An alarm rang through empty off-white halls. A red light blinked with it, somewhat dulled with age. Grime covered the walls and plant life grew unchecked in cracks. No footprints could be found in the thick dust, save for those of small unseen animals. This ringing stirred nothing but insects, insects that had more legs than they had inches in length. The sound reverberated towards a dark room illuminated only by the red blinking alarm and a blueish light coming from rows and rows of human-sized capsules mounted on the walls.
Each capsule seemed to have been intended to be identical, but age or other factors had destroyed many of them beyond recognition. Wires and tubes lay strewn about in what was once the walkway and some capsules had even broken open completely. In the brief flashes of red light that illuminated the room, humanoid silhouettes could be seen but the blue light coming from behind them obscured their features.
One specific capsule remained more intact than others. It had been placed with specific care in the center of the room. Inside of that capsule was yet another humanoid figure just like all of the others. The blue light dimmed behind it, revealing a young man. This young man appeared to be in his mid to late twenties, but it was hard to tell in the dim lighting. Frost covered his face, obscuring his hair color and turning his skin a light blue. The frost began to fade with the dimming of the blue light and the rigidity holding the man seemed to get weaker and weaker until he slumped onto the bottom of the capsule. His knees bumped into the glass, and he slunk into fetal position. His eyelids slowly opened, showing a shockingly blue iris. The eye moved around in its socket, completely oblivious to its surroundings.
The front of the capsule hissed open to reveal the man huddled and shivering. Without the door to support him, he fell to the tiles. Before his body hit the floor, he twisted his torso in an unnatural way and landed on his still wet hands. Water sloshed onto the floor and followed the design made in the grout of the tiles. A white breath escaped from his blue lips and made a fractal pattern upon the surface of the puddle he had suspended himself above. His feet slowly explored their way out of the capsule and slipped on the cold puddle. A dry patch formed the only foothold and the man began to stand on his hands and feet, completing the strange posture of an arched dripping man. He began to shiver like a scared cat with fur bristling on its spine. His eyelids blinked out of sync, very slowly and carefully but this did not seem to do anything to alleviate his blindness.
The man wore nothing but a skintight pair of gray leggings. His upper body showcased a very prominent spine and ribcage but what stood out more than his emaciation were several unnatural sections of grafted skin that looked like the mouth of a sea anemone. They were made of scar tissue and exposed muscle and they marred the otherwise unblemished surface of his skin. The two biggest of these organic valves were on his back. They squished with a sort of slow twitching tremor as like the back of a throat when gagging. As they unsealed, they began to leak a viscous substance that shimmered in the red light overhead. The substance trembled with life as more and more began to gush out of the opening. The man’s shoulder blades, directly above the valve, had each been thinly coated with this substance in two perfect circles but it never seemed to spread as if it were waiting for some kind of command.
The liquid seemed to have received the unseen order for which it was waiting and shivered violently before swelling up and hardening above his back in an orderly, swirling manner. They extended and twitched with the body that they spewed from. Two pillars of clear crystalline substance, about the width of his wrist, pushed out of the openings near his shoulder blades. They seemed organic and bonelike except for the fact that they were almost completely transparent and looked like they were made of slightly foggy glass, or maybe even ice. The act of creating these two crystal bones seemed strenuous as the veins around the man’s body trembled and bulged uncontrolled by his will. The man spat out some of the viscous substance and when it hit the water, it exploded into a shape similar to that of a sea urchin the size of a small rock.
The two bonelike crystals that formed began to split off and created three thin protrusions each that looked very similar to a skeletal wing of some delicate flying animal. The bone protrusions explored the air with uncertainty. They fanned the air like a small bird with wet wings trying to remember how to fly.
The man slapped the ground with his hands as if to make certain it was still there and began to shuffle around the room on his fingertips and the balls of his feet. He skittered uncertainly from one capsule to another, the large protrusions knocking on the walls and on anything they encountered. A gruesome scratching sound filled the room as they dragged on the metal walls. The man, while being able to hear this sound, ignored it completely. The ornate crystal destroyed everything in its path without any resistance other than that unearthly wail of metal being torn and glass being shattered. Whatever was inside was cut or broken. Crimson liquid flowed from each torn capsule, gashed by his unknowing and indiscriminate blade-like wings.
Eventually, the man scrambled his way to the door. He leaned up against it with his knees pushed underneath him and his hands pressed against the door that only would seem warm to someone who has only felt cold for uncountable years. The man seemed to sense something wrong. Near the back wall of the room he was trying to escape, the blue light of the farthest capsules faded. More of the same familiar hissing sounded out. The man did not turn around as it would have made no difference to his senses. Frost receded from each window, revealing many lifeless forms, in some cases with rotting or missing faces. From the area around each individual capsule, he heard wet thuds or a clatter of bones but there was no further sounds of movement from any capsule. Only silence. The man reflected that luck brought him much farther than it had the corpses that slid and settled slowly to the floor as he had done minutes before.
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The alarms continued to sound, and the man finally deciphered what they were saying. “Critical Reactor Failure. No Remaining Power Resources. Preparing to Deactivate Non-Essential Systems. Flooding Reactor Core and Surrounding Areas to Prevent Meltdown. Flooding Subject Containment Units…” He remembered what that meant. His hands started to scrape at what he believed to be the only obstacle to his freedom but even as his fingernails became bloody and threatened to fall off altogether, the door remained the unmoving obstruction for which it was designed.
