Godclads

Chapter 3-8 Celerity's Burn

The first implant you should get is an Accelero. Everything else you get slotted should work to augment the Accelero. Skin replacements to reduce air friction. Bone lacing and muscle fibers so nothing breaks or tears. NerveNet so your senses don’t get all torqued. That kind of shit.

For Jaus’ sake, don’t go installing pistons or industrial-grade frames onto yourself, alright? They’re pretty much just dead weight half the time and they won’t be enough to keep you standing against high-ex.

You move to lose shooters. Your subdermals are for the shrapnel. Hit hard. Hit fast. Hit once. Break contact. Get out.

Get nothin’ twisted, consang, New Vultun ain’t a city where you get to shoot second. Shoot first. Always shoot first. And always be gone afterward.

-Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens

3-7

Celerity’s Burn

Avo stared blankly at the door for a beat before glaring at the drones. “Trying to get me cut in half?”

Osjack laughed. “Sure. It’ll do that. A civilian resident cheap-fab crushing our eighty-thousand imp ghoul right after we cut him open.”

“Loathe as I am to admit it, I do agree with the bioform,” Osjane said. “We can gauge a baseline using the drones. There’s no need for this…ceremony.”

“Ceremony,” Osjack said, imitating her voice. “You make it sound like I’m trying to amuse myself. No. Got to see if it works practically. Contained environments are nice and all, but I doubt our employer wants his pet cannibal someplace safe. There’s really only one reason why someone wants to field a ghoul, and it’s almost never to turn them into a manservant.”

Avo bristled slightly at being referred to as a pet. Right now, he was technically closer to an indentured servant seeing how he had an unpaid organ latched onto him. His blood swirled over–and through it. It had capitulated to his cells utterly. No transplant rejection. It writhed snuggly against his spine, its added weight feeling less than natural at his core. It was as if a ridge of tumors spread out into every part of his body like roots.

The organ’s tendrils were spreading out even deeper, as if budding in his limbs, enwreathing his structure in a new shell.

The installment fascinated him. When he could, he needed to get a MedCon phantasmic running. See just how the Celerostylus was integrating with his biology. Maybe even find methods of optimization and improvement.

Osjack sighed. “Don’t got all day, ghoulie.”

“Avo. My name. Use it.”

“Don’t got all day, Avo,” Osjack repeated in the same bored tone. “Get through the door and come back before it closes. Please? For me?”

Avo shot Osjack’s drone an annoyed look. No one really ever said please before, but he was pretty sure the grafter was being condescending. Still, he wanted to find out what he was capable of with this new augment. See how it changed things for him.

He frowned. “Implant: how do I activate it?”

Osjane scanned him. “Do you feel a new weight along your core? Like a muscle. Where your sternum and T-four meet?”

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“T-four?” Avo asked.

“Upper spine,” she said. “Tense it.”

There was a weight there. A growing numb ebbing throbbed within the cage of his ribplates. He wondered if this was what having a heart felt like. The organ was slow to respond at first, his attempts to tense it making its spasm. It was a lot like tightening his lower back. Then, he felt it, a different squeeze distinct from all his other muscles.

He was about to ask her what was next to follow when it suddenly surged, chaining its voltage through his blood cells and buzzing his mind with energy.

As the implant hypercharged the flow of his synaptic signals, Avo felt the lights around him oscillate and dim. The drones around him were almost frozen except for their spinning optics that moved in increments of scant micro-inches before his hyper-accelerated perception of time.

Avo blinked. A searing pain shot through his eyelids as he felt micro-tears form. His body, it seemed, was far behind in adapting to how fast it could move. More interestingly, he was being to feel a building ache in his skull, the insides of his brain cooking as heat swelled.

WARNING: COG-CAPACITY DIMINISHING…

Good of him to find out now. The pressure in his head was fast building. It hadn’t even been two seconds yet and there was already a problem. Taking a tentative step forward, Avo tried to keep his movements as controlled as possible.

