ATROPHY


Cord realized he was waking up only after he had begun to fight it.

The soft, enveloping warmness of the dream never ceased for an instant, as invisible currents gently pulled him back towards the dim edifice of consciousness. Only the faces - echoes of real memories ripped straight from his past - gave Cord any indication that his hollow world was collapsing. They had begun to curl slightly around the edges - much like pictures that had suddenly realized their own impotence, Cord wanted to say, or a letter that had strayed too close to the flame. At any rate, he watched as the faces distorted into concave mirrors, their gaze suddenly flat and cold and hard. Then Cord opened his eyes, and the last vestige of sleep disappeared completely, enveloping him only in pain pain pain. He screamed. Once.

It took just the tiniest fraction of a second before his heart started pumping again, and in that time Cord had already adjusted to the dim confines of his room, had already returned fully to the simple hexagonal chamber he called home. Bleak angles greeted him from all around, crouched in a designer-washed palette of black. No furniture; Cord disliked non-functionality. As he lay back on the stretch-bed, recovering from the hyper-sleep, it struck him just how much the room reminded him of a vast mechanical organ. An extension of flesh.

The absolute stillness of the moment touched something deeply and utterly vulnerable in Cord. Something long forgotten. Something human.

With an embarrassed cough, the time sensors chose to re-ignite. The containment field suddenly died out, sucked back into the generators with no trace but the smell of ozone. In its wake, the ticking of another sound grew steadily.

Oh shit, thought Cord to himself, and swung over the edge of the mat. For the moment, he ignored his own casual nakedness and groped, blindly, for the decon-plate that he knew lay somewhere near his hand. How much longer do I have? What do I do if… Ah, there.

To enter hyper-sleep in the first place screamed danger; to do so with an active brain-flow infinitely more so. The decombinassion plate solved this problem by uploading non-essential neural synapses into its storage banks, emptying out everything but the ghost of a personality from the actual brain. In this state of atrophy, a person would lie motionless, suffering the countless agonies of complete bodyhaul. New blood, reworked muscle - all done as one braved the soulless dreams of hypersleep.

Coming out of stas/sleep was even worse. A fifty second margin in which you prayed the decon-plate hadn't fried your nerves too badly; a fifty second margin in which you prayed the cost of immortality wasn't too high. Caught between that threshold of two kingdoms - the spirit and the flesh - many chose to die the sweet, disorienting death of cryoshock, a smile on their lips. Not Cord though.

With trembling hands, he brushed back the hair at his neck. Felt the welcome taste of metal, cold under his skull, where the needle inserted itself into his membrane, connecting living matter. Then the moment of apprehension, his body convulsing under a million independent spasms as it accepted the gift. Micro-processors whined a steady stream of not-quite-sounds/not-quite-images. Restored him.

The whole process took less than twelve minutes. Cord sat motionless throughout the whole thing, as if the slightest movement could jar the contents beyond salvage. He willed his consciousness to expand into the whole chamber, touching every solid contour with the vacuum of his mind, before contracting back into the focal point of his mind.

From beneath the stretch-bed, he pulled out a duffel bag and tore open its bypass zip. The pouch slowly deflated, but Cord had already begun pulling free its contents. Without hesitation, he slipped the skinsuit over his head, feeling the metal polymer rasp against his spine. Then the shoulder blades clicked into place, the gloves registering LED displays on the tips of his right thumb and forefinger. The liquid sheets separating Cord’s skin from the world worked on primitive deflection physics - the faster he moved, the more impact he could take. Still, it beat walking around in norm clothes. And the internal tubing was good enough that it could pump out toxins and radiation almost as fast as Cord could breathe them in. Almost.

He stood up; there was just one more thing to do. Reflexively, he let the fingers of his right hand map a complex algorithm onto themselves - dancing madly in a parody of sign language. Green lights blinked in response. Effortlessly, five of the six walls to the chamber slid up into hidden recesses, revealing a tapestry of gold and orange light that flooded the darkness. Cord watched impassively through the transparencies, as the city of Hive unfurling gracefully.

Another quick flick of the wrist. Ghost-script cut into the live feed of his corneas, systematically filtering out the visual residue, intensifying the panoramic vision of the moment. Creating the illusion of the Hive as its first designers saw it - a towering architectural triumph, a plastochemical tribute to Babel - rather than the reality as Cord saw it - a great blind worm persistently stretching its way into the sky… a superstructure so high as to escape the sight of the earth itself, the only visible ground a white blossom of mist. And worst of all, trapped in the bowels of the Hive, a hundred billion lost souls screaming for the release of death.

Cord promised he would give it to them.

An extract/description from further into the story...

His head had sustained heavy deformities, the end result of neuro-surgery and years of fastgrade drugs. The perfect oval skull now stretched in an elongated curve, ending in a tapered bullet-like point. A multitude of plastic tubings, indistinguishable from the wet pinkish flesh, ran down the base of his neck and into the focal point of his spine. The deltoid muscles of his right arm revealed a triangle of careful, tiny holes - rimtubes, as they were called. Each time the spasms got too bad, the shiver of his soft flesh would eject a million cubits of painkiller serum into his arteries. Yeah - Stomp was the perfect wetkid, born without mercy on the streets of Hive.

Cord would have need of him, come nightfall.

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