Stealing Metropolis

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 22:24:15 GMT

The act of entering the facility was disappointingly free of trouble, a smooth progression of events that made the shaman feel as if he'd come home again and been welcomed. Everything was so familiar even in darkness, for he remembered long hours spent here after all had become quiet, alone with his great work. By this point he was cursing himself for all the time wasted convincing his clan to accompany him on this mission. If there were spirits of rust and slag and spark, they seemed to be enveloping him now. Had his sermons held truth to them then? Had his claims that this work was divinely ordained perhaps not been a desperate falsehood? A mind that often failed to yield the names of familiar acquaintances, even lovers, obligingly steered him toward his goal and only the slap of his own bare feet upon the black, almost mirrored floor intruded on his thoughts. His clan were adept at moving quietly.

He could feel them all moving beside and behind him, but his eyes saw only yesterday. It was as if he could feel crisply pressed fabric encasing his soft, unworthy flesh, little more than a vehicle for intellect unappreciated and scorned, for vision thwarted at every turn by those who presumed to know what 'practicality' meant. This place was his, technically. He had once held it by right. Despite the spurious nature of his work, he had given much to the Revolution and been rewarded. If only pithy gestures had been enough, he would not have to sneak into this place. But he wanted to matter, and that would have meant realigning the entire world to accomodate him. The long-term gains he foresaw were judged madness. Out of spite he gave them madness. In anger he made himself a creature they would have to fear. Now he wasn't welcome here anymore. Fortunately a new life gained him new friends, and they had been more than happy to help him once he wrapped his vengance in the bright, angry panoply of jihad.

He began to worry as they reached the door. THE door. Behind it, a life's work locked away to never be touched again. Secrets gathered dust behind a simple chemcard lock. A piece of plastic bearing a strip of genetic signature was required to gain entry into most places when the shaman walked in favor. They could still be found protecting older facilities. He had ordered the installation of these locks when he was given leave to help design the place. It was dismissed as yet another quirk, as he had long since been written off as an eccentric. He had known he would one day be uniquely suited to bypass these locks, and also suspected that some day he would need to. As usual, he felt no joy in being proven right.

"Heeeeere we aaaaaaare!"

The shaman's singsonging whisper bought him a flinch from his clanmates whose bodies pressed close and protectively around him. All eyes shot wary looks down either direction, positive that he had just given them away. The Bonesinger's witch-doctor merely chuckled, while fishing a small card from the pocket of his ruined white coat. He presented the card like a magician about to perform a trick, and then darted in to drag his tongue along the throat of the clan's Red Fist in an untoward gesture of familiarity. Anyone else would've been filleted for trying such a thing, but he and the amazon with the blue dreadlocks went way back. She was a companion of his from days before the Animus and before the tribe. She simply glowered at him, but he was busy licking the black strip on the back of the card.

"My tongue will be working very hard tonight, I suspect," he declared, "I figured I'd have dessert first."

He shooed them away with a glance and set to work, confident that nothing more remained than bypassing a simple chemical lock. Maybe they'd given up stationing guards down here. Stygians were less nosy than their upper-tier superiors gave them credit for, and the facility had looked almost woefully ignored from the outside.

The lock wasn't playing nicely, not at all. Failure was playing havoc with the shaman's composure, frustration interrupting his efforts to replay a library of chemcial signatures he'd once memorized, shortly after rendering himself able to replicate them. Names, faces, deeds, all rose up to accompany each effort. He pretended to be enemies, friends, rivals, lovers, superiors, even men and women he'd never met before, but the chemical lock was not convinced. Either that, or they had been removed from its roster as he had.

The telltale cadence of booted Revolutionist feet began as a deceptively soft thing speaking of distance and inevitability. At first the doctor's own piteous, wordless entreaties to the locking mechanism drowned it out but in time the sound grew to rival him and then to impose itself over the silence that had previously held the corridor. The interlopers all found places to vanish, their changed bodies better able to wring concealment from the empty hallway than was at all proper. All save their shaman who held his post before the lock, working his lips and tongue and streaking the card's signature strip with a fresh batch of altered saliva. The amazon's well-meant bid to drag him into the shadows earned her a trip down the hall, sliding and squeaking along her bare back amidst the echo of tearing cloth. The green phosphorescence wreathing Emerich's arm subsided and he began to stab experimentally at the touchpad before glancing up to the amber light, shaking his hand distractedly to clear away strips of freshly ruined sleeve.

