Blasted Futures, Secret Histories (SciFi Smackdown)

Round Four - Self-Assembly Required, Pt. 3

"Okay, we'll spread out." Rachel ordered her team. He wasn't at the apartment. Of course he wasn't at the apartment. "I've ordered the mayor to evacuate the habitat blocks. Vee, cover the north quarter. Assemble a scanner, look at everyone left indoors. Jenn, you take the plantations. Same pattern. I'll hit the reservoir. Go." the women nodded and made to launch when Rachel held up a hand to stop them. "And if he's doing anything, anything fishy, it's kill on sight." They nodded again and left.

Rachel dashed in fits and bursts over the estuary surrounding the reservoir, pinging with the scanner she'd assembled deep in her cranium every ten square meters. The deep water of the reservoir reflected the black night sky and the stars that shone through the biodome's transparent lattice. Only at the lake's far edge was there even so much as a ripple on the water's glass-like surface. That was where the main road snaked around the waters, a favourite spot for early morning fishermen and bathers. That was where she found him.

"Come with me," she ordered in a voice that brokered no debate, "Beta needs to see you for another test." She hoped her accustomed hostility would mask the actual panic she was starting to feel. He was just sitting at the water's edge; just sitting and looking over the water. It was probably the only body of water he had ever seen. Especially if he'd only been assembled yesterday.

"I'm not going anywhere with you," Remy returned her hostility angrily. He gave her a malicious grin. "Following's not really my style."

"I don't really give a shit about your style, Remy. That lone wolf crap is almost embarrassing. Come with me now or-"

"Or what? You'll kill me? Go for it! Right here! Shoot me, stab me, rip my head off - I don't care. I'll make damn sure my body ends up in the lake and that will be the end of all of this, your whole fucking civilization." Rachel froze in midair, just hovering. He knew. "Yah, you bitches and your fucking growth virus. I might never have known, do you know that? I could have gone on happily trading and fighting and fucking and being the biggest badass in the wastes, but something in me was drawn to this place, always to this place. It - I - wanted in. Back to where I was created, to where I knew I could find food."

Rachel darted towards him and started assembling. She had to get him away from the water, get him contained. If he was anything like the other constructs, he could just break down. Tumble into a trillion pieces, each one hungrier than the next.

Remy laughed as she rammed into his torso and knocked him back from the water's edge. He sounded crazed, maniacal. Something in him was already collapsing. His cheeks grew more pronounced; his temples and his throat and his collarbones looked sunken and gaunt. But he laughed and laughed.

"I don't want to break down!" he laughed as if it were the funniest joke of them all, "I just want to live. But I guess that wasn't the program. I guess the cloud had other plans..."

Rachel assembled a graphene sheet painfully out of the flesh of her back, desperately trying to create a barrier around the man's disintegrating body, but she was too slow. It hurt too much. Remy kept laughing as the softest parts of him bottomed out first, melting off the rusting frame of his skeleton. The marrow of his bones dissolved next, then the hollow remainder fell into a wet heap and trickled into the dirt. 

"No!" Rachel screamed as a tremor in the still surface of the reservoir betrayed a fluid spilling there. They are getting away. They're going to-

She felt it, the rumbling in the earth. Waves heaved and rocked on the surface of the water. Something was assembling down there. Something was assembling inside her home. They had infected the wild nanobots with a virus that gave them organic structure and the ability to grow into biological forms, and this was what was the result. A cannibalistic biological invasion.

And she had let it in.