Bitstream

12.3

It was ten o'clock at night when Rhea rolled up to the facility in the old gang jeep. Cierus insisted on tagging along – just in case things went haywire – and had been quiet for the entire ride. It was dark and starless, and the building was far larger than it had appeared on the broadcasts; almost every inch of the place looked as if it had been bolted together by a committee of machines with no love for symmetry. The outer shell, if you could call it that, was a horrible black metal, pockmarked with rivets and lined with decades of grease. It was difficult to believe this was a tech facility that promised to dedicate itself to the betterment of mankind, because even sitting here, in the driver seat, she thought it looked more like the kind of place where mankind got taken apart.

Rhea killed the engine, and for a moment all she could hear was the rain drumming on the roof.

"You know," said Cierus from the passenger seat, "I was surprised your father agreed to the plan."

"Yeah?" said Rhea. "Why's that?"

"In case [Redacted] caught wind," she replied, grabbing a package of matchsticks from the centre console. "Men like him don't usually risk their careers – let alone their lives – on things they can't control."

Rhea didn't respond right away. She kept her gaze fixed on the massive steel doors ahead, the rear entrance. Faded lettering still clung to the surface: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, half-obscured by grime and old spray paint.

In her left hand, she gripped Cierus' phone. The access pass glowed faintly on the screen. "Then you don't know my father."

She stepped out into the street. Rain tapped against her military vest in metallic pinpricks. At the access panel to the left of the door, she pressed the phone to the reader. Within a few seconds, a green light blinked on, and the doors slid open, revealing a large, box-shaped elevator.

"I suppose we'll find out," Cierus said as she stepped out of the jeep behind her. There was a shadow in her voice that Rhea didn't like: darker than usual, and her usual was already plenty dark.

She pushed the feeling aside and they both caught the elevator to the bottom floor. When the elevator rumbled to a stop and the doors parted, she saw the hallway. Long, too long. The kind of long that made you feel as if you were being pulled into it instead of walking through it. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, humming just a little off-pitch. Cold concrete stretched the entire distance, split down the centre by a yellow line that had since faded into a ghost of its former self. To the left, rows of locked doors with reinforced windows. To the right, steel cabinets, dead monitors, and an awful waft of scorched plastic and cleaning fluid.

It looked sterilised, wiped clean of personality, of error, of everything but cold, hard function.

They walked.

Turned out this sector was a tunnelwork of some sort, but luckily all the corridors were labelled, and it didn't take long for them to find Sublevel 6: a huge vault-like chamber sealed behind a segmented metal door the colour of dried blood. Above it, stencilled in flaking black paint, were the words:

SUBLEVEL 6 — NEURAL OPS

RESTRICTED ACCESS – BIOSECURITY LEVEL 3

This one didn't have an access pad, only a camera bolted directly above the doorway. Rhea was scared to approach it, but Cierus kept walking. Rhea was almost about to ask what she was doing when the camera latched onto Cierus and cast a red light. An angry rejection sound beeped out, and suddenly there was static playing from the speaker squared beneath.

A voice came:

"State your business."

"I'm just along for the ride," Cierus said smoothly. "But nice to meet you again, Kyo. How's the cancer these days?"

"Cierus? What are you doing here?" Kyo's voice echoed down the tunnel.

"Just tying up loose ends," she said. "But I'm not the one you should be asking."

Rhea approached the camera. "Kyo," she said. "My dad sent me. It's important."

A ray of red light flew down her body in a deep scan. She could feel its warmth burying into her very soul.

"Rhea," said Kyo. Then some typing, then some static, and then a bit of coughing. After a moment, he came back and said, "Camera's blind. You've got twenty minutes."

"Just like that?" Cierus chuckled. "Aren't you a model employee?"

"Not a huge fan of her either," Kyo said. "Besides, I owe Viren one for landing me this job in the first place. But make it quick. [Redacted]'ll be here soon. Heard she has a new specimen – says it's the last step."

