Neons lit up as the four subjects of the H-15.62 group were led back to their shared cell from the training grounds. Just like the fixtures that were swallowed by concrete walls, as they failed to emulate sunlight, the subjects were failing to contain their unrest. There had been five of them this morning, and seven two weeks prior.
“Fuck this,” Letticia slammed her good fist into the plexiglass bay good that locked after them. “What did they do to Tony?”
No one bothered to reply. Carl walked to his designated corner of the room, and Vega did the same. They both plopped down in unison onto the bare concrete. Oliver paced around, muttering something in a language only he here spoke. Then, he stopped in his tracks and turned towards Carl:
“When do you think they’ll let us out? We’ve passed the tests. They’ve accomplished whatever they’d set out to accomplish – This is it right, I mean, they can’t just kill us one by one!” His accent was thick as his tone became louder and shakier with each consequent word.
“They’re not gonna. Ever.” Leticia came up to Oli and smacked the back of his head. Perhaps she’d hit him too hard, perhaps he was just too unstable, but he collapsed to the floor, covering the back of his head and loudly sobbing. “They’re gonna take us out the back and put a fist-sized bullet through our head to make sure it doesn’t regrow,” She made an explosion gesture with her hands.
“Stop it!” Vega called out. She got up, reluctantly so as every single muscle in her body hurt – and she was sure some of them hadn’t gotten sewed back right – and took a defensive stance.
Carl hummed, not too bothered by Oli’s breakdown.
Perhaps he was thinking about the time he could bind if they took Oli first. Two or three more days in this cement casket, and the promise of fresh air in his lungs one last time.
“I’m not gonna fight you,” Leticia waved a hand at Vega. “I don’t punch kids.”
“We’re the same age,” Vega gestured at herself, the foreigner sobbing on his knees, and the brunette in front of her. “And you had no issue hitting him.”
“Just so you know,” Lectica crossed the distance between them, hands crossed over her chest, “this,” she gestured at Oli, “is not my fault. He is a weak imbecile who shouldn’t have survived here as long as he has. He isn’t worth shit – hell, I bet he wasn’t worth shit even before they made him-”
“Enough.” Carl finally intervened. He pushed himself off the floor, with more difficulty than he had back when his left arm wasn’t a mess of dark-pink scar tissue that grew in uneven lines just above where his elbow would have been. “We’re all on edge, I get that that. But Victor is in a better place now, so let’s take a second to honour his memory and move on like adults.”
“You’re fucking kidding…” Leticia swore, as she wiped her nose and looked away. Despite all the show, she hadn’t wanted to hear those words. “They’ll bring him back. They always do. I mean come on, he was telling us that the psy whatever was working – that he’d gotten it to work -” She sobbed, letting go of that thought.
Oli glanced up at Carl, then at Vega, then sat down with his legs crossed, and continued to mutter in his mother tongue. Carl signed heavily. Whatever silent conversation had just happened between them; it seemed they’d come to an agreement. Or at least some common understanding about which one of them would be the next to go.
“How the fuck are the two of you so calm?” Leticia snapped at Vega and Carl again. “You barely said anything about Dervla,” she gestured at Vega, “And the number of fucks you give about any of us,” she made a broad gesture to encompass the trio before pointing an accusatory finger at Carl, “can be counted on the fingers of the hand you don’t have!”
His only reply to the provocation was him pressing his lips into a fine line.
“The Soleus muscle will always grow over the Tibialis posterior, even when the Fascia layers get misaligned. It can take minutes to hours to return to its appropriate position. Timing can be reduced by creating incisions in the Flexors hallucis and digitorumto facilitate a muscular duplex pertranseat,” Carl replied. His tone was neutral, in a way where it was impossible to tell if he was going for a metaphor or reciting something from yesterday’s testing. Leticia gave him a confused look, but her body seemed to relax a bit as the subject had finally shifted away from the man they’d never see again.
“Your point being?” She asked. For all the swearing, outbursts, and her own accounts of her life on the streets and illiteracy, she was following the medical talk perfectly well.
“Ah,” Carl ran the bottom of his palm over his short hair. It was the type of gesture one would use to chase away a migraine, and the mixture of pain and frustration that flashed over his face as he did so was the first proper emotion he’d displayed in days. “It’s like that too,” he eventually continued, “It grows back right. Right, Vega?”
