‘-ghh!’ said Nicolai, peeling his eyes open. The screaming wind was gone, replaced by an echo of his yell, a sudden burst of confusion all around him.

He was staring down at a floor of white, unlined stone. Jerking his head around, he realised he was floating, and as though that realisation ended the spell, he fell a few inches and slapped into the stone, letting out a grunt. In his brief look he’d seen himself surrounded by many other naked humans, and there was a wave of sound as they all fell with him, everyone landing on the stone and letting out yelps. Then they all began to stand. Then the talking started.

‘What is going—‘

‘I demand—‘

‘How is—‘

‘Who is—‘

‘Where are—‘

‘What is—‘

Nicolai kept his words to himself as he rose to his feet in lockstep with the mass around him, holding his Seed tight. He saw men, women, old, young, fit, frail, augmented, tattooed, pale, dark, an endless variety of humanity all around.

The sky above was a great blue dome with a bright sun that poured its light down onto those below. Nicolai shaded his eyes, which crinkled as he grinned up at the sky. It had been a long time since he’d seen such a sky, one clear of the endless dirty storms that cloaked Earth’s atmosphere. He spotted birds, a great flock of them circling far above. A muggy wind blew, warming his flesh. It smelt of sweat and sulphur.

Rising over the crowd was a still and silent being which attracted Nicolai’s eyes, and those of everyone around him, all becoming quiet as they turned to stare at it. Nicolai squinted against the sunlight, and realised it was a statue.

The statue was several metres tall and depicted something that was not human. A slender being wearing a long robe which was frozen in a ripple, the stone carved to seem as though it were standing in a strong wind.

It had a beard of many long strands that rose and quested out around it. Not hair, he realised, but something like tentacles. Above this the creature had a face that resembled a humans’ except for a few major differences. It was thin-lipped with a stern mouth, an aquiline nose, a bald pate, cold and narrowed eyes, and all of this could have made it a human, but there in the centre of its forehead there was another eye, larger, circular, surrounded by symbols that looked like tattoos. It also had no ears, nor anything that could recognisably serve as ears.

In one hand pressed against its side it held something like a book, while its other held a rod that pointed into the distance at nothing.

There was a flare of dull red light around the statue and the stone moved, shifting strangely, coming alive. This was answered by a wave of unnerved cries and the crowd shifted, a swelling sea of humanity, as people pressed away from it. Nicolai found himself caught between others as the press grew tight, and he pulled his arms out to get them above the squeeze of flesh because he knew it was likely if he didn’t do so now, he might not manage at all. He held his cupped hands to the nape of his neck, and peeked inside to reassure himself the Seed was still there. He saw many others around him likewise checking on Seeds of their own.

‘Welcome, children, to your Trials,’ boomed the statue, its form twisting to glance around at the humans, Nicolai along with everyone else freezing as they stared back. ‘Cling tight to the words of the Prophet and the People, they will form your guide. This first trial shall be: the Trial of Courage.’ As the statue spoke, it turned a slow circle, pointing with its rod to whatever was beyond their current position. ‘Make your way to a start point. We begin.’ Having completed a full rotation, the statue relaxed and froze back into the same position it had begun in.

There was a dull tone, as though from a great bell, and from above Nicolai heard cries, predatory and avian.

An instant after this, Nicolai’s mark tingled and he saw it pulsing with light. The light gathered and burst into the air above his hand.

Challenge Assigned: Survive the Trials.

At the same time as the words wrote themselves before him, he heard them echoed in his mind by a genderless voice.

The golden hologram shifted and briefly showed him the main menu, with map and cultivation, but now a new section had appeared named Challenges, which briefly pulsed at him before the light of the hologram faded and it sank back into his hand.

As all this was happening, Nicolai had seen everyone around him reacting much as he had, raising hands where golden Marks glittered, and staring at the space above as though something were written there. However, it seemed he could not see the holograms from other peoples Marks, only his own.

Nicolai put all that aside, focusing on what he needed to do next. He did not know what Prophet or People the statue was referring to, and he doubted anyone else did. But its instructions were clear enough, and he translated them into even simpler terms: get moving. Casting an eye upwards he saw the birds slowly descending. They were getting bigger.

Those around seemed to have come to the same conclusion as the press loosened, people on the outskirts moving towards whatever was out there. He struggled a little to see over the press, and found that fact oddly confusing. It took him a second to realise why.

His body was marginally over six feet and three inches tall. Back when he’d lived as a human, that height had been well above average and his body was used to being able to see over crowds. Now, he was still over the average, but by a smaller amount. This, he felt, was good. Being tall had always been a problem because it had made him stand out.

The reason for his momentary confusion was that his body had missed out on centuries of artificial evolution. If you could have brought someone from centuries ago, when he’d been born, and had them look at the naked crowd around them, they would have been surprised by just how much modern humans had managed to change themselves. But, he doubted they’d have been surprised by the general direction of that change.