His leg lashed out before a counter impulse flowed through the limb, dragging him into a near stumble. It seemed the new inhabitant in his body was trying to get used to him as much as he was getting used to it.

Another step. Another stagger. Six seconds. The pressure was slowly beginning to ascend into the territory of a headache. Ahead, the door was still a hallway down, taunting him. Crackling energy and boiling tension washed out from his core, instilling a sharpness in his movements. It was like he was floating on a sea of static, something actively compensating and adjusting as he moved, tuning his nerve impulses; honing his dexterity to fits its requirements.

Through the door, he looked at the wall. Cheap plascrete. Worst comes to worst, it would break against him. Maybe see a few of its supports bent inward. Taking the plunge, Avo pushed off the ground in a sprint.

The hall suddenly blurred around him. His first few steps made him wince. The ground dented beneath his blurring feet. A claw snapped at the tip. It felt like a giant was plucking the tendons in his legs as if they were strings. His arms ground hard in their sockets, chewing against his softer tissues. The air around him grew thicker as if it was growing closer to water tension. Wind folded across his face.

With a thought, he activated his Phys-Sim. Spilling velocity vectors and impact trajectories littered his vision. As he tore past the door’s scanner, he found that he was already in the red, lined with an impact trajectory with the wall ahead. His speed was listed at somewhere north of sixty-five miles an hour and climbing.

Impulses and counter-impulses clashed through his body. His bones and muscles crackled and creaked as his body adjusted to the strain. Right now, the organ was pushing his musculature to its fullest potential, his corded fibers learning to fire as one, moving to the designs of a new symphonist introduced to his system.

Where his vessel faltered was in the bones and sockets. As a whole, his muscles provided much of his durability, serving as an endo-weave over his bones. Now, they were wrenches, levering and jerking his structure out of place.

The fact was that so long as his osseous tissue constrained him, his reflexes would be greater than his body to accommodate.

Likely a deliberate choice on Mirrorhead’s part, Avo assumed. Why give the ghoul the whole course when you lead him on from meal to meal?

Blinking past the door, it was hard for him to keep his eyes open now from all the wind rushing in. His jerking movements created microfractures and tears. Only his active healing prevented his body from spiraling into a major breakdown. Impact warnings sounded from his Phy-Sim as he slammed hard against the wall.

As expected, the outer surface caved outright. Avo braced himself and felt his wrists pop against a folding bar of steel. Twenty seconds. Everything behind his eyes was on fire. He stopped tensing his Celerostylus and clutched at his skull, wincing as the pain immediately began to diminish.

Behind, the door hissed shut.

Rubbing his temples, Avo shook his head. Twenty seconds of active synaptic boosting. Probably closer to fifteen if he wanted to be in any kind of shape afterward. It was overtaxing his brain, signals frying his nerve structure. His cells burned through more of his metabolism, healing the minor stress damage he put his body through. He used to think most street squires were overcompensating with all their chrome, that a rig should’ve been enough for most purposes.

He was wrong. Biology was a brittle, crippled thing, and it needed all the support it could get. When he got back into the room, he needed to talk with his grafters about all the parts that should have gone with it.

The door remained shut behind him. To his left, a busted pipe wept what smelled like sewage down the sides of walls, the lights flickering, walls stripped bare and abandoned. To his right, an elevator awaited, its exterior ghost-tagged with cog-tags of different gangs, ghosts carrying whispered slurs, and throwing up gang signs directly against his mind.

His ward dissolved them before he could catch any mem-viruses.

It felt like he was in a cheap tenement block. Yet, the hab-cell in front of him clearly housed a state-of-the-art grafting station and two experts. The clash of expense and destitution was whiplash-inducing, but from it, a theory began to form in his synaptically-taxed mind.

