aSG: Chalandra Harkness: The Bloodchip Matrix #9

CHALANDRA HARKNESS:
THE BLOODCHIP MATRIX
(a tale from altiverse 998SUPERGUY)
Episode 9
"Bloom"
by
Gary W. Olson

+++

The quiet, gentle sound of rain came to Chalandra Harkness, as
she descended into delirium. Somewhere outside her mind, she
remembered that she had seen the Bloodchip, which had triggered a
prepared chemical reaction inside her body, a reaction engineered by
Vedrik Temekhan five decades before. Even now, microphase scalpels
were opening up her head, to get to the cybernetic implants inside, so
that the Bloodchip could be physically installed.
Inside her head, however, there was only the sound of rain.
A room formed inside her mind, a room that felt somehow familiar,
despite its antiquity. Chalandra recognized it immediately - it was
the room that she had lived in in England in the late sixteenth
century. When she had been alive.
It was illusion, she realized. A projection created by her
tortured synapses, to distract her from what was happening. Chalandra
tried to tell herself that she was on the Red Fortress, Red Sky's
floating nightmare that hovered above the lands below, remote and
inaccessible, and that there was no way she would ever see those lands
again.
She touched the heavy oak table in front of her. It felt real.
God, it even smelled real.
Chalandra took a breath. She could breathe. Her tongue flicked
over her teeth, but could not find the sharp fangs that allowed her to
feed on the blood of mortals. Her heart was beating inside her, the
feel of the blood flowing through her body like a cataract.
There was no window in the room, but there was a heavy door, from
which the quiet sounds of rain were coming. She stood, knocking over
the chair she had been sitting on as she raced towards it. Alive.
She was alive.
Snarling, Chalandra threw open the lockbolt and forced the door
open, stumbling outside to the rain. It was day outside, she saw,
though the sky was overcast with clouds. She let the rain soak into
her, chilling her living skin with wetness.
"Nice day for a walk, don't you agree?" a voice asked her.
Symonachadra Mataphouri materialized in front of her, dressed in the
blue blouse and black trousers he had been wearing the century before,
when she had first met him, in Tokyo.
"Symon..." Chalandra whispered. "What is happening to me...?"
"Relax," Symon told her. "Mnemonic image release is a side-
effect of the initial implantation operation. The best part, if you
ask me."
"Why did you do this to me?" Chalandra asked, her voice growing
louder. She grabbed him by the throat and pulled him closer. "WHY?"
"We needed a test subject," Symon told her, unfazed. "But not
any vampire would do. Our subject had to understand body magic, had
to know the subtle and ever-changing music of the flesh, of the
spirit, of the random nature of order and the plan behind chaos, and
the balance needed to survive this knowledge.
"Why, Symon?" Chalandra asked. "Why do you need that? Doesn't
your precious Bloodchip Matrix do all the work?"
"It is just a conduit, an engine to effect the changes," Symon
replied. Chalandra could feel the skies growing dark around her, as
the rain became thicker and more violent. "The Bloodchip was made to
enable the subject to control her own evolution, to create new
pathways, to adapt to circumstances that even we cannot imagine. It
is not something breathers can use - their lives are far, far too
short to even begin to make changes in their physical structure in
this fashion. But you are a child of the night, immortal in every
relevant sense of the word. You can learn to make the changes that
will show up, centuries later, as the wiring and chemicals we
installed into your undead body transmit their instructions.
"But you can only do this if you have the understanding of your
body that is necessary to change exactly what must be changed, *only*
what must be changed, and in the right measure. This is where your
studies under my tutelage come in. You must understand your body on a
cellular level, must be able to see the natural magic that is infused
in every molecule, the magic that will change with every subtle
alteration you make."
"You told me," Chalandra replied. "'Change what something
applies to, and you change the application.' Every genetic
modification I make will affect the natural magic that makes me what I
am - vampire."
"You must take great care in what changes you make," Symon told
her, as the rain thickened further, and the sky had become a dark
shroud. "You must be a shaman, unafraid to journey deep within, to
dissolve the boundaries between the old magic and the new. The
Bloodchip is the key, and the Matrix is the lock."
Chalandra realized that the rain had become blood, blood that was
soaking her body with life, drowning it in a sea of quantum red.
"As you may have realized," Symon told her, "I am an interactive
program placed in the Bloodchip by Symon, at the hour of final inlay,
before Fekesh is to steal the chip from Red Sky. He placed me here to
explain, in case he could not. You see...a curious thing happened, as
he prepared you over five decades for receipt of the chip. He fell in
love with you."
"I know," Chalandra replied. "That's why I ran away."
"His aims did not mesh with those of Vedrik Temekhan," Symon
said. "Vedrik developed the chip out of fear. He feared that mortals
were catching up to our kind, using the new magic of technology as a
gradual bridge to immortality. His work, in fact, was hastening that
end. By introducing DarkNET, by making cybernetic implants as
available as cellular phones two centuries before, he was hastening
the transformation of life."
Chalandra could feel her heartbeat lessening, growing still
inside her body. Her body was dying, growing cold as the hot blood
pounded her skin. She tried to see Symon, through the sheets of red,
but could not.
"Temekhan wished to keep our kind above mortals, separate and
superior," Symon's voice came to her, through the red haze. "The
Bloodchip would allow us to forever stay one step beyond mortal
evolution, to keep an edge that they do not have."
"And you helped him?" Chalandra asked.
"Our evolution is important," Symon told her. "Even though I
could not agree with his planned usage. What you learn through the
changes you make can be given to mortals, hastening their evolution as
well. Perhaps one day, our two separate evolutionary tracks can merge
again. We would both be stronger for it.
"When I fell in love with you, I knew what I had to do. I could
not force you to take the Bloodchip, as Temekhan wished. I planned
with Fekesh to steal the chip, with the idea that I would explain to
you what I had done, and let you make the decision of whether or not
to accept it. I...never got to make that explanation, obviously."
"I had been long gone, out of Tokyo," Chalandra said.
"Chalandra, you must survive," Symon told her. "You must escape
this Red Fortress, and survive. Temekhan put a test program in the
chip, one that will record the changes you make. During this time,
you will be kept imprisoned. Once he has enough data to satisfy him,
likely only a century hence, he will destroy you, and will put the
chip into mass production. He must not be the one who guides the
future of our kind."
"Symon..." Chalandra started. The liquid red was parting, and
she could see him again, coated in blood, smiling softly.
"The implantation is complete," Symon told her. "The program is
installed, and your implants have been again sealed up under your
flesh and skin and bone. You have become the one you fear the most -
the Chalandra Harkness who is the shaman, the rider of the sine wave,
the bloom of the electric blue flower of the cybernetic garden.
Escape."
She pulled him forward, kissing him savagely, even as she felt
him dissolving back into the delirium that had spawned him. Chalandra
pulled back and looked into his eyes.
He smiled. Five seconds later, his head exploded, showering
freshly cut electric blue flowers everywhere.

