Nothing is inflammable, p.6
Nothing Is Inflammable, page 6
I was able to move freely once again and as I picked myself up was horrified to find that the Protohuman was gone, its chains hanging limply from the wall like stripped DNA strands. I spun around, utterly disorientated, trying to hard-focus on the room as it blurred and re-blurred before me. I steadied myself on the worktop, tried to control my breathing.
Recalling my hallucinations, I ran my fingers across my face and was relieved to find that my eyes, nose, mouth were all intact. But if I had imagined it then where was the Protohuman?
By my foot was the syringe, the plastic chamber crushed and splintered and a small trickle of its contents pooled beside it.
I tried desperately to remember what I had done then noticed the chemical formula scrubbed on the chalkboard.
The newspaper.
The messages.
The radio.
My work.
I rushed out in the corridor, praying to see my creature lying on the ground or propped up against a wall, praying that it had not abandoned me.
Room to room.
And nothing.
Then a bang, the thump of metal. I stopped where I was, in the doorway of the storage cupboard I had earlier recovered the radio from and peered down the corridor.
THUD.
Coming from the door.
Someone was banging on the door.
I remained utterly still, noticing movement beyond the tiny, bleary window and my heart jack hammering in my chest.
THUD.
I started forwards, hesitated.
Jakobsen I thought to myself. Jakobsen intercepted my messages and has now betrayed me. Drugged me and stole the Protohuman and now returned to finish me off.
“Leave me!” I shouted as the thuds became louder, harder, faster.
I quickly looked around for a weapon but before I could find anything I heard the door’s locking mechanisms undoing themselves just as the Protohuman had undone its shackles. I grabbed the first substantial implement I could find, a small claw hammer of the type I used to break up Judas’ meat, and tried to conceal myself in the cupboard. As I closed my door, those who came for me opened theirs.
Theirs because there was clearly more than one of them from the sounds of their heavy footsteps echoing along the corridor. There was a pause as I imagined them to be peering into my main workshop and I heard Judas screeching terribly.
I would not allow my work to be vandalized like this!
As the footsteps began again, I raised the claw hammer ready to strike.
Outside the cupboard, they were right outside the cupboard!
I watched their devilish shadows sweeping across the crack of light by my feet and silently cursed them for what they were about to do and what they had already done.
The handle turned and I tightened my grip on the hammer.
Suddenly the door swung open and light spilled in and I lashed out and possibly hit something but in the same moment my arm was grabbed and I was torn from my the storage cupboard and pushed into the opposite wall. I collided with the hard concrete as my legs were held, then large hands pressed down on my shoulders and abdomen. The hammer was pulled from my immobilized hand as someone leaned over me.
At first I thought it was the Protohuman because of the clean-shaven head but then the face came more into focus. It glittered with piercings and a pair of bright green eyes. Its pate was covered with sprawled markings.
“Dziga,” the face said. The man said.
He leaned back and I could see the rest of my assailants. They were both male and female but all had shaven heads and dark-smeared eyes.
“What do you want?” I asked them.
But they didn’t answer.
Instead they pulled me to my feet and dragged me along the corridor, struggling to hold onto me as I kicked and lashed out at them but those that carried me were too strong and I shouted out for Judas as the open door got nearer and nearer.
Beyond, I glimpsed the billowing smoke of the factories and the razor-light of the heavy rain that was falling.
“NOOOO!” I screamed. “Please!”
My lungs began to close up in panic at the sudden realization that I might be taken from the security of the lab but no amount of struggling could break me free. I kicked and kicked and kicked and managed temporarily to get a leg free and block myself from going through the door but the limb was quickly recaptured.
My head was swimming with blood and dirty oxygen, lights flashing before my eyes and I felt unconsciousness descend on me like a vampire.
My life had been a series of cages, I mused. Some were bigger than the one before, some smaller.
Some dingier.
From my mother’s womb to the steel cot to my bedroom to my first makeshift lab in an abandoned railway shack. From the local hospital to the asylum and from room to room in there. To my lab.
And now to a gurney in a vehicle of some sort.
My captors were huddled around me but appeared as nothing more than disfigured shadows in the darkness. I listened to the sound of the wheels thumping across whatever ground we were travelling and made the decision to remain still and quiet for now.
If they had simply wanted to kill me then they could have done so by now and I did not want to provoke them.
The vehicle come to an abrupt halt and once more I was gang-lifted out of the van’s slide door. The gurney’s wheeled legs snapped into place beneath me. I tasted the steely, rotten air but instead of the usual din of factorial machinations there was a near-silence that made me wonder if I had just been transported into some sort of industrial afterlife.
They’re taking me back to the asylum I suddenly realized and then I started to struggle but the leather restraints around my wrists, neck, abdomen and ankles held me in place. I tried to call out but found that I couldn’t speak, as if my vocal chords had been paralyzed. Instead, my mouth flopped open and closed like a dying fish.
