Manifold [An Interstellar Sci-Fi Progression Story with LitRPG Elements]

The cyborg was sent smashing through the bars of a prison cell.

Metal screeched. A human scream was raised and then quickly snuffed out.

Blood spattered out from under the metal body, as though a meat-bag had been squashed under its tremendous weight and then been forced to give up all its moisture.

To say Betelgeuse was shocked at his own strength was an understatement.

Previously, he'd felt such a heady rush of power that he didn't even question his ability to bend steel.

But this.

This was a strength far beyond what the original owner of the White grade had demonstrated. If that static-cloaked figure had possessed such strength, their death-battle would have ended far differently.

Betelgeuse was beginning to think that this was due to more than just the physical reinforcements the White Incunabulum gifted.

If I recall the White grade's second Etching:

Betelgeuse Sakar's functional adaptations are stabilized to his musculoskeletal form.

My original interpretive parameters were:

'functional adaptations': physical activity, including movement and striking;

'stabilized to': persists in accordance to; and

'musculoskeletal form': body, comprising bone, ligaments, tendons, muscles etc.

Was this too simplistic?

Something has dragged the interpretation of 'musculoskeletal form' far beyond what I'd originally interpreted—dragged it to encompass the MDES' minor augmentations and effected a kind of integration.

I can feel it—the will within me, warping the meaning of the words and forcing them to bear a burden they wouldn't otherwise bear.

Betelgeuse' thoughts were interrupted by a familiar, tingling feeling. The cyborg's servos whined as its four arms clamped upon the cracking concrete walls and pulled it upright.

There was that red laser again, aiming at his head.

Betelgeuse sprang into the air and wondered if his MDES visor had polarization-blinkers.

Thunderclap.

A bolt of lightning carved through the air, missing Betelgeuse and smashing into the concrete overhang opposite in a shower of sparks and concrete dust.

Betelgeuse grunted as his vision was blasted into an all-consuming whiteness. He hit the ground on his soles, but the backward momentum took him off his feet, causing him to fall on his rump.

Damn tincan's got a goddamn electric cannon—

He heard the cyborg force its chassis out of the cell with a sound like shrieking metal. A familiar whirring sound was raised as it began to revolve its phalanges at lethal velocities.

Betelgeuse pushed himself off his ass and started running, even before his vision completely cleared.

There should be a switch for the cell gates—near the exit?

He tore down the hallway in the direction of the exit. All around him, the prison population was baying its insanity, filling the air with fear and madness—

Betelgeuse glanced backward. The cyborg was pursuing him on all fours like a wolfish creature, each of its footsteps smashing the ground into a muddle of concrete rubble. The two arms sprouting out of its back were whipping toward Betelgeuse in an attempt to carve off chunks of his meat with its finger-blades.

Betelgeuse raised his hand and channeled his compulsion against the cyborg, hoping to slow it down.

He felt for its Incunabulum, finding two of them—an Ash and a Primary—but was momentarily nonplussed to feel that their shapes were all wrong. It was like they had been reformed—

Stop it, Betelgeuse, he thought to himself. No fakkin' time for bullshit daydreams.

He sent the full force of his intentionality into the cyborg, only to find that it something was frustrating his attempts at the compulsion.

Like the static-cloaked figures at Marlowe.

Nullifier-Brace! he thought, gritting his teeth.

He's gaining on me! I gotta confuse him, somehow—

Betelgeuse was coming to the end of the hallway. He slamming into the side of wall just beside the ruined blacksteel entrance to the EAST BLOCK, observing to his left a panel affixed to the concrete wall, the panel studded with buttons.

He rammed a hammerfist into the buttons, trying them all at once.

Nothing happened.

Shit!

Betelgeuse sprang to the side at the last moment.

"Troublesome creature!" the cyborg roared, ramming straight into the wall and obliterating the panel, the force of the impact gouging thick cords of wires from concrete. The wires sparked and splayed in the air.

The flickering lights shut off. The surroundings were plunged into darkness. Betelgeuse fell in slow-motion.

The red laser was upon Betelgeuse' chest, lancing across the gloom. Betelgeuse tried to dodge, then realized that he was still mid-air.

No escape.

The cyborg's finger snapped still, its tip aimed at Betelgeuse and sparking brightly in the pitch-black darkness.

The bolt arced out toward Betelgeuse, then turned and caught on a piece of wire.

Thunderclap.

The wire's rubber insulation burst into flame. The lights blazed full blast. The sound of thousands of cell-gates slamming open. Moil and bedlam, chaos and pandemonium. Then the lights blew out as one, crackling, popping, and sparking in a festive show.

