51. Blood
Blood
Isaak
“We are sleepwalking into the future, Isaak. We’ve grown complacent. Tender. Soft. I intend to run into humanity’s next stage with my eyes fully open. Thus, my beautiful sleptigrades. Proud volunteers, pioneers of a new chapter of human evolution.”
He got up and wiped his arm across his mouth. Blood.
There was only Astrid in front of him now. No sleptigrades, no beds, no kidnap victims. No Dylan. He stood on a vast flatland made of tarmac, lit by a high full moon. On the distant horizon all around were towering black skyscrapers dotted with red and green lights.
“Volunteers? You’re sick, Astrid. You’re trapping them. They can’t take the Sleeper off. How?”
“Oh... I started by binding their arms, like so many crazies in a nuthouse…” She paused. “Then I thought to try something new.”
Isaak’s stomach clenched.
“You have experienced it already.” She smirked. “Your little LSD trip?”
His eyes tightened, rage rising.
“And what about sudden cravings for chicken?”
Exactly as they thought. Astrid was trying to control their behaviour.
Isaak’s stomach churned. “What else did you program me to do?”
“Oh, who knows…? Maybe this!” Astrid clenched her teeth and raised her fingers in a rapid gesture.
An immediate sensation took hold of his injured knee, pain shooting through it, as if he had twisted it in just the wrong way – the same as when he’d fucked it up playing ReSports. He collapsed to the floor, holding his leg.
“Fucking cunt!”
“I’ll admit it took a bit of work, creating tape-spaces that make people feel a certain way, crave a certain forbidden food… Shoot an innocent man.” She laughed, a glimmer in her eyes.
“You made me shoot him?’ A swell of anger mixed with relief.
Astrid laughed harder, shutting her eyes, mouth open wide. “No, you fool. That was all you.”
He emptied his lungs and looked down. Blood on his hands.
“With the help of your mother’s research, I… made the Sleeper work.”
Isaak glared at her. “Be very careful what you say next.”
“Oh, Ike, please. Don’t bother with threats.
We both know you can’t touch me in here…
Once I came up with the Sleeper design, with some help from dear Maria, I no longer needed to bind arms and legs.
So much easier to just convince them to slip it on.
‘Here’s a bit of cash, why not try the latest trend in sleeping aids?
’ And then they can never get it off! It inhibits all of their volitions, and any awareness that they are wearing a headset. ”
“Why?” Isaak asked. “Why are you doing this?”
“Why?” Rage flared in her eyes. “No one bothered to ask Eltarc Romly why, when he unleashed cutting-edge climate tech and the most powerful technologies this world has ever seen.”
Bile rose up his throat. “Yes, but he was also responsible for the rise of the Second Revivalists.”
“And? What’s wrong with them?” Astrid’s voice was pregnant with laughter, her face barely holding in a chuckle.
“You can’t be serious? The notorious gang of racists and xenophobes?”
“What’s wrong with a little patriotism…?” she mused.
Fucking witch. He was at his limit. “The things they did belong in the past, not in our future.”
“The things they do, Ike.”
Dread smashed into him a terrifying wave. Was Eltarc Romly alive? The rumoured life extension mods?
Astrid interrupted his thoughts. “Do you know how the trees in the First Kingdom were saved from extinction by fungal disease?”
He shook his head, not seeing the relevance of trees to racism.
“Didn’t think you would.” Astrid frowned.
“That’s the problem with you kids. Taking this world for granted, spattering it with your ideologies.
” She pumped the air in a mocking masturbation gesture.
He looked away in disgust. “People began to look out for strains of trees that looked peculiar, different. Specific species. In order to treat the disease, those had to be uprooted, or the entire ecosystem would collapse.”
She moved closer to him, grinning, her teeth like fangs. “And right now I’m looking at a disease that needs uprooting.”
Isaak backed away, only to hit a wall that materialised behind him.
“Are you a fungus, Isaak?” Astrid asked, her arms around his neck, threatening an unwanted kiss, hands playing with the hair on the back of his head, the way Dylan did.
“Stay away from me, and keep your bullshit metaphors to yourself. Stop trying to justify the shit you’re doing.” He tried to make himself smaller, to slip away. His hand instinctively went to grab the tape from his head, yank it off and escape her. But he knew it wasn’t safe with Astrid so close.
She snatched his arm, her nails biting into his flesh, drawing blood.
“Nuh-uh…” she said, her face right next to his ear. “Not YET!”
The scream nearly tore his eardrum, augmenting the pain in his knee as it reverberated throughout his body. He crumpled.
Astrid walked away, letting him fall to the floor. She snapped her fingers.
“What are you doing?” His ears were ringing.
Shining in the moonlight, tendrilous structures extruded upwards from the ground, black and clear plastic tape.
The feelers shot towards him, leaving him no time to react, ensnaring his arms and legs in taut hard plastic.
They shifted, forcing his legs into a sitting position, arms at his side. There was no way to escape.
“You fucking—” he snarled, spitting through gritted teeth.
“No fucking yet, Ike. I’m just giving you a front row seat to what comes next, babe.” Her voice was a hushed whisper, the kind you’d use with a lover in the dark.
She repulsed him.
Astrid stepped back into the darkness, snapped her fingers once more, and disappeared.
Another woman took Astrid’s place. Smiling at him. The decades had lined her features since he’d last seen her, but he could never have mistaken her for anyone else.
“Mum?”
Unable to wipe them away, tears streamed down his face.
He swallowed deep, trying to stifle the weeping.