+++

"She's coming around..." McFae's voice.
The blood was boiling inside her. Was it blood, or her
imagination?
Escape.
"Please, my dear Ms. Harkness, do not struggle." Temekhan's
voice.
The implantation chamber sprang into Chalandra's vision, skipping
and weaving like a drunkard. Symon's body was staked to the far wall,
nestled in a glowing bed of electric blue roses, while his head rested
in the flower bed below, staring blankly. Escape. Akane and Alexei
were standing to the side, guarded by two kyuuketsuki ninja. They
seemed loose, but Chalandra could sense that both were ready to move
in an instant.
Vedrik Temekhan towered above her, watching her with a mixture of
curiosity and fear. Percy McFae, or Fekesh as he was sometimes
called, stood in the background, watching impassively.
Escape.
Chalandra lunged at Temekhan, fangs glistening in the cold blue.
She felt the twisted rending of the metal as she tore through the
restraints, the thoughts in her head bending to the singular message
pulsing through every synapse. Escape. Escape.
Temekhan was stumbling back, and McFae was moving forward, his
steel hands already grabbing a hold of her left shoulder, trying to
force her back. Her right hand went for his throat, fingers burrowing
deep into the synthetic folds, as far as the steel would permit.
Chalandra clutched her fingers and ripped back.
Escape.
McFae cried in pain as sparks leapt from his neck, as Chalandra
tore out wires and steel plating. She pushed him back and spun away
as Temekhan lunged at her, her combat skills taking over. Her boot
connected with his sternum, and a powerful backhand, using part of the
steel restraint that was still tied to her wrist, sent him sprawling.
Chalandra saw Akane dancing, and saw the ninjas falling as she
used the monomolecular garrote that she had taken from one of them
against the rest. Escape. Unlike the previous dance she had seen,
this was a dance of war, with every twisting, sensuous movement
bringing death to her undead attackers. Alexei was using the stakes
that the kyuuketsuki carried against them, finishing what Akane was
starting.
Escape.
There were windows in this place, in addition to the great
skylight that was allowing in the light, the blood, of the stars.
Chalandra smashed through one of them with the steel plating of her
former restraint, and gazed on the small city below her. A city of
vampires, forever shrouded in night. Each one her enemy. Where could
she go, that they would not follow?
She saw the light of the nucleonic engines, rising up from the
center of the Red Fortress, a shaft of burning light from a primal
domain. Yes, she would escape there. They would not get her there,
in the heart of the primal red light.
Escape.
She leapt from the window, from the majestic spire, feeling the
light that felt like blood rain on her from the stars.