People in general were taller, more muscular, with features increasingly even and proportional, every beard exquisitely shaped, every eyebrow an artful line, and men and women bulged and dangled in ways driven by humanity’s ever more extreme sexualisation of form, inclinations which had been realised by continual improvements in bodily modification.

There were also other, more esoteric changes, though these were fewer in number. Some had tails of various types, or ears that were pointed, or furred. Eyes larger or smaller, showcasing shimmering rainbows of colours all at once or shifting between different colours. Animated tattoos displaying corporate affiliations, gang affiliations, beliefs, interests, and frequently, adverts, shimmered across bodies.

Then there were the purely functional changes, which were the least common. Metal grafted smoothly or not so smoothly into skin to provide extra limbs or sensory organs, even bodies that were more artificial than flesh, though he only saw one like that.

There tended to be a kind of gradient for the richer humans these days. Human aesthetics whose augments lay below the skin, preserving their fleshy forms as much as possible while gaining the benefits of synthetic bodies, took position on one extreme.

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On the other end lay those who had no interest in appearing beautiful or sexual or in any other way appealing, instead focusing purely on functionality and who transformed themselves into beings fit for a purpose. Nicolai preferred this second type, as to his eyes functionality possessed a beauty all of its own, a rawer, more honest beauty. It was the route he had chosen, long ago.

Below these came the larger ranks of what you might call normal people, who went in either direction but to a far lesser extent as dictated by their wallet. The vast majority simply looked human, as flashier augments tended to be very expensive and the first choice for any would be those that didn’t show on the exterior. Brain and organ implants were relatively cheap and provided a good ratio of function-to-cost.

Seeing all these differing individuals squeezed tight in a nude mass around him lent an odd note to the scene, a combining of artificial falseness and animal honesty.

The yelling grew in volume as some pushed their way through or forcefully made room, and things turned chaotic. There was a swell of screaming and shouting from nearby at the same moment as Nicolai was knocked sideways, kept up only by those squeezed in with him, trapped and unable to move as the press intensified.

He saw the flash of an arm-blade augment above the crowd, accompanied by a spray of blood. Someone who’d managed to invest several functional and combat-oriented augments into their body was now benefiting from that decision, making room for themselves in the easiest and most direct way possible.

Nicolai gritted his teeth as he was squeezed, his face pressed in tight with those of the increasingly terrified people around him. There was an animalistic rage swelling within him, but it was as powerless as he.

‘Get off me, give me some room!’ a panicked, sweaty man with bulging eyes screamed into Nicolai’s face. Nicolai couldn’t do as the man asked because of the people crushing him against the man, and he didn’t reply as his focus was on keeping his muscles tense, his lungs almost full, breathing with tiny little gasps.

He felt it likely that if he allowed all the air to be expelled from his lungs, he would struggle to re-inflate them as he was squeezed by those around him. There was an intense urge to strike out in attack but he could barely keep his lungs full and his legs moving, let alone start killing people. Those around him were lucky he wasn’t armed with weaponized augments. The sweaty man beside him was gasping for breath and struggling to find it. Nicolai watched, thinking, I hope that he doesn’t fall over and trip me.

As they moved he felt the smooth stone below him change into something rougher that scraped at his feet. Nicolai had to keep his legs moving lest he fall, and then he was stepping on something soft, trampling over someone.

The moment stretched. Sweaty, squeezing, screaming faces, one then another, battering his vision and his hearing and rendering him increasingly numb, all become a fleshy, noisy blur. Then, blessedly, the pressure began to relent. Nicolai utilised his elbows viciously, shoving some room for himself, and before he knew it, he was out, he was walking, and people were spreading out before him, all of them exhausted and drained, but free from the press.

Looking back, he saw the great swelling crowd behind him, felt the terror of them, saw people on the ground struggling and trying to get the attention of those crushing them in vain. Nicolai’s eyes skimmed over desperate faces.

He was glad to be out of it.

The ground below was ragged black rock. His feet felt wet and he saw red on them, blood from those who’d been crushed below.

People ahead moved forwards and outwards, and as they did so his view was increasingly opened up. Nicolai found he stood in a somewhat vertical area, all from the same dark stone but with rises and falls, gullies and crevices. Not too much difference in level—only a few metres up or down—but it served to cut the place up and meant that from where he currently stood in a lower area, he couldn’t see much more than the nearest rises and the birds circling above.

His eyes narrowed as he saw a splash of familiar red staining the stone around a man who was very dead, a large fellow who’d become quite a mess after being ripped in two. The tears were not clean and straight, as from an augment blade, but ragged and messy.

