Ex Lacrima Remnant

Track #33 – Endless Waltz

Mimi’s foot felt the cold touch of the floor, followed the slick profile of the metal panels, moving her toes through the soldering marks. She stomped her heel on them, kept listening in silence. The vibrations propagated through the ring, like throwing a rock in a lake. She analyzed them, let them resonate with her nanowires, compared it with the frequency she memorized. Something was off. Of course, of course it was off resonance. After the iron bitch served her good, her nerves lost their alignment again. Nobody could have fixed her, on that lost cause of a space station. Maybe Dobrio, if he had enough time and clearance… but he lacked both. So, there she was, playing poker with an open hand, bad cards and not even being able to see them. All because of her pride.

Or, rather.

All because she looked for a new meaning in her suffering.

She leaned her cheek upon her violin, upon its shining body, its beautifully engraved neck, the finely crafted fingerboard. The hands that made that masterpiece were gone, forever, now a headless corpse in a mass grave. Her fingers clenched around the board, almost to the point of cutting herself. Breathe. Breathe. It was fine. All was fine. She was fine.

She raised her bow, let it rest on the strings, idly dance on them. It was like the first time. The same magic. The smell of wood, of glue, the scent of aunt Caro’s fragrance, still permeating the instrument’s plates.

“I’ve got a gift for you, dumbass!”

“… my old violin? You… kept it?!”

“Kept it and tuned it, even if my idiot niece turned into a fuckin’ cop. But here it is, back to her owner.”

She gritted her teeth again. Memories. Painful. Memories. Joyful. Memories. In black. Because she didn’t want to see, to use cameras for that, except when driving. Her stubbornness reigned supreme. She thought she had all the time in the world. But, guess what? She was gone.

The old hag. Was gone.

But the violin remained.

In her arms.

She took another step, turned around, touched the door with her finger. Massive, maybe even twenty centimeters thick. Her index tapped it again and again, sending minuscule pressure waves through it. Too solid to destroy, even in her peak condition. The door on the other side too. The whole block was sealed. One hundredth of the ring. Long enough to look like a small hangar, short enough to be a negligible loss, if it were ejected into space. There had to be cameras too, around her, following her every move. Prying eyes, deciding whether she was worth their mercy or not. Commander Geiger had to be sitting on the other side, watching her through the displays. While Prim… Prim might have been standing directly behind that massive door, waiting to hug her Mal again. To think that a rhizome could develop affection for a human…

She sighed. Not enough time for idle musings.

The human in question was handcuffed to a chair, unfortunately awake. That wasn’t sadism on her side, that was a necessity. If he were unconscious when she triggered the parasite, the plant would have carved its way through his organs in the roughest way possible, instead of taking the path of least resistance. And, for that to happen, she needed to have him be ‘there’, even if she hated that. She couldn’t see his face, of course, but even she could imagine the absolute terror that was going through that poor sod.

Mimi took another step, in her prisoner uniform. That was quite light and comfortable, though barely fit to be a villain outfit. At least, she was allowed to take off her shoes and socks. She needed all the help she could muster to recalibrate her body and sensing the vibrations through the floor was a key part of it. In a way, she felt very similar to a rhizome. Her palms and soles were made for that. Her finger tips, her toe tips. Her absolute best tool to record a material’s leading frequency.

She wandered till she reached a small table, stashed the bow under her violin arm. Her right hand touched the plastic, moved over it, till she reached the first object she asked them to prepare. A simple ceramic mug. She grabbed it, analyzed its structure. Her fingers danced on the surface, danced with the crystalline lattice, till her brain focused, distinctly, on the proper carrier.

She took her bow again, let her nanowires get in place, as if they were still healthy and untouched.

“…please, no, I didn’t do anything. Don’t kill me… Prim…”

Here it went again, that annoying chatterbox called Frijderik den Malstrom. Mimi turned to face him, even if she could see only a black splotch on a white-ish background, then directed all the vitriol she could to her voice.

“Shut up. I’m trying to save you.”

“S… save me? With… with the same… thing you used to kill my colleagues?!”

“Making you join them is easier, you know? I just need to hit two strings and you go boom. If I wanted to do that, you’d be already dead. So, stop being a sissy and shut. The fuck. Up.”

