Godclads

Chapter 3-7 The Symbiote

The Apotheism Movement was born from generational powerlessness and dysmorphia. This much is commonly known, but often the old wounds inflicted on each of the great cultures go less examined, and from the reason beyond each Guild’s predilection for a certain kind of augmentation goes unexamined.

To wit, look no further than afflictions suffered by the Scaarthians at the hands of Szaseangeach–The Flesh-Weaver.

By its will were the binary sexes of the Scaarthian people fused into one. And now remember that it did this to first of the joined kith by fusing husband and wife together through interlacing roots, weaving their beings inextricably through the Stormtree. From thence, all were born male at their birthing and expired as female at the twilight of their age.

In the present, the Scaarthian view their flesh as something both sacred after years of chronological refinement, but also something easily shed. In understanding this, their reluctance to impregnate their flesh with chrome is understandable due to the volatile nature of their morphic biological architecture, but so is their willingness to accept bioware, nanoware, or symbiotes that will align with their biologies rather than intruding outright.

3-7

The Symbiote

Ultimately, Avo was surprised the Syndicate boss even allowed him to do the injection himself, being a creature of egomania and vague opportunism. Couple that with a spontaneous capriciousness, and Avo found dealing with Mirrorhead outright disorienting.

Indeed, as soon as Mirrorhead culminated the “signing” of the contract marking Avo as his property via the ever-reliable method of employee retention cortex bomb, he immediately ordered his new star to walk through a nearby reflection for the procedure.

No other instructions followed after that. Avo wasn’t sure if the recruits that Conflux hired had orientation or even a mentor to lead them through an onboarding process, but so far, something about this organization felt too haphazard. Mirrorhead seemed like he was involved with almost everything. It felt like the entire middle of the organization was outright missing.

This lead into the first and immediate question: why was Mirrorhead dealing with him directly? Micromanager? Yes, but the initialization process didn’t require him; such was a thing that should’ve been done by an administrator of some kind. Pair that with the lack of lieutenants, liaison officers, deputies, operational conductors, logistical supervisors, and internal harmonists, and Avo found himself looking at a two-rung structure thus far.

Mirrorhead. And his enforcers.

Maybe Avo hadn’t been there long enough, but still, missing infrastructure gave off a loud silence. It was like expecting to hit a speed barrier but drifting right on through. Didn’t feel right.

Emerging from the glass into the room where his grafting was supposed to take place, Avo’s expectations were ambushed yet again. The room was pristine. Tiles of blinding white lined the room while the air was laced with stinging decontaminates. Twin hovering cylinder-shaped drones unfurled into a host of medical implements at his approach. One was marked with a stripe of black along its center, while the other was white.

Mirrorhead really liked his thematic colors.

At the center of the room, a grafting station whirred upright into view, assembled by several magnetically charged appendages. Above it was a showerhead undoubtedly filled with the rainwater of midnight. Made mending flesh easy–far more affordable than the meld-tanks that Guilders used to install their augmentations.

Shaking his head, Avo grunted. This was absurd. The quality and equipment here were better than most of the grafter dens in the Undercroft. Holo-screens swirled around the station showcasing a variety of implants and mods available along with the certified licenses to which Guilds they belonged.

The funding that would take to operate this grafting station alone was astronomical.

Avo’s suspicions grew starker. This definitely wasn’t high-class enough to be a Guilder facility, but a street squire or your average chromer-muscle would’ve killed–and have probably killed–to get bled at a place that could afford the original alpha-grade hardware.

“Please proceed to the grafting station.” The White-Striped drone said. They sounded human. Intelligent. Feminine, yet, he could see no ghosts trailing into them, sensed no thoughtstuff or thought-accretion ebbing from their loci. Were they connected through coldtech alone? Were they just autonomous?

“Bot?” Avo asked, curious.

“Beep-boop,” Black-Stripe said, chuckling. Their voice was deeper than their counterpart and was possessed of a lyrical wryness.

“Osjack…” White-Stripe warned.

