Sour Alba

To say the investigator was frightened would be incorrect. She had been in many dark and dangerous places in her long and varied career. There were many times over the decades that she had seen the light of violence glint in the eyes of a well armed opponent. And there had been quite a few times when she had been as helpless before deranged viciousness as she was now.

It is said that the main ingredient of fear is not knowing what is going to happen and imagining the dread things to come. But for the investigator and the person she knew was about to become her torturer, the future was a well-worn path, with tediously predictable milestones of pain.

She checked one more time that there was no means of escape she had missed. There was not. Connections. No. Her limbs? Securely bound. Weapons? None. Helper programs? Helpless. Her tools? Ahh, yes. On her desk back in the office – she could picture them quite perfectly.

Then it began. First, the little finger. O.

A small amount of time passed, allowing the investigator to fully savour the messages running along the nerves from the wrenched end of the ruined digit.

Then the other fingers, broken and pulled off one by one. That really hurt. Between each mangling, the torturer cleaned the blood from his – she sensed this was a male – his implements while the investigator’s body registered the pain.

That really hurt.

That really hurt.

So did that.

That really really hurt.

Sweet Lord, that really hurt.

That. Hurts. So. Much.

Please.

Pl. Ah ah ah ahh.

How long had passed between each pulse of pain, each mutilation? Ten minutes? An hour? Longer?

The investigator tried to switch off the pain, ordering the nerves to cease their insistent communication. But of course this was not her body and she could not control it as well she could her own. Indeed it seemed specially designed to maximise the conductivity of agony. That was worth noting.

Ah. The genitals. Why is every torturer obsessed with the gonads? It just wasn’t natural. Eeh. And. Neither. Was.

That.

This was getting serious. Her head was beginning to swim and her thinking was distracted.

The other problem with this abused body was that she could not exit it in the normal way. She was trapped here. Of particular concern was that the extreme suffering her mind was experiencing in this physical form was binding her to this weak and vulnerable flesh.

The thin-lipped sagging mouth of the investigator’s current corporeal form sobbed as she was gripped by a surge of, well not quite fear – it was all too predictable for that. More concern. Her eyes bulged as they carefully swept for any sign of hope in the cluttered emptiness of this small, grey room However, its metal walls held only echoed squelches and spots of blood. There was still no way out.

One curious aspect about this decidedly messy business was that the interrogator had not actually asked any questions yet. That, too, was worth noting.

As the gloved hands of her white-masked, black clad attendant became blurred through nearness to the face, the investigator tried to retreat into her memory in an effort to maintain control over his consciousness.

It had been a trap. It had been obvious, blatant. Whoever organised this painful tryst – ow, there went an ear, eee – had known that the investigator and her colleagues were so desperate that they would leap at any chance of information. The message had been contemptuous, not bothering to hide the fact it was bait.

It had been an email – an ancient long-obsolete, text-based message that had made its way to her department along some forgotten connection. Given the increased security caused by the recent disease outbreaks it had taken a long time to process. It took weeks for the mysterious communication to be screened, partially because it needed to be quarantined but mainly because nobody knew how to open it. Also, she had needed an expert to help her with reading written text – a skill she had not used in two centuries and had in fact archived in her back-up mind. Finding an expert brave enough to leave their home at the moment was doubly difficult.

She had been reading casualty lists and searching for patterns when the message was finally cracked. It merely said: “The letters of the first names of the heads of security at each of the affected settlements.”

Even with their crippled systems it had taken less than a minute for her research team to piece together the information. The message was startling. It explained part of what was happening and gave a time, world and address for a meeting – all spelled out with the initials of the victims. What was startling was that her name was part of the message.

She was told to come alone. To come unarmed.

She had known what she was getting into, knew that she would end up somewhere like here. She had accepted this assignment. She had chosen it. She had chosen to tread the dark red path to this feeble and trapped body because she was the most intellectually and emotionally equipped to deal with what was waiting at the end of it.

She had felt no surprise whatsoever when she electronically transferred her consciousness into this useless form and found it to be alone in a room with no exits and no usable tools. Zamyatin had actually mouthed the “crump” noise of a connection closing before her one path out of the room was severed.

Oooh. Now he was grinding at her hip bone with something. That was surprisingly sore.

* * * * * * *

The shopping malls of Vulcan were reputed to be the most continually crowded space in the Solar System. On any given day there were an average of 15 people for every square metre of floorspace. The physical impossibility of this retail feat was offset by the fact that the malls were located on the inside surface of a titanium and diamond tube with a diameter of one kilometre and a length of 35km.

