Ex Lacrima Remnant

Track #24 – Here Lay a Man

A series of weak, flickering neon lights guided the travelers like trails of a train long gone. What was once the tunnel of a metro, was now a road stretching towards an unknown destination, one that only their guide knew of. With agile, short leaps from side to side, always playing her violin in a constant stream of reverberant sounds, Kryzalid led the way like a butterfly, despite her blindness, despite the darkness embracing her. Lacrima followed suit, slowly following in her steps, playing at landing precisely where Kryzalid did a couple steps before, in a game of cat and mouse. Right behind her, Robin watched without saying a word, ruminating on the events of the past two days. Lady Kryzalid. The terrorist. The blind violinist. The goddess and savior of all those underground people. She crunched her fists, almost as an automatic gesture. A cult of personality, one that gave that excuse of cosplayer a cadre of loyal followers, one that could only become bigger with time. Yes, Kryzalid had all what Robin had tried to achieve in vain. All her own attempts ended up in utter failure. Warning people about the imminent end, telling them true stories from the past… brought nothing. Everyone was too intent on watching their PV shows to care about her words, wasting their time by idly browsing the comnet and looking for rhizome porn. She might have been guilty of that last one too, just once, but that was instrumental to sate her thirst of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’. The ‘everything’ she strived to record also included erotic movies about plant women, even though that wasn’t something she’d ever admit openly – and especially not in front of Dobriovchka. Yet, those were the signs of a decaying society, one that ignored what lay before their eyes to focus on virtuality, in the absence of real, genuine contact. She was almost happy that the humanity that occupied Lagash for the past millennium never came up with portable comnet devices, something that would have made their situation much worse. Despite their absence and her efforts, though, her proselytism didn’t pick up the pace. Nobody seemed to be interested in end of the days scenarios, except the usual cranks. Some offshoot sects emerged from her words, but they twisted them in a way that made the original message lost, diluted in a show of unorganized falsehood. It was even harder to sell her ‘truth’, after Lagash recorded nine vault openings without adverse effects, with the digital blueprints contained in each new vault being more amazing than the previous. If anything, the opening of a vault was an event akin to a collective Giftday – one that was observed globally, once every one hundred Sol years. So, the tenth vault had to be even more special. There was no way it was in any way dangerous for mankind. And how to blame them, for believing this? She would have too, after seeing so many positive signs. It would have been akin to paint Nikolaus the Giftman as a child-kidnapper that brought toys on Giftday only to find suitable targets for his perversion. Nobody would have ever believed that. But they, the inhabitants of Lagash, didn’t know what she knew. Her forbidden, forgotten ‘knowledge’. Maybe, if she had been more open about it, instead of keeping it vague and obscure, she might have made a better impression. Still, three days before the inevitable Turn of the Millennium, that was very much a ‘crying over the spilled milk’ regret.

“We’re almost there, just a little longer! One turn and we’ve arrived.”

Kryzalid’s voice echoed on the walls, multiplying her words tens of times. She stopped in front of a faint green light, one that portrayed a stickman looking for an emergency exit. Her bow tapped on the door right underneath it, touched three, four spots, almost to ascertain whether she had found the right place. Satisfied by the sounds, she stored her bow between her left arm and her chest, while her right hand slowly moved to search for the handle. She pushed the big red metallic bar three times in a row, unlocking it with a click. The door creaked open, slowly giving way to her push.

And a fragment of moonlight illuminated the sunless gallery.

Like a moth to a flame, Lacrima followed the weak glow almost immediately, her hidden plant arm and flower twitching, aching to get a fair share of it, her whole body craving for photosynthesis despite knowing that moonlight wasn’t enough for her cells to extract energy. Robin watched her disappear through the door, followed her at a distance. She stopped a couple meters before the entrance. That was indeed pale moonlight, creating a strange play of shadows all around that one, open door, devoured by the soft glow of the neon lights. They had to be closer to the surface than she believed. Aralu couldn’t be more than ten, twenty meters underground, but for the light to shine with that angle? That spot had to be closer to the surface. Maybe, that tunnel they were following was one of the old access points to the rich bowels of New Babylon. That would have explained the weird lighting.

