Brian Steele - 4POCALYPSE - Four Tales of a Dark Future

Sienna was told all of this on her way to a cell.

The cold, monotone lecture continued, delivered by a man who introduced himself as Warden Ashmore. She didn’t pay much attention to the rest of it, only noticing that the humorless Mancer acolyte kept staring at her boobs. Sienna considered commenting on it, and decided against it.

“Raleigh is a place attempting to obtain perfection,” intoned Ashmore. “The Madam removes the uncertainty of choice and provides the joy of purpose. The Madam removes the suffering of desire and provides the glory of duty. The Madam removes…”

“Fucking hell,” exclaimed Sienna with sigh.

Ashmore spun on her in confusion.

“Right, you love the crazy bitch — I get it. Don’t tell me, tell her.”

As he turned bright red, Sienna waited for the fist he was cocking back to knock her unconscious. At least she wouldn’t have to listen to him drone on anymore. The punch never came.

“I said that’s enough, Mr. Ashmore!”

“This… vile little…”

“She’s no longer your concern,” said the fidgeting small man. “The guards will, er, escort this, um… to my facilities.”

“Claiming this piece of soft skin for your own needs, Doctor?” Ashmore asked, his voice dripping acid.

“Scientific needs, yes. Er, you were the one ogling her tits, Ashmore.”

Sienna gave the warden a girlish wave as she was marched off, watching him turn red again and sputter in fury.

DataLog Text-MemxJourn: Doyle, Sienna A. / 11-07-24

Sienna had been locked inside a small observation room since she had first entered what she was referring to as “The Mad Scientist’s Lair” in her head. It was filled with more high-grade technology than she had seen in years, let alone in one place. While lit from above, everything was cast under a dull greenish-yellow cast from all the hard-light projections running. Along with charts and graphs, a series of equations were running in one spot, maps of the T-Net tower grids beside it, and a rapid-time digital composite of a human molecular system adapting to Leecher status with it’s eventual collapse into a Feeder.

She didn’t like to look at that one much, even if it was a median calculated avatar. Stuck in the room now for a few hours, she had watched the doctor rush past a few times, stop to fiddle with a device or two, then disappear again. At one point he had walked past, lost deep in thought, paused to look up at her with his index finger searching for somewhere to point to. Whatever idea he had been looking for must have come to him, because he dashed over to a table with two Servants and began tapping on them simultaneously. Then out the door again with one of them.

It was exhausting to watch him through the window, exhausting to be so filled with fear and sorrow. Even though the room was small and illuminated, a small cot had been set in the corner with some water. Sienna couldn’t take being strong anymore right then, not with everything that had happened. They would either kill her or they wouldn’t.

Either way, she was curling up and passing out.

DataLog Text-MemxJourn: Doyle, Sienna A. / 12-07-24

“Um…” came an electrical voice, accompanied by a series of knocks.

Sienna struggled awake, almost fell out of the cot, and saw the doctor peering at her through the window.

“Hello,” he said, as if having a polite conversation over tea.

“Aw, for the love of…” grumbled Sienna climbing off the cot. “I need to pee.”

“Right, yes… er, press the wall there to your, um, left? Yes, left.”

She did and a section of the wall slid back to reveal a small alcove with a toilet.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t close when, er… you know, a subject… yes, um, is inside. But I can’t observe you through the window! Not, um… it’s not the right angle.”

Sienna went in, went to the bathroom, and came back out. The doctor was still standing there. They stared at each other for what felt like a full minute.

“Don’t you have more sciencey things to run around and do?”

“Um, no?”

“Of course.”

Silence.

“Er, what are you?”

Plain as that.

“Well, I’m a female, of the human variety,” she responded, growing irritated. “Blonde, twenty-six, about five and a half feet. I like acoustic music and shooting things that piss me off. Oh, would you like to make a note for Warden Ashmore that I’m a 34C?”

Sienna almost laughed at the reaction her rant had on the doctor. He didn’t seem to have any idea how to process this stream of information, or even determine if it was in fact sarcasm. He basically rocked back and forth, eyes everywhere but on her.

“That dick warden called you ‘doctor,’ right? Hi doctor, my name’s Sienna. What’s yours?”

Motionless now, he replied, “I’m… Dr. Harvey.”

Sienna sighed. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Harvey.”

“You, er… you’re a very strange young lady.”

“Yeah, I’ve got that before.”

He blinked rapidly. “Um, do you appreciate, er… understand how strange?”

Sienna clicked her tongue. “I’m assuming you’re referring to the fact that I’m not going to end up a Feeder or a Mancer.”

“So you know?” Dr. Harvey exclaimed with excitement.

Sienna made a sudden decision not to tell any of her captors about Jean-Baptiste Camus. She wasn’t entirely sure why, but that piece of information seemed safer unsaid. If anything, it made her knowledge appear all the more like guesswork.

“My… friends and I,” Sienna said, also concealing the existence of her brother, “We had somewhat hammered together that theory on our own. I don’t have the same addiction other Leechers do, even if they do turn into Mancers.”

“Fascinating! I hadn’t, er, anticipated that particular aspect of the conversion.”

“Uh-huh. And what am I ‘converting’ into?”

Dr. Harvey said nothing. He stepped back from the window and lowered himself down into a battered folding chair. His fingers jumped around his coat pocket, finally settling on his face where he removed his glasses. No longer trembling, he folded his hands in his lap.

“I… I’m the only biophysicist left alive who specialized in Galvanic Sciences, as far as I’m aware,” he said slowly. “Before my, er, services… became exclusive to those of Madam President, I was working on… a theory.”

His eyes strayed to T-Net tower map. “Nearly twenty percent of the T-Net is down. That’s not a great deal when you considered the vast amounts of data saturation, the way the zettahertz frequencies, um… permeate everything. I keep checking the calculations, over and over… but, they’re the same.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Those few random dead zones, where there is, um, zero signal strength from the T-Net towers. It’s not a coincidence there are no Feeders present in those areas. It’s just enough… just enough…”

“Enough for what?” Sienna asked, voice raised.

“To keep them, er… active? Animated, existing. Alive? And we stay alive with our Servants, correct? Of course, Madam President had me abolish this line of research…”

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, enunciating every syllable.

His eyes finally came back to rest on her in the observation room, and he gave her a very tired, very sad smile through the window. Making his way to get up and leave, he turned off two of the hard-light holograms and typed away at a third keyboard. Siena banged on the glass.

“Dr. Harvey? What am I converting into? Dr. Harvey!”

He paused by the door. “Long ago, it was postulated that ‘energy can not be created or destroyed, only transferred.’ Humans found a way to transfer their own energy, but Leechers absorb it as well. Feeders have lost the ability to transfer, to… um, manipulate it, while Mancers are, er… adept at it.”