《The Theseus Hare》


 Prologue

    The recorder whirs almost silently, but not silently enough.


    You can hear the internal mechanisms moving.


    Grating.


    Setting your teeth on edge, and adding a thin layer of purple static to the edges of your vision.


    "Ok," says a voice, deep and gruff with exasperation, "One more time, from the beginning."


    "The beginning?" You echo, voice as cold and mechanical as the machine on the table.


    Chunky and obsolete.


    The man across from you nods and tents his fingers.


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    He''s tired.


    You''re tired too, but in a different way.


    The sound of cassette tape spooling in the plastic and metal guts of the recorder somehow fills the whole room, drowning out the buzz of the yellowed overhead lights, and the footsteps of the people outside.


    "You won''t believe me, no matter where I start." You say, hands damp with sweat, "A-and it''s not like I don''t want to tell you but¡­ this Story hates being told, it''s--" you pause, fumbling for words, "it''s not like it''s shy, it''s like there''s something physically stopping it from coming out."


    The man looks at you with big bruised eyes, half lidded beneath big fuzzy eyebrows that remind you of wizards from books.


    There''s a gleam there that you both understand and viscerally dislike. He arches a single bushy brow, "Try me."


    You can feel it, the ink crawling its way up your throat like vomit.


    You know you won''t get far.


    But you have to try.


    So you open your mouth and let the Words, the Story, flow.

 Chapter One

    When did you cry last?


    How old were you when you stopped?


    Somewhere behind you, a child was crying. A full throated scream that combined with the clippers'' droning to speckle your vision in a nameless haze.


    The vibrations of the clippers rattled through your skull and settled deep into your teeth.


    Golden fluff floated down from where it had been shorn from your scalp, collecting in drifts with the rest of the hair of the floor.


    Most of it was shades of black, or deep brown, with the occasional flashes of copper-red, and more unnatural colors made natural through scientific meddling in the womb.


    They told you that your color is natural, but there was no real way of knowing.


    There was a man in a white lab coat watching you from across the room, safe behind a wall of glass and steel.


    You watched him back, and saw him scribble something down on his clipboard.


    Loose hair was gently brushed from your face and neck.


    Your barber was an android.


    Quick and methodical, looking you over, beeping as they made minute calculations before nodding in satisfaction. A habit they''d picked up from the human staff on campus.


    The android applied an antiparasitic foam to your bare scalp before scooting you out of the chair.


    You told it ''thank you'' with your hands, and were surprised when it signed back a ''you''re welcome'' before the still sobbing child was dragged into its chair by a different man in an identical white coat.


    You liked the androids on staff, more than you liked the people.


    You looked more like an android than you did a person, but so did many of the other children in the Facility.


    Most of you was metal and wires.


    Cold.


    Unnatural.


    CY-BURR-NEH-TICKS the human staff called them.


    The stuff that replaced much of what had been flesh, bone, and blood.


    You couldn''t really feel anything below the neck anymore, but you''d been told that you still had organs in there somewhere.


    A heart, still beating.


    A stomach, churning with nausea.


    It felt like a lie. That some part of you was still soft and warm.


    Those were very dark and heavy thoughts for someone who was only eight years old, but given the shape of your life at the time you didn''t exactly have anything else to think about except yourself and the lab and what went on inside of it.


    For all intents and purposes, that lab and its concrete halls were your entire world.


    And while you could remember the times before the lab, those memories felt uniformly hazy and upsetting so you spent very little time dwelling on any of them.


    Except in dreams.


    But you tried not to dwell on those too much either.


    You didn''t dream much, but when you did it was almost always nightmares.


    The exact same nightmare.


    One you''d been having as long as you could remember.


    It made you unpopular with the three other children you shared a room with, you''d wake up screaming and scare everybody on your cell block in the process.


    The scientists had taken to sedating you before bed in hopes that it would help somehow.


    It just made the nightmares worse, but you didn''t have the heart to tell them and possibly endure more of their tinkering outside of their (and by proxy, your) normal working hours.


    You wandered back to Specimen Containment on your own, and sat on the edge of your cot in silence.


    The room was small, but not cramped or cluttered. Someone had stuck stickers and posters all over the bare white walls in an attempt to give the space some color.


    All the blankets and pillows were gone, and the entire cell smelled of industrial cleaners. You liked that smell, found a strange comfort in it that most people might find in the smell of their parent''s cooking.


    It was a sign that you''d been here for way too long, but that little tidbit wouldn''t dawn on you until much much later in your life.


    You tucked your knees against your chest and stared at a piece of broken plastic on the bare concrete floor.


    A misplaced chunk of a broken toy.


    Some of the children had toys and belongings from their lives before the lab, and some of the objects in your room had been left behind by previous occupants.


    More toys, mostly.


    Sometimes words on the walls, or papers tucked into hidden places.


    Even though you couldn''t read those words, or the little notes the others had left, you felt a certain thrill that came with having a special secret that nobody else knew.


    There were people from other places outside the lab who would come with new toys and you were allowed to play with them, while they scribbled on their clipboards and asked you questions you didn''t want to answer; like how the toys made you feel or if the colors were good.


    You never got to keep those toys, but that was fine.


    You didn''t really play like other kids did, and the other kids didn''t really want to play with you.


    They found you unsettling, the scientists said.


    More accurately, the other kids thought you were creepy because you couldn''t talk and just stared at people.


    You''d also bite when startled.


    The science staff thought that you were creepy too, but they wouldn''t admit it.


    Not out loud¡­ not to your face¡­ probably.


    They ran a bunch of tests when you first got to the lab to determine what exactly was wrong with you and when they didn''t find anything conclusive, they decided that you were just some flavor of mute or autistic and called it a day.


    And they weren''t exactly wrong either.


    There had been numerous attempts to give you a tablet-thing that would speak for you, but given your inability to read (and the fact that you just found the device cumbersome and intrusive) you preferred to use sign language instead.


    At first, nobody consciously taught you how to sign.


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    You just¡­ watched and absorbed things like little kids are predisposed to do.


    When you watched a deaf scientist move her hands in ways that the others seemed to understand, you just copied what she did until you got the desired outcome you were looking for.


    And when that deaf scientist noticed what you were doing, she took it upon herself to teach you how to sign properly.


    She also taught you how to swear, much to the distaste of her colleagues.


    A knock on the doorframe startled you.


    A kind, brown face smiled down at you, half hidden beneath a cloud of plum colored hair in tight coils.


    "Hey kiddo, you lost?" The deaf scientist signed with a conspiratorial grin. She named herself Nala, after her favorite character from her favorite movie when she was a kid.


    Learning that you could just pick your own name changed your entire outlook on life and immediately cemented Nala as your favorite person in the whole lab.


    You grinned right back with your mouth full of sharp pointed teeth, "Why? You looking for me?" You signed in return.


    Nala made a sound in her throat that might have been a laugh and crouched down until you were both eye to eye, her knees loudly complaining the entire time, "You should be with the others in processing."


    You made a face, being unable to talk had given you the loudest body language anybody had ever seen. "Already got shaved and flea dipped, what else is there to do?"


    Nala tilted her head, purple curls parting just enough for you to see her big brown eyes regarding you with an emotion that you immediately disliked.


    "C''mon, you know that you''re not supposed to wander around unsupervised." She held out her hand, not moving an inch until you took it.


    Dented gray metal safely held tight against deep brown skin.


    Your hands used to look like Nala''s, you could remember that much. You both had the same brown face, the same wide nose, and thick lips even though you weren''t related.


    Nala always said that that meant you were Black like she was, despite your golden hair.


    She took you back to the processing area with the other children, now shorn and sniffling.


    You sat in the corner and hugged your knees while Nala spoke to the other scientists present.


    You were bad with faces, but you knew the others by height and smell well enough and they knew you by your specimen ID number and the big fat sticker on your file that warned of your biting habit.


    A tall spindly man named Doug and Intern 57, a woman who looked simultaneously like an adult and a teenager in the way people always do in their early twenties, stood nearby and spoke about something serious in low voices. They held their bodies in strange, tense ways as if afraid something bad was about to happen.


    Doug had dyed green hair that never stayed vibrant for very long, and always ended up a seasick washed out shade within a few days. One of his more petty coworkers has christened him ''Doug the Nug'' due to his color palette and off-putting odor.


    Intern 57 was an unpaid live-in intern who got coffee and pens and stuff for the scientists when they needed them and put up with you and the other kids when she absolutely had to. She had an actual name of course, everybody had a name, but the lab liked to strip names from new people upon their arrival and swallow them whole.


    Folks had to fight tooth and nail to get their names back and stop being numbers, or just did what Nala did and picked a new one.


    You did not have a name, and this didn''t bother you at all.


    You had your number and people knew you by sight so that was all you needed.


    Doug came and towered over you, his stench filling your nostrils and souring your stomach.


    He smelled chemical and wrong, like the smoky little plastic tube he was always sucking on when he thought nobody was looking.


    "Why are you all by yourself? Don''t you wanna go sit with the other kids?" He was trying to be genuine and gentle but his awkwardness just made him seem creepy.


    You shook your head and hugged your knees a little closer.


    Doug frowned and looked over his shoulder for help, Nala wasn''t paying him any attention. Intern 57 was though, she shot him a rude gesture that made you giggle.


    The sound made Doug grimace on reflex, he immediately started tripping over himself in an attempt to apologize.


    You didn''t really care.


    People found you off-putting, and that was fine.


    You watched him wander back to the others uncomfortably. Nala patted him on the back sympathetically.


    "I like your ears." The voice''s close proximity made you jump. You whipped your head around to find the source and ended up face to face with a little blonde girl with the biggest blue eyes you had ever seen. "Can I touch ''em?"


    You stared at her for a while, your gray eyes burning into her blue until the inky abyss of her pupils seemed to swallow you up and anxiety started to dance down your spine.


    You looked around for help but found none, and ended up pointing at another kid a ways away from you.


    You weren''t the only Specimen in the Facility with rabbity features, not by a long shot.


    3037 had big cybernetic lop ears that went down past her shoulders, but the tips of them were perpetually wet because she kept putting them in her mouth.


    1014 had ears like yours, except his were covered in soft synthetic fur and weren''t as articulated.


    Your ears were plain gray metal and silicone. Naked prototypes meant to test motion and durability and nothing more, surely this little bug eyed creep would get the idea that you weren''t that interesting and leave you alone.


    She did not get the idea, and almost immediately reached for your head moments after speaking.


    You flicked your ears back and away from her probing fingers but that just made her eyes widen. She shuffled closer to you until you were pinned against the wall, and gently ran her hands along the backs of your ears like one might do with a real rabbit.


    She didn''t move back when you growled, she didn''t flinch when you snapped your teeth at her.


    And when your teeth met and broke the skin of her arm she didn''t even make a sound.


    The salty metallic taste of her blood in your mouth made you queasy immediately.


    She gazed at the bite for a long long while and you expected her to scream or to hit you but what happened next had you dumbfounded.


    Her skin glowed like hot metal around the wound and began to knit itself closed until there was no evidence of your assault at all except for a quickly drying smear of blood that she wiped off on her pants before talking to you again like nothing happened. "Can you talk it''s ok if you can''t my handler says I talk enough for two people my name is Specimen 37 do you wanna be friends do you like chocolate I love chocolate what about bugs isopods are my favorite cuz they come in so many colors--"


    Pale freckled hands with long bony fingers reached down and scooped up 37 while she was still mid sentence. The man they belonged to carefully maneuvered the girl until she was gingerly balanced on his hip. 37 grinned, eyes sparkling as she pointed down at you and you noticed that her nails were painted to match the strange man''s. "Hubie! Hubix Cube! Look! I found a bunny, I don''t think he can talk but he bit me and let me touch his ears so I think he likes me. Can we be friends?"


    Hubie flashed you an apologetic smile that reminded you of a fox with its leg in a trap, something you''d only ever seen in the nature documentaries that Nala let you watch after working hours.


    "Did he LET you touch them, or did you help yourself again Duckie?" Hubie drawled in a strange accent that you found out later was Irish.


    Specimen 37 receded into herself like a guilty puppy and fidgeted with her hair, twirling it with a finger. Her silence was deep and palpable in ways that made you feel anxious and uncomfortable by osmosis.


    Hubie sighed through his nose, clearly disappointed. "That''s what I thought, you know that you''re not supposed to touch people without their consent, love."


    Specimen 37 hung her head and whimpered, "Yessir¡­ sorry sir¡­"


    The man ruffled the girl''s hair and looked like he was about to console her before she could burst into tears, only to be interrupted by Nala tapping him on the shoulder. Nala gave Hubie a bright, professional smile from behind a surgical mask and offered a newly gloved hand to shake.


    Intern 57 stood beside her, dressed similarly in her own mask and gloves, "Hello, you must be Doctor Downfall with the new science team, we weren''t expecting you until tomorrow. This is Doctor Phipps, she''s deaf but can read lips, however I will be interpreting her ASL for you if that''s necessary."


    Dr. Downfall nodded at the intern and shook Nala''s hand firmly, "Yes, Doctor Hubris Willoughby Downfall at your service. Excuse the intrusion, this one got away from me while we were in quarantine." He jostled 37 playfully, making her laugh. "Though I understand the need for such¡­ thorough procedures, I can assure you that my team and I are quite clean."


    Nala nodded in understanding, eyebrows raised and apologetic, "You know how it is, protocol protocol protocol." She made an odd gesture like everything was out of her control and she was just as much a victim of the protocols as him. "Some of our specimens have very sensitive immune systems, a side effect of the testing and the sterile environment."


    She produced a plastic package containing a mask and gloves from the deep pockets of her coat and handed it to Hubris. "We don''t have any kits that could fit your companion, I''m afraid."


    Hubris opened the package with his teeth, his canines long and capped in gold. They made him look even more like a fox than before. "It''s fine, I have a mask her size in my pockets. We''ll make our way back to quarantine shortly, but it was nice to finally meet you." He slipped on the mask first, then rummaged around in his pockets for 37''s.


    The little girl fussed and held her face out of Downfall''s reach when he tried to put it on her. However he knew all her tricks and managed to mask the child before setting her down and putting on his gloves.


    "Come along Duckie." He said, taking the child''s hand. 37 looked at you from across the room and pointed to you, tugging on Dr. Downfall''s hand in excitement.


    "Can he come too?"


    Ice bloomed in the pit of your stomach.


    Nala''s eyebrows furrowed as she followed the girl''s pointing finger. You two made eye contact.


    You shook your head in a vehement ''no'', lips pressed into a Thin Grim Line, waving your hand in a slicing motion across your throat for good measure.


    "Sure!" Nala signed, "Be careful with him though, he bites."


    37 smiled a gap toothed smile, vibrating with excitement, "That''s OK he bit me once already!"


    Nala might have given you A Look, but you couldn''t see it from where you were on the ground, in a ball, with your face in your hands.

 Chapter Two

    The next few days were tense and cold.


    People moved strangely, heads down like dogs expecting to be kicked.


    Tarps turned equipment into mournful, silent specters that haunted the suddenly empty rooms, boxes and bins huddled in darkened corners like frightened children.


    Things and people went missing, entire departments shut down overnight and nobody acknowledged it.


    Not with words.


    But you could feel it, that sick and sour feeling that soaked into every surface.


    It got so bad that you took to hiding in your room whenever you weren''t needed for an experiment, curled up tight in the shadows beneath your cot.


    Hiding didn''t make the sick feeling go away, but it kept you out of Specimen 37''s line of sight so a win was a win in your books. Apparently she was going to live there, in the lab with you, forever.


    The slightest thought of having to deal with that girl possibly all day, every day, made you want to do something drastic.


    You still hadn''t forgiven Nala for what she''d done, handing you off to Dr. Downfall (a complete stranger) without your permission like that.


    You let out a groan and ran your hands down your face in desperation, making the engineer examining you jump in surprise. You signed an apology and went still again, the engineer stared at you for a long time but didn''t say anything. He just opened the panel in the back of your skull and tinkered with whatever was in there.


    You sat like that for what felt like hours, unmoving, barely breathing. Periodically the engineer would have you move something or test your hearing or motor functions, and then he''d make a sound in his throat and go back to tinkering.


    That day had been a good day, as far as experiments went. Nothing got cut off or grafted on, nobody opened your torso hatch, or stuck you with needles.


    As much as you liked good days, you always had the superstition that you were not allowed to have more than one at a time and that they''d immediately be followed by something horrible.


    This time, you were right.


    The engineer left you to charge on his work table, and went to go get himself a coffee. Sometimes he''d come back with chocolate milk from the break room if you behaved well enough, so you were hoping he''d hurry back soon.


    His tinkering had left you raw and oversensitive, synthetic nerves struggling to cope with all the new information. Your ears were the worst by far, you could hear the pipes in the walls gurgling like empty stomachs, the overhead lights humming like deranged bees.


    And voices.


    So many voices.


    Conversations barely muffled by concrete and steel walls thicker than your arm. Words rattling through the metal throats of air vents.


    Every voice had a color and a shape that floated around you, drowning you in a multicolored miasma of noise that had your skull in a choke hold.


    "--a purge is kinda drastic, dontcha think? I mean they''re just kids."


    "Why can''t Ramirez get her own facility? Why scrub ours on such short notice?"


    "Removing specimens to make space for new ones seems so wasteful, just use what''s already here."


    "Yeah mom, I''ll be home in a few days, brass wants everybody to help with the uh¡­ cleanup before we finally clock out--"


    Your heartbeat suddenly became the only sound that you could hear, wisps of yellow-green panic blotting out all else as you slapped your hands over your ears and trembled.


    Purge.


    You knew that word.


    You wouldn''t survive that word.


    By the time the engineer returned with your treat, you were gone. Stalking through the hallways like a prey animal on its last legs.


    You refused to go for your containment cell, that''s the first place they''d look for you, instead you wandered for awhile.


    Aimless and agitated.


    Specimen 37 found you first, squeezed behind a bulk box of kitchen sponges under the sink in the Phlebotomy Department breakroom. You didn''t jump this time when she spoke, you just glared at her from your hidey-hole with your ears back.


    "You really like hidin'' huh?" She sat there on her knees, head tilted. Her arms were littered with adhesive bandages of every shape, size, and color imaginable. Her eyes looked bruised too, like she hadn''t slept in ages.


    You stared at the bandages, she stared at you, nobody moved.


    "Why ARE you hiding?" She whispered.


    You¡­ shrugged, unsure of what to say and how to say it. You didn''t know if this girl even understood sign language and you couldn''t trust anybody who did to interpret for you right now. So you sat there, hunched and miserable, listening to the rats scuttling along the rattling highways the pipes made.


    They were humming, the rats not the pipes, squeaky traveling songs. Eulogies for the lives they had here. Their sadness poured into you like water and made your sadness overflow until the only way out was through your eyes and your nose.


    The initial sobs that shook you felt like the first harbingers of vomit, sharp and painful lurches that pulled at every organ. You gritted your teeth and hid your face behind your knees, in a desperate refusal.


    When did you cry last?


    How old were you when you stopped?


    It felt¡­ unfair.


    So. Fucking. Unfair.


    You''d been good, you''d done what you were told. You let them hurt you over and over and over with no complaints. When you''d first gotten to the lab, you''d been a feral thing made of teeth and hate, you''d bit and scratched and tried to run away more times than anybody could count.


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    Then they took your legs, so you couldn''t run.


    Then they took your arms, so you couldn''t scratch.


    Then they sat you down and said they''d give you new ones if you behaved, but you would have rather they''d killed you right there.


    They told you that they didn''t want to do this, that this hurt them too. The people who owned you now, also owned them, owned their homes and their families and if they didn''t behave that would all be taken away, like your arms and your legs.


    They didn''t want to hurt you, they didn''t want to hurt anyone. But if the choice was between hurting some kid nobody cared about and keeping their families safe, they''d choose their families every time.


    They made you understand that, until you started to behave the way they wanted. Until you could be trusted with your limbs again.


    You''d¡­ forgotten that that''s what things were like before. Forgotten that the science staff didn''t see you as a person. That Nala, despite all her perceived kindness, probably didn''t either.


    You felt like you were drowning, a cardboard box full of water slowly starting to dissolve into nothing but a soggy mess. Tears poured out of your eyes, snot poured out of your nose. You shook and whimpered and sobbed in the dark place under the sink for what felt like forever.


    You weren''t sure when or how 37 got under the sink with you, or when she wrapped her wounded arms around you, but she held you in the dark until the shaking stopped and you could breathe again.


    Somewhere close, Downfall was looking for her. You could taste the panic in his voice as he stopped everybody he could and asked them one by one if they''d seen 37 anywhere. He found you both faster than you thought he would, eyes wild and worried as he crouched down and tried to coax the pair of you out of hiding.


    You didn''t want to go but 37 dragged you along like a toy, "He was hiding-- crying too, but he won''t tell me why." She said when Hubris finally had her safe and accounted for in his arms.


    "That''s probably because it''s none of your business, Duckie." He scolded lightly, fixing you with his deep brown gaze, emotions inscrutable. He offered you a hand, "Come along now, I''m sure Dr. Phipps is worried sick."


    Your ears flattened and Downfall tilted his head much like 37 had just moments earlier, eyebrows knitting. "I''m not going to hurt you, little one. I''m just going to take you back to Nala, ok?" He held his hand up like he was trying to sooth a frightened wild animal, and given your emotional state at the time he wasn''t wrong.


    You shook your head and backed away, heart hammering against the bars of your ribcage. You couldn''t go back to her, she was going to let them kill you and all the other kids here.


    You needed to run.


    Your escape plan had been short-lived. The second you''d bolted from the breakroom, you could hear Dr. Downfall cursing a blue streak behind you as you barreled down the hallway at top speed.


    Then came the sirens, red lights and blinding noise that covered everything in agonizing ripples of sound that made navigation infinitely more difficult.


    You started to panic, taking corners way too fast and nearly skidding out of control. All that metal made you heavy, and being heavy meant your momentum was a lot more volatile than other kids your age. But all that metal also made you fast.


