Dizzy awoke. The first thing that met her eyes was light. Light all around her. Good. She would need light if she was going to break free. But free from what, exactly — ? Oh yeah. Her hands. Her arms. She couldn’t move them; they were stretched out to either side of her, her wrists encased in large, steel semicircular restraints. The large yellow happy-face insignia on her black leather jacket — part of her Lister cosplay — gleamed in the harsh blue-white light coming from above, mocking her attempts to struggle free. She was lying prone, on some type of ice-cold metal platform, her leather-clad legs slightly apart and her ankles similarly bound by metal rings (though why, she didn’t know; the bastard knew she couldn’t move her legs). Ravenkroft had obviously removed her Evangeliojaeger. She spotted it now: It stood across the room against one wall of this decidedly odd chamber — the walls were dark and stood in shadow; they seemed to shift and change as she searched for them with her eyes; never quite “there,” yet still present and accounted-for all the same. Indefinable. Murky. Hard to focus on. There was a ceiling, sort of; it hovered above her. Also above her, and above the large, round table Ravenkroft had strapped her to, there hovered some sort of triaxial robotic-arm assembly. Three robotic arms, and all of them bearing instruments she’d really rather not get more closely acquainted with, thanks.
Gods, what was this place? Ravenkroft’s hideout, at long last? Or some other location? A workhouse of some sort? Yup, with her luck, that’s what it was — a good ol’ fashioned, serial-killin’ workhouse. Oh, ye Gods, that did it. Panic squirted into her veins; her pulse accelerated and throbbed in her temples. She was dead meat, deep six, the groundhogs were bringin’ her mail . . . Ravenkroft intended to dispatch her once he saw he wasn’t going to get any information out of her. Because he wasn’t, by gods. No way in hell. She was going out in a blaze of nope. Or was she? No. Wait. No, she wasn’t! She wasn’t “going out” in any fashion! Nor was she going to sit still and be questioned! Ridikkulus! What was she, the hapless victim of the monster of the week in the teaser before the opening credits of Buffy, Fringe, or The X-Files? Heckin’ Balls, no. She was Desirée Gods-damn Weatherspark. And she would use her colossal, Jupiter-sized intellect to figure a way out of this mess, somehow. She just wasn’t sure what it was going to be, yet. But it would come; it would come.
Come on, any day now, she thought. She let out a long, slow breath. This was no different than any of the times Willow had been captured on Buffy. And she always figured a way out, didn’t she?
Okay, first, study the environment. Those walls. Were they moving, or were they stationary? They looked stationary. Were they solid, or were they projections? They looked like projections . . . but then again, they might’ve been solid, but simply been possessed of some state of matter that she hadn’t seen before. And this table she was strapped to . . . what was it made of? Metal? It appeared to be lit from within; so, glass of some kind, at least its top. And these restraints. Metal. Definitely metal. Alluzinium, most likely; he had stolen the alloy’s metallurgy from her when he’d stolen the design for the Evangeliojaeger, years ago. So, practically unbreakable without tools. She would have to wait for an opening . . . At some point, he would loosen the restraints. Then she could make her move. But she would have to wait for him to appear first. So far he wasn’t in evidence. The rest of the room was a mystery. She turned her head to the right. The far walls in that direction weren’t in evidence; either they were too far away to be seen, or the shadows cloaked them. She —
Suddenly, movement. The far walls revealed themselves as the shadows there parted, and a doorway — a round, lenticular portal, about three meters in diameter — suddenly irised open like a camera shutter in the far wall, a light spilling onto the spot from somewhere above to illuminate the area, and in walked Ravenkroft in his spiffy new twelve-tentacled Evangeliojaeger of spinning clockwork and electromechanical contraptions. He walked up beside the table, his deformity now on full display: His body was now fully twice as thick depth-wise as it had been, as were his arms and legs. And protruding out from behind his back . . . a misshapen, teardrop-like, hammer-like hump. The Evangeliojaeger didn’t hide or cover-up any of this as much as it did emphasize it, and his twelve mechanical tentacles, she saw, weren’t a feature of the Evangeliojaeger — as the older, six-tentacle design had been with his old Evangeliojaeger — but were in fact a feature of his anatomy that the new Evangeliojaeger merely augmented and folded into its design. His inhuman face remained the same, though: Barely any of his white wisps of hair left upon his head; huge, cat-like eyes; barely any nose to speak of; pale skin, with almost a greenish tint to it; thin, pursed lips; the enlarged cranium, to hold an enlarged brain, with thinning skin surrounding it, the blood vessels clearly visible. He smiled a vicious grin at her and spoke.
“I see that we’re awake, and that we’re all out of snappy rejoinders,” he said.
“Well, give me a minute, would you?” she said. “I’m rubbish with rejoinders this soon after regaining consciousness.”
“Don’t worry . . . you’re not to have it for very long,” he said. “I have plans for you. But first, let’s try this the easy way. Where is the Transcendence Engine . . . what you call the Tesseract Reactor?”
“Ah-ah,” she said. “Quid pro quo, Dr. Lecter. First you answer a question that’s been buggin’ the ever-lovin’ crap outta me for a while. How did you even find out about the Tesseract Reactor? It’s a closely-guarded corporate secret of Mechanology that the outside world doesn’t even know exists.”
“Fair enough, I’ll tell you,” he said, and nodded. He began to fiddle with the items on a tray that sat near the table. It was filled with surgical tools and several pieces of strange technology. And, oddly, a NeuroBand Headset. What was that doing there? He continued: “Viktor has — well, had; there won’t be much left of Viktor very soon, sadly — a source inside your company. She’s very loyal to him. Well, was. Because Viktor made her what she is today. Oh, your computer scientists created her, but Viktor gave her life.”
Dizzy sighed, and rolled her eyes. “Frakkin’ Astrid. Of course.”
He grinned again. Gods, what a creepy sight. “Ah, I see the two of you have met. How nice. Yes, Astrid. You see,” he sighed, “you must understand, Weatherspark . . . this is all so much bigger than you and I and our little feud.”
“Explain it to me then,” she said. She glanced at the restraints. “It’s not like I’m goin’ anywhere.”
