Chapter Twelve: Perspectives
What game are you playing, Alex?
She half expected an answer. Although, if he ever found a way around her aura to hear her thoughts, their little dance would come stumbling to an end. These hidden doors changed things. What was back there that he couldn’t let her see? And why couldn’t he trust her to see it?
Had she let him go too long without balancing his Con? He’d needed it more often as time passed, only once a week at first. Now once per day wasn’t even enough.
There were still so many things she needed to do before sunrise, not the least of which was washing and changing into cleaner clothes. She had also put off her formal introduction to Diane for too long. She hoped these things would still matter after going home to see her brother. Would this be the last time?
You’re first, Alex.
They chose a storage room in the laundry for their secret lair. It was in its own safe zone, and Lanni extended the walls over the doorway. The only way in was through a hollowed out tumble dryer and a short crawl through a tunnel barely large enough for Lanni and her backpack.
There were no lights, of course, but Alex always lit the room when she came in. Her only concessions to comfort were a small sofa and the area rug beneath it. She kept her favorite comics in a milk crate by the sofa, where she could grab one to read before sleeping. This was home.
Alex was in his corner, standing perfectly still inside a ring of black electrical tape. He looked the same as always, but his appearance still made her cringe. His clothes hung on him like rags caught on a tree limb, and his gaunt face and head were completely hairless. Any human who looked like that would have been dead for a week.
“Hey, Al. How ya doing?” she whispered. “Are you here?” Asking that question didn’t feel strange anymore. Alex’s body was here, but his mind freely wandered the Con cloud, watching over and sometimes controlling everything inside the area he protected.
His eyelids twitched, but she couldn’t tell if it was a reaction to her presence. They often twitched when he was ‘out.’ Her vision blurred, and she blinked fat tears down her face. Would this be the day she’d been dreading? The one she hoped would never come, but always knew it would?
He could hold out a little longer. I could try harder. He would if our places were reversed.
She knew this line of thinking was dangerous. It would keep him alive until it was too late to stop him. If he lost control, all the lives he would end would be her fault. There weren’t enough lives left, to risk them on such a thin hope.
She knelt and peeled an arc of the deadly tape up from the floor. It was easier than neutralizing the effect she put on it, and then having to recreate it when she was done. She imbued it with nanites that duplicated her aura, or close enough. It would scatter any nanites that came too close.
What am I doing? Restoring? Killing? Has it finally come to this?
It had.
More than just a brother, Alex was her twin, her confidant, her best friend. He was her protector and the MPC’s guardian, all at great personal cost. He ignored his own suffering to do her small kindnesses, like cleaning her clothes and mending her myriad scrapes and bruises while she slept. Despite these things, the danger of keeping him alive had finally surpassed the benefits.
He’s not Alex, anymore. He’s more monster than my brother.
Adjusting to his absence would be difficult. There’d be no more planning, no one watching her back. Who would she worry about?
The colonists would see her, and she wouldn’t vanish from their memory like the Ghost they thought she was. She’d have to convince them to let her in Tina’s room, or the baby could mutate. It could become an offspring, or something worse.
Quit stalling. Yes it sucks, but not as much as letting him kill everyone in the MPC.
Suppressing her aura, she reached through the gap in the tape and took his hand. With her own protections subdued, the barrier was just as dangerous to her as it was to him, but she had to touch him to balance his Con.
That touch worked both ways. It also left her completely defenseless against his powers. If she was going to do it, it had to be now, while his mind was focused elsewhere; before he lost too much of himself to care about killing her first.
The feel of his warm hand in hers almost shattered her resolve. It reminded her that she was a real person, with a physical body, and that people needed physical contact. The simple joys in another person’s touch and voice were so easy to take for granted.
Like most pleasant things in life, these had become luxuries she could no longer afford. Now her touch could kill, and anyone who even caught a glimpse of her would quickly forget. Was that human? The colonists called her The Ghost, and in a very real way, that’s what she had become.
She squeezed Alex’s hand affectionately, registering the delicate balance of nanites versus human tissue in his body. It shifted dramatically overnight. He was already borderline. She didn’t know what would happen on the other side of that boundary, only that as he approached it, he became less Alex and more host.