“Robbie~Robbie! What are you waiting for? Go, go! Kryz ain’t the patient kind of gal, right Kryz?”

“Shut up, Dobrio.”

“See, what did I tell you?”

That exchange broke Robin’s inquisition, forcing her to focus back on the current state of things instead of musing about the origin of that light. She adjusted her gas mask lock, slowly walked towards the open door. The fact that she didn’t hear any shriek or scream meant that, whatever lay inside it, wasn’t weird enough to scare Lacrima. That wasn’t surefire reassuring, though, as Lacrima was a rhizome and rhizomes had the common sense of a frying pan. Many situations a normal human found horrifying were simple ‘business as usual’ for them. That was either an unintentional design flaw, an intentional design flaw or a simple byproduct of combining plant priorities with a woman body. Given the biological mechanism that their maker gave them to absorb nutrients (read: sucking them through their feet while planted on fertile soil) and the perverted mechanism that acted as the most effective safety valve to release their excess lymph (read: climaxing), her money was on intentional design flaw. Which, given the personality and antics of Graham Zonta, would have been an extremely safe bet. That thought made Robin grateful to have never been built like that and that, whoever her maker was, surely wasn’t as twisted as that creepy guy. There was an old saying, in the digital books carried by Lagash: God created Man in His image. For Zonta, that was more like: God created Rhizomes in His kinks. Which, frankly, sucked for them. The saddest part was that they couldn’t even realize it, because they saw that as simply part of their biology, never questioning it. Rhizomes were such sad creatures – blissful children that didn’t know any better and couldn’t see themselves as victims of the tyrannical choices of one perverted bastard.

Letting those thoughts die, Robin finally crossed the threshold, one step at a time. Her dark lenses adapted to the different lighting of the room, gave her time to adjust. Only to have her recoil, jolt back, her heart skipping a beat.

That room.

That small room.

Was filled.

With.

Plants.

No, plants wasn’t cutting it. More like.

Tangles of vines. Ever-moving. Twisting. Turning. With oversized flowers sprouting from their main body in random places, leaves germinating where none should have been. Robin felt her stomach contracting, retched, quickly unhooked her mask, threw it to the ground. She kneeled down, breathed, puffed her cheeks, breathed again. Under control. Everything under control. Again. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Swear.

“What… the fuck?”

Kryzalid pranced to her side, violin in hand.

“Remember the plant that bloomed from that Peacekeeper in the Eye? Well… this is what it would look like if we let it go unchecked for too long. Or if we had more of them. Stuff like that.”

Her bow drifted on the strings, playing more notes. The amorphous mass of plant matter didn’t react, kept slithering slowly, pulsating like a grotesque heart. A massive organism, clinging to the brick walls too, blocking what once had to be a flight of stairs to the surface. Light came from cracks on the ceiling, far above, high enough that the tendrils couldn’t reach it, even though they tried. A metallic mesh stopped them from going out, but not from growing on it, trying to catch the faintest glow of moonlight at its disposal.

Robin couldn’t begin to describe the magnitude of that creature, the size of that organism. Whatever ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ she had gathered in her years of roaming Lagash, it was the first time her senses were assaulted so much by a single living being. The stench of decaying leaves with a hint of rotten flesh was barely bearable without her mask. And, yet, that wasn’t even the most horrible part. The human skulls and bones wrapped by the vines were.

Even without being able to see her, Kryzalid noticed Robin’s state of distress, patted her head with the tip of her bow.

“I’m sorry I had to show you this, but you asked for the ‘truth’. And, well, this is the whole ‘truth’. This is the place auntie-dearest sent me and this metalheaded himbo after our taxi went full sprayed-plant-pulp.”

She started playing her instrument again, in a slower, methodical way. The growth didn’t seem to have noticed them, trying instead to reach for the sky, for the world outside of that prison, without success.