The switch in his choice of words made Vega lean towards the theory of him reciting something he’s overheard. She would have agreed, but instead, she momentarily frowned, perplexed at the name he’d used instead of hers.
“I don’t know. I don’t like thinking about those things,” She eventually replied to Leticia. “It’s just … um .. best not to.”
“So what, do you just sit in that corner with your head empty all day?” The woman scoffed.
“I do what they told us to do,” she replied.
Those words felt like she should be ashamed of them, but she wasn’t. Going over the skills she had, and thinking about how she could improve them was a much better pass-time than reciting law manuals in a foreign language or starting verbal fights that refused that only escalated and never resolved. Up until recently, they also had another way to kill time – mostly her and Carl, and some of the others who were now gone. There was relief to be found in having full control of one’s body in an intimate and sound setting. But the glass bay doors took that away from them.
Surprisingly enough Leticia didn’t push it further. She grumbled a few insults, directed mostly at those ‘freaks keeping us here’, and went to take her usual watch post by the glass doors.
Carl silently went to the corner he’d claimed as his. Vega tried to strike up a conversation with Oli, but he refused to reply in a language she understood, so she returned to her spot and started reading over her skills.
The cell felt like it’d shrunk by a tenfold the second they’d stopped talking. Perhaps that was why Leticia was so insistent on yelling; to fill the 7-by-7-meter cube with anything other than cold air and the ghosts of those who’d never return.
Vega tried not to think about that. Instead, she focused on a new hand-to-hand skill that she’d unlocked. She opened her stat window, and a blank note, as she tried to work out Power calculations needed for various skill combos.
Stats
Skills
Goals
Other
Power
No skills requiring P active
P regeneration inactive
Available P:
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Conditions
Daily goals
Cellular Regeneration
Active.
General Viral Resistance
Active. Skill level increase in [4] days to [Mastered].
Specilised Resistance [Bacillus anthracis N-J45_kf5]
Active. Skill increase in [17] days to [Trained].
Specialised Parasitic Resistance Elimination and Processing [Schistosoma haematobium]
Active. Skill increase in [3] days to [Expert].
When that was done, she made a few notes predicting the decrease in skill cost with increased mastery. Before she knew it, guards came to collect her and Carl.
----------------------------------------
The ceiling in the medical wing was black, and somehow the halogen lights here did a much better job at emulating the sun, in the sense that they burned Vega’s eyes.
“Hey,” She whispered to Carl, who was lying next to her.
She didn’t turn to look at him. She didn’t want to watch as his left lung slowly regenerated outside his body. She reckoned somewhere along the line they’d mixed up her injections because she’d unlocked a pain resistance skill, so she didn’t really feel her rib cage slowly closing on itself as all the organs removed from it were very quickly decomposing, while identical copies grew inside her.
It was hard to talk with only one functional lung, but it was good practice, she tried to convince herself, as she called out again:
“Hey, about earlier…”
Carl groaned in response. Not only was his regeneration notably slower, but he sounded like he could feel most of it.
“Don’t talk … in front of … the cameras,” he managed to let out in between jagged breaths.
Vega glanced to the side, where large mounted cameras were filming her open chest. She caught a glimpse of moving reds and browns, and bleached white bones slowly growing the pumping organs, and instantly returned her gaze to the ceiling, trying not to gag.
Vega wanted to tell Carl that she’d given it some thought, and she believed him now, about them having messed up with their brains. She didn’t understand it, but it was clear she didn’t experience anything the way the rest of the H-15.62 group did. She reckoned she could tell him later, so she lay in silence, trying to overhear what was happening on the other end of the two-way mirror that replaced the front wall of the room.
Hearing
Increase the distance range at which sounds are perceived. Change the decibel range perceived. Duration 10 minutes, or until cancelled.
Trained
Cost: 4P per decametre distance increase beyond the base range of 15 meters. 1P per 5dB variation beyond base range of 45 to 125dB at 100 Hz. 2P to cancel.
Vega didn’t fully understand what those values meant. She was given a quick run-down once after she’d reported on having aquired this skill, but it hadn’t been deemed as useful or desirable, so it was left at that. Yet, having spent 6P, she could just about make out the conversation.