"I appreciate that," said Rhea. "Really. Thank you, Kyo."

"No problem, kid."

A green light shot up from the access pad, and the vault doors began to unbolt themselves with deep, hollow clanks. Rhea felt the vibration through her boots. Then, as the segmented plates peeled back, she got the smell: burned insulation and old meat left out too long in the sun, undercut with this bizarre chemical tang that sank down the back of her throat and made the pharynx tickle. It was the kind of smell that scurried in and started looking for a place to nest, and although she couldn't articulate precisely why that was, she felt this grim and frankly imperishable certainty that it found her to be a suitable host nonetheless.

Inside, everything was pitch black save for the outline of green that glowed in faint lines against the sides. When she stepped in and the overhead lights stuttered, she could see that the lines belonged to old tanks. They were as tall as delivery trucks, rounded at the edges, glass panels fogged over and showing, just barely, a darker swirl of that chemical, Ghostfire. The green came from thin strips of bio-lum paint running along the curves, the type meant to guide you during an emergency, though Rhea knew that this place, with all its glass and all its secrecy, was an emergency in and of itself.

In the centre of the lab there was a large, rectangular glass containment unit to which all the lines of Ghostfire were attached. Inside of this case there was a computer terminal bolted to the ground in some vague approximation of an altar. The word STAND-BY blinked an ugly green against the screen's black backdrop.

"You're likely to find her name on the root access logs," Cierus said. "But I'd be careful if I were you. The computer might automatically scan you."

Rhea approached the glass case, phone grasped firmly in hand. The case was taller than it had looked from afar, the thick walls giving it an aquarium-like distortion. Her own reflection warped across its surface, jittering harshly under the overheads. She stepped through the open hatch in the side – narrow, just enough to squeeze through – and felt the temperature drop a few degrees. The air inside had this awful stink of copper and solvent that really put her on edge. She didn't want to be here, not one bit, but all she needed was a quick photograph showing [Redacted]'s name, possibly through e-mails, possibly through incriminating pictures showing her working on the machines, and that was it. After that, they could delta out of here, publish it to the press, to the world, and get that bitch arrested. Rhea could flee the town, perhaps with her father, towards Neo Arcadia, towards Paxson, towards any place other than this godforsaken hellhole, and live out the rest of her life knowing she'd saved the town from a mind-controlled apocalypse.

There was no camera attached to the top of this terminal, unlike the one in Priest's office. Instead, it just sat there like an obedient dog waiting for orders. She tapped the enter key and the STAND-BY hissed away, cycling through a few lines of code before settling on the login prompt. No welcome, not even a hint of friendliness, only a single blinking cursor daring her to touch it.

She plugged in Cierus' phone, the access pad open on the screen. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the terminal emitted a harsh chirp, and the pass disappeared, replaced by a system override notice:

Rhea's pulse picked up almost instantly; she thought it was the 'unauthorised access' notification again. She let out a relieved sigh. Thank fuck for that.

"You know," Cierus said, running her finger along the glass case, tracing a snake-slither through the condensation, "I've always wondered why you never worked with your father, before you realised [Redacted] was out to get the world, that is."

Rhea ignored her at first, navigating through a stack of directories labelled only with clinical shorthand: NEURO_TRIALS, PATIENT_LOGS, GHOSTFIRE_BATCH_ARCHIVE. Each click felt heavier and more debilitating than the last.

"Not my scene," Rhea said flatly, navigating to the root directory, where a log of e-mails popped up. At the very top, she saw her name – [Redacted] – and when she scrolled down, she saw the e-mail she had sent six months ago, to 'Q_TECH_OVERSIGHT', the warehouse where Priest had been hooked up to that horrifying machine. "Didn't want to be another Steele that got chewed up by the system. Don't get me wrong: I love my dad, but I think he gets overworked." Her heart thumped as she brought Cierus' phone up, accessed the camera, and kept it steady over the terminal screen. She took the shot, saved it, then began keying up to the other e-mails, trying to gather as much evidence as she possibly could.