People. They were definitely, absolutely people.

“No ghosts,” Avo said.

“Oh, no, nothing so sophisticated as a ghost,” Black-Stripe said. Osjack. Osjack was his name. “Just neurally-laced through good old H-wave transmissions. Pity us poor voiders and our lack of magical bullshit.”

“Osjack,” White-Stripe said, “stop wasting time with the bioform.”

“Aye, Osjane. Whatever you say, Osjane.”

Oh. Not names. Pseudonyms.

Avo blinked. Wait. Voiders? His grafters were going to implant him jocking these drones from the void? Just how much imps did Mirrorhead have that he had actual voiders in his employ?

“Please proceed to the grafting station,” Osjane said.

Reluctantly, Avo did as she said and walked up to the station.

To call what he was facing a grafting station felt wrong. It was too minimalist. Beyond a tetrahedrally shaped mag-field projector and eight floating clamps, there was little else to the station itself.

As Avo ascended the final few steps to greet the floating pieces of metal, they clicked open like possessed manacles seeking an escaped prisoner. The beast inside him twitched. It didn’t like being bound. Neither did the sensible side of him, but from how Mirrorhead spoke, getting this implant wasn’t something up to Avo. It was a nu-unicorn of a gift; something that most desperately wanted but could never afford.

Avo would be lying if he didn’t relish the opportunity to shear away some of his deficiencies. He survived most of his life as a ghoul facing threats physically and reflexively superior to him in every regard. Suppose it was time for one of those aspects to change.

Stepping into the restraints felt unnatural. As did being drawn up by the tilting mag-field projector.

One of the drones sighed. Black-Stripe. Osjack. He gunned one of his drone’s saws and scanned it. “Another day, another ghoul. Wonder if this one will stay still long enough for us to do the operation or if the client will have to go digging around for another one. Would hate for us to get repainted by this thing’s blood like the last one.”

Avo turned his head at that. “Another ghoul?”

“A test-run for the prototype,” Osjane said. “Something to ensure your transplant will take. The client said this one would comply. And that he would pay us extra if we expedited the processes.”

Osjack whistled. “Right. Let’s get this thing going so I can punch out. Hate working down here. The lag’s hell on my NooDeck. Burns up my exo-cortex something fierce.”

Another crumpet of information. NooDeck. Exocortex. Likely meant they were under the official employ of Voidwatch or one of its subsidiaries. No other Guild was as committed to their anti-thaumaturgical stance. Still, bringing in coldtech experts meant Mirrorhead had serious capital. Or connections.

But that begged the question: if Mirrorhead had such resources, why was he in the Warrens? He could have easily bought his way up into the Undercroft. Unless he didn’t want to. More guesses. More questions.

The black-striped shoved a light in Avo’s eye. Reflexively, he bit the torch.

“Well, his reflex checks out,” Osjack joked.

Avo let go of the torch, gnashing his fangs together. “‘Going to stick a light in your eyes,’” Avo growled, making mock conversation with himself. “‘Don’t be surprised.’”

Osjack chuckled. “Shit. Sass from a ghoul. There’s a first.”

“Stay focused, Osjack. Don’t need you accidentally drilling a hole through this one’s C-Six as you did to that Nu-Dog.”

“Never gonna live that down.”

“No. You’re not.”

The two operators went momentarily silent after that. Light splashed over Avo as he felt static wash over his skin. They were scanning him. A sudden prick in his arm made him bite back a hiss of rage. The beast was coiling inside him. The clamps kept him locked firm. A grim thought occurred to Avo that the magnets connected to his limbs could pull in different directions and dismember him with ease.

Something inside him even expected it, despite knowing that such a killing would have been pointless for the Syndicate. They would have just shot him. Or thrown him from the aerovec.

“Clean bill of health,” Osjane said, sounding a tinge surprised. “Its blood work might be the most stable I’ve seen. No tumors at all. Synchro-synapses show full spectrum firing. Muscles reacting properly; no imbalances. Even its brain patterns are at baseline. Look.”

