[Black Noise | Part Five - Pico] by Pundit [clostridia@bigfoot.com]

Legal : The characters in this story are copyright Archie Comics and SEGA, and are used without permission. This story itself may be freely distributed without the consent of the author, provided it remains unmodified. The author asserts his right to be identified as the creator of this work, and therefore its owner.

Note : Hi, this is Pundit, for those of you who are unfamiliar with me. This is the second part in another series (Shades of Grey was the first). Oh, and it's advisable to read Shades Of Grey before this series, although that's not exactly essential.

Comments/flames/criticism, and other delightful things are encouraged; feel free to send them to clostridia@bigfoot.com.

And if you haven't noticed, there are no, and there will never be, any fan-characters/self-inserts/liberties-with-the-continuity/delightful-ripoffs-of-the-chaos-emeralds in my writing.

Admittedly, I did take quite a lot of advantage of Kragok's character last series, and wrote a few whopping bloopers before I finally discovered a shop selling Knuckles comics (err... about six months after they cancelled it).

Anywayyyy.... with that I'll leave you to the story. Do enjoy it.
-------------------------------------

How do you fight a war? You use weapons, valor, courage.

How do you fight an organization? You use rebellion, guerilla tactics, individuality.

How do you fight a particle the size of a cell? You don't. You can't.

***

She can feel the ruffled sheets beneath her arms and legs, and a gentle breeze that caresses her face every now and then. Through closed eyes, she knows the room is a warm shade of sunlit yellow, but she doesn't want to wake up. Not at all.

She wants to stay on her back, to enjoy her deliciously weary state. Her mind is perfectly at peace, placid and undisturbed like a white winter pond.

She feels a cold metal bedframe under her fingers.

Metal.

This is not her bed.

With that thought, her eyelids spring open, propelled by the suddeness of the shock, and the fear that seeps into her heart.

Then the images begin to pour in. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, cascading over her head, past the realm of thought, into the pit of feelings.

Poison.

Horror.

Pain.

She begins to hyperventilate, just as a nurse sweeps in.

'Lady Lara!'

The nurse whips out a bottle from the unfathomable depths of her apron, grasping it like a talisman. She extracts a little round blue pill, and gives it to the former coma victim, who palms it and gulps it down like a fish gasping for air.

'I'm sorry...' A sheepish, wan smile.

'Nothing to worry about, ma'am - it's just a temporary side effect. Lie back and try to relax. I'll contact your husband, shall I?'

She nods gratefully, and settles back, accepting a copy of the newspaper with a smile, as the nurse prepares to bustle right back out of the room.

'What??!'

The screech comes as she's about to close the door, and she pokes her head back in with a bovine statement of puzzlement and concern. Lara looks at her neutrally, as if nothing of note has happened.

'Thank you, nurse.'

The tone is final enough; the nurse knows to shut the door.

***

The drapes are in position, forming a gauzy barrier between the cool grey darkness of the room, and the brilliant yellow photon shower outside. He likes to think of it as his personal fortress.

An optical disk rotates lazily on a spindle, round and round, the silkscreen on top a spinning blur, as the laser reads an unending procession of pits. Words, drums, guitar, it's all the same thing to the player, which tirelessly converts analogue to digital, and back again.

Kragok pulls off the headphones and listens briefly to the tinny, thin, and yet audible noise that fills a space in between his hands.

He wants to think quietly.

His right hand lifts towards his left eye as if floating, drawn by an invisible thread. Slowly, he traces the border between meat and metal. Soft and hard. Warm and cold.

If the doctors aren't lying, he could choose warm and warm.

Really?

He ponders his existence, and stops in mid flow, unable to continue.

What is normal? What am I in relation to that? What do I want to change? Why?

He imagines he could stay like this for an eternity, lodged in a recliner, not caring what happens outside the room. Just thinking, just being. At peace, even if he has no answers.

What he has got is an appointment.

***

No hurry at all; he knows this takes time.

So many times he's done this, and what was once a strangely abhorrent ritual is now as prosaic as wearing clothes.

Very slowly, he picks up a shiny sphere, which goes into the recessed metal panel on his back, and braces for the moment of all encompassing coldness, as if every vein in his body contracts in unison. Waves of nausea lap the back of his throat, but he keeps whatever's in his stomach down. There is a peculiar sensation in the back of his head, like a microscopic drill boring a shaft through his brain, an acute, local pain that doesn't so much upset as incapacitate.