“This was just a small graveyard, at first. The people down here used it for the remains of dead Peacekeepers who defected before kicking the bucket, so that the Corps couldn’t find them anywhere and pin their ‘sins’ on their families. They could have burned them, but – hey – religious beliefs are still a thing, in this Lagash-forsaken neighborhood. Anyway, four years ago, one of those ‘keepers died all of a sudden, not even one month after going into hiding. He was buried here and, around one year later, this… thing blossomed out of the ground. No matter how hard they tried to excavate the body or prune the plant, it just didn’t die – it kept regenerating from it smallest fragments. Burning it was not an option – it was like telling the bozos upstairs ‘hey, come down, we’re hiding here!’. So, they kept it hidden and simply turned this room into a well guarded secret. Well, at least until a second ‘keeper sprouted in the open. So, two and two makes four, and they forced all defectors in isolation, stashed them in abandoned metro stations down this complex of tunnels. But, when I came down, everything changed. Auntie-dearest didn’t want me to be ghettoed, so she turned me inside out like an old sock, to prove that my plant parasites were already dead – which, fortunately, was the case. The one in my stomach was easy to explain, but the one in my head? That’s when she drew a conclusion… and, once I learned the truth, we decided to give it a go.”

Kryzalid slowed the music even more, letting her words sink in Robin’s brain. She would have liked to see her expression, to see what Lacrima thought of the situation. Yet, as unfortunate as it was, that was a pleasure she couldn’t indulge in. She raised her violin, let its golden friezes shine in the faint moonlight.

“The frequency stuck in my head. The one that made my friends go boom in the mall. It was a gamble, a gamble that could cost the lives of many people. So… we tested it out. Through… volunteers.”

A tear flowed down Mimi’s cheek, wetted her blindfold.

“It… it wasn’t pretty. Before we managed to tune our instruments and my body to hit the right frequency that extracted the parasites without killing the hosts… around fifteen people died. Their remains were buried here too. We are walking on what’s left of their bodies.”

She almost crumpled on her knees, before turning her head up, wearing a wild grin.

“But, but at last, we struck gold. First thing first: we could save some of them with minimal damage to their bodies, if the parasite wasn’t completely developed. Still, the soldiers from the special forces were beyond salvation. We only had two of them down here, but their parasites responded to the usual frequency by… exploding. The most we could do was… putting them out of their misery.”

I still hear their screams at night.

“This is how we saved the others, including Bald Mustacho’s soon-to-be-wife. And that’s also how I saved that ‘keeper, Natasha. By… using what I learned on the… corpses lying under our feet.”

Mimi breathed. Breathed. Shook her head. Let Kryzalid run the show one more time.

“That night of three days ago, when I killed twenty Peacekeepers… it was the general test. I wanted to see how many of them were infected. So, I played my freq when the special forces zeroed on me, ‘cause, hey, they were doomed anyway to bloom in a couple years tops. I… was not expecting all of them to go boom. But, at that point, I had to go on, right? I couldn’t unmurder them, so gotta get full throttle. Oh, and that same freq that hits the spec ops damages rhizomes too. Primula managed to avoid it by shifting her plant fiber structure a little, something that all of them can do in case of need.”

But the Peacekeepers in the Eye… they could be saved. All of them. They weren’t spec ops. I just didn’t… want to do that.

A breath. Another breath. Mimi tried to calm down, to stop the voices in her head. She was a murderer. No matter how much she sugarcoated it. She had a choice, the choice of not killing them and let them live the rest of their short lives in ignorant bliss. Yet, she pulled the trigger. No amount of excuses could change that. Kryzalid was a criminal, a slaughterer that relished in the destruction she caused. A heinous human being that shielded her lust for blood under the excuse of saving people, that cloaked her quest for revenge as a higher purpose. Mimi had to cope with this, with this part of her. Because Mimi and Kryzalid were one and the same. Mimi approved of what Kryzalid did, Kryzalid used Mimi as her emotional cushion. Not two personalities, not two ‘I’s. Only one, juggling between self-loathing and pride, between being ravaged by unsavory appetites and mourning her lost innocence. Now, that was it. Lacrima. Robin. They knew everything. She lay bare in front of them. The ‘truth’ Robin wanted. The ‘truth’ Lacrima didn’t care about. All in front of a writhing mass of plant tentacles that once was the body of a man, now just a mindless mass of plant matter, an amorphous blob that didn’t even react to her music anymore. An it made of cellulose, chlorophyll and whatever else filled plant cells. Lacrima didn’t say a word, kept looking at the abomination that shared part of her DNA. She sensed a hint of familiarity, from those structures. Somehow, there was a connection between it and her. That prompted her to extend her arm, almost to the point of touching it. Only to be stopped by Dobrio’s grasp.