One of my captors leaned over me, a girl whose age was distorted by her shaven head and the tribal tattoo that crawled around her ear. She held a black-nail polished finger to her similarly dark lips and motioned for me to be quiet and still.
With a desperate familiarity my vision was fixed straight up above me so that all I could see at first was the glittering, smoggy sky and the glare of the moon. This was quickly replaced by a corrugated metal roof with a strip-light set into it and we were moving again but vertically this time.
An elevator.
I tried to look around me as much as I possibly could but the restraints were too tight and soon my eyeballs ached from the effort. I caught glimpses of my kidnappers but nothing more.
The familiar mechanical sounds of great wheels turning against threads of thick wire echoed in my head and inside myself I was screaming to get out.
A bell rang and then I was being wheeled along another corridor but what I saw above me was nothing I had seen from the asylum. In my years there I had come to memorize what I imagined to be a large proportion of my former prison from my corpse’s point of view, though of course I had no idea of how much bigger the building might have been. For all I knew I could have been restricted to a small wing yet it felt as if I had been wheeled through every inch of the place.
Above me now, however, was not the endless patterns of stained white and cold blue tiles, the rusted pipes and loose electric cabling but a solid mesh that allowed me to glimpse the levels above us. From the noise the gurney made I suspected the floor beneath us was of the same construction, as if the entire building was merely an architectural sketch, unfinished and exposed, the railings and struts a fine skeletal bonework.
I could see people moving around up there as high as three floors or more if I squinted.
What was this place?
Often my view was blocked by large pieces of equipment that hemorrhaged wires from their undersides or furniture that was wrapped in plastic. I heard the noise of medical equipment, the buzz of electricity.
Finally we came to a stop and the gurney was snapped into place in holding blocks. My captors shuffled around me, turned on a great white light and shone it down upon me.
I was blinded by its luminescence until one of them leaned over me, silhouetting himself.
“Welcome, Dziga,” he said softly. “We’ve been eager to meet you.”
Chapter Seven
Wherein the Chaos forces make themselves known
I held the cup of water in my hands but did not drink from it. Most poisons were invisible.
My restraints had been undone, one end of the gurney tilted so that I sat upright and my captors were gathered around me just as the doctors and research students used to be. They all wore dark clothes with sleeves that came past their wrists and had small holes in them which their thumbs emerged through. Their shaven heads glistened in the stark lighting that spilled in through the latticed ceiling and floor, their curious tattoos like living creatures.
Behind them a woman shuffled around amongst a series of cabinets attached to the wall. She wore a tight white latex uniform and stockings, heavy cream-heeled platform boots and I glimpsed a large red cross just below her breasts.
“We’ve been reading through some of your notes, Dziga,” one of them said. He held a small stack of curling, worn papers and I recognized my own writing.
I found myself following the wiry pattern of his tattoo around his skull and over his ears then down his neck. Spiraling.
A Chaos spiral.
I glanced at the others and found similar patterns in their tattoos.
“Do you have instructions for me?” I asked them.
“Instructions?”
“A message. Directions. For my work.”
The man paused, laid down the papers.
“We were hoping that perhaps you could direct us.”
I regarded them cautiously, still uncertain of why they had taken me and what their intentions were. Their interest in my work was logical both if they were summoned by whatever Chaos energies inspired me and if they were part of a conspiracy to steal my work. I would not allow myself to be intimidated or take advantage of either way.
“What have you done with the Protohuman?”
“It’s safe,” a girl said, stepping forward. Her eyes glittered amongst the kohl like gems embedded in coal.
“You have it?”
“It’s safe,” the male repeated. “We’re here to help you, Dziga.”
“How?”
“That’s what we need you to tell us.”
“I don’t understand.”
They didn’t appear to be armed but the fact was they had forcefully removed me from my lab and brought me here. The room had only one window but I knew we had come up at least a couple of floors, having used the elevator, and therefore I couldn’t be certain of the safety of the drop if I tried to escape. In addition, all impressions I got of the building were that it was huge, from the endless echoes of distant machinery and human babble to the production-line quality of the interior’s construction, and I knew it would be next to impossible for me to get out that way.
The man leaned close and I thought I saw his tattoo squirming on his pate. “The airwaves, Dziga. We listened to them too.”
My eyes widened and some of my fears distilled. “It was you on the radio?”
The man shook his head. “No, it wasn’t us. But we heard. It spoke to us too.”
“Who was it?” I asked, sitting up with sudden interest.
“We aren’t certain,” the girl said. Behind her, the fetish nurse finished what she was doing and left the room, closing the door delicately behind her. I could hear her footsteps for almost a minute after she left, like distant gunfire.
“There’s something else out there, isn’t there? Something guiding us?” I asked them. My excitement grew not just because I was now more able to relax regarding their intentions but also because my theories were being confirmed.