“Jaus,” Osjack said with a huff. “Client wasn’t lying. This one’s impulse control must be in the point-one percentile for ghouls. Intelligence too. Look at that brain.”

“Making me blush,” Avo muttered.

Another laugh from Osjack. “Even cracking me up. Careful there, consang. Wouldn’t want me to start feeling for you when we start making the cut. Might get all anxious and split through your spine.”

Avo didn’t respond to that. He didn’t find much pleasure in being treated like a child or a novelty item, but it beat being shot at while someone hurled slurs at him. “Eat you if you were here.”

“There we go,” Osjack said. “That’s what I needed to cut you without concern.”

The drones continued working on him for a moment. One of them began lathering a sticky substance along his spine. Avo frowned at the feeling. He had to undertake tri-annual surgery for his tumors. Most of his kind didn’t live long enough to experience tumorfication. Avo was envious. Part of the perks of having hyper-accelerated healing: sometimes, the cells could very confused as to what biomatter they were supposed to reconstitute.

A new vector of force tugged on the mag-clamps. Avo found himself being spun around. Osjane was hovering back, now carrying a large vat nested at its core. To the drone’s sides, its chassis was open in mono-thin surgical saws that Avo guessed were supposed to slice up along his spine. The micro-cutters apparatuses it had in support were probably for his muscles then.

The drone hovered up before to show him the vat. Avo squinted through the transparent screen, trying to perceive the writhing organ. He couldn’t tell how long it was or even how it was textured. All he knew was that it looked like something between a serpent and a centipede. He thought he saw some small writhing root-like structures twitching along the edges.

Avo didn’t know too much about bioware, but he had done enough business for grafters that he saw some of their products. Bioware products were far easier to smuggle than chrome. Mostly because you could hide it using a proper mule. Of course, that’s why it also had the highest mortality rate: implanting hyper-powered organs into a body below acceptance criteria was a surefire way of making a corpse.

“This,” Osjane said, “is a prototype Celerostylus. An exo-synaptic symbiote. Its more finalized offshoots are scheduled for public cloning next year. This version had to be…pruned. Too much synaptic overload. Test trials resulted in seizures. Embolisms.”

Avo stared. Was she trying to intimidate him?

“The prototype itself is undiminished. As such, expect your sensory input to be…disturbed while it integrates into your nervous system. Eventually, it will graft itself over your spine before fusing with your brain stem. Do you understand?”

“Mortality rate?”

“High for humans,” she said. “Thankfully, your blood cells offer a lot more bandwidth than your creators were capable of utilizing. A shame. With even a rudimentary reflex boosting organ grown into you, your effectiveness would have been exponentially increased.” She sounded genuinely mournful. “We are going to begin the procedure. Please do not struggle. Due to your biology–”

“Anesthetics. Useless. I know.” Avo shrugged. He had been through this before. He doubted they could hurt him worse than Little Vicious had. Forcing himself to relax, he found even the beast inside him was quieter than usual. Perhaps it liked the offering? “Wait.”

“Yes?” Osjane replied.

“Show me. I want to see it. See it clearly.”

She hovered closer to him and turned the vat translucent. The creature no longer looked much like a mass. Instead, it almost seemed like a wrinkled arachnid of some sort. It was shivering at a pace nearing a frequency blade. As he tilted his head, it twitched in response. The beast wanted to eat it. The drones were going to implant it. Either way, his body was about to get some new meat put in.

Somewhere in there was a dirty joke that ended with everyone dying of wombrash.

Avo grunted. “Rip me open. Get it done.”

“You heard him, Osjane,” Osjack said, “let’s see it done.”

Slowly, the magnetic clumps spun him around, turning him to look at the ground. The titanium steps leading down into the drains greeted him with a shimmering gleam. They kept this place clean. He wondered if it was bright enough for Mirrorhead to peer through. Didn’t matter really. Mirrors lined the outer wall of the room so there was no escape from his new boss's gaze.

