Flash Fiction – Zone Boy and the Worm of Incidence

Chapter Eight: I, Kaiju

He woke from a falling dream that was especially vivid, since he’d really been falling.

He lay on his back, bewildered and sore, wondering what it was obstructing his limbs. He was tied down with a wire-thin material. Its vicious strands cut him when he struggled. So he lay still, gazing up at slim, artisanal buildings.

Some sort of life form moved nearby. Citizens or local fauna? He didn’t know. Two of them scampered away when he rolled his head left. He glimpsed pale green limbs, whip-like tails and furiously bobbing heads.

A couple more beings advanced, cautiously curious, on his right. Their scales were like brilliant mosaic abstracts. Their heads were topped with festive-looking crests. They looked no larger than chipmunks. If these were the city’s residents, then its buildings were smaller and closer than he’d thought.

He fretted morbidly over whether his landing had crushed buildings—or even worse, citizens. He seemed to be lying on tarmac, which felt undisturbed. Perhaps he’d been dragged there.

Several lizard folk congregated nearby, chittering in high, enervated voices. Their snoutish faces were set in anxious half-smiles. Their sensitive, slit-pupiled eyes were trained on one particular building. Their delicate, clawed digits pointed to the dark, monstrous thing climbing it.

He recognized the creature’s jointed segments, its leathery black carapace. In a flash of memory, he recalled it bolting through a hole in spacetime after Girl Zero (that stoned sadist in a lab coat, with her shiny scissors) chopped off one of its legs. It seemed to have grown four new limbs quite unlike its jointed arthropod legs. The new limbs were more like human arms.

It scaled the building, hand-over-hand, like a fearful cub. Then it froze, panicked at how high it had climbed.

Gawking reptiles made way for blocky-looking vehicles that resembled half-tracks. These fired with sharp reports, like cap pistols. Ordinance smacked the building. Scaly citizens fled falling debris.

Some rounds found their target, battering the creature. Frightened, it crept around the tower’s opposite side.

Thwarted, the tanks stopped shelling.

Moments later aircraft appeared, droning like model planes. They fired on the creature with sharp, repeating bursts. The creature clambered higher, in a pointless bid to escape.

The city’s air reeked of fear pheromones.

He strained at his bonds, frenzied by the smell. He yelped as the wires cut him.

“What do I do?” he queried short-breathed, hoping the nano-computer would answer. “How do I get out of—these?”

The nano-computer said nothing. Its silence felt pointed.

“Come on,” he pleaded. “You have to answer.”

In response, the nano-computer played back his recent, rather cruel statements about it.

“The thing that talks in my head?” said his own voice. “It’s useless.”

These words played over and over, inside his skull.

“Do it now,” said his recorded self, impatient for Girl Zero (that fucking strung-out scientist) to extract the nano-computer. “I hate that thing.”

“I didn’t mean that!” he pleaded. “I just—just…”

“Hate that thing. Hate that. Hate. Hate. Hate.”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he yelled, pained by the recording’s volume.

He threw himself against the wires with a beastly howl, driven mad by his torments. One of his arms broke free, then a leg. Artillery stung him as he staggered, roaring inanely, to his feet.

He kicked over one tank by accident, then another on purpose. Lizard folk scattered in all directions.

He halted by the tower’s base, dumbly furious.

“Hate, hate, hate,” blared his own voice.

“Just shut up! Shut up!” he bawled.

The building shuddered as he pounded it in frustration. Concrete chunks crashed down on his head.

A female voice broke in.

“Climb the building,” Girl Zero prompted.

“What? No!”

Hearing her made him furious.

“Listen to me…”

“Why should I listen to you? Why?”

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“I reset the nano-computer,” she said, cutting him off. “It won’t be angry now.”

“Are you going to reset me next? Make me forget you pushed me into this place—literally, physically pushed me?”

“I know I did. I had to.”

“Had to? Had to push me?”

He was incredulous.

“There was someone you needed not to meet. That would have been worse, believe me.”

“Worse? I’m being shot at. Ow! Ow!”

“Then climb the building. Get where the creature is.”

Having no ideas himself, he started climbing. Mortar crumbled under his fingers and booted toes, which at least gave him traction.

“They’re shooting at it up there,” he carped.

“I know.”

“After you cut its leg off.”