    The augmentations to your cybernetic legs were meant to be purely aesthetic at first, just cute clumsy paws to match the big bunny ears you had, but it seemed like the engineer on call at the time hadn''t gotten the memo. Your speed wasn''t superhuman by any means, but good luck to anybody trying to catch you.


    "Shit-- WE GOT A RUNNER!" Someone hollered as they dived for a button on a nearby wall. The ceiling shifted and a heavy steel door started to slide slowly down¡­ down¡­ down, yellow hazard lights blazing at its corners.


    You threw yourself underneath it before it could close completely, rolled, and hopped back to your feet in no time.


    You felt¡­ alive? Not ''alive'', no. Excited, or exhilarated perhaps? Like that was what you were made to do. To run and leap, to skirt the jaws of death. There wasn''t a word for it, the way it felt to duck under grasping arms and the silver nooses of animal control poles, but it felt right.


    The Facility''s construction was unintentionally labyrinthine, with several iterations of the same building built on top of each other to save space and money, traveling up and up from the Phlebotomy Department felt like running through the striped layers of paleontology diagrams from the books Nala read to you.


    The further up you went, the brighter things got. Sunlight, REAL sunlight, peeked shyly through open windows; brand new equipment gleamed ready and clean, still in its plastic.


    You followed the light, followed the sun past the ladies gossiping at the front desk, past the startled security guards howling into their walkie-talkies, up and out the front double doors. Outside, there was grass, and flowers, and warm sun that oozed across your skin like oil.


    The sky looked like a picture, a drawing rendered by a happy and hopeful child in their best crayons. Fat white clouds, slowly scudding across a brilliantly blue sky.


    When was the last time you''d seen the sky, the real sky? Tears pricked the corners of your eyes and you stumbled to a halt in the middle of the wide road that snaked from the mouth of the Facility and out past the huge gate, into a sea of chest high grass that stretched into forever.


    Even though the alarms howled and screamed in the Facility, outside there was only silence and wind. No birds, no cars, just the subtle hum of machinery beneath your feet and the whisper of the wind blowing through the grass.


    It made you careless.


    Behind you, came a sound that shattered the world and all its softness. Barking, snarling, the rattle of dragging chains slithering behind their wearers.


    Dogs.


    Dogs the size of cows, with cybernetic eyes and titanium jaws meant to crush metal. Twin walls of brown fur and red eyes charged after you, mouths wreathed in slobber and foam. You could smell the paralytic in their saliva, even from several dozen feet away.


    They quickly cornered you, your back inches away from an impossibly high electrified fence. You could hear the wires humming with enough charge to put you down like a rabid animal.


    Slowly, the dogs advanced. Bodies low and sleek as they stalked forward. There was nowhere left to run.


    Foam flecked your own lips as you growled and hissed like a little beast. You had no claws to scratch with, but your hands were solid and heavy enough that you didn''t need them. Didn''t matter if you didn''t know how to throw a proper punch, you were dense enough to do damage no matter what.


    Every muscle, every synthetic mechanism in your body, was coiled tight with anticipation.


    "Sit!" Called a voice over the wind and whining alarms. The dogs sat, panting, tongues lolling, eyes glued to you regardless. Their tails thumped excitedly, like normal dogs, chains jingling as one paused to scratch an itch. But every time they seemed like regular dogs, their eyes would meet yours and you''d know that they''d tear you apart in a heartbeat, just to hear someone call them a ''good boy''.


    When Doug appeared, you pitied the animals almost. They were sort of like you, just things to be used and discarded, more metal than flesh, nameless and empty.


    Doug pat the nearest monster dog on the head and it almost lovingly leaned its entire weight against his side, nearly knocking him over. He looked at you with his neon green eyes and crouched until you were at eye level.


    "C''mon kiddo, I''m not gonna hurt yah¡­" He beckoned towards you, gently attempting to coax you closer. You took a step forward, the dogs tensed, you took a step back.


    Doug made them lie down and tried again. Little by little, you came closer, until Doug could grab you.


    Big mistake.


    Your teeth sank into his shoulder with practiced ease, and when he cried out in pain you rammed your little metal fist into the hollow of his throat, then he could only whimper and wheeze.


    With the gate and fence electrified, there was nowhere for you to go, but you refused to die without making a fuss first.


    The dogs were on you in an instant, maws nothing but black holes ringed in titanium teeth. You punched one in the snout, the metal beneath its skin clashed with yours and sent painful vibrations up your arm. The other dog dove for you, mouth clamping shut around your ankle.


    It pulled you off balance and shook you around like a ragdoll. You kicked it in the face and neck but it just locked its jaws with a mechanical whirr and dragged you across the ground like a piece of rope.


    The first dog, nose now bleeding, sat on you and refused to move even when the security staff arrived and tried to take over the situation. Between the dog slobber paralytic, a shot of tranquilizers (unnecessary), and several anxious zaps with a stun wand (very unnecessary), you were unconscious within seconds.


    The world melted away, running from your eyes like syrup, like yolk, as the blackness took you and the outside once again knew true silence.

 Chapter Three

    There was no safety or kindness to be found in your dreams; and you were dreaming again, that same wretched dream that had haunted you always and forever. It felt like a stage play, like a formality as you watched the stage dress itself and the players arrive. The curtain rose on familiar chaos.


    A city in ruin, streets empty and weed-choked. You were in the center of it all, surrounded by destruction that you could do nothing to stop. Not the end of the world, but the End-of-Everything, the Mother of all Cataclysms.


    The sky was a green-gold mirror, broken, reflecting everything that ever was and everything that would ever be within shards of Dreams that fell like verdant rain and distorted the landscape around you as they crashed haphazardly to the ground like glass meteors, shattering on impact.


    Glittering splinters of impossibility cut your cheek as they flew by, and you could taste the bitterness of your future in the pain.


    Before you stood a Nameless Thing.


    An unfathomably huge serpent with many legs that each ended in a seven fingered human hand. Its body curled and coiled in such non-euclidean ways that it arched and rolled against the sky like the apex of an impossible rollercoaster. Its white scales shimmered with a terrible iridescence that reflected more than the mirror sky, showing you the dark and distorted shapes of terrible things that would soon come to pass.


    Its body split at the shoulders, branching into seven heads wreathed in a mane of blindingly green flames. In all fourteen of Its eyes, you saw the End of all things at that creature''s countless hands. Universes subjugated and consumed until there was a True and Endless Nothing left behind.


    Though the Thing was on fire, nothing around It burned or even smoldered, instead things grew wild and out of control.


    Patches of Green swallowed impossible structures, the once glittering behemoths of buildings that should not and could not exist if physics and logic had anything to say about it.


    And where the venom from Its many open mouths fell, sprouted flowers and native grasses. Plants sprang forth from places they were never meant to, devouring everything they touched like a cancer, they tugged at your feet as you walked. Moss and vines tried to crawl up your legs, only to be torn apart with each solemn step towards the Nameless Thing.


    Metal groaned and glass shattered under the constricting grasp of roots and vines thicker than your entire body, strangling building''s foundations until they leaned dangerously and drunkenly across the deserted city street.


    In your hand was a sword. An old and heavy thing, carved from the bones of a beast Higher than you. Among the rabbits and snakes and suns carved into the blade was a Word that smoldered and crackled like an old grudge, it meant "to assemble a name from scars" and was the closest thing to a real name you''d ever had. The tip dragged across the seething wasteland of invasive life, making it blacken and wither like death given form.


    Hatred given teeth.


    You felt so very tired and so very alone, but you could not rest until your task was complete.


    To Name the Beast and set you both free.


    The Nameless Thing hissed as you drew near, and spoke in seven-times-seven tongues. ¡°Do you know who I am?¡± It said in a choir of voices that crackled and snapped like Its halo of fire.


    There was an edge of frustration to Its tone, as if It were just as tired as you, and you simply stared at It with empty, exhausted eyes.


    That Nameless Beast had invaded your dreams and asked you that question more times than you could remember, and each time you''d failed to answer correctly.


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    You were running out of ideas and probably time.


    Stubbornly, you clutched your blade, white-knuckled, and it grew lighter in your hand. Just a hair, just a touch, but you could feel the weight leave as the dying embers of your resolve glowed just a little brighter.


    You opened your mouth to speak, next words utterly inaudible as they were obliterated by a jagged, droning noise that wrenched you from sleep and left you dry mouthed in your wakefulness.


    Waking up hurt.


    You felt soggy, like an oversaturated sponge, like if you moved you''d leave puddles of yourself behind.


    Nala was there, or at least a ghost of her rendered liquid by the remnants of sedatives and paralytic in your system. For a second, you thought that you were still dreaming as she tucked something small and white against your chest. It was warm and breathing, but you couldn''t move enough to properly see it.


    You were strapped tight to a gurney and muzzled for good measure, carefully wheeled through the loading bay towards the empty black mouth of a cargo truck.


    Just like the one that brought you to the lab on your very first day.


    Every single nerve in your body was on fire, both from the electrocution and the abuse the dogs had put you through. Your foot was almost completely gone, hanging onto your leg by the thinnest ghosts of frayed wires that popped and sparked at irregular intervals.


    You were surrounded by people, both scientists and specimens.


    In the distance was an orderly line of test subjects you''d never seen before, adults in various stages of neglect and disrepair who shuffled forlornly forward into another truck. Some of them were barely grown, teenagers that had spent their whole lives in the bowels of this place, now doomed to die broken and alone somewhere else.


    The other children stared at you as you passed, some of their eyes burning with hatred and fear and in that moment you knew that your little stunt had put everybody else in danger. The purge had always been coming, but you''d gone and made everything worse.


    It¡­ it had all been for nothing, hadn''t it?


    A woman watched you from afar, and though she was out of your line of sight you could still hear her every word. Doug sidled up to her, arm in a sling, a bruise slowly blooming from just beneath the collar of his shirt. "Doctor Ramirez," he said with a slight nod, voice reduced to a painful croak.


    "Doug," said the woman with such apathy it felt like she''d sucked all the warmth from the room. She refused to make eye contact with the scrawny little man that barely came up to her shoulders on a good day, and that day was not a good day.


    Doctor Extravaganza "Anza" Ramirez watched your progression through the loading bay with interest. She pointed at you with her lips, "What''s up with Conejito? Why the Hannibal Lecter treatment?"


    Doug took a long pull from his vape, the cartoonishly green smoke leaking from his nose before he exhaled, filling the room with the stink of artificial caramel apples and CBD. "Oh I''ll be glad to see the back of that one, fuckin'' hell. Phipps'' little pet project. He''s an absolute freak if you ask me, doesn''t talk, doesn''t cry, bites seemingly at random. Just look at what he did today!" He pointed at his shoulder for emphasis, "And he punched my fuckin'' dog.


    I mean of course, I don¡¯t wear clothes here I¡¯m really fond of-- I¡¯m no noob, but this shirt just started feeling really comfy and broken in and now he¡¯s fucked up the shoulder and its going to fuck up the whole thing."


    "Is the dog ok?" Anza asked.


    "Well yeah he¡¯s just got a little nose bleed, but now he¡¯s all gross and shit and I gotta clean him up on top of everything else I gotta do today like this kid just wants to piss me off!


    It''s like he exists to make my life difficult. And he stares like he gets fucking paid for it and he doesn¡¯t make any fucking noise despite being so heavy like how the fuck does he even MANAGE--"


    The other staff members eyed Doug with varying levels of disgust and second hand embarrassment, scooting away from him as subtly as possible while he smoked and spluttered like an overfull tea kettle.


    "...I''ll take him." Anza said.


    Doug turned as white as a ghost and promptly choked on his vape. "E-EXCUSE ME!?"


    "I said I''ll take him, it''s not like you''re using him anymore and you DO owe me a new specimen after you lost one of mine." Her tone turned dangerous as she fixed Doug with a glare.


    Doug seethed. "You''re doing this to spite me, aren''t you?"


    Anza smiled at him, like a cat would. It was less a genuine expression, and more like the right amount of bared teeth to be mistaken for one, "Oh please, I stopped doing things to spite you after I won all your Pok¨¦mon cards in the divorce."

 Chapter Four

    The fact that you found some level of comfort in the stark brightness of the lights in the examination rooms was probably a very bad sign, but nobody had the time to unpack that just yet.


    You were still muzzled and strapped to the gurney for ''your own safety'' as much as Anza''s. You''d heard Doug give her a lengthy warning list about your behaviors, least of all your biting habits and just how dense your hands and paws were.


    Now that you were alone with her, something deep in your wires said that she was way more dangerous than you by a mile.


    Anza took the white thing Nala had given you and tucked it underneath the gurney before leaning over you, with flashlight in hand as she watched your pupils dilate. She kept muttering into a little tape recorder pinned to her front pocket, and making little excited observations as she snapped her gloved fingers near your ears and watched them swivel away on reflex.


    You felt strangely numb and you weren''t sure if that was from the sedatives in your system, or if the shock of what had just happened was finally starting to sink in.


    "They really put you through the ringer, ey Conejito?" She held your mostly detached foot up by a toe, it had finally stopped sparking. "We''ll have to see about getting you a new one."


    ¡®We''? Who the fuck was ''we''?


    "Don''t look at me like that, I did you a favor and now you''re going to do me a favor." She found the release button in your calf and popped your damaged foot off, chucking it into the biohazard bin with a thunk. "I''m down a specimen and you just happened to be the right age, I promise that whatever I''ve got planned for you is a hundred times better than what was waiting for you in the back of that truck.


    ¡­plus Doug hates you and that automatically makes you my best friend, and best friends don''t let each other get shipped off to God knows where." She took off her gloves and cracked her knuckles, "My name is Anza, actually it''s Extravaganza but that''s a mouthful so almost nobody uses it."


    You stared at her blankly, unblinking, unmoving. She didn''t squirm like Doug would have, and she didn''t avoid your eyes like the other scientists either. "Did you know that your eyes are gray? I''ve never seen someone with blond hair, gray eyes and your skin tone before. Supposedly there''s an entire indigenous culture who look like you but something tells me that the resemblance is only coincidental."


    You kept staring and wished this weird lady would just shut up and leave you alone or kill you or whatever. Anything was better than just hearing her talk and talk and talk. Your disdain must have shown on your face because she shifted uncomfortably and cleared her throat before changing the subject entirely.


    "Doug told me that you can''t talk, but Doctor Phipps taught you how to sign, is that correct?" Anza prodded.


    You squinted at her in suspicion.


    "You''re not going to get in trouble, Conejito, I just need to be able to understand you." She offered you a smile, a real one, not the barely disguised malice she''d shown Doug earlier.


    You decided right then that you didn''t like smiles, but you nodded anyway.


    Anza clapped her hands together. "Excellent! Alright, I have a friend outside who can interpret for you while we talk but be mindful that this is only temporary and we''ll have to find a better solution later on." She got up and ushered in a chubby intern that you''d never seen before, neither he nor Anza introduced him by name or even number and that made you uncomfortable for some reason.


    The interpreter stood next to you, eyes dissecting you more efficiently than any blade. It made what little skin you had left crawl and squirm with discomfort.


    Anza removed the first of your restraints, allowing you to sit up on the gurney. She bent to retrieve the fluffy thing and suddenly squawked with disgust.


    "Ohmigod why is it WARM!?"


    She held the thing with only two fingers, lifting it off of the ground by a single fuzzy limb and dropping it onto your lap quickly as if afraid it might bite.


    It was a teddy bear, without ears or a face. Soft white fur and rounded limbs. Despite sitting on cold metal for however long it was still very warm to the touch, but not like it had been heated, like there was meat beneath the fabric and fluff that made its outer shell.


    And there was. You could hear tiny lungs and a heart working hard deep inside, but there was no rush of blood or the woosh of actual breath. It was so very strange, you picked the bear-thing up and examined it before pressing an ear to its chest and just listening for a long moment.


    Anza''s eyebrows raised, face contorted with discomfort, "Doug was right, you are a little freak aren''t you?"


    You just shrugged in response and hugged your bear-thing to your chest. It still smelled like Nala.


    "O¡­kay¡­ you have a mild concussion from getting thrown around earlier, plenty of bruising, lots of scrapes, but nothing life threatening." Anza nodded appreciatively. "You got lucky, kid."


    You didn''t respond, choosing to bury your face into your bear instead. The ba-thump ba-thump of its heartbeat soothed your raw nerves and aching skull. Nobody spoke for several minutes.


    "It wouldn''t have worked, you know," Anza said, finally breaking the silence. "Your escape plan, I watched the security tapes.


    You wouldn''t have made it past the fence, it''s on a completely different circuit from the compound. So, even if you''d managed to cut the power to this place¡­ somehow, you''d still have to find AND shut off the generator for the fence and even then the grass around this place is full of things that make those dogs you played with look cute."


    You were winding up to sign something rude but the interpreter interrupted you. "Ok but¡­ why are you telling him this? Now he''ll just try to escape again," the interpreter said, eyeing you warily as if you were going to bolt for the door right that second, mild concussion and missing foot be damned.


    Anza pinched her fingers together in the ''quiet coyote'' gesture and the interpreter shut his mouth. You''d seen staff members use it to silence the younger specimens when they were being too loud, but you''d never seen it used on an adult before though.


    "Until this conversation is done, you are not a person with opinions my friend, you are his mouthpiece, you tell me what he says and nothing more." She gave the interpreter a look so sharp and cold it made you flinch. Anza patted your knee and muttered something soothing in Spanish before turning back to the interpreter. "Do we have an understanding?"


    The interpreter could only nod, back stiff, teeth clenched. He looked very much like he would rather take his chances with the fence and the stuff in the grass, instead of being anywhere near Anza.


    Anza turned to you, "I''m going to take your muzzle off, ok?"


    You stiffened, ears back and eyes narrowed. Hadn''t she heard Doug? Hadn''t she seen the big fuck-off red sticker on your file warning everyone that you''d bite? Your legs were still pinned to the gurney, so you couldn''t run away, there was nothing you could do except sit there while that woman fiddled with the straps to your muzzle until it eventually came loose.


    You immediately tried to bite her, but Anza was much faster than you anticipated. She had your jaw gripped tightly in one hand before you could fully open your mouth, nails leaving little crescent impressions in your skin. Time seemed to stop entirely.


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    "Now listen to me kid, bite me if you want to but understand that I''m the only thing keeping you alive right now and the second I stop wanting to do that is the second you''re in a truck following your friends to wherever they are," Her brown eyes looked black at this distance, deep and all encompassing. They reminded you of the Nameless Thing in your dreams, for you saw the End of all things in their depths. "Do we have an understanding, Conejito?"


    You set your bear to the side and let your hands do the talking, "Fuck you, I''m not dying here or anywhere else."


    She laughed at that, a full belly laugh that made her double over, cheeks red and eyes full of tears. "Oh I was right to pick you Conejito, you''ve got a spark that I love. You''re a little survivor aren''t you? But guess what¡­" Her voice dropped to a dramatic whisper, lips against the shell of your ear. "I''m a survivor too, so let''s be friends and make sure that we both get out of this alive, ey?"


    After your examination Anza had you cleaned, dressed, and fitted for a loaner foot. She took you somewhere amongst the lower floors of the Facility, one of the few places you had never been before.


    Everything was white and pristine, with soft rounded edges and bright spots of color that broke up the monotony just enough. It was full of children, ones you''d never seen before, talking and playing amongst themselves on soft pastel furniture shaped like clouds and rainbows.


    They were all dressed in the exact same outfit as you, a white cotton jumpsuit with numbers on the back and a pair of slip-on shoes. You weren''t wearing any shoes of course, your paws didn''t really fit most sizes very well, plus you just hated socks with a passion.


    Anza cleared her throat, made the quiet coyote sign again, and waited for the children to fall silent. They all watched her with a hundred wide and curious eyes, their stillness and quiet anticipation reminded you of the dogs waiting to tear you apart.


    You clutched your bear a little closer and tried to find comfort in its warmth again, but to no avail. Your vision went yellow-green at the edges and you flinched when Anza rested her hand on your head. "Easy Conejito," she whispered, "unlike you, this lot doesn''t bite.¡±


    Anza cleared her throat again and gave her audience a vibrant smile. "Hello again children, I know today has been very busy and that you''re all probably very hungry, but I have one more surprise for you all before we break for dinner, ok?"


    "Ok!" The children said in unison. Anza nodded proudly.


    "Good, good, this is my new friend," she made a show of ruffling your ears, "he''s going to come live with us from now on, so be nice to him, ok?"


    "We will!" The children replied, again in that eerie unison, it muddled the colors of their voices until you couldn''t tell any of them apart and that frightened you. You needed that distinction, you didn''t know why you needed it but you did. You needed it like you needed air to breathe.


    Anza seemed satisfied with that and scooted you towards the mass of kids. You didn''t budge, but that didn''t dissuade her at all. She just scooped you up by the armpits and deposited you on a nearby bean bag chair.


    You sat there, frozen with your bear in your arms and your eyes wide with fear. The dogs had been preferable to this, sure they had tried to kill you but there had only been two of them.


    Anza left the room without another word and the weight of her absence drove the breath from your lungs. The horde of strange children all turned their eyes on you, surging forward like a single organism until you were completely surrounded.


    There were no adults in sight and you couldn''t hear any signs of one over the multichromatic noise that the children were making. Your eyes darted from face to face, unable to focus on anything, yellow-green suddenly dominating the nauseating rainbow until it was all you could see.


    Too much noise, too many eyes. You wished that you''d taken your chances with the electrified fence or that Anza had just let them load you onto the truck with the others because literally anything else could have been better than this.


    You tried to squeeze your bear for comfort and found your arms completely empty.


    Time stopped.


    The noise was blotted out by your own heartbeat as shock and fear nestled deep in your guts and turned the entire world icy.


    You looked down at your empty arms, then up at the jabbering crowd.


    Every movement, no matter how small, felt molasses-slow.


    A girl, or something vaguely girl-shaped, had your bear in her mouth. She was standing on all four limbs like a dog, and you noticed that her arms and legs were all the same length. She also had a strangely shaped neck and a very long, very thick tail that made her look a little bit like a dinosaur. Her tail had no fur so it looked naked and pink like a rat''s, it was also wagging at inadvisable speeds.


    The girl growled and barked, play-bowing and shaking your bear around with reckless abandon, sending ropes of drool flying as she did.