Avo took a breath and relaxed. Considering what he was, they were probably going to have to make repeated cuts while the process was ongoing. Peel away scar tissue before it clumped up.

That might be why there needed to be two grafters on standby.

A series of low whirls sounded from behind. Avo was mid-attempt trying to relax his muscles when one of the drones cleaved into his flesh and bit down into his spine. In his ears, the chipping of bones being drilled drowned out his sibilant hiss. A force pulled at the incision along his back, opening his flesh like petaled flaps.

A faint surge of hunger grew within him. Mentally, he held onto his blood as much as he could, his cellular lattices clinging to each other. A waterfall still seemed to spill free from his vivisected flesh. The pain was a five. Not pleasant. Not the worst thing he experienced. Avo didn’t mind being cut too much. Not nearly as much as being burned or flayed. He was mostly succeeding at keeping his spasming to a minimum.

That “mostly succeeding” dissolved as he heard the vat open. A wet, stickiness filled the air as something spread its limbs. A stinging sensation whipped into his back, needling into the cleft of his spine. Another followed. Then, a series of cracks burst through him. It wasn’t pain he felt. No. Pain was natural. This was like something was putting him on like he was a rig–a meat suit.

Foreign impulses shot through his body. His limbs jerked and quivered. The clamps held him in place even as his joints popped and tore from the violence of explosive motion surging through him. A series of new stings ran up along his shoulders, into his neck, and finally needled into the base of his skull. A buzz filled his brain as numbness spread through his digits.

It was like he was back in the Maw again, just waking up.

“Reflex test,” Osjack announced. Avo heard a spark.

A small shock ran through him. That small shock exploded into a lightning bolt, burning across every last nerve he had. His back arced. As much as it could arc against the mag-field. But that wasn’t the strange thing. The strange thing was the building heat inside his skull and a growing oscillation to the lights above him.

Looking down, he noticed his trickling blood falling like molasses. His senses felt razor-sharp. Feeling spiked back through his fingers as he felt every inch of pain across his opened back, heard every sound between the drones’ articulations, and felt the crackles in his bones as his muscles fired faster than his structural base was used to.

The state broke. Suddenly, the world sped back up. He slumped back down. The pace of reality returned to normal.

“Implant installed,” Osjane said, sounding like she had a hint of a smile in her voice. “Symbiote accepted. Artificially cultured haemophagic cells integrating. No rejection. No subsumption. Success.”

Avo felt something fold the flayed pieces of his back into place. A scythe of heat lanced across his wounds, sealing them, and filling the air with the aroma of sizzling meat. Overhead, the showers came on dousing him wet as the waters ate his wounds out of existence.

By now, Avo’s hunger was throbbing inside him. With measured slowness, Avo spun back to uprightness by the mag-clamps. Something jabbed him in the shoulder. A flood of energy surged through him. He felt good. Hungry. But good. Heavier and quicker at the same time.

“Look at that,” Osjack said. “Took to it in seconds. Think of the number of nanos it would take to replicate the same adaptive survivability in one of us?”

“Not an apt comparison,” Osjane said. “It’s not human. It’s a war-grown bioform; bad initial foundations aside, it likely can serve as a useful sheathe if further tweaked.”

“Planning on turning ghoul, Osjane?”

“No. But they would be useful as pre-embedded shock-troopers if their impulses were quelled and their blood potency was enhanced. Likely what the Low Masters were going for but failed to achieve.” They scanned him again. “Can you feel your limbs?”

Avo clenched and unclenched his claws. “Yeah.”

“Deactivate clamps,” Osjane continued.

The mag-clamps spun him around. He found himself staring at a narrow exit leading to a closed doorway. Avo slipped from his restraints. The door opened, a scanner spilling a motion grid in front of it.

Osjack hovered over to the door, and upon being scanned, the door clanged shut. The drone floated back over.

“Alright, ghoulie: let’s give you a live exercise,” he said. “See how the symbiote fires when actively triggered, shall we?”