Nicolai paused, standing silent and relaxed as he observed, turning a slow circle. His eyes fell on another corpse, that of a middle aged man with his chest torn and bloody, his lower jaw ripped off, eyes staring straight up. It looked to Nicolai like some kind of gigantic animal or close-combat killbot had ripped and smashed this man apart, which matched up with the other dead he saw.

He decided that the corpses were recent, but not a-few-minutes-ago recent. He guessed them to have died perhaps thirty minutes ago. He couldn’t have been here more than four or five minutes, which suggested to him that this was an ongoing event. He, alongside the others who’d arrived with him, were just one wave, preceded by others like the corpses, likely to be followed by more.

Whatever had killed them would kill him almost as easily in his current unarmed state. With this realisation a powerful thrill crawled through his spine, his eyes dilating, teeth gritting, hands clenching. Life and death, the knife’s edge. It had been a long time since he truly felt this thrill and he delighted in it, so much stronger than the pale imitation he’d experienced as a portion of Zero-Twelve.

‘Hey, do you know what’s going on here?’ yelled a nearby human to him, a confused and worried looking middle-aged woman. She had dark hair, light-brown skin, and a sculpted body, which made her a fairly typical representation of someone from New London. He saw her eyes were upon the nearest corpse as her face twisted with a combination of disgust and horror, her body hunching up defensively. ‘Is this VR? It doesn’t feel like VR.’ She looked to Nicolai again and he saw her eyes unfocus, a sign she was accessing some kind of virtual interface. ‘Is your network online?’

Nicolai’s skull buzzed and the seething mass of animalistic impulses that lurked beneath his consciousness forced themselves to the forefront as his eyes lingered on the curves of her body and he experienced a shocking stir in his groin. He wrenched his gaze away from her and turned his head aside so she couldn’t see the way his expression twisted.

The disgust he felt was so complete that he thought he might vomit. His stomach boiled with an insane mixture of lust, disgust, and rising rage at this latest loss of control, twining with a pressing urge to kill someone.

Nicolai snarled soundlessly. Already he was losing himself. He tried to recall the methods he’d used so long ago to manage this shit but his mind was blank.

‘Guh.’ He grunted as something hit him in the side of the head and he found himself kneeling, confused and disorientated, right temple aching. He looked to the side and saw his own hand, raised, clenched into a fist. For a moment his mind was empty, then a sweaty terror rolled through him as he lifted his hands, and there he found the Seed, cradled safely in his left.

Nicolai released a sigh of relief. He rose back to his feet and a quick glance revealed a woman staring at him with, for some reason, shock and a degree of fear. In contrast, he found himself full of joy that came from nowhere and thrummed through him. I’m alive, he thought, and realised he’d hissed the words and she’d heard as her expression undertook another shift and she took a small step backwards.

There was a gap in his memories, but something told him that she had been speaking to him, that she had requested… what? Advice? Reassurance? He must have shown some part of himself. Had his madness surfaced? He’d shown something he was not supposed to show. He wasn’t sure that he cared and he was struck by an urge to laugh and share his jubilant mood, but he could clearly see that she was in a very different state of mind to his own.

Babbling at her about the beautiful edge of death’s knife, about the glory of freedom and the pleasure of novel sensation, was unlikely to improve her outlook. He met her eyes, imagining himself in her position, trying to feel her fear and confusion. It didn’t cause any reaction in him but he knew that it should, and he decided to try and be helpful.

‘This is a very dangerous situation,’ he told her. ‘Do your best to stay calm and keep your wits about you if you wish to survive.’ He clicked his tongue, vaguely displeased with the words, part of him convinced he could have crafted something better, some sentence that would have encapsulated his feelings and the profoundness of the moment perfectly while getting the right information across. Then he remembered that he’d done something wrong and decided he needed to justify whatever it had been. ‘Sorry about… earlier. My implants are having some issues.’

She frowned at him.

‘This place, you know? It’s crazy.’ He gestured vaguely and laughed, trying to sound like a normal person. He thought he’d succeeded but he wasn’t certain, so he watched her carefully to gauge her reaction while attempting to appear casual. It was important to act human, he remembered that now. Not just for others, but for himself, too. However, it had been a long time since he’d last done this and he knew he was rusty.

‘Yeah.’ She shook her head and puffed her cheeks as she let out a sigh. ‘I’m regretting I accepted that stupid invitation. I didn’t expect this.’ She smiled oddly, and he saw how her body shifted, less afraid, and how her gaze towards him changed as though she were no longer looking at a rabid dog but another person.

Nicolai smiled back, pleased with himself for convincing her he was human, though part of him wondered whether she was just pretending, too. He hunted around for something else to say but nothing came to mind and instead he was filled with a weird shame as the moment stretched. His mind spun empty for a moment then it caught on his survival instincts and everything kicked back into gear. He needed to gather more information.