    You were on your feet before you could even register the movement. The dog girl wagged her tail even faster, smiling around your bear. Every tooth in her mouth was dagger sharp.


    Nobody moved.


    Not you.


    Not the girl.


    Not the crowd of onlookers.


    Had your vision not been tunneling at that moment, you might have seen the sly and sneaky grins spreading across the faces of the other kids. This had been planned.


    You lunged for the dog girl, and she took off like a shot.


    The dog girl cackled madly as she hurdled furniture and ran literal circles around you. She was faster than you by a long shot, and even if you had both feet intact you still wouldn''t have caught up to her regardless.


    Laughter.


    Sharp and cruel and all encompassing.


    You weren''t sure how you hadn''t noticed it earlier, but everyone was laughing at you. Watching you hobble after the dog girl and your toy, like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon.


    Heat spread from your neck and up to the tips of your ears, you skidded to a halt and just stood there. Hands balled into fists at your sides, head down. Tears stung in the corners of your eyes, but you refused to let them fall because after all you''d been through in the last twenty-four hours you weren''t about to give this pack of drooling hyenas anything else to laugh at.


    The dog girl barked and wagged and made a show of parading your bear around like a trophy, the crowd hooted and hollered with more horrible laughter but you did your best to ignore them. You picked a direction, ANY direction that wasn''t full of sneering little assholes, and limped away in embarrassment.


    "Nobody said you could leave." A voice called at your back. Not the dog girl''s, a different person, a boy. A boy that looked a lot like you might have if you weren''t wires and circuits and spite.


    Brown skin, brown eyes, shaved black hair. He had his jumpsuit open and tied around his waist, showing off a filthy Pok¨¦mon tee-shirt that had seen better days. He was taller than you by at least a head, and used it as an opportunity to look down his nose at you.


    You stared blankly at him for a heartbeat before going back to what you were originally doing. He grabbed your wrist hard and pulled you off balance, you fell to the ground with a surprised "Oof!" And gazed up at him with confusion.


    "Didn''t you hear me? Nobody said you could leave, we''re not done with you yet."


    You yanked your arm free of his hold and stood up. The dog girl came over and gave the boy your bear, he looked at it with disgust and held it up at arm''s length over your head. Ribbons of spit trailed down towards the ground and plopped onto your bare scalp.


    The dog girl peeked around his legs and snickered, proud of her work.


    The boy just smiled. He was already missing a few of his front teeth and every fiber optic of your being told you that he''d look even better if he lost a few more. "You want this? Come and get it." He said with such profound malice that the taste of it settled in the back of your throat.


    He expected you to reach for the toy.


    He did not expect you to tackle him to the ground with all of your weight and to put your sharp little knees against his sternum. Your hands were just as ill-fitting as your feet, a little too big for your age. Some of the adults found it cute, but you just found it useful.


    You grabbed the boy''s wrist, the one that held your bear, and squeezed until he screamed and let it go. Before you could grab the toy, the dog girl was back again, snapping it up in her jaws.


    You were not in the mood to play another game of keep-away and grabbed her by the ankle before she could get out of reach. She slipped and hit the ground with a yelp. The other kids were backing away now, a few of them taking hesitant stances with fists raised.


    Despite everything, you were not a good fighter, but you knew how to flail just right and just enough to get most things to leave you alone. Something told you that that tactic wouldn''t work this time, so you picked up your soggy bear and stood and you screamed.


    A horrible artificial sound, like a machine being murdered. A computer crying out for help. You did not stop screaming until the adults arrived, until Anza was kneeling in front of you and cupping your face in her hands.


    "Hey hey, Conejito it''s ok!" She searched your face for the cause of your distress. Then the hiccups started, and the tears came back, you didn''t fight them this time, you just threw yourself into Anza''s arms and bawled like you''d never bawled before.


    You peeked over her shoulder and saw your attackers being led away by nameless interns, they glared daggers at you, but all you could do was smile.

 Chapter Five

    Anza called it the ''Habitat'', a collection of rooms and areas that you''d be living in with the other children until further notice. The place where you''d been introduced to everyone was the Lounge, it branched off into three directions full of identical little apartments where you would all be staying when she had no need of you.


    Apartments were shared between two specimens and their Keepers. Due to all the¡­ excitement surrounding your arrival you hadn''t been introduced to your Keeper yet, but Anza was very sure that you''d like her.


    You were not.


    You''d only been around for a few hours and everybody else had already decided to hate you so why would this new lady be any different.


    Anza did what she did best and scooted you into your new apartment before closing the door behind you, once again leaving you to fend for yourself.


    The apartment was bigger than you expected, basically one big room with doors on closets and bathrooms and stuff. Tile floors, no carpet anywhere. No color either. False windows dotted the walls and lit the space with artificial light in a way that was supposed to simulate outside but really sucked at it instead.


    Everything smelled like bleach and wet paint. No fingerprints on anything, no footprints, no dust, no dirt.


    You were no stranger to sterility but this felt different, this felt wrong.


    Almost lifeless.


    Less like a dollhouse and more like the IDEA of a home but inside of a terrarium, like an ant farm almost, an open nest meant to be observed.


    Nothing scratched or scuttled behind the walls. You couldn''t even hear the pipes rumbling or the AC wheezing. It was all too smooth and too clean.


    You didn''t trust it, any of it. And when the new woman stepped into your field of view, you didn''t trust her either.


    She smiled at you (red flag), and made eye contact (red flag), and knelt to your level (big red flag). She offered her hand for you to shake or sniff or whatever and you just stared at it like it might pop off her wrist and bite you.


    "Hi, my name is Mara, I''m going to be taking care of you for awhile." Her voice was soft and calm, pale blue and warm. Her skin was the same color as yours. She kept her hand out for you to inspect, but made no move to touch or grab you. "What''s your name?"


    You shook your head in response, and watched her face flick through half a dozen confused emotions in barely a second.


    "No you don''t have a name or no you don''t want to tell me what it is?"


    You tilted your head and gave her a weird little smile that said ''wouldn''t you like to know?'' Mara pursed her lips in response and got to her feet, dusting off her standard issue white slacks as she did.


    "Oh it''s gonna be like that, huh?" She crossed her arms and gave you a smile of her own that said that your tricks weren''t going to fly here, but feel free to fuck around and find out. "I guess I''ll just have to call you something new every day until I find a name you like, OR you nut up and tell me what your actual name is."


    Oh¡­ oh this was going to be fun (not). Your ears flicked back and your eyes narrowed. "I don''t have a name." You signed with barely contained annoyance.


    "Ah! He speaks." Mara chuckled, "Looks like my earlier plan is gonna come to fruition anyway, you can''t just not have a name, little buddy."


    You huffed and stomped your good foot, Mara''s eyes lit up with sudden inspiration. "That''s it! I''m gonna call you Thumper¡­ at least until I can come up with something better."


    The door opened before you could respond and a familiar blonde head peeked inside. The second you made eye contact with Specimen 37, your heart nosedived directly into your feet.


    Her little face lit up like the sun and she bolted forward to hug you, but the growl in your throat brought her to a halt. Mara put herself between the two of you and your opinion of your new Keeper immediately skyrocketed.


    "Well hello there! You must be our roommates, I''m Mara, and you just met my little buddy." She held very firm, keeping 37 away from you as best she could given the circumstances. "He won''t tell me his name, so I''m calling him Thumper for the time being."


    37 stopped, looked Mara in the eye and arched a single golden eyebrow. "Did he LET you call him Thumper or did you just help yourself?"


    "Duckie." Hubris warned. His hands were full of Styrofoam takeout containers piled high enough to almost obscure his vision. He bumped the door with his hip to close it.


    "What? I''m just askin''..." 37 called back.


    "Well Duckie--" Mara began.


    "My name''s not Duckie, that''s just what Hubie calls me, my name is Specimen 37." The girl interrupted, following Dr Downfall into the kitchen area.


    "...h-honey that''s-- that''s not a name that''s a number." You watched Mara''s face fall, melting into a mask of confusion and concern.


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    Dr. Downfall set his haul onto the kitchen table and spent a few minutes searching the cabinets for plates and utensils. He set the table for dinner, with 37''s ''help'', and started scooping things onto his plate before sitting. He waved both you and Mara over, and slid empty plates in your direction.


    Up until that point, with the exception of treats given to you for good behavior, you''d only ever consumed nutritional supplements. They came in three distinct forms, a thick paste like mashed potatoes, a thin gray broth, or a crumbly dry bar, but they all largely tasted the same.


    Like cardboard.


    You didn''t know what to try first, and it must have shown on your face because 37 kept handing you things to sniff or nibble. It was nice, it made you feel included.


    Downfall watched you closely, like he expected you to nibble 37''s precious little fingers off instead. He didn''t look at Mara at all but his tone was clearly meant for her.


    "A number is all that some of these people have left. Not just the children either, stop an intern the next time you''re out and ask them what their name is, I bet you my lunch for a week that at least one of them will give you a number and nothing else." He nodded at you, "I know for a fact that that one there has a number and not much else, mind telling us what it is?"


    "7886." You signed absently while Mara interpreted, 37 had just handed you a raw baby carrot to sniff, you gave it a test nibble and recoiled at the texture. Mara stifled a giggle.


    "We both have sevens in our names! We''re almost name-twins!!" 37 bounced in her seat, shaking the entire table until a sharp look from Downfall made her settle. "I knew I picked a good friend."


    "Ok but why numbers?" Mara asked, completely disinterested in the food.


    "Are you new here?" Downfall replied


    She nodded and he gave her a pained look that bordered on sympathetic but was also in the general direction of pity. It made him look like he''d just swallowed something gross.


    "It makes them easier to deal with, easier to categorize and easier to eventually get rid of." He poked at the food on his plate, expression suddenly morose. "It''s really hard to get attached to a string of numbers."


    "So that''s why you call her Duckie, then?"


    Hubris didn''t answer, suddenly intent on finishing his meal.


    You were experiencing the joy of chicken tenders and macaroni and cheese for the first time when 37 broke the silence, "When we''re done eating can I show 7886 my room?"


    Downfall looked at her, then at you, then back at her. "If he wants to see it, he can."


    37 grinned around a mouthful of half chewed baby carrot and wiggled excitedly in her seat.


    After dinner was bath time. You had already been cleaned once that day and didn''t see the point in doing it all again, but Mara wrestled you into the tub and scrubbed you down despite your protests. She gently washed your face with a soft cloth and brushed your teeth for you, since you didn''t know how.


    You hated the way the brush scratched against your gums, but Mara was quick and thorough and it was over before you knew it. She rubbed some Elbow Grease brand petroleum jelly onto your face once you were clean and dry and applied something else to your scalp to make it less itchy, taking extra care of the spots where your ears were grafted on because they were kinda gross and scabby.


    The last thing Mara did before letting you go was dress you in your pajamas. Soft, nice smelling things with gray bunnies and clouds, all over a white backdrop. You''d had pajamas before, a long time ago probably, but nothing as nice as these.


    The second you stepped out of the bathroom, 37 had you by the wrist and was dragging you towards a curtain covered nook in one corner of the apartment. You''d been this close to her before but now that she was even more fluffy from her own bath, you could see that her hair wasn''t hair, it was thousands of extremely thin feathers. Her excitement was palpable, coming off of her in vibrant pink waves that made you a little bit nauseous. She threw the curtain back and posed dramatically in front of her ''room''.


    Every available bit of space was covered in jars and bottles full of things. Terrariums full of moss and leaves, wet specimens of dead things, purple and blue stained animal skeletons, jars of buttons, bottles of dirt and sand arranged into striped layers, loose teeth, beach glass, dried flowers and dozens of other things you couldn''t have hoped to name in a dozen lifetimes. You stared at it all in silent awe, watching numerous invertebrates go about their daily lives in the safety of their little glass worlds.


    "Pretty cool huh?" 37 grinned, climbing onto her bed to better reach one of the jars. It was home to a colony of isopods with yellow faces. "These are my favorites, they''re called rubber duck isopods cuz they look like ducks and over there are my zebras, and next to them are my spiky ones, I''ve also got jumping spiders and banana slugs and a millipede named Jeffrey."


    Something tapped the metal of your foot curiously, something large and many legged. You looked down to see the biggest millipede you had ever seen, twice as long as a dachshund and nearly as thick around. It tapped you with its antennae and reared up a little to get a better look at you. There were several stickers stuck to the plates on its back.


    You pointed at it and 37 followed your finger, she nodded with enthusiasm and recognition when she saw the huge bug, "Yeah that''s Jeffery!" You picked the creature up and handed it to her, she settled him onto her shoulders like a feather boa. You weren''t sure how to react to that at all so you turned around and left, 37 watched you go with a wry smile as if she were used to that sort of reaction. Your room was the same as 37''s, just without all the jars and decorations.


    A bed with a drawer underneath, lots of shelves, a curtain for privacy, and a fake window that was doing its best impression of the night sky.


    Fake windows were a necessity this far underground, they simulated daylight and kept folks from going insane. This window was fancier than what you were used to, a screen that went the extra mile and showed you what weather conditions and smog levels were like outside.


    You crawled into bed and slid under the covers, unsure of what else to do with yourself. Mara peeked in a while later with something behind her back.


    "All tuckered out?" she whispered.


    You shrugged, feeling the first fingers of exhaustion start to tug at your limbs.


    "Well, I''ve got one more surprise for you before it''s lights out." Mara wiggled a little, for emphasis. You had really had enough surprises for one day and really just wanted to go to sleep, so you sank beneath the blankets. Mara pulled them back and handed you something fluffy and white.


    And breathing.


    Your bear!!


    You crushed it to your chest and smushed your face into its dense fur. It didn''t smell like Nala anymore, her scent replaced by heavy industrial cleaners, but it wasn''t soaked with drool anymore either so you weren''t going to look a gift bear in the mouth¡­ even if it didn''t have a mouth. Mara tucked you back in, and kissed you between your ears.


    "Good night Thumper, sweet dreams."


    You curled up tight with your bear, listening to it breathe in the dark before falling headlong into a deep and dreamless sleep.

 Chapter Six

    Whatever had been done to Jeffrey that allowed him to get that big and still be able to breathe properly, also made him snore.


    Between that and the endless scuttling of 37''s captive critters, your deep and dreamless sleep was very short-lived. You woke up sometime in the very early morning, before the sun had come up, if the darkness of the fake window was anything to go on.


    As you slid out of bed, you were met with the vague concern that the new adults in your life wouldn''t be so lenient about your decision to wander around when bored.


    Your concern died with a whimper as you saw the privacy curtains of the grownups little sleeping nooks had been left wide open. Mara''s bed was empty, as was Doctor Downfall''s; both of them were still made as if they''d never been thought about, let alone slept in.


    37 was still curled up and asleep in her bed, with Jeffrey sprawled across her legs and snoring like an old asthmatic. It was probably a bad idea to wake them, so you tiptoed out of the sleeping area as quietly as you could. The front door was unlocked and cracked open, as if the adults had left in a rush.


    Outside, the Habitat was dark, dimly lit by warm orange lights embedded in the ground. You could hear the fitful dreaming of the other children just beyond the walls. You felt like a trespasser, a slimy little thief deep in the guts of a goblin''s den in search of gold.


    Any wrong move or sudden sound could wake the entire horde and put your adventure in jeopardy.


    Anxiety crept along the length of your spine and sent pinpricks of cold to the ends of your wires. Something deep in your guts wanted you to turn back, to crawl into bed and take your chances with the Nameless Nightmare Thing that waited just behind your eyelids, but something teased your curiosity like a carrot on a string. Even if you hated carrots with your entire tiny being.


    Voices, muddled by distance, filtered through the hallways and pulled you towards them.


    As you glided along the corridors of the Habitat, you felt like a herbivore in the underbrush, the subtle whirrs and whines of the security cameras watching you with their wide black eyes felt like the warm breaths of hunters on the nape of your neck as you drew ever closer.


    "You don''t-- I can''t-- those are CHILDREN!" Stammered a voice you couldn''t recognize, thick with disgust and regret. "I can''t do this, not to children, they don''t even know what''s going ON¡­"


    As you got closer and closer to the source of the conversation the smell of tobacco and Doug''s nasty vape filled your nostrils. The exhaust fans spun at top speed and coated the entire conversion in a haze of shuddering gray noise, but you could still tell each voice apart by color and shape so it wasn''t too distracting. You paused, hidden behind a corner, and listened.


    "It''s slavery! In the past ten years there has been more fuss about androids getting rights than how it''s wrong to experiment on people without their consent, and androids aren''t even ALIVE!" Fabric rustled slightly, something dense thunked against a table ¨Cprobably a head¨C and made several glasses rattle, "I just¡­ I just don''t want to do this¡­"


    "Bit late for that," Anza said, as she took a long drink of something and immediately winced like it hurt. "You had your chance to leave, we all did, so don''t go soft on me now."


    Weeping, soft and snotty filled the sudden silence. You dared to peek around the corner and see what was going on. A woman in brightly patterned scrubs had her head on the table, surrounded by other adults as her body shook with quiet sobs. Some of the faces you recognized, Anza, Doug, Downfall, and Mara.


    But most you did not. Some were dressed like Mara, others were in white coats like Anza, but they all looked tired and uncomfortable. Sipping amber liquid from little glasses and screwing their faces up like it tasted horrible.


    "We have to do this, you know what will happen if we don''t." Anza continued, pouring the weepy lady a glass of the nasty brown liquid.


    Doug mimicked his head exploding, complete with unnecessary sound effects. Everybody except Anza flinched.


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    "Oh come on," Doug started, "Conglomerate microchips haven''t been explosive since the 80s, it was just a joke."


    Nobody laughed. He took a pull from his vape and blew rings with the smoke before continuing. "I don''t see what the problem is, yeah they''re just kids but we''re honestly doing them a favor-- it''s safer in here than it is out there and if they croak¡­ we''ll at least be gentle about it."


    Several people grimaced, their reaction tinging Doug''s words with an agitated yellow. "Don''t look at me like that, don''t act like those brats have it worse than we do. They don''t have the Conglomerate breathing down their necks all day, they don''t have to worry about their families if they slip up, they aren''t microchipped like animals and expected to wring blood from stones every fucking day!"


    "You''re so SO close to getting the point." Whispered the weepy lady, head still firmly on the table.


    "Dude, you number your interns, you''re just as bad as the Conglomerate." Said one of the new interns.


    "That''s not me, that''s the guy who ran this shit before me, do you know how fucked up this place was before I got my hands on it?" He took a swig from his glass, "numbering interns is tame, all it does is make them easier to tell apart. Up until recently we''d neuter the specimens upon arrival. Leave ''em with just the hormone producing bits and a single hole to excrete with. Don''t ask me why, top brass never told me shit." He gave Anza a look, "So you might wanna check if your Conejito isn''t actually Conejita."


    "Nothing like that is happening under my watch, fucking Christ if I''d known it was this bad I would have had this place scrubbed years ago." Anza looked like she might puke. "And don''t be a transphobe, Conejito is a boy if he wants to be a boy."


    You were NOT a boy, or a girl for that matter, and had no interest or intention in being either. You were you and that was all that mattered.


    Doug held his hands up, "I''m a lot of shit but I sure as fuck ain''t a transphobe! I helped Nala pick her name back when we were interns."


    "Oh! ¡­that''s wild, anyway--"


    Whatever Anza was about to say next was cut off by a hand over your mouth, and a voice in your ear as you were dragged away from your hiding place.


    It was the boy from earlier, you could tell by the shape of his voice and the bruise on his wrist. "I don''t like you."


    OK? And? You shrugged in response. Nobody liked you, get in line pal.


    Wait.


    WAIT.


    He was trying to study you. The fine hairs on the back of your neck lifted in discomfort. You wriggled loose of his hold and turned to face him.


    His eyes seemed to glow in the low orange light, like coals in a fireplace. You could hear him breathing and the adults still talking in the distance.


    In the depths of his gaze was a spark of recognition and something else you couldn''t name. Almost like he wasn''t used to other kids understanding him.


    Footsteps came towards the both of you, voices slowly growing in volume. You grabbed the boy and pulled him into another darkened corridor, backs flat against the wall as a pair of interns ambled past.


    The boy yanked his arm out of your grip and looked you up and down. You pointed at him and tilted your head in question, asking him who he was.


    "You don''t talk do you?" He said, eyes picking you apart at the seams until you felt itchy and naked. You just shook your head in response and pretended like the attention didn''t bother you.


    "... call me V." Something told you that that wasn''t his real name but you didn''t care enough to pry any further.


    More footsteps, more voices.


    You could hear Mara.


    You needed to get back to your room before she realized you were up. V must have had the same realization because it was his turn to drag you around, back towards the apartments, but after a few steps he stopped and looked you over with renewed interest. "You don''t make any noise when you move."


    You shrugged. He huffed and kept going, tugging you along behind him like a kite on a string.


    You made it to his apartment first, V let you go and stood in the doorway. "What''s your name?"


    You held up seven fingers.


    "Your name¡­ is Seven?"


    Another shrug. It clearly wasn''t but if HE wasn''t going to be straightforward about anything, then YOU weren''t under any obligation to do the same.


    "Is shrugging all you can do?"


    You thought about it for awhile, screwing your face up in dramatic thought before shrugging again.


    V scowled at you and disappeared into his room without a word.

 Interlude

    In the interrogation chamber, the wizard-faced man taps the table impatiently, you still haven''t figured out his name or thought to ask for it. "What does that," he makes a frustrated gesture at you and the fleeting concept of your Words, "have to do with anything?"


    Your smile is tight lipped and wry, "I''m setting the stage, naming the players."


    "Can''t you cut to the chase?"


    "No, not really. This Story is-- well not shy per se?" You tilt your head because everything seems to make more sense at a forty-five degree angle. "It''s not used to being looked at, let alone told, so it''s having a rough time pulling on its socks and shoes and remembering where it left its car keys."


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    "What does that even MEAN!?" The wizard man huffs.


    "It means that the Story has a vague idea of what it should be and what it should look like but it''s really just making things up as it goes along¡­ y''know, like most people."


    "So you''re just making this all up?"


