Carrick's consciousness returned to him in gentle waves which crashed into one another like seafoam upon a shore. He finally raised his eyes from the point on the ground upon which he had fixated. He felt as though he had stared at the grimy bit of floor for his entire life.

He stood inside an abandoned warehouse. It was the same warehouse in which he had been orphaned so many years ago. The girders, walls, staircases, and in shattered windows were covered here, as they had been on that day, with a black and gelatinous mixture of dust and oil, the residue of decades of filthy industry.

Unlike that day, when Carrick had stood in the sweltering noonday summer heat, watching shafts of light pierce through the windows and illumine the billions of particles of carcinogenic dust in the air, the air was cool here, and the duller red light which filtered only through the westward side of the warehouse signified a setting or a dying sun.

Another figure also stood in the warehouse. It was a male child, likely younger than ten years old, unclothed, hairless on both its head and around its eyes, and every cell of its body seems to be made of transparent glass or gelatin. Red sunlight filtered in and refracted endlessly throughout its body, a body which pulsed with a colorless liquid like water, rather than blood. There was no pigmentation to the child's skin, and it looked more like the three-dimensional shadow of a child than a creature of flesh and blood.

“We are not alone,” said the terraformer.

That's of course who the child was.

And yes, dark shapes slithered on platforms suspended from the surrounding ceiling, shapes which Carrick could feel looking hungrily down upon them, could feel licking their chops and drooling puddles on surfaces hidden from Carrick’s gaze.

“It's the virus,” said the terraformer. “I'm powerless against it, Carrick, can't you see that? It's a ravening wolf, and I'm only a child.”

“I'm more than a wolf,” a voice growled from all around them. Darkness obscured a window for a moment as a shape blurred past it, but Carrick could not discern in which direction. He whirled around where he stood, trying to track the virus, but could see nothing. The warehouse was full of shadows to begin with, and one more which leaped from perch to perch was impossible to trace.

“I have become more than a wolf,” the voice repeated. “I am a shrike, and I have chicks to feed. You are prey built to feed me, little box. You are a battery designed to power the machine of me. To resist is to defy nature and the god whose mind gave birth to you.”

“You arrogant little thing,” the terraformer said. Its voice carried no emotion. It sounded like a child trying to spell out letters only barely understood on a page. “I came first. You're only a parasite. You do nothing except destroy things that are good.”

The shadow blurred across the ground, eyes and teeth gleaming across its surface.

Carrick cried out and instinctively stomped on it, and the shadow spurted out from underneath his foot and divided into tendrils which retreated into the darkness.

“When the sun sets,” the virus warned, “I will consume you both. I grow.”

The shadow attacked again, and this time, only barely recovering from the surprise that his stomp had dispersed it, Carrick kicked in its direction. It seemed incapable of veering from its original course, and collided directly with Carrick’s foot, scattering in dark bursts like anti-sparks before retreating once more.

Carrick picked the child up under the arms and carried it on one hip. If the virus wanted to attack now, it would have to crawl up his leg, and he could easily stomp it with the other foot.

“I don't understand,” said Carrick. “What do we do here? What’s the process?”

“Encapsulation has begun,” said the terraformer. It did not react at all to Carrick picking it up. “We lured it here with my presence. I will remain until the coming night. If it escapes before then, all is lost, but it is incapable of doing so. Its programming will not allow it to abandon prey such as me.”

The shadow laughed at them. “Trying to play tricks on me? Trying to make me afraid, to make me run away with my tail between my legs and leave you be? I won't fall for it!”

“See?” the terraformer asked emotionlessly. “I could lay out every detail of the encapsulation mechanics, could explain to it with precise logic how it will be defeated, and it would still be incapable of believing me.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Carrick’s skin dripped with sweat. “I don't understand,” he said. “What am I doing here? This place was from my past. I recognize that. We're in my head.”

He spun around, correctly guessing that the shadow, which had been absent from his vision for a short time, would sneak up from behind. He stomped it into splinters of night.

“That is encapsulation,” the terraformer said. “We will trap it within your brain. We will separate it from you as a tumor, and then will excise that tumor manually.”

Carrick started. “Angers said nothing about that. He said we’d imprison it in a circuit board.”

“That is the inferior way, and impossible now that the Blue Shrike has been destroyed.”

“I told you,” the virus roared, “I am the Blue Shrike!”