"Hah!" Betelgeuse chortled, hitting the concrete wall and finding his senses inflamed by the brush with death.

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How was he not dead?

Something grabbed his left arm. A prisoner, stumbling out of his cell and yelling gibberish.

Grabbing the prisoner's hand, Betelgeuse pulled, tearing that appendage clean off and letting it fall to the ground.

He didn't even hear the scream in all the commotion. The prisoners were rushing out of their cells, pressing forward, pressing towards the only lighted corridor, no matter that it was now half-blocked by the cyborg.

As the prisoners advanced, they became bunched and crushed underfoot; but the stampede did not relent, making of all those human bodies a liquid crush that flowed inexorably towards light.

Moths to flame. Flies to honey. Lambs to the slaughter.

A horrendous tearing sound emanated from somewhere in front of Betelgeuse. The cyborg was wading through the desperate press of humanity with brutal savagery, carving bloody swathes with every swing of its metallic arms.

"Show yourself!" the thing roared, its metal rage discernible even through all the chaos.

Betelgeuse skirted it, slamming into the press of human meat and pushing through it, towards the lighted corridor, straining as hard as he could. He tried to use the compulsion, but found no way to hook onto that raging inferno of human emotion.

Could it be…? They don't have their Incunabula—could that be affecting the efficacy of the compulsion?

He couldn't hold on to the thought.

Screams. More screams than Betelgeuse could process. Brain Meridians leaking fear and trembling into the air. Bodies were squeezed like lemons, vacating their contents from anuses and mouths and out the backs of heads. So much slickness glinting in the wan light of an escape that was so close and yet so far.

Betelgeuse' heart beat raggedly against his ribcage, threatening to explode from the strain of navigating that human cacophony.

He'd come to the wall, scaling it halfway by stepping on the heads and shoulders of howling prisoners. He ripped his combat knife from its sheath and turned.

Straining his powerful legs, Betelgeuse leapt off the wall and hurtled through the air, sailing across the dying human crush and slamming straight into the cyborg, grabbing onto its metal skull.

It yelled a word with something approaching surprise, its voice violently percussive.

The cyborg's head was drenched in gore and refuse, and its eyes were focused upon him, its organic eyes—

Betelgeuse jammed his knife into its left eyeball, pushing it into the orifice until the blade hit something hard.

"Aaaaaaaaaaagh!"

The cyborg roared and flailed, dredging up pieces of human meat with every swing of its arms.

Now!

Betelgeuse jumped, hurtling through the ruined blacksteel door and landing in a spatter of blood and ichor.

Then he ran, tearing down the lighted exit corridor into the labyrinth of the Detention Barracks.

***

"—Thete! Where are you!" Betelgeuse yelled into his comms. The MDES included interface functionality with his transceiver, so he didn't have to raise his wrist to his mouth to talk.

"Corporal Collins got us to the lockers, but he's looking weird, man—"

"No time—the fucking thing's still after me, Thete! Did you get the Incs?" Betelgeuse said, interrupting Thete brusquely. He could hear a tremendous sound behind him—the cyborg, no doubt, pursuing him with vengeance on its mind.

"We just broke out the Incs—"

"Is there a way out from the locker-area?

"I said that the Corporal guy is looking off. He's just standing there. I can't get him to move!" Thete exasperated. "He's the only one who knows a way out of here, Betelgeuse, what the kak did you do with him?"

Betelgeuse cursed. Something about the way he'd used the compulsion had ground the Corporal's autonomy-centers to mush.

"How do I get there?"

"Uhm…" Thete began uncertainly.

There was some jostling on the other end, some whispered remarks, until eventually Edith's voice filtered through. She sounded weak and spent.

"... Just follow the corridor… into a lobby," Edith breathed.

"I'm there now," Betelgeuse said, bursting out into a rectangular space from a corner and observing immediately that three other corridors stretched out from the three other corners.

He could just hear the rage-filled creature tailing him, tearing its way through the narrow corridors.

"Far end of the lobby… left corridor," she instructed.

"I'm there," Betelgeuse said, continuing down the corridor and pushing his augmented body to its limit. Despite the intense exertion, Betelgeuse was able to maintain the breakneck pace without flagging.

As he forged down the corridor, the cyborg's perfervid roars became fainter, and then disappeared altogether.

Following Edith's instructions, Betelgeuse eventually made it into another lobby, this one many times larger than the previous one and lined at the far end with rows upon rows of lockers towering two or three stories high. Several track-mounted ladders had been set up to facilitate locker access.

Edith was sitting on the ground and leaning against the lockers, with Thete and the emaciated man standing over her. The musclebound Corporal Collins was standing ramrod straight in the middle of the room, his eyes glazed and unseeing, his tannish face rigid as a mask.