“Very well,” he said, and he began to circle the table as he talked. “I will. When I was first . . . born . . . all those years ago, I knew I was destined for something greater than simply protecting Viktor from the emotional trauma you and your father delivered unto him, and revenging Anastasia’s demise upon you. Yes, that too, of course, but still, something greater. So I continued Anastasia’s work, as you know . . . researching, searching for a way to take humanity to the next level of its evolutionary destiny, and the next level beyond that, without waiting for Mother Nature and her millions of years’ worth of work to do the trick. And then three years ago, I found Jetta . . . She was quite happy, living away from me and Viktor . . . I pretended to be Viktor to win her trust. And then, one day, I overpowered her . . . Drugged her . . . And took her back to the house, where I locked her up, and began experimenting on her.”
“You frakkin’ bastard!” cried Dizzy. She struggled in her restraints. Oh if she hadn’t been tied down, and had been in her Evangeliojaeger! She wanted so badly to get up off the table and belt him one. Gods damn him! Jetta. Poor, dear Jetta. Dizzy hadn’t seen her in so many years, and now she found out this asshole had abducted her and done unspeakable things to her! Oh how she longed to rise up off this table and kick his ass! Maybe even do what she hadn’t been able to do before — and take him out once and for all.
“It was difficult,” Ravenkroft went on, with a heavy sigh — the bastard, what did he have to sigh about? — “keeping all this a secret from Viktor. He never even suspected I was keeping her in the house. Neither did Astrid, thank the gods, or else I would’ve been exposed straightaway. But, anyway: The experiments. I had, earlier in my . . . existence . . . happened upon a most amazing fact: That there exist, out there in the wild, actual, real-to-the-touch . . .
. I know it sounds . . . well, downright laughable, to your scientist’s ears. But it’s the truth, Weatherspark. And I speak to you now as a fellow scientist. There are such things as Vampires out there, in the world. Real ones. But they’re not the undead, and they’re not supernatural beings; they are . . . an evolutionary offshoot of Humanity, or so it would seem. It took me risking getting killed — fed upon as prey, in fact — but I managed to make contact with one of them . . . A Vampire whom I found out goes by the name Krycek. During the struggle for my life — which I nearly didn’t escape — I managed to obtain a syringe of his blood. After my escape, I came back to my laboratory and analyzed it. I used my equipment, and Viktor’s genius — poor Viktor, he was always so helpful, when prodded — to deconstruct and . . . improve . . . the genetic code I found within it. And oh, what miracles were there! This, I thought, was what I was looking for — the next phase, the next leap in human evolution! Just a few tweaks, a few improvements, and it would be just the thing! So after I toyed with it — after I made a few improvements — I injected Jetta with it, and waited. And to my astonishment, she became . . . something wonderful. A creature to end all other creatures. An amazing, beautiful, perfect predator. I had astounded even myself. I kept her there for a while, testing her . . . until she escaped. That was last night. But what matters most — and what is relevant to this story — is that the way the Vampire DNA had been rewritten from Human DNA — the way in which it had been changed, evolved away from its Human roots — could not have been achieved through ordinary evolutionary processes. That is, it couldn’t have occurred by Humanity simply adapting to new circumstances, genes being selectively bred, and mutation, the way ordinary ’evolution’ is supposed to work over thousands or millions of years. It was too radically different from ordinary Human DNA. And there was no reason for it to exist. None whatsoever. Therefore, no evolutionary process could have produced it. So how did it come to be? Ah, that was the question.”
“I take it,” said Dizzy — Gods, did he ever love to hear himself talk! — “that this long-arse monologue actually has a point somewhere buried in it? And hopefully, an ending? If you’re gonna continue on like this, you could at least be a dearheart and fetch me some popcorn. Oh wait! I can’t eat it. And have I mentioned my arms are tired? Yeah. That.”
“All in good time,” he said. “But where was I? Oh yes. Jetta, and the Vampire genetics. Yes. I suspected that some outside force had been involved in the creation of the Vampires’ genetic code. So I began doing research. It wasn’t easy. The Vampires have worked very hard to conceal their existence from us. Very hard indeed. Their society — they call it the Vampire Kingdom — has existed for over five thousand years, mostly in secret, and totally veiled to mortal eyes. But there have been accounts written down of it. If you know where to look. It began with Atlantis.”
“Aw crap,” said Dizzy, rolling her eyes. “Why do I feel a history lesson coming on?”
“Do you want to know my motivations before I scramble your mind and extract what I need to know, and then kill you, or don’t you?”
She sighed, and kept looking over the room for details pertinent to planning some sort of escape. And, pretty much resigned to the fact that she was going to have to endure this anyway, she said, “Yeah, yeah. I guess so. Go on.”
“Atlantis,” he said, “was real.”
“Right,” said Dizzy. “Pull the other one, Rave.”
“Although Astrid doesn’t like me,” he said, visibly irritated — good, she thought — “she will do whatever Viktor asks of her, and so I had him ask her to hack into the Vatican’s library of forbidden texts. She found out all of what I’m about to tell you. The realm of Atlantis — which was real, I tell you — came to an end in 3,036 B.C., but it didn’t sink; it was somehow obliterated from the face of the planet via a different cataclysm. The civilization on Atlantis dated back to the time before the previous Extinction Event . . . its peoples were holdovers from the First People, the Humans who existed on Earth two million years prior to the current incarnation of Homo sapiens sapiens. Their level of technology was staggering. But they were few, alone on the planet; there was something wrong with their reproductive rate due to exposure to the radiation from the reactors that powered their cities, and their population was dwindling. Accounts are sketchy at best, but this is what I managed to glean, you understand. Just before the Cataclysm that wiped them out — my thought is it was probably a meteor — somewhere around 3,100 B.C., the scientists on Atlantis knew that the Cataclysm was approaching. So they made plans for their remaining populace to escape. Not to another continent on the planet — because they knew that there were far less civilized races busy roaming, farming, and hunting everywhere around them — but to a parallel Earth, in a neighboring universe. So they built what they called ‘the Waybridge.’ A portal that would, theoretically, open a doorway into a parallel universe so that they could make their escape. But when they opened it, they got more than they bargained for. As it turned out, they hadn’t constructed a doorway to a parallel universe after all, but instead, a portal to a veritable ‘hell dimension’ filled with ferocious, insubstantial creatures called the Draketh, which served a race of godlike master-beings called the Eidolon.”
“These Atlantean scientists sucked at their jobs,” observed Dizzy.