“I saved its life,” she protested.

“They’re trying to shoot it down.”

“Then get up there, to it.”

The building, though for tiny people, was still tall. He tried not to look down.

“I have a plan,” Girl Zero continued.

“Does it get us killed or just maimed?”

“You get out of here. Just trust me.”

“Are you fucking kidding?”

“Hate me if you want to. But trust me.”

He hove himself up uncertainly beside the creature. It seemed to have grown since he last saw it. Did it eat some of the lizard people, he wondered?

“Get ready, it’s opening.”

“Where? Where?”

An impossible hole in space opened and hung there before him. There was a dizzy drop between it and the building.

“Just step into it. creature will follow.”

The creature caught one of the planes, which crumpled like paper in its hand.

“I’m not sure.”

“Just do it!”

He stepped into mid-air, sick with vertigo.

Subway doors whooshed shut behind him. A deafening tri-tone sounded.

The creature collapsed on the floor, heavily, beside him.

The long car was full of empty seats, upholstered red. He sat down wearily in one of them and fell immediately to sleep.

(Next: The Mobius Subway)

(Previous: Dr. Cybrot)

Chapter Seven: Dr. Cybrot

The boy who fell out of the void wouldn’t quit talking. He barraged her with frantic questions, not even pausing between.

Footfalls sounded just outside the room. Frustrated hands shook the door with pointed violence after finding it locked.

She was almost out of time.

With energy born of expedience, she grasped the creature by one of its myriad legs, while the rest of its limbs flexed in useless panic. With cutting forceps, she snapped the leg off with a hollow, wet pop.

In pain and terror, the creature fled on its remaining limbs. Zone Boy One (she had to remember to call him that) barked something in protest. She felt sickened and sorry. Her head throbbed from drugs and days of no sleep.

A fist smote the door’s thick wood.

“Let me in,” said a muffled voice. “You can’t…” Pound. Pound.

Silence for a moment. Then metal rasped on metal as different keys were tried.

In the same moment, a portal bloomed out of mid-air. It started as a marble-sized bolus of spacetime in absolute curvature.

She was down to seconds and everyone was in the wrong place.

She moved to intervene, but then remembered she had the creature’s severed leg in one hand and medical cutters in the other. The creature reared its jointed body defensively, where it cowered in a corner.

She retreated to the worktable, where she placed the leg in a stainless steel tray. She did this with apologetic care.

By then, the portal had inflated to an endlessly black sphere, like a giant dark pearl. It was bigger than the door, which was groaning open.

From certain angles the sphere presented a mirage like a tunnel stretching (or infinite tunnels) stretching forever. Perhaps the creature saw this, because it bolted for the portal, legs pistoning like train gears. Zone Boy stood there frozen as it bolted past, mouth stupidly agape.

His passiveness enraged her.

In a desperate fury, she shoved him at the portal, so roughly he lost balance. His body distended like a funhouse reflection as it sucked him inside.

“I’m sorry!” she cried as the black sphere swallowed him—and then itself right after.

“Sorry about what?” said someone beside her.

She just stood there, hands balled and shaking.

Dr. Cybrot shrugged, disdainfully unbothered. He raised his ridiculous, complicated goggles, to scratch his face underneath. His eyes glittered with mean amusement. He seemed content, for the moment, with her discomfort.

She broke off from him, going to a terminal.

Dr. Cybrot reached past her for a set of tongs on the table.

“I see you didn’t want me meeting him,” he said. “But I don’t know what you thought I’d do.”

He sauntered over to where bullets were lodged in the wall. His goggles whirred with faint mechanical sounds as lenses in them refocused. He extracted one bullet, then the other. They dinged as he dropped them in a metal dish on the worktable.

“Is that enough flagrantium?” she said, not looking up from the terminal screen.

“We’ll see,” he said. “These are the first samples of Flagrantia’s alloys. You got your own specimen, I expect?”

She held up the tray with the amputated member.

“That’s all?” he complained.
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She set it down with a hostile clang.

“You should have harvested the whole creature. You’d have a complete specimen.”

“I know you feel that way,” she said in a constrained voice.

“You could have caught it while it’s juvenile and weak. But you threw it back.”

“It ran off,” she muttered.

“Same thing,” he said. “You lost it.”

