92 - Liminal Coil Pt. 4 [Cherno]

A/N 11th July: Added more detail to Krahe's reminiscence of Oasis.

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“We will now begin with the extraction of your spine.”

Bit by bit, the two grafters did just that, starting with a single cut down the length of her back. The bones and discs went first, extracted with a combination of cutting and the bone-dissolving liquid from before, leaving only her wrecked spinal cord. Then, in stages, sensation was lost to her, leaving only sight and sound.

“First stage complete. Now initiating stage two…”

Before another hour passed, Krahe saw her original spinal cord being placed into a narrow containment tube. Then, Firminus set the Liminal Coil’s rib cage into place, piece by piece, while Fidelia vanished out of sight with the spine itself in her tendrils, presumably to set it into her back. They worked for some time, subtly adjusting the spine and rib cage’s alignment and size, as she learned from listening to their occasional comments.

“Alignment complete. Proceeding with pre-connection graft assembly…”

Firminus abruptly stopped, looking into empty space.

“Abnormal activity in upper-left thoracic region. Tissue hyperactivity. Partial autonomous graft assimilation.”

There came a popping sound as her left shoulder shoved itself into its new socket.

“...Activity has ceased. No abnormal readings. Proceeding as normal.”

Fidelia’s masked face appeared in front of Krahe.

“Blink twice if you did not purposely initiate any action, and thrice if you did.”

She blinked twice. Fidelia once more vanished from sight. Various metallic clicking and clacking followed as the Liminal Coil was joined together and anchored to the rest of her skeleton.

“Ready for final stage. Initiating sensory blackout…”

Krahe was plunged into senseless blackness.

She let herself drift away into nothingness; a nothingness she had known before, and which she expected to know again.

A one-night-stand with death.

For a while, Krahe basked in this nothingness. Sensory deprivation was nothing new to her. Inevitably, the hallucinations began, her mind trying to fill in for lack of input, and though she could’ve stopped it, she didn’t. A scene faded into view, dreamlike in its vagueness, the only things that received focus being the scorching heat, the smell in the air, and whatever her mind’s eye looked at any given time. It was the middle of a dusty street, a single strip of asphalt running through the small desert town. There were only a handful of real buildings; most of the town of Oasis, New Dixie was made up of prefabbed shells, retrofitted shipping containers, and salvaged vehicles. Nonetheless, it was her little slice of home, a place of ecological and human revolution going on beneath the nose of the corpocracy. Greenery grew from the desert sand and spat in the face of the arid climate.

A forgotten seed vault, forgotten gene resequencing technology, a spring-bearing cave full of plastic-eating fungus, and a centuries-old south-american geneticist with a chip on his shoulder - one Joseph Erber. That had been the birth of Oasis, a place of not just restored ecology, but restored people. The first generation of Oasis-dwellers had been just as sick and genetically degraded as all the rest of the world that didn't have the privileges of the corporate neo-aristocracy. Over the years, however, Erber's tireless work showed results, restoring both the landscape and the people in equal measure. The average Oasis-dweller of Krahe's generation had better genetics than most corpo neo-aristocrats; they were taller, stronger, smarter, more resistant to toxins and radiation, they even possessed an entirely new organ that would enable them to resist genetic degeneration. Despite wildly varying appearance, they also possessed universally green eyes, with Erber calling it his signature by which they were to recognize one another. He called them his heirs, acting as a grandfather to the entire town even as he himself became a fullborg in defiance of time's cruel march. Oasis was a rough town, that was true, but it was, nonetheless, one of the safest places east of the California Nuclear Exclusion Zone.

Inevitably, however, despite Erber's best efforts, They took note. Envious and wrathful, they brought nuclear fire upon Oasis, and with it, hundreds of square kilometers of New Dixie, trying to exterminate any possible survivors.

Krahe walked through her memory of the town, utterly devoid of any people. Hours passed, though with no external stimuli for reference, it felt far shorter, much like a dream. Inevitably, it began turning to glass. Bit by bit, everything in her surroundings crumbled away into greenish glass, and she was left standing on a radioactive mirror.

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Firminus’ probe, as part of its functionality, could effectively read the patient’s surface thoughts and even translate an accurate reconstruction of what she was seeing, or rather the image in her mind’s eye. He of course relegated such a drastic application of the functionality to extreme conditions, using the probe for purely diagnostic applications.

Only, just as the Liminal Coil hooked into the rest of Lady Blackhand’s central nervous system, he felt an alert ping from the artifact. A distinct, yet ignorable sound began to ring out, produced by the physical ringing of the probe itself, caused by massive cognitive pressure buildup. Normally, this meant a seizure, or an extreme mental state that would demand attenuating measures to allow the procedure to proceed at all as well as to prevent the patient from suffering permanent mental damage. But Firminus looked inward, to the actual readings, and saw nothing to suggest anything like a seizure or psychotic break. He actually wasn’t sure what these readings meant, as he hadn’t ever encountered them, and they didn’t seem to be causing issues with the procedure. The probe’s inbuilt projector flickered to life, projecting within Fidelia’s field of view, while Firminus saw it in his own mind’s eye. It was a desolate landscape of shimmering, greenish glass, reverting back and forth between itself and the same location, only filled with alien buildings and greenery. The scene turned to glass, then reverted. Over and over again. Glass effigies of people filled the thoughtscape, as did shrouded, faceless figures in lavish business suits of all kinds, spreading vitrification wherever they passed. The mental image went from slowly moving, as if walking through the thoughtscape, to sprinting, lashing out at the figures.

Firminus hadn’t been able to pin down exactly what the previous readouts had meant, but they shifted to a pattern he did know: Hostility. He had no way to objectively discern the specific nature of it, his probe wasn’t so thorough, but he couldn’t help but interpret it as hatred. Hatred beyond hatred, hatred so profound it bled out through his artifact, hatred so pure the emotion alone could cast a curse if given the opportunity and the catalyst.

The only reason he could afford to pay the readings any mind was the fact all his work was already done; Fidelia’s impossibly skilled and numerous extremities were the ones doing the astro-neural connection work. He was good enough to do it himself, and would’ve liked to do so, but unfortunately, he didn’t have the authority. This was, after all, not just a grafting procedure, but the officiation of a new graft-apostle.

By the end, she was no longer cut open. Amorphous graft-paste and numerous elixirs, both valued far above anything available on the open market, had been used to seamlessly and instantaneously bond the Liminal Coil to the surrounding flesh and to close the skin with only thin, reddened incision lines that would vanish before long.