But he's had years to get used to the sensations, and the extra functionality more than makes up for the inconvenience. Besides, he wasn't equipped with formidable servo assisted limbs, nor broad spectrum electronic eyes, nor even an integrated computer. Just a little port in his back, more of a symbol of his allegiance than anything else.

He yanks out a few squares of toilet paper from the dispenser in the wall in a desultory manner and makes papery noises. The belt gets straightened, the tie cruelly yanked tight, and the paper goes in the porcelain bowl (he takes a moment to reflect on some fundamental principles which never change, like the ones to do with organic waste disposal), which flushes obligingly, announcing to all that yes, he visited the toilet for a legitimate reason.

He never does things by half; although it might seem a little like overkill, meticulousness brought him success, and only a fool changes winning ways anyway.

A lost moment, as he grins to himself, savoring the sheer audacity of it all.

Hah - air freshener. He likes that.

With delicate motions, he couples the tube to the briefcase and presses a concealed button. In five minutes, he will begin dispersal.

***

'Gentlemen. My counterpart has raised several issues, to which I have but one thing to say. Therefore thou art inexcusable, whosoever thou art that judgest for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself, for thou that judgest doest the same things. The tomes, as my honorable counterpart keeps saying, do have some application to our situation.'

It's almost as if a vortex has sucked up every sound in the building, and the only thing left is his strident voice, declaiming truth to the world. Throwing wide the veil over the open secret that has persisted for years. Many, he decides, have waited as long to hear this speech.

'We ask them to drop their front, and their parochial excuses. We ask them not to engage in blatant hypocrisy. We ask them to drop all pretense of moral superiority. In short, we ask that they start being the leaders you deserve as a people!'

***

The crowd outside the parliament building is silent, which makes the demonstration even more ominous, because the discontent has transcended strangely cherful chanting, and rude violence. Just an eerie, enforced silence, which screams to the observers that the situation is now determinedly serious.

And then a gaggle of parlimentarians make for the front door, are swamped by reporters, who shout questions and take pictures, the noise building up and over itself, forming a tall wave, flowing over the heads of all present.

Above, thunder crashes furiously, the sound hollowly echoing off silent buildings, and black clouds gather, blotting out what remains of the sun, reducing it to feeble shafts of pale light.

Someone casts the first stone, which lands with a thud, in a brief spray of blood.

The rest is history.

***

They didn't have a chance to talk face to face, since her hospital room was full of relatives and friends, who had come to witness the miraculous resurrection of someone once designated permanantly comatose.

But she had looked at him in that questing, faintly suspicious look she could pull off so well, and once everyone else had been chased out, including her new husband, she told her old husband to get a wheelchair.

And he found himself obeying.

***

He planned his route yesterday, over an espresso in a nondescript little sidewalk cafe, with a map furnished by the city's records. It wends its way through the most crowded areas of the hospital, including six waiting rooms, three holding areas, and the staff lounge.

Walking down the hall, he smiles wryly as the briefcase diffuses a invisible, vaporous cloud.

"Physician, heal thyself!", he thinks, and almost cracks up.

He feels like he's carrying the burning torch of Prometheus, passing large doses of the agent out to those whom he touches. It's a curiously godlike posture, he notices. He has control over people, he can choose to happen to someone, he can cause someone to wish he was never born. Armed with an invisible plume of mist, crammed with a concentration of no less than ten thousand per cubic centimetre.

Silent, clean, undisputably effective.

And with the almost magical aura of a clipboard, you can belong anywhere.

***

She's determined to keep him in suspense until she's good and ready to talk, muzzled as she is by the oxygen mask. And although he scrutinises her face closely, he cannot come to any valid form of certainty as to how she's feeling.

So he contents himself with pushing the wheelchair along at a decent clip, scrutinising random things along the way, as is his custom when bored.

His eye sees the business suit clad drone approach; his mind dismisses it as totally unimportant. It would, he realised much later, be a rather large oversight.

***

Undisputably, it's some kind of shock to see a face you've been brought up to hate just three metres away on the other side of the corridor. It's all he can do to stop himself from charging that wretched Guardian and stuffing his beard down his throat - but his task is far more important to be sidetracked by such irrelevance, and his focus is too sharp.

And he allows himself a hidden, predatory smile when he thinks of the many possibilities opened up by this development.

Oh yes.

***

There's no way in hell he can sense it as it wafts towards his inviting nostrils, pouring into them at a frightening rate, an unstoppable crush of invaders too small to be seen, even under a microscope.

And they blitz through the claustrophobic airways speckled with clumps of cilia, down into the humid, warm tubes in the abdomen, the tubes branching, and branching, and branching yet again into individual ochre grape-like clumps of alveoli. All around is the rhythm of life, pounding and pounding.