“We don’t need the entire creature,” she argued, doggedly. “It’s entirely composed of stem cells…”

“So you think.”

“…or analogous units. Any size sample should express its whole biology.”

“Should—should,” he echoed facetiously. “If your hypothesis is right. You haven’t proven any of it.”

She snatched the tray defensively and walked it to a station where gimbaled instruments loomed over a square table.

“I have the only sample of this species ever obtained,” she said, “which now I need to analyze.”

She positioned the leg on the grid-lined surface, like a colourless chessboard.

“You could at least be happy about it,” he said.

A smile accordioned across his face.

She didn’t like him much better when he smiled. It actually made him worse.

“We seized an opportunity,” he continued. “And we succeeded. Enjoy it.”

She positioned a wide magnifier over the specimen. She gazed at it forlornly.

“Don’t let it get to you,” he cajoled, in an oily effort to reassure. “Small cruelties come with the work. We learn to adapt.”

He gestured where the portal once was.

“Even that—boy has to. Who knows? He might even make it.” The grin widened. “But he doesn’t seem that bright, does he?”

She faced him, glowering, for two defiant heartbeats, before returning to her specimen.

She reached for more instruments, ignoring him sullenly. A tense eternity later, he left.

As the shutting door’s echo died down, she slunk over to her terminal. There she cycled through close and far views of locations ranging from maddening to mundane. She finally settled on one captioned, “ZB-1”.

An alien city’s skyline loomed over him. He lay strapped to the ground with many, many slim, dark cables, that same idiot look on his face.

(Next: I, Kaiju)

(Previous: Girl Zero)

Chapter Six: Girl Zero

His feet went out from under him in slow motion as two bullets volleyed past his face. The bullets were picking up speed, yet were perversely slow enough for him to ponder their murderous, conical points. They’d missed him by mere centimetres.

He toppled backward at a leisurely pace, like he was falling down on the moon.

He tumbled through endless black nothing with only one bright thing ahead: a blinding cut-out circle of reality. It framed a young woman’s distracted face, which was upside-down to him.

She frowned in concentration, eyes down. She clearly didn’t see the bullets coming for her. When she looked up it happened with fluidic slowness, like she was underwater.

As the portal widened, he shot through it into a room. Just prior to impact with the floor, he saw the hem of a lab coat and feet in buckled, blunt-toed boots. The boots did a sharp pivot. Stone cracked as bullets smacked the far wall.

His skull collided with slate tiles.

He lay there groaning, listening to the scuff of rubber soles.

An alarmingly pungent smell hit his nose. It hijacked his nerves with waves of distress, like an infant wailing. He discovered the odour came came from the creature, which lay, flipped on its back, myriad legs twitching.

He dragged himself over to where it was writhing, but then recoiled from its arthropod shape. He was shocked at how large it had grown. It looked more fearsome than its previous form, which had been more like a mushroom.

“It won’t hurt you,” said a voice belonging to the boots. “It’s imprinted on you, like a baby.”

He knew her as soon as he stood and faced her. Last time she’d worn a rain slicker. Now it was a lab coat. Her face was still like his own, with feminized features. She had a tremulous, shocked demeanour suggesting she kept awake with stimulants.

“Are you going to help it?” she asked, intrusively curious.

“Yes,” he groaned. “Here…”

To stop the pheremonal war on his senses, he pushed through his aversions and took hold of the creature. Its skin felt warm, leathery and appealingly dry. The creature seemed eager to cooperate with his efforts to turn it over. Once upright, it slunk under a work table and settled down there.

The table was cluttered with a confusion of humming machines and cryptic gadgets. Scattered around were cold cups of coffee, half-eaten biscuits and playing cards raggedly placed in solitaire games.

The young woman occupied a terminal at the table and started typing.

He noticed where the bullets were lodged in dungeon-like stone bricks. They made perfectly round bore-holes, ringed with shallow, dusted craters. They bullets had hit close to a heavy, gothic-looking wooden door.

“I don’t know how you managed to dodge those,” he ventured. “I didn’t think you were looking.”

She rounded on him.

“Answer me,” she demanded. “Who are you?”

“What?”

“Your name,” she pressed. “Just tell me that.”

“My name? Sure.”

He said nothing.

“Well?”

He said more of nothing.

“Like I thought,” she said. “Identity drift. Not uncommon.”