“The Eidolon,” he continued, ignoring her, “promised them safe passage across the five-dimensional bulk and into their desired parallel world, if they would allow the Draketh through to their world in order to guide them across.”
“Please tell me they weren’t also really stupid,” said Dizzy, “in addition to sucking at their jobs?”
“The Atlantean scientists agreed.”
“Yep, they were stupid.”
“The Draketh swarmed through the Waybridge and into the Human world. They were frightening beings . . . octopus-like, with bat-wings, they flew through the air like winged nightmares, terrorizing the laboratory and the scientists and the Atlantean Centurion guards and Clerics there. They wrapped their tentacles around the faces of their victims, and their victims fell to the ground, screaming behind the masks of the creatures attached to their heads. The creatures themselves died soon after grappling onto their victims. The scientists managed to close the Waybridge before any more Draketh could get through. Via painful surgery, the dead Draketh were removed from the victims, who regained consciousness a short while later. At first, it appeared nothing was wrong with them save for the curious wounds on their necks. But then, things began to change. The affected Atlanteans first developed a sensitivity to — and then an absolute mortal vulnerability to — sunlight. One of the Clerics, trapped outside the shelter of the hospital one day, simply burst into flames and collapsed into a pile of dust and ash. Then came their sensitivity to — and, also a mortal vulnerability to — silver. Exposure to any amount of it on their bare skin left a severe burn; it was thought — perhaps known — that even a small amount ingested or injected would kill them. Then came their revulsion at regular food, in concordance with at first their manic fascination with — and later, their desire and hunger for — human blood. They began to live on blood, and blood alone. Their teeth changed, to become fangs. Their eyes adapted, to see better at night. And they developed superhuman abilities: Each of them had the strength of twelve ordinary men; each could heal from wounds extraordinarily quickly; each could move faster than the blink of an eye — one could merely twitch one’s eye, and they would be across the room before one even knew it — and, their reflexes had the quickness and agility of acrobatic cats on wires. And, they did not age.”
“So you’re tellin’ me that Vampires — frickin’ Vampires, the kind I’ve fought on the streets — come from Atlantis?”
“Not just that. I’m telling you the story of the Eidolon. The true masters of the Human Race. They slumber in their home dimension, just outside of our spacetime continuum, waiting for the portal to be reopened. And that’s what the Tesseract Reactor — the Transcendence Engine — will do, Weatherspark. It will re-open the portal. It will be the new Waybridge. And in doing so, it will serve me . . . and Ravenkroft . . . and my other . . . constituent . . . For if we control the Waybridge, we will be gods. We will be the masters of the Eidolon, who in turn will be the masters of Humanity. Don’t you see? We will control Humanity’s forward Evolution from this point forward. With the Transcendence Engine in our grasp, we will control the Gateway through which the True Gods will once again return and conquer mankind. And thus, we will control them. And, what is more . . . I now possess the secret of the Vampires’ genetic code, and the means to transform a Human into a Vampire. So I will control the direction and the flow of evolution as well. This is my destiny. And you will help me achieve it. So far you have stood in my way. Obstructed me. Challenged me. Well, no more. Now you will help me. Now you will assist me. Now, you will be of use.”
“Ha!” she laughed. “Not bloody likely! And just what is this ‘we’ nonsense you keep spouting? Who’s your partner in crime, Ravenkroft? Dracula? Frankenstein? The First Evil? Darth Vader, maybe? Or perhaps Queen Chrysalis? Skeletor? C’mon Ravenkroft, spill it!”
“Stop calling me Ravenkroft!” he yelled, and pounded his fist on the table. “I am more than that now! More! Look upon me, and behold the future!”
Dizzy watched as his Evangeliojaeger split open, its pieces retracting around him, the same way hers did whenever she disengaged it. And as he stepped out of it — or more like lumbered out of it, with his now-hunched frame and now-misshapen legs — Dizzy’s eyes grew wide. Jesus Hooper Humperdinck Christ, what had he done to himself? What had — ? And then it hit her. Of course. What she had feared all along . . . what she had told Zoë about during their car ride to her house . . . Aliens. The aliens had come, at last. And they had already made First Contact, and it hadn’t been the peaceful, cozy ceremony she’d always envisioned, with the friendly E.T. raising its hand in a tentative gesture of peace and the hesitant Earthling doing the same, and a long a prosperous future spreading out before them in the awkward silence that followed. No. The aliens had landed, and somehow, one of them had grafted itself onto Ravenkroft’s back . . . it’s tentacles sprouting out disgustingly from his backside, its arms and legs fused to his . . . what remained of its head sticking out from between his shoulder blades . . . God, the enormously horrific deformity of it shocked her, appalled her . . . The sheer . . . She hated the bitter, prejudiced, and toxic taste of the word “alienness” on her mind’s tongue, but there it was: The sheer alienness of what she was seeing disgusted her, the twistedness of the experiment he’d undertaken with his own flesh, his own body. Given that fresh hell, what would a creature like this do — or not hesitate to do — to someone else? To Jetta? To her?
For the second time since she had awakened, her heartbeat raced; her pulse quickened; she breathed a little faster and more shallowly. Dear gods, maybe she had miscalculated here. Maybe now he was more dangerous than he had ever been. Maybe this time, she wasn’t going to make it out of the encounter alive.
Plus, she’d now seen him naked. Eww. Yuck. Some things, once seen, could not be frakkin’ unseen, man.
Ravenkroft stepped back into his Evangeliojaeger and it closed around him once more. He raised his tentacles into the air. Each of them picked up a different surgical instrument from the tray beside the table.
“Now, Weatherspark,” he said, “you will tell me the location of the Transcendence Engine.”
She swallowed the lump in her throat. “No can do, Evil E.T. Sorry.”
He smiled that wretched, creepy smile of his again. Gods, she wished he would stop doing that.
“You’re frightened,” he said. “Your heart rate is elevated. Your breathing ragged.”
“Well hell yes it is!” she cried. “Wouldn’t yours be? Well wait, I guess not. I’m talking to the idiot who just up and decided it’d be a great idea to graft an alien critter onto his backside. Didn’t that thing come with a warning label that read ‘Caution: Will frak up your brain even more than it’s already frakked up?’ ‘Cause I think it should have.”