Maybe Mirrorhead wanted this. Maybe the Syndicate boss was keeping his operations masked and hidden. Or just logistically separated into different sections of this megablock. Running a quiet operation somehow. But why? Was he being hunted? Afraid of being hunted?

The door in front of him hissed open. Osjack hovered over.

“You make me sad, Avo,” Osjack said.

Avo walked past him. “Because I didn’t make it back in?”

“Yeah. That and you clearly hate walls.” Osjack’s drone scanned the damage. “People used to live here, you know.”

Avo grunted. “What happened?”

“Oh, they got eaten during the Uprising,” Osjack said, floating back toward the grafting station. “Ghouls broke in.”

Avo didn’t react to that. Wasn’t much to react to. The Low Masters had unleashed on the city, sending them up through the Umbra into the Underways and the guts of the blocks proper. Called for a grand feast for the ghouls, and feast the ghouls did. Even at present, the Guilds only had vague estimates for how many FATELESS died during those initial days.

“Missing implants,” Avo said, pointing back at the station. “Reflexes work. Skull hurts. Bones and sockets are major liabilities. Will need to get them adjusted too.”

“Yes, that is known to us,” Osjane said. “Alas, we were paid to implant one experimental organ, and so one is what we shall do.”

Expected, but annoying. Again, how very Mirrorhead. Rich enough to pay for a grafting operation but not willing to finish out the entire package. The Syndicate boss clearly wanted his new pet project to be effective, but not formidable, building in deliberate limitations that could only be plugged gap by gap.

“Now that you’re done, you can return the way you came,” Osjane said, gesturing toward the reflection Avo arrived from. “We have contacted your owner about this operation's success and he would like for you to return for your first assignment.”

First assignment. Already. Mirrorhead wasted little time, but also didn’t seem to leave any float room to see if the implant would have post-surgery complications. Told Avo the man was either wasteful or just didn’t have that much experience actually running projects. Maybe both.

Avo himself couldn’t imagine making someone perform a task immediately post-surgery, but then again, ghouls were ghouls and people were people. One was made to thrive despite damage while the other had to attune themselves to it.

Staring at the mirror he entered from, Avo shot the drones a look, biding his time before he had to leave. Truth be made manifest, he hated the sensation of sinking through the glass. He could feel the presence of Mirrorhead's Heaven in the depths. Always. Lurking. Burning dimly. Reflections hadn’t felt right since Avo felt himself get pulled into the mirrored ceiling of the aerovec and made to face the Twice-Walker.

“This a frequent thing?” Avo asked, gesturing at the grafting station.

“What? Putting experimental bioware in ghouls?” Osjack said. “Strangely, yeah. Paladins don’t much give a shit about ethics when your kind is involved and…ah…what can I say? Your subspecies make for good test subjects. A little bit of food and they stay alive. You can implant anything into them and see how it works in them. You guys are nearly perfect. Except for, you know, the screeching, violence, shitting all over everything, trying to kill everything, the spitting.

Avo grunted in agreement. Who was he to deny the faults of his brothers? “Works until the blood rejects the implant.”

“Till that,” Osjack agreed. “But for a few beautiful moments, you’re the perfect lab dummy.”

“Touched,” Avo said. “Low Masters gave us a future after all.”

Osjack laughed again. “Ah, man, I wish I could keep you. You're like the perfectly grumpy monster I always wanted.”

Osjane sighed. “Osjack…”

“Can we keep him?” Osjack asked. Avo couldn’t tell if the man was actually being serious or not.

“No, Brother Osjack. This is unbecoming and our sessions are being recorded. We cannot keep a client’s property.”

Osjack smacked his lips. The sound emerged as static and crackles through the other side. “Shame. Goodbye, sassy ghoul. Or maybe see you later. Who knows? If your master decides he wants to continue these installments, you just might end up on our station again.”