    "No," You shake your head, "the Story I''m telling you has a set beginning and a set End, but all the middle-y bits are kind of floating loose so it''s scrambling around for places to put everything."


    "You say that like it''s alive." He looks vaguely sick and generally concerned, like he''s planning to book you a grippy sock vacation the second this is all over.


    "Well¡­ because it is, but it also isn''t? You''ll understand later, just let me get back to where we were."

 Chapter 7777777

    They let you outside again.


    The sun had become shy and hiding behind a nest of clouds in the pale blue sky you couldn''t help but stare into.


    You could hear the fence humming as it curled around the little haven that the science team had carved for you and the children.


    A floor of thick rubber mats made from recycled tires stretched from the Facility into a rough octagon surrounded first by a thick wooden fence shaped and painted to look like giant popsicle sticks, and then by the electrified one about two feet away.


    In the center of the yard was a playground. Brightly painted plastic and steel apparatuses intended to provide enrichment for kids like you. There wasn''t much of a theme to it but you guessed it was supposed to look like a tree house, except it had been designed by someone who had never seen a real tree.


    There were swings, climbing ropes, slides, monkey bars, and other such playground staples that the children were excitedly playing with.


    You were on a bench with Mara. Recess was mandatory but that didn''t mean you had to like it, and much preferred to sit and people watch instead. Mara was knitting and occasionally putting whatever she was working on onto your head to make sure that it would eventually fit once she was done. This was preferable to interacting with the other kids so you let her do whatever she liked so long as she didn''t force you to go play and be normal.


    One of the other Keepers was busy chasing his assigned kid all over the playground, screaming "Roady!" "Roady stop!" "Roady no!" And the occasional "Spit that out!" Whenever he got particularly close to catching her.


    Roady was the dog girl from before and she kept eating things off of the ground when her Keeper was distracted. You might have found it funny if you didn''t want her kind of dead, or if you liked dogs, or if you didn''t feel sorry for the poor idiot in charge of her.


    Roady skidded to a halt in front of your bench and stood up on her back limbs before hunching over dramatically and pretending to limp while she held her hands up near her chest like a little mean spirited tyrannosaur. You gave her the blankest stare you could muster before pointedly ignoring her attempts to make fun of you.


    You walked funny, even with a complete set of feet. According to the medical staff, your cybernetics were both too numerous and too heavy for your remaining organic parts to deal with, especially your still-growing spine, so you walked with a permanent slouch.


    It didn''t hurt, so you didn''t care, but the med team strongly urged Mara to have your parts replaced with lighter ones as soon as possible.


    You weren''t sure if Mara had that level of authority or that kind of cash, but everybody talked over you like you weren''t there so you didn''t bother trying to argue.


    Roady''s Keeper tackled her like a football player, pried her mouth open and shook out several half dead bugs, a rock, pieces of chewed plastic and a severed cybernetic finger. The girl glared at him with such malice that it oozed off of her in brilliant orange streams, but her Keeper just crossed his arms and gave her the same look back before telling her to behave.


    She stuck her tongue out at him.


    He stuck his tongue out at her.


    This lasted for about thirty seconds before both parties dissolved into laughter.


    The man looked up and locked eyes with Mara, he offered her a hand to shake, which she ignored completely.


    "Hey I''m Craig," said the man, hand still out for Mara to shake. Roady put her face in it and forced Craig to pet her.


    "I know," said Mara, the click-clack of her knitting needles made little sparks, combining with the cool blue tone of her voice to conjure visions of a low smoky fire. "We met at orientation."


    Craig chuckled awkwardly, "D-did we?"


    His voice was a particular shade of maroon that made you wonder if he was just generally kind of scared about everything or if his voice was Just Like That normally.


    Mara nodded, one eyebrow raised as if she couldn''t believe this guy in any way shape or form. "We met everyone during orientation, that''s the purpose of orientation."


    Craig cleared his throat and sat in the empty spot on the bench next to you. Your ears immediately flicked back and your lips began to curl but Mara shot you a glance before you could do anything.


    Craig stared at you, eyebrows furrowed.


    "Uh¡­" He looked at Mara for assistance, "What''s up with him?" He pointed at you and you snapped your teeth at his fingers. He squealed like a small child and fell off the bench.


    Roady growled, hackles raised. You flipped her the bird and Mara smacked your hands for it.


    "It''s rude to point," Mara said without looking up from her knitting. "He doesn''t like to be touched or crowded and has a history of biting people for doing that, so your best bet is to find somewhere else to sit for now." She smiled at Roady, the kind of smile that says ''if you don''t get out of my face I''ll rip yours off''. "You too sweetie, my little friend here told me what you did to his bear."


    "M''not ''sweetie''!" Roady stopped growling and sat, tail thumping, "My name is Rhododendron but Craig calls me Roady cuz he''s lazy and he doesn''t wanna say the whole thing!" She stuck her tongue out at Craig again who had managed to peel himself off of the ground. "It''s a kinda flower."


    "Wait-- what bear, what did she do?" Craig responded, dusting himself off. His cheeks were red with embarrassment and maybe a little exasperation.


    You started signing and Mara interpreted for you, "She stole my teddy bear and drooled all over it and made me run around like a dumbass trying to get it back."


    "Language." Mara scolded. You gave her a look that told her that she was not the boss of you but the way she didn''t react clearly said that she was.


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    "I was only playing." Whined the dog girl, hanging her head and making her eyes wide and watery in an attempt to gather sympathy. Nobody fell for it.


    "Ah jeez, it''s not too busted up is it? I can buy you a new one." Craig offered, crouching down to your level. You never understood why adults did that sort of thing, you guessed that it made you easier to interact with on some level but it honestly felt kind of mean? Not mean on purpose, but still mean.


    "My bear is fine, it got a bath so it''s ok now but it doesn''t smell like my friend anymore and that''s upsetting but you can''t give me her smell back anyway so don''t worry about it." You signed.


    Roady blinked at your hands, then blinked at Mara. "How do you know what he''s saying if he doesn''t talk? ¡­and why doesn''t he talk?"


    Mara, realizing that she was not going to get any more knitting done, sighed very heavily and put her supplies back into the little bag she''d brought with her. "He''s using sign language, the gestures and things he''s doing with his hands are actually words and phrases that I understand and interpret. It''s used mostly by deaf people and other people who can''t talk, like him."


    Roady heard the word ''deaf'', and let the dusty wheels in her brain turn in the wrong direction. You could see her winding up to yell, as if that would fix anything, but Mara pressed a finger to the girl''s lips as quick as a flash. "He''s not deaf, he can hear you just fine right now so there''s no point in yelling."


    "Oh." Said the dog girl. She looked at you. "Why can''t you talk?"


    You shrugged.


    It wasn''t like you COULDN''T, you just¡­ didn''t? You distinctly remember speaking at some point in your life but when you got to the lab you stopped, but couldn''t remember exactly why.


    But you weren''t going to explain that to Roady.


    "Oh¡­ do you wanna go play?" She tilted her head and smiled, tongue out and flapping as she panted. Her tail was wagging again, kicking up a small cloud of dust and pebbles.


    You looked at Mara, and she looked at you. She signed at you in slow, gentle motions. "You don''t have to if you don''t want to, we can sit here for as long as you like."


    You pressed your face into her shoulder, a bit like a cat might, and got off of the bench. Roady hopped to all four limbs and barked before tearing across the playground and back several times. She was talking too, in between the barks, asking you what kinds of games you wanted to play.


    You settled on fetch.


    The popsicle fence had been built with idiot children in mind so it was tall enough to keep most balls and other thrown objects from being chucked over it and lost. It was also built with barely any gaps so nobody got the bright idea to stick their grubby little hands through it and grab the hot wires on the other side.


    Said wires were several feet away for added safety, but kids are as smart as they are stupid and someone would have found a way to shock themselves at some point if all the necessary precautions were not in place.


    These were all very good precautions, because you threw the Frisbee a little too hard every time and had the fence been even a foot shorter, Roady would have probably cremated herself by accident trying to catch it.


    She was almost fun to be around without your bear in her mouth and the other kids egging her on, but you were never gonna forgive her for that first sin.


    Ever.


    As long as you lived.


    At one point you threw the Frisbee way too hard and it ended up stuck at the top of the playground so you both decided to climb up there and retrieve it. Roady insisted on turning that into a game too. You two weren''t just looking for a Frisbee, you were brave explorers climbing Mount Neverrest (Everest) in search of a lost alien craft that had crash landed there.


    It was silly, but you enjoyed it. Climbing ever higher, crawling through plastic tubes, and up knotted ropes to the summit. You found the Frisbee half stuck in a part of the playground''s construction, you held it high in triumph and Roady howled at the top of her lungs.


    You howled too, or tried to anyway. The sound came out wrong, modulated and weird.


    The entire playground fell completely silent. All eyes were on you again.


    On the little freak who couldn''t even howl right.


    You dropped the Frisbee and ran the whole way down, back to Mara, and curled up next to her on the bench. Embarrassment pulled you under and your cheeks heated. You wanted to go back inside, to dissolve or disappear, to unexist so completely that nobody remembered you at all.


    Roady followed you and nudged you with the Frisbee, "Are you ok?"


    You didn''t look up from the little self pity ball that you''d become. Mara petted you gently and tried to sooth your bruised ego.


    The girl dropped the Frisbee "Why''d you run away? We were having fun¡­" She touched you with one of her weird paw-hands and you stiffened. She looked at Mara, eyes bright with concern, "Did I hurt his feelings again?"


    You shook your head and Mara rubbed your back. You didn''t know how to explain all the big stupid feelings rolling around in your chest like marbles and dice, clattering painfully against each other.


    Roady put her chin on the bench, "We don''t have to play anymore if you don''t wanna, we can just sit¡­ Craig says I''m bad at sitting and staying but I''m a PUPPY ok I''ll get better later but for right now there''s so many smells and noises and stuff that I just gotta see y''know?"


    She licked your arm sympathetically, "I like your noises! Your howl was really cool, like a robot werewolf or something!"


    You peeked at her, and she sniffed your face. It tickled, and you giggled before you could stop yourself. Your hands clapped over your mouth as you remembered the way Doug flinched at the sound, but Roady didn''t.


    Her tail wagged and wagged and she gave you a dopey dog grin, excited by this new and undiscovered noise.


    You had been OK with people finding you unsettling but the second someone found you interesting and fun, things stopped computing and you immediately shut down. You didn''t know how to react to Roady or her wiggling as she sniffed your face again and tried to make you laugh.


    Her tongue was rough and slimy, breath rancid and hot, but you cackled and squealed when she licked your face and sent you both tumbling off of the bench.


    There were tears in your eyes by the time the Keepers managed to separate you.


    You were both giggling, buzzing with excitement. Mara started to drag you inside so she could wash off all the dirt and dog spit but Roady ran in front of you. "Wait! Wait, I never got to know your name."


    "He doesn''t have one." Mara said, struggling to balance you on her hip, "I''ve been trying to think of one but he''s hated all of my suggestions."


    After Thumper was Bugs, then Hazel, Fiver, Pipkin, and Peter, but nothing had stuck. Roady sat stubbornly, and thought while Mara tried to scoot around her and into the Facility.


    "What about¡­ Jack?" The dog girl offered, "like jackrabbits and Jack the Ripper and stuff?"


    "Jackrabbits aren''t actually rabbits, they''re hares." Craig said as he picked Roady off of the ground. "N-not that it matters!"


    Everyone was looking at you again and it made you dreadfully uncomfortable.


    "Well, what say you kid?" Mara looked at you appraisingly, studying you as if she''d never seen you before. "You do look like a Jack now that I think about it."


    You rolled the name around in your head over and over until it became smooth and good to hold. You had had a name before coming here, before being rebuilt piece by piece and habit by habit.


    That name was gone, worn away and forgotten, so you needed something new and your number wasn''t going to carry that weight properly anymore.


    Well.


    In that case.


    Jack would do just fine.

 Chapter Eight

    The apocalypse arrived on a Thursday, on the back of an unmarked semi truck.


    The sky was black with smog and thunder clouds that roiled and seethed like an upset stomach. The rain fell acidic and cold, making the tall grass smolder and all the things that lived in it run for cover.


    The truck had been a part of a scheduled supply restock provided by the Conglomerate, the contents of which were mostly mundane and not worth mentioning. The contents of the unmarked semi truck on the other hand, rippled with an impossible heat haze that surrounded the entire truck and made it look slightly holographic.


    The truck''s driver was an underpaid man named Roy who had just been told to drive the cargo from point A to point B and not ask questions. He''d done his job remarkably well.


    Even when the cargo started whispering to him in his sleep.


    Even when he started seeing things in the darkness behind his eyelids.


    Even when the truck crashed, becoming a smoldering heap of metal crumpled as easily as paper.


    Even when Roy''s sorry carcass was halfway out the windshield with glass in his face and even more splitting him open like a spatchcocked chicken.


    Even when he closed his eyes and let oblivion take him, only for him to wake up seconds later back in the driver''s seat of his truck parked on the side of the road. Whole and healthy, the truck unscathed, the cargo calling his deadname in the faint silence between his hyperventilating breaths.


    Roy vowed to quit truck driving the second whatever he was hauling was gone and the money he was owed was safely in his hands. He didn''t talk to any of the hazmat suited science types when he pulled into the Facility''s cargo area, he made them sign for their delivery, waited for the money to land his account and sped off the second his truck was empty.


    The cargo was handled with care, a collection of liquid cooled canisters plastered with every kind of hazard warning known to man. Each one contained a severed body part, and if anybody listened carefully they could hear those parts calling to each other, reaching out and trying to become whole again.


    You could hear it. Loud and clear.


    Like the universe splitting apart at the seams and crying out in such indescribable agony that it obscured all else.


    The entire world pitched left upon the truck''s arrival and sent you hurtling towards the ground as your body seemed to give up out of nowhere.


    Later on, the medical staff would tell you and Mara that it had just been a seizure. That it was just a side effect of the brain damage you''d gotten from years of having people dig around in your skull uninvited. It was why you couldn''t really see faces, why you could see sounds and taste colors.


    Didn''t matter if you''d never had a seizure until right that second.


    They gave you meds to help with it, and told Mara to keep a closer eye on you in case it happened again. She kept you in the apartment all day that day, and let you watch TV. She wasn''t supposed to, but there wasn''t much else she could do to keep you busy.


    So you sat with your bear, you''d named him Mr Man at some point, and watched epilepsy safe children''s programming. The med team wasn''t sure if you WERE epileptic but it was probably best to play it safe. Just in case.


    The new meds made your head swim and made the whole world feel washed out and strange. You could still hear the cargo, crying out for itself deep in the bowels of the Facility. A deep and terrible longing without color and without shape that seemed to probe your very soul, looking for answers, looking for help.


    Escape.


    Solace.


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    Oblivion.


    You threw up.


    Mara took you back to the infirmary and they kept you overnight in case something else happened. Except for the massive headache the noise was giving you, you were fine, they gave you nutrient broth to sip and a comfy quilt to sleep under, and your bear to hold. You were right as rain the next morning.


    The sudden absence of the sound was almost as horrible as its pervasiveness. You weren''t sure when the crying had stopped, but the fact that it had unsettled you so much that you couldn''t focus on much of anything for the next couple days.


    They weren''t very interesting anyway, just the Keepers'' attempts to get everybody on roughly the same schedule. Lots of visits to the infirmary, blood draws, throat swabs, physicals.


    Things that you were already very used to. You got candy and cute bandages for your troubles, even though you didn''t have skin in the places they stuck you. You were built to be experimented on, disassembled and reassembled as conveniently as possible. That meant that you had little ports in your arms where needles could be stuck, or an IV placed or whatever anybody might need vein access for.


    ¡­still, you liked the bandages and were starting a collection of the coolest ones on your wall behind your bed. Mara offered to put them in a scrapbook but you preferred the wall, it brightened the place up somehow.


    Whenever you saw Roady, you''d compare bandages and see whose was cooler, and then you''d have to go find V and use him as a tie breaker. He insisted that he was not your friend and that he didn''t like either of you but he judged your bandages anyway, because it made you go away. He put up with the both of you sitting with him during meal times and following him around during recess, even though he didn''t do much except sit and people watch.


    If you asked, he''d tell you about the other kids in the Facility. Some of them he knew before coming here, others were new to him, but he talked about them the same way the smooth voiced narrators in documentaries talked about wild animals.


    There was a girl named Coronet who went by Nettie, and she was only nice and well behaved when there were adults around. She liked attention, good and bad, and would do next to anything to get some. This usually involved introducing herself to anybody new and talking their ears off for however long she could manage. Or doing handstands, or running really fast, or whatever ''look at me look at ME'' type activity she could think up.


    Nettie did not like you, because she was operating under the assumption that you were Anza''s favorite. In fact it had been her idea to humiliate you that first day.


    You did not like Nettie.


    Another kid was 4242, she had naturally pink hair and a knack for stirring the pot whenever she got bored. She''d start fights between two people and just watch them go at it, it didn''t matter who they were. Back at the group home she lived in before all this, she once got the guy who ran it arrested purely because she thought it would be funny.


    It was but that''s besides the point.


    You avoided 4242 at all costs, for your own safety and sanity.


    Then there was Edwin, a shy little boy who preferred to be by himself. He was wholly unremarkable and an easy target for bullies, but most folks left him alone because V liked him and stood up for him like they were brothers, even though Edwin was pasty and white. Edwin could read several grade levels above what he was supposed to, and had a tendency to devour every bit of written material he could get his hands on. He was also trying to teach you how to read, with great difficulty because you hated letters.


    Numbers were fine, reasonable. Any string of random numbers was an actual real number with a name and a value. You couldn''t make a gibberish number like you could gibberish words, which made numbers inherently superior to letters.


    Edwin did not share this point of view with you and had made several attempts to teach you about irrational numbers, but you refused to comprehend their existence.


    Despite all of this, you liked Edwin and he liked you.


    There was also Akira, a tall girl of Japanese descent that minded her own business and tried her best to remain unbothered given the circumstances. You two didn''t interact much, but you were on good terms. Sometimes she ate with you during meal times, or retrieved your Frisbee when it went flying in her direction. She had thin, shimmery scales along her throat like a snake that she shed every couple of months. It was kinda gross, but she let you keep some once, and now they lived in a jar on your bedroom shelf.


    It felt nice to have people who liked you, not tolerated, not acknowledged, LIKED. You had FRIENDS and people to play with who didn''t mind that you were well¡­ you.


    You told them about the not-seizure and the crying. Roady believed you, she''d heard the sounds too and they''d kept her up all night until they stopped suddenly, "Like in that part of Bambi where you hear the gunshot and everything gets real¡­ bad." She made a pained face that explained what she was trying to describe better than words could.


    You had never seen Bambi, but you could imagine the gunshot tearing the world apart until there was only silence. You wondered if the crying thing was dead but something told you that it wouldn''t be that easy, that clean, that quick.


    A shudder rippled through your little group. Goosebumps speckled V''s bare arms and you watched him rub at them, visibly unnerved.

 Chapter Nine

    ?? The following is a document from Lazarus Manufacturing Research Facility Delta.


    The contents of this document and the events described herein are classified. ??


    Date: 06/0¨€/21¨€¨€


    Time: ¨€¨€:¨€¨€


    Weather: Muggy, 70¡ã F


    My therapist said that keeping a journal might help with my anxiety, and even though what we''re doing here is highly classified I strongly doubt that anybody will actually see any of this so¡­


    My name is Francis Moreau, my pronouns are they/them and I am a researcher at Lazarus Manufacturing''s remote Research Facility Delta, under the watchful eye of Head Geneticist Extravaganza Ramirez.


    I am writing this all down because that''s what you''re supposed to do¡­ isn''t it? Especially with science. If you don''t write anything down it''s just fucking around and finding out with no set purpose.


    I''m a part of Project Merlin.


    I don''t know if it was started by a guy named Merlin or if the people in charge were nerds for Arthurian legend, but it''s got a nice ring to it.


    It''s an experiment, or series of experiments, started in the late 2070s concerning the mutant life found in the Uninhabitable Zones around the world and the exotic form of radiation that causes them.


    Uninhabitable Zones are basically rogue nuclear exclusion zones that pop up at random as if by magic, we have no idea what causes them.


    Hence the experiments I guess.


    Project Merlin was originally intended just to understand the Uninhabitable Zones, where they come from and how they function as an ecosystem but due to corporate meddling, has quickly become "find and extract any valuable or useful materials from the zones."


    Or more accurately "how can we monetize the fuck out of this New Thing?"


    Ugh. It''s deplorable.


    I shouldn''t complain really, we''re essentially being paid to throw science at the wall and see what sticks and the budget for this endeavor seems to be completely bottomless.


    We''re not on any sort of schedule and nobody''s found anything useful just yet, but the money just keeps coming and the investors keep breathing down our necks so we push on.


    It''s invigorating though, despite everything I feel like one of the scientists straight out of old science fiction movies finding something new and undiscovered just waiting to be shown to the world.


    Uh¡­ hopefully this turns out better than science fiction though, because I''ve seen one too many movies where this exact scenario happens and nobody gets out unscathed.


    Or alive, in most cases.


    Bluh.


    Fuck.


    This was supposed to help with my anxiety, not make it worse.


    Anyway, I''m not cut out for field work but I want to see a Zone first hand.


    Sure Zones are Uninhabitable because they''re so volatile and unpredictable that it''s safer to just shoo everybody out and put a wall around it so nobody goes in and gets hurt.


    Sure the Zones are fucking dangerous, do not conform to the laws of nature or physics, and the wildlife in them tends to be too angry to die.


    But I just really wanna see if they live up to the hype and all the theories. I''ve heard some of my colleagues say that the Zones might be tears in space that lead to other dimensions, which (I guess) accounts for the temporospatial discrepancies but not the radiation.


    See, ever since the first Zones were discovered they''ve been permeated with this new kind of radiation that we have yet to replicate in a controlled setting. It acts like ionizing radiation almost, but it isn''t deadly. We''ve studied the (often homeless) human populations of the Zones and found no signs of cancer or radiation poisoning, and yet there are the mutant animals.