“But…”

“Your plant BFF will let me suck her lymph, if I save your hide. So, why should I kill you, come on?! What’s in for me if you kick the bucket – how was it, Mal? I’m a friggin’ lymph junkie juggling my shitty life between a withdrawal and the next! I can’t throw her juices away!”

She could hear Mal’s foot dragging on the floor, trying to get away from his precarious position. His voice thundered again, full of something akin to despair.

“Prim would never bargain with a criminal like you! She’d never give away her dignity… her lymph like that!”

“Well, guess what? She did it because of you. Congrats, she adores you, to the point of extending this remarkable offer to someone as evil, depraved, and corrupted as me. Lagash take me, I wish I had friends like her, when I needed them.”

Mal fell into an uncomfortable silence, stopped moving. Good. That meant that Mimi could focus on the mug again. The leading frequency was loaded in her brain, her movements precise like clockwork. The first notes left her instruments, masking the inaudible sound in a concerto of classical valse. The vibrations came back to her through the floor, through her soles, back up through her nerves, reaching her brain again, in a perfect feedback loop. She stopped playing. The discrepancy was terrifying. She needed to adjust her positioning by more than she expected, if she didn’t want to turn that medical operation into a pyrotechnic show ending with an explosive decompression. Her fingers slid on the neck of her instrument, taking what she knew was a completely wrong position, were she in her normal state. She let her bow glide and pluck the strings one more time, listening to the results, analyzing the vibrations. Too much on the other side. Sweat flowed down her forehead. Breathe. Breathe.

Memories. Again. Of someone slapping her nape with a metallic hand.

“You can do it, come on!”

“Come on? Old fossil, this tuning thing-y is hard as heck! I’ve been trying for four hours straight!”

“You’re trying it all wrong, then!”

Another slap.

“Look, your body is an antenna, alright? A diapason!”

“A dia…”

“That fork that plays four hundred forty Hertz sharp. What did you learn in your music classes, idiot?”

“Okay, how? How do I do it?”

“Slowly. Up. Down. Approximate, step by step. Like a pendulum. Aim for the center, yes? You can’t overshoot forever. Sooner or later, you’ll get it.”

You can’t overshoot forever. Aunt Caro was right, of course. She adjusted the position of her hand one more time. Slowly, moving back her fingers on the neck, slightly below their previous hold. Notes spread around the empty hangar, echoing on the ring walls, under Mal’s hypnotized gaze. He didn’t understand a single thing of what was happening to him. Only that he was sneezing like hell and that what he believed to be phlegm was – in fact – lymph, like Prim said. That was no joke. It was the true state of his body. But why he had to sit there, in a section of the ring ready to be ejected from Atropos at a moment’s notice, he didn’t know. Everyone had been cryptic. ‘Please, keep calm. It will hurt’. That’s the most he was told. So, he looked, watched, without really understanding, enraptured by the strange movements of that fragile, ethereal figure, dancing in an orange prisoner fit. Then, he saw something new. The mug. That anonymous ceramic mug placed with other weird objects on the small table. Started vibrating. Faster. Faster. Before stopping again, all of a sudden.

Mimi growled. Almost.

Almost.

Just a little too low. She slid her pinky down by less than a micron, forcing all her nanoimplants to drive that infinitely small movement. Then, her bow rode the strings one more time, one more time, faster, faster, faster. The mug trembled, shook, vibrated. Before exploding, in a sudden pop.

“See? I told ya! I told ya you could do it!”

Another slap on her nape, followed by a hug. All because she had managed to make a dish explode just by playing that violin. After three full days of unfruitful attempts. Mimi was tired. Tired and a little bit discouraged.

“Old hag… this idea of yours…?”

“Yes, yes, I’m a genius, right?”

“…it sucks boar dicks. Come on, three days for a fuckin’ dish?”

“Idiot!”

Another slap, this time on her forehead.

“Think about it like this: you have the power to break everything, given enough time! This… this is the finest weapon your hot aunt ever built, suited exactly for you!”

She felt her aunt’s hand on her shoulder, the smell of tobacco exhaling from her open lips.

“See, once you get that into your brain, you’ll learn how to hit a resonance in minutes, maybe seconds for one large enough! True, imperfections in the material will change it, but as long as it’s standard issue? You’re good!”

“I dunno, old hag…”

“What’s the matter?”

“Why me? Why are you giving… this violin to me? Why not, I dunno, make an automatic system that finds the freq and plays it back? Without needing this… useless niece you have?”