“We believe so,” another of the males said carefully. He was shorter and stockier than the first, with broad lips and a tongue piercing that glistened in his wet mouth as he spoke. “We believe we have been brought together because the time has come for us to combine our abilities.”
“You are scientists, too?”
“Of a sort,” the first male said, placing a hand on my shoulder as I began to sit up. “Please, stay where you are, Dziga.”
“Why? I don’t understand. What is this place?”
A look was exchanged between those gathered around me that made my excitement waver momentarily.
“Our paths have crossed. Our work has crossed. Independently we have been working towards the reinvention of the human species—an evolution.”
“Yes,” I responded enthusiastically. “My work . . . I have been making some great progress lately!”
“As have we. We are part of the collective that established and runs this building but our work diverged some months back when we received our first message.”
“What is the nature of your work?”
“Simply put, modification of the body to enable modification of the species. We started like all the others in this building, working for purely aesthetic reasons. But then the messages began and since then we have been experimenting, going further.”
“You are no longer restricting yourself to aesthetics?”
“The exact opposite, in fact,” the girl said. She looked no older than nineteen and as she slid herself alongside the men I saw that the tattoo spiraled off her shaven head and reappeared upon her stomach where the tight-fitting black garments she wore separated and exposed flesh.
“Aesthetics are the key to our work,” the larger man began. “What we see is the key to what we are.”
“But sight is just one sense. The new human species should evolve from ALL senses and introduce new ones!”
“No, Dziga. Our work says that this is not true. There is only one sense, it merely functions on several levels. Reality need only register on one of these levels for it to permeate throughout all of them.”
“A Chaos spiral,” the young girl said, lifting her t-shirt to expose her stomach further and tracing the unending curve of the tattoo that swarmed around her belly button. “Everything is the same.”
I nodded for it made sense. “The perfection of Chaos is that it was too simple for us to understand, not that it is too complex.”
“Exactly. Rationalization is merely the removal of all perceptions of reality except for the sole true one. Our work is not to create—but to uncreate.”
My heart pounded with the excitement of this sudden clarity. It was as if someone had revealed to me the value of an unknown variable in a simple but solvable equation. The answer was perfect and precise.
“We’re here to help you with the Protohuman, Dziga,” the bulkier man said, moving closer.
“Help me? How?”
“Uncreation,” was the reply.
“I don’t understand.”
They moved closer to me and I felt myself leaning back further into the bed to maintain our distance.
“As we said, sound, image, touch—they are all a manifestation of a single sense, a single emotion. If we change one, we change them all.”
“Change how?”
I found myself looking at the exits once more as they drew in around me.
“Uncreation, Dziga. You have created an identity for the Protohuman. We must undo that.”
“Identity? I don’t . . . ”
My feet were grabbed again and my restraints reapplied. I couldn’t see who by.
“I won’t let you touch the Protohuman. It is my work.”
“It is not your work. It is beyond any of us. And we already have the creature.”
I tried to sit up but they forced me prone, one large hand slamming down on my chest and my wrists were placed in bondage once more. I saw the young girl pull on a pair of black latex gloves that went up to her elbows and pick up a needle filled with a substance that looked the same as the one I had been told to mix. She sparked the needle, throwing a small spray of the liquid into the air.
“Leave it alone!” I barked, pulling desperately at the restraints. “I won’t let you touch it!”
The bulkier man leaned over me. “We don’t need your permission, Dziga. This goes beyond us. We don’t need your permission, we don’t need Jakobsen’s permission, we don’t need any of it.”
I screamed as the girl shoved the needle into my chest and all I saw as consciousness faded was the movement of other modification artists moving around above me. My vision blurred and I watched one of them kneel on the grating and peer down at me.
Lab coat and graying, frizzy hair.
He looked just like Dr. Denovich from the asylum had.
Chapter Eight
Wherein Dziga realizes Jakobsen’s betrayal and decides to act on it
As I stared back at myself in the reflective surface of a handheld mirror I ran my fingers across what the Engineers had left of my face. It was smooth, abnormally flat where my nose had been, and thick like old scar tissue. My eyes were sunken black holes, my mouth a sunken red one. My ears were ragged, raw at the edges.
This wasn’t me I was looking at.
This was someone else. Something else.
I had no recollection of the procedure, nor of being returned to my lab. I was filled with vague, blurry memories like the images that clouds form if you look at them long enough, little sparks of recall jolting me every now and again. The rumble of their van mixed with the hum of drills that I might or might not have been conscious of as they worked on me. Their chatter, their whispered arguments about where to make the next cut and how deep to go splintered with the drum of my own heartbeat.
I remembered a diagram.
Shining metal implements.
My face throbbed rhythmically, the open flesh successfully coagulated now and whatever substance they had put on it soothing the pain. I could still feel my nerves burning just beneath the skin of translucent gel, menacing me with a pregnant agony.
Had I felt the pain at the time?
I remembered our discussion. I remembered the bonds. I remembered nothing.