“Drift?” he echoed, dumbly.

“Amnesia—aphasia,” she said. “Call it what you want. We think it’s a stress response.”

“‘We…?’”he said, grasping at the word. “What ‘we’ are you talking about?”

“Some subjects remember later, so you might. It’s possible, at least. Until then,” she looked him over briskly. “Zone Boy One: that’s you.”

“That’s stupid!” he objected.

“So tell me what to call you,” she she shot back.

He glared at her guardedly, still silent.

“Good,” she said. “You’re called that.”

“So what do I call you?” he said in a challenging voice that just came off as peevish.

She picked up a playing card and studied it, in fierce avoidance of eye contact.

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“Girl Zero. That’ll be me.”

“These sound like spy names. Are we spies?”

“No!” she barked. “Damn, this was simpler when it was just me talking.”

“You keep dodging my questions.”

“You keep asking stupid questions,” she snapped. “Ask better ones. Or ask the nano-computer. That’s what it’s for.”

“The thing that talks in my head? It’s useless.”

She aimed some type of portable scanner at him.

“It has an older nano-processor,” she conceded. “Whoever installed it was down to dregs.”

“Do you know who installed it?” he asked with excitement.

“Someone—someone. It doesn’t matter. Oh well, it takes a few seconds to replace. We’ll do it after…”

“No, do it now,” he insisted. “I hate that thing.”

Her attention had moved on to the creature. She kneeled beside it.

“How does it change—into things?” he wondered aloud.

“It polymerizes novel nucleotides and aminos, we think.”

“It—what?”

“Its cells make different cells,” she said, exasperated. “So it can metabolize alien nutrients, breathe other atmospheres. An engineered adaptation, we think. It’s too perfect to just randomly…”

Footfalls outside the door cut her short.

“Oh shit,” she gasped.

A hand tried the door, which was bolted. Someone’s voice, muffled by wood, protested.

She gripped one of the creature’s legs. With fearsome clippers, she cracked another leg off, with a sickening wet snap.

The creature fled the moment she released it. The musk of its fear filled the room.

“I’m sorry!” she exclaimed, sounding honestly appalled.

The creature cowered, antennae twitching, in a dirty corner piled with things like circuit boards. Its gaze darted between two humans. This was the first time in its life it had eyes.

A fist pounded insistently on the door.

He felt a small, familiar disturbance behind him. Another portal was opening.

Metal rasped on metal as someone tried a key.

The creature bolted toward him with sudden speed—and then past him, right through the portal.

The girl advanced on him, eyes frantic.

“Go!” she urged, pushing him roughly into the portal’s opening.

The door moaned heavily open.

“I’m sorry!” she repeated.

He watched her face—as time slowed—pass through stages of dismay.

A man’s face showed beside hers, wearing heavy unwieldy-looking goggles. As this person lifted his goggles away, Zone Boy One witness a severe-looking male face that maddeningly matched his own. His grin got wider as if something utterly awful delighted him.

This strange picture froze as the portal shrank to nothing.

He careened through the void.

(Next: Doctor Cybrot)

(Previous: Bullets Between Worlds)

Chapter Three: Dream of Fungus

He woke up on something like a toadstool. His gas mask was gone. So were his boots.

It took a groggy moment for him to realize this. He was busy trying to reconcile the dreams he’d just had with his very dream-like surroundings and didn’t think he was doing it all that well.

The waking scene was lit by a menagerie of luminous fungoids.

Some were capped like round-headed mushrooms. These were embellished with spots, striated lines or cankerous bumps. Others were tall and bulbous, chaotically honeycombed, like morels. Others were unevenly rimmed cups, like failed pottery. One was oblong, riven with vulva-like folds. It was a meaty, wheel-of-cheese sort of orange.

The fungoids glowed hypnagogically, across a ridiculous spectrum of colours. He wondered if this had any pattern. He thought it must. It felt nuanced, how their colours shifted. They were immersed in water, which doubled their effect in drunken-looking reflections.

The fungous dome he sat on glowed violet and had yellow spots. It was his island in a lagoon of mushrooms. Bounding all this were featureless, prehistoric-looking pillars. These were tall as trees, fluorescing pale green—beginning to turn yellow, he thought. Beyond their conical tips, slick cavern walls segued into seemingly perpetual dark, which he thought he’d fallen out of.