“Your body, your whole body is the weapon, not the violin. The violin is just a toy, the tip of the iceberg. You are our automatic system, Mimi! Building a machine that adapts to unexpected situations as fast and as reliably as you? It’s hard. I dunno if I could program it, if I don’t find a couple fresh brains on the BM. I’m good at building badass tech stuff, but pure computer programming? That’s out of my depth. So, yeah, till I manage to step up my prog skills, you are my best hope.”

“…we’re screwed.”

“Oh, come on! I’m sure I’ll manage to put something together, just give me a couple years!”

“A couple decades. You’re good with hardware, old hag, but you suck so hard at software other than programmable neural paths, you know that, right?”

“Yup. And that’s why you’re my plan A.”

Yes, aunt Caro was simply that bad with writing her own software. That time she tried to customize Dobrio’s voice system to a timbre he liked more, he ended up barking like a dog for twenty minutes straight, before she could reset the defaults. That made Mimi chuckle, at least for an instant. But, now, she had to go back and focus. Focus. Focus.

The mug broke down, popped like a balloon – that was all she needed to know. She memorized the position, the frequency, the delta on her sensory actuators. Completely out of place, completely out of sync. But she had to make do with them. She approached the table again, reached for the second object. A plastic bottle, one used for water. Pretty simple, plain. Her fingers touched the surface, slid around it, registering its structure, finding its fundamental frequency. She walked back, tuned her fingers on the strings once again, adjusted the position by the delta she calculated from the mug. Notes filled the air once more, in a wonderful cascade of tones. The bottle started vibrating a little, imperceptible movements left and right. Almost. Not there yet. She compared the frequency she played with the one she expected to get, adjusted her hand accordingly. As her bow plucked the strings one more time, she started prancing around the floor, without even realizing it. Dance and play music. Just like when she was a kid.

And other memories flooded her, as her steps became faster, as the bow slid again.

Memories of Kryzalid in her robe, dancing on the clotheslines hanging between the building in Upper Aralu, jumping among them, while never stopping playing, the blinding sun of the noon as her backdrop, a dark spot leaping with the elegance of a butterfly, moving around hell like an angel without wings, in a majestic feat of acrobatics that would have made a circus performer mad with envy. Back to space again, to that cold metal she was walking on, while trying to hit the right tune, while the bottle couldn’t stop but shake.

Till it exploded too, popping in a hundred small fragments.

She wiped her forehead, the sweat dotting her skin, let out a deep breath. Her fingers started to hurt, but it was not over yet. One more step. The last. A simple fork, made of stainless steel. She touched it, followed its profile back and forth, till her nerves located the correct resonance. Enough for a test. Breathe. Breathe. Sweat poured out of her skin once more, flowing down her cheeks, like small pearls of water. Something that would have made Laccy regret not being there. That day where they drained each other, Laccy couldn’t stop licking her skin, for every single drop of sweat, till all it was absorbed and drunk. Unfortunately, Laccy wasn’t there to see her perform. She was still in her cell, like Dobrio… and Robin. She gritted her teeth. Robin. No. That was not the right moment. She let her feelings go. Instead, she focused her anger on that fork, placed her fingers on the strings once again, applied all the corrections she estimated from the mug and the bottle. When the bow started playing, the steel vibrated almost immediately.

Faster.

Faster.

Faster.

Pop.

Gone. Metal sawdust, infinitesimal fragments. Spreading down on the small table. She let out a deep breath, stopped for an instant, bent forwards. Breathe. Breathe. It worked. Her nerves were now calibrated on the faulty, damaged condition of her wires. It was an emergency procedure, one that she performed just once. One that cost almost half an hour on its own. Breathe. Breathe. Sweat was drenching her clothes completely, from head to toes. It wasn’t over. It wasn’t over yet. If anything, it was just the beginning. She walked back to the small table once again, this time touched it directly. Then, played her music one more time.

The table vibrated.

Shook violently.

And, finally, exploded.

The meaning of those pictures, frames capturing the last moments of those everyday items, one by one, wasn’t lost on Vettor Geiger. His attention was enraptured by the camera feed, by that weird virtuoso of destruction that unfolded before his eyes. He brushed his beard, watched in silence, recalled the agitated words of the chief paramedic.

“Sir, we have a problem.”