(to be continued...)
--
Copyright (c) 1994-2010 by Gary W. Olson. All Rights Reserved.
--
Gary W. Olson
swede at novitious dot com
Superguy LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/superguy_list/
Superguy DreamWidth: http://superguy.dreamwidth.org/
Superguy Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47273370926

aSG: Chalandra Harkness: The Bloodchip Matrix #8

CHALANDRA HARKNESS:
THE BLOODCHIP MATRIX
(a tale from altiverse 998SUPERGUY)
Episode 8
"The Belly of the Beast"
by
Gary W. Olson

+++

Chalandra could feel the omnipresent hum from her dreams all
around her, penetrating her cells like an unending, unvarying song.
Only here, it was no dream - it was a nightmare turned real.
Everywhere she looked, she saw black or silver plated steel,
stretching hundreds of yards to the far end of the landing bay.
"I apologize for the rather spartan look of this bay," Temekhan
said to them all, though to Chalandra, it felt like he was talking
just to her, his eyes were fixed in her direction. He took her hand,
and she closed her fingers around his. "It's an auxiliary bay, not
one regularly used for personnel transfer."
"Impressive," Symonachandra said, unnecessarily. "Is the whole
Fortress like this?"
"No," Temekhan replied. "The rest...well, you shall see that for
yourself. Come! We will begin the tour I promised." He offered his
arm to Chalandra, and after a moment's hesitation, she took it. They
proceeded towards a lift set into the near wall of the bay, followed
by Symonachandra, Akane, and Alexei. Percy McFae, or Fekesh, as he
was sometimes known, was the last to board the lift. Chalandra
wondered at the fact that Temekhan would allow himself to be alone on
a lift with three who had ill will against him and no compunctions
against carrying it out, with only McFae as a defense. Surely, in the
corridors and labs of the Red Fortress, there would be kyuuketsuki
ninja armed with stake and monomolecular garrote who could emerge from
hiding in an instant to quell any uprising. But on a lift?
Again, she sensed something not quite mortal about McFae. He was
not a vampire, but neither was he a breather, at least, not in the
ordinary sense of the word. Quietly, she wondered just what the hell
he was.
The lift doors closed, and with the barest sensation, the lift
rose.

+++

The red glow rose from around them, a boiling fire that seemed
like the pits of hell of the old religions opened up to receive them.
The red light lit up the steel spires that vaulted upwards on every
side, towards the red haze that was the sky.
"What you see below," Temekhan told them, "is the continuous
nucleonic reaction that powers the massive engines of this vessel. It
keeps my floating city aloft, keeps it moving counter to the spin of
the Earth, so as to stay perpetually in the shadow of night."
"The nucleonic plants in Tokyo aren't as large as this," Alexei
commented, his voice subdued, touched with awe, but no fear.
"They don't have to be," Akane added. "They don't have to power
a mountain."
Chalandra gazed at the reactions, feeling an odd familiarity, one
that had been growing ever since she had arrived on the Red Fortress,
as Temekhan's guest and prisoner. Leaning over the railing of the
small walkway that connected two huge spires, one at either edge of
the Fortress, she could see a faint reflection overlaying the ongoing
reactions.
"A radiation shield," she surmised.
"Yes," Temekhan said, seeming pleased that she had noticed the
almost indistinguishable bubble that sealed off the reaction process.
"It filters out the harmful aspects of the reaction, and dims the
light to an acceptable level. It also prevents accidental plunges
into the heart of the engines, which I assure you is fatal, even for
our kind."
"You've shown us many marvels, on this tour," Chalandra said to
Temekhan. "Is this the last marvel we are to see?"
"We have yet to reach the final destination of our tour,"
Temekhan answered her, his eyes fixing on hers. "When we reach it,
the last of your questions will be answered."
Chalandra did not reply, but walked with Temekhan, as they
proceeded towards the tallest spire that rose from the huge main body
of the Fortress. The metal she walked upon felt like a thin strip of
an old bridge above the altar of Shiva, and she was glad when they
entered the tower, and the steel door shut behind them.
The comments Alexei and Akane had made were the first they had
made since they had arrived on the Fortress. But they had not been
inactive. Chalandra had noticed how they monitored the details of
what they were shown, particularly the details of how the engines were
kept under control, and from where those processes were controlled.
Did they actually believe they had a chance to escape from this
place? That they could overwhelm the kyuuketsuki ninjas who followed
their every move like a silent cloud?
"I have ordered that the Fortress rise to an increased
elevation," Temekhan told her, conversationally. "You may enjoy the
view."
They boarded another lift. Again, McFae was the last to board,
and the only security for Temekhan that Chalandra could consciously
detect. The lift rose, silently.