He chuckled. “Fear makes your mind careless. Undisciplined. Just the way I need it for this to work properly.”
He reached down with one of his tentacles and picked up his version of Gadget’s Dr. Manhatten Helmet. The one that had been struck by lightning from the thundercloud Gadget had conjured during their fight in the hotel’s Grand Hall. Still smiling, he picked it up and locked it into place on top of his Evangeliojaeger’s helmet. Its circuits lit up.
“No . . .” she breathed.
“Yes,” he hissed, and closed his eyes, and appeared to concentrate.
Dizzy blinked. Whoa! What the hell! She suddenly felt something . . . odd going on in her head. What the . . . ? It was as if someone had stuck their finger all the way into her ear and was flicking it around in her brain, twitching it back and forth across the neurons; flashes of memories besieged her. Here was her fifth birthday party, with balloon animals and a cheesecake with candles on it; she loved cheesecake, and suddenly, she could taste it, in her mouth . . . the sensation was so real she licked her lips. And then — bang! She jumped a little, hearing a firecracker go off somewhere to her left, and it was the fourth of July, and she was nineteen years old . . . a year after the events with Anastasia . . . and then there was her mom . . . Amelia . . . Her eyes, so crystal blue, a blue you could drown in . . . She shook her head, and blinked furiously to clear away the splotches of color that filled her field of vision. Next, she was standing in the grand foyer of Mechanology headquarters, a laptop case slung over her shoulder, and dressed in her usual business-casual clothes, her heart beating wildly, her nerves frayed, because it was her first day at work at her father’s company . . .
“Stop this!” she said. “Stop it now!”
“Almost there,” he muttered. “Almost there . . .”
Mechanology. The Special Projects Divison, her pride and joy. Next, she was outside, on the roof of the parking garage next to the Renaissance Regency Hotel And Convention Center. She was locking the Fangirl, punching in the security code into her smartwatch. The force-field went up around the vehicle, and she imagined the Tesseract Reactor in the trunk, safe and sound . . .
No! No, no, no!
In a flash, she bumped her head on the cold table, and was back where she had been. Restrained, and a prisoner. Gods-damn it! She had given it to him!
“My thanks,” he said, still smiling, as he unhooked the Psionic Device from his helmet and set it back on the tray. “You’ve been most helpful, Weatherspark.”
“Frak you!”
“Now, now, language,” he said, and laughed.
She struggled in her restraints again, but it did no good; the steel that held her was just as strong as it had been a few minutes ago. All she did was bump her head again. Ow. Frak.
“So now what,” she said. “You’re going to kill me?”
“Oh no,” he said. “I have much grander plans for you, dearest Desirée. “
“Gee, how’d I guess that.”
“Much grander plans indeed. You see, the Eidolon in their true form are horrific beasts. They would tower over this world and reduce it to ash with their gaze if I let them come through into this world in their true form. But perhaps I can mitigate that if I bring their essence through, and contain it somehow. By binding it to a Human form . . . such as . . . well, you. I’m afraid there’ll be little left of your mind, or soul — if such a thing even exists — and your biology will have to change, of course. Much like mine has. But you will be so much more than simply Human. Why, you will even be a leap beyond me! But you will be controllable, manageable. That’s what matters.”
“And tell me, Rasputin,” she asked, “once you’ve called down the Ogdru-Jahad into my hot and nubile form, just what makes you think you’ll be able to control them?”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
He broke into a full-fledged belly laugh, his eyebrows going up. “I don’t!” He cackled laughter. “I don’t know! That’s what makes it such a grand science experiment! Now come on, Weatherspark — admit it. Isn’t the scientist in you the least bit thrilled and intrigued by this? The prospect of it . . . and oh, the glory of it! The glory if we succeed! Think of that! You and I will be the shapers of mankind’s final destiny! The architects of humanity’s fate! All I need to do now is use the Tesseract — the Transcendence Engine — to build the . . . oh, what should I call it . . . Ah! Yes! The Psychotronic Transcendimensional Transmogrifier! Ha, ha-ha! Yes! That’s what I’ll call it! Now tell me, Weatherspark — tell me honestly! — tell me that the prospect of all of this — the science of it; the rush of the potential discoveries — doesn’t it just thrill you to the bone!”
“Jesus, you really are bat-shit crazy,” she whispered.
He came around the table and leaned in close to her. “No,” he said. “I’m possessed of a brilliance you cannot possibly comprehend! I see that now. You are to me as are the ‘Mundanes’ of the world to you. You simply cannot understand me, because you lack the eyes to see the incandescence with which my star burns!”
“What I lack is the mobility to get up off this table and kick the ever-lovin’ snot out of you.”
“Ah-ah, now, now,” he said, stroking her purple hair with his gauntlet. She flinched away from his touch as much as she could. “There’s no need for violence anymore. That’s all behind us now, isn’t it? In fact, you’re going to help me. Yes. I see that, too. You’re going to help me build my Transmogrifier.”
“Right. And if I refuse?”
He smiled again, and this time, he spoke very softly, his cat-like eyes staring into hers, unblinking.
“Let me explain where you are,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “You are on a spaceship. My spaceship, now. Its inside is bigger than its outside, by way of dimensional engineering. And it is currently parked on the rooftop of the Renaissance Regency Hotel And Convention Center. And its weapons systems are fully operational. With the touch of one button, I could take off, and destroy the entire hotel. I could vaporize it. Do you understand? I could fire the weapons onboard this ship and reduce the whole building to a pile of fire, ash, and rubble within minutes. Your . . . friends . . . are still there. As are hundreds — if not over a thousand — innocent people. And I will do it — I will murder every last one of them, men, women, and children, and you know I’ll do it, too — if you do not cooperate with me. I can even send the command mentally, using the same device I just read your mind with. Now. Do you. Understand me?”
Dizzy gulped. Yep, she believed him, alright. He would. And maybe if she helped him build whatever mad device he had in mind, it would buy her some time to help her think of a way to escape. Or buy time for the rest of the gang to get their asses in gear and come after her. Yeah. Playing along was definitely the safest bet. Besides. Like a gods-damned moron, she had let him get hold of the Reactor’s location, allowed him to pull it right out of her head! Stupid, stupid, stupid!
“Alright,” she said at last. “I’ll help you build it. But fair warning: I’m still gonna kill your arse when this is all over, Ravenkroft. I promise you that.”