The dim red lights started to shut off from the back of the room. He could hear the click as the darkness that it left behind advanced towards his position like a dark wall of fog. A sloshing sound filled his ears and water slowly began to reach his feet. The water level increased quickly as the floor was completely covered.
He scraped faster and harder as if it would change anything, but the steel was unyielding. Sensing his panic, the liquid fell again from the openings in his body as his wings twitched once more in distress. The liquid crawled up his arms without dripping a single drop and coated them in their entirety to form a semi-transparent liquid glove. When the liquid reached the fingertips of the man’s hands, it continued forward to form claws on the ends. The man continued to scrape at the door, seemingly unaware of his new blades. With every slash, the shape of the blades were deformed but immediately formed again. They coiled around his fingertips again and again, mixing with flesh and exposed fingernails.
He still clawed. Starting from the organic valve that it originated from, the liquid began to harden, giving function to the crystalline gauntlets that coated the subject’s arms. The self-inflicted cuts scabbed over with the crystal and began to heal at a rate visible to the naked eye. The man felt that his pain had disappeared and stopped scratching long enough for the liquid claws to harden and extend beyond his fingertips. The man smiled thinly in relief and brought back one of his arms as wide as he could behind him. His eyelids narrowed around his eyes and his muscles clenched all at once to swing it at the door.
The claws shimmered like a rainbow in the flashing light and sliced right through the thick door with little resistance, making his past struggles seem meaningless. He tore enough of a hole into the door to stick both of his hands out of. He peeled the door to accommodate his body like some young insect sticking its many appendages out of its egg when it is born. The voice of a long dead announcer rang through the halls with a crackle that is exclusive to something that had gone through the trials of age long past its owner.
The man was now on the other side of the door. The alarms blared louder but with a different message. “Neutralize Escapee,” the loudspeakers blared, repeating this command to vacant halls and missing guards. The man paused with his hand on the wall taking in what he had just heard. His eyes widened in comprehension and he began to sprint. Or at least he attempted to. His bare feet stumbled and slipped on the grimy ivory colored floor that was slowly being covered with water from the adjacent room and his head met the ground. He did not feel anything but simply stayed stunned on the cold floor.
Iron shutters slammed down on all sides as the man lay on the floor. Even the door he had torn apart was covered by an extra layer of metal which cut off a tendril of fog that had slipped in unnoticed. He had cut through the thick door and didn’t doubt that he could slash through the thin shutter but as soon as he thought this, he heard a distressing sound. He had an ominous premonition when he heard the gentle hiss of air through the ceiling vents. He tried to stand up and strike his confinement with his crystal claws but found that he could barely move. His claws lightly scratched the metal and then fell limp with the rest of his body.
He weakened so much that he appeared to have sunk through the floor and lost consciousness. As soon as the man fell unconscious, all of the crystal, including his wings, liquefied and began to leak once more from his body at a rapid pace. The man became skinnier at a rate noticeable to the naked eye as gallons of the fluid covered the ground. The fluid seemed to have a clear goal as all of it flowed towards one wall, the wall the man had just etched a small line. When it reached the metal shutter, it pooled in a shimmering puddle for a moment before it shot up without warning, abruptly forming a long spike that passed through the shutter completely. The spike was like a projectile, though it remained anchored to its host and to the puddle that it came from. The liquid siphoned out of the small hole, expanding the hole into a gap that the rest could follow even faster.
The trickling streamlet slowly made its way down the halls, leaving its host in the stainless enclosure. Watching this viscous stream, a small rodent scampered its way down the hallway, hoping that what had seeped in front of it was something it could use to sustain itself. It was an odd creature with no visible fur except for a collection of whiskers that were longer than its entire body, including its tail. It had no eyes or even eye sockets on its face and its teeth were thin and numerous like that of a leech. Not a cute thing by any stretch of any imagination. It dipped its face into the crystal fluid and began to slurp up the fluid with an unnaturally long purple tongue. After a while, it paused, twitched and burst in a silent explosion as thin transparent needles erupted throughout its body. The spikes returned to liquid and disassembled the carcass of the rodent with medical precision, sorting each bit of organ, muscle, and skin into neat little piles. It collected all of the blood and viscera of the rodent very carefully and began to pump them back to the metal cage.
The viscera reached the man and with the assistance of the fluid, began to funnel into his body. Many assorted pieces of flesh soon made their way to the body, seemingly half-digested already. A small bit of the fluid was produced in equal quantities with each piece of meat and blood that was digested. The man grew warmer and unconsciously curled up into a ball once again as a transparent cocoon slowly hardened across his body, preparing to reconstruct his marred form. All that remained to evidence what had just occurred was a small, well organized pile of neatly picked bones and a viscous shimmering river slowly advancing out into the open, appearing as liquid fire in the flashes of red light from the alarm. Even the small, irremovable stains of blood would be unseen amidst the grime and dust that age brought to this facility.
A crash rang out as the fluid forced back its only obstacle to freedom. It shimmered in the orange light of the sun as opposed to the ominous red alarm. It knew what its host needed. The host needs food. Nutrients. Sustenance. No matter where it came from. It would remodel its host to get these by the host's own power, but first, the host would need some coddling while he was still helpless. A thin trickle of shimmering liquid trailed through the forest.