"Makes sense," Cierus said. "So you figured the police was the way to go?"

"Uh-huh," said Rhea, focusing.

"I suppose that also makes sense. You know, given the whole arm incident. It impressed me, you know. Not many grown-ups could survive something like that, but you're special, aren't you?" A soft chuckle escaped her lips.

Rhea's fingers froze on the keyboard. There was silence for a moment, so heavy and hot that she could feel it creeping down her spine. "I never told you that story." The words came out slowly, and there was a hint of gut-sink weighing down every syllable.

"What?"

"That story: I never told you about it, not once."

"Yes you did," Cierus said.

Rhea turned, staring her down with sudden realisation. Dead silence now. Not even the fluorescents dared thrum in it. There were only two people who could have known that about her arm, about Scrapboy. No, three: her dad, Lucian, and…

Cierus hummed. "... Oops."

Rhea stepped back towards the hatch, gut twisting hard now, but before she could clear the glass lip, Cierus moved. Not fast – smooth. One step, then another, her hand finding the control pad at the side of the case. The hatch slammed shut with a hydraulic hiss.

"Hey—!" Rhea lunged for it, but the locking pins shot home with a deep, final clunk. The sound reverberated in her chest like a coffin lid sealing.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Cierus stood outside the glass, visor reflecting Rhea's wide, furious eyes. "Don't take it personal," she said softly, almost kindly.

"FUCK YOU!" Rhea roared, punching the glass as hard as she possibly could. Even with her incredibly augmented strength, it didn't crack. "YOU LIED TO ME, YOU CUNT!"

Cierus didn't flinch. "Temper, temper," she murmured, tilting her head like she was studying something in a tank.

"What the hell is this?" Rhea snarled. "You bring me all the way here, you feed me this whole 'help the cause' bullshit, and now you—" She swallowed, hard. "Now you're turning me in?"

"Turning you in?" Cierus gave a humorless little laugh. "Oh, Rhea. You really think this is about them?" She tapped a finger against the glass. "This is about you. It's always been about you."

"That doesn't make any damn sense!" Rhea's pulse was hammering now, and she hated that her voice cracked on the last word.

"Oh, it does," Cierus said.

Suddenly, all the machines lit up, and the lab brightened, chasing away the shadows on either side. Lined up against the walls and stacked on steel walkways were pods of naked people floating in tanks. Facemasks clung to them, tubes worming down their throats and into their chests, their limbs slack and bobbing with the slow pulse of the pumps, eyes fluttering under lids that twitched as though they were dreaming. Bad dreams, dreams you didn't wake up from. The sudden wet, sucking sound of the filtration system kicking into a higher gear made the whole place feel alive. Then there was a voice, not from Cierus but from somewhere deeper in the lab, a voice that was smooth and poisonous and utterly certain of itself, and as Rhea's gaze followed the sound she saw her: [Redacted], stepping into the light from a side corridor, her heels clicking in perfect, patient rhythm on the metal grate, every inch of her tailored suit catching the sterile glow, her expression not angry but amused in the way a cat is amused when the mouse finally stops running, and Rhea knew, with the slow and dreadful sinking of her heart, that whatever was about to happen here had been planned for far longer than she could comprehend, and that she had walked straight into it.

"Who's this little listener?" said [Redacted].

"You," yelled Rhea, slamming her fists on the case again. "You disgusting monster."

"Such rage," said [Redacted]. "Big mouth for a little girl who got all the way here on her daddy's clearance."

"Go to hell!" Rhea spat.

[Redacted]'s smile was thin. "You think you're different from the others? That you're here because you chose to be?" She glanced at Cierus, and something unspoken passed between them. "Sweetheart… you were invited."

"I'm not part of your freak show," Rhea shot back, even as her chest tightened.