Quietly each of the Bonesingers mourned the loss of their shaman. The guards would surely silence him after their cursory round of questions and abuse. For their part, the faceless men whose lives had largely consisted of walking these halls night after uneventful night were intrigued by the strangeness before them and completely forgot the impulses they were programmed with. It had been a long time since either had felt genuinely motivated to shoot something. If this had been any less of a novelty they would be terribly upset to have their trip to the breakroom delayed by an actual intruder. The elder, by perhaps a year, presuming himself to be the experienced one, flashed a knowing grin to his nominal subordinate and gestured down the hall before putting a finger to his lips. Since the madman seemed so intent on breaking past that door, they would walk up to him and see how long they could stand there without being noticed.

It was going to be quite a wait. The man seemed oblivious to them. He seemed..familiar as well. The marquee implanted into the elder guard's eye seemed to be trying to peel the shaman's face off with twisting neon shapes. As the blond savage finally flashed a look toward the pair those lights siezed upon his features and a photograph slapped itself into the forefront of the guard's vision, along with a stream of information which read, for the most part, like a long-winded assurance that the break room visit would be delayed even longer than it would've taken to dispose of the body. This, sadly, was someone important.

"Doctor Emerich?"

The shaman staggered away from his labors, his mouth working like a bug's. Even as he vivisected the pair with a slow sweep of fevered green eyes, he lapped at the chemcard in his hand. He narrowed his eyes, daring them to interfere, and then tore the card angrily through the slot. His lips formed a feral smile as the effort went uncontested. "Where?" he asked, as if curious to know where this 'Doctor Emerich' was, same as they were. He teetered on the balls of his feet, muscles standing in stark relief as every fibre of him held a tension that seemed to have been present for hours. Finally he dipped his head and replied,

"Guilty. That is me. Yes."

He presented quite an odd picture. A necktie hung lifelessly around his neck and a ruined lab coat draped from his shoulders, its sleeves little more than tatters. Apart from a pair of weathered boxer briefs he seemed to be clad entirely in rubbish and tattooed where he wasn't painted beneath all that. Flashlights and hollowed gunmetal bones adorned him. A neoprimitive, clearly, but also, according to the readouts, an exile from Eden itself. Behind spectacle frames void of lenses his eyes acquiesced to a retinal scan performed by cybernetics within the senior guardsman's head that operated independently of their wearer. A perfect match, despite at least a decade's disparity between that young, painted face and the bored fourty-something visage displayed on record. A search conducted in the guard's peripheral vision found a graduation photo of one Matteus Sebastian Emerich, taken well before the Revolution.

The match was perfect. People could stop aging, but could they go backwards these days? It was really not important. What mattered was that this had just turned into a very long night. Even exiled, a scientist from Eden could not simply be shot and dumped, the mess cleaned by custodial bots. And if this was a ghost, would shooting it accomplish anything at all?

Oblivious to his senior's discomfort, the younger man took it on faith that the intruder's identity had been confirmed and addressed the savage. He let the muzzle of his rifle punctuate the question, gesturing idly with the thing as though it weren't packed with live ammunition.

"Doc, what are you doing?"

Emerich glanced to the object in his trembling fingers, subjected it to a grunt of disdain and incomprehension, and then lifted wide eyes to the figures assembled around him.

"I seem to be licking a piece of plastic," he replied, as his attention once more darted from one guard to the next, to the card, then back again. A shake of his head, more of a twitch really, followed as his features slackened in concern. "That can't be good." A moment spent in sober contemplation ended with another grunt dredged from the insides of his lungs as he dipped his head to lick the black stripe on the back of the passcard again. With a disconsolate wheeze he realized he'd forgotten the important bit, and resumed his buglike palpations until satisfied at the taste of the chemicals brewed upon his tongue. He licked the card, swiped it again, and reared back to wait for the light to change from amber to green. Red.