+++

The room they had entered was strangely reminiscent of the place
Chalandra had first met Temekhan. Electric blue roses surrounded
them, covering the walls of the spacious, circular chamber with their
eerie glow. The roof of the chamber was transparent, and Chalandra
could see the red haze of the clouds, very close, now, getting closer.
Five kyuuketsuki ninja stood at equidistant points from the
center, silent, almost apologetic sentries in a place that even they
could find no place of concealment. Nothing could hide from the
roses.
There was a table in the center of the chamber, with an array of
electronic equipment fanning out from it, like the wings and pincers
of a monstrous cybernetic insect. There were no lights suspended
above the table. Only the light from the light strips suspended above
the electric blue roses, and the red glow from the red sky above,
provided light. It was more than enough.
"Tell me, my dear," Temekhan said, releasing Chalandra's arm,
"what do you think of life and death in this century?"
"I'm given to understand that both still exist," Chalandra
answered.
"But not as we once knew them," Temekhan replied. "Even a
century ago, they were changing, with the emergence of the net.
Electronics wove themselves into the fabric of the living, fiber-optic
tendrils destroying the meaning of distance, destroying the very
notion of barriers. When Red Sky introduced DarkNET, the process was
completed, making the world a single room."
"I'm well aware of your place in the cybernetic revolution,"
Chalandra said. "I was there, after all, after a fashion."
"It was more than a revolution in cybernetics," Temekhan told
her, pacing towards the wall, and the ozone haze of the electric blue
roses. "It was the most significant event in the evolution of mortal
humans in millennia. The most significant because it is the key to
further control of evolution."
"One of our points of agreement," Symonachandra interrupted, "is
that the blind track of evolution is at an end. The slow process of
natural physical adaptation has not been able to keep pace with the
rapid alteration of the physical and mental landscape. The real
revolution was in turning the reins of change over to those being
changed."
"You say that it's been an evolution for mortal humans,"
Chalandra spoke. "What about our kind? It's had a tremendous effect
on us, as well."
"Not to as great a degree as you might think," Temekhan replied.
"The net has united the world, but it has also fragmented it like
nothing ever has before. Technology unites, but it also isolates. It
is a cold medium, a medium of illusions and masks. In cyberspace,
there are no boundaries. Anything is possible. One can take on any
form, any persona, in dealing with others. The laws of form, of cause
and effect, are suspended, made obsolete. One becomes invulnerable to
real harm, isolated from real contact, feeding on the electric blue
datastreams to gain strength in the form of information. And one only
has to leave when the physical body demands sleep."
Temekhan turned from the wall, and fixed another gaze on
Chalandra.
"Tell me, my dear," he said, his graveled voice low and
predatory, "does that sound familiar to you?"
"The life of a vampire," Chalandra answered, "is a life of
isolation, no matter how many people he surrounds himself with.
Immortality can destroy the walls of time and space because it is its
own wall. We must change identities, change masks, to survive the
centuries. We must feed on blood, and sleep at the rise of the sun.
We are part of all around us, yet separate."
"The old magic and the new magic are not so different, you see,"
Temekhan said. "The mortals are beginning to blur their own
mortality, by wiring themselves into the immortal net. What we take
from blood, they will take from the machine, forming a synergy between
the two.
"For millennia, we of the night have had what the mortals have
not. It set us apart, our special evolution, placed us far above
their lot. And yet, it seems that our evolutionary offshoot has
become a dead end. The mortals are catching up to us, and, sometime
in the centuries to come, they will surpass us. Our immortality, our
increased strength, our lack of need for food or drink or air to
breathe will no longer be an edge. In a world where mortality has
lost its meaning, our nature will become our weakness.
"That is why I developed the Bloodchip."
"Building a better vampire," Chalandra said, smiling slightly.
"What does your chip do, exactly? Take away vulnerability to
sunlight?"
"That may be a result," Temekhan said. "It depends on how the
test subject responds and interprets the Bloodchip program, on how
well the Bloodchip Matrix controls the evolution of the body over the
centuries the program will operate." He walked closer, his eyes
burning. "You remember how I told you I grew my roses. Study,
experimentation, genetic modification, and patience. Being gifted
with eternal life, I could afford to wait the decades that it would
take for the test subject to assimilate the Bloodchip Matrix, the
genetic modifications required to take the program from the Bloodchip