But Betelgeuse didn't care about all that.

As he stepped forward, the room began to fill with whispers and blunted intentionalities.

Thin susurrations suffused the space, crowding Betelgeuse' mind with blurry half-thoughts and causing him to stumble forward in a daze.

Thete's mouth was moving slowly, but Betelgeuse couldn't hear the words.

So many of them…

So many Incunabula for the taking.

But they're not dead, not yet, not like the corpses you found in Marlowe…

They're crying out in pain, in fear—

You need all of them.

For money?

For control. For dominion. For—

A tearing sound. Betelgeuse wheeled to face the corridor. The ragged sound was getting closer and more intense.

Without thinking, Betelgeuse raised his hands and called upon the intentionalities of the Incunabula, bunched them together, intertwined them, forced them to do his bidding—

Betelgeuse knew that he had control. The understanding flooded him all at once.

The brain was the fount of emotion and autonomy.

The Incunabulum was the means to usurp it, by way of the Brain Meridian.

Proximity between Incunabulum and brain meant symbiosis—the Incunabulum afforded its poisoned blessings, the brain afforded the protection of its autonomous will.

Separate the two, and both would be weakened. Brain and body suffered the Bloaming, while the Incunabulum became vulnerable to compulsion.

What a marvelous synthesis of intuition and will! The conclusion, once arrived at, gripped him with an intense power.

Betelgeuse felt all of the Incunabula yield to him. All of them, including Thete, Edith, the emaciated man, and Corporal Collins...

No. I want Thete, Edith, and her friend out of here. Corporal Collins must lead them out.

Corporal Collins left immediately via the adjacent corridor. The other three followed wordlessly.

The light darkened. Betelgeuse called upon the Incunabula, cutting through that inferno of human pain and forcing them under his will.

He called for them to come to his aid.

The cyborg had revealed itself before Betelgeuse.

It stood, framed in the corridor, too large for the corridor to contain. Its entire body looked dipped in mud, as the clotting blood made clumped stickily upon its angular surfaces.

His knife was still sticking out of its left eye socket.

It forged towards Betelgeuse, its armor plates tearing a wicked gash across the walls and shearing them apart, the walls vomiting chunks of rubble behind it.

"You've taken away something of mine," the cyborg said, its artificial voice harsh and grating to the ear.

"I'll take away your other eye," Betelgeuse said, raising his arms to either side and willing the varied intentionalities together into one lumpen mass. He could feel the minds soften under his grasp, feel them become manipulable.

He directed them towards the cyborg, gave them one single directive.

Destroy it.

The cyborg took a single step, then froze.

A sound was getting louder by the second. It was a multitude of voices raised in a chorus of agony.

"What is this!?" it said as it turned.

The flood of human bodies, bloodied and half-disintegrated, came pouring out of the corridor like a zomboid spew.

"Compulsion!" the cyborg managed, before becoming engulfed. It flailed, snuffing out human lives by the dozen—but for every dozen that died, two dozen came running out to grasp the cyborg, chittering with abandon.

The cyborg stumbled backward from the weight of the rushing prisoners.

Stabilizing itself, it thrust its long arms out straight and then started to revolve its torso. Fingers, arms, bodies were caught in the hinges and nooks of the cyborg's armor plates. The cyborg ground them out like mincemeat, its arms becoming fanblades that bisected the mindless prisoners.

Betelgeuse could see that the horde of prisoners wouldn't keep the cyborg entertained for long. They were meatshields—mindless and powerless without their Incunabula's blessings.

"I'll take your eye next time," he asserted, then cut and ran down the adjacent corridor, leaving the cyborg to cry out in rage and frustration.

***

Betelgeuse hurtled out the front door of the Detention Barracks.

It turned out that the exit was a mere five corridors away—Corporal Collins' guidance hadn't been necessary.

"Betelgeuse! Get in!" Thete called from the front seat of the APC.

The back of the APC lay open, with Corporal Collins standing dazedly beside it and Entuban beckoning towards him.

Betelgeuse sprang down the front steps in a single bound, pushing past Corporal Collins and slamming into the APC, yelling out: "Let's go! Let's go! It's a cyborg!"

The APC revved and began to accelerate.

"Go where!?" Von called from the driver's seat.

"We take the overland roads to the Western Quadrants—I don't want to risk the Earthborers—"

"Underpass or Highway?" Von shot back.

"You trying to be smart with me?" Betelgeuse sputtered. How the fuck would he know?

"Highway it is."

The hull doors jerked close, and the last Betelgeuse saw of the Detention Barracks was the great cyborg smashing out through the glass facade and crushing Corporal Collins underfoot.