The thin plasteel panels shook with the force of the blow as he slammed the heel of his palm into the wall next to the chem-lock, and he sank to his knees while a thin keening escaped his shivering form, accompanied by the squeak of a sweaty hand dragged down smooth metal and a thump as he rested his forehead against the wall.

"Damnation.."

"Uh..Doctor, I'm afraid you're going to have to come with us." The men approached hesitantly, shifting their weapons and reaching for what appeared to be a harmless eccentric. They were armed, armored, and ready at a moment's notice to become drug-laced engines of slaughter. Not that either had felt the sting of needles from their chemical harnesses since their training days. They liked their job for precisely that reason.

"And WHYYYYY aren't these men DEAD YET?!!" he barked into the wall, only to forget his anger upon hearing the tinny resonance of his own voice echoing back at him from the panel. So he smiled as he rolled his forehead along the wall to look toward the two Revolutionists, blinking his way toward a beatific expression as he watched their helmeted heads fall past their belt buckles and bounce upon the polished floor.

"Save that," he admonished, gesturing absently toward the fresh meat that was dropping to its knees, waving his chemcard toward the primitives who'd just quit their places of concealment. He wanted to warn the young assassin against licking the cord he'd used to sever the junior guard's head with, but since it wrought no fresh disasters he simply returned to his task. His shoulder thudded against the wall as he turned about to sit with his back to the panel, so as to reach blindly for the keyslot and swipe the card again. And again, with pauses to wet it with a different chemical signature.

Another hour passed uneventfully. But for the doctor's unending litany of whimpers and enraged shouting, and a brief spell where he cast the chemcard down the corridor and was forced to scamper after it on all fours while his helpless tribemates felt their last reserves of patience bleed away, the scene became rather monotonous.

Amber, then red. Red. Red. Red.

"My tongue is sore," Emerich confided to his clan.

Red. Red. Red.

Green.

The doctor sighed and dropped the card to the floor for the fifth time, draping his arms upon his knees and looking up to the amazon, gracing her with the long-suffering grimace he dared not show the others. She frowned at him, seeming to goad him with the stab of her eyes, and he snapped from his reverie to look up and see a flickering green light. The door's servos were about to ease it closed again. He had been so at peace with failure that he forgot what success would yield.

"I used to be better at forging the boss's signature than this," he mused apologetically to his clanmates while rolling to his knees and then propelling himself through the doorway with the same motions that returned him to his feet.

Past that smallish portal lay a chamber which comprised most of the building's space. Tiers of huge machines lay dormant below the catwalk across which the doctor padded, wavering back and forth and drinking in stale air as tears streamed down his face. Above, great behemoths of unfathomable purpose sat poised to move again, sinister and subtly medieval in their configuration. It was patterned to resemble a clockwork layer of Hell. Emerich recalled dreaming of this as he slept, awakening to scratch out schematics and equations without bothering to turn on a light. He had pleasured himself to the imagery he was now surrounded with. It was beautiful. It was a return to the proverbial womb.

"A laboratory," he declared, hands at rest upon his hips, head bobbing in approval at all he saw. "That's what they called it. But laboratories are where experiments take place. THIS...this is my bridge, my command post for the vehicle that IS Metropolis!" And here he saw fit to spread his arms and teeter back, casting his proclamation to the dark above him, shivering in delight as it echoed back down.

The clan didn't seem convinced. There was quiet parley amongst them, debates on simply leaving their shaman to his toys or dragging him back home. But no. He had promised them something, and more than one pair of eyes bored into the madman, waiting for him to deliver on that promise.

"What is all this, -Doctor-?" Jafari inquired, motioning toward the arcane assortment of machines. "You told me you had a machine the size of Metropolis and you'd use to to shake the heavens. This room is big, but none of this stuff seems to do anything. It makes noise, it lights up, but nothing's connected to anything else. These look like toys. Where's the machine you promised?"

