Jak Koke - Stranger souls

Muscle cells differentiated into bone and skin. Intestine cells became fat and kidney and muscle. The doctors were

able to slow the process, but it was too late to fix it. Too late. They told him he would never leave the vat. He would never breathe in the real world again.

All the doctors could do was improve his Matrix connection. He continued with his life. He wasn't going to let anything slow him down. He still owned a hefty portion of Aztechnology, not to mention various holdings in many smaller corporations, including a significant chunk of Universal Omnitech. He would be damned if he'd give up on life.

Now, standing over the sink in the clinic's bed chamber, he touched the button that turned on the light over the mirror. Am I finally out of the vat? Perhaps.

The face looking at him from the mirror was handsome despite the bruises. His eyes were silver-gray and flecked with blue, and there was a line of stitches through the reddish-brown eyebrow that arced above his left eye. There were blackened purple patches on his jaw and neck, some of the bruises disappearing under his copper-colored hair.

He stepped back from the mirror to look over the whole body. Quite nice, he thought. A substantial improvement over the fat and flabby form he remembered. I'll have to take better care of this one.

He heard footsteps out in the hall, two people approaching his door at a rapid pace. Urgent. And as the door opened, he crouched down and pressed himself against the wall. Quick and silent, without thinking.

What am I doing? he thought.

Two people entered. One was a human who wore a form-fitting white suit, and carried weapons. A stun baton and netgun, he knew suddenly, though he could not remember how. The other was dressed in loose pants and a jacket made of purple silk, embroidered with gold thread. He was an elf, tall and slender with a brown pony tail and arrogant eyes.

A mage? Again the thought just came into his head, though he didn't know how. But he knew it to be true.

"Hello?" said the elf. "Mr. Roxborough?"

He stood up.

"There you are," said the elf. "Is something wrong? Nightmares again?" He thought of the vat. "Yes."

"Please come and lie down," the elf said. "My name is Meyer. Are you hungry? Thirsty?" "No."

"What was your dream about?"

He felt compelled to tell this one. Maybe it would help to get it out of his head. Maybe they could help him. "I dreamt I was drowning. I was put into a vat of some sort, and I couldn't breathe." He looked right at the elf, giving him a hard stare. "Is this something that happened to me?"

Meyer nodded solemnly.

"Tell me about it."

"Why don't I show you?"

The elf put a reassuring hand on his arm, wrapped him in a thin cotton robe to cover his naked body, and escorted him from the room. The hallway outside was brightly lit by overhead fluorescents. White and black tiled floor, white walls. There was an almost antiseptic air about the whole place.

They passed what the elf described as recovery rooms, where the people who came here for surgery were allowed to rest while they healed. It seemed that every one of the patients was here to get some sort of metal implanted. The feelings he got from that discovery were mixed. Part of him was proud of the clinic as though he had some stake in its performance, but underlying that pride was a sense that there was something deeply wrong with whatever went on here.

The hall was segmented every twenty paces by a fire wall and double doors made of reinforced steel. Security cameras scanned the hall at these checkpoints, and autofire turrets tracked along.

High security for a hospital, he thought. Cameras everywhere.

Nobody else walked the halls except for a few others who wore the same form-fitting white suit and weaponry as his human escort. The other patients were either asleep or behind closed doors. He could hear some faint conversations, though he couldn't make out the words.

Meyer and the human guided him to an elevator. Upon entering, Meyer looked into a small glass port on the steel control panel as the machine scanned his retina. A second later a few previously hidden buttons lit up on the panel.

Meyer pressed the one marked B 5-Roxborough, and the elevator began to descend.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

"You must realize that you aren't complete," Meyer told him. "Part of you is still inside the tank. We're taking you to see that part."

A chill took him as the doors slid open, revealing a dark corridor. Security cameras and autofire drones scanned them. He pulled the thin robe tighter around him, but the chills did not abate.

The hallway was raw duracrete and very thick, probably enough to withstand a small tactical nuke. Fluorescent lighting hung on metal posts embedded into the duracrete ceiling. There was a short open section that ended in a door. Again, Meyer had to submit to a retinal scan to get them through, and on the other side were two guards standing alert, ready to draw weapons.

The guards wore tan uniforms over body armor with black and red jaguar-shaped patches at their shoulders. Their heads were completely shaved and they had no visible ears, just tiny chrome dots on the sides of their heads. Their eyes were covered with dark violet glasses that were jacked into their skull through a microthin wire. The wide area behind the guards was blocked by floor-to-ceiling fencing, through which the only access was the door between the two guards.

Behind the fencing stood another guard, a dark-haired Hispanic woman without any visible cyberware. Another mage.

The guards took a drop of blood from each of the three of them, pricked from the tip of their ringers. The blood soaked into a strip of paper and into a scanner mounted next to the door. While the scanner checked their DNA with the files on record, the guards searched each of them for weapons. The search was a formality only because they had already been scanned by the SQUID that Ryan had noticed in the hallway. The SQUID was a quantum interference device, and it would have picked up any weapons and any cyberware.

How do I know all this? he wondered. More memories?

After a few minutes of unpleasantness, they were through. The elf turned to him and explained. "We can't be too careful," he said. "You're one of the major shareholders of Aztechnology. You're responsible for making decisions that

affect millions of people. Your life must be protected at all cost."

As he took in the details of the room, the door clicked closed behind them. A series of large plexan tanks lined the semicircular wall. There were twelve in all, black tanks about five meters high and cylindrical, about half as wide as they were tall. Machinery hummed and pumped near the base of each vat, and a veritable spider web of fiber-optic cables spread across the surface of the tanks, connecting to sensors and probes. Two catwalks provided access, one about halfway up, and the other at the top where more cables, thicker this time, plunged into the apex. Matrix connections, he knew suddenly.

Lights illuminated only four of the tanks, those in the middle. The machinery and electronics on the others remained off. A bored-looking human technician in a white lab coat unjacked from a terminal as they approached. Another tech watched them from the topmost catwalk.

"Can you depolarize the tank?" the elf asked.

"As you wish," the tech said, turning back to the control panel and tapping a few keys.

This must be what I was, he thought, watching in horror as a broad window appeared in the side of the vat. The black plexan changing color to become clear.

Lights came on inside, showing him the results of his disease. Organs and differentiated tissue floated in a soup of saline and connective tissue. Bits of blood and bone, clumps of liver and intestine all jiggling inside the vat like a cellular chili.