In response, he only smiled. “We’ll see, Weatherspark.” He turned and walked away, toward the camera-shutter-like doors, which irised-open at his approach. He called back over his shoulder, “We’ll just see!”
And so, Dizzy Weatherspark began to aid the man who had once been Dr. Viktor Arkenvalen — but who was now Lord Ravenkroft Evolutior, almost through and through — build the machine that was, theoretically, meant to lead to her doom. Viktor watched through the view-screen in his TARDIS-shaped hideout inside Ravenkroft’s mind as Dizzy walked around the med-bay of the alien ship in her Evangeliojaeger, its weapons systems and force-fields disabled — with four of Ravenkroft’s bizarre, anthropomorphic-animal-like Cybermechazoid guards pointing their Disruptophazers at her at all times — and hammered, soldered circuits, smelted metal, hauled components, tightened nuts, wrenched apart pieces of the ship, screwed screws, bolted bolts, forged metal pieces, and constructed pieces of the large machine as it took shape before his eyes. The Cybermechazoids also “helped,” serving as muscle to lift and carry, hammer and weld.
Meanwhile, as he watched her, Viktor fixed a bag of microwave popcorn — he had found it in one of the TARDIS’s cupboards below decks, in a room where the Alien Vines had not intruded too deeply — and lamented that he hadn’t installed any seats near the TARDIS’s main control console where the view-screens were located. Then he remembered that the entire TARDIS was his own delusion, purely a mental construct; and so he concentrated hard, and imagined some seats . . . and then he sat down, munched his imaginary popcorn, and continued to watch.
Slowly, the machine began to take form. First, Ravenkroft — or as Dizzy now called him, “Ravenkroft Two-Point-Oh” — went to retrieve the Tesseract Reactor from Dizzy’s vehicle. He made quite a show of parading it in front of her while she lay there on the table, a revolting display of sore-winner’s syndrome, in Viktor’s opinion. But Dizzy appeared to weather through it, though she did roll her eyes a few times. (In fact, in his opinion, if eye-rolling had been an Olympic sport, Dizzy Weatherspark could’ve won the gold after that.) She then showed him how it worked . . . with his Psionic Device at the ready, she showed him how it responded to Psi Forces . . . How it created energy fields, time vortexes, and kinetic fields of force and motion when exposed to them; and how it apparently could be made to interface with ordinary Earth tech — and tech beyond that — using cybernetic data transmission via electromagnetic fields. Ravenkroft 2.0 proved ecstatic when he made this “discovery.”
Viktor watched, nauseated to his core, as the monster forced Dizzy to help him brainstorm a way to connect the Tesseract Reactor — oh, excuuuse me, “the Transcendence Engine,” he smarmed in his head — to the hyperspace engines of the Visitor’s starship. Careful to not allow her to sabotage him, and Ravenkroft checked her work every step of the way.
Well, he’s careful, I’ll give him that, thought Viktor. He slumped in front of the TARDIS’s main control console. Dammit. It had been two days, and he still hadn’t managed to regain any kind of control over his own mind or body. He reached forward and randomly flicked a few switches. Nothing. The controls were dead. He concentrated hard on the main Departure Lever, and then pulled back on it. He had found that by doing this, he could engage the TARDIS’s “engines,” and could visit different “memories” that he — and Ravenkroft — possessed, and relive them in third person point-of-view . . . but could do little else. He would figure it out eventually, though. He was damned if he would ever give up. He glanced around at the disgusting, oozing vines that had invaded the TARDIS. They were growing. Ever so slightly, ever so little by little, they were curling and writhing and growing, taking over more and more . . . Soon, there would be nothing but them. And he too would be but a memory.
Next — as Viktor watched, munched popcorn, and pretended not to watch the vines grow — came Ravenkroft and Dizzy’s assembly — well, the partial assembly, and the radical redesign — of the Physion Bio-Printer. Instead of creating tissue, and perhaps even living organisms, as Viktor had intended his redesign of the machine to be used for, this remodeling of Zoë Deschain’s masterpiece of biotechnology involved a way to reengineer the biology of an already-grown lifeform with all its tissues still intact . . . specifically, a lifeform of the human variety. The central sarcophagus-like chamber of the Bio-Printer now occupied the center of the med-bay, and everything now fed into it: The warp-power conduit coils from the hyperspace engines; the magnetic-field couplings that surrounded the Tesseract Reactor; the data cables that led to the various hacks into the ship’s photonic computer core; the cables that led to and from that to the small NeuroBand Transmitter; as well as all the pipes, funnels, rubber tubes, distillation rigs, vacuum chambers, tubules, valves, pipe junctions, and glass condensers that made up the rest of the Bio-Printer’s mechanics: About three dozen beakers, volumetric flasks, and hefty bags of liquid, along with several large tanks of volatile biogenic material taken from Viktor’s basement laboratory. The robotic arms from above the med-bay worktable had also found a place there, too, mounted just above the sarcophagus and connected into it. As had the NeuroBand Headset — it sat inside the glass crypt, right at eye-level, attached to the lid, so that it would fit down over the face and head of whosoever lay within. Viktor wondered if Dizzy pictured herself lying down inside of it . . . for soon, he knew she would have to.
Then, it seemed that no sooner had he mused on this — and no sooner was he out of popcorn — than the moment of truth had arrived. The Cybermechazoid guards aimed their guns at Dizzy, and Ravenkroft said, his voice ringing crystal clear over the speakers next to the view-screen —
“Well, dearest Desirée, I’d say that about does it, as they say. Magnificent, isn’t it? Simply magnificent. Congratulations on achieving your greatest breakthrough. Quite possibly the greatest breakthrough in the history of all of science itself. And upon being — in just a few moments — its first test subject.”
“Aren’t you suffering from a case of premature e-jubilation?” said Dizzy. “I mean, before you congratulate me, don’t you even want to test it first, before the big finale with me?”
“No need,” he said. “I know it will work. The Eidolon are guiding me. I cannot fail.”
“How exactly did you meet these ‘Eidolon,’ anyway?” asked Dizzy, narrowing her eyes at him. “How the heckin’ balls did you even wind up all mixed up in this ‘alien invasion’ shite to begin with, in the first place?”
Viktor leaned in closer. Even he didn’t know the answer to this question.