He would have never expected his medical personnel to say that, not in a million years. Yet, it was precisely what happened. Unknown plant parasite. Entrenched inside the nasal cavity of the patient. Another one found dead in his belly, already decomposing, possibly due to the trip to space or to the lymph secreted by the first. And, of course, no prepared procedure on how to operate without killing the host. Geiger gritted his teeth, wondered how that wasn’t discovered sooner. A simple body scan would have sufficed, especially now that the parasite was as big as a human thumb. He massaged his forehead, eyeing the red button on his desk, with the key already inserted. If worse came to worst, pushing it was all he needed. That sector of Atropos would have been jettisoned into space, venting out all the oxygen in less than one minute. The ejection part might have been a little excessive, but it was meant to make sure that whatever was deemed dangerous enough to trigger the containment protocol became deader than dead. One push. One push of that button and goodbye Malstrom, goodbye Kryzalid, goodbye weird plant parasite. It felt very tempting to push it but, unfortunately, Prime Minister Hertz had been adamant in reminding him that ‘Kryzalid must survive till the date of her public execution’, not even three days before. Political plays, as usual. He was tired of them. Unfortunately for him, Geiger couldn’t keep his position without sacrificing some of his integrity, so he had to play along.

Now, as a result of that meddling, Kryzalid was running her show, moving around like a circus performer with that weird violin of hers, one that was stashed together with other weapons and trinkets that belonged to the prisoners when they were sent to Atropos. Commander Primula got him good, no joke. His medical team couldn’t do anything about it, so their agreement came in effect. He crossed his hands under his chin. Thirty minutes more. Thirty minutes more and he could push the button without remorse. That thought made him feel better. Whatever happened to his space station, he was ready to deal with it.

Back in the sealed segment, Mimi stopped, breathed again, slower, slower, wiped the sweat out of her forehead. Her muscles felt heavy. Her fingers in pain. All the adjustments led to a very unorthodox hand position, one she had never used before. It would have been impossible to get accustomed to it quickly, it wasn’t sustainable in the long term. For one last concert, though? Maybe. She listened to her heartbeat, focused on the beeping sound in her ears. That tinnitus that accompanied her for so long, now telling her which frequency to hit to make Mal burst like a punctured tyre. So, the extraction frequency had to be close. Inhale. Exhale. Breathe. She leaned her cheek on her violin again, plucked the strings one by one, listened to their response, compared them with her corrections. Everything matched.

So, there was no more

delaying the inevitable.

Her bow slid once more on her violin.

And music started playing.

Carrying the frequency too.

The one that could make or break that Peacekeeper there.

Mal coughed. His whole head. Trembled. He coughed. Coughed. Sneezed. Tried to move his arms, but the chains stopped him. Tried to stand up from his chair, but the chains stopped him. Headache. A splitting headache. Cough. Cough. Sneeze. Vomit.

Lymph.

He was

vomiting

lymph.

His ears rung, his breath became ragged. He screamed. Screamed. Vomited again. His mouth completely filled with the acid aftertaste of his gastric juices. Then, he felt something else. Something moving, slithering through his oral cavity, sliding on his tongue, blocking the way. And his ears too. His nostrils. Mal shook his head, pain, pain all over the place. Tears. Tears down his cheeks as something moved through him. Something. Foreign. Till he saw, in the corner of his eyes. Tendrils. Vines. Coming out of his ears. Of his nostrils. And a flower. A huge flower. Emerging from his open mouth, making its way through his teeth. Mal felt like fainting, his consciousness fading, his senses dulling, the pain, the pain getting stronger and stronger. No thoughts. Full emptiness. Just. Pain.

Pain. Pain. Music. Pain. Pain. Music. Music. Pain. Music. Music. Music. Music.

Music.

The bow stumbled for an instant, causing a sharp dissonance. All of Mal’s body shivered, twisted for a second. Mimi gritted her teeth, corrected the course. His screams. His muffled screams. Were eroding her nerves. Like. Every time. In the Eye. But. She had. To go on. Drenched in sweat. In tears. All her muscles aching. All her nerves flaring up. She adjusted her grip, the position of her ring finger. It was time. The last. The last step. The bow slid on the strings once more.

The flower twisted.

Jerked.

Jolted.

Before finally.

Breaking down.

In a cloud.

Of vegetal matter.

Falling to the floor.

Like ashes.