    I don''t know if it''s fair to call them mutants, they might just be some extant species we haven''t come across yet. But I digress, Zone mutants are one reason why the Zones are so dangerous but also why they''re so fascinating.


    Much of what we found is plant or animal life that shares much of its DNA with regular everyday species, but looks and acts so dramatically different that there''s no telling what happened to them.


    For example take Specimen 37, a young girl who was found wandering around a war zone in Switzerland a few years ago towards the tail end of the ¨€th World War. She was completely unharmed despite the carnage around her and willingly approached field agents when she spotted them.


    Unfortunately she stepped on a landmine.


    She was reportedly blown in half, but just kept moving like nothing happened. She regenerated the missing half of her body and was unscathed by the time field agents could physically grab her.


    She''s been in Conglomerate custody ever since, under the care of a Dr Hubris Willoughby Downfall.


    Attempts are being made to isolate, extract, or replicate the child''s abilities but nothing concrete has come of it just yet.


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    -


    Date: 06/0¨€/21¨€¨€


    Time: ¨€¨€:¨€¨€


    Weather: Inclement/Thunderstorm, roughly 65¡ã F


    The "sample" arrived today, along with other necessary supplies for our long stay here. Dr Ramirez expects us to live and work in this facility year round, or until we have a breakthrough.


    The "sample", hereafter abbreviated to "TS" (and subsequently nicknamed "Elliot" by my colleagues) was originally discovered in an Uninhabitable Zone in ¨€¨€¨€¨€¨€ less than a year ago after it had reportedly injured a homeless person who was squatting in the area.


    Conglomerate field agents initially struggled to contain the anomaly because it "would just change shape and wiggle its way out of any trap set for it."


    Any video documenting this behavior has not been found intact as TS seems to project some sort of heavy distortion field similar to certain types of radiation, causing any recordings (be they audio or visual) to warp considerably.


    Any personnel exposed to TS during this initial meeting were quarantined and monitored long-term in case of any potential radiation poisoning, but aside from persistent nightmares they appear to be perfectly healthy.


    After another botched capture resulted in the anomaly''s sudden decapitation, but not its immediate or eventual death, a solution was found.


    The anomaly displayed limited regenerative abilities similar to Specimen 37, but unlike 37 it could not regenerate limbs once they were completely severed.


    It could, however, reattach them and slowly reassemble itself if allowed to. Reportedly, after recovering from the initial shock of its injuries, TS picked its head up and placed it onto the stump of its neck where the wound healed seamlessly within seconds.


    TS was eventually subdued and vivisected by personnel.


    The various pieces of the anomaly were carefully placed into separate containers before shipping. Agents and bystanders testified that they could hear the parts "singing" to each other, something that only became louder the closer the pieces were to each other.


    Each part of the anomaly retained vital signs, and noticeable brain or motor functions. Severed limbs could move on their own, the anomaly''s head could still blink and bite, and so on.


    Shipping each piece individually was highly recommended by the agents on site but the company is a bunch of cheap bastards this suggestion was ignored for logistical reasons.


    Under Dr Downfall''s recommendation, each part of TS has been quarantined on a different floor of the facility for maximum safety, with talks of sending out smaller samples to other external labs at a later date.


    -


    Date: 06/0¨€/21¨€¨€


    Time: ¨€¨€:¨€¨€


    Weather: Sunny I think, I didn''t go outside.


    The first batch of tests began today, mostly vivisecting Elliot (the nickname grew on me ok) and watching it put itself back together again.


    Attempts to isolate or replicate its regenerative abilities have had mixed results. Samples of Elliot''s various tissues and fluids were individually examined and rendered into serums that were administered to a small population of lab mice, rats, and rabbits who were immediately quarantined from each other and closely monitored.


    Several of the animals died almost immediately, their blood had changed colors and explosively exited all available orifices.


    Those that survived could heal at an accelerated rate.


    Ramirez wants to move forward onto human testing as soon as possible.


    She has acquired several children for this purpose.


    Sometimes when I close my eyes I can see a little white mouse staring at me from its cage, calm and happy, before all the blood in its body rushes out of its eyes like the world''s worst water balloon.


    I can''t do that to a child.


    I can''t see the color orange without getting sick.


    I want to go home.


    -


    Date: 06/0¨€/21¨€¨€


    Time: ¨€¨€:¨€¨€


    Weather: Sunny again, 100¡ã F


    More tests today.


    Aggressive attempts to refine the serum.


    I''m having nightmares about mice exploding on a regular basis now, I can''t talk about it with my therapist either so that''s fun.


    I can hear Elliot singing in my dreams sometimes, saying my name and stuff I can''t understand.


    This is common apparently, the Elliot thing not the mouse thing, the field agents who initially captured it have reported similar issues. There have been attempts to find and contact the truck driver who delivered the anomaly to us in order to interview them and offer them further compensation for any distress Elliot might have caused during the trip.


    But it''s like that guy just vanished off the face of the earth.


    It''s so fucking eerie.


    Anyway the serum has started to explode fewer and fewer animals with each new batch, we''re aiming for "explodes no animals" but we''ll probably settle for "only explodes a few".


    Ramirez still wants us to test it on humans as soon as we''re physically able.


    I want to test it on her just to make her shut up, but at this stage it probably wouldn''t kill her out right so there''s really no point.


    -


    Date: 06/1¨€/21¨€¨€


    Time: ¨€¨€:¨€¨€


    Weather: Cloudy/humid/rain expected 94¡ã F


    Human trials began today at the insistence of Dr. Ramirez.


    The children were divided into two groups of fifty, with group A being the control group and group B getting the serum.


    I don''t want to write about this but it''s a habit by this point, maybe it''ll make me feel better about what I have done.


    Like going to confession with my parents when I was younger.


    There is a priest on staff, he lives here with us at the Facility. His presence is legally required by the company.


    They''re required to provide a nondenominational place of worship within any facility that intends to have people live in it long term, they''re also required to staff that place of worship with the appropriate people depending on who''s gonna be working there.


    We have a catholic priest named John Ward and a rabbi I haven''t met yet.


    It''s kind of stupid, but endearing at the same time but I''ll be there asking for forgiveness shortly I think.


    The serum is not perfect, I don''t think we could ever perfect it with how little we know and understand but we got it to stop exploding things entirely so that''s close enough.


    Now the specimens experience intense flu-like symptoms, potentially dying of fever or dehydration via vomiting if not monitored closely, but the casualties are much much lower than what they originally were.


    If there is a God capable of love and forgiveness, forget me and go with these children for they have done no wrong but we still have thrown them into the open arms of the devil in the name of science.


    -- Francis Moreau

 Chapter Ten

    That first night was hell.


    Forever seared into your memory you can remember that night in stark and violent detail.


    It is the night that haunts your nightmares harder than the Nameless Thing.


    They woke you early, lined you all up outside your apartments and took roll with military precision. Everyone was used to it by then, that was just how things were in the Facility. They woke you up, they counted you, then they sent you off to breakfast.


    There was no breakfast that day, just two straight lines of groggy children being led deep into the bowels of the Facility to be weighed and measured again and again.


    Samples taken, things swabbed.


    The Keepers disappeared and it was just you and the scientists with their cold faces and white coats and suddenly everything felt like it had before the purge.


    Something told you to run but there was nowhere to go.


    They stuck you with needles full of strange liquid and locked you away in a tiny concrete room with only a cot and a drain in the floor to keep you company.


    And then the screaming started, white-hot noise ricocheting off of the cramped walls and down the twisting hallways to join the choir of voices raised in indescribable agony.


    You lay there soaked in vomit and sweat.


    Unable to find solace in familiar nightmares, let alone dreams.


    Every inch of you throbbed with unfathomable pain, even parts of you that had lost feeling a long time ago.


    You were metal, not meat, the serum couldn''t find anything to regenerate so it sank into your wires and nerves and brought them to life until you could feel the weave of your cotton jumpsuit scrape against your plating as if it were skin.


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    You gripped the edge of your cot, feeling the steel frame bend beneath your trembling fingers, teeth gritted so hard that they shattered, fell out, grew back, and shattered again in the span of seconds.


    You couldn''t move, each micro twitch of synthetic muscle was like a gunshot wound.


    You couldn''t even scream.


    You wanted to die, you wanted to get up and smash your head against the wall over and over and over again until everything stopped and you were at peace but you could barely roll over in time to be sick on the ground instead of the cot.


    Your vomit came out pitch black with tiny points of neon blue bioluminescence, almost like stars. It squirmed and writhed and slithered until gravity and the drain claimed it and it vanished from sight.


    You fell from your cot and lay on the cold floor, watching the shadows thicken like pudding until you felt like you could reach out and touch them like living things.


    Your fever climbed to dangerous heights but the pain refused to let you rest.


    You stayed like that for hours and hours, curled up and trembling on the cold cold floor.


    Blood seeped from your eyes and nose and threatened to drown you but you were denied even that small mercy.


    All around you, children screamed and cried. The meaty thuds of tiny bodies throwing themselves against the walls and doors of their cells reverberated through your aching skull.


    Your ability to see sound meant that you got a fairly clear picture of whatever a sound bounced off of, so you were an unwilling spectator to the suffering of the other children in the immediate vicinity.


    You have no memory of when the screaming or the pain stopped, just of hazmat suited science people opening your cell the next morning, scraping gunk off of your face and the floor to put into vials and taking you away to get cleaned up.


    You tried to ignore the terrible rainbow smears that oozed from beneath some of the other cell doors, or the body bags wheeled away in silence.


    You were too tired to really care.


    You were washed and weighed and measured just like before. They took lots of pictures and gave you a mug of hot nutrient broth to sip and some pills for the pain before sending you back to your cell.


    It was clean now and stank of bleach, you collapsed onto the cot without a word and slept for a full forty hours.

 Chapter Eleven

    Date: 07/1¨€/21¨€¨€


    Time: ¨€¨€:¨€¨€


    Weather: Hot/dry/heavy sun, 98¡ã F


    One of my colleagues has suggested that we start a garden here at the Facility "to test the effects of the anomaly and serum on various plant tissues".


    I know that the greenhouse is just another way for us to stave off cabin fever in the winter months, but I can''t help but be excited about it.


    I doubt that it''ll be a viable food source for the entire facility, but I''ve always wanted a garden. My mom used to tell me stories about the garden her grandmother had and her fond memories of eating sun-warmed produce right off the vine, of course this was before the amounts of heavy metals in the soil reached dangerous levels and home gardens were made illegal.


    We''re allowed to have one here at the Facility because it counts as a research experiment. Most of our produce will be grown hydroponically to save space, but Dr Hemlock (my colleague and the one who proposed the idea (and also to me last week) assures me that there will be plenty of dirt and compost for some of the smaller items.


    -


    ??The following is a transcribed recording from Lazarus Manufacturing Research Facility Delta.


    The contents of this document and the events described herein are classified.??


    (SFX: tape recorder whirring)


    The voice of Francis Moreau: "Uhh there we go. Date is July ¨€¨€, 21¨€¨€. Time is ¨€¨€:¨€¨€."


    (A brief pause, a keyboard clacks as Moreau types.)


    Moreau, in a silly newscaster voice: "Weather is hot and dry today with lots of sun, coming in at a balmy ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit!"


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    (Moreau giggles)


    Moreau: "This is an addendum to my previous entry, I would like to clarify that--"


    (Moreau is cut off by a knock at the door)


    Moreau, calling to the knocking person: "I''m recording!"


    (The knocking persists, Moreau groans, their chair squeaks across the floor as they get up from it. Footsteps receding, a door opens. A kiss.)


    Moreau: "I''m busy!"


    The voice of Adelaide Hemlock: "Oh yes, very busy, busy kissing me in fact."


    (Moreau laughs)


    Moreau: "I''m serious! I''m making a journal entry, you''re being recorded so please behave."


    Hemlock, with dramatic inflection as if telling a ghost story: "A journal entry? What are you an ill-fated NPC in a horror game? Gonna tell the whole world about your tragic backstory before perishing in some tragic lab accident leaving only your words behind?"


    Moreau: "Don''t¡­ joke about that, I''m just excited about the new garden and I thought I''d document it."


    Hemlock: "Ok if we have a garden then we gotta have bees"


    Moreau: "Why?"


    Hemlock: "Keep the plants company and we can see if any anomalous effects transfer to their honey"


    Moreau: "Yeah that makes sense I guess? "


    Hemlock: "We gotta have chickens also"


    Moreau, snickering: "Why??"


    Hemlock: "To see if the mystery juice does anything to their egg production or makes them tastier, duh! But seriously, how else are we going to fertilize our plants, Frank? if we manage to be self-sustaining, it''ll cut our budget in half by 21¨€¨€!"


    Moreau, verbally smiling: "...you just want a farm huh? If you can convince Janine, by all means. She''s the one writing the grant proposal."


    Hemlock: "We also need the Rhode Island reds for the chickens. Just that strain."


    Moreau: "Why that one in particular..?"


    Hemlock: (fabric rustles suspiciously) "Uh¡­ no reason?"


    Moreau: "What''s that behind your back?" (Footsteps, rustling) "Lemme see!"


    Hemlock, laughing: "No!!"


    Moreau: (gasps) "Oho my GOD, is that a pinterest board?"


    Hemlock: "...mind your business."


    (Recording ends)

 Chapter Twelve

    You dreamed that you were in that room again, the concrete one with the cot and the drain, but the walls stretched up and away into infinity. The door loomed over you like a predator, roaring and screaming in a hundred tortured voices that came down as multicolored lights filtering through a stained glass window.


    The Nameless Nightmare Thing was there too, slithering out of the gathering dark and coiling around you ever tighter, until you couldn''t breathe.


    Its teeth were syringes armed with deadly needles, serrated scalpels, bone saws, and unfathomable instruments of torture that only existed in your fever-addled child mind. They sank into your plating as easily as if it were just skin, pumping you full of venom and Wrongness.


    For a second you saw the Truth of that place and the things being done to you.


    For a second you saw the Truth and Shape of the World outlined in red squiggles that made no sense.


    For a second you might have died, but you had no real way of knowing.


    You woke up screaming your awful metallic scream, the sound reverberating off of the claustrophobic walls of your little holding cell until it was all you could perceive. Indistinct shapes in hazmat suits waded through the early morning gloom to collect and inspect you.


    You did not cry or bite, instead clinging to the nearest warm body until the Nightmare faded from memory and you were OK again. They sent you back to bed once they were sure nothing serious was wrong with you and you just sat there staring at the drain in the floor until it was time for roll call.


    They were going to send you home.


    Not your real home, back to Mara and the apartment, and your bear.


    They scanned you with a strange box that whistled and clicked and whined when exposed to radiation and other dangerous things, but you didn''t register above what was considered normal for a cyborg child so Mara got to come and collect you.


    You hugged her when you saw her, you''d only been gone for a couple of days but you''d missed her and her soft blue voice.


    She hugged you back and ran her fingers through your hair, because you had some now, a lot in fact. Given your makeup, the serum hadn''t had much to target in terms of regeneration so it had rebooted your fried nervous system and grown out your hair.


    It was down your back at that point if you pulled on it, otherwise it kinda stuck up in a big golden cloud that made you look like a dandelion before they went to seed.


    Mara clucked her tongue and sat you between her knees once you were home and set to work making you presentable. She parted your hair with the tip of a comb, and divided it into sections before carefully detangling it in a practiced and methodical way. She loaded a fingertip with some greasy, fragrant hair product and deposited it in a smooth line along the parts before twisting everything into a complicated set of braids. She decorated them with pretty plastic beads and sealed the ends with brightly colored rubber bands.


    It was a long process. You sat there quietly, legs and rump going numb while Mara turned your head this way and that and occasionally popped you with the back of a hairbrush if you didn''t behave. She used the brush to sweep and sculpt the hair into glossy smoothness, the very tip coaxing the fine baby hairs on your forehead into elegant spirals and curls.


    By the end your head hurt from the tension, the braids were most certainly too tight but you kept your mouth shut about it. The smell of the gels and greases and sprays made you dizzy and just added to your headache. It was a horrible, terrible, oily feeling that stuck to your face and scalp and made you want to claw your skin off but you looked pretty and Mara was happy so you behaved.


    The last thing Mara did before leaving you alone was to help you put on your bonnet. A shiny satin thing with holes in the top for your ears that made it look kind of like a pair of underpants. She slipped it on and tied the sash tight around your head so that it wouldn''t slip off while you slept.


    You did not like the bonnet but it kept your hair off of your face and neck, so you tolerated its existence.


    Mara enjoyed doing your hair about as much as she loved doing her own, it was done up in a set of vibrant rainbow dreadlocks decorated with beads like yours. Mara''s hair always reminded you of the colorful yarn she knit with and that made you giggle. She often changed the color of it to match her moods for the day and at one point you wondered if she''d been modded to have mood-hair but then you watched her dye it in the bathroom one evening after dinner.


    You liked Mara. She treated you like a person and not a thing, and even Nala had treated you like a thing sometimes. You knew that Mara was being paid to be nice to you and you understood that this wouldn''t be forever, but you liked her and decided that if you ever tried to run away again that you had to take her with you.


    The mess hall was almost deserted at breakfast that day, with scattered clumps of pale and sweaty children huddled at tables, picking at the food on their plates. Where there should have been rowdy chatter was an uneasy silence fed by the distrustful glances that the kids periodically shot their Keepers.


    The adults lingered at the edges of the room, their duty outweighing the discomfort they felt. Many of them looked sick and scared, eyes sunken and bruised from lack of sleep or an excess of worry.


    Your eyes drifted to all the empty spaces, you knew that you should have felt sad or upset at the loss of life but you were used to disappearances and had learned a long time ago not to get attached to anything.


    To people, to treatments, to scraps of comfort.


    You let that familiar numbness settle over you like skin and ate your oatmeal without a word.


    When Roady showed up sometime later, plate loaded with slimy scrambled eggs and soggy bits of toast, something squirmed in your chest but in a good way. It squirmed the way little animals do when they''re happy and excited, like their bodies were too small to hold in all their big feelings so they had to shake some loose just to make room.


    Roady nearly tackled you to the ground when she saw you, coating your face in slobbery morning breath kisses until her Keeper could pull her off of you. She pressed herself against you and wagged her tail so hard you were afraid it might fly off.


    When the others eventually appeared, that excited squirmy feeling doubled until you were quietly vibrating in your seat. Everybody''s reaction was mostly the same, they''d shuffle out of the breakfast line looking haggard and depressed and then they''d see you and their faces would light up and they''d hurry over to sit.


    V did not do this, he saw your group, made such an obvious effort to look cool and detached that it made him seem sort of ridiculous, and sat in his usual spot at the furthest edge of the pack. Everyone was still very happy to see him alive.


    His eyes looked irritated, the whites an unhealthy pink like he''d walked face first into a wall of solid pollen. When this was brought to his attention he gave you all a very blank look and said, "Have you guys seen yourselves lately?"


    Between your inability to see faces and Roady''s colorblindness, you really hadn''t. According to Edwin, everybody''s eyes were a weird color. The sclera, the part that was supposed to be white, was faintly tinted a different, concerning, and unnatural hue for each of you.


    V''s were red, Akira''s were vaguely purple, Roady''s were green, and yours were blue.


    Edwin couldn''t see his own eyes so he couldn''t really tell without help, but apparently his looked almost normal except that the tiny veins in them had seemingly disappeared.


    It was eerie.


    The other children in the cafeteria were apparently in the same boat and it quickly became a contest to see who''s eyes were the coolest looking. Nettie lost immediately and loudly sulked about it for the rest of breakfast because her eyes were just kinda gray, as opposed to 4242 whose eyes were cartoonishly pink and made her look a bit like an albino lab animal.


    Under Anza''s regime, the Facility had given the children a number of classes and activities to complete throughout the day, because you can''t have that many kids around and not give them something to do.


    Sometimes it was poorly disguised cognitive testing and similar things, or in the case of art class; just something to keep little hands busy for a few hours.


    As you and the other children were shuffled off to the first class of the day, two things became very clear.


    One: the other children, the ones who had not been given the serum, were now group A and they got to do everything first which made you and everyone else group B.


    Group A was a little bit smug about their position and that made you hate them in ways you couldn''t really describe.


    Two: you could feel the floor beneath your feet and that distressed you greatly. You''d been used to feeling general vibrations and the like through your metal but now you could feel every crumb, every loose hair, every ball of lint and speck of dust on the floor and it was quickly driving you insane.


    You told Mara this in your own way. "I can feel the floor and it''s gross and I wanna eat my feet off."


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    She washed your feet and found you some shoes that were only marginally better than feeling the bare floor. You tolerated this for obvious reasons.


    You could also feel the warp and weft of your clothing rubbing against your plating but Mara wouldn''t let you be naked about it, so you sulked and went to art class without any further complaints.


    You liked art class, it was held in one of the older rooms in the Facility with a low ceiling and dark wood panels on the walls that made the room look cozy and ancient.


    Kind of like the art teacher who was a woman with wild gray hair and chunky jewelry that clacked and clattered whenever she walked. The rumor was that she wasn''t a researcher or a scientist or anything, just somebody''s grandma that had wandered into the Facility and decided to stay.


    A bit like a stray cat, which fit because she had long whiskers, slit pupils, and pads on her bony fingers.


    The art room always smelled like paint and clay and all the other supplies you were allowed to use during the day and you found a specific kind of comfort in that smell like the comfort you found in industrial cleaners and sterile surfaces even though the two couldn''t be more different.


    At one end of the room was a set of wooden cubbies that held your smock and your binder. The smock had been white when you got it, but on the very first day you all got to tie-dye them different colors and write your names on them after they''d dried.


    Your smock was a whirling riot of bright hues that sounded the best and coated the back of your tongue with something almost sour like a slightly under ripe strawberry.


    The binder was your art book, a collection of all the paper works that you had made thus far arranged in chronological order so that you could see how you''d grown as an artist. You were allowed to take it home on the weekends and show Mara who convinced you to stash your bandage collection in there instead of on the wall.


    The art teacher had seen your bandage art and had called it ''self reflective'', you didn''t know what that meant but hoped it was a compliment.