It was one of the marvels of the solar system. Every other construction in space from orbital stations to ships to planetary settlements was a web of tiny spheres linked by short corridors. Some were small: the Mercury Observation Platform was a tiny pressure cooker of just three pods. The Saturnine Ring Station was a circular bundle of 4,500 interconnected globes.

The vast glittering cylinder was a testament to the creativity and wealth of the Vulcan Renaissance – sparked by the station’s independence from Venus and its prospectors’ astounding mineral finds in the outer system.

Very few people ever strayed down to the floor – they hovered at a particular altitude and then dived through a cloud of fellow shoppers to the outlet of their choice. As they descended their millions of internal nanomachines altered their bodies’ magnetic charge in relation to the gravity cells on the floor to control their flight.

These same machines could also control their hosts, given a little prompting. Shop managers continually targeted the passing swarms with magnetic fields and clouds of pheromones. Certain kinds of nanomachine, unless properly shielded, could be tricked into generating in their owner an irresistible urge to purchase new shoes, or a new arm or more nanomachines, anything really.

The lure was not based on the ability to pay, which could lead to some psychological damage when a shopper’s irresistible craving to buy could not be satisfied. Most retailers had plentiful supplies of countermeasures to neutralise the nanomechanic compulsion and, if necessary, the shopper.

One could always tell when an establishment had a new pheronome against which there was no widely available defence. A dancing tornado of shoppers and their carry units would twist and writhe above it. In the unlikely event of several shops having such an “edge” at the same time, there would be widespread turbulence in the retail weather system with thousands of people being pulled in multiple directions.

The chaos would continue until the shoppers’s internal defences were able to create patches to counteract the pheromones. This could take a while and sometimes there were casualties.

Georgina Zamyatin, who revelled in the title of Deputy Chief Efftipee Quaestor of the space station’s Genetic Data Security Division’s recovery and special projects team, had always loved this place. Its cycle of continuing evolution, the birth, death and rebirth of modified behaviours, captivated her. It had thrilled ever since she had come here as a young, wide-eyed student to study the application of Ancient Chaos Theory to techno-human development.

She was just out of school, just 65 Earth years old then, and had fallen in love with this vast seething vortex of humanity.

It was a love that had not been extinguished by the grotesque crimes she had witnessed over the centuries. Nor had it been diminished as she shed the original human form she had been born in.

She had had seven major hosts. The first was female. In it she had experienced all the pleasures that life laid before her. Her second body had been female as well. She liked being a woman. Then she had spent fifty years as a man. It had been interesting but she had found the pointless aggression disconcerting.

*******

* * * * * * *

Speaking of pointless aggression: “Externalise. Externalise. I must shield my inner self from the pain and scrutiny. I am here to calmly observe. Pain is merely a transitory sensation. It is not happening to me, it is only happening to this vessel. In the long term it is not real.

“Oh no, this useless weak body is speaking my thoughts now. That is most vexing. Ow that really really hurts. Stop doing that.”

The plain white mask (spotted with red by now) looked up. It spoke, but not with a human voice. The torturer was using a synth to mechanise his speech, stripping out all character and emotion: “It hurts doesn’t it? You want this to end, don’t you? It will, one way or the other.”

He returned to his tools.

Zamyatin said: “Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Is there any point to all this or am I just here so you can get your jollies?”

The mask looked up as the gloved hands reached for a triangular implement. “All in good time.”

Strengthened by her “rest” Zamyatin studied the room and the torturer while he selected his next tool from a tray of shining, sharp instruments.

Something caught her attention. Something – the pain was really interfering with her perception now – had changed. He had been so anonymous up until this point but now there was something personal happening.

That’s it – he was humming a tune very very quietly. Even though it was distorted, she realised it was a tune she knew.

“I know it. What is it?” her body’s mouth spluttered.

There was a blur of black and white as torturer whipped round to stare at her. His tools left trails of silver and red in her swimming vision. He hissed: “What do you know? What is what?”

He added emphasis to his question with a vicious stab deep into her gut.

Zamyatin thought quickly – and wordlessly – of a possible answer that would not betray her discovery. The pain was overwhelming. She was totally isolated. She could not control her body and her thinking was either fuzzy or audible. This was beginning to get interesting. “I know you. I recognise your technique.”

The torturer paused again and silently wiped on his sleeve a tool that looked like a cross between an antique corkscrew and a megaphone. “Go on.”

“Yes it’s coming back to me now. The Venusian mutilation case about 50 years ago. You liked to bind people in secure places, sever their connections with reality and slowly disable their bodies’ nanomachines until they completely collapsed. We caught you when you lingered over one victim too long.”