“Ah, well,” said Ravenkroft 2.0, “that’s a very interesting story. And I see no need to keep it from you, since you won’t remember any of this anyway once the . . . procedure is over. Remember when I told you that I met a Vampire and barely escaped with my life? Well. The Vampire got his fangs into me and fed from me. And I learned a most remarkable thing. When a Vampire feeds on a victim, there is an . . . exchange. Not just of blood, but also of . . . memories. Experiences, images, words . . . and knowledge. Normally Vampires drain their victims to the point of death, so they don’t have to worry about outsiders — Mortals, in other words — learning any of their secrets. Oh, I’m sure a few slip through the cracks here and there . . . and then there are clubs — all private affairs — where Humans go to be fed upon and slip into the ecstatic bliss of the Vampiric Embrace for a while . . . but other than that, the Vampires keep a tight lid on the inner-workings of their vast and complex Shadow Society. When I was fed upon, I was given a glimpse into their world. And one of the things I saw . . . was their god. It’s name . . . is Orogrü-Nathräk. It came from the stars and blasted through the dimension barrier in 1909 over Tunguska, Russia . . . a beautiful, gargantuan creature of immense power and majesty . . . a master-feit of cosmic evolution . . .” He gasped, enraptured in his own tale-telling. “A god to end all gods. An Elder god. One of the Eidolon. And from within that memory, it . . . called to me. Reached out to me in my dreams — or what passed for my dreams, whenever Viktor was awake and in control — and calling out my name, teaching me . . . guiding me . . . calling me to serve it. And so I did. It was the Eidolon, Orogrü-Nathräk, who asked me to retrieve the Tesseract Reactor from you, Weatherspark. It was in service to him that I attempted to steal it from Mechanology labs. And later, to extort it from you. And now that I have it, Orogrü-Nathräk . . . and all those kin to it . . . will serve me.” He clenched his raised fist and, though Viktor couldn’t see it from this angle, he was fairly certain that Ravenkroft 2.0 smiled a devious smile.
“Well. If that doesn’t pass for rat-frak crazy,” said Dizzy, “I don’t know what does.”
“You have no respect for anyone, or anything, Weatherspark,” said Ravenkroft, and there seemed to be — what? — genuine sadness in his voice?
“Oh no,” she retorted. “I have respect for lots of things. Just not you, or your lunatic ambition for world domination. I have respect for love. And honor. And decency. And kindness. Yeah, most of all, kindness. Y'see, I swore an oath to myself when I first put weapons on this suit. And that oath went something like this: ‘I will never be cruel nor cowardly; I’ll never give up, and I’ll never give in.’ But you’re the opposite of that oath. You’re cruel, and you’re cowardly. And you gave up a long time ago. You gave up on decency, and honor, and love, and kindness. And you gave in, to madness, deceit, treachery, cruelty, malice, and evil, and hate. You’re a madman with weapons of mass destruction. You’re everything every comic book hero has ever fought against, come vividly to life in the real world, only for you, there’s no redemption possible. There’s no sympathetic backstory explaining how you got from point A to point B. There’s no winning you back to the side of light and goodness. You’re just rotten to the core, and pure frakkin’ evil, Ravenkroft. And so is whatever thing you merged minds and consciousness with. I used to long for the day when we’d meet other intelligent life in the universe. But I don’t anymore. I grieve over the fact that what we’ve met, met you first. Because you’re the worst example of the worst the Human race has to offer. You could be so much more, but you choose to be what you are. And that is so, so sad. So I grieve. I grieve for you, and for the world you want to create. I beg ya, Rave. Don’t do this. Don’t listen to that . . . thing in your brain. You can turn this around. You can still choose.”
Ravenkroft simply stood there, scrutinizing her for a moment. Viktor held his breath.
“You see this face?” said Ravenkroft, pointing to himself. “This is the face of someone . . . who didn’t listen to a word of what you just said. Now. Get in the Transmogrifier’s Chrysalis Capsule, Weatherspark. It’s time that your . . . Metamorphosis began.”
The Cybermechazoids marched toward Dizzy a few paces, their Disruptophazers leveled at her. She gave them a steely-eyed once over, her fists clenched.
“This isn’t over,” she said, as she opened the door of the glass sarcophagus at the center of the Psychotronic Transcendimensional Transmogrifier. She eyed the Cybermechazoids and their weapons. “You win this time. But I’ll be back. Depulso Evangeliojaeger.”
The Evangeliojaeger detached itself from her body piece by piece and folded up into its usual suitcase. Dizzy collapsed into the waiting arms of one of the probably-smelly Cybermechazoids and it carried her to the sarcophagus. She slipped inside, and never taking her eyes off of Ravenkroft, she said one one more time:
“This isn’t over.”
Viktor watched, his heart sinking as the NeuroBand Headset was lowered over her face, and she laid there, her arms at her sides. She called out one more time: “This isn’t over, Ravenkroft! It isn’t over.”
The lid of the sarcophagus closed over her body, and she was gone — sealed into the machine.
And with that, Viktor slumped back in his chair, and let his empty popcorn back fall to the floor. The show was over. Tears streamed down his face. Could this situation possibly get any worse?
Then, he saw that it could. Ravenkroft walked over and sat down in a curvy, modernist-styled chair he had brought from the basement of the house on Mystic Lake, and took out another NeuroBand Headset. He placed his Psionic Device on top of his head, and plugged a cable into the side of it . . . and into the side of the NeuroBand Headset, which he had seen Dizzy modifying earlier . . . No . . .
“No,” whispered Viktor. “He’s going in with her . . . what the hell . . . ?”
Apparently, this device Ravenkroft had built required him to enter the NeuroScape with Dizzy, in order to somehow act as a “pilot” or “controller” for the process he had initiated. Viktor watched as Ravenkroft leaned back in the chair, and the NeuroBand Headset sparkled into life, its status lights all coming on and going green, just as The Psychotronic Transcendimensional Transmogrifier suddenly came to life. Ravenkroft put on his NeuroBand Headset just as the one in the Sarcophagus latched onto Dizzy’s face. All the beakers, flasks, fluid tanks, and glassware began to boil, bubble, gurgle, sizzle, and steam. Clouds of vapor, smoke, and gas curled up through the air around all the equipment. Bright blue electrical arcs zapped between antennae and electrode. Gauges rose and fell, and dials, wheels, and gears turned. The warp-power conduit coils lit up with a fierce purple-white light, and the power conduits began to glow a soft reddish color. Even within the TARDIS, safe inside this corner of Ravenkroft’s consciousness, walled off from the rest of it, Viktor heard the colossally-powerful engines of the alien ship revving up to full capacity.