    That day, you were learning how to make paper out of recycled scraps. The teacher showed you all how to soak the shredded paper, blend it into a pulp, and then scoop it up into thin sheets using a screen.


    "After it dries we''ll use it to make collages  of our self portraits, how does that sound?" The teacher had purred.


    It sounded nice.


    The paper making station was small and drying the paper took time so everyone was allowed to work on whatever they liked while they waited. You were playing with clay, enjoying the way it felt as you squeezed it through your fingers and pressed different stamps into it to give it texture. You weren''t making anything specific or special, just a tile with plenty of cups and crevices for paint or glaze later on after it had been fired.


    The art room was full of fascinating things that made your wires hum with delight. A hundred colors that you had never seen before, soft brushes that kissed your metal skin, creamy paints that glided with ease, fragrant glue that made your mouth water.


    The art room''s shelves and closets made 37''s collection of jars look like a joke and you made a note to yourself, saying that you would bring her down here someday and tell her all the sounds that the rainbow made.


    "I heard that the shots we got turned Lyler into a big fish, one so big that they had to cut him up into little pieces to get him out of his room and that''s why he''s not here today." Said a kid named Jeremy as he plunged his screen deep into the paper pulp, the sleeves of his smock rolled up to his elbows.


    "Nuh-uh! I live across the hall from Lyler and I woulda seent it!" Called another child from across the room, hands sticky with finger paint.


    "No you wouldn''t have cuz they did it while everybody was at breakfast so nobody would freak out," replied Jeremy matter-of-factly.


    "If they did it at breakfast then how do you know about it?" said a girl with star shaped pupils and twitching antennae.


    "Charlie told me," Jeremy said, arms crossed.


    "Which Charlie? There''s four of them," Roady piped up from her place on the floor.


    "The one that lives with Lyler, duh! He was there when it happened and it traumatized him so bad that the White Coats came and got him and that''s why he''s not here either."


    "...why would they cut Lyler up though, why not just cut a bigger door?" said someone else.


    "Cuz fish can''t breathe on land stupid, Lyler couldn''t breathe neither so he died and they was gonna cut him up anyway to see what was wrong so two birds ''n all that." Jeremy shrugged and everyone nodded like that made the most sense in the world.


    The art teacher said nothing and shakily sipped strong coffee from a mug with the words ''NOT PAINT WATER'' written on it in big red letters for the rest of the class, periodically refilling the paper making station when necessary.


    She was happy when class was over and she could rest her head on her cluttered desk as she rethought the life choices that had brought her to that exact moment.


    The rest of the day was largely uneventful, nobody died or exploded or turned into a giant fish, much to everyone''s mutual disappointment. Children were periodically pulled from their activities for individual testing by the scientists, and returned soon after as if nothing happened.


    Everything was fine until gym class.


    It was dodgeball day and you weren''t looking forward to feeling any new sensations associated with that game any time soon.


    To make matters worse, Nettie was captain of the other team and she fucking hated you.


    She hated you with every fiber of her being, with every strand of hair, with every breath and heartbeat.


    She hated you because you got attention and she didn''t, never mind that you hated being perceived in any capacity. You were new and strange and that made people look at you and that was a crime in and of itself.


    It was phenomenally stupid.


    There you were, both your teams down to the dregs. Your captain paced the sidelines uneasily, hands pulling desperately at their hair.


    All your escape attempts had made you fast, made you good at ducking and dodging any obstacle that didn''t have teeth. They had also made you cocky.


    Coronet stood there, gripping a dodgeball so tightly you worried it might just pop, somehow knowing that she wished it was your skull in her grubby hand instead.


    There were no projectiles within reach on your side of the field but you theorized that you could dive-roll for one when the whistle blew.


    The gym teacher swallowed thickly, beads of sweat racing down his face and neck as he raised the whistle to his trembling lips and blew a single clear note.


    Nettie mimed a throw, but you were too clever to fall for her tricks. Her lips twisted into a snarl and she chucked the ball at you full force, you dived and she missed. You fired back a double barreled shot and she deflected it with one of her own.


    All you had to do was survive and you would win this. There were no prizes of course but winning a game was everything to a kid that small, and the losing team would have to live with their failure forever!


    Or until the next dodgeball day.


    Same thing really.


    Nettie scooped up another projectile.


    Your muscles tensed, your ears flicked back.


    Something was wrong.


    The skin on Nettie''s throwing arm started to bubble and blacken like burning sugar. The muscles beneath it bulged and writhed as the bones slid and snapped like firewood. The blackness spread up her shoulder, to her neck, and finally to her face where all the blood vessels in her eye on that side burst simultaneously and turned her sclera pitch dark in an instant.


    Nettie''s arm grew sharp overlapping scales and wicked claws that popped the dodgeball. Her arm hung off of her body, misshapen and huge like a club wrought from flesh.


    The other children screamed in horror, the gym teacher stumbling back in surprise as Nettie wound up to throw again.


    You couldn''t dodge in time.


    The deflated ball left her hand like a rubbery missile so fast that the air around it seemed to collapse. It hit you harder than the hand of God and sent you flying across the gym at horrible speeds.


    You crashed into one of the protective mats covering the exposed brick walls and went partially through it.


    You couldn''t breathe.


    Blood welled up in your throat as you coughed and came out in neon blue streams, like a mangled glow stick.


    The deflated ball was embedded in your chest, crumpling the plating inwards like a soda can.


    The world started to go black around the edges, pain radiating from the wound with each heartbeat like hammer blows on hot metal, filling your mouth with the sickly sweet taste of butterscotch.


    Nettie took an unsteady step forward, dragging her mutated limb behind her like a cape. She was smiling, lips curling into spirals at the corners in ways that shouldn''t have been possible.


    The other kids were gone, running, screaming.


    Chaos.


    The gym teacher wasn''t with them, he called for help and activated an alarm that tinted everything scarlet and angry.


    It was getting hard to keep your eyes open.


    Your blood gathered into a starlight pool beneath your feet.


    It was beautiful and terrible all at once.


    Nettie came closer.


    The gym teacher stepped in front of her, to protect you maybe, or to calm her down.


    She swatted him aside like a fly and you watched him splatter just like you had, only he had no metal to save him.


    Your blood slithered towards Nettie in timid strands, like serpents approaching their tamer. She didn''t seem to notice.


    Nettie raised her scaly claw above her head and you saw them glint with a wickedness not found outside of your nightmares. For a second, they were the teeth of the Nameless Thing and you found a strange peace in that image.


    You let your eyes flutter closed, the fight draining out of you as quickly as your blood.


    You were going to die there after all then?


    After all that big talk.


    Pathetic.


    POP POP!


    Your eyes pried themselves sluggishly open in time to see a squadron of people in body armor crouching down behind riot shields. They aimed rifles at Nettie that fired tranquilizers, each one bounced off of her scales and fell harmlessly to the bloody floor. She turned with a hiss and lumbered towards her attackers like a sick animal, they fired again and again, wasting ammunition until she was upon them.


    Ripping, tearing.


    Screaming.


    They held her down and found a soft place to stick the sedatives, refusing to let her go until she stopped moving.


    They dragged her unconscious bulk out of the room shortly after and one of them came hesitantly up to you to inspect the damage Nettie had caused.


    He screamed like a startled bird when you coughed and tried to raise your head, before waving his arms at his comrades like a madman, "He''s alive! Holy shit he''s ALIVE! Somebody get medical down here now."

 Chapter Fourteen

    Stasis wasn''t the same as sleeping.


    People don''t dream in stasis.


    In the cold depths of their tanks with tubes snaking in and out of their bodies like worms, forcing them to eat and breathe, there were no dreams.


    No solace.


    No comfort.


    Just a dark place full of wheezing, beeping machines.


    It¡­ scared 37 to be there in the stasis chamber, surrounded by bodies and bits in suspended animation. No matter how many times she''d visited before, the apprehension always came back and curled around her neck like long, bony fingers.


    It made it hard for her to breathe, to think.


    All she wanted to do was turn around and run back to Hubie and her little place in the Habitat, surrounded by bugs and trinkets, but she knew that she couldn''t.


    37 kept her eyes on her feet and just kept moving, ignoring the horrors around her as best she could.


    It made her nauseous in an ironic, stupid, sort of way. She could look at her own body torn apart and gutted, growing back in a flash, acid eating her down to the bone. A hundred tortures no child should ever have to experience. She could sit through it all and be fine, she could marvel at the undulations of her own bare intestines and not flinch.


    But the second someone else got hurt, she felt sick¡­


    Sick¡­


    Sick in ways she couldn''t put into words or shapes or colors other people could understand.


    37 hated the stasis chamber, hated the cold dark, hated the wheezing and whining vents. She hated the scurrying scientists in their white coats and purple gloves scratching notes onto their clipboards.


    In her heart of hearts, in the slimy black pit of her stomach hidden by feathers and fluff and a happy attitude as fake as Hubie''s nails, she hated Jack too.


    She hated him for getting hurt and for ending up there.


    She hated herself for hating him.


    But still, she found him in his tube and sat there with her eyes shut and her cheek against the glass, letting the uncanny warmth of the liquid beyond settle into her skin like lotion.


    "I brought you something," she said, into the not-silence, the near silence, the noises that blended together and began to fade into nothing the longer she sat there surrounded by them.


    She didn''t expect a response from the mangled mass of gore bobbing placidly in the tube, but she talked like she did.


    37 couldn''t look at Jack, she''d already done it once and once had been enough. The memory was seared into the backs of her eyelids, the ghost of it haunting her as she sat there with closed eyes.


    She rummaged around in her pockets and pulled out a rock, a weird knobbly thing that had flecks of brightly colored plastic embedded in it. "Hubie says it''s a¡­ it''s a plast-ee-glom-er-it, it''s a kind of rock made of plastic and sediment that''s been melted together." 37 placed her gift amongst the pile of a hundred other little things she''d found or made that reminded her of Jack.


    It was a shrine to their friendship.


    Jars of bugs, strange rocks, oddly shaped sticks, wet specimens, rabbit''s foot keychains. His bear¡­ thing, Mr. Man, was there too.


    Mr. Man unnerved some of the scientists in a way that didn''t really make sense to 37. They could stand to sit there and turn children into monsters, to tear them apart and peer at their organs, but a breathing stuffed animal was somehow one step too far. She found it funny, how some of the staff skirted around her little friendship shrine solely because of that bear. A few of them had gone so far as to lodge formal complaints with Hubie, to demand he do something about the collection of oddities slowly swallowing the base of Jack''s stasis tube.


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    Hubie found it amusing that so many grown adults could be put off by a prototype children''s toy. He let 37 keep her shrine so long as it didn''t become a tripping hazard or stop the scientists from treating Jack properly, just because he found everyone''s discomfort funny.


    37 snuck a glance up at Jack without meaning to and immediately wished she hadn''t. He was just a head, organs and a few attached bones floating in a tank of pink fluid. Nausea scaled the back of her throat. She shut her eyes again and shuddered as if trying to shake off the image.


    Jack had been like that for a while; his cybernetics had been completely unsalvageable after the incident with Nettie. Nobody had expected him to survive and 37 seriously questioned whether or not this actually counted as survival.


    It certainly wasn''t living.


    Half the scientists had hoped that the serum would cause Jack to grow back the parts he''d originally lost to the experimentation done on him previously, but that was stupid.


    Bodies didn''t work like that¡­ not without help at least, 37 knew that much.


    She also knew that her body and her blood could do amazing things, she could heal from almost any injury. She''d been sliced completely in half once and been perfectly fine after she''d pressed the raw halves of herself back together.


    Complicated stuff like brains and eyes took the longest to grow back. But that was OK, Jack''s head was mostly intact anyway. The worst of the damage done to his soft parts had healed on its own, but the scientists wanted to keep him in stasis until they could build him a new chassis.


    It was probably for the best. Ever since the incident with Nettie things had changed in the Facility, and not for the better. The project had changed course, focusing entirely on Nettie and her abilities, countless hours had gone into figuring out if her initial transformation had been a fluke and how to trigger it again on purpose if it hadn''t.


    While Nettie was loving all the new attention, the other children weren''t enjoying it nearly as much. Many of the children had their own unique transformations, but it was apparent that no two kids had the exact same trigger so it was a shot in the dark trying to find ways to discover these newfound abilities, let alone harness them. Many of the methods necessary to force the children into becoming their other selves (the staff seemed hesitant to use the word ''monsters'', at least out loud) were often cruel or extreme, and largely ineffective.


    And though she missed him terribly, 37 knew deep down that Jack was probably safer in stasis. But that didn''t stop her from wanting to save him from his slumber, even though the thought felt like the most selfish thing in the world to her.


    "I miss you¡­" 37 whispered. "The scientists are scary now, even Hubie." Her stomach hurt, fear settling deep in her belly, talking about it should have helped but she only felt worse with each word that came out of her mouth.


    "They took Nettie away after she hurt you and did stuff to her to make her change again, she''s not even sorry she did it!" 37 sniffed back an angry tear. "Now everybody else is getting hurt cuz of her. It''s not fair, it''s not!"


    She sniffed again, wiping her face on her shirt. "I-I''ve been hearing stuff at night, bad stuff¡­ sometimes it''s people hurting but most of the time it''s something else underneath us." She swallowed thickly, suddenly very afraid, like the ''something'' might show up any second. "I hear it in my dreams too, they''re full of teeth now and crying eyes and other stuff that hurts to think about¡­ I woke up with a bloody nose this morning and a song in my ears I don''t remember."


    37 opened her mouth to say something else, but faltered, her head snapping up like an animal sensing a predator in the bush.


    Jack''s Keeper, Mara, rounded the corner and paused. The same startled ''prey in the grass'' expression on her face. The two stared at each other for what felt like a very long time, the silence between them broken by a stream of bubbles snaking its way through a nearby stasis tank.


    "Hi¡­" said 37.


    "...hi," said Mara, sidestepping the strange little girl, her normally brightly colored hair a somber shade of brown that day. Mara pressed a few buttons on the panel attached to Jack''s tube and wrote down the information that came up on the screen.


    She looked tired, pained.


    Like being there physically hurt.


    Mara went into the Project with the knowledge that whichever id she''d be stuck with would almost certainly die at some point and there was no use in getting attached. But, humans will pack-bond with anything, (even rocks if they aren''t supervised) and she had bonded with Jack from day one.


    Something about his spark and sass made her smile.


    It was like he had this hard coded desire to exist despite everything.


    Mara just stared at the tube, not really seeing its contents. She stared at her reflection in the shatter-proof glass, tinted pink by the stasis gel inside.


    She looked like microwaved shit, felt like it too. Mara scrubbed a hand down her face and watched Jack''s exposed organs pulsate with whatever passed for life in this place. Tears stung the back of her eyes. She shut them and took a deep breath, jumping when something warm brushed her hand.


    Specimen 37 looked up at her with those horrible, big blue eyes of hers. They had no pupils, just a flat disk of sky blue that scared the shit out of most people. Mara was not most people, but she was still unnerved by the tiny undying girl with feathers instead of hair, the same genre of thing as the mutant that started all of this.


    "I can fix him," 37 said in a whisper, "do you trust me?"

 Chapter Fifteen

    "Do you trust me?"


    The words rang like church bells in Mara''s ears, just as heavy and haunting.


    Truth was, Mara didn''t trust a single person involved with this mess. She was here to get paid and go home, she hadn''t signed up for any of this Doctor Frankenstein fuckery.


    But something worried at her heart, tugging like a child at their mother''s apron strings.


    Mara searched 37''s face for any hints of deception or malice, only finding the kind of bare hearted truthfulness that only children could manage. Raw and unafraid of rebuke or the sharp dark feelings that came with adulthood, in spite of the fear that curled there in the depths of 37''s wide and watery eyes.


    "Yes, I trust you," Mara found herself saying, kneeling to be at eye level with the little girl who took her hands and held them tight.


    "I need you to cut me and feed the blood to Jack," 37 said, with such nonchalance that Mara could only sit there and blink, totally dumbfounded. 37 continued, "My blood is special, it fixes things and people if they eat it or get it in their boo-boos."


    Boo-boos¡­ right. The realization that Mara was talking to a literal child settled on her shoulders like a wet blanket. Mara blinked again, suddenly overwhelmed by the absurdity of the situation. 37 must have seen the faith drain out of Mara''s eyes because she frowned and darted away, coming back with one of the gifts she''d given Jack.


    A sharp white animal tooth on a string. A forked, bifurcated, branching thing plucked from the mouth of a smaller Zone Mutant brought in for study and experimentation some weeks back. It glinted in the faint overhead lights, glimmering with a sort of cruel opalescence.


    37 pressed the tooth into her throat, blood beading from the pinprick of a wound. Mara tried to get up, anticipating what came next, but she was too slow to stop the child from digging the tooth deep into her own neck, drawing it across her throat like a knife.


    Mara stopped in her tracks, a wave of warm arterial spray bathing her face as Specimen 37 fell back, hitting the ground with a terrible, horrible thud.


    She could only stare, eyes wide, mouth open, the tastes of iron and bile mingling on her tongue and threatening to bring up what was left of her lunch.


    The ragged wound in 37''s throat grinned up at Mara like a toothless mouth, the girl''s lifeblood spilling out of her, seeping into the numerous drains polka-dotting the floor of the stasis chamber.


    And then it started to close.


    The wound glowed like red hot molten metal and started to close. The sharp and terrible smell of hot iron and cooking meat rolled off of the wound with wisps of sizzling steam.


    Edge by edge, the flesh knit back together, slowly at first as if 37''s body was figuring out just exactly what to do, then rapidly until the wound was completely gone and the girl was sitting up again, bloody but otherwise unharmed.


    "See?" 37 said, pausing to cough up a clot. She was smiling like nothing had happened, her teeth bloody and slick. The ground around the little girl was a dark and sticky mess that Mara couldn''t tear her eyes away from.


    "Doesn''t that¡­ hurt?" Mara said.


    37 shook her head, some of her feathers were stuck together with quickly drying gore, but she didn''t seem to notice, and if she did notice she certainly didn''t care. "Hubie says I''ve got ex-stem-sive nerve dam-ledge, I can''t feel anything."


    "Nerve damage, extensive nerve damage," Mara corrected, moving more on autopilot than anything. She picked 37 up off of the ground and tried to wipe the blood off of her face. 37 just squirmed, seeming so utterly human in that moment that Mara was ready to believe that this was all some terrible, horrible dream.


    But people don''t dream in stasis.


    "How do you know your blood can fix Jack like it fixes you?" Mara said.


    "Cuz that''s what I''m FOR!" 37 cried, the unspoken ''duh'' hanging in the air between them. "I''m s''posed to fix stuff, that''s why I was born and why Hubie has me and why I get cut open all the time, I''m gonna fix everybody and everything someday! I promised!"


    "Promised who?" Mara was back to blinking dumbly and regretting her life choices.


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    37 grinned that bloody grin again, a perfect toothy mirror to her once open throat. "My mama!"


    "Your¡­ mama?" Mara blinked and 37 nodded, "You¡­ have a mama?" If that freaky undying kid had parents, Mara thought to herself, then there was a nonzero chance that one or both of them was just as (if not more) freaky than she was. She didn''t know how to process that sort of information, or if she even wanted to.


    "Not anymore, she got blown up when I was little but she still talks to me sometimes." 37 shrugged. Mara blinked, unsure of exactly what to say, and decided not to pry any further.


    She wanted to ask how 37''s dead mother could still speak to her, but this kid had no pupils and apparently couldn''t feel pain or die, and that was enough to unpack for one day.


    "How¡­" Mara paused, trying to sift the right words out of the panicked mess sloshing around in her skull. "How do we help Jack?"


    "You just gotta get my blood into him and it''ll do the rest." 37 sounded so sure of herself. "Promise!"


    Mara''s nausea came back in full force. She glanced between the gory little girl in her arms, the puddle of blood on the floor, and what was left of Jack in the tube. This was all too much. She wanted to throw up and be done with it, but something wouldn''t let her let this go. Some twisting, twining, slithering THING she couldn''t see or sense but she knew it was there the same way people knew they were being watched.


    She set 37 down. "OK, tell me what to do."


    37 bounced on the balls of her feet, happy to finally be of use. "How do they get food in him?"


    Mara pointed at the base of the tube, somewhere around the back near the information panel. "In there, they keep it covered so nobody messes with it." Mara opened the cover, revealing the life support systems.


    37 found the input for Jack''s feeding tube and pulled it out. She gnawed on her own hand until it bled and sucked up a mouthful of the blood that followed. Mara grimaced, her stomach threatening to finally riot. She grabbed 37''s bloody, spitty hand and pulled her aside, shoving the needle-less tip of a feeding syringe into the wound before it could clot or close.


    Mara handed the syringe to 37. "Let''s use this instead, OK?"


    37 just shrugged and stuffed the end of the feeding tube into the tip of the syringe, squeezing the blood into it. A thin red line of potential salvation traced itself through the stasis tube, into Jack''s nose, and hopefully his stomach.


    Nobody breathed or moved for several heartbeats, even the other creatures in stasis seemed to hold their breath in antici¡­


    ¡­


    ¡­


    ¡­pation.


    Nothing happened.


    Jack stayed still and unconscious.


    37''s face fell, anxiety sinking cold fingers into her guts without mercy. Mara didn''t say anything, she couldn''t say anything, she just sighed and walked away. 37 watched her go, that cold cold feeling spreading throughout her body until the whole of her was numb and sad and scared all over again.


    Specimen 37 twisted the hem of her shirt in her hands, tears welling up in her eyes. She bit her tongue until she tasted iron. She wasn''t going to cry, not here, not now.


    Mutinous tears rolled down her face and she angrily swiped them away, heat rising from her chest to her ear tips. She couldn''t breathe, she couldn''t think. Her heart roared in her ears, and drowned out all sense.


    Don''t cry.


    Don''t you feckin cry!


    Over and over again the words swirled around in her empty skull, her emotions churning like a tide, threatening to drown her.


    Go ahead then, throw a tantrum. It''s all you know how to do, all you''re good for.


    37 struggled to swallow a sob, mopping her face with her filthy shirt. Her inner monologue had found a foothold in her self hatred and refused to let go; she could feel her hope crumbling like a sandcastle beneath the waves of her anger and embarrassment.


