enough, yeah. Werewolf beats Frankenstein,” said Tyson, with a smile. “Though it’s really Frankenstein’s monster,” he added.
Behind them, Sunari had one question for Billie: “Why didn’t you run?”
“I wanted to see the wolf guy kick his ass!” she said, with an awkward punch. “And I was sure he had it in the bag the second he ripped his arm off. Smart move, that one.”
“You are so weird,” said Sunari.
“Yeah, so why’d you pull me behind you?” she asked him, with a grin.
Sunari’s pale grey skin flared up ruddy red in his cheeks. “I mean, you’d do the same for me, right?” was his reply.
“Yeah,” Billie said, grinning.
“Yeah, cool,” Sunari said, smiling back.
She took his hand in hers. It felt good.
From high above, sitting on the rooftop railing and chewing on a stack of pressed powder candies, perched cyborg agent, longtime teenaged werewolf, and casual enjoyer of Halloween Van Parker. Most days, people called him Canine only because it was his codename, but on this night, he was enjoying making the metaphor a reality. Though at the moment, his mask was more of a hat- candy was more important to him at that particular second.
It had been a good night’s work: one less armed asshole with some sort of a personality issue on the streets, five kids safe and going home actually sober, he got to let his inner demon out for walkies, and he even got some candy out of the deal. All that, and he learned that he looked pretty good in a letterman jacket, even if he preferred his biker leathers.
What’s with you, you actually feel like shutting up for once or have you got something caustic to say? Van turned his thoughts inward, to the bionic passenger in his brain, the Canine co-processor that took the fighter he was and made him a killer.
Nothing to say, the beast rumbled from between the hemispheres of his mind. Tonight we have experienced both Superior Violence and intake of simple sugars, It savoured every letter of the word ‘violence’ as it spoke. Both are appreciated. I had been anticipating this night as a source of both, as it is always reliable, even if the violence is sometimes imitation.
Fireworks flashed in Van’s eyes, and like a child, he kicked his feet idly over the ledge. So that’s your logical death-machine way of saying you’ve found a favourite holiday?
The Canine processed this for a bit, and returned, simply: Yes.
Van crushed another stack of powder candies in his palm, then hoofed the pile of sugar shrapnel into his mouth, chewing the citrus-spiked sweetness up like a hardcrete grinder. He knew he was one of maybe 12 people in the entire city that liked the damn chalky things, but that was fine, more for him.
Then good for you, y’know, is all Van could think to say. It’s good to have preferences.
The Canine made a sound like contentment, and it radiated a sense of calm through Van’s head. Like somehow, on the vaguest of levels, living host and bionic symbiote were seeing eye to eye, and the signal-to-noise ratio between them had just been dialed in a notch stronger.
You want to go jump over the railing at the canal with the mask on, and make people freak out like there’s a werewolf attacking? Van asked his hidden passenger.
Yes, the Canine replied instantaneously, without hesitation, like a true machine. Yes, I very much do.
Standing to his full height on a railing four storeys up, balancing without effort, Van Parker pulled the wolf mask over his face and put charge through his boosters. As he sprung over the street below, trailing emerald light as he went, he smiled to himself, knowing that amateur hour was over.
Now, he was gonna show this city what a cyborg Halloween horrorshow should really look like.