“Don’t. It doesn’t react well to touch. Been there, seen that. Almost lost a hand.”

“But… but this is a rhizome, right?”

“Huh?”

That question made everyone turn towards her. Kryzalid stopped playing her violin, all of a sudden. She aimed her bow at Lacrima, at where she thought she had to be.

“What… what do you mean by that?”

“Well, this is how Father’s prototypes looked, back in the lab. Not that big and with more human-like shapes, but they were very similar. I’ve seen many of them, before he put me in cold sleep. Father always said that they lacked sex appeal and that he ‘couldn’t just slap boobs and a pussy on them to make them fuckable’. Which is why he made me like this.”

Robin grabbed her mask from the ground, squinted her eyes at Lacrima.

“…when you say Father, you mean that deranged pervert of Graham Zonta?”

Lacrima nodded.

“Correct. He always asked me to call him ‘chad dad’, but I didn’t like the sound of it. Father sounds a bit like ‘feather’. Easier to remember. He was weird, but bought me a lot of books on birds, when I asked him about them. He was… surprisingly fine?”

‘My first plant gal is an autistic bird freak, for fuck’s sake’. Those words were engraved in Lacrima’s memory, and they came back with the violence of a thunder.

“Well, until he started designing my first sister and… and put me in forced hibernation because I wasn’t… huh, tall enough… to… to step on him.”

Her right platform shoe made circles on the ground, scraping small flakes of soil.

“But… but if I get taller, if I wear higher heels, maybe he’ll take me back! These are the highest I could find, but… but maybe there’s something better! If I grow by thirty centimeters I will… he will…”

“Laccy…”

Mimi’s hand. On her shoulder. Trembling. Lacrima stared at her, at that blindfold obscuring her gaze, dancing on the border between Mimi and Kryzalid, her grin turning into a sob turning into a grin again.

“…to hell with that creepy bastard! If that wannabe ‘chad’ wants you back, make him bow to you, make him ask for forgiveness first! Then, kick his ass and smash his balls with your prettiest boots!”

“But I…”

“Shelving you because you’re too short?! Who says that?! You can frickin’ step on me as much as you want! I don’t care about your height, your story, your anything! So, forget about your daddy issues! You’re my house plant, now!”

“Our house plant,” Dobrio added while raising his finger. Which prompted Kryzalid to hit him with her bow, almost in the eye. Way to ruin an emotional speech. Robin, though, had stopped listening to their antics, focusing on that mass of vegetal matter instead. So that was what rhizomes used to look like. Pretty different from what she expected. She wondered what her prototype looked like, instead. A crystal? Just the gem on her forehead? Unfortunately, the ‘truth’ on that was long lost. Her fingers went for her gun, danced on its barrel. Maybe, that would have been enough to put that thing out of its misery. A shot through its core, killing it, stopping its constant regeneration. Would it have been enough? Or just another failed attempt? She relaxed her grip on the handle. Four years. That situation was going on for at least four years. It had to be connected with rhizomes, but how? The first rhizome fielded by the Corps was that Captain Commander Lily that looked a lot like Lacrima, seven years before. The Mist and Sword types were the second introduced, around one or two years after. That Whip type and the Mantis type they faced weren’t revealed until four years ago tops. Spear types and Shield types were only freshly produced, maybe even just two years before, maybe three. Same for the remaining eight or nine varieties of rhizome. So, many of them were just too young to be involved. What did that give? She left the handle, her gun remained holstered. There was no way to shoot that thing without damaging the room and causing a ruckus. Kryzalid was right: the Corps would have zeroed on them in no time. No choice but leaving it alive, for now. Robin turned around, locked her gas mask again, after wiping her lips, avoiding eye contact with that monster as much as possible.

That’s when she heard it.

They heard it.

Alarm sirens.

Blaring.

Reverberating.

Echoing in the tunnels.

The same alarm tone as in the Eye.

Coming from the metro station they left behind.

The one all those people were preparing to leave.