"Oh, but you will be." [Redacted] moved closer to the glass, her heels ticking like a countdown. "You see, unlike the rest of my subjects, you're already… primed. Neural augmentations, cybernetic replacements, that lovely little arm of yours." Her gaze lingered on Rhea's prosthetic. "But the issue with my little project was that I just could never quite find someone with a traumatic-enough past. With something that haunted them day in and day out, that terrified them to their very bone. But you… you're already one step ahead of most, aren't you, Rhea?"

"What the hell are you talking about?" Rhea said, her voice softening a notch.

"Well, I heard all about how you discovered my little secret," [Redacted] said. "Oh yes – Strannik clued me into your suspicions."

"Strannik knew about this?" she said weakly, her mouth agape.

A nod. "Oh yes. But you see, not everyone did. Those rebels you saw at the warehouse were not entirely aware of what was happening. They believed they were truly fighting for a good cause. But when Cierus showed up and gave them the power of Ghostfire, a certain Mr. Priest felt compelled to… shall I say, play along. Of course, the only person who had access to those e-mails was Cierus, until you came."

"That can't be true," Rhea said, and promptly had trouble believing she could say such a thing. "The whole force, everyone, all…"

"Money talks, Little Spark," said [Redacted]. "It doesn't matter what position you hold. I own this town. And I decide who gets cut."

There was a pair of footsteps echoing somewhere far, near the vault hatch. When it neared, Rhea heard another sound: something heavy being dragged along. As she waited in horrified anticipation, she saw a large, bulky man dressed up in an extremely heavily armoured powersuit. Not just any powersuit: it was the Prototype Hydra-Class A12, the one Lucian had been working on over six months ago, though now it was lit up with blue seams, and each movement caused the gears to hiss and yank. Then she saw what the large man was dragging: a body: her father, Viren, who looked withered, beaten, and bloodied.

Rhea's throat closed.

"Dad…" Her voice was barely air, a rasp clawing its way past the lump in her chest.

Viren's head lolled, but he managed to lift it just enough to find her through the glass. His face was a ruin – split lip, one eye swollen shut – but the moment he saw her, something in his posture straightened.

"Rhea," he breathed, and even muffled by distance and glass, she could hear the weight of it.

[Redacted] stepped aside, letting the Hydra-suited brute drag him further into the light. "Your father has been very helpful to me," she said, as though she were commenting on the weather. "But unfortunately, loyalty is… a finite resource."

"Let him go," Rhea shouted, slamming her fists on the glass again. The blows sent dull shocks up her arm, but the case didn't even tremble.

Cierus finally spoke, voice calm in a way that made Rhea's stomach turn. "You should save your breath. He's already made his choice."

Viren coughed, shaking his head. "No. I—" He winced, the effort costing him. "Rhea, you have to—"

A sharp jolt from the Hydra's gauntlet cut him off, blue arcs snapping across his body. He cried out, then sagged, chest heaving.

Rhea's scream tore through the chamber, hoarse with rage: "I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!" She kept banging, kept striking the glass with all the power she could generate. She sprang out her mantisblades and thrust them into the glass, hoping they could put a dent in.

But they couldn't.

There was no hope.

[Redacted] grinned, her eyes [BLURRED]. "See? That's the response I wanted. Fear. Anger. Desperation. All the perfect accelerants for what I'm about to do."

Rhea shouldered the glass, hot, angry tears streaming down her face. Another pounce, another failure to break free.

The Hydra-suited man shifted, hauling Viren upright. He was still conscious – barely – but his gaze didn't waver from hers.

"Don't… give her… what she wants," Viren rasped.

Rhea felt something inside her splinter.

[Redacted] chuckled. "Oh, she already has." She reached into her pocket, pulled out a remote, and thumbed the top button. Somewhere deep inside the chamber, pumps groaned to life, and the Ghostfire in the wall pods began to churn faster.