She shouldn't have given up show business, the doctor pondered privately. Those were the lines he taught her the night before, timed and delivered flawlessly and convincingly. It even felt spontaneous! His heart ached with delight and he favored her with a pained, adoring look before letting his head drop, signalling a dramatic pause.

"The machine is EVERYWHERE!"

"Components of my masterwork LITTER this city, top to bottom, the Metropolis is saturated with seemingly pointless knicknacks! Consider: a man works in a factory. He sees a machine and learns its functions-but only some! He is not taught to master every minute function of the device. If it breaks, one of two separate crews comes to repair it, depending on where the fault is found. No one really knows what any of this stuff does! So of course they remain contentedly IGNORANT of those extra odds and ends, the plugs that don't seem to go anywhere, the dials that don't pertain to anything these workers were taught. Factory Row is a gigantic engine capable of propelling us across the universe! But what good do they do, separated and useless?"

Emerich was less than thrilled with his audience's response. He lost them at the word 'saturated'. He resumed his pacing, wreathed in green ectoplasm that threatens to become the Animus. If Green Teeth came, the shaman may well forget his task and set upon them to fill his belly.

"Our answers lie in Nullspace. Distance is irrelevant. Space can be CREATED where there wasn't, previously, any ROOM for nothingness!! There was no such thing as emptiness until I invented it! Vaccum is something. Empty space is -something-. Energy passes through all things, all the time. The gyrations of singularities have dragged taut the skin of the universe, the birth of stars has rippled and wrinkled it so that one can become lost in the folds! But Nullspace...nullspace is true nothingness. Its existence is as subjective as sorrow, as ephemeral as joy. It is an interpretation made reality..!"

"We don't care."

The doctor was silenced, and cast about angrily for the source of the interruption.

"None of this shit makes any sense to us. We just want to know when we fight."

A brown-skinned Bonesinger with more piercings than seemed at all healthy stepped forward, waving his re-bar spear as he spoke. Evidently he'd been holding back something for hours and his concerns had finally built to a head.

"What about the holy war? When are we going to storm Utopia and claim our rightful place as rulers of Metropolis?"

Emerich sniffed distractedly, his expression going flat as he stared through the young warrior. He waited for some sign that this was a joke. Receiving none, he winced and sighed through his teeth, mustering what patience he had left. He paced in a circle, flexing his tensed fingers and tilting his head back to gurgle softly in agitation.

"Does anyone ELSE remember me saying a goddamned thing about a holy war? I mean, specifically?" Testily, the doctor probed the expressions of his clanmates for some glimmering of useful insight and found nothing. He arched a brow, watched them shuffle uncomfortably under his gaze. Only Jafari remained unmoved as he looked to her. He decided not to look at her for too long. There were others present, and watching her breathe made him want to do things best done without witnesses. "Anyone? I mean, there was subtext, there was impliCATION, but nothing you can hold me to." He waited a moment, then bored deeper. "Was there?"

He was met with an inarticulate bellow and the point of a makeshift spear. This was one of the newer converts, just recently snuck away from home to take up a clothing-optional lifestyle of savagery and lawlessness. The new ones always brought with them the wierdest ideas. It usually fell upon gentler souls to disabuse them. Making it Emerich's problem was the youth's first mistake, and would have been his last. The spearpoint grazed a wall of gellid ectoplasm, the fleshy shoulder of the Animus. The youngster's body was pinned beneath a clawed mitt several times larger than the doctor's own hand, buried deep within the construct's arm and tensed in a pantomime of the crushing effort he enacted upon the boy. Dr. Emerich hovered virtually prone within the body of his manifest id. Its quivering, luminous body bore scraps of what clothing the doctor had deigned to wear. The heavier bits were clattering to the floor after having slid down its slippery body. Its head, a beartrap on the end of a thick stump of plasmic flesh, grinned down at the young Bonesinger. Hazily Emerich could be seen within the creature, grinning as well.

After a one-sided staring match, the Animus slid its prey across the floor, back into the midst of the Bonesingers.