Without a conscious decision to do so, her energy flowed through their connection, restructuring his nanites into human tissue, and locking them into that role. Nanites in his brain would form brain cells, and in his blood would form blood cells.
As super-powers went, Lanni’s ability to make these changes was less than spectacular. She had once seen lightning arc from Alex’s bare hand. As dull as it sounded, her power had kept both Tina’s baby and Alex from becoming mutant monsters. It was as rare as it was powerful. In all of Alex’s rapidly expanding Con cloud, her brother knew of no other being, exterminator or host, who could do what she could.
She maintained careful control of the energy flowing between them. Her body continually and steadily generated this energy. Holding it back was always easy at first, but like flood waters behind a dam, it grew increasingly difficult. If she used too little energy, Alex’s nanites wouldn’t respond. Too much, and she would neutralize what he needed to survive.
It was a quick enough process that she had never had to test her limits. Just before she let go of his hand, Alex took hold of hers with inhuman speed. Startled, she stood up and tried to pull away, but his grip was like iron.
#
His eyes opened gradually, first one, then the other. An accumulated crust of eye gunk flaked and crumbled away. His dull, unfocused eyes grew bright and glassy. His cracked, peeling lips were forced apart by a dry tongue, but quickly plumped and moistened as he spoke, refreshed and replenished by his Con.
“Be careful, Lisa Ann,” he said. “I doubt I could mend you if you fell across the tape.” He spoke with a combination of his natural voice and the one that didn’t require the use of his mouth. It was simultaneously the low, raspy croak of his throat, and the high, ethereal monotone of the Con.
“Sweet Tea, Alex! Do you want to give me a heart attack?”
“That, I probably could mend, but no. I don’t want your heart to stop.”
“That’s good to know,” she said. “If you’re done with my hand, I think I’ll have it back before this gets creepy.” Since their physical connection hadn’t been broken, her energy continued to flow into him. The easiest way to stop it was to let go, but that option had been taken off the table.
“I don’t intend to keep it. Your tiny fingers are too delicate for my taste. First, I want you to be sure.” His voice was shifting back towards his old self rather than a b-rate actor playing a ghost.
“Sure?” Oh God, he knew. He was in her head. “About what?”
“Things changed last night. Something important happened while you were out exploring. It might not matter, though, if you think the time has come. I can’t tell for sure, but you may be right. I’ll have to trust your judgment. If you are correct, this will be your only chance to do it. Either way, I want you to be sure of your decision.”
With her aura suppressed, he could read her thoughts as easily as her expression. But that didn’t make him guilty of it. Maybe he really was reading her body language. The tears on her face were a pretty strong indicator of her emotional state. She had come here to kill him, after all.
“I am entirely here, sister,” he said. “I am fully in this room with you; in this body, this ill-fitting, decaying sack of viscera. I used to fear staying away from this shell for too long. One can’t help but wonder what is happening to his body while his mind wanders. I didn’t enjoy having to divide my attention among several places at once.”
“Why?” Lanni asked. “I haven’t seen you like this since we came here. Don’t you need to be out in your Con?”
“I’ve developed a new understanding of the Con. It harvests data on every living thing that moves within it. I used to sense when and where new collections took place. I could focus my attention there to learn what was happening.
“It was a foolish waste of my time. I understand, now, that the Con is an extension of me. It is me, and I am it. I don’t need to choose which bits to witness. I can simply be aware of everything that happens within my cloud. I’m like God, in that sense. Well, like a god.”
“Alex, my hand.” She had stopped crying, and was careful not to express any pain. Alex was mostly a host, now. He no longer ate or drank for his sustenance. The Con scavenged everything his physical body required on an atomic level from his surroundings. His only real craving was for emotions, and he could experience them vicariously by draining them from a human. Love, hatred, pain, fear, it didn’t matter. The stronger the emotion, the better.
Instead of letting go, he squeezed her hand tighter. She resisted gasping in pain as her knuckles ground together. If he was enjoying her suffering, he didn’t show it. He promised long ago to stay out of her head without asking first. If he had kept that promise, or if he would still, remained to be seen.
