aSG: Chalandra Harkness: The Bloodchip Matrix #9

[Gary W. Olson]

                         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
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