"Don't make me kill him. Hold him back. Thank you." The Animus did disconcerting things to Emerich's voice. Its jaws didn't move when he spoke. Being in its presence was like having one's feet buried in sand and one's body assailed by waves and undertow formed of unrefined bestial -presence- tainted only by whatever emotions disturbed it. Currently the doctor was amused, so his clan was merely being battered about like cat-toys by his mercurial mood. Aware that his audience was going to be able to focus on little else so long as he kept the psychic exoskeleton in place, Emerich drew it back into himself and battened down the presence it exuded until they were no more privy to his emotions than he was to theirs. It shrank upon his body, glowing more brightly, and then dissipated with only a soft miasma of psychic residue to cling wetly to his skin.

"Ahem. Nullspace is a subjective realm made undeniable fact, empty space made in between gaps in matter and energy that we can create by creating the proper level of dissonance in the material of space. It is also a convenient method for connecting things that are, by conventional estimation, miles apart. Like the teensy bits of my little machine. We are still on the same page here, right? Big machine, lots of little pieces? Going to change everything? Good."

"Oh, and no holy war. I was only kidding about that part."

"Do you have any idea how easy it was to become distracted from my work?" Apparently it was quite easy, for Emerich had become distracted even now, more intrigued by his own stream of consciousness than the task at hand. He had spent so long in silence that any audience, even one for whom his concepts and vision were meaningless, would suffice. " My bid to spawn nothingness led to numerous byblows. I found energies our minds have no means to fathom, stuff that has just been..laying about, all this time. We can USE that. With the things I have discovered, we do not need Earth and it, as if that much wasn't PAINFULLY obvious, does not need us..I....Forgive me, I seem to be winding down. Yes. But. I am going to save Earth from -us-. I am going to save us from ourselves. I'm going..." The sense of purpose his pacing about had gathered as he spoke now results in an angry hammering of a nearby console, a bellow of impotent rage, and a moment spent drinking in heaving breaths as he gripped the console's edges and collected himself again. "....to find the goddamned lever. I made one lever. Just one. What's a mad scientist without his magical catastrophe-inducing lever?"

He glanced up in search of an answer and found nothing but blank incomprehension in the eyes of his clan. He was their advisor, their doctor, their spiritual leader..but he was also a complete basketcase and no one pretended otherwise. When Green Teeth got to ranting and using big words, it was best to just smile and nod.

"Oh!" the doctor cried exuberantly, lashing out and snatching up a little black wand from the terminal beside him. "There it is! I was wrong. I built a remote control. It seemed more fitting." The thing looked like it belonged to someone's entertainment center. He thumbed a button and the shadowed walls and ceiling groaned as hidden mechanisms opened them like petals of an ugly metal flower.

Amidst the noise the doctor stalked up to his clan and singled out his would-be assailant, all smiles and forgiveness now that he had his toy. He shuffled alongside the pierced youth and held the remote for him to look at.

"See these buttons? Decoration. Push that one. Yes, you can push it."

At his insistence, the warrior hesitantly pressed a bright orange button. It lit up and the youth withdrew his hand, stepping warily to one side and looking around to see which of the room's contraptions came to life.

"See? Nothing happened."

Most of the device's buttons were purely ornamental. They made the thing look more important, and therefore harder to misplace. In theory at least. Emerich looked skyward and noted with some dismay that a corner of Utopia was blocking his view of the sun. Convenient, but an affront regardless. He had forgotten about that part. Would there even be a sun over Metropolis when he was finished here?

Idly, the doctor gestured toward the open canopy as if it were a television screen and settled the weight of his thumb upon the only other functioning switch on his device. Results were immediate, but decidedly anticlimactic.