It had begun. Out there, somewhere, inside the pocket universe within the alien ship, the portal to the Eidolon’s Home Dimension was opening, just a tiny crack in the cosmic wall . . . and something was peeking through, staring back at humanity with ravenous hunger blazing in its eyes . . .
The Ravenkroft Hybrid sat in a lotus position, relaxed his hands on his kneecaps, and opened his mind as the Psionic Device kicked into action, and the NeuroScape enveloped him; there was a moment of disorientation as he fell through an empty abyss, and then a new world dissolved into existence around him as his Avatar popped into being just outside of his Virtual Laboratory, which Ravenkroft — the old Ravenkroft, one of his constituent life forms — had forced that damnable virtual lifeform Astrid to construct for him over the past year or so. He had to admit — she had done a fine job.
The outer hallway that led to the Laboratory was beautiful in its own right. A work of art. A series of flaming torches, hung in sconces on the now-visible walls, ignited themselves, bursting into fiery life in sequential order as the hallway lit-up with the warmth of their glow. The hallway arched above him, like some fantasy castle’s entryway, about eight meters wide, its flooring a made of porcelain, checkerboard tiles, alternating black and white, with alchemical symbols etched into their surfaces, the flooring thus forming equations, of a sort. He had fashioned the walls from a greenish-blue glass, the iron sconces bolted through them, and had written even more equations on the glass — some simple, some complex, all of them containing alien-looking glyphs and symbols, some of them of occult origin. The hallway continued on for some length, and at the end of it, there was another set of iron double-doors, these leading to the Lab.
Ravenkroft strode forward, and stuck his Avatar’s finger into the tiny concave indentation in the center of the clockwork pieces mounted to the huge iron door that sat on the left. He felt a tiny pinprick, and then the clockworks began to spin, the gears all turning each other rapidly, orbiting around one another and spinning themselves into place with a whirring noise. The double-doors yawned open with a great eldritch creaking and groaning noise, and then stood wide, revealing the Lab.
It was a large, circular room, roughly twenty meters in diameter. The polished, jet-black obsidian floor, which spiraled out from the center of the room in the spiral pattern of a whirlpool, with various alchemical and Enochian symbols carved into the tiles, gleamed in the light. The rounded, cherry-stained wood walls shined, the machines around their perimeter — dynamos; vacuum-tube amplifiers; man-sized, ribbed insulators; gauge, valve, and switch-boxes; mammoth, copper-wrapped Tesla-coils and gothic, Strickfadenesque electrical devices; cables that dangled from a central hub mounted to the ceiling — almost all fashioned from clean, shining steel, crystal, ivory, obsidian, cobalt, iron, and porcelain. And in the center, side-by-side, stood an operating table, featuring padded restraints and a beanie-like metal cap — festooned with wires and tubes — fastened to a stereotactic surgical device laid out horizontally, designed to hold a human head in the proper position whilst a patient lie on their back. Just as one such patient lay there right now. The operating table lay horizontally, facing the curved wall, where, near to that, there stood a gigantic electrical transformer topped with two high-powered Tesla-coils; on the front panel stood three large, electromechanical switches, each one topped with a circular power-gauge and a small oscilloscope screen, with the third switch the largest, and set off to one side by itself, all numbered in sequence using Roman numerals, with the last switch also labeled with the words, “THE WORKS.” The machines were, of course, all Metaphors wired to Effects within the NeuroScape; they were programmed to be scientific takes on the esoteric functions of the various spheres of the Cabalistic “Tree of Life,” the occult symbol that explained the nature of the cosmos and creation itself as a series of emanations of both divine and human energies.
“I suppose this is your idea of a joke,” said Dizzy, who lay on the operating table. “Right? Bring me into the NeuroScape so you can do . . . what? Torture me with bad puns? Assail me with knock-knock jokes? Bore me with your Avatar’s conventional . . .” She turned her head — as much as the stereotactic device would allow her to — and then said, “Okay, even I have to admit. Your Avatar is pretty badass. But you’re still a vile asshole, Ravenkroft. And you’re still a cruel coward of a bastard. And I don’t see the frakking point of all this. Why a frakking NeuroScape simulation? What, are you too much of a frakkin’ pussy to frakkin’ rape me in the real world, so you have to do it here?”
In response, he only smiled at her at first. So weak. So vulnerable. He knew she did not mean that literally, sexually . . . but had he not better things to be about tonight . . . Well . . . Here, he wasn’t ashamed of his appearance or his impulses. Here, he was beautiful. Majestic. At two-point-two meters tall and with a positively massive, broad-shouldered, muscular build, his Avatar was the epitome of masculine virtue. At least, Human masculine virtue . . . But that would have to suffice. Its dark purple skin gleamed in the lab’s fluorescent lighting, with crystalline glimmers shimmering throughout its surface here and there. Its eyes, with their rainbow-colored sclera, with black irises, were deep-set in a hardened face with a strong jawline that said this was a man — well, Alien-Human Hybrid — that brooked no compromises, and would never back down from any challenge. He had sharpened the horns that grew from his head, Satanic and menacing, to points that could pierce steel; and his armor — black steel, and filigreed to a ridiculous amount; his collar, vambraces, and pauldrons all flared out from his body at sharp angles — protecting everything but his bare chest, his boots heavy with mechanics and equipped with rocket thrusters, his gauntlets robotically-augmented, his helm an eruption of metal spikes. His sword, a broad monstrosity with an ornate, black steel hilt, hung at his side, and its surface constantly burned with an ethereal blue flame. It did not — could not — burn him . . . But his enemies, when unleashed . . . that was another matter entirely.