and write it into the structure of the test subject itself. An
assimilation that is now complete. But first..."
He made a single gesture. Two kyuuketsuki ninja grabbed
Symonachandra and slammed him into the nearby wall of roses. In a
blur of motion too fluid to see, let alone stop, one produced a
sharpened stake and drove it into Symonachandra's heart, burying it to
the hilt. Symon's eyes widened, but he did not scream. He looked at
Chalandra silently, pleading, not for assistance, but for forgiveness.
With a second fluid motion, the other ninja looped a
monomolecular garrote around Symonachandra's neck. The wire was
comprised of single molecules, joined in a line. It had no breadth,
and could cut through anything.
Symon's head landed in the bed of electric blue roses at the base
of the wall, staining the energetic blue with dark ichor. The
kyuuketsuki ninjas moved away from the body, leaving it suspended in
the artificial garden of blue, stake driven into the soft metal that
had been designed with such slayings in mind.
Something snapped inside Chalandra's mind. She leapt at
Temekhan, fangs bared, a scream of pain and rage and fury ripping from
her throat. Temekhan did not move an inch. He didn't need to.
The arm grabbed her by the throat, catching her in mid-leap.
Violently, she backhanded the one who had caught her, a blow that
would have taken the head off a mortal.
Percy McFae just smiled at her, blandly. "Below my organic
epidermis is a titanium alloy frame, with motorized kinetic
enhancement." She struggled, trying to wrest his arm from her neck.
"Over sixty percent of my body is now synthetic. I am the goal of
mortal evolution, and your strength is no match for mine."
He lifted her body, and forcibly placed her on the table.
Chalandra felt hidden restraints rising from the table to hold her, to
bond her legs and arms. With a final burst, she lunged for McFae's
neck, fangs gleaming in the blue light from the orchards. McFae
simply grabbed her throat again and slammed her back down. A
restraint rose from the table, replacing his hand.
"I don't need your immortality, Ms. Harkness," he said, politely,
as he stepped back. "I have my own."
"An admirable creation, is he not?" Temekhan asked, leaning over
Chalandra. "It took nearly a century to perfect him. It will take a
lot longer to perfect you, however.
"I killed Symonachandra Mataphouri because he betrayed me, twice.
His second betrayal you already know, when he allowed the Bloodchip to
be stolen. Of course, since McFae was Fekesh, I had never really lost
the chip, but it is the principle that counts.
"The first betrayal was the most damaging. It was when he
allowed you to escape Tokyo, half a century ago. I nearly killed him
then - I would have, if I hadn't needed him to complete the
programming. But the fool had fallen in love with you, and let his
defenses down. And you were far stronger than any of us had given you
credit for."
Chalandra could see the sky. It was all she could see, besides
Temekhan's face. They were rising through the red haze that was the
sky. And above...above...
The stars were emerging. The bloody stars of her dreams were
emerging.
"You remember this place now, don't you?" Temekhan asked, as he
pressed some buttons. Machinery hummed, filling Chalandra's body with
its song. "You have been here before, you know. All you remember of
it is that it was when your library chip and neural input jacks were
implanted, to allow you access to cyberspace. But much more was done
than that. You were brought here, to the Red Fortress, by Symon and I
for special treatment. We implanted a special program into you, a
program that required decades for maturation."
"I know," Chalandra said, her voice small and quiet. "I've
always known. I just never...consciously...realized..."
"That is why we needed to bring you here, why you were the key,"
Temekhan told her. Machinery hummed, bringing a thin, red wafer-
shaped object into her vision. Its blood-red hue was tinged with the
blue from the roses. "The test subject is you, of course."
Chalandra felt her body going numb, as chemicals implanted inside
her decades ago were released. The sight of the chip was the
conditioned trigger, she realized. To keep her still...for
implantation.
"You are the Bloodchip Matrix," Temekhan told her. Chalandra
felt her consciousness slipping, as the vision of the electric blue
rose blossomed over the face of the Bloodchip. The rose was the
Matrix, and the Matrix was the door through which the one she most
feared would arrive.
The blood was raining from the stars now, raining into the
electric blue rose, into the Bloodchip, into the Matrix, into her.
The omnipresent hum of machinery surrounded her, and the someone she
feared had arrived.
She stared into her own eyes, as the electric blue overwhelmed
her mind.

(to be continued...)
--
Copyright (c) 1994-2010 by Gary W. Olson. All Rights Reserved.
--
Gary W. Olson
swede at novitious dot com
Superguy LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/superguy_list/
Superguy DreamWidth: http://superguy.dreamwidth.org/
Superguy Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47273370926