They looked like clouds of television static and swirled like vultures above the city. The weak blue of the sky rippled in their wake and finally buckled, birthing more of the entropic cumuli until they blotted out the world and enveloped Metropolis in quiet madness. Perversely, everything within the boundaries of the dome was calm, as if the city were protected from what transpired just past its walls. Emerich had forgotten that part. In his more lucid moments he arranged for safeguards to minimize the damage. He was a kinder man then, far more easily amused. All of his equipment was screaming, whirring, glowing with unnatural life and orchestrating the shift with a precision he had forgotten was possible. Calculations he set into place before he succumbed to madness governed the clean transition from one world to the next. Thousands of possible destinations were deleted from a list of numbers as precognitive machines deduced the survivability of the city, making no allowances for fatalities. Originally this had merely been meant to serve as an object lesson, not a massacre. Emerich's memory failed him in that respect. The chaos he dreamt of was not happening.

Of course, the show was more than enough to elevate him to godhood in the eyes of the clan. Green Teeth COULD destroy the sky, could uproot a whole megalopolis from its moorings and send it through space. They watched worlds manifest at the borders of the chaos-bulb that enclosed the city, watched the worlds dissolve as long-forgotten machinery deemed them unsuitable. Skies of many colors came and went, and if nothing else an uneducated observer might be disturbed by the fluctuations of time, since the sky was flickering from day to night, midday to twilight, evening to morning. The sun danced across the sky behind a veil of static and a steady whirrrrrrr began to resonate throughout the city.

None of this appeased Emerich, who had dreamt of creatures from incompatible dimensions being hurled into this reality as the city was cast through dimensions, had dreamt of earthquakes and turmoil for which there was naught to do but throw a cataclysmic celebration. Instead there were fifteen minutes of oddity followed by calm. The scent upon the air had changed and the temperature was up by several degrees, but traffic on the Loop picked back up again and people took their eyes from the sky again, probably never to look up for the rest of their days now that no sound was suggesting that they might ought to have a peek. Few Stygians ever bother to look up. Maybe the sky is simply supposed to do that every now and then.

"No pretty colors..no mass hysteria.." Emerich sighed, looking as if he might weep at any second. Certainly the damage he has wrought is tremendous, more than sufficient to have the elite of Eden scouring the city to find him. They would know he was responsible and know that what he had done would kill their city and all within it, once emergency reserves were depleted. They would expect him to fix what he had broken. The plan hinged upon their sudden need for him, actually. He had more answers than they had questions. Depending on where they finally settled he could have the status quo reestablished in a manner of days. But they would need him to make that possible, and never again would his work be dismissed as frivolity.

On a quiet, desolate expanse of Nondoleur's badlands whose only landmark was the unseen conjunction of many ley lines, the nexus of those bands of raw potential became infected. A disease which sent its taint along the veins of the world grew from a kernel of unwholesomeness to become a blister, then a boil, the dark shapelessness of a Black Gate. The Gate continued to swell, scattering sands into a veil with the outpouring of energy that hissed from it. It filled with its own netherforce, trembling as its surface tension was tested from within. It becomes a towering sphere of darkness visible for miles, and the energy thusly displaced screamed along the ley lines, bursting nodes and flooding the webwork of power that encompassed the entire planet. Nothing solid had yet emerged from the Gate but the energies which once traveled unhindered along the nexus atop which it squatted were then cast back along their course and dispersed along improper paths. The world screamed, agonized and giddy, its discordant ululation matching the whine from within the bubble of night the Gate had become.

The resultant 'pop' was given a handful of seconds to feel like an anticlimax. The thunder that came in its wake was anything but. A sandstorm of undreamt-of proportions obscured the final moments of the Gate and a blinding surge of energy along the ley lines served as its eulogy. A ring of sand and wind expanded and depleted itself after several miles, scouring the land clean of witnesses. In the wake of all that displaced matter lay Metropolis, the entire walled monstrosity, freshly plopped upon the sands. The crater born by the Gate's demise was filled with the stone and steel and concrete upon which the city's foundations were built and into which its substrata are set. The suffering its arrival wrought went largely unnoticed inside the outer Stygian wall. The heights of Utopia were similarly untroubled. There were people indoors who never even noticed.

"I had hoped for explosions," Emerich murmured sadly, "at the very least."

Eater Of Crayons

Stealing Metropolis