Rhea's reflection blurred in the glass as the green light swelled around her.

And then, with terrible finality, the hatch seals hissed again – this time not to lock her in, but to flood the chamber.

Rhea softened her fists. "Please," she said in a breathless rush. "I'm who you want. Not my dad. Let him go, I beg you."

[Redacted] didn't even glance at her. She watched the Ghostfire swirl in its pipes, her expression one of quiet satisfaction.

Viren's chest rose and fell shallowly, every breath a battle. But somehow, he still found his voice. "I love you, Rhea," he managed, the words trembling on the edge of collapse.

Rhea's hands pressed flat to the glass, as though she could push the words back to him, give them the strength he didn't have left. "[Redacted]. Let him go." Her voice was softer now, more emotional.

"Well," [Redacted] said, "there would be no point to this if—"

"I don't give a shit anymore." Rhea's voice began to break. "Please. Do what you want, take over the city, doom us all. But don't—" But she couldn't get the words out. She was choking on her own sobbing.

Viren looked up at her. "Little Spark..." he managed. "You'll... do great things..." A deep breath, and then more tired than ever: "Just... not right now..."

Rhea stared at him, at the man who raised her from birth, the man who did everything he could to keep her safe.

She loved him so much.

"Enough." [Redacted] raised a dismissive palm. "Your talking's beginning to bore me."

Rhea shot her a deadly eye, doing her best to keep her voice steady. "What did I ever do to you? Is this just some sick fetish where you get off on torturing people?" She wiped snot from her nose.

"Cheeky, aren't we?" said [Redacted]. "As I was explaining earlier… before we got sidetracked… I realised there was something special about you, Rhea. You're the Unkillable Girl, the woman who God placed an insufferable amount of armour on. No matter how much the world tries to put an end to your sad, pathetic life, you still prosper.

"You should have died that night you lost your arm. I could have let you. But I saw an opportunity. You see, that machine in the warehouse wasn't just playing random videos pulled from the darknet. No, they were memories, converted into a digital format."

"Memories?" Rhea said with shock.

"That's right, Little Spark," [Redacted] replied, rubbing her hands together and clearing her throat. "And you have quite the dataset to pull from. Your mother's death, the night you lost your arm, the time you lost your job…"

She knows about my drinking problem, too? Has she been watching me?

"... and now," she added. "I know how to really overload the machine, to give birth to Ourovane. Oh, Adam, if you wouldn't mind?"

"Ourovane?" Rhea said, struggling to keep her breath steady. "What the hell is Ourovane?"

The man in the powersuit released his grip on Viren and let him drop onto his hands and knees. He walked out of sight, over by the steel walkway, where the pods of floating bodies stood, and came back a moment later carrying a keg of Ghostfire. In it, the body of a snake sloshed around. She could see the eyes, those horrible eyes, staring at her.

[Redacted] reached into the chest pocket of her tailored suit and brought out a small, rectangular data shard. "Shall we call it… Halcyon's successor?" She inserted the shard into a slot embedded in the glass case. Within seconds, the micro-LEDs along the edges of the unit lit up with a sickly green glow.

The tubes began to expel Ghostfire into the glass case, pooling at Rhea's shoes, filling up quickly.

"The final step in the process," [Redacted] said. "Adam?" She looked at the man in the powersuit. "Begin."

He popped open the exit hole of the Ghostfire keg and began pouring it all over Viren's body.

Rhea thumped the glass again. "What are you doing?" she shouted, wide-eyed, heart hammering so hard she thought it might explode.