    What makes you think you could save him, or anyone else? You couldn¡¯t even save your own mother.


    "Shut up," she whispered, fingers buried in her feathers, nails digging into her scalp. She was bleeding again, she knew that even if she couldn''t feel the little crescent cuts she was leaving in her own skin. "Shut. Up."


    Her entire body itched and burned. Pin feathers poked their way through the tender skin of her arms and back, blooming into sharp blonde plumage. With each ragged breath, it got worse.


    And worse.


    And worse.


    37 curled into a little feathery ball, her skin glowing, sizzling, steaming. Pin feathers blooming, wilting, blackening. The stasis chamber smelled like smoke and death, the ancient fire suppression system whining to life like an old dog.


    Freezing cold water rained down from the overhead sprinklers, the sirens barked and bayed, bathing the room red with violent strobing. 37 did not move from her spot on the ground, even as scientists flooded in, panicked and squawking like headless birds. Even when they tried to remove her from the scene, she stayed balled up and still.


    Even when Jack''s tube started to shudder, the glass spider-webbing beneath the force of the growing flesh behind it. Even when the glass finally gave, shattering, spilling shards and gel across the floor, followed by a rolling mass of exposed muscle and bone that struggled hard to shape itself into something real and coherent.


    Even then.


    37 was completely gone.

 Chapter ??????????

    You¡­


    Don''t remember what happened.


    Or how it happened.


    Your last memory was being stuck in the gym wall, bleeding out, struggling to stay conscious, and then you woke up on the floor of the stasis chamber.


    Surrounded by glass, gel, and screams.


    You couldn''t move at first, it felt like your entire body weighed a ton so for the first few minutes all you could do was stare up at the ceiling.


    It didn''t feel real, like you were watching a movie through somebody else''s eyes. Like you were just along for the ride. You should have been considerably more distressed about that but you were being bathed in an otherworldly sense of calm. Beneath the screams you could hear a Song, a deep melancholic melody that resonated through your bones. The Song had no words but you could understand it just the same.


    Whirls of impossible, improbable colors poured from the vents in the walls, the grates in the floor, they leaked through half open doors and oozed through the hallways like blood¡­ like honey. The colors settled on the back of your tongue and tasted like longing, like the sickly butterscotch sweetness of pain. It tasted like Hurting in ways you could not fathom, but somehow Knew and Understood.


    You tried to move towards the sound, but could not feel your arms or legs. You could not turn your head or blink your eyes. The Song wove around you and showed you yourself outlined in eerie neon colors laced with Aching and Fear that felt so real and alive it could have been your own.


    Some part of you was singing too.


    You were a mass of undulating black flesh and jutting bones, your organs bobbing in the sea of exposed muscle and pulsating blue veins. Scientists stood around you in horror and awe, unsure of what to do and when. A few of them were bleeding, shards of glass stuck deep in their skin. One of them held a bloody, broken looking, Specimen 37 close to their chest.


    You registered ''friend hurt'' before the memory of her abilities could climb out of the foggy soup of your thoughts. You told your body to move and it did, sliding at first, painfully dragging your mass across the glass strewn floor and leaving a trail of blue behind you like some kind of fucked up slug. You wished for limbs, for a mouth to speak and cry out with, and your body obeyed. Bones sliding beneath muscles tearing and reshaping themselves into familiar shapes, the iron in your blood forced its way through your skin and solidified into steel, blue-hot and steaming in the cool air of the stasis chamber. You felt so heavy, your legs slid uselessly out from underneath you and left you crashing to the ground.


    Hard.


    You weren''t fully formed yet, just some horrible meat-blob with a child''s face and twisting boneless limbs made of metal and wires that struggled to hold you upright. You reached for your friend with a wretched almost-hand and watched the scientist''s eyes widen with horror, reflexively holding the little girl tighter to their chest.


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    The Song grew louder, rising to a nauseating neon crescendo that crashed into every available surface like waves. For a second, you could see Everything. Every nook and cranny of the Facility, every floor and every foot that tread there.


    For a second you saw the End-of-Everything too, that Nameless Nightmare Thing, twisting and twining Its incomprehensible body through toothy holes in the world that drooled ink and babbled strange sentences that made zero sense. All seven heads of the End loomed over you, grinning like a madman, Its violently green venom replaced by streams of black ink that nobody seemed to notice except for you.


    Nobody saw the End except for you.


    Nobody saw the flames and molten glass glinting in the depths of fourteen eyes.


    Except for you.


    And that scared you more than anything.


    The fear gripped your heart and ripped your consciousness backwards, your body slumping to the ground like a puppet without strings. You couldn''t think, you could barely breathe. A staff member nudged you with the tip of their shoe and jumped back like a startled bird, chuckling uncomfortably when nothing happened.


    You were only vaguely aware of the sensation.


    You weren''t there anymore, at least not mentally.


    Your eyes were open, unblinking, staring at nothing.


    Inside your own head was a different story.


    Surrounded by shadows and turmoil your brain struggled to make sense of everything, of anything.


    Wrong, disjointed feelings, like someone flipping haphazardly through the pages of a book leaving most of the story behind and unread. Context and coherence falling by the wayside.


    You knelt in a puddle of dark water.


    You lay prone in the stasis chamber.


    The shadows seethed with something tremendous just beyond your reach.


    The scientists stood there in fear and awe, unsure of what to do next.


    Your awareness of the physical faded until there was nothing left except you and the dark water spreading away into forever, surrounded by writhing dark full of growling things you could not see.


    Something prowled in the dark, cat-like and uncanny. Its bulbous feline head swung as it loped, kicking up waves of black water. Suddenly it was there, an eyeless beast, inches away from your face. The beast opened its horrific maw, lined with dozens of glowing blue teeth trailing strands of drool, its warm and rancid breath hit you like a punch to the gut. You flinched, shutting your eyes in anticipation of the worse, but when you opened them again the Beast was gone.


    Before you stood another child, he was no more than 8 or 9 years old. Gray and black eyes nearly hidden beneath a mass of thick blonde afro-textured hair, brown skin, gray rabbit ears and ugly prototype cybernetics pressed against the fabric of his white cotton jumpsuit. Wires trailed from the base of his spine like a tail, winding into the darkness around you both. His voice was Wrong when he finally spoke, raspy from disuse and horrifically artificial.


    Another You.


    "Get up." His mouth didn''t move, the sound utterly colorless and shapeless, it poured from the darkness like a roar, a prayer, a promise. His hand shot out, fingers spread and empty, offering nothing and everything all at once. "Get up and fight."


    You took the hand and the darkness swallowed you both whole, curling around you like smoke.


    You blinked and the Other You slowly smiled.


    Every tooth in his mouth was needle sharp and glowing neon blue.

 🕸🦇 Halloween Boo & A 🦇🕸

    Hello! In preparation for out Halloween update tomorrow we''ll be opening our inbox and allowing our readers to ask the most burning questions they have on their minds regarding The Theseus Hare!


    Questions can be asked in our tumblr inbox or in the comments of our Royal Road page.


    You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    Have fun and please keep your questions kind and appropriate (no hate/NSFW)


    Frequently asked questions can be found here:


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 ChaptERROR

    Your exposed flesh rippled like water, the makeshift metal plating sinking¡­


    Sinking¡­


    Sinking inside of you like stones.


    Flesh became skin, became scales, it sprouted eyes, and sprouted teeth like feral blossoms. You hauled yourself to your feet, unsteady on six legs like a newborn lamb.


    Your face melted, the bones beneath breaking and healing and becoming something else. An eyeless skull, a muzzle crammed with glowing blue teeth.


    Cat-like and uncanny.


    A deep and wretched sound rattled in your chest, organic and metallic at the same time like a bad midi dragged from the depths of an old point and click game.


    You saw Everything all at once, every frightened face and every half formed mistake pickling in the stasis tanks.


    You were covered in eyes.


    Anything that was not head or massive tail or the undersides of your heavy paws was covered in eyes. An ugly, artificial Argus rendered in blue-black flesh. Electric blue spit slithered from your open maw, glowing with an unnatural luminescence, it sizzled and smoked as it hit the ground leaving holes in its wake.


    The scientists bolted, a panicked flurry of limbs in motion crashing into each other as they struggled to make it through the open door. Several people tripped and were trampled. The scientist holding 37 screamed and forced their way to the front of the pack, taking off down the hallway like a shot. You sped after them, your gait unstable and awkward until you figured out how to get your feet beneath you. You slammed haphazardly into walls with every sharp turn, your claws leaving furrows in the tile floors as you struggled to gain traction.


    You were not in control, that much was clear. Your brain took a backseat to your body''s wishes, an almost instinctual desire to run and fight and be free of this place drowned out all else and left you almost delirious. You could only watch in terror with your hundred eyes as the innocent were trampled underfoot and tossed aside like toys.


    You didn''t want this.


    Any of this.


    All you wanted was 37, and Mara, and your other friends safe away from this hell. You couldn''t stop, no matter how hard you tried, your body kept surging forward like the tide.


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    Sirens screamed themselves awake, and lights strobed overhead.


    "This is an activation of the Specimen Suppression System, if this is not a drill please take cover. This message will repeat." Droned a recorded voice over the Facility''s loudspeakers. Parts of the ceiling slid open, huge guns poking their muzzles from the space beyond like well behaved dogs. They followed you as you ran, whirring to life and spitting out a stream of tranquilizers and suppression foam bullets.


    The foam bullets splattered against the walls and floor, the fluid inside them quickly expanding to triple their initial size and hardening within seconds.


    You took a tranq to an eye on your shoulder, the eye popped like a grape and started to bleed.


    Two more eyes quickly grew back in its place, too close together to even blink or roll.


    At no point did you slow down or stumble, the pain and fear urging you on.


    The scientist cornered themself on accident, you saw your reflection in their wide and terrified eyes. They held 37 tight enough to hurt, tight enough that she stirred and looked at you.


    And then she screamed.


    You finally stopped then.


    Ears back and hackles raised.


    You wanted to lay down, to be small again. You wanted to tell her and everybody else that it was OK and you were sorry but your big stupid body wouldn''t fucking let you.


    It hissed, teeth bared. Flecks of acid flying from its snarling mouth as it took a single step forward.


    The fear in 37''s eyes broke something inside of you. You weren''t her friend anymore, you were a threat, a wild animal.


    A monster.


    You¡­ you couldn''t think anymore. A sort of numbness breached the surface of your panic and spread like melting ice until you were cold and empty and trembling. Your body didn''t tremble though, it refused to show any weakness, but fat iridescent tears fell from every wild and rolling eye.


    The beast lunged, a sharp and horrible pain shot through your tail. Your eyes caught on the bright plumage of a tranquilizer dart buried in the flesh of your tail. Your body twisted around, mouth still open and spraying acid, a semi-mechanical roar building in your chest. Mara stood there, dressed in riot gear, holding a tranq gun in trembling hands.


    Smoke curled from the gun''s muzzle.


    Mara''s betrayal took the shards of your broken heart and ground them into dust. She dropped the gun and held her hands up like she was trying to soothe a startled animal, not a scared kid in a body he didn''t recognize. Mara glanced behind you. "You folks ok?"


    "I-I''ve been better." Stammered the scientist, one terrified Francis Moreau, clearly on the brink of tears. "But-but we''re not dead."


    Mara laughed but the sound carried no relief or amusement, "That''s good to hear, now Frank I''m gonna need you to hold tight to 37, and cover her eyes¡­" The Specimen Suppression System turned its guns towards you in eerie unison, security guards dressed in riot gear shuffled forward. The sounds of their boots stomping towards you sounded like funeral dirge. "She doesn''t need to see what happens next."

 system/BOOT.HareDraft (7).Info

    You could barely see through the blinding flood of tears.


    Your body gritted its many teeth and flexed its claws, muscles coiled and ready to spring.


    When you were little and got your first set of cybernetics, they weren''t exactly installed properly and the software necessary for them to function had a tendency to crash. You could remember how that felt, the full body paralysis and distress that overwhelmed you and¡­ and¡­


    Seeing Mara like that, knowing she had just shot you, felt worse than a system crash. It felt worse than getting put through a wall by Nettie.


    It¡­ it felt like dying while still being alive enough to feel it.


    Like it would never ever stop hurting.


    It felt like knowing that nobody in this wretched place was really your friend, nobody really cared about you.


    Your body rightfully identified Mara as a threat and lunged for her with jaws wide. The Suppression System fired, peppering you with foam and tranquilizers. Your body shook the tranqs off like flies, splattering your surroundings with foam that had yet to harden. Whatever Mara had shot you with was starting to work, your tail felt like it weighed a ton. A feeling that soon spread to your back pair of legs, you dragged them across the ground and slipped as your middle pair gave out too. It felt like trying to climb through gelatine, the world too soft and malleable to walk on.


    You slid slowly to the ground, your tongue hanging dumbly from your open mouth. It was getting hard to keep your eyes open, the lids felt like they weighed more than your tail. You drooled and gurgled, paws sluggishly scraping against the ground in an attempt to stand.


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    One of the security guards shuffled forward and tried to slip a makeshift muzzle onto your face, you snapped at them lazily and growled. The guard yelped and danced backwards, narrowly avoiding the pool of acid eating through the floor. Your body laughed, a rough and rumbling sound that slowly trailed off into a rattling wheeze. Your eyes shut one by one, glazed and dense with sleep.


    "Hello again, My sweet stupid thing." Purred the End-of-Everything in Its 7 times 7 overlapping voices. Its impossible body curled around and around you, each scale on Its glittering hide a window into a different calamity.


    You saw yourself in every one, a rabid and raging beast, cutting people down left and right.


    You felt lips against the shell of your ear, a chorus of voices pouring into your mind. "Don''t give into despair, my dear thing, not now¡­ not yet¡­ we''re only in the first act after all and there''s still so much left for you to see and say before the curtain can close and send us hurtling into our intermission." Several seven fingered hands squeezed your shoulders and pulled you into a scaly embrace. Up close the End smelled like the world on fire, like fresh growth and the death of all things. But It held you like a mother would have, It wiped the tears and gore from your face.


    "Think of Me as the snake in the garden, I am here to set you free¡­ to show you the Truth." It brought all seven faces close to yours, dropping Its voices into conspiratorial whispers. "Do you want to know the Truth of this world, sweetling? You saw it once but I don''t think you understood. "


    "The truth of this world is that it sucks and nobody cares about me or loves me and the only reason I''m still alive is¡­ is¡­" The words came out of you as fast and bitter as vomit, leaving you breathless with a sour taste in your mouth.


    The End-of-Everything held you close, cooing and nuzzling your hair tenderly. "Oh My sweet stupid thing¡­ if you only knew how right you are."

 Case 77- 21鈻堚枅: Vivisection of an Unknown Species.

    ?? The following are a collection of media files from Lazarus Manufacturing Research Facility Delta.


    The contents of these files and the events described herein are classified. ??


    [The video opens in an operating room, dozens of scientists are crowded in and around the space dressed in protective gear.


    There is a window on the far wall, the camera zooms in to show the gawking faces of more Facility staff pressed up against the glass trying to get a good look at what''s going on inside.


    Mara is glimpsed amongst the horde of onlookers for just a moment. She is a lithe Black woman with lighter skin and long hair in intricate Locs dyed a myriad of different colors. She is dressed in the standard issue white slacks and matching shirt befitting her station as a Keeper within the Facility. She looks pale and uncomfortable, like she might puke.


    The second Mara notices the camera is pointed at her, she melts into the crowd and vanishes.


    Doors can be heard opening in the operating room.


    The camera swings around to face the sound.


    A huge creature is wheeled into the room strapped to a makeshift gurney.


    The footage starts to warp and deteriorate as the creature is brought closer to the camera. It''s just chromatic aberration at first, but it quickly gets worse.


    Multichromatic distortion starts to cover the creature, slowly spreading outwards from its body until the entire video is lost beneath seething static and pulsating colors.


    All sounds become a harsh, garbled whine and wide glaring eyes roll within the bitcrushed mess.


    The video feed stops suddenly.]


    A tape recorder whirrs to life, the voice of a scientist can be heard.


    Dr. Extravaganza "Anza" Ramirez: "October ¨€¨€ 21¨€¨€, at approximately fifteen-hundred hours today I was alerted to a¡­ disturbance in the stasis chamber on floor fourteen. Specimen 7886, a cybernetically modified child estimated between eight or nine years of age, had awoken several weeks ahead of schedule."


    Anza sighs in exasperation, fabric rustles in a way that implies she''s rubbing her temples or dragging a hand down her face.


    Anza: "According to what footage we have left of the incident, Specimen 37 (a hold over from another series of experiments done by a colleague of mine) fed Specimen 7886 a sample of its blood while under the supervision of the soon-to-be fired Mara Jones.


    Specimen 7886''s altered form seems to have a universally negative effect on digital media files and recorders, attempts to document its vivisection using a digital camera have failed multiple times so the procedure is being postponed until a film camera can be located."


    Anza (aside/to the room): "I''m certain someone on site has one, like ninety percent of us are autistic so there''s a nonzero chance somebody on staff has a hyperfixation on analog media; and if they don''t we''re supposed to be stocked with analog gear in case of emergencies."


    A door squeaks open, fabric rustles and the wheels of a desk chair can be heard rattling across the floor away from the recorder.


    Anza: "Did you--"


    ???: "Yeah! Almost immediately. Looks like Jimmy in radiology is really into vintage tech, he talked my ear off for almost an hour explaining why you''re not supposed to shake Polaroid pictures."


    Anza: "...go back and grab those cameras, we might need them."


    Fabric rustles again and the heels of shoes clap together, like the unnamed person is giving Anza a military salute.


    ???: "On it boss!"


    Anza snorts, there is the sound of retreating footsteps marching away in exaggerated rhythm.


    The door squeals shut.


    Anza: "Apologies for the intrusion, we''re spread thin today." She clears her throat and continues. "If all goes well we''ll be able to properly document the proceedings, if not¡­ we''ll figure something out."


    [Another video, this time grainy and nostalgic. The telltale aesthetics of a video shot on a film camera versus one done in a digital format is apparent.


    Whatever camera this was shot on was well loved and well maintained.


    The science team has cleared out a space on the operating room floor and covered it heavily with tarps in lieu of an operating table big enough to hold their current specimen.


    The video focuses on the creature from before, easily the length of a city bus, unconscious and stretched out on its side. All 6 of its legs are bound and its massive tail, easily half its total body length, has been pinned down and tacked to the floor as a precaution.


    There is a tube forced into its open mouth, shoved down its throat, supplying a mix of heavy anesthetics and oxygen.


    It looks like a child''s idea of a chimera.


    The feline head of a cheetah fixed haphazardly onto a thick neck blending into a long body with six gangly legs and a fat gecko tail, each leg ending in a paw with 5 fingerlike digits tipped with wicked retractable claws.


    At first glance the creature is solid black, an awkwardly shaped shadow come to life, until the light hits it at just the right angle and brings out the swirling deep blue and purple iridescence within its scaly skin. A scientist swaddled in PPE timidly lifts one of the creature''s paws and compares it to their own hand, chortling with unease when the creature''s digits attempt to curl around their own reflexively.


    Someone yelps and the camera quickly darts in that direction, falling on another scientist. The measuring tape in the scientist''s hands trembles slightly, an eye the size of a grown man''s fist glares at them accusingly from its spot in the creature''s haunch. The eye follows them as they move around, closing in one spot only to open in another one elsewhere.


    "It''s sedated right? Like we gave it enough tranquilizers to put down a whale, how is it still moving?" Someone says, their voice partially muffled by their PPE.


    "No it totally is, I''ve heard of crocodilians sleeping with one eye open, maybe this is like that?" answers somebody else, as they measure the eye''s diameter and take a sample of its tears with a swab.


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    The eye blinks in discomfort, closes completely, and reopens at the opposite end of the creature''s body, as far away from the probing swab as possible.


    The amassed onlookers chuckle.


    The creature is measured and weighed, its resting heart rate and respiration monitored and logged.


    "...I feel like we should get Jimmy down here--" says Anza from the head of the creature, she''s examining its eyeless face with practiced ease.


    The person behind the camera speaks up, "I''m right here actually."


    "Oh! Not sure how I missed that, but there''s no way this thing is gonna fit in the radiology department so we''ve gotta figure something out, any ideas?" Anza continues.


    "Let the other departments have their turn in the meantime, I''ll figure something out if I have enough time to think." Jimmy replies. An eye opens fairly close to the camera. It stares at him for a long while before blinking closed and disappearing.


    "...how does it keep doing that without any fixed eye sockets?" Says Doug''s voice from somewhere in the room. "Jim zoom in on that eye for me?"


    The camera zooms in on an open eye on the creature''s neck. The eye rolls slowly to glare at Jimmy as if daring him to try something.


    The eye has white sclera webbed with blue veins, there is no distinction between pupil and iris; it''s just a black disk gazing at the camera. It''s a little unnerving actually, the way the eye blinks and moves, bobbing beneath the flesh as the lids close; like a ball dipping beneath the surface of a pool.


    "Can someone grab a sample of that?" Says Doug.


    "A sample of the eye?" Asks a different voice.


    "No a sample of your mom, yes a sample of the fucking eye! What are you, an intern?" Doug growls.


    The voice from before sounds meek and embarrassed now, "Yes?"


    "Oh¡­" Doug says and clears his throat awkwardly into the sudden uncomfortable silence.


    What comes next is several minutes of the unnamed intern chasing the single eye around the creature''s body until it seems to disappear entirely, only reappearing when the intern has their back turned. The eye squints as if amused, Anza sighs in exasperation from off screen and darts into frame holding something sharp. The eye widens in panic but Anza is upon it before it can blink itself away.


    Jimmy flinches hard and the camera jolts to one side sharply, his hand covering the lens, but whether it''s a conscious action on his part or a reflex is unclear. The sounds of cutting flesh overtake the stunned silence that descends like a theater curtain.


    "Jar!" Calls Anza, followed by frantic footsteps and the wet PLUNK of an eyeball dropping into a container full of liquid.