Begrudgingly, Avo had to admit: these two weren’t the worst grafters he knew. Far from it, in fact. Even the Undercroft had establishments that offered a varying expanse of products and qualities. It took Walton some time to find one that was halfway decent at tumor removal.

“Thanks. For not severing spine.”

“Praise from a ghoul,” Osjane said glumly. “Truly, my practice has reached its apex. Off you go then. The client is contacting us again, doubtless to harry your departure.”

Osjack snorted. “Half-strand’s about as patient as a lit fuse.”

“Do not speak ill of the client, Osjack.”

“I’m not speaking ill, Osjane. I’m speaking truth. Should’ve been a philosopher.”

“And I should have had a better partner. But we must face life as things go, no? And what are you still staring at us for? Have you not been summoned.”

Avo studied the two drones a moment longer. “Question. Last one.”

“Make it quick,” Osjane said, voice tight.

“You two got public idents? A mem-scan that links to a palace? For contact.”

“Oh, I think the ghoul’s asking us out, Sister Osjane,” Osjack said.

“In accordance with Tenet 3-A under the Nu-Scripture, a practitioner of the New Alloy is not to be attached to the flesh which they will come to strip,” Osjane said.

Avo tilted his head. “Does that mean no?”

“That means, ghoul, that should you require our services again, you may submit a request to the Church of the New Alloy under Voidwatch and schedule an operation. Should you possess the means and funds, we will provide services for any modifications you so desire.”

“Yeah,” Osjack said. “But if you want to see us again specifically. Just ask for Mayflower-3288-B and Terror-3285.”

“No B for her?”

“I’m not a duplicate,” Osjane said as if that explained everything.

“Purist bigot,” Osjack said, sounding like he was smiling.

“Mayflower. Terror.” Avo repeated the words.

He guessed those were the names of ships. Walton said the voiders were bound not by parentage or culture, but by the voidships that printed them. However that worked. Supposedly the ships were references too, a name taken from long-lost vessels from eons before when the fabric of the void was still calm and the stars had yet to succumb to madness.

He recorded a remembrance of this conversation in his Metamind.

Avo gave the two drones an awkward nod and departed. They bantered on behind him as their drones began to dismantle the grafting station. He wondered where they were bound to next. New Vultun was a big place, and there was no shortage of flesh to temper with the alloy; no shortage of work for these post-human pilgrims.

Curiosity flickered inside Avo. He always wondered about the stars. Perhaps someday, if he didn’t find true-death along the way, he could greet the voiders in person. See how they really were. A great gulf remained between those who woke amidst the cold emptiness of the void and those that were born in a place long sustained by now-silenced gods.

The synaptic burn had subsided by this point. Avo guessed it took close to a minute before he recovered. His new transplant didn’t seem nearly as enduring as what Draus had, but still, he felt like…he was more. Greater. He just wished this happened in a circumstance where he wasn’t owned by another.

Freedom was easily lost and hard to win back.

He couldn’t be too disappointed. He did also have a Heaven. A dormant one. But still, a Heaven. Avo grinned as he marched toward the glass. Mirrorhead was still unaware of the problem he had on his hands, thinking he merely stumbled into possessing a controllable ghoul.

For now, it was time to prepare. Leech what he could from his new master. Figure out just what happened to him and how he got his Liminal Frame. Sequence and rebuild his Metamind. Kill enough to manifest his Hell and get his Heaven back online.

And with the Celerostylus working in tandem with his domain of blood and matter, new options were being made available for him. What was that the canon said? That the speed and force of his blood will mirror his natural limits unless the canon was altered.

Well, his canon hadn’t been changed, but he had. An image came to Avo of his blood lashing out at speeds greater than even his body could contain. Yes. There was potential here. Great potential. A chance for greater bloodshed. A chance to sample the flavors of flesh that were previously unimaginable to him.

The beast growled gleefully inside him as stepped back through the threshold of the mirror, his senses lurching.

Time to see what Mirrorhead wanted from him. He had a thirst to slake.