“No,” he replied to her. “I am here on more urgent matters than sex, I’m afraid. You see, this is just Level One, dearest Desirée. This is the level of the simulation where I will do the work of preparing your mind for the transference of the Eidolon’s consciousness into your brain . . . while in the ‘ostensibly real’ world, the Bio-Printer transfers it biological essence into your body. But in order to do that, I must plunge you one level deeper into the simulation . . . A simulation within the simulation . . . A dream, within a dream. A place where your mind can . . . Dance . . . with what is happening to it. Or what will soon be happening to it. You do remember what it was like to dance, don’t you? Of course you do. Oh! How it must pain you, to not be able to do that anymore! To not be able to ‘cut a rug,’ as the old folks say. Pity. You always were such a fine little . . . ballerina. But anyway. From here, within the first level of the simulation, I will monitor your . . . progress. As your brain and mind dance with the Eidolon . . . as they change, so too will your Avatar.”
“Ravenkroft, listen to me,” she said. And now she sounded desperate. How wonderful. He walked over to the main control panel, where the three switches were located. “Just listen. You don’t have to do this. Viktor. Think of Viktor. He’s in there, somewhere. Viktor, I know you’re in there. Viktor, I know you can hear me. I know you can. If you’re in there — if you’re in there at all — I need you to stop him. Stop him from what he’s doing. Viktor — Viktor can you hear me?”
“Viktor, I know you’re in there. Viktor, I know you can hear me. I know you can. If you’re in there — if you’re in there at all — I need you to stop him. Stop him from what he’s doing. Viktor — Viktor can you hear me?”
Viktor rocked back and forth in the chair that sat before the TARDIS main control console, and bit his knuckles and cried. Tears rolled down his face. He wanted to help — desperately! — but could not. Could not! The controls, they wouldn’t respond! Frantically, he reached forward and tried one last combination. He clicked a few buttons on the console, and adjusted a few knobs. Maybe if he targeted the motor control center of the brain. Yes, maybe that. Maybe he could get Ravenkroft to turn the dials on the control console to the wrong settings. Perhaps! There was only a slim chance . . . but a slim chance was all he needed to perhaps save Dizzy’s life . . . and with it, the lives of billions.
He nervously tapped out a sequence of commands on the computer keyboard nearest the view-screen, and threw a few more switches. The readout on the view-screen looked good so far. That gave him hope. Finally, he threw the master switch, and — yes! — he was tied into his body’s motor control cortex!
Carefully, he grasped the joystick as he watched, through the view-screen, as Ravenkroft adjusted the dials on his equipment. Just as Ravenkroft touched one of he dials, Viktor jerked the joystick to the left. Sure enough, he saw Ravenkroft . . . hesitate a moment. Then he turned the dial, and Viktor wrenched the joystick again. Ravenkroft’s hand jerked, and the dial jerked too. Ravenkroft removed his hand, surprised, and looked at it curiously, and flexed his fingers. Then he put them back on the dial, cautiously, made as if to turn it again, and then . . . left it where it was.
Yes! Success! He had gotten him to turn it to the wrong setting! Viktor tried to do it again on the next dial, and —
Suddenly, the main control console exploded in a shower of sparks and smoke beneath his hands, and Viktor stumbled backward and bumped into his chair, surprise and pain making him cry out. Tendrils of smoke rose from the control console. And then a voice echoed throughout the TARDIS control room:
“Ah-ah-ah, Viktor,” came Ravenkroft’s dulcet tone. “I’d watch that, if I were you. You’ve hung on a long time, my friend. Longer than I would’ve expected. But watch yourself. I don’t know . . . where in there . . . you are hiding . . . Or exactly what . . . you’re doing . . . But I’d stop from trying to interfere with me like that, if I were you. Just keep to your own corner of our mutual psychocosm, if you would please, until . . . well, until the inevitable happens, and it’s just me we’re left with. Goodbye now, Viktor.”
Viktor sat down in his chair, put his head in his hands, and cried. Oh god damn it! How had this ever happened? How had he let it come to this?
He wiped his face off and stared at the view-screen, where he watched, indeed, the inevitable unfold.
Ravenkroft lifted the first of the three large switches and closed the contacts. A burst of yellow sparks shot from the twin metal plates, and a hissing, buzzing sound emanated from them for a second or two; the gauge above the switch began climbing, and the small oscilloscope screen above it began working, displaying a wave that began gradually increasing in frequency and amplitude. The other machines in the lab began powering-on and cycling-up. On the operating table, Dizzy arched her back and screamed at the top of her lungs, her fists clenched so hard that blood ran from between her fingers.
Electrical sparks leapt between terminals, vacuum tubes began to glow, and the air filled with zapping static currents. A whirring noise came next, one that sounded like the turbines in a jet-engine readying for take-off. The machines all around Ravenkroft and Dizzy thrummed and rattled into life. Several Jacobs' ladders ionized the air between their spark-gaps and the sparks climbed their twin antennae, then whiffed-out as soon as they reached the top, only to start their climb from the bottom again. Bright arcs of blue lightning crashed between the Tesla coils atop of the central switch-panel transformer, and then Ravenkroft threw the second switch.
More yellow sparks flew from the switch, and Ravenkroft had to avert his eyes, as now the central cable-hub up above the table began to whir and hum as well, and began to rhythmically pulse with a sound not unlike the rattler of a snake, a crystalline "shimmering" noise not unlike those heard in 1960's-era science-fiction films whenever alien warships prowled about on Earth. The stereotactic unit also began to pulse, but with a glowing purple witch-light, almost a kind of St. Elmo's fire. Dizzy screamed again, more hysterically this time.
Ravenkroft threw the third switch, the one labeled “THE WORKS." Yellow sparks flew, and a mighty crack of lightning blasted out of the contacts. The cherry-stained walls of the place — behind the various machines — spun around, and grew dark and indistinct . . . as through a special effect in a movie and were fading to reveal beyond them a panoramic vista of deep space surrounding the lab. Various nebula and galaxies, stars, black-hole accretion discs, and multicolored planets all spun and whirled around them, just as the walls had seconds before. A powerful wind blew through the room, and lightning bolts crashed just beyond the perimeter, out in space around them as the lab appeared to "fly" through space, headed toward the gaping maw of a supermassive black hole in the distance.
Dizzy screamed a third time, and then passed out.
“'I saw, with shut eyes, but with acute mental vision,’” whispered Ravenkroft, his eyes wide as he quoted Mary Shelley, as he watched the android Alicia quiver and tic and jerk. ”’I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.’”
“’Frightful must it be,’" said Viktor, finishing the quote, “‘For supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator . . .’”