The single cell thick walls are no barrier; the agent seeps through as readily as water through porous sandstone, into the endless flow of red, insinuating itself like some foul black poison.

Around the body in eight minutes.

***

The doctor absently spins a pencil in his hands, blisfully unaware of the irritation the rather spurious habit brings to everyone around him.

'We managed to come up with a viable process just recently - it involves a rather intricate arrangement of substrates, and then growing the correct cells in the correct zones. It's still rather experimental, but Remington did recommend you, Kragok, as a possible... possible... subject...'

He flushes with embarrasment, of all emotions, and what he once thought of as an aid, he now thinks of as a hindrance. But he does have some form of manners, and unlike other people, the doctor hasn't called him a heretic and an abomination quite yet, so he tries to maintain an attentive, open look.

'We'll have to get cell samples from the inside of your... organic eye, and then the growing process should take a couple of weeks, upon which we'll replace your... r-r-'

'Oh for heavens sake, are you afraid of that damned word?'

The doctor, taken aback, recovers swiftly.

'I'd advise you,' he says slowly, 'to go home and take a good long think about the process.'

***

It's almost like a scene from a movie.

He steps out the door, effortlessly swinging it open, and turns, walking down the corridor.

And he comes face to face with someone from his past.

All is quiet, save the ticking of their thoughts, quietly incrementing in each brain.

The other one goes rather pale.

'Kragok!'

The other one yelps incoherently.

He leaps, just as the other one turns, leather shoes squeaking horribly on the polished floor.

He misses.

***

The lights overhead dissolve into a continuous line, not that he cares very much about such ornamental triviality. Currently, he's trying to convert both air and glycogen into movement at a faster rate than his pursuer.

His mind is far too scattered to think; all he knows is that a once missing, presumed dead leader is now dead on his tail.

It's a weird chase, really, the chief reason being that the chase is totally silent, except for the rhythmic taps of foot on floor, and the occassional heaving breath.

He finds himself focusing on the really minute details, like his icy hands, chilled by the draft, the sensation of hot air fountaining out of his mouth, and the hypnotic, neverending whoosh of the ventilators overhead.

Ahead, a floor to ceiling window looms, and he prays that it isn't reinforced.

He leaps through it shoulder first, curling up into a tight ball, falling away to the ground.

***

What is his name? What is his name?

D group, Black Ops. That much he can remember.

One of their top people? Possibly.

He grunts, and speeds up, gritting his teeth, willing himself onward. He can feel the pounding every time he lands on his feet, a regular, systematic pounding.

Ahead, he sees his quarry leap through the glass, pieces shattering on the floor with a marvelous cadence, and he brings himself to an undignified, wobbling halt in front of the now open windows, nearly cutting his face a new outline on the jagged glass.

Too late. He leans out carefully, and sees nothing. Well trained targets generally have a propensity towards dissolving like sugar in a cup in waiting crowds.

***

'Running preliminary queries on all relay stations... okay we have good responses.'

He can't quite understand Dimitri's strange obsession with working in dim red light, when perfectly acceptable full-spectrum white will do. He does have a theory, and the theory goes something like dim red shadows help make a roboticized monstrosity look about twice as large, four times as sinister, and eight times as creepy.

But what he finds creepier is the voice Dimitri picked out for himself - no, not the specially calibrated, high fidelity profile they painstakingly reconstructed from high resolution audio recordings of when he was... flesh, but a wildly modulated, distorted, flanged, filtered thing, which smacks of ostentation and a bad B movie.

A few taps, and he bring up a list. The list consists of humorous names such as 'Pulmonary Embolism Build 22a', 'Arrhythmia Type 4', and 'BETA Arterial Haemorrhage'. It was, he thought, decidedly bad taste to let the science people dream up macabre programs designed to instruct the agent in the art of interesting death.

'Lord Dimitri?'

'Number 141.'

His finger hovers innocently over the button. Exactly 4.6 grams of pressure will activate an unstoppable cascade.

Ah, the heck with it.

Contact.

***

They have just received a directive from their master, and therefore they obey. In much the same manner a limb might respond to a nervous command.

As one, they pile into the trunk route leading to the head, up and up, past the mouth of the carotid, into the Circle of William, the central beltway around which other lesser vessels gather. And they disperse, carried down separate branches into the furthest corners of the brain.

Deadly. Insidious. Efficient. Extensions of the reach of their masters.

But not malicious. Oh no. The instructions are malicious, but the agent itself; not at all. Really. Truly.