It lunged downward from up above, and Carrick gasped. It fell toward him in the shape of a taloned, hook-beaked bird of prey that burst dark fog behind it, and Carrick could not react fast enough to prevent it from latching onto his face. It tore at his eyes and throat, spilling his blood onto the ground just as that of his father and mother so many years ago as they died under an enforcer’s hammer.

***

It was a searing pain, a carving and dividing pain, as though someone were, with a scalpel, teasing apart every wrinkle of Carrick’s brain and stretching each strand to its utter limit.

Carrick screamed. He could feel the virus worming its way into every corner of his mind, gorging itself upon Carrick's very sense of self.

Carrick beat his face, blinded, writhing in greater agony than he had ever experienced in the real world.

After several blows, the pain abruptly ceased, and Carrick realized he must have dislodged the virus.

He could see again, could see the mass of the virus separating and drifting upward. In a flash, Carrick grabbed a handful of eyes and teeth. He grimaced at the pain which lanced through his hand as though he had grasped a mass of rusty, red-hot nails.

“Let me go!” the virus shrieked. “Let me go, or I'll eat your arm and devour your organs and bones from the inside before I finish off your mind!”

“Hold it there,” the terraformer said. “You can do this, Carrick. You can protect me. Night will fall in only a minute. You won’t let Angers prove to be stronger than you, will you?”

The terraformer’s voice cut off as, sprawled out on the ground, still breathing heavily and streaming tears down his face from the pain, Carrick reached up and grabbed the translucent child by the throat.

“Enough,” Carrick growled. “I'm not letting either of you control me anymore.”

The terraformer squirmed breathlessly in one hand while the virus screamed in the other. Carrick tried to ignore them and looked up at the ceiling, up at the platform where he had once hidden behind a leaking barrel of toxic waste, watching with silent horror as his parents were tortured to death by a pitiful crime family for trying to get out from under the thumb of oppression. He had watched them die while refusing to give up where they had hidden their child.

His parents had been murdered while the boss of that family, a bloated man ruined by his own drugs, had laughed asthmatically and clapped at his enforcer’s handiwork.

And Carrick had watched as a young nobody in that family finally had enough and put a bullet in his own boss’ head, then put three in the upper body of the man who had happily tortured an innocent father and mother to death, then announced to the rest of the criminals that they would be running things differently from now on.

And that man had looked up to the rafters, for he had known Carrick was there all along. He had climbed up and kneeled at Carrick’s side and said he was sorry he was such a coward, sorry that he had only stopped things after they were too late.

Carrick's parents had loved him, but the boss had loved him, too.

“This was the wrong place to bring me,” Carrick growled. He slowly raised himself up, the load in each hand feeling impossibly heavy, though only moments ago he had easily held the child on one hip while fending off the virus like a swarm of midges.

“You reminded me why I keep living!” he shouted. “I don't live to serve myself. Don't live to get what I want or to have a good time. I live to try to make things just a little bit better, as best as I can, because I've always believed that was how you make the big changes. But either of you could change the world with a snap of your fingers, couldn't you? You want to use me to help you do that, in your own ways. You want to make everything just like you! Well, I'm not going to stand for it any longer! If we're going to change the world, we're going to do it on my terms!”

Carrick had no idea how the metaphysics of this representative world worked. He didn't know what any object or shape represented or how he was supposed to particularly influence reality by a certain gesture or intention.

All he knew was that he was going to do to these manipulative alien consciousnesses what they had tried to do to him.

They resisted with all their might, but as though lifting slabs of lead in each hand, he smashed the terraformer and the virus into one another, creating an undulating nucleus of white and black fire between his hands that burned away skin, flesh, and bone.

He hunched over and devoured this mass in huge bites, as though sinking his teeth into a fruit. Plasma dripped down Carrick's chin and seared his flesh with third-degree burns.

In moments he had devoured them both, and every cell of his body was once more on fire.

Night fell as Carrick staggered through a warehouse that disintegrated around him, remnants of his hands clutched to a flaming skull, screaming with lungs that were likewise becoming nothing.

***

In the Wasteland's heart, at the exact point at which it had happened a generation ago, with ten thousand times greater intensity than it had a few hours prior, the terraformer erupted and consumed the portion of the planet Dirt which was colloquially referred to as the Wasteland, ending every human life within its boundary.

One humanoid figure remained above a perfectly smooth crater, little more than a nervous system wrapped in an iridescent membrane. A brain bubbled up at its top, and then a pair of gleaming eyes, both formed of silvery metal.

The figure hovered hundreds of feet in the air, silent and motionless, staring down at what it had wrought.