Infection and disease has been on my mind lately. Not a surprise really, as swine flu rips acoss the planet, decimating everything in it’s path, a plague unseen since the Black Death… oh, right, sorry.
Out of that train of thought, somehow I started musing on the idea of diseases or parasites that could be of benefit to the patient. And from there, because it’s me, a slow drift into body horror and biotech. The first pass of this piece of flashfic had a swarm of nanites as the infectious componant. I prefer this, somehow. Any comparison between the enhancile and a certain face-hugging xenomorph of cinematic legend is entirely deliberate.
The enhancile is quiet in the nurse’s hands. Bone-white, the only sign of life in the thing is the faint throb of a pulse across the thick blue vein feeding the flat paddle of it’s headstem. It looks like a flattened Tesco Value chicken carcass, a mutant genehack that could be the reason for the Colonel taking the noun out of the company name.
The appendages that ring its body, the arachnid limblets that for the sake of sanity I have chosen to call legs, stir very faintly. The boney tips flex as the enhancile begins to shrug off anesthesia, warmed by the body heat of the nurse. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s just a machine. A machine that’s been grown in a modified pig’s womb.
It is an eyeless, faceless horror dragged chittering from the very darkest of my childhood nightmares, a creature that in equal measure revolts and terrifies me.
Ten minutes ago I signed papers allowing it to hook permanently into my nervous system.
“Be absolutely certain,” they’d said. “There’s no walking away from this. The relationship you are entering is permanent.” I nodded, half-there, half in the next room. “The enhancile makes connections at the limbic level using nanoscale filaments. It becomes part of you. This isn’t just a symbiotic relationship. It’s mutual parasitism. After it joins, neither of you will be able to live without the other.”
“Fine,” I said. “I sign here, right?”
I regret my eager thoughtlessness now, but it’s too late. It’s just me, in this white, windowless cell, and the nurse. And … that.
“So,” I say, with a bluffness I do not feel, “how do we do this? You put me under, and I guess there’s something surgical that needs to be done to splice Flat Eric there into me…” I tail off as the nurse gives me a look that’s half amusement, half pity.
“Hold your hands out,” she says. Without thinking, I do.
“Here you go.” She passes the enhancile to me. I take it before I quite realise what I’ve done.
It is warm, and heavier than it looks. It’s dry, yet somehow slick to the touch. It has a pulse, a strong one, hammering under my palm at a frantic, unhealthy rate.
“Hey, wait,” I say, but by then the nurse is already at the door. She gives me one quick look before she slides through and out. A look of relief. A look of apology. The door thuds shut behind her, a solid, hermetic thump. I’m sealed in.
The enhancile and I are alone. It’s very quiet in here. I try to swallow, but my throat has dried and closed.
I take one deep, shuddering breath.
And the enhancile comes to abrupt, squirming life. It twists violently in my hands. I try to drop it, but with a swift flick it wraps it’s legs (not tentacles not tentacles) around my arm and scrambles up to my shoulder.
I shriek. I bat at it, but it is no longer the frail bag of flesh that the nurse was holding. It is muscular, swift and fluid, and shrugs off my feeble swats.
Before I quite know what’s happened, it is behind me, at the back of my neck. As it moves, one leg jabs out and there is a faint sting. The nip of a kitten’s tooth. And all of a sudden, I can’t feel a thing. I can’t move my arms. Sensation drops out of me, and I fall to my knees.
My head flops downwards involuntarily. There’s blood on the floor. There are wet sounds coming from the thing at the nape of my neck. Moist, chewing noises. I start to cry, because I can’t scream.
“Ssshh.” The voice is warm, an alto, female and everywhere. I don’t hear it. It simply is. “Ssh, baby. Don’t cry. It’s all gonna be OK.”
I try to talk, and manage only glossolalia.
“It’s OK. Don’t try to talk. Just listen. It’s me. I’ve made a rough patch into your sensory net, so that we can talk a little before I start properly.”
The enhancile. It’s in me. It’s in my head. I’m suddenly grateful that I can’t feel anything.
“We don’t have much time. I have to move quickly. But I wanted to give you what comfort I can before we carry on. This is the point where you and I begin our new lives together. It’s a rebirth, if you like.”
Tingling in my fingertips, becoming an itch.
“I’m starting to move into the spinal cord now. Once I’m in, anything I do will over-ride the pain management I’ve loaded into you. So let’s be clear about the events of the next few hours.
“In order to complete the procedure you signed up for, I have to unmake you. I have to take your nervous system apart and realign it with my own. It’s necessary, if we are to be together. The benefits to both of us come from this re-creation.
“I won’t lie to you. This isn’t just going to hurt. The pain will be almost unimaginable. There’s a strong likelihood that you won’t survive the procedure. But if you do, if we come through this together, then our new life will be something very special. You understand me, don’t you? I can feel your acceptance. See, we’re already communicating on a deeper level than language.”
The itch was worse now, a burning spreading up my arms. I could feel myself flensing away, torn millimeter by millimeter out of myself. She wouldn’t shut up. She wouldn’t let me suffer in peace.
“I’m sorry. You can feel this now. This is one-thousandth of the pain you’re going to have to work through soon. I wish there was another way. I wish I didn’t have to three-quarters kill you.”
And this is the way it starts. I understood that there would be inconceivable agony at the start of it. I understood that I would be better, stronger, that if I survived I would walk out of the white room with abilities that would set me above the rest of my kind.
But no-one had told me that I would never be able to be alone again. That she would always be there, talking, cajoling, always at the front of my mind, never letting me be.
It was my fault. I had never wanted a companion. All I ever asked for was the power. The power to take myself away from all the meaningless chatter, the endless banal noise.
“It’s OK, baby. We have forever to be with each other.”
I let more tears fall. It is the only defence I have left.
A Love Story by Rob Wickings is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