“I won’t hurt you Lisa Ann. I’ve invested too much energy keeping you alive and molding you into the perfect creature you’ve become. If you have to destroy me, I won’t fight you, but if you intend to go on living, I need to show you some things.”
She felt like she’s been plunged into a black river. All of her senses faded, and then, just as quickly, the world returned. The stifling air of their shared tomb-like home became a strong, cool wind, gusting around her. She was perched on the edge of cargo container suspended from a tall crane. The Red Hook warehouse sprawled along the river, far below.
#
She understood what Alex meant by knowing everything that happened in his Con cloud, because she was experiencing it firsthand.
Dangling hundreds of feet above the river, she was experiencing the world through the mind of an offspring. They didn’t exactly see or hear as humans did, but she knew the location of six other offspring, scattered across the yard below her.
Husks appeared and disappeared from her awareness as they moved or made sounds. She was privy to the observations of the other offspring, too. Their minds shared everything through the Con. Four humans lurked near the chain fence by the street, and bright flashes of activity erupted as another offspring attacked a husk. The view changed.
She was on the ground, hiding; cowering with several others in the dark. The wall behind her ripped open with a metallic screech. She ran. Around a corner she joined several other husks running together. Another turn, and the big husk at the front of the pack collided with a girl, knocking her over, and falling on her.
It was her! Alex was showing her what happened in the warehouse with experiences recorded in the Con.
The view changed again.
“I don’t care what he said. Follow me.” It was a young man, probably nineteen or twenty, with a baseball bat in his left hand. She and one other guy followed him through a few twists and turns, until they found the fat husk that pinned her.
“Guys! I think it saw me. Bash it!” one of them shouted, and they beat it to death with their bats. She didn’t know how they missed her legs sticking out from beneath it, but they moved on quickly.
In another view, three guys and a fourth in a wheelchair entered the warehouse from the docks. The boy in the wheelchair saw her as she ran across the wide lane and ducked behind an electric pallet jack.
“Told you,” another boy said.
The perspective changed again. A beautiful burst of nanite energy called her from her flesh feast. Once more in the mind of an offspring, she climbed up the side of a cargo container and launched from stack to stack towards the source of the power.
She dropped on top of a human, enjoying the satisfying crunch. She spun to see the others, knocking the smallest of them over. Down the lane, a woman dressed in an exquisite gown of black and gold stared through the wedged open sliding door into the room beyond.
The vision ended.
She was back in the square room with cinder block walls that they called home. It wasn’t exactly the same, though. Alex was with her, but he was the healthy Alex from before the plague. They sat side by side on their old couch, with a ninja movie on their brand-new flat screen. Their father bought it to keep Mom happy while she was pregnant.
“You promised, Alex. You promised to stay out of my head! How can I trust you now? How can I know if anything that happens after this is real, or if I’m only seeing what you let me see?”
“This is the best way, Lisa Ann. But you aren’t asking the right questions. If you want to get out of here, you have to take this seriously.”
It was nice hearing Alex’s old voice and seeing his full head of thick, curly hair, even if it was just a phantasm. His healthy skin and round face were almost painful to see, knowing that in reality he was emaciated and bald, with pasty, mottled skin that barely clung to his bones.
She turned sideways on the couch to face him. “So, what are you saying? You’ll keep me trapped here until I die? Until I starve to death? Watching this horrible movie? I should have done it when I had the chance.” Her voice was a whisper as she ended.
“I won’t keep you here. I can’t. We can talk here for hours while only minutes of real time pass. Our thoughts are much faster than…”
She shoved his shoulder to stop him. “Please! If you want to kill me, do you have to bore me to death? I don’t need to know how all of this… nanite… Con garbage works, do I?”
He laughed. It was a sound she hadn’t heard in ages. It was infectious, too. She wanted to laugh with him, but she knew she was in very serious trouble.
“Fine. Tell me what you need me to know. Better yet, just force-feed it into my head like you did the with that spear-master’s memories.
“I did that so you could defend yourself. You made the spear. I just scanned the Con for an existence that knew how to use it, and put it in your head. I fully intend to give you an understanding of the Con, especially if you are going to kill me. You’ll need to know the plans I’ve put in motion, and a few other essentials. I have to tell you now, in case I’m not around to tell you later.”