For reasons he could not understand, his mum was wearing an Elizabethan dress, cinched at the waist and heavily ruffled, complete with lacy trim, in various shades of black.
He had never seen her like this. It was a gaudy display, a show of power.
But from his mum, or from Astrid, he wasn’t able to tell.
“After Astrid invited me to join her at the company, I was drawn in deeper and deeper.” She said Astrid’s name with a warmth he recognised, one usually reserved for talking about family. “It was a welcome distraction. Life at home was…”
“Miserable…” Isaak completed.
“Wasn’t it just?”
His mum sat down, a chair forming out of luminescence behind her. A black leather chair with a tall, wing-shaped back-rest and supple armrests. It matched the dress she wore, the same aesthetics of extravagance and leisure. A corrupting influence from Astrid, he thought.
“At first, Crypterra was all parties, social engagements, public speaking. There was one phrase Astrid used all the time, ‘Thinking strategy! You’re not thinking strategy, Maria!’” She said it in falsetto, imitating Astrid’s voice.
Then his mum’s face fell. She wrapped her arms around herself, the Elizabethan dress shapeshifting into a black business suit, the ruffles and frills dissolving into nothing.
She shifted her seating position on the chair. It was as if she was trying to make herself at home, to be comfortable in luxury, but an undercurrent of worry and anxiety kept her from being able to do so.
“Then you stopped sleeping at home as often,” he said. “I remember you’d say it was work travel.”
Frowning, anguish struck his mum’s face. What he said had wounded her.
“It was!” she said defensively. “At first…” She looked away from him.
“Your dad had given up on our ideals. I didn’t recognise him when I came home.
He started eating meat!” she spat. “And Astrid, she was always there for me, just a text away. She recognised me. Talked to me as a person. Not as a mother or caretaker.”
Isaak’s stomach twisted, guessing what would come next.
“Astrid became my everything. Our days spent harassing R&D at the office, pushing forward our simulation project, eventually turned into nights of lovemaking.” She grinned, relishing these memories, a flush in her cheeks.
“Mum! Please.” Disgust fought with pain inside him. Astrid was sick, seducing both his mum and him. He felt nauseous. But pain won out in the end. “I can understand why you left dad,” Isaak said, “but what about me? Why did you leave me?”
“Oh, Isaak… I couldn’t bear it.”
He wanted to get up and walk away, but the tape tendrils around his arms and legs kept him seated forcibly.
“Couldn’t bear what?” He could barely get the words out.
“To see you suffer at his hands. I knew how much it pained you. His meat-eating, his drinking, his cheating.”
“His cheating? You just admitted you were spending your nights with that bitch.” He tried to say more, to express all his anger at his mum for leaving him alone with his dad, who had proven incapable of raising him, but no further words came out of his mouth.
Every sound was born dead in his throat.
Maria Powers shifted, hovering above the chair.
“Mum!” He struggled against the tendrils of tape, trying to escape their grasp.
She left a trail of floating dust as she rose into the dark sky. “This world was meant to be something so much more…” Her voice was like a out-of-tune piano, discordant, grating. “We wanted it to be a balm for the soul—”
As his mother uttered those words, the darkness folded around him until everything was pitch black.
Isaak screamed, hands tightened into fists, everything about him shaking. “What the fuck is going on?”
Talia materialised in a burst of light particles, still wrapped inside the glass pod. Her eyes were closed and she was unconscious, exhausted.
“Stop talking, Ike.” Astrid leaned in from behind him, making him jump. “We’re done, you and I.”
“Let my mother go—”
“Shhhh. Not another word!” Astrid ordered. “Maria is fine where she is.” She looked up to the sky, where his mum had vanished into thin air. “Truth is, she was so keen to forget you. Oh, how I tried to make her reconsider. ‘Please, no, think of your husband and son!’”
At the mention of his father, Isaak once again struggled, attempting to escape.
But the tape held him tight.
“She didn’t love you anymore,” Astrid said, then made a shocked face, her mouth in an O shape, as though she couldn’t believe what she’d said.
“I was shocked too. Maria wrapped herself into her work, poor thing. And without a man to take care of her… Let’s just say I filled in the void.
” She burst into laughter, and pressed her hand to her mouth, wagging her tongue between her index and middle fingers.
Isaak’s grunts of protest simply got her going even more.
“Oh, my poor baby…” She caressed his face, wiping his tear-stained cheeks, taking sick pleasure from his suffering.
Isaak moved away from her hand. He fought to contain his emotions.
“But I digress,” she said. “Maria is perfectly happy here with me. I suggest you worry about someone else…” She waved a hand at Talia.
“You bitch. Don’t you dare!”
Astrid walked closer to Talia’s cage, and then looked at Isaak, a devious grin plastered on her face. “What shall we do to her, Ike?”
“Stop!”
“She’s been resisting my mindwork. Not like that Nicholas, poor bastard. He turned into a sleptigrade in an instant. This one… She’s proving a little harder to break.” Astrid tapped her finger on the glass of the pod. “Shall I bring about her induction? By force?”
Astrid closed her hands into fists, and immediately Talia started moaning in pain, reflexively fighting off an unseen danger with her arms. Then, more pain. She screamed, eyes still shut.
The sight was too much for Isaak. But he was numb. He stopped grunting, giving up his attempts to escape, and simply stood there, unable to do anything but watch as Astrid tortured Dylan’s best friend.
Talia became further and further constricted by new bindings, black, oily ropes of tape that bit into her limbs, materialising from nothing.
A wild look of pleasure painted Astrid’s face.
The skyscrapers in the distance began to crumble.