Her mind raced – wordlessly – for more details to add to the fiction. “You sorry little pervert. Some of your victims are still getting treatment. One of them nearly crashed. I though we deleted your personality and repurposed your mind and body as a … oh what was it now?

The torturer rubbed the back of his glove. “A waste droid?”

“Why would we do that? It’d be a waste of a mind. No, we carnated you as a shuttle pilot between Venus and Vulcan. And we equipped you with a keyword so that if you ever slipped your programming we could pause you instantly by just saying it to you.

She tried to sound as triumphant as possible given that most of the body she was in was a bloody pulp. “Ha. Now I’ve got you. Now the torturing ends. Now it’s my turn!”

Despite the artificial distortion and the damage to her ears, Zamyatin could hear the contempt in his reply. “Oh yes, you’ve got me bang to rights. It’s a fair cop. Say the keyword then. Say it.”

She bubbled out the first word that came into her head: “Torquemada.”

The torturer dropped his instruments, and fell to his knees, clutching his face. The white mask – now decorated with deep crimson hand prints – looked up at her with an aspect of despair. And then the torturer started to laugh.

He placed his hand under her maimed chin and lifted her head to look at him. “I’m very very disappointed in you, DCEQ-DCS Zamyatin. And I was so impressed after studying your files, I thought you were intelligent. I thought you would be able to understand, even to participate.

“But no, you’re just another moron.”

He muttered to himself. “Venus! I wouldn’t set foot on that sweltering shit hole if…”

Her head sagged forward in mock despair as she tried to digest the valuable clues she had gleaned.

The pain-master was not from … why was she thinking of him as the master? He was just another sadistic loser. It was this body getting in the way again.

The low, vile, venal little creep – thank the Creator her body didn’t vocalise that – was not from Venus. His reference to sweltering suggested he was not from the Mercury colony nor a native of here, the Vulcan station. Locals were used to heat.

It was unlikely he was Terran either. The fabulously wealthy didn’t tend to stray from their comfortable well-watered home.

That left Mars and the outer settlements. She could work on that information. Maybe glean additional information from him.

Another curio was his reference to “setting foot” on a planet. It was a most odd thing to say. Any normal person would refer to taonloading – that process of electronically transferring one’s mind to a remote host tailored for its environment. “Set foot” was an ancient concept from the days when one’s body was physically transported across space to a planet. Finally, none of the entities grown, built or created to survive on Venus had anything that could remotely be described as feet.

However – ouch, my knee, yeah whatever – the most startling nugget the oh-so-powerful mask had let slip was that he had read her files. That meant he either had a higher security clearance than Zamyatin did. (At times she was forgetting who Zamyatin was thanks to the pain and this useless body.) Or he was a hax0r of such staggering talent that he was bound to be on Solarpol database. Either way it narrowed down her hunt considerably.

She’d have her revenge on this vicious little worm yet.

But to get to that point she had to keep herself focused on the part of her that was the rational, transferable mind and resist the seductive lure of suffering afforded by her host incarnation. She must not become this body or she would die with it.

As the torturer did something else that blanked her mind with pain – no, blanked this body with pain, she called to mind a quote she had memorised in her youth. It was a foolish expression of defiance by a long-dead general fighting in a long-dead war made meaningless by eons. But she needed foolish courage now.

Across the centuries of her life, the young student she had once been whispered: “Hard pressed on my right, My centre is yielding. Impossible to manoeuvre. Situation excellent. I am attacking!”

She spluttered out her stratagem: “I don’t care any more. Yes, you’re making this physical space feel tremendous pain but this entity will crash itself before it aids you.”

The torturer raised his mask from her body’s – predictably – genitals.

Her statement intrigued the … pathetic sadist: “You don’t seem afraid. Do you still not understand? There are no connections here. When your mind gives up there will be no transfer of information – no ‘taonloading’. If you crash there will be no arduous recovery process. Your damaged essence will not be saved anywhere so it can be reconstructed. I’m not interested in hurting you. I can kill you. Make you dead. Permanently.”

Now that intrigued her, so much so that she was too curious to feel fear at his threat. Death was a very arcane concept. She’d never heard a criminal mention it before. Coercion, yes. Imprisonment, yes. Pain, yes, oh tediously yes – every one of them thought they were Torquemada. Even crash her – punish her mind until it ceased to function. But nobody had ever threatened to extinguish her essence before. Most of the criminals she’d come across wouldn’t even know what death was. Not that they had been stupid, they just hadn’t been of a philosophical bent.

The Last Man in Europa: Chapter 2