If his appearance and this place were intended to comfort her, his incongruous words were a cold splash of reality in her face. She nodded, and he continued.
“You were careless at the yard last night. Even though you thought I wasn’t watching, you were hasty. You didn’t scout the area, and you didn’t notice the other humans. Worse, they noticed you. Your aura destroys Con particles on contact, so offspring can’t detect you, and hosts can’t see your thoughts. Hosts and humans have eyes, though. Your aura doesn’t hide you from plain sight.
“The woman outside the door saw something that puzzled her. I don’t know what it was, but I can extrapolate. She was a host.”
Lanni’s heart froze. “A host saw me?” She was speechless for a few seconds while that sank in. “Why am I still alive?”
“Don’t celebrate yet. I had to leave the Con before it found me, so I don’t know why it didn’t kill you. I would assume it was the same reason it followed you all the way back to the MPC. If I didn’t know about you, I would want to know why my eyes could see you, but the Con couldn’t.”
Now she really did feel like her heart would stop. Hosts had come to the safe zone before, but like every other thinking being that tried to step out of Hell into their little utopia, Alex’s barriers turned them away.
“Where is it now?” Her voice was tiny. She didn’t want to know, but she had to ask. “Is it inside… is it here?”
“If it is here, it knows about me, the other exterminators in the prison, and everyone else. It will know about you, too, since your aura is down and you are bleeding power like a New Orleans dike in a hurricane. But I don’t know where it is. It could be in the room with us, but I think it is more likely to be gathering an army to clean us out.
Lanni shifted quickly from shock to being angry at her stupidity, and was slipping into strategy mode. “I have to kill it, first. I have to find it, and kill it before it gets back to the safe zone.”
“Yes. Preferably before it gathers an army of mutant thralls for you to kill, too.” Alex’s smile was meant to be sad approval, but his eyes betrayed his lack of emotion. He was more like the host that followed her home than the brother he used to be. “But it’s even worse than that. The safe zone is gone. If I leave it up, the host will investigate it and find me. That can’t happen.”
“What’s the worst that could happen if a host sees you? You’re practically one of them,” Lanni said, a little angrier than she intended.
“Oh, I am very different, thanks to you. Your handiwork has allowed me to retain at least a shadow of my self. As long as I hang on to that, I am still an individual. I can use the Con like a host, but I’m not part of their collective mind. If a single host sees me, every host in the cloud will know it, and they will come for me. As it is, there may be more than one coming for your friends upstairs, but who knows how many would come for me. Ten? Fifty? More? We wouldn’t have a chance.”
“You have to let me go, now. I have to balance Tina and the baby before sunrise. I have to warn Diane about the runner guy, Leonard and the chubby one. They are up to something, and I know it’s no good. Then I’ll find and kill this host. If I don’t, the rest won’t matter.”
He looked at her face, and pointed at the television. “That is the look on your face.”
It was the Mutant Ninja Assassins movie. Based on one of the best comic books ever written, it was unfortunately one of the worst films ever made. Nominon, the main character, was Lanni’s idol. He was the reason she started taking advanced martial arts classes in the 6th grade. He fought with a special alien spear that gave him mutant powers, against his former assassin pupils who wanted to kill him.
It was rather prophetic. Lanni used her own mutant powers to craft a spear just like his, though she never used it. With the false memories of a spear master in her head, she could probably take Nominon. She could definitely take the potato-headed so-called actor who played him.
“I don’t look a thing like that! He’s like Ben Affleck’s ugly twin!”
They argued for a couple of minutes about nothing, just like old times. Lanni even forgot, however briefly, that none of it was real. It was all happening in her head.
“You are so much better than Nominon. He fights because he can. You fight because you must. You fight to save others, where he fights only for himself. Your spear doesn’t want to kill, either, so that makes it even better.”
Lanni hugged her brother; the brother she loved before the world turned to crap and he turned into a monster. It wasn’t real, but it felt good anyway. “I love you, lump-head.”
“I love you, too, Lisa Ann.”
“No you don’t, or you wouldn’t call me that.”
“Everything we’ve worked for will end today, one way or another. Stay focused. You won’t have time for distractions.”