"I told you," [Redacted] said. "Completing the final step. Your emotion is the one thing Ourovane needs to program itself. Not your skills. Not your mind. You. Your trauma. The fire you carry – grief, rage, guilt – it's the perfect codebase." She stepped closer to the glass, as if she could drink in the heat rolling off Rhea's panic. "Machines can be told what to do, Little Spark. They can even learn. But they can't feel. And feeling is what makes a mind… whole. Ourovane is the closest thing I've ever built to a god, but it's hollow. Empty. Without a heart, it's just another program. Your heart, however – your pain – is the missing piece. Every loss you've suffered, every memory you can't scrape out of your skull, every night you've lain awake hating yourself… that is the data Ourovane will absorb. It will see the world the way you see it. It will want the things you want. And when it wakes, it will act on them." She studied Rhea's contorted face. "You've already given me the perfect source material. Tonight, I finish the upload. And when it's done, your ghosts will live forever, in Ourovane. Your trauma will shape it, drive it, make it unstoppable. You'll be its mother, whether you like it or not."

Her eyes glittered.

"Now watch, Little Spark."

When Viren was completely covered in Ghostfire, Cierus reached into her pocket and pulled out the package of matchsticks. It didn't take long for Rhea to clock what she was about to do. And in some uncontrollable fit of rage, she began to thrash, to strike and shoulder and kick and claw and thud-thud-thud and weep and slobber and scream and slam her mantisblades into the glass again, over and over, until her breath came ragged, and her muscles burned.

She drew back her right arm, clenched her fist as tight as humanly possible, and thrust her mantisblade into the glass, hoping to puncture it by focusing all the force on a singular point. Instead, her mantisblade snapped off from the impact, and pins and needles shot up her body.

"STOP IT!" she cried, the case filling up to waist-height now, making her movements more and more difficult.

The match flared to life.

Cierus didn't look at Rhea as she dropped it.

Ghostfire caught with a sound that wasn't quite fire and wasn't quite liquid but rather something hung between a hiss and a scream. Orange-green tongues crawled up Viren's body in fractal patterns, latching into him. He jerked once, twice, head snapping back, a raw sound tearing from his throat.

The flames licked at his labcoat first, the delicate fabric igniting in an instant. His arms flailed, beating against the air, as the fire rose in some awful bloom of fury, higher and higher and—

Don't pout like that. You'll get very sick. Terminal pouting. Doctors say it's incurable.

Rhea's mind blanked to static. She didn't even register the pounding on the glass anymore – her hands just moved on instinct, fists and blades smearing her own blood across the cold surface.

Her arms trembled, fingers clawing at the glass, powerless to bridge the gap between them. The flames surged higher, a wall of green and orange that swallowed Viren whole. And then there was nothing but the fire: roaring, crackling, devouring. Viren's screams petered into silence, leaving behind only the horrific image seared into Rhea's mind: her father lost in the inferno, his beaten, bloody face twisted in a final moment of terror and pain.

Viren Steele is a sellout, a man who would rather thrust this town into misery than build it up. We've seen him cutting deals with Gutterman and [Redacted]. He's planning to develop the chip that will destroy not just our town, but the entirety of Neo Arcadia as we know it.

Rhea collapsed as the rising liquid reached neck-level. She sank down into it, letting it drown her. Her stomach twisted and vomit surged up her throat, but the Ghostfire kept it down.

I love you.

Here she lay, held afloat like some specimen, her life force slowly deteriorating, being sucked away by the reaper of time. Sharp wires stuck into her body, but she didn't feel any pain; she was numb, perhaps because of the chemical, perhaps because of the horror.

Her vision tunneled, edges fraying into black. Somewhere outside the glass, shapes moved: [Redacted]'s silhouette, Cierus' visor glint, Adam's towering bulk. And the last thing she saw before the darkness took her was her own reflection, hanging ghostly in the glass, lips parted, eyes wide, already looking like she belonged in one of the tanks.

"Warning," her neural AI announced. "Foreign substances detected in the bloodstream. Refrain from introducing hazardous chemicals into your system."

(but who am i, little spark? who is [Redacted]?)

"Vitals low. Activating emergency protocols."

(i remember)

"Optics offline."

(oh, do you?)

"Cardiac system offline."

(i remember your name)

Calyx Ward.