    The camera pans upwards towards Anza, her gloves wet with blue blood. The empty hole sinks back into the creature''s body with a slurping, sucking noise. Two new eyes bob to the surface, they share the same socket and set of eyelids like some sort of fucked up ocular hydra.


    "...fascinating." Anza coos. She shines a small light into one eye and then the other, making the entire thing squint in discomfort. The double eye struggles to close completely and  just sits there, staring at nothing in particular, glassy and disoriented.


    The next few minutes are uneventful with the different research departments gathering samples and measurements as Jimmy follows behind them with his camera. A few people take Polaroid pictures of the creature and their samples.


    Jimmy has to restrain himself whenever the pictures are shaken.


    The entire ordeal seems to be stressing Jimmy out but he doesn''t complain, ever the steady handed cameraman, though he does wander off towards the head of the beast in an attempt to distance himself from those deplorable picture shakers.


    The creature''s mouth has been propped open and the breathing tube removed so that its maw may be properly inspected. Up close its many rows of teeth are translucent daggers around thin white filaments that provide their glow, its tongue is a long black rope that forks at the end. The team tasked with studying the creature''s mouth are heavily suited, carrying metal tongs and canisters. They gather saliva samples and teeth of various sizes, marveling when the teeth grow back almost immediately.


    After a bit of prodding, the acid glands make themselves known, wedged between teeth and nestled beneath the creature''s slithering tongue.


    At first nothing happens. A gland is gingerly expressed into a heavy-duty container for future study, and that seems to be the end of it. Until a few stray drops make their way into the growing puddle of drool gathering in the creature''s lower jaw.


    The droplets start to glow on contact with the saliva and the metal pole holding the creature''s mouth open starts to sizzle and steam.


    The scientists all glance at each other. Nobody speaks or breathes and the only sound for what feels like a long while is the sizzling of acid slowly dissolving a support pole.


    One scientist takes a glass stirring rod and dips it into the container of what was previously thought to be acid.


    Nothing happens.


    "...inert?" She wonders out loud, grabbing a fresh rod and dipping that in a saliva sample.


    Again, nothing happens.


    A solitary "Huh¡­" is the only word spoken for several tense minutes.


    The video cuts forward an indeterminate length of time. The group of scientists from before are setting up a spur of the moment experiment that involves beakers and tongs.


    "Ok so¡­ it looks like the acid is a complex chemical compound, an enzyme activated when the fluid in the glands comes in contact with the specimen''s saliva." The scientist sounds excited, holding a beaker gingerly at the end of a pair of tongs as far away from herself as she can get it.


    The beaker contains several milliliters of saliva, blue tinged and thick. A colleague slowly pours a vial of the gland secretions into the beaker and the result is instantaneous.


    The newborn enzyme glows violently blue and starts to MELT the glass beaker, making it stretch and balloon like hot plastic until gravity gets the best of it and the enzyme makes its way to the floor. The liquid sizzles and hisses, eating a hole through the protective layers of tarp and plastic and eventually the floor beyond.


    "That''s so cool¡­ horrifically dangerous and probably a carcinogen but IT''S STILL SO COOL!" Chirps the scientist from before, doing a barely contained happy dance in place.


    The sizzling, hissing sound gets louder.


    Naturally everyone starts looking at the hole in the floor first before the teams behind them start to shout.


    The creature is steaming.


    Blue-white wisps of steam billow from every available orifice, natural or not. Several hundred eyes open wide and worried, more steam pouring from them like some incomprehensible expression of grief.


    The creature''s body begins to sag, shrinking like a balloon losing air. Its skeleton is visible for only a moment as stark hard shapes that hold its skin up. Until those too collapse; like a house of sticks in the wind. The creature''s flattened form starts to move, undulating like thousands of hands stretching pizza dough into shape.


    And then it starts to fold up, into itself in ways that defy logic. Skin bunches like fabric, pulling on itself until it coalesces into a singular point that just keeps folding and folding to an impossible density. Sharp shards of metal poke their way from the folding flesh and curl around each other to form limbs.


    A hand here, a paw there.


    Long gray ears and sharp white teeth behind a cleft lip.


    Exposed nerves become wires twisting like snakes into familiar configurations. A single pair of dark eyes opens in a child''s face, glazed and unseeing. The child struggles to take a step forward, slipping on a puddle of moisture and falling into the arms of a shocked intern who buckles under the sudden weight.


    The child is barely conscious and extremely delirious, trying to keep himself upright and moving but failing every time.


    The child is quickly inspected and verified to be specimen 7886, back in his original form.


    He looks¡­


    Perfectly normal?


    Or at least how he did before ending up in stasis.


    Every scratch, dent and chip in his cybernetics is completely identical to his original set, the one Nettie had destroyed with the dodgeball.


    The set that was removed before he went into stasis.


    The wild chatter of speculating scientists is deafening, each one of them vying for their chance to further examine this anomalous child. Greedy gloved hands grip expensive equipment or jot down observations, the noise quickly rising to a roar.


    Jimmy doesn''t seem to notice or care as he slowly zooms in on something that wasn''t there before.


    A long articulated tail grew from the base of the specimen''s spine, ending in a puff of soft blonde fur that ruffled in some unseen breeze.

 From the Desk of Dr. Downfall.

    My name is Hubris Willoughby Downfall, I am a researcher in the employ of Conglomerate, with its components listed as follows.


    Lazarus Manufacturing, Mendel Genetics, and Cardboard Fish Entertainment Unlimited.


    I have been brought in as a consultant for a recent venture pioneered by Dr. Extravaganza Ramirez, the study of Zone Mutants and their habitats and how we can best explore and/or exploit them. I was brought on for my experience in that field, having been in possession of a mutant child for the last few years. A young girl by the name of Specimen 37, who has rejected all my attempts at giving her a more human moniker though she begrudgingly accepts my calling her "Duckie" on most occasions the same way most people would accept being called "dear" or "honey" by a stranger.


    Specimen 37''s life prior to my care remains a mystery, the Uninhabitable Zone she was collected from was bombed into oblivion some time during the last World War, making any further study near impossible. Having been a toddler when she was acquired, 37 remembers very little of her life in the Zone except for increasingly vague memories of her "mother". In quotation marks for reasons I will not get into at this time, I have already spoken of 37 and her parents at length on various occasions and see no point in doing it again.


    I''m here to talk about the Merlin Project, or Project Merlin, I can''t remember which it is and I don''t care enough to look it up. All the pedantry surrounding such "secretive" endeavors drives me insane, I see no point in it. If you''re going to be a monster, then do it the right way and wear your monstrousness on your sleeve, don''t hide it behind pretty words and fancy titles like a coward.


    We butcher children here, we strip them of their innocence as easy as skin and act like we''re serving some greater good when deep down we know we''re being paid to throw science at the wall and see what sticks. Better to hurt children nobody wants than condemned criminals that could use their newfound abilities to escape and destroy us all I suppose.


    I could lie and say such actions sicken me but I''ve been in this business too long to feel anything other than a sort of distant numbness wrapped around what''s left of my morals, choking them out until there''s nothing left for me to fret over. I''ll take that numbness as a blessing and pretend I don''t see tiny trembling faces every time I close my eyes at night. I have surrendered to my monstrosity and will let it consume what''s left of me, before I break down and become something I can truly despise.


    The Project has yielded promising results thus far and that''s all my employers truly care about, so it''s all I care about. The potential military and medical applications of what we have discovered are nearly limitless, but only if we can find a way to refine and control our experiments.


    With the current trajectory we find ourselves careening towards, I doubt we''ll be able to do either before the world comes crashing down around our ears.


    The number of mishaps and casualties the project has suffered by this point hangs over its surviving staff like the blade of Damocles, I do not pity them.


    What we are working with here are two of the most unstable forces known to man, radiation and children. To combine the two is an exercise in self destruction, but nobody listens when I talk so who cares! Go right ahead, expose developing bodies and minds to things that we as fully formed adults have yet to understand and see what happens! Maybe we''ll make a quick buck off of it, and if we don''t? Well, we''ll know not to do that again.


    The flagrant disregard for traditional scientific processes brings to mind the crimes of Aperture and Black Mesa, bought out by the Conglomerate and buried where no sane person could discover their desiccated remains.


    But I digress.


    The children of Project Merlin are remarkable in their desire to survive and grow despite their surroundings hinting at their inevitable destruction. It''s almost admirable in a way, to watch them get up and continue on after the serum has distorted them beyond imagination. You can''t help but root for them, even though you know deep in your heart that it doesn''t matter.


    The children are disposable, and so are you.


    Uncanny comrades tipped headlong into the maw of some great beast made of paper and red tape that neither of you really understands. You know that you''ll be pulled out last minute and dangled somewhere else just as dangerous because the Conglomerate still has use for you, but you can''t stop yourself from reaching out and hoping that the tiny hand falling away from you can come too.


    Jack is an anomaly of sorts.


    A hand-me-down from a previous experiment done within the Facility, it''s a wonder that he''s lived as long as he has. Cybernetics make up around 80% of his body. You''d think that being so mechanical would disqualify him from the Project, but you''d be wrong. Jack was brought in as filler, to round out our test groups after a clerical error misplaced our original specimen, but Anza took a liking to him on that first day so he''s stuck with us now for better or for worse.


    He has responded well to testing, although "well" in this context is highly subjective. We shot him up with goo that made several small animals exsanguinate themselves and he didn''t immediately die, so I suppose "well" is an apt description. Jack is the only test subject (we know of) to pull off a full body transformation.


    Coronet, our patient zero, has shown promise yes but her transformations seem limited to her arms and face. So far we have discovered that Coronet''s transformations are triggered by a sharp drop in oxytocin, that is to say it only happens when she''s angry to some degree. Her scales and claws are incredibly dense and durable, capable of deflecting small caliber bullets easily, but her most curious ability is her control over blood. Her blood, your blood, animal blood, it''s almost like she can talk to it and bend it to her will. It''s fascinating, really.


    Coronet does not like Jack, the mere mention of his name has brought about sudden changes in her form on multiple occasions. When questioned as to why she reacts so violently to the other child Nettie simply shrugged and said "He just pisses me off." She also refused to apologize for nearly killing him during a dodgeball match some weeks ago, saying that he deserved it but declined to explain why.


    I have advised Anza to keep the two of them apart for obvious reasons.


    It''s almost comedic, they way they have him trussed up when I arrive. My colleagues have strapped a child to a chair, a print-locked muzzle fastened firmly to his face. Someone has even gone the extra mile and pinned Jack''s new tail to the back of the chair with a length of duct tape. He raises his head as I approach, the twisted snarl of wires snaking from the back of his head slither eerily as he moves. He''s plugged into half a dozen different machines meant to monitor everything from his vitals to the type and amount of hormones in his system.


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    The machines whine, slowly coming together into a chorus of voices that make my skin crawl.


    It''s disjointed at first, gibberish and scattered thoughts splashing in the shallows of his cognition like too many fish in a bucket, but one phrase floats to the surface fast enough to be heard.


    "Am¡­ I¡­ going¡­ to die?" It''s more of a whimper than a roar, the defeated whisper of a wire-bitten child and not some uncontrollable monster.


    "Oh we''re all going to die someday, but if you mean right this minute I would certainly hope not, I''d have nightmares for days." I smile, the gold caps on my incisors glinting in the harsh overhead lights.


    When Jack looks at me, his eyes have no pupils. Flat disks of glinting silver set in inky pools shot through with neon blue veins. He doesn''t look human, to be fair he never looked human but this is something entirely different.


    His face has changed, his wide nose flattened into something lagomorphic and vaguely triangular. His top lip has split and curled like an animal''s, it makes him look dreadfully wrong like something pretending to be a child. Luminous sweat soaks into the fabric of his shirt, he smells sour like vomit and unwashed skin.


    "You can¡­ hear me?" Jack''s ears twitch with interest, his eyes searching mine for understanding.


    "Yes, I can hear you just fine." I settle into the uncomfortable desk chair across from him and cross one leg over the other. "How are you doing that, if you don''t mind me asking?" I indicate the machines and see that their screens are full of eyes, it''s only for a heartbeat, just long enough for me to blink and think I''m hallucinating but I still feel my blood run cold.


    Jack just shrugs at my question, it''s not much of an answer but I nod like it is.


    Neither of us moves for what feels like a long time, the silence settling over us like a blanket until a low gurgling whine breaks it and I recognize the rumbling of an empty belly.


    "Let''s get you something to eat, what are you in the mood for?" I hop to my feet and clap my hands together.


    Jack flinches at the sound. "...I don''t think anything I eat is gonna stay put long, my stomach hurts."


    "How about some broth then? In a nice mug with a fun straw, that sound good?" I''m being softer than I realize but it''s too late to reel it in now.


    The child nods timidly and I make my way out of the room. I come back later with my electric kettle, two mugs, and a nutrient block tucked under one arm. I flake a few pieces off the block into a mug and top it off with hot water, stirring the murky liquid with the end of a crazy straw until the chunks at the bottom had mostly dissolved.


    It was then when I realized my error.


    The muzzle won''t accept my fingerprints but the other restraints behave themselves and soon Jack''s hands are free. He takes the mug gratefully, maneuvering the straw until it fits through one of the gaps in his muzzle. I watch him sip in silence until I''m sure he''s taken care of and make myself a cup of black tea without a word.


    "Why is your name Downfall?" He asks.


    "Why is your name Jack?" I reply.


    "I picked it myself."


    "Well then, so did I." I smile. "My Nan used to say ''hubris will be your downfall'', and I thought that sounded cool at the time so when I was old enough I had my name changed to Hubris Willoughby Downfall just to spite the old bat. She was a Bible thumping Catholic and I was not, not that you understand what any of that means but it does add a bit of weight to my decision that wouldn''t be there otherwise."


    "...what was your name before?" Jack''s head tilts.


    "David, what was yours?" My old name tastes wrong on my tongue, like milk that''s just about to spoil but hasn''t gotten there yet.


    "I don''t remember." Jack''s face crumples, ears back and eyes searching as if this singular realization was another bullet in the chamber of his misery.


    "Ah, that''s OK," I pat his shoulder without meaning to, we both freeze as if anticipating harm from the other. I remove my hand and Jack relaxes. "Names are like teeth, we shed them as we grow."


    Until recently, Jack went by specimen ID number exclusively and a glance at his file tells me why. There is no name listed, no date of birth, or anything regarding his life before coming here.


    It is unknown if this is merely an error within the system, or if this was purposefully scrubbed from his file, but it''s as if someone does not want us to know the true identity of this child for whatever reason.


    I have no drive to dig any deeper into this matter at present, the new name suits him just fine and I will continue to use it until he tells me not to.


    "Is she mad at me?" Jack whimpers, the leering screens behind him leak something vicious and blue from the gaps in their plastic shells. Like a child''s idea of tears.


    "Who?" I can guess who he means but it''s better to be sure.


    "37."


    "Now Why would she be mad at you?" I know why, I''ve seen the footage, I also know that Duckie has no idea that the "eyeball creature" and Jack are the one and the same.


    "She was so afraid of me¡­"


    "She didn''t know it was you, it''s not your fault." I''m trying to be soothing and sympathetic but my voice naturally makes everything I say sound sleazy and sarcastic, though Jack doesn''t seem to mind.


    "Oh¡­ are we still friends?"


    "Duckie seems to think so, she misses you terribly." My eyebrow raises as I pour myself another cup of tea. "But I have to ask, why were you chasing her like that?"


    "I thought she was hurt, I¡­ forgot what she could do." Jack fiddles with his straw, avoiding my gaze.


    "...I forget sometimes too, it''s alright." I refill Jack''s empty mug with more broth. The color has returned to his cheeks, the color is blue of course but it suits him.


    Following the attempt on his life by Nettie, Jack had been placed in stasis, both in an attempt to speed up the healing of his organic components and to see if he would possibly regenerate any of the tissue lost to the experimentation done on him previously.


    A truly baseless assumption.


    Specimen 37 considers Jack her friend and insisted on visiting him whenever possible. She would talk to him for hours despite his unresponsiveness, and bring him things he might like, including several of her specimen jars and his peculiar stuffed bear.


    A prototype of a canceled toy meant to soothe children with separation anxiety, the bear''s apparent lack of facial features and ears, paired with the synthetic organs it contains (used to generate body heat, and produce breathing and heartbeat noises in an attempt to simulate human contact) reportedly frightened focus groups and investors alike.


    Many of my colleagues and the other staff members find the toy to be unsettling, but I personally find it endearing. Much like Jack himself.


    Out of desperation or some misplaced sense of love Specimen 37 fed Jack her blood, causing some sort of¡­ mutation or a clash with the serum in his system. He rapidly grew in size, escaping the stasis chamber and going on a rampage through the lower levels of the Facility. Knowing that he was trying to protect Specimen 37 adds a certain¡­ something to the interaction.


    Was Jack trying to protect her because they''re friends, or was it 37''s blood calling out to him, wanting to be whole again? I''ll likely never know but it''s a fun hypothetical to mull over.


    "Am I in trouble?" Jack is looking at me again with those eyes so like and unlike 37''s it makes my chest tighten


    "No, not necessarily." I say, it feels like a lie.


    "Then why am I tied up?"

 Wanting.

    "What do you want to be when you grow up?"


    The question caught you off guard, crazy straw hanging from your mouth.


    The machines behind you stirred and chirped, beeping and babbling a thousand disjointed thoughts that eventually coalesced into a single bewildered "Huh?"


    Dr. Downfall regarded you with something bordering on amusement, but you were ninety percent sure his face just Looked Like That normally.


    You weren''t sure though.


    "I said," he continued between sips of grassy smelling tea, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"


    "Grow¡­ up?" You said.


    "Yes, the thing all children do eventually." Dr. Downfall replied.


    He didn''t expect you to laugh.


    A sharp and terrible sound. The wretched prerecorded mechanical mess of your own laughter bolstered by a chorus of giggling machines, their screens weeping blue liquid onto the pristine floor.


    It sounded cruel, felt cruel to laugh in Hubris'' face after he''d been nothing but kind to you.


    "I¡­ don''t¡­ get¡­ to¡­ grow¡­ up!" You gasped in between guffaws. "None of us get to grow up."


    Dr. Downfall''s expression of vague amusement never changed, even when it was obscured by your own tears rolling hot and fast over your muzzle. Even when laughter turned to anger and the crying wouldn''t stop, your tiny ragged body trembled with each sob.


    "Fine then, what do you want to be?" Hubris was unphased, he poured himself another cup of tea without taking his eyes off of you.


    "Be¡­?"


    "Yes my little echo, what do you want to be, what do you want to become, even if you don''t grow up?"


    "...alive?" You didn''t understand the question, that much was apparent.


    Dr. Downfall gazed at you from over the rim of his mug, eyebrow raised. "That''s all? You want to live and nothing else?"


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    "What else is there?"


    "Let me rephrase, what does ''living'' mean to you? What does it look like?"


    What does ''living'' look like?


    Your nose wrinkled in confusion, you didn''t understand the question. Any of Dr. Downfall''s questions really. The idea of ''wanting'' or ''being'' was so completely alien to you that you decided to change the subject. "Why am I tied up?"


    "Because you''re dangerous and they''re afraid of you." Hubris said without hesitation. "You are also dodging my questions, little echo."


    "Are you afraid of me?"


    "No, it''s pretty hard to be afraid of a monster once you''ve unmasked it." His smile was soft and sly, like a fox''s tail. "There''s a children''s show about that I think, something to do with a dog, you''d probably like it."


    "Is there a difference between being alive and living?"


    "Oh yes," Dr. Downfall said in a soft voice, one that was almost a whisper. "From an etymological standpoint I believe they''re synonyms. But in a metaphorical sense ''being alive'' is a state in which your cells are functional, whereas ''living'' is interacting meaningfully with your surroundings."


    "What does that mean?"


    "Right now you''re alive, you''re doing what it takes to survive and nothing more. You''re so focused on being alive and staying alive that you can''t even enjoy the little things you do while being alive." Hubris tilted his head, tapping his long and elegant nails on the side of his mug making tiny pinging noises that looked a little bit like raindrops. "And that enjoyment is part of living."


    "Why are you telling me this?" Your head tilted too.


    "Because you interest me and I would like to know what sort of person you are." Dr. Downfall smiled, his long golden fangs on full display. Top and bottom.


    "I''m not a person though? I''m an experiment or lab equipment or both."


    Hubris'' smile faded, just a little, melting into a slim line that turned up at the corners. "Here''s the deal ouroboros, bite down or let go because you can''t keep holding on like this. If you''re not careful, you''re going to be stuck in a cycle of ''what I''m not'' instead of focusing on what you are."


    "What am I?"


    "You''re a good kid in a shit situation doing his best to keep going despite having next to no autonomy." "You''re Duckie''s best friend, and you deserve better."


    "Should you be telling me this?"


    "Oh definitely not, but they can''t fire me so I''ll do what I please until it comes back to bite me." He grinned then, and looked more like a sly and slinking fox than ever. "I''m rooting for you Jack, I want to see you get through this and live a life that makes you happy."


    Had you ever been happy? You weren''t entirely certain, but something strangely warm settled in your chest like a cup of hot broth.


    You wanted to be happy, you wanted to know what it felt like to be a person who wasn''t just surviving, just being alive.


    You wanted to LIVE.

 Extras #1

    Chapters must be at least 500 characters long so this is mostly filler test, but we thought our readers would like to see what our protagonist and his friend look like! (Don''t worry about Jack''s pupils he grows them back)


    Character art of Jack is by/commissioned from candysharkart on tumblr


    This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    Character art of Specimen 37 is by jujulebee, also on tumblr

 A word from our author

    Hello there! Sorry for the impromptu hiatus there, but between work and the holidays I haven''t had much time or energy to write anything new so it might be a bit before The Theseus Hare gets a real update. I''ll try to keep your guys posted on what I''m doing and when, but rest assured I''ve got some big plans for this year in terms of updates :D they just might... take longer than I originally anticipated. Welp, hopefully I''ll see you guys really soon, if not then I''ll see you guys later. Be good, pet your animals, take your meds, do your laundry, and relax your jaw. I love you even if I don''t know you yet.


    This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.