“- mean, 03 is doing fine, I think we can start with the psy skills on it.”
That was one of the doctors. The voices were just a tad too distorted for Vega to figure out if it was the shorter one, or the one with glasses.
“You’re not touching 03,” A stern voice came in reply. “Look at what you did to 01 with your ‘psychic skills’. There is feedback you’re not accounting for.”
“Don’t call them that.”
“What?”
“Psychic. It makes it sound like I’m doing tarot card reads and not redefining human nature.”
One of them scoffed.
“Jesus, Walter. For a second I thought you were going to say something else.”
“Can we get back on topic? We need to test the new batch of skills.”
“Yes. I can run another debug algorithm, but I still insist that 01’s situation is an isolated case.”
“What about the one we had to drag out this morning?”
“Shit, that was from H-15?”
“Yeah, Oleg. And 15-07 is going insane.”
“I didn’t pick that one. You can’t blame me for faulty sources.”
“Right, so the psy skills-”
“Walton, you are a stubborn motherfucker. But the answer is still no. Which one in that batch isn’t glitching yet? Try them instead.”
“I don’t even want to know what you’re saving 03 for, Corporal.”
“Get your mind out of the gutter Oleg.”
A moan from Carl made Vega turn off the skill.
“Are you alright?” She asked, knowing full well the answer, but wanting to make him feel not alone.
He didn’t reply, verbally, or otherwise.
Bracing herself for the sight, Vega turned to face him. Cold sweat was running down his body, as he tensed against the restraints that kept him on the steel table, failing to grab onto anything that would help him with the pain. His ribcage had fully closed over, and his lungs were slowly merging with it, as they returned to their initial position.
When he noticed Vega staring, he turned his head. It might have been a second, or several hours, but their eyes locked, his blue and red irises piercing her black ones. He was trying to have one of those silent conversations he so often held with Oliver, but Vega wasn’t getting it. He relaxed a little when his lungs returned to a position that allowed him to talk.
“Take care of Oliver. And don’t pick fights with Leticia,” he said.
“No-” Vega shook her head. She repeated the word several more times, each of the monosyllables being more and more hushed by resignation.
“Vega,” He said her name wrong again, as he looked up at the ceiling, “At least it’s just us. They’re failing,” he turned towards one of the cameras, “This System, the skills, all of it. The human body is not meant to harbour any of it, and try as you might, I think you know. And now you’re just breaking us for your own pleasure.”
He sounded as calm as he always did.
“Carl,” Vega didn’t know what to say. If he himself admitted defeat then his System would respond accordingly. Whatever was killing him, it wasn’t the new skills they’d tried to put in his skull. It was something that was already there, growing over thoughts and emotions, just like the muscles he was on about earlier. “I hope – the other place is really better,” Vega spoke.
He hummed in reply.
“Goodbye Vega.”
She didn’t correct him.
“Goodbye, Carl.”
----------------------------------------
The calendar in the small office to the left of the elevator read ‘January 2012’. The day before it’d read ‘March’ of the same year, so Vega wasn’t fully sure how much she could trust it – or her memory.
A lot of redecorating and expansions were happening around the complex. Or rather ‘komplex’ as the K in O.B.E.L.I.S.K. shouted in its matte grey paint from every other white wall. Knowing why they’d stopped with the medical experiments in favour of more utility- and combat-oriented ones was above Vega’s station. That four-to-six-hour block in her day simply got replaced by something new.
She was being taken down to one of the larger rooms that’d been designated as a training ground. It was hard to see it as such, as it still had the metal toilet and sink along one of its sides that came with every identical cubic cell, but it was over twenty meters in each direction and had clearly not been made to just host other subjects.
A young man with short grey hair and a small scar under his left eye, whom Vega later came to know as Lupus, was just being taken out of the training cell. With two guns pointed at him, he slowly dragged himself along, pretending that his leg injury hadn’t yet fully healed.
“Aim for the head,” He whispered in a playful tone, as he passed by Vega.
This earned him a hit with the butt of rifles of the guards taking him to his cell, but he scoffed it off.