Or maybe he just dreamed it.

In a luxuriant mood he stretched out his feet, feeling the spongy, forgiving surface.

But he kept looking up into the dark. It told him he was in a crevasse many kilometres deep. That he’d never climb out. That he was trapped.

He started to hyperventilate.

It was at that moment he noticed he didn’t have on a breathing mask. So how was he still breathing?

He found the mask. It wasn’t far from one of his discarded boots. But he didn’t put it on. The atmosphere felt completely breathable, even pleasantly fragrant.

Plumes of coloured light caught particles vaguely troubling the air. Some of them tickled his nostrils. The air otherwise felt fine.

He thought he still must be forgetting something. Oh, yes. Some creature fell into here with him. It was just a larva at first, but then it changed.

There it was, floating nearby: pale-bodied, flaccid like a downed parachute.

It seemed to find its surroundings restful. It looked to be basking in the warmth of some little spring that sent up ecstatic bubbles, underlit with aquamarine. The bubbles rose to where they popped or vanished to nothing in the dark.

Its tentacles were sprawled across light-giving neighbours, which looked undisturbed. It seemed collegial with them, almost familial.

All at once, small bulbous eruptions distended its centre, like dough suddenly rising. This effect spread until the creature became like a mushroom itself, with a rounded cap and gills fanning out underneath. A little top-heavy for its stem, it tipped over slightly. It glowed a bit—modestly, as if preparing to speak with the others.

The transformation made him despondent. He felt set apart from the sessile fraternity around him. Miserably, he gazed at his toes. Even those felt foreign: skinny and overlong, wriggling in the viscous water. Their reflections tapered off through shifting reds, yellows and purples, disturbed by placid waves.

Here and there spun little whirlpools—pulled down, he thought, by cavities underneath. He enjoyed those. At the centre of each whorl of colours sat an oily pearl of black. He felt if he touched any of these, he’d be pulled in, stretched like taffy by their implacable force.

He wanted badly to touch them—all of them at once. He could do this, he thought, if he reached out with all his tentacles. Some little voice told him he had no tentacles, and that there was reason to think his identity must be slipping. He brushed away this concern and reached for the little spirals—all of them at once.

They pulled him into so many places.

— He was a young boy, pretending his small fingers could do magical things. The thought of their fantastical powers made it impossible to sleep.
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— He was a youth, strangely alone in the heart of a city that was deserted when it should be crowded. He felt elated when the sky opened up and grabbed him. It was like being sucked through a straw.

— He floated through the deeps of space, naked and helpless, hating the cold starlight.

— He was a woman with an umbrella, exasperated by the petulant dandy who was, unfortunately, her double. There were things she had to tell him, but she felt too annoyed. When he was swallowed by a rift in space she regretted this.

— An old man, surrounded by fabulous machines: all which he’d built and none of which fascinated him anymore. He wanted his life to reverse, to live it all backwards. But he’d forgotten which way backwards was. He missed the simplicity of directions. Like up and down. Like falling.

— It felt it was falling. Always, it was falling. It was born falling. It wanted to drink the wind.

— To them, falling was like floating. They felt like a multitude of small clouds. A diffusion of spores seeking contact with tissue.

— Fungoids communing. Their mycelia, tendrils beneath them, all touched. Contact made them the same. Their quiet minds saw no difference between digestion and love.

He was sitting on a toadstool, watching the alien that was recently a huge grub and was now a great leaning mushroom. It flashed benignly, like the ones around it. But he saw no pattern now: just lights.

He felt spent and thirsty. Thoughts, like tracers of dreams, slipped away. He struggled to keep them, but he had a headache.

He groaned.

“What—what just happened?”

“Your filtration mask was removed,” said the nano-computer. “You breathed the spores, which are intoxicants. I synthesized a counter-agent. Why did you remove your filtration mask?”

It sounded scolding.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. My head hurts. It’s spinning. Wait—why is it spinning?”

The dark pill in the centre of one whirlpool grew larger as it spun faster. Sadly, this wasn’t hallucination.

Right before the Worm took him, he said, “I was starting to like this place.”

He lay on the rocky canyon floor. It was covered in red dust.

He noticed a naked female foot.

Against better judgment, he looked up.

(Next: Fire Folk of Flagrantia)

(Previous: Boy Falling)