Professor W. Taylor, as his name badge read, was waiting for Vega by the door. He’d stopped wearing his glasses roughly around the time the medical experiments stopped, and his eyes had gained that red tint that most of his subjects had. With professional disinterest, he instructed Vega:
“This is a test of your regenerative ability. Don’t start anything and don’t destroy the other subject or you will be penalised.”
Daily task:
Demonstrate regenerative ability without destroying testing materials.
Failure Penalty
1 failed daily task. Duration: 7 days.
Global 50mA Electroshock.
Vega frowned. This was the first time one of these screens had popped up after verbal orders. Usually, the daily tasks just spawned in the morning. But she didn’t get the time to dwell on it, as the heavy metal doors to the training – testing? – room opened, and she walked through them before someone had the chance to shove her.
On the other side of the room, another subject was shoved in. They were wearing an older version of the white overalls with the built-in straps and held themselves as if several of their bones were broken. Their right knee bent inwards, and their left shoulder was pushed back, out of its socket. Most of their left sleeve seemed empty, suggesting an amputation just over the elbow, which was a very common injury here.
Vega presumed that the wording of her task meant that the other subject was showing their combat skills. So, she put her arms up and moved her legs into a wider, more stable, stance.
Sure enough, they lounged at Vega. They ran, ignoring the twisted knee, before aiming at Vega’s eyes with their nails. She hadn’t really expected an unarmed attack, but she moved her arms up quickly enough to shield herself.
The other subject groaned, before taking a few steps back.
“Hey, we can-” Vega barely had the time to glance at her torn sleeves, before the subject lunged at her again.
The subject pinned her to the ground and growled in her face. Then, it tore her overalls and dug deep into her chest with its one good arm. It groaned and made hungry, guttural, noises as it dug deeper and deeper, pulling out bits of lungs, liver, and intestines almost as fast as they regenerated.
Vega could have easily pushed him off at that time. But she’d frozen. Not from the pain, which she felt as lingering discomfort or the fact that with this subject so close, she could clearly see early signs of decay on its body, but because she’d recognised those mismatched blue and red eyes. Sure, they were glossy, and unmistakably dead, but also unmistakably Carl’s.
She called out to him. Several times. He froze, for long enough for the blood that covered his exposed hand to filly pick a direction to run down.
“What – what did they do to you? Do you remember me? Carl?” Vega muttered. She also wanted to tell him to get off her, and that they could pretend-fight for the rest of whatever this was, but something inside her screamed that he couldn’t understand her.
He tilted his head. He softly groaned. He took a big swing at Vega’s throat.
When her blood mixed with the residues and fluids on his hand, she finally pushed him off, and spun around, vomiting on the floor. She pressed a hand over her throat, trying to speed the regeneration along so that she wouldn’t taste her own insides, nor watch them pour out of her severed oesophagus.
Carl waited. What for, neither he nor Vega could tell. But the second he lounged at her again, she swept her leg under him, causing him to topple over.
“Carl, please, umm, say anything other than a groan,” she pleaded.
He growled, getting up and running at her with the intent to swipe at her head with his claws again.
“Or blink. Three times. Look at me and blink,” she begged, as took a step to the side, dodging him.
He almost fell to the ground again, managing to regain balance with a big swing of his arm at the last second. Then, he ran at Vega. She maintained eye contact. For as long as she could, her red eyes started into his mismatched blue and red. His teeth came within millimetres of Vega’s neck.
Serpent’s Strike
Hardens the side of the palm, and allows to quickly, unpredictably, horizontally, move it towards a target in direct range in a controlled manner.
Mastered
Cost: 1P per use.
Daily task Failed
She hit hard enough to damage the muscles in his neck. She took a few steps back, covering her mouth with her hands. She didn’t know what to do next. She was scared of what would happen to Carl next. What else they’d do to him. She was scared of what they’d do to her, and to every single subject here who’d outlived their use.
Applying Penalty in 5 seconds.
She took a deep breath and knelt by Carl. He kicked her, and dug his hand deep into her arm. She lifted his head, as he growled, and tried to push her away. Vega closed her eyes.
Strength Increase
Temporarily increases the user's muscle power.
Trained
Cost: 3P for a maximum of 15 minutes, granting an increase of up to 75% in effective strength output.
She smashed his head into the concrete ground.
The pain from the electroshock overwrote her skills and paralysed her, thankfully before she could she what she’d done to her friend.